The Rake Magazine

Category: Article

  • Tomato, Tomahto

    If your cardboard and paper-lace valentines box wasn’t exactly overflowing on the big day, don’t despair. There are plenty of potential sweethearts posting regularly to the Minneapolis Craigslist “Missed Connections” page. Functioning as an online “I Saw You,” this forum gives shy-types a chance to yearn in public, or sort of in public, whether mentioning a suggestive cough on the 4A or searching for a lost love from ten years earlier. As workers at the Wedge Community Co-op recently learned, the page can produce plenty of real-life drama.

    The tempest began in late October, with a wistful entry titled, the fishmonger – with personality. “Oh seafood counter fellow…how you make my visit to the co-op so much more than just grocery shopping. Your preparation suggestions improve my dinner, your clever banter makes me smile, and your eyes are rather lovely (nice glasses too!). I think I’d like to make fish with you and exchange further witticisms.” Over the next three weeks, Wedge regulars, ex-patrons, employees, and even members of other co-ops visited the page and dished their opinions and various crushes.

    Inside 2105 Lyndale Avenue South, it took only a couple of days for word of the seafood post to spread. Brent and Kyle, both bantering fishmongers with nice glasses, emerged as the most likely objects of desire. Kyle composed a response on behalf of his celebrated department: “Everyone has been drawn to this like sharks to blood,” he wrote. “Of us all that work within the Meat & Seafood Dept. only 3 Do NOT wear glasses. How are we to know of whom you speak???” The confusion finally cleared when Brent read the post, recognized some its more specific references, and wrote a private email to his admirer. (Kyle was singled out several entries later: “Bravo—you’re a real cutey and damn good at your job.”)

    Grocery stores have always made good venues for flirtation, for making eyes while hefting an especially juicy grapefruit or squeezing a fresh loaf of bread. And with Brent and Kyle, especially, interactions often get mighty chatty. Brent’s repertoire includes jokes, cooking advice, and questions like, “What’s Keanu Reeves’ worst movie?”; “What famous person died of Lou Gehrig’s Disease?”; and, when standing next to a fellow co-worker, “Who’s cuter?”

    Usually, the conversation ends right there. So Brent was both surprised and abashed by the Craigslist post. “I was so flattered!” he said. “My whole life, even as a young teen, I was looking in the ‘I Saw You’ … I’d always thumb through those and be like, ‘Why can’t someone just see me?’”

    The post, which turned out to have been penned by a woman named Marie, led to almost forty additional entries over the following weeks, and an entirely new blog (isawyouatthewedge.blogspot.com). Most posts were affectionate. One told a cashier, “You’re feisty and hilarious.” Another marveled, “… every time I go in, I see beautiful people touching my foodstuffs.” Not to miss out on the action, a Seward Co-op Grocery & Deli regular commented that the Wedge is “not the only co-op full of foxy folk. Seward got hotties at the help desk, cashiers, stocking shelves, produce, HBC and deli!”

    Since November, the Wedge fishmonger discussion has mostly died down, though the co-op still comes up now and again, as in one recent entry titled, the wedge, tuesdays normally, where someone wrote of a grocery bagger, “i used to think you were flirting with me with your all too familiar greeting. now i see you just are that way and that’s pretty great.” And those curious to read the posts from the original saga likely will come up empty-handed. The Craigslist archives only reach back roughly eight hundred posts, or less than two months.

    But don’t despair. The “Missed Connections” page abounds with earnest, heartfelt, aw-shucks declarations of love or lust focused almost exclusively on Twin Cities residents. Skeptics may argue that online romance discussions are bogus—in theory, one person could pop a few multivitamins, log on, and go to town, strictly for entertainment. But there’s no disputing that Brent found a new, very real, pal. Of Marie, he says, “She’s cool. I like hanging out with her a lot.”

    —Eden Benbow

  • Made in the Shade

    Last December I was in Minnesota, chatting with workers at Peace Coffee, a Minneapolis-based one-hundred-percent Fair Trade coffee company. To these guys, who make local deliveries on bicycle, Starbucks is the enemy. It’s a huge, non-transparent corporation; only a small percentage of its coffee is Fair Trade; and it doesn’t re-invest in the communities where it operates.

    In January I was back in Nicaragua, chatting with Fair Trade coffee producers. It’s a different world. They love Starbucks. It may be that only a small percentage of the coffee bought by the caffeine behemoth is Fair Trade, but that’s still a massive amount of coffee. Starbucks is a godsend to these farmers, who may support the Sandinistas (the leftist party that led the Nicaraguan revolution from 1979 to 1990), but socially have little in common with U.S. liberals. They are typically gay-fearing churchgoers. The women do the cooking and watch over the children; the men carry machetes and work in the fields.

    They are also poor. They use outdoor latrines. They cook over a fire. Meat is a rarity; dirt floors are common. Many households have electricity, but others do not. Fair Trade gives these farmers a bit of stability, though; it guarantees a fixed price that meets both the costs of living and production. That price is above those offered by the extremely volatile regular market, but it does not make the farmers wealthy.

    Still, it does help them produce the best coffee in the world. The fact is, most coffee is crap. Producing quality coffee is just not cost effective on a large scale. While you can pull a banana off a tree and eat it, a good cup of coffee is the result of a long, labor-intensive process whose many steps must be approached with skill and care. Only small producers have the time.

    They grow their coffee in the shade, using arabica plants, which grow more slowly and yield less, but don’t end up tasting like sawdust. During the harvest, farmers pick only the ripe coffee berries, returning to the same plant week after week until the berries are gone. As they dry the coffee, they sort through the beans and throw away anything discolored or damaged by insects.

    On huge plantations, owners cut down trees to grow their coffee in the sun. They use the inferior robusta plant, and during the harvest produce thousands of sacks of coffee a day. Workers pick the berries all at once, and there’s no time to pick out bad beans. These beans are cut with small quantities of arabica, because otherwise the coffee would be undrinkable and wind up in cheap instant mixes, or the auto-drips at Ye Olde Truckstop.

    Nicaraguan coffee farmers are poor, but they’re not miserable. Life in the countryside is pleasant. People live in shacks, but these shacks are not one foot away from their neighbors, as they would be in the city. There are trees and mountains and lakes in every direction. Families are strong, and though people work hard, they seem to enjoy themselves.

    Twenty-year-old Byron Gámez gave me a tour of his family’s lands. Byron’s mother is the president of a women’s cooperative, formed because the men in the mixed cooperative insisted on making all the decisions. Byron is also one of my English students. He calls me “Mister Teacher,” and likes to say things like, “I am Mister Tired.” He is endlessly amused by a question he once asked in class: “How do you say say?” and repeats it every time he sees me.

    Byron showed me a neighboring farm that is nothing but a forest of stumps. He explained that disease wiped out their coffee crop. “That’s one of the disadvantages of not being part of a cooperative. You don’t have easy access to credit.” A loan of eighty dollars would have covered the chemical needed to prevent the disease.

    Fair Trade organizations must guarantee access to loans. They also generally help out when disaster strikes, such as the recent hurricanes in Guatemala and Mexico. Companies like Peace Coffee want sustainability and long-term relationships; they’re in trouble if their suppliers lose their farms.

    Cecocafen is a Nicaraguan Fair Trade organization that serves as middleman between families like Byron’s and companies like Peace Coffee. They have funded community water projects, better farm equipment, and new schools in rural coffee areas. They are also sending Byron to school.

    Then there are the cupping labs. In the past, farmers rarely tasted their own product, they just provided raw beans. They had no idea what the quality of their coffee was, much less an incentive to improve it. Cecocafen provides training on how to make good coffee, and processes it locally so the farmers can taste it. Not only can farmers earn a premium for producing better coffee, but they can take real pleasure in their work.—Katherine Glover

  • "The Minnesota Moment"

    On a blustery Saturday night in January, one of the year’s most anticipated gallery shows opened in New York City. As winds off the Hudson River barreled eastward down the charmless streets of Chelsea, the haute monde of Manhattan and the wider world streamed in from the west, down to Gagosian, at the very end of Twenty-Fourth Street. They came to see Niagara, the new series of photographs by Alec Soth, who lives in Minneapolis and works in a studio just over the border in St. Paul.

    Gagosian anchors one end of what is acknowledged as the “power block” among galleries in Chelsea. There are other big names on this street, including Barbara Gladstone, Matthew Marks, Mary Boone, and Andrea Rosen, but Larry Gagosian, with his towering stature, silver hair, and tanned skin, looms largest. Less an art dealer than an art mogul, he’s a perennial figure on Art + Auction magazine’s annual “power list,” and the kind of man whom people fear, admire, and envy in equal measure. Chelsea is just one outpost of his empire, which includes galleries on the Upper East Side and in Beverly Hills and London.

    At thirty-thousand square feet, Gagosian is the size of a small museum, and it was mobbed for Soth’s opening. Plenty of people were glammed up in full-length minks, in gold leather jean jackets, in Gucci ascots. They pivoted expertly on glittering midnight-blue stilettos, flipped their expensively colored, perfectly ironed tresses—and also admired two dozen large-scale photographs that Soth made in and around a place that is a quintessentially American honeymoon destination. Throughout the reception, a clutch of people slowly drifted around the main gallery; at the center of these admirers, well-wishers, collectors, would-be collectors, onlookers, old and new friends, was the artist. He smiled, chatted amiably, shook a lot of hands, had people tug on his arm and whisper in his ear.

    As the reception wound down, 170 guests made their way to an honorary dinner party at nearby Bottino, the art world’s version of Elaine’s. It was modest compared with last year’s notorious to-do for Damien Hirst, another Gagosian artist of a slightly older vintage. Considering that Soth was virtually unknown four years ago, though, it was impressive—and not undue. A few weeks later, one of Gagosian’s directors reported that sales—more than four hundred prints were available, for between $5,500 and $20,000—were considered “very successful.” Soth had a pragmatic explanation for the ardor with which his work has been received. “It’s in fashion,” he said, with a modest shrug characteristic of someone who describes himself as a “conservative Midwestern boy.” “And I don’t think it’s going to last forever.”

    Soth’s success is uniquely dazzling, but he is not the only Minnesota artist to make a recent splash in New York. A few days after the Niagara opening, paintings by Jin Meyerson, who was born and raised in Atwater, Minnesota, were being installed at Zach Feuer Gallery, a few doors down the block. Roiling with swirls of disastrous imagery, these floor-to-ceiling canvases were intended to overwhelm the space, which is as tiny as Gagosian is massive. Yet the gallery’s size belies its influence; though he’s only been in the business for six years, twenty-seven-year-old Zach Feuer has quickly become a powerful arbiter of the gallery world, one who merits his own spreads in glossy magazines.

    As it happens, Feuer also represents Aaron Spangler. Spangler is a native of Park Rapids who, after graduating from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, built himself a house outside his hometown. Last summer, he added a studio, reinvesting, in a sense, the earnings from his carved wood reliefs and sculptures, which fetch tens of thousands of dollars. (Many people are waiting to acquire work by both Spangler and Meyerson.) That same summer Rob Fischer, another Minnesota artist whose career has been taking off, built a studio and cabin nearby. Fischer too is an ex-Minneapolitan and MCAD graduate who now lives part-time in Brooklyn; a solo exhibition of his sculptures was on view this winter at the Whitney Museum of American Art’s midtown gallery. The week after it closed, a collector had asked for a private viewing of one of the pieces, a twisting form made up of battered hardwood flooring that might have been salvaged from an abandoned farmhouse.

  • Greta Pratt

    For years, photographer Greta Pratt considered herself a New Yorker. As a Pulitzer-nominated documentary photographer whose works hang in museums including the Smithsonian and the National Museum of American Art, she was thoroughly enmeshed in the East Coast art world. And then she went to a hog-showing competition in Nebraska. “I looked around me and realized that I looked just like everyone else there,” she said. “I was clearly a Midwesterner. No one on the East Coast truly understands what that means.”

    Pratt grew up in Minneapolis and, along with her husband, Mark Peterson, shot photographs for City Pages and the United Press International during the early eighties. After moving to New York in 1986, she returned for extended trips across the Midwest, haunting small-town festivals and county fairs for her first photo book, In Search of the Corn Queen. Pratt was so dazzled by the experience that two more book projects were born, Using History, and her latest, Nineteen Lincolns. Both explore the cultural icons–flags, cowboys, statues of livestock–that make life in America unique (and sometimes bizarre). “I became interested in how history, real or otherwise, becomes part of group identity,” Pratt said.

    Group identity is tough to come by on a deserted island, but we think Pratt will do quite well when she gets stranded on The Rake’s favorite pile of sand. She’s got that Midwestern-practicality thing going for her, after all. Looking at this more as a jolly solo camping trip than an imposed exile, here’s what she’d bring:

    1. A hearty supply of s’mores fixings. And, of course, matches to light the fire that will melt the marshmallows.
    2. A case of oak-y, buttery, full-bodied Chardonnay. It’ll go well with fish.
    3. The collected works of Jean Baudrillard. Contemplating simulacra and simulation should keep me busy for a while.
    4. My new digital camera and solar-powered laptop with satellite Internet connection, so I can email photos of my new digs and blog my thoughts about simulation.
    5. The lyrics for “Kumbaya”… in case I forget the last verse.

    Greta Pratt presents a slide show discussion about her work at the Minnesota Center for Photography on March 14, in conjunction with her exhibition, Using History, at Gallery 13, on view March 14 – April 7. Pratt will sign books at a reception at the gallery on March 18, 6:30-10:00 p.m. 302 13th Ave. N.E., Minneapolis; 651-592-5503

  • Santino Fontana

    Enough already with the fat, bearded, balding guys playing Hamlet! The Prince of Denmark is twenty or so years old. While we certainly understand that anyone cast in the role–perhaps the most storied in all of English-language theater–should have something of a track record, Hamlet just doesn’t work when its titular character is middle-aged and sporting a pronounced paunch. Enter Santino Fontana, the twenty-three-year-old who’s been cast in the role for the Guthrie’s book-ending production at its Vineland Place theater. Not only is Fontana young enough to meet whatever romanticized notions we have about the role, but he’s also got actor-ly cred. Just two years out of college (he’s a graduate of the Guthrie Theater/University of Minnesota B.F.A. program), Fontana already has appeared in Guthrie productions of Six Degrees of Separation, Death of a Salesman, and As You Like It. Of course, Hamlet will expose and test him in an entirely different way. We caught up with Fontana to gauge his thoughts and fears about the role.

    hat was your first encounter with this play?
    I hadn’t read it, really, until my first year of college, which is sad. It was the year 2000, and Simon Russell Beale’s tour came through. [Beale arrived by way of London’s Royal National Theater’s touring production.] We studied the play in preparation for the show.

    In that production, Beale seemed far too old to pull off Prince Hamlet. Where do you put Hamlet’s age?
    Well, that’s the question, isn’t it? I think it depends upon which text you’re reading. We know that the actor who originally played him was well into his thirties. In most modern editions, there’s a line in the play that makes it sound like he’s thirty years old. But the word “youth” or “young” is used so much in the play. And when Shakespeare wrote this, if this man was a prince and thirty and unmarried and still in college, something was terribly wrong. What we’re going with is that he’s twenty-three, twenty-two, twenty-one. He’s a kid off at school. He heard about his dad dying and had to come home.

    Who is the oldest guy you’ve ever seen play Hamlet?
    He [Beale] was it, to be honest. John Gielgud played it, what, three times, four times? The last time he played it he was in his forties, and I think he even said he was too old.

    So how terrified are you?
    Um, well, I mean… There was a guy in London who was twenty-three. And at the time, that was two or three years ago, he was believed to be the youngest to professionally play Hamlet. So I’m not alone. But, of course, it’s frightening. It’s frightening! It’s frightening! It’s frightening! And I’ve got to get this one right! I don’t want to disappoint this director, this audience, this theater community that’s been so good to me. I’m finding a lot of inspiration in the character. I mean, being told by a ghost you need to avenge your father’s death? He’s not there yet. He’s not ready. [Director Joe Dowling] has talked several times about having wanted to pick someone who could capture the insecurities of youth. He couldn’t have picked a more insecure youth.

    What about that giant etching on the side of the new Guthrie of George Grizzard, the actor who played Hamlet in the Guthrie’s first-ever production?
    How ominous is that? I was touring the new Guthrie and the woman leading the tour pointed up and said, “There’s George Grizzard.” It’s thirty feet high, huge! She just pointed and said, “You’ve got some huge shoes to fill.” And I’m just stuck asking: Me? Are you sure?

  • And Now This

    The King was widely regarded as a complete jackass: a foolish man who traded his Kingdom and his wondrous gifts for a chain of muffler shops.

    The Queen had left him immediately, and was followed in short order by his retinue (for he had, in fact, once had a retinue). A few desperate and greasy palace cooks and a handful of stable hands were all that remained of his old life, and these characters he depended on to do his dirty work. There was always much dirty work to be done around the muffler shops.

    Who knows where the muffler idea came from? The King himself didn’t have the foggiest notion anymore. All he could remember was that he’d been drunk one night on a riverboat casino, so drunk that he’d not only seemingly lost his magic touch but had apparently abused even the privileges of a king, and he’d been forcibly removed from the boat for urinating in a public drinking fountain.

    When he eventually sobered up in a Dubuque hotel room he had the realization that he’d lost all interest in being King. Even the gold business had become tiresome to him; when you could turn everything you touched into gold, gold entirely lost all significance and value. The whole formal world of the court bored him to tears. He hated all that ridiculous velvet and the snug knickers and, especially, the strange and foppish hats he always seemed to find himself wearing.

    When he found himself penniless in Dubuque he was pleased to discover that he felt absolutely nothing in the way of desperation or regret. If anything, in fact, he experienced something that felt almost like serenity.

    Who knows? Perhaps, ultimately, he had been inspired by his older brother, who’d walked out from under his kingdom to launch a hamburger empire. All he knew was that the muffler business—lark though it might initially have been—had eventually demonstrated (and demonstrated conclusively) that he hadn’t lost his old touch after all. Yes, he’d showed them all in the end, Midas had. A man could make boodles of cash in the muffler racket.—Brad Zellar

  • Rake Appeal { Fashion

    The spring collections usually lend levity to our wardrobe, but this year, that’s not necessarily the case. Many of the season’s prettiest party dresses and tissue tops are coming fully loaded with all manner of heavy metal hardware. Surely you noticed such chains, charms, pendants, and toggles stitched onto last season’s winter things. Now the gossamer fabrics of spring—the chiffon, the linen, the silk—must also bear this burden of alloy. We were wondering how the featherweights might hold up, until, at one of the Twin Cities’ most exclusive boutiques, we spotted a light cotton neckline drooping with bullet casings.

    This metal fetish is not so surprising, of course. We’ve had years of frothy gauze, ribbons, ruffles, and lace. Gold, nickel, and bronze seem only

    a natural progression. But if trend reports are to be believed, the fashion capitals are growing tired of such fripperies, and design houses will be circling back to nineties-style minimalism shortly. A few designers are applying pleats and bandaging to shirts and dresses, offering angular contrast to all the curlicue finishes we’ve grown accustomed to. Pantsuits aren’t far behind.

    Yet there’s no shortage of femininity in the spring fashions. Openwork crochet; skirts and dresses in layered mesh; frayed edges; elaborate, almost Elizabethan collars; and floppy, over-sized bows play the season’s other central characters. Vibrant colors inspire a bounce in our step as we slog through winter’s lingering slush in the strappy wedge heels we simply can’t wait to wear. The indication is that rich hues have drained from the palette as of late, in favor of so-called “naturals” and “organics.” However,

    if you insist on contrasting with your muddied, Minnesota-in-March surroundings, as we do, then you’ll favor apple greens, intense yellows, and azures as well as flamboyant, African-style florals

    and kimono-inspired acetates.

    These are the insurgents against white, buff, and nude.

    For most of us upper Midwesterners, occasions that would compel us to slip into that Monique Lhuillier daffodil dress (pictured at left) are rare. Still, there’s good reason why Lhuillier, the Beverly Hills designer whose creations for autumn 2006 caused a modest ripple at New York’s Fashion Week last month, chose to open her second-ever boutique at Fiftieth and France. The two-year-old shop is known for its wedding gowns. But the perennially single will admire her long, bias-cut dresses, done up in an array of cheerful colors and botanical prints.

    There are other places to fortify your optimism for Twin Cities fashion; they include Alfred’s Grand Petit Magasin, the Bergdorf Goodman-inspired department store in Edina; the downtown Minneapolis Neiman Marcus (of course); stalwart clothiers Grethen House, in Edina, and Bumbershute, in Wayzata; and some of the new boutiques that have been popping up like crocuses around the metropolitan area: Stephanie’s in Highland Park; Ivy in Uptown;

    and Ensemble in Linden Hills,

    to name a few.

    For the beaus, designers have been thinking Rio de Janeiro, rolled-up trousers, and Panama hats. Of course, most area gents will ignore such impressions, adhering to a Twin Citizen’s night-on-the-town uniform:

    a vertically striped dress shirt, often left untucked over distressed jeans or fresh black denim. Note how this favorite look can be updated with simple, bold strokes—and we’re not talking straight up-and-down strokes, mind you. The Italian label Etro, for example, offers adventurous alternatives to such inveterate preppiness with classic-cut shirts in easy floral prints. No pansies here! These shirts lend their wearers a look of sophisticated courage.

    —Christy DeSmith

  • Person

    “I never had a business dream,” admitted Dave Kapell, founder of Minneapolis-based Magnetic Poetry Inc. “I aspired to be a starving artist.”

    In 1993, he was a thirty-year-old musician struggling to write song lyrics in his living room. He picked up a newspaper. He picked up a pair of scissors. He picked up adhesive, magnetic tape, and a pie tin. In the space of an afternoon, he had created Magnetic Poetry, which would, within three years, earn something like six million dollars. “The thing that happens when people see words bump up against each other; it takes their brains to a completely weird place they never would have gone.”

    Kapell’s brain has no problem going to completely weird places. His office in Northeast Minneapolis looks like a cross between an artist’s studio and a toy store, and it suits him perfectly. Hardwood floors sparkle beneath warehouse walls alternately painted bright yellow and sea-foam green. Directly across from the front door, huge black-and-white magnets spell out things like “ask / his / behind / for / sizzle / time,” “long days / are not blue,” and “my music plays / a sad & sweet / symphony of life.”

    Perched on the edge of his desk-chair, Kapell gestured toward his shiny red violin. “I took my first violin lesson on 9/11. What a bizarre day that was. My teacher was this elderly woman who was sort of rigid in her ways, you know. And I walked in and had to convince her to turn on the TV.”

    He pulled a ukulele out from behind a potted plant. “Music started for me with my mom. She used to do tours to Hawaii back in the fifties—it had just become a state—and she’d wear this grass skirt and teach people ukulele songs. She taught them to me when I was really young; the ukulele’s great for small hands.”

    These days, Kapell’s hands are busy building featherweight canoes. “I wanted to build a fiddle,” he explained. But after outfitting his “creative lab” with woodworking tools, Kapell decided to begin with something simpler. “It’s a similar process … you build molds, and stretch the wood over the mold.”

    After one canoe, Kapell was hooked. He built one for his wife. He built one for his son. And then he built another so his son could bring a friend. Kapell’s single-person canoes look like topless mahogany kayaks. On one, a small wooden block attached to the bottom houses a unique Kapell accessory: a cello string. “You’re in the middle of a lake, and you pull it taut and pluck it, or use a bow … it vibrates the whole boat.”—Julie Bates

  • Kevin Phillips

    The ingenious inventions and dazzling artifacts left to us by the fallen superpowers of millennia past cannot help but raise the question, “What went wrong?” Ancient Rome, China, Britain, and other countries have enjoyed a few shining centuries in the sun, only to sink into the shadows of subservience and mediocrity when another region took over. For many decades, the top dog has been the United States, but Kevin Phillips sounds a dire warning. Our time is almost up, if the lessons of the past are to be trusted. In this fascinating analysis, he pinpoints four factors behind the downfall of every major world power in history: global overreach, radical religion, resource problems, and ballooning debt. Sound familiar? 3225 W. 69th St., Edina; 952-920-0633

  • Thing

    There was a time, not that long ago really, when a lonely and obsessive-compulsive man, unable to sleep, might have spent hours on his hands and knees, raking and grooming the floors of his apartment with his fingers, venturing into corners and hard-to-reach places to gather handfuls of hair, dust, random miniature tumbleweeds, and wispy nests of inexplicable origin. From this material he might, depending on his level of boredom and stupor, create a series of small, reeking ashtray fires that would be moderately fascinating, if not quite entirely amusing.

    A fellow could easily be defeated by the eternally circulating dander and fluff of this world, by the mysteries of its origins, production, and composition: Where exactly does this stuff come from, and why is there so much of it? How could one man, a man who is in no way even remotely hirsute, shed so much pubic hair, and cast it into so many unlikely places?

    These are all preoccupying questions, questions for which some scientist might provide a satisfactory answer. I am not a scientist. I do not have any satisfactory answers. I can tell you, though, that thanks to the wonders of the Swiffer—a gizmo I adore above all other gizmos—my obsession with monitoring and addressing the ceaseless moldering of my existence and my private space has a new, healthier, more graceful and dignified, and certainly more efficient focus. Swiffing, I have discovered, is great fun, and when you Swiff as aggressively and obsessively as I do (and sweat as copiously as I often do while Swiffing) there are also, I think, aerobic benefits to the activity. The Swiffer is an ideal dance partner, or the perfect companion for a plodding, meditative trance. It’s also already earned its own Wikipedia entry, which I intend to embellish when I manage to actually pull myself away from Swiffing for a time.

    Perhaps you are one of the several dozen poor souls who remain in the dark about the Swiffer, one of the great modern marvels of design and utility. In which case, there clearly is something wrong with you, and in all likelihood you are living in filth. Also, there is really no excuse for your ignorance. The Swiffer is cheap, plastic, and snappy as all get out. It is easy to assemble and even easier to use. It is a magic wand disguised as a sort of stylish mop. The secret to the Swiffer’s genius is its disposable “electrostatic cloths,” each of which is, according to the Procter & Gamble packaging, “textured with deep, V-shaped ridges to trap and lock dirt, dust, hair, and even crumbs.”

    The true Swiffer aficionado knows these electrostatic cloths are reversible, which means you can use the things twice. I’m amazed so many Swiffing enthusiasts don’t know this already. The pleasure of this discovery had nothing to do with frugality and everything to do with confirming that there are still parts of my brain capable of analytical function. The cloths can also, of course, be used as simple and effective handheld dust rags, to clean household items and reach places the Swiffer cannot, although there are very few places the Swiffer cannot reach. I routinely Swiff my walls and ceilings, for instance.

    The “Swiffer family” has now grown to include the Swiffer WetJet, the Super Swiffer, and the Swiffer Sweep & Vac, but I don’t know anything about these recent innovations. I’m more than happy with the basic model, which has transformed my life and provided me with hours of nocturnal enjoyment. I find the compulsion to Swiff is strongest in the small hours, when I am most keenly aware of the impossible battle against dirt and disorder. In those moments, gliding alone around my apartment, I find that the silence of the Swiffer, or rather, its calming, rhythmic sibilance, is perhaps its ultimate virtue in this noisy and degraded world.—Brad Zellar