One of the gratifying—and maddening—things about publishing this magazine is that we get to start over each month. Roughly every four weeks, we wipe the slate clean and get another chance to shine (and yes, of course, to suck), to correct ourselves when we are wrong, to refine the rough spots, find new ways to frame the same old punch lines, and try to sneak dirty words in (or, failing that, maybe some Latin).
Our publishing calendar is both a promise and a threat. We’re not nearly as important or permanent as a hardcover book, say, but we hang around a bit longer than the typical daily headline or the weekly political harangue. With this issue, we celebrate the self-appointed privilege of repeating ourselves for one full year, which is about six months longer than some of us expected to be repeating ourselves.
Redundancy is the new black. We’re back in the hot-box with Iraq, 12 years after we should have finished the job right the first time. Indeed, many people feel like one Bush should have been enough, but there you are—history repeating itself, and not exactly a surfeit of wisdom won from hard experience.
On the other hand, we welcome other kinds of eternal return. Many Minnesotans are secretly pleased that winter finally arrived a few weeks ago, a little behind schedule to be sure, but with all the windchill and accumulation of a less apocalyptic time. The return of our most beloved season is reassuring. We wanted to write about global warming this month, but besides the fact that there wasn’t room for us to park our lips on Paul Douglas’, uh, barometer, we decided to do the American thing, and let our world views be dictated by nothing more than what we can see out our window.
Let’s hope the view keeps improving. Interesting, isn’t it, that someone had the temerity to send back the architectural plans of Jean Nouvel and Michael Graves, some uppity Minnesotan had the balls to ask for another draft? Interesting, too, that the masters seem to have been strong-armed by stoic rubes who might otherwise have been convinced that the tossed-off, million-dollar, second-stringer designs were manna from heaven. Nouvel was made to realize, apparently, that there was considerable cognitive dissonance between his “context-sensitive” design of the Guthrie as riverfront factory, and its function as a space fundamentally about transcendence. Graves had the opposite problem: His overly literal remake of the Children’s Theater smacked not so much of laziness as a genuine fear of children, expressed in cloying babytalk—the architectural equivalent of “goo-goo-ga-ga.” For the record, both architects were able to salvage the most important element of each project: the ego of the architect. Nouvel claimed last year’s design was only “50 percent” finished, and Graves said, “the first iteration is never the one you go with.” In other words, folks, don’t fool yourself: Your worries fell on the deaf ears of genius.
We’re beginning to think that learning from history is still no hedge against repetition. After all, the poet wrote, “There is nothing new under the sun.” Then he changed his mind and scribbled, “Vanity. All is vanity.”
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