The Rake Magazine

Category: Article

  • Higher than Fi

    The European sun shines on James Coburn, his lean frame in a white Mod jacket with red turtleneck. Putting on enormous sunglasses and flashing his classic chops, he sidles out of the palm-tree fringed villa, where he has just spent the night with Monica Vitti, and slips into his silver Ferrari. Bound for another criminal adventure involving diamonds, art, or cold hard cash, he speeds onto a cliff-side road, which just happens to overlook an endless body of crashing blue water.

    None of this, mind you, is from any particular movie or real life situation. It is, in fact, one of the many exotic images you can’t help but conjure when listening to a typical night of Jet Set Planet on KFAI radio. Once a week, for ninety minutes, host Glen Leslie spins what he describes as “forgotten music from Thrift Store, USA”, most of it produced from the dawn of the 331/3 record through the close of the 1970s. And all of it on vinyl.

    The emphasis on turntable as opposed to digital jockeying is, in part, borne out of Leslie’s frustration with the substandard CD compilations of the music that he labels, in tribute to a favorite Marty Gold album, Higher Than Fi. But the real issue is that many of the audio treasures Leslie seeks out can still only be found on LPs.

    So far, over the course of fifteen-plus years, this record hunter can proudly claim 5,000 trophies, whose sounds he makes available to audiences courtesy of the two turntables in KFAI’s tastefully paneled, and notably clean, studio.

     

    The source of this collection, which Leslie pays for with his salary from the Geography Department at the University of Minnesota (KFAI, a listener-supported station, is fully manned by volunteers with other sources of income), are the thrift stores and record shops that continue to gather dust in various parts of the country. This includes Minneapolis, whose best source for vinyl is Hymie’s, on Lake Street. But it also includes the small towns and cities he and his wife, Carol, and friend, Steve, travel to throughout the year on cross-country expeditions. “The week, or month, before the show,” says Glen, whom I interviewed at Mapps coffee house, and who, with his mop of gray hair and Blanche glasses, reminds me of the latter-day Cary Grant in his LSD phase.

    “We hit the same thrift stores at the same time, because you only have a few hours to go through it. When I get home, I go over the piles we get from those trips. I draw up templates, so that, as I’m going through the pile, I kind of swaddle in songs that fit the genres. There is usually only one good song on each record, so if I make a mistake, the results can be devastating!”

    Clearly, the host takes the art of acquisition, and his show, seriously — good, clean fun notwithstanding. Fellow KFAI DJ Ron “Boogiemonster” Gerber confirms this commendation: “Glen is a record collector at heart, and he has great communication skills. Having those two things at the same time is a rarity, and it’s what makes Glen and Jet Set Planet so terrific.”

    Eschewing the bar room tones of Clear Channel brawlers and studied delivery of public radio commentators, Leslie, on-air, comes across as an arch, world-weary tour guide, who swills cocktails while leading cruises through exotic earthbound and intergalactic locales. In fact, each broadcast begins with a clip from a sound effects record in which a male voice on an intercom repeatedly tells an airport full of harried, oblivious travelers: “Attention passengers. Attention passengers. Please maintain contact with your personal belongings at all times.”

    The show’s current time slot, 10:30 to midnight each Monday, matches its after-hours vibe — though it must be said, its original post, 2 a.m. on Fridays, probably would have suited Dean Martin, or James Coburn, better. But the host does have a paying job to face, and he was grateful, after eighteen months on the graveyard shift, to join what is regarded as the station’s jazz shift in April of 2007.

    The move increased the program’s listenership significantly, since Leslie estimates the average KFAI devotee is 45, the same age as he is, and an age whose typical member goes to bed by the witching hour. “Nobody under thirty listens to radio,” he figures, “For older people, there’s more purity in genre distinctions. For example, there’s this one great box set put out by Reader’s Digest called Happiness Is …. It features a big band guy named Charlie Barnet, who retired in 1949, and came back twenty years later to do covers of ‘Light My Fire’ and ‘A Hard Day’s Night.’ People in their 30s and 40s get that clash. For younger people, it’s just music and nothing but.”

    Much of this “just music” is spoken of by the turntable operator in terms of title, artist, record, and recording label. After a block of songs, you might hear a track listed as, say, “Jean Carroll with ‘Girl-Talk in a Steam Bath’ from Girl in a Hot Steam Bath on the Columbia label.” In conversation off-air, he will do the same, even when remembering the album that triggered his obsession with all things Higher Than Fi. “In 1991, I found a Les Baxter record called Caribbean Moonlight, on Capital Records, at a sidewalk sale. I was rearranging my apartment, and I put on side two. I must have listened to it twenty times. A light went on, and I said, ‘I gotta get this stuff!’”

     

    This journey through the bins of yard sales, flea markets and, especially, thrift shops would continue with few interruptions as Leslie moved from Portland, Maine, to Maryland, to Milwaukee, and finally landing in his fourth “M” location of Minneapolis in 2004. Though he insists that working for KFAI, a community station of high esteem that he listened to online for four years prior, was not the main motivator in moving to the Twin Cities, he admits that on the same day he started his job at the U of M, he began volunteer training at the station in the nearby West Bank.

    As Pam Hill, the station’s volunteer coordinator, recalls, “He has been dedicated to the station’s mission since he joined us, at first volunteering in the music library, and asking how he can help the station in other areas. When he took the on-air training … little did I know what an entertaining, informative, and truly joyful program he would put on!”

    The fact is, he was already an experienced radio personality, having cut his teeth at WNPG at the University of Southern Maryland in the late ‘80s, while briefly forging a musical career of his own in what he refers to as a “white-bread, stiff-as-you-can-be funk band” called Chum.

    While the Jet Set Planet playlist may be derided by some as white-bread or elevator music, even its detractors would admit it always manages to evoke memories of pleasurable moments, or delightful scenes from movies — even if those moments or movies never existed.

    “Now, that doesn’t mean that every second of Jet Set Planet is a delight,” cautions Luke Andrews, a longtime friend and host of KFAI’s Groove Garden. “Sometimes, the music is torturous, like what you might hear while tra
    pped in the diaper aisle at the grocery store. But just when you think you can’t take another minute of it, Glen justifies with a complementary dose of something downright groovy.”

    That’s because for every corny farm ditty or sappy love ballad he pipes through the airwaves, there are at least three smooth, silky, and absolutely sweeping instrumentals (generally only one or two tracks per show feature a vocalist) performed by experienced jazz or pop musicians who, though they may be working on the album to pay the rent or feed their drug habits, perform with absolute dedication.

     

    Likewise, the host plays these cuts without a hint of irony — irony, in his mind, being a four-letter word. And even if the music isn’t always satisfying, the talk breaks that the radio guide usually prepares just before each show, to describe what audio vistas have passed by or lay ahead for his passengers, almost always are. When introducing a Sonny Lester belly dance instruction record, our radio instructor proffers this food for thought: “This is music for your international suburban pool party — that you proceed to destroy, when, drunk on Mai Tai’s and coveting thy neighbor’s better half, you strip down naked, tag a friend and say ‘you’re it,’ dive into the water, and come up for air just in time to see the last pair of tail lights pulling away from your driveway. I guess you should have learned your lesson from the last time this happened — there’s a big difference between fantasy and reality, my friend.”

    But not every aspect of the show involves fantasy. In between tunes, Leslie will relate personal anecdotes about his record buying trips, the most recent one of note being a visit to a home in Toledo, Ohio, whose lower floors were a makeshift vinyl store packed wall-to-wall with LPs. “He had all these really pricey jazz records for fifty bucks up in his bedroom,” Leslie recounts, “and he complained about these Japanese buyers who wanted the whole stock, but he would sell only a few. He was an old guy who chain smoked, and slept and ate around all these records. We figured what kept him from being killed by the mold from the records was the filter on his cigarettes.”

    He also has a distinctive take on the competitiveness of the strange creatures who comprise the vinyl collecting world. “In record stores, I’ve had people fart in aisles because they don’t want you in the area they’re sorting through. I’m convinced they’re doing that deliberately.”

    This is indicative, more in terms of eccentricity than marking territory, of the many downright peculiar artists who are regulars on the Jet Set musical roster. This includes Pete Drake, a Nashville pedal-steel picker whose signature instrument is a “talking guitar” that, when played, suggests an unusually melodic tracheotomy recipient. Another frequent guest is Rod McKuen, a spoken word artist who relates vignettes about cross-dressers and omnisexual encounters while strings and pianos tinkle in the background. You will also hear selections from obscure movies like The Last Rebel, a Civil War drama starring NFL great Joe Namath, and The Day the Fish Came Out, a thriller involving atom bombs, gay stereotypes, and future Murphy Brown star Candice Bergen brandishing a whip. And then there are the Latin instrumental albums, many named with one or more uses of the word “Cha”, and the instructional records on exotic dancing and bongo playing, and the psychedelic concept albums by big band musicians who’ve fallen on hard times, and the song collections by TV and movie stars who can’t sing, and …

     

    So, what, in the end, is Jet Set Planet — or Higher Than Fi, as the program was going to be called before wife Carol thought up the more extraterrestrial title? Is it jazz? Is it pop? Is it easy listening — or, as the host describes many of the saucier selections, “sleazy listening”?

    When Leslie pitched the show to KFAI’s programming committee in 2005, he could only pin it down as “Not not-jazz.” Even if jazz is the category this music is stuck with, Ron Gerber, another member of the committee, is correct in his assertion that, “you can find a lot of jazz music elsewhere on the radio and the internet, but you can search the entire globe and not find anything that sounds remotely like Jet Set Planet.”

  • Scientology: The Local Source

    Until last week, everything I knew about Scientology came from Tom Cruise on Oprah, and from an experience I had last summer.

    I wrote two articles for Salon.com, one in May 2007, the other in June. The first, about a catastrophic reaction my son had to psychiatric medication, resulted in a swell of support from Scientologists. Then I published the second piece, describing how doctors at the Mayo Clinic brought our son back from near death with electroconvulsive therapy, and was cyber-stalked by a few.

    Around the same time, representatives from the local chapter purchased the former Science Museum in downtown St. Paul and announced they planned to build one of the largest Scientology churches in the world there. Strangely, no one seemed to question this. So a couple months later, I walked into the current “church” on Nicollet Avenue determined to find out: Who are these people? What, exactly, do they believe? Why do they oppose psychiatric medications? And is their ministry more Franklin Covey, sci-fi Fundamentalism, or a combination of the two?

    I was told that if I left my card, the church’s “public affairs officer” would contact me. The following day, he did, saying he was very eager to meet and provide me with details. “Our current church looks like an office building,” he told me. “It’s not a good representation of what Scientology is about. But soon, we’ll have something that truly represents the riches people can find inside our doors."

    I’ll call him Karl. He didn’t ask me to use an alias, and with the details I’m about to provide any third-grader with an Internet connection could find him. But this man is either an excellent liar or the victim of a cult — and I’m betting he’s the latter. Should he choose to get out some day, I’d rather not link every Google search of his name to Scientology.

    We meet on a Wednesday afternoon in winter. He is exceedingly well dressed: a deep, purple shirt, gray suit coat, and designer tie. Small wire-rimmed glasses and short hair. He holds the door for me, shakes my hand with deference, and smiles often in a neat way but never — throughout our two-hour interview — actually laughs.

    Karl grew up a devout Catholic in small-town Iowa. He started college intending to become an electrical engineer but dropped out and moved to Nashville at the age of 19, because he dreamed of becoming a professional bluegrass musician. Five years went by and little happened: he was playing small, private parties and working odd jobs. Then he read Dianetics — a self-help manual written by the pulp science fiction and western author L. Ron Hubbard in 1950 that later became the basis for the Church of Scientology — and was hooked.

    “It made so much sense to me,” he says. “It explains the mind and psychosomatic illnesses, which may be 70 percent of all illnesses. I thought that was really neat. It explained so well why a person might be depressed and what to do about it. Dianetics helps you figure everything out. I read it today and it’s just as mind-blowing as it was back then.”

    Karl and his then-girlfriend (now wife) moved to Minneapolis from Tennessee in 1991 so he could pursue mission work with the church. Today, at 41, he is an ordained minister — one of several in his congregation — and public affairs liaison for the Twin Cities Church of Scientology but claims that he continues playing music because he needs the money; despite all the hours he puts in, his service to the church pays a pittance: “Somewhere between $20 and $50 a week.” For the same reason, he says, his wife has abandoned her career as an artist to become a full-time bill collector.

    We get some pay but it’s only a token,” Karl tells me. “That’s because most of the money we make goes into furthering the religion. It goes to pay the light bill and our insurance. Then there’s a percentage that goes to our management in Los Angeles. Also, we support many human rights campaigns and drug education programs.”

    Scientology, he tells me, literally means “the study of wisdom” (it derives from the Greek word “scios”). The religion did not, Karl insists, develop out of the plot of a science fiction novel Hubbard was writing, and it has nothing to do with aliens, though the press often insists that it does. What’s more, according to Karl, Hubbard himself didn’t even start the movement. It was people who read his books and started a church in California around 1954 in homage to the man — and his writings — whom they called The Source.

    Unlike other religions that don’t tell you how to live, this is an applied religious philosophy,” Karl explains. “It’s a way to look at life, and it looks at the spirit, too. But it’s also applied like a science because you use it to do things. You can actually take the tools we give you and use them to improve your relationship with your spouse or your working situation.”

    When I ask for specifics, Karl is quiet for a moment.

    “You might take a class in how to improve your marriage,” he answers after a time. “There would be drills you do with your spouse and the idea is you would go home and continue to apply what you learned and things would be better. You would learn that a marriage has to be created every day.”

    Tell me about the drills,” I press on. “Give me an example of a problem a couple might work on.”

    Instead, Karl describes the method: people pay for the classes (later in the conversation he will amend this and tell me they make voluntary “donations”), which are conducted at the church. Each class is a self-study, meaning there is no teacher — only a single supervisor who is available for questions — and members must read books written by Hubbard to find the answers they seek. They also have to buy the books.

    “You’re getting the wisdom straight from the texts,” Karl says. “This is important for a couple reasons: first, we can have a lot of people studying different things; but also, we want you to get the facts straight from a book, not someone’s interpretation.”

    In fact, Karl’s own ministerial course was self-study as well; and yes, he paid for the privilege of reading on-site and becoming ordained. Now he can perform marriage ceremonies, preside at funerals, and give sermons. These days, however, most of his service to the church involves outreach. He also helps run the local arm of their street drug prevention program, Narcanon — which owns several dozen rehabilitation centers around the world and implements Scientology’s “New Life Detoxification Program” — as well as a public awareness campaign focused on the mental health field that disseminates pamphlets such as Psychiatry: An Industry of Death.

    I do not claim to have conducted an exhaustive study of Scientology. I couldn’t, frankly, given the time and resources I have.

    Journalists who write extensively on the topic — most notably Richard Behar, a reporter for Time whose article The Thriving Cult of Greed and Power was published in 1991 — spend years conducting hundreds of interviews and reading through court cases. I have read those stories, however, as well as Dianetics (the 1992 edition) and the work of a man from Norway who has administered the anti-Scientology website Operation Clambake since 1996.

    I’ve also spent enough time in the church in downtown Minneapolis to describe it accurately: It consists of several connected rooms. The front two are lined with shelves
    containing books, audiotapes, CDs, and workbooks — all of which are sealed in plastic. You can buy a pocket-size paperback edition of Dianetics on Amazon for $7.99, but the prices on the materials here hover in the $20 range. You can also get a free personality test, typically administered with something called an “e-meter,” a device invented by Hubbard which measure very small changes in the electrical resistance of a person’s body and points to “engrams” — traumatic memories that block one’s attainment of success and happiness.

    Engrams can derive from a variety of events. In this passage from Dianetics, Hubbard described how pre-birth coitus trauma will cause a “thetan” (or immortal spiritual being — Scientology claims we are all immortal but is vague about exactly how the spirit lives on after death) to become blocked:

    "Mother and Father are engaging in intercourse which, by pressure, is painful to the unborn child and which renders him unconscious. . . Mother is saying “Oh, I can’t live without it. It’s wonderful. It’s wonderful. Oh, how nice. Oh, do it again!” and Father is saying “Come! Come! Oh, you’re so good. You’re so wonderful. Ahhhh!” Mother’s orgasm puts the finishing touch on the unconsciousness in the child. Mother says, “It’s beautiful.” Father, finished now, says, “Get up,” meaning she should take a douche (they do not know she is pregnant) and then begins to snore." (Dianetics, p. 326)

    Hubbard also wrote that there is no foolproof method for terminating a pregnancy and that a major cause of mental “aberration” is attempted abortion.

    "Attempted abortion is very common. And remarkably lacking in success. The mother, every time she injures the child in such a fiendish fashion, is actually penalizing herself. Morning sickness is entirely engramic, so far as can be discovered, since Clears [see below] have not so far experienced it during their own pregnancies. . . Actual illness generally results only when Mother has been interfering with the child either by douches or knitting needles or some such thing." (Dianetics, p. 199)

    Hubbard defined homosexuality as a sexual perversity, “far from normal and extremely dangerous to society” (Dianetics, p. 135) and claimed Scientology can “heal” a penitent of this and other forms of sexual deviance. For years, the actor John Travolta has been held forth [unofficially] as proof of this, and he was even cited in a lawsuit brought against the Church of Scientology by a man who submitted believing he, like Travolta, would be cured of being gay.

    Engrams can be dealt with only through “auditing,” which is, basically, the process of self-study Karl described. It involves years spent studying the religious works of L. Ron Hubbard — he wrote dozens of texts, tracts, and standalone pamphlets before his death in 1986 — and watching his taped lectures, then working one-on-one with a specially trained auditor from the church. The goal of all this is to attain a state called “clear” (this is used both as an adjective and a noun: those who have achieved engram-free existence are called Clears). After that, with more study, it is possible to achieve the more enlightened level of Operating Thetan (OT). Operation Clambake estimates the cost of becoming an OT to be $300,000-$500,000.

    This is where the questions about Karl arise.

    Several years ago, a former Scientologist went public with the story he was told upon reaching OT III status: Only the chosen few who had dedicated their lives to Scientology were let in on the “true” story of its genesis. It is based on the Galactic Confederacy of an alien community ruled by the tyrant Xenu, who brought them to Earth 75 million years ago and killed them, leaving their spirit essences to wander the planet and damage humans in modern times. It’s fairly well established that Scientology has a science fiction connection, but Karl may not be high enough in the ranks to have learned it yet.

    On a more pragmatic front, the money trail of the Church of Scientology is long and convoluted — and there’s reason to believe it supports more than just the mission. Behar claimed in his TIME magazine exposé that “Hubbard was skimming millions of dollars from the church, laundering the money through dummy corporations in Panama and stashing it in Swiss bank accounts.” The founder was accused of stealing around $200 million and was under investigation for tax fraud when he died in 1986. And Scientology has been characterized by many as a pyramid organization, which uses the faithful to recruit more people and rewards them, very modestly, for bringing more [paying] members into the fold.

    Finally, Scientology was the leading reason people cited for calling the Cult Awareness Network (CAN) for deprogramming of their loved ones until 1996. That was the year CAN filed bankruptcy after years of fighting “freedom of religion” lawsuits, and was bought outright by the Church of Scientology.

    Of course, Karl has access to the same various Internet sites and Wikipedia entries I do. He’s aware this information is out there but believes (or at least says he does) that this is propaganda put forth by the mainstream press, the IRS, and the psychiatric community to make his religion look greedy and “ridiculous.” Psychiatrists in particular, he tells me, are desperate to discredit Scientology.

    “We know the damage it causes when people go to psychologists and psychiatrists,” Karl says. “The drugs are very damaging. But they also tell people all sorts of garbage, “You’re depressed because your mom used to spank you,” which gives people all the wrong ideas about their lives. [Note: This is inconsistent with Dianetics, which does claim childhood “abuses” cause engrams.] And we’re against psychiatric drugs because number one, they don’t work; number two, we think they’re damaging; and number three, we have all the answers anyway in our books.”

    He denies vehemently the idea that money is at stake and refutes the apocryphal story about L. Ron Hubbard (recounted by many people, including the author Harlan Ellison) that he joked in the 1940’s that the best way to become rich would be to start a religion. Despite a 30-year battle between Scientology and the IRS, Karl cites a 1993 ruling that confirmed the church’s nonprofit status.

    "Every religion I have ever studied tried to answer questions that are beyond the physical world. They want to know what happens after we die. They all mark different rites of passage: birth, marriage, death. And they all involve a community of people who come together to practice similar beliefs.” Karl pauses then looks me straight in the eyes. “I do this work because I know we have the answers people are looking for. And all the money we take in is spent right back on what we’re doing.”

    In June 2007, Karl helped his congregation negotiate the purchase of the former Science Museum building in downtown St. Paul. It’s an 80,000 square foot space, which Karl tells me will serve five states: Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, and both Dakotas. Though it will not approach the palatial “advanced” institutions in Los Angeles, Clearwater, Florida, and various locations overseas — or the Celebrity Centers built to serve only well-known actors and artists, including Cruise, Travolta, Lisa Marie Presley, Kirstie Alley, Jenna Elfman, Juliette Lewis, and Chick Corea, — St. Paul soon will be a major Scientology site. If all goes according to plan, a $7 million renovation of the building will begin in early ‘08 and finish late the same year.

    This is part of an international effort under current leader David Miscavige to upgrade Scientology facilities and prepare for a whole new wave of followers. No one knows how many peop
    le identify themselves as Scientologists today. The church’s administrative offices in California claim worldwide membership is around ten million, but independent surveys estimate this number is inflated by 20-50 percent.

    Karl reports — accurately according to all the information I can find; though it’s likely he provided the numbers for other local reporters as well — that the Twin Cities sect is growing steadily. “When I got here in ’91, we had a couple hundred people. But now, we have 700 active members, people who attend weekly services and take classes and participate in all our events. We didn’t plan to become one of the biggest churches in the country. We just got lucky. With the new St. Paul facility, we’re going to be ready to take as many new members as we can.”

    In his final correspondence with me — just prior to publication of this article —Karl directs me to several Scientology-friendly websites, expresses concern for my situation, and offers his personal assistance.

    I believe in his way, he means it.

  • Food Police to the World

    Jim Harkness never expected to return to Minnesota. A native of South Minneapolis who studied Chinese in high school, he started his career as an activist specializing in Asian birds, then giant pandas. His work took him to China often, and eventually he became a full-time resident of Beijing, working first with the Ford Foundation, then serving as executive director of World Wildlife Fund China.

    But in 2005, when he heard the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP)—a Minneapolis-based nonprofit that promotes sustainable farming and ecosystems—was searching for a new president, Harkness picked up and moved back home.

    “When I was first told about IATP, I’ll admit, it sounded removed from my lofty ideals,” Harkness says. “But when I saw what this organization does, looking at issues that affect everyone in this world, I realized that food is a very powerful force.”

    IATP was born out of the farm movement in the 1980s that opposed global trade and supported a traditional model for rural family farms. Today, the organization is still fighting the North American Free Trade Agreement and the World Trade Organization, on the premise that both promote nonsustainable, commercial farming that harms both the environment and public health.

    Also among the major issues IATP addresses are the federal subsidies that favor commodity crops such as corn, soybeans, and wheat—as well as the corporate farm entities that produce them—over smaller, independently owned operations that produce a diverse range of foods. The result, according to Harkness, is that roughly eighty-five percent of arable land in the Midwest’s “Farm Belt” is devoted to soybeans and corn. This in turn leads to an economy where other foods must be shipped in from around the country and overseas—making them both ecologically damaging and expensive—while processed products, made with soy byproducts and corn syrup, are plentiful and cheap.

    “Over a fifteen-year period, from about 1985 to 2000, the cost of fresh produce went up thirty-five percent, whereas the price of ground beef and Coca-Cola, in real terms, went down about an equivalent amount,” Harkness says. “That’s because feedlots and the soft-drink industry suddenly had all this very cheap raw material at their disposal, which they would not have had without massive government intervention. And if you look at the onset of America’s obesity crisis, it coincides almost exactly with these changes in policies.”

    According to Food Without Thought, IATP’s 2006 report, childhood obesity skyrocketed between 1970 and 2000—at the same time as spending on processed food climbed to forty percent of the average American’s grocery bill, while produce dropped to claim less than nine percent. Perhaps most alarming: The consumption of high-fructose corn syrup rose one-thousand percent. A cheap, shelf-stable sweetener found in soft drinks and most processed foods, corn syrup provides no nutrients and very little usable energy, but must be processed entirely by the liver, like a toxin. So concurrent with the rise in obesity has been a surge in cases of type 2 diabetes.

    Harkness and IATP are waging battles on many different fronts. The key is for the tiny agency to operate on whatever level is appropriate to the issue at hand, explains Harkness. A major initiative is to lobby for changes in the federal price support system of payments to farmers, so most of IATP’s energy is devoted to rewriting the byzantine national farm bill and swaying national lawmakers. (Part of this involves countering messages from large-scale agribusinesses such as Cargill and General Mills, which is one reason IATP is based in Minnesota.) One goal is to develop language around a “common farmer/public health policy platform” for the next farm bill, developing policies that are good for both producers and consumers.

    But Harkness and his staff also work locally—in North Minneapolis, for instance—to establish farmer’s markets in urban neighborhoods and encourage low-income residents to buy fresh food. Regionally, their top concern right now is the growing enthusiasm for farms that will produce corn exclusively for ethanol. And Internationally, they’re focused on exposing how the World Trade Organization’s policies shape our communities and our lives. IATP’s promotion of fair trade practices has even led to a for-profit company of its own: Peace Coffee is perhaps its best-known success.

    “I took this job because for most of my life, I’ve been concerned with social justice and the sustainability of our planet,” Harkness says. “And I keep working toward those goals using all sorts of different means, whether it’s talking about conserving pandas or giving people decent, affordable food to eat.”

  • Strong, Rugged, Somewhat Sweet

    On any list of the smaller enormities of modern life, other people’s Christmas circular letters ought to loom large. It is not the information itself that is so rebarbative. In the great scheme of things, knowing about the family’s new job/house/car/place at the lake is no more or less annoying than reading that Junior has scooped the Miss Joyful Prize for Raffia Work.

    What offends is not the list of facts; it is the impersonal braggadocio which implicitly animates their recital. Other documents in life that puff one’s importance at least do so to secure some good purpose: To get a pay raise or obtain a job. But the Christmas circular is bombast in its pure form, intended to impress merely for the purpose of impressing—vanitas vanitatum.

    How much more welcome than such cyclo-styled self-advertisement are a few words of personal greeting scrawled on a conventional card. One might even be happier to receive one of the un-Christmas cards sent out annually by an irascible colleague who experiences difficulty forgiving his enemies, even though he knows he really ought to. His concession to the Season of Goodwill consists of posting to the offenders plain black cards signed and inscribed in simple silver script: “I await your apology.”

    At least his cards are plain. The nadir of the Christmas circular phenomenon is reached when the puff sheet is accompanied by a card showing not the Holy Family heaped onto a single donkey fleeing into Egypt, but the Nuclear Family disporting itself somewhere warm. Such an exhibition can only be intended to promote envy and uncharitableness when sent to people spending December in Minnesota.

    The only one of these family snaps I have ever kept beyond Twelfth Night came from a sprightly minded graduate student the Christmas before the invasion of Iraq. The photograph showed her husband in combat fatigues standing next to his tank. Her bikini-clad form was draped deliciously across the front of the vehicle. The caption read simply “Peace on Earth.”

    It is good to know the U.S. Marines do irony.

    It is actually the Christians of Iraq I shall be thinking of this Christmas. These are not the converts of intrusive Victorian missionaries; they are communities as old as Christianity itself, long predating the emergence in the Western Middle Ages of Christmas as an important holiday. (In the early Church the great festivals were Easter and to a lesser extent Epiphany.) Their liturgical language is Syriac, a literary form of Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke.

    During the first three centuries of Islam, Syriac Christians were a vital link in the transmission of Greek science to the scholars of the Arab world. In the three centuries before Islam, their monasteries were places of poetry and of a spiritual endeavor characterized by considerable psychological acuity. Standing outside a monastery gate on the escarpment of Mount Izla, looking south over the little Turkish border town of Nusaybin, once a great center of Syriac learning, one can sense centuries of intellectual effort wafting up on the thermals from the Mesopotamian plain.

    Today the subtle symbiosis that has for centuries sustained these Christian communities is being brushed violently aside. Syriac Christians are leaving their ancestral land to live precariously as refugees in Syria and Jordan. And it’s not just Christians; the Yezidis, a small community whose principal shrine is in the mountains of northern Iraq, also live in justifiable fear. This tragedy seems to be little reported, though the Archbishop of Canterbury’s distress at what he saw when visiting refugees in Syria got some coverage on the internet.

    The sober consideration of this cultural catastrophe may be lubricated by a wine that, like the landscape of northern Mesopotamia, is strong and rugged and somewhat sweet. The people of Mount Izla were making their own wines in the time of Ezekiel, but I fear that today the grapes there get turned into raki (the Turkish equivalent of ouzo) or pekmez (a sort of jam). One may substitute a Parducci Pinot Noir grown in the precipitous hills of Mendocino County in northern California, which may be had in Minnesota for about twelve dollars. The color is a good deep red; an aroma rises with the alcohol as the hand warms the glass; the taste is robust and lingering.

    This wine would be good company for bread and cheese and hard thinking. Its mellowing influence might well evaporate the vanity of one’s friends. One might even start to wonder what can be done to stop the modern world from destroying all the good we inherited from the past.

  • Season's Eatings

    One of the toughest questions I’m asked is “What’s your favorite restaurant?” You might as well ask me which specific taste bud I prefer. Instead of a quick reference, this question begs a full discussion of the weather, the season, the time of day/night, what I’m wearing, who’s paying, etc. But that’s the thing about being a foodie—our hunger is unusually complex and wide-ranging.

    This means that gift-giving for food lovers can come easy; unless you give a box of steaks to a vegetarian, it’s hard to mess up. Epicures are by nature curious, so if you can appeal to even one aspect of their passion, you will earn a permanent place in their heart—and at their table.

    For the convert to “sustainability”: Alice Waters’s new tome, The Art of Simple Food: Notes, Lessons, and Recipes from a Delicious Revolution, is a straightforward and tasteful discourse from one of the founders of the sustainability movement. Pair this gift with a loin of grass-fed beef from locally owned Thousand Hills Cattle Co. and the recipient will feel that all his ranting about factory farming has not been in vain.

    For the harried cook: The mise en place approach isn’t just for veggies—it can apply to a whole recipe system. The Russell + Hazel recipe keeper is both stylish and ingeniously organized so as to eliminate the 5:30 p.m. frenzied search for Chicken Diablo. Another way to save time is with the new OXO peeler: It fits in the palm and allows both speed and control over any vegetable. As a party gift, the time-crunched hostess will love the frozen cubes of chopped herbs available at Trader Joe’s. They melt perfectly and brightly into any concoction.

    For the Scandinavian locavore: Even if you didn’t grow up eating them, one taste and there’s no denying the power of the ebleskiver. These Danish stuffed pancake-balls can be filled with jam or chocolate and are made in a special pan created by the local wizards at Nordic Ware. Beyond breakfast, you can satisfy your inner Swede and support a small, local shop when you buy lingonberry fudge from The Sweet Swede. Dark and rich on the front with a deep berry finish, this is fudge even an outlander would love.

    For the dairy snob: Most of those who fall into this category are cheese snobs, and most of them believe that they must love the oddest, stinkiest, funkiest of washed rind cheeses in order to hold court. I say relax and enjoy the soft earthiness of Sottocenere al Tartufo, an Italian semisoft cow’s milk cheese that is plied with black truffle and aged in an edible vegetable ash rind rubbed with a heady concoction of nutmeg, coriander, cinnamon, licorice, cloves, and fennel. If you want to go the simple route for a lover of dairy, give a rich European butter like the salted Beurre de Gourmets—and a Laguiole spreader to use with it exclusively.

    For the adventurer: Your food-lover might never be an Iron Chef, but now she can study up with Morimoto: The New Art of Japanese Cooking. In his first book, Masaharu Morimoto gives wonderfully exact instructions on how to create staggeringly beautiful Japanese food. It’s serious kitchen work, especially the bit about how to tie up your samurai robe. Before diving in, your giftee should do an initial read-through accompanied by a nicely chilled glass of sake, that under-sung brewed beverage. Otokoyama should do the trick.

    Finders, keepers: where to get the goods

    Cookbooks: online at Jessica’s Biscuit or at Kitchen Window, 3001 Hennepin Ave., Minneapolis; 612-824-4417

    Thousand Hills Cattle Co. meats: Kowalski’s, various locations

    Recipe keeper: Russell + Hazel, 4388 France Ave. S, Minneapolis;
    952-358-3685

    OXO peeler: Sur la Table, 3901 W. 50th St., Minneapolis; 952-656-0045

    Frozen herbs: Trader Joe’s, various locations

    Ebleskiver pan: Cook’s of Crocus Hill, various locations, or Nordic Ware

    Lingonberry fudge: The Sweet Swede, www.thesweetswede.com

    Cheese and butter: Premier Cheese Market, 5013 France Ave. S., Minneapolis; 612-436-5590

    Laguiole spreaders: Williams-Sonoma, various locations

    Otokoyama sake: Hennepin-Lake Liquors, 1200 W. Lake St., Minneapolis; 612-825-4411

  • Love That Latex!

    So, maybe by now you have seen Lars and the Real Girl. It’s a comedy set in Minnesota and the title character, Lars Lindstrom, is the sort of Norwegian bachelor Garrison Keillor never mentions. You see, Lars is a social misfit who sends away for an anatomically correct sex doll, falls in love with it, and begins bringing it along on visits to relatives and out to dinner. According to gossip, the actor playing Lars—Ryan Gosling—became so enamored of his costar that he bought her and brought her home, much to the discomfort of his flesh-and-blood girlfriend, Rachel McAdams.

    It’s the ultimate mail-order bride, but of course sex dolls are nothing new. Back when I was a sweet young thing on the comedy circuit, I spent a lot of time in L.A. with a famous big-shot agent who was trying to make me the next Roseanne. Aggressive as he was—he’s actually the guy Jeremy Piven’s character in Entourage is based on—he couldn’t turn me into the next Rose Marie. But we spent a lot of time together, and he would dazzle me with tales of his clients’ eccentricities. According to him, one of America’s favorite funnymen had a thing for elaborately detailed $6,000 love dolls. Actual Austin Powers-style Fembots made of flesh-like sculpted silicone. I guess the real women in his life weren’t cold, fake, and submissive enough.

    I’m pretty sure there’s a message here about the objectification of women in our culture, but I can’t get too indignant. The way I look at it:

    A) That’s $6,000 the guy won’t be spending on roofies;

    B) This is taking exactly the right kind of people out of the breeding pool; and

    C) I have considered buying the economy blow-up doll version so I could use the carpool lanes.

    So who am I to judge? Fact is, I did once have my own boyfriend doll, Armando. I purchased him for a bit that I used to do onstage, then I ended up taking him to parties as my date. This was a period in my life when dating a fella who would dress how he was told and listen to me for as long as I wanted was pretty appealing. I was up to the challenge of interacting with actual human men, but there were advantages to snuggling up to a guy-shaped balloon. For one thing, he wasn’t afraid of my single-mother status. And a partner you can store in the back of the closet was quite practical in the cramped apartment where I lived.
    Eeeew, you’re saying. How could you cuddle with something that just lies there like a lox: clammy, slightly squishy, and unresponsive? Hey, I’ve had girlfriends who married that guy. My problems stemmed from me being the jealous type. I was worried I would come home early and catch him with a female mannequin AWOL from Nordstrom, the two going at it like the marionettes in Team America: World Police. After a trauma like that you’d probably be incapable of having a relationship with another doll.

    It was fear of embarrassment that pushed me back to dating guys with a pulse. I couldn’t imagine wandering the streets after a torrid wrestling match, looking for an all-night bike repair shop that stocks flesh-colored tire repair patches. Or what about bringing him home to meet the folks? Mom would give him a big hug, making him blow a huge raspberry and sending him whizzing around the room a couple times, only to collapse in a wrinkled heap.

    In all likelihood, guys are psychologically better equipped to have a long-term, meaningful, and committed relationship with a latex lady. Guys love stuff. They love their cars. They love their computers. They love their boats. And they could love us, too, if we were just better engineered.

    My hope would be that owning one of these dolls is a gateway for a guy to have a relationship with a lady who is warmer than room temperature—the same kind of imaginative outlet I had when my Barbie was living in sin with Ken. Looking after a love doll does require a certain degree of commitment on the guy’s part. She is harder to clean than an old gym sock; you probably need a bottle brush. And lugging Silicone Sally to the dinner table and waltzing her around the ballroom before retiring to the boudoir takes a lot of effort. These things weigh 130 pounds, which makes them only two percent more plastic by body weight than Cher.

    So I will not wag the finger of disapproval from my comfy chair of judgment. We often try to mold our partners like putty. Is it really such a reach to send for one that was vacuum-molded by Mattel instead?

  • The Cat Who Outlived Christ

    “Baby” is thirty-seven years old. This is the claim of one Al Palusky, of Duluth, who considers the black, long-haired cat to be his best friend. This is not news to Al’s wife Mary. “When we were married Al’s priest told him that he couldn’t call Baby his best friend anymore,” she said. Al just shrugged and added, “It’s true, he’s still my best friend.”

    It might be hard to argue with that, but some people have questioned the veracity of Palusky’s claim about the age of his cat. There’s actually no way to determine it, since there’s no such thing as feline birth certificates, and it’s not as if you can cut his tail and count the rings. Also, Baby only visited the local vet for the first time at age twenty-eight (if you believe he’s now thirty-seven), when he was declawed. “I had to do it,” Al said. “We were just married and had all new furniture, and Baby ran all over the house scratching everything.” Outside of eyewitness testimony, the only evidence Palusky can provide is a photo dated from June 1973, which ostensibly proves that the cat’s at least thirty-four years old. The cat in the photo, grainy and shown at a distance, does have a sloping snout that seems to match that of the aged feline. If that’s not enough evidence, well, Al simply doesn’t care.

    Baby certainly looks old. There’s the matted coat streaked with gray, the milky white eyes, and the complaining, scratchy meow. Baby was adopted from an animal shelter by Al’s mother in 1970; her friend had rescued the poor kitty from the clutches of a gang of firecracker-tossing hooligans, who had him trapped in a garbage can. Baby was brought back to the modest two-story white clapboard home where he has spent his nearly four decades. In those early years, he had to put up with a pair of dogs and another cat, but as those animals passed on, Baby became the sole pet of the Palusky household.

    The creature still has some pep, as evidenced by the way he struts around the house or squirms violently when held. He’ll still catch flies, too, according to Al. But he’s definitely showing his age, and spends most of his days asleep. In fact, “Baby will sleep so hard,” Al laments, “that he’ll wake up and suddenly just poop right there.”

    There’s an upside to Baby’s age, however: It won him a contest held by Cat Fancy magazine to find the world’s oldest cat. Part of the $150 prize was spent on a new bed and some toys, and the rest was deposited in a savings account under the name “Baby Palusky.” Apparently, Baby will use the money for retirement.

    How do the Paluskys account for Baby’s longevity? Mainly it’s his diet. “The vets and so-called ‘people in the know’ say don’t feed cats from the table,” Al scoffs. “But Baby eats what we eat.” When Al and Mary sit down to dinner, Baby gets his own little plate of food as well. He enjoys peas, green olives—“and olive juice!” Mary chimes in—steak, and even corn cut off the cob (without butter or salt). He munches on snacks of cheese several times a day, and has an ever-present supply of cat food next to his water bowl. It’s a diet that appears to work, and not just because he’s thirty-seven—the cat is svelte, for all the calories he takes in. Ultimately, Al believes that Baby has lived to a ripe old age due to consistency through the years. “Same diet, same house, same owner,” he notes. The cat, too, is reliable: Baby serves as Palusky’s alarm clock, waking him in time to get to work as a janitor at a local medical center.

    Since winning the Cat Fancy contest earlier this year, Baby has been featured in a number of publications, on television stations as far away as Dallas and Los Angeles, and in chat rooms across the internet. Palusky is not much interested in all of this attention, though he would like to see his pet on Willard Scott’s Today Show segment honoring the aged—after all, the cat is 185 if you go by the five-cat-years-per-one-human-year-rule. The exposure has also led to a steady trickle of email from cat lovers challenging Palusky’s assertion. One of them, a lawyer, was sent a digital version of the documenting photo. Says Palusky, “The guy wrote back, ‘That would stand up in court!’”

    Other pet owners write to share tales of their own aged and beloved companions. And then there are the lonely souls who want to pay a visit to Baby and befriend him. At this, Al rolls his eyes. “Sometimes I wish people would just get a life.”

  • Born Again!

    “History dead-ends Holly Avenue,” says Michael Koop. The preservation specialist at the Minnesota Historical Society is talking about the way in which a neoclassical giant, complete with Ionic columns and a massive pediment, rears up in the middle of the avenue, disrupting the neat street grid characteristic of St. Paul’s tony Historic Hill District. Location isn’t the only commanding feature of the building, which was built around 1908 as the First Methodist Episcopal Church, and this month becomes the new home of SteppingStone Theatre.

    Constructed in an era when local church styles tended toward the Gothic, First Methodist made a statement from the start. It’s not a modest building—and, according to Paul Clifford Larson, that is precisely the point. “The church was built during a movement within Protestant Christianity that emphasized the importance of social ministry—what we call social justice today,” says Larson, who chairs the St. Paul Heritage Preservation Commission. Because the church ministered to the larger community, not just its own congregation, the exterior was designed to reflect the humanistic ideals of the Classical era rather than a specific theology. Muted religious icons made it easier for people from all faiths to walk in without heresy; the church’s lone cross (now long gone) was effectively camouflaged within a circular frame. The building’s height—one must climb twelve feet of steps just to get to the front door—stemmed from the same impulse. The church leaders “weren’t looking for the highest hill, like the Cathedral,” explains Larson. Instead, he points out, their building “was always intended to be a community building. Methodists had been designing some churches with raised basements so you could enter directly into the garden-level meeting rooms” and thus avoid the sanctuary altogether.

    The architectural firm that followed that design directive was Thori, Alban and Fischer. Although this partnership was short-lived, the men had individual influence throughout the state. Martin Thori and another partner, Diedrik Omeyer—“the mad Norwegians,” chuckles Larry Millett, the architectural historian who includes the church in his 2007 AIA Guide to the Twin Cities—are responsible for many of St. Paul’s intricately baubled Queen Anne residences; while Larson credits William Linley Alban with bringing a wave of neoclassical architecture to St. Paul. Alban was also dominant as the sole partner with academic training, graduating from the Chicago School of Architecture. “He was almost certainly the chief designer” of First Methodist, says Larson.

    Like most churches, First Methodist changed along with the demographics of the neighborhood. In 1964, it became Saints Volodymyr and Olga Ukrainian Orthodox, and later, Grace Community, a church whose progressive theology eventually proved unpalatable to its African-American congregation. So much for the inclusiveness of the original church: Reverend Oliver White’s outspoken advocacy for gay rights left him with just eleven congregants in 2001, barely enough to fill a pew, let alone tithe for the staggering monthly utility bill.

    By this time it would have been kind to call the place a fixer-upper; estimates for repairs topped a million dollars and the tiny congregation went looking for a savior. A highly original developer offered to raze it and build condominiums. Word hit the street—on the eve of a city council meeting that would decide the matter—and guerrilla war ensued. Within hours, neighbors gathered more than a hundred signatures, enough to block the church’s sale and demolition. Another developer proved more acceptable, with plans to rent the church to a charter school. The deal was inked, but then the school moved elsewhere. The developer, David Kabanuk, was stuck with a million-dollar treasure, a locally designated landmark, a leaking, cracking, teetering entry on the National Register of Historic Places.

    Meanwhile, a bid by SteppingStone Theatre to buy the Highland Movie Theater had fallen through. The phone at the scrappy company—the only children’s theater in St. Paul, and a poor cousin, relatively speaking, to the Children’s Theatre Company across the river—started ringing. It was the Preservation Commission, it was former City Council Member Jerry Blakey, and it was dozens of the church’s neighbors. Thus wooed, SteppingStone bought the building. The city of St. Paul pitched in half a million. Corporate donors and foundations big and small, including Bush and McKnight, all wrote checks, as did hundreds of individual supporters. Ultimately, the $5.3 million gut rehab didn’t just restore the structure, it also revitalized the old church’s community spirit. Just as First Methodist did, SteppingStone’s artistic director Richard Hitchler plans to open the doors to the neighborhood, starting with a grand opening celebration December 1.

    Today the theater is a beguiling blend of old and new: both stainless steel elevator and creaking staircase climb to the balcony. Repaired walls pop out in pleasant primary colors; the original maple woodwork is buffed and gleaming. And even though the 430-seat house is outfitted with plenty of technological gadgetry, there are stained-glass windows that are cracked and popping, awaiting repair. Like any old house, the to-do list never ends.

  • Dispensing with Formalities

    A white-haired man in a finely tailored suit is breezing through the lobby of the Chambers Hotel with three black-garbed hotel employees, including the general manager, at his heels. He glides past Subodh Gupta’s stainless steel sculpture that evokes Animal, the wild-man drummer Muppet. He cruises by the bull’s head suspended in a formaldehyde-filled tank, a work by British bad-boy artist Damien Hirst, without blinking. What stops him is a throwback from the days before smoking bans. “There’s a cigarette machine in here?” he asks.

    The machine at the Chambers is a true antique, but there are no Pall Malls for sale. As Minnesota’s first Art-o-mat—one of about ninety such contraptions in the country—it has been retrofitted to dispense original artworks for five dollars—not much more than a pack of cigarettes.

    The man who founded Art-o-mat ten years ago, Clark Whittington, is in town to officially introduce the machine and to present a slide show about Artists in Cellophane, the collective of more than four hundred artists who create cigarette-pack-size artworks for the machines.

    The crowd of three dozen is made up of mostly curious onlookers, but Whittington is a rock star to a few. There’s a middle-aged woman from Minneapolis who enthuses about her collection of more than thirty Art-o-mat artworks, and Laura Gentry, a pastor, “laugh therapist,” and resident Artist-in-Cellophane member, who drove four hours from McGregor, Iowa, to meet the self-titled Art-o-mat National Bureau Chief.

    Whittington, forty-one, is playful and approachable—he’s an artist, but also a dude, with a military-short haircut, hipster glasses, and grease-monkey shirt with embroidered patches above each pocket that say “Lucky” and “Clark.” Fresh from the Van Halen reunion show with David Lee Roth in Greensboro, NC, he’s proudly sporting a gold VH necklace.

    Art-o-mat was launched in 1997 as a one-time installation, but Whittington now cultivates the project full-time. The range of offerings is impressive, from the crafty (handmade beaded earrings, or the tiny ceramic eggplants that Gentry makes) to the political (“Bad Boy Pincushions” that feature the smirking faces of Bush, Cheney, and other politicians).

    Whittington says he was influenced by Fluxus, the ’60s art movement described by one founder, George Maciunas, as “a fusion of Spike Jones, vaudeville, gags, children’s games, and Duchamp.” Fluxus was a kind of slapstick movement that snubbed the idea of gallery art, juried shows, and exclusivity in art—Dada without the nihilism.

    Jennifer Phelps, the curator who oversees the Chambers’s cutting-edge art collection, agrees, calling it “Fluxus for the twenty-first century.” She especially likes the arcade-like aspect to Art-o-mat: insert token, make your choice, and pull the rusty lever. That carefree act creates a bond between artist and buyer, even at the five-dollar level, and the artists play that up. Christian Andrew, who makes tiny modern houses from paper, will catalog the sold artworks as “[owner name] residence” on his website. Gentry posts photos of people with her cheeky ceramic aubergines in her online “Eggplant Owners Gallery.”

    Fluxus, wrote one critic, “happens when one feels that life and art must be taken so seriously, that it becomes impossible to take life or art seriously.” In that respect, Art-o-mat’s sense of democracy—and its price point—may be right on cue. Christie’s, the famous auction house, set an all-time record for single-week art sales this June: a jaw-dropping $485 million. No one better embodies the mania of the current art boom than Hirst, notorious for displaying various animals in formaldehyde; this year he created a platinum cast of a human skull, covered in 8,601 diamonds, which reportedly sold for $100 million. He titled it For the Love of God.

    At the same time, some 25,000 pieces of art are selling each year via Art-o-mats located in community centers, cafés, and even supermarkets. Perhaps not surprisingly, the most successful machines are at places like the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

    On this night, at Ralph Burnet’s $30 million art temple masquerading as a hotel, a swarm of people has gathered around the Art-o-mat. A student who wandered down from the nearby Art Institutes International happily snaps onto his backpack an R-rated key chain, featuring an artsy photo of a nude woman. Another agonizes over whether to choose a Styrogami, a miniature Styrofoam sculpture by J. Jules Vitali, or a Bar Code Tattoo by Omaha artist Scott Blake.

    A U of M freshman is interviewing Whittington for a research paper, while Phelps gingerly opens a ceramic ArtBar, a sort of anagram game. (If the pieces spell A-R-T-B-A-R you win one of the artist’s larger works.) “Darn it!” she says, when she doesn’t win.

    Whittington, standing off to the side, is documenting the night with his camera. He laughs when Gentry hands him a tiny eggplant stamped with the words “Gimmicky Bastard.” “Yeah,” he says. “That’s about right.”

  • Renaissance Man

    A tall man in his mid-forties with long wavy hair, a full beard, and round glasses, Richard Griffith has something of a troubadour’s air about him, which is appropriate given his status as a full-time lutenist. Since live lute music is no longer the draw it was five hundred years ago, Griffith has added a few extras to his act: poetry, prose, and prestidigitation. To the extent that the Upper Midwest has a market niche for a lute-playing illusionist, Richard Griffith owns that niche.

    On a crisp evening a few weeks ago, the musician/magician was at the Mad Hatter Tea House in St. Paul for one of his usual gigs. As he sat tuning his lute—a plump, bent-neck instrument that Griffith has heard described as “a broken guitar”—his wife Ann walked around arranging chairs. A grandmotherly soul named Fran Gray was pouring tea, and the dozen or so middle-aged patrons conversed amiably. “This is good tea.” “I like tea.” “Oh, I do too!” Shortly after seven o’clock, Griffith launched into one of the greatest hits of 1611. His audience sat in rapt silence; later, they ooohed appreciatively when he introduced a twelfth-century story about a werewolf.

    After several more lute pieces, Griffith asked, “Now, would you indulge me by letting me abuse your eyes and judgments?” A giggling volunteer chose a card from a deck he presented. The audience burst into applause when, after some theatrical maneuvers, Griffith produced a red cloth bearing the image of the card his volunteer had chosen. Then it was time for musical requests. “You know what I want to hear!” one fan exclaimed. “Yes, I do,” nodded Griffith as he played the first notes of “Kemp’s Jig.” Listeners’ desires aren’t always so transparent. “Beat My Wife” was a shouted request at one show. “Um,” Griffith ventured, “do you mean ‘Whip My Toady’?” The fan shrugged. “I knew whipping was in there somewhere.”

    Griffith’s skill in working a crowd dates to the early ’90s, when he worked at Treasure Island Casino as a sleight-of-hand artist—one who performed in a sequined pirate costume. “There’d be days when someone was losing big, and they’d come over and yell at the guy in the sequined suit,” he recalls. “Definitely not wanting a card trick at that time.” A guitarist since childhood, he acquired a lute on a whim in 2001, and within a few years was playing Renaissance fairs. Initially he didn’t get quite the reception he expected—he recalls that it was as if he were sitting there teaching algebra. “You would think playing Renaissance music at a Renaissance festival would be a no-brainer, but I have not found that to be so. A group out at the Fest last year was playing Jethro Tull covers, and I thought, OK, no room for the lute guy here.”

    Still, over time, Griffith has cultivated a base of devoted fans who appreciate both his proficiency on an obscure instrument and his willingness to indulge in just a little of the old razzle-dazzle. A year ago, he left his longtime desk job at an HMO to make a go of it as a full-time lutenist on the coffee-shop circuit, doing the occasional wedding gig on the side. His income from tips is sufficient to make the performances worth his while, and his wife is enthusiastically supportive. “It’s been good for him,” she says with an affectionate smile.

    Griffith’s most dedicated followers proudly refer to themselves as “the Usual Suspects.” There’s Steve Lelchuk, who sat with a book at the Mad Hatter performance, having attended another the night before. When Griffith mentioned his CDs for sale, Dan and Brandy Gergen joked that having one in every room of their house was sufficient. They discovered Griffith one day at the Olde World Renaissance Faire in Twig, Minnesota, where they were impressed enough to listen through several of his sets.

    Other Usual Suspects have done serious time in the mead-and-wenches milieu. Janet Davis, the ebullient card-trick volunteer, attends every single day of the Minnesota Renaissance Festival—in period costume. Indeed, a performance by Griffith is something of a mellow little Renaissance festival unto itself. He brought magic tricks into his act in part as a hook for crowds, but his ultimate goal is to complement the music with illusions incorporating mentalism, alchemy, and other supernatural preoccupations from the golden age of the lute.

    After Griffith closed with a sprightly dance number, several fans stayed to chat and rearrange the chairs. “Once you’ve been to a few shows,” explained Griffith as he packed up, “you’re one of the Usual Suspects and you’re going to get a hug when you leave.” With an instrument whose heyday is ye olde, Griffith appreciates his avid following. “Honestly, can the Rolling Stones say they’ve got that one guy who comes to see them play every time?” He paused. “Of course,” he acknowledged, “I don’t charge three hundred dollars for tickets.”