Category: Article

Recently, the American College of Emergency Physicians issued a national report card on the state of emergency medicine, and the whole country received a grade of C-minus. Minnesota, which is generally the slightly smug and self-satisfied Lisa Simpson character amongst its peer states in these ratings, was issued a slightly improved C-plus, a devastating blow to our “quality of life”-based ego. (Granted, one of the college’s five criteria was Minnesota’s medical-liability climate, where we were rated a D-minus, a grade which one presumes would be improved by a medical-liability damages cap or by exporting HMO hawk Mike Hatch to Wisconsin.)

Recently, I had a firsthand opportunity to test our state’s emergency

preparedness at an early morning bio-terrorism drill at one of the metro area’s major hospitals. I was forwarded an invitation that went out to hundreds of public-health students at the University of Minnesota, soliciting volunteers. It may have been the fact that the drill started at 6:00 a.m. on what turned out to be the coldest day of winter thus far, or that we were advised to wear a swimsuit under our clothes in order to retain modesty during a decontamination shower, but in the conference room where the drilling team assembled, I was one of only three volunteers who weren’t actually employed by the hospital. Our small but brave cadre of outsiders received many thanks, complimentary coffee, and a single powdered doughnut that we were asked to smear on our clothes and faces in order to simulate an anthrax exposure.

While I yearned for more fully developed backstory (“OK, you’re a renegade genetics researcher, and your attempts to create the world’s first pig-soybean hybrid have drawn the ire of animal-rights extremists. One day you receive a suspicious envelope … ”), we volunteers were merely asked to run into the emergency room and tell the attendant we believed we were exposed to anthrax at a building across the street. Emergency-room workers were not supposed to be tipped off to the drill, but some may have grown suspicious at the post-midnight assembly of two shower tents, one in a heated garage and one outside the main entrance, in below-zero windchills.

The organizers staggered our arrival at the emergency room. I was volunteer number seven, so by the time I walked in, the novelty had worn off for the nurses on duty. They barely raised an eyebrow, and, from behind protective glass at the desk, they directed me back outside to the ambulance garage in order to be decontaminated. In the garage, the mood was not so blasé, and there was a lot of muffled consultation going back and forth between hospital staff members clad in hazmat suits who, with their bright-orange boots, looked like a cross between Oompa Loompas and astronauts. In a barely intelligible voice, one of them told me to come with him to the outside shower, but before I could even protest, news arrived that the waterlines to the outside shower had frozen. My relief was short-lived as I stripped down to my swimsuit and was herded into the garage’s shower tent, blasted with water that was only slightly warmer than ice, swaddled in towels, and then rolled in a wheelchair into the ER, where I and my fellow victims were “monitored” for signs of infection by the nursing staff.

At a debriefing that followed, the problems were enumerated: the hazmat suits took too long to don, there was a shortage of bags for contaminated clothing, and the “victims” did not receive quick or understandable instructions. But these problems paled when compared with the adventures of one of the hospital staff’s more entrepreneurial victim-volunteers: When he found himself undirected and unsupervised in the garage, he wandered into the ER and beyond, presumably “infecting” entire wings of the hospital. What’s more, a hospital security guard who had been in an infected area returned to the situation-control room, thereby “infecting” the response-management team. The drill organizers assessed these events soberly. Clearly, this exercise was a starting point, but there would seem to be many more early mornings—and powdered doughnuts—in all of their futures. —Dan Gilchrist

Cell phone chirps, caller ID says it’s my wife calling. “Hi Honey!”

“Do you have a minute?” Uh-oh. I can tell by the clipped tone of her voice that this is not my lovely, doting bride, the future mother of my children, calling to say she loves and misses me while I’m away for a conference. This is business; and I already have the fear.

“Um, yeah, I’m just taking a break between speakers. What’s up?” Wait for it.

“How much money have you spent?” Gulp. This is a loaded question. As the household chief financial officer, she knows exactly how much I’ve spent.

“I dunno, a few hundred dollars, something like that? Vegas is kind of expensive sweetheart … ” Sweetheart. Thrown in as an act of desperation as I try to take mental tally of how much it’s been. I realize I have no idea.

“Expensive? I guess so. You’ve spent more than six hundred dollars. In less than twenty-four hours.”

Shit. “No I didn’t. I couldn’t have. Six hundred dollars? Are you sure?”

“Yes, I am sure. Yesterday you had withdrawals of $200, $280, $100, and then $100 today. So actually, that makes $680.”

Blink. Blink. The click-pinging of slot machines and other casino din, which I’m sure she can hear in the background, mock any attempt to account for having spent six hundred dollars, constructively, in Las Vegas.

“What on earth did you spend all that money on? I thought this was a corporate thing.”

“Well, um, I dunno, Vegas is expensive, you know cabrideslimosdrinksdinneralittle gamblinganothercabridetceteraandsoon—are you sure it was that much sweetheart?”

“Why do you keep calling me ‘sweetheart’? You never call me that.”

“Well, you know, honey, stuff just kinda, adds up. I’m really sorry sweetheart.” I am in full retreat. I am pathetic. Dear God, why didn’t I let this go to voicemail.

“Sorry? What the hell is wrong with you? And stop calling me ‘sweetheart’! We’ll talk about this when you get back. And try to make it home without spending too much more. I love you.” Click.

My wife and I rarely fight, but when we disagree, it’s usually about money. Yes, we fit that textbook example of domestic discord. We have one bank account, which collects both our paychecks. As a mortgage banker, I deal with other people’s money all day, helping them budget and plan for what is normally the largest expense in their lives. The last thing I want to do when I get home is account for my own finances. (The very thought of balancing even my own checkbook gives me jaw-clenching anxiety.) So rather than being the carpenter who lets his own house go to ruin I entrust my wife, a sales representative by day and domestic goddess by night, with handling all the finances. She manages our money, pays all the bills, keeps us on budget, and does a fantastic job. I love her for it. It’s an arrangement that works well for us—that is, until I periodically screw it up.

For the record: The CFO occasionally blows off budget, too. But here’s the thing: I’d been blowing dough as if it were all my own—we’ll chalk it up to a twenty-four-hour bug. Even though those dollars were being spent on things my wife and I would agree are valid social/business purposes, the fact that I didn’t track it, or at least warn her I’d be high-rolling, was what put me in the doghouse. Between the two incomes, our account was plenty padded. There wasn’t a cash-flow problem. This wasn’t about money in the least.

Six hundred dollars at Target? At Sam’s Club? At Pottery Barn? That’s no problem for her (and for me, just to be clear). These are legitimate expenses; food for the family, household maintenance, and nesting materials to make for a happy home. But six hundred dollars in Vegas with nary a throw pillow to show for it? You have no idea. —Alex Stenback

With his wide-set, almond-shaped eyes and dark-coffee complexion, the statuesque Ini Iyamba possesses a sort of chiseled, architectural beauty, which is only enhanced by a devout commitment to fitness. The other day, he wore an outfit that complemented both God-given and hard-won features: closefitting jeans and a snug vintage tee, tight around the shoulders, with rainbow letters spelling “Fascination.” A daring pair of white, faux snakeskin loafers finished the jaunty look.

Iyamba owns Ivy, the Calhoun Square boutique that, in the year since it opened, has become known for its exotic, funky selection of denim and other casual clothing for women. But even while admiring gold-threaded hoodies and tiered cotton skirts, it’s hard not to notice how great Iyamba looks, whether he’s in an old track jacket or custom-tailored cuffs.

Finding out where he shops for his own clothes involved a tasteful display of his wardrobe staples in Ivy’s backroom: Jockey V-neck T-shirt from Target; knit pageboy cap; monogrammed, cashmere sweater from J.Crew; glow-in-the-dark, seventies-era Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey tee, a thrift-store find; reconstructed vintage Levi’s—a limited edition from Barney’s New York; custom-made black dress shirt; Puma trainers; and pinstriped trousers of uncertain origin.

“Dress pants are huge,” he said, holding this favorite pair to his legs. “I come from a culture in which everybody gets dressed up in their Sunday best.” Iyamba was born in Nigeria, and although he moved to the Midwest when he was ten (he attended St. Thomas Academy in St. Paul and the University of Wisconsin at Madison), in terms of fashion, it is the styles worn by his African compatriots that left a lasting impression. “In the summer, they’d have on their dress pants with sandals and a singlet,” he said. Later, he would cite their influence on his own penchant for fedoras and pageboy caps.

“Every man should have a custom-tailored suit,” he said. “But they’re not cheap, so a lot of men can get a custom shirt instead.” He showed how his black dress shirt had been darted at the waist. “If they’re working out, they probably have broad shoulders, so there’s going to be some excess fabric,” he said, gesturing with his palm toward his slender mid-section. “I have about twenty black dress shirts—the majority of them, maybe fifteen, with French cuffs. And I wear them like the French do: un-cuffed.

“Vintage, for me, is really big,” he continued. “It personalizes your wardrobe. All my vintage shopping is done at Tatter’s. My friends and I call it ‘The Dusty.’” Iyamba held up a classic Tatter’s find: a seventies-era polo sweater done up in bright orange and ivory stripes. “I was once offered $300 for this,” he said, in all seriousness.

With the first birthday of Ivy last month, Iyamba began stocking menswear. So far the offerings are light, but they impressively straddle the expanse between pantywaist and Navy Seal. They include dress shirts in contrasting floral and camouflage prints—sometimes in a single garment; a line of sandal-loafer hybrids by Lacoste that are made with Louis Vuitton leather; ball caps with skull and sergeant-stripe appliqués; and lots of high-buck designer denim—most notably, Evisu, a top-dollar line with cult status (thanks to various pro athletes and rap stars). Even at more than $300 a pair, Iyamba says customers have been gobbling these up. “But I actually like ‘em. They fit really well,” he said. So he’s keeping a pair for himself, too. —Christy DeSmith

Standing where Cedar and Riverside Avenues cross, it’s hard to believe that this was once the blondest intersection in all of Minneapolis. In the 1800s, it was home to the city’s largest concentration of Scandinavian immigrants. Today, framed by the looming Riverside Plaza Towers and the long-standing 400 Bar, the neighborhood is still defined by newcomers, except that they are more likely to hail from East Africa than Northern Europe.

Next to neighborhood stalwarts such as the Wienery and the labor-party-endorsed Mayday Books, newer entities have moved in, like the Dar Al-Hijrah Islamic Center, which shares its space with the Cedar-Riverside cop shop, and the Al Karama Mall, offering fine furniture and digital versions of the Koran.

Despite Mohammed’s presence, the neighborhood retains its reputation as a hard-drinkin’ destination with a few hard-luck regulars. Bars and clubs line the streets, from the Triple Rock Social Club to the Nomad World Pub to more purposeful drinking haunts like Palmer’s. Throw in throngs of U students straight outta Ames, and you’ve got a neighborhood with a distinctly transient feel. The ubiquitous ads for phone cards and money transfers only add to the effect.

Life for Cedar Avenue’s newest homesteaders still seems firmly rooted in Africa. Aside from a few mini groceries selling Syrian bath products and locally made flat breads, most of the area’s Somalis shop at a makeshift market at 419 Cedar Ave. S. This place would seem forlorn if not for the smiles and laughter of the women hawking colorful long skirts, tunics, and headscarves, all of which can be admired in cracked mirrors alongside machine-made prayer rugs, plastic flowers, and incense.

Another favorite destination is Ubah Restaurant and Coffee, where men in kufis and henna-dyed beards slurp down steaming soup from plastic bowls and watch Al Jazeera on the big-screen TV. It’s hard to go unnoticed at Ubah, especially if you’re a lily-white woman. Each new customer gave me a curious once-over before sitting down. And I got the sweetest smile from the slight young man who wiped my table.

It occurred to me while sipping coffee that this is exactly what the Department of Homeland Security is most fearful of: foreign-born, Islamic, Al Jazeera-watching men. But from where I sat, it looked like they were probably discussing the weather and their kids and telling jokes. Cancel that code orange.

Cedar-Riverside remains, as always, a sort of cultural chameleon. But just as in the seventies, the word on the street is “peace.” Now it just sounds more like “salaam.”

—Sarah Lemanczyk

Back in the seventies, one of my sisters spent a summer clopping around in Dr. Scholl’s with white cotton socks. Supposedly it was doctor’s orders—he said she had an allergy to the rubber in sneakers—but what kind of doctor would prescribe Dr. Scholl’s for an eight-year-old tomboy? Probably she badgered our mother for them. Naturally desirous of anything a sibling had that I did not, I tried out the Scholl’s one day, and naturally fell off (or out of) them, twisting my ankle and jabbing the arch of my foot with the hard edge of the shoe.

Childhood impressions die hard, and thereafter wooden-soled shoes were out of the question. But decades later, I found myself trying on Troentorp clogs. I liked that the uppers were attached to the soles with tiny silver nails, not staples, and that they were made by an old-school Swedish company. The clearance price also helped—I had little to lose.

What other shoe can inspire a brief jig while, say, waiting for a file at the printer? Maybe it has something to do with how, in a traditionally designed clog, the heel height, the tread, and the space beneath the toe are all precisely aligned to make walking on an inflexible wood sole not just doable, but delightful (think clog dancers). And maybe it’s that purity of design, or more accurately, its mix of complexity and simplicity, that is so compelling.

Clogs date back at least to Roman times, when men and women wore wooden shoes called Tyrrhenian sandals to the bathhouses. In the 1500s, affluent ladies wore a variation called a “patten,” basically a galosh, to protect their fancy fabric footwear, but eventually the clog—and the French sabot and the Spanish pantofle—became common among peasants and servants. These days people in sturdy, no-nonsense professions, cooks and nurses most notably, are often huge clog fans.

That’s another aspect of clogs’ appeal: Their vibe is hardworking yet quirky and, thanks to their long association with Scandinavians, socialistic—a different spin entirely than that of the crunchy Germany Birkenstock. Birkenstock even attempts to co-opt some of that vibe by calling various of its styles “clogs,” which points to a larger and serious problem: the corruption of the clog.

First, there’s the confusion of “slides” and “mules” with clogs; the most repellant among these styles have ungainly polyester fleece collars and backs that rise to cover just the smallest sliver of heel. Talk about a lack of commitment. The backs of real clogs are closed or open; there is no in between. This not-really-closed-or-open style has become commonplace on all kinds of shoes, and while it’s difficult to articulate, I feel strongly that there is a link between its popularity and the Democrats’ infuriating neither-here-nor-there dilemma. Then there are abominations like sneaker clogs and brightly colored plastic Crocs; the former have a troubling persistence, while the latter, I suspect, will soon go the way of Jellies. Then you’ve got spike-heeled clogs and platform clogs and the “sweater clog” offered by Steve Madden last year. Surely no one would try to make a sweater emulate a clog—why force a clog to adopt the characteristics of a sweater?

When faced with so many variations (or bastardizations) of style and function, it’s necessary to stick with the classics. But they needn’t be boring. Besides Dansko’s patent-leather and crazily striped styles, there’s always inspiration to be found trawling eBay. One vintage pair that tragically got away had huge, Pilgrim-like brass buckles—an acceptable novelty since they were produced by the venerable clog-maker Olof Daughters. My best find by far has been a vintage open-back style whose mysterious long-haired fur and elfin toes inspired observers to make cinematic references (Matthew Barney’s Cremaster films, Lord of the Rings), or to tell me it looked like I was wearing hamsters. Some things are too bizarre to resist. Now, with warm weather approaching, cute perforated clogs are cropping up, and I realize that this is a worthy obsession for all seasons. —Julie Caniglia

Two years ago Israeli author Etgar Keret published a children’s book about a man who saves his family by abandoning it. In Dad Runs Away With the Circus, the titular father is so seduced by a traveling group of lion-tamers, elephants, plate-spinners, and acrobats that (after a brief argument with Mom) he chooses to leave his son and daughter and perform under the big top for a while. He eventually returns home, but only after a whirlwind global tour. “Everything went back to being the same as it always had been,” Keret writes—except for Dad being able to use his newfound fire-breathing skills to cook hotdogs at barbecues.

The book is as playful as any piece of kiddie lit you might find, but it’s still a surprise: Using a mid-life crisis, or any family dysfunction, for comic relief doesn’t get a lot of traction in American letters these days. Blame the memoir glut, blame sobersided MFA programs, blame Oprah—for whatever reason, a lot of popular American writing about families takes its main theme as fixing the flaws that plague us. Into this arid arena arrives Keret, a very funny and very odd writer who aggressively turns the family-problem story inside out. Our screwups with our parents, kids, and lovers are the things we ought to revel in, he argues—they’re what save us, make us whole. That’s not necessarily a novel theme, and for a while there was a small tribe of writers making hay of all the nervous handwringing by letting their freak flag fly: Joseph Heller for example, or Kurt Vonnegut, Philip Roth, even early John Irving. These days, however, it’s an idea we only get slathered in gloom from Rick Moody, soaked in irony from Dave Eggers, and not at all from melodrama pimps like Nicholas Sparks. All of those three can give you love and death, but none of them would set a comic love story in Uzbekistan, which happens to be where the gates of hell are.

Keret was born in 1967, the son of two Polish-born holocaust survivors; he grew up in Israel and, by his account, had a dismal time during his mandatory military service, made worse by the suicide of one of his army buddies. This is the formula that might have produced a drearily glum fiction voice for latter-day disaffected Israelis, but Keret’s refused the role. Instead his off-kilter short-stories, written in Hebrew, have earned him an Eggers- and Moody-like celebrity among young readers in Israel. He’s sold more than two hundred thousand copies of his collections and earned the title of most-shoplifted author in the country—an Israeli Bukowski.

The Nimrod Flipout, his second collection of stories published in the U.S., offers thirty glimpses into beautifully bizarre circumstances and predicaments. In “Fatso,” the narrator’s girlfriend lets him in on a secret: “What if I told you that at night I turn into a heavy, hairy man, with no neck, with a gold ring on his pinky, would you still love me?” No joke, she really does become a burly bully at night, but the hero finds that there’s a best-of-both-worlds aspect to this transformation; sex with the woman’s pretty good, and the guy knows good steak joints. A young boy in “Pride and Joy” suffers from a “rare family disease” in which the parents become shorter as the child grows taller; to keep Mom and Dad from disappearing entirely he tries to stunt his growth. His smoking, along with his erratic sleeping and eating patterns, alienates him from his peers—nobody said balancing the trials of adolescence with family illness was going to be easy. But when the boy finally gets to kiss a girl, his father’s right there cheering like a soccer dad, sitting in his son’s shirt pocket.

Those stories, like nearly everything Keret writes, are commercial-break short. Few of the pieces in The Nimrod Flipout or its 2001 predecessor, The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God, run longer than ten pages; the closest he’s come to a novel is “Kneller’s Happy Campers,” a forty-page story written as a series of vignettes in the latter book, set in a seriocomic afterworld for people who’ve killed themselves. (It’s been adapted into a film, Wristcutters: A Love Story, which features a cameo by Tom Waits, a very Keretian musician.) That brevity helps give many of Keret’s stories the intensity and impact of fables, but without the pat moralizing. “Dirt,” all of two pages long, twins the narrator’s fantasy about opening a chain of laundromats for singles (“wherever there are lonely people and dirty laundry, they’ll always come to me”) with a sort of prayer for his father, who is sick with guilt over the narrator’s suicide. In “For Only 9.99 (Incl. Tax and Postage),” a boy writes in for a pamphlet alleging to contain the meaning of life—which turns out to be the real deal, though the boy discovers this knowledge doesn’t do anything about your fear of death, or angry religious mobs, or dads who think you’re being bilked. In the end the publisher releases a new pamphlet solving a more mundane problem, on sale for 29.99, and the story closes with a vaudevillian kicker: “One lucky break, and already they go and up the price.”

You’ll notice a few recurring themes here: boys navigating adolescence, parents with commanding and often domineering roles, suicide and its aftershocks. And you might also notice a distinct lack of what you might call Israeli-ness. Keret’s stories are often set in Tel Aviv and sometimes reference Middle Eastern politics in passing, but the author seems to be striving for universality in his stories. “When you wake up in the morning,” he told Newsweek, “before you’ve had your first cup of coffee, what you think about is not, Why isn’t there a Palestinian state? You say, ‘Why doesn’t my girlfriend love me?’ Or ‘I hope somebody didn’t steal my car.’” Keret’s taken a few whacks in his homeland for such attitudes, and he hasn’t had an easier go of it in the U.S.: Reviewing The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God in the New York Times Book Review, novelist Benjamin Anastas dunned Keret for choosing to “provoke without consequence, entertain without investment, and value above all things the pursuit of fleeting pleasures.”

It wouldn’t be the first time a critic’s mistaken comedy and brevity for shallowness. But if Anastas means that Keret often fails to tell the story straight, he’s guilty as charged. Unquestionably, he can be glib and hollow on occasion: The three pages of “My Girlfriend’s Naked” don’t contain much more insight than the three words of its title, and “Malffunction” is an unfunny one-page gag about a balky keyboard. And he’s not much for stylized characterization; there usually isn’t the room.

But that’s not to say his stories are mechanical, emotionless morality tales—and Keret never once confuses the humor he finds in his characters’ predicaments with an opportunity for a cheap shot. The most carefully designed piece in The Nimrod Flipout is the title story, in which three young men are haunted by the ghost of Nimrod, an army buddy who killed himself. His intervention in the lives of the three men slowly frays the braid of their friendship, and the power of the story resides in how Keret locates the point at which mourning a lost friend stops being commemorative and starts to mean you’re living in the past.

The outsized and fable-like qualities of Keret’s stories make them great fodder for graphic novels; as proof, Jetlag collects five drawn by members of the Tel Aviv comic collective Actus. (It was first published in Israel in 1998, finally making its way to the U.S. in February.) The artists seem to key in on Keret at his weirdest, picking one tale about a plane that’s intentionally going to crash in the ocean (“so people will take the whole flight safety issue more seriously”), and another in which the occupants of hell get a twenty-four-hour furlough in Uzbekistan once a century. But “Margolis,” a loyal take on the Bus Driver story “Breaking the Pig,” is both the best-turned tale and least absurd—a clean, simple, and funny inversion of typical morality tales about fathers and sons. A man gives his son a piggy bank in order to teach him the value of money, but as the pig gets stuffed with coins and cash, the boy begins to cherish it more; he’s completely forgotten the desire for a skateboard that prompted the pig’s arrival in the first place.

That’s almost banal on its face, but “Margolis,” like many Keret family tales, is thick with thorns. The boy’s affection for the piggy bank reflects his growing distance from his already-remote father, who creates an austere chill in the household. The boy tells Margolis, named “after somebody who used to live in our mailbox and dad couldn’t scratch his name off the sticker,” that he loves him more than his mother and father. But that statement comes off as neither cute nor tragic, nor even bittersweet. It charmingly reflects how Margolis is the first thing the boy’s been able to love, and it maps the gulf between the boy and his father with a Carver-like elegance and a surrealistic tinge.

All of these assets have made Keret something of a celebrity in American alt-culture spheres, though maybe the reason his stories get read on This American Life have as much to do with their potency as their brevity. An Etgar Keret novel could easily be a complete disaster—endless cuteness and piled-on absurdities from a writer who isn’t at his best when he has to control a narrative throughline. But I wonder if folks didn’t say the same thing about Roth circa Goodbye, Columbus. The liberating power of dysfunction has been a tough sell in these parts for a while, and it may very well take a bright foreigner like Keret to make the case. An Israeli writing the next Great American Novel would be a beautiful, very Keretian thing.

“When you truly love somebody, all those things that at the beginning are really alienating are things you learn to love,” Keret once told an interviewer, by way of explaining “Fatso.” But that statement serves as a sort of motto for about everything he’s written. For the past decade of Prozac Nation-ed memoirs and Corrections-obsessed novels, the prevailing sensibility in popular American writing has been, well, sensible, focused on the path to healing, and looking at broken homes as ships to be righted. Keret’s simple assertion—that we can no more safely remove our flaws than we can remove, say, an artery—is a useful prescription. Let the healing begin.