Author: Julie Caniglia

It’s hard to explain—it was just something I slid into,” said Andy Rempel. He was describing his job as a fashion stylist, which is akin to defining style itself. After all, what is style? Rempel offered an explanation. “I think of it as playing with ideas of what’s appropriate and expected,” he said. “You twist things, not to offend, but just to have fun. Maybe you have a gown that’s appropriately appointed with jewelry, and then the shoe is a little off. Maybe it’s the color or height, but it’s something to make the whole look a little awkward, uncomfortable—not normal.”

His own ensemble on a recent steamy day was a good example. He had paired standard Gap cargo shorts with a cream-colored football jersey, notable for its Playboy logo, layered over a pale blue T-shirt. And his shoe—a louche version of a loafer from Dolce & Gabbana, in brown leather and denim patchwork, worn sans sock—did indeed make the outfit. It was an astute mix of upscale, average, and downmarket. Naturally, Rempel has his favorite boutiques, but he also loves thrift stores. His favorites are Everyday People, the Unique and Savers thrift stores in Columbia Heights, and the Goodwill in Roseville.

Ultimately, Rempel said, style is a matter of fit, both with one’s personality and one’s body. “Especially here in the Midwest, women need to take a good look at their bodies and figure out what works.” He targeted ill-fitting bras as the most common fashion faux pas among women: “Ladies need to run, not walk, to the closest good lingerie department and get properly fitted!” In general, women buy clothing that’s too tight, but Rempel also sees slender types in baggy sweatshirts who “think tight clothing is sexual, which it doesn’t have to be.”

As a tip to avoid potentially regrettable purchases, Rempel recommends getting opinions from other shoppers, not friends or sales clerks. “A friend doesn’t want to hurt your feelings, but strangers who aren’t trying to make a sale—they’ll tell you the truth.”

There was one last, mystifying issue Rempel was able to clear up. Who pays full price? He smiled. “A lot more people than you think.”

—Julie Caniglia

Whaazzzaahhp?! It erupted from my niece with as much guttural bass as a five-year-old could muster, accompanied by a grin and a vigorous shake of the head. When asked if she heard that at school, she began hopping around the living room. “Everyone’s saying it!” she said. “The big kids are saying it, the little kids are saying it—everyone!”

This was several years ago (that catchphrase from a beer ad, you might recall, peaked at the millennium), but while reading Leslie Savan’s new book — Slam Dunks and No-Brainers: Language in Your Life, the Media, Business, Politics, and, Like, Whatever — I realized that my niece had defined what Savan calls “pop language.” It wasn’t just that “everyone” was saying “Whaazzzaahhp?!”; it was also her exuberance at being part of a large phenomenon, one that involved “the big kids.” That transcendence is a major factor in making a word or phrase go pop, says Savan. Its usage has to spread like wildfire, crossing boundaries of age, class, race, and ethnicity, until even the naysayers are drawn, almost involuntarily, to say it (probably with a slightly contemptuous inflection).

Having been exiled to the island of cast-off catch phrases, “Whaazzzaahhp?!” now dwells with the likes of “Show me the money!” and “Talk to the hand” (one hopes that “Don’t go there” is en route). But, of course, potential popisms are bubbling continuously into the collective consciousness, auditioning for their moment in the spotlight. They have varying life spans, just like celebrities. So, rather than creating a compendium of zeitgeist-y verbiage, one that would become dated faster than The Preppy Handbook, Savan aimed to give her book a longer shelf life (oops) by examining the whys and wherefores of pop language.

The main characteristic that distinguishes pop language from mere slang or jargon is widespread popularity. The corollary: Pop is often slang or jargon that has jumped out of its niche. Savan devotes a sizable chapter to showing how, from “bogus” to “411,” slang that was coined or popularized by African-Americans is “all over mainstream pop talk like white on rice.” Once it ascends to pop status, a phrase can pass through several stages, according to Savan. The crest of its popularity is inevitably “followed by a period of soft ridicule for overuse.” Then there’s the irony stage—people will say it, but only knowingly. After that, if it’s still around, the phrase becomes “like a Raid-resistant roach—and it sheds the irony and begins to seem as indispensable as, say, Do the math or 24/7.” Not all pop language makes it that far, but if it does (consider “awesome”), then it has attained the status of “a thought—or more accurately, a stand-in for a thought.”

Although that might sound like the definition of “cliché,” pop is also distinct from those linguistic shortcuts. The two can overlap, however; “fifteen minutes of fame” is both pop and cliché, Savan says, though as a “senior pop phrase” it has more “jolt” than its cliché siblings (“by the skin of his teeth”). That jolt is essential to pop language—maybe adults don’t hop around when they say “Fuhgedaboudit,” but it does provide a feeling of power, or at least iconoclasm, in the face of dehumanizing cubicle farms, telephone labyrinths, and big-box retailers. It shows that the speaker is in the know, up to speed, down with things.

Not that you have to be down with the history of a given word, even if Savan’s tracing the evolution of various pop terms, including “Yesss!,” makes for some of the most interesting parts of Slam Dunks. In the real world, etymology is for losers. Like, who cares that “fifteen minutes of fame” comes from one of Andy Warhol’s prophecies, or that pearls come from grains of sand? What matters is their lustrous allure, and what they say about you. Except that pop language doesn’t have to say much of anything—which makes it, like pearls, suitable for just about any occasion.

By way of a long but interesting digression into the structure, forms, and rhythms of sitcoms, Savan makes the point that, just as these shows are designed to flatter and excite audiences rather than challenge them, we translate those forms into pop language to flatter and excite each other. She describes pop phrases as “verbal viruses” with the “ability to flash-freeze thought and stun our imaginations with commercial confetti.”

I have a friend who is a stylist in New York; it’s part of her job to read magazines, from the trashiest of titles (In Touch Weekly) to more esoteric fare like Italian Vogue and Surface. When I’d visit, she’d often load me up with back issues, which I’d browse on the way home. Sitting on the subway one evening, I pulled a copy of Lucky, “the magazine about shopping,” from the pile. Like so many others, I had derided this publication as brazenly tacky. I figured I’d flip through it in less time than it takes to get through InStyle—ten minutes, max. But something pulled me in. I spent a good half-hour with that mag. I even did something that I knew, even as I was doing it, was superficial and shameful. But I couldn’t help myself. From the magazine’s signature page of stickers, I pulled off one that read “Maybe?” and attached it to a page of shoes.

I managed to sidestep a full-blown affair with Lucky; that one encounter sated my curiosity. But now its much-anticipated spinoff, Domino, “the shopping magazine for your home,” has arrived. I impulsively grabbed it off the newsstand the other day, maybe because this publication somehow seemed a little more, well, seemly than its sister dedicated purely to shopping (for yourself). So cut me some slack—we all make rationalizations about our indulgences. Domino got tossed in the back seat of the car, where a friend who is not a stylist scoffed at it. The next day, I saw that he had plastered the magazine with its own signature stickers—“gift,” “renovate,” “entertain,” “decorate,” “garden”—mocking me, needless to say, in the process.

Why all this discomfort over a magazine? Partly it’s because Domino and its siblings (Condé Nast also publishes Cargo, for guys) are actually “magalogs.” They are the unholy spawn of catalog and magazine, the perfect synthesis of advertising and editorial. Or is it merely advertorial that’s super-light on the ’torial? Regardless, magalogs are a publisher’s dream. After launching in 2001, Lucky quickly became one of the most successful publications of any kind. Revenues rose from $23.9 million in 2001 to $127 million in 2004, and naturally, dozens of imitators were born. Even more telling is the degree to which other publications, especially fashion titles, women’s magazines, city magazines, and even newspapers, have incorporated tantalizing displays of products with virtually no copy—a magalog trademark—into their pages.

But my discomfort goes beyond the status of magalogs in the publishing industry. While Lucky is devoted to personal goods—clothing, jewelry, toiletries—Domino literally hits home, a much broader target. Consequently, it tweaks all sorts of nerves that are tied to class and taste and materialism. It provokes insecurities and, yes, snobbery. Ultimately, it throws into relief the question of how and why we develop desires for certain things, and blurs the line between wanting something and having it.

Let’s address the “C” word first. People in the very highest income brackets don’t subscribe to House Beautiful or Metropolitan Home; these are “aspirational” magazines for the rest of us to drool and dream over. But Domino is not aspirational in the same way as these other home magazines. Nor does the magalog appeal in the traditional “how-to” sense, as in how to make cool stuff for cheap, which is a mission of the spunky Readymade, a hip magazine published in San Francisco. Domino, like Lucky, is shamelessly, unapologetically, how-to-buy; it’s stuffed with “actionable” suggestions, to use a term that marketers swiped from the legal profession. In the magalog, the how-to-buy and the aspiration merge, which is to say that in many ways, Domino is devoted to showing the masses how to ape the upper classes (to un-mothball a little Marxist jargon).

For example, the premiere issue shows us regular Janes how to buy wallpapers and fabrics that are usually sold exclusively “to the trade”—i.e. to interior designers, who pass on the goods, with a healthy markup, to the people wealthy enough to hire interior designers. “Scalamandré, Brunschwig & Fils, Fortuny… What’s a girl without a decorator to do?” So reads the caption for an illustration of a young woman who, like the little match girl, looks longingly through the window of a decorator’s boutique. Assuming for a moment that these kinds of magazines actually lead to better-informed shopping sprees, Domino shows us how to beat a system set up largely to maintain a certain elitist cachet, and how to obtain some Scalamandré of our own to show off at cocktail parties. It facilitates our step up from aspiration to a quintessentially American, or at least Gatsby-esque masquerade. (Just hide the credit card bill from your husband.)

Whatever other problems we might have with the extremely rich, there’s nothing wrong with the fact that they are different from you and me, except for how resolutely we want to deny it. If Brunschwig & Fils is destined to become available to the masses, maybe by launching a lower-priced line at Sears, then dollars to doughnuts you can bet that the rich will have long since abandoned it for other exclusive goods, which no doubt will be featured in upcoming issues of Domino. In this sense, the magalog falls within that branch of consumer capitalism that manifests itself as a game of hide-and-seek between the rich and those who wish to be.

Many of the images in Domino are partially obscured with arrows and notes (“stash napkins and silverware here”) rendered in computer-generated script. It comes across as a blatant attempt to create “personality,” even though Domino is not about personality—it’s about choice.

A case in point is the “Accessorize My Kitchen” feature, with its picture of a kitchen and a computer-generated note, “has anyone seen my personality?” Presto—the eye is directed downward by an arrow—three choices are offered: “retro cheer,” “French flea market,” and “California rustic.” (This raises a question that has been popping up ever since strawberry kiwi shampoo was invented. Why do we choose California rustic—shunning California modern—even if we live in Illinois?)

It’s the job of Domino’s stylists to “source” objects and arrange them into themed displays, thereby showing us ways to bring “personality” to our homes, or to make them look less humble than they really are. They put together sleek plastic goods and a sparing use of chartreuse for “retro cheer,” and mix up ceramic, bamboo, wood, and stainless steel for “California rustic.” In magalogs like Domino, stylists are often called “editors” or “directors” (a concession to traditional magazine titles), but the fact is, stylists are shoppers, albeit professional ones. This is why they “source,” and then we, following their inspiration, shop.

Stylists, then, do fulfill a real need, other than dressing movie stars for the Oscars and making guest appearances on cable. Certainly you may choose to live your own life, but if you’re interested in cultivating a particular lifestyle—and if you’re a girl without a bona fide decorator—then a stylist will be useful in the endeavor. With so much stuff out there, someone has to show us the things that we really want. The genius of Domino is that it shows these things as various types of visual lists, dispensing with everything extraneous except for basic key-word descriptions, and, of course, shopping information. Its pages are loaded with eye candy. In fact, it’s such a pure formula that the shopping itself—the acquisition of the thing—becomes in most cases irrelevant. Looking is enough. Domino’s main job, of course, is to sell itself, and it will probably do that exceedingly well.

Last year, in a book called The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less, the psychologist Barry Schwartz put forth the insight that we are shopping more than ever, but taking les
s pleasure in it. Acquiring goods has become a chore because we are overwhelmed by choices, sometimes to the point of paralysis. Shopping has been perverted into a dysfunctional practice, what with shopaholics, shoppertainment, shopping out of anger or depression, and so forth. Domino, it could be argued, offers shopping as a vicarious experience, in the same way that travel magazines and pornography provide attractive, affordable, and easy alternatives to the real thing.

With actual shopping, displays of abundance are crucial. They’re eye-catching and they make individual items look desirable. (Newsstands finally caught on to this; often they display a dozen or so copies of one magazine, arranged in a grid.) Domino translates this basic merchandising technique to displays of abundant choices. In a charticle on bed linens, for example, the objects of desire are laid out in a grid on a white background, like so many butterfly specimens. The X axis shows five fully made beds; the Y axis breaks down their components: euro square, pillowcase options 1 and 2, flat and fitted sheets, blanket/quilt, and duvet cover. (Who knew it was so involved?)

The other way to show abundant choices is to create still-lifes. Confronting Domino’s seductive spread of twelve chartreuse vases, it’s simple instinct to scan, then pick out the one that appeals most to you. It doesn’t matter if you don’t actually like chartreuse, or vases. It doesn’t really matter if you buy one, either—you have been shopping, if only in your mind.

When it comes to being overwhelmed by choices of things we don’t want or need, Domino is part of the problem—but it also wants, as so many magazines do, to be part of the solution. So its premiere issue includes an article on how to shop at art fairs. A potent example of abundant choice, art fairs have proliferated in the last five years as glamorous and profitable spectacles. Wealthy folks jet to New York for the Armory Show, or Miami for Art Basel Miami Beach, or Basel itself for the original Basel Art Fair; over a long weekend, they might drop tens of thousands of dollars on pieces for their various homes.

True to magalog style, the Domino article includes a spread of ten artworks, branded as “smart decorative” by the author, that had been on view at the AAF Contemporary Art Fair (the upscaled incarnation of what was formerly the Affordable Art Fair). Which one will be yours? Of course, they may already be sold (there’s a caveat at the bottom of the page); even though these artworks are unique (or, in the case of prints, quite limited), they are displayed no differently than the linen hand towels on page fifty-eight.

In truth, there’s something appealingly up-front about this. Art is a product, after all; otherwise we wouldn’t have terms like “art market” and “art object.” It’s the emphasis on the shopping, rather than the art, that’s bothersome. On the other hand, it would be silly to expect Domino to teach us the art of falling in love with art, or the value in cultivating one’s own taste for linen hand towels, or any other type of object. These aspirations can’t be achieved by flipping through a magazine, but that won’t keep Domino’s stylists and readers from trying.

At a recent screening of The Assassination of Richard Nixon, the director, Niels Mueller, showed up for a question and answer session. It quickly became apparent that his questioners didn’t care so much about the film’s story as what it was like to work with Sean Penn and how Mueller got his movie made. How did he get the money? How did he get the script to Penn? How did he get producers on board? Mueller was modest, and almost sheepish, because as it turned out, the story of making his film was a remarkably trouble-free Hollywood fantasy, except that it was true.

A few days later, an essay about the current state—or rather, statistics—of moviemaking backed up the unlikelihood of Mueller’s experience. Writing in the New York Times, Adam Leipzig, who runs National Geographic Feature Films, contended that while making a movie has never been easier, getting it seen is harder than ever. A lengthy string of dispiriting numbers served as evidence: submissions to the Sundance Film Festival have nearly doubled from six years ago, from 1,325 to 2,613; the number of scripts registered at the Writers Guild of America rose sixty percent between 2001 and 2004, to fifty-five thousand; Guild-approved agencies that will look at unsolicited screenplays receive about four hundred each month, to which they respond positively to just one. “The numbers may be against you,” Leipzig concluded, “but hang in there. Because in Hollywood, the dream of being number one keeps the whole town going—even if it happens only 0.3 percent of the time.”

The dream, of course, isn’t limited to Hollywood. Last year, an NEA study reported that “the number of people doing creative writing increased by thirty percent, from eleven million in 1982 to more than fourteen million in 2002”; at the same time there was an overall decline in literary reading. What’s more, “the number of people who reported having taken a creative writing class or lesson decreased by 2.2 million during the same time period.” How many of these unknown writers hope to get a novel published, only to find that the “slush pile” of unsolicited manuscripts at publishing houses is obsolete, as most editors simply don’t look at anything that doesn’t come to them from an agent? As for getting an agent—well, see the statistics above for screenwriters. The plight of Miles Raymond in the film Sideways was all too real; no wonder everybody’s blogging.

Aspiring writers may be eschewing instruction, but enrollment at visual art schools is up. The number of undergraduate students at the University of Minnesota has risen from 297 in 1997 to 478 today. At Carleton College, students must compete to get into studio art classes—for spring term, some 260 students applied for 180 slots. As for pop music, the fact that American Idol is now a cultural fixture should say enough. What about alt rock? Forget stats; as my genuinely bewildered mother once asked, “Why is everybody in a band these days?”

“Self-expression in fashion always triumphs, regardless of circumstance.” So proclaimed a vodka advertisement in a recent edition of the JC Report, a fashion e-letter. “Suffer for your art, embrace the sacrifices—do anything to do what you love,” it continued. “There’s an unwavering compulsion to get your message out there … . Unleash your creative spirit. Unleash the Raspberri.” (Unwavering compulsion … Unleash the Raspberri … Is this some unwitting statement about Tourette’s syndrome? Are the copywriters making fun of us?)

However overwrought, the advertisement merely reinforces beliefs that have dominated American culture for the last half-century. Creativity is good. Conformity is bad. We’re all unique! And it’s not just our right, it’s practically our sacred duty to freely express our uniqueness, whether it’s through a tattoo or painting or blogging or making digital movies. We take this as an article of faith, so much so that it is hard for a modern person even to conceive of a world where only a few truly gifted individuals are allowed to “express themselves” creatively. For example, poets in ancient Rome had to earn patronage from public officials by dedicating their poems to them—and only a handful could do so. They were the pop stars of their time, but there was no Roman Idol, let alone open-mike nights or poetry slams, where amateurs could hope to get discovered. When it comes to maximizing the number of people with the time, money, and desire to act on creative impulses, to express ourselves as individuals, there’s no time like the present.

Two recent books by Canadians consider the implications of unfettered self-expression, extreme individualism—and their ties to rampant consumerism. In Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture, Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter take down the myth of fighting “the system” by daring to be different. While they build a solid, if somewhat academic, argument focused around sociopolitical theories, Hal Niedzviecki, in Hello, I’m Special: How Individuality Became the New Conformity, explores the myriad ways in which we dare, with increasing urgency, to be different. Niedzviecki assays the backyard amateur wrestling scene, the making of a new boy band by Lou Pearlman (of Backstreet Boys fame), a guy who’s fighting to have his own local TV station, fan fiction, the mainstreaming of tattoos, and much, much more.

Both books, in fact, are bursting with research, referring to a long tradition of social criticism, from Thorstein Veblen and Gustave Le Bon in the late nineteenth century to William H. Whyte, Guy Debord, Georg Simmel, and Michel Foucault, to contemporary critics like Todd Gitlin, Juliet Schor, and Thomas Frank. (Heath and Potter even track the origins of counterculture back to eighteenth-century Romanticism.)

It is the mode of recent consumerism to celebrate individuality as a matter of style (a development covered recently in Virginia Postrel’s The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness); thus, we consume in a way that is supposed to underscore our individuality, and attack conformity. But that assumption is simply wrong, say Heath and Potter. To the contrary, they argue, the rebellion against concepts like “mass society” and “conformity” is one of the more powerful engines driving consumer capitalism (Postrel would agree). “Consumerism is not an ideology,” they write. “It’s not something that people get tricked into. Consumerism is something that we actively do to one another.” (Or maybe even inflict on each other—consider products like SUVs.) Because consumerism is both competitive and interactive, it’s essentially both a way to attract attention and to distinguish ourselves. But that hardly constitutes a rebellion.

While Nation of Rebels focuses on the interplay between the individual and the market economy, Hello, I’m Special goes down other paths to document rebellion-as-individualism. Niedzviecki documents the myriad ways in which we are encouraged to nurture our individuality and express ourselves. Parents insist that their children can “be anything they want to be” and urge them to “follow their dreams”; they’re backed up by well-meaning teachers and a host of profit-seeking industries and entrepreneurs—like the founder of the Hard Rock Academy, a “boot camp where would-be performers can see where they stand.”

“Who will discourage the youngsters of today from pursuing their pop dream?” asks Niedzviecki, a question that seems more than a little cantankerous, especially since, as he writes elsewhere, “Millions of otherwise ‘normal’ citizens of the Western world harbor the notion that fame of some sort awaits them.” These dreams of being special are an extension of the theory, which has been around at least since Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, that we potentially restive moderns must be placated by entertainments; now, however, we do no
t merely wish to consume them, we wish to be part of the system that creates them. And if you apply the supply-and-demand equation, it follows that we should require more “creatives” (to borrow a term from advertising) and supporters-of-creatives of all kinds. Event promoters. Makeup artists. Audio book narrators. People who write subtitles for Bollywood films. But then the NEA’s findings—more people writing; fewer reading—give rise to the question of whether we are approaching the point where there are more producers of culture than there are consumers of it.

Niedzviecki’s man-on-the-street research, plus his personal revelations and self-deprecation, make Hello, I’m Special the more readable book, but ultimately the author is rather defeatist. He has no proposals for mitigating extreme individualism, and so, falls back on the idea of fighting “the system” with various countercultural means. Heath and Potter are more prosaic, and while their cultural criticism can become tedious, they do ultimately offer some striking observations, as well as hope. With every reiteration of his theme—that our attempts at expressing individuality are in fact conformist—Niedzviecki seems unconsciously to be making a case that awareness of the problem will lead at least partway to a solution. Meanwhile, Heath and Potter point out that these attempts at individuality drive the very consumer capitalism that sophisticated liberals and aesthetes (hyper-individualists, to say the least) often say they despise.

So where does that leave us? Might there be a kind of conformity that could usher in a new counter-consumerist era? Maybe it’s not so much conformity as a certain type of modesty, or reserve, a sacrificing of our desire to be noticed. After all, if we believe in ourselves, as we’re so often encouraged to do, isn’t that enough? Heath and Potter point to the characters on Star Trek as part of a political allegory in which “citizens of the Federation have found a way of being individuals without being rebels, of wearing uniforms without succumbing to a deadening existential uniformity.”

They also suggest a way to foster counter-consumerism: legislative action. (Remember, they’re from the country that has tried to pass laws requiring a minimum amount of Canadian cultural content in the arts.) It’s not as sexy as a WTO riot, but Heath and Potter believe that a simple change in the tax code, ending the fully tax-deductible status of advertising expenditures, would create a “devastating blow” to advertising. In other words, they propose strangling or smothering advertising, rather than trying to subvert it with “culture jamming” that inevitably goes ignored or unseen—or worse, simply becomes part of the overall spectacle (as protests have, says Niedzviecki, in another example of individualism gone awry).

Some things, of course, come down to individual action. Heath and Potter prescribe “clearing away some of the consumerist clutter and introducing a bit more uniformity into our lives. Instead of ‘daring to be different,’ perhaps we should dare to be the same.”

We might also look at the flip side of their notion about the two-way nature of consumerism, as “something that we actively do to each other.” Think of it in terms of a pair of squabbling siblings. Heath and Potter say that consumerism will continue, like the bickering of two children, unless there’s some incentive to stop. But what happens when no one is on the receiving end—no one to reinforce our consumerism, to admire our individualism, to up the ante and make us respond in kind? What if we did as our mothers counseled: Ignore the irritating sibling so that he’ll go away? With decreased numbers of people putting themselves on the receiving end of self-expression, it would force creative types to be that much more persistent about success. A form of Darwinism might eventually replace the supply-and-demand equation with respect to arts and entertainment, whittling down the number creatives-per-capita. Fewer people might go desperately seeking fame in Hollywood, or on websites like iwannabefamous.com.

In fact, the experience of one Gary Brolsma could be a portent. Brolsma had briefly become famous, thanks to an Internet video showing him chair-dancing to a Romanian pop song. The New York Times published a story about him on its front page a few weeks ago—not to dwell on his fame, but rather his abrupt rejection of it. Disenchanted, the nineteen-year-old had stopped taking media calls and canceled major television appearances. His friends and his family couldn’t imagine why. Perhaps Brolsma simply discovered that some things are best kept to oneself, and perhaps the Times was trying to spread the message?

Consider the advantages in cutting back on our self-expression. We’d have time and energy to do more. Plant a garden. Play with the kids. Teach someone to read. Read more ourselves. Maybe the word “hobbyist” would even become chic. With less expression in our lives, we could turn inward and hone our perception of what’s going on around us. We’d find connections and commonalities with each other, at the same time short-circuiting consumerism. After all, relentless capitalism can’t sustain itself on inner peace.

It’s doubtful that people will camp out in order to be the first inside the newly expanded Walker Art Center, but who knows? They did at Ikea in Bloomington last year; surely some flapdoodle ought to accompany the unveiling of a shimmering contemporary art center designed by avant-garde Swiss architects. However, to members of the media who toured the building while it was under construction, it’s been made clear that art comes first, not architecture—in the galleries, that is. These spaces are straightforward, unassuming adaptations of the elegant white boxes Edward Larrabee Barnes designed for the Walker’s 1971 building. This is entirely appropriate, given how the “Bilbao effect” has curdled, in some quarters, into the “Bilbao backlash,” whereby some people accuse globally prominent “starchitects” (such as Frank Gehry, builder of Bilbao) of designing museums that try to upstage the art they shelter.

Still, you don’t hire a firm like Herzog and de Meuron if you merely want your new building to ape another building. (Some grumble, for instance, about Cesar Pelli’s Minneapolis Public Library, which they feel is disappointingly similar—on the outside, anyway—to the building it has replaced.) So while the architects played it straight in the galleries, the rest of the expansion is a funhouse of odd and surprising angles, in stark contrast to the Barnes building’s severe rectangular forms.

A critical angle comes into play in the expansion’s main corridor along Hennepin Avenue. In this space, which connects the lobby and museum shop to a stairway and a gallery in the Barnes building, the floor is raked at the same angle as the public sidewalk outside, along Hennepin Avenue as it climbs Lowry Hill. The slope is remarkable, but not difficult to navigate, since the function of the space is to channel people from one place to another. In architectural terms, this is known as the “program,” and the “theme” of the program, as it were, is transparency. In layman’s terms: The architects want people outside to look inside and see what other people are doing—thus the double-paned glass curtain wall. The program for this corridor also includes lounging, as the space is called the Hennepin Lounge, not the Hennepin Corridor. (The prominence of lounges in the expansion brings to mind loitering people wearing aggressively interesting footwear and/or eyewear and/or Macintosh products, making very little eye contact.) To facilitate lounging, custom benches were designed with legs that are longer on one end to accommodate the angled floor. While some people will no doubt prefer the bucolic views from the garden lounge on the west side of the building, others will find it restful, in an airport-y kind of way, to sit in the Hennepin Lounge and watch vehicles jockeying to get over to the I-94 onramp. And if one foot touches the tilted floor while the other just barely dangles, consider it a subtle yet singular architectural experience.

So where the original Walker is all restraint and rectitude, the expansion aims for surprise—and a peculiarly simple type of sumptuousness. Consider the materials. The emblematic object of the Barnes building would have to be a purplish-brown brick, but several visual motifs run through Herzog and de Meuron’s expansion. Most prominent is its aluminum mesh skin (on a less fancy building this would be called “siding”), while inside are bursts of curvy, baroque latticework; gleaming Venetian plaster walls; and gorgeous chandeliers made from molten glass. Incidentally, most of these materials have been cleverly translated into exclusive merchandise for the museum shop.

Speaking of the museum shop, it, too, was supposed to have a tilted floor like that in the Hennepin Lounge—continuing that angled parallelism, if you will, with the city sidewalk outdoors. But that presented problems for the retail space, whose location in the expansion is as visible as the former was hidden. Stationary benches with mismatched legs are one thing, but merchandise tables, which shopkeepers move around regularly, would be a royal pain if they had angled bases. Then, too, there is the experience of the shopper to consider. Standing on the placidly horizontal floor in the museum shop, one can look out at the determined dynamism of the tilted floor in the Hennepin Lounge—and at the floor of the adjacent lobby, which is not so much a tilted plane as one that seems to fall away just a bit. To stand on such a floor can be slightly disorienting, an effect that is not conducive to comfort, which is crucial in encouraging consumerism. So design ideals did not fully give way to the duller demands of commerce; the architects merely raised the bottom line, so to speak. When you visit the museum shop, you will no doubt notice that in this space, it’s the ceiling that tilts.—Julie Caniglia

“I was a troublesome model,” said Karen Ilvedson, who is now mostly retired from the business. “There’d be shoots where I just said, ‘I have to go.’” She was, however, quietly gracious during our Rake Appeal shoot (see page 53), even as the photographer asked her to pose in increasingly complex, contorted positions; even as a gaggle of stylists, assistants, and staffers, plus assorted construction workers, trained their gazes intently on her. What she was thinking, staring back at us?
A lot, it turns out. Ilvedson enjoys thinking so much that, while modeling, she was also earning a degree in philosophy with a focus on metaphysics from the University of Minnesota. “People in New York would make jokes about me, the ‘model philosopher.’ They think the two don’t go together, but they do! Through modeling, I learned that so many things are illusion. I went from being a student to being a model in a matter of days. And so how do you define reality? When you’re traveling around the world, you start to wonder, is reality in my head, or in this physical place I’m at?”
It’s understandable to question reality when stylists are dressing you in see-through plastic shorts with strategically situated fur patches, or when Yohji Yamamoto is using you as a muse for his new season. It’s also easy to understand how someone with so many passions of her own might resist serving the whims of other people’s creative endeavors. Ilvedson grew up shooting Super-8 movies and is now preparing to remake The Theory of Distractions, her thirty-minute, “tongue in cheek” film about how to “see beyond illusion, beyond the veil of reality.” (Who says philosophers can’t be funny?) She is a certified scuba diver and, more recently, a serious tea aficionado, inspired by the wealth of opportunity at the
St. Anthony shop TeaSource. And in between practice sessions with her band, Ildved, she’s patiently reworking a two-hundred page “Faustian tale,” whose manuscript cover bears a picture of legendary ex-Pink Floyd member Syd Barrett. “It might be decades before the time is right to publish it,” she said.
Since moving to Northeast Minneapolis a year ago, Ilvedson has been drawn to a sprawling, gnarled tree on a vacant lot near her home. It gives off “a weird kind of energy,” she said. Having had her fill of Western philosophy—“the newer philosophy of the mind focuses soley on science; it’s too cold and rational,” she said—she is delving into the often misunderstood Hegel and older traditions that include a holistic, mystical, or more feminine dimension. The kinds of philosophy, in other words, that allow for sitting in a tree, taking in its energy.—Julie Caniglia

Some people find great pleasure in a roomful of antiques. Others wonder, not without their own selfish pleasure, who gets to do the dusting. In either case, ever since “Famous” Dave Anderson piled stoneware crocks, license plates, mounted deer heads, and loads of other vintage goods from his personal collection into his Linden Hills BBQ joint, the customers have been delighted—a crucial factor in the restaurant’s success.

Now, of course, Famous Dave’s is a publicly traded company (Nasdaq: DAVE) with more than a hundred restaurants across the country. (It has grown even more quickly than another homegrown chain, Buca, which makes liberal use of Italian kitsch in its décor.) Each one is bedecked as profusely with old-timey goods as the original restaurant. With still more franchises opening all the time, it would be perfectly reasonable to wonder: Where does all of this stuff—hundreds of enameled coffee pots; Paul Bunyan decanters by the dozen; seven-foot chainsaw-sculpture bears; heaps of snowshoes, fishing jackets, tobacco tins—come from?

The simple answer is Famous Dave’s headquarters in Eden Prairie. At the back of its corporate offices, past all of the gray-flannel cubicles, is a door leading to a massive, state-of-the-art warehouse. Thousands of square feet are filled with twenty-foot-high industrial shelves, which shelves are laden with umpteen carefully categorized and inventoried objects, which objects are destined to generate admiration, surprise, nostalgia, wonder, and other generally warm feelings in diners from Smithtown, Long Island, to Tempe, Arizona.

“A lot of people who come back to the restaurant want to sit in a different room each time, so that they can take in everything,” Dave Leach told a visitor the other day. He should know. As head of the décor and design department, Leach presides over Famous Dave’s warehouse of wonders, and has had a hand in decorating quite a few of those hundred-plus restaurants. (Business got brisk enough that he now has a partner, Greg Bartholomew, a former antiques dealer.) Leach is a man of few words, but after talking with him for a while it becomes apparent that he takes great pride in his work, and he’s aware that he has a brand of dream job.

When Leach gets word of a new Famous Dave’s, he first notes which model it will be: roadhouse shack, northwoods lodge, or the just-developed smokehouse design. Then he begins pulling items from the warehouse inventory, creating what he calls “vignettes” for the various restaurant spaces that evoke a farmhouse kitchen, a bait shop, an old-timer’s garage, a hunting shack or fish house, and so on. “It’s not just a display,” Leach said. “There’s a reason for everything to be where it is.” And a reason to stay there. To foil sticky fingers, each item on a shelf or in a cabinet gets glued down, from a Baby Ben alarm clock to a pickle jar of puzzle pieces. “Someone once ripped a decoy off a shelf,” said Leach. “They pulled so hard they took part of the shelf with it.” Once assembled, every last component, from a curio cabinet to salvaged church pews for the waiting area, gets shipped out from the warehouse.

The original Famous Dave’s décor has largely been translated to a series of formulas and templates, such that Leach can note offhand that twenty to twenty-four coffee pots get sent to each restaurant. But he and Bartholomew have leeway to add custom touches, such as Southwestern pottery for restaurants in Arizona, or Big Red memorabilia for those in Nebraska. (And if a sentimental franchisee wants to display a few of his own antiques, well, they’ll diplomatically integrate them.)

Leach maintains the inventory, every last item of which is tagged and registered in a database, with the help of a network of dealers and collectors in Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois, and elsewhere. Once a dealer has accumulated a sizable pile of stuff, someone from corporate retrieves it with a truck. Leach also attends the bigger circuit sales himself, most every weekend from March through October. “I still like to beat the bushes to find something unique that can really help make a restaurant,” he said. But there’s another secret to creating atmosphere at a Famous Dave’s restaurant. Not everything is real.

Leach takes what looks like a can of motor oil from a warehouse shelf. It is actually a carved block of wood that has been meticulously painted, right down to the intricate stipples of black and brown amid silver and red that evoke years of accumulated grease and dust. There are also “Aladdin Angler” prop Thermoses (real ones can fetch sixty dollars) whose lids, Leach says, are grocery-store takeout containers painted a shiny enamel red. The artists and craftsmen who create these fakes are world-class counterfeiters, but Leach is tight-lipped about them. Company secrets. In fact, he’s about as willing to reveal that information as he is eager to hear from people who want to sell their old stuff. In other words, don’t ring him up about the decoys you inherited from Grandpa. He’s got plenty, thank you.—Julie Caniglia

We’ve long heard about the charms of Hopkins’ Main Street from folks who once cruised it at night as partying teenagers, and who now enjoy patronizing its antique stores on weekends (just as their mothers do). We, too, appreciate goods from yesteryear, but let’s be honest, antique-shop districts can get a little precious—despite the presence, in Hopkins, of shops like World of Knives, A+ Vacuum, and our favorite, Steve’s Train City. Doubtless this has something to do with “antique” becoming adjective, noun, and verb.

It was with this in mind that, on our most recent visit to Main Street, we wandered toward the strip’s west end, where the antique stores trail off, to see what we could see. Around Tenth Avenue, past the assertively “new urbanist” Marketplace Lofts, past Tinkerbella and Somewhere in Time, the balance tips—here’s a gun shop, there’s a tanning salon—and the street also gains a more open feel as it heads into what was once farmland.

Along this stretch, in small-town fashion, no-nonsense enterprises like the MN Low Vision Blind Store, Carpet Resources, and Gopher Cash Register co-exist peacefully with a gift shop whose name—Live! Laugh! Love!—is perhaps overly whimsical but heartfelt, we’re sure. Near Twelfth Avenue, the awning of Munkabeans Café adds color to the street; across the way at Custom Wheelz of Hopkins (“where the players shop”), there’s a wall display of merchandise more dazzling than many a contemporary art installation.

It’s at this corner, too, where one can take in a full spectrum of arts: the Hopkins Center for the Arts hosts productions by Stages Theatre, concerts, films, art exhibitions, and classes; the Hopkins Cinema 6 is a discount theater that features mainly quality second-run films.

Out-towering Cinema 6’s neo-retro sign is the plain brick belfry of St. Joseph’s church, a block away. Built in 1953, this church is one of those modern yet still welcoming models. Next door, the former parish school, dating to 1922, recently became the Main Street School of Performing Arts (its students take advantage of the Center for the Arts).

We were heartened to see all of these institutions, plus a funeral home, lined up together on Hopkins’ Main Street; too often they are flung far and wide throughout a suburb. Watching a woman stroll by St. Joseph’s with a wagonload of day-care kids, the strip felt like a place that incorporates the full cycle of life. This is not just a great shopping street, we realized, but one that puts the very idea of civil society into practice.
—Julie Caniglia

Once upon a time, high school seniors all had their yearbook pictures taken against a blue marbleized background, just like everybody else on picture day. Maybe they posed with chin in hand or had a halo of backlighting, but their portraits were all pretty much the same. One day, an ambitious but anonymous photographer saw golden light streaming through the leaves of an oak tree outside his studio, and he had a revelation: posing a senior there, under that tree, would make a pretty sweet portrait. Later, he pulled a log up to the tree, so seniors could sit on it. A few brought their dogs.

Self-expression and freedom of choice have significantly altered the business of senior portrait photography. “We’ve seen a change over the last five to seven years in what students are looking for,” said David Peterjohn, a senior director of business development for Lifetouch, a national chain whose Prestige Portraits division is devoted exclusively to photographing high school seniors. “They’re looking for more variety in their poses—both vertical and horizontal pictures, outdoor and indoor shots, with multiple sets. They are having four or five clothing changes, and bringing in props that show their personality.”

A survey of recent yearbooks dug out of sock drawers gives evidence of this rich pageant. Today, students bring their pets: dogs, cats, or, say, an iguana or a prize bull. There are young men with their guitars, and also the xylophone player and the rock drummer who wish to be photographed with their instruments. Students pose with their Harleys, their BMWs, and their pickups. They surround themselves with athletic equipment or cheerleading paraphernalia. They create moods with different backdrops: There are “urban” back-alley doorways (shop students?); a pueblo-style setting with adobe walls and pottery (especially popular lately); or a discotheque conjured with colored smoke and dramatic lighting (eighties revival?).

There will always be seniors who don’t bother with a portrait (the truant), or turn in a tongue-wagging snapshot (class clown), or go for the bare-minimum basic package (late bloomers). But the other end of the spectrum has grown more extreme. “They spend a lot of money on these portraits. It can be upwards of a thousand dollars,” said Jeff Kocur, a language arts teacher and yearbook advisor at Hopkins High School, where senior portraits for the yearbook are due this month. “It’s a pretty drawn-out ordeal for some.”

Cretin-Derham Hall, the athletically inclined Catholic high school in St. Paul, saves its students from such agony and venality. It has always had strict guidelines regarding its yearbook photos. “For girls, a white or cream dress shirt. Boys wear a dark tie, dress shirt, and dark sports jacket,” said Theresa Haider, an English teacher and yearbook advisor. “We have one photographer that students can use free of charge for the yearbook.”

It appears that Cretin-Derham Hall is now leading a back-to-basics counter-trend. “Schools are getting to where they want just head-and-shoulders portraits for their yearbooks,” said Beth Johnstone, who has operated Johnstone Photography in Minnetonka with her husband for the past sixteen years. “The six main schools we do pictures for want head-and-shoulder studio pictures—no outdoor scenes, no props, no full-body shots.” It turns out that Hopkins High is now a client. Last year it required head-and-shoulders portraits. “A lot of students resisted it,” said Kocur. “But parents liked the uniformity and consistency.” Of course they would—parents are totally boring. Kocur, however, pointed out something essential about the nature of a yearbook portrait. “The fact that they played football is not important. It’s a portrait; we want to focus on the face, not the extracurricular elements of their lives. The football thing will come through elsewhere in the yearbook.”

“As a school we want to put our best foot forward with the yearbook,” said Haider. “The kids obviously have the right to get any other photos they want taken.” A Cretin-Derham Hall alumna, she’s come to her own conclusions about self-expression and freedom of choice in senior portraiture. “Today, some of my senior pictures look so 1995,” she said. “I was wearing a bodysuit with a vest and jeans. But my official yearbook picture is much more reflective of me as a student and young person. You can’t really date it; it’s just a nice picture.”

Just a nice picture is, well, nice, but why would parents and teachers want to rob their children of the opportunity to laugh at themselves and their fashion blunders twenty years hence? The answer is one of the great enduring injustices: Adults are, it is true, just so totally lame.
—Julie Caniglia