Year: 2007

Imagine that your casual evening walk has suddenly landed you in a minefield. That’s the kind of tension radiating from this acclaimed thriller, in which an unnamed woman is spirited off to a hotel room to wait (and wait some more) for orders—which are to detonate a bomb in Times Square. With tiny yet terrifying clues to compel you through long scenes of waiting, phone conversations, and bystanders strolling blithely past the heroine (if you can call her that) on what might be their last day on earth, director Julia Loktev nonetheless manages to grab you by the throat. Exploiting her camera and your imagination, she’s made a film that provokes both thought and fear. Part of the Women With Vision 2007: Mirror Image film festival at Walker Art Center, which runs March 2–17; 612-375-7633; www.walkerart.org

Will Black Book mark Paul Verhoeven’s triumphant return? The guy behind such gut-wrenching “classics” as RoboCop, Basic Instinct, and Starship Troopers seemed to have the potential to become one of our most talked-about directors, a bastard hybrid of Sam Peckinpah and Fellini at his most indulgent. Then, however, his career slipped into the toilet with two bombs, Showgirls and Hollow Man. With Black Book, Verhoeven has abandoned Hollywood, returning to Holland and a subject that has been on his mind for seventeen years: the Dutch resistance. The story of a Jewish woman who uses her sly sexuality to infiltrate the Nazis and pays the price, Black Book is all Verhoeven—bloody, erotic, and filled with loathsome characters. Here, the Nazis and the Resistance men are equally brutish, and only our heroine emerges from the fray with anything resembling dignity.

Dan Slager was a wide-eyed college graduate when he moved in 1989 from his home state of Michigan to Manhattan with a futon tied to his car and “a sense that New York was where you went if you were interested in literary books.” He landed a job as an editorial assistant at William Morrow but “hated the commercial scene” and washed out after six months. Like many young idealists, Slager’s brush with the real world sent him scrambling for the cover of graduate school. He enrolled at NYU and began working as a German translator for the lit-mag Grand Street. Within two years Slager was sitting in the editor’s chair and working alongside venerated contributors like Drenka Willen, one of the world’s most esteemed literary editors. When Slager and Grand Street parted ways, Willen offered him a job at Harcourt working with her list of prized authors (including Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco, and four Nobel laureates: Günter Grass, José Saramago, Wislawa Szymborska, and Octavio Paz). In September 2005, after five years under Willen’s tutelage, Slager relocated with wife Alyssa Polack and their two sons to take the helm as editor-in-chief of Minneapolis’ Milkweed Editions, a leading independent, nonprofit literary publisher.

What did you learn from working with Drenka Willen?
Here was this incredibly venerable woman who had been in the business thirty-five years when I started working with her, who still did all the editing herself, still saw the books through each step of the process, and was a fiercely protective advocate for her authors. I’ll never forget what she said to me the first day I was there: “You probably think working in book publishing is very glamorous, right? It’s not. It’s just hard work. We’re in the service industry. We’re working for these authors, to publish these authors well. I just want you to be mindful of our place in the process. The author always comes first.”

In which direction do you plan to take this house?
I plan to continue to establish Milkweed as a significant player in terms of books exploring the human relationship to the natural world. Those kinds of issues are becoming more mainstream—in a sense tragically—because the climate is changing and no one can ignore it. There’s been so much environmental degradation. How we become a more sustainable civilization is an urgent question; we want to be part of that conversation.

Does Milkweed have a particular commitment to local authors?
It’s not part of our stated mission. Both idealistically and pragmatically, however, it makes sense for us to be publishing local people because it’s much easier for us to find an audience for these writers here, and publish them well here, and then establish them nationally.Talk about the role of agents in the work you’re doing at Milkweed.
I get plenty of submissions from agents, but I take very seriously direct submissions from authors. We’re open to everything here. We take the slush pile seriously, which was not the case where I worked in New York. In fact they wouldn’t look at anything that was unagented. Since I’ve been here, out of maybe twenty or so acquisitions, there have been several outstanding manuscripts that were discovered in slush.

What are some of the earmarks you look for in a publishable manuscript?
Not everyone would agree with my decisions as to what meets a certain threshold of quality. We’re looking for books that are not just outstanding, but that are also particularly engaged with the world regarding questions of human rights, the human relationship with the natural world, and social justice; books that are not merely beautiful aesthetic objects, but that actively address what’s going on with the world around us.

What are some of the similarities and differences between operating in the Minneapolis and New York literary scenes?
There’s a little less glamour here, a little less of a cocktail-party scene, a little less bling. But Minneapolis is a great book town. There is no shortage of real books and real work and interesting thinking and people trying interesting things.

What do you miss about living in New York?
I like nightlife. I do have a young family so I’m not out all the time, but I miss being in a city that’s very much alive well past midnight. I know there are things going on here, but it’s a different level of vitality at night.

You’re a big Detroit Tigers fans. Is there a contradiction between being a literary editor and a baseball fan?
I’m passionate about baseball. I always have been. I’ve tried to rid myself of it at times, but I can’t. I’ve stopped trying and I’ve embraced it. For me baseball is baseball. It’s beautiful as such and I love it. I have eclectic interests, put it that way.

Would you like to describe some of your others?
(Laughs … )

Melody Gilbert has always considered herself a global citizen of sorts, having worked in television and film everywhere from Wisconsin to Romania. But in 2001, her sportswriter husband Mark Wollemann landed a job at the Star Tribune, and the couple settled down in Minneapolis. That was when her work as a documentary filmmaker started to assume Midwestern tones. Projects such as Married at the Mall [of America] and A Life Without Pain are anchored by Minnesota characters, and her latest, Urban Explorers: Into The Darkness, was inspired by her nights out with a group of local rogues who navigate underground drains and abandoned buildings for sport. The film features an indigenous soundtrack as well, with excellent tunes from such favorites as The Owls, Dave Salmela, and Kid Dakota. Beyond the Minnesota streak, though, what truly unites Gilbert’s work is an interest in members of fringe societies, and in “humanizing the outsiders,” as she said in a phone interview. And what if she herself were banished to the fringes—the very outer, uninhabited edges of society—say, The Rake’s desert isle? Which books, CDs, and DVDs would she require to hold up?

1. Dark Days—an incredible documentary, available on DVD, by Marc Singer. It’s about a group of homeless people who lived under the Amtrak train station in New York City. Singer documented a handful of troubled, endearing people with a humbling ability to survive and create their own subterranean society that—for better or worse—mimics the above-ground world. I could learn a few things from them while I’m stranded.

2. Fargo, because I would need to remember where I came from. And it makes me laugh … every time!

3. Carole King’s Tapestry, because if I’m stranded on an island, it’s “Too Late Baby.”

4. Candide, because I better get optimistic about where I am. As Voltaire writes, “All is for the best in this, the best of all possible worlds.”

5. History of Art by Anthony Janson. This is the textbook you get in college Art History 101. It gives written and visual meaning to the captivating story of what artists have tried to express—and why—for more than thirty thousand years. I could sit on my island and ponder this for years to come.

Urban Explorers: Into The Darkness premieres at Walker Art Center on March 16 & 17; for more information, call 612-375-7600 or visit www.urbanexplorersfilm.com or www.walkerart.org

Once upon a time, say fifteen years ago, portraits of chief executive officers had much in common with oil paintings of George Washington or Robert E. Lee. There was a man (they were pretty much all men), shot from a slightly low angle so as to amplify his stateliness and power, with his hand on a chair or maybe a globe. Sometimes he smiled, but not too broadly. After all, running a company was a grave matter.
These days, however, it’s not unusual to open a business magazine or an annual report and find a CEO reclining on a patch of grass with a football, or wading waist-deep in a lake. They are posed nuzzling cows or other barnyard animals or buried up to their necks in breakfast cereal. New to these photos are shiny open grins, expressions that seem to say: “You can trust me with a suitcase nuke—but I also might put a whoopee cushion on your chair.”
This more playful and quirky style of portraiture is partly a result of the overall loosening of corporate culture as baby boomers have moved into the top ranks. Perhaps having difficulty reconciling past protests against The Man with their current status as The Man, these business titans wear jeans to work and pal around with their underlings, sometimes with David Brent-like results. Self-effacement in a CEO is now a highly valued quality. Sara Jorde, a Minneapolis photographer who has been shooting CEOs for twenty years, has witnessed the shift to this new mindset. “One thing I’ve noticed is that CEOs are often eating in the lunchrooms with their employees,” she said. “Maybe not at the same tables, but in the same lunchrooms, as opposed to being out having their bourbon and steak. I’ve seen CEOs of really big companies in the break room with their Tupperware. They know everyone’s names. It’s the Nike generation moving into positions of power.”
Yet there also are more complex forces at work behind modern corporate photography, as anyone familiar with the work of Leni Riefenstahl, who managed to make Hitler appear statuesque, might suspect. Eric Guthey and Brad Jackson, professors at the Copenhagen Business School, are some of the rare academics studying CEO imagery. In a recent article titled, “CEO Portraits and the Authenticity Paradox,” they noted how, as companies become more diffuse, it becomes more difficult to portray them visually. “This poses a problem,” they wrote, “ … because visible presence has functioned as a traditionally accepted prerequisite for authenticity … This quest for corporate presence, visibility and authenticity helps explain the proliferation of photographs of top management figures, who often come to represent their organizations not just in a managerial sense, but also in an iconic one.” In other words, the CEO serves as the face of an otherwise faceless entity; at his best, he is a warm and likeable personality set out in front of a sprawling, impersonal, and, if you believe the most ardent critics, psychopathic corporation.
In that regard, CEOs have had a tough time of it lately, as companies like Enron and Halliburton have become synonymous with corruption. Back in the 1990s, during the tech boom, the American public was largely pro-corporate and looking to privatize everything from the postal service to public schools. Now, we watch the rise and fall of companies and their superstar CEOs—players like Ken Lay, Carly Fiorina, and Martha Stewart—almost as a spectator sport. It hasn’t helped public opinion that the average CEO’s salary is approximately four hundred times that of the average blue-collar worker. Not surprisingly, a 2002 CBS News poll found that only one in four Americans believes most corporate executives to be honest.
It’s easy to surmise, then, that as esteem for big business has declined, big business has become more determined to put on a friendly face. A lot goes into creating these dynamic images: What should the executive wear? Should she put on goggles and hold a welder? Which company products should appear in the background? “I think people want to portray more personality and let people see a little bit more of who they are,” said Jorde of her clients, “but still maintain a level of dignity and professionalism about their image. They want to be seen as confident but not cocky, and also approachable.” A corporate photographer in Britain put it more bluntly on his website: “Do you look slick, shifty, or vacant? Or a mix of all three? It’s time to move on … Your corporate portrait should say: Look at me—I’m OK.”
Guthey and Jackson argue that CEOs suffer from identity issues just as their corporations do, thanks to “downsizing, outsourcing, the stripping away of productive functions, and the governance of corporate activity through increasingly fluid networks.” Thus “authenticity” is a notion currently making its way through the corporate world, the same as “teambuilding” and “thinking outside the box” once did. It’s become a movement, a way to quantify the existential crises that are bound to occur among those at the helm of unwieldy enterprises. Gurus of the ideology describe authentic leadership as continuing to do “real work” with one’s life, “telling it like it is,” and “treating people, especially the disadvantaged, with love and dignity.” The concern that one may not be authentic seems like a distinctly modern problem, one that likely never occurred to Washington or Grant, or even Cyrus West Field, founder of the Atlantic Telegraph Company who was, in fact, photographed in 1858 looking stately and powerful with his hand on a globe.
One of Jorde’s most illustrative photos portrays three men, the top executives of local Tiro Industries (formerly Lamaur, manufacturers of such once-famous hair products as Apple Pectin shampoo and Style hairspray). The trio sits in old-fashioned salon chairs, black plastic ponchos over their white shirts, with globe hairdryers on their heads and goofy grins. To get such unusual shots, Jorde strives to make her clients feel comfortable, a decidedly simpler task these days. That may mean ditching a CEO’s personal assistant, or sharing an embarrassing life story. “If you can establish that connection, no matter how small it is, people trust you and let their guard down and they are willing to give you something.”
These more wacky CEO portraits further the perception of the executive as a creative type, as an unbridled optimist—and even as the guy or gal next door. Just as we’re encouraged to vote for the presidential candidate we’d like to have a beer with, it’s assumed that we may buy a computer or car based on our affinity for a particular CEO. Images of Steve Jobs often show the co-founder and head of Apple dressed in casual genius apparel: jeans and a T-shirt, usually black. Sometimes he’s sitting cross-legged on a floor, a pose no doubt appealing to Apple users, who consider themselves less corporate than PC loyalists. Jobs is the ultimate CEO superstar, sometimes called “Apple’s showman nonpareil” and a “master magician.” His image has served the company well. However, when he was questioned in January in relation to stock irregularities, analysts began to worry that Apple’s value could plummet, especially if Jobs should ever be shown in another, increasingly familiar CEO pose: head down and hands cuffed. Such is the risk that comes with building a corporate identity around one man, even one who “seems at times to defy gravity.”
Corporate heads are framed differently depending on the success or failure of their companies, according to Minneapolis photographer Doug Knutson, who has been shooting executives for two decades. “Things are cyclical,” he said. “In a bad year, they want to look more serious, and more focused on their job.” In such images they’ll stare directly at the camera, the idea being that they are “looking the investor in the eye, facing up to the company’s circumstances, or the challenges of the industry. Other years they want to show how dynamic they are so they aren’t looking at the camera. Maybe they’re looking off or talking to someone.”
Whatever the message, Knutson added, the CEO wants to appear sincere. “That’s why some of these places hire me,” he said. “I’ve got a style of getting people warm and comfortable with the camera.” Knutson, who is a fan of Yousuf Karsh, the man who famously photographed Winston Churchill for the cover of Life magazine, was one of the last photographers to shoot Bill McGuire, the former head of UnitedHealth Group. “Shortly after I took that picture, he started getting more attention for his income, and he got camera shy.” In the photo, McGuire is standing next to a glass door, his image reflecting back at him. He’s wearing a traditional suit-and-tie uniform, and also a slight smile. The photo is shot from above, the opposite of the traditional power angle, but Knutson said there was no message in that. “The photo was not intended to be looking down on him; it was intended to make a fascinating composition, including the geometry of the floor,” he said. “When the pictures succeed best, they are aesthetic commerce. They may not be art, but they are fulfilling a communication purpose.”

I live in Minneapolis, the fiftieth state in the union, known far and wide as the “Moon Crater State” and “Green Grocer to the World.” There are more than one thousand lakes in Minneapolis, and herds of bearded reindeer in the North Country.
I’m sorry—Minnesota is the fiftieth state in the union, etc. Minneapolis is the capital of Minnesota. It is also the city of big shoulders and brotherly something-or-other. Some say it is a toddling town—the toddling town, allegedly, the most toddling of all the toddling contenders. It is the windy city. It never sleeps, and is also famous for being the cradle of jazz and the home of the seldom-visited Pro Football Hall of Fame.
The city was discovered by Hernando DeSoto in the nineteenth century when he was discovering things in the New World, and the name means “Place of Many Rats” in some other language. Great battles have been fought here; our schoolchildren learn early on of a time when “the streets ran with rivers of blood.”
There is a giant statue of Edmund Muskie alongside his blue ox outside City Hall. History has happened here, in other words. We used to have a Living History museum, in fact, until it fell over. Today the city is a desolate place, constantly under siege and still wracked by the cholera epidemic. There remain, though, plenty of tanning spas, video stores, and places to get a burrito. There are not, however, any famous people here other than a swimsuit model who works in a shopping center.
Once upon a time, famous people did occasionally visit Minneapolis to marvel at its many attractions and eat in its legendary Shakey’s Pizza Parlors, where old men with handlebar mustaches and candy-striped plastic aprons played the banjo. A woman by the name of Ann Landers was one such person, and she was once presented with the key to the city. I now have that key in my possession, having traded a wheelbarrow for it back when there was so much rubble and wheelbarrows were in great demand.
I am currently living in a yurt near the airport with my wife and seven children. I lost my job servicing vending machines when the airport fell to the marauders.
To say anything more at this point, I’m afraid, wouldn’t be prudent.
We like it here, though. We’re proud of our city.

Actors on The Young and the Restless wore them while embracing Bianca, Bailey, or Bambi, and then convincing the ladies to sneak off and make love in the janitor’s closet. Older cousins wore them to weddings, with girlfriends attached to their arms like weights at the gym. As a scrawny, suburban Ohioan pre-teen who couldn’t throw a football, I was convinced that a suit was a passport to that mythic island of manhood.
As seniors in high school, my male classmates were buying their first suits for senior pictures. Sitting behind Kevin at my desk in calculus, envying how his neck sloped like an Italian vista into wide, sweeping shoulders (I mean, I liked his jacket), I became convinced that wearing a suit would change everything. I would barely notice that my sideburns wouldn’t grow like lush grass the way Eric’s and Jason’s did. If I were in a suit, I’d no longer be bothered by the way my classmates’ pecs pushed through their shirts, whereas mine wouldn’t push through my skin. In a suit, a wind would pick up, fill my sails, and blow me away to the island of manhood, where Eric and Jason wrestled Kevin, and the three competed to see whose pee could put out the campfire. In a suit, I would cheer them on.
As my mom drove me to Kaufmann’s department store to try on suits, my passport to Manhood, I envisioned stepping out of the boat, pulling it safely to shore, and lugging it onto the sand. But when we got there, the salesman, not much older than myself, took one look at me and chortled, “A suit? You’re going to have to start lifting weights, dude, if you want to fit into one of those.”
Three years later, I was twenty years old, a junior in college studying abroad in Hamburg, Germany. Walking through Die Esplanade, a popular shopping district, I spotted a cluster of suit jackets hanging in the middle of H&M like forbidden fruit. It was better, I thought, just to stay away. Somehow I convinced myself that if I stopped to admire the suits, other shoppers would point and laugh at me, the pint-sized American dwarfed by my L.L. Bean backpack, as if I were a monkey, a silly creature about to do something preposterous. So, passing the rack, I pretended not to notice the jackets—just like I did with those half-naked men on the Hanes underwear packets at the Kaufmann’s back home.
But I was in a new country, gosh darn it. No one wore deodorant. Shampoo smelled weird. Cars were smaller than American closets. I looked the jackets over. They hung heavy there, like ripe berries.
Just then, a wind picked up; my sails began to billow. I drifted toward the jackets. They came in various shades of gray and sported four buttons up the front, creating a long, lean look. I lifted a dark one off the rack and double-checked that it was the smallest available size. I pulled it off the hanger. I slid one arm through a sleeve. Then the other. The jacket rolled down my back, carpet smoothing against a floor. Would the carpet warp—too big for the room? I panicked and looked around the store, convinced I had heard monkey noises. But after shifting my sleeve this way and my collar that, the carpet fell into place.
I darted for the mirror. Who was that guy standing in front of me? I hesitated. Had I landed? Had my boat finally struck solid ground? I jumped out, my feet sloshing in the water along the shore. I turned in the mirror, studied my profile, lifted sand from the beach. I looked handsome. And I hadn’t even worked out. Standing in Hamburg’s H&M, with the suit’s price tag scratching my neck, I felt, for the first time in my life, that I actually might be a man.
The jacket still hangs in my closet to this very day, along with all of the boxes of letters and postcards that mark my year abroad. But I rarely, if ever, take these things out. When I’m at the Mall of America, however, I can’t help but cast an admiring glance over at H&M, as if it were a three-dimensional postcard waiting to be read anew. Although the store’s style no longer jibes with mine, I still quietly pay my respects to the place that offered me that very first suit in my size. —