The Rake Magazine

Category: Article

  • He Wanted To Be “Really Evil.”

    Ed Morrissey is terse, never letting a sentence extend beyond fourteen words. A typical example: “Shithead. You swing on me again, I’ll kill your sorry ass.” Ed Morrissey is garrulous—as political director at Blogtalk radio, he interviews some of the most prominent members of the conservative movement, his voice a slightly less nasal version of Wallace Shawn’s. A typical example, from the conclusion of a recent broadcast: “Steven, thank you for being here … if you’re going to be in the Twin Cities, you have to let me buy you a beer, buy you dinner … Let’s do Manny’s, that would be great!” Ed Morrissey has a remarkable thatch of dark curly hair. Ed Morrissey is bald. An investigator remarked, “Maybe in the end he’s the kind of guy nobody cares much about alive or dead.” He has a wife, a son, and a granddaughter.

    In spite of these data, Morrissey seems to have neither the type of existential crisis nor the type of psychological condition that one might expect. He is a fictional character. He is a real person.

    About two years ago, Morrissey (the real person) was the winning bidder at a benefit auction. What he’d bid on was the opportunity to have his name attached to a character in a mystery novel by William Kent Krueger, a local author who’s garnered a national fan base with his series featuring Cork O’Connor, an ex-Chicago cop turned P.I. who lives in the north woods of Minnesota. (All that was said was that Morrissey paid a “pretty penny.”) Shortly after the event, Krueger asked whether Morrissey wanted to be a good guy or a bad guy in his next novel. “Oh,” Morrissey answered. “Really evil.”

    Thunder Bay came out a few weeks ago. In it, Morrissey plays a dutiful pawn, and the plot quickly leaves him behind. Still, there is a certain enduring quality about his presence in the book; the effects of a punch he lands on the protagonist—“a blow like a cannonball”—are brought up so frequently they become a theme. He is a character so mean-spirited, so loyal to his personal iniquity, that he leaves a visceral impression on the reader. One almost wishes he actually existed. Eventually, the fictional Morrissey is shot through the right eye.

    Aside from the fact that both Morrisseys populate unreal realms—one, the dramatized version of Thunder Bay, Canada; the other, the blogosphere—there is really no similarity at all between them. The real one, whom Krueger describes as “a teddy bear of a guy,” bid mostly for the charitable benefits, and had no input or influence on his character’s development. “I just hoped [he] would be better looking than me,” Morrissey said. He says he has not been affected by his role in the book, nor does he feel any guilt or responsibility for his counterpart’s violent tendencies.

    Krueger has put character names in his books up for auction on a number of occasions. “Most mystery conventions have a charitable component,” he said; in Morrissey’s case, the organization that received the auction proceeds is called Twin Cities Marriage Encounter, whose mission is to “nurture and support the marriage of a man and woman and their family life by offering an opportunity to experience a deep and loving communication with each other and with God.” “That was simply another good cause I thought might benefit in this way,” said Krueger. (Full disclosure: Morrissey is president of the Marriage Encounter organization.)

    The broader literary world, always in need of ways to connect with its public, has picked up on this idea. Stephen King, Michael Chabon, Dave Eggers, Daniel Handler (a.k.a. Lemony Snicket), Neil Gaiman, and several other writers of note have all put forthcoming names of various characters and entities in their books up for auction, with the proceeds to be donated to charities. (You can bid for them on eBay.) Morrissey paid for the opportunity to be someone evil; in the case of Stephen King, one lucky bidder will pay to be a murder victim.

    This purchasing of character names raises a question, though. Aside from benevolent motivations, why pay good money for this privilege if one’s fictional namesake is only that—if this character is devoid of any of one’s personal characteristics? Is it possible that, even within the most magnanimous among us (a category that would seem to include Ed Morrissey, who exudes sincerity in a form rarely experienced these days, and who refers to his wife as his First Mate), there is still that (very small, probably subconscious) desire to be part of something larger (and possibly more glamorous) than oneself? Regardless of how remote—or nonexistent—the resemblance between the fictional and the real? It’s not such a selfish urge—rather, it’s an instinct not much different from what makes one pick up a book in the first place: that hope for minor, personal transcendence.

    “It’s an honor to be cast as a villain,” Morrissey said. Next time, he said, he might make a bid on behalf of his First Mate.

  • Running Against Type

    The idea of a footrace in North Minneapolis seems to inspire two reactions from residents of other neighborhoods: incredulity and concern. “Do you want to get mugged?” “Are you wearing a flak jacket?” And, of course, the simplest question: “Why?”  

    It is no secret that North Minneapolis has a reputation as one of the most dangerous places in the metropolitan area. Which is precisely what several local nonprofit organizations had in mind when they conceived the first annual Go! Northside 5K run, held a few weeks ago. A press announcement advertised that the course would be set in “one of the most blighted neighborhoods in Minneapolis, an area with high levels of crime and home foreclosures.” Not exactly typical terrain for a recreational road race. “A majority of our supporters are from the suburbs, and a lot of 5Ks are run out in the suburbs,” said Ryan Petersen, development director for Urban Homeworks, an affordable-housing organization that co-sponsored the race. “But then we figured we might as well do it in the neighborhood where we do most of our work.”

    The neighborhood surrounding North Commons Park, where the race’s starting and finish lines were located, did not appear particularly blighted—to the contrary, it seemed quaint on the sleepy and quiet Saturday morning of race day. Then a local drum corps shattered the morning silence. Some runners bobbed to the beat. Others were less than enthusiastic. “Ugh,” said a fifty-ish man, checking his watch and adjusting his singlet. “Grandma’s [Marathon] has thousands of runners and even they manage to start on time. We’re gonna be ten minutes late here!”

    The Go! Northside 5K drew more than two hundred participants—a modest but respectable draw for an inaugural race (though many wore T-shirts that identified them as members of teams from Urban Homeworks or the PEACE Foundation, two of the race’s sponsoring organizations). There was a 5K somewhere in the Twin Cities area every weekend this summer; why did runners choose this particular race? Certainly the cause of community-building in a beleaguered neighborhood was a worthy one, but also attached to it, as Petersen’s comment suggested, was the opportunity to see a place considered by many to be dangerous from the safety of a group of people, in a supervised setting.

    Whatever drew the runners, spectators were scarce. Some might think that a largely white pack of runners passing through a predominantly non-white neighborhood, one whose streets probably never have been blocked off for a road race, would draw onlookers; however, the majority of them were actually race marshals: officials in blaze-orange vests who mark the route and assist injured runners. With one at each intersection, this made for a strangely deserted course.

    The few other spectators were accidental—people out on their daily business as the runners trickled by. An elderly man stopped his lawnmower, pulling it back from the street so as to not spray the athletes with clippings. A man carrying groceries stopped and stared, greeting the runners’ waves and hellos with silence. A woman came outside in her robe and surveyed her car-free street as a handful of widely spaced runners passed. “There some sort of race today or something?” she called. “Yeah!” yelled a runner. “Wooo!” responded another.

    At the finish line, the mood was more celebratory than competitive. Recreational runners congratulated each other on finishing, and race geeks joked about setting course records (an easy feat in a brand-new event). “Were you fast?” inquired a sinewy running veteran. “I was fast by thirty seconds. Must be a short racecourse.” Two women at the end of the chute were keeping track of the order of finishers, and trying to get a chattering mass of teenage runners, all wearing blue PEACE Foundation T-shirts, to move along. The kids paid no attention, hollering and adjusting their iPods. In many ways, the finish-line celebration had more of the feel of a company picnic. The Urban Homeworks team held its own awards ceremony, and members of all teams stayed on for an afternoon softball tournament.

    Meanwhile, most of the runners packed up and left within an hour or two of the race’s end. Many returned to the suburbs (home to one-third of the morning’s runners, according to finish time listings) and still more to ritzier parts of the Cities (though the race did attract runners from such exotic locales as Texas, California, and North Dakota). The Go! Northside run doesn’t seem likely to spark a trend for road races on the North Side. But at least a few people got to see a hitherto unfamiliar part of town. “You know,” said a south Minneapolitan, taking in his new surroundings, “I suppose I had never really been up here before.”

  • Morning Migration

    Things are getting back to normal now. The collapse of the bridge was two months ago, and except for the families of the dead and injured, we Minnesotans have moved on. The Legislature had its special session and funds were approved for southeastern Minnesota flood relief, but the gas tax is where it was before the bridge fell, and the roads continue to deteriorate.

    It’s difficult to be optimistic in Minnesota in October. The days shorten and get colder. The daily walk around the lake with the dog starts to chap the lips. If you do it after work, it’s dark by the time you get home. If you do it in the morning, it’s dark when you start. The entire traverse begins to remind you that winter is coming and the days of dry macadam stretching ahead of your easy gait are numbered. In fact, the newly installed blacktop path is itself a reminder of your government making yet another wrong move by paving over the soft wood-chip surface the walkers and runners preferred.

    Still, the walk is worth the effort. Pounds begin to fall away. Familiarity with the more obscure entries in your music collection increases, courtesy of the one hour of iPod shuffle. Horowitz piano concertos follow Willie Dixon’s “I Ain’t Superstitious.” The Gipsy Kings singing “My Way” in Spanish into your earphones drowns out the tires humming up Franklin Avenue toward downtown.

    The earnest industry of Minnesotans often comes to mind as you watch the drivers who have avoided the freeway and nudge their way to their parking stalls via the neighborhood streets. Up the lake roads they come, only a few stop signs and occasional dog walkers crossing the street interrupting the resolute journey to the office. On a recent day, Lake of the Isles Parkway stacked up ten cars at the perfunctory north end stop sign while a father on a bike guided his three young charges on their bikes, each with streamers on its handlebar grips, across Franklin toward the neighborhood school. Further down the west side of the lake, a family parade of ducks briefly stopped a few walkers in their tracks. As soon as the babies are better fliers, they’ll be leaving. Soon after that, Sun Country flights to Florida will begin to fill up as well.

    Surely many of the runners you see every day beating the narrow dirt path next to the asphalt are training for this month’s marathon. They run on the dirt because the blacktop is too hard on the ankles, knees and shins. They miss the wood chips more than you do. You see different people depending on the time of day you pass. The earlier you go, the faster the runners. Between six and seven are the most determined. If you are sleepy and don’t get out until near eight, the real runners are done—replaced by the middle-aged women walking and talking in pairs and the overweight joggers with terrible running form, but still with more ambition than you, who maintains the leisurely eighteen-minute-mile pace.

    The dog’s daily routine is even more constant than yours. He urinates within two blocks of the house, and defecates soon after. You smile every time you think of the odd symmetry of using the bag that wrapped that morning’s Star Tribune to pick up after him.

    The dog and the music are your companions. You make eye contact with surprisingly few oncoming fellow travelers. Some eyes brighten, but many ignore or even glare at your proffered smile. They’re focused on their walk, their music, or their dog tugging at his leash to make friends with your dog. Can’t have that. Your dog doesn’t care to make friends anyway. There’s only one jogger who regularly interrupts his private revelry long enough to fish a small Milk Bone out of his belly pouch for your dog and a few words about the weather for you.

    That’s the break you need, though, from the fretting that, as soon as the walk is done, you’ll be showering, dressing, and joining the cars on their way past your house to downtown. The one hour daily vacation isn’t long enough. You need at least ten days in a country where you can’t speak the language.

  • Something for the Weekend

    A prophet is not without honor, save in her own country and among her own people. One of life’s perennial puzzles is why people in the United States do not seem to read the wonderful novels of Alison Lurie, the sharp-eyed rhapsode of Ithaca, New York.

    Every good paperback emporium in England stocks Alison Lurie; you will find her even among the horrid throng and press of Gatwick Aerodrome. But in Minnesota I find her slim volumes elusive. We are divided, as is so often the case, by a common language. Perhaps Americans find Alison Lurie too cruel to be entertaining.

    Or maybe it is simply a matter of size. English readers are content to fill up for the weekend with the concentrated spirit of a Penelope Lively or the Welsh wit of Alice Thomas Ellis, whereas the American has greater staying power and prefers to imbibe great Proustian draughts, like a Detroit dragon at a petrol pump. Whenever I hear the word blockbuster, it is of the engine blocks of such mighty motors that I think.

    Let me, en tout cas, commend to you Professor Lurie’s Imaginary Friends, a tale of a millenarian cult in upstate New York the denouement of which (it would be deeply unkind to reveal in advance) does little for the reputation of the social science known as religious studies (as distinct from theology, Queen of the Sciences, with its lofty truths and profound heffalump traps).

    Or my own particular favorite, Foreign Affairs, a novel about an American spinster professor who spends her summers reading in the British Library and has a positively Janeite capacity for observing the rest of the human race. She needs all her powers of penetration. The American characters are straightforward enough; they have one personality each. But the English all have at least two: The posh lady turns out to have a second life as a cleaning woman; even the dogs have multiple personalities. Nothing is what it seems to be. Honest folk who tell the truth are at a disadvantage.

    Art reflects life. There are, after all, precious few straight lines in nature. The Monarch butterfly takes a distinctly wobbly course through life but manages to migrate successfully over many thousands of miles. To be sure, the Romans, straightforward folk, laid out their cities as tidy-minded oblongs, making their outlines instantly recognizable from the air, even when (jam seges est ubi Troia fuit) they lie now under farmers’ fields. But the Greeks knew how to marry the apparent irregularity of nature to the elegance of mathematics. Bicycle down Bryant Avenue South between Franklin and Lake and enjoy the Ionic columns that support the porches of many of the older houses. The spiral volutes at the top of each column are an ancient Greek design derived originally from rams’ horns and deliberately patterned in the pleasing ratio of 1:1.618, what they call the “golden section.” There is more in nature than meets the eye.

    Which is why it is a substantial pleasure to recommend a straightforward wine that tells the truth. St. Francis “Old Vines” zinfandel from Sonoma County provides (for around twenty dollars a bottle) considerable delight but no surprises. The color is a good dark red, the nose strong and as fruity as black currants. The flavor carries through precisely the promise of the smell; an initial sweetness recalls the clarets of Pomerol. There is a good gravelly center to the taste and afterward there lingers a strong redolence of alcohol (15.8% by volume, according to the label). As the wine sits, the sweetness gives way to simple strength, but it still pleases; it does not bully. It would make pleasant company equally for roast beef or an omelet, even for Welsh Dragon Sausages (recently withdrawn from sale on the orders of the Common Market on the grounds that they contain no dragon meat. Yes, really).

    Of course, there are complexities here if you want to look for them. St. Francis was not the pantheistic bunny-hugger of common supposition. Nor is the Sonoma Valley a flat Jeffersonian chessboard. More interesting, the zinfandel old vines have a history. The variety came to California from New England in the slipstream of the Gold Rush, and, in the past few years, DNA analysis has shown that it is actually the Primitivo, a grape that grows prolifically on the coastal plain running up the stocking seam of the leg of Italy; its ultimate origin seems to be a Croatian variety called crljenak kastelanski. Yes, I have spelled it right. But why worry? Pour yourself a glass and settle into a soft chair with Alison Lurie. Together they should see you through a long weekend.

  • Beyond the Bakery

    It has long been held that aroma is one of the most powerful triggers of memory. This fact seems especially salient in October, recalled every time I catch a whiff of cinnamon. Sharp blue skies, sweaters unearthed from storage, the return of thick soups and roasts and quick breads on cool, oven-friendly afternoons make this my favorite month. Cinnamon invokes the memory of a breezy apple orchard scattered with brilliant fallen leaves in the fading autumn light, a golden afternoon forever linked to the golden spice.

    Cinnamon has been prized since antiquity. Pliny the Elder recorded in the first century AD that cinnamon was worth fifteen times the value of silver by weight. The Eastern traders who first brought cinnamon to the West closely guarded its true origin. By shrouding it in mystery and myth, they ensured their monopoly on the spice, as well as its mystique. Herodotus told of the fiery phoenix that made her nest from cinnamon sticks. Harvesters tried to offer the bird large gifts which they hoped, when brought back to the nest, would cause the nest to collapse, thus permitting them to gather the golden sticks.

    In truth, cinnamon isn’t really a stick—it’s bark. The first cinnamon, or “true cinnamon,” came from the inner skin of an evergreen tree native to Sri Lanka (once known as Ceylon). Now referred to as Ceylon cinnamon, it is still highly prized throughout the world. More common in the U.S. is cassia cinnamon, native to Southeast Asia. Whereas Ceylon tends to be a complex, less sweet cinnamon with notes of citrus, cassia carries the smooth and spicy-sweet flavors Americans are used to. A tree cannot be harvested for cinnamon until it’s around thirty years old. From the topmost branches, harvesters carefully cut the inner bark, which naturally curls into quills, or sticks. The bark destined to be ground into powder is cut in larger pieces from the lower, older parts of the tree, where the flavor is stronger.

    For many, the aroma of cinnamon is inexorably tied to sweets and treats: from cinnamon rolls and sticky buns to an apple brown Betty. One of my earliest memories is of waking up to a heaping mound of monkey bread, the pull-apart castle of dough balls drenched in a cinnamon glaze. From apple pancakes to pumpkin cupcakes to chocolate-chip cookies, there’s almost nothing I’ll bake this month that won’t contain some measure of cinnamon.

    But as the rest of the world knows, the golden spice has a life outside the bakery case as a key ingredient in savory dishes. Middle Eastern and North African cooks use it to flavor tagines, even lamb-filled pastries, and pilafs. It is featured in Indian spice blends such as curry and garam masala. The woody, earthy flavor of the spice makes it a natural for long, slow-cooked meats, like short-ribs braised in cinnamon and Guinness. When I slip it into chili, people are surprised, and sometimes maybe even a bit proud when they identify—and enjoy—that additional depth.

    Pork Tenderloin with Cinnamon and Apples

    Serves 4

    2 lb. pork tenderloin
    4 Tbsp. soy sauce
    2 Tbsp. cinnamon
    2 Tbsp. brown sugar
    1/2 tsp. salt
    2 Tbsp. mirin rice wine
    1 tsp. powdered ginger
    2 tsp. Dijon mustard
    2 tsp. lemon juice

    4 Tbsp. butter
    4 peeled , chopped green apples
    1 tsp. cinnamon
    1/2 tsp. cayenne
    1 tsp. powdered ginger

    Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Place pork in baking dish. In a bowl, add soy sauce, cinnamon, sugar, salt, mirin, ginger, mustard, and lemon and mix well. Pour over pork and chill for at least one hour, turning once to recoat. Bake until pork’s inner temperature reaches 155 degrees. Take out and let rest for five minutes.

    For apples: Melt butter in medium sauté pan over medium-high heat, add apples and spices. Toss to coat and sauté until apples are just beginning to soften. Remove from heat and serve over the pork.

  • Honorable Exit

    My mother took me on a wild, unforgettable ride the morning she died. Drugged and nearly comatose for about twenty-four hours, she suddenly started breathing heavily, opened her dull, mucus-covered eyes, and began writhing her shoulders off the bed. I was holding her hand, and she gripped me so hard that her bones stabbed painfully into my palm. This intense, disquieting resistance lasted between five and ten minutes, and then Jeanne Northridge Robson was dead from cancer at age fifty-nine.

    Nearly twenty years later, I can say it was the last of many incredible gifts she bestowed upon me. I’d anticipated a subdued, imperceptible death; the nurse would come in and check for a pulse, whisper the news, and then pull the sheet up over the body. I’d coated my thoughts with that scenario the way one applies sunscreen on the way to the beach. But my mother burned through the balm and peeled away some mystery for me. She showed me how you can be alive one minute and dead, tangibly dead, the next. Ever since that morning, I have urged friends to be present, if at all possible, when someone they love dies. My younger sister, the only other person in the room at the time, changed her career to hospice work.

    Among all of the claptrap surrounding death in our culture, only some of it involves our fears and ignorance of the dying process. Much of it is more ignoble, tied up in melodrama and titillation. “Gawker slowdown” describes a certain type of traffic jam, but that term also factors into the way we patronize artists, being drawn magnetically to those who die tragically and early. Every generation has a few potently dead icons (James Dean, Jack Kerouac, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain, et al.) whose live-fast, die-young biographies are seductive to fledgling artists at least in part because of the promise of self-destruction as a lazy shortcut to celebrity.

    Among jazz artists, the most insidious icon of this type was Charlie Parker. Heralding the revolution of bebop, he had the perfect sobriquet—Bird—because his alto saxophone solos could levitate and veer and soar like none before him. But Bird was flighty in other ways, too; he was a man of great appetites and impulses, and died of drug addiction in 1955 at the age of thirty-four. Dozens of talented musicians emulated his heroin use in the mistaken belief that it might unlock some of the secrets of his artistry.

    Whether he fell prey to Parker’s mystique in particular or the ravages of the jazz life in general, John Coltrane was among those addicted to heroin and alcohol in the 1950s. After celebrating his sobriety with the classic A Love Supreme in 1964, Coltrane became more overtly spiritual; Ascension in particular is unremitting in its intensity and became a hallmark of late ’60s avant-garde for its “sheets of sound” saxophone wail. In 1967, in the midst of this obsessive and uncommonly beautiful spiritual journey, Coltrane’s death at age 40 from a liver ailment put an immediate and lasting luster on his legacy. It is no coincidence that Ken Burns’s PBS series on jazz—probably the closest thing we have to a historical overview of the music for the masses—states that “John Coltrane was, after Charlie Parker, the most widely imitated saxophonist in jazz.”

    One wonders if Burns would still be making that claim had ’Trane lived to a ripe old age, and another saxophonist of that era—say, Sonny Rollins or Wayne Shorter—had died young instead, in the midst of one of his own high-profile, quickening phases. In the wake of Parker’s death, Rollins (born just four years after Coltrane) was generally regarded as the new saxophone king. Academics transcribed his thrilling improvisations and revealed them to be geometrically pristine, compositions of integrity conjured on the fly. Today, at seventy-seven, Rollins continues to top critics’ polls and is generally regarded as the most compelling soloist in jazz. Meanwhile, Shorter, due to both his brilliance as a composer and his acute intuition as a player, has dramatically raised the caliber of any ensemble he joins. It happened to Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers in the ’50s, the Miles Davis quintet in the ’60s, and Weather Report in the ’70s. Today, at seventy-four, his Wayne Shorter Quartet is probably the most intellectually rigorous and rewarding ensemble in jazz.

    These comparisons certainly aren’t meant to denigrate Parker or Coltrane. But how clearly would we peg their influence if, instead of dying at thirty-four and forty, they’d each lived another forty years? What if they’d gone on to respond to the music’s artistic ferment on a day-to-day and year-to-year basis, if they’d had to face challenges from younger generations—even as they struggled to remain vibrant and innovative through the watershed perspective of middle age and beyond? The point is, the persevering excellence of Rollins and Shorter is equally heroic, and should be equally emblematic of jazz sainthood.

    Which is why, while it’s an admittedly macabre notion, I hope that Rollins and/or Shorter have the foreknowledge and facility to deliver artistic works influenced by their impending mortality. Put bluntly, I want them to make music that shows an awareness that they are dying. It doesn’t have to be soon—may they both live to one hundred. But it seems only just that death should come forth in art that reflects the tangible reality of old age and disease as well as the romantic titillation of youthful tragedy.

  • Daniel Mason: New Paintings

    By now, most of us have read Harry Potter. And there are differences between that parallel world and those of yore. Namely, in the ’60s, the parallel world was real, created through individual skill and grace. It was J. D. Salinger’s Upper West Side; or it was on the roads and streets of Kerouac and Ginsberg, the address of people with greater reserves of appetite and heedlessness. Readers could enter if they learned the skills, took the leap. But there’s no way to become a wizard. Dan Mason’s paintings present a parallel world, too, but it’s one that’s findable somewhere on this globe. His blocky cities and landscapes shimmer in colors that can be sought, through travel or the pharmacopoeia, in real time. 530 N. Third St., B10, Minneapolis; 612-338-3656; www.thomasbarry.com

  • Bird x Bird

    More fun than a flock of starlings! This improbably cool event is a snowballing phenomenon. Artists passionate about something besides art. A show that’s rife with feeling. The only unusual thing is—jeez, Minnesota!—the dearth of collectors in the mix. For God’s sake, people, this show brings together some wonderfully skilled artists. And it doubles as an auction to support bird-related causes (it’s organized by a nonprofit that “links the collective action of artists to organizations dedicated to the stewardship of avian species”). So show up already, get bargains, and meet a lot of interesting-looking folk. 1500 Jackson St. N.E., #322; Minneapolis; 952-994-0914; www.birdxbird.org

  • Georgia O’Keeffe: Circling Around Abstraction

    This is a strongly curated show—just as the Walker’s recent Picasso exhibition was. Both venture to transform familiar work by presenting it with vigorous scholarship and a fresh eye. In this case, the focus is on the circle—the paradigmatic composition in many of O’Keeffe’s abstractions—and it’s a valuable insight that had been lying there in plain sight but had not been picked up. Through this frame, O’Keeffe’s work is stripped of any potential mawkishness and restored to living status. What’s more, these curator-driven shows are fun even if you’re not a huge fan of the artist because the thought behind them amplifies the effect of the work—like a lens that suddenly sharpens. 612-870-3131; www.artsmia.org

  • Bruce Tapola: Paintings for Germans, Sculpture for Snobs

    If you’re going to be in Rochester for your annual colonoscopy, brighten the occasion with a trip to the Rochester Art Center to see the always interesting work of Bruce Tapola, Minnesota’s most famous somewhat-obscure artist. Venues ranging from esteemed institutes of art (in Milwaukee and Minneapolis) to a rented U-Haul parked in front of the Walker Art Center have spread his fame. Recent outings in Miami and Minneapolis, and a collaborative installation with his wife and daughter called I’m With Stupid, have enabled Tapola to further develop his broad range of media-inflected moody imagery. Here he again hammers on the closed gates of American culture, with his ambivalent cry: “I love you! I hate you! I love you!” 40 Civic Center Dr. S.E., Rochester; 507-282-8629; www.rochesterartcenter.org