Category: Article

At a recent screening of The Assassination of Richard Nixon, the director, Niels Mueller, showed up for a question and answer session. It quickly became apparent that his questioners didn’t care so much about the film’s story as what it was like to work with Sean Penn and how Mueller got his movie made. How did he get the money? How did he get the script to Penn? How did he get producers on board? Mueller was modest, and almost sheepish, because as it turned out, the story of making his film was a remarkably trouble-free Hollywood fantasy, except that it was true.

A few days later, an essay about the current state—or rather, statistics—of moviemaking backed up the unlikelihood of Mueller’s experience. Writing in the New York Times, Adam Leipzig, who runs National Geographic Feature Films, contended that while making a movie has never been easier, getting it seen is harder than ever. A lengthy string of dispiriting numbers served as evidence: submissions to the Sundance Film Festival have nearly doubled from six years ago, from 1,325 to 2,613; the number of scripts registered at the Writers Guild of America rose sixty percent between 2001 and 2004, to fifty-five thousand; Guild-approved agencies that will look at unsolicited screenplays receive about four hundred each month, to which they respond positively to just one. “The numbers may be against you,” Leipzig concluded, “but hang in there. Because in Hollywood, the dream of being number one keeps the whole town going—even if it happens only 0.3 percent of the time.”

The dream, of course, isn’t limited to Hollywood. Last year, an NEA study reported that “the number of people doing creative writing increased by thirty percent, from eleven million in 1982 to more than fourteen million in 2002”; at the same time there was an overall decline in literary reading. What’s more, “the number of people who reported having taken a creative writing class or lesson decreased by 2.2 million during the same time period.” How many of these unknown writers hope to get a novel published, only to find that the “slush pile” of unsolicited manuscripts at publishing houses is obsolete, as most editors simply don’t look at anything that doesn’t come to them from an agent? As for getting an agent—well, see the statistics above for screenwriters. The plight of Miles Raymond in the film Sideways was all too real; no wonder everybody’s blogging.

Aspiring writers may be eschewing instruction, but enrollment at visual art schools is up. The number of undergraduate students at the University of Minnesota has risen from 297 in 1997 to 478 today. At Carleton College, students must compete to get into studio art classes—for spring term, some 260 students applied for 180 slots. As for pop music, the fact that American Idol is now a cultural fixture should say enough. What about alt rock? Forget stats; as my genuinely bewildered mother once asked, “Why is everybody in a band these days?”

“Self-expression in fashion always triumphs, regardless of circumstance.” So proclaimed a vodka advertisement in a recent edition of the JC Report, a fashion e-letter. “Suffer for your art, embrace the sacrifices—do anything to do what you love,” it continued. “There’s an unwavering compulsion to get your message out there … . Unleash your creative spirit. Unleash the Raspberri.” (Unwavering compulsion … Unleash the Raspberri … Is this some unwitting statement about Tourette’s syndrome? Are the copywriters making fun of us?)

However overwrought, the advertisement merely reinforces beliefs that have dominated American culture for the last half-century. Creativity is good. Conformity is bad. We’re all unique! And it’s not just our right, it’s practically our sacred duty to freely express our uniqueness, whether it’s through a tattoo or painting or blogging or making digital movies. We take this as an article of faith, so much so that it is hard for a modern person even to conceive of a world where only a few truly gifted individuals are allowed to “express themselves” creatively. For example, poets in ancient Rome had to earn patronage from public officials by dedicating their poems to them—and only a handful could do so. They were the pop stars of their time, but there was no Roman Idol, let alone open-mike nights or poetry slams, where amateurs could hope to get discovered. When it comes to maximizing the number of people with the time, money, and desire to act on creative impulses, to express ourselves as individuals, there’s no time like the present.

Two recent books by Canadians consider the implications of unfettered self-expression, extreme individualism—and their ties to rampant consumerism. In Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture, Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter take down the myth of fighting “the system” by daring to be different. While they build a solid, if somewhat academic, argument focused around sociopolitical theories, Hal Niedzviecki, in Hello, I’m Special: How Individuality Became the New Conformity, explores the myriad ways in which we dare, with increasing urgency, to be different. Niedzviecki assays the backyard amateur wrestling scene, the making of a new boy band by Lou Pearlman (of Backstreet Boys fame), a guy who’s fighting to have his own local TV station, fan fiction, the mainstreaming of tattoos, and much, much more.

Both books, in fact, are bursting with research, referring to a long tradition of social criticism, from Thorstein Veblen and Gustave Le Bon in the late nineteenth century to William H. Whyte, Guy Debord, Georg Simmel, and Michel Foucault, to contemporary critics like Todd Gitlin, Juliet Schor, and Thomas Frank. (Heath and Potter even track the origins of counterculture back to eighteenth-century Romanticism.)

It is the mode of recent consumerism to celebrate individuality as a matter of style (a development covered recently in Virginia Postrel’s The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness); thus, we consume in a way that is supposed to underscore our individuality, and attack conformity. But that assumption is simply wrong, say Heath and Potter. To the contrary, they argue, the rebellion against concepts like “mass society” and “conformity” is one of the more powerful engines driving consumer capitalism (Postrel would agree). “Consumerism is not an ideology,” they write. “It’s not something that people get tricked into. Consumerism is something that we actively do to one another.” (Or maybe even inflict on each other—consider products like SUVs.) Because consumerism is both competitive and interactive, it’s essentially both a way to attract attention and to distinguish ourselves. But that hardly constitutes a rebellion.

While Nation of Rebels focuses on the interplay between the individual and the market economy, Hello, I’m Special goes down other paths to document rebellion-as-individualism. Niedzviecki documents the myriad ways in which we are encouraged to nurture our individuality and express ourselves. Parents insist that their children can “be anything they want to be” and urge them to “follow their dreams”; they’re backed up by well-meaning teachers and a host of profit-seeking industries and entrepreneurs—like the founder of the Hard Rock Academy, a “boot camp where would-be performers can see where they stand.”

“Who will discourage the youngsters of today from pursuing their pop dream?” asks Niedzviecki, a question that seems more than a little cantankerous, especially since, as he writes elsewhere, “Millions of otherwise ‘normal’ citizens of the Western world harbor the notion that fame of some sort awaits them.” These dreams of being special are an extension of the theory, which has been around at least since Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, that we potentially restive moderns must be placated by entertainments; now, however, we do no
t merely wish to consume them, we wish to be part of the system that creates them. And if you apply the supply-and-demand equation, it follows that we should require more “creatives” (to borrow a term from advertising) and supporters-of-creatives of all kinds. Event promoters. Makeup artists. Audio book narrators. People who write subtitles for Bollywood films. But then the NEA’s findings—more people writing; fewer reading—give rise to the question of whether we are approaching the point where there are more producers of culture than there are consumers of it.

Niedzviecki’s man-on-the-street research, plus his personal revelations and self-deprecation, make Hello, I’m Special the more readable book, but ultimately the author is rather defeatist. He has no proposals for mitigating extreme individualism, and so, falls back on the idea of fighting “the system” with various countercultural means. Heath and Potter are more prosaic, and while their cultural criticism can become tedious, they do ultimately offer some striking observations, as well as hope. With every reiteration of his theme—that our attempts at expressing individuality are in fact conformist—Niedzviecki seems unconsciously to be making a case that awareness of the problem will lead at least partway to a solution. Meanwhile, Heath and Potter point out that these attempts at individuality drive the very consumer capitalism that sophisticated liberals and aesthetes (hyper-individualists, to say the least) often say they despise.

So where does that leave us? Might there be a kind of conformity that could usher in a new counter-consumerist era? Maybe it’s not so much conformity as a certain type of modesty, or reserve, a sacrificing of our desire to be noticed. After all, if we believe in ourselves, as we’re so often encouraged to do, isn’t that enough? Heath and Potter point to the characters on Star Trek as part of a political allegory in which “citizens of the Federation have found a way of being individuals without being rebels, of wearing uniforms without succumbing to a deadening existential uniformity.”

They also suggest a way to foster counter-consumerism: legislative action. (Remember, they’re from the country that has tried to pass laws requiring a minimum amount of Canadian cultural content in the arts.) It’s not as sexy as a WTO riot, but Heath and Potter believe that a simple change in the tax code, ending the fully tax-deductible status of advertising expenditures, would create a “devastating blow” to advertising. In other words, they propose strangling or smothering advertising, rather than trying to subvert it with “culture jamming” that inevitably goes ignored or unseen—or worse, simply becomes part of the overall spectacle (as protests have, says Niedzviecki, in another example of individualism gone awry).

Some things, of course, come down to individual action. Heath and Potter prescribe “clearing away some of the consumerist clutter and introducing a bit more uniformity into our lives. Instead of ‘daring to be different,’ perhaps we should dare to be the same.”

We might also look at the flip side of their notion about the two-way nature of consumerism, as “something that we actively do to each other.” Think of it in terms of a pair of squabbling siblings. Heath and Potter say that consumerism will continue, like the bickering of two children, unless there’s some incentive to stop. But what happens when no one is on the receiving end—no one to reinforce our consumerism, to admire our individualism, to up the ante and make us respond in kind? What if we did as our mothers counseled: Ignore the irritating sibling so that he’ll go away? With decreased numbers of people putting themselves on the receiving end of self-expression, it would force creative types to be that much more persistent about success. A form of Darwinism might eventually replace the supply-and-demand equation with respect to arts and entertainment, whittling down the number creatives-per-capita. Fewer people might go desperately seeking fame in Hollywood, or on websites like iwannabefamous.com.

In fact, the experience of one Gary Brolsma could be a portent. Brolsma had briefly become famous, thanks to an Internet video showing him chair-dancing to a Romanian pop song. The New York Times published a story about him on its front page a few weeks ago—not to dwell on his fame, but rather his abrupt rejection of it. Disenchanted, the nineteen-year-old had stopped taking media calls and canceled major television appearances. His friends and his family couldn’t imagine why. Perhaps Brolsma simply discovered that some things are best kept to oneself, and perhaps the Times was trying to spread the message?

Consider the advantages in cutting back on our self-expression. We’d have time and energy to do more. Plant a garden. Play with the kids. Teach someone to read. Read more ourselves. Maybe the word “hobbyist” would even become chic. With less expression in our lives, we could turn inward and hone our perception of what’s going on around us. We’d find connections and commonalities with each other, at the same time short-circuiting consumerism. After all, relentless capitalism can’t sustain itself on inner peace.

It’s doubtful that people will camp out in order to be the first inside the newly expanded Walker Art Center, but who knows? They did at Ikea in Bloomington last year; surely some flapdoodle ought to accompany the unveiling of a shimmering contemporary art center designed by avant-garde Swiss architects. However, to members of the media who toured the building while it was under construction, it’s been made clear that art comes first, not architecture—in the galleries, that is. These spaces are straightforward, unassuming adaptations of the elegant white boxes Edward Larrabee Barnes designed for the Walker’s 1971 building. This is entirely appropriate, given how the “Bilbao effect” has curdled, in some quarters, into the “Bilbao backlash,” whereby some people accuse globally prominent “starchitects” (such as Frank Gehry, builder of Bilbao) of designing museums that try to upstage the art they shelter.

Still, you don’t hire a firm like Herzog and de Meuron if you merely want your new building to ape another building. (Some grumble, for instance, about Cesar Pelli’s Minneapolis Public Library, which they feel is disappointingly similar—on the outside, anyway—to the building it has replaced.) So while the architects played it straight in the galleries, the rest of the expansion is a funhouse of odd and surprising angles, in stark contrast to the Barnes building’s severe rectangular forms.

A critical angle comes into play in the expansion’s main corridor along Hennepin Avenue. In this space, which connects the lobby and museum shop to a stairway and a gallery in the Barnes building, the floor is raked at the same angle as the public sidewalk outside, along Hennepin Avenue as it climbs Lowry Hill. The slope is remarkable, but not difficult to navigate, since the function of the space is to channel people from one place to another. In architectural terms, this is known as the “program,” and the “theme” of the program, as it were, is transparency. In layman’s terms: The architects want people outside to look inside and see what other people are doing—thus the double-paned glass curtain wall. The program for this corridor also includes lounging, as the space is called the Hennepin Lounge, not the Hennepin Corridor. (The prominence of lounges in the expansion brings to mind loitering people wearing aggressively interesting footwear and/or eyewear and/or Macintosh products, making very little eye contact.) To facilitate lounging, custom benches were designed with legs that are longer on one end to accommodate the angled floor. While some people will no doubt prefer the bucolic views from the garden lounge on the west side of the building, others will find it restful, in an airport-y kind of way, to sit in the Hennepin Lounge and watch vehicles jockeying to get over to the I-94 onramp. And if one foot touches the tilted floor while the other just barely dangles, consider it a subtle yet singular architectural experience.

So where the original Walker is all restraint and rectitude, the expansion aims for surprise—and a peculiarly simple type of sumptuousness. Consider the materials. The emblematic object of the Barnes building would have to be a purplish-brown brick, but several visual motifs run through Herzog and de Meuron’s expansion. Most prominent is its aluminum mesh skin (on a less fancy building this would be called “siding”), while inside are bursts of curvy, baroque latticework; gleaming Venetian plaster walls; and gorgeous chandeliers made from molten glass. Incidentally, most of these materials have been cleverly translated into exclusive merchandise for the museum shop.

Speaking of the museum shop, it, too, was supposed to have a tilted floor like that in the Hennepin Lounge—continuing that angled parallelism, if you will, with the city sidewalk outdoors. But that presented problems for the retail space, whose location in the expansion is as visible as the former was hidden. Stationary benches with mismatched legs are one thing, but merchandise tables, which shopkeepers move around regularly, would be a royal pain if they had angled bases. Then, too, there is the experience of the shopper to consider. Standing on the placidly horizontal floor in the museum shop, one can look out at the determined dynamism of the tilted floor in the Hennepin Lounge—and at the floor of the adjacent lobby, which is not so much a tilted plane as one that seems to fall away just a bit. To stand on such a floor can be slightly disorienting, an effect that is not conducive to comfort, which is crucial in encouraging consumerism. So design ideals did not fully give way to the duller demands of commerce; the architects merely raised the bottom line, so to speak. When you visit the museum shop, you will no doubt notice that in this space, it’s the ceiling that tilts.—Julie Caniglia

Neal Viemeister, a psychology professor at the University of Minnesota, can’t pinpoint exactly what prompted him to hire the Greek undergrad as a research assistant back in the 1970s. He searched his memory—“Well, John knocked at my door looking for research experience, which impressed me, that an undergraduate would be that motivated and courageous. He was a real nice guy and very bright. He somehow learned to program this ancient IBM 160 computer that was the size of a desk. He was intense, worked very hard. Yeah, he had a nice smile and the long hair, but so did everyone back then. About halfway through the year, he decided to go by his Greek name, Yanni, instead of John.”

Yanni, that mono-monikered musician/composer superstar whose multi-platinum recordings and videos (Live at the Acropolis is the second best-selling video of all time, you know) spell success in any language, is also the biggest enigma since Ed Sullivan. Can you hum a Yanni song? Can you name a Yanni song? Nope. You can’t even categorize his music, which seems like it should be some kind of standard for success (which award show to attend?). The half of the human race that isn’t out feverishly buying his CDs and wall calendars are collectively scratching their heads about how this guy got so darn popular. Yanni was here in Minnesota from 1972 until the mid 1980s at a budding stage of his life and, what, no one noticed early glimmerings of greatness? Wasn’t he turning heads and knocking people back with his star quality? Wouldn’t you think the other dishwashers at the Campus Club would have noticed Yanni Chryssomallis’s exquisite hair? That’s because he didn’t have that certain something yet. He acquired it in Psych 1001.

Now that he has wrapped up his winter tour, I feel prepared to offer my theory: Yanni, a naturally gifted musician, uses his undergraduate psychology degree to get into the vast prairies of the Minnesota collective mind. He memorizes the bucolic, nonoffensive terrain, and translates that metaphysical state into music. He synthesizes Minnesota, minus the slush, and makes millions.

First off, why go into psychology rather than music? Yes, Yanni is self-taught and never took formal lessons because that might have crushed his unique gift. Whatever. Psychology seems like a pretty good tool for getting at the Minnesota psyche. Of course, Auto Tech III is likely, too, but it doesn’t look as good on your résumé. Let’s review what his former teachers remember about Yanni: nice, nice, real nice, nice smile, and hardworking. Notice, not hot or charismatic or artistic or fantastically top-shelf talented or flamboyant. No. Nice.

Tom Paske, Yanni’s business manager from way back in the eighties hair-band days, says he is probably Yanni’s best friend. I wondered aloud why Yanni has struck pay dirt with electronic music when others haven’t. Many of his bandmates from Chameleon, a second-tier Twin Cities bar band, are still playing, some even in the new-age genre. They haven’t played the Taj Mahal or the Forbidden City. They haven’t been the official composer of the last two Olympic Games. How to account for this divergence of fortunes?

“No one does what Yanni does, that’s why,” said Paske. “No one creates the sound he does. No one puts world, classical, and rock elements together. He’s very very smart, very creative and absolutely unique.”

A couple weeks ago, the Xcel Center was packed for Yanni’s adoptive-hometown concert. The fans, averaging white and about forty-five years old, were orderly but rapt. A starship captain at the bridge, Yanni pushed buttons with much feeling. He flipped his mane, conducting the first-class crew as they took the audience on a breathless flight of classical violin, a rocking harp blast (you heard me), and a funky digideroo trip down under, to name just a few of his musical wanderings. These fans would not be found at the Minnesota Orchestra or the 400 Bar or the Blue Nile, but they’ve been lining up for Yanni for fifteen years. Like the Minnesota State Fair, there’s something for everyone at a Yanni concert.

Unscientifically, I fished for support for my Yanni-Minnesota theory, but evidence was circumstantial at best. Everyone was having a good time, but that occasionally happens outside Minnesota, too. No one vomited on me, but again maybe this is normal outside of Cheap Trick concerts. A moment of self-assessment revealed that I was enjoying myself and, like discovering a taste for Cheez Whiz, that worried me. I cast around for reasons for this “enjoyment.” A series of small strokes can never be discounted, but I was looking for something more sinister, more insidious. I turned to ask my friend, Barb, if she thought the haunting vocals and tribal rhythms reminded her at all of tater-tot casserole, but her eyes were all glazed over and she was smiling rosy-cheeked and clapping along. She appeared to be brainwashed. That’s all the proof I needed. That Yanni, he’s pretty darn good.—Sarah Barker

Dear Reader, in an effort to clear our accounts and our desks each March, we lay before you our laurels and our brickbats. (We noticed from the account books that we have gone through quite a few brickbats, without really knowing what a brickbat is, or where one might be obtained at a reasonable cost.)

We are proud of our many achievements over the years. You know, no government or private institution has ever been looted, thanks to our vigorous editorial policy. The availability of Chicago-style hot dogs is assured and sustainable. Ever notice how everyone stops courteously when a traffic light is on the fritz? This is the power of a pointed editorial during troubled times! We have also been staggeringly effective, we don’t mind saying, in keeping Whippy Dip stores in Iowa, where they belong.

Contrary to popular opinion derived from this astonishing record, though, The Rake’s influence is not unlimited. Here, in all modesty, we need to clear the air: We did not teach Fran Tarkenton how to scramble, although we certainly did not discourage him from doing it. We would have done everything within our power to stop the great disaster of the Third Avenue Bridge, but we were in traffic court when the City of Minneapolis built it. And despite expending great editorial resources on the matter, we have so far not succeeded in having Spoonbridge and Cherry moved to the city impound lot. (That garish yellow seventies sculpture, however—the one deposited at the farthest possible corner on the grounds of the Federal Reserve Bank? That was us.) We also wish now that we hadn’t cooperated in burning that last Minneapolis streetcar. (We were printed on highly flammable, uncoated paper at the time. Nostra maxima culpa!) We do say, though, that the recent troubling incursion of Asian attack carp has nothing to do with a small boat we keep moored in Northeast, nor the broken aquarium in the closet.

Never mind all that. Let’s try to focus on the good, people. With varying degrees of success, we have applied the full measure of our energy to the popularity of ice hockey, the proper care of Red Wing boots, the Brothers’ pastrami on rye, and that huge Long Island iced tea they used to serve at the Nankin. We have owned a secondhand purple blazer with Denny Hecker’s name embroidered in it.

One certainly cannot assess the success of a publication these days without mention of its “business operations,” and in this respect, we have far exceeded our modest editorial achievements. Our resistance to the “Best of the Twin Cities” issues, not to mention our refusal to print hundreds of alloy medallions and affix them to expensive sheets of congratulatory vellum, signed by our editor—well, there are signs that our efforts have slowly starved that particular illness. It has also saved our handwriting. The fever breaks, the sun rises, and all feel equal under the kind gaze of The Rake.

In other advertising news, we were still trying to land the Sliced Bread contract when it became the most popular campaign in memory—all on the rumor of a single quarter page sometime in the fiscal year! So powerful and relentless is our marketing muscle that the mere suggestion of an ad buy was enough to set off a panic in bakeries throughout the land. It was deemed unnecessary to go through the motions of actually printing that ad. Alas, the check was not tendered, either. The price one pays for being a pioneer!

People understandably want to know how we do it. Here is how: Paper, not plastic. Chocolate. Clarinets and tambourines. Rolling stops. Magic Markers. Big hair. AAA batteries. Yellow. Running in place. And of course, you, Constant Reader.

If you were a Minneapolis bohemian ten years ago, you might have found yourself packed into a downtown nightclub for what was then one of the city’s most popular bands, the Beatifics. Back then, the band was promoting its first album, How I Learned to Stop Worrying, a collection of gloomy love’s-lost lyrics and power-pop melodies. The now-legendary radio station Rev 105 was giving it a regular spin right up until the day Rev died, in 1996. As a result, track one—“Almost Something There,” a swell bubblegum anthem—had become a local hit with crusty hipsters and high school cheerleaders alike.

Since the demise of Rev 105, and thus of most programming of local music during waking hours, the Beatifics suffered a fall from radio grace. Their 2002 album, The Way We Never Were, fell on deaf ears at Drive 105 and Cities 97, the surviving corporate FM stations that feign devotion to local music. (The Beatifics remained darlings of the AM dial at the low-powered, student-run Radio K, God bless them.)

Their luck changed in late January when Minnesota Public Radio launched its new station, the Current. Beatifics frontman Chris Dorn and his friends report that the new station, staffed by some of the same Rev 105 personalities who championed his band’s first album, plays a song from How I Learned to Stop Worrying almost daily. (They don’t yet have Dorn’s second album in rotation. “I’ve been meaning to drop it by,” he said.)

Suddenly, Dorn’s music is being blasted again across the prairie on high-powered FM radio. This represents an opportunity to him and many other earnest musicians who wouldn’t otherwise be heard. In its early days, the Current aggressively worked to build a representative library of local music, one that reached beyond the Replacements and Soul Asylum (bands that somehow suffice to define the Minnesota sound farther down the dial). MPR staffers brought in their personal music collections, much of which was residual from Rev 105 days. They also called bands. They called promoters. They called distributors. They went shopping. Mary Lucia email-strafed all the musicians in her address book—all in a blanket effort to invite more local CDs. ’Twas certainly a fertile moment for musicians with stars in their eyes.

“The Current could make celebrities out of some local rockers,” said radio maven Jerry Steller, who owns a St. Paul-based promotion company that helps unsigned and indie bands get airplay. (Now that must be a long row to hoe.) Steller said there are a handful of stations like the Current in cities like Seattle, Santa Monica, and Philadelphia. Depending on their wattage and marketing might, these stations are freed from corporate playlists and can cultivate healthy music communities in their midst—replete with income-earning, recognized-by-fans-on-the-street musicians. In Steller’s estimation, the ninety-eight-thousand-watt Current has that potential, especially under the able watch of Minnesota Public Radio. “It’ll affect CD sales of local artists,” he predicted. “And a lot more people will go to shows.”

The Current is exhuming many other Rev 105 superstars, too, including Matt Wilson, Lifter Puller, and Dan Israel, who got misty about it when he appeared on Local Music with Chris Roberts, a recently added weekend show. At the same time, the station is fortifying post-Rev acts like Valet, the Olympic Hopefuls, and Atmosphere—a group so popular with concertgoers it surpassed the Replacements’ 1985 five-show-feat when it packed the Seventh Street Entry for seven days straight in January (but still hadn’t been played on a local commercial radio station). For flavor, the station also tosses in the occasional unlikely track from local jazz vocalist Prudence Johnson or folksinger Ann Reed. (This may be a consequence of forcing the square-pegged Morning Show with Dale Connelly and Jim Ed Poole into the station’s otherwise hip aesthetic. But it seems to work in the Current’s oddly felicitous iPod-on-shuffle way.)

Although Dorn is happy to be in the company of bands getting airplay, he’s sheepish about revealing his pipe dreams. When pressed, he conceded, “Yeah, it’s nice to have someone saying ‘We like your stuff. We wish you made more of it!’ And when a radio station plays your music five times a day and is constantly telling its listeners you have a show and then parks its van out in front of that show, you tend to bring in more people,” he said, pondering his Rev 105-induced stardom. “I wonder if MPR will get a van.”—Christy DeSmith

Some people find great pleasure in a roomful of antiques. Others wonder, not without their own selfish pleasure, who gets to do the dusting. In either case, ever since “Famous” Dave Anderson piled stoneware crocks, license plates, mounted deer heads, and loads of other vintage goods from his personal collection into his Linden Hills BBQ joint, the customers have been delighted—a crucial factor in the restaurant’s success.

Now, of course, Famous Dave’s is a publicly traded company (Nasdaq: DAVE) with more than a hundred restaurants across the country. (It has grown even more quickly than another homegrown chain, Buca, which makes liberal use of Italian kitsch in its décor.) Each one is bedecked as profusely with old-timey goods as the original restaurant. With still more franchises opening all the time, it would be perfectly reasonable to wonder: Where does all of this stuff—hundreds of enameled coffee pots; Paul Bunyan decanters by the dozen; seven-foot chainsaw-sculpture bears; heaps of snowshoes, fishing jackets, tobacco tins—come from?

The simple answer is Famous Dave’s headquarters in Eden Prairie. At the back of its corporate offices, past all of the gray-flannel cubicles, is a door leading to a massive, state-of-the-art warehouse. Thousands of square feet are filled with twenty-foot-high industrial shelves, which shelves are laden with umpteen carefully categorized and inventoried objects, which objects are destined to generate admiration, surprise, nostalgia, wonder, and other generally warm feelings in diners from Smithtown, Long Island, to Tempe, Arizona.

“A lot of people who come back to the restaurant want to sit in a different room each time, so that they can take in everything,” Dave Leach told a visitor the other day. He should know. As head of the décor and design department, Leach presides over Famous Dave’s warehouse of wonders, and has had a hand in decorating quite a few of those hundred-plus restaurants. (Business got brisk enough that he now has a partner, Greg Bartholomew, a former antiques dealer.) Leach is a man of few words, but after talking with him for a while it becomes apparent that he takes great pride in his work, and he’s aware that he has a brand of dream job.

When Leach gets word of a new Famous Dave’s, he first notes which model it will be: roadhouse shack, northwoods lodge, or the just-developed smokehouse design. Then he begins pulling items from the warehouse inventory, creating what he calls “vignettes” for the various restaurant spaces that evoke a farmhouse kitchen, a bait shop, an old-timer’s garage, a hunting shack or fish house, and so on. “It’s not just a display,” Leach said. “There’s a reason for everything to be where it is.” And a reason to stay there. To foil sticky fingers, each item on a shelf or in a cabinet gets glued down, from a Baby Ben alarm clock to a pickle jar of puzzle pieces. “Someone once ripped a decoy off a shelf,” said Leach. “They pulled so hard they took part of the shelf with it.” Once assembled, every last component, from a curio cabinet to salvaged church pews for the waiting area, gets shipped out from the warehouse.

The original Famous Dave’s décor has largely been translated to a series of formulas and templates, such that Leach can note offhand that twenty to twenty-four coffee pots get sent to each restaurant. But he and Bartholomew have leeway to add custom touches, such as Southwestern pottery for restaurants in Arizona, or Big Red memorabilia for those in Nebraska. (And if a sentimental franchisee wants to display a few of his own antiques, well, they’ll diplomatically integrate them.)

Leach maintains the inventory, every last item of which is tagged and registered in a database, with the help of a network of dealers and collectors in Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois, and elsewhere. Once a dealer has accumulated a sizable pile of stuff, someone from corporate retrieves it with a truck. Leach also attends the bigger circuit sales himself, most every weekend from March through October. “I still like to beat the bushes to find something unique that can really help make a restaurant,” he said. But there’s another secret to creating atmosphere at a Famous Dave’s restaurant. Not everything is real.

Leach takes what looks like a can of motor oil from a warehouse shelf. It is actually a carved block of wood that has been meticulously painted, right down to the intricate stipples of black and brown amid silver and red that evoke years of accumulated grease and dust. There are also “Aladdin Angler” prop Thermoses (real ones can fetch sixty dollars) whose lids, Leach says, are grocery-store takeout containers painted a shiny enamel red. The artists and craftsmen who create these fakes are world-class counterfeiters, but Leach is tight-lipped about them. Company secrets. In fact, he’s about as willing to reveal that information as he is eager to hear from people who want to sell their old stuff. In other words, don’t ring him up about the decoys you inherited from Grandpa. He’s got plenty, thank you.—Julie Caniglia

According to hundreds of billboards, bus sides, and direct mailings: Do.

Of course, you are already doing something. You are reading a billboard. As you do, you learn this is not enough in the doing department. You should “groove your body for ten minutes three times a day.” Grooving includes such agreeable activities as dog walking, skipping, and snowman building. It does not include reading. (Reading about the Do campaign in a magazine is, one hopes, a sort of awareness-building limbo.)

On the other hand, if this all sounds pretty unambitious to you, you’re probably not in the target market. Even as the Surgeon General is recommending sixty minutes of physical activity per American adult each day, it is Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota that is taking this more direct approach. It is aiming to get the most sedentary—and expensive—Minnesotans on their feet.

“Do is directed at people who aren’t physically active,” said Dr. Marc Manley. He is the director of Blue Cross’s Center for Tobacco Reduction and Health Improvement. That is the rather flat-sounding name of the organization responsible for these upbeat ads. “We’re trying to get them on something that’s manageable. We’re trying to help them understand that moving’s fun.” The campaign’s most guerilla feature is something Manley calls “decision prompts”—strategically placed ads that guilt-trip you into, say, taking the stairs instead of the escalator.

Some people are confused by the bite-sized exercise tips, which are communicated via billboards, television and newspaper ads, bus wraps, and “spectaculars” (that’s ad lingo for 3-D installations, most notably the mirror ball hanging above Block E). There is no indication on the billboards as to who is worried about their health. Blue Cross’s name does not appear anywhere on the billboards, although its logo does show up in newspaper and television versions, alongside its co-sponsor, the American Heart Association. Manley said, “We didn’t want to clutter it up.” As a result, many Do admirers assume it is a state-sponsored public service campaign.

So what’s in it for Blue Cross? Put simply, because fat people contract cancer and heart disease almost as often as smokers, the state’s largest health insurer claims to pay out the nose to treat the inactivity-related illnesses of an increasingly corpulent populace. It would seem, then, that Blue Cross’s strategy is to save money by spending; the company said it expects to save two dollars on health spending for every dollar spent on Do—with the fringe benefit of possibly improving the health of some people whom it does not insure. (By contrast, United Health Care—the Minnesota-based insurer that pays CEO William McGuire around $100 million per year—is apparently too hard-pressed to care about the public’s laziness.)

Dr. Manley’s office is, in fact, now the de facto public health arm of Blue Cross of Minnesota. It was founded in 1999 after the company, which was then preoccupied with smoking, successfully sued a group of tobacco companies. Blue Cross’s very public, very lucrative payout in that lawsuit compelled it to launch the center, which is wholly devoted to spreading good health across Minnesota.

As the center gained momentum over its first five years, a survey of the public-health situation revealed a landscape in which love handles are more pervasive than smoker’s cough. This inspired Do. The $6.7 million campaign—Blue Cross’s biggest initiative ever—buys a lot of billboards and bus shelters. It seems like an earnest effort rather than a perfunctory public-relations campaign, especially since all $460 million of Blue Cross’s tobacco settlement is still tangled up in litigation.

Manley won’t venture a guess as to when the tobacco settlement dollars will be available, but in the meantime, he said, the center won’t be twiddling its thumbs. “We’re going ahead as best as we can with health improvement programs, but not at the level we will once we can use those dollars,” he said. In other words, those commands to “groove your body,” as widespread as they seem, are just the beginning of what may be a permanent ad campaign nagging you to get off your duff. That huffing sound you now hear is the result of a sort of corporate body-groove: It is local ad agencies and media companies hyperventilating.—Christy DeSmith

Unless you happen to be as rugged as I am—which is, I realize, highly unlikely—you probably aren’t familiar with the Peakbaggers, a loose-knit but increasingly large group of highly motivated self-starters determined to scale the highest points of all fifty states (and, for the true completists among us, the District of Columbia).

The Peakbaggers also have an official sub-club, the Highpointers, who publish several fine guidebooks to help climbers in their quest. Peak bagging is, as you might imagine, an arduous, expensive, and frequently lonely hobby. Many of the high points are very high indeed (Alaska’s Mount McKinley is 20,320 feet), and require the sort of courage and mountaineering skill I haven’t yet mustered. I’m working my way up, though, and have already tackled Florida’s Britton Hill (345 feet), Mississippi’s Woodall Mountain (806 feet), Illinois’s Charles Mound (1,235 feet), and Minnesota’s own Eagle Mountain (2,301 feet). If my records are correct, I’ve so far bagged six or seven high points, and last year, in perhaps my most memorable and challenging summit experience to date, I managed to scale Hawkeye Point, the highest elevation in Iowa.

I started my trek to Hawkeye Point from Bigelow, Minnesota, which is, according to the sign just outside of town, the “Home of Swampy Days.” On the border with Iowa, southwest of Worthington, Bigelow is two miles north of Hawkeye Point. It is the launch site for most expeditions to Iowa’s summit. Folks in Bigelow have grown up in the shadow of the fabled Point, and the town’s guides and outfitters do a modest business. There is also a large ranch just outside of town where llamas can presumably be rented to haul gear from the base camp to the peak, and there is no shortage of stout local lads who are willing to provide this service as well.

I, however, was determined to make the climb solo, entirely unassisted, and without supplemental oxygen. I set out from Bigelow early in the morning under a bright and cloudless sky. According to conventional wisdom, there is a ten-week optimal window of opportunity for tackling Hawkeye Point—generally from late March through early June, after the threat of winter storms has passed and before the oppressive humidity of mid-summer in Iowa sets in. While I had a support vehicle along for my ascent, I had vowed to make the trip from Bigelow on foot, and sent my companions ahead to establish a base camp and begin emergency readiness preparations. After a relatively easy two-hour hike I arrived at the Donna and Merrill Sterler farm. The Sterlers are corn and soybean farmers, and Hawkeye Point is located in the north-central corner of their 187-acre tract. There are very few high points in the United States that are situated on private property, and the Sterlers were entirely ignorant of the fact that they were living on the roof of Iowa until Merrill encountered surveyors nosing around his farm in 1970.

These men were members of an official state topographical expedition assigned the arduous task of locating Iowa’s high point. Months of difficult work came to a startling conclusion that day on the Sterler farm, as the surveyors, trudging through the fierce winds that have foiled many subsequent expeditions to Hawkeye Point, planted their flag on the summit and pronounced themselves satisfied that they had reached their goal. Their findings, however, would not be official until 1972, when Hawkeye Point—at 1,670 feet—received formal acknowledgement as the highest elevation in all of Iowa.

After stopping briefly to chat with Mrs. Sterler, who was preparing lunch and has lived on the property virtually all of her life (her parents moved to town in 1946, she says, but six years later Donna and her husband, then recently married, settled back in at the old family home and resumed farming), I set out for Hawkeye Point. The trek ended at the summit, three hundred yards from the back door, and took me across grassy terrain that required navigating around a few rocks and patches of spring mud. I had to pause just below the Point to catch my breath, and there was one brief, harrowing moment when I lost radio contact with my support staff (which was hunkered down in a Subaru station wagon on a gravel road one-eighth of a mile from the summit).

I had no sooner reached the U.S. geological survey marker that officially signals the highest point in Iowa when dark clouds began to roll in and the wind began to pick up, carrying sharp granules of dirt and the whiff of ammonium fertilizer. The always-temperamental Point allowed me one brief but unforgettable vista of fields stretching away far into the distance.

Before I began my hurried descent I took time to sign the official logbook, and noted (with considerable and—if I dare say—justifiable pride) that each year fewer people successfully attempt Hawkeye Point than climb Mount Everest.

—Brad Zellar

Minnesotans have every reason to be proud of the numerous smoking bans on the way for bars and restaurants in municipalities throughout the state. After all, the clean-air initiatives associate us with such enlightened populations as the city of New York, the state of California, and even the entire country of Ireland, where the average pub once trapped air as thick as a good stout. The ashtray may go the way of the spittoon.

Or maybe not. Once the peculiar vice of baseball players, ranchers, and unruly teenage boys, chewing tobacco is now being positioned as the cigarette substitute of choice for urban hipsters. (Yes, for women, too.)

One highly sissified, minty-flavored “smokeless tobacco” has been advertising energetically in alternative weekly newspapers here and elsewhere. These ads have typically been two-page campaigns where a dilemma is identified on the first page. For example, Metrosexual Joe watches the Big Game at the local sports bar with his buddies. He is galled because he must either skip his nicotine fix or miss the action as he and his cigarettes decamp to the parking lot. But turn the page and—voila—a fat dip of Skoal is the answer to his prayers. Now he doesn’t have to miss a single play or dose. It’s like TiVo for your bloodstream.

Of course, Skoal also gives metrosexuals increased exposure to oral cancer and cardiovascular disease, along with decreased exposure to members of the opposite sex, who will surely look askance at that black wad in a petitioner’s teeth as he tries to score a phone number. It is no improvement in the breath category, either.

Joni Jensen, a project manager at the University of Minnesota’s Transdisciplinary Tobacco Use Research Center, said chew is a trend we should hope to avoid. “Smokeless tobacco in and of itself is less harmful than cigarettes, but it’s still not risk-free,” she said. “If it’s being advertised to be used not as a substitute to cigarettes but in addition to cigarettes, you’re actually increasing your risk. If people who might have quit because of the smoking bans are instead marketed into using a smokeless tobacco product, it’s going to have a negative public health effect.”

Jensen noted that smokeless tobacco is actually more addictive, because it gives the brain a steady buzz of nicotine rather than the quick spike and slow letdown provided by a cigarette, and the new “starter flavors” (apple, berry, vanilla) clearly indicate a product trying to appeal to a new market segment.

Then there’s the problem of secondhand saliva. Chewing tobacco waned in popularity in the early 1900s when it was banned in public due to fear of exacerbating a tuberculosis outbreak. And besides, it’s just gross. “Anybody who’s ever picked up a Coke can that somebody’s been spitting into and thought it was theirs would complain about the exposure to secondhand saliva,” Jensen said.

But Jon Schwartz, an enthusiastic spokesman for U.S. Smokeless Tobacco Company, said the days of spit-filled bottles at bars will soon be a thing of the past, thanks to something called Revel. It is a new smokeless tobacco product that’s being test-marketed in Charlotte, North Carolina, and Dallas, Texas.

“Revel is a blend of premium, one hundred percent American tobacco that comes in mint and wintergreen,” said Schwartz, apparently reading directly from the company’s website. “It’s a small, discreet white packet, smaller than a piece of gum, and adult consumers can place it anywhere in their mouth where it’s comfortable and quickly enjoy tobacco satisfaction.” (Yes, he really talks like this.) “And many adult consumers who use it don’t feel the need to expectorate—or spit. That makes it a little more attractive to use.”

But is it any safer to use than Skoal? Or cigarettes? “Oh, we don’t make health claims,” Schwartz nervously pointed out. “That’s not something that we do as a company. Our objective as a company is to expand our category. There are millions of adult smokers in the U.S., and that universe of adult tobacco users is an opportunity to reach a new audience.” As anyone knows, it will not be identified as a serious new trend until Ikea starts stocking polyethylene spittoons.

—Patrick Donnelly