The Rake Magazine

Year: 2006

  • When We Dead Awaken

    This year marks the hundredth anniversary of Henrik Ibsen’s death. And what better way to commemorate the solemn dramatist than with a wallop of theatrical desperation, accompanied by some Norwegian rosemaling workshops? Around these parts, there’s no finer Ibsen-obsessed company than Commonweal Theatre. Based down in the hip hamlet of Lanesboro, Commonweal Theatre is firmly rooted in southern Minnesota’s Scandinavian community, where it hosts an Ibsen festival that is now nine years strong (the festival runs February 3 – 6). This year, Commonweal stages When We Dead Awaken, a stoic play about an aging artist that is, coincidentally, the last in the Ibsen catalog. 206 Parkway Ave. N., Lanesboro; 800-657-7025; www.commonwealtheatre.org

  • Only Human: Exploring Contemporary Portraits

    As portraiture exhibitions go, this one is pretty crackling: Osama bin Laden in airbrush, five-foot-square photographs of blood-soaked extreme fighters, a painstaking oil rendering of Louisa May Alcott, a Marlene Dietrich-inspired video presentation, and a sculptural self-portrait using years’ worth of garbage are just some of the faces greeting viewers here. In all, nine local artists–Ernest Arthur Bryant III, Katinka Galanos, David Hamlow, Suzanne Kosmalski, Anthony Marchetti, Peter B. Becker Nelson, Ben Olson, Xavier Tavera, and Jay Wittenberg–offer up more than thirty unconventional portraits. 50 W. Kellogg Blvd., St. Paul; 651-266-1030; www.mmaa.org

  • Dafatir: Contemporary Iraqi Book Art

    The art of book illustration is particularly revered in Iraqi culture; traditionally, artists have enhanced religious, contemporary, and political texts with highly detailed, almost baroque imagery. Today they are equally likely to turn to abstract, colorful expressions that tell new stories in a new way. The three-dimensional works of seventeen Iraqi book artists are on display in this rare glimpse of the people with whom we are now entwined, and it’s made abundantly clear that art is a far more effective communication tool than any press conference. 1 North College St., Northfield; 507-646-4469. Part of the exhibit then travels to the Minnesota Center for Book Arts, 1011 Washington Ave. S., Suite 100, Minneapolis; 612-215-2520; www.mnbookarts.org

  • Ruth Duckworth, Modernist Sculptor

    Duckworth is most often celebrated for her work in porcelain, which has the opaque, milky presence of bone, gives off a sensual glow, and inspires a surprisingly emotional response. As she says, “there’s no other material that so effectively communicates both fragility and strength.” The steadily productive eighty-seven-year-old artist has been sculpting evocative forms from ceramic and metal since she fled Nazi Germany at age seventeen; her influences range from ancient Egyptian sculpture and Henry Moore to, most evident in her porcelain works, Isamu Noguchi and Constantin Brancusi. Duckworth eschews naming any of her work, so as to refrain from giving any suggestions to viewers (though she does profess a deep concern for ecological issues). Contrasting with her delicate porcelain tabletop pieces, her figurative work is more to the point: human and animal figures strike expressive and even humorous poses. Also included in this retrospective, which includes some eighty-five pieces and spans almost fifty years, are ceramic murals, carved stone pieces, and bronze castings. 612-870-3131; www.artsmia.org

  • HOME House Project: The Future of Affordable Housing

    Although we’ve been appalled by plenty of McMansions, we still find the greater mystery to be the look of inexpensive homes, which can be the epitome of ugly. Can’t inexpensive mean simple and attractive? The HOME House Project demonstrates that low-cost (or at least lower-cost) homes can be creative, inspiring, sustainable, innovative, and even beautiful. Moreover, the exhibit takes the view that they really should be all of these things, if people are going to care for and invest in them. On view are award-winning visions from more than a hundred local and national architects tackling a critical issue. 333 East River Rd., Minneapolis; 612-625-9494; www.weisman.umn.edu

  • Hang In There, Baby!

    I live in utter fear of motivational products—those soundbites of schlocky uplift that appear on calendars and posters, accentuating images of glorious sunsets, soaring eagles, big-eyed children dressed as cute hobos, and kittens dangling precariously from tree branches by their tiny, razor-sharp claws.

    It’s because there lives inside me a deep-seated anxiety that everything I read (except Ann Coulter) must have a grain of truth to it. Or a strain. Like a virus. A strain of virulent truth, inoperable and drug-resistant, that will enter my bloodstream through my eyeballs. There will be no symptoms initially, other than a persistent snickering. One poster, featuring an image of a lush woodland path, says, “Fall down seven times. Stand up eight.” Why? If you’re that clumsy, it’s safer to stay down. Maybe invest in a helmet.

    The snickering eventually clears up on its own, but this only indicates that the infection has progressed to a more dangerous stage. By then the uplifting message has been internalized, gnawing a sanctimonious new neural pathway through my psyche.

    It may lay dormant, awakening only during a flare of activity, such as jogging. I could be half-heartedly chugging around Lake Nokomis, with only the sounds of my leaden footfalls to keep me company, when the endorphins kick in and “Just Do It” repeats in my brain over and over again, licking at my fiery hamstrings like a lash from an inspirational whip.

    Or, as in the case of “WWJD?,” the homilies may go to work immediately, cross-contaminating every thought, word, and deed until I am no longer able to distinguish between reality or Wal-Mart’s professed focus on scriptural principles. (I’m pretty sure Jesus wouldn’t back a company that lines its management’s pockets with gold and drives its workers into poverty, while hiding behind a yellow smiley-face mask. I’m Christian myself. Look it up in our manual. See Revelations under “Great Deceiver.”)

    Actually, if you give them any real thought, all of these sayings are problematic. Take “I grumbled at having no boots until I met a man with no feet,” attributed to “Unknown.” First of all, what does this mean to the guy who has feet but no boots? Stop complaining? Maybe the guy with no feet had feet until his feet froze off because he had no boots. Second of all, if I didn’t have feet, I wouldn’t need any boots. I’d need fake feet, and probably a ride to the fake-feet store to get a pair. And boots at that point would be superfluous, like balloon valances.

    Also, doesn’t the fact that most of these sayings come from some “Unknown” freak you out? The Void is telling us how to live our lives. It’s like taking a prescription drug from a doctor you don’t know. Tell you what; just substitute “Beelzebub” for “Unknown.” It works almost every time. Imagine Lucifer in his blazing pit, pointing his pitchfork at you and cackling, “Today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday!” And that little kitten hanging from the branch—she’s dangling just above Satan’s head. The white-hot tines of his trident are poking at her furry bottom as he screeches, “Hang In There, Baby! BWAH-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!” Come to think of it, isn’t it a little suspicious that the kiosks selling these calendars all vanish after Christmas? Admit it, Anthony Robbins looks like the Devil, doesn’t he? How else could he be that big? He’s got paws the size of catcher’s mitts. Brrrr.

    Nobody buys motivational calendars for themselves. They’re always given to you by someone who claims to have your best interests at heart. It’s like presenting someone with a can of Slim-Fast and a mirror and saying, “I know you’re going through a tough time right now. I saw these and I thought of you.”

    Deep down, my real fear of these motivational posters is that eventually, if I’m infected long enough by the germ of truth in their sayings, I will have to face up to my responsibilities. And that’s scary because the answer for me is almost always: No. No, technically, I am not being “All That I Can Be.” I could be nicer, thinner, richer, smarter, and more loving to my fellow man. I could get up at five a.m. and walk my dog around the lake and come home and throw a load of laundry in and do the Times crossword puzzle and sing my children awake and pack healthful lunches and smile at my co-workers for no good reason. I could eschew takeout in favor of home-cooked. I could give up sugar, sugar substitutes, and trans fats. I could think globally, act locally, and visualize world peace. I could do more sit-ups and have more face time and look on the bright side until my retinas are French fried.

    I could probably keep up this kind of schedule for a week, and then I would go shoot up a Wal-Mart.

  • A Valentine Across the Fence

    Before I understood what “wild oats” were, my parents—especially my mother—warned me to stay away from white women. Both came of age in the pre-Emmett Till South, where black men got lynched for so much as flirting with white girls. For my mother and father, however, avoiding “playing in the snow” was more about racial pride than physical safety. I can still hear my mother telling me that there was no need to “cross the fence” because we had every shade of color imaginable on our side, from “dark as midnight” to “high yaller.” “Have some pride,” she said. “If you and your friends don’t stay within the race, girls like your sisters will not have decent men to marry.” She meant that the male portion of W.E.B. Du Bois’ “talented tenth” had a duty—which they failed to meet because of slavery and its aftermath—to protect black women and take their rightful place as head of the family. To marry “out of the fold” was to once again abandon black women.

    I did not openly question this obligation, but I did surreptitiously date white girls. In college, when I dated a white girl, my father believed it was simply a misguided attempt to dis my parents’ values. Meanwhile, my mother prayed for my black soul. I called my parents hypocrites for marching for freedom in the 1960s while castigating me for embracing freedom in my choice of romantic partners. I saw myself as carrying out Dr. King’s dream—that people should be judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin.

    Before and between marriages, I dated women with light, dark, and red hair, but relatively few with dark skin; I’m now married to a woman with blond hair and blue eyes. I used to rationalize my choices as a search for smart women, skin color be damned. And when I did admit, to close male friends, that I found blonds and redheads especially appealing, I was always quick to point out black women who also tripped my trigger, such as Halle Berry and Vanessa Williams. Interestingly, they were in many ways the “high yaller” version of what I found attractive in white women. Did I truly have a preference but lack the guts to admit it? Was it just physical—I gravitated toward whites over blacks the way other men go for model-thin waifs over their more zaftig sisters? Or was it something deeper? I have to wonder if years of living in white neighborhoods and attending an Establishment bastion like Harvard created confusion about my racial identity—and maybe that confusion led me to what could be taken as a symbolic abandonment of black women.

    One of my best friends, who resembles a slightly wizened, middle-aged Kunta Kinte, has followed a similar path; his spouse is a statuesque blond with blue eyes whose family hails from Northern Europe. He is proud of his blackness and rails with gusto against the injustices that whites have inflicted upon African-Americans. He says the only criteria for his partner is that she be “pretty, nice, and let me be the man.” The ethnic identities of his paramours over the years suggest he does not believe African-American women fit the bill. He told me that, living in Minnesota, his choices were strictly a result of “supply and demand,” but I wasn’t really convinced. Truth be told, I have always felt that we two were playing a little game of hypocrisy in energetically proclaiming our love for black people but not sharing our love with black women.

    Now my teenage sons are introducing me to their girlfriends, and it appears the apple has fallen close to the tree. Until recently, I said nothing. After all, I taught them to look past color. Yet I also taught them never to forget their racial heritage. I still very much believe what Dr. King preached, but I worry that, through my choices, I have unwittingly told my sons they should look primarily to non-African-American women for romance.

    Ironically, my mother has come to terms with “crossing the fence.” And I have become more empathetic to her underlying fear, that my dating and marrying women who did not look like her was somehow a rejection of her and her values. Since women have historically been the ones to pass on cultural traditions from one generation to the next, my stepping outside the racial box meant that my children might not be as connected to our African-American roots as I had been. This is a scary prospect for a proud African-American like my mother. And I owe it to my sons to make sure they consider that possibility as they make their romantic choices.

  • A Winter Warmer

    These winter mornings, the sunshine shows things as they are. I was recently in Devon, the corner of southwest England where I was brought up, which was covered with a fine coating of frost that imparts sharpness to every detail of the landscape. “Proper rimey,” said my neighbor there, a man who lives in the house where he was born and has been digging the graves in the village churchyard for nigh on forty years. The frost (a.k.a. rime) gives each blade of grass a thin, sharp edge with the patina of brushed steel. A little warmth from the sun strikes the tousled twigs of the willows down by the stream and rows of water drops form orderly queues along the underside of each wooden wisp. All this ambient moisture freezes the fingers and, seemingly, each individual capillary within each finger. Thirty degrees Fahrenheit in Devon feels something like thirty degrees colder than it does in Minnesota.

    If the morning sun shows things as they are, it is the pale, slanting light of late afternoon that is the joy of the historian, for it shows things as they were. This narrow valley has become a palimpsest, a surface like a medieval sheepskin manuscript that has been written over by one scribe after another to record successive lives. Oblique light reveals the slightest lump or line in the landscape left behind by an old lane or hedgebank or by the walls of a building long since disappeared. Sunset has an ultraviolet feel.

    Nowadays, the stream, one of the little brawling brooks which eventually empties itself into the River Exe, runs straight through pasture into an ornamental garden. But a couple of hundred years ago, trenches and tributaries, long since dry but now apparent in the weak winter sunshine, ran in and out of it. These were excavated in order to irrigate orchards growing apples with names like Kingston Black, Sweet Alford, and Slack My Girdle, the fruit that made the fearsomely alcoholic farmhouse cider for which Devon used to be famous. I have known tough Scotch matelots, well acquainted with the strong waters of their own country, who have come ashore from their ships at Plymouth and found Devon cider to be more than they could handle.

    Underneath the vanished sylvan landscape of the apples is another—noisier, malodorous, industrial. Seven hundred years ago, mills here were fulling and bleaching woolen cloth, their wheels driven by the water power of leats laboriously dug out by hand and visible now as the merest shadows in the field-grass. These are not the product of the fey fancies that some folk associate with so-called ley lines. They were dug by hard graft to serve a serious business; like many modern developing nations, medieval Devon made its first efforts at industrialization by manufacturing textiles. One of the fields on the side of this valley is called Long Bolham; the name is that of a weaver, Nicholas de Bolleham, who on the eleventh of September, 1337, took on a lifetime lease of the land and mills from the Lord of the Manor—you can read the document in the Harvard Law Library. His industry has left little enough impression on the sedgy grass of these pastures. In the four centuries that succeeded him, however, the long, slow growth of the West Country cloth trade powered the enterprise of intrepid Devon seafarers such as Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Francis Drake, not to mention the brave folk who sailed from Plymouth in the Mayflower in 1620 and thus made a mark on a wider world.

    Teasing ghosts out of the frosty fields is a fine occupation for the dark time of the year, but it is chilly work. Too much contemplation makes one pale. You could put warmth back into your extremities with the 2001 vintage of a fine red Rhône from Domaine Sainte-Anne (Appellation Côtes-du-Rhône-Villages Contrôlée). True, the wine comes from near Saint-Gervais in the hill country west of the Rhône, so the vines that grow its grapes (principally Grenache and Syrah) are no strangers to cold. But lemon trees and the Mediterranean are within reach.

    This is wine with a good red color, strong, toothsome tannins, and fruity flavors reminiscent of cherries, neither flimsy (like bad Beaujolais) nor seriously weighty (like great Châteauneuf du Pape). Nor is it excessively expensive in Minnesota, at around $15 a bottle. And, as a vegetarian friend recently said to me, “Rhône goes with everything.” This would certainly be fine with all sorts of food, from hummus dip to roast pheasant. It is the kind of warming wine that inspires confidence. Maybe it could set 2006 in a somewhat rosier light.

  • Out of Your Shell…

    It’s hard to admit, but my real first encounter with escargot was at Bunny’s Bar and Grill in St. Louis Park, with a flock of hospitality bats. Some of my fellow bartenders thought it would be funny to order the strange appetizer—what was escargot Bourguignon doing there alongside nachos?—and someone else thought it would be even funnier to drop one in my mouth without telling me what it was. Once I understood that I was eating snails, I could no longer understand why this definitive dish in the cuisine of cuisines was so maligned. In truth, my initial taste of these slimy creatures was an odd sort of awakening. The earthy, buttery softness of this accidental escargot led me to oysters and sushi and other culinary adventures that might have been postponed for who knows how long.

    Piles of shells excavated from archeological digs across Europe indicate that snails have been enjoyed as a food by a number of ancient peoples. The Romans cultivated special vineyards where their snails could feed. By the sixteenth century, dining on snails was so fashionable that the Catholic Church classified them (along with frogs and turtles in France) as “fish” and they were therefore allowed on meatless days. But it wasn’t until the mid-1800s, when Alsatian-run brasseries proliferated in Paris, that escargot became a defining dish of French culture. Today the French consume some forty thousand metric tons of escargot each year, more than the country can produce. Just last year, the Burgundy Snail Festival was saved by the importation of Polish snails to handle the demand (to the delight and chagrin of the French). In fact, heliciculture, or snail farming, is becoming a popular economic solution for Eastern European countries as demands across the globe increase.

    Gastropod mollusks, snails occupy one of the largest classes of animals and can be found all over the planet in both water and land environments. Gastronomically, the most popular are Helix aspera (or petit-gris), the common garden snail, and Helix pomatia, the famed Burgundy snail. Spending their lazy days grazing on wild herbs and vineyard plants, wild Burgundy snails are not as widespread as they once were, due to land development and farming practices. Meanwhile, the garden snail is detested by green thumbs because of its insatiable appetite for plant matter and its prolific breeding ability. (It helps that most snails are hermaphrodites, and toggle back and forth between male and female.) Indeed, it must be hard to appreciate critters on your table that you curse in your garden. Other haters are usually people who have, shall we say, “textural issues” with foods. Just thinking of the slimy, gelatinous nature of a raw snail is enough to set off their gag reflex. And yet many of these people would happily wolf down a lobster, the cockroach of the sea, which is actually similar in texture to a cooked snail.

    The Slow Food organization, those champions of fresh and independently produced food, and of the meaningful and lengthy enjoyment of a meal, uses the snail as its logo. Puns aside, cooking fresh wild snails is a slow and laborious undertaking. Although gardeners may be inspired to boil up their nemesis as a tasty revenge, caution should be heeded as snails, more so than most animals, are what they eat—including pesticides and plant life that may be poisonous to humans. Therefore, preparing snails for consumption involves holding them in an untreated wood box while they fast for three to four days as a detoxifying process. It also may include burying them alive in rock salt to draw out harmful toxins, or boiling them at length while removing the frothy scum that gathers on the surface of the cooking water. Not surprisingly, canned snails are a popular alternative to the home-cooked variety; many brands use age-old French preparations and are becoming more readily available in the U.S. through gourmet websites.

    Most of us, however, think of escargot as de rigueur on the menu at any traditional French restaurant. At Vincent in Minneapolis, escargot is prepared in the classic Burgundy style, with garlic, shallots, and butter; when perfectly cooked in this way, it is amazingly soft and delicate—like a divine portobello. (You will know the overcooked snail when you meet it: Chewy and rubbery, they lose all magic.) For a departure from the Gallic, venture to Solera for a warm tapas of snails with mojo verde.

    While escargot may seem hopelessly retro, young chefs are rediscovering the dish. Over the last year, restaurants across the country featured such creations as escargot-stuffed figs, escargot with truffled parsnip puree and artichokes, escargot parfait with potato puree, and parsley pesto-dotted escargot pizzas. Escargot on the menu gives a restaurant a certain pedigree, since most everyone has heard of escargot, and many consider it a luxury item, whether they enjoy it or not. So perhaps these chefs are at the forefront of a new international trend, and soon enough, escargot will be as popular as steak frites.

     

    Escargot Pasta

    6 to 8 ounces linguine pasta

    3 tablespoons butter

    1 10-ounce can artichoke hearts,

    drained and sliced

    1⁄2 cup quartered mushrooms

    (such as baby portobello or porcini)

    1 7- or 8-ounce can escargot, drained

    2 to 3 cloves garlic, chopped

    1 teaspoon chopped fresh sage

    1 teaspoon chopped fresh parsley

    1⁄2 cup freshly grated Parmigiano cheese

    Cook pasta in water until al dente.

    While pasta is cooking, melt butter in large sauté pan over medium heat. Add garlic and sauté until golden. Add mushrooms and artichokes and cook until mushrooms have softened and browned.

    Stir in escargot, sage, and parsley, cooking until just warmed. (Don’t overcook snails or they will be tough.) Remove from heat.

    Toss cooked pasta with half of cheese and place in serving bowl (or on plates) and top with escargot mixture. Sprinkle with remaining cheese and serve. Makes two large portions.

  • Pseudoflesh

    The world is a cold, hard, lonesome place. Despite ads telling you to pull yourself together and develop buns of steel, what the hardness and the coldness make you want to do is touch things that are warm and softly upholstered, like pets, or other people. Since creatures with a pulse are not always available, we turn to science, where the wish for things as squishy as our selves has been inspiring industrial designers to work with new materials that simulate the tactile qualities of flesh. The resilient gel-filled seats on bicycles, for example, mimic the give of your own rump. The gummy-bear-like pushbuttons on phones, TV remotes, and cameras are made of substitutes for flesh—little rubbery pills, jujubes, and boogers of plastic that feel like the spongy pad of a fingertip, a nipple, an earlobe, the lips.

    Children, before their desire to touch everything is squelched, love to poke their Jell-O and watch the way it shudders in a bowl. For as long as they can get away with it, they remain polymorphously perverse, playing with quivering plastic worms and millipedes, trembling rubber spiders, and those trompe l’oeil fried eggs or splats of puke that give slightly when they’re touched. Eventually, though, letting your hands wander wherever they please becomes illegal—then there are places that stay open late selling latex or pneumatic companionship to those having no luck finding the real thing.

    The real thing is elusive. Everyone is looking for a hug. Life, meanwhile, just offers one concussion after another. This is sometimes called “learning,” but we keep looking for ways to soften the blow. Noting the poverty of our defenses, materials scientists have rolled up their sleeves to create sympathetic substances that, when you touch them, seem to touch you back in an almost human way. Today, for instance, when you’re sitting at your desk, struggling to find the right word, the soft sleeve of rubber around your pen is there to give your fingers a therapeutic little squeeze of encouragement, like the hand of a friend during a moment of distress. And now, thanks to those rubbery inserts in its handle, that slippery toothbrush will never go flying out of your hand again. Same for that new can opener, and your pancake flipper and your toilet brush, because ergonomics is on the march, bringing with it peace of mind. Now that we have neoprene beer cozies, memory-foam mattresses that lovingly conform to our bodies, pacifiers that plug into baby’s mouths to keep them quiet, and udderlike beverage sacs for us to suck on, we are equipped to deal with hardships that would at one time have worn us down to a nub. We have what we need to get a grip.

    Once you start with this stuff, though, it’s a slippery slope from ersatz flesh to materials that curiously resemble little blobs of matter secreted by our bodies. I don’t know what to do about those adhesive dabs of synthesized snot used to paste advertising inserts into magazines and to stick new credit cards to letters in the mail. I can see someone accumulating a wad of this disturbing but weirdly engaging substance the way that Francis A. Johnson of Darwin, Minnesota, patiently wound, over the course of thirty-nine years, his record-breaking, twelve-foot ball of saved-up twine. On reaching retirement, some new contender is going to set up a roadside attraction featuring the world’s biggest medicine ball made out of magazine boogers. For five dollars he will let you into the Quonset hut where it is kept under a trouble light and allow you to knead it.

    All this stuff that replicates the feel of our own bodies, not to mention what comes dribbling out of them—carnal materials, let’s call them—has come into being because we want the things we touch to touch us back: in essence, we want them to be us, but without all the mess of being human. Has the mystery gone out of things or is it going into them? The materials used to make chew toys and earbuds and gearshift knobs get stranger and stranger. The chemicals might as well be shipped in from Pluto. People fondle the fake leopard skin covering their steering wheels more than they do each other. We are a lonely species, infinitely sad, with bodies the consistency of pudding, but engineers and surgeons are doing what they can. Let’s look on the bright side. The rubberization of women, for example, is making it possible for them to bounce higher than ever before. Silicone and collagen shape their breasts into bathtub toys of spectacular buoyancy, their lips into king-sized pillows, their buns into peaches that a man wants to bite into (but be careful—the Food and Drug Administration isn’t sure yet if they’re good for you). Now that the soft buttons on the keypads of telephones light up, the day of the bioluminescent nipple, implanted to glow at a lover’s approach, can’t be too far off.

    Our fate is to wear out and fall apart. To stave off entropy, we have tools and implements to battle carpal tunnel, tennis elbow, lumbar pain, whiplash, love handles, and flat feet. The shaped grips of scissors, snow shovels, and roll-on luggage reach out to us like friends. The modern ergonomic desk chair cups us in a closely engineered simulacrum of ourselves. It swivels, flexes and adapts to every movement and dimension of your body with the dogged loyalty of your own shadow. When I set out to be a writer, one of the first tools I bought to get myself some traction was a device—in German it would be a “sitzmachine”—called the Equa Chair, a terrific piece of functional sculpture by the Minneapolis industrial designer William Stumpf. For fifteen years I’ve been sitting in this thing pounding out the words, and the chair has never once buckled under the sturm und drang of trying to get things to make sense. It’s holding up better than its owner.

    Every decade or so, Stumpf and his associates come out with a new desk (or “task”) chair incorporating the latest materials, some of which are the result of their own experiments. Stumpf’s Aeron chair, introduced in the late nineties, has become modish. You can’t walk into an ad agency or the offices of hip architects without bumping into one of them. The Aeron (the name sounds like a mythological creature that got streamlined in the thirties) has been pronounced the most comfortable office chair on Earth. What most intrigues me about it is the material used for the seat and back. Instead of conventional upholstery, a resilient mesh that Stumpf calls a “pellicle” is stretched taut within the chair’s curved frames. The American Heritage Dictionary defines pellicle as a “… a thin skin or film, such as an organic membrane … .” The stuff of the Aeron’s pellicle is very tough and durable, with an elasticity that does not deform or weaken appreciably with use. Unlike our skin, it isn’t tragic; it doesn’t sag. This is progress. This is more than we can say about what droops before us in the mirror. Evidently we are creating materials that are better at being us than we are.

    The chemicals in those tank cars rolling past could be the ingredients for a seraglio of new squeezable best friends, or for a million translucent, jiggling, jelly-colored bugs. They could be the stuff cheeseheads are made of, or Gumbys, or the nose pads of our eyeglasses, or the material for the lenses of those glasses, so we can see straight. We’re swaddled in chairs so ergonomically perfect that they duplicate the comfort of the womb, but our bodies keep breaking down anyway. More and more replacement parts are available, though engineers are having a lot of trouble with the heart. They haven’t quite doped it out. It still has a few kinks in it, but they’re working on it.