The Rake Magazine

Author: Christy DeSmith

  • Sippin’ Suds at the Single-Wide

    Anyone who’s traveled the back roads of western Wisconsin has probably spotted the bait shops, pole barns, and even semi-trailers that serve as watering holes. On my many passes through the area, en route to a friend’s cabin or a visit with family, I’ve happened upon bars made from substandard shacks and, in one instance, a trailer home. For years now, I’ve been driving past Kappus Bud’s Place, a bar situated inside a dilapidated singe-wide just up the road from an uncle’s cabin. Recently, I ventured inside.
    Located on a glistening lakefront near the resort town of Minong, in the northwesterly part of the state, Kappus Bud’s hardly appeared ominous or even out of the ordinary on a recent sunny Sunday afternoon, when my brother and I finally pulled off the road and into its dirt parking lot. Miller Lite banners flapped in the wind, tied between the trailer, with its tan, peeling paint and some nearby saplings. An illuminated signpost, bearing the establishment’s name and an illustration of a heavy-duty truck, towered above the squat building. A new ramp made the front entry handicap accessible.
    Stepping inside, however, was like entering the Twilight Zone. Kappus Bud’s Place is outfitted with accoutrements common to Wisconsin’s countryside barrooms: plenty of Green Bay Packers pennants, a cloud of secondhand smoke thick enough to slice, and a crusted-over toaster oven for warming bar snacks. Add to these a couple of inoperable arcade games shoved in the corners and a pool table made unsteady by the buckled laminate floor.
    All of three people were sitting at the trailer’s long, narrow particle-board bar. On the far right end, an old man in a Packers cap and baseball jacket sat across from a large TV broadcasting the Jacksonville Jaguars/Philadelphia Eagles game at a deafening volume. At the other end of the bar, a disheveled but attractive fifty-ish man with a long, black beard and Panama hat prodded a video-poker game with his left hand while a cigarette dangled from the fingers of his right. “Beautiful day, isn’t it?” he said, looking up. His voice was clear and warm—a counterpoint to the ghostly-quiet environs. At the center of the bar, the mousy bartender, bespectacled and slight of build, dispensed cans of Miller Lite for a buck apiece. On a shelf above him, the bar’s second television played War of the Worlds, the 2005 version starring Tom Cruise, at a volume rivaling that of the football game thirty feet away. During a sparse and rather eerie movement in the film’s score, sudden crashes of strings were interspersed with bolts of timpani, and long silences in between. Together with the cheering crowds and yipping sportscasters, these dissonant sounds formed the perfect soundtrack to that afternoon’s excursion.
    As for bar chat, old-timer football fan muttered indecipherable comments about the game as well as the occasional question. “You hunt?” he rumbled to us, turning his attention from the game for a few seconds and revealing a cleft lip and chlorine-blue eyes. Awaiting an answer, he seemed to chew the air, which set his jowls rippling. “No, I do not,” said my brother, sounding embarrassed. I smiled but remained silent. I knew that the man knew damn well I didn’t hunt. There was no breeze to be shot with the bartender. His deep-set, ferret-like eyes were too melancholic to hold comfortably in a gaze, and he obviously wasn’t interested in idle conversation, let alone eye contact. After collecting our dollar bills and murmuring just enough to betray a nasally speech impediment, he resumed his position on his stool: slumped over, hands hanging limp between the knees, head hung slightly.
    I sipped my Miller and bided time by examining items on the shelves behind the bar: dead batteries, defunct fuse boxes, and all manner of metallic junk. Seemingly well-adjusted teenagers appeared in portraits, now yellowed and curled at the edges, taped to a 70s-era fridge. Later it appeared that the bearded man had departed without our noticing, leaving my brother and me alone with these two curious characters. The bartender glanced up at the movie, and then snuck a peek in our direction. The old man chewed air. But mostly everyone sat in silence, waiting out the trespass.

  • The Sparkle Force

    Made-in-Minnesota fashion has been getting a lot of attention lately, but it’s local jewelry designs that have impressed us most with their beauty and breadth. (Note: We’re thinking beyond the surfeit of reindeer-shaped pendants and other novelties peddled on the craft-fair and church-bazaar circuits.) While area boutiques like Bluebird, Karma, and Ivy have imported clothing lines previously unavailable here, it’s telling that they also carry an array of locally made earrings, bracelets, necklaces, and rings—pieces that are as sophisticated and edgy as anything in high-profile fashion magazines. When it comes to homegrown jewelry, two notable names to look for are Anne Waddell, whose leaf bracelet fashioned from hammered sterling is pictured here, and the Farahbean label.

  • A Shopper’s Nordic Trek

    Any foray into local Scandinavian style—as purveyed by a number of area emporiums, boutiques, and gift shops—rightly begins at Ingebretsen’s. This stalwart Lake Street retailer offers Scandinavian wares in their most basic forms: wool cardigans with pewter clasps, traditional Norwegian hardanger doily cloths and embroidery, and countless varieties of the painted wooden Dala horse. For Minnesotans—especially those who grew up in small towns like Lindstrom (aka “Little Sweden”) or Norwegian Northfield—there’s a certain familiarity in the way the gray-haired shopgirls at Ingebretsen’s tidy up after their guests. Presiding over a stock of Vikings miniatures and recordings by Finland’s Lahti Symphony, they keep the store’s displays looking bountiful but orderly, just as we northerly types like it. At the far end of the store, just in time to fatten up for the season, the shopper finds a spread of Firkløver chocolates, gingerbread cookies, and lutefisk. And there’s more to marvel at behind the meat counter: blood sausage, pickled herring, sardines.

    As handy as Ingebretsen’s may be for those in need of Icelandic Christmas cards, it has not, in recent years, been quite what we had in mind for certain style-conscious folks on our shopping lists who might appreciate something “Scandinavian.” From the 1950s on, most people have taken the adjective to describe stunning-yet-simple designs for furniture and housewares. Modern Scandinavian design evolved amid the new, and rather liberal, brand of social democracy—not unlike Minnesota’s own—in Northern Europe following World War II. The result of tinkering with an array of newly developed and inexpensive materials—such as plastics, pressed wood, and enameled aluminum—the new domestic goods were touted as efficient in both function and production. Scandinavians regarded them as tools for bettering their standard of living.

    Steeped as they are in Scandinavian heritage, the Twin Cities have long been dotted with a great many retailers offering merchandise from that part of the world. Many of them cater to loft dwellers in search of what’s new and hot in home design—which oftentimes turns out to be classics dating back to the much-heralded arrival of Scandinavian design stateside some fifty years ago. For example, goods made from the bright, graphic fabrics produced by Marimekko—with quirky names such as Kivet, Korsi, and Unikko—have been a constant (and recently reinvigorated) presence at just about every store purporting to be Scandinavian. Saga Living, on Grand Avenue in St. Paul, boasts the most expansive Marimekko collection in these parts. Another mainstay, the Aalto vase—a wavy-shaped piece unveiled in 1936 by Finnish designer Alvar Aalto (above)—today is manufactured by Iittala, the renowned glassware company of the same national origin. Scandia, a furniture store on Washington Avenue (not far from the Metrodome), carries a reissue of Danish designer Poul Henningsen’s famous “brain lamp.” And Danish Teak Classics, housed in a Northeast Minneapolis warehouse space, is a trove of mid-century furniture designs from familiar names like Hans Wegner and Borge Mogensen as well as unknowns; its parallelogram-shaped coffee table would serve as the perfect centerpiece for any minimalist living room—though its price would deplete this admirer’s savings account twice.

    While these purveyors of modern and contemporary Scandinavian design don’t go in for Dala-horse doorstops or braided wool sweaters, they do have a soft spot for the moose—a creature indigenous to the Scandinavian folk arts. Finnstyle—a sleek, sparsely appointed store in downtown Minneapolis—offers moose-shaped napkin rings skillfully carved from individual wood discs and, for those who entertain more casually, paper napkins bearing a minimal but friendly-looking moose profile. Another popular item at several Scandinavian boutiques is a moose-shaped keychain made from cork, while at Nordic Home, a store with outlets in Edina and Minneapolis’ warehouse district, the moose silhouette adorns rugs and fleece blankets that are draped across birchwood-framed sofas and easy chairs. Ingebretsen’s, too, has some moose-themed items. But there’s some indication the venerable retailer is forging ahead—into porcupine territory, with a stack of polymer coasters.

    No survey of Scandinavian style is complete without a visit to Ikea, the Swedish-born behemoth famous for its cheaper-than-imaginable designs in pressed wood and plastic. Here, as at the boutiques, the merchandise is often artfully displayed and the designers prominently credited, even on the tag for a $5.99 knotted rug. A closer look reveals the extent to which many of the store’s young designers borrow liberally from their mid-century Scandinavian forebears; for instance, the $69.99 Knappa Klöver floor lamp has, at first glance, an uncanny resemblance to Henningsen’s iconic brain lamp. In fact, if the shopper of modest means unburdens herself of snobbery—and the burning desire for a reissued Arne Jacobsen chair—she will realize that cut-rate Ikea, in its way, carries on the tradition of those venerable designers. Such reasoning also serves to make a two-hundred-dollar Ikea coffee table seem a much more attractive purchase.

  • A People’s History of Circle Pines

    Photo courtesy city of circle pines; An early brochure touts the cooperative, courtesy minnesota historical society

    The landscape of Circle Pines is bleak. Entering town off I-35W, drivers are greeted by a stretch of newly constructed townhouses in varying shades of fawn and ecru. The wayside scenery along Lake Drive, the main thoroughfare, is similarly hued by swampy meadows peppered with sandburs. In the middle of town, there’s a blip of a strip mall. Then, finally, the landscape offers up a few splashes of blue and green, mostly in the form of the cracked and peeling paint of the city’s old ranch homes and split-levels.

    Outsiders seldom have reason to pass through Circle Pines. Those who do, I’ve learned, are often there to visit an area gun range.

    This, my drab little hometown, is located just fifteen miles north of Minneapolis, in the famously unprogressive northern suburbs—an area formerly, and not long ago, considered a last bastion of white flight, a collection of communities in which conservative Star Tribune letter-writers and talk-show hosts are known to live. A kid who grew up in Circle Pines in the 1980s and 90s probably hasn’t forgotten the racial slurs commonly bandied about, even though few people of color actually lived there in those days. She might also remember the time dozens of bagels were thrown onto the ice when the Centennial Chiefs hockey team played Edina High School, Circle Pines fans having assumed there’d be Jews on the opposing team.

    Given these memories, and the realities of the city’s present, it’s hard to imagine that a visionary once set his sights on Circle Pines as the breeding ground for a socialist utopia of sorts, a model of cooperative living.

    On a sunny afternoon in the summer of 1945, V. S. Petersen was sprawled along the shores of Golden Lake, located on the northern side of Circle Pines and these days, lined with the city’s most upscale homes. Petersen, a left-leaning Danish immigrant and peripatetic banker, was, at the time, an employee of Midland, an organization of credit unions and other cooperatives; at the time he was in charge of building a lakeside picnic-area pavilion for credit union employees. While enjoying his day off, the proverbial lightbulb lit up in his mind. Or so the story goes. He sat up suddenly, turned to his wife, Fylla, and said: “I have an idea.” Petersen would proceed to spend the rest of his days, numbered though they were, organizing, financing, and promoting his vision for a carefully planned community featuring such modern conveniences as public water, electricity, and sewage systems. In this case, however, the maintenance costs involved would be split equally among residents, and in fact, the utilities would be resident-owned. This dream—fueled by Petersen’s dedication to socialist principles and constructed from an inexpensive prefab building material called Cemesto —was christened “Circle Pines.”

    This being the World War II era, building materials were in short supply and prices were high. Working folks couldn’t shoulder the cost of building their own homes. “V. S. Petersen thought that savings could be achieved through mass production of houses and with the dollar-saving benefits of cooperative living. Profits from any cooperative venture would be redistributed to members.” So writes Stephen Lee, a Circle Pines local, in his exhaustive portrait of the city’s past, Circle Pines & Lexington, Minnesota: History of the 1800s to 2000. In other words, by buying a home in the community and paying cooperative association fees, residents would own shares of the town’s café, grocery, meat market, and tavern. In theory, profits from these businesses would be shared among citizens, but that part of the plan was never actually realized.

    The reality, from the very beginning, was that Circle Pines’ creators confused idealistic “social protections” with capitalist aspirations. Although Petersen played the central role of visionary and cheerleader, in his quest to make fiscal sense of his project, he had enlisted the help of two others—Tom Ellerbe, essentially an urban planner, and Paul Steenberg, a Danish-born contractor. The success of the community hinged on the trio’s ability to lure residents. But even while they scrambled to entice buyers, Petersen couldn’t resist screening potential residents to ensure that their politics aligned with his own. This made a certain sense, considering that Petersen would later invite residents to his family’s Golden Lake estate for rousing house parties (his version of a parade), featuring bean-bakes, sing-alongs, and homemade wine. Ellerbe and Steenberg, sympathetic though they were to Petersen’s ideologies, meanwhile proceeded as though Circle Pines were any other suburban, moneymaking venture. Theirs was to be a short-lived experiment. Although the three-man team had projected that Circle Pines would have about 500 homes by 1948, only eighty-four had been built by 1949.

    Then there was the issue of financial backing, which proved elusive. Even organizations like Midland, which had a history of supporting cooperative ventures, weren’t sure bets. Ellerbe and Steenberg imagined the most lucrative homesites would be along the shoreline of Golden Lake (around which Petersen wanted to pave a public walkway), but that stretch was never actually developed during the cooperative’s lifetime. Of greater consequence was the ultimate failure of Petersen, Ellerbe, and Steenberg to attract enough residents to sustain the cost of utilities and city services. Adding insult to injury, those who did buy into the community discovered that their homes were of substandard construction; the builders hadn’t adequately sealed the seams between the cheap, cement-like slabs of Cemesto at the four corners of each home, making the houses drafty during harsh Minnesota winters.

    The cooperative was already in dire straits when an influential group of University of Minnesota sociology professors, sympathetic to the cooperative model and interested in joining the community themselves, approached Petersen about inviting minority groups to live in Circle Pines. It was the professors’ thinking that families of color were in greatest need of the financial benefits the cooperative could, at least in theory, yield. After deliberation, Petersen, Ellerbe, and Steenberg agreed that the banks and savings and loan companies would be unwilling to shoulder the credit risk for minority applicants, and they held back on issuing an up-front-and-open invitation to families of color. Instead, minority families would be quietly accepted, so long as their down payments were in hand. It was a painful decision for Petersen, a lifelong bleeding heart, and the professors responded angrily. Ultimately, they refused to relocate to Circle Pines, and their defection from the project turned out to be a huge financial and ideological blow for the cooperative.

    Meanwhile, the shortage of building materials continued, and slow home sales as well as profit-mongering among the Ellerbe-Steenberg sect took additional tolls. Townspeople responded with increasing anger to the cooperative’s mismanagement and the resulting rise in association fees. As Stephen Lee notes: “On April 7, 1950, the citizens of Circle Pines voted 89-5 in favor of incorporating as a village, thereby abandoning the idea of a cooperative community.”

    And, adding further drama, according to an old article from the local newspaper, Circulating Pines: “Just hours before the polls opened and the people voted to incorporate Circle Pines as a village, V. S. Petersen had been struck down by a cerebral hemorrhage [at age 54]. Stunned mourners felt without his inspired leadership Circle Pines would probably never become the cooperative community he had envisaged … and some wondered if the strife and disappointment had not brought about his premature death.”

    As a young person growing up in the town, I always thought “Circle Pines” had a funny ring to it. I thought it sounded fictional, eerily reminiscent of, say, “Green Acres,” “Mayberry,” and other such Xanadus. When, at age 18, I left Circle Pines for the University of Minnesota, I was embarrassed to tell my classmates, whom I presumed were all big-city types, the name of my hometown. No one had ever heard of Circle Pines—though a mere half-hour away—but the schmaltzy name nonetheless inspired eye-rolling from my hip new friends. As it turns out, I might’ve been able to impress the cosmopolitan lefties of my acquaintance if I’d known then that the name pays homage to a classic emblem of cooperative organizations: a pair of encircled pine trees. To me, it looks reminiscent of a smil-ey face, but the symbol stands for the idealistic vision of shared responsibilities and resources. All over the country, the twin pines logo can be spotted in credit union lobbies, at cooperative campgrounds, and on the packaging for organic foods.

    Even the street I grew up on—the blandly named Edge Drive—is a nod to the old Circle Pines order. My childhood home was a no-frills Cape Cod, built in 1954, after the Petersen era, as part of a development that went up quickly and on the cheap for returning veterans and their families. These houses had lured a new crop of working-class families to Circle Pines, and it’s safe to say that, given the burgeoning postwar economy, the ideals of these new residents stood in stark contrast to the values of the old Circle Pines order. Still, the peculiar, half-moon-shaped grid to which my childhood home belongs was part of Petersen and Ellerbe’s master vision for the city’s planning: a clustered, walkable community in which a park is never far away. An aerial view shows that the town’s layout mimics Circle Pines’ round emblem. There are few cul-de-sacs; instead, the streets loop back into themselves. Inner Park sits at the center, where Petersen wanted it—at the heart of the community.

    Growing up there, I saw no obvious remnants of the socialist ideals to which my city once aspired. But as it turned out, I’d need to venture out into the world before coming to appreciate any of Circle Pines’ amenities or off-beat characteristics. Even today, the town thumbs its nose at corporate Minnegasco by maintaining its own cooperatively owned gas utility. As for electricity, residents get that from Connexus, the state’s largest customer-owned utility. And until 1994, Circle Pines had its own rather left-leaning news rag, the aforementioned Circulating Pines, a long-lived outgrowth of the old cooperative broadsheet. As a young reader, I enjoyed its witty columnists and primitive political cartoons, oblivious to how slanted they were. In an interview, town historian Lee laughed as he recalled how Andrew Gibas, Circle Pines’ first-ever village clerk and founder of the paper, used to chronicle his own civic activities in the paper. In a story about a city council meeting, he wrote, of himself: “Citizen Andy Gibas rose and addressed the council.”

    As I learned more about Circle Pines, I became eager to swap stories with old friends and neighbors. But I was disappointed to learn that few Circle Pinesians, even some folks I regarded as old-timers, had ever heard about the city’s cooperative origins. And among the handful of people who were clued in, there was ambivalence about what it all meant. Lee, by far the most knowledgeable source on Circle Pines history, was unwavering in his characterization of the founders’ socialism. Petersen’s own son, 80-year-old V. S. Petersen Jr., responded with a blank, confused stare when asked how the pinko little city of Circle Pines had fared in the early throes of the Cold War (he was serving in the military during the cooperative’s earliest days, including the time of his father’s tangle with the University professors). Joel Hogstad, the brother of one of my childhood friends, had discovered Circle Pines’ history while writing a college paper. His take was that Petersen had simply tried to create an affordable community for working-class families, not necessarily a socialist refuge. And Jim Keinath, a twenty-year veteran in his post as Circle Pines city administrator, wasn’t comfortable de-scribing the founders as “socialist,” choosing instead to refer to them as “Scandinavian.”

    There’s an interesting contrast between the city plan of Circle Pines (population: 4,663) and that of its closest neighbor, Lexington (population: 2,214). While Circle Pines’ streets—not just Edge Drive but also North, East, South, and West roads, and Inner and Outer circles—are ringed with homogenous, two- and three-bedroom homes, Lexington is a ragtag collection of apartments and one-of-a-kind houses. It’s dominated by Paul Revere Manufactured Home Park, which appears as vast as a white-pine forest but is less stark than most trailer parks thanks to residents having enthusiastically added flower gardens, lawn ornaments, and other decorative elements to personalize their homes. The roads in the patriotic-themed development have names like Minuteman and Patriot lanes.

    These street signs demonstrate that there had been some tension between Circle Pines and Lexington in the old days. Back when Circle Pines was being designed as a stringently planned, circular community, Lexington was being populated by the sort of resourceful folks who built homes out of found materials. Not happy with what they saw taking shape across the border, Circle Pinesians took to calling Lexington “Shack Town.” Representing Lexington in the skirmish was a prominent landowner named Art Otte, a man V. S. Petersen Jr. likened to “a Republican farmer,” who spoke out fervently against the “socialist-community experiment” next door. “This cooperative concept was out of his league; he called it all sorts of names for a while,” said Petersen Jr. He believes Otte penned an anonymous 1957 letter to the Circulating Pines signed “Lexington Old-Timer,” which opined: “They did not like our houses. We did not like their ideas.”

    Nearly fifty years later, Circle Pines’ idealists and Lexington’s individualists have been absorbed by the melting pot. Both remain blue-collar towns, and a downtown business district has grown up on the border, bleeding into the two communities. They share a police department, a school district, and a post office, and sit on the same inhospitable marshland that was regarded by a Minnesota state surveyor in 1847 as “almost unacceptable for either men or beast except when frozen up …”

    More to the point, as housing costs have skyrocketed, especially in the last ten or so years, lots of working-class families have found both Circle Pines and Lexington to be especially welcoming. Housing prices there have remained among the lowest in the Twin Cities, though for me, including “Circle-Lex” as part of the metropolitan area remains hard to swallow. Developers have been gobbling up every available inch of Circle Pines and putting up townhouses, condos, and other glossy new structures that reek of gentrification; still, there’s an ample supply of “starter” homes, including a block with six of the original Cemesto houses and the development where I grew up. In Lexington, the Paul Revere enclave continues to provide an affordable option for some of those in the Twin Cities’ lowest income brackets. In an interesting turn of events, the park’s residents incorporated Paul Revere in 2005, making it one of just two resident-owned trailer park cooperatives in the state.

    As a kid, the thing I appreciated most about Circle Pines was all the sandy, open space. I could go snowmobiling, dirt-biking, or salamander hunting pretty much wherever I pleased. On summer evenings, my friends and I played football in the sandbur fields. Or we hopped on our Huffy bicycles and traced every line of the town’s semispherical blocks, which never took us very far and eventually wound back to our homes. Back then, there was a small grocery, a shopping strip (technically in Lexington), a gas station, a balloon shop, Mar-Dee’s diner (where I worked throughout high school), and always plenty of kids to scuffle with. But I certainly didn’t regard my town’s growth as a bad thing; I remember the arrival of McDonald’s, circa 1982, and how cool that was to my second-grade friends and me.

    These days, Circle Pines is swimming in fast food and increasingly resembles a first-ring suburb—an aesthetic cousin of Roseville or Maplewood. Upon the demolition in 2002 of a block of Army-green, Petersen-era Cemesto motels collectively known as Circle Court (an eyesore with a bad reputation; it had long been the least expensive place to live in Circle Pines), condos and townhouses immediately went up in its place. Since then, more spacious (and beige) townhouses and condos have appeared on nearly every available plot, including former swamp acreage that’s been sucked dry to fuel the boom; like Circle Court, they all look exactly alike.

    Plenty else has changed as well, of course. Nearby, just across the borders into Blaine and Lino Lakes, there’s a growing constellation of the usual chain-retail behemoths— SuperTarget, Wal-Mart, Home Depot, and strip upon strip of familiar shops and restaurants—to lure Circle Pinesians away from their city’s remaining businesses. Petersen’s old farmhouse still sits along Golden Lake, though it’s been remodeled to the point of being unrecognizable. As for that central body of water itself, it’s become so tainted by overdevelopment and storm runoff (being the terminus of a wetland system that’s dried up) that it’s taken on a deep, not particularly attractive shade of its namesake color.

    Despite Circle Pines’ drastic modern makeover, V. S. Petersen Jr. maintains an attachment to the place that goes far deeper than anything I’ve ever managed to feel. When we met for lunch recently at Matthew’s, the restaurant that now inhabits the former Mar-Dee’s site, he showed up wearing a tan flannel button-up and a black-leather driving cap, which he removed before sitting down, revealing a thatch of gray hair. As we talked, he leaned across the table, clearly relishing the conversation. He enjoyed telling stories about the good old days in Circle Pines and how he and his wife, Stella, have kept busy over the years, remaining active in the Democratic party, at their local Lutheran church, and as volunteers at a nearby battered women’s shelter.

    In 1946, when he returned from World War II, Petersen Jr. enrolled at the University of Minnesota and helped his dad with odd jobs around Circle Pines. After his father’s sudden death (the younger Petersen was twenty-three years old at the time) and the demise of the cooperative, he embarked on a career as an insurance salesman. “When I first started selling insurance, the company I represented sent me to Edina because that was where all the money was. After a year, I was so sick of it, I wanted to throw up on my chest,” he said. He moved back to Circle Pines, started selling insurance to its residents, and became even more entrenched in the community. “I enjoyed the working people and they enjoyed me,” he said. He went on to become a prominent local landlord, eventually buying the building in which Circulating Pines was published. Today, two of his sons run the family insurance business, which is still located in an inconspicuous office building just off Lake Drive.

    But with the passing years, Petersen Jr. confided, he and Stella have felt less and less at home in Circle Pines. “We’re kind of stuck,” he said with an uncomfortable laugh. The feelings of uneasiness first surfaced in the 1970s, when, sensing the same intolerance and stifling homogeny that I felt in the town’s school system, the Petersens contemplated sending their children to school elsewhere. More recently, they downsized, selling the home they owned at Golden Lake and moving into a nearby townhouse. “We’re believers in the simple-living concept,” said Petersen with a smile. But they’d also started feeling ill at ease with the sociopolitical climate that was developing around Golden Lake, which has housed Circle Pines’ most affluent families since the mid-1950s. “Stella and I just had to get outta there,” he said. “They simply weren’t our people.”

    Before meeting with Petersen Jr., I had a brief phone conversation with Jim Keinath, Circle Pines’ current city administrator, who remarked that Circle Pines’ cooperative history had still been a strong influence when he first arrived on the job in 1984. Back then, the city’s “founding families” were highly regarded and still played prominent roles in community affairs. But today, Keinath said, the cooperative is all but ancient history. When I asked Petersen about this, he strongly disagreed. He sees his dad’s influence on everything from the city’s plentiful park space to the credit union and gas utility, both of which are still going strong. Still, he admitted, it’s been sad to watch the progressive roots of Circle Pines wither. For example, along with Shoreview, Arden Hills, and Lino Lakes, the residents of Circle Pines are represented by the staunchest fiscal conservative in the state legislature, Republican Phil Krinkie. (“He’s sick,” Petersen Jr. said. “I think he’s illiterate.”)

    Perhaps Circle Pines has been swept into the gulf of working-class, independent voters to which it now rightfully belongs—Minnesota’s sixth congressional district, a block that stretches from the northern suburbs up through St. Cloud and that likely represents our state’s best showing of the “NASCAR Dad” demographic. At any rate, the city’s obviously not the stronghold of liberalism it once aspired to be.

    “Circle Pines has always been progressive—up until three years ago, when we started dropping off the liberal side,” Petersen Jr. said, remembering a version of the town history very different from my own. He was bothered that Circle Pines seemed to be turning against the founding principles of his father. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that precious few of the town’s current residents—let alone anyone outside the city limits—had heard of the Circle Pines Cooperative in the first place.

  • LOCAL MUSIC: The Audiophiles

    Chris Osgood
    Age: 52 Background: Formed the seminal Minneapolis punk band, The Suicide Commandos, in 1974 and then went on to serve as label manager/producer for Twin/Tone Records. Currently serves as director of artist services for Springboard for the Arts, a St. Paul-based nonprofit dedicated to helping self-employed creative folks earn a living.

    Name some of the local bands you’re listening to.
    The three newest things in my purview are Tim O’Reagan’s new record—I was listening to that just today. I was listening to the Mad Ripple, which is Jim Walsh’s new project. I’ve also been listening to a new band called Texatonka. I listen to a lot of local music because of my gig at Springboard.

    Where do you go to buy music?
    I try to support the indies out there as much as possible—the Roadrunners of the world and, of course, Treehouse. I give a plug to both of them. And a plug to the [Electric] Fetus as well. I throw as much of my business to brick-and-mortar stores as I can.

    What’s your concertgoing schedule like these days?
    I’m not the inveterate concertgoer I used to be. Back when I worked at Twin/Tone, there were years I was out at concerts three hundred days out of the year. These days, there are other things I like to do. I like to fly-fish, and fly-fishing is exactly the opposite of being at First Ave.

    Ryan Cameron
    Age: 46 Background: Owner of Let It Be, the record store that stood on Tenth Street and Nicollet Avenue in downtown Minneapolis from 1987 to 2005. The store hosted many notable in-store performances by local and national bands. Since it closed, “I’ve just been concentrating on selling things online and a few other places—collectibles, out-of-print stuff, and rarities.”

    How do you find out about new music?
    By reading the couple of magazines that I read. Mojo is a good one. Uncut is another good one. The Wire is good for electronic music, although that’s not my forte in terms of what I listen to.

    So, is the good stuff still out there?
    There’s always been really, really good music; there just always has been! Sometimes you just have to dig deeper. And now it’s gotten to be a little confusing. Do you go to a record store? Do you download it?

    Do you have any local favorites?
    I have to be honest and say that I don’t listen to a lot of local stuff. I just don’t. It’s a fault of mine. I just don’t go out and see a lot of local shows, and I think that’s the best way to experience local music.

    Lindsay Kimball
    Age: 23 Background: Intern at 89.3 The Current; former music director at Luther College’s KWLC. She also booked all the campus concerts and wrote all the music reviews for the student newspaper. “They called me the ‘music monopoly.’ ”

    How do you go about finding new music?
    A lot of it is talking to friends and people I run into at shows, just seeing what they’re listening to. The other two ways are, one, going to shows—whether it’s a small local show or a national show—and two, MySpace.

    Name some of the local bands you like.
    I was just listening to the Get-Up Johns this morning—for a completely different style of music, more of an O Brother, Where Art Thou? sound. The Duplomacy disc is pretty good. I’m still digging Coach Said Not To, the Alarmists. At first I wasn’t sure about the Alarmists, but then I saw them live and thought, yeah, they’re pretty fun.

    Warm fuzzies for the Minneapolis music scene:
    The cool thing about the Minneapolis scene is that there’s a huge sense of community. You see the same people at all the shows. The bands go out of their way to support each other. I’ve made tons of friends just by running into people at shows. I don’t want to say it’s a quality-of-life thing—but for me, it is.

    David de Young
    Age: 42 Background: Publishes HowWasTheShow .com, a website that, since 2002, has featured reviews of concerts by local and national acts. “When I go out, say, on a Saturday, I might see ten different bands because I go to four different venues. I try to go to as many shows as possible.”

    Local music scene: alive or dead?
    I’m not one of those people who says these are the heydays as opposed to five years ago, because I’m kind of old and I’ve seen it all—and it’s always kind of been the same.

    Where do you go to hear new music these days?
    For brand-new bands I’ve never seen before, I’ve probably seen more new bands at the Hexagon than I have at First Ave or the Turf Club, because crazy stuff, unexpected stuff, just happens there more often. But the answer is not venues, it’s people. I’d have to say that I hear about new bands from other musicians faster than people who just go to shows.

    What are some of your favorite local bands?
    The Alarmists, White Light Riot, Stook, Espionage! … which I guess includes some former Man Planet guys.

    Are there any bands you haven’t seen yet but plan to?
    Middlepicker, I’ve heard good things about. I haven’t seen ’em but I know I’m supposed to.

    Any local discs people ought to hear?
    I think everyone should buy Tim O’Reagan’s new CD because it’s amazing. For people who like the Minneapolis sound, Stook’s Soundtrack to My Minneapolis is good.

    Sonia Grover
    Age: 31 Background: Started working at First Avenue as a booking assistant in 1998; has since been thoroughly entrenched in the process of booking Minneapolis’ most prominent club.

    How often are you out hearing live music?
    I’m here [at First Avenue] like four or five nights a week. So if I go to another venue, it’s probably just one or two nights outside of First Ave. Sometimes if you get a night off, you just don’t want to go see another band.

    What are some of your favorite local bands right now?
    Well, I’ll always check out Mark Mallman’s shows. I’m a big fan of Chooglin’, or someone like the God Damn Doo Wop Band, or the Dad in Common.

    Any favorite local discs?
    We [at First Avenue] get a lot of music sent to us, so we’re lucky that way. And then I have friends who are experts with downloading, so I tend not to buy a lot of music. But I listen to it. I see most of these bands live or maybe listen to them on MySpace, but I’m not listening to any one local record right now. And you know, there are a lot of stations in town with good local shows, so I just tune into those anyway—like the Homegrown Show [KQRS], Jason Nagel’s show on Cities 97, and the Local Show on The Current. Radio K tends to play local music throughout the day, but also on Off the Record.

  • Slick Stick

    I used to be an overdressed runner. For example, at my first marathon, Grandma’s in 2002, I sported a pair of cropped cotton pants despite the steamy weather that day along the North Shore. The reason for this is that I, like many runners, was born bearing an extra-heavy burden, so to speak. But it’s not what you think; it’s not the half-moons stuck to the hips that plague so many women. In my case, rather, the saddlebags are slung on the other side, around the inner thighs. Long pants were my attempt to wrangle them.

    Aesthetically speaking, I don’t find inner-thigh fat at all displeasing. Like large breasts or shapely hips, it’s one of those essential, carnal ways in which females differ from males. The plumpness draws a womanly curve that’s especially appealing, I’ve found, to any number of men. From a biomechanical perspective, however, “thunder thighs” aren’t always so pleasant. Though mine barely brush against each other when I’m walking, the instant I pick up the pace, they begin rubbing violently—unless they are harnessed. The result is that wearing shorts puts some of the tenderest flesh on all the human form at risk for getting rasped into red, smarting rawness.

    A few months after that first marathon, an angel swooped down from the heavens and, masquerading as a clerk at my favorite running store, handed me a stick of BodyGlide. Previously, I had relied on petroleum jelly, which was successful in ameliorating but not eliminating some types of abrasion, as long as they occurred from the waist up. For instance, Vaseline shielded my chest from the stabbing seams of my sports bra. But it could not solve the problem of my thighs. Before I’d run so much as a mile, friction would have whisked the jelly away, and my thighs would be chafing along just as before. I had resigned myself to wearing Lycra yoga pants and biking shorts, which kept friction at bay but made me feel stickily and sweatily confined.

    BodyGlide changed everything. It isn’t greasy in the same way Vaseline is because it was invented by surfers who didn’t want to muss their expensive neoprene wetsuits. Neither is it gunky or sticky. Instead, BodyGlide is a silky balm. It’s made from plant-based triglycerides, better known as aloe vera and vitamin E, so in cold, windy weather, it staves off cracked, dry skin, too. Then there’s the packaging, much like that of a deodorant stick, which makes it a snap to apply. Amazingly, BodyGlide doesn’t absorb into the skin, nor does it rub off. One inner-thigh application lasts through an entire marathon. And, of course, this allows me to comfortably wear short-shorts (including those sexy, retro, Steve Prefontaine-inspired looks) again, for the first time since, oh, about fourth grade.

    So delightful have I found BodyGlide that it has inspired me to experiment with secondary uses. It’s wonderful when wearing summer skirts on especially hot, sticky days, and a few daubs on the ankles relieve the dig of the hard leather on those shoes that are too fashionable not to wear. Indeed, BodyGlide has ascended my list of household necessities and now ranks right up there with toothpaste and AA batteries.

    This product is hardly ubiquitous, however; it’s carried only at running specialty shops and other stores, like REI, that cater to endurance athletes (and ironically, are often staffed by skinny folks with no use for BodyGlide). So while it might require a special trip, stocking up on BodyGlide is never a problem. In the process, I can usually justify picking up a pair of hot new running shorts.

  • LOCAL MUSIC: Wanted Man

    The local music scene’s ubiquitous and ridiculously busy hot hand, Erik Appelwick has, remarkably, been living in the Twin Cities only six years. Having grown up in South Dakota and Michigan, and then kicked about South Dakota for a while during his collegiate and postcollegiate years, he made the bold decision in 2000 to move east, if only slightly. “I wanted to play music, and there wasn’t really anywhere there to play,” he said of his old South Dakota digs. “I was scared to move to a really big city—afraid of being eaten alive and that sort of thing. Minneapolis was just the closest place. And I was even afraid of moving to Minneapolis.”

    That admission turned out to be the most telling detail Appelwick would let slip during the forty-five uncomfortable minutes he spent rehashing his whirlwind music career. For while he has enjoyed many successes of late, he doesn’t particularly relish talking about them.

    Appelwick had come ambling into Spyhouse, a South Minneapolis coffee shop known for its loyal patronage of MCAD students and musicians. There he ran into Dan Wilson, the Minneapolis singer-songwriter and frontman for Semisonic. He lingered for a bit to chat, but not long enough to make him late for an appointment. Then the clean-shaven, neatly dressed Appelwick took a seat in the sunlight. “How are you?” he asked quietly, his voice barely audible above Tom Waits’ “Day After Tomorrow.”

    According to the brief career history he’d provided in an earlier email, Appelwick’s youthful fascination with KISS—and, embarrassingly, Huey Lewis and Peter Cetera—led to piano and guitar lessons and then, in high school, to playing percussion with his school’s orchestra band. (“First chair, thank you,” he’d written.) He then got a taste of the spotlight while playing guitar with the Harvesters, a University of South Dakota rock band that found its way, in 1996, to the SXSW Music Festival in Austin, Texas. But any exposure SXSW might’ve provided was mostly squandered, as Appelwick and his bandmates spent the bulk of their time getting drunk.

    Fast-forward to the year 2000. Appelwick eased into his new hometown of Minneapolis, having quickly hooked up with another South Dakota export, Darren Jackson (Kid Dakota, Alva Star, The Hopefuls). Soon Appelwick was playing guitar with Jackson’s band Cellophane, an infectious power-pop foursome that morphed into Camaro, then The Olympic Hopefuls, and, finally and simply, The Hopefuls. During this same time, Appelwick was also cobbling together an income by gigging with Kid Dakota and Alva Star while trying to persuade others to let him play on their records—“bass and keys or tambourine,” he said. “I can play just about everything. I can come up with a melody for a song if it needs it.”

    All this while he was writing and recording his own songs as well. At the urging of Jackson and other new-found Minneapolis friends, those homemade recordings became Blood & Clover, the booty-shaking debut from Vicious Vicious, an enduring solo project on which Appelwick plays “pretty much everything, except drums.” The 2005 follow-up, Don’t Look So Surprised, proved equally groovy.

    This past April, after initially offering to help the band with future recordings, Appelwick became bass player for Tapes ’N Tapes. The band quickly became an indie rock sensation, with the requisite grueling tour schedule. The unfortunate upshot of Tapes ’N Tapes’ success was that The Hopefuls tribe came to the conclusion that Appelwick no longer had time for their band and let him go.

    The ability of some musicians to carve out a living is an enduring, and sometimes obsessively jealous, fixation for lesser- and non-musicians alike. As for Appelwick, he’s sustained himself on “record sales and money from shows.” Call it dumb luck perhaps, but he’s managed to do so without much knowledge of the financial nuts and bolts of the business; for example, he has no idea whether Tapes ’N Tapes’ July appearance on the Letterman show helped bump sales for the band’s latest release, The Loon. Likewise, Appelwick isn’t particularly fond of marketing. Vicious Vicious, he said, has been heard only by local music aficionados and random visitors to his MySpace page; he hasn’t even bothered promoting his records to college radio stations, an established and time-honored route for most indie bands. “I’m not that good at business,” Appelwick noted more than once. “Talking about it sort of cheapens the experience for me. I’m much better at the process.”

    But that’s not to say he’s particularly adept at discussing the process, either. In his defense, by this time, Appelwick was clearly losing steam and admitted to being jetlagged, having returned just the day before from a Tapes ’n Tapes tour of the U.K. His gray eyes had started to glaze over. When asked how he goes about writing his songs, or why, for that matter, he continues slogging his way through the pitfalls of the music industry, Appelwick shrugs. “I’m just doing it because that’s what I do,” he said. “And I like doing it.”

  • The Other David Salmela

    Walking north along Second Street through Northeast Minneapolis, one eventually happens upon the most unusual variant of a white picket fence: Based roughly on piano keys, it has the occasional cutout or half-missing panel that allows passersby a peek into a thriving vegetable garden. This artsy parapet belongs to David Salmela, a musician, software designer, and, most visibly, the owner and co-curator of Creative Electric Studios, the gallery and performing arts space adjacent to the gardens, which seems to collect rock musicians and all their tangential art projects. Although the fence was built to look more welcoming than forbidding, Salmela said that neighbors subscribe to varying opinions about it. As one old-timer strolling by recently asked him, “Did you make that fence? Were you drunk when you did it?”

    With uncombed blond hair, saucer-shaped blue eyes, and a wardrobe of rumpled T-shirts and jeans, the thirty-five-year-old Salmela exudes the sort of youthful exuberance that might be mistaken, by cynics, for naiveté. Certainly, there’s a pipedream quality about his plans for the old storefront. But that impression would overlook the considerable amount of muscle and thought he’s already put into improving the place, which was essentially a floor-to-ceiling trash heap when he bought it in 2001. Today, the building and its grounds serve not only as an art gallery, performance space, and community gathering spot; the upper-level apartment is also home to Salmela, Jenny Adams (his girlfriend and Creative Electric co-curator), and pal Kurt Froehlich (also a curator at the space).

    The fence came about when Salmela contacted the renowned, Duluth-based architect with whom he shares both a first and last name (but to whom he is not related). “I asked him if he would like to do a project with me and he said ‘Yes, but I have a waiting list of two years,’ ” the non-architect Salmela recalled. “‘But I have this son-in-law in the Twin Cities … ’” And that’s how Salmela hooked up with another architect, Souliyahn Keobounpheng.

    Keobounpheng designed the fence, and drew up the plans for an ultra-modern shed that juts off the back of the building like a caboose and is made of various found materials, mostly wavy corrugated sheet metal. The architect’s plans for a third-floor addition and renovation of the garage into art studios are yet to be realized. Salmela is still chewing over the presumably steep price tag for those projects; but, he insisted cheerfully, where there’s a will there’s a way. “I’ll figure out a way to do it. I want to do it,” he said.

    Salmela’s gumption is not dependent on Keobounpheng’s involvement. Inside the building, he and friends have hammered out a loft that doubles as a guestroom for visiting artists and storage space. Upstairs, he installed a handsome tin ceiling as well as an eco-friendly (and newly trendy) corn-burning stove, which he and Adams discovered at the Living Green Expo. Another ecological feature: To minimize storm-water runoff (and the associated tax the city slaps on “impermeable surfaces”), Salmela designed and built a rain catcher. The contraption collects water from the building’s rooftop and deposits it, via a large pipeline, into a two-hundred-gallon tin tub, where it stands ready to water the beets, peas, and squash.

  • Respects to 1992

    Fashion fuels itself on the past, spinning out retreads, revivals, and re-interpretations, produced at what seems to be an ever-faster rate. In fact, because of this profusion of styles, you’d have to go back to the early 90s to find evidence of the last really big rally around one particular look. For a few short years, young rockers and their fans took seam-rippers to their jeans, mussed up their hair, and piled on layers of figure-obscuring garments: extra-long-sleeved thermals, unbuttoned flannel shirts, hooded sweatshirts, misshapen cardigans, and, of course, work boots (an aesthetic that, itself, borrowed not a few things from the late 60s).

    Fashion also fuels itself on subcultures: Some of those early 90s grunge fans were clothing designers. The 1992 collection that a young Marc Jacobs designed for Perry Ellis was based on flannel skirts, cashmere thermals, layer upon layer upon layer, even skull caps. This season, not surprisingly, Jacobs is credited for having picked up the speed with which designers rummage through our past; he has spearheaded a “grunge redux” style made up of chunky, knit headdresses and baggy, shirt-tied skirts. For those who like to relate fashion trends to larger influences, the revival seems apropos, given the United States’ wars in the Middle East then and now, as well as its battles with a decidedly lackluster economy.

    The difference today, though, is that, with our fractured culture and always-splintering preferences for music, art, and fashion, there’s little chance tastemakers will converge on any one influence. The mid-1980s continue to be an abundant source of inspiration, judging from all the legwarmers, leggings, and ultra-wide belts. A slow burning of embellishment is also afoot, making way for more austere, minimalist treatments—another echo of what transpired in the early 90s, when tailored dresses and coats took on simple cuts and long, severe lines. As with last year, boots continue to play a central role, alongside plenty of dark and muted colors, a flash of metallics, and piles upon piles of knits.

    To view the fall fashion images, click on the PDF below.

  • There She Goes Again

    The current Minneapolis epicenter of prostitution, at least if you ask the neighbors, centers on the residential streets around Hiawatha Avenue and Lake Street East. The area is so active that an all-volunteer, amateur “John Patrol” has sprung up in order to keep an eye on things. The foot patrollers have been known to rat out a prostitute or two, and they reserve a special disdain for pimps, but their true raison d’être is intimidating the men who venture into their neighborhood to pick from the hookers. The rotating clan of about a half-dozen is mostly women, proud residents of the Corcoran neighborhood, and they will resort to just about any measure short of a direct confrontation: staring, copying down license plate numbers, stopping by to see the truck-drivers who often park along a nearby residential street, and especially dialing the police.

    This is difficult work, so the John Patrol members like to make themselves useful in other ways, too. For example, they pick up litter as they go—fast-food wrappers, intravenous drug needles, used condoms.

    One recent evening, on the hunt for johns, the patrollers passed several dilapidated rental properties with buckling mini-blinds drawn over foggy windows, beer bottles strewn across the front lawns. “There’s the brothel,” said Sarah, a founding member of the patrol, gesturing toward one such house. The group kept walking, and waved to the retired-age couple next door, who were enjoying a cookout on their back patio.

    Conversation found that the patrollers had schooled themselves in the ways of the street, and even reveled in some of the details. A middle-aged white woman described how Sur-13, “a Laotian/Latin gang,” had tagged her house several times. Jeff, a white forty-something patroller, claimed to have seen a drug deal go down at the gas station we’d just passed. Mike, a lifelong Corcoran resident in his early thirties, also white, described the night a friend dropped him home after a Pearl Jam concert; several prostitutes banged on the windows of his car. Sarah, showing her savvy, claimed to be on a first-name basis with several hookers.

    At various points, female residents of Corcoran have been mistaken for prostitutes. They were not flattered. For example, Sarah, an attractive thirty-something with a thin build, tattoos, and chestnut hair streaked with blonde and auburn, says she gets pestered by johns “all the time.” Kathy, a bottle-blonde forty-something who favors black eyeliner and, for the occasion of patrolling in eighty-five-degree heat, black athletic shorts and a matching tank top, said she had been honked at and waved to earlier that very day. This was by “an old guy in a green van, old enough to be my grandfather” who then circled the block to get a better look.

    The johns are understandably confused because prostitutes these days don’t necessarily strut their stuff in hot pants and spiked heels. On various patrols, I saw all manner of looks. One evening, we strode past a wan, middle-aged white woman with cropped black hair whose dusty jeans and unadorned white T-shirt hung loosely from her bony frame. Sarah leaned in to say that the woman was definitely a prostitute. On a hot Sunday morning, while parking my car, I noticed a potbellied Asian woman strutting up the avenue in a denim skirt and gauzy floral tank top. Was she a hooker? The lack of a dress code meant that everyone was suspect. Later, when walking with the patrol, the Asian woman passed by once more and several patrollers confirmed that she was indeed a lady of the night.

    Turning the corner onto Thirty-first Street, near South High, the John Patrol spotted a prostitute sitting on a retaining wall. She wore a white blouse, high heels, and fashionable cropped jeans—quite glamorous. From across the street, I discerned that she’d taken care to iron her blonde hair smooth. “That’s Carrie,” said Sarah, who went on to describe how much more beautiful Carrie had been before falling into drugs and prostitution. Another patroller dialed her cell phone. When the police arrived, moments later, Carrie rose to her feet and unceremoniously placed her hands on the hood of the squad car. Not having been caught in the act, she was released with a warning.

    A moment later, Carrie came stomping up Longfellow Avenue, just ten paces behind us, and I got a better view of the leathered skin that had tarnished her looks. As Carrie stood knocking at the front door of a “bad house,” a big, dark van bearing two plump black men came rolling by at five miles per hour. The word “pimp” was uttered by a few speculative patrollers. But after nailing a parking spot, the driver of the van waved to and thanked the group for its efforts. He even offered to lend a hand at a later date, explaining that he thought the walking might help him and his wife lose weight. The balloon popped on a tense moment. Everyone exhaled. Two patrollers crossed out the van’s license plate number in their notebooks.