Category: Article

Next month the Guthrie will grab all the attention when it re-opens, but right now you need to train your sights on Northeast Minneapolis, where the long-shuttered 1920s-era Ritz Theater will once again open its doors. In its heyday the Ritz was the lynchpin of a friendly neighborhood entertainment district–back before people drove to the mall for dinner and a movie. Once a number of galleries and watering spots revived the neighborhood, the savvy Ballet of the Dolls troupe recognized that it was high time for the old theater to be reborn too. The Dolls celebrate their new home–and their twentieth anniversary–with a brand-new ballet whose score includes music ranging from Mozart, Rachmaninoff, and Schubert to Mary J. Blige and David Bowie. 345 13th Ave. N.E., Minneapolis; 651-209-6689; www.balletofthedolls.org

John Guare’s script could rightly be called the star of this classic Jungle Theater production, but the cast includes a surefire lineup of local stage wonders: Jungle artistic director Bain Boehlke, the indefatigable and inimitable comic actress Wendy Lehr, and the ex-Twin Citizen Rosalie Tenseth, who’s returned from New York to reprise, for a third time, her role as Bunny, the mistress who favors hot-pink spandex and leopard prints. Guare’s acerbic, eighties-era tale makes light of a host of modern predicaments: terrorism, infidelity, mental illness, and celebrity lust. The resulting production is at once gut-busting and biting–a must-see. 2951 Lyndale Ave. S.; 612-822-7063; www.jungletheater.com

A woman finds herself torn between two loves, one with a beautiful body and one with a beautiful mind. Of course, the triangulated longing Thomas Mann wrote about in his 1941 novella The Transposed Heads, which was based on an Indian folk story, is a theme that keeps cropping up again and again. Ragamala Music and Dance Theatre, a foremost local authority on East Indian culture and dance, has crafted an evening-length production that debuted to enthusiastic reviews in 2001, and whose storytelling is reliant on movement, gesture, and sign language. Nicole Zapko, a deaf actor, and Ragamala artistic director Ranee Ramaswamy play multiple characters. 1501 4th St. S., Minneapolis; 612-338-6131; www.ragamala.net

The buttery-yellow walls with navy-blue accents may make you think you’ve wandered into a Scandinavian wine bar. But the menu at Willie’s, which comforts downtowners in fitting style from sunrise to nightfall, has just a few Nordic touches. Daytime visitors enjoy choice selections like tangy kielbasa salad–plump grilled sausages atop tart, lemony frisee or tatsoi leaves, dressed with goat cheese and pinot noir. At night, when the lights are dimmed and the yellow backs down, the food and wine find center stage. Sophisticated small plates pair nicely with the extensive wine list: A taste of pork and apple mingles amicably with a sweet Riesling; chorizo and roasted pepper are kept in check by a quenching Rioja. 1100 Harmon Pl., Minneapolis; 612-332-8811

That old Thomas Edison saw about inspiration and perspiration? It came to mind when we received Alison McGhee’s response to our question about which five things she’d take with her to a deserted island. McGhee, a Minneapolis-based writer who has won two Minnesota Book Awards, didn’t just answer the question–first she wrote an entire essay about the proposition, and then whittled the thing down. Presumably that industrious approach to the creative process has proved useful to McGhee in the writing of her six novels, including the acclaimed Shadow Baby and her most recent, All Rivers Flow to the Sea, a young adult novel–and yet another MBA nominee. Her work also appears this month in The Rake’s first-ever literary supplement. And judging from her annotations below, she wouldn’t let a thing like being stranded on a desert isle hamper her artistic life. Here’s what she’d bring:

1. The brown, fake-leather Merriam-Webster dictionary that I won at age eleven in the New York State Spelling Bee. This dictionary is the only book I will need, because it contains all the words I’ve ever known, and with enough time and patience, those words can be rearranged into all the books I’ve ever loved. Every day on my desert island I will look for cool words I don’t know, like “testudo,” which is a row of armor made by Roman soldiers when they hold their shields up high in the air, and “palimpsest”: writing that has been partially erased from that which it was written on.

2. A notebook in which I have copied down my ninety favorite poems. Ninety because my grandmother lived to be ninety, and my grandmother loved poetry, and if A = B and B = C, then ninety poems seems about right. On my desert island I will finally have plenty of time to memorize all my favorite poems.

3. My piano and the music I brought with me. I’ll play my Hanon scale exercises over and over and over. Maybe I’ll play them ninety times each. And then I’ll turn to my Chopin prelude, the one I can never get exactly right. With all that time, alone on my desert island, maybe I can finally get the incredibly hard part near the end to sound as if it’s not hard at all.

4. A needle and thread and the small box of old clothes from the top shelf in my closet. These are clothes I have saved over many years: My grandmother’s flowered housedress, my baby’s polka-dot pants, the navy blue shift that my mother looked so beautiful in when I was a child, the shirt my best friend wore every time we went dancing in college. I will cut them all up into scraps and turn them into a quilt that will keep me warm on the sand at night.

5. A small, sharp knife. I don’t know how to carve, but I’ve always wanted to, and finally I have plenty of time to learn. I’ll carve only the pieces of driftwood that wash up on shore. No coconuts, no plastic flotsam. When I get good at carving, I’ll mount a driftwood sculpture installation beside a poem written on the sand, below the high tideline, for the fish and seagulls to admire. When the tide is high, I’ll play Chopin for the seagulls, and the fish will raise their silvery fins in a testudo, honoring the palimpsest of our art as it washes out to sea.

In 1949, Jerome Liebling left the established New York art scene for the academe, taking up an influential post as professor of film and photography in the University of Minnesota’s fledgling fine arts program. As he set down roots here, his outsider’s perspective drew him toward people and places–scenes from St. Paul’s slaughterhouses, work-worn faces from the Iron Range, children on the Red Lake Reservation–that few others at the time considered artistic fodder. He also witnessed political history as figures ranging from Walter Mondale to JFK made memorable appearances in Minnesota. Today Liebling lives in Florida, but he visited the Twin Cities recently to celebrate the opening of a retrospective of his work at the Minnesota Center for Photography.

You left New York at a time when it was becoming the world’s art capital. Do you think coming here limited or liberated you as an artist?

I really grew up in Minnesota, whether I knew it or not. The loss of my home and my friends in New York was tough, but I thought Minnesota was very rich, and I really traveled throughout the state to discover what I could.

Your presence here was influential in developing a stronger art community and gallery scene. Were you hoping to recreate some of what you’d experienced on the East Coast?
Well, one of the things going on at the time was the vast expansion of the universities, much of it due to the GI Bill, and the art department at the U of M had just been formed. At that time, I didn’t understand what that meant, but it was a very significant change for young artists. Previous to that, you trained at a conservatory if you were in music or the arts. Suddenly, you could get a respected degree in the arts. So I was part of that change, but I didn’t even know it.

Your body of work includes some very disturbing images. Are you drawn to photographing the dark side of life?
Well, those things are there, and at some point we all have to face them. I like to think my work captures the passion and the pain of life. Passion arises and destroys, nature rises again, and things seem to rejuvenate. You have hope and, unfortunately, a little despair. The wonderful growth that you get from nature–young people, beautiful things growing–is amazing. But then eventually things die. And how we resolve that philosophically, I don’t know.

Have you ever been upset by your subject matter?
The South St. Paul slaughterhouse project was challenging. I started it in 1952, and I’d been in World War II until my discharge in 1945. When I first went down to South St. Paul and went through some slaughterhouses, it was really a challenge to my memory. That’s when I saw the chaos and the blood and the killing, and absorbing that was just as much a part of what I was doing there as simply documenting how these guys worked.

Is there a photo out there that you always wanted to shoot, but never got the chance?
There’s not really a missed opportunity I dwell on, but rather a general desire to keep getting out my camera and working. I’m not really still taking photographs. Well, I do a little bit in the winter. I live in Florida now, and for a long time I’ve done a nature series there.

What was the last photo you took that you were really excited about?
Well, I just wrote an article about the people who came to Florida, and I’ve been working on photos that illustrate the whole migration and culture that has evolved there. All the New York people that I knew, and my mother as well, went down there and became the snowbirds, and it was a long time before I understood the connection between their desire to come to Florida and the natural scene, the tropical flora. I’ve found that flora to be endlessly interesting to photograph–as well as the people, of course.

You’re about to turn eighty-two–is working behind the camera getting difficult?
It does. I don’t seem to have the energy at my age. And there’s also the conflict of digital. I’m not a digital photographer, and very slowly, the materials that I use are disappearing or becoming hard to get. So there’s going to have to be a change there, but I’m postponing that as long as possible.

The Calhoun Beach Club’s on-site restaurant wins Facelift of the Year. The rejuvenated space (pictured here), once home to Dixie’s, is now a restaurant worthy of the club’s luxe membership. The warm, orangey colors; clean, modern lines; and cushy pod furniture are invitingly swank, but this place isn’t all about show. View’s sesame-encrusted salmon with an orange beurre blanc, shrimp spaghettini baked in parchment paper, and crispy zucchini fries are notable successes. Even the beautiful people can dine well here without mistreating their bodies: In keeping with the Club’s fitness mission, delicious and healthy dishes like Moroccan grilled tofu and turkey burgers populate the menu. This is the rebirth of a spot that thoroughly deserved to be gorgeous again. 2730 Lake St. W., Minneapolis; 612-920-5000; www.viewcalhoun.com

Nick Hook never envisioned himself as an editor. When he was thrust behind the helm of the Whittier Globe in April of last year, he had virtually no writing experience. Nick had been shuffling between gigs as a rocker with Vinnie and the Stardusters and a lackey in the corporate world when he decided to submit an article to his brother and then-Globe-editor, Jamie. Suddenly, Jamie was fired or quit, depending on whom you ask. And since the Globe’s two-member board president, Ralf Runquist, a spry eighty-four-year-old, had no interest in managing the paper, he allowed Nick to take control on a temporary basis. After three months, another Hook was officially in charge.

Rarely more than eight pages and printed on the cheapest paper, the Globe has been the Whittier community’s voice since 1976. There are no offices, just a P.O. Box and Hook’s cell phone. Meetings are held nomadically, via the telephone, or at local bars or a favorite Vietnamese restaurant, over mock duck sandwiches and bubble tea. The Globe could be called a poor man’s Onion, a punked-out rag that pokes good-natured, boozy fun at local events and politics. It is unlike any other newspaper in the Twin Cities.

Under Hook’s tutelage, the Globe has steered away from such yawn-inducing stories as, “City Out of Compliance With Federal Mediation Agreement” and toward screaming yellow journalism like, “Pumpkin Vandals!” On one occasion, when news was slow, Hook sent an inebriated pal to cover a Whittier Alliance meeting. Like a small-scale Hearst kick-starting the Spanish-American War, the “reporter” glommed onto one of the meeting’s many talking points and inflated it into a lighthearted controversy. Accompanying the article was a photo of a young woman dressed in a short skirt, sexy black boots, and a hat and mask, holding a letter said to be offensive. Of course, there have been setbacks and some of Hook’s jokes haven’t gone over so well. After he suggested that readers avoid the Wedge Community Co-op, for example, claiming that organic vegetables are nothing more than conventional food that has been washed really well, his paper lost the co-op’s advertising for several months.

Hook, in his mid-thirties, is a bed-headed manic with the wide eyes and uncontrolled gesticulation of a guy either tremendously caffeinated or consistently thrilled. Almost immediately after coming on board, he had the idea to make the Globe more of a laugh than a snooze. “This is all for fun,” he said. “It has to be, since we don’t make any money. I pay our writers with beer when I take the staff out every other month and pick up the tab.” Hook himself receives a modest stipend of a couple hundred bucks each month, certainly not enough to live on.

Editing the Globe is a slapdash affair. Hook rounds up articles toward the end of each month and then pushes them through at the last minute, filling empty space with odd tidbits like dating contests and photos of cats or his friends’ children. Sometimes, when the events calendar is sparse, he’ll add fake happenings like an audition for Subhuman, a musical about the “fascinating life of three modern tow-truck drivers!” During Hook’s tenure, the Globe has launched a variety of oddball columns like “Ask the Nurse,” in which readers (real and imagined) seek medical and fashion advice; “Ask Oscar,” a six-year-old boy answering child-rearing questions as best he can; “Everybody Is A Star,” a horoscope that explains its vague advice in terms of movie plots; and “Don’t Knock It ‘Till You’ve Tried It,” Shannon Keough’s monthly rumination on new adventures, like severing her Achilles tendon or suffering through a personal-finance class. A recent contest, featuring a photo of half-bared cleavage, was called “Win a date with these!”

No one seems to know who really owns the Globe. Runquist, though, has run the paper for ten years—he took over after the editor at the time literally dropped dead during a delivery run—and seen it through various incarnations. While disapproving of the paper’s newfound interest in boozing, it turns out that he’s generally pleased with the product. “Some of the articles seem strange to me,” he admitted. “But that’s the new generation, I guess. It’s become a fun thing, and I like that.”

Hook has serious goals for the gabsheet. He’d like to draw more advertisers, pay his writers with money instead of alcohol, and someday print more than eight pages at a go. What he doesn’t want is for the paper to be like all the other neighborhood monthlies. “If we can get five more advertisers, that would be good,” Hook said. “But it’s not going to come at the expense of the articles. There’s a lot of humor in this neighborhood and in the meetings.” He laughed. “Though some day I might just try and please Ralf and have an alcohol-free issue.”

—Peter Schilling

The Man in the Housing Bubble

Did he die? Or just abandon his house to the “Ugly” people?

Ug bought my next-door neighbor’s house. I didn’t think it was dilapidated enough to be purchased by the “We Buy Ugly Houses” people, but apparently it was. When I moved in, my landlady warned me that the guy next door was weird, but I figured that was just because she was from the Home Depot school of property maintenance (vinyl siding and lots of pavement), while he preferred a more lived-in look that included randomly planted shrubs and ankle-length grass. The house’s peeling siding was an amalgam of different colors, with holes artfully covered in plywood. More power to him, I thought. My perfectly manicured South Minneapolis block needed some excitement.

He walked his dog wearing brightly colored hot pants and erected a limp chain-link fence that bisected his front yard, the way one might surround a trailer to protect it from rabid dogs. He hung his birdfeeder so that it leaned into my front yard, which soon became an unwelcome haven for a riot of birds and squirrels. He rarely appeared outdoors. I saw him so infrequently that when I picture him I see a sixty-year-old Andy Warhol, with shaggy grey-blond hair.

Last fall, his unmowed grass became a vast grass forest, with unraked leaves padding it in wet clumps. The bird feeder sat empty and all signs of life, already infrequent, ceased completely. For weeks I waited for an indication that he was alive, but there was nothing.

Then one day a few weeks ago, I heard a series of crashes coming from the house. Rushing to the window, I saw two men in blue uniforms throwing the contents of the house into a miniature dump truck marked 1-800-GOT-JUNK? HomeVestors had purchased the house, the dudes in blue told me. “You know, the ‘We Buy Ugly Houses’ people.” These guys would clean the place out, and then HomeVestors would fix it up and put it back on the market.

HomeVestors is a national franchise with headquarters in Dallas. They pay cash for neglected homes and rental properties, close within a few days, and then fix them up and turn them around at a higher price. The twelve franchises in the Twin Cities combined buy about three hundred properties a year. To HomeVestors, ugly isn’t just multi-colored siding and unmowed grass; it’s more often messy situations. Many houses come into Ug’s possession because of the three D’s: debt, death, and divorce. Others are sold as a way to get rid of a burdensome rental property, which was why my neighbor’s house was sold. It turned out he was a tenant who just wasn’t wanted any longer.

By the time I got outside, the truck had been stuffed with two refrigerators, a stove, and a dishwasher, and the workers were in the process of rolling another stove down the steps, not on a dolly, but by rolling it end over end. From my side of the house, I could still see the only adornments that had ever been there: a crooked air conditioner and a small American flag, the kind you might see at a small-town Veterans Day parade.

On the overgrown front lawn there was a mournful display: an old metal kitchen cabinet, a fold-up metal bed, innumerable broken floor lamps, a set of floral TV trays, and a perfectly good basketball. These items looked like a pack of kids waiting for a late parent to pick them up from school. And still more stuff kept coming out of the house. As a second dishwasher was tossed into the truck, a left-behind spoon tumbled out of it onto the street.

The inside of the house was a scene of bare ruin. The whole place was freezing cold and, without the carpets, overwhelmingly brown. It felt as if I were exploring a house that had been abandoned for years, as if the floorboards would give way at any moment. An empty Xbox box sat in the middle of what was meant to be a dining room. In the threshold between that room and the bedroom lay discarded Herbal Essences shampoo and conditioner bottles and a dirty glass ashtray. What would make my dog-walking, anti-yard-mowing guy leave all of this behind?

On the wall of the living room was a solemn portrait of a Hispanic family, circa 1992, that had never lived in the house. The father wore a Girbaud T-shirt and a steady expression. His wife and three children were equally stoic. The family stared straight ahead at a spot across the room, where an entire section of the wall had been torn out, revealing the guts of the house, water pipes, and wiring.

From the porch where neighbor dude had once smoked, the men in blue now heaved the contents of the second floor out onto the lawn. They threw oven racks, stiff sheets of carpet, flattened boxes, and blocks of wood. The American flag was one of the last things to go. Like an autumn leaf floating slowly to the ground, over and over it tumbled, finally landing with a little click on top of the pile of a forgotten life. —Alexandra Kerl

In Ideal Corners, a tiny town near Brainerd, trips to the local dump were a family tradition. My grandfather would pop the enormous trunk of his robin’s-egg blue Oldsmobile and we’d load it up with cans, done-in appliances, or dozens of leaf bags. In the spring, he’d bring along binoculars in order to watch the wild animals—black bears and so forth—lured by the aroma of rotting trash. It was more exciting than any episode of Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom.

Nowadays, things are less wild. The dump has been spiffed up and renamed the “Ideal Corners Transfer Station.” There are no more scrounging bears or hawks diving for rodents. Gone are the mountains of plastic and eggshells, and along with them the exciting prospect of a garbage avalanche.

In this new age of trash, recycling must be dutifully sorted into various bins. Old batteries, and other toxic waste, are set aside in the garage for environmentally responsible disposal. Customers must sign a ledger, describe what they left, and pay accordingly. Trucks then haul everything away thirty miles to a forty-acre pit lined with protective clay and plastic.

“Nope, you can’t bury toxic waste anymore,” said Doug, the transfer station manager. “The dump in Brainerd cost eight and a half million to build and they thought it would last thirty years. It’s only been eight years and it’s half full!” On a recent Wednesday afternoon, a few buddies kept Doug company as they lollygagged on discarded couches and stained Barcaloungers. Inside his little office, a salvaged chandelier dangled from the ceiling and the radio with the coat-hanger antenna blasted live coverage of Bean Hole Days in nearby Pequot Lakes.

Given rapidly dwindling natural resources, a new subculture of salvagers now keeps watch on the dump. Steven, a junk dealer wearing gigantic sunglasses, examines incoming vehicles for worthy finds. “Do you want to buy an icebox from 1906?” he asked me. “You can’t find them anymore. I heard they’re going for hundreds of dollars on eBay, but I don’t know anything about computers.” Doug told me that Steven looks for storm windows and breaks the glass out to sell the aluminum. “I don’t know where he takes the metal now. There used to be a guy down in Crosby who had an aluminum smelter, but he got lead poisoning.”

During my afternoon visit, the pickings were slim, but everyone was excited anyway. “You know today’s a big day here, right?” Doug asked. “The baler is here and is compacting all the appliances.” He pointed down a dirt hill to a cherry picker lifting rusty, old machines from a thirty-foot mound of old refrigerators, washing machines, and ranges. Making a considerable racket, the hydraulic press smashed each appliance into a mangled square bale and spit it out onto a pile.

The garbage pits are gone from Ideal Corners because, simply put, trash is just too valuable to waste. After the compactor finishes, Doug explained, the bales will be shipped “to Winnipeg where the insulation and plastic is blown off. They take out the mercury switches. You know, the kill switches, the Freon, and all that. Then they ship it by train to Seattle. From there it’s sent by boat to China where they melt it down.”

“In the end, we buy it all back!” —Eric Dregni