Category: Article

It was the first Broadway musical to be commemorated by a postage stamp. It has earned dozens of accolades, including a Pulitzer Prize, an honorary Grammy, and two Academy Awards. It held the record for longest-running Broadway show for fifteen years, playing longer than any other brainchild of Roger and Hammerstein, including South Pacific, The Sound of Music, and The King and I—even longer than Curley holds the opening note in the theme song. If that isn’t enough to make you want to saddle up for a revival of the landmark musical, how about a good old-fashioned family hoedown to cure your holiday homesickness? With quirky characters like Aunt Eller, Ado Annie, and Gertie Cummings kicking up their heels to classic showtunes “Oh, What A Beautiful Morning” and “Surrey with the Fringe on Top,” audiences are sure to leave loving Oklahoma! all over again, in all its grits and glory. OK? Sure, sounds good to us. Orpheum, 910 Hennepin Ave., (612) 339-7007, www.hennepintheatredistrict.com

So what if you haven’t waxed the Lexus lately? Trend food is now in reach of the proletariat on the Tejas lunch menu. We once walked into the Southwest-style eatery at the spiritual (if not geographic) center of Edina and asked for a takeout menu and instead received a withering glance. Now, three years later, they have one. Yes, trend food can be as obnoxious as a cosmetic surgeon who trying to parallel-park his Suburban. But Tejas fare is not just fashionable—it’s good. For lunch, you can’t go wrong with the fresh-tasting Maine lobster roll and fries. For more of a trip, try the only open-faced tamale we’ve ever seen, with barbecue pork and other nice morsels resting on yam masa and a cornhusk. Bring a bigger wallet for dinner. We recommend the beef tenderloin with barbecue bernaise. This sauce may sound more like heresy than innovation, but we’ve never left a drop on the plate.

Despite the overnight snowfall and a route through some of the metro’s most notorious traffic hot spots, I pulled into the well-salted parking lot almost fifteen minutes early for my appointment to look at the Minnesota Department of Transportation’s new Roseville compound. It’s a brushed aluminum affair, called the Water’s Edge building. Together with the attached Operations Center, the facility looks spanking modern indeed, especially standing abreast of the aging Rosedale Shopping Center just across Snelling Avenue.

Mary Meinert, a traffic information officer and occasional tour guide, greeted me with an enormous cup of coffee in hand. Arriving as early as 5:30 a.m. some days and leaving as late as 8 p.m. others, she counts java second only to her ID badge as a workplace necessity. After I was fitted with a visitor’s badge, she took me to the Operations Center to show me exactly why my rush-hour drive had been so efficient. In the tour room, Meinert projected a computer display onto a large screen, made selections from a network of more than two hundred live-feed cameras, and toggled the cameras to show me, in real time, the route I had just driven from Highway 100 to I-394 to I-94 to the Lowry Tunnel, to 35W to Highway 36. “People were pretty well behaved today,” she said with the tone of a satisfied preschool teacher. She expertly panned a camera to check on a stalled car I had passed on I-94 just twenty minutes before. “You are Big Brother,” I accused. “You can call me Big Sister,” she quipped.

If there is a place where Minnesotans need some babysitting, the highways are certainly it. Pretty much everyone knows anecdotally about our atrocious driving. Last January the Minnesota Department of Public Safety released statistics from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration confirming that Minnesotans drive like, well, morons. Minnesotans crash and die more often per mile than the national average, comparing favorably to only a handful of retrograde states, such as Mississippi. In 2002, there were 94,969 crashes reported in the state, fifty-nine percent of them concentrated in the metro. These crashes yield nearly seven hundred fatalities annually. This particular morning two Anokans had perished on Highway 10.

To shepherd the metro’s endangered commuters, Mn/DOT completed the new facility last February. Meinert admits that they didn’t publicize the opening aggressively; the political climate hasn’t exactly been ripe for an announcement that we’ve spent $23.5 million on a fifty-three-thousand-square-foot facility just to help folks drive around. I was, in fact, the first journalist allowed to prowl the floor of the Traffic Operations Group. It’s an impressive room, right out of Hollywood’s imagination of such places. Three banks of thirty screens each monitor more than two hundred locations on 170 miles of metro highway. The top row of each bank keeps accident sites locked onscreen, while the rest scroll through various camera angles and locations, monitoring rush-hour progress. At an array of a dozen or so desks, Mn/DOT dispatchers and state troopers watch the screens and keep track of other data streams, from electronic in-road traffic counters (called loops) to air patrols. Unlike the CIA, Mn/DOT has a pretty good idea what to do with the information: They adjust ramp meters, post messages on changeable signs, and dispatch help where needed. (Alas, they are powerless to rid the world of its most disturbing and intractable evil—the gawker slow-down.)

None of this can be done on the cheap. System architecture design supervisor Terry Haukom sat down with me to defend some of the gadgets he clearly loves. “A changeable message board costs about $60,000,” he said, “and to the average guy that sounds like a lot of money.” But the average cost of a crash is now close to $20,000, said Haukom. “If we can prevent just three secondary crashes, we’ve made our money back. And I expect to get twenty years out of each sign.”

Since this is all about safety, I asked Haukom about the new microwave technology being installed for traffic counting. I wanted to know if this is roasting drivers. He patiently explained that “microwave” can refer to any radio-wave signal frequency in the gigahertz range. “Your radar detector will go off. But you won’t be able to heat up your sandwich.”

With all these devices at the ready to spot trouble, I wondered if Mn/DOT plans to roll out the heavy artillery for the notorious New Year’s Eve commute, which, after all, will be an hour later and an hour drunker this year. As it happens, they’ll leave on the lights, but Mn/DOT staff will turn night operations over to the State Patrol, just like any other night. Operations manager Nick Thompson apparently doesn’t relish the thought of driving home in the wee hours himself. “We hope to be out of here by about 8:30.” Besides, the morning commute often supplies more entertainment anyway. “Up on 169 for the last few weeks we’ve seen a pig,” said Meinert. “People would call on their cell phones and tell us they saw something.” Eventually, she said, “they had to shoot him.”
—Joe Pastoor

POPULAR CREEPS

My hopes for the future include the following:
1. That we finally see a real end to the war that officially “ended” last spring.
2. That we finally see an end to makeover-decorating-themed TV shows. I can make over your rock ‘n’ roll crib, easy. Give me a pile of oily rags and a match.
3. That with losers like Jack Osbourne and Rush Limbaugh going public with their addiction to Oxycontin, most self-respecting hipster addicts will realize this drug is so over. They will promptly replace their daily habit with a Flintstones vitamin and a warm bath.
4. That Fiona Apple makes several more good records but never speaks in public again.
5. That the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of the Overrated inducts new members Chris Cornell, Radiohead, and the Shins to keep Lou Reed, Patti Smith, and Alex Chilton company.
6. That polite, Midwestern, God-fearing Timberwolves fans muster the courage now and again to boo some of those phoning-it-in millionaires.
7. That if you see Latrell Sprewell out on a non-game night you’ll consider throwing your own coat over a puddle for him.
8. That you, realizing it’s no one’s lifelong dream to work in a coffee shop, will leave only paper currency in the tip-jar for at least one month.
9. That the next time you go out for drinks, you go to a bar where a local band is playing, face the stage occasionally, and, if they weren’t altogether or even partially responsible for rock’s ultimate demise, or if it looks like even one band member might cut his own hair, buy their CD.
10. That in the interest of science, as well as my entertainment, at least one victim of a freak farm or surfing accident will throw caution to the wind and have the forelegs of a chihuahua surgically attached where their own arms were ripped off.

Little Jimmy Scott
If You Only Knew
Mary sez: This one’s for you, Hal.

If you’ve watched television at any point during the past ninety days, you’ve probably seen the latest ads from Old Navy, a brand that dispenses irony like VH1 serves up nostalgia: cheap, shameless, and unfiltered. In a commercial I cannot for the life of me get out of my head, a waxy Fran Drescher brays, “My shizzle’s gone fazizzle.” She enunciates these words in a way that suggests she’d like very much to be told what the hell “shizzle” and “fazizzle” mean. Needless to say, she’s not the only one.

Lil’ Kim is featured in another Old Navy ad that offers a race-reversed variation. In it, L’il Kim wears the sort of outfit a prep-school girl might pack for a trip to Killington with Muffy and Biff.

Outside the world of inexpensive clothing manufactured by impoverished Asian children, Jerry Stiller stars in an advertisement for the latest Satanic incarnation of America Online. Stiller appears unannounced in the home of a middle-class couple who, like the rest of humanity, feel only contempt and hatred for the AOL discs sent to them on an hourly basis. They’re so turned off by AOL, in fact, that they’ve constructed an elaborate fish sculpture out of the discs. This is upsetting to AOL pitchman Stiller. He suggests that they complete their sculpture with a Snoop Dogg CD. This prompts the arrival of a visibly enraged Mr. Dogg, who admonishes the couple to “wait just one minizzle.”

These campaigns at once highlight and satirize the state of race relations in the U.S. They’re funny, one supposes, precisely because they offer such improbable juxtapositions: Fran Drescher and black slang, Lil’ Kim and tweedy ski wear, and Snoop Dogg mixing it up with George Costanza’s dad. These ads are part of a wave of humor based on the lazy melding of black culture with white idiocy. In Bringing Down the House, one of the year’s most popular films, a far-too-enthusiastic Steve Martin adopts a ghetto-fabulous wardrobe and spouts horribly dated Ebonics in an attempt to help real-life raptor and costar Queen Latifah. In Malibu’s Most Wanted, Jamie Kennedy plays a Wafrican-American (White African-American) who doesn’t let his privileged background or white skin get in the way of behaving like a particularly sorry would-be member of Master P’s No Limit army. On HBO’s hilarious Da Ali G Show, a white Brit named Sacha Baron Cohen adopts the comic persona of a clueless Indian who desperately wants to be taken seriously as a B-boy.
There are countless other characters whose humor is predicated on the contrast between their white skin and their black behavior. The feebleminded “wigger” is by now a stock comic character, the walking embodiment of the culture-clash school of comedy.

From an entertainment point of view, it’s easy to see why the wigger is a popular character. It’s an easy gag, one so embedded into our nation’s background that it’s almost a part of our mythology. Why did the chicken cross the road? We still ask that question not because it’s a hilarious joke, but because it’s part of American folklore. Similarly, a movie need only introduce a white character kicking it street-style to win an unearned laugh of recognition.

“Wigger” became vogue shorthand to label white kids who behave in ways considered black. The word gives a good indication of the low esteem in which these characters are held. People who wouldn’t be caught dead using the word “nigger” seem to have no such hang-up about using the word “wigger,” even though it’s nothing more than a contraction of “white nigger.” (Some have argued that blacks themselves coined the word not only as a contraction, but to label someone who had “wigged out” about his or her racial identity. This punning is itself an example of how wonderful authentic black street talk can be.)

White comics who act black usually emulate a particularly debased, broad caricature of black behavior. This sort of comedian is a descendent of the minstrel performer of yore, the clown who earned his daily bread reassuring racist whites that all the negative stereotypes about blacks were true.
The main difference between the minstrel-show performer and the Wafrican-American comic of today is that the latter’s buffoonish behavior is supposed to reflect negatively on whites rather than blacks. He functions as a supposedly self-deprecating white person, the message being “Don’t white folks look ridiculous when we try to emulate cool, black culture?”

But just how incongruous is the Wafrican-American? Black popular culture is increasingly becoming American pop culture, to the point where the two are pretty much one and the same. In practice, plenty of white kids grow up listening exclusively to rap and R&B. Doesn’t it make sense that they’d pick up the affectations of their black heroes? After all, kids are nothing if not impressionable. As the U.S. becomes an increasingly multiracial place, the Wafrican-American caricature continues to suggest the regressive idea that black is black and white is white and never the twain shall meet. (Kids, of course, are smarter than that.)

This is particularly ironic considering that the most controversial, influential, and admired pop star in the world is Eminem, a white rapper whose unironic embrace of black culture is widely and correctly attributed to his natural affinity and deep reverence for it, rather than self-hatred or the delusion that he’s a black man stuck in a white man’s body.

The Wafrican-American stock character isn’t likely to die out any time soon. But there are small signs that artists are increasingly recognizing the complicated and ambiguous state of race relations. One of the many subtle touches in Barbershop, for example, was a white character whose mimicry of black culture is depicted as a natural admiration and respect for black culture, rather than a pathetic attempt to be something he’s not. Eminem’s character in his autobiographical movie 8 Mile was depicted this way too.

Unfortunately, characters like that are still exceptional. But artists in the future would be wise to acknowledge that the boundaries between black and white culture are increasingly fluid and ambiguous—a fact of life refuted by the very existence of the comic Wafrican-American.

A few months ago, Intercontinental Video reopened its doors. It had been closed for more than a year, after a fire destroyed the West Bank store’s irreplaceable video collection of almost 50,000 titles. The store was always a sure bet if you were trying to up your cool factor with an attractive potential mate by finding some obscure title. Om Arora, owner and operator, had been gathering foreign films for twenty years. He is originally from India.

It might have been a good time to get out of the business, what with the rise of DVDs and DirecTV. But Arora decided to resurrect the shop, after scores of loyal customers and desperate singles encouraged him to. Starting over made it easy to convert the business; Arora now deals primarily in digital discs. This is not the first time he’s had to convert from one format to another. Shortly after he launched the first time, a new format called VHS was beginning to take a bite out of Beta.

Arora started the business as a hobby while he was finishing his Ph.D. in genetics at the U of M. When I stopped in to check out the new digs, he took the broad view. “It’s a fresh start, after twenty years. Now it is like a takeoff for me. When an airplane takes off, it is slow of speed and then it gets fast. Whether that speed will come for the store again, I do not know.”

Intercontinental’s seedy old Cedar Avenue charm has been replaced by a white-and-green sheen, spotless décor, and the tidy economy of DVD boxes on thin shelves. Still, the shop holds the same old wealth of dubious offerings. Here’s a copy of the depressive subtitled foreign flick Stroszek. There’s the kitschy cult classic Vampyros Lesbos.

Around the corner, on Riverside Avenue, is World Beat and Video. The friendly competitors are just out of view of one another. Together, the two stores encompass the largest and most diverse video collection in the state. World Beat also has plenty to crow about in the way of recent improvements. The store’s owners, Solomon Cherne and Erdoan Akgue, have enlarged the DVD stock, including Bollywood titles and the African films that appeal to the neighborhood’s burgeoning Somali population. They have also installed a café on the store’s ground level.

Solomon Cherne is originally from Ethiopia. Erdoan Akgue came from Turkey. The two met when they attended junior high together in Minneapolis. For the past twelve years, they have gotten along remarkably well, working together in the store every day. They occasionally disagree on the merits of particular inventory, however. “This guy can get excited about a movie like My Dinner With Andre!” said Akgue with disgust. “Not for me. I need movies with more action.”

Arora, Cherne, and Akgue seem to agree that there is enough business for both stores to thrive. But it’s probably not something to chalk up to the cosmopolitanism of Twin Citizens. Any owner of an eclectic, independent video store holds this maxim dear: When the going gets tough, the tough fall back on steady porn rentals.—Jeremy O’Kasick

Bobbleheads have recently become all the rage among collectors of sports souvenirs. Those oversized craniums, wobbling on springs as if Parkinson’s disease were desirable in a doll, are a pleasant diversion when perched on your mantel or flanking your computer monitor.

They’re funny not just because of their striking ugliness, but because they point beyond themselves to some disturbing home truths—at least the football bobbleheads do. In real life, the craniums of 300-pound linemen are incredibly vulnerable, despite appearances. Blows to the head, no matter how thick the skull or its natural padding, can lead to serious brain injuries, most commonly concussions. They are the type of injuries that can cut short careers. Thus the most recent attempts to improve the safety of football players have focused on helmet technology—specifically, efforts to make the headgear lighter, stronger, and cooler.

“It’s a question of simple physics,” said Vikings tight end Hunter Goodwin. “A lot of concussions are caused by a whipping effect of the head and neck, and with less weight to propel, there’s less whipping.”

Goodwin is one of a handful of Vikings wearing the most modern version of protective lids. After a four-year study of both head-on and lateral collisions, Riddell Sports introduced the Revolution.

The most noticeable difference is its size—if you thought Jim Kleinsasser, Bryant McKinnie, or Chris Claiborne appeared a bit bubbleheaded this year, you’re right. The Revolution’s shell is bigger than standard models, to accommodate extra padding. It’s also got six oval-shaped holes across the crown to provide better ventilation, and it wraps around the mandible to protect the jaw.

Goodwin said that after years of little change in helmet technology, Bike—a competitor of Riddell—came out with a space-age prototype that he tested in 2000, when he played with the Miami Dolphins. “I was the players’ association rep in Miami, and in a players’ union meeting the safety issues were discussed,” he said. “We saw the results of the tests between the Bike and the old Riddell helmet, and that made it a conscious decision for me.”

Riddell introduced the Revolution at Super Bowl XXXVI, where Rams fullback James Hodgins was the first player to wear it in a game. Riddell made the Revolution available to the rest of the NFL in time for the 2002 season. Other companies are working on similar models. Schutt Sports unveiled a new brain-bucket at the Army-Navy football game a couple weeks ago. Schutt claims its helmets borrow from technology used in the Army, meaning we’ve come full circle since John T. Riddell allowed the U.S. government to borrow his patented suspension helmet design in 1939 to protect Allied troops in combat.

The suspension model—an unpadded plastic shell literally suspended above the player’s head by crisscrossing straps—was still the helmet of choice in 1975, when equipment manager Dennis Ryan joined the Vikings staff. In fact, Hall of Fame quarterback Fran Tarkenton was one of the last to change to a padded helmet, and Minnesota Supreme Court Justice Alan Page never did make the switch.

“When Page went to Chicago, I think we had to send his helmet there, which they painted blue,” Ryan said. “He also wore an aluminum face mask. They bent a lot, and what was scary is, they would collapse. There were a couple of times where you wondered if you were going to get the helmet off the player’s head, they would be smashed in so far.”

So even though the old helmets were good enough to protect the bean of a future supreme court justice, one would have to be pretty thick to deny that today’s models are a decisive upgrade. But it’s still too early to tell if the Revolution has helped reduce concussions league-wide. “It’s tough to say one helmet is better than another,” Ryan said.

Of course, the lack of data—scientific or anecdotal—is both a blessing and a curse. How can you tell which blows should have caused a concussion, but didn’t, thanks to the new helmet? “I haven’t noticed anything, but I guess that’s a good thing,” said Revolution-wearing Vikings tackle Mike Rosenthal. “It must be working.”—Patrick Donnelly

You can do it!

Here are the answers:

Magers—the King; Robinson—the Count; Santaniello—the Helmet; Binkley—Bozo the Piece; Grayson—Best in Show; Diana Pierce—Ferret-Glo; Murphy—the Wet Mop; Gatenby—the Rust Bucket