Category: Article

About ten years ago, intrigued by the rerelease of Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! and amused by Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, I decided to explore the rest of Russ Meyer’s oeuvre. I figured that such a project was best tackled with the same voluptuous spirit in which Meyer made his movies, so I walked up to the counter of my neighborhood video store in San Francisco with a handful of films I found in the cult bin: Cherry, Harry, and Racquel!, The Seven Minutes, and Lorna. The Seven Minutes is a mediocre, thrill-free thriller that Meyer coughed up for Twentieth Century Fox in 1971, so the clerk rented it to me for free. The videotape they had was a crummy transfer, he explained—and besides, it wasn’t really a Russ Meyer film.

In other words, it wasn’t a film about tits. Nevertheless, after Meyer died last fall (at eighty-two, of complications from pneumonia after a long, sad decline into dementia), many obituaries strained to position him as more than a soft-core icon. Time argued that he “set the tone for late twentieth century pop culture at its most cheerfully leering.” Chuck Stephens, in Film Comment, compared Meyer to Sam Fuller and hailed him as “an American independent before anyone had thought of the term.” These assessments followed years of claims by many cineasts—not least Meyer’s early booster and occasional collaborator, Roger Ebert—that colorful, bosomy, and often baffling films like Up! and Supervixens were, in fact, essays on female empowerment.

But in a new biography, Big Bosoms and Square Jaws: The Biography of Russ Meyer, King of the Sex Film, author Jimmy McDonough points out that the director himself wasn’t much for this kind of sophisticated thinking. “I don’t care to comment about what might be inside a lady’s head,” Meyer once said. “Hopefully, it’s my dick.”

Sam Fuller, like hell. Meyer was exuberantly sui generis, but his impact on popular culture is modest at best. Even McDonough, who’s clearly a fan, has a hard time arguing that Meyer belongs anywhere but the cult bin. In the fifties, before moving into film, Meyer became known as a talented cheesecake photographer (a genre he referred to as “tittyboom”) and shot several Playboy centerfolds in the magazine’s early years. His first successful film, 1959’s The Immoral Mr. Teas, took its cue from Hef and helped propel soft-core porn out of grindhouse theaters and stag parties. With two exceptions—Pussycat and Dolls—the remainder of Meyer’s career amounts to nothing more than a persistent big-breast obsession, which became more dreary and perverse as time went on. Meyer spent his later years laboring over A Clean Breast, his massive memoir and photo collection, driving staffers mad with endless fussing over photo selection and even type kerning. He initially planned to title the book The Rural Fellini, until Ebert wisely suggested a change. To the extent that Meyer worked hard to find archetypal man-killers—“Meyer women” like Uschi Digard and Haji, who often appeared jiggling in the desert—he’s an auteur. But a man who learned the basics of movie-making by filming Patton’s march through France during World War II never produced anything that remotely resembled an Amarcord.
To its credit, Big Bosoms doesn’t over-sell Meyer’s accomplishments; McDonough presents his subject mainly as a snickering, grudge-bearing, I-got-mine tough guy who eagerly snookered the movie business. Teas, an hour-long bit of motion-picture “tittyboom” that looks almost comically tame today, made a million dollars when it came out—more than forty times its production cost. Indeed, throughout his bio, McDonough practically implores readers to think of Meyer as a moneymaker first and filmmaker second (the book’s section breaks are dollar signs).

Luckily for McDonough, there’s a quirky, intriguing, and sometimes baffling persona beneath the profiteering lech. “[Meyer films] without dames means TV-movie tedium,” he concedes, so Big Bosom’s most intriguing passages have little to do with the movies themselves. Instead, they’re the ones discussing Meyer’s tendency to “inspire” his actresses by either browbeating or sleeping with them; the extended obscenity battle over his 1968 film Vixen! (Charles Keating, later a notorious player in the 1980s savings and loan scandal, successfully prosecuted the case); and the ignominious meltdown that occurred around Who Killed Bambi? (aka The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle), the Sex Pistols film that Meyer was initially tapped to direct. Meyer and Pistols front man Johnny Rotten took an almost immediate dislike to each other—Rotten later called Meyer a “dirty old man” and “an overbearing, senile old git”—and Fox pulled out of the production after Grace Kelly, a stockholder, protested the choice of Meyer as director.

However, McDonough does champion Meyer artistically, as it were, by defending the likes of Mondo Topless and Common-Law Cabin, and here he’s on shakier ground. “When aliens excavate the ruins of planet Earth in 2525, would you rather they found a copy of some anemic, technically inept, politically-correct-to-the-point-of-boredom John Sayles film?” he writes. “They’d learn a lot more about us watching a top-heavy Lorna Maitland pulling a burro up a hill!” As if that scene from Mondo Topless shows anything more than Maitland’s remarkably cantilevered figure—and as if what the coal-mining-town tragedy depicted in Matewan really needed was more cleavage.

So why did Meyer eventually get the Sayles-like auteur treatment? And why are Meyer’s films still worth a glimpse? The answer is reflected in a comment from longtime Meyer booster John Waters: “He made industrials about tits.” Meyer’s plots are ridiculous, but the opening sequences of many of his films are skillfully constructed and sometimes utterly sublime. No matter what nonsense the ponderous voiceovers were spewing, his shots of breasts, cityscapes, cars, bars, whatever, all packed together, were brilliant, impressionistic visions of the sixties and seventies zeitgeist. It’s as if Meyer learned editing by speed-reading Eisenstein and a stack of Playboys, and McDonough captures the aesthetic perfectly: “Ass shaking! Cut! Chrome fender! Cut! Breasts quivering! Cut! Car radio! Cut! Tape recorder! Cut!”

After those sequences, though, Meyer’s films tend to run out of gas—your ability to enjoy them is mainly a function of your ability to appreciate the figures of Digard, Erica Gavin, or Kitten Natividad. It may be that what critics called “female empowerment” in Meyer’s films was really just their female stars’ unique capacity to render men immobile, both agape and agog. These women are not empowered, just overpowering. Pussycat stands out from the dross because it was with that film that Meyer developed his editing style; it also had a remarkably full-blooded and indomitable character in Tura Satana’s Varla. Brash, no-nonsense, and threatening, she’s the very definition of a man-killer: “She’s a murderous, evil villain, all right,” McDonough writes, “but you want to get into her pants.” (Interestingly, Meyer, despite some effort, couldn’t.)

What distinguished Dolls was a budget from Twentieth Century Fox, some semblance of plot, and Meyer’s ability to integrate his jump-cutting throughout the film. His editing underscored the comedy of this tale of the rise and fall of a stoner-girl rock band. The sex scene in a Bentley is more about the Bentley than the sex; and shortly after the youthful Edy Williams coos to a stud, “I’d like to strap you on sometime,” we cut to an elderly woman in ghastly makeup saying the same thing. Dolls may be the only time Meyer seemed willing to acknowledge the inherent ridiculousness in his career-long enterprise.

Because he seemed to be so willfully benighted about his obsession, it’s hard to make a case for Meyer as an enduring artist. Sexuality is an auteurist theme; tits aren’t. Discussing his 1963 film Lorna, he bristles at any suggestion of influence or aesthetics: “Did I shoot in black and white for the purpose of grittiness and to emulate the Italian masters? Horseshit! I didn’t have the money to do it in color.” If Meyer had something to say about sexuality, it’s hard to figure out what it might be. Lorna exploits a no-means-yes theme, Vixen advocates incest in a sidewise manner, and the opening of Up! is a button-pushing mess of S&M and Nazi themes. For Meyer, there was no continuity problem or philosophical bind that a shot of quivering cleavage couldn’t fix.

A defining style, it turns out, is not the same thing as enduring influence. It’s telling that Meyer’s clearest legacy isn’t in movies but in rock music: Poison Ivy, guitarist for the psychobilly band the Cramps, cribbed much of her brassy persona from Varla, and at least two bands take their name from Meyer films: the influential grunge act Mudhoney and the mediocre hair-metal group Faster Pussycat. And film? Well, nobody makes industrials about tits anymore. The classier “erotic” mainstream movies from the past few years—Swimming Pool, Y tu mama tambien, Romance, etc.—take their inspiration from randy stylists like soft-core pioneer Radley Metzger or gauzy erotica like Last Tango in Paris. And the rest? Well, earlier this year, actor-turned-director Elizabeth Starr resurrected the career of Kitten Natividad for a remake of Pussycat that was billed as “a titanic tribute to the late great Russ Meyer.” It’s a straight-to-video hardcore porno, costarring Ron Jeremy, titled Faster Pussycat F—well, you get the idea.

An old friend of mine, Rich, is gay but he was married to a woman for ten years. His was not the typical scenario, in which a closeted gay man discovers a decade too late that he prefers men. No, this was one of those marriages of convenience. Rich had had boyfriends since he was a teenager. He met Laura when we are all in college, and they became best friends. She was straight, she knew he was gay, and they made a handsome, platonic couple. They had an “open” marriage that allowed them to be physically involved with other people. (Talk about threatening the sanctity of heterosexual marriage!)

I caught up with Rich recently, because I wanted to know what he thought about a new study that shows that fruit flies have a single gene that determines whether they are homosexual or heterosexual. (Do you find it as weird as I do to think about fruit flies hooking up?) Scientists found that by tweaking this gene, they could make male flies totally get into whatever the fruit-fly equivalent of Judy Garland and leather chaps is. Also, they could make the females wear little mullets and drive motorcycles.

“They’ve done studies like that many times,” Rich told me. “Why do you think they call us ‘fruits’?” He laughed and pointed out that this latest one is interesting only because it seems like the most thorough, irrefutable one to date.
Rich said it is certainly satisfying for the gay community to be able to say that homosexuality is not a “lifestyle decision,” nor is it a perversion of the natural order of things, a deviation from doing things “the way God intended.” He and his gay friends have been hearing that kind of nonsense for so long, from so many horribly backward people, that they find it comforting to have a little backup from science.
I couldn’t help pointing out, however, that a little science never did anything to derail the fervent beliefs of the most willfully ignorant people—the sort who argue that being female or African-American is genetically determined and “normal,” but that it doesn’t mean God wants women or blacks to run for president. Still, confirming the existence of a “gay gene” may put to rest the most virulent forms of homophobia—the sort where people consider it a “disease” that can be “cured” through prayer and psychotherapy.

Of course, anytime you mix science and sex, trouble comes up. Another very interesting recent study, about women and orgasm, may have some troubling implications. It showed there may be a “genetic influence” on whether a woman can achieve orgasm. “Now you’re out of my depth!” said Rich when I brought up this one. But I thought his perspective might be interesting. How would he feel if he were one of these “genetically influenced” women? Rich said, “On the one hand, it may be reassuring to know that this problem could be based in genetics. I suppose that could take the heat off, and relieve some of the guilt or shame that comes with not being able to get off.” The authors of this study were very quick to say that the genetic influence on orgasm is just that—an influence that can be, uh, manipulated, given enough time and patience and practice.

I asked my precious wife what she thought. She is not what I’d call a person who loudly announces the arrival of her orgasms, but generally she does not have any problem getting there. She had an interesting take. “Consider what the biological imperative might be for a sort of gray-area orgasm in women,” she said. (So smart and sexy!) “If women had the same super-obvious, concrete orgasms that men have, would humans have survived the caveman period?” I guess she meant that men have orgasms that are consistent with the Darwinian drive to “spread the seed” around as much as possible—to maximize the possibility for the greatest number of conceptions in the tribe, assuming that polyamory is our natural state.

If females did the same thing, hanging out at the cave-bar looking to hook up with as many cave-partners as possible, there’d be no cave-women at home to take care of the little cave-children. Still, I’m skeptical about this sort of natural-selection determinism. I think it might be more personal than that. What if desire itself has evolved in self-preserving ways? If a woman’s orgasms are much more variable in quality and degree, it may serve as a form of insurance—her man, to stoke his ego, will keep coming back and trying for a higher score. Call it the pinball theory. I like it, and I’m sticking to it.

A few weeks ago, Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty set tongues wagging
when he vetoed a bill that would have created a state poet laureate.
The position would have required no public funding, but would have
acknowledged a longstanding tradition that is observed by thirty-three
other states and the federal government. In a world of civil compromise
and checks and balances, titles matter. Even when they are strictly
ceremonial, they reflect the public’s values and its will. By the time
they land under the governor’s pen, they are not frivolous. Thus many
people saw the guber’s gesture as a blatant middle finger directed at
poetry specifically, the arts in general, and even at the state
Legislature at large, which had voted overwhelmingly for passage.

Displaying an alarming aptitude for both arrogance and ignorance in one
deft move, the governor seemed to say he has no interest in the arts,
and that he considers interpretive dance and pottery to be good punch
lines. Of course, Mr. Pawlenty has received the ridicule he deserves.
Who would defend such pointless boorishness? But it is worth
considering how the normally nimble, boyish politician developed this
blind spot. It was an involuntary expression of the contempt certain
people have for anything that isn’t written on a spreadsheet.

To a person like that, poetry is frivolous mainly because no one gets
rich writing it, reading it, or selling it. Compared to doing real work
like, say, consulting with telecommunications companies and
test-driving ATVs, poetry is sloth at best, elitist narcissism at
worst. Regular, honest people like James Lileks have no truck with
poetry. If God thought poetry a virtuous human activity, he would have
proven it by making poets rich and Republican. Also, Psalms would have
been written in iambic pentameter.

True, it would be unfair to impugn the governor’s party. Republican
Barb Sykora of Excelsior was one of the poet laureate’s key sponsors,
and red-blooded Republicans in both houses voted with their effete
Democratic rivals. In fact, this bill provided a rare moment of
agreement in an otherwise contentious legislative session. Until it
reached the governor, the whole episode was the mirror image of last
year, when inexperienced lawmakers deliberately introduced contentious
sallies into reverse-engineering on social issues—through stunts like
reintroducing the death penalty and constitutionally banning gay
marriage, issues that have no value other than their power to divide.
On the contrary, the bill to institute a poet laureate not only brought
everyone to the table, but gave a symbolic nod to the highest
expressions of civilization. It was a noble, positive gesture met by a
graceless, negative one.

There was something perversely exciting about Mr. Pawlenty’s
imperiousness—that Minnesota will have no state poet laureate merely
because Mr. Pawlenty does not see any merit in poetry. In these times,
values are always confused with value. Every public conversation is
dominated by a paradigm of “return on investment” and “relief” from the
burdens of public expenditure. But even these have become disingenuous
arguments, because there is no longer any true impulse of conservation
among state and national leaders who gaily pass the costs of civil
society down to cities and counties, and from there on down to our
grandchildren. By these arguments, the arts have always been a favorite
bogeyman of the accountant and the utilitarian. The romantic myth of
the starving, parasitic artist has numerous beneficiaries, but it is a
myth that needs permanent debunking.

A person who lives and works in the Twin Cities cannot fail to see the
value of the arts in our community. Despite the rumor, it is a resource
that can be measured at the cash register. St. Paul receives six
hundred million dollars each year from patrons of the arts. In
Minneapolis, more than 110 arts organizations draw nearly five million
visitors and audience members each year. The arts have created nearly
ten thousand full-time jobs in the City of Lakes. They generate eight
million dollars annually for the city’s coffers, and nineteen million dollars
in state revenues. So when our leaders say they cannot afford to invest
in the arts, they have the rhetoric exactly backward. The arts can no
longer afford to invest in them.

The blond woman grabbed the shiny brass pole and, with a single
athletic move, flipped her body upside down, her legs splayed—toes
pointed, mind you—on either side of the pole. As she slowly slid down,
she stared at her audience with confidence. Christina Aguilera’s
“Dirrty” blared from the sound system. Heading down to the hardwood
floor, the instructor talked over the music. “All it takes to do moves
like this is practice and being comfortable with the pole.”

Nicole Zivalach teaches “Pole Basics” at a new studio and gym for women
called Stripped. Bedecked with red velvet curtains, the studio is
situated on the delivery side of a Plymouth strip mall, behind Domino’s
Pizza, Hairtopia, and It’s a Pet’s Place.

According to experts who keep track of these sorts of things, pole
dancing is a popular new fitness trend for women, both in this country
and in Britain. In Plymouth, at least, the classes are outwardly
chaste—think chakras instead of skank. The dance style is supposed to
be “exotic” and “sensual” rather than sexual, and is aimed at women
“from 18-98,” according to Stripped’s brochure. Elsewhere, Bally’s
Total Fitness is offering “Cardio Striptease” and the Learning Annex
has a class on “The Art of Exotic Dancing.”

Back at Stripped, Zivalach righted herself and explained that this
brand of dance is “a way to get fit and enjoy our bodies.” It does not
involve getting naked. Sensual dance is “not to share with strangers,”
she said, “because that squashes our soul.” She is adamantly opposed to
women stripping for money, and there is absolutely no male ogling of
her students as they attempt to get sensual. Men are barred from
classes; however, Zivalach smiled as she whispered that students don’t
seem to mind the opposite sex shopping in the “Goddess Lounge”
boutique. It’s a good thing to have “a little male energy swirling
around occasionally,” she said. The rest of the studio is a comfy,
supportive women’s-only enclave. With stripper poles.

A chime tinkled when I opened the glass door to the Goddess Lounge for
my first “Pole Basics” session. Nine women stood around the room, their
arms stretched out, fingers nearly touching. “It’s okay if you touch;
it’s all about connection!” Zivalach said. Next, it was all about hip
circles. The class pushed its collective pelvis front, right, back,
then left, following the movement of Zivalach’s slim hips, which were
wrapped in tight black shorts that said “Stripped” across the butt. She
told students to pretend they were spatulas scraping a mixing bowl. As
they scraped, Aguilera sang, “You are beautiful, no matter what they
say … .” Then they were snakes, slithering and undulating from down low
to up high. They were almost ready for the pole.

The students started with a hip-swinging walk, and by the end each was
grabbing at her pole and swirling to the ground. Here, it was all about
the chest, butt, or hips: “One of these leads every move,” said
Zivalach. Walking around to check on each student, she was met with
looks of intense concentration. “Come on!” she remonstrated. “You’re
sexy kittens!” But learning to be free is hard work, and it did seem
strange to be dry-humping a brass pole in a well-lit studio and
receiving encouragements like, “Wow, you’re a natural at ‘the
waterfall.’”

Zivalach said, “What we’re suggesting to women is that they can reclaim
their sensuality and their feminine spirit in American sensual dance,
and they can bring it back out and dance in their homes and dance in
the streets just like they do in other cultures.” Plymouth may not be
ready for pole dancing in the streets. Yet.

After class, I became curious about how the pros do it. During a
relatively off-peak weeknight happy hour, I visited a local strip
joint, whose stage was outfitted with a red velvet curtain and two
poles. A handful of men sat around the bar, played pool, and generally
stared at the performers; their male energy was not just swirling
around the place, it was stifling. One performer ventured nowhere near
either pole, but instead squirmed on the floor, almost face to face
with patrons seated around the bar. “Super Freak” blared from every
speaker. Her name was Paige, she told me after her performance.

Paige is a single mom, a student, and a saleswoman at an upscale
clothing store. She spoke in a caffeinated, rapid-fire manner, and
everything she said ended with, “Okay, what next?” She was adamant that
stripping is not her profession. She does it for quick cash. “Men will
pay a hundred bucks for a lap dance,” she said. She wrinkled her nose
in disgust when she was asked about the pole. “I used to use it, but
never again, not after I realized how dirty they are.” (Let’s just say
that the typical stripper pole is less hygienic than your average bus
seat or subway strap.) Paige did confirm that the secret to success is
“confidence,” but suggested that this is often achieved by way of a
stiff drink or two, rather than an awareness of one’s inner sensuality.

Paige’s successor on stage did work the pole eventually, using some of
the moves that Nicole taught. But after about thirty seconds, she was
back on the floor. I took another chug from my beer and felt like I was
a million miles from Stripped’s Goddess Lounge. Even though I wasn’t
sharing my sensuality with strangers for cash, Nicole’s words echoed in
my head and clashed with the garish eighties rock. My soul did feel a
little squashed.—Kelli Ohrtman

The other day, customers entering the Office Max in St. Paul’s Midway
were greeted by bold signs bearing an urgent message: “Avoid Identity
Theft. Protect Personal Information.” Next to them were sprawling
displays of home paper shredders, all bearing names intended to invoke
fear, awe, and consumerism: The Sentinel. The PowerShred. The Paper
Monster.

Lynne, a short, bespectacled Office Max employee, shuffled by and
offered packets of coupons to customers. Mail-in rebates on shredders
were among the deals. Sales were brisk last month, she said. And for
good reason: A section of the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act
that went into effect June 1 requires all employers to shred the
redundant personal information of all employees. This law isn’t just
for haughty CEOs, however, or even neighborhood record stores—it’s for
you, if you hire anyone for any purpose, like a babysitter, lawnmower,
or housecleaner.

Lynne doesn’t own a shredder. She tosses bills and credit-card receipts
in the trash, without even tearing them up. She’s not losing sleep over
it, either. But others are, and shredding companies, concerned
businesses, and advertisers have capitalized on this. Consider
Citibank’s ad blitz that features victims speaking with voices of
identity thieves, describing the merriment of truly risk-free spending.
Couple the new law with these rising fears, and you find a booming $350
million shredding industry prospering both in offices and at home,
where the paper trail, despite the wonders of online billing and
communication, continues to grow.

No technology seems able to render paper obsolete. There’s been a ten
percent increase in the volume of workplace paper during the last
decade, in defiance of “experts” who expected its use to drop
dramatically with the rise of networked computers. Ironically, email is
the main culprit. The irrational impulse to send much of your inbox to
the printer has been the biggest boon to the pulping industry. As a
result, the average cubicle farmer uses ten thousand sheets of copy
paper each year. Print. Read. Repeat.

All those reams generally end up in two places, trash or recycling,
which creates security headaches for business espionage experts (yes,
people have this job). Similar headaches exist for individuals, with
dumpster diving celebrating several years of legalization. Thus
shredding, once limited to the paranoid, the neurotic, the
ultra-responsible, and the occasional chief executive scoundrel, is
becoming wildly popular.

Now that the shredder is destined to acquire a domestic status
somewhere between the refrigerator and the waffle iron, drab just won’t
do, and on the consumer level, there are hip home alternatives. Michael
Graves has designed a lustrous, smiling basket that is sold at Target,
and there are handheld personal shredders for on-the-fly jobs. But even
the most expensive consumer-level shredder can handle only a dozen
sheets at once, and this causes difficulties, since paper must be fed
manually, with all paper clips removed.

For the really epic, corporate scandal-level jobs, there are the
professional shredders. Shred-N-Go, a company in Plymouth, owns
specialized mobile shredding units—trucks—that can demolish three
hundred pounds of paper in less than four minutes. That’s about two and
a half tons of confetti in an hour.

There are several other local companies with equally fanciful names
(could you think of a better one?), including Document Destruction in
Lakeville and Minnesota Shredding in Edina. As they are happy to point
out, their services are inexpensive, considering the estimated cost of
identity theft for a typical individual is around fifteen hundred
dollars. Plus, according to Document Destruction’s testimonials, the
“professional, yet fun” employees leave everyone “totally pleased.”

The law is clearly on the side of the shredders. A few weeks ago, the
U.S. Supreme Court overturned the conviction of Enron’s accounting
firm, Arthur Andersen, whose shredding spree was thought to be an
obstruction of justice. It turns out that it’s completely lawful for
higher-ups to instruct employees to regularly shred or otherwise
destroy incriminating documents. This holds perhaps the most important
lesson for novice shredding enthusiasts. If you’re shredding documents
because you know they could be deleterious to you, then just lie—and
make sure you’re shredding something valuable every day.—Brian Voerding

With its low ceilings, faint sawdust smell, wood paneling, and seventies-era earth tones, Jim Fiorentino’s front office is what you’d expect of an old garage door company. Going into the larger warehouse, however, is like entering some kind of a fairytale world. It’s not just the massive, hundred-year-old Belgian band organ, decked out with painted roses and latticework—the walls of this palatially proportioned room are covered with wooden clocks, carvings, and phonographs.

“I’ve never really let on that it’s kind of a museum in here,” said Fiorentino, who closed his Minneapolis garage-door business fifteen years ago. While the surrounding Warehouse District was going condo-crazy, Fiorentino was remodeling his old workplace into a showcase for his hobbies. He walked among rows of display cases filled with World War I-era bayonets; nearby, shelves swayed under the weight of woodcarvings from Polynesia, China, Thailand, and other myriad corners of the globe. Pointing to the top of a bookcase, he noted several renderings of horses done by his father with a pocketknife.

Clocks, however, are a particular passion of Fiorentino’s. By way of instruction, he held up a photograph of a carved French clock, comparing its “shoddy workmanship” to the sharper edges carved by more detail-oriented Germans. “Sloppy!” he said, shaking his head at the photo. A motley collection on the warehouse’s longest wall—some 140 feet—includes ornately carved “gingerbread” clocks that adorned American kitchens a hundred years ago, and a single, amazing nineteenth-century Japanese model that vaguely resembles a cuckoo and keeps time using the sun.

An awe-inspiring assortment of cuckoos, many of which Fiorentino restored himself, dates back to 1840. The most prized ones hang in a small corridor off the main room. “These are all cuckoo and quails,” Fiorentino said, maneuvering the hands of one clock to show how it would produce the wail of a quail every fifteen minutes, and a cuckoo on the hour. Another string of cuckoos, made in Germany during the late 1800s, features images of strung-up pheasant and chamois carcasses. “I get people in here saying ‘I don’t like the dead animals on that clock!’” Fiorentino said, a bit peevishly. “But the folks who made it were hunters. That’s how they survived. This is what they knew.”

He brightened up after turning toward a festive clock, one of the largest in the place. “This here is my lady friend’s favorite,” he said, running his fingers across its leafy ornamentation and pointing out a sprightly, avian version of a nativity scene. “She likes the birdies in the nest there.”

Returning to his front office, Fiorentino admitted that “some of my friends call me cuckoo Jim.” But when it came to explaining why he’d bothered to amass such a collection, he struggled. “I just … how should I say it … I like cuckoo clocks!”—Christy DeSmith

Early on the afternoon of the Northern League exhibition season opener, Midway Stadium is bustling with activity. The Rolling Stones are blasting from the public address speakers, and players are already stretching and running in the outfield grass. Underneath the grandstand, in the cramped bunker that serves as the offices of the St. Paul Saints, the phone is ringing off the hook and the atmosphere is one of jovial chaos. The Saints command center is decidedly short on the streamlined ambience and formal atmosphere of most offices. It looks, in fact, like it could be the reception area of a thriving small-town automotive garage.

Mike Veeck has commandeered someone else’s spartan office, and is looking uncomfortable perched behind a desk. The ringmaster most often associated with the unlikely and phenomenal success of the Saints, he’s clearly a guy who likes to be in motion. Even sitting down, he never quite manages to sit still. Veeck’s a fidget, with the wild eyes of a man who has a lot going on in his head. In fact, he is ridiculously busy these days. He’s promoting his new book—Fun is Good: How to Create Joy and Passion in Your Workplace and Career (Rodale Press)—and has a full slate of speaking engagements. And then there are the six minor league baseball teams he operates and owns (along with such high-profile partners as Bill Murray and Jimmy Buffett).

Right now, Veeck is in the middle of writing a giant pile of thank-you notes, by hand, to every Saints season-ticket holder, and conversing with a visitor, while people keep wandering in and out of the tiny space—some simply to say hello and others to check on some detail related to the upcoming season. One guy comes in to look for a VCR that has apparently vanished. A question blurts from the office’s intercom: “Who recorded the song ‘Bus Stop’?” Veeck pauses mid-sentence to answer (the Hollies), then picks up the conversation right where he left off.

Thirteen years ago, Veeck moved to St. Paul to help launch the Saints in the fledgling Northern League, a confederation of professional teams that intended to operate outside the umbrella of Major League Baseball. At the time he was in a gambling frame of mind (actually, he’s always in a gambling frame of mind). He had recently given up an advertising career to help resurrect a floundering minor league franchise in Florida. That stint with the Miami Miracle followed more than a decade in exile from professional baseball, after he was essentially blackballed following his role—okay, it was his idea—in the now-legendary Disco Demolition promotion at Comiskey Park in 1979. That stunt, which involved blowing up thousands of disco records between games of a White Sox doubleheader, resulted in damage to the field, a near riot, and Chicago’s forfeiture of the nightcap. Collateral damage notwithstanding, the episode was a classic Veeck production. The games were sold out, and it was estimated that tens of thousands of fans were turned away.

Veeck, of course, has a first-class baseball pedigree. His grandfather was a Chicago sportswriter who became president of the Cubs back in 1917. He was the man who had the idea to grow ivy on the walls of Wrigley Field. Bill Veeck, Mike’s dad, was one of the most colorful and innovative entrepreneurs in baseball history, and is in the Hall of Fame. At various times in his life, he owned and operated major league franchises in Cleveland, St. Louis, and Chicago, where he pioneered all manner of ballpark promotions and amenities. Most famous for once sending three-foot-seven, sixty-five-pound Eddie Gaedel to the plate for an at-bat with the Browns (he walked on four pitches), Bill Veeck also introduced the exploding scoreboard at Comiskey Park and was the first owner to put player names on the backs of jerseys. He loved mingling (and drinking) with the fans, never had an unlisted number, answered his own phone, and had a wooden leg with a built-in ashtray. Mike Veeck is an apple that didn’t fall far from the tree (he wrote Fun is Good while recuperating from a broken leg sustained, he said, while “playing basketball on my bike”), but he was a late bloomer. When he accepted investor Marv Goldklang’s offer to run the Saints, he was moving into his forties and had a wife and two kids (including a son named Night Train). He was strapped, and maybe more than a little desperate.

“I bet every nickel I had on this thing, and I was scared to death,” Veeck said. “Everybody thought we were nuts.”

Veeck’s original marketing plan for the Saints consisted of exactly three words: “Fun is good.” Everything else followed. “We wanted to run a ball club with people who didn’t have preconceived notions about how things work,” he said. “We wanted to foster an environment where people loved to come to work, and where they were appreciated for what they did. And we were going to put all of our energy and attention into creating an atmosphere that ensured that when fans came out to the ballpark, they had a good time and went home happy. Is that simplistic? You bet. But I don’t think you’ll find that attitude in a lot of companies.”

That simple philosophy—and a constant string of unpredictable and sometimes insane promotions—have turned Veeck’s and the Goldklang Group’s initial investment into a collection of minor league teams with an estimated combined value of thirty million dollars.

Veeck’s book argues that humor can be an asset in any company. “You can’t force or fake this stuff,” he said. “And I know that corporate America has never been tremendously receptive to this sort of philosophy. They do, though, always have an interest in anything that works. It’s a competitive world, and now more than ever there’s a direct correlation between the attention people receive and their satisfaction with an experience. That’s as true of employees as it is of customers. A lot of people, from the top on down, are starting to realize there are going to have to be some changes.” —Brad Zellar