Month: October 2006

Last August, a graphic adaptation of the 9/11 Commission Report was published, and the media did what they always do when they notice cartoon artists taking on serious themes. They freaked. “Yes, that’s right, a comic about the attacks is set for publication,” gasped Bravetta Hassell of the Washington Post. “Is the most defining moment of a generation in danger of becoming just another franchise with a Happy Meal tie-in on the horizon?” fretted Vaughn Ververs, editor of CBS News’ Public Eye blog. Wringing her hands, Chicago Tribune cultural critic Julia Keller wrote, “I don’t know if it’s a good or a bad idea to treat serious subjects in terms of comic book art, if such works represent an advance or a retreat for civilization.” Her story was headlined “Are you ready for this?”—as if we, as a culture, could withstand 9/11 itself but might go to pieces if we happened to experience drawings of it.

All that keening was the product of a common but false assumption: that comic art is inherently a children’s medium. There’s ample proof to the contrary, of course—the works of Art Spiegelman, Marjane Satrapi, and Alan Moore, to pick just three relatively recent examples. But in a capitalist consumer society, those with the money usually get to define the terms under which a culture operates, and Spiegelman’s Maus has never stood a chance against the Mouse. Walt Disney, more than any one person, developed the grammar of modern cartoon art, and thanks to his studio, he remains the chief influence on the way the average citizen consumes and understands this medium. Critics have given him hell for that: In his 1968 book, The Disney Version, Richard Schickel eviscerated his subject for turning his art into a kiddieland and dismissed the Disney oeuvre as “mostly a horror.”

And Schickel wasn’t alone; his assessment of Disney as a sort of Hitler of wholesomeness remains pervasive. But in his mammoth new biography of Disney, Neal Gabler makes a solid case for his subject as a middlebrow but mature artist, a not-just-for-kids artist, and, in his own way, an occasionally not-for-kids artist. Perhaps as important as his stance, Gabler assumes it without sounding like a company man. A rightfully acclaimed and observant writer on celebrity and film history, he scored unprecedented access to the Disney Archives to research the book, and while he’s not as aggressive as Schickel was, Gabler doesn’t pull his punches, either. In the closing chapters, Disney is a compromised man who’s quite distant from the aspiring animator struggling in Kansas City in the 1920s; his ambition never wavered, but what he was ambitious about changed radically. Heartened by the success of Disneyland in 1955, Disney had all but abandoned animation and plotted to expand his family-entertainment empire by purchasing land in Florida that would become Walt Disney World. By 1966, shortly before his death, his studio was dealing in cheap, unchallenging family fare like Pollyanna and That Darn Cat. The saddest scene in Gabler’s book describes how Disney would regularly call the Sherman Brothers into his office, demanding to hear the songwriting team perform “Feed the Birds,” their melancholy, elegiac tune from Mary Poppins. “Play it!” Disney would order, staring blankly out the window. The brothers would, and their boss wept every time.

So, what happened to the person who could spearhead a clever Depression-era allegory like Three Little Pigs, or pull off a technical triumph like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs? The cheery, safe Disney style resulted in part from the economic realities with which its creator was forced to reckon. During World War II, Disney dropped much of what he was working on to make government-subsidized films. Plus, a unionization effort among the studio’s animators put a crimp in his obsessively improving ways. These occurrences, thoroughly and compellingly detailed in a chapter titled “Two Wars,” kneecapped aesthetics as a prime consideration at the studio. By the mid-50s, Disney was more concerned with his revolutionary new theme park, and the kiddie TV show explicitly designed to promote it, than with promoting cartooning as a complicated art. Once both those projects became hits, the quality of Disney’s films was even less of an issue.

Before all that, Disney had made legitimate claims to art that few thought to dismiss as kid stuff. He was proud of his 1946 collaboration with Salvador Dali on Destino, a short that was finished, posthumously, in 2003. And though critics split on his 1940 film, Fantasia, they never argued about whether Disney’s ambitious pairing of animation with classical music was fit for adult consumption. Nor did they question whether a film so abstracted was fit for the cartoon form. Indeed, when Pinocchio and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs were released, arguments often revolved around whether they were fit for children. (When Disney’s four-year-old daughter, Diane, attended a screening of Snow White, she watched it through her fingers and was eventually escorted out when she started bawling.) Disney’s main flaw prior to his post-World War II decline wasn’t his hokeyness but his intense perfectionism—his efforts to keep “plussing” (i.e., improving) his animations and his continuous, abject fear of getting stale. Admitting he overreached with Fantasia, Disney said, a decade later: “Every time I’ve made a mistake is when I went in a direction where I didn’t feel the thing actually. And I did try to be a little smarty-pants.”

In the late 30s, being a smarty-pants was part of the Disney gospel; it wasn’t until after the war that Disney came to embody middle-class values for postwar America. Still, he was never comfortable with his assigned role as a purveyor of cuteness. In real life, Disney didn’t much resemble Uncle Walt; if anything, he was antisocial and often neglected his wife and daughters to concentrate on the studio. Disney was a bona fide artist for a time, Gabler argues, citing Snow White, Steamboat Willie, and Three Little Pigs as works of art. That contention runs counter to the claims of many of Gabler’s colleagues (the eminent critic David Thomson calls Snow White “pretty pablum”), but even Disney’s harshest critical enemies have laid down their arms when it comes to the technical achievements that those first features represented. More than anything, those movies stand as arguments that animation is a medium where anything is possible, and in Fantasia and abstracted shorts like The Skeleton Dance, Disney endeavored to prove it. “This is not the cartoon medium,” he told a colleague during the making of Fantasia. “It should not be limited to cartoons. We have worlds to conquer here.” It was a great mission statement at the time, and it’s a shame that Disney’s own work ultimately contradicted it; the world he wound up conquering was a small one after all.

Disney would probably blanch at much of what’s contained in An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, & True Stories, a collection of contemporary North American comic art edited by cartoonist Ivan Brunetti. Robert Crumb’s fetishes, Art Spiegelman’s neuroses, and Chris Ware’s youthful insecurities are all on display in the book, and those themes in many ways directly oppose Disney’s polite, well-scrubbed, heavily controlled postwar works. Sure, Mickey Mouse could be a pervy prankster in his early days; in Steamboat Willie, he uses a winch to lift Minnie up by her undies, swings a screaming cat by its tail, and turns a duck into an ad hoc hurdy-gurdy. But his creator would probably have little patience for Tony Millionaire’s foul-mouthed strip, “Maakies,” or the hooker and street bum in the samples from Archer Prewitt’s “Sof’ Boy,” both of which are featured in Brunetti’s book.

That said, the editor makes it clear, through his selections, that both Chris Ware and Disney have shared roots in straightforward gag writing. The opening pages of the collection are dedicated to three- or four-panel strips, some of which are the offbeat likes of “Underworld” and “Zippy the Pinhead.” But Brunetti also dedicates space to works inspired by Charles M. Schulz’s “Peanuts.” For most people, the star of “Peanuts” is Snoopy, but for cartoonists, Charlie Brown is the dominating figure—a roly-poly underdog whose intelligence, awkwardness, and self-loathing make him sort of the ur-character for many of the graphic novels published in recent years. (Reading Brunetti’s book, it’s hard not to assume that a lot of its cartoonists suffered from a Charlie Brown-like despair during their childhoods; Chris Ware, for one, cops to that in his tribute.)

The anthology also includes an essay by Schulz in which he details the amount of rigor required to break into the cartooning business. “You must be in constant search for the characters and ideas that will eventually lead you to your best areas of work,” he writes. Like Disney, who launched drawing classes at the studio to get his animators up to his standards during the making of Snow White, Schulz was fighting against a presumption that cartooning was a naïve, anyone-can-do-it art form, or a repository of kiddie lit. Folks aghast at the notion of a 9/11 comic might make something not just of Maus (which is excerpted in the anthology) but also of Jaime Hernandez’s intimate and mystical redemption tale, “Flies on the Ceiling”; David Collier’s intricate, well-researched “The Ethel Catherwood Story”; or John Hankiewicz’s reminiscence, “A Paragraph by Saul Bellow (1915-2005).”

Ultimately, Brunetti’s book isn’t arguing for comics’ not-just-for-kids status so much as displaying the form’s many possibilities. (After all, only daily newspapers still play up the “Comics aren’t for kids anymore!” angle.) Cartooning, like any medium, is an empty vessel that’s free to be manipulated and used in any number of ways. Either animated or on paper, it easily lends itself to the gag. And if it fails to become more than that, the shortcoming isn’t with the medium but its makers—Uncle Walt, unfortunately, chief among them.

Today, Tom Green’s profile in the world of pop culture is so marginal it’s easy to forget how prominent he once was. But in 1999, after MTV imported his eponymous show from Canada, the hyperactive slacker hit America like a virus. “He’s become famous faster than anyone I’ve ever been associated with,” exclaimed Brian Graden, head of MTV programming, in April 1999. That was a mere two months after Green’s show debuted on the network, and all the hallmarks of A-list stardom soon followed. Green guest-hosted Saturday Night Live. He made the cover of Rolling Stone. He landed a deal to write, direct, and star in his own movie. He married a major Hollywood star. And then the big fade commenced.

But it didn’t happen because we tired of Tom Green’s shtick. To the contrary, our appetite for the sort of antics he displayed on his show—sucking face with a butchered lamb’s head, asking the prime minister of Canada to sign his balls, playing pranks on his long-suffering parents—has only increased.

So when Green stopped production on his show at the height of its popularity—first to deal with testicular cancer, then to pursue a movie career—countless others stepped in to meet the demand for transgressive cathode mayhem. For the last six years, NBC has made squid guts and liquid sewage a key part of its prime-time lineup with Fear Factor. When Jackass: Number 2, the big-screen prankfest starring Johnny Knoxville and his wondrously shatterproof troupe of masochists, catapulted into theaters in late September, it grossed $29 million its opening weekend. Jackass spin-offs Wildboyz and Viva La Bam are MTV2 staples. And then, of course, there’s Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. It’s the only show on TV that features as much real-life wanton destruction as Green’s once did—and the only one with a host, Ty Pennington, who can scream as loudly, moronically, and incessantly as Green once did. (Where Pennington makes use of a megaphone to achieve his effects, Green mostly worked acoustic.)

Ultimately, Green’s influence is felt most deeply on the Internet, on sites like YouTube and Google Video, where thousands of his aesthetic heirs upload clips of themselves spazzing out in their bedrooms, taunting security guards, and engaging in various other Greenian theatrics.

Green himself is part of the Internet fray now, too. Last summer, with support from a company called ManiaTV, he started broadcasting a live call-in talk show from his living room four nights a week. So far, technical difficulties are more common than not, and his worldwide audience is only around twenty-five thousand people, a fraction of the millions who once watched him on MTV. Compared to his previous level of stardom, this may seem like a fairly mediocre prize. Still, Green commutes from his bedroom to his living room, no longer has to worry about network censors, and, if he feels like going on for an extra half hour any given night, he can. So maybe the Internet’s not such a bad place to be—in fact, it’s actually where Green was headed all along.

Back in 1993, when only Al Gore and a few other techno-prophets knew what the Internet was, a twenty-two-year-old community college student in Ottawa, Ontario, was busy inventing its future—on a Canadian public-access channel. On his weekly, hour-long show, Tom Green did whatever it took to create a few visceral, visually arresting moments in no-budget, handheld fashion. He descended on city streets and shopping malls, saying things that people just don’t say in public, rubbing his “bum” against strangers, and otherwise invading their space with fearless abandon. He tortured his parents, painting their house plaid while they were away on vacation and dumping a severed horse head in their bed in the middle of the night as they slept. He harassed his best friend, Glenn Humplik, an amiable human punching bag whose unfortunate surname apparently gave him a tolerance for constant abuse. Slouchy and slack-jawed, swinging from catatonia to mania in the blink of a haunted, heavy-lidded eye, Green looked like a guy who’d end up stalking a beautiful blonde movie star, not marrying one.

Somehow, this haphazard approach to TV worked incredibly well, perhaps in part because Green’s shtick wasn’t exactly revolutionary. In fact, his show was modeled very closely on the traditional late-night talk-show model. He interviewed guests on a studio set and ended with a musical performance by a local band. He and his crew performed short comic sketches, and he did man-on-the-street bits, too—just like one of his major influences, David Letterman. The affable, endlessly accommodating Humplik served as Green’s Ed McMahon-like sidekick.

But while the Tom Green Show shared the same DNA as Letterman et al, it also bore a strong resemblance to COPS. There were long stretches of noisy, repetitive tedium, with Green screaming nonsense at strangers on the street, followed by bursts of inspired lunacy: a surprisingly clever ad lib on Green’s part, or a moment of inspired rage from a benign-looking soul whom Green had pushed too far.

But compared to other lo-fi, vérité shows, like the Real World and even the amateur submissions of America’s Funniest Home Videos, the Tom Green Show seemed shoddily made. Segments often had no discernible rhythms or structures, and overall, the show’s aggressive artlessness didn’t play as faux-authentic contrivance—the work of self-conscious, shaky-cam auteurs—it just looked bad and cheap and incompetent. Where, one wondered, was the craft? Where was the desire to hone a comic premise until it reached its full potential, to perpetrate some ingenious, Candid Camera-style prank? Green just turned on his video camera and started throwing shit at the wall. If it stuck, great. If it slid, even better.

For all its lazy, sloppy, and grating qualities, the Tom Green Show was also quite compelling. It didn’t matter if Green was donning scuba gear to dive for change in shopping mall fountains, or trying to convince his sweet, clueless grandmother that a box of neon-colored vibrators was actually a collection of kitchen gadgets, or simply smashing a platter of fresh meat with a baseball bat. More often than not, whatever he was doing was the most arresting thing happening on TV at any given moment, and restless channel surfers stopped and paid attention. Here was a show that adhered to none of the conventions that lent all TV programming, good and bad, a certain sameness. For a few months, at least, the Tom Green Show pulled off that rarest of TV tricks: It looked like nothing else on the tube. That’s why, after just a few episodes, it became a local cult favorite, then a hit on national Canadian cable, and ultimately, an MTV classic.

So it was that, as the twentieth century ran down, Green had figured out where twenty-first-century entertainment was headed. Before Jackass, before Fear Factor and YouTube, Green proved that punch lines weren’t necessary. That plots weren’t necessary. Even the themes that unified similarly plotless clip shows, like World’s Wildest Police Chase Videos, weren’t necessary.

Green’s efforts echoed the innovations of late-80s gonzo pornographers like John Stagliano and Ed Powers, who realized that their viewers weren’t particularly interested in storylines, dialogue, costumes, character development, or any of the other Hollywood conventions that the adult-film industry had traditionally aped. What drew viewers was raw, unrehearsed spectacle—unexpected moments—so that’s what Stagliano and Powers gave them.

Demonstrating that what worked for porn videos worked even better on mainstream TV—where the competition for viewer attention was (and is) relentless—Green liberated his audiences from having to follow complicated storylines, or watch from start to finish, or even watch all that closely. No matter when you tuned in to his show, there was always some kind of confrontation or disturbing imagery, or at the very least, a skinny, disheveled slacker who appeared to be in the midst of a psychotic breakdown. After just six episodes on MTV, the Tom Green Show had established itself as the network’s highest-rated series.

The show’s success marked the ascendancy of the amateur, bringing a punk-rock, DIY spirit to corporate television. Once Green became a certified network hit, the medium that had once been the most exclusive was suddenly accessible. Inspired provocateurs were no longer consigned to the ghetto of public access. A fifteen-year-old delinquent in the middle of nowhere could actually compete against Hollywood production companies—he just needed a handheld video camera, some wacky ideas, and the nerve to pull them off.

Green’s time at the top didn’t last long. Like many other purveyors of ambush TV, who rely on unsuspecting individuals to pull off their tricks, he found that his new notoriety made guerrilla street theater difficult. The objects of his attention began responding to him not as a random lunatic, but as Tom Green, MTV icon. His bout with cancer and an unsuccessful foray into movies further sidetracked his career. His first run on MTV ended in mid-2000, and a 2003 resurrection of the show, in a somewhat different format, lasted only a few months before being canceled due to low ratings.

Even so, Green’s initial success had a permanent impact on viewers, other rogue auteurs, and industry executives. It was suddenly clear that there was a lucrative market for all kinds of raw, surreal, caught-on-tape spectacles, no matter how slapdash or tasteless. For years, critics had accused TV executives of pandering to the lowest common denominator, but Green’s success proved that those execs were actually tight-assed gatekeepers. Even the scuzzy laughs and cheap thrills of Fox staples like Married with Children and World’s Wildest Police Chase Videos looked like Masterpiece Theatre compared to Jackass, Girls Gone Wild, Bumfights, and all the other DIY fare that followed in the wake of the Tom Green Show.

While it’s been more than a decade since Green first went on public-access cable, the style of programming he helped pioneer is still in its infancy. As the Internet evolves, it will become only more prominent; nothing else delivers the same bang for the buck. In the same way that traditional print-media operations, with their large staffs, cumbersome production processes, and expensive payrolls, are trying to find success while competing against bloggers, who can amass sizable audiences at virtually no cost, traditional TV producers will also face the democratizing wrath of the Internet.

When prime-time audiences ultimately splinter into pieces too small to underwrite the likes of Lost or even the Amazing Race, producers will turn to the kinds of shows that can aggregate eyeballs on a budget. In Nielsen terms, the twenty-five thousand nightly viewers at TomGreen.com is nothing; but what other regular producer of independent programming for the web—one that doesn’t involve naked women—can claim such numbers? Just a few years ago, few people believed that independent amateurs like DailyKos.com and Instapundit.com could crash the insular world of the news media elite in any significant way, but now, major players like Time and the New York Times have adopted the tools, techniques, and attitudes that such bloggers pioneered. Once again, Tom Green finds himself ahead of the curve.

Yo, Steve-O . . .

Just finished reading the Bozeman Chronicle articles on ATR (A Thoughtful Revolution / Alternative to Rage) and am impressed by your movement’s mission to ease the town’s growing pains: cyclists fearful of cell-phoning drivers, Peach Street becoming the local speedway, the scary dawning of “Boze Angeles.” These days, you could toss a dart at a map and hit a burg where the newcomers, natives, long-timers, and everyone in between might benefit from a movement like yours—a hands-on effort to help the members of the new settlement find their common ground.

In fact, ATR has inspired me to name my door-opening movement here in the Cities: HIP (for Hold It, Please). As the name implies (and implores), its aim is to get people to hold doors for each other as they move about the marketplace. Based on a gesture easily performed by the average pedestrian, HIP transcends language barriers—if not all cultural and age-related norms. (My friend Lydia’s seventy-something dad recently advised her to let men do the door-opening; I’m looking forward to trying out my nascent HIP proselytizing tactics on him one of these days.)

Of course, ATR and HIP could be just the beginning. I’m solidly behind a PUT (Pick Up Trash) crusade to deal with the loathsomely littered urban landscape. And what about GAB, a Give-a-Brake effort designed to make tailgaters back off a bit? Maybe even a rally to cheer up those pinch-faced shoppers—the ones with the peace-and-love stickers plastered on the bumpers of their imports but themselves wearing Oscar de la Grouch faces as they navigate the aisles of Consumerville; the LYS (Lose Your Scowl) movement might help address that social scourge. These are all subsets of ATR, and the list of actions we might take to live more harmoniously with our city mates, old and new, is endless. We’re on the journey, regardless; might as well make it a copasetic trip.

So, neph . . . you take the ATR road in Bozeman, I’ll forge the HIP course here in the Cities, and let’s see if our small but concerted efforts can nudge our fellow citizens toward a renewed belief in each other and in that higher power known as Good Ol’ Decency.

Yours in the effort,
Anti P

P.S. If all else fails, there’s my standby Bernie Mac slogan—fit for tongue or bumper, and the perfect antidote to those bossy “Calm Down” stickers: Chillax!

I was ten years old when I first encountered the Swatch. I was flipping through the pages of Seventeen, idly rubbing perfumed strips on my wrist, when a glimmer of high design caught my eye and never let go. There, starkly positioned on a blank white page, was a black plastic watch covered with mysterious symbols. Bacteria-like symbols. Japanese kanji, in fact, but this was 1987. Hello Kitty was the way you greeted a pet; sushi was regarded as a health risk; anime was a Jungian reference misspelled. Nonetheless, that watch spoke to me. “Own me,” it said. “Wear me.” That Christmas, I obeyed (with help from Santa). And thus began my lifelong affair with Swatch—the greatest product, I humbly submit, in the history of watchkind.

In the event you missed the Great Swatch Explosion (you never admired the sophisticated double-watch look on a classmate’s wrist, never positioned your sleeping bag under the face of a giant Swatch wall clock—oh, how I wanted one!), Swatches are the zany plastic watches that rocketed onto the market in 1983. Before then, watches were pricey and breakable, or, in the case of Timex, sturdy and plain. Swatches, on the other hand, were cheap, gorgeous, and hard to destroy. The company has since released a new line of watches every season, and, along the way, jewelry, eyeglasses, and even a car. And while I defy you to name another watch company with the cojones to bring an automobile to market (Breitling? Rolex? Cartier? Non!), we shall limit our present discussion to the Swatch watch itself, a holy union of artistry and performance.

First, the artistry: Fifteen years before Michael Graves began flinging spatulas around Target HQ, Swatch hired artists to design its products. Before Swatch, a watch might have consisted of a white face with a leather band. “Stiletto,” a Swatch designed by Mexican painter and sculptor Cisco Jiménez, was made of lime-green plastic and festooned with images of an egg beater, a bunk bed, a stiletto heel impaled on a dagger, and an oven that appeared, somehow, to be bleeding. The late video artist Nam June Paik—better known for airborne performance art and magnetized TVs—designed a Swatch, as did Yoko Ono, Keith Haring, and hundreds of other artists whose genius defied the strictures of good taste and brought high art to everyday accessories. With their help, Swatch injected the workaday world with other-worldly visions, including “Missing Spoon,” a gingham picnic-scene watch; “Space Sheep,” a sheep-heads-floating-in-space watch; and this season’s hot-orange number, “Instantaneous Fresh.”

As for performance: In an era of routine corporate overpromise and underachievement (Eye cream that makes you look younger! Beer that makes you more popular!), Swatch actually underpromises and overachieves. For example, Swatches are virtually indestructible. While company literature modestly describes them as “water-resistant,” I can attest to their absolute waterproofness. At the height (or depth) of junior high, a black kanji Swatch remained strapped to my wrist continuously for three years. I washed the dishes, I swam in the ocean, I dove through a Slip’n Slide made of garbage bags—without removing the watch once. And it lasted for more than a decade.

This is not to say Swatches are perfect. As with any relationship, Swatch and I have had our ups and downs. There was that ninety-four-degree day when, in the middle of a church picnic, a Swatch melted to my wrist. Then the harrowing encounter involving my mother, my second Swatch (the Cisco Jiménez model), and a jet of instant-dry aerosol hairspray. There was also, sadly, that afternoon in college when I opened the battery compartment of that very first Swatch to find something I can only describe as “corrosion explosion.”

These incidents, however, are but specks of dust next to the blaze of Swatch majesty. What’s remarkable is that Swatch has survived being a trend without ever bowing to the pressure of trends. While Martha and the Gap offer us products carefully designed to have universal appeal, Swatch continues to inject the idiosyncrasies of art into our daily lives. This season’s collection features a silver-and-blue model cryptically titled “Bathroom Smiles” as well as a watch covered with line drawings of rabbits caught in flagrante delicto. Title? “Bunny Sutra.” But it’s perhaps the Swatch company’s literature that best describes the watches, in language as insouciantly surreal as its wares: “A selection of watches to welcome our space brothers to Planet Earth.” One day, I hope to personally entertain these space siblings by designing a Swatch myself. Until then, I’ll be flashing my wrist toward the sky. Space brothers, welcome.

For anyone who grew up out in the sticks and harbored big-city dreams fueled by pulp novels and Hollywood noir, Minneapolis’ Elliot Park neighborhood is living evidence that there are still little pockets around the Twin Cities that could give Brooklyn and Chicago’s Southside a run for their money.

Tucked away south of downtown, penned in by interstate highways and dwarfed by the city’s skyline, Elliot Park is an inner-city neighborhood in every sense of the word. Its poverty and unemployment levels are historically (and substantially) higher than those for Minneapolis in general, and its once aging population has been thinned out in recent decades, making way for the sort of dizzying sidewalk diversity that is now most commonly associated with older and larger eastern cities. It is also, in places, a model of the hardscrabble picturesque, and seems an inevitable candidate for gentrification.

The neighborhood—which includes the Hennepin County Medical Center and North Central University (founded in 1930 by the Assemblies of God church)—is one of the city’s oldest, having sprung up in the wake of the mid-nineteenth-century industrialization of the river around St. Anthony Falls. The park itself, one of the first in Minneapolis, is nudged up against South Eighth Street. Originally a farm, the land was donated to the city in 1893 by the neighborhood’s namesake, a physician.
Though the area was thought swank, however so briefly, in the late nineteenth century—evidence remains in the handsome mansions along Park Avenue—it has almost always been a working-class neighborhood.

Elliot Park’s melting-pot meeting place is the tiny Band Box Diner, since 1934 the anchor of the tangled, off-the-grid intersection of East Fourteenth Street and South Tenth Street, just west of Chicago Avenue. The Band Box, a locally designated historic landmark, is the last survivor of what was once a small regional restaurant chain. It’s an architectural gem, done in the style of streamline moderne, that’s been preserved and expanded but still retains the feel of an authentically scruffy greasy spoon. The place has a no-nonsense attitude coupled with an obvious pride in its history as a neighborhood institution. It also has terrific (and cheap) burgers and American fries that are out of this world. Walt Whitman would be right at home on one of its counter stools, as would Iceberg Slim or H. L. Mencken.

Directly across the street from the diner is a row of tidy brownstones that wouldn’t look out of place in lower Manhattan. They share a block with the Del Kingsriter Centre for Intercultural Relations, which additional signs announce is home to such apparent adjuncts of North Central University as Cross Cultural Ministries, Deaf Culture Studies, and the Deaf International Bible College.

On the opposite side of South Tenth, there’s a string of abandoned storefronts, formerly the headquarters of Gateway of Hope’s Eshkol Mission. The spaces have been completely cleared out with the exception of a window display of a painting of Jesus on black velvet, framed by a hand-lettered sign: “Sin would have fewer takers if … the consequences were immediate.”

On a recent bright autumn afternoon, a man wearing an eye patch and a worn suit with the pant legs rolled up to his knees and secured with Ace bandages was standing on the sidewalk outside the empty storefronts. He was hunched over and peering intently into the rearview mirror of a parked car as he ran an electric razor over his face.

Rimming with myriad curiosities, the Uptown office of Jawaahir Dance Company looks something of a crowded bazaar. Persian rugs, strewn end to end, cover the floor. A herd of carved wooden camels congregates on a shelf lined with gold fringe. A tangle of brightly hued scarves is heaped in a corner. And in the entryway hangs an enormous replica of a Bedouin wedding necklace—a stage prop painstakingly detailed with faux silver, turquoise, amber, and carnelian.

Cassandra Shore, the founder of both Jawaahir and the Cassandra School, appears no less exotic than her surroundings, carrying herself gracefully on bare, hennaed feet. Her long black hair is offset by a vivid turquoise blouse, and her gold earrings resemble the jingling coins that cover the hip scarves favored by her belly-dance students.

After studying Oriental dance in California, Shore came to Minneapolis in 1977—a serendipitous occasion, as she soon discovered an unexpected richness and diversity within the city’s dance scene. She established her school in 1978, and now, twenty-eight years later, the name “Cassandra” reigns supreme among Minnesotans who’ve fallen in love with Middle Eastern dance.

Among the trove gathered during Shore’s travels through Egypt, Turkey, and North Africa, her collection of dolls immediately catches the visitor’s eye. Surprisingly, they originate closer to home, having been handcrafted by a former student who now lives on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington state. Designed to represent the various folk styles of Middle Eastern dance, the six exquisite dolls are rare; only a few of each character were made.

The Ottoman “Rom” dancer is outfitted in traditional Turkish gypsy style, with white pantaloons and a vest detailed with gold embroidery and tiny sequins. A pillbox hat accented with a pink lotus-like flower perches on her braided hair, and a festive smile is painted across her face.

Another doll, dressed in a brown and turquoise striped caftan and braided yarn belt, represents a Tunisian folk dancer artfully balancing a water jug on her head. In Tunisia, it is traditionally a woman’s duty to collect water, Shore explained, and this utilitarian skill becomes art via a vigorous dance of twisting and twirling during which the full pot remains stationary on her head.

The Moroccan Guedra doll, with hair of braids and beads, maintains an atypical stance; she’s planted in kneeling position. Hers is a trance/blessings dance enacted through the upper body, predominantly with the hands—a style Shore referred to as the “finger ballet.” Draped in indigo fabric, the doll’s arms are positioned as though presenting a gift. The collection also features dolls depicting Khaleeji (Persian Gulf), Ouled Nail (Algerian), and Moroccan Schikhatt dancers, each modeling an embellished costume, painted fingernails, superbly detailed jewelry, and an evocative expression.

Serving as both decorative objects and instructional aids, these gorgeous dolls couldn’t ask for a more fitting home than Jawaahir, a word that, in Arabic, means jewels. “I’m trying to expand people’s horizons,” Shore explained when asked about the utility of her collection. “Everyone knows belly dance, but there’s a lot more to Middle Eastern dancing than just that.”

About seventy-five people who had not won the lottery waited outside the Department Store Formerly Known as Dayton’s at Rosedale Center. The manager of the store talked into a microphone that rendered his voice unintelligible, then some instigators tried to incite the crowd with a rousing countdown. After a lackluster “ … two, one,” the manager cut a ribbon, a deejay summoned upbeat music, and consumers shuffled into Macy’s North, clutching complimentary ten-dollar gift cards that, I discovered two weeks later, expired on opening day, September 9.

I’m not sure what I was expecting—maybe orange-haired, Brooklyn-accented salespeople—but everything was as before: wool skirts and matching sweaters, Nine West shoes, crystal, Ralph Lauren bedding, ties, gifts-with-purchase. The Oval Room was looking very White Plains/Hamptons, with Michael Kors up to there. Evening gowns were overwhelmingly long and black. I drifted through departments with disconcerting names like Better Sportswear, touching things, until I was drawn into the juniors department by something pretty and inappropriate for my age. As I flipped through the sale rack—thick with droopy modal tunics, chunky sleeveless turtleneck sweaters, and size-zero pants—a red Asian-inspired top jumped out. What had we here? Heavy silk that didn’t slither off the hanger, a unified design statement, and the dignity of a tired refugee washed up on some benighted shore. The tags read Prada, a line once harbored in the exclusive Oval Room but jettisoned when the store became Macy’s North.

A few weeks later, there was a much larger and very much giddier crowd skittering across the red carpet outside the Orpheum Theatre turned out for the fourteenth annual Glamorama, née Fash Bash (ouch). Sponsored by whomever is currently residing at 700 Nicollet Mall, this fashion show-cum-pop music extravaganza is one of the Twin Cities’ few opportunities to dress up for the sake of dressing up—top down, no-holds-barred, well-shut-my-mouth glamour. So where—in this day of Target whores, ateliers.com, vintage on celebs, revolving-door department stores—does one find the perfect outfit for such an occasion? I asked around in Macy’s downtown Minneapolis store for the specially created Glamorama Shop and was sent, serially, to third floor, the Oval Room, Cosmetics, Handbags, and “by the loud music on first floor,” only to learn from a floor manager wearing a headset that glamorous pieces are endemic to Macy’s, like chipmunks in Minnesota. They’re everywhere.

Obviously, the 2,100 style mavens at Glamorama had spent considerable time and money exploring the glamour question as well, and it appeared that many of the sisters had got themselves down to Fiftieth and France, in Edina, to snag something fluttery, with smocking or pleats and a fetching finish. Certainly, there was a whiff of A. B. S. by Allen Schwartz and BCBG, and some prom-like dresses, sparkly and low-cut, that might have been of Macy’s origin, but the feeling was that shopping at Macy’s for a Macy’s-sponsored event was a bit too formulaic. Glamour calls for risk, creativity, and provocative spirit—none of which has ever been stocked by department stores.

Considerable cleavage, bare backs and legs—all staples of glamour—held their own without a lot of props. Manicure? Si, si. Hair professionally constructed? I don’t think so. Accessories were limited to a delicate necklace and a man. A Profound Geo-Fashion Thought occurs: Maybe stepping out in the middle of the country is a lot like a tectonic meeting of the coasts: West Coast sexy (without the ballistic breasts ’n’ baubles) merges with East Coast sophistication (minus the Upper East Side snarl). Oh, on with the show!

The gilded lobby fairly bubbled with air kisses, shiny faces, and camera flashes as a photographer captured somebodies at their botoxed best. Thumping house music gave way to a bilingual announcement that we were about to enter the Glamosphere, where the official languages were Beauty and Spanish. Since Beyoncé—the philosophical, musical, and stylistic muse of Glamorama—could not be present, she delivered her fundraising message that fashion rocks, and so does children’s cancer research, via video. Fast-flashing international images, including a sweat-slicked torso and a bare international bum, got us in the right frame of mind and, bing bang, the magic began. Cavalli, who has gotten a lot of good ideas from Keith Richards over the years, put an obi over a gothic shirt and some thigh-high boots and, herro, Kyoto-infused business casual. The designers behind Tuleh found it elementary, my dear Watson, that formfitting tweed solves the case of the missing ass. In a design coup, Badgley Mischka transformed a chenille bedspread into the most stunning flamenco evening gown. A hot Latin beat ran through that collection like pink-eye through a kindergarten class. YMCA: Moschino sent out a sexy cowboy, a sexy priest, a sexy conductor, a sexy boxer … and just in time for Halloween.

On and on; it only got sexier with a brief interlude for hideous by Marc Jacobs. Wrapping things up, House of Deréon kind of took advantage of its connections (founder Tina Knowles is Beyoncé’s mom, for heaven’s sake) to show a whole compound’s worth of curvaceous clothes: House of Excitement, House of Hotness, House of Mild Interest (housecoats, pants liners, compression socks, and that ilk).

As the lights blinked on, those 2,100 surprisingly nimble fashionistas sprinted the three blocks to Macy’s for more sensual pleasures at the after-party. But little did the partygoers know that the hot-blooded, Rio-flavored frocks from the runway would not be hanging in the Oval Room and, in fact, can be ordered only through Macy’s personal shopping service. At the click of a mouse, however, they could be in Temperley’s ateliers. Or they can always pop over to Neiman Marcus or Stephanie’s, in Highland Park, to try on that drop-dead gown. They can shop Bluefly or Girlshop or any of a myriad online boutiques for that upwardly, utterly flare-out-to-there-wardly, sell-my-clothes-I’m-going-to-heaven incarnation of glamour. Macy’s may have whetted the appetite for glamour, yet I wondered, can it deliver the whole feast?