Month: July 2006

Here’s an update on Jessica Mitford’s still-relevant 1963 classic of muckraking, The American Way of Death, which shed all sorts of unwelcome light on this country’s funeral industry and its often horrific practices. While Mitford’s book had its (occasionally unintentional) hilarious moments, Lisa Takeuchi Cullen focuses on some of the bizarre modern rituals that have personalized death to the point of absurdity. God knows, in this day and age, when dead folks can buy customized “Precious Moments” caskets or have their ashes converted to keepsake “human diamonds,” Cullen has plenty of offbeat material. Even so, some of her yarns—a graveside dove release gone horribly wrong, or an account of a Colorado town’s Frozen Dead Guy Days festival—are almost too good to be true.

Through five previous Cork O’Connor novels, Krueger has put his beleaguered hero through the wringer and then some. As Copper River, the sixth installment in the popular series, gets under way, O’Connor is on the run from hired killers who have already deposited a slug in his leg. This after the poor bastard spent much of the previous book, Mercy Falls, being stalked by a mysterious assailant and trying to solve the brutal murder of a well-connected businessman. Krueger’s novels always have a terrific sense of place and a solid feel for local color and regional characters, yet who knew the north woods were so crowded with dead bodies, secrets, sinister suspects, and interlopers? All right, maybe we all knew, but it’s a bit creepy all the same. This time out, O’Connor seeks refuge in a remote area of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where he hopes to lick his wounds and shake his pursuers, yet murder and mystery dog him even there.

Another collaboration from Kevin Kling and Michael Sommers, Old Four Eyes is partly a treatise on the engineering (or “taming”) of the Mississippi River, and partly an appreciation of John Banvard, the nineteenth-century panoramist who famously painted the river valley on huge canvases. Kling’s goofy script and a colorful spectacle of puppets, projections, and flamboyant costumes by Sommers’ Open Eye Figure Theatre make this old-timey production, as performed by University of Minnesota students, perfect fare for the kiddies. But with the strong impression it makes about the beauty and vitality of the old river, it can be enjoyed by grown-ups, too—so long as they’re game for a little silliness. Harriet Island Regional Park, St. Paul; 651-227-1100; www.showboat.umn.edu

Further proof of the vitality of the local dance scene, Carl Flink, the director of the University of Minnesota’s dance program, debuts a new company whose name refers to the no-nonsense ethic conveyed by 70s-era generic food packaging. As such, one of the company’s goals is to take down walls between dancers and non-dancers—and between the University community and the rest of us rubes, for that matter. The BLM style is built on gut instinct and the old-fashioned, bootstraps-and-shirtsleeves American can-do spirit; the music, much like the choreography, is based around an aesthetic of de- and re-construction—listen for pieces by Phillip Glass, Sigur Ros, and the like. Images draw from witches’ covens, sinking ships, and, more poignantly, the fractured emotions Flink felt after his sister’s recent death. 612-340-1725; www.southerntheater.org

Much more informative than browsing at antique stores or Design Within Reach, this show is a must for design aficionados—even though, alas, you’re not allowed to park your tush on any of these models. The show includes works from the nineteenth century, but focuses on the twentieth century’s greatest names: There’s Marcel Breuer’s Wassily chair, iconic designs by the Eameses and Eero Saarinen, along with pieces by Russell Wright, Harry Bertoia, Jens Risom, and others. 240 McNeal Hall, 1985 Buford Ave., St Paul; 612-624-7434; goldstein.che.umn.edu

The current Minneapolis epicenter of prostitution, at least if you ask the neighbors, centers on the residential streets around Hiawatha Avenue and Lake Street East. The area is so active that an all-volunteer, amateur “John Patrol” has sprung up in order to keep an eye on things. The foot patrollers have been known to rat out a prostitute or two, and they reserve a special disdain for pimps, but their true raison d’être is intimidating the men who venture into their neighborhood to pick from the hookers. The rotating clan of about a half-dozen is mostly women, proud residents of the Corcoran neighborhood, and they will resort to just about any measure short of a direct confrontation: staring, copying down license plate numbers, stopping by to see the truck-drivers who often park along a nearby residential street, and especially dialing the police.

This is difficult work, so the John Patrol members like to make themselves useful in other ways, too. For example, they pick up litter as they go—fast-food wrappers, intravenous drug needles, used condoms.

One recent evening, on the hunt for johns, the patrollers passed several dilapidated rental properties with buckling mini-blinds drawn over foggy windows, beer bottles strewn across the front lawns. “There’s the brothel,” said Sarah, a founding member of the patrol, gesturing toward one such house. The group kept walking, and waved to the retired-age couple next door, who were enjoying a cookout on their back patio.

Conversation found that the patrollers had schooled themselves in the ways of the street, and even reveled in some of the details. A middle-aged white woman described how Sur-13, “a Laotian/Latin gang,” had tagged her house several times. Jeff, a white forty-something patroller, claimed to have seen a drug deal go down at the gas station we’d just passed. Mike, a lifelong Corcoran resident in his early thirties, also white, described the night a friend dropped him home after a Pearl Jam concert; several prostitutes banged on the windows of his car. Sarah, showing her savvy, claimed to be on a first-name basis with several hookers.

At various points, female residents of Corcoran have been mistaken for prostitutes. They were not flattered. For example, Sarah, an attractive thirty-something with a thin build, tattoos, and chestnut hair streaked with blonde and auburn, says she gets pestered by johns “all the time.” Kathy, a bottle-blonde forty-something who favors black eyeliner and, for the occasion of patrolling in eighty-five-degree heat, black athletic shorts and a matching tank top, said she had been honked at and waved to earlier that very day. This was by “an old guy in a green van, old enough to be my grandfather” who then circled the block to get a better look.

The johns are understandably confused because prostitutes these days don’t necessarily strut their stuff in hot pants and spiked heels. On various patrols, I saw all manner of looks. One evening, we strode past a wan, middle-aged white woman with cropped black hair whose dusty jeans and unadorned white T-shirt hung loosely from her bony frame. Sarah leaned in to say that the woman was definitely a prostitute. On a hot Sunday morning, while parking my car, I noticed a potbellied Asian woman strutting up the avenue in a denim skirt and gauzy floral tank top. Was she a hooker? The lack of a dress code meant that everyone was suspect. Later, when walking with the patrol, the Asian woman passed by once more and several patrollers confirmed that she was indeed a lady of the night.

Turning the corner onto Thirty-first Street, near South High, the John Patrol spotted a prostitute sitting on a retaining wall. She wore a white blouse, high heels, and fashionable cropped jeans—quite glamorous. From across the street, I discerned that she’d taken care to iron her blonde hair smooth. “That’s Carrie,” said Sarah, who went on to describe how much more beautiful Carrie had been before falling into drugs and prostitution. Another patroller dialed her cell phone. When the police arrived, moments later, Carrie rose to her feet and unceremoniously placed her hands on the hood of the squad car. Not having been caught in the act, she was released with a warning.

A moment later, Carrie came stomping up Longfellow Avenue, just ten paces behind us, and I got a better view of the leathered skin that had tarnished her looks. As Carrie stood knocking at the front door of a “bad house,” a big, dark van bearing two plump black men came rolling by at five miles per hour. The word “pimp” was uttered by a few speculative patrollers. But after nailing a parking spot, the driver of the van waved to and thanked the group for its efforts. He even offered to lend a hand at a later date, explaining that he thought the walking might help him and his wife lose weight. The balloon popped on a tense moment. Everyone exhaled. Two patrollers crossed out the van’s license plate number in their notebooks.

One must be awful careful these days when bringing up H. L. Mencken. The “Bard of Baltimore” was an inspiration to a generation of plain-talking columnists long before Molly Ivins or Maureen Dowd were even born—or before anyone in journalism worried about hurting people’s feelings. Mencken’s specialty was puncturing the pomposity and pointing out the peccadilloes of the privileged. However, he was no great champion of the common man. He reviled ignorance even more than he did corruption. As he said, “All professional philosophers tend to assume that common sense means the mental habit of the common man. Nothing could be further from the mark. The common man is chiefly to be distinguished by his plentiful lack of common sense: he believes things on evidence that is too scanty, or that distorts the plain facts, or that is full of non sequiturs.” 

According to Mencken, the main cause of ignorance was religion, especially the kind practiced by an “auctioneer of God,” i.e. a Protestant Bible-thumping tent revivalist—or, if you will, today’s television evangelist. Indeed, he maintained that one of the most destructive acts in the history of man was translating the Bible into the vernacular, thus making its fables accessible to the uncritical, uneducated vulgarian. These translations amounted to putting the Bible’s interpretation into the hands of the auctioneers instead of keeping it within the exclusive circles of the learned clergy of the Latin Church, which, “despite its frequent astounding imbecilities, has always kept clearly before it the fact that religion is not a syllogism, but a poem.”

While he had utmost disdain for bombastic preachers, Mencken reserved a special place on his skewer for those who, like William Jennings Bryan, made their political fortunes by pandering to the religious rubes. Mencken’s accounts of the Scopes “Monkey Trial” of 1925 are entertaining for their piquant descriptions of the hypocrisy rampant among the citizens of Dayton, Tennessee. (It’s almost as if he, Jeremiah-like, foretells the “auctioneering” that would come from the likes of Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker two-thirds of a century later.) But the obituary he composed for Bryan, the three-time presidential candidate who led the prosecution of Scopes, and died five days after the end of the trial, is unique in its venom, not just for Bryan himself, but for his natural constituency: the inhabitants of “every country town in the South and West.”

Here’s my favorite excerpt: “[Bryan] felt at home in such simple and Christian scenes. He liked people who sweated freely, and were not debauched by the refinements of the toilet. Making his progress up and down the Main street of little Dayton, surrounded by gaping primates from the upland valleys of the Cumberland Range … he was obviously happy.” In case you missed the “primate” reference, there’s another one further on: “The simian gabble of the crossroads was not gabble to him, but wisdom of an occult and superior sort. In the presence of city folks, he was palpably uneasy.”

But, even more damning than the mere fact of Bryan’s consorting with the rednecks, were his reasons for doing so. Mencken explained it like this: “He [was] deluded by a childish theology, full of an almost pathological hatred of all learning, all human dignity, all beauty and fine and noble things … He was born with a roaring voice, and it had the trick of inflaming half-wits. His whole career was devoted to raising those half-wits against their betters, that he himself might shine … His one yearning was to keep his yokels heated up—to lead his forlorn mob of imbeciles against the foe.”

I keep a book of Mencken’s essays by my bedside and page through them when I’m bored with what I’m currently reading, or extremely tired of the predictability of those pale simulacra of Mencken who pass for newspaper columnists today. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to open a paper one morning and see what Mencken would have to say about Dennis Hastert and his “American Values Agenda,” or Hillary Clinton and her flag-burning legislation, or Michele Bachmann and gay marriage?

Not that I believe today’s newspapers would dare print anything so vicious.

Besides, what would really be the point? No one has yet improved upon Mencken’s assessment of such politicians: “The worst government is often the most moral. One composed of cynics is often very tolerant and humane. But when fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.”