Author: Hans Eisenbeis

It’s been a few years since Montblanc, the German jeweler, brought out the Meisterstück, the world’s grandest fountain pen. In fact, it was an old design going back to the early twentieth century, but through some kind of marketing alchemy, the pen suddenly became ubiquitous in American malls and upscale catalogs in about 1988. I received one, as a gift, upon graduating from college; it had been one of those presents I told my girlfriend to tell my parents about, and crossed my fingers. The silly thing was as big as a Cuban cigar, and probably the most spendy stock fountain pen one could ever hope to find. I put the price tag at about three hundred dollars. (There are limited-edition, precious-metal versions of the Meisterstück and its competitors, but I like to think that the standard jewelry-store versions top what is reasonable for a normal person.)

It is, of course, the kind of pen you want to reserve for signing declarations of war and bilateral trade agreements. This is true of fountain pens in general, I suppose. They are a delight to write with, once you’ve mastered them, but they can be a pain to master. Fountain-pen ink has not yet been developed to the point where it will dry as fast as the ink from your typical ballpoint, felt-tip, or rolling-ball pen. This is both a weakness and a strength, because fine pen ink is silky, almost oily as it goes onto the page. It is a widespread fallacy that fountain pens are “scratchy.” They are only so when they have a cheap nib, or when the ink is inferior. Like vintages in wine, you can’t really go by brand. The finest bottle I ever had was an inexpensive, opaque black Platignum that flowed like my grandmother’s chocolate syrup poured over a sundae. I’ve never found another bottle like it, though a well of Pelikan turquoise came close. Also, you can tell a lot about a fountain pen’s owner by the ink color she chooses—blue-black and brown are especially eccentric and beautiful.

The Montblanc’s main selling point is its nib, which contains both yellow and white gold, along with some dramatic filigree. Although I felt terribly self-conscious about using it to take notes in grad school, I quickly got over that, due to the pure sensual pleasure of using it. When I missed a lecture, I mostly regretted the missed opportunity to take notes that day. I believe I developed a kind of iron grip with my right hand that has—like my brain—atrophied considerably since then.

A good fountain pen with real gold in the nib will quickly form to the hand of its owner. It will feel as if it intuitively knows the slope of your words. When people ask to borrow my pen, I know it will not work for them. When I first got my Montblanc, I thought it might become an heirloom, something I’d pass along to my children or grandchildren. Surely the price justified that sort of exaltation. But it will never quite write in anyone else’s hand, and that seems a shame.

A pen like that you constantly worry about. I had several close calls when I left a book bag in a bathroom, or dropped the uncapped pen and watched in slo-mo horror as it pin-wheeled down to the floor, only to bounce off the safe end. Eventually, I retired the Montblanc to my home office; sadly, I don’t use it much anymore. I bought a cheaper and more modest Pelikan, and the truth is, it fits my hand better than that massive Meisterstück. Besides, the first and last peace treaty I’ll ever sign was my wedding license, fifteen years ago. Other than that, I’m not really in the business of signing Important State Papers. But it’s nice to know that I’d be well equipped when the next opportunity comes along.

The other day, we were surprised to see a certain advertisement in Newsweek and the New Yorker. It was a bold yellow page that made a startling claim: Everything you’ve heard about mercury poisoning in fish is false. According to the ad, published by a mysterious organization identified only as FishScam.com, all the claims about the presence of mercury in fish are based on a single, flawed study, five decades old, of an island race that ate massive amounts of whale blubber.

As it turns out, the ad was bought by the Center for Consumer Freedom. A notorious Washington, D.C., lobbying group run by Rick Berman, the CCF represents the restaurant, alcohol, and hospitality industries. FishScam.com’s website is a net bulging with counter-information to fight environmentalist “fearmongering.” But it essentially comes down to an argument not about whether mercury is in fish—it is, after all—but what might constitute levels dangerous to humans. Berman and his cohorts would impeach the FDA and the EPA’s own standards on base doses of toxins in food. It is a matter of deep concern to them that scientists establish the minimum amount it takes to produce pathology in humans, and then divide that number by ten to account for differences in weight, metabolism, genetics, and so on. In other words, erring on the safe side.

With their self-interest on such unflattering display, FishScam.com’s funders remain mostly anonymous. Like proponents of, say, intelligent design or “natural” global warming theory, Berman’s experts engage in much criticism of existing science, without offering peer-reviewed science of their own. This is because what they are really arguing about are non-empirical first principles.

Incredibly, the Center for Consumer Freedom suggests that the Sierra Club, the Oceana institute, Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, the Ad Council, and about twenty other organizations—including, by extension, the FDA and the EPA—are hiding their true agenda, which is to attack the coal industry for mercury emissions. If that is true, it is hardly a secret, given the overwhelming evidence that mercury—and most other heavy metals—are demonstrably toxic to the human body. This is universally acknowledged. That mercury concentrates in fish, especially fatty predatorial fish like mackerel, swordfish, and some types of tuna is also settled truth. (As any holder of a Minnesota fishing license can tell you, non-commercial fish caught in our local lakes and rivers are poisonous enough that one should not eat them except ritually, at most once a week.)

Of course, what the CCF really wishes to do is sell more fish, and there they have an uphill battle. The good news is that American fish consumption has not changed much in the past ten years, since the rise of awareness about risks associated with red meat. Fish is recommended primarily for its omega-3 fatty acids, good for the brain and the heart. This is also conveniently available from organic dairy products, for example. The bad news is that Americans still eat less than half of the recommended quantities of seafood—half a pound per week of less-risky species such as salmon, pollack, shrimp, and catfish. Almost a third of the fish we do eat is in the form of canned tuna. Unfortunately, a recent study by the Mercury Policy Project suggested that one can out of twenty actually exceeds the “reference dose” for mercury.

Rick Berman and his employers believe that there is too much black-and-white thinking in the world—at least when it comes to their bottom line—and with that sentiment we can partly agree. But there is a time and a place for subtle thinking, and with the health of women and children at risk, this is not it. “Play Russian Roulette with your unborn child” would be an ad campaign with long odds of succeeding. And the idea that there may be an acceptable level of mercury to put in the mouths of infants and children must have been conceived by a person who does not have kids, and is not capable of empathizing with those who do.

We’ve grown used to this sort of anti-activism and counter-spin; the manipulation of facts in an effort to explode some sort of widespread science-based conspiracy. The proposition that our notions regarding safe levels of mercury in fish comes from one flawed, fifty-year-old study is, on the face of it, bunk. It ought to be an embarrassment to those who would take money to publish it.

You probably didn’t notice, but due to a bureaucratic mix-up, there was no Shortlist Music Prize awarded this year. The “Shorty” was a newish but well-respected award that tried to recognize serious pop and rock bands for doing important new work, regardless of popularity. The main symptom of doing important work was selling less than 500,000 copies of any particular album—a prerequisite for the prize.

The first Shortlist winner, in 2001, was the Icelandic art-rock band Sigur Rós and they were emblematic of everything the judges were looking to reward with their new trophy. Here was a band deeply engrossed in unique aesthetic issues, rabidly exercising its “creative control” by producing odd and beautiful sonic art in a faraway place. Yet simultaneously, they became deeply influential in the mainstream recording industry. Like Radiohead before them, they became a shibboleth for all self-respecting musicheads. Their epic seventy-minute albums of exquisitely slow ambient rock are shamelessly anti-commercial; their CDs are often unmolested by song titles, liner notes, or credits. The band sings in a mixture of Icelandic and nonsense; they play their guitars with horsehair bows. (Sigur Rós play the Orpheum Theater in Minneapolis on May 8).

One could speculate on the prospects of a shoe-gazing art band like Sigur Rós by looking at, for example, the slow starvation of Spin magazine and the College Music Journal, the corporate consolidation of alternative weeklies, and how fast what’s cool and credible becomes mainstream and bland. Still, new undergrounds are constantly found deeper down, and there are new markets opening up to them. Free of the expectation of commercial radio celebrity, a band like Sigur Rós can succeed by capturing the attention of chic producers of TV shows, films, and advertisements. Sigur Rós licensed a song to the Wes Anderson movie The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, and another to the Cameron Crowe-Tom Cruise flick Vanilla Sky. They’ve written with composer Hilmar Orn Hilmarsson and played with the London Sinfonietta orchestra. They’ve even collaborated with the godheads of art-rock, Radiohead. In short, cool still counts for something.

Sigur Rós formed in Reykjavík in 1994, and once their otherworldy, ethereal, minimalist sound got off the isle of Iceland, the band was quickly tagged as the next big thing out of that country since Björk. Critics loved the massive doses of reverb, organ, and strings, and the tempos that sounded like they were in hibernation. Riding on top of that nearly stationary wave was the thinnest falsetto voice, backtracked, multitracked, and degraded. Singing in a language he called “Hopelandic,” Jonsi Birgisson sounded like a trembling ingénue coming through an unreliable connection. While he sawed at his guitar, keyboardist Kjarri Sveinsson played one or two notes at a time, drummer Ágúst Gunnarson did more noisemaking than beat-keeping, and bassist Goggi Holm seemed not very busy at all. With the first flush of success, the group built their own recording studio in an empty swimming pool out on the Icelandic tundra. No one was surprised.

With his spare and beautiful 1978 recording, Music for Airports, Brian Eno coined the term “ambient music,” a genre that could serve as audio wallpaper, but was supposed to reward scrutiny the way Muzak couldn’t. Sigur Rós may be the first group since Eno to fulfill the promise of his invention—music as uncorrupted art for your ears.

But Sigur Rós’s is an inescapably Nordic interpretation. There is a deeply melancholic vibe in all of its music, a hyperborean sense of isolation and anomie. The first record released overseas, Ágætis Byrjn (1999), was spare and exposed. On their second record, (2002), the flight took on a new drummer (Orri Dyrason) and hit some turbulence and aural bombast. Their latest, Takk, revisits this density but with heavier orchestration—more strings, brass, glockenspiel, flutes, 3/3 time, vocal harmonizations—along with multiple layers of guitar distortion. It’s as if Nordic reserve has turned inside out, and passionately embraced itself. “Takk” means “thanks”—at once a light form of gratitude and a casual parting note, with overtones of finality. It may be the only word the band has ever used that your average English-speaking critic can understand.

On Takk, the sound structures are beginning to resemble commercial anthems and soundtrack epics; there is a lot of bona fide up-tempo rock ’n’ roll drumming. As it has matured, Sigur Rós has gradually abandoned minimalism and clarity for structure and complexity. The end result is that Takk sounds more urgent and impatient than its predecessors, as if the band were trying to make you understand its language by speaking louder and faster.

Listening to Sigur Rós’s albums, one is unmoored from lyrics and their meaning. The lyrics become part of the artifact, rather than a framework to establish its meaning—words as tones, not syntax. The voice is played like a wind instrument, not a percussion instrument. In this way, Sigur Rós is the antipode of hip-hop, the dominant form today. While it is true that a rap has lilt and flow according to the style of the rapper, the genre is inescapably about the words; it is still, at its roots, a form of performance poetry. Yet there’s no alternative but to consider Sigur Rós purely as sound; understanding the lyrics would, on some fundamental level, subvert the experience of their music.

Let’s be frank and admit that this is pure, blindingly white music. If Sigur Rós weren’t so opaque, and if anyone parsed anything malevolent in their music, the band might be accused of representing racial purity, the way troublemakers accused Joy Division in the eighties of being Nazi sympathizers. That’s unfair to both bands, because the “evidence” was circumstantial at best. (The swastika, for example, was a popular artifact with many pre-PC punks.) Still, it’s an interesting comparison. Superficially, Sigur Rós’s funereal packaging and imaging owes much to Factory, Joy Division’s famously artsy record label. At a more profound level, Joy Division appropriated the symbols and signs of World War II, most obviously with its name, which was what Nazis supposedly called the coteries of Jewish women they kept as sex slaves. “Sigur Rós” means “victory rose,” and although the band was named after Jonsi’s younger sister, it is a name that, at least in English translation, is also evocative of a World War II lexicon. On a tour of Dachau once, I was told that SS officers kept Jewish children caged outside in the winter; the cruel effects of exposure led the Nazis to call them their “victory rose garden.”

That’s an irresponsible association to make, but an irresistible one for a self-loathing white critic. Given hip-hop’s ascendance, not just in mainstream music but mainstream culture, it is hard to believe a band can exist that does not exhibit any sign of its influence. And yet here it is: a modern band that is so radically isolated and self-sufficient and uncorrupted that it becomes something of an anthropological curiosity. Maybe this sound is the natural outcome of Iceland’s homogeneous, insular society. Of course, insularity never stopped the English from tampering with the blues, skiffle, reggae, and the like—but then Iceland has never been the colonizer that Britain has. It is no crime to be white, and no misdemeanor to make music for yourself. And it is not entirely surprising that Sigur Rós is most popular among mostly white alt-rock critics and mostly white composers of modern classical music, while they do not register at all with commercial radio programmers and sneaker manufacturers.

Another way to pose this old riddle—whether a band can develop an uninfluenced, sui generis sound—is to consider why Sigur Rós are considered art-rock or alt-rock rather than world music. If these musicians are as strongly defined by their geography as people say they are, they should bear stronger marks of folk influence. Much has been made of their sound being a sort of audible analog for Iceland. No one doubts that place has a huge influence on sound, but musicians tend to study other musicians more than they study landscape. (Indeed, although in interviews Sigur Rós frequently dismiss “geographic determinism,” they have toured with and championed Steindor Andersen, a traditional Icelandic rimur chanter of their acquaintance.) Often by “world music” we mean non-American folk music with some sort of modern corruption, like Sweden’s Väsen, or England’s June Tabor, or the Afro Celt Sound System. Sigur Rós are probably the inverse of that—modern corruption inflected by elements of local folk. It is possible that they represent art-rock as a sort of trailing edge of identity politics, quite literally the last stand of the pale-faced artiste.

Despite Daunte Culpepper’s departure for Miami, he’ll be making a few non-voluntary return trips. That’s because the Vikings Sex Boat scandal continues to play itself out in the legal system. We trust our courts of law, of course, but it was never clear to us what laws precisely were broken in that unseemly episode. Last time we checked, casual, consensual sex between adults was discouraged but not illegal. Lap dances, on the other hand, are perfectly legitimate and generally considered protected by the First Amendment as a sort of artistic expression. (To be sure, lap dances are supposed to take place in a licensed establishment, with the other trimmings of public performance—you know, stage names, soft-lighting gels, costumes of sorts, those sorts of things.) We’re not saying that makes lap dancing good; we’d rather not have to adjudicate that subject. It is easier to say that people ought to be able to express themselves, than to dictate how they should do it (or what they should wear while they’re doing it). Incidentally, the word is that the post-Culpepper era will begin with a bold move on the franchise’s part. The team is redesigning its uniform, including the risky sartorial proposition of purple pants. If they could also eliminate that faux-military script Vikings logo that has long polluted end zone and sweatshirt, we’d be grateful.

As it turns out, the Twins will be tweaking their uniforms, as well. In honoring the late Kirby Puckett, the players will wear number 34 patches on their sleeves this season. It was ennobling to see Puckett’s send-off in March, and we felt bad that he’d retreated so far from the public eye in the years after his retirement. Of course, it didn’t help when, three years ago, his private life was blown wide open in a Sports Illustrated cover story, and the self-righteous colloquy that proclaimed his good-guy image a “sham.” Sometimes public figures remember these injuries much longer than the public does. No one wishes to excuse the man’s flaws, but it was nice to have so many reminders of the joy Puckett brought to doing his life’s main work—or, really, to playing a game. What Puckett’s story underlines is how much media have changed in the past fifty years. There was once an assumption that pro athletes were role models for our youth, and the media helped prop up this felicitous myth in part by leaving alone the private unpleasantries that are, in some degree, visited on every life. In later years, plenty of pro athletes kicked back by getting tattooed and dying their hair and getting in fistfights at nightclubs. If their private lives were to be scrutinized and publicized by the press, then they would stop pretending to be ambassadors for their corporate owners, stop dropping into elementary schools and pediatric wards and tousling the hair of towheaded young fans. By those standards in his public life, Kirby Puckett was a throwback. He loved being a baseball idol and representing the honorable values of hard work, mutual respect, self-sufficiency, loyalty, and generosity. Whether these values carried over into his private life is probably a question we should all turn on ourselves.

The other day, another franchise player expressed his loyalties to our fair cities. Columnist Nick Coleman pleaded with his bosses at McClatchy, the overlords of the Star Tribune, to do right by his old employer, the St. Paul Pioneer Press. At first we were a little startled to hear Coleman explain that loyalty is one of several values that supersede money-making, because we recall Coleman’s surprising jump from the Pioneer Press to the Star Tribune in 2003, after seventeen years at the former paper. (At the time, it seemed odd that the Star Tribune wanted to add yet another reasonable and articulate fellow to its stable of … well, middle-aged, white-male columnists; the paper has since achieved a sort of corrective balance by hiring a shrewish neo-conservative think-tanker.) But this would be unfair. Coleman, after all, spent his first decade as a newspaperman at the Star Tribune. There is a difference between being a company man and being a community man.