Author: Hans Eisenbeis

Try as we do, we can’t always see eye to eye with our friends in outstate Minnesota. (Hell, we don’t even see eye to eye with our spouses always, but that’s another story.) We hate to add fuel to the fire of the present urban-rural dissension, but how can we help it? Now a few greedy Minnesotans have managed to convince the state court of appeals that their local rails-to-trails bike path should be closed, the land fenced and turned over to them for their exclusive use. One imagines it took just minutes after the controversial decision for the rustic mob to turn out with their pitchforks, torches, and No Trespassing signs.

Lawyers representing three land-owners adjacent to the Paul Bunyan State Trail near Walker have filed suit based on technicalities, claiming that the Burlington Northern Railroad never owned the land to sell it to the state—they only had easements dating back to the 1890s. Never mind the fact that in almost every similar case across the country, easements are as transferable as titles and must explicitly be abandoned. And never mind the fact that this sort of ugly selfishness has no place in civil Minnesota society. Their claim is a transparent land grab, and a fine example of not-in-my-backyard softheadedness.

Minnesota has 1,300 miles of trails converted from railroads—a happy state of affairs endorsed in precincts as far away as the U.S. Supreme Court. At the same time that railroads were being decommissioned in the late seventies because of the rise of truck and air transport, courts recognized the value of railroad corridors and acted almost universally to ensure their continued preservation in the interest of the public. That commitment to “railbanking” proved to be prescient. Virtually every community in the nation that has created one of these paths has seen its investment returned in a bounty of tourism, recreation, and community spirit. Property values increase, the tourist economy takes off, people are agreeably sociable, everyone wins. Except the hardbitten redneck who would sooner shoot his own foot than abide city slickers in Lycra.

It gives us pause to consider how this situation is handled in the Old World. In Scandinavia and in the British Isles, for example, private property has an even more storied and sacred past. And yet in places like Scotland and Norway, there are explicit “Freedom to Roam” laws that make it illegal to prevent law-abiding, nature-loving citizens from walking harmlessly through one’s “private property.” Nature is seen as a national treasure and inheritance. Access to it is a birthright. And even in the more ill-tempered counties of England, there are national holidays known as “Trespassing Days,” where roaming is encouraged and supported as a noble principle.

And now three “property rights” bumpkins up past Brainerd may have the courts tied up for years to come, threatening the continuity of every public trail in the state. Imagine the daydreams of shameless litigators, hoping to cash in on the deep reservoirs of misanthropy, xenophobia, and yuppie hatred that are as much a part of the rural landscape as creosote, mullets, and grain elevators. And this surly mob may effectively reduce the state’s trails to a fractured system of dead ends. Mike Sandberg, of Guthrie, was one of the few landowners who was willing to speak publicly on behalf of the Covetous Three. Resorting to the time-honored babblings of anti-government paranoia, he said of the state, “They think they can do whatever they can do. They want the land.” We have news for you, Mr. Sandberg. “They” is us. There are more of us than there are of you. And yes, we want our trail back.

I’ve stopped idealizing world travel. Sure, I’d love to believe that some day I’ll set foot on every continent. I’ve even overcome an odd, inherited prejudice against the Deep South, and started fantasizing about a road trip through the cornbread belt. Still, more and more, lately, I realize the place for me is my own couch, nodding off with the Twins at home-run volume and a can of cheap local brew tipping into my lap. The sunsets are pretty, the folks are agreeable, the politics are relatively progressive. It’s not much, but it’s home.

I think we Midwesterners are predisposed to this inner struggle—a desire to travel to more glamorous places, but a suspicion that where we really belong is at home, right here among the cornfields and pig farms. Otherwise, why wouldn’t we have moved, years ago, like everyone else, to L.A. or New York? We may lust after the big city and the open road, but we have instincts for home. There is no shame in this. In fact, there may even be some art in it.

Two wonderful new disc sets illustrate this; they feature new albums by two of our very best singer-songwriters, along with a documentary film about each. Greg Brown’s If I Had Known: Essential Recordings 1980-1996 comes with a DVD of the 1993 documentary Hacklebarney Tunes: The Music of Greg Brown. Paul Westerberg’s Come and Feel Me Tremble is both a new album and a separately sold DVD documentary of his most recent tour and studio sessions.

It’s hard to overestimate the importance of Greg Brown, but time is beginning to confess it. If there’s an artist who needs no other explanation than his own recordings, it’s the Iowan musician. And yet this is precisely the kind of person you want to see at the center of a documentary. Brown would surely chafe to hear it, but he represents a modern romantic ideal—the poet philosopher as farmer and folkie.

Hacklebarney Tunes confirms most of what you know and believe about the artist. Greg Brown has a home, or at least a spiritual home base, and it’s everything you’d expect: a seedy little brush farm in the rolling driftless of Iowa, nestled next to a trout stream and a blackberry patch. His actual life is considerably more complicated than this suggests, of course; he collects art, he travels and tours incessantly, he hangs with folks like Garrison Keillor, he’s in Europe as often as Iowa, and he runs a record label, if not a new-folk revolution. Whether he likes it or not, though, his music and his person evince a simple American ideal: The love of a humble home in the heartland, and all that implies—baking bread, walking beans, singing along.

Brown may never be a rock star like Bob Dylan or Van Morrison—or even Paul Westerberg, for that matter. Even so, you can feel a slow process of grassroots lionization going on, almost in spite of him. It began, especially, with Going Driftless, last year’s album that was touted as “an artists’ tribute to the songs of Greg Brown.” That disc featured a dozen women from the A-list of folk and roots playing his greatest hits; Lucinda Williams, Ani DiFranco, Iris DeMent, and so on. (Yes, all women. Proceeds were donated to the Breast Cancer Fund.) To my mind, that CD left little doubt that a song like “The Train Carrying Jimmie Rodgers Home” will outlive its author as folk standards. And the documentary, though made a decade ago, has grown into its clothes as a biopic of Someone Who Really Matters.

Judged by his own standards, though, I’d guess the albums Brown himself loves best are Dream Café and Poet Game—his most personal, least folkie records from the latter period. These are urbane albums that get inside the head of a modern man who has played through the clichés of folk music long enough to get itchy for new turf. Yet he’s too smart to abandon his roots. Brown knows that the folk idiom is full of sleeping dogs, rusty trucks, and swimming holes because these homey icons point beyond themselves to transcendental things.

Still, I am convinced that the best recording of a Greg Brown song isn’t by Greg Brown. It’s by his three daughters, singing “Ella Mae” on Going Driftless. What a haunting, spare, and gorgeous tribute to their father’s grandmother. Dad’s only recorded version, included here on If I Had Known, and originally appearing on the 1983 album One Night, is oddly perfunctory. But in the mouths of his daughters, it is a thing of intense beauty that makes my throat catch every time I hear it. “Ella Mae” captures the essence of what makes Brown so compelling—a folkie modest and timeless. He’s a man whose music grounds generations in their common humanity. For reasons that I’m sure are connected to deep spiritual things, the daughters are the best evidence of what the father is.

Paul Westerberg doesn’t have a home, artistically speaking. He’s not even comfortable in his own skin. Which is, in its own way, fitting for his area of specialization. Midtempo garage rock never had a better agoraphobic champion, and fans of the older, trashier Replacements catalog have been gratified to learn that, even though you can’t go home again, you can dial up something new on your CD player that sounds pretty damn familiar.

Most American punk rock was disingenuous, and it remains so. To the extent that punk was an urban form of folk music, produced by and for regular people who happened to live in flophouses instead of farmhouses, its American version has come mostly from artless, well-off suburban kids whose idea of alienation was no more complicated than it ever was for the leisure class: Dad worked too much, Mom was imperious, and there were never enough ski trips to Colorado. In other words, the overwhelming injustice of life in these privileged precincts could only be that it’s so frickin’ boring.

Luckily, we bumpkins in flyover country were chronically, genetically earnest when we got punk. The Suburbs were prep-school new-wavers who never pretended to be anything else, and they rocked the harder for it. The ’Mats, though, were as close to the genuine homegrown article as we’d ever have—city kids, working class if you like, smart enough to know they weren’t that smart, and they didn’t mind. Tommy Stinson will still tell anyone who’ll listen: They honestly were never aiming any higher than the next show, never more forward-looking than last week’s City Pages. In a sense, they accidentally embodied the bleeding edge of what became a whole argot and morality of “the genuine”—jeans and flannel shirts, Converse high-tops, bed-heads, too drunk to play, I hate music, got too many notes. Some people say that’s what killed Kurt Cobain. But punk-rock credibility doesn’t kill people. Guns kill people.

Like Westerberg’s previous record, Tremble is willfully ragged, presumably recorded live off the studio floor. For the better part of this album, he’s turned the amps up and the vocals down. It’s “Answering Machine” guitars with “Hootenanny” vocals; he’s mixed himself, self-effacingly, almost off the record—and where you can hear him, he sounds astonishingly unconfident and vulnerable, for all his accolades as a “critics’ darling.” There is plenty of succor, though: Other tunes are cut from the melancholy fabric of “Here Comes a Regular” (“Meet Me Down the Alley”) and the twisted, Brill Building chintz of “Swinging Party” (“Knockin’ Em Back”).

Over the years, Westerberg has sounded as if he believes what’s written about him. This may be why he prudently stopped talking to people. And it may have given him the space and the perspective to give it up a little bit with this new DVD. I haven’t seen it yet, but it’s said to be a real revelation, a doorway into the headspace he’s been occupying for the last five or six years, which about ten thousand rabid fans are dying to see. If the last thing he read was that he didn’t rock hard enough, and that he worried too much about getting his hall-of-fame reservations
right next to Alex Chilton’s, and that he should just be himself, then we hope he’s still not reading. If he is reading, though, we hope he skipped to the end: You used to live at home, Paul, and now you stay at the house. We wouldn’t have it any other way.

It might have been a lull in the news cycle. It might have been the fact that every news outlet from TV to the daily newspaper wants to be a magazine. (Stories that make you feel good! Pretty pictures! Candid opinion!) But for one glorious week this summer, we were introduced to, fell in love with, and then lost all interest in the “flash mob” phenomenon. There was something really cool and urbane, in the same way that meringue is cool and urbane, about a random group of Twin Citizens, hundreds maybe, overtaking the Mall of America and doing the Robot in the Sears Court. That it was arranged in advance by email was a secret for them to know, and for us to find out.

This particular secret society was so easy to get into, though, that we’re wondering now how many journalists are dying to get off the Minneapolis Mob’s listserv. This was punishment enough for infiltrating the group: Our inbox was flooded with the social theories of every johnny-come-lately mobster who wanted to argue that Minneapolis is just as cool as San Francisco or New York.

Given all the interest flash mobbing attracted, we can’t escape the cynical conclusion that most of us are incredibly bored and well behaved. It takes a herd of pranksters to reveal that the rest of us are merely in the larger herd of individuals who mind our own business, shoulder to the wheel, and so on. But let’s be charitable. The flash mob was nifty because it appeared to be spontaneous, and we can all use a little more spontaneity and surprise in our lives.

In fact, spontaneity is the new black. As usual, the Design Institute at the University is modish. This month, the DI is conducting something they call “The Big Urban Game,” which involves teams of players moving thirty-foot-high inflatable pawns throughout the city, sort of like playing chess by global positioning. The way this well-planned event will be experienced—the way it is meant to be experienced by whatever audience self-generates—is by surprise. The result will be similar to the flash mob; the city becomes not so much a performance space, but a space for spontaneous spectacle. The usual authorities are casting a wary eye and palming their billy clubs.

They need not be too concerned. These things are designed to be ephemeral. That, in fact, is their main asset. Perhaps the neatest contribution to the new spontaneity is the Design Institute’s new typeface. The printed word is typically thought to be the opposite of spontaneous. (Some publications are worse than others, of course.) Fonts are like architecture: They are normally created with permanence in mind. But the Design Insititute commissioned a mutable font, called Twin, that will change (on a computer screen, naturally) over time. Twin is inspired by its namesake, the Twin Cities. It is designed to respond to—what else?—the weather. In cold conditions, it looks formal and distant like Courier. In warmer weather, it grows into a round and playful script.

The split personality of this new typeface raises the question: indecisive or self-conflicted? Either way, it’s a clever invention that pays us the backhanded compliment of an avant-garde prank. We don’t know whether anyone will actually use this new font, but we like its impetuousness. Life can be pretty predictable around here, and nothing changes so fast as the weather. Maybe that’s why we talk about it so much. And now we have an excuse to write about it more, too.

Despite the barely noticed building boom that’s spreading faster than scandal through residential sections of downtown Minneapolis and St. Paul—especially along the suddenly vogue Mississippi River—there are no serious office buildings in the works. Where are the new skyscrapers? The last major high-rise built here was U.S. Bank Place, finished in 1992.

Perhaps a more salient question is why cities build skyscrapers in the first place. Manhattan, of course, has the excuse of being an island where the only direction to grow is up. But the rest of the nation (and the world) takes its cues from New York. Real cities have skyscrapers that act like lighthouses to the world: Behold, here is our city—visible from miles around—a safe harbor of culture and commerce. One should not simply make jokes about the phallic nature of skyscrapers—like rockets, they point in the direction of progress, and connote the beautiful violence of conception, creation, expansion, new frontiers.

But the age of skyscrapers is probably finished, especially in a place like the Twin Cities, where culture and commerce have quietly packed their boxes and moved to the suburbs, where the cardinal direction of expansion is out and away, where the architectural idiom is long and flat and depopulated. This flight has many well-documented causes. Mostly, businesses and people argue that it just costs too much to live and work downtown. But we’ve come to suspect that fear plays an increasing role. What are people so afraid of? Same as it ever was: death and taxes.

Because the city bears a disproportionate share of the poor and the needy, our taxes are higher and our schools aren’t as strong. The outer suburbs, which are still primarily bedroom communities, have virtually no social obligations beyond their lustrous public schools. More homes and fewer disadvantaged—these things make the suburbs richer and cleaner than the city. Then, of course, there is the widespread perception that the city is infested with violent criminals. Some of the most heinous violent tragedies have happened out in the exurbs in the past year, but one does not have to read between the lines to see that many thoughtful people automatically equate crime with inner city minorities and scofflaws simply expanding their turf. (Perhaps they make that equation because they know where to go to get their cocaine and companionship.)

Worst of all, this conflicted view of the city has traditionally translated into an unjust burden of taxes, fees, and levies. The thinking is that visitors coming to the city should help foot a higher proportion of the bill because they are a captive audience enjoying the unique amenities of the city. More and more, though, people are repelled by the higher costs of the downtown district, which can be as much as 20 percent higher, thanks to various tarriffs. They will simply stay at home in the burbs, which are being choked to death by agreeable national restaurant chains and big-box shopping clubs that are as native to Minnesota as milfoil.

Is life better out where there are no sidewalks? We can’t say. We’ll just continue keeping track of who precisely is itching to carry guns, and where all the road rage seems to be occurring. It’s not clear whether these angry, frightened people are heading into the Big Bad Cities or away from them.

The true north is Canada, of course. But we like to believe that we’re essentially a northern people. True, that knob on the very crown of our state qualifies as the northernmost point in the lower 48. The legend on the street has long been that a mapmaker zigged when he should have zagged, creating the Northwest Angle before getting his bearings straight and heading off again on the 49th parallel.

That myth is an oddly pleasing one, because it rings with pitch-perfect Minnesota modesty—especially for anyone who’s tried to find a portage in the Boundary Waters substituting map and compass for hard experience. Still, the myth isn’t very likely. The most common explanation as to how we got that little bump on our arrowhead is that anyone on the U.S. side who cared about where to draw the border back in 1783 wanted to include the northwestern-most point of Lake of the Woods, just in case it turned out that the mighty Mississippi River originated there. (The other theory—mundane but most likely of all—is that the cattywampus line was drawn in consideration of commercial fur-trading routes, the only germane travel that was going on in the area, decades before white men laid eyes on Lake Itasca.) The border was fixed for good in 1818, and never seriously challenged, until a few years ago. Back in the summer of 1998, Northwest Anglers were threatening to secede if legislators didn’t work out a thorny fishing-rights dispute with Canada. It just goes to show you that some of the things we hold most dear are subject, like everything else, to change. Borders move in funny directions, and to a Canadian, even Minnesotans are soft-headed southerners.

There was a time when Minnesotans could count on death, taxes, and summer road closures. Despite rumors, the grim reaper and the taxman aren’t taking a vacation this year that we know of. But we have noticed considerably less road work. This is gratifying, until we realize that the taxes we might have paid to sustain Crosstown Commons will now go to replace our prematurely blown struts and shocks. Funny how everything is connected, but the price stays the same.

We’ve enjoyed about all the fireworks we can tolerate on the roads and highways, and now there is no need to drive in any direction other than the nearest supermarket to buy the formerly illegal stash of firecrackers, Roman candles, and bottle rockets that used to be the pleasure of Wisconsin and South Dakota roadside merchants. Yes, we swell with pride when we consider the far-reaching social ramifications of recent legislative sessions.

We supposedly embrace change, at least when it comes to seasons. Summer is upon us, and if we can resist complaining about the heat and the bugs, we might remember the bitter cold that is but a few months behind us. (And ahead of us.) In the north, we have a growing season that would not likely sustain local populations. There would be long nordic faces indeed if we didn’t get sweet corn from Georgia in June and from Iowa in July.

The closer you get to true north, the less self-sufficiency you find. One would think this realization would encourage a sense of global, or at least continental, citizenship. But selfishness—like love and now fireworks—recognizes no borders. Is life in Minnesota becoming meaner? Does it worry you? We come from ethnic stock that hates to ask for help or directions. And if boorishness becomes our lot, we can probably expect a few more bumps on the head before we find our way.

Who says our new Republican majority isn’t capable of bipartisanship? After passing a law that encourages Minnesotans to carry guns (despite the fact that the only people demanding it were apparently carpetbagging NRA lobbyists and the usual exurban crackpots in tinfoil hats), the legislature is now passing a kind of quid pro quo for lefties. Feeling alienated from a government you didn’t elect? Feeling like the only way you can air your complaints is through lawn signage? You may be a good candidate for later bar-times!

It’s astonishing that this proposal, which would have yanked Minnesota into the modern age the first time it came up, oh, like 50 years ago, has taken so long to get serious consideration. (What’s next, car lots open on Sunday? Oh, the depravity.) Minnesota is among the last four states to require bars to close before 2 a.m. The tourism and convention industries have been arguing for decades that our pubescent curfew on nightlife was a repellant to business. While we can think of a few other reasons why Minneapolis might lose out to San Francisco, New York, or Santa Fe, a nice cocktail would certainly help us forget.

We live in difficult times, and they’re taking their toll on good people in powerful positions. Still, maybe a stiff nightcap will only exacerbate the problem. Our old friend Katherine Lanpher would love to forget her little scrape with the law in April, and we would too. All we can say is that the hardest-working woman in broadcast journalism has certainly earned the right to a few kamikazes at the end of each work-week. As far as we’re concerned, the only real crime here is that Bill Kling still hasn’t hired her a driver; we hear the Star Tribune’s Eric Ringham may be available. In fact, he hosted “Mid Morning” the other day, giving the star a well deserved vacation day. We think he’d make a great sidekick, judging by the way he handled calls on the touchy subject of… er, alcohol legislation.

The proposal to loosen up on bars is the perfect antipode to our shiny new conceal-and-carry law: So few people supported the latter, while so few oppose the former. Only a vocal minority argues against 2 a.m. bar time, mostly on some reflexive fear about drunk driving. We don’t get it. If people stay later in order to get drunker, and still drive—which they won’t necessarily do, according to various studies, but bear with us for a moment—it certainly would be to everyone’s advantage for that to happen when there are fewer people on the road, yes?

And another thing: We aren’t at all clear on why lawmakers would abandon the off-sale folks so quickly and decisively. If the main concern about loosening alcohol laws is the car-bar connection, why wouldn’t they encourage more people to imbibe responsibly at home—by making it easier to buy beverages at the package store? Why did they refuse to even consider the idea of extending the mandatory closing time for wine shops? One of the not-very-quaint aspects of life in the Twin Cities, as compared to other major cities, is the clumsy rush to the liquor store, which is often closed before dinner is even over. (On the other hand, it’s pretty encouraging to see that the growler may become legal—allowing takeout of the area’s great brewpub beers. So even if the packie is closed, maybe we’ll be able to run down to Herkimer or Town Hall for a to-go cup of the really good stuff, the way they do out in Oregon and Washington.)

Not to dis Mothers Against Drunk Driving, but the state’s restaurant and bar owners are a pretty muscular bunch with logic and numbers and now the state legislature on their side. Anyway, if we were really serious about putting an end to drinking and driving, then why does every bar around here have a parking lot? That’s a little like having a gun-rack in every car. Hey, wait a minute…

There’s a cute little gift shop on 42nd Avenue in South Minneapolis called Wasteland. There isn’t much to the place, and the hours are erratic. It seems mostly to be a storefront reserved for the editorializing of its eccentric owner. In lieu of a strong geopolitical or psychosocial opinion one way or another, the window celebrates the season—festooned, for example, with valentines in a good February, or St. Patty’s shamrocks for a peacetime March. Needless to say, the past six months have given the shopkeep plenty of inspiration by which to arrange her display.

Early in the year, we walked by and noticed the window was filled with dolls, toy figurines, and action figures from every walk of fantasy-life: everything from farm animals to stormtroopers to kewpie dolls. They were staging a protest, each holding a little tooth-picket sign with an anti-war slogan. A mutant ninja turtle held the largest sign, which acted as a kind of caption for the whole mob. It said “Toys for Peace.” And we misunderstood the slogan, at first, as a kind of Food for Oil corollary. What if Iraq had been carpet-bombed, we thought, with toys instead of cruise missiles and bunker busters? After all, if we want them to forcibly accept democratic capitalism, why not cut to the chase and litter the whole Middle East with Nikes and Coca-Cola and Nintendo?

A month ago, our friend Kurt Andersen visited Vietnam, just as the first bombs fell in Baghdad. Writing in the New York Times magazine, he found his vacation instructive. Seeing the bright storefronts, the sidewalks in front of Hanoi convenience stores stacked with 12-packs of western soda, Andersen had an epiphany: We may have lost the battle in Vietnam, but we apparently won the war.

That is, if winning means opening new markets for capitalism. But that war, much like this one, hardly proved the veracity of our geopolitical paradigm. (Not a single WMD turned up yet. Hmm.) If terrorism is the visceral response to American imperialism and hegemony in Arab lands, and if this war was about stamping out terrorism, then there’s a pretty good chance that we’ve won this battle but may yet lose the war.

On the other hand, we pride ourselves these days in courageous thinking. And we think Wasteland is onto something. What would happen—really?—if instead of approaching global problems with a hammer, we came at it with grease? If, instead of marching into Baghdad with bayonets, we brought Barbies? Think of the money, the diplomacy, and the innocence that could have been saved if we’d spent $80 billion on toys, clothing, and food for the Iraqis.

Then again, we’re not entirely convinced that raising the standard of living and putting playthings in their hands will help at all. Look at how Gopher fans made Dinkytown look like Basra—after winning a hockey game.

[From the May 2003 issue of THE RAKE]

Kurt Andersen seems to be a man of moderation in all things–with the possible exceptions of coffee and work. As we sit in an elegant anteroom of the Minneapolis Club, he is brimming with creative energy, seeing and making connections across vast intellectual territory. One Italian loafer bounces jauntily beneath the Georgian coffee table for almost an hour.

Andersen is best known as the founding co-editor (along with Vanity Fair’s Graydon Carter) of the celebrated humor magazine Spy. But that was just one chapter in a charmed media life. Andersen got his start writing for film critic Gene Shalit in the 70s. From there, he went to Time magazine, where he met Carter. The two left in 1986 to found Spy. After they sold the magazine in 1991, Andersen became editor of New York magazine. He eventually got the sack for being too tough on Wall Street, then worked in television, and as a staff writer at the New Yorker. By the late 1990s, he finally decided to attempt a novel. The result, Turn of the Century, was a bestseller. For his next act, he founded Inside.com, a respected web-based publication dealing with the media trade. Now, he’s jumped careers again, taking the host’s stool of the popular new PRI radio show Studio 360. The other day, Andersen came to the Twin Cities to defend his life, crediting his successes to “the amateur spirit.”

HANS EISENBEIS: You’d never been an editor before Spy, never a novelist before Turn of the Century, never a radio host before Studio 360, never a new media mogul before Inside.com. How do you distinguish the amateur from the dilettante?

KURT ANDERSEN: At any moment along this zigzag path, it requires being fully invested, fully focused on the things at hand. It only looks like jumping around and only turns out to be jumping around when you look back at what you’ve done. At the moment, you know, it’s I’m doing this thing with all my energy and heart. I believe that, but it’s also a way to self-justify how my life has turned out so far. I have been lucky. Even though I don’t love managing people, particularly, and I’m not managing anybody now, thank God, I think I did it pretty well, in that sense of seeing when someone has the combination of talent and gumption and hunger and all those things, to see this is a good person. The things I ran, I was always pretty careful to hire people that I wanted to hang out with. With Spy magazine and all the entities I’ve been involved in, part of the fun is having a club–a group of like-minded people to hang out with and have fun. If I had any management theories, which I don’t, that would be part of it. Also, in terms of managing people, the thing that drove me crazy always, and I tried to avoid or quash, was people who are at a place and they’re whining and grumbling. Obviously there’s always grousing at the job, but ultimately either be there and be happy, or don’t be there.

So you did a lot of hiring based on chemistry?

Absolutely. And mostly that worked out. And mostly I stay friends with people I’ve worked with, if that’s a measure of anything.

A lot of talent came out of Spy. For example, Susan Morrison was your executive editor at Spy for all those years, and now she’s one of the great pillars at the New Yorker.

When Graydon and I were starting Spy, we’d been in the Time Inc. bubble, where you don’t necessarily meet lots of other writers and editors at other magazines. I met Susan through a friend. She was like 26, she was working at Vanity Fair as an associate editor, and she seemed great, so we hired her. In retrospect, we were able to hire her and other people away from good jobs to do this nutty lark of a thing, it’s kind of amazing. Again, I suppose somewhere in the back of my mind it reinforces my new doctrine of amateurism. The kind of interlocking trails of the media world in New York, Graydon left Spy to become editor of the New York Observer, he left the New York Observer to become editor of Vanity Fair. Susan followed him as editor of the New York Observer, then got fired, then went to Vogue. I was, by that time, at the New Yorker and said to Tina Brown, “You should hire Susan Morrison,” and she did and she became my editor.

The amateur spirit is one thing, but not everybody gets asked to write about their vacation in the NYTimes magazine, or to host a national radio show. Obviously, a person has to earn his stripes first. Would you say you earned your stripes at Time magazine?

I’d say I earned my stripes in three ways. The first job I had writing for Gene Shalit was a great job, dues-paying, daily work. He then very generously got me this book contract for this little book I wrote. And so at 26, I had that kind of young writer hunger to have a book out of my system a little bit. That probably helped me get the job at Time, so yeah–the first ten years of my stripes-earning life, ending with Time, were kind of the proving-myself period. Even if you find yourself at a place that isn’t maybe your favorite magazine, or isn’t in absolute sync with your sensibility–like Time was for me–I had a great time at Time, because they liked what I did, and let me do a lot of things, and I worked with great people. But it was the daily, weekly work of, OK, I will try to make this thing I’m doing this week or this month as good as it can be, and be proud of it, even if Time magazine isn’t where I want to spend my career. And then my lucky stumble into doing Spy was some kind of graduation into personal, orbital velocity or something, I guess.

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.”

Even as the first production Hummers and Gelandewagens begin to roll on local streets, there’s a growing national chorus of self-righteous folks complaining about the sport utility vehicle. When Arianna Huffington and Jesus agree on anything, there’s clearly something afoot.

Sure, there is much to hate about these biggie-sized vehicles. And yet all this kvetching is ultimately an exercise in self-loathing. Literally every other new car driven off the lot is an SUV or light truck—and not because there’s been a sudden upswing in farm work and logging. When you attack the SUV, you attack American values and American business. You attack American soccer moms. The truth is, most people think SUVs are safer, roomier, and cooler than other more reasonable automobiles. Even though 9 out of 10 SUVs never leave pavement, we seem to be comforted by knowing what we could do, in a pinch. This all has to do with the American myth of (solipsistic) self-reliance in the (mostly extinct) wilderness.

Here in Minnesota, we’re caught in the middle. We tell ourselves we need SUVs because of the snow, but we’re skeptical of the leather seats and the DVD entertainment center. Perhaps this pragmatic investment in the national delusion is why our economy tends to be more stable, and why we drive more modest, utilitarian cars than our friends in New York, Miami, and L.A. Indeed, most of Minnesota’s moneyed class would rather be seen in a Volvo than in a garish Italian sportscar or a ridiculous Teutonic limousine. There are very few things Minnesotans hate more than a show-off.

Utility, durability, affordability—these are the magic words that are nullified by too many ostentatious options. Just so, Volvos have long been a popular ride in these parts, owing not so much to our Scandinavian roots, but to our prudence. Kjell Bergh, the jovial Norwegian who runs Borton Volvo, recently confirmed that his dealership sells as many Volvos as anybody in the country. Now that Volvo is officially offering an SUV—the highly anticipated XC90—Borton is already the automaker’s top-selling SUV dealership on the continent.

That’s a pretty neat trick, considering that very few XC90s have arrived in North America yet. The car was so much anticipated that more than 130 Minnesotans signed up last fall for the waiting list. Alas, tragedy struck. In December, the first XC90s from Gothenburg met with an untimely demise. The cargo ship containing 3,000 automobiles—including more than 300 new Volvos—capsized in the English Channel. It’s not clear if Jesus or Arianna Huffington intervened.

Bergh said people on the bottom of the waiting list may now have to wait until May or June before they can park their butts in the seat-heaters of this “near luxury” car. (It’s not the first or worst time Volvo fanatics in the Twin Cities have been sunk. Back in the 1970s, two major floods on South Lyndale ruined 55 cars on the Borton lot.)

We are reasonable folks, and our modest northern European roots show through in canny ways. Occasionally, we even have something to teach the rest of the nation. Perhaps our interest in these more reasonable, less ostentatious cars—known in the industry as crossover utilities (CUVs) and including vehicles like the Honda CRV, the Toyota RAV, and the Subaru Forester—can help ease the self-hatred that lately rises from the depths of a nation addicted to big cars, big oil, and big me.–Hans Eisenbeis