Category: Article

British playwright Caryl Churchill weighs in on the subject of human cloning with her deliciously absurdist and a-tad-bit feminist commentary on the great debate. Set in the near future, A Number is about a man suffering the loss of his wife and son. In his grief, he arranges to have his boy cloned–times three. But thirty years later, those triplets come back mad and kicking. This is a dark drama of devil’s advocacy, in which Churchill imagines the emotions and environmental influences a cloned human might face. During its 2004 premiere, New York critics called the show “Beckettian” and compared it to Harold Pinter’s Theater of Menace. That’s big league! 528 Hennepin Ave., eighth floor, Minneapolis; 612-339-4944; www.illusiontheater.org

ick Oehlenschlager’s office is crowded with so much unusual visual stimuli that it’s often hard for a visitor to follow the man’s enthusiastic torrent of conversation. There is a dead grouse splayed on its back on a newspaper atop a desk. There are tottering stacks of mounted plant specimens, various skeletons, and shelves jammed with obscure volumes on botany, ornithology, and all manner of biological arcana. There, too, are Oehlenschlager’s own publications, including Notes on the Prairie Vole—Microtus Ochrogaster—in Wadena County, Minnesota and something called Avian Distribution and Abundance Records for the Sierra de los Tuxtlas, Veracruz, Mexico. Oehlenschlager mentions that his great-grandfather lived in a palace in Denmark and was the country’s poet laureate; he wrote Aladdin and the Magic Lamp, as well as the words to the Danish National Anthem. There’s his ornately framed portrait, in fact, leaning against piles of books on the floor.

Oehlenschlager is the assistant curator of biology and the manager of biological collections for the Science Museum of Minnesota in St. Paul. In the basement of the museum, in a warren of rooms that is equal parts laboratory and sprawling curiosity cabinet, he spends his days sorting and cataloging and skinning and preserving everything from insects to songbirds to bald eagles to groundhogs. The creatures he cannot skin and stuff he’ll deposit into a large tank, where they’ll be stripped down to the skeleton by hundreds of thousands of swarming hide beetles.

One recent afternoon, Oehlenschlager had his hands buried in the chest cavity of a great horned owl that was laid out on a table. The owl was a roadkill victim, transported to Oehlenschlager in the back of a pickup truck. He was making easy work of separating the skin from the carcass, but temporarily abandoned the process to give some visitors a tour of his subterranean workshop.

He led the way down the hall to the osteo room, which houses a collection of bones that includes the remains of Billy the Bison, Don the Gorilla, and Rosa, a circus elephant originally buried on a family farm. En route, Oehlenschlager admitted, “I did eat an owl once—a boreal owl—out of sheer lunacy. It was just a little experiment on my part, and I can tell you that an owl tastes like nothing else.” He has also, he said, eaten all sorts of other animals it wouldn’t occur to the average person to put in his mouth, including crow, boa constrictor, and groundhogs, which he claims are mighty tasty.

Oehlenschlager is pretty much a one-man gang, and the enormity of his task was apparent as he hustled through the various collections he presides over—the fluid room, where various specimens are preserved in jars; the bird and mammal banks, whose morgue-style cabinets are crammed floor to ceiling with stuffed creatures; and the bug room, with its hundreds of drawers of beetles, butterflies, moths, and other insects.

“If I live forever, I’d never run out of things to do down here,” Oehlenschlager said. “And I don’t have any intention of retiring. I’d rather keep working, working, working. There’s always something strange and challenging coming through the door. I recently had somebody bring me a black widow spider that they plucked off the luggage carousel at the airport.”

—Brad Zellar

Just around the corner from Como Zoo’s polar bears, snow leopards, and other winter-loving creatures is a Victorian-era tropical oasis. The Marjorie McNeely Conservatory in Como Park floats on the horizon like a series of great, sparkling glass beads. Up close, the building’s steel and aluminum frame and solid Ionic columns are less ethereal, but the dominating impression is of glass and light.

Call it a reverse snow globe. Outside: a winter tableau—snow falling on the rolling park’s pine, elm, and willow trees, and people wrapped in bulky coats. Inside: thousands of extraordinary palms, plants, ferns, and orchids in four different gardens; pools and fountains; and visitors disrobing, coats on their arms.

The Palm Dome is the hottest and most fragrant room in the complex, dripping in jasmine-infused humidity year-round. Each plant is carefully identified. The stubby King Sago, Cycadaceae cycas revoluta, with its coarse, woody trunk and elaborate crown of elongated green fronds, looks disarmingly like a palm. The edifying sign at its base, however, identifies it as a cycad, a living fossil that covered the earth 150 million years ago, whose closest living relatives are the pine and the spruce.

Near King Sago is the soaring fifty-foot Chinese fan palm with broad leaves and a trunk that looks like rough husks bound together. Next to that stands a thin cousin—the hurricane palm—equally tall, but with a smooth, narrow trunk and oval-shaped fronds.

The conservatory opened on November 7, 1915, under Park Superintendent Frederick Nussbaumer’s direction. As a young man, Nussbaumer had worked at London’s Royal Botanic Gardens, where ornate glasshouses like the Palm House were popular. He was hired by the city of St. Paul as a gardener around 1887 and became superintendent in 1892.

In the Sunken Garden, a balcony overlooks a long, rectangular pool full of water lilies and thick, piebald goldfish, which leads to a bronze maiden. Dozens of red, pink, and apricot-colored poinsettias—eight different varieties—are on display in the winter, ringed by blue Italian cypresses, to spectacular effect.

Most visitors enter and leave the conservatory by way of the new Fern Room, which opened in 2005. The addition’s boxy shape is at odds with the curving original, but the interior is serene. Beside a waterfall, there are wishing ponds and ferns unfurling in every imaginable way: wooly tree ferns, rasp ferns, and racks of staghorns sprout from the walls.

St. Paul, Nussbaumer believed, must always have a “recreation ground for all classes of people.” And this is it. Their voices rise above the star fruit and common fig in the North Garden. They photograph their children in the Sunken Garden. They take refuge from the cold and the wet, whale-gray winter sky, and exclaim with delight at the sight of a spider-like brown and yellow orchid descending from its stem.—Julie Hessler

The “white lie”—is there such a thing?

Good journalists, they say, have no friends. We have a few, so perhaps we’re doing something wrong. It’s true, though, that anyone who writes for a living makes enemies now and again. Writers of all types are caught on the horns of fact and fabrication. On the one hand, novelists writing under cover of fiction often get in trouble when “characters” recognize themselves in a story. Conversely, if you’re writing nonfiction, there are high expectations that everything in your account will, you know, be true and verifiable and all that. In the past four weeks, the issue has come to a boil, thanks to two memoirists who appear to have transformed their Minnesota experiences from low-voltage, real-life fluorescence into explosive, incandescent scandal. That would be Nicole Helget, the fascinating young writer of The Summer of Ordinary Ways, and James Frey, the successful but embattled writer of A Million Little Pieces. Helget’s story has been generating some static from immediate family and friends for her disturbing rural Minnesota memoir; some of the characters implicated in her tale have decided that the writer exceeded the limits of her artistic license. And Frey notoriously padded his resume as a drug addict and felon, the better to tell the story of his redemption at a Minnesota treatment center.

This all raises the question of what constitutes a memoir, and what rules must be followed. And the answer, apparently, is that there are no agreed-upon rules. While we are inclined to give all writers and storytellers the benefit of the doubt, it will not do to have them begging off responsibility due to the “subjective memory” of the writer. That is a disingenuous dodge. Should memoirists make things up, outside of their own internal states? They should not. Memoir is a fashionable genre, but it is also a chronically troubled one. Thanks to professional jealousy, almost every bestselling memoir is eventually scrutinized, weak points are identified, and the authors are dutifully rebuked. Folks from Lillian Hellman to Dave Eggers have stepped over the line of veracity into verisimilitude. There are those who are hurt by libelous narratives. And then there are the rest of us who like nothing better than to pile on an artist for taking liberties with the truth. Beyond this small epidemic of mendacity, we’re frankly more worried about the clucking, sanctimonious press. In critical circles these days, there is a strong whiff of vigilantism. It’s even stronger than the fume of victimhood that seems to be the exhaust of most popular memoirs.

Other forms of autobiographical art are given much more leeway. Consider, for example, the visual artist. In early December, local artist Gabriele Ellertson succumbed to cancer after living with it, documenting it, battling it, and exploring it as subject matter in her work. This she did for almost two decades in her elegant, disturbing paintings and drawings. It would take a very precise and jaded critic indeed to see (or even to care) where Ellertson might have embellished her own story within the parameters of her art. In the visual arts, we do not think in terms of truth and falsehood. We think of beauty and imperfection. And yet, one of the enduring precepts of civilization is that truth is beautiful, and beauty is truth. We’re not sure that lets an elegant stylist like Nicole Helget, or a successful twelve stepper like James Frey, off the hook. But there is some substance to Picasso’s idea that art is a lie that tells the truth.

And then just a week ago, Bob Feldman passed away. He was the president of Red House Records, an internationally respected folk label based here in St. Paul. Feldman, who was a gracious, funny, and authentic man, will be remembered as a publisher of great stories—though only a boor would vet the Red House catalog for historical fact. Folk music would seem to be another art form that does not truck with questions of prevarication. But then it doesn’t make a lot of sense to ask whether “Honky-Tonk Blues” is a true story, does it?

In the real world, outside the bounds of art, this imaginative approach to storytelling is often called “lying,” and sometimes “fraud.” The other day, Stillwater high school students unmasked one of their classmates as an imposter. You will recall that Joshua Gardner claimed to be British royalty, the seventeen-year-old “Caspian James Crichton Stuart IV, Fifth Duke of Cleveland.” In fact, he was merely an imaginative twenty-two-year-old registered sex offender from Winona. One can’t blame him for trying to reinvent himself—why should pop-culture royals like Madonna and David Bowie have a monopoly on self-reinvention? Is there anything more Anglo-American? But perhaps Gardner ought not to have aimed quite so high, nor insisted on being addressed as “your grace.”

More eloquent critics than us have pointed out that there is reason to worry about a culture that tolerates so much fibbing. Times book critic Michiko Kakutani has written movingly about the ramifications that Oprah’s Book Club has selected Elie Wiesel’s Night as its next title in the wake of the James Frey affair. If Oprah’s view of the Frey controversy is that it was “much ado about nothing,” what’s to prevent readers from denying that the Holocaust, at least as witnessed and detailed by Wiesel, ever happened outside the imagination of the author? And an important larger point needs to be emphasized. As Kurt Andersen has said, the climate of relativity today is a strange one in which evolution is “just a theory,” allegedly on an equal footing with the crank religious propositions of “intelligent design,” and a just war is one that can be redeemed by any number of fungible perceptions and political prejudices that trump the “reality-based community.” When we allow facts to be displaced by subjective impressions, then spin replaces the news, the globe continues to heat up, the voices of antagonism grow shriller, and our attention is diverted from real tragedies large and small.

The room was smaller than I would have liked. And there were no tables to stand behind and very few chairs. I was on an upper floor of the Cosmopolitan Club in Manhattan, celebrating the eightieth birthday of my husband’s father, the lights of the surrounding buildings twinkling through the windows as the bow-tied and velvet-draped guests poured in. Soon there were more than forty men and women in this compartment, most of them over sixty, all of them standing and talking, sipping cocktails, performing with ease an age-old ritual known as mingling.

I’m generally not a “greatest generation” person, but I couldn’t help but notice that these people knew exactly how to behave at a mixer. There never was anyone standing nervously and alone in the corner, pretending to read the fine print on a napkin. Nobody fell down. Nobody cried. Smiling guests approached, hands outstretched in confident greeting, a sparkling tidbit of information at the ready. My father-in-law is an accomplished author and also was a writer for CBS for thirty years, so the conversations tended toward the journalistic. There had been a presidential speech that afternoon, providing endless fodder for this group of lefties. Andy Rooney, who is almost exactly as you’d imagine, spoke amiably with a portly gentleman about whether Bush had put on a good show. When the man walked away, Rooney waved over a friend and asked, “Who was that who’s gotten so big I can’t recognize him anymore?”

So, two important arrows to have in your cocktail party quiver: interesting information about the outside world, as opposed to the latest on that uncle in prison, and also the skill and grace to make others feel comfortable, even if that means pretending at familiarity. Keeping a conversation going—with talk that is neither frivolous nor grave—is paramount. That’s where things often fall apart with my friends. I come from a generation raised on quick-cut commercials for everything from cereal to tampons, electric billboards, headphones, and home theaters. It’s always easier if there is a band on stage to stare at, or a movie. In those settings, socializing is restricted to snarky, mumbled one-liners and face-making in the shadows. My friends and I practically invented “social anxiety.” Among these comfortable old-guard New Yorkers, consummate adults at ease with nothing to look at but each other, I felt like a person in a state of arrested development. My attention span was roughly that of a seventh grader.

I headed to the bar for a stiff drink, an ancient tactic that has carried over nicely to modern times. A few slugs and back out into the room I went. Several guests had been briefed on my background. It kept coming up that my mother lives in the same town where the actress Jean Seberg was born. Had I thought ahead, had I known what to expect, I would have Googled Seberg and marked all the details—that she’d stood up for civil rights and against the Vietnam War and had been accused by J. Edgar Hoover of carrying a Black Panther’s baby. I would have known that she’d miscarried and, in a ballsy, tragic move, presented her dead white child at a press conference. I would have known that she herself had been found dead several years later, in a car in suburban Paris. An impressive chatterbox I would have been, indeed. Instead, I said, “Are you kidding? I love old movies!” mildly insulting the retiree to whom I was speaking.

Oh well, I thought, any minute and I’ll be face to face with someone new. That’s another fascinating aspect of accomplished socializing, the moving toward and away from conversations as though entering and exiting a freeway. Deftly, a man might say, “That’s just great. John will get a kick out of that. I think I’ll find him and tell him about it.” There are very few stutters or hesitations. There is no feeling that you’ve been interminably captured by someone boring, that a ransom note is forthcoming. Of course, this constant rotating of people requires a knack for remembering names, because decorum requires a final round of handshaking at the end of the evening, during which everyone explains how nice it’s been to meet everyone else.

The temperature in the room was on the rise. I’d had a few more cocktails and eaten more than my share of the smoked salmon and puff pastry appetizers. I’d chatted with just about everyone there was to chat with, occasionally breaking the rule against lingering. And then my own dear husband bade me to step out onto the balcony. The air outside was crisp and fresh, the skyline stunning. Looking around, I noticed that there were others leaning against the railing, also not talking. It was surely no coincidence that they all looked to be under forty.—Jennifer Vogel

There’s usually no problem finding a good movie to see in the Twin Cities—between the imperiled Oak Street Cinema, the Heights, Walker Art Center, and Landmark Theatres, there’s plenty to choose from that doesn’t insult one’s intelligence or batter one with sound and C.G.I. Sometimes, though, you get the urge to shut down your brain and settle in with something genuinely awful. For the worst, most bizarre—and by their very nature obscure—movies in history, there is no better local source than Joel D. Stitzel’s Cinema Slop, the eccentric movie program that screens the second Tuesday of every month in the Dinkytowner Cafe.

“We present rare and unusual movies that aren’t commercially valuable,” Stitzel explains of his free program, now in its fourth year. “It’s questionable as to why people would release these in the first place.” The Cinema Slop curator’s taste for such ephemera was acquired at a young age, thanks largely to local pitchman Mel Jass’ Matinee Movie, a Channel 11 stalwart noteworthy for also forging the Coen brothers’ tastes. Jass was famous for wasting everyone’s Saturday afternoons with such fare as Project Moonbase and other sci-fi drivel. With the arrival of home video, Stitzel, like many film obsessives, began to build his own impressive library. Unlike other buffs, however, his collection is mostly made up of films that could not even properly be categorized as B-grade fare: This is the stuff that even remote gas-station video stores shy away from. Because of this, the pictures featured in Cinema Slop are often difficult to find. With the advent of eBay, the hunt has become somewhat easier but often more expensive, as collectors like Stitzel compete to acquire the strangest and most obscure titles.

It would be easy to look upon Cinema Slop as a sort of den of cinematic iniquity. Stitzel has, after all, shown such “masterpieces” as the Esperanto-language Incubus, starring William Shatner with his own hair (a novelty unto itself); Toomorrow, in which Olivia Newton-John is kidnapped by aliens because her rock band’s “vibrations” are needed to save their planet; and The Gong Show Movie, which needs no explanation at all. Before each feature (there are at least two each month), audiences are treated to odd shorts, cartoons, and sometimes bits of strange Japanese game shows.

Cinema Slop does manage to slip in some legitimate gems now and again. When this past year brought impressive DVD reissues of classic works by Robert Bresson and Jacques Demy, Stitzel screened films by the same directors that were left out of boxed sets and film festivals. Slop has also filled its nightly roster with works by Andy Warhol, had Joan-of-Arc themed nights (featuring Dreyer’s silent classic and Besson’s lackluster modern version), freaked out my own Zappa-loving brother with a screening of 200 Motels, and, at times, retreated into the comfort of Stitzel family favorites, like Wings of Desire and Séance for a Wet Afternoon. It is his program, after all.

But Cinema Slop’s usual fare is the film equivalent of a White Castle hamburger. Its clientele are often shaggy college students and backpack-wielding film fanatics looking for something out of the ordinary to pass the time or fuel their habit. The same rules apply in the Dinkytowner as in most theaters: Talk too loud and the surly crowd will bark its disapproval. Despite the “slop” in its title, you can’t watch a movie and have better food anywhere else in the Twin Cities. To my mind there’s not much more appealing than having a good BLT and a Newcastle Ale while enjoying Harry Nilsson and Ringo Starr in Son of Dracula.

Primarily, though, there is a genuine pleasure in joining a like-minded crowd and seeing something like Night Train to Terror, a thoroughly misguided horror film that includes, sandwiched between the requisite nudity and gore, an earnest dialogue between God and Satan. The whole proposition leaves a little breathing room for your conscience—the production cost of these films is a tenth of what Jim Carrey makes in a more forgettable movie. Then there’s the pleasure of seeing something truly awful and knowing you couldn’t replicate it if you wanted to. It takes a certain genius to make one of the worst films ever—Ed Wood’s and Russ Meyer’s films, in my mind, are far more entertaining than anything Ron Howard has ever directed. Or consider the Oscar winners of the past. Wouldn’t you rather see the 1968 Japanese transvestite “classic” Black Lizard than Oliver! (the Best Picture winner from that same year)?

“This is sheer, stupid entertainment,” Stitzel claims with a wicked glee. “You can have the canonical works of Western culture, you can have the pap, but we show the stuff that falls through the cracks. If all you have is a top box office mentality, you aren’t going to get any spice in your life.”—Peter Schilling

By summer, the hulking, multi-ton blade sharpening machines of Printers Service Inc. will be gone, hauled out through the big front windows of 716 Washington Avenue North. For more than half a century, Ken Springer has run his business here, with the help of various employees who tend to stick around like family, and his sons, Wayne and Keith. The shop is a throwback to a time when people and machines interacted in a way that didn’t include a keyboard. It’s grimy, too. The sharpeners are constantly lubricated with a fine mist of oil, which coats everything not encased in plastic or stashed under a cardboard box. The Washington Avenue Business Center, which for decades has housed artists and musicians, along with Penco art supplies, is undergoing an upscale renovation; many of its tenants are being evicted. The plan doesn’t include Printers Service, which will seek a less pricey locale outside of downtown Minneapolis.