Author: Jem Casey

Dick Clark is not pleased about the headlight situation. Oh sure, he’s driven his fair share of luxury automobiles, both domestic and European. He has even leased various Japanese models, though he finds the lack of headroom troubling. But every day lately, Dick finds he’s spending more and more of his valuable time thinking about how best to carry out his crusade against the proliferation of very bright headlights. Unread copies of Billboard accumulate in a growing column on his nightstand. He isn’t keeping up with pop culture like he should, and close friends say they’ve noticed a few gray hairs at his temples. He lies awake at night, vacantly watching the LEDs dance on his clock radio. In the morning, exhausted, he makes his coffee without turning on the kitchen radio. He does not make his customary scan of both frequencies in search of his friendly rival, Casey Kasem. For the first time in his life, there are dark circles developing under his eyes.

Why do they have to be so bright? Why is the light so intensely white-hot? Is this a further sign of man’s inhumanity to man? Dick Clark is deeply troubled. Now that Daimler and Chrysler have merged, he feels certain that very bright headlights will be installed on virtually all automobiles. This, of course, is unrealistic and pessimistic. But there is little doubt in Dick Clark’s mind that cheap, aftermarket headlights will be made available to drivers of older cars. These will not be quite as bright, but they will have the same painful blue nimbus seen from certain angles. He’s already noticed them retrofitted on used minivans and economy cars.

Technically, Dick is not losing sleep over very bright headlights. He’s resigned to the fact that they are here to stay. Instead, he is obsessed with what his own personal response should be. He feels a vague sense of powerlessness, even though he is one of the most influential pop culture icons ever to hold a California driver’s license.

The fact of the matter is that this is not the first time Dick has toyed with the idea of using Bandstand as a bully pulpit. Several years ago he was very unhappy about high levels of mercury in the environment, due to sneakers with batteries in them. In the seventies, he felt that so-called “earth tones” were unflattering to most complexions. In the fifties, he was convinced that canned beer was a sure sign of social declension. But his producers always prevailed. Why would he want to needlessly alienate his fans and his potential advertisers? Bandstand was about uniting the kids, not dividing them! A professional would surely save such personal “issues” for private after-parties.

Frankly, though, Dick is at his wit’s end. He has tried everything. At first, he would flash oncoming cars. Unfortunately, they often flashed him back. When you are flashed by very bright headlights, you don’t soon forget it. Once, Dick saw multicolored lights in his peripheral vision for a long time afterward. Dick Clark is a very conscientious steward of the corporal territories of Dick Clark (particularly those in the Northern Hemisphere), so you can imagine how disturbing this must have been.

Dick tried honking. He quickly realized this brought him the wrong kind of attention. Other drivers thought he was trying to get them to notice him—Dick Clark! A grown man with his own television program! And yet still eager for every last bit of public recognition, no matter how petty! He felt certain this would lead to a backlash in his popularity, or at least an insinuating article in the tabloids. Not very helpfully, his agent advised him to avoid driving at night.

Perhaps it was desperation that finally pushed him into playing “chicken” with drivers of cars equipped with very bright headlights. Most sane people would say that at this point Dick Clark had crossed the figurative line. His producers would have killed him if they knew what he was up to. Luckily, he came to his senses. In theory, of course, it would not have been an unpleasant death for a timeless legend like himself—Dick Clark finally dead! Foul play suspected! Yet he was repelled by the thought of leaving such a big tonsorial job to even the most accomplished of mortuary beauticians.

In his troubled dreams, Dick Clark entertains fantasies that do not conform to the expectations and practices of the waking world. He uses laser-sighted weapons to frighten inconsiderate drivers (he would never actually fire). With a very powerful transmitter, he commandeers their car radios and shames them in full surround-sound stereo. He spends hours in the hot sun of the San Fernando Valley, putting up false detour signs that say “Deduction for Business Use of Halogen Headlights, Next Exit.” In the mercifully muted twilight between dreaming and waking, Dick Clark is afforded a precious few moments of extraordinary happiness each morning.

With Martha Stewart behind bars, I thought for a moment that it might be a good opportunity to launch Jem Casey Living Omnimedia, but I see now that it would never work. I’m not exactly clueless, but my tastemaking skills are, well, suspect. Everyone already likes what I like. I’m not talking about motorcycle jackets and Radiohead, I don’t even like those things anymore. I’m talking about brick houses on dead-ends, I’m talking about four-wheel drive, I’m talking about charming Scottish people. I’m talking about fine woodwork and artisan cheese. I’m talking about babies. Micro-brews. Everybody likes this stuff now, and I’d like to know why.

There was a time when a person had his preferences, and they were wildly unique. There was no mainstream. No one wanted to own a Pacific island who didn’t already own one, and the going rate was reasonable. There was a handful of beery old men who couldn’t find anything better to do than go fishing. They were burdened with lakes clotted by bass, walleyes, and muskellunge.

Now that I wish to go fishing, all the best species are on the verge of extinction. There is hardly room to dip an oar into the boat-choked lakes. Now that I wish to buy a Pacific island, the pickings are slim, and they are priced right out of my range.
In the old days, a person could be knighted and could own an estate with a gothic castle. A person could occupy himself with hunting foxes and making social calls. A person could drink claret, for example. I wanted to be that person, but now I cannot.

Reality TV? I should feel vindicated, but I feel ripped off. For years I’ve been saying how much I would enjoy seeing celebrities put in uncomfortable or embarrassing situations on unscripted television programs. I am pretty sure I was the only one who fantasized about six Miss America contestants competing in bikinis to eat a thermos of fish guts. If anyone had asked me what I’d do with my own TV network, I’d have said recreate Lord of the Flies on a desert island with real people competing for a million dollars in a kind of psychological chess game of secret alliances and obstacle courses. Now everybody says that!

And another thing: My longstanding disgust with small dogs. As the popularity of toy poodles, schnauzers, and Chihuahuas increased, my distaste sharpened. Give me a Black Lab or a Saint Bernard any day of the week. So what breed wins best of show at this year’s Westminster Kennel Club? A Newfoundland, for God’s sake—not my favorite, but a damn big dog.

All of a sudden everybody’s yakking about Mars. I knew about Mars a long time ago. Months ago, I said, “Why can’t our administration come up with a credible intergalactic diversion from pressing domestic and international issues, the way JFK did? Why are we still operating on the outdated platform of the space shuttle, when new worlds await?” And then they go and do it! I swear, they have bugged my home, or they are reading my email.

Someone has to fly all over the world and stay in all the best hotels and motels. Someone has to cover the Tour de France for the New York Times. If there is a waiting list of people who will get to do this, it is very long and I am near the bottom. My position on it will not carry over into the next two or three lifetimes or however long it would take for me to get “the call.”

Even reincarnation offers no hope. Being born has gotten tremendously popular. The Hindus have admitted that new souls are being minted like there is no tomorrow. Life itself is suffering from strong inflationary pressures, I’m afraid.

This is a personal statement from Jem Casey. It is not issued by or on behalf of Jem Casey Living Omnimedia, Inc.

A few weeks ago, we were blessed by a yearly event that has come to symbolize all that’s good and noble about the human spirit. United Health Group CEO William McGuire received his annual stock option grant. On Valentine’s Day, Minnesota’s best-paid executive notified the SEC that he has received an option for 650,000 shares of United Health Group stock. This tidy sum is a small token of the shareholders’ esteem and gratitude. Recently, the entire token of their esteem has been in the neighborhood of $50 million per year.

That’s a lot of tokenage, and we wondered: If McGuire actually had a heart, and it was infarcted, how many transplants could he afford? (In the absence of a heart, we guess it technically would be considered an implant.)—Jem Casey

McGuire’s Annual Income (2000–not including unvested options): $54 million

Average Cost of a Heart Transplant/Implant: $200,000

Number of Heart Transplants/ Implants possible per year for McGuire, paid in cash: 270
Number of major medical policies that could be issued for $54 million 45,000

Number of uninsured Americans 40 million

A few years ago, Gerard Cosloy detailed the reasons why we shouldn’t encourage voting. The founder of Matador Records (and legendary Gen-X curmudgeon) argued convincingly that the last thing this nation needs are legislators put into office by the same people who have made Eminem, Spongebob Squarepants, and Miller Lite what they are today. Is that an elitist point of view? Of course it is. Is it correct? Probably. Look at it this way: Do you really want MTV’s viewership deciding the fate of Social Security?

Of course, it’s a matter of degree. Even the most informed political junky can have a few blind spots. For many years, we entered the voting booth with both a sense of purpose and angst. Why were half the names on the ballot completely new to us? Why hadn’t we seen significant public debate among the major-party candidates for dog catcher? What exactly did the State Auditor do besides run for office every four years? Why were regular, law-abiding citizens–most of whom haven’t seen the inside of a courtroom since The People’s Court–being asked to elect judges?

One response–and we think it was more common than anyone lets on–was to vote for a woman, all else being equal. (Consider this salient truth: The single largest minority or “special interest” is women, who at about 51 percent of the population are actually a numeric majority. So why do women hold less than 10 percent of all elective offices?) Well, we know now that there are plenty of women who are just as capable of wildly misanthropic policy positions as men.

The lesson? If you don’t know for whom to vote, then don’t vote. Simply casting a ballot is not enough. Better you don’t vote at all, than vote for someone arbitrarily on the basis of party affiliation, the color of her lawn signs, or the number of vowels in his surname.

But if, on the other hand, you simply don’t know where to vote, try here.

Tyler Ellwood is a sales executive for WorldCom. He works at the company’s Golden Valley offices. A few weeks ago, he was ready to go on a fishing trip to the Boundary Waters with his father and a couple friends. As they drove up to Ely in a white minivan, he frequently checked his voice mail messages. “A big truck just pulled up in front of headquarters,” he said. “It’s full of empty boxes.” The company had just announced its intention to layoff 17,000 employees. Since he is in sales, he felt confident that his position would be spared. But he was prepared for the worst.

In any case, Ellwood wouldn’t know whether he had a job until he returned from the Boundary Waters. He was concerned—but not so concerned that he couldn’t tolerate the spotty cell-phone coverage he was getting as they made their way through Cloquet. He said his goodbyes to his wife and his 1-year-old daughter, looking forward to four days in the wilderness. “I’m going to turn off now, Sweetie, and save my battery,” he said.

When they got to Lake One at the end of Highway 169 (“If you go the wrong way, the other end is in Texas,” said the outfitter dryly), Ellwood was disheartened by the flies. As it turned out, it was a terrible year for tent caterpillars—also known as army worms—and, ecosystems being what they are, that meant it was a terrible year for “friendly flies,” big black insects that don’t bite. But they swarm all exposed flesh.

The lakes out of Ely were doing a brisk business in humans too. Ellwood spent most of the first two days looking for campsites that weren’t already occupied, and it became clear that most parties were settled in for indefinite stays. His group grew disgusted with the situation, and they were forced to camp illegally on an island with no latrine or fire grate. Although Ellwood caught a nice Northern the first morning, he released it. It was the only fish he caught that might have made a meal. And there was no relief from the flies.

One might have escaped them in a good tent. Ellwood brought along a nifty one-man tent with good walls and reliable netting. “Nothing personal,” he told his dad, who’d brought a two-man tent. “This is new and I haven’t slept in it yet.” But the unusual heat, reaching high into the 90s, made it unbearable to be inside a tent of any size. Soon it became clear that the campers’ only real option was to jump in the lake, and spend most of the day floating in their life preservers where the heat and the flies were kept at bay. “This kinda sucks,” said Ellwood. Out of the water, it was unpleasant. Even so, no one was eager to throw in the towel and cut the trip short. Aside from the ready availability of cold beer and cheeseburgers, the prospect of going back to civilization still didn’t seem very appetizing.

Once a year the Prospect Park neighborhood opens the doors of the Witch’s Hat Tower. This 1912 landmark is visible from many vantage points in the Twin Cities owing to the fact that it sits atop one of the highest points within city limits. It was built because the homes perched in the immediate vicinity lacked water pressure at the turn of the last century. Whatever else may go on there in the way of witches’ covens and warlock’s circles, the tower’s interior is occupied mostly by a 155,000-gallon water tank that is no longer in use.

When it was decommissioned as a water tower in 1952, and struck by lightening a few years later, the city proposed tearing it down. By then, the community had come to view it as an irreplaceable icon that lent the neighborhood much of its charm. In a rare case of preservation defeating the urge to demolish, the city relented. The Tower was restored to its present state of glory. Before long, it bristled with radio antennae and cell-phone relays discretely positioned on, in, and under the hat.

Of course the tower’s main attraction is to children and childish adults who view it as a castle garret for the witch who lives there. (Only the most pedantic parent will insist that the tower is, in fact, named for the witch’s hat.) And the opening of the tower—which is secured by three doors and six locks—is accompanied by an impressive street fair that draws Twin Citizens from as far as you can see. This year, revelers stood in long lines not only to file up the narrow spiral staircase inside the tower, but to buy brats and upscale focaccia sandwiches, to watch a startling belly-dancing exhibition, and to commission face-paintings.

The Minneapolis Police dutifully manned a bike registration table. It was the only vacant attraction, and across the way, next to a moon-walk fully inflated in the middle of Malcolm Avenue, rowdy teenagers horsed around with an unregistered unicycle. Another small group of beltless boys tumbled head-over-heels through the steep underbrush below Tower Hill Park, screaming as if they were actually falling, or as if they were in a Jackass video. Heads turned.

Not all the horror was an act. Inside the tower, on the dark and dank and not entirely safe approach to the viewing platform, small children clutched at their parents. The narrow stairway would not admit two large adults passing, and many were disheartened at how hard the climb turned out to be. One woman failed to heed warning signs about low clearance, and she burst a wall-mounted light bulb with her forehead. There was a loud pop, glass fell, and children screamed. The bouncer at the door, a kindly retiree representing Prospect Park’s neighborhood association, speculated that admitting the public once a year may be too frequent.

A cold river rushes by, and cottonwood trees have toppled in along the bank. On a sandstone bluff, 20 feet up, there’s a dancing Shiva carved deeply into the rock. The Hindu God of Destruction has been defaced by kids, farmers, fundamentalists. When Jim Langford carved it 15 years ago, a few Faribault evangelicals mobilized. They xeroxed flyers and put them in farmer’s mailboxes throughout the area. They claimed the “paganistic idol” would sicken cattle and kill crops. Theirs was a decidedly Old Testament view of things.

Each summer, Langford still makes the trip south to visit his handiwork at Scott’s Mill, a piece of Isaac Walton League land halfway between Northfield and Faribault, on the Cannon River. “Shiva was dancing on the head of ignorance,” he said recently, still relishing the truth of it. “But not anymore. Some farmers came with a shotgun and took target practice.” Years later, Langford saw the head of ignorance again—at a friend’s house. The friend had found the fragment in woods near the bluff, and brought it home to the safety of his garden.

Langford is a tall and energetic man, a happy father with fraternal twins in first grade. He travels five days a week, giving financial seminars in Atlanta, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. In 1986, he was a senior at St. Olaf College. Through the arcane knowledge of upperclassmen, Langford learned about Scott’s Mill— a remote but favored location for the usual college bacchanals. And in a long-since extinct program that was on the leftiest fringe of a liberal arts education, he fashioned a senior project that encompassed American studies (think Huck Finn), Asian religion, and three-dimensional art. It all came together in the eight-foot-in-diameter carving.

The outrage of the locals was palpable. The Faribault Daily News was moved to remark on the public outcry. “Not since the city council considered cat-leashing has a story created such a stir here,” one reporter exclaimed. Religiously-inclined folks bridled the most, while the secular objected on the grounds that Langford had vandalized park property. Then again, Langford’s handiwork was simply the latest and most accomplished in a long tradition of local vandalism. Sandstone, which yields to pointed sticks and strong fingers, practically cries out for the initials of teenagers.

Langford spent six months working on Shiva, through the spring of 1986. He built his own scaffolding, waded through meltwater, and spent about six hours a day on the project. As final exams and graduation approached, he even hired an assistant. But the aide couldn’t handle the work, and suffered an episode of neurosis that involved staring at the sun for long periods of the workday. Believers might have called it a demonic possession. “He had issues,” explained Langford with the benefit of hindsight.

Despite a decade and a half of abuse, Shiva still dances on the sandstone bluff. “Oh yeah, he’s really in there for good,” said the artist, who received his baccalaureate degree as his reward.

Minneapolis and St. Paul are self-confident enough, thank heavens, to recognize that the Windy City has some things to recommend it. Chief among them, the Chicago style hot dog, one of this magazine’s life forces. In recent years, there have been just two vendors in the Twin Cities from whom a hungry fellow can reliably purchase this toothsome delight.

First things first: Understand that a Chicago dog bears little resemblance to your usual ballpark frank. There are a number of highly refined and specific ingredients–a recipe and alchemy that must strictly be observed. First, of course, the dog itself. It must be a Vienna Beef hot dog, with natural skin casing, the kind of high-quality wiener that provides the “snap” which repels the uninitiated and simpleminded. Then there are the toppings. Sport peppers, tomatoes, relish, onion, and yellow mustard. Pickle spear. Celery salt.

Jerry Petermeier, former owner of grubby West Bank institution The Wienery, says the sine qua non of an authentic Chicago dog is the poppy seed bun. It may seem a trifle, but poppy seed buns are actually available from only one local distributor. And without the poppy seeds, in the common vernacular, you got squat.

The other day, Pat Starr was trying to pass off non-poppy seed buns. The Weinery’s current operator is a sturdy and smiling man of thirty-something who takes orders from behind the grill, and shouts greetings to the constant stream of regulars coming in the derelict door. He wears a stocking cap in all weather. “This isn’t really a Chicago dog,” he said apologetically. “But I ran out of buns.”

The next day, Tommy Dennis tut-tutted in mock disapproval. He and his brother Bobby run Joey D’s in South Minneapolis, a “Chicago style eatery” which native Chicagoans treat as a local consulate. Wearing a Blackhawks away jersey over his barrel-shaped chest, Tommy said there’s no single ingredient that makes a Chicago Dog authentic, because “you gotta have it all.”
And it’s all gotta come from Chicago. Pat Starr gets his stuff–the celery salt, the day-glo Chipico relish–from a local distributor that specializes in Windy City fare. But the Dennis brothers rent their own semi and drive it down to Chicago every couple of months. “This is the real deal,” said Bobby Dennis, with a photo of Mike Ditka peeking in agreement over one shoulder, and Stan Makita peeking over the other.