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One might think that the Pink Floyd Laser Spectacular would be a disorienting experience for someone with eighteen years of sobriety under his belt and only the haziest recollections of unnumbered adolescent evenings spent hunched over a power-hitter and listening to Dark Side of the Moon on the eight-track player of a 1972 Cougar.

That was our assumption the other day as we prepared to attend Laser Floyd at the State Theatre. We’ll admit to certain hardwired preconceptions regarding Pink Floyd and Pink Floyd fans, and we’ve also heard a few things about lasers. Given this admittedly sketchy background, we had reason to fear some at least mild psychological disturbance, if not outright flashbacks and seizures.

Precisely to bolster us against such fears, we felt it prudent to choose an appropriately seasoned chaperone to accompany us, someone whose own drug experiences and knowledge of the Pink Floyd catalog was a bit more up to date, shall we say. We’re not ashamed to acknowledge that our personal phone directory is full of candidates whose credentials on both these counts are impeccable, but the clear front-runner to play Virgil to our Dante for the Laser Spectacular was our old friend and occasional bookkeeper, Dutch Gaines.

We were unsurprised by Dutch’s enthusiasm for our proposition, even as we were nonetheless unprepared for the advanced state of torpor in which we found him—enshrouded in smoke and listening to Jim Reeves’s version of “Gentle on My Mind”—when we arrived at his basement apartment.
This alarming spectacle made it abundantly clear that we would be chaperoning Dutch to the Laser Spectacular, rather than the other way around. So obviously indisposed was Dutch that when we eventually managed to steer him into the lobby of the theater and immediately encountered a booth for the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, the do-ragged caretaker of the booth took one look in our direction and bawled, “Lots of weed smokers here tonight!”

For those who might be unfamiliar with the Pink Floyd Laser Spectacular, it is, according to its website, the “longest touring theater show in history!” The phenomenon has spawned a host of imitators (e.g. Laser Nirvana, Laser Zeppelin) in its eighteen years on the road, but, we are assured, it remains the undisputed king of all laser shows. Judging by the steady emission of satisfied chortles and dissonant bleats we noted from our companion, we feel it’s safe to say that Dutch would soundly endorse this contention.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. A few words of advice: When you have a chance to check out the P.F.L.S. in the future, fork over the two bucks for the 3D glasses. Thus goggled, we discovered that even the theater’s exit lights were positively lysergic, and the uniform weirdness of the things only added to the goofy esprit de corps.

The show itself really is quite a lot to process, and frankly we had a hard time fathoming how anyone with smoldering brain cells and crackling synapses could handle the multi-tiered assault. Dutch was so fully engaged in the experience that he was of little help with the set list. Near as we could tell, however, the evening’s first half featured the entirety of Dark Side of the Moon, blasted at maximum volume (never mind the decibels, this was ten thousand watts), while the battery of lasers cut through clouds of smoke, and strange imagery was projected onto three huge screens on the stage. There was a good deal of footage from The Wizard of Oz, and as we were unfamiliar with the theories regarding the alleged synchronicity of Dark Side with that film, we’ll admit to finding these juxtapositions at times somewhat confusing and unsettling. The computer-generated imagery resembled everything from colorful Spirograph doodles to Spin Art, and there were plenty of moody interludes that featured various flying things (including a bloated, sexless baby) and religious iconography transposed over what appeared to be vats of bubbling pudding; tornadic bursts of blood; protoplasm sloshing around in a skull; and video footage of a colonoscopy. An androgynous moon-man with perfectly shaped buttocks and a bottle of whiskey did an interpretive dance, rode on a merry-go-round, and played a trumpet. Things sometimes got vaguely erotic; we were frequently dazzled.

The audience seemed comfortably numb but did manage the occasional collective gasp or burst of applause, often at oddly inexplicable moments. As for Dutch, he didn’t end up being of much use other than as a spectacle of slack appreciation. His commentary on the evening consisted of exactly two full utterances, one for each set of the show. The first, during an early segment from Dark Side, was, “This is like a really incredible screen saver.” The second came as “Learning to Fly” pulsed through the speakers—or perhaps it was “Run Like Hell.”

“Pink Floyd,” Dutch leaned over and observed helpfully, “is all about containment and freedom.”—Brad Zellar

These past harrowing weeks, we’ve heard a lot about the “Culture of Life.” Perhaps it would be edifying to take a closer look at the Machinery of Death. Sometime in the coming weeks, we may hear more about reinstating the death penalty here in Minnesota, a favorite subject with some of our legislators. Regardless of how we proceed, the one thousandth person condemned to death since the reinstatement of capital punishment in the U.S. will die soon too, most likely down in Texas.

He will walk from a holding cell to a starkly lit, barren execution chamber. There, a team of guards and technicians will operate his state’s machinery of human destruction. It will be carefully designed to bring about the quick and efficient death of the convict.

Like most of the previous 999 executions, this one won’t have much in the way of uncertainty or technical novelty. It will be private, clinical, and, as far as we know, pain-free. For that small favor, Condemned Man Number One Thousand can thank an obscure New York bureaucrat named Elbridge Gerry.

In the late nineteenth century, after a number of botched executions by hanging that resulted in slow strangulation or decapitation, the State of New York began searching for a more humane method of capital punishment. The governor appointed a committee of experts to evaluate alternatives to hanging for convicted and condemned capital murderers. This committee became known as the “Gerry Commission,” after its chairman, Elbridge Gerry.

Under Chairman Gerry’s watch, thirty-one deadly ideas were developed and described in the Commission’s March 1888 report to the governor.

In all likelihood, the Gerry Report is the most bizarre and grotesque document ever produced by a committee of government bureaucrats. For weeks, plucky public servants brainstormed, researched, and categorized all the ways of killing people they could think of. Many ideas were apparently dredged up from the most ghoulish recesses of a bureaucrat’s sadistic soul. Then they comprehensively, deliberately, and dispassionately examined the merits of each in alphabetical order.

Some of the more unusual suggestions included:

Beating to death with clubs;

Beheading;

Blowing from a cannon. (The commission became interested in this method of execution based on reports of its use in the East Indian army in the nineteenth century. Its report notes two ways for carrying out this sentence. First, “the insurgent is lashed to the cannon’s mouth. Within two seconds of pulling the trigger, he is blown to ten thousand atoms.” Alternatively, “the living body of the offender is thrust into the cannon, forming, as one might say, part of the charge.”);

Boiling (“usually in hot water but sometimes in melted sulfur, lead, or the like”);

Burying alive;

Crucifixion;

Dichotomy (cutting a person in half);

Dismemberment (like dichotomy but messier);
Drowning;

Exposure to wild beasts. (In due diligence, the commission briefly considered the method of execution served on female criminals in Tonquin, present-day Vietnam. The commission noted that the condemned were “tied to a stake and in that situation delivered to an elephant who seizes them with his trunk, throws them into the air, catches them on his tusks, and finishes them off by trampling.”);

Lapidation (stoning);

Peine forte et dure (placing heavy weights to stop breathing);

Pounding in a mortar. (In Proverbs 27:22, the Bible reads, “Though thou shouldest bray a fool in a mortar among wheat with a pestle, yet will not his foolishness depart from him.” This passage prompted a religious Gerry commission member to consider “pounding in mortar” as a possible method of serving the death sentence. Presumably, this procedure would involve the condemned being placed in a large mortar or similar vessel and then pounded with an enormous pestle, rather the way mint is prepared for a mint julep.);

Precipitation (throwing from a cliff);

Garroting;

Running the gantlet;

Stabbing;

Strangling.

With a little imagination, one can envision the tenor of the debates swirling around the conference table of the Gerry Commission. On one side of the table might have been the dismemberment and elephant-stomping advocates, sniping derisively at the beheading and garrote crowd about their relative daintiness, while the “blowing from a cannon” promoters crowed about the sure-fire nature of their choice, as well as the state’s ability to raise funds by charging admission.
While some of these methods (e.g. boiling, crucifixion, and throwing from a cliff) may have possessed an impressive deterrent effect, few of them fit the commission’s stated objectives of speediness, humaneness, and efficiency in execution.

Brainstorming session over, the work of winnowing out the cruel, the unworkable, and the just-plain-weird ideas began. In the end, no ideas remained—all were considered either too cruel or weird.

“Your Commission have examined with care the accounts which exist of the various curious modes of capital punishment … that have been used. The result (is that none of these) can be considered as embodying suggestions of improvement over that now in use in this State.” The felons on New York’s death row may (or may not) have sighed in relief, knowing that the whole mortar and pestle thing was off the table.

One hundred and sixteen years later, Condemned Man Number 1000 will lie on the gurney as orderlies attach long tubes to the needle inserted in his arm. When the lethal drip starts, he may take a bit of comfort in knowing it could have been worse.—William Gurstelle

Here in the city, one of the more delightful rites of spring is the University of Minnesota’s annual release of injured birds that have, over the winter, recuperated at the Raptor Center. This gala happens May 21 at Battle Creek Regional Park—just in time for the great raptor migration back north.

Serious raptor enthusiasts all over the world know about Hawk Ridge up in Duluth. They are especially familiar with the fall count in September, when tens of thousands of hawks, eagles, and falcons funnel through Duluth before heading south. They also know about the spring count, although it is less dramatic because of shifting, more disparate southwesterly winds. Just the same, up to four thousand broad-winged hawks will make their way back north through Duluth each day this month, along with red-tailed and rough-legged hawks, eagles, peregrines, and any other raptor you’d care to name.

Naturally, the biannual migration attracts lots of scientists. Last fall, I met up with one of them. His name is Frank Taylor, and he is a master bird bander from White Bear Lake. For three decades, Taylor has maintained a huge bird blind in a vacant field between Duluth and Two Harbors. The day I visited the nine-foot-by-four-foot, camouflaged blind, the atmosphere was tense and hushed, as a female harrier hawk checked out the lure behind an invisible net.
“She’s looking, she’s looking—aw, she’s turning toward the road,” Taylor said quietly, a note of disappointment in his voice. The six other occupants of the blind, including Channel 11’s “Bird Lady,” Sharon Stiteler, shifted their cramped positions and resumed their scan of the sky. The blind is an unassuming shed built more for science than for comfort. It has a pitched roof to shed snow, and its fence-post skeleton is weathered gray, blending nicely into the woods behind it. A three-inch gap in the boards at eye level allows a panoramic view of the north to northeast skyline; and overturned milk crates accommodate the bottoms of as many visitors as will fit inside.

Thanks to a federal bird-banding permit, which he has had for thirty-three years, Taylor captures birds of prey during the yearly migration and provides statistics for the Bird Banding Laboratory of the U.S. Geological Survey. What does Taylor do with the birds he snares? First, he notes whether the bird has already been banded. “I take care so as not to injure the bird,” Taylor said. He typically cradles the hawk, then barks rapid-fire orders to his helpers to hand him a band—an alloy circle imprinted with a serial stamp and sized for every genus of hawk and falcon. Next, he measures wingspan and tail length, and assesses the bird’s general health. When he’s on a roll, Taylor can band up to sixty birds a day.

Information gathered by banders is used to measure bird populations and communities and the life spans of individual birds, and to study dispersal and migration. There are only two thousand master banders in the United States, and Taylor is proud to be one of them. The practice requires dedication and expert handling skills.

Everyone in the blind held his breath as a passing red-tail spotted the lure, a little furry bauble that mimics injured prey. The hawk circled in to get a better view, and decided to check things out on the ground. Out came the “landing gear” (as banders call the outstretched talons—even a novice can see they look like a 747 approaching an airfield) and the dihedral guided it down. Then, surprise! The net dropped and the blind burst into action.—Jaime Benshoff

One day each spring, thousands of partygoers descend on St. Paul’s West Side to celebrate Cinco de Mayo. On the other 364 days, the parade route along Cesar Chavez Street—including the business district branded and marketed as District del Sol—is something of an urban hamlet. Geographically protected by the Mississippi River from years of downtown development (and redevelopment), and isolated by steep bluffs and caves along its other borders, District del Sol has always marched to its own beat. The only connections to St. Paul proper, it seems, are a bridge and one of those odious Peanuts statues, although this version of Linus wears a cheeky sombrero.

District del Sol was the sticks back in 1874, when the city of St. Paul absorbed it. Lying south of downtown at a bend in the river, which somehow confuses everyone into calling it the “West Side,” it was thought too removed for residential and business development by downtown sophisticates. So immigrant communities started settling the cast-off river flats: first the Germans in the late 1800s, then Eastern Europeans and Russian Jews. By the 1920s, a wave of Chicano immigrants had settled the West Side; their influence remains most visible today.

Spanish-language medical clinics and tax services dot Cesar Chavez Street. A mosaic monument identifies the local playground as Parque Castillo (Castle Park). A few retailers are scattered throughout the district: a grocery with a portrait of the Virgin de Guadalupe in the entry; a boutique bursting with tiny white shoes and christening dresses; two Western wear shops with walls of cowboy hats in numerous shades of tan. Storefronts are plastered with signs advertising, in Spanish, everything from homes for sale to outdoor festivals. But the neighborhood’s biggest draw is its dozen Mexican restaurants and cantinas. Some, like Boca Chica, are well established and tastefully decorated in colors of the Aztec palette, while others seem pulled together with found furnishings, like the scrappy Mi Tierra.

According to the Ramsey County Historical Society, the oldest structures in Del Sol are “architecturally insignificant,” a status that likely stems from their ornament-free utility. Bright, hand-painted signs and murals bring a cheer to the kind of industrial structures that elsewhere meet bulldozers. Whereas the bright yellow and red logo of a global fast food joint might look garish among more manicured brownstones, in this neighborhood it appears almost drab alongside the jaunty, hand-lettered pink and green sign for Don Panchos Panaderia.

Similarly, the bleached housing complexes cropping up along Del Sol’s periphery counter the neighborhood’s tidy row houses. This clash of threadbare and new, modest and lively, defines the handmade texture of Del Sol. Strolling the sidewalks, your feet pick up dust and BK ketchup packets, while the sizzle of fresh carnitas and the sunshiny ring of mariachi music, piped outdoors from the swankier restaurants, fill the air.
—Christy DeSmith

The entire apartment, which can’t be more than fifteen feet by fifteen, is visible from the front door: the makeshift sofa, the kitchen, the workshop, the “bedroom.” In fact, Dick Donovan’s apartment, where he’s lived since August, more closely resembles a fort. “On the second morning I lived here,” he recalls, “I fried eggs from bed and ate them in bed. And I thought either I am in heaven or I am in danger.” Indeed, the bed abuts a tiny gas stove. He’s mounted a tall window screen between the two, which acts as a grease shield and also keeps his blankets from catching fire.

There’s a genuine artfulness to Donovan’s space. Not only is he a charcoal artist, a master Etch-A-Sketcher, and a collector of found art, but he built nearly every structure in the apartment by hand, including his platform bed, the clothes rail above it, and a swivel counter in the kitchen. He did this without making a single cut to the wood he retrieved from alleys and trash bins. All of his work is unique, some might even say Seussian. “I always deviate from my plans,” he explains. When not running deliveries for Leaning Tower of Pizza, he’s taking classes in carpentry. Donovan recently acquired a fixer-upper houseboat that’s anchored on the Mississippi. “It’s all I can think about now,” he says. “I’ve been building forts since I was a kid, starting with cushions and evolving into elaborate snow forts. That’s my fort on the river.”

The aspects of the apartment Donovan didn’t build, he modified. The small refrigerator is mod-podged with old sewing patterns, as are patches above the door and fireplace. Yes, this tiny nook has a fireplace, in which he has placed a plug-in pile of fake logs. Some of the walls are framed with wooden yardsticks; all are painted, at least partly, ochre yellow, Donovan’s favorite color for walls. Sticking with the warm palette, his curtains are orange. His sofa is covered with a red blanket. “I like sunset colors,” he says. “Mellow tones. I find them relaxing.”

A computer used to hang over the bed from chains, but as winter dragged on and his “life force drained,” he had to take it down. “The thought that it might fall on me was giving me insomnia,” says Donovan, who holds a psychology degree from the University of Minnesota. “Maybe this summer, I’ll put it back up.” Most of his other electronics are old and formerly discarded. They include a four-track recorder that “may work,” a turntable from a grade-school AV department, and a microwave that he says weighs as much as two air conditioners. “It’s so preposterous—it must have come from the Chernobyl cafeteria.” His most prized appliance by far is a screw gun. “If I was stuck on a desert island and could have only one thing, it would be a screw gun.” After a pause, he adds, “and a lot of batteries.”—Jennifer Vogel

While Jonathan Safran Foer just made New York Press’s “50 Most Loathsome New Yorkers” list, Ms. Krauss would likely beg to differ; she married him. What does this have to do with Krauss’s The History of Love, published just a month after Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close? Quite a bit, it turns out, when you look between the covers. The following aptly describes both books: A very old Holocaust survivor who has spent his postwar life in tortured isolation trades chapters with a very clever young person who is on a journey across New York City to uncover a mystery. In both books, the journeyer’s mythically wonderful father has died young. Both books indulge in Internet-age visual play, with graphics and page layout trickery to enhance the story. Both have a distant and mournful mother whose children wander recklessly in a world proven unpredictable and cruel, as well as a man who, grief-stricken into silence, is reduced to yes-and-no gestures to communicate with a child. The similarities continue — Call it the single-mindedness of marriage, or something else, but Krauss is darn lucky she writes as well as her husband. Her book is completely engrossing, beautifully told, and, despite the above (not to mention its generic snooze of a title), quite original.

A new Ann Beattie book is no longer the event it once was, which is something of a shame. She’s been kicking out such consistently accomplished fiction for so long now that it’s become easy to take her for granted. When she first made her name with a series of New Yorker stories in the seventies, Beattie was most often compared to older writers of frigid urban realism like the Johns Cheever and Updike, or her contemporary, Raymond Carver. Nearly thirty years later those comparisons are still in the ballpark; Beattie’s mastered an economy of style and a terse, emotional shorthand that often masks her versatility. She has an uncanny feel for the way real people talk, and her subtle descriptions of the idiosyncrasies, neuroses, and frequent sense of disconnection that bedevil her characters are as timely as ever.

Year after year, this lecture series brings in some of literature’s heaviest hitters, and yet somehow maintains a surprisingly low profile. Isabel Allende, May’s featured author, is a former journalist and the niece of slain Chilean President Salvador Allende, who was overthrown in a CIA-assisted coup in 1973. Since her first novel, 1985’s The House of Spirits, Allende has garnered international acclaim for a dozen books that are distinguished by their powerful female characters, connections across generations, and rich historical detail. Her latest, a novel on the legend of Zorro, is due this month. Adath Jeshurun Congregation, 10500 Hillside Lane, Minnetonka; 952-847-8637