Author: Shannon Olson

One Sunday evening in June, three regular guys are settled into a
corner of the bar at Figlio in Uptown, within spitting distance of one
of the room’s three flat-screen televisions. On the tube: men’s beach
volleyball on Fox Sports.

My friend and I plant ourselves across from them, armed with a stealthy
little device that hangs from my keychain and looks vaguely like a
Batman toy or a keyless entry fob. Invented by a forty-eight-year-old
guy named Mitch Altman, TV-B-Gone can turn off almost any television,
anywhere. However, it doesn’t seem to be working today on the TV
hanging from the ceiling just ten feet away—or on any of the bar’s
other large, looming monitors. As a result, TV-Was-Still-Here, and I
gave the gadget to the guys to try. It didn’t work for them, either,
but their curiosity was piqued.

“Who would come up with something like this?” asked one, incredulous.

Perhaps, I suggested, an antisocial person who doesn’t approve of
television. “Well, that person shouldn’t be allowed in public,” he
replied.

I asked the guys if they would have been upset if the device had
actually blacked out the beach volleyball game. Even though they’d been
devoting only occasional glances to the game, they agreed that its
sudden absence would have been irksome. “I don’t have this channel at
home,” one of them said.

In another corner of the bar, there was one remaining TV I hadn’t tried
to zap. It was an older model on which a 60 Minutes broadcast had just
started. I walked across the bar casually, keeping TV-B-Gone out of
sight at waist level (shooting from the hip, as it were). I hit the
button, and the TV went dark. No one seemed to notice.
Back in our corner of the bar, the guys cheered. When I sat down again,
they confessed they were beginning to think I’d made up the whole thing
about TV-B-Gone and was just using the gadget to pick up men—a
corollary activity for which it actually seems to work moderately well.
(Though wouldn’t that make it—ahem—a turn-on?)

Rachel, a young woman seated next to me, said, “My ex-boyfriend used to
watch TV in public all the time. Whenever we went out. It’d be just the
two of us and he’d be staring at the TV. I go out to socialize. It
drove me crazy.” She gestured at her Argentine boyfriend, Ozzy. “That’s
why you have to date someone from another country. He doesn’t care,”
she said. Ozzy said he would care if it were a soccer game. “If you
went to a bar in Argentina during a soccer game and shut off the TV,”
he said, “people would go crazy.”

Angering sports fans seems to be one of TV-B-Gone’s easiest and most
cruel amusements. The day before, at Billy’s on Grand in St. Paul, my
friend and I had walked onto the patio, where the bartender and several
of the waitstaff were engrossed in the second game of a Twins-Yankees
series, their backs to the restaurant. I aimed from the hip and one of
the bar’s two outdoor televisions went out. The bartender’s head
snapped around as if someone had fired a shot from the grassy knoll. I
had never seen fury erupt so quickly. He scanned the patio patrons and
the peripheral bushes for snipers (no one ever suspects the blond) and
finally turned the set back on warily.

Seated inside, I turned off the big-screen TV above our table. And
though there were three other televisions still on, a twenty-something
dude nearby screeched, “What the—? Shit!” as his wafer-thin girlfriend
continued nibbling at her salad and baked potato. The waiter scratched
his head and went looking for the remote control.

Inciting public riots, as it turns out, is not the inventor’s
intention. A self-described former television addict, Altman invented
TV-B-Gone in the first place “so I’d have one for me.” For the record,
he never turns off a TV that people are actually watching. Instead, he
says he takes aim at those televisions tucked in the corners of
laundromats and hovering over bar stools, those boob tubes that are
adding only noise or silent yet distracting images to the atmosphere.
“Even people who love television don’t like to have toothpaste sold to
them during dinner,” Altman told me. His original inspiration came
about twelve years ago when he was out with some friends and noticed
that they all, at various times, were distracted from conversation by a
nearby television. Altman admitted that if he’s out in public and a
television is on, “There’s no way I can stop looking at it. We’re all
helpless in the face of it.” He laughed.

TV-B-Gone’s arrival on the market was greeted with a frenzy of media
coverage, and the initial inventory sold out in two days. After almost
a year, people have purchased nearly fifty thousand of the
feather-light zappers. “You could easily go to an electronics store and
buy a universal remote,” said Altman when I asked about any legal
issues regarding “tampering” with private property. “This is just a
little more stealthy.”

Back at Figlio, a very tall man who’d joined our conversation decided
to take matters into his own hands. He got up and turned off the
flat-screen TV the old-fashioned way: by pushing the power button. No
one seemed to notice or care. And though 60 Minutes’ hour was up long
ago, that TV was still dark, too. Something even Andy Rooney might find
amusing.—Shannon Olson

Last year, Bob Dylan turned up in a Victoria’s Secret ad, and I’ve been troubled about it ever since. On a possibly related note, a couple of friends recently mentioned their discomfort with “the dudes who seem to be permanently wandering” the larger lingerie departments, who don’t seem to be shopping or accompanying anyone in particular. One was convinced that some stores even put out chairs for them, “to keep them at least from roaming so much.” She’d seen one of these happy wanderers the last time she’d shopped Marshall Field’s downtown. The other said she’d spotted a few at the downtown Target. None of this really rang a bell with me; mostly my visits to Target are surgical strikes, and my occasional forays to Marshall Field’s lingerie section had been pervert-free. Nevertheless, I scratched out a shopping list and decided to investigate.

Marshall Field’s, downtown Minneapolis: I made my way past the children’s clothing, through the party dresses and maternity wear (cruel juxtaposition), past the active wear and into the intimates corner, and sure enough, a middle-aged man with his head tucked was walking quickly to the elevators, shoving a receipt into a crumpled Target bag. I looked for a spot from which to observe, settling near the Hanes thigh-highs. It didn’t take long before I was approached by a sales associate. To establish my plausibility as a customer, I asked her if she thought it was okay to wear hose with sling-back shoes. As we looked for an appropriate pair of sandal-toe hose, I confessed that I was also writing an article, and asked if she ever saw men wandering around the department for no reason. She screwed up her face as if I’d just asked her to smell bad milk.

“Huh-uh,” she said. She stopped to think. “Huh-uh,” she said again. “Except, like, once in a blue, blue moon. Men usually come in who are with someone … ” She trailed off as an Elton John-ish type guy dressed all in black sashayed by and said hello.

“He works here, huh?” I said.

“He works here,” she said.

“What about the guy with the receipt who left a few minutes ago?” I asked.

“He was returning a robe,” she said. I bought a pair of Donna Karan hose that can apparently be worn with sling-backs, and made my way to the escalator.

Field note: Research expensive. Apply for grants.

Victoria’s Secret, Mall of America: A friend agreed to be my research assistant. On a Friday night, we plunked ourselves down on a bench in front of Victoria’s Secret, next to a pale teenager in a black hooded sweatshirt, his hands shoved into his jeans pockets. Men came and went from the store, but most of them were pushing baby strollers (with real babies in them), and each was with a woman. Some couples happily laced hands as they left with those striped bags dangling at their sides. For a good twenty minutes we kept an eye on a man who was pacing in front of the store, looking furtively inside.

“What if the guys who sit on these benches really are just sitting and relaxing?” I whispered to my assistant. “What if they just happened to be sitting here?”

“I asked my husband,” she said, “and he said that any normal guy would go out of his way not to sit in front of Victoria’s Secret, so people wouldn’t think he was a perv.” The teenage boy got up and left. Eventually, the loitering man’s female counterpart emerged from the store, swinging her shopping bags.

Nordstrom, Mall of America: Aha! Spotted. Homo erectus reclined in customer seating, staring at granny panties and gigantic support bras. Playing with cell phone and jiggling leg nervously. Glances at me and my friend. Scratches head and makes phone call as if to appear busy. After call, screws index finger around in ear.

Wife emerges from behind Wacoal display.

Victoria’s Secret, Roseville: I had made the mistake at the Mall of America of identifying myself as a reporter when I’d asked a sales clerk if she ever noticed unwanted male browsers. She told me that she would have to ask her manager before she could answer my question. Her manager directed me to the Victoria’s Secret media hotline.

At Roseville, I talked to the customers instead, and asked two young women who were rifling through a drawer of red-lace demi-cups if they’d ever been bothered by staring strangers. They both said no. “I mean, most of the guys who come in here are with someone and they’re just totally clueless,” said one. “Look at him.” She pointed to a man in his twenties, standing in front of the cash register with the vacant look of someone standing in line at a methadone clinic. From his fingers dangled a delicate beige thong. Both girls burst out laughing. “They have no idea what to do with themselves, so they try not to look at anything.”

It was true; outside of the fitting rooms stood three men, all of whom seemed to be in their early twenties. They all looked supremely bored, even willfully bored, masters in the art of the middle-distance gaze.
I asked one young man holding a woman’s coat and an orange handbag how he liked being in a lingerie store. “I wish they had a place for us guys to sit down,” he said, before his girlfriend emerged and he dutifully helped her pick through a bin of pink polka-dot 32C bras.

My search for the urban lingerie pervert seemed to be proving fruitless. Though, in addition to my earlier Marshall Field’s purchases, I’d now picked up a white T-shirt, a raincoat at thirty percent off, and a pair of espadrilles. Weary and thirsty, I headed toward the food court.

Where were the greasy, salt-and-pepper-haired men? The ones with beat-up tennis shoes, jeans hanging low enough to reveal their cracks, and nylon jackets with “Bear Essentials” embroidered on the back, along with a spirited tableau of Winnie-the-Pooh and friends? Where was the mulleted guy with the windbreaker that said “DAVE College,” shuffling around and fondling merchandise? The pasty bachelor in the brown blazer, who looks just a little bit too long after making eye contact and darts nervously to another display?

I finally found them. At the Apple Store.—Shannon Olson

If you didn’t see ABC’s Wife Swap! on March 2, here’s what you missed: Powderhorn Park peacenik Mina Leierwood gingerly examines the contents of “Fort Patrick,” the Louisville, Kentucky, home she’s to live in for two weeks with a family of strangers. Cheri Patrick, the usual lady of the house, is a retired Air Force senior airman; her husband Ryan is a former sergeant in the U.S. Cavalry. She runs her home with military efficiency. When her three young children are actually allowed to play, it is typically with toy guns and bombers. Leierwood finds taxidermy on the walls, a cavalry sword above the master bed, and a “W” mouse pad, baseball cap, and mug.

Meanwhile, conservative Christian Cheri Patrick had marched into Mina and Greg Leierwood’s Minneapolis home. She tried valiantly to come to terms with the “Send Bush Packing” suitcase planted in the front yard, and attempted to force the Leierwoods’ belligerent seventeen-year-old, Dan, to say the Pledge of Allegiance. (Dan, a long-haired and lip-pierced atheist, believes the United States should be dismantled.)

It is hard to imagine two families who better characterize America’s current political polarization—real representatives of an America divided into what some wags have called “The United States of Canada” (the “blue states”) versus “Jesusland” (the “red” ones).

While the show’s title promises more kinky fun than Desperate Housewives, its mission is more noble than that. It merely challenges two ordinary families to see life from another point of view for two weeks. There are no key parties, no swinging, no hanky panky. Instead, it’s a sort of cultural exchange program. The swapped wife shows up at her new home and must familiarize herself with the “household manual” (each family writes one). She is required to follow the current household rules for the first week. At the start of the second week—the “Rule Change”—she may unleash a new world order.

After seeing Wife Swap!, I couldn’t resist calling on Mina for some backstage dope. Here is what you missed even if you watched: For one thing, Mina found a high-powered crossbow in the basement, within reach of the little troops. Leierwood says that part got edited out. While some of the dropped footage is shocking (always keep your high-powered crossbow out of reach), most of it presents a more nuanced picture, and one that gives us all hope for more gray area. What makes it onscreen can be a sort of two-dimensional caricature—but it wouldn’t be the first time TV simplified real life.

The show’s rules meant Leierwood, during her first week, had to follow Cheri Patrick’s rigorous military routine, getting up at oh-six-hundred hours for a forty-minute walk, waking the kids and making them breakfast, getting them off to school (husband Ryan sleeps late because he works the late shift at a steel mill), and then cleaning the house like an obsessive compulsive on crystal meth for the remainder of the day. (Cheri’s daily chore list is divided into fifteen-minute increments.)

Mina Leierwood is a Quaker and therefore a pacifist. When it came time for her to impose her rules on Patrick’s household, she eliminated all the toy guns, bombers, tanks, and violent video games from the home, asking the children to collect them and place them in a cardboard box labeled the “War Chest.” (“That’s not fun,” said five-year-old Brendan Patrick.)

For Cheri Patrick, week one meant that she couldn’t do all the cooking and cleaning herself, because the Leierwoods share chores. It’s hard to know which was the bigger hurdle for Cheri—the trashed house or the secular humanism. When she wasn’t retching with disgust at these Bush-haters, she was compulsively trying to find her place in the kitchen. When Dan challenged her for cooking without help, Cheri replied, “I believe that a man is the head of the house, because when Eve partook of the apple or the fruit that she shouldn’t have, she condemned herself and her kind to be under the heel of man.”

Under the heel of the oppressive order at “Fort Patrick,” Mina Leierwood started to crack. Constantly on camera, stressed and unable to sleep, Leierwood told me that she slept the second week in a hotel after she and temporary husband Ryan got in an argument and Ryan kicked a door. (Edited out.) In his defense, Leierwood added that she had covered Ryan’s red pickup truck with peace magnets (also cut). Despite their differences, Mina called him “a great father, a great husband.” Most of the heat from the episode revolved around Dan’s intense provocation of Cheri; at one point, he yelled at her, “Jesus was a carpenter who talked too much!” and Cheri left the room crying. (Out-of-control Dan’s views don’t necessarily represent the Leierwoods’. He’s a teenager, after all. Greg laments his son’s cruelty, saying, “I hate to think I’ve taught Dan to be that insensitive.”)

Off camera, there were moments when Dan and Cheri actually got along. During week one Cheri had to attend her first peace rally, but during week two Cheri made Greg, Dan, and Avram, the Leierwoods’ younger son, play paintball. “They loved it!” said Mina. At one point, Dan and Cheri ganged up on Greg and Avram, pelting them with paint. “For pacifists,” Cheri exclaimed, “you guys are a pretty good shot.”

Of course, there were mild transformations by the episode’s end. Cheri learned that she doesn’t have to be perfect, that she can ask for help. Mina learned to put a more personal face on war, to understand the sacrifices soldiers make.

The editing was equal opportunity, giving neither side a clear polemical advantage. For example, during the episode, eight-year-old Tyler Patrick draws a military plane. Mina asks him about it and he says that the plane is dropping bombs over Iraq. What got edited out: Mina told Tyler that there are also children and moms and dads on the ground. And Tyler came to Mina hours later, saying, “I think I figured it out about the bad guys. They’re just like us. We just haven’t met them yet.”—Shannon Olson

The other day about eighty thousand Christians gathered at the State Capitol for Luis Palau’s Twin Cities Festival. Just a mile away, at St. Paul’s RiverCentre, a smaller but no less devoted crowd convened at the Midwest Scrapbook Association Convention, the better to observe the objects of its own faith—designer paper and vellum and bottle caps. These are the icons of the Holy Order of Scrapbooking. (Yes, it’s one word. And yes, like “journaling,” it’s now a verb.)

Like religion, the $4.5 billion scrapbooking industry is driven by fervor and motivated by guilt. “I do think a lot of it is guilt,” laughed Carrie Ingalls, who has worked in the biz since 1989 and is currently a manufacturer rep for a company called Bobo Co. It’s those neglected piles of photos that you’ve boxed and tucked away, she explained, never bothering to label or stick in a photo album. You feel like you should do something nice with them. And once you start to assemble them in scrapbooks, she said, “It’s an addiction.”

So how do laziness and avoidance translate into monomania? The novice scrapbooker is faced with a dizzying array of choices that go way beyond simple page layout. There are decorated papers, ribbons, buttons, glitter, stickers to commemorate everything from a trip to the zoo to a trip down the aisle, inspirational quotes on vellum, inspirational quotes on ribbons, and so on. In a modern scrapbook, the photos hardly matter. It’s all about the “design concept” of each page. This can require, for example, flattened and decorated bottlecaps stuck to the page with Dots candies.

Hoping to score a free copy of Simple Scrapbooks magazine, I leafed through a copy under the watchful eye of a booth-minder. “See?” she said proudly. “It will show you how to get started, what product you need, and how to organize a page, so that you can get more photos on the page and still tell the story.”

Aren’t the photos supposed to tell the story? Apparently not. Or they’re just not saying enough. A sample page on one vendor’s wall, for example, displayed a single photo of a newborn baby. It was nested in a congeries of striped pink and blue paper, surrounded by cutouts and ribbons trumpeting the definitions for words like precious, miracle, treasure, laughter, and blessing.

“This is never going to go away,” said C.D. Cross, an affable man who claims the title of first male designer in the industry. (Before that, he was a softball coach.) He tipped me off to two significant industry trends: torn paper and brads. Brads? “Like Brad Pitt,” he said. (Oh, now the appeal of scrapbooking is becoming more clear!) C.D. showed me a little tack-like doohickey that you can use to attach your paraphernalia to the page, to give it a kind of rustic look. A designer and representative for Outdoors & More, decidedly the most masculine booth at the convention, C.D. said scrapbooking is “the fastest-growing craft in America.”

“I think it’s replaced quilting,” agreed Carrie Ingalls. “It’s an excuse to get together. It feels good to you personally, to do it, and to share it with others. And it really is also sort of an addiction. People can’t have enough supplies. They’re always looking for the next thing.”

Many of the biggest scrapbooking companies are headquartered in Utah, and the Mormon interest in recording genealogy is most often cited as the progenitor of the country’s current cutting and pasting craze. It is an enthusiasm that accelerates during troubled times. Ingalls told us there was a huge surge in sales after 9/11. “That hurt a lot of industries,” she said. “But we grew by leaps and bounds. People are so passionate about this…it’s something they live.”

Over at a booth for an Oakdale store called Paige’s In Time, a woman wore a nametag that said “Marni Fabulous.” She had a captive audience as she demonstrated The Wizard, an embossing gadget that sells for $149.99. Like one of the hucksters at the State Fair’s horticulture building, Marni had a crowd of women in the palm of her hand—laughing and waiting breathlessly for an embossed gift tag to shoot out the other end of The Wizard—when she spotted a man in the vicinity. “Man alert! Man alert!” she shouted. “Man at the booth! Do not look at the man! Do not talk about the cost of golf clubs!” Even Marni’s victim laughed, because it was true: There weren’t a lot of guys.

When I asked Jackie Schoenbauer from Jordan about the convention’s abundance of estrogen, she said, “You know, the husbands have their hobbies. We can spend money, too.” (The average amount plunked down per visit to a store like Archivers, according to two insiders, is somewhere between forty and two hundred dollars.)

Schoenbauer came to the convention with her friend, Chrissy Kampen, from Lakeville. Both are twenty-nine years old; both are married. “It took me a year just to put my wedding album together,” said Schoenbauer, explaining that each page had to be just a little bit different. Said Kampen, “We’re a year or two behind with our photos. I don’t foresee us being current any time soon.”
—Shannon Olson

Somewhere in the middle of the nation’s heated debate about gay marriage, a new billboard popped up on one of my usual routes. The ad, for Cub Foods, features two women positioned in friendly proximity to each other and to a bag of groceries. The tag line says, “Real People. Real Values.”

Wow, I thought. That may be the most progressive ad campaign I’ve ever seen. Good for Cub. Gay families are real families, whether the law acknowledges them or not, and everyone needs groceries. If you can’t make it to Massachusetts, walk down our aisles!

It hadn’t occurred to me before that in the cutthroat grocery market, ten percent of the population might have gone unattended as a targetable marketing group. Trading in on the media frenzy over one of the nation’s hottest buttons, Cub had found a fresh approach to vying for the Rainbow shopper.

A risky approach, no doubt, in a country that values its heteronormativity, and with an administration that insists on it. Could a campaign like this successfully lure the Queer Eye without offending those who are Touched by an Angel?

On the other hand, wasn’t it a little crass to coast a marketing campaign on the back of a struggle for basic freedoms? You can’t get married but you can get tomatoes?
Mostly, though, it seemed a brave nod of acceptance for what’s still billed as an “alternative lifestyle” instead of just family. Could this really be the case?

Had anyone else seen this ad? And what did they think about it? I asked a group of friends, by email naturally, and this produced a trickle of disinterested responses. Apparently, no one else had noticed it.

So I called Cub headquarters. “They’re supposed to be a mother and a daughter,” reported Chris Murphy, senior manager of public relations, after consulting with his staff. “Really? Because from the freeway, they look like lesbians,” I said. “It’s supposed to demonstrate the generations who have shopped at Cub,” Chris told me. But if that were true, shouldn’t they have included some little kids, some grandparents? “Well, I looked at it up close, and you can tell that one’s older than the other,” Chris said.

But whizzing by on I-94, they definitely didn’t look to me like mother and daughter. One looked possibly Italian, a bit of a fireplug, vaguely like Rhea Perlman playing Carla Tortelli on Cheers; and the other looked like, well, her pleasant Midwestern and perhaps only slightly younger girlfriend. Even in stalled traffic they wouldn’t represent a May/December romance. At best, May/July.

“Do you want to talk to anyone else at the company?” Chris politely asked me. No thanks, I told him. I had called hoping that “Real People, Real Values” meant what I thought it meant: that acceptance of life in its enormous variety should be our primary value, and that somebody besides the AIDS Walk organizers was finally brave enough to advertise it. But I pretty much figured even before I called that it probably didn’t. And the truth is, I live closer to Kowalski’s.
—Shannon Olson

On a sunny June afternoon, Mark Vogt and Azure Marlowe have been given the enviable job of replacing bowling pins on hole number three of the mini-golf course-cum-art exhibit installed for the summer at the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden. Hole three, titled Bolfing for Gowlers, is designed to look like a tiny bowling lane, and after two weeks of play and several saturating rainstorms, its wood is warped and several of its pins have been plucked like rotten teeth. And so, released from their usual gigs in Walker Art Center’s comparatively dim indoor galleries, the construction supervisor and lead tech for the mini-course have jacked up the hole and then balanced it on saw horses; Vogt is drilling screws in from underneath to replace the bowling pins that create one of the mini golf world’s most impossible approach shots. (The bowling pin placed directly in front of the hole seems to preclude any chance of scoring a hole in one, and the gutters on each side take most balls hopelessly, irretrievably out of play.) When asked if the pins have regularly been swiped as fond souvenirs, or ripped mightily off their screws by frustrated players, Vogt says, “I think it’s called ‘picking up a spare.’”

The Walker seems to have bowled a strike with “Walker in the Rough,” located at the Sculpture Garden’s north end, between the Calders and the jutting arms of Mark di Suvero’s Molecule. Shortly after opening the ten-hole mini-golf course, the hours were extended to accommodate crowds that have sometimes waited up to three and a half hours to play. “I don’t think they had any idea it would be this popular,” says Marlowe.

Indeed, on a Wednesday, when the course is officially closed, at least two dozen hopeful golfers have come to keep their elbows straight and swing through the ball, only to be disappointed by the locked-up shack that houses score cards and clubs.

“Is there anywhere else to golf around here?” asked one woman, a tourist whose group finally went to their cars, retrieved their own clubs, and played a couple of holes anyway.

And perhaps this is one reason for the exhibit’s runaway success. Until this summer, there really hasn’t been anywhere to play mini-golf right in the city. Now, though, St. Paul has also joined the game with the nine-hole “EarthScapes” course at the Science Museum. Even before that, the suburban course at Centennial Lakes in Edina had become quite the hotspot. Clearly, the draw of the Lilliputian links is not to be underestimated.

In the 1920s, mini-golf was the United States’ fifth-biggest industry, as popular as baseball and the movies. With courses designed in homage to Scotland’s rolling greens, the game was a sophisticated pastime whose popularity spread from New York rooftops across the country with an almost feverish intensity. Opening a mini-golf course became one of the era’s most foolproof get-rich-quick schemes; soon, local ordinances were being passed to keep enthusiasts from playing late into the night, and widespread worry emerged about the pastime’s corruptive and corrosive influence on America’s youth. (Think Footloose: Those kids and their crazy dancing!)

Alternatively called dwarf golf, pygmy golf, midget golf, and a variety of other things unpalatable to the modern sensibility, mini-golf as we mostly know it emerged during the Depression, when course owners had to get a little more creative, trading in pre-fab groomed holes for homemade links, which is when the windmills, tiny bridges, clown mouths, pendulums, and the like came into play. While eventually its popularity began to decline—clearly Hollywood is currently faring better than the mini-golf industry—mini-golf’s manageable challenges still have a draw.

But that can’t be the only reason so many people have come here this June afternoon. Of the disheartened golfers who showed up on an off day, most settle happily for wandering from hole to hole as they might in the Walker’s indoor galleries, reading the didactic labels and clucking appreciation, disapproval, or just plain confusion:

“An ice-fishing house. Ice fishing in the summer. Fantastic!” “This one looks like you could skateboard up it.” “Gosh, what is this? I thought this was going to be a real golf course.”

Good point. So is it a real golf course? A mini one, that is? Is it golf? Or is it art? Or some strange hybrid created by the seemingly unlikely bedfellows of sport and art? And with ten holes instead of the usual nine or eighteen, you have to wonder if the Walker had any idea what it was doing—should artists really design golf courses? Even tiny ones?—or if, as usual, this avant-garde institution is asking us to think outside the box, bending the boundaries of our understanding. What does it mean that there are ten holes? Is it a comment on our blind acceptance of the status quo, of a kind of lockstep reverence for obscure numerological Kaballa?

“We put out a request for proposals and we picked eight that we liked,” says Christi Atkinson, the Walker’s associate director of education. “And then we got to design one. And Target [the course’s corporate sponsor] got one. Oh. So how does a mini-golf exhibit fit with the Walker’s usual challenging fare? “It’s true that we’re often challenging art, opening up people’s ideas about what art is. But the purpose of this isn’t to deconstruct mini-golf,” Atkinson patiently responds.

But how many golf holes are, well, curated? And, in such close proximity to the gnomic declarations that Jenny Holzer carved into her marble benches, one can’t help but read things like “Keep club head below knees and do not loft ball” as some kind of metaphorical directive. After strolling the course long enough, even the adjacent Coke machine’s “Thirsty?” came to read as a metaphysical question.

Take hole number four, Mini Golf Smackdown!, whose creators have devised a point system rewarding schadenfreude and raw aggression, and “questioning the passive competition of traditional golf.” (Passive? Have they ever played golf with my sister?) Assuming that most people are essentially playing against themselves and to better their abilities, Takuma Handa and Daniel Vercruysse here instruct players to whack their way around a grid of raised and inverted pyramids, encouraging you to knock other balls off the course, chip your own ball back onto it using most any means, and to “laugh at others’ misfortune.” On a hole where it’s essentially impossible to line up a shot, the first person to actually sink the ball in the hole is rewarded with one point (three under par), the second gets two points, and so on—that is, your score for the hole has nothing to do with how many shots you actually took.

For mini-golf, this is sort of complicated, and one steamy Thursday night, the line backs up quickly. “It’s a good thing there’s a ten-stroke limit,” comments one player when asked about her success on the Smackdown, “or we would have been there all night.”(Actually, the stroke limit for the course is six.) When I asked a member of another group what she thought of the idea behind the Smackdown, she said, “The one with the pyramids? Yeah. We didn’t read the instructions.”

The creators of Pachinko Generation, hole number two, have constructed a combination skateboard half-chute and Plexiglas-encased wall of spinning blocks that have screws in them, and which looks something like a medieval torture device. The didactic label states, “A surprising discovery about pachinko machines is that the more evenly its metal pins are spaced, the more unpredictable the ball’s bounce becomes.” More surprising still is the raw aggression (extra Smackdown points here?) that players use to get their balls unstuck from the pachinko machine, something like trying to get a jammed Snickers out of a vending machine when your blood sugar has dropped. Most players resort to shoving their clubs behind the Plexiglas to sp
in the blocks, which does have the desired effect of “remix[ing] the machine’s images,” though not as organically as the designers might have hoped.

Other holes are more straightforward. Winter in Summer; Ice Fishing House pays homage to a Minnesota pastime, and Frank’s Frolic is a nod to a Frank Stella painting in the Walker’s permanent collection. (Its maddening diagonals prompted my partner, after several bad shots, to bellow, “Stella!”) Point of fact: If you’re actually competitive about mini golf, you’re out of luck here.

“One of my friends is a high school math teacher,” noted Charles Weed, who was golfing the course with his wife, Jennifer Prestholdt, and their two young children. “He kept saying ‘This is clearly designed by artists! The angles are all wrong!’” Jo Schultz, an MCAD student in a black T-shirt that said “Kill ’Em All. Let God Sort ’Em Out,” was playing a second round with her boyfriend Parker. “I’m competitive about it,” she said. “It’s a little frustrating to not be able to kick his ass so bad.”

Most golfers seemed to quit keeping score after a while and simply surrender to the heat and the giddiness of the game. (“Get over here now or I’ll club you like a baby seal,” one golfer entreated her son, and then broke into gales of laughter.)

The question remains: Is it sport or is it sculpture? “They are sculptures,” Christi Atkinson asserts. Are they? “I think they are,” said Rose Park, golfing with her co-workers from the Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights office. “But it’s artists creating art for a certain purpose. They’re practical sculptures.”

The most practical of which turns out to be Bullseye’s Bunker, the hole created by Target. Perhaps it’s just that adherence to the bottom line so necessary to the corporate world, but as one player laughed, “That’s the only hole I got it in.”