Year: 2006

Last summer, Ismail Kadare was awarded the first-ever Man Booker International Prize, beating out Muriel Spark, Doris Lessing, and Ian McEwan. I felt a bit smug about having discovered the Albanian author many years before, in the late 1980s. At Hungry Mind Bookstore in St. Paul, where I was working at the time, no one bought books by this little-known writer, from a country I could barely find on a map. But then my brother loaned me a copy of Kadare’s Chronicle in Stone, a semi-autobiographical novel about growing up in the remote villages of the forgotten country of the Balkans. In it, Kadare showed how bizarre tribal laws kept religion in check among a fiercely proud population made up mostly of Muslims, as well as Orthodox Christians and Catholics—while also fomenting vendettas that endured for generations. The rigid rule of monarchists, Stalinists, or fascists pales in comparison with these Albanian blood feuds.

I was hooked and have since devoured Kadare’s other hard-to-find novels. Broken April, published in 1998, used as a backdrop those generations of familial battles that, in a country cut off from the rest of Europe, continued well into the twentieth century and the reign of King Zog I, the tribal king with the space-alien name, from 1928 to 1939. In 1938, Zog had Mussolini’s son-in-law as the best man at his wedding to Princess Geraldine, the “White Rose of Hungary.” As a wedding gift, Mussolini gave the king and his bride a yacht with an Italian crew that tried but failed to kidnap Zog on his honeymoon.

Italy eventually annexed Albania in April of 1939, and while Italian troops were greeted with cheers from the Albanians, Mussolini had the Italian press publicize the event as a fantastic military victory for the Fascist forces. The Italian public went wild over Il Duce’s triumph, and Zog looted the treasury on his way out. When he checked into the London Ritz Hotel, a porter asked him what was in his bags that made them so heavy. “Gold,” Zog famously replied.

But even after Zog’s abdication, little Albania couldn’t oust its homegrown communist tyrants, as most other Eastern European countries had by 1989. Many of Kadare’s books, such as The Concert, give a glimpse into this complete communist state and how its dictator of forty years, Enver Hoxha, who followed Zog in power after the war, played Mao and Stalin off each other and maintained the most repressive government in Europe, comparable only to North Korea.

Spurred by the tales Kadare told of his lost country, I decided to travel to the darkest Albania to meet the author. Like awkward subtitles of foreign films, the sometimes simplistic translations of Kadare’s books only piqued my interest in what seemed like an undiscovered and closed world. I wanted to see for myself the towns made of stone where generations of vendettas and clan loyalty made Sicily’s Cosa Nostra look modern and welcoming, like a group of Rotarians. Americans were unwelcome and the only way into the country, I found out, was through an obscure Greek bus-tour company.

Our bus left Thessaloniki, winding through desolate dirt roads over empty mountains. Guard houses sat atop every hill in the distance. At that time, an average of five Albanians a day were shot trying to flee the country, and their corpses flung into town squares as a warning. I soon realized that the inspiration for many of Kadare’s stories—vicious but often faceless government oppression—was alive and well in his homeland.

At the remote border post into eastern Albania, officials rifled through suitcases and confiscated magazines and picture books. A Greek man whispered that photos from the outside world were illegal as one guard paged through a Bible and another studied glossy centerfolds of Greek starlets in search of propaganda. Religion was outlawed, too, making Albania the only officially atheistic country in the world. Also verboten: kissing in public, dogs, foreign music, beards (border guards had orders to shave any visitors with facial hair), candy and gum, and cars (except those for government business). As we drove onward, people who were hunched over in the fields stood up and waved, as if they’d never seen a bus before.

All the roadside trees had been chopped down, as Hoxha, like Zog before him, had a particular fear of snipers. Among the stumps, cement bunkers lined the roads about every hundred feet—the dictator’s investment to protect the country from some imminent attack and evidence of his paranoia.

The Successor, from 2003, shines light on Hoxha and his possible motives in the unsolved assassination of his Number Two, known throughout Albania as the “successor.” High-ranking members of Albania’s communist party, who apparently shared Hoxha’s paranoia of insurrection, dug secret escape tunnels from their houses in the capital of Tirana. Theories abound in this real-life mystery and probable cover-up, with the shadows of Mao and other tyrants eclipsing the truth. Kadare’s Cold War whodunit opens the curtain to reveal Eastern European intrigue and the subsequent official government version of events, whitewashed for consumption by the masses.

When we reached Korçë, five hundred people surrounded our bus; we were the first foreigners in that town since the 1940s. I handed out ballpoint pens and a fellow tourist gave some teenagers a Bic lighter after demonstrating how to use it. A boy flicked a flame to life and held it aloft as his friends clapped in awe.

The stores were empty. A line formed around the block outside a boarded-up, padlocked shop; rumor was that milk would be delivered at midnight. I asked our guide how I could meet Ismail Kadare. Impossible! He replied. Our tour only had permission to visit two towns on the Greek border. Perhaps as consolation, he led me to the town bookshop. Its window displayed the dust jackets for a French-Albanian dictionary and a remedial physics book; no one had seen the actual books in years.

The bookstore clerk, too, was aghast when I asked for Ismail Kadare’s books. He caught the eye of the guide waiting outside and stood up straight. A shipment of Kadare’s books was expected any day—but not today. Instead, he suggested I purchase the twenty-plus volumes of speeches of Comrade Enver Hoxha, which was on special; apparently, the forward-looking autocrat’s memoirs made a decent substitute for firewood, since most of the trees were gone.

The clerk seemed to convey that Kadare’s novels were off-limits under the repressive regime, though of course everyone knew them. The people were starved for information and stories that weren’t burdened with purveying government propaganda, and Kadare provided page-turners without glossy fairy-tale endings. Even though the prolific author’s works are relegated to the fiction aisle in American bookstores, these are the only true and readable windows into this land of secrets.

The next year, images of Albanians toppling statues of Enver Hoxha were transmitted across the globe. I made another attempt to visit Kadare in Gjirokastër, the mountain town where he was born and grew up. Thanks to a faxed letter from the prosecutor general of Albania (who had visited Minnesota to learn about our legal system through the Minnesota Lawyers International Human Rights Committee), I acquired a visa at the Albanian embassy in Athens, a dingy, smoke-filled efficiency apartment in a rundown suburb. From Tirana, I hopped a bus south to Berat and then on to Gjirokastër. In the highest point of the walled city stood stone houses, headless minarets, and once-outlawed church ruins that now served as playgrounds. On a distant mountainside, “ENVER” was spelled out in three-hundred-foot letters formed by painted stones; the deceased leader had hailed from the same town as the country’s most famous writer.

I poked my head inside a beautiful stone three-story villa where royalty, perhaps even King Zog’s relatives, had probably stayed. Grizzled men chain-smoked and took shots of raki. I asked if anyone knew where Ismail Kadare lived. They didn’t understand, but tried to sell me the villa for three thousand dollars.

A fifteen-year-old boy chimed in that Kadare left as soon as he could, probably for Paris. “Anyone that can leave Albania, does.” In fact, this boy had already walked to Athens twice—eight days and eight nights with only three hours of sleep per night—and had been returned both times.

I was crushed to find out that Kadare had left this country—his muse—for greener pastures, and I cut short my trip (but not before succumbing to a vicious bout of food poisoning).

I eventually did meet the author, but not until 1997, by which time the already-feeble Albanian economy had collapsed and the influx of guns during the Balkan War had made the country Europe’s center for weapons—and white slave trade. That year, I traveled to Frankfurt for the annual Frankfurter Buchmesse book show, the world’s largest trade show, filling eight convention halls. The Albanian booths were easily identified by the pall of cigarette smoke, in flagrant violation of the “Rauchen Verboten!” signs everywhere. A ring of men hovered around a table littered with shot glasses and a large bottle of Jack Daniels. When I asked about Ismail Kadare, they looked me over suspiciously.

One stubbed out his cigarette and said, “I’m his agent. What do you want with him?” I explained that I was a fan and had even traveled to Albania to interview him. “You went to Albania? No foreigners go to Albania.” He squinted at me almost menacingly and scribbled something on a scrap of paper. He handed it to me and commanded, “Meet us at our hotel at 11 p.m. tonight. Don’t be late.”

I went to a cafeteria in the building next door to get a cup of coffee and ponder how this guy planned to swindle me. There, just a few tables away from me, sitting alone and eating a würstel and sauerkraut, was Ismail Kadare; he was surprised that I recognized him from his dust-jacket photo. I told him I had visited his hometown, and he wanted to hear about the situation there. I ended up relating the story of my two unforgettable trips. He shook his head. “There is much to tell about Albania. The problem is, who wants to listen?”

There’s enough history in Minnehaha Park’s 193 acres that it feels worthy of a Ken Burns documentary film. There’s the home of the first permanent settler west of the Mississippi—the transplanted John H. Stevens house. Originally built around 1850, it was in this house that the word “Minneapolis” was first tossed around. The Pergola Garden drips with flora native to the area, and there’s even a replica of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s home in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Those wanting to skip the history lesson can slip into the Sea Salt restaurant, a slick place that’s open seasonally, to load up on shrimp tacos or Sebastian Joe’s ice cream—and then head over to the band shell for an evening bluegrass concert.

But the real magic remains at the falls.

A stairway winds down into a tangle of greenery. You lose the sounds of the city even before losing sight of the banking planes and the brick towers of the Ford Plant to the east. More important, as you descend among the silver maples, you begin to see the waters “laugh and leap into the valley,” as Longfellow put it in his 1855 Song of Hiawatha. It was that poem that first lured pilgrims, including the likes of Mark Twain and Henry David Thoreau, to this place, and actually gave the falls its name. By 1894, a zoo was built on the park grounds. By 1922, tourist cabins were erected and the park’s Princess Station welcomed dozens of streetcars a day.

Watching the water foam up, tasting the mist in the breeze, you’ve moved back in time—to a Minnesota devoid of mills, dams, or the Mall of America. Daily life in the Twin Cities offers few such opportunities to mingle with the ancient. Standing in the rush of water, hidden from the world above, it seems entirely plausible, as the creation story goes, that this is the spot where the mother of the earth gave birth to the Dakota people and that all the trees and surrounding grounds are indeed sacred.

The park has many moods. There are sunny afternoons with crowds of picnickers; Hmong girls splashing in the creek; bevies of high-end bicycles locked to the wrought iron fences along the gorge; and cool, cloudy mornings when walking along the creek is a solitary pursuit, met only by the occasional heron, clutch of bachelor ducks, or jogger.

Several years ago, the parks department put up fences to discourage intrepid trailblazers from clambering up to and even behind the waterfall. This spring, the stairway, which dates back to the New Deal WPA era, got a fresh coat of concrete. But even if you can no longer stick your hand in the froth, there’s still something a little illicit about disappearing in the woods, about the rush of all that water around you. The falls remain an icon, a vision of what the world was before us—and a sense that, should it come to pass, the world would do just fine without us.

With its lion’s head door knocker and elegant front walk, Robyn Waters’ home in Deephaven is a world away from rural Minnesota, where she grew up attending one of the state’s last one-room schoolhouses. Waters herself has come quite a long way from the little girl who used to tie Lord Hathaway, her tri-color Paint horse, to the merry-go-round every morning after riding him to school. Armed with thirty years of service at Target Corporation, culminating in her appointment to vice president of trend, design, and product development, Waters embarked on the consulting phase of her career in 2002, not just as a run-of-the-mill “trendspotter,” but rather a full-fledged “trendmaster.”

“It’s not about predicting the next trend,” Waters explained. “A trendmaster gives you the thirty-thousand-foot view from above—she tells you what the trend means.” And right now, the trend Waters is busy defining is paradox—the subject of her forthcoming book. “Look at the Hummer and the Mini,” she said, referring to the models she named in the title of her book. “Cars are getting bigger and smaller. It’s yin and yang.” Waters gestured toward a carving of the black-and-white symbol on her coffee table. Waters’ home is a trove of rare and eclectic objects from her travels around the world. She embraces paradox—devoting her life to analyzing the future while surrounding herself with relics from the past. “It all ties to my fascination with symbols, discovering the story behind the story.”

A tour through the trendmaster’s house revealed other ways in which Waters lives out her trend theories. A sandstone bust from Cambodia was carved by young landmine victims—an example, she said, of “social capitalism.” The antique apothecary chest on which it sat demonstrated how “everything old is new again.”

A stunning pair of hand-painted waist-high statues represented Waters’ interpretation of Maslow’s hierarchy of need, and her place in that order. “When you get to the top, you ask yourself what really matters. All of my things have meaning. They’re more than decorations … I bought these statues in Udaipur, India, and they represent a Hindu feast day, when the wealthy would bring offerings to the Rajistani—the lower castes—and wash their feet. That resonated with me.”

Bright red tassels are attached to the knob of every door in Waters’ home. When asked for their story, the trendmaster paused. “Actually,” she said, cracking a smile, “I found those at Target.”

The Stella McCartney for Adidas clothes get the haute treatment on their specially designed altar at Paiva, the new shop trading in high-fashion fitness gear at the Mall of America—track lighting even lends them a halo glow. Indeed, these hoodies, swimsuits, and track pants are not at all humble, especially by Midwestern standards. Those who make do working out in cutoff sweatpants and old-boyfriend T-shirts will surely scoff at the price tags—ninety dollars for a barely there running top, $160 for a see-through tennis dress. But for the marathon runners, masters swimmers, and exercise bulimics of the world—women who spend almost as much time in exercise gear as they do in regular types of clothing—items like die-cut singlets and mesh-inlaid running shorts will be irresistible.

As of yet, there are no numbers available to prove that active Minnesotans are actually buying this stuff. On the supply side, however, manufacturers are fusing high-performance gear with high fashion like never before. Fila’s impressive and upscale Biella line includes a $625 tennis dress double layered in super-soft, moisture-resistant polyester. Nike just introduced a line of hip-hop-inspired dancewear fashioned from Dri-Fit, its trademark technical fiber. But the designs seem overly reliant on gimmicks: quilted “gill” detailing imbues some of the Nike clothing with texture but also lends a certain holographic dimension, sort of like Hypercolor; while the corseted shimmels (in case you were wondering what to call those sports bra/tank top hybrids) lack support and, like so many others, don’t adequately cover the tummy. And the line uses coarse fabrics and a cold palette that dates to the early 90s, the golden age of hip-hop fashion.

From a design perspective, McCartney’s Adidas gear clearly crests this wave of high-end fitness wear. Her line has been singled out by fashion and style editors on both coasts and in between—one dubbed these clothes “too cute to sweat in.” Now the line is so highly coveted by retailers that Adidas has become rather persnickety about who can carry it, and how. Paiva can’t sell the clothing on its website, for example. Nor can it be featured in the store’s catalog; Adidas produced its own artful Stella McCartney supplement instead. But Adidas is only following the dictates of high fashion, which, after all, subsists on a strict diet of exclusivity and snob appeal. “We’re just lucky to have it,” said a Paiva publicist, who seemed almost humbled by the line’s actual presence in the store.

But what’s worth considering is how these clothes stack up in the real world, where many fitness subcultures still eschew the wearing of fussy duds. A $160 Stella McCartney for Adidas tennis dress will go great on the court—that sport has traditionally held hands with the fashion world. But the same doesn’t necessarily hold for running, say, or lap-swimming—solitary, more cerebral pursuits that tend to draw people much more intent on personal performance than on aesthetics. Can McCartney’s line unseat the traditionally unadorned, full-coverage gear perfected by un-sexy brands like Moving Comfort and Speedo, and win the slow-beating hearts and laser-focused minds of these kinds of athletes? That remains to be seen.

Solid, sturdy, maybe a provincial flourish at the leg—this is the sort of wooden furniture most of us grew up with. A scratched pine dinner table—the utilitarian plinth on which the evening’s steaming noodle casserole is served—likely played a central role as a family gathering spot. Squat shelves are another of these universals, the collecting point for both books and dusty portraits of forebears sporting alarming hairdos.

But Thomas Menke insists such staples of domestic life needn’t be boring. “I pride myself on an innovative use of the material,” he said of the woods—cherry, black walnut, and maple—he uses in bookcases, tables, and cabinetry. Menke has spent the past twenty-six years as a custom woodworker, crafting simple and elegant yet rigorously individual forms. “I’ve always liked to push the idea of modern work,” said Menke, hinting at the clean lines that characterize his pieces. “ ‘Modern’ is, essentially, always seeking the next level.”

Another virtue that Menke says he and his contemporaries strive for is the “beautifully functional.” One example is a Menke coffee table fashioned out of a long plank of laminated wood. Made from thin strips of fir and then sawed off to expose their edge-grain, the laminate’s texture is something like a bamboo sushi mat. It can indeed be succinctly described as “modern,” yet the painstaking quality evident in the laminate lends it a certain traditional glow.

Another popular Menke piece is the “Archie” bookcase, a compact piece whose three shelves are anchored between sinuous, sloping lines. The simple design highlights the gentle gleam and buttery quality of the wood itself, an African species called Paduak.

Local woodworkers like Menke are busier than ever these days, thanks to the boom in residential loft and condominium developments. These kinds of homes beg for something more striking than the IKEA-style butcher block or standard factory-made cabinetry, yet the owners of such places still want the comforts that go along with the more-traditional furniture they grew up with. Local galleries, too, are embracing woodworking more than ever, with two spaces being wholly devoted to the art form. Blue Sky Galleries in Northeast Minneapolis and Xylos in southwest Minneapolis sell everything from whimsical bookcases that feature attached ladders to twenty-first-century takes on the classic Eames lounge chair, and sleek, metal-trimmed tables that cover up unsightly radiators—all crafted by locals.

I long ago discovered the correlation between the price paid for a pair of sunglasses and the speed at which I lose them. I once dropped a sweet pair of Ray-Bans over the side of a friend’s Sunfish and watched them sink to the bottom of Lake Michigan after only one week. Eventually, frugality had forced me to stop wearing sunglasses altogether. That is, until the wretched sunlight began to wear away at my good nature—squinting put me in such a foul state of mind last summer that a stranger stopped me on the street and told me I ought to smile more. It was time to get a real pair of shades.

I already wear prescription specs (and hate contacts, and fear laser surgery), so I needed a pair that would fit over my small Ben Franklin-style oval frames. I knew that regular shades, the type you might find at a Mall of America kiosk, would fit neither my face nor my modest budget. On a routine visit to Walgreens, however, I found just what I was looking for: the SolarShield Oval Fits-Overs.

It has been suggested, quite successfully I might add, that I long ago abandoned any fashion pretense in favor of simple creature comforts. Perhaps the SolarShield Fits-Overs are a reflection of that—they’re unbelievably effective on a glaring summer’s day, but have yet to catch on with the trendy set. Being a whip of a man—thin and un-muscular with a diminutive head—wearing such bulging sunglasses lends me the look of Plastic Man, albeit one clad in cotton cardigans and jeans. Drivers often do a double-take when they see me on the road—admittedly, with my Fits-Overs on, I do resemble a blind man at the wheel. A friend summed it up best when I modeled them for him: “Jesus Christ, you’re not going to wear those?” But when I slip these babies on, the raging incandescence of a summer’s day is diminished, and if I don’t look cool, I at least feel that way. The SolarShield company has a number of styles, ranging from the bulging pair I like to wear in the car, to a smaller, more compact version. When the same friend stopped by later on, I was lounging in my lawn chair sporting this new, sleeker pair of Fits-Overs. I suggested to him that these were similar to the sort of shades favored by Bono. He rolled his eyes. “Bono?” he said. “Sonny Bono. Maybe.”

With a name that seems borrowed from some turn-of-the-last-century medicine show (Cures all manner of lazy eye! Suppresses optic phantoms! A restorative for ocular fatigue!), the Fits-Overs are a more-evolved version of the wrap-arounds your great-uncle used to wear after cataract surgery, when he couldn’t allow even the smallest ray of sunlight to hit his peepers. Those glasses went well, you might recall, with his golden Sears’ golf shirts, plaid shorts, and black socks with flip-flops. They looked as though they’d been fabricated in a high school shop class—squarish slabs of opaque plastic, ugly as hell. To the benefit of mankind, someone at the SolarShield company ventured into the realm of the moderately hip, realizing that seeing-impaired sixty-year-olds might wish to look a bit edgier than in years past. In fact, the SolarShield website features pictures of all kinds of people sporting the Fits-Overs, from elderly gents to dashing young men.

Despite their considerable size, Fits-Overs are light and comfortable. Each pair is a wonder of design, looking like something from the New York World’s Fair. The giant, polarized lenses are so dark they drop the world into a near-total eclipse, while a small, tinted porthole at the hinge of either temple allows for “peripheral protection,” and gives bus-riders like me an opportunity to eyeball the crackpot in the next seat without incident. The “integrated top bar” slides over the top frame of my prescription glasses and up against my forehead, preventing any penetration of sunlight from above.

Best of all, because SolarShield Fits-Overs are cheap, ranging from just twelve to twenty bucks, I don’t care if I lose them. This probably means I’ll have mine forever.

It was Monday morning at Treasure Island casino near Red Wing, somewhere in the vicinity of 5:00 a.m. It was hard to say for certain; I didn’t have a watch, my cell phone was dead, and there were no clocks anywhere. I know the slow, grinding pace of late nights, though, can feel the hours turnover in my head, and in my skull it felt like 5:00 a.m.

I’d been on the floor of the casino since eleven o’clock the previous evening. My head hurt. I am not a gambler, and am pretty much a stranger to casinos. I was running down, and decided to step outside for a breath of fresh air. The first light of dawn was creeping along the horizon, and standing at the edge of the parking lot you could hear little beyond a distant pulse, the stirring of birds, and the sibilant, sedative rhythm of the sprinklers swiveling in the grass. A distraught woman sat on a curb near the motorcycle area, talking on a cell phone. “Tell her not to be mad at me,” she said. “No, listen. Would you please just tell her not to be mad at me?”

A few feet from me, just outside the main entrance to the casino, a much-older woman sat parked in her elder buggy—one of those motorized contraptions with handlebars and wire baskets. She had a cigarette clenched in her teeth, her eyes were closed, and her head was thrown back at what appeared to be an excruciatingly uncomfortable angle.

The number of players at Treasure Island had thinned out considerably after last call at the casino’s liquor dispensaries, Bongo’s and Toucan Harry’s Bar. The groups of whooping, collegial gamblers—students, older folks from the RV park up the road, golfers unwinding after a day on the course, couples taking advantage of the package deals at the hotel—had departed, but somehow the casino seemed even noisier. Now, though, it was essentially a cacophonous province of solitaries. Among them were an agitated Vietnamese man shuffling numbers on a video roulette game, and an elderly fellow, wearing overalls, driving gloves, ear plugs, and what appeared to be yellow-tinted scuba goggles, who was pounding away at the Nurse Follies slot machine. Nearby, at the counter of the Mongo Bay Grill, a stooped little woman slowly pinched nickels out of a plastic cup and slid them across the counter to pay for her chicken strip basket.

Earlier, after the bar-crowd exodus, I had ventured up to my hotel suite to rest my feet, scribble some notes, and pound down caffeine. The place was lavish: two rooms, two bathrooms, two televisions, a king-size bed, akitchenette, and a huge Jacuzzi. The walls were adorned with art involving palm trees, expanses of blue sea, sunsets, and people strolling on the beach, in keeping with the casino’s Caribbean theme.

In hindsight, the suite was a foolish expenditure. I would use it as little more than a locker for my stuff. Except for this break, I would be downstairs from 11:30 p.m. until 7:30 the next morning, wandering the floors of the casino. I would not sleep in that king-size bed. The Jacuzzi would remain unused.

At 2:00 a.m., when I went back down to the casino, hundreds of people were still scattered around its 120,000 square feet, hunched alone at slot machines or huddled in quiet groups at the blackjack tables. Many of the wee-hours gamblers were quite old, and many of them were Asian; a number of them were Asian and quite old. Some of them were in wheelchairs or motorized carts. The majority of the gamblers who were not old, Asian, or in wheelchairs were young men, most of whom were wearing backward baseball caps and smoking cheap cigars. These characters tended to sport the kind of carefully groomed facial hair common to professional athletes, along with wrap-around sunglasses and sweatbands.

At that hour, the majority of the blackjack action was consolidated at a handful of tables. The players seemed intimidating in their concentration and silence. The dealers had a rapid, almost comically formal style, marked by a stoic demeanor and elegant flourishes that often looked like the sleight-of-hand routines of a magician.