The Rake Magazine

Year: 2007

  • Guys and Paper Dolls

    We asked a quartet of men-about-town, each dapper in his own way, to demonstrate. We sent them off to different women’s retailers—a department store, a discount chain, a boutique, and a consignment shop—and, all in all, were surprised when they all turned up with styles that stressed comfort, grace, and even downright conservatism. Kevin Friedland first picked up a drop-dead see-through lacy number by Dolce & Gabbana and then decided it was too revealing, and while Mikal Arnold did settle on lace, it was used in a demure cocktail dress. Brant Kingman improvised a hip-skimming skirt to cover the fanny of some tight leather slacks, and Kieran Folliard topped off an ensemble for his wife with a modest—no, make that schoolmarm-y—cardigan. What can we conclude from this little experiment? Guys may enjoy mooning over their ladies at a candlelit restaurant, but it seems they don’t want anyone at the next table doing the same.

    Kevin Friedland
    Defender/midfielder for the Minnesota Thunder professional soccer team
    Shopped at: Bumbershute, Wayzata
    Currently attached to: Meghan, a student and volunteer Thunder cheerleader
    What she usually wears: “Either a dress or jeans and some kind of top.”
    What he likes a woman to wear: “I like black and I like color—not so much beige.”
    On his date-night selection: “It’s not too over the top, not too lacy or see-through, but it’s still kind of sexy.”

    Brant Kingman
    Sculptor, designer, and noted party host
    Shopped at: Nu Look Consignment Apparel, Minneapolis
    Currently attached to: Kara, a dancer and IT project manager
    What she usually wears: “A lot of Max Studio, BCBG. My favorite coat of hers is a Betsey Johnson—with a fitted, sort of frilly collar.”
    It’s all in the details: “I like skirts that are cut on the bias … I like appliqué and embroidery … I’m partial to fringe.”
    Holding up a skirt to his waist: “I happen to know that my hipbone-to-hipbone measurement is about the same as hers.”

    Kieran Folliard
    Owner of Kieran’s, The Local, and The Liffey
    Shopped at: Target, downtown Minneapolis
    Married (and divorced and re-married) to: Lisa, a dietician
    On Target: “This is the bull’s eye, literally. It’s the only place I could’ve gone without going crazy. It’s laid out clean—I can be in, I can be out.”
    Unsolicited praise from his son Jerome: “That outfit actually does look like Lisa. Very impressive!”

    Mikal Arnold
    Guitarist/songwriter for Revolver Modèle and master’s candidate in Spanish literature
    Shopped at: Bloomingdale’s, Bloomington
    Currently attached to: Jahna, a Neiman Marcus sales associate and fashion stylist
    When examining a beaded dress: “I like it because it’s sort of a cross between flapper girl and Morticia Adams, which are two fetishes of mine.”
    On his date-night selection: “It sort of looks like it’s been worn—like an heirloom.”
    On the jewelry he picked out: “The skull is what I love. But she’d totally take that off right way. It’s also got the fleur-de-lis!”

  • Our Seating, Ourselves

    Planning to snuggle up with that special someone—or hell, just anyone—on Valentine’s Day?
    Nothing says lovin’ like some cozy new (to you) furniture from Craigslist! Just remember that competition is stiff, so hopeful soon-to-be former owners try to show off their wares in the most attractive light possible. Also, “BO” means best offer, not body odor.

  • David Rathman

    After making a splash at galleries in New York, Los Angeles, and Berlin, Minneapolis-based artist David Rathman is returning to the Twin Cities for a show of new work at the Weinstein Gallery, his first local exposure since an exhibition at the Walker Art Center in 2003. Raised in Montana and schooled at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, Rathman’s early art was clearly influenced by punk rock, but he made his first big mark with a body of work inspired by the Westerns of such punk progenitors as Sam Peckinpah. Those drawings, paintings, and prints featured stark silhouettes of cowboys, and usually incorporated snippets of text functioning equally as Zen koan and punchline. The western stuff was utterly distinctive, and clearly touched a nerve with collectors, not to mention art directors; Rathman’s work has been featured in such publications as Harper’s and the New York Times’ Style section. In recent years he’s moved on to other subject matter—boxers, wrestlers, stock car crashes—and the works on display at the Weinstein are devoted to high school football. Regardless of his topic, however, Rathman’s dark, atmospheric style and off-kilter sensibility remain unmistakably his own.

    So where did this new obsession with football come from?
    I loved football when I was a boy. I wanted to play in high school but I was small. I sort of lost interest for a while. And then kind of a beautiful thing happened a few years ago—I got hooked up with a kid through the Big Brothers mentoring program and one of the first things he wanted to do was play football. That renewed my interest in the game, to see the boys playing for the sport of it.
    Later, my father mentioned he’d been to a six-man football game. So I went to Montana and watched some of these games. And it was just beautiful. There was an amazing atmosphere in these mining towns. These hills were ringing the field, and that was really seductive to me. And the way the games were played was really interesting. They play on a lined field but everything’s scaled way down. I had this marvelous Saturday going to two games, and the bulk of this show was inspired by that trip.

    How did you know you were onto something?
    Sometimes you chase things and they just don’t click. But I think the football thing—it’s sort of theatrical, something dramatic is always happening. The other thing was the bodies of these high school football players: a lot of them are very manly, and standing next to them would be some skinny, knock-kneed kid. I’ve also always loved the gear—the padding, the helmets, the gloves—and that struck me as something that’d be interesting to paint.

    You’re probably best known for the cowboy work. How long did you stick with that? And what caused you to move away from it?
    I’d say it was about three years. It started out with two shows in New York and one in Berlin and then I did one at the Walker—those were all drawings on paper. That was an amazing thing when I found that material; I knew I had something there. I scoured film books, watched Westerns, took Polaroids of the screens. But there came a time when I just wanted to stop, but I’ve also felt that I’d like to go back to it.

    There is a preponderance of masculine themes in your work.
    What is the deal there, right? People ask me that all the time. I’ve never come up with a good answer. I just like this stuff. As a child I was very small, very inward and dreamy; I think some of that’s still going on. I remember being really thrilled by those Western characters. It was also a big deal as a boy growing up in a small town to watch high school football. Obviously, there are things I’m dealing with there; there’s aggression; it’s people being tested, contesting. It almost feels like I’m making pictures of the things that captivated me when I was a boy. I wanted to be an artist from day one, and so I kind of gravitated, over time, to the stuff I was into when I was eight years old: cars crashing, football players, boxing …

    Who are some of your influences in terms of other artists?
    I love Goya—especially his dark paintings, the way he pulls figures out of the darkness, that heavy atmosphere and mood. Rembrandt as well, especially his print work. Love Philip Guston. Oh, and Basquiat. I absolutely love that guy.

    Home and Away, an exhibit of new work by David Rathman, runs through March 10 at the Weinstein Gallery, 908 W. 46th St., Minneapolis; 612-822-1722;
    www.weinstein-gallery.com

  • Michael Korie

    Back home in New York, librettist Michael Korie has a current Broadway sensation—and a Drama Desk nomination—on his hands with the Grey Gardens musical. So why isn’t he already basking on some tropical isle? Instead, he and composer Ricky Ian Gordon (his Upper West Side neighbor) are wintering here in Minnesota, putting the finishing touches on their Minnesota Opera commission, The Grapes of Wrath. In the tradition of Rodgers and Hammerstein, the duo got the story down first; Korie’s poetic libretto, borrowing directly from Steinbeck and salted with a Plains dialect, was penned well before Gordon wrote any orchestration. With the lyrics complete, Gordon then layered in his jazz and roots-inspired orchestration, using stride piano and banjo as well as the full orchestra. “This is an opera in the way that Porgy and Bess is an opera,” declared Korie, referring to that modern classic’s distinctly American musical style and natural approach to storytelling. “We hope you won’t have to look at the supertitles.” Having transformed a 1975 cult documentary into a musical and a great American novel into an opera, we figured Korie would be eager for some R&R on The Rake’s desert island. But he’s planned well for his return to the mainland, as evidenced by the contents of his carry-on:

    1. “Iron Chef” Bobby Flay who will be grillin’ and chillin’ while I finally get around to reading …
    2. The Complete Unexpurgated Journals of André Gide while relaxing on an …
    3. Aero Mattress which happens to be afloat on the same tranquil cove where I have moored my …
    4. De Havilland Canada DHC-2 Beaver float plane with an adequate supply of …
    5. Airplane fuel to return me home when I have had my fill of wild boar with coconut-mango chutney.

  • The Migration of Snakes

    You have to get out of the house. That’s what he always says, on those rare occasions he’s home and not on the road. Or he’s on the road, on the phone, from his hotel. You have to get out of the house. Spoken truly like someone who has no idea how difficult it is to go somewhere, with two kids, three and eight months, and no babysitter, no nanny. And no one around. We’ve moved so much, luckily just within the U.S., because there are families that move internationally in his company. But we stay in the U.S., moving from one town to another. And where we are now, in this godforsaken suburb, there’s no one here during the day. All these people, their kids are older, they’re at school all day, and the dads work, and the moms are gone, doing what I don’t know. I don’t know them. Because they’re never home. And nights and weekends, they’re going to soccer, to softball, to basketball, hockey, whatever, whatever’s in season, to barbecues, to one another’s houses. It all takes so much energy. We’re home alone, Nicole and Freddy and I, going nowhere.
    But though I often think Sam is wrong—this job will be better, wrong; this town will be better, wrong; we’ll be able to save more money, spend more money, have more, wrong—there are so many times when the walls feel like they’re closing in on me. Maybe I do need to get out. So when I got a brochure in the mail from the Parent and Child Center, I thought maybe Sam was right, and this would be a lifesaver. “A place for families,” the brochure said. So I signed up for a class for parents and three-year-olds, during which I leave Nicole in the nursery with the smiling mommy-aged women. Half the time she cries and they have to come get me because she won’t stop crying. I’m the only one who has a baby who can’t make it through class. The other women nod at me, superior in their own children’s ability to adjust. But even when I’m there, listening to them talk is almost worse. They know everything about parenting. And they all know one another; they’ve been taking these classes together since their three-year-olds were barely out of the womb. They have scheduled playdates and lunches and shopping excursions and visits to the park in nice weather and the mall’s soft play area in bad weather. And they invite one another’s kids to birthday parties. “So invite them over,” Sam says, as if it was that easy. You can’t just break into a tight little women’s group. It doesn’t work that way. Especially not for me; moving gracefully into a group of such self-assured and self-satisfied women strikes me as impossible. “Picture them in their underwear,” says Sam.
    “That’d work better for you,” I say. They’re all thin, thin and trim, they work out, dropping their well-adjusted children at the fitness center nursery. They probably have beautiful underwear, gorgeous lingerie on gorgeous bodies. Not saggy underwear on a flabby belly.
    But we’ll move again. I just don’t know where and when. Trying to fit in, that’s too much work. It’s hard enough to get out of bed in the morning as it is.
    Freddy loves the Parent and Child Center. Good for him. At least someone is getting something out of it. Today, as usual, we’re late, and I’m trying to hustle him out to the car when he finds another snake in the yard. A snake in the grass! He sees them all the time, little black-and-yellow striped garden snakes. He hunkers down, fascinated, staring. “Get away from it, Freddy,” I tell him. “Snakes bite, you know.”
    He shakes his head, solemn with his knowledge. “They don’t bite,” he says.
    “They do,” I say. “They have little sharp teeth that really, really hurt.” I have no idea if this is true, but I’ll say whatever it takes to get him to back away. Me, I won’t go in the backyard. In the trees by the swamp—no, the wetlands, they’re wetlands, not swamps—the snakes breed, they’re always slithering back there, behind our little house.
    “But no poison, Mom,” he tells me. “Daddy said.” What faith he has in what Daddy says. I remember when I was secure in the knowledge of what his father told me.
    “You won’t care about poison when they sink their teeth into you,” I tell him. “Come on, Freddy, we’re going to be late. Come on.” We live in continuous echo chamber: come on, hurry up, let’s go, we’re going to be late. When we’re going anywhere, that is.
    Then something slides across my foot, and I look down to see a snake using my sandal as a speed bump. For just a second I freeze, thinking maybe it’s only one of Freddy’s many toys that’s been left outside. But those, of course, don’t move. I stifle a scream and kick, jerking my foot as hard as I can, sending the thin black snake writhing helplessly through the air. Freddy watches, his face alight with joy. Then I rub the top of my foot against the back of my jeans.
    “Snake germs,” I mutter, trying to make light of it.
    “Snakes don’t have germs,” Freddy says. “Daddy said.”
    What answer can I have for that? Daddy said. Daddy, the glamorous visitor, calling from Detroit. Chicago. Dallas. Charlotte. I stay home, keeping the doors closed, keeping the snakes out.
    But now I’ve gotten out of the house, and I’ve kicked a poison-free, germ-free snake across the yard. And my reward is waiting for me at the Parent and Child Center, where Nicole whimpers and cries in the nursery while Freddy and I sit in a circle of moms and kids on the floor, and we sing songs that the other moms seem to know, but I don’t, songs about liking to eat bananas and apples. I missed this somewhere, didn’t read that chapter in the mommy manual.
    Then we have our “breakout” session, where the kids stay and play with Teacher Debbie, who’s just a few years younger than grandmotherly, and the moms go off for our mom lessons. Today I’m treated to a lengthy discussion of validating emotions. This is for three-year-olds, for heaven’s sake; whoever said a three-year-old has emotions worth validating? I distract myself by wondering what’s worse, having a snake slide across my foot at home or being here, listening to this.
    Maybe it’s because I’m tired, because I don’t sleep, or Nicole doesn’t sleep, which means even less sleep, but I can’t hold my tongue anymore. “Don’t you think,” I say toward the end of class, clearing my throat, “that maybe there’s too much validation going on?” The other mothers turn toward me, polite, frozen smiles on their faces. I’m not going to be a hit today. “I mean, if you think about it, how about all those kids who go around shooting other kids, or shooting their parents?”
    The smiles fade. “What do you mean?” says Liz, the parent educator. Now there’s a great job title.
    “We go around telling these kids their emotions are all OK,” I say. “So doesn’t that lead them to think any feeling they have about anything is a valid reason for shooting someone?”
    “Oh, no,” says a women whose name I don’t remember and whose nametag I can’t read from here. “I think those kids who kill have been told to suppress their emotions all their lives. They’re really miserable. It’s just like—” she laughs, a pseudo-self-deprecating laugh, “when my husband tells me, ‘You’re making too big a deal about that. It’s not important.’ That just makes me go ballistic!” And the other women laugh and nod.
    “I don’t know,” I say. “I think we’re giving kids too much room to feel.”
    “I don’t think you can give them too much room,” says another woman. I can see her nametag: Patty. She has a baby younger than Nicole; she’s my height and at least two sizes smaller in clothing. “We have to teach them how to handle their emotions, not suppress them.”
    “I didn’t say ‘suppress them,’ ” I say. “I said ‘validate.’ Isn’t that what we’re talking about here? Validation? If my kid says, ‘Hey mom, I feel like blowing some people away today,’ I should say, ‘why sure, honey, I validate that’?”
    Oh, I’ve got their attention now.
    There’s a silence before the others collectively turn to Liz, as if to say, help us with this twit. Liz clears her throat and fingers the pendant hanging from her neck. “Well, that would be taking validation to an extreme,” she says. “What I think we’re”—notice the collective we’re—“saying is that we have to let our kids know we hear what they’re saying, that we understand they are really feeling that particular emotion. Not that they should go ahead and act on it.”
    “But if we’ve told them their emotions are valid, how are we going to stop them from acting on them?” I don’t even care, but I can’t seem to stop.
    “By giving them acceptable outlets for their emotions,” says Liz. The other mothers nod, validated. Liz goes on, encouraged: “In fact, let’s talk about healthy outlets. That’s a challenge for three-year-olds.” There’s laughter. I don’t join in.
    When class ends, no one talks to me. I tuck Freddy into his jacket, make the usual parent-educator-approved comments about how hard he worked on this painting and how nice that he used so many colors. Around me, other kids are being tucked into Tommy Hilfiger and Ralph Lauren jackets, shinier and more impressive than the blue fleece jacket from JCPenney that Freddy wears. Someday, there will be money for better clothes. Daddy said.
    I tell myself I don’t mind when I see the other mothers lingering in the hallway, chattering brightly. When I stop by the office to withdraw from the class I tell myself that it’s just something that didn’t work. It’s part of life. But it feels like giving up. I’m a mother and I’m a woman; I’m supposed to belong here.
    But I don’t. As I’m leaving the office, on my way to pick up Nicole from the nursery, I have to walk by a cluster of women from my class, all of whom stop talking when they see me, more of those polite smiles, no one meeting my eye. As far as I know, anyway, since I don’t try to make any eye contact Freddy seems to know what I’m doing. “I don’t wanna go,” he says, pulling my hand to keep me from exiting the building. “Stay.”
    “Can’t,” I say. “Class is over.” I pull him harder than I mean to, and he collapses on the floor, howling. Nicole watches him, her eyes bright. “Freddy,” I say, trying hard to sound loving in front of the attentive receptionist and the silent women behind me, “come on, honey, it’s time to go.” He just cries harder. Now Nicole is whimpering. I lean down to whisper into Freddy’s ear. “We … have … to … go,” I hiss. “Now. Come on. I’ll take you to Burger King if you stop this right now.” Bribery, I know, is not highly thought of at the Parent and Child Center. That was a topic for two whole classes.
    Freddy whimpers, but at least he looks at me. “Burger King?” he says loudly.
    “Yes,” I whisper. “But you have to come now.” And so we go.

    I don’t want to go home, but I can only tolerate Burger King so long, and Nicole needs a nap. Some babies sleep in their mother’s laps, but not Nicole, she has to have her crib. Besides, the stink of French fries, the screaming of kids, the too-bright lights, all make me feel like my skin is being stretched too tight. So home we go. I tuck Nicole in, and she waves her little hands in front of her face, a ritual she performs to put herself to sleep. I can hear the TV; Freddy learned how to turn it on, and I keep it set to Animal Planet. He slumps down in front of it, waiting patiently for crocodiles, for snakes, for dogs and cats being rescued.
    Suddenly I’m so tired that I’m trembling. The afternoon stretches before me, full of things I should do, empty of anything I want to do. I go sit in the living room, that useless room-for-show in the front of the house. But, I realize, the useless room isn’t so useless, if it gives me this time alone. Leaning my head back on the couch, I close my eyes and sit with my hands on my thighs, palms up. It’s not sleeping, but it’s not exactly conscious either. It’s about the closest thing to sleep I can do. I feel my lungs breathing, slow and slower, each breath feeling like it might be the last. Then Freddy calls, “Mom? Mom!” I sigh and open my eyes. Across from the couch is a display cabinet, full of the useless knickknacks, crystal bowls, Chinese tea sets from Chinatowns we used to visit before kids, things we’ve collected in seven years of marriage. It has a mirror for a back wall. I see myself, a puffy figure in loose, rumpled clothes, hair not really clean and pulled back into a tight ponytail. Something flickers in the upper range of my eyesight, and I look up. There’s a thin something poking out from the top of the cabinet, and I sigh. How did Freddy get a toy snake all the way up there? But then it moves, and I realize that the snake looking down on me is not a toy.

    The Yellow Pages has dozens of ads for pest control companies, but most work only with mice and squirrels, bugs, moles, voles, rats and bats. No one wants to do snakes. I finally find one that does and call them. I want to hide somewhere, but I don’t know where. I don’t know how the snake got there, but if it made it to the top of the cabinet, it could get up the stairs. So I sit in the chair that’s outside Nicole’s room for decoration, all poofy and white, where I can watch her crib while still peering downstairs to the TV room. Freddy is transfixed in front of some show about koala bears. And I’m standing guard, as if that will help.
    The snake man is big and burly, with a grizzled, graying beard that covers his face. I show him where the snake was. He brings in a ladder and peers over the top of the cabinet. “Yup,” he says. “Here he is.” Then, with his bare hands, he brings the snake off the cabinet.
    “Oh my God,” I say, peering around the corner to the TV room, hoping Freddy isn’t coming our way. He thinks the big man is here to clean the china cabinet.
    He chuckles. “You’re not afraid, are ya?” he says. “Of a little old garter snake?”
    “I thought they were ‘garden snakes.’”
    He shakes his head while he puts the snake in a canvas bag. “Common mistake. They’re really known as ‘garter snakes.’ Know why? Probably not, if you didn’t know they was called ‘garters.’ ” He twists the end of the bag, knotting it. “Since they’re mostly black with stripes, they look like men’s garters, back from the old times.” A picture suddenly appears in my head of snakes dangling from my underwear, striped snakes twisting around my legs, little snake teeth holding up silk stockings. “Although since people often see them in gardens and lawns, calling them a ‘garden snake’ is not too far off base.” He descends from his ladder. “Tell you what. I’d guess this thing got in through an open window or door, but let me have a look in the basement, just to be safe.”
    “I didn’t know they could climb.”
    “Oh, they’re good little climbers,” he says. “I seen ’em in places you wouldn’t believe. You ever heard of those tree snakes in Guam? They got those brown snakes—now those are deadly!—and they just drop right out of the trees.” He guffaws. “Law of gravity—what goes up, must come down!”
    “There’s the basement door,” I say, pointing at it. Freddy calls for juice, and I hurry to help him, my eyes flickering up and down, looking for slithering tails on the floor and scanning the cabinets for dropping snakes.
    Minutes go by. Freddy drinks his juice and wanders upstairs, where I hear the sound of his Lego bin being dumped on the floor. Normally a sound that nearly makes me cry, since it means I will be picking up thousands of Legos later, but for now it’s good.
    Then there’s a shout from the basement. My stomach lurches. “Ma’am?” calls the snake man. “You better come down here.”
    I pause at the top of the stairs. “What is it?”
    “You got a whole nest of snakes down here,” he says.
    I close my eyes. “I can’t,” I say.
    “Sure you can. They get into houses easily enough.”
    “No,” I say. “I can’t come downstairs.”
    There’s a thumping on the steps, then he reappears. The bag in his hand is clearly fuller now, and wriggling. “I think I got ’em all,” he says. “But I want to look around outside, see where they came from.”
    I wait by the doorway as he disappears around the side to the backyard. Eventually, he calls me out. I pull my winter boots out of the coat closet, even though it’s sixty degrees and sunny, unusually warm this late in the fall. The snake man is staring at the house foundation in the side yard. He bends over, and in spite of myself, I smile to see the beginning of his butt crack appear at the top of his work pants. “I think this is your problem,” he says, pointing to a minuscule gap between the concrete block foundation and the siding. “This is where they’re getting in.”
    “That’s so small,” I say, squinting at it. “How can they fit in there?”
    “Snakes can worm their way through almost any size crack,” he says. I have to choke back a scream of laughter at a sudden vision of a snake slipping into his crack. “And this time of year, they’re migrating.”
    “‘Migrating’?” I say. “I thought geese migrated.” Now I see crazy V-shaped formations of flying striped snakes.
    “Snakes too,” he says. “Spring and fall. In the spring, they’re leaving their hibernation to find places just like that”—he points to the trees and swamp, wetlands, behind our house—“to spend the summer. Then fall comes, like now, and they need a dark, kinda warm place to wait out the winter. A basement is ideal, if they can get into one. Of course, it’s not ideal for you, because come next spring, there’s babies.”
    “Oh my God,” I say. There’s a hard, choking ball of panic rising in my throat. My stomach is squirming like the tied-up bag he’s tossed on the ground.
    “I can do up an estimate for you to fix that gap,” he says. “And we should probably do another sweep of the basement. Once they’re in, it’s a tough job to keep ahead of them.” I try to say something, but all that comes out is a strangled sound. He looks at me.
    “Where in the basement did you—” I say, unable to finish the sentence, just pointing at the bag on the ground.
    “Sump pump,” he says. “That’s a common one. But I’d like to do more looking, maybe behind some of the walls. They could be anywhere. Hell, I’ve seen ’em nesting under water heaters. I went to a house where they was coming up through the pipes into the washing machine.”
    “No,” I say, and what I mean is: stop talking. “Can you just fix it?”
    He looks at his watch. “Not today,” he says. “You’ll have to call scheduling. I’m booked solid all week. I only got here because I was doing an estimate for mice the next block over.”
    “No,” I say. “You have to help me.”
    “Well, call scheduling and see if they got anyone on call,” he says. “They might be able to get someone out in the next couple days.”
    I grab hold of his arm. “No,” I say. “Please. Can’t you help me? I can’t be here with these snakes.”
    He glances down at his arm, where my fingers are digging in as tightly as I can.
    “Hey,” he says. “It’s not that bad.”
    “It is,” I say. “It’s exactly that bad. This is impossible. I can’t live with snakes in my house. Everything is wrong. I hate this house, I hate this town, I hate this—”
    “Ah, hell, lady,” he says, gently removing his elbow from my hand and patting my shoulder awkwardly. “We can kill the snakes. You don’t have to feel bad about that.” He pulls a small spiral notebook out of his shirt pocket, flipping through it and frowning at it. “Well, I can move a couple of things around, come out tomorrow afternoon. I need another guy with me, but I can grab him from his lunch hour.”
    “I’ll buy you both lunch,” I say. “Please.”
    He peers at me, brow furrowed. “You got anywhere you can go?” he asks. “Any family? Your mom around here?”
    “No,” I say. What I don’t say is that even if she lived next door, she’d be no help. All my life, she’s never been there. The shadow woman. Silent and miserable. Until my sister and I grew up and moved away. Then she was free. She’d want nothing to do with this. And I want nothing to do with her. I’ll be different, I’ve always thought, always said, I won’t be like my mother, I’ll be there for my kids.
    “You gonna be OK until tomorrow?” the snake man asks.
    I nod. “What choice do I have?” I say, trying to laugh.
    “You could go to a hotel,” he says. “You might sleep better.”
    “Yes,” I say, nodding again. “A hotel.” It sounds beautiful, dreamlike, a quiet hotel, but already it sounds like too much work—packing, planning, preparing. What if Nicole cried all night? What if someone complained?
    I’ll think about it later. For now, snakes are all I can consider.

    The snakes don’t bother my husband. “You don’t need to go to a hotel,” he says, from his own hotel room in Cleveland.
    “I can’t sleep here,” I say. “Snakes climb.”
    “They’re harmless,” he says. “Garden snakes aren’t poisonous.”
    “Garter snakes,” I correct him. I can almost feel them slithering around my ankles. “But they do bite.”
    “They’re not coming up to the bedrooms,” he says, patience clearly wearing thin. “So the guy found some in the basement. And by the way, what did this snakebuster cost?”
    “I don’t know,” I say. “He didn’t leave a bill. He’s coming back tomorrow to look for more and to seal off the siding.”
    “No, no, no. Christ. Look,” he says. “All he’s going to do is spray foam insulation in those cracks and charge hundreds of dollars for something I can do myself for twenty bucks.”
    “When you come home at the end of the week,” I say. “The snakes are migrating. They’re moving into the house. You’ll just lock them in with your insulation. Then next spring there’ll be babies everywhere.”
    “I don’t care if the snakes are migrating, we’re not spending that kind of money,” he says. “I’ll deal with it when I’m home on Friday. I’ll go to the hardware store on the way home from the airport.”
    “I already told him to come,” I say. “He rearranged his schedule just to help me. I can’t cancel him now.”
    “Sure you can,” he says. “Just call them up. If you call now, you can probably just leave a message and not even talk to a live person.”
    “You don’t know how awful it was to see that snake on top of that cabinet. I can’t make it until Friday. You don’t understand—the snakes climb! They climb!”
    “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” he says. “It’s not that big of a deal. The snakes aren’t going to hurt anything. You don’t need to be so dramatic about everything.”
    “What else have I been dramatic about?” I demand. “I always put up with everything—”
    “Give me a break,” he says. “Everything is a complaint with you. Everything is always wrong. You could show some appreciation.”
    “Appreciation for what? A house full of snakes?”
    “Like that’s my fault,” he says. “Listen to yourself. I should have known. All the time we dated, you bitched about your mother, how she was never around, how she worked and was so tired, and you wouldn’t marry a man who couldn’t allow you to be home with the kids.”
    “I—”
    “And it couldn’t be just any home. It had to be a nice one. So now you’ve got what you said you always wanted, and all you do is bitch about it. ‘I hate being home, I hate this house, I hate this town.’ Well, you’re just going to have to figure out how to live with it.”
    “What’s that supposed to mean?”
    He sighs, the annoyed, pointed kind of sigh. “Not that you’ll appreciate this,” he says, “but I’m being promoted. To manage the local office. So I shouldn’t have to transfer again, not for a long time.”
    “Wonderful,” I say. “Then you can afford to snakeproof the house.”
    The line hums between us. “At the moment,” he says slowly, “the extras come in the form of equity in the company, so—”
    “So it’s not more money,” I say. “What a great deal. Equity. Will they give us equity in snakes?”
    “Mommy?” Freddy appears in the kitchen, rubbing his eyes.
    “What are you doing up?” I yell at him. “You’re supposed to be asleep. Why can’t you just sleep when you’re supposed to? Go to bed!”
    “Is that Freddy? Let me talk to him,” Sam says.
    “No,” I say. “He’s supposed to be in bed. I can’t talk anymore.” I hang up the phone and scoop Freddy up, his little legs swaying. “You have to stay in bed.”
    He leans his head on my shoulder. “Scared, Mommy. Snakes.”
    I stop and grab his chin, looking hard at him. “What snakes? Did you see a snake? Tell me!”
    “You said snakes.” He starts to cry.
    “Are there snakes in your room? Real ones? Not those goddamn toys? Tell me, Freddy!”
    He cries harder. The phone begins to ring. It rings four times, then goes to voicemail. After a moment, it rings again. I haul him over my shoulder and rush upstairs, where I pull back his bed covers and look under the bed and behind the dresser, then cautiously open the closet doors. The phone stops. There are no signs of wildlife. “You see snake, Mommy?” Freddy asks, calmer.
    “No,” I say, “and neither do you.” He reaches up for a hug, but I pull his arms down and plop him into bed. “Go to sleep.”
    “I wanna story,” he says.
    “No,” I say, and he begins to cry. “Bedtime. You have to learn that.” From downstairs I can hear the phone ringing again. I close his door and lean against the wall outside it, listening to Freddy’s wails jangling along with the phone, and I wonder how many of Freddy’s emotions I haven’t validated today.
    Freddy finally hiccups to a stop, and the phone rings twice more. Then everything is quiet.
    Back in my own room, the one I share with my husband when he’s here, I gingerly pull back the bed covers and look under the bed. Nothing but dust. I leave a table lamp on low, so I can see what’s happening, and I crawl into bed fully dressed. The day is ending, I think, and then I think, as I do most nights, that I don’t know if I can do this anymore. My own nighttime ritual, like Nicole’s fluttering fingers.
    I remember how I saw myself in the cabinet mirrors, before I saw the snake—a puffy, unhappy woman. A shell. Useless. The skin the snake leaves behind. There’s nothing there that anyone could want. I pulled Freddy out of the class he liked because I didn’t. And because the mothers didn’t like me, and if they don’t like me, Freddy doesn’t have a chance. Better to take him out before he starts to understand that he’s being left out, and he’s being left out because of his mother.
    I yell, I cry, I withhold hugs not to be mean, but because I don’t have any left. I can’t even protect my kids from snakes in the house.
    All those women in that class, none of them have snakes in their basements. Or if they did, they’d cheerfully scoop them up and carry them outside, gently so the snake weren’t harmed, all the while teaching their children about nature. They don’t lie awake at night, making lists of all the day’s failures. Nicole and Freddy would be better off in any of their homes, with any of those mothers. Any mother but me.
    Now I can’t sleep. Every slight sound jerks me awake, makes me wonder if a snake is moving across the comforter. I think I’m hearing noises that aren’t even there, and then I remind myself that noises don’t matter, snakes are silent. But I still hear them. Finally I get up and go out into the hallway. You’re being a baby, I tell myself, but I can’t help it.
    I sit in the chair outside Nicole’s room, so tired, and watch the stairs for climbing snakes. I rest my hands on my legs, breathing slower and slower, but not slowly enough.
    I won’t sleep now, even though the house is hushed and quiet. But underneath the quiet, I hear the snakes slithering in the grass on their migratory path, nosing along my foundation, searching for cracks, looking for a way in.

  • Katherine Kersten: The One-Woman Solution

    When the tinny tinkle of “Joy to the World, the Lord is Come” begins playing on the cell phone, everyone in range in the Star Tribune newsroom knows who’s getting a call. It is Katherine Kersten, the paper’s unapologetically religious and fiercely conservative metro columnist.

    Since May 2005, the Star Tribune has been engaged in what its top editor freely describes as “an experiment.” The test has Katherine Kersten, a fifty-five-year-old former banker, lawyer, and think-tank denizen, now an opinion writer, playing the role of an alien element injected into a tradition-bound newspaper culture.


    Long battered by conservative critics as the “Red Star” for its alleged knee-jerk liberalism—particularly over the past decade, as conservatives were rallied by the echo chambers of talk radio and right-wing blogs—the Star Tribune decided it had to answer. So, for the last twenty months, Kersten has been a one-woman solution, applying a decidedly different, and perhaps revolutionary, face to the role of big-city reporter and metro columnist.
    Directed by editor Anders Gyllenhaal, a man with only two years of Minnesota experience under his belt at the time, the paper consciously sought an unequivocal political and social conservative—not a classic Minnesota moderate Republican, but rather, someone whose voice and point of view could have been lifted off the pages of the Weekly Standard (for which Kersten has written), or the Sean Hannity Show. Moreover, Gyllenhaal declined to put her column on the editorial pages, where Kersten used to write when she worked for The Center of the American Experiment, and where no one would have blinked had she appeared again. Instead, he put her on the metro pages, where consistently overt, unvarying partisan ideology has historically been discouraged.
    Kersten seized the opportunity and has delivered a steady drumbeat of unvarnished socially conservative thinking, railing steadily against gay marriage—and the slippery slope from there to polygamy, public schools, the legitimacy of Keith Ellison’s congressional candidacy, the cynical stagecraft of the so-called “Flying Imams,” and, in a near-camp classic, the Rolling Stones’ lack of family values.
    The primary response has been a chorus of infuriated liberals. But the unvarying perspective and tone of her writing has also called into question several long-accepted tenets of traditional newspapering, among them the unwritten code that says columnists should avoid easy labeling and present an image of editorial independence, an image that at no time suggests they are in league with unknown forces.
    A year and a half later, Gyllenhaal’s ‘experiment’ is neither the ‘tremendous success’ he and local conservatives describe it as, nor the ‘sick joke’ outraged liberals and a small minority of Kersten’s Star Tribune colleagues have called it. Both Gyllenhaal (who is leaving the Star Tribune this month to take over editorship of the Miami Herald) and Kersten claim to be buoyed by a steady flow of correspondence praising her work. Nevertheless, her harshest critics continue to see her as a painfully unpolished reporter serving mainly as obvious sop to barking-dog conservatives, a crowd that wouldn’t respect the Star Tribune if it ran neo-con valentines on the front page.
    At the same time, several of the paper’s more prominent writers wonder if Gyllenhaal’s choice of a bona fide member of the intellectual elite is really serving the optimal conservative constituency. In other words, is she effectively solving the paper’s “conservative problem”? There is also a concern with Kersten’s near-lockstep choice of topics and point of view with influential conservative bloggers—chief among them Scott Johnson, one of the three primary authors at Powerlineblog.com and her friend of twenty years.
    In person, Kersten comes off as a classic Edina working mother of four, albeit one with a monochromatic wardrobe favoring shades of black. (On a personal level, her Strib colleagues seem to like her; some say they’ve even encouraged her to “soften” her look in her column mug shots—it has changed four times, by one count.) Her vocal inflection is earnest and precise, her thoughts organized. She doesn’t fumble for words. Without question, she is well read, open, self-effacing, and even eager for a civil clash of opinions. She shows no hint of defensiveness or the knuckleheaded combativeness of talk radio. Nor does she stoop to the kind of contrived venom and cynical mangling of facts made famous by Ann Coulter.
    In fact, unlike so many commercially successful bloviators, Kersten gives the impression that truth actually matters to her. Her conversation, which does have a tendency to drift into think-tank policy-speak, is peppered with references to “ideas,” “issues,” and “vision.” Yet during a conversation, you can’t help but be puzzled by the contradictions she doesn’t see, and wonder if she isn’t another example of a person whose facile intellect and desire to differentiate herself have impelled her to a rarefied stratum of thought.
    Over coffee at an Edina Starbucks, Kersten describes her family in Fort Dodge, Iowa, as “Republican, but not terribly political,” and recalls, with amused irony, marching in anti-Vietnam War protests as a Carleton College freshman in 1969-70.
    “You can imagine what Carleton was like at that time,” she says. “It was certainly a political hotbed. There was a moratorium, as you might remember, which was observed across the country when the Kent State and Cambodia-related issues kind of came to the fore in the spring semester. There was a great length of period when there were no classes at all. Classes were just suspended, and people met to talk politics on [the Carleton commons].
    “Paul Wellstone was a relatively new faculty member. But he of course was very, very prominent in all this.”
    Being an eighteen-year-old at this point, she says, she wasn’t thinking of herself as deeply political, and certainly not as the free-market capitalist and purveyor of conservative social nostrums she would eventually become.
    “Oh no. In fact, I remember writing home from Carleton,” she says, “asking that my parents send up some of my hard-earned waitress dollars so I could put it into an account for people who might need to raise bail after civil-disobedience actions. And I remember marching by the governor’s mansion.
    “I actually wrote a letter to my hometown paper about the war, and my uncle wrote a counterpoint.”
    Hers was anti-war?
    “Yeah, anti-Vietnam policy, I guess you could say. But all along, I was pretty much aware my information was spotty, and that I didn’t have the big picture,” she says.
    As uncertain about her future as any eighteen-year-old, Kersten says, she tried to balance her love of great books with a major in chemistry, but very soon shucked all thought of Petri dishes and Bunsen burners.
    After one year she shucked Carleton, too, in favor of the then-all-female St. Mary’s, across the highway from the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana. She entered “a general program of liberal studies” and “a great books program,” which, she declares, was “the best thing that ever happened to me.”
    After she finished her undergrad work, she went off to Yale University, intending to work toward a doctorate in philosophy, but her capitalist instincts quickly deflected her from that track. She signed up for a master’s program with an “organizational, management-type focus.” Two years later, she was headed for a job at Northern Trust Bank in Chicago.
    “I wanted to work with a big company that would essentially teach me what I needed to know,” she says. “And of course at that time banks were kind of the premier place to start.”
    Two years with the bank was enough for Kersten to decide the pin-striped life “was also not [her] passion.” But now—maybe, possibly—the academic life was. Seventy letters to various institutions of higher learning netted her a job with the University of Wisconsin as a liaison between the administration and the extension university.
    But the need to score a doctorate (a requirement if one is to stay viable in university administration) was, again, not something she felt passionate about. A business contact in North Carolina convinced her that a law degree was a much better real-world commodity than a Ph.D. She soon became the fourth lawyer in her family.
    Kersten met her husband Mark Johnson, who is now an attorney in a private practice, in law school. She then married and found herself, three years later, out of school, buying a house, and about to have her second child (she eventually had four in five years). She was also thinking, “I can’t do all of this.” So, “I quit my job [with the University of Wisconsin],” she says. “And really, that begat my first experience with writing.”
    After that, Kersten says, a grad school friend contacted her wondering if she’d be interested in taking over an assignment from the conservative Hoover Institution’s Policy Review journal to “write a kind of conservative feminist manifesto.”
    Though that idea conjures visions of braless Lynne Cheneys and Liddy Doles cracking heads in an eighty-fourth-floor executive suite, Kersten explains that the editors were curious as to whether she—a thirty-five-year-old, very-well-educated stay-at-home mom—detected any overlap between what, at first glance, appeared to be repellent poles of the cultural globe.
    At this point, though, she still had not sworn a blood oath to conservatism.
    “My real interest is ideas,” she insists, “not politics,” and goes on a bit about how she developed an appreciation for the positive influences of Western culture while studying at St. Mary’s. “The way [Western culture] has produced modernity; the way it has produced the scientific world view; the way it has produced the notion of individual liberties and individual rights.”
    Kersten was becoming enamored with this view at a time—1970—when many of her college peers and faculty members were expressing passionate dismay at the Vietnam War, seeing it as yet another catastrophic episode of Western hypocrisy, another tragic example of the Western ethos carpet-bombing not-quite-our-kind-of-“modern” individuals and individual liberties “back to the Stone Age” (to quote then-Air Force General Curtis LeMay).
    So did she feel she ever had a Saul-on-the-road-to-Damascus moment—an experience that shifted her lust for ideas permanently away from the conventionally liberal attitudes of most college campuses, and into the bosom of conservatism?
    “Well,” she says, grasping the question, “in terms of my interest in current events and how current events are shaped by these ideas, it really was my decision to stay at home as a mother, and to then begin spending more time looking at issues, and in particular my experience with Central America.”
    In the mid-’80s, “Central America” was shorthand for the turmoil of socialist/populist revolutions against long-entrenched dictatorial governments, most of which had cozy, supportive relations with large American and European corporations. In Nicaragua, the Sandinistas had finally grabbed control after a twenty-year struggle against the American-backed Somoza family. The Reagan administration responded by funneling military aid to right-wing rebels seeking to undercut the Sandinistas.
    Meanwhile in Minneapolis, stay-at-home-mom Katherine Kersten was attending parties at the well-appointed Lake of the Isles home of a former law-firm colleague.
    “We were invited, regularly, to Sandinista events. Events where there’d be a Sandinista priest or a Sandinista politician speaking. And often these events were held at these lovely homes, where there would be bread-and-soup suppers, and people would come in proper revolutionary dress, with the right head scarf and the right peasant skirt.
    “I had really known very little about [this kind of culture], and I got pretty interested— especially because I’d raise my hand at the end of one of these speeches by these Sandinista apologists, and I’d ask a skeptical question. And there’d be this shudder that would go around the room. People would whisper, ‘You can’t say that,’ ‘How can you say that?’
    “I realized pretty quickly there was something else going on here. There was a deeply emotional need being met.”
    Her voice registers excitement as she recalls Minnesota college campuses shipping faculty members and students off to Nicaragua on field trips where “they were all filled with this righteous indignation. And often these people were accountants: they were lawyers. They were kind of in their mid-forties. They had gone to college in the ’60s, and, I don’t know, maybe thought they’d sold out. But now they were pretty well heeled. But to them, there was nothing more exciting than to see [Sandinista leader] Daniel Ortega in his bandolier and his camouflage. To them, he was, you know, an authentic revolutionary. A reeeal man.
    “And I had seen this over and over at these Lake of the Isles parties.”
    It was at this point, Kersten says, that she refashioned herself as a lonely champion for rectitude—a mom-style Joan of Arc, leading an often-solitary crusade for clarity in true democratic principles. Like so many conservatives, she asserted that “there was literally no one out there” countering the argument of Sandinista sympathizers. (No one, of course, other than the Reagan administration.)
    Borrowing a page from the Republican handbook of “issue framing”, Kersten formed The Midwest Coalition for Democracy in Central America. Soon, her notoriety and singularity as a countering argument to liberal orthodoxy began earning her an audience every time a school or radio program needed to “balance” a forum.
    Tireless and reliably on point, her newspaper op-ed pieces caught the attention of Mitch Pearlstein, who at the time was handling reader mail for the St. Paul Pioneer Press’s editorial page. Pearlstein encouraged her to write more, and soon, after he founded the conservative Center of the American Experiment think tank in the early ’90s, Kersten was brought on as a fellow.
    By the mid-’90s, she was well enough established as a go-to conservative thinker to become a regular presence from 1995 to 2003 on the Star Tribune’s editorial page, where she began serving up regular assaults on precious liberal sensibilities. “It was not a particularly comfortable fit for me,” she says. “The editorial page has a very decided slant.”
    Some see Kersten’s unvarying perspective as her primary weakness. “Maybe the biggest struggle in being a columnist is trying to avoid being labeled,” said Star Tribune columnist Nick Coleman one late fall afternoon, as he carved his way through lunch at Kramarczuk’s Deli. “A big part of the game is surprising the reader from time to time, showing some latitude in your thinking and staying out of the box people try to put you in.”
    Coleman (full disclosure: he is a longtime friend of mine) has been a Twin Cities columnist for more than thirty years. He, and nearly all of the other Star Tribune staffers with whom I spoke, have no objection to adding new voices to the paper—even an unabashed conservative voice. His problem is placing Kersten on the metro pages in an attempt to create a “balance” and respond to the regular accusations of liberal bias hurled at him and fellow columnist Doug Grow. “You find the last time some Democratic politician or liberal blogger referred to me as, ‘our good friend, Nick Coleman.’ It’s never happened. They all hate my guts, and that’s the way it’s supposed to be.”
    In fact, there is no end of Star Tribune readers who agree with the description of Grow and Coleman as “liberals.” And there’s a long history of big-city newspaper columnists with “liberal” sensibilities. You think of writers like Mike Royko, Pete Hamill, Jimmy Breslin, and so on—journalists who built legendary careers, and a large readership, by covering the stories of underdogs bucking city hall and big business. Columnists like these savored an emotional kinship with a hard-living underclass—people with little more to offer the community at large than their colorful and amusing stories. But today’s hyper-cautious newspaper managers, more peripatetic bureaucrats than journalists, consign that kind of novelistic storytelling to the trash heap of journalistic days gone by.
    Coleman and a number of other Star Tribune reporters (who preferred not to go on record) see the Kersten “experiment” as essentially this: In hopes of appeasing a rancorous minority, the paper has taken a straightforward, arch-conservative opinion-page writer with no traditional newspaper reporting experience—no time spent covering society’s random violence and injustice and the street-level impact of “big ideas”—and allowed her to do on-the-job training as a metro columnist.
    There is something to the complaint. While even her critics concede Kersten “is getting better,” her columns, particularly those on her signature topics of gay marriage, schools, and Keith Ellison, read more like guest editorials with quotes than traditional metro columns.
    For his part, Doug Grow thinks Gyllenhaal may have missed the true reason for reader alienation from the Star Tribune. “When a newspaper starts chasing specific demographic groups, I think you’re asking for trouble. Once you start tailoring yourself to appeal to narrow demographic targets, you risk becoming as irrelevant [journalistically] as the ten o’clock news.
    “But our reputation out in Anoka County and other exurbs is not good,” adds Grow, an entirely affable guy who says he genuinely likes Kersten (and whom Kersten, in turn, thanks for being “so gracious and welcoming”).
    “People out [in the northern suburbs] rightly perceive that we don’t talk to them,” Grow says. “So my sense was that what we really needed was a columnist who actually lived in the exurbs. You know? Someone who rides ATVs on the weekend and goes deer hunting.
    “Personally, I didn’t think an ideologue was the answer, but rather someone who lived that kind of red-state lifestyle.”
    In response to the idea of a blaze-orange, locked-and-loaded, ATV-revving columnist at the Star Tribune, Kersten replies, “But those people can’t write [newspaper columns],” which may—or may not be—true. But it is obvious the paper didn’t look beyond politically active conservatives when considering how best to address its “balance problem.” When there was a choice between a moderate and a hard-liner, it took the latter.
    In a notoriously gossipy industry, in which news of anyone under consideration for a plum job is traded like a hot stock tip, only two names ever emerged from the Star Tribune’s so-called “nationwide search.” Kersten and Republican lobbyist Sarah Janecek were the putative finalists. Both live in the paper’s backyard, and neither boasts about her skill field-gutting a twelve-point buck. Janecek is regularly derided by militant bloggers as a RINO (Republican in Name Only), while Kersten appeals to the most socially conservative wing.
    Few individuals embody the conservative siege engine trained on the Star Tribune better than the three attorneys who operate Powerlineblog.com, the renowned website that Time magazine called “Blog of the Year” for 2004. Power Line has been catapulting vats of molten lead at the Star Tribune ever since it went live in 2002.
    “The [Star Tribune] is a paragon of political correctness and a national laughingstock,” says Scott Johnson, one of the trio. “That paper is a lost cause, and I say that looking at it through the job they did on the Fifth [Congressional] District race” between Alan Fine and Keith Ellison. During that race, Power Line and Kersten engaged in a symbiotic dance of predation, attacking DFL nominee Keith Ellison for everything short of selling crack to preschoolers. Follow Power Line regularly and you can’t help but be struck by how often Johnson plugs the next day’s Kersten column, usually as soon as it appears on the Star Tribune website. Johnson and Kersten have been friends for twenty years, and he usually refers to her as “Kathy” or “our good friend, Kathy.” Nor can you miss how often Kersten’s column echoes something recently posted on Power Line.
    Conservative “pillow talk” is rampant. By my unofficial count as of early December 2006, Kersten had written approximately 135 columns and Power Line had lauded seventy-five of them. There has been no criticism. This coziness of both choice of topic and point of view lends itself to suspicion of a kind of mentor-pupil relationship—a notion that prompts a playful question from Johnson: “And so, which is which?” He goes on to say that “it is true that Kathy has written a number of columns off things she has read on Power Line. But no, there is no ‘mentor-pupil’ relationship. I don’t direct her. I mention her column as often as I do only because I believe what she has written is of interest to a national audience.”
    All Fall, Power Line and Kersten pressed their assault on Keith Ellison and “The Flying Imams” (referring to the nationally-reported story of six Muslim clerics being taken off a USAir flight from Minneapolis), hammering, one after another, like the two blacksmiths on the same Scandinavian weather vane.
    Not that Johnson is pleased with the result of his effort. “I never worked harder to less effect,” he says, “in trying to embarrass the Star Tribune to do its job in [the Ellison] race.”
    Gyllenhaal dismisses Johnson and Power Line as “a group that has been virulently critical of the paper,” adding with a tone of exasperation, “The criticisms they made, on the Ellison coverage, were just totally without merit.” He declines comment on any symbiosis between Power Line and Kersten, claiming to be unaware of any similarities.
    The Kersten column, as Gyllenhaal explains it, is not a matter of blowing up the old paradigms of journalism. Rather, it is simply an acknowledgement that the world has changed, and that readers look to newspapers for a wider variety of voices, not all of which have been nurtured for years in a newsroom environment. And he concedes the paper did not adequately serve the Twin Cities’ “conservative audience.”
    Gyllenhaal sees Kersten as far less predictable than her critics claim, and says he’s entirely pleased with both the “stories” she’s telling and the craft with which she tells them.
    There was only a tip-toe mention of conservatism in the original description of the job Kersten won. “As with all columnists,” said the job description, “the emphasis would be on deeply reported columns, story telling off the news, pieces that can best be told with a columnist’s leeway. This columnist would have the added goal of bringing a conservative perspective to the paper in story topics, circles traveled and views explored.” Introducing her May 22, 2005, in a fifteen-paragraph editor’s column touting her career, but making no direct reference to her signature political ideology, Gyllenhaal mentioned, far down in the column, that, “As the staff looks ahead to the future of newspapers, we think it’s vital to expand the reach of the paper for a wide base of readers, young and old, urban and suburban, conservative, liberal and independent.”
    So during the hiring process, was it ever explicitly put to Kersten that the paper wanted a conservative voice? After a pause, she says, “I’m trying to think how that was put. I don’t recall that that word was used. It was pretty clear what they wanted, though. They wanted somebody who would balance the generally liberal perspective of the editorial page and the columnists who are there, which would be a conservative.
    “But, of course,” she adds, “you could describe ‘conservative’ in a number of ways.”

  • Transportation in the Round

    One recent Sunday afternoon, upon sighting a candy-apple red contraption maneuvering the chilly streets of downtown Minneapolis, a shopper called out from the sidewalk, “What is that?” It’s a question Paul Selcke finds himself answering frequently. “It’s a conference bike,” he said, dinging his bell for emphasis. Monday through Thursday, Selcke makes his living teaching ESL at the Mall of America, but on weekends he’s the entrepreneur behind Cycle Seven, the first conference-bike-tour company in the Midwest. The bike, which essentially looks like an overgrown tricycle built to accommodate seven riders, is available by the hour to business groups, family parties, tourists, and whoever else—it’s even been used by speed-daters. Riders benefit twofold, from the exercise and an innovative design concept that inspires conversation among the participants; hence, the “conference” in the appellation. Selcke originally planned to start a pedicab company, but online research led him to the conference bike, and he became smitten with its efficiency and unique design.
    A frigid afternoon in December may seem an unlikely time for a leisurely bike ride, but the jovial Selcke insists that, like any other winter sport in Minnesota, the key to comfortable conference biking is to dress for the weather. Clad in Sorels, a green, puffy jacket, and woolen hat, Selcke, who officially took Cycle Seven to the streets in the fall of 2005, leads by example. He likens the level of activity to cross-country skiing, and even suggests a family jaunt on the conference bike as “the modern alternative to the sleigh ride.” Though Cycle Seven operates year round, business in the winter months is, predictably, slow: Selcke books an average of two to three hours a week, compared with the ten to twelve weekly hours he has the bike out and about in more inviting weather.
    The conference bike is equal parts form and function. The circular frame creates a round-table environment in which all passengers face one another—a set-up that facilitates conversation and, according to the inventor’s website, “lowers inhibitions.” While riding the conference bike, one person steers and operates the brakes, leaving the remaining six passengers free to pedal, or not, depending on respective energy levels and inclinations. Currently, riders must be at least twelve years old, but Selcke says that a new seat is in the works to allow kiddies in on the fun.
    The creation of Eric Staller, an American living in Amsterdam (ground zero for global bike culture), the conference bike was designed as a part of his ongoing public artwork series Urban UFOs. The first in this succession of mobile, socially interactive art pieces was a Volkswagen Beetle covered in more than 1,600 computerized lights, appropriately dubbed the “Lightmobile.” The conference bike first appeared in 1991 as the Octos: an eight-seater tricycle with a circular frame. The bike as it now exists emerged in 1996.
    At four hundred pounds, the conference bike is by no means lightweight, and the mechanics are correspondingly sturdy. In fact, the contraption is a marvel designed by automobile engineers, who borrowed here and there from the bike’s motorized counterparts: The steering is made by Porsche. The frame is crafted from powder-coated steel and outfitted with motorcycle wheels and hydraulic brakes. Over flat terrain, its average speed falls between ten and twelve miles per hour, but the hills of St. Paul are another story entirely. “With seven passengers, it’s gone as fast as thirty to thirty-five [miles per hour] down Kellogg and Wabasha,” boasts Selcke.
    Perched on the bike, one feels rather like a pageant princess, returning the smiles and waves that are the almost-universal reaction generated by the appearance of this innovative transport. (Visibility has proven to be Cycle Seven’s best advertising: Selcke cruises populated areas of the Cities, giving free rides to drum up business.) Cars honk their horns in appreciation. On one recent trip, an SUV pulled over to better allow all four of its college-aged occupants to hang out the windows and yell, “You guys are awesome!” According to Selcke, this kind of thing happens all the time. He’s had a few negative experiences as well—run-ins with drunks and rude or inattentive drivers (as frequently happens with riders on run-of-the-mill bicycles), but overall, the response has been overwhelmingly positive. As one conference bike rider put it, “I don’t know when I’ve ever seen my fellow citizens being so friendly!”
    While Cycle Seven may be a part-time endeavor at the moment, Selcke has big plans for the future. “This is a back-up now,” Selcke, his glasses fogged from the cold, admits. “Eventually I’d like to do it for a living.” Ideally, he says, access to the bikes could be free and underwritten by sponsors, which would be a perfect fit at public events and around shopping malls. He’d also like to have more bikes stationed around the city so he could retire the trailer he now uses to transport the bike, thus rendering the operation entirely fossil fuel free. This environmental consciousness is an integral part of Selcke’s philosophy, and part of the reason why he thinks he can be successful. “There have to be alternative ways to get people around. This is efficient transport,” he says. “Look around. All of these cars are emitting carbon. We’re leaving no footprints.”

  • The Happy Executioner

    The first time my father drove past the original Ax-Man Surplus location on University Avenue in St. Paul, he pulled over immediately. This was some thirty years ago, but he still becomes radiant when recounting the momentous occasion of his first visit: “I was overcome—I didn’t know where to look. Finally, I calmed down, got a hold of myself, and started looking.”
    More than a surplus store and not quite a dollar store (though a dollar will go a long way), Ax-Man is a sort of curiosity shop with a bit of an art-gallery vibe. On any given day, Ax-Man’s extensive, eclectic stock includes marbles, vacuum tubes, wading boots, and crime-scene tape … and French mess kits, hazmat suits, and plastic bottles of every shape and size. That’s just for starters; put simply, you haven’t known stuff until you’ve visited Ax-Man.
    That may well be because “no one needs [Ax-Man’s] stuff,” as owner Jim Segal admits. And that may explain why Ax-Man is so mesmerizing, luring artists, tinkerers, inventors, do-it-yourselfers, handymen, hobbyists, and the curious to its three metro locations on a regular basis. They are all looking for something just so.
    Like many Ax-Man disciples, my father is part craftsman, part artist, mostly do-it-yourselfer. On a recent visit, the two of us pawed through barrels and bins and crates and boxes of gemstones, wheels, bowling pins, magnets, gas masks, leather scraps, home-alarm key pads, and doll limbs of various skin tones. The giant phone is not for sale, but plastic brains were, for $19.95. There were Beetle Bailey lunch pails, wrapping paper, and bullets in various stages of rusting. Pop poked at stuff, bounced small objects in his palm, and examined everything through his bifocals. “Usually I don’t even know what I’m looking for,” he said. “But if I see what I’m looking for, I’ll know it.”
    Sometimes even Segal isn’t quite sure about the stuff he has for sale, but that’s no matter: “The customer comes up with how it should be used,” he says. Many items are broken down, their various components sold individually. “I love seeing the creative process at work with the customers, when they don’t rely on preconceived notions about what a thing should be used for.”
    Segal, who has a business degree from the University of St. Thomas, doesn’t consider himself particularly creative. “But I like the idea of creativity,” he says. That’s why he lets the staff create the signs for the merchandise—a small perk, he admits, in an otherwise routine retail job. This artfully executed signage usually consists of sassy dialogue pasted onto photos from old magazines. Shelves displaying various mugs and glasses, for instance, feature the iconographic photo taken at the conference of Yalta, with speech balloons emerging from the mouths of Franklin D. Roosevelt—“Can you believe Churchill showed up hammered again?”—and Joseph Stalin: “Da, da.”
    Segal, who bought the business in 2001 and is its third owner, is circumspect about where Ax-Man gets its inventory. “Sure, I could tell you,” he says, “but then I’d have to kill you.” This much he’ll say: It comes from basements, warehouses, manufacturers with leftover parts, and trade shows. “We want to give things a second chance,” he says.
    Things like flashcubes. Segal describes discovering a pallet of those little glass cubes for old Instamatics at a car-parts distributorship. Ax-Man now has a lifetime supply. Caught up in the spirit of the place, I suggest over-enthusiastically, “Christmas tree ornaments! Earrings! Pretend ice cubes!”
    My dad and I left, however, not with flashcubes, but with armfuls of small wheels that my father will use on toy trucks he makes for the grandchildren. His favorite purchase ever was an oversized porcelain hand-and-forearm, perhaps once a glove display in a department store, which stands upright in a graceful twist. “My vision was to use it for a display for your mother’s jewelry,” he grumbled. Mother, however, was disturbed by the shiny disembodied hand emerging from the dresser like the scene at the end of Carrie, so my father’s great find is now used to hang wet rags and gloves in his workshop.
    Arriving home from our Ax-Man visit, my father remained in a trance. Thumbs hooked on his tool belt, he had a faraway look in his eyes, perhaps imagining some distant past where he himself might have lorded over all that stuff. “It’s a young man’s game, I guess, but that would have been a fun business,” he said. “I would have loved digging through all that crap every damn day.”

  • “No, man, you cannot divide by zero!”

    Many years ago, someone scratched these words on the metal divider of a men’s room stall in a pizza joint near Hamline University in St. Paul: “Anonymous dialogue is a means of sanity.” The self-reflective statement could hold many meanings. It might look inward to the author’s motives—one can almost hear the sigh of mental relief—or to the motives of all graffitists. If not a means, is graffiti at least a measure of social sanity? Unfiltered and anonymous, it might be even more than a measure: a glimpse beneath the accepted veneer, a push to the boundaries of the collective conscious.
    Or it might just be dirty doodling.
    Garvin Davenport, the recently retired dean of Hamline University’s undergraduate school, and former chairman of Hamline’s English department, asserted that graffiti is secure text, emboldened by anonymity. “The writer can express … [with] no accountability or liability,” said Davenport.
    Numerous studies of the subject trace “latrinalia,” as researcher Alan Dundes dubbed it in 1966, back to ancient times and across many cultures. In some cases, the content was remarkably similar to modern graffiti, like this message found in the ruins of Pompeii: “If you want to make love, ask for Attice. The price is 16 asses.”
    A relatively recent survey of more than thirty local lavatories produced a fair sample of stall scrawl. The majority of the restrooms are now graffiti-free, thanks either to fresh coats of paint or ink-resistant walls, as at the Red Dragon on Lyndale Avenue in Minneapolis, where this macabre proverb once appeared: “Build a man a fire, and he’ll stay warm for the night. Set a man on fire and he’ll stay warm for the rest of his life.”
    Much of the graffiti was of the classic, unprintable variety: F-bombs and sexual boasts or invitations, explicit come-ons and vicious threats, ugly racial insults and attacks on sexual preference. Some restrooms feature a mess of florid, unreadable tags that express little more than “I was here.”
    Of the printable graffiti, there was a lot of talk about God and religion. Politics and September 11th were discussed, and even the pure language of mathematics proved controversial, with corrections to a hypothetical equation and this scolding: “No, man, you cannot divide by zero!” Among the more rarified offerings were posthumous quotations of Dorothy Parker, James Dean, Baudelaire (in French, no less), and even the occult-/Wiccan-/pagan-goddess figure Babalon: “But to love me is better than all things.”
    Perhaps the most thought-provoking—and chilling—example was a message at the Hard Times Café: “I lost my love and now I can’t make it anymore. So I’m going home. And I’m ending my sorry life. P.S. I had fun here, live for me.” The note inspired a rare signed response, this reassurance from a well-known regular whose girlfriend had recently died: “I didn’t write this.”
    Here is a sample of other notable finds, organized by topic. “(R):” denotes the responses.
    Religion: There is no God. (R): Is that your final answer? (R): Let him in your heart.
    (R): Heaven is true. Satan will eat science alive.
    Inspiration: Things may suck, but we can fight against apathy and make ’em better!
    The optimist is the person who’s really in revolt.
    Politics: No war but the class war.
    Terrorism: 911 was your fault anyhow, honky. (R): If it were me, I’d 911 your punk ass next. This plane is a tower bomb.
    Comments on the graffiti or its author: Unthinking redneck. (R): Overthinking hipster activist college student. (R): Over analytical tough guy with almost no teeth left. (R): People with too much time on their hands.
    Hip-Hop and metaphysics: High North Hip Hop celebrate the culture of intelligent life by respectin’ the conscious said-rappahz of the past, present and future 2 elevate the said-culture of hip hop to its rightful place both mentally and musically. Long live the re-evolution of man space & time.
    Sex: Toussaintt’s hot PS I did him PSS Really multiple times PSSS And I kissed him and his name is on my shirt—biotch!
    Bad poetry (men’s room): I do not know what I may appear to the world/ but I myself I have seem to be/ like a boy playing on the shore/ and diverting myself in now and then/ finding a prettier shell
    Bad poetry (women’s room): I want to make your ego bleed … Let it sting so you’ll never forget/ The past pain/ Through midnight rain/ Insecurities pool on the/ Grimy floor … (R): Don’t quit your day job.
    Health: The superior doctor treats when there is no illness.
    Rehabilitation: Harry was here! Finally recovered from drug and alcohol addiction, Oct. 2006 (R): Thank God! Keep up the good work, Harry. Congrats! (R:) God isn’t real.
    Reformation: I will only write nice things now.

  • The Last Picture Show-er

    Local 219 of the International Union of Showbiz and Theater Entertainers was recently called to order over breakfast at the Edina Perkins. Bob Anderson, at seventy-nine still an imposing presence with broad shoulders and a strong handshake, pushed his omelet aside, pulled out some notes, and addressed his audience—myself and a waiter. “There are about eight remaining union projectionists,” he explained. “Only a few of us are still working, and I’m the one with the most seniority …” He cleared his throat. “Which means I’ll probably be the next to go.”
    It used to be that if you owned a movie theater, you relied on union labor to show the picture. Once upon a time, in fact, a person could make a decent living doing the work—in Fritz Lang’s Clash by Night, one of the characters earns his wages looping film late into the evening. This is in stark contrast with today’s reality, where teenagers get your blockbuster rolling with little more than the push of a button.
    Anderson got his start as an apprentice projectionist back in 1947, and, before the rise of the multiplex, worked in literally every theater in the Twin Cities. He was on the staff at the opening of the Riverview, got the arc lights burning when the drive-in was king, and has had a hand in each of the twenty-four Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Festivals. From his perch in the booth, he’s watched the cinema’s transition from primarily black-and-white affairs to Technicolor and 70mm; he sat through the auteur movement of the 1970s, treaded Hollywood’s shallow waters of the 80s and 90s, and weathered the assaults of television, videotape, and DVD.
    As a young boy, Anderson’s curiosity was piqued when he was given a toy projector with a Felix the Cat cartoon one Christmas. This was a simple, hand-cranked number with a light bulb, but he was instantly entranced. “Since then, whenever I see a movie I have to turn and admire the silver light from above,” he said. “I can’t help it.” His passion grew over time, and throughout junior high, high school, and college, Anderson played the part of resident audio/visual geek. “You could find me hauling the projector and cans of educational films between classes. That was a lot of work.”
    After graduation, Bob entered the nine-to-five world, working for a local advertising firm and settling down with his wife and kids. But the bug never left him, so he would steal away to the local movie houses each night, determined to break into the insular world of Union projectionists.
    It was a tight-knit community: You couldn’t just walk in and become a certified Union projectionist. There weren’t a lot of jobs to go around, and projectionists were famously reluctant to retire, so it was difficult to get a foot in the door to the booth. After a few months, however, Anderson was finally accepted into the union as a registered apprentice, shuttling between theaters. A projectionist had to know every machine, from the military green and imposing Simplex projector to the sleek, silver Philips Norelco. Back then, the nitrate film was tricky and dangerous stuff, highly flammable. “The projection booths were like an Alcatraz jail cell,” Anderson explains, and it was his job to get the hell out if the thing caught fire—the booth, with its reinforced concrete, was designed to contain the blaze and keep the theater from burning down, at considerable risk to the poor souls inside.
    While the story was unfolding on the screen, Anderson would be wrapped up in his work, cleaning and splicing the celluloid or maintaining the machines. In the early years, he found himself in the projection booths of dozens of different theaters, filling in for a sick or vacationing colleague. He finally landed a regular gig at the Lucky Twin drive-in, where he remained until the theater was closed and slated for demolition. “People didn’t pay too much attention to the feature there,” Anderson admits. “It was necking heaven.” Once, a wiseacre rearranged the wording on the marquee’s traction board to read, “START YOUR FAMILY AT THE LUCKY TWIN!”
    Watching Anderson work today is a clinic in professionalism—he handles his machine like a man who knows what he’s doing and has flexed this knowledge on an almost-daily basis. With a seasoned hand, he threads film, carefully oils his machine, and listens to the rhythm of the movie rattling through the reels for any odd sound indicating trouble. Recently, at the Bell, where he had been hired to screen a preview of an already-forgotten movie, Anderson seemed at ease in the overheated projectionist’s booth, which had the damp, dusty aroma of an old radiator. This was clearly the refuge of an organized man, with its oil-stained toothbrushes, film cutters, screwdrivers, and tools all neatly in place. I couldn’t help but imagine all the masterpieces Anderson had brought to moviegoers over his career—fifty years is a lot of film history. When I mentioned all the time he’s spent in the projection booth, he nodded and said, “God, have I ever. See, there’s two of me—the guy with the nine-to-five job and the wife and family, and the projectionist. Everyone leads a double life—mine just happens to be up here.”