Business wasn’t great at the little budget steak house in the St. Paul Midway, so the Hang family, Hmong refugees from Laos, decided to try something different. They brought in cousin Christian Hang, a recent culinary-school graduate, as chef; remodeled the dining room with a tasteful black and orange décor; and added Asian fusion to the menu. You can still get an $18.99 T-bone or a $10.99 sirloin, but the dinner menu at the Café, formerly a Best Steak House, now includes seared yellowfin tuna salad with mango salsa; red or green coconut curry; and poached red snapper with basil, mint, lemongrass, and shallots—plus a few Italian dishes such as shrimp scampi and fettucine alfredo. The lunch menu is even more eclectic, with offerings including a fajita wrap and a BLT. Preparation and presentation are first-rate; wine and beer expected soon. Most entrées run $9-$14. 1613 University Ave. W., St. Paul; 651-644-1444.
Month: June 2007
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Pinebox Purgatory
John Parizek was standing on a stage in the middle of the Mall of America’s rotunda, waving some sort of a racing flag and speaking into a microphone. Even though he was less than twenty-five yards away, nothing Parizek said was intelligible. Granted, the Malliest Mall of Them All is a noisy proposition on most Saturday afternoons, but with the place hosting the annual Boy Scouts of America Northern Star Council Pinewood Derby championships, the decibel level was skull rattling.
Nearby, the mall’s amusement park was churning and the rotunda stage was surrounded by hundreds of chattering, uniformed Cub Scouts, their assorted parents, siblings, and random curious passersby.“This is boring,” a boy complained to an older man who was seated next to him in the back row.
“Shut up, George,” the man said. “Can I just tell you how tired I am of being your grandpa?”
If the squirrelly behavior of many of the kids in attendance (not to mention the churlishness of the grandfather) was any kind of a barometer, it’s possible George had a point.
The Pinewood Derby has been a hallowed Scouting tradition since 1953, when the first race was held in Manhattan Beach, California; the races remain an annual rite of passage for Scouts and their fathers (or, increasingly, mothers); but, people-watching aside, it’s not much as far as spectator sports go, particularly for restless youngsters with the temptations of the mall beckoning on all sides.
For most of the participants, the real action takes places in the weeks and months leading up to the championship. That is when the Scouts, working from the same uniform kit (a block of pine wood, four plastic discs, and four nails), attempt to transform those raw materials into “the fastest gravity-propelled miniature ground vehicle.” Preparation begins early for the pack-level races and district championships that serve as qualifiers for the main event at MOA. The Northern Star Council—one of the largest in the country—encompasses the Twin Cities, a broad swath across the central part of the state, and four counties in western Wisconsin. Thirty-thousand Scouts and their carefully crafted, often elaborately painted and decorated cars started the year in the running, a number that had been whittled down to 187 by the time the championships rolled around.
The official rules are remarkably specific, and Derby officials are notorious for enforcing strict compliance, often in the face of fierce scrutiny and protestations from parents: Cars cannot exceed five ounces (race scales will flag violations up to one-hundredth of an ounce); only officially approved wheels and axles are allowed; wheels may not be “rounded, pointed, concaved, shaved, or otherwise modified.” Scouts must be present and in uniform for their cars to compete, and are required to build a new car each year.
Speeds can vary a great deal from race to race, but Parizek, working with race director Jim Smeby (who owns the track and timing equipment and participates in more than fifty Pinewood Derbies per year), works hard to ensure uniform racing conditions. And Parizek personally inspects and weighs every car before the championships. “I get real picky when it comes to weights and wheels,” he said. “A lot of the parents don’t like it, but if they’re over by even a fraction of an ounce the weight has to come off or they don’t run. When I get complaints I always tell people to give me their names and I’ll happily put them on the committee for next year.”
Parizek, who also serves as master of ceremonies at the championships, is an instructor for the local plumbers’ union, and for the last eleven years he has been the chair of the Northern Star Council’s annual Derby.
Smeby’s track, sloping at slightly more than forty-five degrees (as mandated by official rules), features three lanes. Races consist of three heats, with each entry getting an opportunity to run in all three lanes; the combined scores determine the winner. Scouts don’t actually participate in the races other than as observers; their cars are “impounded” after weigh-in and are raced in rapid and efficient fashion by Smeby and a handful of volunteers. Parizek enters the times in a computer, often while surrounded by fathers transcribing the information into pocket notebooks. Some of these characters were visibly nervous, and one man spent a good deal of time tapping numbers into a calculator.
Despite intense competition, apparent disparities in lane speeds, and times that plunged with each heat, a sleek, thin, bright orange car emblazoned with Firebird decals—the creation of Adam Sicora, a fifth-grader at St. Paul’s Nokomis Montessori and a seasoned Derby veteran—was the wire-to-wire leader at this year’s championships. After running a 6.66 in the first heat, when the majority of the other cars were running into the sevens and even eights, Adam followed up with another 6.66 in lane two, and 6.67 in lane three. On the heels of a third-place finish in 2006 (his brother Matt took home the second-place trophy, and finished fifth this year), Adam breezed to victory in this year’s championship.
“We’ve actually won a bunch of trophies in the last few years,” he said. “This year Matt finished third at district, and I was fourth, which shows that I definitely fine-tuned my car between races. You have to keep trying to get better. Sometimes, though, you can tinker with something that you think is going to make you faster but it messes up the aerodynamics and you get worse. Our friend who won the district came in 188th at the Mall of America.”
This was Adam’s last championship—his Derby eligibility expires next year when he’ll enter the sixth grade, but he, his brother, and their father, Chris, have spent a lot of time zeroing in on the qualities that make for a Pinewood Derby champion.
“We’ve looked at websites that have tips,” Adam said, “and Matt and I did a science project on pinewood cars for school, and learned a lot about things like inertia, aerodynamics, and potential energy. Even if you think you have a really fast car, though, you can usually count on something messing up. I had a good car, but I was just lucky that nothing went wrong this year.”
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The Voyage of the Heath Ledger
On June 17, 2006, we quietly paddled the Heath Ledger across the Canadian border. We hadn’t exactly planned to sneak into Canada. Joe and I were on a mission—to reach Hudson Bay by canoe, still hundreds of miles to the northeast—and as we approached the border we realized that interactions with government officials might endanger that mission. For one thing, we were unsure whether the guards would let Joe, with his extensive juvenile record, into the country. We also carried a 12-gauge shotgun (for protection against the polar bears we expected to meet downriver), which authorities in firearms-phobic Canada would seize if declared. So we chose the path of least resistance across the frontier, paddling through swirling waters into shimmering twilight.
We could hear the distant rumblings of semis, and between silhouettes of weeping willows, we saw the glow from floodlights at the Pembina/Emerson border post a mile beyond the muddy banks. But on the Red River there was no customs station, no sign of welcome to “Friendly Manitoba.” The border here was marked only by a black trestle of crisscrossed girders without so much as a single red maple leaf. As we slipped under the railroad span, floating illegally into the country, we were pushed along by a welcome rush of current, the first significant natural flow we’d seen since the trip began on June 4, four hundred river miles south at Wahpeton, North Dakota—the headwaters of the Red.
Already we had been interrogated by officials from five different law enforcement agencies in the U.S. They seemed to think we were either terrorists, immigrant smugglers, or perverted lovers: a big sick white guy with a lip ring and his skinny younger Puerto Rican/Lakota boy-toy acting out a canoe version of Brokeback Mountain. The movie had come out a few months earlier and now it seemed that two men couldn’t go camping together without the assumption that they were gay. In response, we named the canoe after one of the film’s stars.
They all asked the same questions:
How do you two know each other?
Where are you going?
How long do you expect that to take?
How did you get time off for such a long trip?
How will you know where you’re going?
What are you going to do for food?
Why are you doing this?I insisted on taking charge of these conversations after watching Joe lose his cool at the sight of uniformed authority figures. He would start running at the mouth, each jittery falsetto utterance sounding more sketchy and full-of-shit than the last.
My responses were cautiously worded to prevent the cop, sheriff, ICE official, game warden, or forest ranger from opening new lines of inquiry. If they had hauled us in for questioning they might have connected Joe to the recent Frogtown incident.
So I always told them the truth, albeit a painstakingly tailored version. Nevertheless, the cop, sheriff, ICE official, forest ranger, or game warden would nod suspiciously at what must have sounded, to their post-9/11 ears, like a hastily manufactured cover story: I was Joe’s mentor. We had met five years earlier at New Voices, a Minneapolis-based journalism program for American Indian youth. We expected our trip on the Red, Nelson, Echimamish and Hayes Rivers to take roughly two months. Joe’s employer, Pawn America, had granted him a leave of absence for the summer. I was a teacher, so I got summers off. We were navigating with topographical maps, compasses, and a Global Positioning System receiver; for sustenance we had freeze-dried camping food and the occasional gas station or restaurant meal.
I was careful not to mention that this trip was Joe’s way of lying low for the summer. My nineteen-year-old paddling partner had recently been mixed up in a street incident involving a sawed-off shotgun and a crack dealer named Sonic. Luckily, no one was hurt. But word in Frogtown was that Sonic was seeking swift retribution. Joe left with me days after the episode without telling anyone where he was going—not his older brother D, his closest friend and confidant, not even his mother.
Nor did I volunteer the intimate details of my life: I was a single father of four, an unemployed writer with no certain job prospects to return to, and no goal in life except to make it to Hudson Bay with Joe or die trying. I had embarked on this journey to try to stave off a nervous breakdown, having spent much of the previous six months alternating between dizzying waves of anxiety and fits of uncontrolled sobbing, symptoms of a depression resulting from a series of deaths and personal losses that began with my divorce in 2003.
Each time the police ran our names for warrants, there was an increasing fear that the law had caught up with Joe, and that this trip would end for us not at the sea, but in the penitentiary. I don’t know if it was the fact that we were an unusual pair of travelers heading toward an international border in an age of terrorism hysteria; or perhaps it stemmed from the kind of extralegal scrutiny many dark-skinned people in America endure every day. Either way, it seemed our trip was being viewed by government officials as a criminal act. In Grand Forks, we were issued a trespass warning after we spent the night camped atop a flood dike. In the tiny Red River Valley town of Climax, Minnesota, we stopped one night for cheese curds and beer at the Corner Bar and were questioned by a patrolman who said he had received “reports of two men with backpacks.” Thirty miles north of Drayton, North Dakota, a pair of game wardens in a speedboat approached cautiously after scrutinizing us through binoculars; they then grilled us at length about fishing regulations, even though we weren’t fishing.
The trickiest part of these interrogations was inventing answers the authorities would believe in response to that last question: Why? They demanded to know what was motivating this odd couple to travel over water and land from the heart of the Great Plains to the far edge of the continent, an endeavor that, judging from their uniformly dubious expressions, no sane person would undertake without sinister motive.
There was no innocent-sounding answer, so I again went with a clipped rendition of the truth. This trip was about physical and spiritual renewal. That’s what I told them: physical and spiritual renewal.
Joe, on the other hand, would puff out his chest and bluster righteously, Vacation! The word sounded suspect coming out of his mouth—anyone familiar with the Red River knows it is one of the most hellacious, unforgiving American waterways to paddle—but it, too, was partially true. Joe would often say life on the river, however difficult, was a cakewalk compared with his day-to-day in the city. The torture of paddling ten or twelve hours a day to make thirty or forty miles, eating and sleeping on riverbanks that were essentially mud pits, baking under the withering sun, and freezing through frequent cloudbursts, was, to us both, a welcome respite from the heartache and stress that had come to dominate our lives in St. Paul. There was an aspect of our days on the river that was similar to self-mutilation; the physical pain relieved our suffering hearts.
Crossing the border without incident, Joe expressed relief by mocking me for having intended to report to customs. It had been his idea from the start to steal across the border under cover of night. “Fuck them border bitches,” he laughed. “Them bitches can’t touch us out here.”
I realized how absurd some of my assumptions about the river had been. Even though we had seen a total of only five other boats in the past fourteen days, I half-expected to find a fully functioning customs station on this all-but-abandoned river. But since I was relying for guidance on Canoeing with the Cree, a book chronicling a 1925 expedition from Fort Snelling to Hudson Bay, I was bound to be wrong once in a while.
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Picasso and American Art
Pablo Picasso: a name that started as a revolution, became mainstream, evolved into a platitude, and ended up as a punch line. He became the repository for everything Europe knew about art, and was the hinge between the School of Paris and the immense gathering energies of the New York School. Every artist in the last century has had to face him down; local legend Frank Gaard writes of his own struggle: “Most of my pals in high school called me Pablo or Picasso even in signing the yearbook … ” (read more). This much-anticipated show includes a couple dozen Picassos, and work by such grand types as Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and David Smith, as well as Marsden Hartley, Louise Bourgeois, and Andy Warhol, among many more. 612-375-7600; www.walkerart.org
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Charles Lazarus’s Playlist
The Minnesota Orchestra’s concert on July 21 will celebrate the talent of one of its own, the trumpeter and jazz composer
Charles Lazarus. Not only will Lazarus play as a soloist, but the program will include a selection of his original compositions, which will be paired with Louis Moreau Gottschalk’s seminal 1861 symphony Night in the Tropics, a Cuban-flavored affair that is said to have anticipated New Orleans jazz by a half-century. Lazarus’s works—“Kilauea’s Fountains,” “Waves,” and “Dance Honu”—go nicely with Gottschalk’s tropical tones; these are brassy, Hawaiian-flavored numbers cut with hula and chant. We wondered what influences might have informed this sound, so we asked Lazarus to name his favorite songs.1. “The Sinister Minister,” by Béla Fleck & the Flecktones
The title always makes me laugh. It makes me think of some character in a really cheesy horror movie. It features one of my favorite bass players, Victor Wooten. I love the mix of banjo and harmonica in a groovy rock context. Maybe I owe that to growing up with North Carolina bluegrass. For some reason, it makes me crave barbecue.2. “Summertime” off the album Miles Davis – Porgy and Bess
Nothing beats the soulful expressiveness of Miles Davis—particularly when paired with Gil Evans’s innovative orchestrations. It’s almost impossible not to feel cool while listening to this.3. “Orchestral Suite No. 3” off the album German Brass Bach 2000
This is the perfect listen-to-at-brunch CD. My favorite moment comes at 1:17 when the most perfect note comes soaring out of the high horn part. It’s the best single second of any CD I own, played by one of the best brass groups of all time.4. “Corcovado (Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars)” off the album Getz/Gilberto
It’s the combo of the evocative lyrics and Astrud Gilberto’s sultry vocals [the famous voice behind “The Girl From Ipanema”] mixed with Tom Jobim’s bossa nova—everything is so laid back and in the pocket.5. “Neruda Trumpet Concerto” by Maurice André
This is actually from a cassette of an album long out of print. I might spend the rest of my life trying to play one note as beautifully as any on this recording.6. “Rapper’s Delight” by the Sugarhill Gang
When I was in fourth grade, my best friend Jody Bowman and I used to bring a boombox to the school playground. We would strut around with the box on our shoulder and rap while everyone else played kickball. We took it very seriously. Sometimes I’d even wear a leisure suit!7. “Red Sun” off Anoushka Shankar’s album Rise
This is an ultra-modern, hip version of the Indian art of vocal percussion called konnakol. She has taken an ancient tradition and modernized it with rockin’ club grooves. One night I spent hours rewinding one tiny section, trying to figure out the patterns. Lucky for me, the tune grooves so hard you don’t have to understand it to enjoy it.8. “Don’t Wait Too Long” off Madeleine Peyroux’s album Careless Love
My girlfriend and I heard this for the first time on a television commercial and for some reason it captured our attention and we ended up dancing in front of the TV. Madeleine Peyroux is like a modern-day Billie Holiday—gorgeous voice.9. “Janine” off Thievery Corporation’s album DJ Kicks
I love how this album is like one giant seamless tune. It puts the organic, earthy sounds of the tabla in a trip-hop setting. There’s something very moody and primal about it.10. “Punahele” by Sonny Lim, off the compilation Slack Key Guitar Vol. 2
This CD is ideal stress relief. It won a Grammy a couple of years ago and features traditional and modern Hawaiian slack key guitar. After about a minute of listening, I’m on the beach. This tends to be a particular favorite of mine in February, living in Minnesota.Charles Lazarus and the Minnesota Orchestra perform Night in the Tropics on July 21. Sommerfest runs July 13 through August 5. 612-371-5656. www.minnesotaorchestra.org
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Angela Strassheim Photographs
Local artist Strassheim is a former forensic photographer who now shoots her own family in disturbing tableaux. Her reputation has been growing ever since her work was featured in the last Whitney Biennial. Small wonder, then, that she has a beautiful show at the Burnet Gallery in the Chambers Hotel—which, of course, has built its own reputation on both overweening hipness and an abundance of adventurous art. Since good art is rarely served in close proximity to good cocktails, don’t miss this chance to take in both. 901 Hennepin Ave., Minneapolis; 612.767.6900; www.chambersminneapolis.com/hotel-events
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Ratatouille
This collaboration between writer/director Brad Bird (The Incredibles) and the animation geeks at Pixar takes the medium to new heights. Ratatouille is the simple tale of Remy (voiced by Patton Oswalt), a rat hiding in the shadows of a famous Parisian restaurant who seeks to become a chef. Like The Incredibles, Ratatouille is a comedy of startling action, consistently hilarious jokes, and mechanically brilliant slapstick. But the film is also a deeply felt meditation on the pleasures of hard work, friendship, eating (of course), and, surprisingly, the often cantankerous relationship between artist and critic. Avoid pigeonholing this one as a child’s diversion; Ratatouille is a profound joy, and the best film of the year.
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Vitus
When it all boils down, Vitus is nothing more than a story about a child prodigy who seeks to be a normal boy. But in the hands of director Fredi M. Murer, the simple tale becomes a small but complex masterpiece about the universal difficulties of childhood. Murer, who is unknown in this country but considered Switzerland’s greatest director, obsessively captures the details of youth, including the rich interactions between child and adult. You will not find a movie that better addresses the pains and frustrations of childhood. Vitus is a must-see for parents seeking to challenge their children. Something tells us Mom and Dad will be moved, as well. 651-649-4416; www.landmarktheatres.com www.landmarktheatres.com
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There’s Always Tomorrow
Oh, that Douglas Sirk. The king of suburban ’50s melodrama is being given his due at this year’s Walker Summer Music and Movies program, and it’s about time. In There’s Always Tomorrow, Fred MacMurray—possibly the most underrated actor of his generation—plays a successful family man who is, nevertheless, plagued by disappointment. His wife is focused on their kids, who live their own lives and leave Dad pondering the meaning of it all. And then in walks Barbara Stanwyck—remember their pairing from Double Indemnity?—and sparks fly. But while the wife remains oblivious to her husband’s absence, MacMurray’s oldest child suspects treachery. Per the usual with Sirk, emotions are crushed beneath the stifling norms of the ’50s, and no one can emerge unscathed. 612-375-7600; www.walkerart.org
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The Earrings of Madame de …
In the strange Earrings of Madame de …, a lonely woman, cloistered in an upper-class existence of endless soirées and empty finery, sells the pair of diamond earrings her husband gave her on their wedding day; the unnamed heroine needs spending money to cavort with her long queue of suitors. Oddly enough, the earrings make a complete circle, going from jeweler back to husband, from him to his mistress, then lost gambling in a casino, then back to our eponymous Madame (given to her by the paramour with whom she eventually falls in love). Max Ophüls’s moving 1953 picture is not so much an indictment of upper-class mores (both husband and wife make no secrets of their affairs), as it is an examination of the complex trappings of love, jealousy, and marriage.