Author: Jeremy Stratton

Many years ago, someone scratched these words on the metal divider of a men’s room stall in a pizza joint near Hamline University in St. Paul: “Anonymous dialogue is a means of sanity.” The self-reflective statement could hold many meanings. It might look inward to the author’s motives—one can almost hear the sigh of mental relief—or to the motives of all graffitists. If not a means, is graffiti at least a measure of social sanity? Unfiltered and anonymous, it might be even more than a measure: a glimpse beneath the accepted veneer, a push to the boundaries of the collective conscious.
Or it might just be dirty doodling.
Garvin Davenport, the recently retired dean of Hamline University’s undergraduate school, and former chairman of Hamline’s English department, asserted that graffiti is secure text, emboldened by anonymity. “The writer can express … [with] no accountability or liability,” said Davenport.
Numerous studies of the subject trace “latrinalia,” as researcher Alan Dundes dubbed it in 1966, back to ancient times and across many cultures. In some cases, the content was remarkably similar to modern graffiti, like this message found in the ruins of Pompeii: “If you want to make love, ask for Attice. The price is 16 asses.”
A relatively recent survey of more than thirty local lavatories produced a fair sample of stall scrawl. The majority of the restrooms are now graffiti-free, thanks either to fresh coats of paint or ink-resistant walls, as at the Red Dragon on Lyndale Avenue in Minneapolis, where this macabre proverb once appeared: “Build a man a fire, and he’ll stay warm for the night. Set a man on fire and he’ll stay warm for the rest of his life.”
Much of the graffiti was of the classic, unprintable variety: F-bombs and sexual boasts or invitations, explicit come-ons and vicious threats, ugly racial insults and attacks on sexual preference. Some restrooms feature a mess of florid, unreadable tags that express little more than “I was here.”
Of the printable graffiti, there was a lot of talk about God and religion. Politics and September 11th were discussed, and even the pure language of mathematics proved controversial, with corrections to a hypothetical equation and this scolding: “No, man, you cannot divide by zero!” Among the more rarified offerings were posthumous quotations of Dorothy Parker, James Dean, Baudelaire (in French, no less), and even the occult-/Wiccan-/pagan-goddess figure Babalon: “But to love me is better than all things.”
Perhaps the most thought-provoking—and chilling—example was a message at the Hard Times Café: “I lost my love and now I can’t make it anymore. So I’m going home. And I’m ending my sorry life. P.S. I had fun here, live for me.” The note inspired a rare signed response, this reassurance from a well-known regular whose girlfriend had recently died: “I didn’t write this.”
Here is a sample of other notable finds, organized by topic. “(R):” denotes the responses.
Religion: There is no God. (R): Is that your final answer? (R): Let him in your heart.
(R): Heaven is true. Satan will eat science alive.
Inspiration: Things may suck, but we can fight against apathy and make ’em better!
The optimist is the person who’s really in revolt.
Politics: No war but the class war.
Terrorism: 911 was your fault anyhow, honky. (R): If it were me, I’d 911 your punk ass next. This plane is a tower bomb.
Comments on the graffiti or its author: Unthinking redneck. (R): Overthinking hipster activist college student. (R): Over analytical tough guy with almost no teeth left. (R): People with too much time on their hands.
Hip-Hop and metaphysics: High North Hip Hop celebrate the culture of intelligent life by respectin’ the conscious said-rappahz of the past, present and future 2 elevate the said-culture of hip hop to its rightful place both mentally and musically. Long live the re-evolution of man space & time.
Sex: Toussaintt’s hot PS I did him PSS Really multiple times PSSS And I kissed him and his name is on my shirt—biotch!
Bad poetry (men’s room): I do not know what I may appear to the world/ but I myself I have seem to be/ like a boy playing on the shore/ and diverting myself in now and then/ finding a prettier shell
Bad poetry (women’s room): I want to make your ego bleed … Let it sting so you’ll never forget/ The past pain/ Through midnight rain/ Insecurities pool on the/ Grimy floor … (R): Don’t quit your day job.
Health: The superior doctor treats when there is no illness.
Rehabilitation: Harry was here! Finally recovered from drug and alcohol addiction, Oct. 2006 (R): Thank God! Keep up the good work, Harry. Congrats! (R:) God isn’t real.
Reformation: I will only write nice things now.

Pipe smokers like to claim they live longer than nonsmokers. More than four decades after the fact, they’ll still cite a 1964 Surgeon General’s report on smoking, which stated: “Death rates for pipe smokers are little if at all higher than for non-smokers …”

That report and others that followed warned of negative health effects for practitioners, including oral and lung cancers, but there’s a state of mind—a “calm and objective judgment in all human affairs,” according to pipe smoker Albert Einstein—that enthusiasts claim the habit enhances.

“Pipe smokers are just more relaxed people,” said Rich Lewis, the owner of Lewis Pipe and Tobacco. “Especially compared to cigarette smokers.” Despite lean times, Lewis himself, a fifty-four-year-old pipe maker and tobacconist, definitely fits that description. Adorning the walls of his tiny shop, located on the street level of the historic Rand Tower in downtown Minneapolis, is an assortment of antique pipes. Tiny nude figures and stags’ heads are carved atop pearly meerschaum bowls amidst stranger contraptions made of metal and briar—the hard, ball-shaped Mediterranean burl from which most pipes are made. Cases hold the cigars, pipes, and tobacco that make up most of Lewis’ sales stock, along with some imported and domestic cigarettes.

The current seventy-percent wholesale tax on non-cigarette tobacco products has hurt business, as have the smoking bans that eliminated many cigar customers’ and downtown corporate accounts. Since laying off a longtime employee this past spring, Lewis has been running a one-man operation. Yet he seems to take all the glum news in stride, just as he did the chaos of relocating from Nicollet Mall last summer. This despite the fact that for five months, while his workshop was in shambles and he waited out construction next door, Lewis was unable to make a single pipe—his true love and talent.

Lewis hopes the new workshop, visible from the Rand Tower lobby, will interest passersby in his arcane craft. He also agreed that the Rand is a good fit for his business. The building’s Art Deco design evokes an era when tobacco was as ubiquitous as the fedora, another anachronism in the twenty-first century. Calling his business “kind of a dinosaur in that sense,” Lewis said he’d hate to go the way of the haberdasher.

Lewis has run the shop since 1972, when his father passed away. (His mother worked with him until 2001.) Nearly thirty-five years later, he is the authorized U.S. repairman for many of the world’s top pipe makers, and some believe he deserves a place among their ranks.

“When I tell you that Rich Lewis is the best pipe maker in the world, I am not blowing smoke,” quipped Tony Soderman, president of the locally based Great Northern Pipe Club and a pipe collector for forty-two years. “I have heard two of the world’s foremost pipe makers say the same thing,” Soderman added. One of them, Giancarlo Guidi, tutored the previously self-taught Lewis in 1986 and 1989 at Guidi’s Ser Jacopo factory in Pesaro, Italy (just above the calf on the Adriatic coast).

These days, the number of master pipe makers is dwindling, Lewis said. After World War II, European factories brought in train cars full of briar to craft hundreds of thousands of pipes. Now, those companies are gone or have whittled their ranks of craftsmen to a handful. Even the gathering of briar, which is done by hand, is a dying art relegated to the older generations.

Lewis says he’s not in danger of going out of business but admits it’s a struggle to be the only employee. In addition to tending the store six days a week, he fronts the Rich Lewis Band at night, playing covers and Lewis originals—New Orleans-style R&B and boozy, bluesy rock ’n’ roll—as an acoustic trio at Erte Restaurant in Northeast Minneapolis or with a full band and horns at Neumann’s in North St. Paul.

What keeps Lewis Tobacco going is a core of regular customers, both in-store and online, who buy cigars, pipes, tobacco, and related accessories. Les Pettit has been a Lewis patron for twenty years. “It’s the only place I can find this particular brand of weed,” he said. Pettit smokes Upshall “estate” (a fancy name for used) pipes, which Lewis buys and sells. The shop owner even makes custom mouthpieces to fit Pettit’s teeth. “I chew a pipe a lot,” Pettit said as he stepped behind the counter to weigh out his tobacco.

Neither man smokes cigarettes, an experience they differentiate from the fine feel of a burning briar bowl. Both spoke calmly, if not quite objectively, about the smoking ban and the tabooing of tobacco. Pettit referred to pipe smoking as a dying art, and Lewis admitted doubt about future demand.

“Will the boomers pick it up as they get a little bit older?” Lewis wondered. “I don’t know.” Despite that professed uncertainty, the question didn’t seem to raise his blood pressure much.

The call came on a cloudless weekday afternoon. “Hey, it’s Luther, I’m going to take off early and fire up the parabolic.” Needless to say, I rushed right over.

“Fire” is not exactly the right word in this instance, as the only flame involved in the parabolic’s operation is more than ninety-one million miles from Earth.

“Luther” is Luther Krueger, a crime prevention specialist with the Minneapolis Police Department, and “the parabolic” is the German SK14, which looks like a satellite dish four feet in diameter, a shining concavity of aluminum that reflects the sky above Luther’s South Minneapolis backyard.

Krueger collects and builds solar cookers. When I arrived, he was dropping potatoes into a pot held fast above the parabolic’s focal point, which can reach a thousand degrees.

The SK14 is the glittering gem of Krueger’s collection, but, an hour later, the yard was cluttered with other models. There’s the twenty-dollar Sunspot, made of cardboard and plastic that folds into a Trivial-Pursuit-sized box. The HotPot is basically a casserole-within-a-casserole surrounded by reflective panels. The Tulsi–Hybrid has a heating element for cloudy days and packs up like a red suitcase. One model, by the Sunstove Organization, is made out of salvaged aluminum lithograph plates from old printing presses.

In the two years since he caught the solar bug, Krueger has amassed about ten different models and given away a half dozen homemade ovens—the Hallacy model—built out of plywood, glass, and insulation. Most heat to between 250 and 350 degrees, and, with a little patience and sunny skies, can cook breads, beans, stews, casseroles, meat and fish, cakes, cookies and pies—anything you don’t need to sauté or fry. “Last summer, I put on twenty pounds,” Krueger said.

Krueger’s wife arrived home just in time for dinner—moist, delicious salmon, soft potatoes, and near-caramelized garlic in bubbling-hot olive oil. She’s all right with her husband’s hobby. “He could be rebuilding motorcycles,” she said.

For Mike and Martha Port, solar cooking is more than a novel way to bake their daily bread. The couple cooked their first solar meal—beef roast with potatoes and carrots—in 1988. Almost twenty years later, their locally based Solar Oven Society, a project of the non-profit Persons Helping People, has produced and sold nearly five thousand ovens in more than forty countries. The goal is to provide people in developing countries with a safe way to cook and pasteurize water without the laborious collection of fuel, related deforestation, and harmful fumes produced by open fires in poorly ventilated kitchens.

Martha Port told of women in Kenya who walk seven hours a day, six or seven days a week, to collect firewood.

To fulfill their mission, volunteer sponsors transport the recycled plastic Sport Solar oven to developing countries, sometimes one or two ovens at a time. The society has conducted four larger pilot projects that sent Sport Solars by the hundreds to the United Arab Emirates, Nicaragua, Haiti, and Afghanistan.

Currently, the society is working on a major contract that will deliver thousands of ovens, Port said, but full details have not been announced.

Port related her story of bringing the first prototypes of the current Sport Solar to Haitians on the island of La Gonave. Nine people were trained to teach others how to cook with the sun.

After the weeklong course, Port sailed to another village on the island to find that one woman from the training had walked home with the Sport and “was already telling a crowd of fifty to sixty people about it,” Port said.

“The environment, nutrition, health, economics—it’s win, win, win,” Port said.

Most of the solar society’s ovens must be purchased either with money or “sweat equity,” Port said. “Things that are free aren’t valued as much,” she said.

The Solar Oven Society is just one of the organizations worldwide preaching the gospel of solar cooking. While Krueger supports the cause, he is not sure he’s seen the perfect philosophy yet. He’d like to see a self-sustaining system, in which local people not only use but manufacture and profit from the ovens.

Back in the United States, Krueger lent me his Sport Solar, which I “fired up” in the backyard before hosting friends for the final match of the World Cup in July. The sun-cooked veggie quiche was a clear favorite over the pesto pizza prepared in a conventional oven. So far, though, my solar-cooking career has ended there; the tree cover in our yard limits me to mid-morning brunch. Ironically, it will take a little deforestation for me to truly join the ranks of the solar-cooking fanatics.