Category: Article

Even Jon, who sees everything, wasn’t expecting to see the drowned man rolling in the waves. We were sweetly exhausted from sun and saltwater on the first day of our vacation when Jon took me by the elbow. “Look there,” he said. “Is that a person?” Jon’s uncanny tendency to see everything used to stun me. Right in the middle of some urgent conversation about, say, losing his job, he’d grab me and say, with genuine awe, “Look, in the mud. It’s the first crocus!” I’m ashamed of how little those crocuses mattered to me then. It took me a long time to learn to care about the things Jon sees. But this, this couldn’t possibly be what Jon thought.

We were on Flamenco Beach on Isla Culebra. This tiny island lies eighteen miles off the coast of Puerto Rico and is loved for its undeveloped raw beauty, especially the pristine coral reefs and empty beaches. We and our five kids had arrived by way of a twin-engine plane the size of a Volvo. Later, after we’d survived being buffeted about in the wind between the slopes of two small mountains while more or less nose-diving toward the runway, we learned that Culebra is considered one of the trickiest landings in the Caribbean. But at the time it was more exhilarating than scary. After all, isn’t this why we leave home at all: to jolt ourselves back to our senses, to lose our breath so that we can find it again?

Our cabin was one of twelve situated on a nature preserve along Tamarindo, one of the island’s most beautiful reefs. We’d been traveling more than twenty-four hours by the time we arrived, and it was all Jon and I could do to navigate the “road” back to town for food and supplies before darkness fell. We soon sank helplessly into the sort of sleep so heavy it cannot be disturbed by children breathing in your face or sudden loud noises or bright lights or even by the damp, tropical chill that creeps into a cabin in the middle of the night. Sleep so deep that you might awake in the blackness before dawn and have no idea where you are.

That next morning we went to Flamenco Beach, a quintessentially perfect horseshoe of white sugar sand and surreal turquoise water, nestled between rounded mountains. What it lacks in terms of shell-seeking opportunities, it more than makes up for in honest-to-God, paradisiacal loveliness. But the waves were rough that day. Twelve-foot swells had stirred up in the Atlantic, and even normally gentle beaches like Flamenco were seeing strong surf and currents. After a good hour of watery pummeling, we were winded and tired.

And that’s when Jon saw him. He was a larger man, middle-aged and barrel-chested, wearing a white T-shirt and a snorkel mask. Jon was already running into the water, and I ran the other way, calling to another man for help. Together, they dragged him in and tried their best to save him. Jon’s thirteen-year-old son stood solemnly on the periphery. Clearly, he was seeing the responsibilities of his own future as his father bent over the limp body, struggling to push water out, to push air in, to bring color back, to bring life back.

A gray-haired woman drifted away from the small crowd, crying. She was the drowned man’s wife, seemingly alone in her terror, so Jon’s sixteen-year-old daughter took her into her arms, and the other children and I sat with her and listened. Alternating between Spanish and English, she told us why her husband may have had a heart attack, why he could not die. “He already had four heart surgeries,” she told us. “He will see his grandson on Saturday! Forty-four years we are married! What will I do without my husband?” She was afraid that her husband was already dead. “Please, send up your prayers to Jesus,” she begged. Finally, the ambulance arrived, and the man, whose color was returning but who would not survive, was lifted onto a stretcher.

Bystanders tried to hustle the drowned man’s wife into the waiting ambulance. But she could not leave the beach without her shells. She had collected a small pile—white clams and broken bits of conch and sea glass—on the corner of her towel; they scattered when someone had tried to help by gathering her belongings. She dropped to her knees, protesting through her tears, and we all scrambled to pick her tiny seashells out of the sand and press them safely into her hands. Then she hurried onto the path, away from the beach and through the stand of fig trees toward her husband.

At Como and Carter, next to the St. Anthony Park neighborhood’s library, the remains of an old tree trunk have been carved into a statue of a boy reading a book, an owl perched on his back.

A few blocks northwest, sightings of a real owl—a great gray with a five-foot wingspan—have delighted the Park’s bookish inhabitants, a mix of professors, creative professionals, and university farm-campus students. Lately, many of them, toting high-powered binoculars and dog-eared copies of Peterson Field Guides: Eastern Birds, have been spotted roaming the Park’s hilly streets, trying to catch a glimpse of the spectacular creature.

Just outside the corner’s combined Dunn Brothers and Finnish Bistro—where café au lait mingles with sweet, cardamom-rich pulla rolls—a battered wooden kiosk with a shingled roof provides ethnographic clues to the neighborhood. Handmade signs announce organic produce, private piano lessons, preschool French, a statewide rally for public school funding, a lecture—“Circuses: No Fun for Animals”—by a PETA activist, feng shui classes, and a new flower store, claiming, “We deliver love.”

The good life, even the exceedingly comfortable life, is clearly evident here, but it’s steeped in earnestness and civic-mindedness. And no wonder. The corner’s architectural jewel, its anchor, is the St. Anthony Park branch library, a splendid 1917 Beaux Arts-style Carnegie that stands like a luxury liner on a triangle of lawn, just kitty-corner from the kiosk.

Inside, banks of windows frame the neighborhood’s trees, and green window seats are offered at each end of the main room. In the children’s section, three primitive watercolor paintings of the library are displayed. All depict the façade’s essentials—the six elegant, arched windows with glistening panes, and the black cast-iron staircase railings. One child has colored the panes a dazzling flame blue, exactly capturing the windows’ inner glow and reflection.

The past and the future are visible from the library’s front staircase. There is the commodious St. Anthony Park Home for the elderly, built in 1903 by the Children’s Aid Society of Minnesota as an orphanage for children coming west on the orphan trains; Milton Square’s half-timbered buildings, home to the restaurant Muffuletta, apartments for University grad students, and Micawber’s Books, one of St. Paul’s only remaining independent bookstores; the blue awnings of the original Bibelot Shop; and, everywhere, trees.

Charles Pratt, who helped develop St. Anthony Park in the late 1800s, is largely responsible for the neighborhood’s park-like setting and nature-loving sensibility, insisting that neighborhood lots and blocks be “laid out in accordance with the topography of the ground, due regard being had to the natural beauties of the situation.”

A quilt displayed in the library’s basement commemorates St. Anthony Park’s 1987 centennial and dutifully honors its trees. A notice reads: “Trees of St. Anthony Park represented in quilting: birch, poplar, hackberry, elm, linden, gingko, mulberry, sugar maple, red maple, red oak, white oak.”—Julie Hessler

The other day, my pal Steve finally loaned me a book he’d been telling me about for years. It was John Krakauer’s Into the Wild, which has sort of been eclipsed by his later blockbuster, Into Thin Air. It recounts the story of a young man who decided to move to Alaska and try to survive in the wilderness by his wits alone. But as I paged through it, I found I was most interested in the pictures—which were of Steve and Suzie having sex! It turned out that he had stashed a handful of naughty Polaroids the two had taken years ago, probably before the arrival of digital cameras. (The Polaroid used to be the camera of choice for amateur pornographers—no worries about nosy workers at the film-processing counter.)

This, obviously, raised some questions. First of all, my finding these snapshots inherently violated the longstanding moral code all guys have, which is to be tasteful whenever referring to one’s own spouse, no matter how lewd the conversation. It is okay to talk about your love life, but it is not kosher to be too specific about your lover’s unique assets or skills or liabilities. In other words, it is best to be general. Polaroid photographs of you making love with your wife are highly specific. You should not willingly share them with your buddies. I phoned Steve right away and told him what I’d found, and of course, he was mortified. I promised to seal them in an envelope without giving the matter a second thought, and I did. I could tell you more about what I saw. (Some readers may remember how I’d been briefly obsessed with whether Suzie had had any, erm, elective surgery done—but you’ll also remember how it was not appropriate to ask, no matter how intimate my friendship with Steve.) Needless to say, I won’t turn a moving violation into a first-degree felony by violating “the code.”

I hasten to add, though, that Steve’s and Suzie’s misadventures with a camera were a perfectly legitimate subject for general discussion. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if Steve had already boasted about it to some of our mutual buddies. That’s the kind of thing guys discuss, but again, only within a certain range of what’s considered tasteful detail. (Women, you do this, too—I have it on good authority that you get just as down-and-dirty, but that you, also, observe certain unwritten rules about what’s foul territory.) If we hadn’t talked about it before, we certainly did now. Steve wasn’t embarrassed because they’d taken the pictures, just that they’d been seen by one of his buddies. Of course, I wanted to know if there was any back story to the photos, and there was.

Here’s how it happened. Suzie had once caught Steve with a girlie magazine, and she, being a solid feminist with certain predictable politics, had gone ballistic. Steve first confessed that men are the inferior gender—mea culpa, blah blah blah—and then he gingerly suggested that men seem to need frequent release more than women do. In his view, the girlie magazine was a harmless assist to a biological imperative. If Suzie wanted to have more sex, then she would surely be asking for it, right? In Steve’s view, it was saving his good wife some hassle to be taking care of his own business, as necessary, instead of pressing his need onto her. It also seemed to him that Suzie was asking the impossible—was he supposed to be celibate just because she didn’t happen to want to have sex as much as he did?

For her part, Suzie said what bothered her most was that Steve was getting turned on by other women. Without even going into the nettlesome politics of porn, Suzie basically said that playing solitaire mentally was one thing, but playing it with someone else’s deck was going too far. So Steve made the radically brave suggestion that he’d prefer, of course, to look at dirty pictures of his wife. Suzie one-upped him—she actually agreed to it!

Perhaps the best part of the story was that, according to Steve, the Polaroids had loosened both of them up quite a bit. Suzie came to enjoy the idea that she could be stimulating to Steve even in her physical absence, and the two had since graduated to video. Obviously, they’d never want these tapes to fall into the wrong hands. But we must all learn to celebrate that there is an inviolate line between the public and the private, and that line can be played with for fun and personal growth. Your love life is your own business, so why be constrained by what others would think?

Depending on how much snow we get in March, the year’s snowiest month, April can be one of the ugliest seasons. The yard is too soft to clean up, so the grimy leavings of winter are everywhere to be seen. On the upside, this is one of our favorite times of the year, because the woods are naked. Before the world remembers to bloom again, and after the drifts have melted, we like to look for ancient junk piles along country roads.

Collecting old beer cans is a peculiar hobby, but not really that odd, when you consider it as a form of low-rent treasure hunting. Yes, one person’s worthless garbage is another’s extra special garbage, and we enjoy having an excuse to get out and fiddle around in the woods even before the first hepatica and bloodroot bloom. Minnesota is actually a fine place for “canning,” and there is at least one chapter of collectors here that specialize in “rustlings”—more or less worthless cans that have value only in the eyes of the dirty-kneed treasure hunter, and bear no real relationship to the mint-condition cans that others discover in attics and garages, well away from the elements.

At the time when beer was first canned, in the 1930s, Minnesota had a brewery in nearly every city. Today, if you find a Kato beer can, or a Kiewel’s, or a Red Wing—among the Schmidt’s, Grain Belts, and Blatz—you’ve found something quite special.

These old cans are becoming rarer, of course, because they are disintegrating in the forest, helped along in their return to dust by the two hundred thousand tons of salt that are spread on Minnesota roads each winter. There is something pleasing and reassuring about these old tin cans in the woods, precisely because of their slow decay—ashes to ashes, rust to rust. They underscore the ugliness of plastic and aluminum, which appear to last forever, until someone literally removes them. Ten-year-old bleach bottles and diet Coke cans have not yet found a market among collectors.

Thankfully, aluminum is relatively rare in the woods, for one simple reason: Aluminum is the single biggest success story in the short history of recycling. Today, more than one in every two aluminum cans is recycled. Smelting recycled aluminum cans uses ninety-five percent less energy than smelting raw aluminum ore. This year, nearly two trillion pounds of aluminum will be recycled. The turnaround on a recycled aluminum can—from store shelf to thirsty consumer to smelter and back to store shelf—is less than sixty days.

Due to the high value of aluminum, the national addiction to canned beverages facilitates a special kind of sub-economy. It’s not exactly the safety net we should rely on for the indigent and the homeless and the disaffected, but it’s a start, and a balm in this new gilded age. For some reason, Minnesota has been a holdout in beverage-container deposits. We think the state could put an exclamation point on its reputation for general cleanliness and order by instituting one, as they have in New York, California, Iowa, Maine, Oregon, Vermont, and Michigan (where it’s a whopping ten cents per can or bottle). Even the most recalcitrant conservative can see that this is a private program for the public weal, a point-of-purchase fee willingly paid to insure that more aluminum stays in the recycling loop and out of the ditch, while benefiting some of the most self-reliant participants in off-the-radar sub-economies.

It is interesting to see Budweiser and other brewers trotting out antique designs for their packaging. Locally, Stite Beer has developed an aluminum bottle, which is more forward-looking than backward-looking (whoever remakes the cone-top can will make a mint), but we like what it means. If you can bring yourself to develop a taste for beverages in cans instead of plastic or glass bottles, you’ll be left with the sweet aftertaste known as enlightened self-interest.

On a recent international flight aboard Northwest Airlines, a reporter was pleased to learn that the movie would be Sideways, the popular Alexander Payne film that has uncorked a million bottles of pinot noir. Of course, in-flight entertainment is notoriously prudish about dirty words. Sideways is a film that has a full nose and thick legs when it comes to rough language, so it posed a challenge to airline entertainment directors. By tradition, this sort of thing is covered with clumsy overdubs—“fudge,” “shoot,” “darn,” that kind of thing. But for some reason in Sideways, the frequently uttered word “asshole” was overdubbed “Ashcroft.” That was a new one, as far as anyone could say. It seemed a rather bold move for Northwest.

Kurt Ebenhoch, the airline’s spokesman, said, “We simply asked for an edited version of the movie because the unedited version contains some sexual content.” When those are the only two choices, it becomes obvious why airlines would settle for a few “Ashcrofts” in place of the full-frontal that occurs in the earthbound version. But that still didn’t answer who decided that “Ashcroft” should be a synonym for the unmentionable. The reporter called Sideways’ distributor, Fox Searchlight Pictures, and asked to speak with the people in charge of dubbing films for airlines.

The call was put through to the department in charge of desalinating the naughty films Hollywood gives us. Mr. Blakeley is the man in charge, and he is ninety years old, so the caller was urged to “be patient.” Well, it turns out that Mr. Blakeley wasn’t available at the moment, but his assistant, Rudolph “call me Rudy” Freeman was. Rudy was glad to give the lowdown on the cleanup process that turns “ass” to “butt,” “bastard” to “bad guy” and, in Sideways, “asshole” to “Ashcroft.”

For airlines in particular, Freeman said, “Most don’t want to have anything that has to do with airplane crashes, too much blood, profanity and killings.” Fair enough. But surely showing a few good crash scenes could up the alcohol sales a mite. Anyway, enough with the small talk. What about the dirty stuff? Freeman referred to The List. Circulating the office at Fox Searchlight is a master list of all the most common bad words and racial no-no’s that they have authority to modify. Freeman was kind enough to fax over this master list, and to give several artful examples of their best dubbing work. “For instance the four-letter word. Instead of using that, they’ll say ‘frigid’ or ‘phooey.’ Like for instance ‘g-damn.’ We can’t have ‘God,’ and we can’t have, ‘Oh Jesus,’ or anything like that …” Rudy went on for a while, swearing and cleaning up, so the reporter really got the hang of it. So when did “Ashcroft” get worked into the repertoire alongside “animal, officer, turkey, rascal, airhead” as an acceptable substitution? As it turns out, it didn’t.

Rudy explained that directors will sometimes supply alternative dialogue to be dubbed in for edited versions of their films. For Ashcroft, he said, “Well, it just so happens they gave us that word. It was a director’s choice. We would not have used that.”

A true aficionado of his craft, Rudy agreed that Ashcroft was a “unique” substitution. He said, “Not only that, it didn’t fit the mouth too well. You can tell the difference between the syllables.” What was Payne thinking?—Kelli Ohrtman

If you didn’t see ABC’s Wife Swap! on March 2, here’s what you missed: Powderhorn Park peacenik Mina Leierwood gingerly examines the contents of “Fort Patrick,” the Louisville, Kentucky, home she’s to live in for two weeks with a family of strangers. Cheri Patrick, the usual lady of the house, is a retired Air Force senior airman; her husband Ryan is a former sergeant in the U.S. Cavalry. She runs her home with military efficiency. When her three young children are actually allowed to play, it is typically with toy guns and bombers. Leierwood finds taxidermy on the walls, a cavalry sword above the master bed, and a “W” mouse pad, baseball cap, and mug.

Meanwhile, conservative Christian Cheri Patrick had marched into Mina and Greg Leierwood’s Minneapolis home. She tried valiantly to come to terms with the “Send Bush Packing” suitcase planted in the front yard, and attempted to force the Leierwoods’ belligerent seventeen-year-old, Dan, to say the Pledge of Allegiance. (Dan, a long-haired and lip-pierced atheist, believes the United States should be dismantled.)

It is hard to imagine two families who better characterize America’s current political polarization—real representatives of an America divided into what some wags have called “The United States of Canada” (the “blue states”) versus “Jesusland” (the “red” ones).

While the show’s title promises more kinky fun than Desperate Housewives, its mission is more noble than that. It merely challenges two ordinary families to see life from another point of view for two weeks. There are no key parties, no swinging, no hanky panky. Instead, it’s a sort of cultural exchange program. The swapped wife shows up at her new home and must familiarize herself with the “household manual” (each family writes one). She is required to follow the current household rules for the first week. At the start of the second week—the “Rule Change”—she may unleash a new world order.

After seeing Wife Swap!, I couldn’t resist calling on Mina for some backstage dope. Here is what you missed even if you watched: For one thing, Mina found a high-powered crossbow in the basement, within reach of the little troops. Leierwood says that part got edited out. While some of the dropped footage is shocking (always keep your high-powered crossbow out of reach), most of it presents a more nuanced picture, and one that gives us all hope for more gray area. What makes it onscreen can be a sort of two-dimensional caricature—but it wouldn’t be the first time TV simplified real life.

The show’s rules meant Leierwood, during her first week, had to follow Cheri Patrick’s rigorous military routine, getting up at oh-six-hundred hours for a forty-minute walk, waking the kids and making them breakfast, getting them off to school (husband Ryan sleeps late because he works the late shift at a steel mill), and then cleaning the house like an obsessive compulsive on crystal meth for the remainder of the day. (Cheri’s daily chore list is divided into fifteen-minute increments.)

Mina Leierwood is a Quaker and therefore a pacifist. When it came time for her to impose her rules on Patrick’s household, she eliminated all the toy guns, bombers, tanks, and violent video games from the home, asking the children to collect them and place them in a cardboard box labeled the “War Chest.” (“That’s not fun,” said five-year-old Brendan Patrick.)

For Cheri Patrick, week one meant that she couldn’t do all the cooking and cleaning herself, because the Leierwoods share chores. It’s hard to know which was the bigger hurdle for Cheri—the trashed house or the secular humanism. When she wasn’t retching with disgust at these Bush-haters, she was compulsively trying to find her place in the kitchen. When Dan challenged her for cooking without help, Cheri replied, “I believe that a man is the head of the house, because when Eve partook of the apple or the fruit that she shouldn’t have, she condemned herself and her kind to be under the heel of man.”

Under the heel of the oppressive order at “Fort Patrick,” Mina Leierwood started to crack. Constantly on camera, stressed and unable to sleep, Leierwood told me that she slept the second week in a hotel after she and temporary husband Ryan got in an argument and Ryan kicked a door. (Edited out.) In his defense, Leierwood added that she had covered Ryan’s red pickup truck with peace magnets (also cut). Despite their differences, Mina called him “a great father, a great husband.” Most of the heat from the episode revolved around Dan’s intense provocation of Cheri; at one point, he yelled at her, “Jesus was a carpenter who talked too much!” and Cheri left the room crying. (Out-of-control Dan’s views don’t necessarily represent the Leierwoods’. He’s a teenager, after all. Greg laments his son’s cruelty, saying, “I hate to think I’ve taught Dan to be that insensitive.”)

Off camera, there were moments when Dan and Cheri actually got along. During week one Cheri had to attend her first peace rally, but during week two Cheri made Greg, Dan, and Avram, the Leierwoods’ younger son, play paintball. “They loved it!” said Mina. At one point, Dan and Cheri ganged up on Greg and Avram, pelting them with paint. “For pacifists,” Cheri exclaimed, “you guys are a pretty good shot.”

Of course, there were mild transformations by the episode’s end. Cheri learned that she doesn’t have to be perfect, that she can ask for help. Mina learned to put a more personal face on war, to understand the sacrifices soldiers make.

The editing was equal opportunity, giving neither side a clear polemical advantage. For example, during the episode, eight-year-old Tyler Patrick draws a military plane. Mina asks him about it and he says that the plane is dropping bombs over Iraq. What got edited out: Mina told Tyler that there are also children and moms and dads on the ground. And Tyler came to Mina hours later, saying, “I think I figured it out about the bad guys. They’re just like us. We just haven’t met them yet.”—Shannon Olson

Protestants are prone to being artistically challenged because they grow up in an environment that sees the arts as a luxury. I can hear my uncle Knute wandering around the Sistine Chapel, muttering things like, “Oh, the Pope loves luxury, you know.” But those with Jewish and Catholic upbringings tend to see art as a source of inspiration; “great spiritual art pulls you on to sacred ground,” as the scholar Wilson Yates has said. Bach is the dividing line for my people, the Lutherans, because he was a Lutheran organist, and anything before him smacks of Popery—smells and bells and other fancy stuff. Bach, especially his choral and choir music, is certified in the Lutheran church canon like stained glass windows and the theology from Luther’s notebooks: if you can’t find what you need in those three media, you can probably get along without it.

But now, having lived for more than a half-century, I am pulled into an ecumenical appreciation for the beauty of other faiths. The Greek Orthodox have icons that project us to a sacred place, in a traditional painting technique as old as Jesus; the Russians have fantastic architecture, like the onion domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral in Red Square; and the Catholics’ record in painting and sculpture can’t be beat. For all the things I disagree with in the theology of these religions, and there are many, there is one argument that sticks: the Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox churches have a continuity to the art of the ages that the Protestants, by nature, bad luck, and design, will never have. That’s because the Protestant’s faith tradition cannot be more than five hundred years old, and its origins include the smashing of icons in the Catholic Church (“iconoclast” comes from this); all other religious art, too, was considered suspect. I think stained glass windows survived as an art form because they kept out the cold.

I’m not the only Protestant who is rediscovering more sumptuous traditions. Famous theologians like Marcus Borg (The Heart of Christianity) are telling about growing up Lutheran, attending Presbyterian churches, and joining in the relatively highfalutin ceremonies of the Episcopalians. Even Harvey Cox, a Northern Baptist and progressive iconoclast critic of an unthinking church, who worked with the Rev. Martin Luther King, currently attends an Episcopal service. In secular terms, this is like B.B King making a point of taking high tea at the Mayfair, as opposed to ribs at Famous Dave’s. In a recent book, Common Prayers, Cox describes the rediscovery of the connection of meaning to ceremony through his Jewish wife, who maintains the ancient practice of weekly Shabbat; it opened a door for him. “Rediscovering Shabbat was a step on the way to rediscovering the Eucharist,” he said recently, describing his newfound attachment to taking communion every week. “One brings one’s own symbolism to it; but to me it is the ultimate symbol of the human community. Rich and poor, black and white are all gathered around the table. It is equalitarian distribution, and that is a basis for an equalitarian society.”

Cox and Borg are groundbreakers in modern theology, finding new meaning in the old faiths, so it comes as a bit of a surprise that these innovators are drawn to the more traditional ceremonial aspects of the church. God, in this case, is in the details; a spiritual experience can arise through participation in a complex ritual in the same way that good sacred art can draw the viewer or listener on to sacred ground.

Which is why this recovering Lutheran is swept away by the Rose Ensemble. This twelve-member choral group, based in St. Paul, is devoted to early music—music that connects with ideas and aesthetics that have been tested over centuries of audience trials, but is being remade for people who live and who listen now.

The latest thing in archaeological musicology, early music is more traditional than “neo-trad.” It goes back past the bulk of classical music to the Baroque, Renaissance, and Medieval eras. It’s the ultimate in non-electronic, non-materialistic music. Where Billy Bragg and Wilco dug up unrecorded Woody Guthrie lyrics and set them to new music, scholars of sacred music like Jordan Sramek, the Rose Ensemble’s founder and director, are poring through vocal music catalogs in Europe (especially newly liberated treasure troves in Eastern countries like Poland and the Czech Republic), and bringing back to daylight sounds that voices gave life to as much as a millennium ago.

You don’t have to believe in any faith to be awestruck by the melodies, harmonies, and tonalities that pour from Sramek’s Rose Ensemble. Among practitioners of early music, it is quickly becoming nationally recognized. A recent performance on the national early-music radio program “Harmonia” led to an avalanche of orders for its five recordings. Sales of between two thousand and twenty-five hundred copies for its newest, Fire of the Soul: Choral Virtuosity in 17th-century Russia & Poland, may not sound like much, until you consider that the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra has stopped recording altogether.

The manuscript for the Rose Ensemble’s latest project, Visitatio Sepulchri: The Dublin Mystery Play (to be performed April 7–10 at the Southern Theater in Minneapolis; 612-340-1725), came to light almost accidentally. A couple of years ago, Sramek was studying fifteenth-century chants for the feasts of St. Patrick, St. Killian, and St. Bridgit at Trinity College in Dublin. “Once I got there,” he said, “I found that there was this network of manuscript libraries. Once you went to one, they kind of pointed you to the next one, saying, ‘You really should see this.’ I was sent to a private one, Marsh’s Library, located in the back of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. One of the oldest manuscripts there contained the Dublin Mystery Play.”

Mystery plays (also called Miracle plays) are the birthplace of Western theater as we know it, developing out of feast-day celebrations of the medieval church. Just as stained glass windows could help tell the stories of the Catholic faith to the illiterate, feast days offered a supplemental education in those same stories, outside the Sunday service. Feast days began to gain in importance in the mid-eleventh century, as the monolithic grip of the church on the populace started to loosen. Not only was the economic influence of guilds expanding, but universities were also breaking the church’s monopoly on education. By focusing on feast days, the church could keep both individuals (including tradesmen) and new institutions involved in the church. Bakers might sponsor a performance centered around the tale of the loaves and fishes, for instance, supplying performers, props, costumes, and staging. At the same time, these performances brought religious education out of the church and into the streets. The audience was bound by a shared experience, lasting for months in its planning, rehearsal, execution, and discussion.

Mystery plays were an all-inclusive form of participation, a medieval form of what some today call “edutainment.” They were community-builders, a chance for everyone to get in the act, but also to share in a moral universe, a tradition that reached back into an ancient past, and into the foreseeable future.

The Visitatio Sepulchri is the most popular theme of the mystery plays, telling the story of the three Marys—Mary Magdalene, Mary Salome, and Mary Jacobin (or “mother of James”)—who go to the tomb to anoint Jesus’ body with spices, only to find that he has disappeared. While it’s difficult to date the version that Sramek unearthed in Dublin, best guess places it between 1100 and 1300.

While the Rose Ensemble’s version sticks closely to the original manuscript, it also expands on the one-act musical drama with narration (from Minnesota Public Radio’s Tom Crann), a new work by Minnesota composer Abbie Betinis, lighting design by Jeff Bartlett, and danc
e from Matt Jenson’s New and Slightly Used Dance. Sramek even took the liberty of adding the character of the Virgin Mary. “A lot of the traditional Irish ‘keens,’ or laments, were written in the voice of Mary lamenting the death of Jesus,” he said. “And I thought, what a wonderful opportunity to add these keens, with Mary lamenting the death of her son in Irish—Gaelic religious music is like Irish folk music, it has twists and turns in it and it’s very lyrical—and the rest happening in Latin. It will be like two worlds colliding.”

At their best, the secular arts and religious ceremonies bring some meaning to this often meaningless existence; with a sense of dedication, craft, and sheer reverence, the Rose Ensemble makes tangible the best of both worlds.

Nobody calls up the Internal Revenue Service for fun. But the other day, a reporter telephoned Eric Erickson, a “media relations specialist” for the IRS, to ask a few nosy questions. Erickson said that about 640,000 Minnesotans filed their taxes in the last two weeks before April 15, 2004. That’s almost the combined populations of Minneapolis and St. Paul. Erickson does his own taxes, and doesn’t understand why so many people put it off. “It’s easy,” he said.

Really? The reporter picked up a 1040EZ, the “easy” tax form. Then she called Joel Rosenberg, who’s been a technical writer for twenty-five years. “I enjoy it,” he said of technical writing, “because it’s fun to figure out what’s going on.” With his experience, Rosenberg ought to have no problem figuring out what’s going on with the 1040EZ. On top of his technical expertise, he’s also one of the authors of Everything You Need to Know about (Legally) Carrying a Handgun in Minnesota. Rosenberg recently wrote a similar book for Missouri, and now he’s working on a nationwide edition. He attributes the book’s success to one simple fact: “I try to explain what the law is in terms that people can understand.”

He agreed to try to do the same thing with the 1040EZ. But it wasn’t long before he ran aground. “When do I find out whether I can use this form or not?” he grumbled, flipping through the instructions, before finally coming to page eight. “This should be at the front, where you can find it fast.” Then he looked through the list of requirements, one of which involves something called the Alaska Permanent Fund. “What is that?” asked Rosenberg. “Where do they tell me what that is?” He flipped back through the instructions, looking for some kind of explanation. “They’d make this easier,” he finally said, “if they just said, ‘Take this to an accountant.’”

Rosenberg has taken his own taxes to an accountant since the eighties, after an unpleasant incident. “I got a letter from the IRS telling me I owed $27.34,” he said. He spent “hours” checking and rechecking his tax form, reading and rereading the letter. Then, like the experienced technical writer that he is, “I figured out what the IRS was really telling me,” said Rosenberg. “They were telling me that if I just sent them $27.34, they’d leave me alone.” Rosenberg sent a check. The IRS left him alone.

Courtney Danielson would do the same because, she says, the IRS has “a fear persona—they have so much power.” Danielson is a graphic designer who works at Brainco, an advertising school in Minneapolis. She and school founder Ed Prentiss agreed that the IRS could use a good marketing campaign, in addition to employing a technical writer.

“They don’t do a good job educating people,” said Prentiss. “Really, they’re just the messenger; they’re just doing their job. But they have this image of trying to get you. Pay up—or we’ll take your house.”

Prentiss had a couple ideas how to change that image. One approach would make the IRS “more personal.” The IRS could admit a few things, Prentiss said. They could openly say, “We understand that this is complicated, but you still have to pay your fair share.” He’d also focus on the positive aspect of taxes. “There are things that are common to everybody, like an ambulance or roads.”

Or, said Prentiss, he could go a different route altogether and use humor. He and Danielson even mocked up a beautiful print ad, at no expense to taxpayers: “Please give generously so we don’t have to take it from you.” Humorous ads work, Prentiss said, because they’re true. “There’s such a power in honesty. It’s refreshing.”—Maria Rubinstein

A brief squall of horns opens “Focus on Sanity,” the song that kicked off Ornette Coleman’s seminal Atlantic Records phase. Part fanfare, part detonation, that sound made it plenty clear that the Texas saxophonist was plunging into almost entirely uncharted territory. Twenty-nine years old when he recorded the song in a Hollywood studio in May of 1959, Coleman was something of a late starter as jazz musicians go. Like so many others of his generation, he had cut his teeth in rhythm and blues bands, before recording two relatively conventional-sounding records for the California label that defined the sound of West Coast jazz, Lester Koenig’s Contemporary Records. That cool West Coast sound—exemplified by the work of Chet Baker and Stan Getz, among others—wasn’t exactly Coleman’s niche, as he demonstrated when he showed up to record his debut for Atlantic. That session featured the first version of Coleman’s classic quartet (Coleman on alto sax, Don Cherry on cornet, Charlie Haden on bass, and Billy Higgins on drums) and was to result in the then-shattering album, The Shape of Jazz to Come.

Such seemingly hubristic titles were a hallmark of Coleman’s Atlantic stint—others would include Change of the Century and This is Our Music—but the music more than lived up to the hyperbole, even if it was greeted with considerable skepticism and even outright derision at the time. Made up as it was of equal parts disruption and eruption, and presided over by a quiet, self-assured oddball given to often inscrutable utterances, it was perhaps unsurprising that Coleman’s revolution met with resistance from the various branches of jazz’s old guard—modern giants and revolutionaries in their own right. “I don’t know what he’s playing,” Dizzy Gillespie famously observed, “but it’s not jazz.” Miles Davis seemed, if anything, even more perplexed. “Just listen to what he writes and how he plays,” he told writer Joe Goldberg at the time. “If you’re talking psychologically, the man is all screwed up inside.”

Coleman’s adventurous discography now spans forty-seven years, and he has become a stellar example of that wondrous American phenomenon: the heretic transformed by time into an icon. He is also one of the last survivors from what was arguably jazz’s most revolutionary and fecund period.

It seems somehow fitting that the newly expanded Walker Art Center will kick off its reopening this month with a three-day celebration of Coleman’s life and music, a tribute that will include a performance from the seemingly ageless and increasingly reclusive titan, accompanied by his latest quartet (April 21–23, Walker Art Center and Ted Mann Concert Hall; 612-375-7600). The oddly named “The Festival Dancing in Your Head”—what was wrong, I wonder, with “The Dancing in Your Head Festival”?—is pegged to Coleman’s seventy-fifth birthday, and in that sense the institutions are contemporaries (the Walker was originally launched in 1927, at the tail end of the great modernist revolutions in art and literature, and in the midst of jazz’s first flourish), and also comrades in arms.

The evolution of most art forms from the end of the nineteenth century through much of the twentieth was remarkably accelerated and punctuated by revolutions both major and minor; the period between Monet’s Rouen Cathedral series and Picasso’s Guernica, for instance, was barely forty years, and a mere thirty-seven years elapsed between Huckleberry Finn and Ulysses. Yet even by that standard it seems remarkable today to consider that only thirty years separate Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five’s West End Blues and Coleman’s 1958 debut Something Else! Perhaps even more remarkable is the fact that it took Coleman just two years to make the leap from that now almost accessible-sounding debut to the barbarians-at-the-gates assault of Free Jazz, the album that provided the basic template for a whole new generation of outsiders who would, in short order, completely transform the modern jazz landscape.

Given the intervening decades and the truly forbidding torrent that would later be produced by various outsiders plunging much further down the trail blazed by Coleman, it’s sort of hard now to hear what all the fuss was about. Listening to Coleman’s earliest records today, what stands out is his gift for writing memorable, even lovely melodies, and the extraordinary communication between the members of his original quartet. Coleman is first and foremost an emotional player, and his alto has a keening pitch, alternating between expressive blasts and clusters and impressionistic lines, often in almost telepathic lockstep with Don Cherry’s cornet or pocket trumpet. The rhythm section of Charlie Haden and Billy Higgins (Ed Blackwell would later replace Higgins behind the drum kit for a number of the Atlantic sessions) always seems to be both driving and navigating, exploring every cranny of each tune’s structure and simultaneously goading and responding in conversation with the horns.

Coleman’s compositions can veer from the placid to the frantic, but there’s generally a solid framework in place, a method to what his detractors hear as madness. Although Coleman famously coined the word “harmolodics” to describe that method, it’s a word—and, even more broadly, a general philosophy—that may never be satisfactorily defined by anyone, including the man himself.

Loosely (and, perhaps, wholly inaccurately), harmolodics represents Coleman’s attempt to free jazz from the yoke of conventional chord changes and concepts of harmony. In braiding the harmony and melody of a particular tune, Coleman allows for an intricately patterned approach to improvisational interplay, or, as his longtime collaborator Cherry once noted, an entirely new improvisational vocabulary. The result is music that is continually coiling and unfurling like strands of DNA, with Coleman and Cherry circling the same melody in different keys.

Coleman has applied that same approach to his diverse catalog of work, from those early forays into free jazz to his shambling and shamanic (call it shambolic) electric excursions with his Prime Time band. Like Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane, and a number of other icons of the period, Coleman took a self-imposed hiatus in the early sixties, only to reemerge with a new, even broader commitment to his fiercely individual vision. He took up trumpet and violin, recorded with his ten-year-old son Denardo on drums, wrote and recorded a symphony (“Skies of America”), and traveled to Morocco to jam and record with the Master Musicians of Jajouka, truly kindred spirits. They pushed Coleman in an entirely new direction and exerted an obvious influence on Prime Time’s herky-jerky funk workouts and distinct brand of jangling trance ragas.

He has also collaborated and performed with Pat Metheny, Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead, received a MacArthur “genius grant,” contributed to the score for David Cronenberg’s adaptation of Naked Lunch, and, in recent years, appeared on recordings with such disparate characters as Joe Henry, Lou Reed, and even Eddy Grant.

Yet no matter what sort of configuration he’s playing with or what he’s up to, Coleman always sounds like nobody else in jazz. His various bands have never been anything short of first-rate chemistry labs, churning out synthetic and organic variants of his own complex and still highly original formulas.

Coleman’s discography includes very few collaborations outside his own circle of acolytes and protégées, and he has seldom been as thunderous or caterwauling as some of those who came after him: Albert Ayler’s simple and indelible folk melodies owe an obvious debt to Coleman, and John Coltrane took Coleman’s Free Jazz to the very edge of the abyss with 1965’s Ascension, in his volcanic late period. Nevertheless, Coleman’s influence is as vast as it is singular. Though he has inspired countless others, he’s spawned no
real imitators and contributed few tunes to the jazz canon—1959’s “Lonely Woman,” certainly, but nothing else comes immediately to mind. Yet you could, I think, make a solid case that Coleman’s main contributions effectively represented the end of the line in terms of jazz’s evolution. Certainly plenty of others would take his basic ideas further into dissonance and deconstruction, and still others would reject them altogether, but no one, really, has managed to do anything much (or anything much good) that is not recognizably a strain of his revolution, or a reaction to it.

I fully realize that that perhaps ridiculous assertion is likely to lead to exactly the sorts of arguments that Ornette Coleman has been starting for almost fifty years—which is all, of course, just as it should be.

Charlie Callahan and Brian Spanier, creative directors at a Minneapolis agency called Periscope, spent the winter preparing an advertising and marketing juggernaut designed to pitch Twins baseball to the sticks.

After several seasons of success on the field and futility at the turnstiles, this year the team scrapped its vaguely self-deprecating “Get to Know ’Em” approach and turned to the pros at Periscope in an attempt to rally its far-flung fan base. The result is a campaign called “Twins Territory.” It ranges from aggressive, hectoring exhortations and calls to arms, to print ads that feature juxtapositions of Twins players with bits of regional iconography (Joe Mauer, crouching in his catcher’s gear, roasts a hot dog over a campfire, for instance, or Torii Hunter leaps from a dock to snare a fly ball). In one television spot a woman scrubs a bathroom floor with a Yankees jersey, and the legendary voice of Bill Woodson intones, “This is your state. This is your team. And this is Twins Territory.”

“The whole idea is really pretty simple,” Callahan said. “It’s about recognizing that this tradition is out there and building on it. This team has now been here for more than forty years, and Twins baseball has literally become part of the fabric of the state. Great franchises are about the relationship between the fans and the team, so our approach has been to encourage maybe a little bit more of an us-versus-them football mentality in our fans.” “The ultimate goal, of course, is to put fannies in the stands,” Spanier added. “In the end that’s what we’ll be judged on.”

The inability of the Twins to consistently post the sort of attendance figures commensurate with their success hasn’t always been the aggravation it has become during the team’s recent run of three-straight Central Division titles. This is, after all, a team that in 1988 became the first franchise in Major League history to draw three million fans. Those staggering numbers, a league record at the time, came on the heels of Minnesota’s first ever World Series championship, yet in the intervening years the team has managed to draw two million fans in just four subsequent seasons.

Last year marked the tenth consecutive season in which the Twins fell short of the two million mark, despite making another trip to the post season. For a little perspective, in 2004 Minnesota drew 1,879,222 fans, which placed the team’s attendance eleventh out of the fourteen American League teams. Needless to say, those numbers continue to bedevil the folks in the front office. Plenty of reasons get tossed around for the team’s inability to draw fans. There’s the monstrosity of the Metrodome, for starters, and the long-running new stadium imbroglio that has by now assumed tragicomic status. Others will point to the general ill will engendered by the forbidding and penurious specter of the team’s owner, Carl Pohlad. Those are certainly intangibles unique to this team and market. Most of the other gripes—from the length of games, competition for fans’ discretionary income, and the general disorder of the league’s economics—are obstacles the Twins share with the other teams that consistently outdraw them.

Anybody who grew up in outstate Minnesota, where Twins radio and television broadcasts have always provided an omnipresent backdrop to the languor of midsummer, likely understands that relying on attendance figures to gauge the ultimate interest in a team is a flawed proposition. This is a team with deep roots in the region. It is also, it is sometimes useful to remember, an organization with a pretty impressive resume, small market be damned—three American League titles, two World Series championships, a trio of homegrown Hall of Famers, and a history that stretches back to the Washington Senators and the earliest days of the American League.

Yet if Twins fans have never quite achieved the legendary (and legionary) status of the faithful in such places as Boston, Chicago, New York, and St. Louis, we nonetheless encompass a broad swath of geography, from border to border in the north and south, sprawling out into the Dakotas to the west and lapping the borders over into Wisconsin and down into Iowa. True, Twins Territory once stretched as far as Miles City, Montana, and Houghton, Michigan, but the politics of cable TV and the debasement of WCCO’s once-omnipotent signal have slowly closed the borders. Nowadays, even box scores in local papers are hard to find beyond the reach of Fox regional sports net.

Still, there is plenty of Twins Territory, and a lot of geography for the folks at Periscope to cover. The team’s television and radio ratings have been strong in recent seasons, which has been encouraging if bittersweet news to the people in the front office. Periscope’s job is to convince those people who habitually follow the team at home that the real action—and the real camaraderie—is in the blue seats at the Dome.

“We all know that this is a society of convenience,” Nancy O’Brien, the Twins’ director of advertising, said. “It’s infinitely easier to go home, park the car, and curl up on the couch to watch the game. But I don’t know if anybody really reminisces about games they watched on TV. Real memories are created at the ballpark.” —Brad Zellar