Category: Article

In the past three weeks, I’ve been browsed 253 times, though I wonder if that number includes the twice-daily peek I take at my own profile, like a quick glance in the mirror as I pass by. Tickle.com first lured me to its domain with a promise to rate my intelligence. While other indicators have given me a good read on my own mental candlepower (solid annual report cards, successfully playing along with Jeopardy!, a decent employment exam at Outback Steakhouse), recent unspectacular GRE results had left me wounded. Forty multiple-choice clicks later, I was back up there where I belong, “extremely higher than average.” I was identified as a “facts curator” in the company of geniuses like Bill Gates. My self-esteem in good repair, I got briefly addicted and dug up every other Tickle quiz I could find: the “Ultimate Personality Test” (Observer—kind-hearted, intuitive, good mediator); the “Values Test” (Loyal Rebel—honors relationships and truth-telling); the “What Breed of Dog are You?” test (Chihuahua—energetic, devoted, and passionate). I ended my binge of self-love with the “Confidence Test” (Your Confidence Level is High!)

Tickle founder James Currier said the idea for his website came to him in a 1998 Harvard Business School class. After he and his peers took a career personality test, he noticed a dramatic improvement in their interpersonal relationships. “Everyone is interested in themselves,” he said. Perhaps it is true that you must first love yourself before you can love others.

Tickle’s quizzes are divided into “Fun tests” (Who’s your TV Family? How Hip are You?) and “Ph.D. Premium” tests. The latter deal with serious topics like “Relationship,” “Career,” and “Personality.” Tickle claims that these little exams are “Ph.D.-certified.” By this, they mean they are “the highest-quality and most-scientific tests available on the Internet, meeting standards on par with the academic world,” said a Tickle spokeswoman named Christy Albright. “Each test takes five to ten months to design, construct, validate, and launch.” If a solid record of profitability and a recent ninety-four-million-dollar acquisition by Monster.com are any indication, Tickle is doing something right. While the site gives away teaser test results, it makes bank through in-depth Ph.D. analyses, a plethora of pop-ups, and emailing priveleges in the “Matchmaking” domain, which I succumbed to in order to contact a certain blond jokester.

Ty Tashiro, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota, is skeptical of Tickle’s methods and claims. “Most licensed psychologists would question the ethics of giving psychological feedback with no expert around to explain or work with the results,” he said. He would say that. Still, this may explain Tickle’s consistently positive feedback, which, in my experience, is not at all “on par with the academic world.” At best, Tickle provides keen insight into the human psyche; at worst, it is a high-tech fortune cookie.

After my last real-world relationship dissolved, I leapt from Tickle’s self-indulgent quizzes to its “Matchmaking” area. Time to move beyond self-love. The good news was, I could take my test results with me. I created a profile and filled out the TrueMatch questionnaire, well on my way to discovering love matches. Searching my digital archives, I found just the right photo to present myself as attractive, charming, and hip. It would be my passport to love.

While getting acquainted with the bells and whistles on Tickle’s matchmaking service, I requested a Chemistry Report with myself. I was greeted with the headline, “Will tdapra and tdapra sizzle or fizzle?” There was my photograph, posted twice, side by side, each over-the-shoulder gaze looking out through the computer screen with a mix of intrigue and playfulness. I looked like a pair of sassy identical twins. According to Tickle,

What will make you sizzle:
Feeling safe and comfortable
Frequent relationship check-ins
Someone’s who’s interested in making
the relationship unique
Someone’s who’s equally excited by the
world around you

What will make you fizzle:
Getting too comfortable in a rut (We have
been watching a lot of “Everybody Loves Raymond” reruns.)
Your partner needing to check in on feelings
a lot (We thought this was a good thing!)
Getting confused about who does what in
the relationship (Yes, this could be a problem with us.)
Butting heads (There’s that Loyal Rebel factor.)

Over the next couple of weeks, I exchanged emails with a half-dozen guys (for a monthly fee of $19.95) and met one for coffee. While passing notes with electronic admirers gave me something to look forward to while checking my in-box, meeting in person proved to be less than spectacular. After my first cup-of-something-warm encounter, I returned home, ever so glad to be back in the company of myself (“feeling safe and comfortable”). I turned on my computer and immediately checked my email for more potential love matches. When I browsed my list of Tickle favorites, I caught a glimpse of my photo and noticed the little orange fuel gauge above it at full capacity. “Compatibility rating: 100%.” I clicked on “Chat with me,” and a laughing blue box popped up. “Unfortunately,” it read, “you cannot chat with yourself.”—Tara DaPra

It’s February, and if you aren’t carbo-loading for the Birkebeiner, then you could be carbo-loading on behalf of your local public broadcaster. Can it be long before the next round of pledge drives hits the airwaves? The last time this happened, I volunteered all over town to sample the culture and the carbohydrates.

First I went to KFAI, the little community radio station on the West Bank, where I sometimes have a show. When I arrived, another woman and a man (not a couple, forty-something) were already there to volunteer. They wore jeans and sweaters. It was early on a weekday morning so, naturally, I was still in my pajamas. No one seemed to mind. With its natural light and the smell of good, strong coffee, KFAI’s war room was a lot like my neighborhood coffee shop; there were books of poetry (written by an on-air host) for volunteers to take home. There was one small card table, and all three of us sat around it, talking about films, restaurants, and the changing Twin Cities scene. And we answered the phone. Between calls, we’d eat bagels and homemade coffee cake. My best call came from a woman at a violin repair shop, who can’t receive KFAI’s signal unless she turns off the lights. One of my two fellow volunteers said she was having such a good time that she planned to come back next week.

Next up: Minnesota Public Radio. On this weekday morning, there were maybe twenty volunteers. The youngest looked to be about thirty, and more than a few were probably in their seventies. A few of us wore grubby jeans, but most dressed in workplace casual. MPR’s vibe is very office-like. We started with a twenty-minute presentation on filling out pledge forms, conducted by a woman using a pointer. After the lecture, we filed into a room with one window and about thirty cubicles—stopping first for food. The spread was strictly breakfast-meeting: bagels, pastries, fruit, and coffee, although I was happy to see I didn’t have to use non-dairy creamer. I found a cubicle and struck up a conversation with my neighbor, a freelance classical musician who’s been volunteering at MPR for years. He remembered taking pledges sitting at a table in the hall and said, “Cubicles are much better,” which is something I never thought I’d hear someone say. Like me, he must need a fix of office life every once in a while. In fact, I found myself longing nostalgically for happy hour, with free nachos and all the chicken wings I could eat after a long day driving the mouse.

Meanwhile, I talked with my neighbor about skiing and I answered the phone. I took a call from a man making a sizeable pledge in memory of his stepson, who was murdered in St. Paul. I got up to check out the freebies, mostly books on financial planning. “‘Sound Money’ must have weeded out their library,” my neighbor said when I came back with a book on retirement options.

My last stop was Twin Cities Public Television. It was a Saturday night, and I felt a little out of place in a group of about forty people, mostly in their sixties and seventies, wearing pressed slacks and pressed sweaters. I even spotted my first Christmas sweater of the 2004 holiday season. Since we were seated at two long tables and could talk only to our immediate neighbors, answering phones at TPT was a lot like those dinners with relatives I see only once a year. The conversation focused on the weather, winter driving, the shortage of flu shots, and local television personalities. Unlike a family dinner, everyone at the table could simultaneously surf the web and talk on the phone. My best call was from a woman who worried that her premium might include the disco ball clearly visible on that evening’s programming. I was able to talk her down from this harrowing emotional ledge.

When it was time for food at TPT, I have to admit that I expected green bean casserole and Jell-O salad. But the spread was totally slumber-party: pizza, ice cream, and popcorn. The staff contributed to the family-room atmosphere, drawing names out of a hat for the freebies. A woman next to me got a Sesame Street T-shirt, which she traded with her neighbor for a video of a Sarah Brightman special. They were both happy.
—Maria Rubinstein

One of the upsides of not being a serious athlete is that you can feel a little less guilty about smoking and drinking with impunity. But you can always count on certain subcultural elements to contradict even that plain truth. Bike couriers, for example. They seem to take special pleasure in doing everything, well, extreme. While a credible courier would never use that word (uncool), there is no other that adequately describes the lifestyle. A fifty-mile ride on a single-speed bike without brakes; a twelve of Pabst; a pack of American Spirits. These are core competencies.

“I don’t want to work in a box breathing recycled air. And I don’t want to drive in a box to get to that box,” said Christian Klempp the other day. He was summing up why he’s been sweating it as a Minneapolis bicycle courier and “alley cat” bike racer for the past eight years. When Klempp isn’t spinning across town with legal or architectural documents for the messenger company he co-owns, he is planning Minneapolis’s biggest alley-cat event, the Stupor Bowl.

These races are the unofficial sport of messengers everywhere: part athletic feat, part scavenger hunt, and—for those seeking the overall Stupor Bowl title—part drinking game. The eighth annual bowl is slated for the wintry Saturday of the big football game, February 5, and the hometown team always hopes for the worst possible weather. “Couriers come from all over, and we want them to see the conditions we have to work in,” said Klempp.

A large number of these courier-contestants, along with being game for your surreptitious Sno-Ball and malt liquor ingesting competition, are also smokers. Fred Eisenberey, an eighteen-year courier veteran and smoker, said “probably forty percent” of his colleagues are puffers. “It’s significantly higher than the general population.” Any random day outside Nicollet Mall’s Dunn Brothers coffee shop gives visual confirmation that these everyday athletes light up in high numbers.

In fact, the numbers were high enough to entice Canadian cigarette maker Dunhill to sponsor the Vancouver alley cat known as the Human Powered Rollercoaster in the mid-nineties. “The registration packet even included a pack of Dunhill cigarettes,” said Klempp, reminiscing about the days when tobacco manufacturers could still sponsor sporting events without shame.
Though Eisenberey concedes that smoking is part of the rebel image of the bike-messenger industry, he wishes he’d never started. He has been rolling his own for the past quarter-decade in an effort to avoid toxic glues and additives. Still, he bristles at any suggestion that he kick the habit. “Minnesota is such a ‘mommy state,’ where absolutely nothing is allowed. I mean, it took someone like Jesse Ventura to finally let us play with sparklers. Everyone here knows what is better for me, but I don’t think smoking has slowed me down much.”

It would seem that Eisenberey hasn’t been taking it slow at all. In addition to bicycling all day and in all weather, he is an active underwater hockey player and snorkeler. “I have an above-average lung capacity and always have. I’m known for spending a lot of time on the bottom of the pool. I really don’t think smoking has been as harmful to me as overeating or drinking too much.”
Smoking is not a pastime shared by many other athletes. Jay, a half-pack-a-day smoker who wished to be identified only by his first name, holds an impressive 3:14 time in the Twin Cities Marathon and doesn’t see other long-distance runners smoking at events. “It is not really the venue or location to smoke. The two activities do not go hand in hand, for obvious reasons.” Still, he occasionally lights up while waiting in line to get his race bib, just for the sadistic pleasure of seeing fellow racers clear a wide and outraged berth. “It’s obvious” that his times would be better if he never smoked, he says. But what isn’t so clear is the effect of all that healthy cardiovascular exercise on a serious smoker. Is it possible that all that vigorous exercise could somehow reverse the ill effects of continued smoking? In other words, could one cancel out the other?w

Dr. Mark Johns, a physician at St. Mary’s in Duluth, said, “I am not aware of any studies that directly address this question; however, it is interesting to note that there is data to support the use of pulmonary rehab in patients with emphysema.” While the research work from the American Thoracic Society does not indicate a survival benefit for smokers who exercise, it does show promise for an improved quality of life. So what does this mean to jocks who do indulge in smokes? Dr. Johns interpreted the data like this: “You’ll die just as soon. But hey, you’ll be happier until that day comes.”—Lucie Amundsen

Lakewood Cemetery, situated between Lake Calhoun and Lake Harriet in South Minneapolis, is a place of big lawns and grand monuments. It is one of the city’s fanciest and most meticulously maintained community spaces. Indeed, it holds the graves of some of our state’s most prestigious former citizens, including Hubert Horatio Humphrey, Paul and Sheila Wellstone, Les Kouba, and Tiny Tim, among a whole lot of Washburns, Pillsburys, and others.

But it’s also the site of a little-known though equally inspiring local treasure: the domed and tiled Lakewood Memorial Chapel. Completed in 1910, it is described by some as the “most perfect example of Byzantine mosaic art in the United States.”

Now, a person can’t just trot up the steps and sashay inside. That would be rather too casual for Lakewood. Instead, visitors must stop by the office near the cemetery’s front gates and ask permission. A member of the staff, friendlier and more obliging than you might expect, then calls over to the crematory, located beneath the chapel, and somebody trudges up the stairs to unlock the door and flip on the lights. And there you are, alone in one of the most gorgeous interiors in Minneapolis.

The walls and ceilings appear to be made of light and color. Every square inch of them. And they are, in fact, adorned with more than ten million fingernail-sized tesserae: shards of marble, colored stone, and glass fused with gold and silver. This is the kind of place that once made people fall to their knees, mistaking beauty for God. Except that here, the symbolism is more earthy and less partisan than you’d find in a church, synagogue, or mosque. Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed make no appearances.

One alcove features a row of olive trees, known for their legendary healing properties; differently hued leaves represent the various stages of life. In each corner of the chapel’s largest room, female figures represent each of the four virtues—Love, Hope, Faith, and Memory. Even the shadows of their flowing robes are intricately rendered in tiles, as are their mood-appropriate expressions; Love looks straight ahead, Hope gazes upward, Faith looks off to the side, and Memory peers downward, hand to cheek. She seems a bit forlorn, as Memory should.

The chapel was planned at the turn of the century by Minnesota architect Harry Wild Jones and New York designer Charles R. Lamb, in order that Lakewood, founded in 1871, should have a suitable site for funerals. The exterior is modeled on the Haghia Sophia, the domed church built in the sixth century by Emperor Justinian in what is now Istanbul. The interior is inspired by Venice’s ornate San Marco Cathedral. In fact, when it came time to create the mosaics, Lamb traveled to Rome and hired six of Italy’s finest tile artists—they’d just completed a project in the Vatican. In Venice, they crafted the tesserae by hand, attached them to gummed cloth, and shipped them to Minneapolis. Then, in 1909, the artists arrived in person to assemble the chapel’s interior mosaics.

As you sit on one of the dozen or so wooden benches, your eye is drawn upward, into the dome. Here, your deepest and most churlish thoughts are captured by the butterfly wings of twelve gilded angels who wear brilliantly colored garlands, gowns, and halos. The intricacy of the ceiling makes it seem infinite; it reminds me of trying to count stars on a black country night. Encircling the dome are twenty-four stained-glass windows, which throw a soft glow on the angels. They also serve as a sundial, telling astute observers not only the time, but also the time of year.

It is a remarkable feat, an ingenious creation that mingles layers of meaning with stunning visual appeal. It leaves one feeling both contemplative and inspired, but not the least bit oppressed. Yet, strangely, sadly, hardly anybody ever sees this chapel, except at funerals for the city’s favored sons and daughters. “If this chapel were somewhere in Europe, thousands of Americans would visit it each year,” wrote a rhapsodic journalist in 1931. “Never have we seen anything to equal it in this country.”—Jennifer Vogel

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In August of 1953, the American painter Beauford Delaney was aboard the ocean liner Liberté, bound for Paris, the city in which he would spend the rest of his life. The ship’s purser asked Delaney if he wouldn’t mind regaling the other passengers with some jazz standards. Delaney, it seems, had written “artiste” on his travel papers—which implied that he was a performer. If he chafed at the assumption that any black artist must necessarily be a jazz singer, Delaney didn’t record it in his journal. Instead, he obligingly (and drunkenly) sang “Old Man River” for his well-heeled fellow travelers. But then again, Delaney wasn’t a man unused to performing for the white world: As an artiste, his most vivid creation was himself.

Delaney, whose work is currently the subject of a major retrospective at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, has slowly been creeping back into fashion decades after he died, penniless and largely unknown, in a French insane asylum. Such a critical rehabilitation is well overdue: Delaney is blazingly good—if more than a little perplexing.

Part of what’s confounding about Beauford Delaney: From New York to Paris—which includes portraits and streetscapes, as well as the wild abstractions for which Delaney is best known—is that it seems to include the work of at least a half-dozen artists, each with his own distinct style and lineage. Delaney’s essentially chameleonic nature makes it nearly impossible to place him in any sort of art historical tradition. On the evidence of a 1958 piece like Abstraction (Autumn), in which whorls of red and yellow imply dense autumn foliage, you’d swear he fit best with the Abstract Expressionists. Then again, the playful, squiggly brushstrokes and bold colors of his wonderful 1946 Jazz Quartet suggest a painter under the spell of Matisse and Cézanne. Likewise, Delaney is difficult to classify according to any of the other usual categories. He was black, but moved with equal facility in both black and white circles; he was gay, but puritanical and self-conflicted about sexuality; he was American, but took much of his inspiration from Europe. Delaney’s restless, alchemical approach to painting makes one want to throw out those fussy taxonomies and just enjoy the damn stuff.

Delaney was born in Knoxville in 1901, the son of a former slave and a Methodist circuit-riding minister. Contrary to the later popular assumption that he was self-taught, Delaney actually apprenticed with an older painter in Knoxville, a Confederate apologist who specialized in landscapes. Later, this unlikely mentor facilitated Delaney’s formal art education at Boston’s Lowell Institute.

Life as an artist didn’t really begin for Delaney until he moved to New York in 1929, however. His welcome was not particularly warm; he was robbed of all his worldly belongings within a few hours of arriving in Harlem. In fact, because of his homosexuality, Delaney never felt comfortable in the relatively bourgeois milieu of Harlem’s black society. Instead, destitute and malnourished, he ended up in a decrepit Greenwich Village apartment. His was literally a cold-water flat: One winter, the pipes beneath the floor froze solid, and Delaney was hobbled by frostbite from walking on the frigid planks.

Even under such desperate circumstances, Delaney seems to have found time to befriend nearly every artist in New York. He was close with Henry Miller, acted as a kind of spiritual adviser to James Baldwin, and became at least acquainted with everyone from W.C. Handy and W.E.B. Du Bois to Anaïs Nin and Alfred Stieglitz. To them, Delaney was a smiling, gnomish eccentric; to Delaney, his friends were a source of money and food as much as companionship. Perhaps as a way to settle perceived debts, Delaney often painted flattering portraits of his friends and patrons. One of the finest in the MIA exhibit is his 1941 painting of a young James Baldwin, Dark Rapture. In it, a lithe and apparently nude Baldwin is posed as a classical Adonis in a sylvan setting. The colors—pastel purples and pinks, along with boldly deployed slashes of dark green—are pretty obviously influenced by van Gogh. The tone of the portrait, however, is pure Delaney: A sinuous intertwining of the erotic and the mystical, an adoration both spiritual and sexual.

In 1945, Miller wrote an essay about his painter friend, “The Amazing and Invariable Beauford Delaney.” Like a lot of Miller’s writing, it seems overheated; nevertheless, it made Delaney a Village celebrity. More than one acquaintance compared him to Joe Gould, a classic New York eccentric made famous by New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell. Mitchell’s description of Gould—“a blithe and emaciated little man”—could indeed have applied equally to Delaney. For his part, Delaney cultivated the reputation of a bohemian guru and a gentle, Buddha-like sage. Even frequent episodes of sweaty, drunken delirium became part of his put-on persona (in addition to being a serious alcoholic, Delaney was likely an undiagnosed schizophrenic). There’s an often-repeated story about Baldwin and Delaney walking down the street in New York. Delaney pointed out a pool of filthy water in the gutter, iridescent with gasoline. When Baldwin didn’t see anything, Delaney said, “Look again.” Finally, Baldwin saw the shimmering reflection of the city. That same dreamy transfiguration of New York comes through in streetscapes like Delaney’s 1940 Greene Street. Here, the grimy workaday elements of the city—a manhole cover and sewer grate, for instance—are rearranged in a floating Kandinsky-esque dream landscape.

Given how Delaney responded to the vibrant environs of Greenwich Village, it’s hard to understand why he chose to leave America in 1953. Maybe he was seeking the racial and sexual egalité that Baldwin and Miller seemed to have discovered in Europe. Or maybe he intuited that his art was out of step with the macho primitivism that characterized the exploding New York art world: While Jackson Pollock and his fellow Abstract Expressionists were creating an art fit for the rhythm of American industry and the violence of the A-bomb, Delaney’s work remained suffused with the gentle grace of an Old Master. Or perhaps, as his journal suggests, Delaney originally intended to return to New York, but simply liked Paris so much that he decided to stay.

Paris has, of course, always represented some sort of resplendent Shangri-La—a “moveable feast,” in Hemingway’s words—to American artists. In Oscar Wilde’s memorable quip, it’s the place good Americans go when they die (bad Americans go to America, naturally). That wild bohemian Paris of Hemingway and Gertrude Stein was already a faded myth by Delaney’s time, but the air of Old World grandeur still clung to the city in the American imagination. Artists certainly weren’t chasing their muse to Akron or Frankfurt. Unlike Baldwin and Miller, however, Delaney thought of himself less as an exile than as a traveler. An exile, after all, carries the memories of home with him wherever he goes; a traveler maintains a passionate, childlike openness to the experience of a new place. In his journal, he recorded his first impression of France: “the light inscrutable, eternal, serene, wordless, yet sovereign, moving yet still including all things, silencing all things.” The light in Paris seems, in fact, to have triggered his most radical self-reinvention.

Not that his life was any easier in Paris: Delaney’s garret in Montparnasse was every bit as tumbledown as his New York quarters had been. He still relied on friends for food and money. At one point, in fact, he was so destitute that he turned his raincoat into a canvas (the painting he made from it is cleverly displayed at the MIA so that you can see the coat pocket on the reverse side). But the paintings he made in Paris are so unlike anything he’d done before that it’s hard to believe they were done by the same person: Almost purely abstract, these giant canvases are exp
losions of color. The sprays and squiggles of soft blues and warm reds give the heavily worked pieces an almost quilt-like texture. But unlike the similarly Expressionist paintings of Jackson Pollock, there’s nothing violent or aggressive about them.

One of these pieces is named for Charlie Parker’s “Yardbird Suite,” and it has the same cool, intellectual precision as that exemplary piece of music. During his time in Paris, Delaney also fell under the spell of Monet—particularly the now-famous water lily paintings displayed at the Orangerie, which Monet painted during his blind dotage. Delaney’s late abstractions have that same admixture of melancholy and serenity. Beneath their heavily worked surfaces and turbulent colors, these paintings work a synesthetic magic: Merely to be in a room with them is to feel Delaney’s beatific calm.

Delaney’s life didn’t end after a peaceful and prosperous old age, unfortunately. In the grip of worsening dementia, he took to wandering his Paris neighborhood, a wraith-like figure supported only by the few of his surviving friends who still lived in the city. But even knowing that his mind was probably slipping from its moorings as he painted his abstractions can’t diminish their radical freshness. If his subsequent tumble into obscurity seems like an unjust fate for an artist who probably should have been considered in the first rank of American painters, c’est la vie. In a weird way, it may even be the very qualities that made Delaney such a baffling cipher during his lifetime—his restless, protean approach to life and art-making, as well as his openness to influences both American and European—give the MIA’s retrospective its frisson of discovery. How else could you label such a vagabond spirit except as an American original?

Guy Nelson, Guy Nelson–someone please tell us why we’re stuck on this Guy’s name. He’s certainly making a splash at SooVAC, having filled its space–no mean feat–with a host of found-object sculptures and five large-scale paintings. We were drawn to the paintings’ mix of abstraction and primitive/cartoonish representation, along with their goofy titles and a great Pepto-Bismol shade that Nelson seems to favor, but his sculptural provocations based around phalluses failed to strike a chord. (Do penises still shock the young folks?) What did resonate were works like the Dada-ish Inside a Supermodel’s Leg; and Sweet Jesus! a bust of the Son of God made from sticky red licorice that necessarily recalls Marc Quinn’s notorious self-portrait bust made from his frozen blood. Overall, the show is playful, but with a darkly humorous bite: HISSSS features a trike towing a cheerful garland of plastic flowers, among which stuffed rattlesnakes are hidden. 2640 Lyndale Ave. S., Minneapolis; 612-871-2263; www.soovac.org