The Rake Magazine

Category: Article

  • Unhappy Trails

    Guthrie, Minnesota, is not much more than a sleepy little huddle of buildings nestled between Lake Itasca and Leech Lake. It’s classic lake country, where tourists have been coming to summer resorts for generations. Cabin season is short and the impact of tourism can be dramatic, especially since logging and mining have ebbed. The locals have quietly tried to adapt. Here, the famous Paul Bunyan Trail, which runs one hundred miles from Brainerd to Bemidji, is still unpaved. Maps describe the Guthrie section as “natural surface,” which means it is open primarily to snowmobile use in the winter. It is a dirt-and-gravel path that used to be a railroad. The plan is eventually to pave it for bicycles, in-line skaters, and dog-walkers. Today, though, it is penned in by “No Trespassing” signs and a cloud of animosity, rather than the pizza and ice-cream joints that typically sprout up along state trails. As if to wear its troubles like a war scar, the trail here is badly damaged, torn up by outlaw ATVs, which aren’t supposed to use the trail but do anyway.

    In a scrubby spot a few miles outside of Guthrie, the trail runs across the property of Brian and Mike Sandberg. Despite their desire simply to be left alone, the Sandbergs may be the most famous men in the county. Along with some of their neighbors, they are involved in a case that is now under consideration by the Minnesota Supreme Court. They believe they own the land on which the trail is built, and they’re asking the court to close their section of the Paul Bunyan Trail and give it back. If they win the case, it could be the beginning of the end for recreational trails in Minnesota and across the nation.

    Though he grew up in the Guthrie area and owns seventy acres here, Brian Sandberg is an itinerant welder. He works construction jobs in Iowa and Missouri, where he specializes in fabricating huge agricultural tanks. Brian told me he desperately wants to return and retire on his land, although he claims the controversy, and the actions of the Minnesota Department of Resources, have made that impossible. But it’s not clear what stands in his way.

    His brother Mike lives in a tidy new home on twenty acres adjoining Brian’s. Marlaine and Mike are a pleasant, fiftyish couple. Clad in shorts, with his dirty blond hair casually brushed back, Mike Sandberg could easily pass for a tourist on his way to jig for walleyes. He is quietly intense as he walks with me on the Bunyan trail, which runs just a few yards from his house. A muscular black dog dashes out menacingly from behind the garage. But Sunny is only trolling for playmates as she prances around mouthing a tattered tennis ball. Mike shows me where he and some of his neighbors erected barricades across the path, and where DNR crews tore them down. The tension hangs like the humidity in the summer air. It’s difficult to think of humble Guthrie as the vortex of a bitter fight involving property-rights advocates, barricaded trails, local recreational businesses, snowmobilers, ATV jockeys, and spandex-clad bicyclists.

    Minnesota has thirteen hundred miles of recreational trails. Most were built on narrow strips of land that once were owned by railroads. Minnesota’s first modern trail was built on a former railroad corridor near Pipestone. The Casey Jones State Trail opened in 1967 and was so successful that it set a pattern for the following thirty years: As the railroad industry yielded to overland trucking and air transport, the state would purchase abandoned rail corridors from companies like Burlington Northern for the purpose of developing them into public trails. In fact, the idea of converting miles of disused rail easement into recreational trail was so successful that bike and jogging paths began proliferating all over the country. National organizations such as the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy began springing up “to enrich America’s communities and countryside by creating a nationwide network of public trails from former rail lines and connecting corridors.” But, as it turns out, they were making two huge assumptions: that the railroads actually owned the land they were selling, and that Americans would universally embrace the idea of a public trail. The Sandbergs are here to say that neither assumption was sound. They don’t want the trail, they say the land legally belongs to them, and they intend to prove it in court.

    Mike sees the issue in straightforward terms: “What it all boils down to is that Brian has an abstract which states that when they stop using that property for railroad purposes that it reverts back to the landowner. Now Brian has land that he cannot even get to.” According to the Sandbergs, there is no access to Brian’s land other than the former railroad grade that is now the Bunyan trail. But this is a little misleading, because, according to Mike himself, the DNR offered to provide access by building a tunnel or a road, at state expense, through the grade. It seems their main problem is less with a stretch of trail than with the idea of government, and its arrogant bureaucrats trampling on the Sandberg’s private property rights. The idea that the state can exercise its will at the expense of a property owner is abhorrent to them.

    And their stubborness may have basis in law. There are two legal issues in their case with the DNR, and considering that it has landed in the state’s highest court, their chances are better than even. First, was the railway abandoned prior to the land being turned over to the state? Even though the railroad finished removing tracks by 1987, there is still a dispute in the community, as well as in the courts, about what constitutes abandonment. After all, right-of-way is a legal principle, and the question becomes whether the railroad had the right to cede its rights to the state, instead of to the current holder of the deed. Did the original 1898 deed give actual title to the land, or simply an easement to use it—and would it make a difference? And when the railroad abandons an easement, to whom do the rights revert—the current landowners, or the owners at the time the easement was granted (in many cases, the state)? This most contentious issue hinges on verbiage written into deeds more than a century ago, when the railroad first appropriated land.

    Brian Sandberg’s property abstract says, “so long as the land shall be used for Right of Way and for Railway purposes; but to cease and terminate if the Railway is removed from the said strips.” That language seems pretty clear. But weighed against the possibility of throwing the entire state trail system into disarray, or at least into the courts, one can see why trail advocates might quibble just the same.

    Marlaine and Mike’s home, a tidy pre-fab, was built in Canada and trucked onto his property two years ago. He is still putting siding up on parts of the house. The quarter-mile road leading to the home runs parallel to the old rail easement.

    Mike bought his property from Brian. The rest of what Brian owns is, according to Mike, “landlocked.” Brian farmed some of that land, and used the railroad grade to get to it. “We had it blocked off, I think, since 1998,” says Mike. “He had cattle. He just ran them across it.” From the Sandbergs’ point of view, there was nothing broken, and therefore nothing to fix. The DNR’s offers to compensate Brian, build a tunnel, or otherwise work out a solution allowing him to legally cross the trail fell on deaf ears. The Sandbergs see any claim to or meddling with their land as unreasonable.

    This was not the first time that local residents have had issues with the DNR. Some had worked out deals, but the Sandbergs and a few others were not willing to compromise. Some placed barricades across their sections of trail. The DNR responded by removing the fencing. Landowners only became more enraged. “DNR officials think they can do whatever they want,” says Mike Sandberg. After a feeble negotiation and intense posturing on both sides, the DNR took the landowners to court. Hubbard County District Judge Jay Mondry ruled that the Burlington Northern Railroad had title to the property and that the sale of land purchased by the DNR in 1991 for $1.5 million was legal.

    The Sandbergs and the other landowners fought back, adamant that the language in the 1898 deeds clearly transferred ownership of the hundred-foot-wide sections of land back to them if the land was abandoned by the railroad. So they took the case to the Minnesota Court of Appeals. Last September, the state Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the landowners. The court ruled that the railroad only had easement to the land, which ended when the tracks were removed.

    At the DNR’s Division of Trails and Waterways, officials were thrown into a panic; suddenly the trails themselves were embattled. Tasting victory, the Sandbergs and others in Guthrie began erecting fences barricading the Bunyan trail, and the practice threatened to spread. As Mike Sandberg explains, “There are a lot of people on down the line here who have this same language in their deeds.” Immediately, the DNR asked the Supreme Court to overturn the appellate court’s decision. The Supreme Court agreed to review the case, and began doing so last February.

    Trail advocates came together quickly. The Parks and Trails Council of Minnesota, the Paul Bunyan Trail Association, and the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy filed a friend-of-the-court brief in support of the DNR position. Surely, they said, there is a great deal at stake here.

    Nationally and locally, trail use by pedestrians, bicyclists, in-line skaters, and others is on the rise. Millions use rail-trails each year, and they spend a lot of money. Food and drinking receipts in Lanesboro, Minnesota, increased by eighty-four percent the year after the Root River State Trail opened there. The Cannon Valley Trail in Red Wing and the Willard Munger Trail in Duluth are models of success in every measurable way. Tourism and recreation are big business, and the trail system is an integral component of what Minnesota has to offer. But some people reject the emerging tourist economy. Brian Sandberg would rather travel hundreds of miles to the south to find welding work than cater to bicyclists on a weekend jaunt from the Twin Cities.

    Plenty of people in Guthrie see their community as a haven. Theirs is a lifestyle removed from the clamor of outsiders. Mike says, “If we wanted to live in town, we would live in town. You don’t want people running around in your backyard. It’s ownership, pure and simple.”

    From the trail advocate’s perspective, opposition to trails is simply fear of change. Terry McGaughey is credited with conceiving and naming the Bunyan trail and now acts as volunteer coordinator for the Paul Bunyan Trail Association. McGaughey moved from the Twin Cities to Bemidji in 1968. He was instrumental in introducing the idea of the Paul Bunyan Trail to the state Legislature, which first authorized the trail in 1988. McGaughey suggested that opposition to trails fades once trails are fully developed. Although the unsurfaced, rutted base of the rail bed is perfect for ATVs, once the trails are fully improved, the nuisance of illegal use goes away. The Sandbergs admit they have never seen or heard a bicycle on the trail passing through their land—though a mountain bike could easily ride it. It’s actually the noise of ATVs and the obtrusive behavior of ATV riders that is most irksome.

    Motorized vehicles other than snowmobiles are legally prohibited on the trail. McGaughey understands that no one wants ATVs running around his land, but insists that the problem vanishes once the trails are complete. He stresses the health, fitness, recreational, and economic aspects of the trails. He points out that the trail has expanded the tourist season for local businesses, and effectively turned the community into a year-round attraction. McGaughey said that there is actually a lot of enthusiasm and pride for the trails in communities where they have been completed. Portions of the Paul Bunyan Trail that are paved and complete have become an attractive destination for perfectly well-behaved bicyclists, hikers, and snowmobilers. This has created and expanded businesses at just about every point along the trail. Trails preserve the environment, create parkland, cultivate community pride, and preserve a corridor of green space that can help dampen the effects of urban sprawl—an ugly reality that threatens recreation and natural resources even this far north.

    But the Sandbergs aren’t really interested. In a January 24 letter to the Brainerd Dispatch, Brian Sandberg wrote:

    One of the reasons for writing this letter is to let the public know that there are still many of us, that are willing to take the time and money to fight for our Constitutional rights and to ensure that local and state governments can not come in and take property from one person and give to another, in the name of progress or for play. And after the final decision is made, I should have the right to use, sell, rent, or donate any part of the nine-acre strip in question. And also, there is great hope for those, that after the last decision is made on this case, hundreds of Minnesotans will have their rights restored. And they will also have the same right to use their property as they wish.

    On the phone from Iowa, Brian’s voice is raspy. He speaks in the odd, vaguely Southern accent of men everywhere who see themselves as hardworking and close to the land. He talks about how he quit his job in Alaska and drove four thousand miles in fifty-below weather, moving back to the lower forty-eight in order to fight for his property rights. For such a rugged man, he has many fears: He strongly believes that the trail will drive property values down and lead to crime, primarily manslaughter and rape. His wife is afraid to live alone back in Guthrie, while he is on the road welding. He says it is an outrage that he was threatened with being charged as a public nuisance for putting up “No Trespassing” signs on his own property. “It just pissed me off,” he hisses. Brian also refers to the web page of the National Association of Reversionary Property Owners, which claims that its “major goal is to assist property owners in maintaining their complete land ownership and resisting government confiscation.”

    Dorian Grilley, executive director of the Parks and Trails Council of Minnesota, is more philosophical. Grilley doesn’t expect much of a problem elsewhere in Minnesota, even if the Supreme Court rules in the Sandbergs’ favor. In other parts of the state, the sequence of abandonment of the rail easement actually favors the DNR’s acquisition plans. If the courts rule against the DNR in this case, it won’t exactly be the end of the line. The fact of the matter is that the state really can “do what it wants” no matter how loudly the Sandbergs or anyone else protest. Grilley puts a point on it: “The state Legislature certainly has the right to compensate the landowners and take the property.” However, this would mean that in some instances the state would have to pay for the property twice. “Millions of people use the trails each year and there is an increased awareness of the value they serve. The outcome will depend on the community and on statewide values,” Grilley says.

    Dick Kimball, the DNR’s longtime manager of Trails and Waterways, lives and works in the Paul Bunyan Trail area and knows just about everybody involved in the issue. Though some might think of him as an evil agent of the government, Kimball is actually a thoughtful man who understands the need to balance limited resources and the difficulty of reconciling various community interests. Kimball spoke frankly about the growing pressure on resources. “In the Park Rapids, Walker, and Bemidji area, there are probably 150,000 people up here at any given time. I lived in Walker, and the traffic today is fifteen times what it was in 1980. Our biggest issue with these state trails right now is money for maintenance and staff visibility. The more often people see our officers on that trail, the less likely it is that there will be problems. Right now, Brian and Mike are right: The ATV traffic on that unmaintained, unused trail is incredible. In my twenty-five years up here, this is the most contentious issue I have had to deal with. We work on rectifying things without going to the legal side, but some people are bullheaded. Now, whatever the courts decide, we will all have to live with it. It should never have gotten to this point. We should have worked it out.”

    Often the issue comes down to competing ideas about how the environment should be managed and used. Yuppies from the city sometimes believe it should all be off-limits to motor vehicles and logging; locals want to be able to drive ATVs; landowners want everybody to stay away. “People think this is a wilderness area,” said Kimball. “This is not wilderness. It’s a working forest. What we have to do is balance all of our uses, and that’s the goal of our planning process. We are attempting to separate and zone the forest. In 1971, snowmobiles came within one vote of being banned in Minnesota because of all the issues: trespass, damage to private property, wildlife harassment.”

    In some senses, the Pandora’s box has been opened. If the Sandbergs can enforce the language of their original deed, what’s to stop anyone who lives adjacent to disused rail corridor from doing the same? The court itself cannot answer the real question: For an opinionated, hard-working middle-class person, is a solitary, backwoods lifestyle even possible in the already changed economy of what was once Minnesota wilderness? Is Brian Sandberg an intractable mouthpiece for landowners’ rights or a grumpy migratory industrial worker stubbornly attempting to hold onto a dream?

  • Olympic Spirit

    You can find the best-looking man in Minnesota, my female colleagues tell me, at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. He is well over six feet tall, poses naked, and has a relaxed, arrogant look about him—there’s that jutty chin that women find irresistible. I am led to believe (by the same authorities) that the view from the rear is particularly gratifying—this baby got back, as my daughter’s favorite rapster once said.

    And perfect proportions. In fact, mathematically exact proportions; every one of his measurements is a planned and precise multiple of one of his knuckles (or digital phalanges, as they call them in the trade). Man is the measure of all things, as Protagoras said. Nothing illustrates more elegantly than this muscular specimen the ancient Greek conviction that the basis of beauty, indeed of all reality, is actually mathematical.

    Before you ask, we will never know how many digital phalanges were allotted to the part of him which was most masculine; it must have broken off some time in the last couple of thousand years. The plow-gash on his left thigh looks pretty painful as well.

    This is not one of your modern males, with an intense and sensitive inner life. It is impossible to discern what he is thinking, beyond perhaps that he feels relaxed and confident. A knee and an elbow are bent, the latter to hold a no-longer-extant spear (hence his name, the Doryphoros or Spear-Bearer). Despite the severed tree stump behind him, he does not seem as dim as Paul Bunyan. One imagines him as frozen poetry in motion, like an Olympic athlete: elegant in action but inarticulate when faced with a gabbling journalist.

    Beauty here is only skin deep. But what a skin—smooth white Pentelic marble (a Greek marble, though he is a Roman copy of a long-lost Greek original). You may think marble is merely parboiled limestone, of no more interest than potatoes. For Greeks and Romans it was a pleasure to be savored like wine. They looked at the green marble of Thessaly and saw in its white and yellow flecks the flowers and pasture on the spring hillsides from which it was cut. The more decadent emperors enjoyed building baths faced with the creamy stone quarried from the island of Skyros, with its distinctive gold and maroon veins, the colors of the Golden Gophers. (Could that be why Skyrian marble was used for the staircases in the Minnesota State Capitol?)

    A plainer creamy marble came from the island of Paros. Its noble simplicity and calm grandeur belies the wild life enjoyed by its ancient inhabitants. Lesbos might be famous for luxury and the poetess Sappho, but for the real strong stuff one turns to Archilochus, the poet of Paros. Too bad his works survive only in fragments. But you will get the idea from the title of a lecture about one of his recently rediscovered poems: “Last Tango on Paros.”

    Nowadays Paros is also home to wine marketed by Boutari, the best-known of all Greek wine makers. (Mr. Boutari is known also as a campaigner against dancing bears, but that is another story.) Unusually, this wine is red and robust, not white or resinated (retsina is surely one of those pleasures that are best enjoyed in the land of their origin); it is made from the distinctive Greek grape Xinómavro (“acid black”), with a strong, consistent flavor and a slightly brandified twang at the end.

    Its taste, indeed, is monochromatic enough to allow one to mix it with water in the ancient manner, in a krater or mixing bowl. (Just as “crater,” as in volcano, comes from krater because they are the same shape, so “acetabulum”—for the hip-socket —comes from the ancient name for little bowls that Greeks and Romans put vinegar in). Only barbarians drank their wine neat. Do you think the drinkers and thinkers at Plato’s Symposium could have been half so witty if they were in a condition that would have rendered them incapable of operating a motor chariot?

    So sit back, add a little water if you wish, and watch the marbly patterns swirl around your glass (or red-figured skyphos). You can do this while you watch the Olympics if you like. For myself, I would rather be among the cypress trees on a Hellenic hillside, balancing the aromas of pine and sunshine, of crushed thyme underfoot, and a whole lamb spitted and roasting succulently to celebrate the Greek festival of the Dormition of the Mother of God.

  • Desert Island Duffel

    All this year, the French-American company Theatre de la Jeune Lune has been celebrating a quarter-century of existence by restaging and revisiting works from previous seasons, culminating with a return to the Georges Bizet opera Carmen, running through August 15 and directed by co-founder Dominique Serrand. Given Jeune Lune’s reputation as one of the most imaginative theaters in the country, we knew that Serrand would certainly have intriguing responses to our desert-island quiz. And he didn’t disappoint. In fact, Serrand seemed to have a whole marooned-chic lifestyle mapped out and ready to go: “The food would be terrific,” he told us. French cuisine? “On a desert island? Oh, no, it would be fusion!” But he did admit he’d miss living among the rest of humanity. “You have to leave people behind [in this game]—that’s the trouble I have.” So we suggested that, instead of five objects, he could take any five actors in the world along to stage plays on the island with him—an offer he refused with a laugh, noting that “I’d make a lot of enemies that way,” since he’d inevitably have to leave out some friends. But in the end, he even devised an elegant solution to that problem.
    1. “For my first choice, I’d take either Plato, Descartes, or de Toqueville’s essays and reflections on democracy.
    2. “Foure’s Reqiuem. A most celebrated piece of music. I don’t know that I would actually choose to hear the music; I might just want to bring the score, and read it and try to remember in my mind.
    3. “I would bring a big knife. A nice thing to carry around. I don’t mean it as a weapon, but as a tool.
    4. “If I could, and I don’t know if this is too much of a sci-fi version of an object, I would take Camille Claudel’s hands. That would be a nice thing to have. She was Rodin’s girlfriend, and a lot of people think he stole some work from her. She had formidably muscular hands.
    5. “And last, I would take several puppets in one box. It could be Saddam Hussein, George Bush, different puppets. People I could play with. I could bring the whole collection. We would make a new play every day, and pretend it was true!”

  • Soundtrack to Mary

    I should preface everything by saying that for me the scariest scene in Rosemary’s Baby was not when the middle-aged Satan worshippers drugged Mia Farrow and forced her to have “relations” with the Beast Master, thus planting the seed of Lucifer in her waif-like womb. For me, the real horror began when, upon moving into their lovely turn-of-the-century Manhattan apartment, Mia Farrow promptly painted all of the woodwork white and the walls a cheery lemon yellow. Now that’s when I had to shield my eyes.

    I realize that personal taste is far too subjective a topic for me to get into in this tiny column, so I’ll cut to the quick. If you have a holiday-specific windsock hanging anywhere off your house, chances are good that you also have at least one room inside that is wallpapered. I can safely say that you wouldn’t like me.

    Who exactly invented wallpaper? Mr. Tacky McJackass? Is there a photo of him in Ruin My Life Digest? I bet if I looked closely I would see horns hiding in his combover.

    While going through the arduous process of buying a house, I stood half-graying out as the housing inspector rattled off terms like “irrigational gulches” and “joist rod integrity.” Eyes rolling back in my head, all I could think about was how I was going to remove that Holly Hobbie crap, installed by some country music-lovin’ adult doll collector, from my soon-to-be kitchen walls! Home Depot, meet Lucia. Lucia, meet your new best friend.

    “Don’t worry, I’m removing that and redoing the walls myself,” I bragged to everyone on their first tour of the new crib. Normally I don’t let my mouth write a check my ass can’t cash, but who am I kidding? I’ve never done anything like this. I can’t even peel the price tag off a glass picture frame without becoming frustrated and pitching it in the trash.

    As I write this, I am knee-deep in my first-ever home-improvement project, feeling like the anti-archaeologist. The further I scrape and dig, the less I’ll find—or so I pray. I’m calling people I barely know in the middle of the night to ask for advice, having judged their level of handiness on the fact that I’ve seen them open a bottle of wine skillfully. But I have no choice. For me to live with this wallpaper is like being told at the closing that I would have to wear the previous homeowner’s clothes for the rest of my life. Trust me, you don’t want to see me in a Brooks and Dunn concert T-shirt and stretch pants. The wallpaper is history.

  • Straight Talk

    The saying goes that slow and steady wins the race. If so, give Low the gold. This Duluth indie-rock trio—guitarist Alan Sparhawk, his wife Mimi Parker on drums, and bassist Zak Sally—have become internationally renowned for a contemplative, ethereal sound reminiscent of Galaxie 500 and the early Cure. Their new retrospective box set, A Lifetime Of Temporary Relief, collects B-sides and rarities going back to Low’s earliest recorded work, in addition to eleven videos and three documentaries, including the illuminating “Closer Than That.” Essential for any fan, it would be a good place to start for the casual listener as well (say, those who might only have heard the version of “Little Drummer Boy” the Gap used in a Christmastime TV ad). They’re currently working with Flaming Lips producer Dave Fridman on a full-length record, their seventh, which Sparhawk jokes will “sound like Weezer.” Sparhawk will play a solo show at the 400 Bar July 31, and Low appears October 8-9 at Triple Rock Social Club.

    THE RAKE: Does Duluth exert a geographic influence on your songs?

    ALAN SPARHAWK: I think so. There’s a sort of Scandinavian reservedness about it. And the cold, the long winter, the mini-ocean. We have a definite Midwestern thing going on, a lack of irony. Although we did do a Journey cover.

    The “Closer Than That” documentary includes footage from a concert in Amsterdam. How is Low received in Europe?

    Pretty well, actually. I think we actually sell more records in Europe and England. I hope we don’t become one of those bands that nobody knows over here but we’re huge in Belgium. We have a great fan base in the U.S., and we’re certainly not slagged or ignored by the press, but it seems like in Europe we’re treated seriously, as a band that’s as valid as anybody else. Whereas in the U.S. we’re still kind of an anomaly: “Oh, yeah, that slow, quiet, indie rock band.” We could tour Europe twice as much as we do.

    On the other hand, it’s more difficult to tour Europe because you’re also traveling with your children.

    Yeah. In the U.S. you can just hop in the van and go.

    What’s it like for Low to be simultaneously a band and a family?

    It’s good. It can be difficult, but I’d rather do it this way. We’re lucky to be able to be around our kids all the time. Each side of my life is amplified by the other. The band pushes the possibilities for tension in the marriage, but also the rewards. They play off each other. The bad days are bad for the family, and vice versa. The biggest factor is having children.

    You and Mimi just had your second, didn’t you? Yes, he’s about a month old.If you keep going, you could transform Low into the world’s slowest Von Trapp Family Singers cover band.

    There you go! It could become a family variety show. A friend of mine says, almost seriously, that he wants to film a pilot of us going on the road, and call it Family Band. Sort of an alternative Osbournes—though it’d probably be more like The Office.

    Your cover of “Surfer Girl” started as a lullaby to your daughter, right?

    Yes. It’s funny, because there’s a moment on the documentary where Mimi and I are sitting on a couch backstage after a concert, and we play “Surfer Girl,” and she suddenly perks up and turns her head to look. I didn’t realize she did that until I’d seen the footage.

    Despite your successes, Low’s unusual approach probably means you’ll always be a niche band. But your ten-year career suggests you’ve found the right niche.

    It’s been appropriate for us. I’d love to make a record for $200,000 with Brian Eno, but you have to work with what resources are there. It’s not about staying “indie”—we don’t care about that. You have to adjust to the fact that if you have something going on and it connects with people, even on a small level, you can do it if you have the right attitude and the right perspective. You’ve got to work within the limits.

  • Don’t Panic, It’s Not Organic

    It’s nice to see former Senator Rudy Boschwitz still flying the flannel after all these years. Like any self-respecting legislator on the receiving end of a populist pink slip, he’s gone quietly into the private sector. There, the glad-handing, expense accounts, and corporate logrolling aren’t scrutinized by every craven reporter and party activist (as if there is a difference) with an axe to grind. For a price, a former senator will throw his considerable weight behind just about any cause, even a specious one. Today, Boschwitz is taking up the cause against alternative farming techniques.

    What on Earth could possibly be wrong with organic food? You’d be surprised. We recently learned that among Mr. Boschwitz’s many roles in public service, he is the chairman of something called the Center for Global Food Issues. We must admit that under normal circumstances, we wouldn’t have noticed. But he stepped out from behind the curtain few weeks ago, in a letter to the Star Tribune complaining about that paper’s intolerable position on food that contains genetically modified organisms—hybrid corn and other produce usually identified through the cautionary acronym “GMO.” According to the letter, Boschwitz and a CGFI colleague named Dennis Avery believe that GMOs can have a positive impact on Third-World economies and farming by increasing yields of pest-resistant crops. This sounds perfectly reasonable. Why, then, is it so creepy to realize that Boschwitz and Avery are shilling for the companies that stand to profit the most from the idea? Perhaps it is because the truth is not even salient, because they have forfeited their authority; they are essentially writing advertisements for their corporate benefactors.

    The Center for Global Food Issues is run by the Hudson Institute, a conservative “think tank” that is funded by Cargill, Monsanto, Novartis, and McDonald’s—among many other corporations. A full list of Hudson’s underwriters reads like an all-star roster of petro-chemical agribusiness.

    If mercenary lobbyists like Boschwitz and Avery actually believed what they say about the benefits of big-business farming, we think they would be less disingenuous in their rhetoric. In promoting their brand of high-volume, low-quality, non-sustainable agriculture, they are shameless about arguing all sides. All is fair in love and war; agribusiness has been taking it in the gut for a decade now. Why wouldn’t they marshal their forces to fight back against the insidious tide of hippy-dippy paranoia about proven modern farming techniques? (The only thing petro-chemical farming ever killed was the family farm, duh!)

    Boschwitz and Avery say that genetically modified crops are preferable because they reduce the need for pesticides and herbicides; suddenly and inexplicably, they are worried about Third-World farmers trudging through their fields with backpack sprayers. This is surely a recent and isolated case of dementia, rather than a prick in their conscience, since their supporters continue to claim that glyphosate herbicides and pesticides are perfectly safe for man and beast alike. This old saw is still a good one, it turns out. Many experts agree that GMOs—excused as a technology that would make pesticides and herbicides obsolete, after that nasty business with DDT a few years back—actually increase farmers’ reliance on chemicals. As GMOs have spread around the world, pesticide use has increased. How odd.

    There’s more of this brand of double-talking dishonesty. Organics are wasteful and inefficient, says the Center for Global Food Issues, because they allegedly require a lot more acreage to produce the same yield as “conventionally grown” produce. This is the first we’ve heard that Cargill, Monsanto, ADM and the rest are worried about land-use issues and the preservation of wilderness and wetlands. (They might ponder the considerable evidence that monoculturing—planting millions of acres of the exact same hybrid of, say, “Roundup Ready” corn—is destroying the basic building block of biology: diversity.)

    Worst of all, the Cargills of the world have cynically peddled at least one Dennis Avery prevarication. Avery invented and spread the falsehood that organic foods are less safe than non-organic foods (because, he said, they use manure as a fertilizer—which conventional agribusiness does too, but never mind). In a widely syndicated article, he cited an epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention saying that organic foods are eight times more dangerous with regard to bacteria like E. coli. The problem was, that source is a CDC scientist named Paul Mead. Mead never said anything of the kind. He merely hung up on Avery when he called to beg someone at the CDC to confirm his views on the matter. In fact, the CDC subsequently clarified the issue, and retractions were published all around: Avery’s claim was as bogus as it was self-serving. No less an authority than the New York Times gave Avery the public scolding he deserved.

    So what is the honorable former senator doing in the same byline as this industry flack who is prone to stretch the truth, or simply invent his own? Funny how these sorts of people never seem to espouse beliefs that are independent of their corporate benefactors—or undertake any “public service” that isn’t somehow connected to commercial interests.

  • Mock & Roll

    There is a rock god on stage at the Triple Rock Social Club bestriding the speakers like a colossus, his Loverboy T-shirt sacrificed to a Dionysian frenzy, his tongue out and waggling, his fingers pulsating. With a quick kick and flip, he’s down in the crowd, then up on the back bar, strutting around the beer bottles and whiskeys as he brings the music directly to the people. The fact that he has no instrument is of no consequence; this is rock ’n’ roll.

    At the Minneapolis regional of the Air Guitar World Championship a couple of weeks ago, nine contestants took the stage to see whose mimicry of real rock-star moves would be good enough to win a slot at the L.A. nationals. There, one lucky American would be chosen to represent the red, white, and blue at the world tourney of “airaoke” in August.

    Though amateurs have practiced the art of air guitar for generations (you only start feeling stupid doing it sometime in your thirties), the formal World Championship first took place in 1996 in the city of Oulo in northern Finland. Though the annual Finnish event has been a reliable source of silly-season news stories since then, only last year did the nation that invented the electric guitar finally send a competitor. Davie “C. Diddy” Jung swept the title just the way the U.S. dominated Olympic basketball after NBA players were allowed to compete. And there are signs that the world’s newest Sport of Kings is headed straight for the Hollywood machinery that builds American Idols.

    The championship is set up in that mode, with the contestants playing to both the crowd and a panel of three local judges (rock critic Melissa Maerz, Cities 97’s Brian Oake, and Andy Lindquist of Willie’s American Guitars) who are hamming it up as much as anyone.

    In the first round, contestants freeform for sixty seconds to the song of their choice. Things have been heavily stage-managed; all contestants have outlandish costumes and goofy stage names, and it’s impossible to miss the camera crew filming the proceedings for Ben Affleck and Matt Damon’s production company, Project Greenlight.

    All contestants were entertaining, though maybe in spite of themselves. One, who used the nom de guerre “Iron Ranger,” had a peculiar floppy style, as though she were trying to get a handle on a twenty-pound trout instead of teasing power chords from a guitar. And the mullet-wigged “Ax Action,” concentrating with furrowed brow on the riff to AC/DC’s “You Shook Me All Night Long,” almost fatally misjudged the length of the Triple Rock stage. He told me later, “Falling off the stage is a classic guitar thing. I really should have gone down to the ground, played for a second, then come back from the dead.” So that was on purpose, then? “Oh, sure,” he deadpanned, then burst out laughing.

    The best was “Bob the Murderer,” an orange-haired Triple Rock employee who enthralled the crowd with a perfect punk pantomime of Sex Pistol Johnny Rotten and The Young Ones’ Vyvyan. Though he did little in the way of actually mimicking a guitarist, he stomped and glowered and spazzed brilliantly. An added plus: That was not technically a costume, since it’s the way he dresses all the time. Even in air guitar, authenticity adds extra weight.

    After the second round, in which all contestants performed “Cat Scratch Fever,” the judges declared a tie, leading to an “air-off” between Jon “Jackicaster” Maki, who performed in a painted-on seventies pornstar ’stache and orange jumpsuit emblazoned “Stroke This,” and the clear crowd favorite, Michael “Mother” Rucker, in the Loverboy T.

    “It’s a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock ’n’ Roll)” erupted from the speakers. Jack and Mother strutted homoerotically. Jack flashed his nipple ring, but Mother stripped to his Calvins, and the screaming crowd sealed his win.

    Of course, there was one little thing: Mother was a ringer, an L.A. actor and story editor who’s worked on (surprise!) the Project Greenlight TV show. But it seems churlish to complain about fakery in an air-guitar contest, especially when there was no real attempt to hide the setup. Minutes after the closing jam, Mother basked in air fame as he answered questions from two journalists and signed a T-shirt for a besotted female fan, who was greatly saddened when his Sharpie pen turned out to be dry.

    In the end, air guitar is all about love. Nick “Swami” Swanson, who took third place, told us: “Air guitar comes from you expressing what you wish you could have done yourself. You want to be like the real thing. It lets you forget for a moment.”—Christopher Bahn

  • Ghetto Is As Ghetto Does

    Until a month ago, I did not think that I lived in “the ghetto.” North Minneapolis, the inner city, and even, on occasion, the ’hood—but not the ghetto. However, that was before a string of troubling incidents occurred in my neighborhood—and before I got some surprising reactions to them from some of my South Minneapolis friends. I’ve seen first-hand what happens when urban geography, race, and our notions of individual self-worth get mixed together.

    “Ghetto” derives from the name of an island near Venice where Jews were forced to live in the 1500s. Now, according to Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, a ghetto is a “thickly populated slum area, inhabited predominantly by members of an ethnic or other minority group, often as a result of social or economic restrictions, pressures or hardships.”

    Things started to get strange a few weeks ago when I asked some of the young men in my neighborhood about the dramatic increase in cars parked near my home at odd hours and often with suspicious-looking passengers. I made it clear to these men that I would report any drug dealing or other criminal activity to the police.

    A few days later, a young African-American man approached me as I was headed to work. “I heard you were asking about drug dealing around here,” he said. “Nobody is dealing drugs. But you gotta understand—you live in the ghetto.”

    I was just a little perplexed. “I live in the ghetto? What does that mean? Am I supposed to accept trash in my yard, open drug dealing, and general mayhem because of my ZIP code? People in Linden Hills or Kenwood don’t have to put up with this.”

    “Brother, you don’t live in Linden Hills or Kenwood.”

    “Fair enough,” I replied, “but my parents placed their lives on the line in Mississippi during the Civil Rights movement so that black people could live in decent neighborhoods. I am not going to disrespect our struggle as a people by accepting that kind of defeatist thinking.”

    Then our eyes locked for a moment, each looking at the other with mutual bemusement. He clearly did not understand me, and I surely did not understand him. Did I challenge his expectations of what he and other Northsiders were entitled to from their surroundings? He probably thought I was setting the bar too high with my Kenwood comparisons, and I thought his ghetto comments provided an excuse for condoning subpar living conditions and bad behavior.

    Less than thirty-six hours later, a ten-pound rock crashed through my living-room window at three o’clock in the morning. Was there a connection? Was I being punished for being too bourgeois and not accepting the consequences of my geographic place?

    When I told two of my best friends, both Southsiders, I thought that they would surely empathize. Instead, I got lectured about “ghetto life” and strongly encouraged to “git while the gettin’ was good” to the relative safety of South Minneapolis. “I warned you about messing around with those Northside Negroes,” one told me. “They don’t look at the world the same way you and I do. You are dealing with men who don’t value their own lives, let alone yours.”

    My other ABC (“ace boon coon,” Southern lingo for close personal friend) largely agreed. “You’ve got a choice to make,” he began. “If you don’t do anything else, they probably won’t either. Don’t start a neighborhood block group, don’t write about this in your column, and for God’s sake, do not challenge them again. Next time, you might just really piss them off. Inside your own home, say whatever you want, but do not ruffle their feathers by trying to impose your view of appropriate behavior on them. Accept that you live in a ghetto, populated with bad people who, if pushed, will do bad things to you.”

    However, I am not going to ignore trash in my yard and criminal activity on my street because of my address. I strongly encourage my fellow “Northside Negroes”—and Northside Hmong, Latino, and all the other hyphenated Americans—to have zero tolerance for bad behavior. We’ve got to let the bad boys and girls know that the heat is on. We all deserve what people in Kenwood and Linden Hills take for granted—clean, relatively crime-free neighborhoods.

  • Stand and Deliver

    So, I’m sitting at this casino bar outside of Carlton, Minnesota, last month, and this rather handsome gent rolls up alongside me and says, “Nice mustache-ride joke. Can I buy you a drink?” I’d just closed out the bill at the Black Bear Casino’s “Free Comedy Night Thursdays.” Now, I don’t mean to brag, but that’s headlining, baby. Top o’ the hog pile.

    When I say the guy rolled up, I mean that literally. My beer benefactor was in a wheelchair. Marine Corps, Vietnam, but that came out after the second round of beers. He told me he lost the leg in a poker game.

    As it turns out, the guy wanted to talk shop. He’s just started making the rounds with his own stand-up act at open mikes in Minneapolis. That’s a long drive for someone who lives in Hinckley, but when you love performing, a couple of hours’ drive time can weirdly sweeten the deal. Whets the appetite for a crowd.

    I took the Lady Slipper Lounge gig for the money. No mistaking that. But also for love. I’m called a comic, but I’m more of a B.S. artist. Anybody who has the audacity to take a microphone in hand and stand on a stage alone in front of strangers in a strange place with the intent to bring them together in a symphony of delight is both an artist, and full of it. I mean, talk about the impossible.

    In truth, it had been years since I headlined a room of any size as a stand-up. You can leave the stage, but you never get over the laughs. I wanted to see if my old love would have me back.

    The stage was a set of steps that led into the bar and a mike on a stand. No lighting, pre-show music cued in from a Discman. The crowd numbered fifty. The house emcee wore matching “Ziamond” pinky rings on each of his hands and did a pretty convincing Burgess Meredith impersonation. Kind of a mid-eighties vintage if you ask me, but the crowd lapped it up. Every grunt was underscored by the ringing slots.

    In the middle of the first comic’s act, a drunken heckler roared to life. She was the prototypical Birthday Girl. Slumped in her seat, melon breasts spilling out of a shiny party blouse. Toy tiara from Wal-Mart perched on her head, queen for her day. She emitted giant eruptions of slurred sass, angrily ensuring that all eyes remained on her. Because they were tanked, she and her friends could only understand so much of what was being said to them from the stage.

    The opening comic handled her like a brilliant neurosurgeon that is suddenly forced mid-operation to work with butter knives. He had a pattern. Mollify, compliment, insult. Apology, flattery, personal attack. Dig, dig, push. Tamp down the dirt. Bye-bye birthday girl. Twenty minutes later, she and her friends were stunned into shamed silence, the rest of the audience laughing at them. The comic killed her. He killed them. He killed.

    I followed, and my set went fine. What I like to call “wildly OK.” My beer buddy was right; the best joke of my set was the mustache joke. It was a toss-off, part of a crowd riff. A fella in the front row sported a humongous Tom Selleck tickler, and I couldn’t take my eyes off it so I said: “Hey Tiger, how much are they charging for a mustache ride these days? Used to be twenty-five cents, and you’d see those T-shirts everywhere. What happened? Do you think there might have been a big mustache-ride accident? What do you think it was—whiplash? Or a dislocated jaw? That’s a damn shame. Bunch of litigation-happy people gotta screw it up for the rest of us!”

    It was hilarious—really, it was, but I guess you had to be there.

  • High on the Job

    On a typical workday, Jeff Speed arrives at work at six-thirty in the morning. He has half an hour to climb twenty stories up to the little capsule where he works, which is at the top of a crane. He brings food with him—with only half an hour for lunch, there is no time to climb down, then back up again. While his fellow construction workers use Port-a-Pottys down on the ground, he keeps a jar up in the crane for nature’s call. “You learn not to drink too much coffee,” his site supervisor joked.

    Speed has been running equipment on construction sites for twenty-five years. His training was not formal; he says he just got lucky. He started by operating smaller machinery—bulldozers, forklifts—and then had the good fortune to be around when someone needed him to operate something larger and threw him in front of the controls. He gradually moved on to bigger and bigger machinery, until he found himself two hundred feet off the ground. He’s been operating cranes for about fifteen years.

    The first time was a thrill, he said, but now, “It’s kind of second nature.” He’s not always in the tall cranes; it depends on the job. He still operates forklifts and bulldozers sometimes; “I do whatever needs to be done.”

    But if a crane is being used on a site, Speed is usually the one in it. “It’s hard to find good crane operators,” said Mark Brown, the superintendent at the construction site of the new Guthrie Theater. “Everyone is dependent on them.” The Guthrie has two tall cranes, including the one run by Speed, which daily perform a careful pas de deux.

    Each carries heavy loads from one side of the site to another, delivers construction materials to workers on the upper floors of a building, keeping everyone working by keeping them supplied with what they need. The crane operator, in turn, is dependent on riggers on the ground, who strap on the materials and let the operator know via walkie-talkie when things are ready to be moved.

    It’s a lot of stop-and-go, Speed said; sometimes everybody wants him at once, and he finds himself working through breaks, even skipping lunch. Other times, there may be a long lull when he’s not needed. “I read a book, I read a magazine,” he said. He keeps all of that stuff with him up in his miniature glass office.

    Speed said he’d always wanted to operate machinery. He started on earth movers at age fourteen. “I like the challenge of being able to control something, I guess.” He appeared to set his mind on the problem from another angle, then stopped. “I’ve never really thought about why I do it. I just do it.”

    His only complaint about the job is the erratic hours. He never knows in advance how long he’ll be at work. He could be stuck for fourteen hours, or he could get rained out and find himself unemployed for a week. His pay rate also varies—the taller the crane, the more he earns. Not all construction sites require the tallest kind of crane. “It’s hard to schedule life around work,” he said.

    Overall, though, Speed is happy with his job, and seems to have a natural affinity for it. “You have to get to know the equipment,” he said. “You don’t want its movements to be clunky like a machine. You want them smooth. You have to control it like it was your own arm.”—Katherine Glover