Author: Hans Eisenbeis

It would be nice to believe that a pajama party could be enough to ground airplanes. But we know now that silence in the skies comes at a terrible price. Last year, on a crisp blue-bird day, the planes stopped. The sky over Lake Harriet and Lake Nokomis was silent the way it hasn’t been in more than 50 years. The last contrails over the IDS tower became clouds and drifted away. It was eerie, of course, and when the planes started flying again a week later we wondered if we’d ever get comfortable with that horrible ripping sound. Was it the music of regular daily commerce, or the cacophony of some new, unspeakable horror? Or both?

We’re reluctant to dwell on this particular anniversary, because newspapers and magazines have been busy doing precisely that ever since it happened. A few weeks ago—on the 11-month anniversary of September 11, you know—the Star Tribune published a front-page, over-the-fold investigation with the astonishing news that no one is quite sure how to mark “the day we can’t forget.” Without self-consciousness the Strib wrung its hands in empty space. “When it comes to plans for commemorating the first anniversary of the attacks,” wrote puzzled reporter Deborah Caulfield Rybak, “the only thing that seems certain is the relative uncertainty about how to proceed.”

In uncertain times, the passage of time is our only certainty. It’s as if our new world disorder is a premature baby, its anniversaries measured in days, weeks, and months. Perhaps because we were so entrenched in a hollow form of journalism for so long—so little real news that our papers began to read like magazines and our magazines began to read like catalogs—we can forgive ourselves for the crisis coverage that really hasn’t let up in 12 months.

Still, no matter how much we are nagged by the popular press, most anniversaries mean nothing because they are as hollow as they are random. This month, for example, marks the 10th anniversary of the Mall of America’s opening. It’s not clear why we’re marking time out in Bloomington. True, the last resort of a slow news day is to look at the calendar and sift through the press releases for, say, the 50th anniversary of La-Z-Boy furniture, the centenary of Lindbergh’s birth, or the three-week mark of the Mayor’s Commission on Navelgazing. But there is something essentially wrongheaded about celebrating the Mall’s birthday—not because there’s anything wrong with the Mall. It’s just that the Mall is emphatically not about memory and meditation. We can’t even remember where we parked the car.

There are, of course, interesting points of comparison in these two anniversaries—and not just because we can pursuade ourselves that the Mall would make an attractive target. “Celebrating a decade of fun!” is a slogan not obviously connected to “Infidels Out of the Holy Land!” But we had better get used to these non sequiturs. We are more connected than we realize, to each other, to the world at large. Whether we believe that is less important than the simple fact that others do. This makes us both powerful and vulnerable—which is disconcerting indeed to the modest and self-reliant Minnesotan.

It’s good to remember: There is a place for fun in your life. But now we know there’s a place for terror, too. And if our only response is to count the passing hours, there isn’t much to look forward to except the day the clock stops.

Chicago has long been the unofficial capital of modern architecture in the U.S. But the Twin Cities certainly have opportunities to compete in the noblest art. With high-profile expansions and demolitions underway (the hammer always comes with a claw), there’s been a small parade of internationally known architects arriving here with plans tubed underarm. It’s a fine thing to live in a city where there is sufficient vanity and money to indulge in an ambitious new Guthrie Theater, an expanded Walker Art Center, a face-lift for the Children’s Theater, an augmentation for the M.I.A., and a reconceived public library.

Unfortunately for these kinds of projects in this part of the world, it’s often an exercise in dilettantism. When steering committees propose new buildings, the same short list of trendy architects ends up on the back of the envelope. For a while there, it seemed as if Frank Gehry was the golden goose, to the point where his grocery lists were winning local admiration. Let’s remember I.M. Pei too, who essentially pasted a “kick me” sign on an entire city’s rear-end with that cheap tiara atop the U.S. Bank building. (One can only hope that the same people who removed the original Guthrie’s pretentious façade are looking up in the sky with wrecking balls in their eyes. If we’ve learned anything here it’s that architecture is emphatically not a permanent art form. Architecture in the Twin Cities is slightly less archival than a typical black and white photograph.) Now, of course, Michael Graves is in fashion. Ephemeral times call for finite artists. There is nothing inherently wrong with an architect who spends much of his time designing can openers and toilet plungers.

Even when they reach for real historical continuity and solidity, city planners manage to make decisions that are as predictable as they are dubious. Consider the bloated and precious “Frank Lloyd Wright” bridge, recently finished on Third Avenue over I-94. Given the Twin Cities’ tradition of vainglorious bridge-building, it came as no surprise that city guardians wanted to build something special for the “Avenue of the Arts” initiative. (If the lakes of Minneapolis ever revert to swampland, we could justly change our epithet to “the City of Bridges.”) But lots of eyebrows went up when Minneapolis announced that it was commissioning the first Frank Lloyd Wright bridge ever to be built. Eye brows twisted further when Minneapolis revealed that this would actually be a Wright-inspired bridge. Now that it’s done, Minneapolis realizes that no Wright bridge has ever been built for the simple reason that Wright’s bridge designs are, by and large, some of the ugliest, uninspired drawings the man ever put on paper.

Our impulse to make inspired buildings and bridges is admirable. But we are plagued by our own limitations. When it comes to public building projects, no one seems capable of thinking past a few one-syllable surnames. Most of the public is well aware of Frank Lloyd Wright, and vaguely conscious of his importance in the canon of middle-American architecture. Some have actually made the effort to seek out what remains of his overrated portfolio—such as the wholly unremarkable gas station in Cloquet, which is unique in the same way as the new Third Avenue Bridge; its unsightliness is rare indeed.

It’s one thing to commission a world-class architect, and quite another to commission a world-class building. But to reanimate the dead is the most unnatural and unnecessary trick of all.

The great polar explorers Ann Bancroft and Liv Arnesen
go where they’ve never gone before—your backyard. So this
is the Next Frontier: the web, schoolkids, and Lake Superior

I’m shivering uncontrollably and I think I might puke. Gray waves roll and swell on Lake Superior, a stiff cold wind blows from the east, it looks like rain—or maybe snow. Even in late May, the North Shore doesn’t want to warm up.

I’m with Ann Bancroft and Liv Arnesen, who are paddling along in sea kayaks, making their way from Grand Portage, which they left 10 days ago, down to the port of Duluth, which they’ll reach in about two hours. There is a heavy swell on the lake, it’s true. But with the wind at their backs, Bancroft and Arnesen are actually surfing the four-foot waves, their kayaks carving the crests and their paddles barely dipping for balance. They make it look fun and easy. Frankly, I’m having a hard time keeping up with them, even though I’m in a 30-foot fishing boat. I’ve asked the captain to stop talking about the various colorful episodes of seasickness he has witnessed.

Bancroft and Arnesen are toiling like this because they’re on a new expedition, hoping to kayak most of the way from Lake Superior to the St. Lawrence Seaway. I’m toiling like this because it’s a rare opportunity to accompany the world-famous explorers in action. For the first time in their professional careers, they’ve decided to undertake an adventure through well-known, well-charted, and fully settled territory. In fact, for the next six weeks, they’re going to have a hard time finding a place to camp that isn’t someone’s front yard, and one of the more serious dangers they’ll face is the possibility that too many people will approach them with coffee and donuts. How did two of the world’s most accomplished polar explorers end up in this absurd situation? There’s only one way to find out—ask them.

Later, I’m waiting in Duluth’s stunning Great Lakes Aquarium, under a 50-foot glass-encased waterfall. (We parted ways earlier; I found a cheap, warm place to have a little breakfast and settle my stomach. They paddled.) Ann and Liv have a scheduled appearance here, where they’ll meet a group of fans—eco-groupies, I guess you’d call them—who have gathered in the lobby in little huddles of polar fleece and hiking boots. When Bancroft and Arnesen stroll in, there’s a round of applause. In person, the great explorers strike me as precisely what they are: gym teachers who have given up coffee and gone on permanent sabbatical. Even at the age of 46, Ann Bancroft practically vibrates with nervous energy. She is short (around 5’5”) and solid and looks like she prefers her oatmeal straight. Undoubtedly when she was a young turk working the climbing counter at Midwest Mountaineering on the West Bank, she was perceived as an adrenaline junkie—someone not really happy until she’s logged a dozen miles on the trail, maybe put up a new line on the climbing walls of Taylor’s Falls. With age and experience, she has become a person with zen-like focus and unseen reservoirs of energy. Like the great cyclist Greg LeMond, she has used maturity to her advantage, recognizing the value of pacing yourself for the long haul. Patience is an acquired skill, and it’s one of Bancroft’s secret weapons that put her beyond the reach of most world-class endurance athletes. She’s incredibly centered, like a small, powerful catapault waiting to be triggered.

Liv Arnesen is the perfect professional complement to Bancroft. She’s a tall, slightly stooped, 48-year-old Norwegian, with weathered skin that betrays the fact that she’s spent far more time outside than in. She has long arms and fingers, and looks a bit trollish. Paradoxically she seems less high-strung than her American partner, but at the same time less patient. It suits her personality that she was the first woman to ski solo to the South Pole. She carries herself with stoic self-assurance, she has the air of a woman who would prefer not to talk but to do—and involving anyone else in the doing is an automatic liability.

June is the month when Twin Citizens get out and really enjoy their parks in staggering numbers—especially our chain of lakes. More than 5.5 million joggers, skaters, dogwalkers, cyclists, and ersatz nudists visit our city parks annually. That’s nearly twice as many visitors as Yellowstone National Park gets each year. We can thank our city founders for laying down the law. The lakes are public property, and should ever remain thus. In Minneapolis, private estates directly on the waterfront are an abomination. (The egalitarian tradeoff is that the park system was laid out so that there is greenspace within six blocks of every residential home.) Except for a shameless pocket of fiefdoms on the southeast shore of Cedar, every lake in the city is surrounded by uninterrupted parkland. Theodore Wirth was a champion of this noble vision.

In the big pavilion in the sky, superintendent Theo is undoubtedly fretting about the development on the western side of Twin Lake (known in the vernacular as the home of “Bare Ass Beach”) in the park bearing his name. The city of Golden Valley and a rogue’s gallery of profiteers have conspired to sell this prime greenspace to the highest bidders, who are dedicated to building—what else?—yet another outbreak of McMansions bejeweled with No Trespassing signs.

The Hidden Lakes development is not news. Five years ago, one lucky homeowner named Jean earned the distinction of occupying what is probably the first new house built on the shores of a Minneapolis lake for 100 years—her own private paradise. The elysian metaphors get lots of play in Hidden Lakes Development literature, which describes the peninsula between Sweeney and Twin lakes as “indeed, a private paradise. Imagine your own estate on this precious parcel dotted with majestic oaks and maple with sunset views to the west.” We can well imagine. That’s because, in point of fact, this is a public paradise, accessible to anyone with the courage to make the hike from the Minneapolis side, through the wildest stretches of Wirth park. The city of Golden Valley recently approved the peninsula for development of private homes (“starting at $1.5 million”) on this “precious parcel.”

Sharps like Barry Blomquist and Robert Schmid have cashed in on the parkland inheritance, having bought the 100-acre parcel fair and square. “So what?” say their critics. That their side of the lake is not in Minneapolis is no argument—it’s simply a testament to the fact that avarice, unlike love, recognizes borders. Less than a dozen homeowners easily trump a century-old ethic simply because the line between the enlightened and the benighted happens to bisect this beautiful lake.

It’s a done deal, so get your bids in now. But there is hope for the tree-huggers. Plans suggest that the new estates will be built on the Sweeney side, and the forested shores of Twin will escape the blade. Hidden Lakes owners will undoubtedly stake their claims on the west bank of Twin (indeed, they’re already trying to change the name from “Twin” to “Hidden”—which seems an exercise in counterproductive publicity), but they’ll have the unpleasant job of dealing with an intransigent population of park users who aren’t always burdened by normal expectations of “Minnesota Nice.” What’s worse, Minneapolis may require a 10-foot easement on the shoreline providing for public access (as they do on Cedar Lake, much to the chagrin of homeowners there who would prefer you didn’t know that). This may insure the expansion of “Bare Ass Beach” all the way around Twin Lake, into the backyards of Golden Valley. To paraphrase Hemingway, the moon also rises.

It’s astonishing. Every spring, round about May Day, the world remembers to wake up. After months of cold and barren winter, the ground softens, the sun rises a little higher, the grass greens, the crotch-rockets line up around Lake Calhoun, and we’re back on our way—resurrected and ready to join the parade. The Midwestern memory is a funny thing. It’s often connected to morality, and it’s a function of our nordic demeanor. One of the dirty little secrets about Minnesota Nice, which is really just a smiling variety of stoicism, is its corollary. We’re nice to a point—a point way beyond reason, as a matter of fact. But once you’ve crossed that line, you will never be forgotten or forgiven.

Brenda Oldfield crossed that line. In March, the puffed-up former Gophers basketball coach was poached by Maryland—a superior basketball program at what is otherwise one of the nation’s most ignorable schools. Last year, she arrived in the Twin Cities with a powerful hairdryer, lots of empty language about dream jobs, and a mantra of absolute loyalty. And then she left on the same platform. She turned tail and sold her wares to the highest bidder. She now joins the infamous ranks of Norm Green, Chuck Knoblauch, Lou Holtz, and everyone else who ever violated our sense of decency and loyalty. Her next appearance in the Barn should be a real hoot.

For some reason, we Minnesotans find it easiest to hate sports figures. Even our most deplorable, self-serving shysters—the politicians—are forgiven and forgotten without a second thought. Brian Herron and his cronies aren’t hated so much as pitied. Rod Grams is the butt of a few harmless jokes, but no one wastes any energy actually despising the poor duffer. John Grunseth? You don’t even remember him, do you.

If you forget, then there’s no need to forgive. When Mark Yudof announced a few weeks ago that golf and men’s gymnastics may be released from the University’s stewardship, we had mixed feelings. Golf is not a sport. It’s a game, and we say good riddance. In the grand scheme of things, it belongs somewhere between bowling and billiards. Men’s gymnastics, on the other hand, is one of the most noble amateur sports, dating back to the cradle of democracy in Greece 2,500 years ago. The U of M’s program is 100 years old.

Although Gopher gymnastics coach Fred Roethlisberger is kind of a pushy jerk, we’ve excused him. We realize you don’t rise to this level in college athletics without being a pushy jerk. It’s the nature of the business, and we can’t think of one Gopher coach we’d actually sit down with and have a beer. (When Gophers coaches rallied round a podium last month to fight the cuts, it frankly gave us the willies seeing so many elastic waistbands in one room.) But with these venerable traditions lying in the dust, folks will quickly forget about Fred, even though his bullying ways have produced dozens of national champions and All-Americans in his 30-year career.

Fred undoubtedly feels like a martyr. Why couldn’t they pick on, say, J. Robinson, the belligerent coach of men’s wrestling who has been bad-mouthing Title IX for years? The coach who has been complaining that equal funding for female sports is anti-male? His would be a more perfect martyrdom, since these sacrifices never would have been made in the Good Old Days. Robinson can neither forget nor forgive Title IX, despite the fact that it clearly hasn’t prevented his wrestling squad from capturing its second straight national championship.

May Day is a holiday with long traditions among pagans and the proletariat—the kinds of people who, incidentally, make good college coaches. But memory is a powerful, two-edged thing. Here in Minnesota, where memory is indelible and forgiveness is rare, the Maypole might easily be mistaken for the whipping post. And some deserve the lash more than others.

April is, among many other things, a time for fools and taxes. Not coincidentally, it’s also the time of year when we’re forced by law to take a break from fishing. Your Minnesota angling license expired just in time for you to get your ice shack off the lake, and you can’t renew until May.

A little mandatory distance from rod and reel is a good thing. It’s like a secular Lent: Giving it up for a little while allows us to reflect on how important fishing is to the Minnesota soul. Confronted with increasingly brazen terrorist attacks and health insurance premiums, we find nothing soothes the spirit like staring into the waters of Cedar Lake, say, or Lake of the Isles. As you know, Minneapolis got its awkward name thanks to the 12 highly fishable lakes within city limits. (Whoever proposed combining the Greek polis with the Lakotah minne remains a mystery. Apparently they weren’t too proud of the silly word.) Still, few people have taken the time to plumb the depths of this metaphor. Fishing is all about revelation. Sometimes you send down your worm, and up comes a thing of beauty. Other times, well… the less said the better.

Witness the recent flap over Jackie Cherryhomes. After being chased out of office last December, the former city council president made fish meal out of most of her files from the Brian Herron years. We’re assured this kind of vandalism often happens when bullheaded incumbents lose their jobs. Still, we can’t help feeling like a fishing expedition onto Cherryhomes’ former hard drive might have pulled up some real whoppers.

Although the Star Tribune chose not to run their fishfinder through Cherryhomes’ waters, they have discovered something else. A March 3, 2002 story claims that “Every day, untold thousands of people fire up their computers and log on” to something called “the internet” where self-publishing mavericks create an astonishing array of “web logs.” Apparently they caught wind of this trend because one of their own—the redoubtable Mr. James Lileks—is one of the nation’s most prolix bloggers, and other newspapers around the country have noticed. We’ve long wondered why the Strib chooses to isolate their columnists in the remote backwaters of the Metro section. But it hadn’t crossed our minds that no one at the paper was actually reading their best-paid staffers. It occurs to us now that www.Lileks.com may actually be a cry for help.

Also noted: KARE-11 news was recently awarded the National Press Photographers Association top honors. In reporting this happy news, Strib reporter Darlene Pfister captures KARE-11 photojournalist Gary Knox in action, on the scene last year where two boys were feared to have been swept away in an icy river: “Over the rush of the water and the scraping of a backhoe,” writes Pfister, “Knox’s earphone caught a softer sound. It was the voice of Olivia’s police chief, consoling the father of one of the boys… He zoomed in as the chief stood close to the grieving father. ‘If you want to be with your wife, that’ s a good idea,’ the chief said gently, his words captured by the wireless microphone Knox had attached to his uniform hours earlier… In living rooms across the Twin Cities, that scene made the news report personal. It’s typical of the intimate, storytelling moments that metro-area viewers have become accustomed to in their broadcast news.”

We’d call that a typical case of eavesdropping, but who’s complaining? The Rake itself was recently the subject of a KARE-11 mini-documentary and a Strib investigation, which certainly stroked our egos in the right direction. We storytellers run in packs, and we know that sometimes a carefully placed eavesdropper is precisely what’s needed. You might call it poaching for good publicity, but these lunkers pretty much jumped right into our boat.

Was Bob Dylan a genius in the rough when he arrived at the University of Minnesota in the late 50s? Did he show signs of incipient greatness to those who hung around with him in the streets and cafes of Dinkytown? The Rake dug up this ancient history and discovered a thriving community of people who were there–who are here, 40 years down the highway.

It was fall, 1959 when 18-year-old Robert Zimmerman arrived from Hibbing, Minnesota. Bobby had always been interested in music, growing up on the Iron Range. He’d learned first to play the piano, then as a teenager, he picked up the guitar. His favorite music was the edgy, still-crazy rock ’n’ roll of the 50s—music that was at that time still considered a radical off-shoot of jazz. He stayed up late at night listening to the radio, in the crystalline air of the Far North, picking up stations from the deep, sultry South that played rock ’n’ roll, jazz, and the blues. Bobby was obsessed with music. A good middle-class kid with a prankster streak, he loitered at the Hibbing record store, picking through the slim offerings and harassing the clerks about this album or that single, laughing at the incompetence of these behind-the-counter nitwits who’d never heard of Leadbelly or Little Richard. As his abilities grew on piano and guitar, he started several rock ’n’ roll combos with his high school friends.

Already, Bobby had set his sights well beyond Hibbing and the Iron Range. Summers spent at Jewish Camp had hooked him up with friends who lived in the Twin Cities—among them Larry Kegan, who shared Bob’s love of pop music and had his own doo-wop group in St. Paul. In his later high-school years, Bobby Zimmerman took trips to the Twin Cities to visit his metropolitan buddies. Naturally, they turned him on to the best new music, the finest record shops, and even the worldly coffee shops that had sprung up around the University, where the beatniks hung out and played chess and solved the world’s problems. And the girls—Bobby was already crazy about the girls.

Picture the time and the place: In 1959, students across the country were still reeling from the age of McCarthy, still edgy with the constant threat of nuclear war, hanging like a thunderhead on the horizon—the real threat of what might happen if the Cold War suddenly got hot. The University of Minnesota, like the University of Wisconsin in Madison, increasingly became a gathering place for students who were beginning to question the dangerous world they were inheriting. Flo Castner, who was a student at the University in 1959 and a Dinkytown habitué, says, “You’ve got to remember what McCarthyism did to intellectual freedom, and independent academic research. All University research fell under the Defense Department, and everything was supposed to fit into our grand military and political schemes. Real research was dead. There were loyalty oaths. That was the climate.” Even though the Vietnam war was still three years away, there were plenty of reasons—beyond the eternal one of simply rejecting all authority—for students to feel anxious and indignant. And thanks to the baby boom and the GI Bill, there were more kids than ever before arriving at University. This equalizing effect meant that more middle-class and lower-middle-class kids were coming to school. Musician and longtime Dinkytown fixture Dave Ray remembers tuition was pretty affordable too. “The U. was a land-grant university, and anybody who could pony up the 75 bucks a quarter for tuition could go.”

A significant proportion of students were now coming from working-class families, and they brought a world of strange, fresh ideas with them. Bobby Zimmerman actually fit the stereotype of the traditional student pretty well. He was from a respectable professional family, albeit one from northern Minnesota. Ironically, even though Zimmerman hailed from the hardscrabble open-pit iron-mining country, he wasn’t really that sort of person at age 18—though he’d spend the rest of his life trying to become that kind of person. Or pretending to be that person. In 1959, though, he only knew that he liked rock ’n’ roll, and he seemed pretty sure of himself.

The summer before he arrived in Dinkytown, Dylan actually traveled to North Dakota to audition for Bobby Vee’s band. Not yet a star in his own right, Bobby Vee had a regular need for backup touring musicians, and when Bobby Zimmerman showed up in the summer of 1959 calling himself “Elston Gunn,” he let the kid play the piano for a couple of gigs. But they soon parted ways—Vee wasn’t overly impressed with Zimmerman. Anyway, Zimmerman was on his way to the big city.

When Bobby arrived at the University in the late summer of 1959, he was a typical Jewish boy ready to matriculate in general studies like Theater Arts and Astronomy. Of course, he’d brought along his guitar and his delusions of grandeur. But he still respected the wishes of his parents, who wanted him to be a good student. Zimmerman signed up for classes and made plans to rush Sigma Alpha Mu, the Jewish fraternity at the University where at least one of his cousins had rushed. But like so many abortive freshmen before him, Bobby suddenly and spectacularly went to seed. And like so many University freshmen before and since, the corrupting influence was Dinkytown.

***

You can’t make sense of the Dinkytown scene of 1959 without revisiting its center of gravity: The 10 O’Clock Scholar. First established on the University’s Ag School campus over in St. Paul, by 1959 it had moved to a location at 418 14th Avenue SE. Today, this spot is occupied by a Hollywood Video parking lot. But in 1959, the Scholar was a small hole-n-the wall coffee shop that held no more than a couple dozen people comfortably. For a while, it was owned by a character named Clark Batho, but soon it was bought by a young man from Rochester named Steve Oleson and his wife Annie Mossman. Oleson was an accomplished flamenco guitarist, and when he bought the Scholar, he had a natural affinity for folk music—a growing interest among a certain crowd of students who were hanging around the University’s business district.

In the beginning, it wasn’t a massive scene like punk rock was in the 1980s, or the rave scene in the 1990s. “It was a small scene,” says John Pankake, a longtime resident of Dinkytown and folk enthusiast. “Everybody knew everybody else. I knew a dozen or so people, and if you count people I was acquainted with but didn’t know, like Dylan, I probably could have named about 20 people who were interested in folk music.” In fact, Pankake had himself been turned on to folk music by a guy who lived in his boarding house—Paul Nelson, a friend who’d seen a Pete Seeger concert, got turned on to folk, and started spreading the word. Nelson himself became a fixture in the Dinkytown folk scene not only as a fan, but as a photographer. He shot the covers of several albums by Minneapolis folk artists—including Koerner, Ray, and Glover’s first two records—and he edited a folk newsletter.

Editor’s Note: this page was modified from its original form to clarify a reference to Clark Batho.

If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, think of The Rake as a work zone. Slow down, give us a brake. We aim to fill the potholes, maybe add another lane. If it’s all going to a hot place in a hurry, we want to make the ride as smooth and enjoyable as possible.

This is a rich town. There aren’t all that many American cities that still support two daily newspapers, two city magazines, and two alternative weeklies. Media as a topic of media, of course, bores us all to tears. Bear with us a moment, though. Like pro sports teams, art museums, light rail, and an openly bald governor, a vibrant local media is one of the things that helps us believe we matter, helps us believe the Twin Cities are something more than the last stop before Seattle.

Just so, this town may not need another magazine, any more than it needs thousands of square feet of new development right outside our door in downtown Minneapolis. Indeed, recent numbers suggest that vacancy rates in the metro area are the highest they’ve been in five years. Nevertheless, the building boom continues. We guess we’ll take our cues from the developers: We aim to be the biggest and the best, and the vacancy rate will become someone else’s problem, yeah? Perhaps it’s the patriotic thing to do.

Seriously, though. Magazines like all other enterprises need an excuse for conducting business. We felt that most of the worthy publications already in print here were for somebody else. Edina housewives, in particular, seem to be a well-served readership. And a handful of Gen-Xers who somehow are still stuck in the bar scene without serious jobs or families still have their Lovelines and refugee-of-the-week stories. But the rest of us–folks who live, work, and play in the city, folks who have a passion for life that goes beyond the area’s terrific crème brulee and cosmetic surgeons, folks whose politics have never been as predictable as the newspapers–we don’t have a periodical to read and enjoy. It’s not a commonly known fact to the general public, but there’s nothing in the International Code of Print Media that says reading and entertainment have to be mutually exclusive–it just happened that way.

Our hope is to rake up some intelligent and entertaining stories for ourselves and for you. Our intentions are good, and the road is smooth, and who cares where it goes, anyway? It’s the journey that counts, not the destination, right?

One recent evening at a Walt Disney World resort called Caribbean Beach, the tikki bar was entirely empty. The only customer turned out to be an off-duty bartender. Like all other Disney World employees, bartenders here are officially called “cast members.” This particular cast member talked shop and flirted a little too loudly. He and his attractive on-duty colleague discussed how to locate the surveillance cameras (they’re hidden in the bookshelf speakers) and how to give away unauthorized freebies (zip the keycard and void the transaction).

It’s peak season at Disney World–that’s the one in Florida, not California–and 51,000 Disney employees are celebrating the centenary of Walt Disney’s birth. It’s not clear how many tourists are celebrating with them at Magic Kingdom, Epcot, Animal Kingdom, and the handful of other Disney theme parks here in Orlando. Judging from the short lines and vacant seats at Space Mountain, attendance is down. Way down.

Many guests have the misimpression that Disney World itself is 100 years old. It isn’t. A cast member in a blue jumper tells me that Walt Disney himself personally cut the ribbons here in 1952. But I instinctually distrust everything at Disney World, especially the histories.

It’s true that security is a little tighter since September. Friendly security guards rifle through backpacks, purses, and fanny packs at the entrances to every park. But one senses there are too many Disney targets in too many Disney places, tucked into too many acres of Florida swampland, to attract a serious terrorist plot. Cinderella’s castle, which is essentially a 600-foot façade on a cramped one-room gift shop, somehow doesn’t seem like much of a prize in the global war on terrorism.

On the other hand, Disney’s two new cruise ships are sitting ducks. At nearby Port Canaveral, security is waterproof and vacancies are rare. Since launching their luxury Carribean cruise business in 1999, Disney Cruise Lines has been a resounding success. Scores of sun-starved Midwesterners like me buy all-inclusive packages that admit us to the theme parks, then we climb aboard the Disney Magic or the Disney Wonder for a three-day cruise to the Bahamas. Each time we make port, we are required to bring our keycards and photo IDs, and our bags are X-rayed. A bomb-sniffing dog wags its tail.

One port-of-call is Castaway Cay, a 1,000 acre Caribbean island which Disney purchased a few years ago. Formerly known as Gorda Cay, it was an uninhabited drug smugglers’ stopover with an airstrip and not much else. Disney dredged a deep-water harbor for their ships, which weigh anchor here twice a week. At each anchorage, about 2,500 slightly overweight professionals from Minneapolis, Columbus, and St. Louis are disgorged, steering their children to Disney’s exclusive beach, playground, and restaurant.

On the paved trail to this island paradise, Disney has also built a rustic two-room shack that serves as Castaway Cay’s official post office, a bureau operated by the Bahamas Postal Service. Here, you can buy real Bahamian stamps that feature a beautiful image of the cruise ship from which you just disembarked. The Postmistress, Miss Carmita Roker, says there are 40 permanent residents of the island. How many of these are Disney cast members? All of them, she says. “Except me. But I don’t live here.”