Year: 2006

An old-fashioned version of this whole desert-island charade would have had author, television writer, and occasional standup comic Merrill Markoe bringing along her “collected works of Robert Benchley,” because “his silly rage at minutiae combined with great word usage is both a comfort and a reminder to have perspective.” But nowadays, the people who play our desert-island game usually assume their iBook is a given. So, in that spirit, here’s what Markoe would bring:

1. A DVD with all the contents of the National Library on it.

2. And I’d have access to all the music (via downloads) and literature and news in the world. Making me think: To hell with Benchley. I’m going ahead with the Mac and the library instead. I should add at this point that my boyfriend accuses me of wrecking hypothetical scenarios with my literal-mindedness. He may have a point. I am sick with worry that I will wake up on my first desert-island night and realize I wasted two of my five items on a useless piece of equipment because I can’t recharge the battery or plug the damn thing in. That is why I have no choice but to make item number three …

3. A Costco store. Just one container of Costco seasoned salt can last for up to three generations. My friend Elayne Boosler said that the first time she unpacked her groceries from Costco, she started to cry because it hit her she would never live long enough to use up all that ketchup. Of course, I could get a Costco but what if there is no one paying the bills—will there be no electricity? Or does my Costco arrive complete with employees who come over on their own boat and leave at the end of the day? And do I need to put my Costco card on this list? See. My boyfriend is right. And you know what? The last thing I need in stressful circumstances is for someone to make me feel bad about myself. That is why he will not make this list. But now that I don’t have a boyfriend, and I don’t know if my Costco comes with employees, I am going to need some companionship. So …

4. A pregnant shepherd/lab/border collie mix. Because if I am going to populate the island with dogs (and I can—there’s plenty of dog food at Costco), I don’t want purebreds. I want big happy smart dogs who will continually look at me with those buoyant expressions that indicate they think everything is going not just great, but even better than we expected!

5. One thing I don’t think they have at Costco: A computer animation program that comes with a tutorial. Now I will finally have the time to not only learn computer animation, but I will be able to draw and paint and save my work from the mold and moisture in sea air and the fading of that cruel desert-island sun.

“Our work is a subjective observation of sound,” said David Berg. As a scientist of sorts for the Acoustics and Audio Group at Orfield Laboratories in Minneapolis, Berg listens for a living. For instance, if you ever wondered what noise a cell phone’s seemingly silent display makes, he has the wherewithal to tell you. Not only that, but he can analyze the tiny purr and determine whether it can be improved upon. To do so, he would probably retreat to a room at the center of the Labs, a spot the Guinness Book of World Records has named the quietest place on earth.

Berg is a tall fellow, a man with ears sensitive enough to catch sounds the rest of us miss. He is constantly listening, at one point bending his body like a dowsing rod to check the hum of a fridge. “Oh sure, I measured that,” he said, regarding the Kenmore. “It’s quiet. Stupidly quiet.” His office used to be the sound booth for Sound 80, the world’s first direct-to-digital studio, famous for capturing most of Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks album and the song “Funkytown.” Another part of the former studio is now a training room where paying customers scrutinize various noises. Does the burp from a particular Harley’s tailpipe seem rugged? Does a vacuum cleaner’s screech inspire confidence in its sucking ability? Does an airplane’s engine whine assure passengers that it won’t plummet to earth? “It’s the quality of the sound, not the level,” Berg explained. “For instance, we dispensed with the notion that a vacuum has to sound annoying to be effective. It can be quiet and still sound as if it works.”

Berg has had a love affair with sound for most of his life. He’s played in several bands, most recently an alt-country group called the Famous Volcanoes, and left the University of Wisconsin in Eau Claire years ago to pursue his love of audio and electronics, receiving most of his training on the job at Orfield.

The quietest spot on earth is the Anechoic Chamber, a room within a room, a double-walled, fabricated steel structure on springs, padded on the interior with wedges of fiberglass. The chamber is dark and comfortable, as quiet as a bedroom in the middle of the night—well, obviously, quieter. As you enter, you walk on a tight grid of wires, allowing the sepia-colored wedges beneath to absorb every dollop of sound. Berg proved this by clapping and hollering. The noise died abruptly, the claps diminishing into strange, flat boings. You could hear every heartbeat in your ears, a subtle rhythm that eventually gave way to an annoying approximation of tinnitus.

“This is the direct opposite, the Reverb Room,” he said, wandering into a place that looked like a box made of concrete block and echoed like a handball court. At the center of the room was a rotating microphone boom that captured every noise bouncing off the walls or the corrugated tin panels mounted in the corners. Berg whooped, and his voice caromed endlessly, mixing with the sound of footsteps to create a deafening roar. He pulled out what looked like a mechanical centipede, a tapper that hammers the floor of the Reverb Room. “You’d be surprised how many condos are built without adequate insulation!” he yelled, his voice amplifying the already painful cacophony. And in fact, this room soon would be used to test the insulating capabilities of drywall, windows, and doors.

Berg’s iTunes collection features his favorite music as well as speeches, the din from vehicles, and the subtle grinds of an assortment of household appliances. He enjoys making and studying noise, and also showing off the gadgets at Orfield Labs. Besides the Head and Torso Simulator, which looks like a talking crash-test dummy, there were various small microphones in little wooden boxes, accelerometers to measure vibrations, and acoustic calibrators. Berg demonstrated the effectiveness of these instruments by clapping, stomping his feet, yelling, and whispering—anything to make noise that could be recorded and dissected.

His skills and proclivities come in handy more often than you may think. Berg has recorded preachers giving sermons, manipulating three-dimensional computer models of their churches, in order to help them cut down on echoes. In one case, a church asked the folks at Orfield to leave room for a bit of fancy reverb so the organ could really drive home the point. The Labs are also assisting a company with a machine whose sole purpose is to create babble, thus masking conversations between work cubicles. Berg tests every device with a holler or a hiss, a burst of laughter, or an imitation of a foghorn. At one point he declared with a scowl, “Hard drive’s loud,” addressing a machine that seemed, to less discerning ears, completely silent. earth.

People sell all kinds of oddities on Craigslist, but if you’re looking for really weird stuff you might want to sign up for an email list generated by the University of Minnesota. That’s how Ben Awes, Bob Ganser, and Christian Dean, who together make up the architecture firm Citydeskstudio, found their skyway.

“We signed up for the U’s Bid Information Service to get RFPs for work,” said Awes, referring to the request-for-proposals that institutions send out when they need contract work. “But one email sent in June had an item about a skyway going up for auction.” Mildly curious, the trio clicked onto a University website to see the pictures. “We almost fell off our chairs–we thought, ‘There’s no way they’re actually selling this!’” That’s because “this” was no brassy-tacky 80s skyway, nor some context-sensitive postmodern 90s model–it was of 70s vintage, when skyways were still young and cool and futuristic. Even better, it came with a pedigree, having been designed by Edward F. Baker & Associates, the firm whose namesake designed the Cities’ first two skyways in the early 60s.

An elegant glass rectangle encased in a painted steel frame, including seven diagonal bars that run across its long sides, the skyway definitely has retro-modern appeal. At just 1,300 square feet, it’s also invitingly cozy, recalling the new generation of prefab homes (like the Flat Pack House and the Weehouse, both also designed right here in the Twin Cities), which have been all the rage in design magazines of late.

But the Citydeskstudio architects would hate to see their prize wind up as a private home. “One priority is to have a public use,” said Ganser. “We’d like it to stay in the public eye, to keep that connection to its history as public space. Given how much skyways mean to the Twin Cities, it’s an icon in a way.” Sitting isolated on a vacant lot at the University, the 140-ton structure does appear oddly monumental. It once hung unremarkably over Fifth Street in downtown Minneapolis, where it connected the old JC Penney and Powers department stores, but the city took it down to make way for the new light rail line. Then the U acquired it, but plans to use it on campus didn’t come to fruition. When the U’s stadium deal went through, the dirt lot where the skyway had been stored became needed for (surprise) a parking lot. Thus the auction.

The architects declined to specify their winning bid for the skyway, but did note that they were the only party that submitted one. Ganser said that they’re comfortable with what they paid. “We took a chance‹we didn’t want to lose it, but we had limits.” One thing to consider, said Awes, was that “there was no guarantee this was a feasible project. And we had less than two weeks to decide whether to go for it.” They also had to factor in the cost of relocating the skyway from the future parking lot to another nearby parcel of land, where the U would allow it to remain until the end of the year.

So it was that, on a hot, windy morning last month, a crew from Stubbs Building and House Movers–which famously lugged the Shubert Theater to its Hennepin Avenue location a few years back–arrived at the lot on Twenty-fifth Avenue Southeast and Fourth Street Southeast. In amazingly short order, they had the skyway propped up on four sets of wheels, one at each corner, and a hydraulic system rigged to keep it level once it was in motion. Cables were hooked to a metal plate on one end of the skyway that ran to a pair of extra-burly tow trucks. Then the trucks began inching up and over a hill. It all took considerably less than a day’s work.

Now the challenge is to create a plan–and find the partners–to make the erstwhile aerial passage into a bona fide building: “A main event,” as Christian Dean put it. He and his partners have no shortage of ideas regarding new uses for an old skyway. In the Cities, they envision it as a bar or restaurant, a gallery, a warming house in a park, or a yoga studio.

Out in the country (they have the wherewithal to move it up to 150 miles away), it could become an interpretive center, a chapel, or even a rentable cabin or retreat. “It’s not hard to get the motivation to think about a project like this,” said Awes. “This is our baby now–our bouncing baby skyway.”

Billed as an “American comedy,” Steven Dietz’s eerie, densely packed play premiered last fall at the esteemed Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago. Last of the Boys contends with the specter of the Vietnam War and takes place in a present-day trailer park that, appropriately, sits on a toxic dump site; there, a vet is still wrestling with the ghosts, lies, and psychic wounds he earned while serving his country. He receives a visit from an old war buddy, who brings along his much-younger thirty-five-year-old girlfriend, who is the daughter of a fallen soldier. Ultimately, the play leaves us swimming in the divergent paths these three take in trying to reconcile the blows they’ve been dealt by the Vietnam War. 612-822-7063; www.jungletheater.com

Not quite ice cream but more than a snow cone, Italian ices are smooth concoctions flavored with purees of fruits like mango and strawberry. At the new Grand Italian Ice Café, the only thing better than a root beer ice is a root beer ice with a giant scoop of custard added to it—creating what is known as a “gelati.” This place is versatile enough to offer coffee and sandwiches, but we’re banking on the beautiful texture and flavor of their ices to carry them through the chill months. 976 Grand Ave., St. Paul; 651-290-2704

As the menu at Café Brenda has long made clear, Brenda Langton was one of the first Twin Cities chefs to recognize the value of local food producers. Her newest venture, Spoonriver, is a stylish, next-generation expression of those ideals. Brunch after the farmers market might consist of tea-poached eggs or a garden leek omelette, and loft dwellers in the neighborhood can stop in for take-out meals that go way beyond roast chicken or deli sandwiches. Still, that doesn’t mean that dinner can’t be an event, with entrées like orange blossom apricots stuffed with goat cheese, or trout with a passion-fruit lomi crab sauce. 750 2nd St. S., Minneapolis; 612-436-2236; www.spoonriverrestaurant.com

Capping off the populist Sommerfest series is the catchiest darn opera ever written. Taking the role of the titular seductress in this semi-staged production is the smoky-eyed American mezzo-soprano Angela Horn (pictured on next page), a New York-based singer who’s regarded nationwide as one of the finest interpreters of the sultry Carmen character. In fact, Sommerfest music director Andrew Litton directed Horn in a production of Carmen last year, in Vail, Colorado, after which he announced, “Angela Horn is Carmen.” The cast also includes hometown-girl-made-good Jennifer Baldwin Peden, who returns to the role she played at Theatre de la Jeune Lune: the sweet little peasant girl Micaela. Perfect for a Minnesotan! 612-371-5656; www.mnorch.org

The Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne would make a fine old-time carnival barker, beckoning us into a world of wonder and weirdness, dressed in his white suit and flanked by people dressed like stuffed animals. So it is not ironic at all that the Lips are playing the State Fair. Their latest, At War With the Mystics, is their most political, but with songs like “Free Radicals (A Hallucination of the Christmas Skeleton Pleading with a Suicide Bomber),” they are in little danger of becoming overly serious. 651-642-2262; www.mnstatefair.org

When name-checking guitar gods, technical show-offs like Michael Hedges, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Preston Reed, and Joe Satriani come to mind. But one would be hard-pressed to find a young lady among their ranks, someone who spent her formative years noodling away in string-based obsession. Until Kaki King came along, that is. This twenty-five-year-old is that kind of guitarist, a majestic talent whose mind moves as quickly as her hands, and whose style is already stunningly distinctive and brazenly experimental. On this, her third album, the producer John McEntire (who’s worked with the likes of Stereolab and Tortoise) injects a faintly indie air into King’s atmospheric playing.