The Rake Magazine

Author: Julie Caniglia

  • A River Runs Through Us

    If you follow pop culture’s magic rule of three, then the Mississippi River counts as a bona-fide trend this summer. There’s the promotional extravaganza called the Grand Excursion, and the Minneapolis Institute of Art’s ambitious exhibition, Art & Life Along The Mississippi River, 1850-1861 (which covers the time of the original 1854 Grand Excursion), plus all of their attendant hoopla. On the heels of those events is the July 9 opening of Sleeping by the Mississippi, a series of photographs at the Weinstein Gallery by Alec Soth. This exhibition might not have the grandness of the Excursion or the breadth of Art & Life, but it’s one ripple created by the splash that Soth made in the past year.

    The Minneapolis photographer was one of the standout artists at the 2004 Whitney Biennial this spring; a concurrent show at Yossi Milo, Soth’s New York gallery, satisfied the demand to see (and, of course, purchase) more work from the Mississippi series. There has since been another gallery show in San Francisco, and a book will be published this September.

    What is it about this body of work—forty-five images of people, landscapes, and interiors shot in and around small towns along the river—that struck such a chord with the art world? It’s not just the cognoscenti, it’s thousands of museumgoers eager to see what the Biennial branded as the latest and greatest American art; it’s art directors at major glossy magazines calling to commission a Soth photo shoot. It’s Gerhard Steidl, the legendary German publisher of art and photo books, taking on a relative unknown.

    At the Biennial in particular, which displays the wares of more than a hundred artists, it’s a feat for any work to truly captivate. These ritualistic surveys, regardless of the thematic declarations of their curators, inevitably end up more like a bazaar than an art exhibit, and are just as exhausting to take in. After dozens of galleries filled with sprawling wall paintings, arid conceptual sculptures, videos demanding ten minutes (or more!) of your time, and room-sized installations of psychedelia, Soth’s “straight” photography served as a welcome and earthy respite. The stark, large-format images invited, even demanded scrutiny: a jumpsuited man standing on a roof, holding two model airplanes; the garish green walls and tapestry armchair in an Iowa brothel; a rusting bed frame nearly swallowed by foliage in a swampy backwater. At the Biennial, these were like the wallflowers at a school dance that the guys suddenly found compelling for their freshness and honesty.

    Soth himself has a simple explanation for his work’s reception at that exhibition. He told me, “I think it was popular because it’s accessible.” Fair enough. But it’s possible that viewers also somehow intuited what this series meant to its creator. Finally acting on a long-standing dream, Soth set out to travel south along the Mississippi, with no objective in mind other than to satisfy his own boyish wanderlust. He was also, however, quite consciously following in the tradition of American road photography embodied by Walker Evans and other WPA photographers in the thirties, Robert Frank in the fifties, and William Eggleston, Joel Sternfeld, Robert Adams, and Steven Shore in the sixties and seventies.

    Unlike those artists, however, Soth seeks a kinship with the bohemian figures and eccentrics that he both admires and photographs. “One of the things I love about the river is how, as you follow it from north down south, these different types of personalities emerge,” he says. He admits to being particularly drawn to personalities that reinforce the national narrative about the Big River—the slow decline of this once-glorious economic engine, so essential to the nation’s growth; the shores, small towns, and people that now embody a lost America full of picturesque oddities; a dreamy obsolescence. Certainly Soth didn’t choose to photograph the million-dollar lofts along the Mississippi in Minneapolis and elsewhere. Nor did he take in the riverboat casinos or factories or suburbs or golf courses—all of which his teacher, Joel Sternfeld, with whom he’s often compared, might have photographed had he undertaken a Mississippi River series. While Sternfeld tends to train his lens on the socio-economic landscape, Soth’s sensibility is shamelessly romantic: the artsy, weathered domicile in “Peter’s houseboat, Winona, Minnesota”; the fluorescent glow of a gas station that falls on gravestones in “Cemetery, Fountain City, Wisconsin”; the battered furniture in “Luxora, Arkansas” gathered to create an outdoor living room for vagrants.

    In the forthcoming book, images are edited so that they move from the frigid north in early spring to the blossoming of New Orleans during Lent and Easter. Throughout, beds are among the most overt of themes, with their intimate allusions to dreaming, loving, sex, illness, death, religion, and rebirth.

    Particularly dreamy instances of amateur art, and the art of self-transformation, are another compelling thread: a cartoonish rendering of a headless muscleman’s body drawn on a vivid blue wall; a black-haired figure painted on a sliding glass door. A Mississippi matron poses proudly with her own “photograph of an angel” (as seen in a cloud formation), while a Louisiana prisoner has written “Preacher + Man” on his T-shirt collar. And toward the end of the book, a strapping, bewigged cross-dresser in Easter finery sits primly on a Disney princess bedspread.

    These images all play with a familiar Mississippi River narrative, but they also touch on Midwestern exoticism and the Southern Gothic, and reveal the river itself as the common thread between the two. Ever since Lewis and Clark, and even before, civilized folk on the East Coast have periodically looked westward to renew their surprise and delight at what curious things are to be found in the hinterland: Convicts, preachermen, hookers, wrestlers, all-around oddballs.

    Soth’s romanticism leads him constantly to strike at the tyranny of literalism that plagues photography as a point-and-shoot medium. This body of work is intricately composed, using a cumbersome 8×10 format camera—the old-fashioned type set on a tripod, which requires the photographer to throw a cloth over his head and shoulders. In this regard, Soth is not so much a photographer but a picture-maker, scrupulously manipulating colors, angles, poses, props.
    This is shown to advantage in a work like “Mother and daughter, Davenport, Iowa,” with its amazing contrasts in focus—the clarity of the daughter’s fingernails and cigarette, or the mother’s toes—and the slight blur on legs, feet, fabric. You begin analyzing the poses of arms and legs, and thinking about the conversation that transpired during the long set-up of the camera and the scene it would record.

    Elsewhere, Soth’s eye can become a bit too fastidious, even obsessive. In “New Orleans, Louisiana,” the position of a chair seems so intentional that you want to find the blocking marks taped on the floor. This begins to impugn the rest of the composition: Did the photographer sweep that small pile of detritus into one corner of the image in order to counterbalance the light bulb in the opposite? Similarly, there’s a whiff of heavy-handed staging in “Immaculate Conception Church, Kaskaskia, Illinois”—in the way an old armchair is situated in a brick-walled corner beneath a picture of priest, draped with a gold vestment, with a large, cheap mountain landscape leaning on its side in a doorway. Soth cheerfully admits that the aura of one image would be “ruined” if the viewer knew its “true story.” (He wouldn’t reveal the story, and I won’t reveal the image—and I’m not sure it makes a difference anyway.)

    Soth is probably the last person who could have predicted his good fortune. A few years ago, he was “mister conservative,” a workaday guy tied to his job and hi
    s home, where he helped his wife care for her mother, who lived with them and recently succumbed to cancer. “I was always painfully shy, even in college,” he says, noting that his classmates must be shocked to find that he ended up photographing people.

    Instead of waxing poetic about his vision or his determination, Soth credits his success to good timing and good luck. He received the Minnesota trifecta of artist grants (the Jerome, the McKnight, the state arts board) in relatively quick succession, which brought him attention from Walker Art Center, which in turn led to the Whitney Biennial and the 2003 Santa Fe Prize for Photography. Now that he’s got a post-Biennial bandwagon (something that doesn’t happen to all hundred-plus artists in that show), he’s taking it as far as it will go. “My philosophy is to take advantage of as many opportunities as I can,” he says. “I’m a pragmatic Midwestern boy!”

    There’s a savvy edge to that pragmatism, too. Sleeping by the Mississippi has deep roots in the tradition of American road photography, but Soth is leery of being branded “the Mississippi River guy,” or even the “8×10 format guy.” He notes wryly that in turning in his work for an editorial assignment, the art director was disappointed to see digital images instead of negatives shot with his 8×10 camera: “I was shooting while riding a bike,” he says, laughing. “I was shooting moving vehicles.”

    He’s also chosen to ignore the advice of an art-world “goofball” who urged him to move to New York. “First, that’s cynical,” he says. “Second, I absolutely disagree that as a photographer, you have to live in New York to be successful. Where would photography be if everyone lived there? Look at what that does to other art forms.” But perhaps most important, Soth is well aware that his status as the “exotic Midwesterner” carries a certain amount of mileage with Eastern art and media figures. Why relocate there? Here is where he can be pragmatic and romantic at the same time.

  • The Prefigured House

    It’s early June, and the house going up near Cedar Lake is still weeks from being completed. Already, however, its roof needs replacing. The new roof has just been dropped off at the construction site: It consists of metal-encased foam panels bundled into large, rectangular plastic-bound packages—kind of like a giant, shrink-wrapped twenty-four-pack of Kleenex from Costco. The old roof is not cracked or leaky or flimsy; rather, it’s what you might call dishonest. Its panels (which double as the home’s upstairs ceiling—there’s no attic) are finished with a white, mottled texture—an imitation of sorts of the coating on certain types of drywall, which in turn vaguely imitates stucco or plaster, or whatever might camouflage the inherently flimsy nature of drywall. The new roof panels, with their perfectly smooth finish, don’t evoke or refer to anything other than their own whiteness and smoothness.

    This is what Charlie Lazor, the genial and boyish architect of the house, is getting at when he talks about “truth in materials.” Picky? Perhaps, but it’s warranted. This house, where Lazor will live with his wife and their two children, is the prototype for a system of “manufactured architecture” that he’s been developing since early 2003. That’s when he set up an architectural practice, Lazor Office, next door to Blu Dot, the thriving furniture design firm that he co-founded in 1996 (and where he continues to work as a designer). Lazor is still dealing with panel finishes and working out a host of other kinks from his manufactured architecture system. But several variations on the “Flatpak House,” as it’s been christened, are on order already, and if all goes according to plan, lots more people will soon be building them. There’s even a catalog with a stickers-and-worksheet “game” to help them make their own designs. “I wanted to re-think in a quiet way how things are put together, how industry makes things,” Lazor says. That’s kind of a humble way of saying that he’d like to revolutionize the home-building industry.

    It’s no secret that this is one trade that’s ripe for change. A century of unprecedented technological progress, including the constant developments in materials and manufacturing systems, has improved virtually every commonplace object under the sun, from cars to toothbrushes. But most any architect will tell you that the business of “stick-built” homes is shamefully backward. “It really hasn’t changed significantly since Jesus’ time,” says Lazor. “The industry is totally fractured. There are no standards, unlike in Europe. That’s why building houses is incredibly inefficient, and expensive, for what you get.”

    There are a couple of exceptions, however. Sears had success with its kit homes in the first half of the twentieth century, a business that gave way to a small but steady market for mobile homes. But there’s no contemporary version of a kit home (how many people today would take on the seventy-five-page assembly manual?), and mobile homes are pretty much permanently relegated to trailer parks. Old, even ancient ways of building the average home persist. What’s worse is that once-commonplace but labor-intensive features—stone fireplaces, brick facades, mullioned windows, built-in cabinetry—are now prohibitively expensive, so cheap imitations and poor substitutes abound, all in order to serve a diehard domestic dream.

    That hasn’t stopped architects in their perennial quest to build the perfect home for the masses. Le Corbusier described his Villa Savoye as a “machine for living,” and Frank Lloyd Wright imagined his Usonian homes sprouting all over the American landscape in the forties and fifties. On the more quixotic side are Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes, and the ongoing efforts of Paolo Soleri (a student of Wright’s) and his disciples at Arcosanti, a utopian community in Arizona. Now, a younger generation of architects is avidly taking up the challenge, armed with new materials and manufacturing methods. Many were no doubt inspired by Dwell, the influential shelter magazine, and its recent prefab design competition (which in turn was likely inspired by Arts & Architecture magazine’s landmark Case Study House Program from the 1940s). Among a host of designs for prefabricated or modular homes, Alchemy, a firm in St. Paul, offers “weeHouse” steel-and-glass modules. One can serve as a 336-square-foot studio or office, or several can be aligned to create a one- or two-story, one- or two-bedroom home. Rocio Romero is now taking delivery on her sleek, silvery, 1,150-square-foot “LV Home”; and this past May, Sunset magazine unveiled the “Glidehouse,” billed as an eco-friendly modular system by its architect, Michelle Kaufman. These and other models, all designed to be built quickly and at a relatively modest cost, are getting fawning “next big thing” coverage from design and lifestyle magazines, and even Time (which goes to show how “good design” has gone mainstream).

    Prefab and modular designs, however, come with a basic requirement: Their components can be no wider than twelve to fourteen feet, or what can fit on a flatbed truck (thus the twenty-four-foot “double wide” mobile home, which comes in two pieces). The Flatpak House, as its name indicates, gets around that constraint with panels, not modules. Made of glass, concrete, metal, wood, or cement fiberboard, with different colors and finishes, the Flatpak panels are basically sheet goods, which are manufactured in the U.S. to a standard eight-foot width. The cedar cladding panels on the Flatpak prototype, for instance, are more commonly used for high-end garage doors, says Lazor.

    The main advantage of the Flatpak House over prefab or modular designs, then, is that it maximizes flexibility. Like sectional sofas, modular wall or storage units, workstation components—or Legos, for that matter—the Flatpak House can be configured in any number of combinations to suit both a homeowner’s needs and the particular demands of a site. This flexibility is why Lazor calls his house “manufactured architecture” rather than prefab. (Also, like any good designer, he knows that naming, packaging, and marketing are essential to the success of a product.) “This way of designing is all about finding an answer to a problem,” he says, “rather than expressing the will of an architect. It’s the opposite of the individual genius model.”

    In other words, Lazor is merging good design with good business sense, seeking to accommodate a wide range of buyers while keeping costs relatively low. In this sense, the Flatpak house has a strong affinity with Ikea, notwithstanding Lazor’s Blu Dot pedigree. The Swedish behemoth revolutionized household goods by taking advantage of efficiencies in manufacturing, storage, transportation, and distribution, and by developing the “flatpack” concept for furniture. (Incidentally, it is now in the home-building business, too, with prefab developments in several Scandinavian towns.) The Flatpak House also seeks to maximize those efficiencies, with its prototype costing about $130 per square foot. Eventually, Lazor aims to get the square-foot cost down to $100 or so.

    The 2,600-square-foot Flatpak prototype sits on a long, narrow lot right alongside the Kenilworth Trail, and hard by Cedar Lake’s Hidden Beach. Because of its proximity to those public areas, the west façade of the house is mainly comprised of an eight-foot concrete wall, with wood panels and large windows on the second story. One portion of the concrete is perforated with portholes to allow views outside while limiting views into the house. “That’s not because I don’t like people,” says Lazor. “But there’s a lot of traffic on the trail—more than on the street. We realized that people will probably always be stopping to look at the house, but that doesn’t mean that we always have to be looking at them.” For views, Lazor opted for floor-to-ceiling windows looking out on thick stands of trees on the short ends of the house. “On a typical city lot, which is fifty by one hundred and twenty feet, you’d lay things out differently,” says Lazor, “because you’d have neighbors.”

    Like most modernist designs, the layout of the Flatpak House is basic and wide open: Downstairs, the living room, kitchen, and dining room flow from one to the other; upstairs, there are three bedrooms and two baths. A bridge and a courtyard connect the main house to a smaller structure with an office on the ground level and a guest room/common area above. Lazor points out another “truth in materials” issue when it comes to the Flatpak’s windows and walls. Their design was inspired by homes by Louis Kahn and Richard Neutra, which had fixed windows and used wall panels for ventilation. “When the panels open out, they catch the air and draw it right into the house, much better than a window does,” he says. “So the windows serve their essential function, providing light and views, and don’t have to be more complicated, or more costly, by being operable. This is also re-thinking the wall so that it can actually perform a function, rather than just be this object that’s taken for granted.” (Maybe I’m a diehard in this regard, but I’d argue that windows are for leaning out of too, not just looking out of.)

    Extraordinarily ordinary, the Flatpak House is part of Lazor’s mission to design what he calls a “contemporary vernacular.” (Not to be confused with “soft contemporary,” an abhorrent residential style apparently devised for homebuyers who think they might want modern architecture but aren’t quite sure.) Contemporary vernacular is not so much a style as a condition of design, one that Lazor explores in work with his Blu Dot partners, and with students in his U of M classes in furniture design and manufactured architecture. “The Flatpak house is not going to be like your neighbors’ house, of course, but there is a simplicity and regularity to it that makes it seem rather normal. That’s because its design is completely of its time,” he says. “The vernacular is what you get when the solution to a problem makes so much sense that it’s totally obvious.”

    Lazor’s manufactured architecture also harks back intriguingly to the work of Charles and Ray Eames. Like Lazor, the Eameses made comfort, ease of use, and affordability their chief concerns; their cheerful, curious manner contradicted the designer stereotype of severity, egotism, and attention-getting spectacles. Moreover, as the first “nice modernists,” to borrow a phrase coined by Dwell, they found great success—as Lazor has—in designing furniture and an array of other goods. The Eames House, their entry for the Case Study House Program, was built in 1949 in Pacific Palisades, California, and quickly became an icon of modern architecture. One of their goals was to put the manufacturing power created during World War II to a peaceful use, by designing a home whose materials—wall panels, steel beams, factory-made windows—could be ordered from a catalog.

    Appropriating materials and technologies that have only become more accessible, wide-ranging, and sophisticated—such as those foam panels for the roof—Lazor is updating that basic idea. So if Flatpak House takes cues from the Eames House, it’s more out of pragmatism than nostalgia (for one thing, Lazor had to account for the Minnesota climate). In other words, Lazor’s 2004 Flatpak house has more in common with the fifty-five-year-old Eames House than the Eames House would with any 1890s-era dwelling, however radical. That’s because the proliferation of new technologies altered the average person’s daily life more drastically in the first half of the twentieth century than in the second. Charles and Ray Eames rode the crest of that revolution in the forties and fifties, and became folksy giants of twentieth-century design. Could Lazor, picking up where they left off, make his own mark on the twenty-first?

  • Peeping Tom Goes Legit

    Along with its pollen counts during spring and summer, the local news should also offer an index on real estate fever. My case is rather acute this year. No doubt it has something to do with a recent move from a city with an obscene real-estate market to one where it is merely overheated (and said to be cooling—bring on the deep freeze, please!). Who hasn’t gotten pumped up in the past few years with stories about record-low interest rates, refinancing bonanzas, the next hot neighborhood, loft conversions, and so on? Everyone talks real estate these days, not just New Yorkers. Banks are hawking home loans with Day-Glo posters in their windows, just like the coffee-and-donut specials at the gas station down the block. Then there’s the host of expos, parades, tours, showcases, and other home-and-garden events that further stoke the fires—of domestic inspiration (and consumerism) in some, and of other, less charitable, and sometimes petty feelings in others.

    The annual Minneapolis & St. Paul Home Tour, which took place for the seventeenth time last month, is distinctive in that participants put their homes on display as part of a broader showcase of urban neighborhoods—and civic boosterism. It’s also a publicly run event, rather than the private or nonprofit affairs organized by trade associations, garden clubs, and the like. Coordinated by the city’s Neighborhood Revitalization Program, with help from both the city and Hennepin County, the Home Tour originated in 1988, when urban flight was a problem. Emphasizing its civic component, this year’s tour included several city- or county-rehabilitated homes for sale, and other homes that had been the beneficiaries of NRP investment.

    Nevertheless, the Home Tour is also a marketing opportunity, both for its government sponsors and the host of advertisers in the twenty-eight-page Home Tour guide, which mapped out and profiled the fifty homes on view. It’s a way to “sell” a city of proud burghers busily upgrading windows, remodeling kitchens, planting bulbs, and generally plowing money into the homestead.

    For the participants, however, the Home Tour didn’t seem to be so much about marketing as simply showing off. That’s partly because urban flight (or blight) is not the problem it once was—things have turned around, and how. “Minneapolis has never been more vibrant!” wrote Mayor R.T. Rybak in the Home Tour guide. He might also have crowed about vibrant home prices, which have doubled over the past ten years in some neighborhoods (the same cannot be said about the income of most people, notwithstanding the Clinton boom years and the Bush tax cuts). Homesteads around these parts once literally were people’s livelihoods; now the home is the future—the goose we nurture, counting on it to lay a golden egg when we trade up or retire.

    So it’s not surprising that homeowners’ pride—once the righteous preserve of urban pioneers toughing it out in downtrodden neighborhoods—now seems glazed with a measure of boastfulness. It was detectable without even visiting the homes; one need only read the profiles in the tour guide, written by the homeowners themselves, which are riddled with the real-estate and interior-design jargon that has been adopted by the broader population: “charming Tudor cottages,” a sunroom that “boasts large windows and a vaulted ceiling,” “a custom-made granite-topped vanity,” and “prize-winning gardens and a spectacular Minneapolis skyline view.” Kitchens are updated “in an English country style” or with “a peninsula that seats three,” while a bungalow “boasts coved ceilings, hardwood floors and custom-made maple cabinetry.” Another home shows how “wall color, refinished hardwood floors and a Corian bathtub surround make big difference in comfort, style and maintenance.”

    And what of the spectators, the thousands of us who followed each other around the cities all weekend, tour guides and “passports” in hand, rows of our slip-on shoes flanking the sidewalk outside each featured home? The comparison between house-hunting and dating (or mating) is, like most aspects of love (or sex), a well-worn cliché. As a subset of this practice, home tours have a peculiar pornographic twist—if you define pornography beyond sex, which is not hard to do. Countless cookbooks and magazines substitute sexed-up food for human bodies; in motivational posters, screensavers, and Sierra Club calendars, nature is the stand-in. Shelter mags from Architectural Digest to Nest, along with the dozens of domestic-makeover and home-design television shows (even public TV has one), count as professional purveyors of domestic porn—which makes home tours the domestic counterpart to amateur porn. As with those salacious home videos, home tours involve consumers/voyeurs and performers/exhibitionists. Both parties get what they want—to see and be seen—while leaving out the middlemen (snooty interior designers, television producers, magazine editors).

    Another key similarity is that, unlike a real-estate open house, the goods put up for display on a home tour are not for sale: You can look all you want during these periodic orgies centered around granite countertops, open-plan baths, attic renovations, historic restorations, and sleek birch cabinets—without committing to anything. It’s fantasy. (Don’t ask me what this says about people who go to open houses not intending to buy, but just to nose around someone else’s dwelling. That’s perverted!)

    On a more wholesome level, the home tour is also localized and populist. It’s not lifestyles of the rich and famous, it’s jus’ folks. Still, someone has to decide which lucky homeowners will get a coveted spot on the tour, which means that people have to submit themselves (and their homes) to judgment by some sort of organized body. In this sense, home tours tapped into a particular impulse—the average Joe’s desire to compete and show off in the public realm—that would later be exploited by the reality-TV juggernaut.

    These days, the home tour has become a real real-life counterpart to the television’s real-life domestic programs. So maybe your charming Tudor cottage or woodsy urban retreat struck out in the big leagues of Homes Across America or Building Character—it could still make it on the home tour circuit. On the Minneapolis & St. Paul Home Tour, a proud papa showed off the regiments of gorgeous maple cabinetry in his remodeled South Minneapolis kitchen; not far away, people were lined up almost to the street to get into a 1950s Lustron house constructed with enamel steel panels, whose owners must have been both overwhelmed and overjoyed at the attention.

    Playing host is one thing. But home tours, and the larger remodeling/home improvement industry, emphasize that grown-ups also enjoy playing house—they just spend lots more money on it than their children. Do you want Ralph Lauren preppy or something vaguely ethnic? Soft contemporary or the edgier urban contemporary? Log-cabin rustic or an explosion of blowsy chintz? The home is a cluster of miniature stages on which we play out a series of wish-fulfillment dramas, all in the service of achieving that ever-elusive “dream home.” Whether it’s five or fifty or five hundred projects away, the dream home continues to hold out hope that the right abode can fix everything else wrong with our lives.

    As with cosmetics, the marketing of home-improvement and interior décor products is couched in positivity and potential, even as it targets our anxieties and deficiencies. What it comes down to is that your windows are not insulated well enough. You don’t have the right kind of partyware. (What, no margarita glasses?) You’ve got winter draperies and rugs out in summertime, and your accent pieces are all wrong. Your lawn is not lush or green enough. Your neighbor’s home theater system is more awesome than yours. Your down comforter is declassé, and more important, it has no cover. Let’s not g
    et started on your sham-less pillows or the thread count of your linens…

    Not to add insult to injury, but despite this continual dissatisfaction with our surroundings, we also can be frequently misguided in our attempts to change them. Just the other day a real estate agent showed me a place that was a nightmare conglomeration of home-improvement projects, from the mint-green, too-short Formica kitchen counters to the carpet-glue residue still coating the floors in the master bedroom. The do-it-yourself movement has wreaked untold havoc on our built environment: otherwise winsome homes appended with clunky wooden balconies and front stoops, plastic picket fences, tawdry lampposts, and the biggest trespass of all, vinyl siding. Somehow, the army of people, services, and products put into place to help us do it ourselves just isn’t passing muster, which proves that you can foist “good design” on the masses, but you can’t give them taste.

    On the Home Tour, my friend and I saw some rather dubious ideas about what it means to preserve history, including smoked floor-to-ceiling mirrors flanking an antique fireplace; acoustic ceiling tiles; cheap paneling and spongy carpeting made spongier still with a pair of Isotoner foam slippers (literal padding from the harsh world outside). My friend took special umbrage at one place whose gorgeous parquet floors were almost entirely covered with cream carpet.

    Overall, the atmosphere of the Home Tour was quite convivial, if also tinged with that peculiar brand of Minnesota reserve. One domicile had snacks, both sweet and savory, set out—and an owner that immediately started asking questions. We felt trapped. Was the food a lure? Were lengthy, expository conversations compulsory with each home visited? We didn’t see a check-off for this on our “passports” (really just a survey tool). Each home also had volunteers stationed everywhere, most of them middle-aged ladies, their nice-o-meters turned way up. It was impossible to ignore the fact that, like the professional greeters at Target or Wal-Mart, their presence was intended both as a welcome and a warning to the tourists: Ogle all you want, but don’t go trying to pilfer the soap or rifle through the lingerie drawers.

    Beyond its marketing value, the Minneapolis & St. Paul Home Tour has the quasi-civic function of “community-building.” Ultimately, it seems difficult to discern between the two. Is it real community when people stand around talking real estate and school quality, or trading tales from their home-improvement ordeals? Probably it’s just as valid as any other community—the canine-lovers who meet daily at the dog run, the tattoo crowd, the bikers at Bob’s Java Hut. Still, there seems to be something a tad disingenuous, or maybe just sad, about a home-tour brand of community. It’s a staged way of socializing. Come ogle my home. Come make our neighborhood “hot” (we’ve already bought). Help us jump-start those property values. We’re all in this together, right?

  • Being Beige and Nothingness

    It started innocently enough, with a casual decision to gradually weed beige out of my wardrobe. What has beige done for me lately? What does it do for anyone, really? Have you ever received a compliment on a beige blouse or scarf? Later, while car shopping, I eagerly clicked on a web listing for a Plymouth Volare, an old favorite. I was crestfallen, then oddly annoyed to learn that the sedan was an indescribably innocuous shade of beige. You could compare it to the cream filling of a four-day-old bismarck. It made the car unbuyable. In the same way that tinted windows can impart a pimpish feel to certain automobiles, I realized that a beige Volare just immediately signifies “child molester.”

    Whence all the beige in our world? I began to wonder. The more you look, the more there is. And the more you see, the more perplexing it becomes. Two years ago, you may recall, astronomers declared the universe to be a turquoise shade—the New York Times even ran a little Pantone-ish square of the shade on its front page—but weeks later they said sorry, we got it wrong. The real color of the universe is beige. Somehow that seems only fitting, and foreboding: Beige is as infinitely mysterious and ever-present as the universe itself. Beige is the universe.

    Red is supposed to stimulate the appetite, while yellow is agitating. Certain shades of blue promote tranquility. What affect does beige have? Color theory tells us simply that beige represents practicality, conservatism, and neutrality. In other words, it has earned a reputation as the ultimate no-nonsense color. This explains how it has come to dominate in millions of square feet of corporate and institutional workspaces: copy rooms and kitchens, waiting rooms and lobbies, walls, halls, bathroom stalls… In its sheer abundance, beige collapses on itself to become stasis, obsolescence, mountains of computer monitors exported to Chinese junkyards.

    Even now, despite the inroads white, gray, and black have made in the computer-equipment color palette, beige stubbornly holds sway in the average office (the sliver of candy-colored Macs is so small as to be insignificant). Post-it notes provide a small bit of solace—they’re not only useful, but yellow. But overall it’s a losing battle. Think about it. Did you ever get file folders in any other color than “manila” without specifically asking? A friend of mine just started a new job in a one-hundred-percent beige cubicle. Looking up at the white ceiling is his only form of relief, he says. No wonder half the workforce is on antidepressants and the other half hates its job. That’s the effect of an economy fueled by business-like beige.

    Both in and outside the workplace, beige does dress up and try to disguise itself in more evocatively named colors—puce, taupe, cream, buff, oatmeal, biscuit, ecru, mushroom—but these many guises only reinforce its ubiquity. Tan and khaki are excluded from beige classification, however. They, like those food-oriented agents of beige, have other associations that give them some dimension. Beige, however, can only be a color. Or rather, it—not white—is the true non-color.

    Beige creeps in when nobody is around to make a choice otherwise. Beige is absence: of care, of taste, of opinion. It is a void or vacuum (which further supports its recent scientific designation as the color of nothingness). Beige as “neutrality”? It’s more like beige as the intersection of mediocrity and apathy. This is why beige is simply everywhere, once you start looking, the visual residue of some weird, dull-minded neurosis, hiding in plain sight.

    If you had to write the most boring book in the world, it would be hard to top the so-called Beige Book. This tome is published not once, but eight times a year by the Federal Reserve Bank—one of those all-powerful agencies that we really ought to know more about. (I, for one, simply can’t summon the interest. Maybe that’s the point.) The Beige Book itself is off-putting enough; purporting to gather “anecdotal information” from each of the twelve Federal Reserve Banks, its title is probably more effective that any form of obvious censorship could be. Then there’s Minneapolis’ own Federal Reserve Bank, whose designers seem to have made a point of choosing the beige-est possible shade of Kasota limestone (a favorite among institutional architects in the upper Midwest). Standing aloofly beside the Mississippi, the layers and textures of the complex deflect curiosity by radiating a willful blandness, such that a passerby’s natural impulse is to direct her attention toward the river—which is probably just the way the Fed wants it.

    Often you notice beige only in the presence of some other more assertive color. The Déjà Vu Showgirls club, just down Washington Avenue, provides a welcome contrast. One could argue that it’s intentionally garish and tasteless, given what the building’s tenant is up to, and it’s certainly no architectural wonder. However, let’s all be thankful for the pink paint on its frosted-stucco façade. It could’ve been beige. After all, beige was good enough for the multitudes of upscale lofts and townhouses that have sprung up all around it in recent years, importing a suburban, monochromatic, tract-house-style atmosphere into the downtown area.

    One of my most-ever hated buildings was the Vision Loss Resources rehabilitation center on Franklin and Lyndale. For years I passed it almost every day, an overwhelming monolith of windowless beige. The people using the building may be blind, but why does it follow that VLR should pretend to make this hulking monstrosity disappear for the rest of us by making it beige? Finally someone saw the light and painted it brick red. Not that it stemmed the tide. There’s a strikingly similar monument to blank beigeness at 28th Street and Nicollet, which I am told is a meatpacking plant (further evidence that beige is a perfect foil for mysterious goings-on); a tour of this particular neighborhood would be incomplete without noting the amazingly full-on beige McDonald’s, right down to the crushed-rock landscaping, a few blocks away. (McDonald’s brief flirtation with repainting its restaurants their original fire-engine red must have died out before they got to this one.)

    Beige is a cover-up. In a mass-produced environment, one governed by efficiency and not aesthetics, it is the default choice to offend no one, and so it is imposed on everyone. Unlike white, it is said not to show dirt; thus the beige linoleum, carpet, blinds, walls, and appliances in apartments owned by real estate management companies. But what does the bounty of beige say about us as a nation? Political pundits yammer on about red states and blue states. (Republicans apparently having forgotten about the Red Scares, which could mean it’s now okay to call moderate conservatives pinkos.) However, given all the trouble that simmers just below the surface of our economic fantasies and melting-pot mediocrity, it seems depressingly likely that the true color of the USA is, like the universe itself, beige.

  • The Cultured Pugilist

    Rick Sordelet knows how to fight dirty. “When you’re going to Wisconsin bars as a college kid, you’re going to get in fights, that’s just a given,” he said. He also knows his Shakespeare. He has choreographed fight scenes for sixty-three productions of Romeo and Juliet, including the Guthrie’s current staging. He’s plotted fisticuffs and swordplay for at least a dozen other Shakespeare plays, not to mention twenty-five Broadway shows, a handful of productions for Disney, the Public, the Roundabout… but I digress. He is a certified fight director, and I guess he talks like one.

    “Let’s take the Mercutio-Tybalt fight,” he said the other day during final previews. “It’s about honor, not killing. It’s about humiliating the guy in his own town, so that he has to hang his head low. You got Tybalt calling out Romeo, and the crowd is going, ‘Alright, now Romeo’s going to kick Tybalt’s ass.’ But Romeo can’t kick his ass because of Juliet, so Mercutio has to pick up the flag.”

    The color commentary continued: “Mercutio’s not up to par with Tybalt as a swordsman. But he’s a good scrappy street fighter.” Based on that interpretation of the famous brawl in Act III, Scene I, Sordelet turned Mercutio into a goofball scene-stealer who gleefully parries Tybalt’s angry prowess. He grabs Tybalt’s sword and kisses both it and its owner; he leaps with mock-fright into the arms of his page; he pauses to swig from his flask, then sprays a mouthful of booze in his adversary’s face. It’s all great rowdy fun until Romeo, as he is destined to do, bursts into the fray with the cry of a true pantywaist, “The prince expressly hath forbidden bandying in Verona streets!”

    Sordelet’s job is to make murder and mayhem seem as real as possible—or, as he puts it, to create “truthful behavior under imaginary circumstances.” As one of the busiest fight directors in the country, he notes that “the sun literally never sets on my work. I have shows in times zones all around the world.”

    Born and raised in Duluth, Sordelet described himself as “very cocky” while attending the University of Wisconsin at Superior, where he got his initial theatrical training and was first exposed to stage combat. “I felt like I should be a part of that—it seemed so exciting and swashbuckling,” he said.

    He now lives with his wife and kids in Montclair, New Jersey, a short commute from Manhattan’s Theater District. Currently he’s choreographing nearly a dozen productions, and gets twenty-eight emails every night about different shows he’s got onstage in the U.S. These are reports from stage managers, which include notes from the fight captains, the appointed actors in each play who “keep the integrity of the show” and watch over their fellow actors’ swordplay, punches, kicks, lunges, and so forth.

    Also helping keep things in line are the “fight calls” preceding each performance, right before the actors get into costume. With Sordelet having returned to the East Coast to work on other productions, Michael Anderson (a local certified fight director in his own right) acts as his on-the-ground assistant at the Guthrie.

    “Ready?” shouts fight captain Michael Booth (who plays Peter). “Let’s fight!” The run-through of Romeo and Juliet’s fight scenes is curiously wooden, with lackluster acting and slightly slowed-down, belabored motions. Anderson explained, “This isn’t for show, but more for memory. You can’t fix things that are wrong with the choreography if you’re going full speed. Fight call lets actors look at targeting, distance, and traffic patterns. They can pick out the moments they have to breathe. The slow tempo lets them try things on, and revisit their movements so they become natural, absorbed into the actor’s body.”

    Afterward, the actors discussed problems (“we can struggle a bit longer there”), practiced extra-slow-motion groin kicks, and got advice from Anderson. “You’re both tending to stand up,” he cautioned Karl Kenzler (Mercutio) and Alex Podulke (Tybalt) on the last night of previews. “It’s a little bit rote, and that will come back to bite you in the ass, hard. In a real fight, you’re running—either toward the guy you want to kill or from the guy who wants to kill you.”

    Sordelet compares theatrical violence with songs in musicals. “The character is saying, ‘I can no longer express myself with words, so I have to sing.’ In some cases, he has to fight. This is where Shakespeare is so brilliant. In Henry IV, Hotspur says to Hal, ‘I can no longer brook thy vanities.’ Or when Macduff sees Macbeth, who’s just killed Macduff’s family, he says, ‘I have no words: My voice is in my sword.’ The idea is so clear: ‘I can’t talk about it anymore, I have to come kick your ass now.’”

    Suffice it to say that Romeo’s proclamation, “fire-eyed fury be my conduct now!” unleashes much spectacular pugilism in this production, including stabbing, stage-diving, and an act that would give Mike Tyson (the ear-biter and the boxer) pause. “I know a good fight scene’s not going to save a play if the rest of the production is awful,” said Sordelet. “But even though my wedge of the pie is small in a lot of cases, often it’s got the most berries.” —Julie Caniglia