Category: Article

Every year about this time, the Noise Pollution Clearing House gets a flurry of calls about leaf blowers. Some people don’t like them, and in California, the gas-powered models have been outlawed or restricted in several municipalities. They can’t be used within five hundred feet of a residence in Los Angeles.

The director of the Noise Pollution Clearing House is Les Blomberg, an Arden Hills native. He clearly enjoys his work. Reached at the group’s headquarters above a travel agency in Montpelier, Vermont, he had just come in from conducting a field test, using a hand-held decibel meter. He was measuring the sound produced by a rake. “We’ve done lots of readings on leaf blowers,” he explained with a laugh. “One of our guys was just curious how they’d compare.”

For the record, the rake, measured at fifty feet, registered forty-four decibels. That’s about four times quieter than the quietest leaf blower. Up close, the gas-powered models are noisy enough to permanently damage hearing. “The leaf blower is really a silly invention,” said Blomberg. “It solves the problem of ‘leaf pollution’ by creating a bigger problem of noise and dust pollution.

One might think the Twin Cities, with its solid if shrinking liberal core, would be predisposed to take up the issue, but that hasn’t been the case. A municipal clerk in St. Paul agreed to show me a few pages of recent noise complaints. It reads like a poem of urban malaise: “Working on cars till late hours of the night, dogs constantly running loose”; “Ethanol plant is louder than usual”; “Noise all night and during the day. This is so loud”; and the oddly moving “Noise complaint. Ringing in ears. Two tones.” But no mention of leaf blowers.

That fact put me in mind of something I once witnessed while driving east across the Ford Bridge in St. Paul. A few blocks ahead, I noticed a thick, brown turbulent haze. It looked as if one of the shopping centers at Highland Village was on fire. It turned out to be just two men at work, using leaf blowers to flush debris out of the foliage, onto the sidewalk, and into the street. The air had that strange color it takes on just before a total solar eclipse. The sound was like two angry chain saws. Nonetheless, the outdoor tables at a Starbucks, about twenty yards away, were fully occupied, boulevardiers sipping their lattes as if nothing was happening.

But something was happening: Two machines were “pushing relatively large volumes of air, typically between 300 and 700 cubic feet per minute, at a high wind speed, typically 150 to 280 miles per hour,” in the words of the California Air Resources Board. (“Hurricane wind speed,” that study noted helpfully, “is 117 miles per hour.”) The localized storm raises a cloud of dust that, according to a California grand jury, includes “fecal material, fertilizers, fungal spores, pesticides, herbicides, pollen, and other biological substances.” In an urban setting, the blower also stirs up what some studies call “paved road dust.” That would include your allergens, your heavy metals, and the residue that comes from brakes, tires, and engine exhaust.

The only place this issue has risen to the level of a political battle is California. It went on for years, and it isn’t over yet. “It was a battle of Democrats,” says Larry Rolfuss of the California Landscape Contractors Association in Sacramento. Hispanic workers carried the water for the landscapers, at one point staging a hunger strike in the state capitol over the issue. Los Angeles passed its leaf-blower ordinance in 1998.

One anti-blower activist was Joan Graves, still an active member of a group called Zero Air Pollution Los Angeles, and the wife of Minnesota-born actor Peter Graves. “They are really dreadful machines,” she said. Today enforcement is lax, according to Graves. She noted that the elderly and chronic asthmatics, who may suffer the most direct effects, may be the least likely to complain.

Robert Moffitt, communications director of the American Lung Association of Minnesota, agrees there’s a problem. Two-cycle engines are part of it, he says. They pollute as much as several cars can. Electric models solve that, but not the problem of the “fine particulates” leaf blowers stir up. “They get right past the body’s defenses and breathed deeply into the lungs, where they are trapped,” he said. —David Rubenstein

Up until about two weeks ago, Mike Byard was a daytime operator of the historic Stillwater Lift Bridge. Byard is one of three seasonal attendants who keep the bridge manned twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week until mid-October, when the Coast Guard restricts river traffic in anticipation of winter. The bridge, built in 1931, stays down until the spring. It’s a well-earned rest for bridge and operator alike. Byard typically lifted and lowered the bridge at least twelve times during his 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. shift.

Byard is fifty-four. He is a man of experience when it comes to machinery. Although this was his first season as a bridge tender, his three decades of operating heavy equipment for the Minnesota Department of Transportation’s Spring Lake Park shop has given him the steadiest of hands. He is built close to the ground, his movements are deliberate, his eyes are alert, and he smokes constantly.

First, warning lights and gates were activated on both ends of the bridge as the traffic cleared the deck. Next, Byard eased forward a lever in the middle of a control panel and the 480-volt electric engine whined to life. The ride was surprisingly smooth. No great groans or cracking joints from the 72-year-old piece of machinery. The motor turns a drum beneath the bridge to wind massive cables that run through a series of pulleys and terminate at two 300,000-pound counterweights. When the counterweights go down, the 600,000-pound section of bridge goes up—along with Byard, the tender’s house, and, on this day, me.

A scale on the wall indicated how high we were going. “Today, the river was eleven feet below the deck, so add eleven onto that number—that’s how far above the water we are.” At the top of the lift, we were about forty feet above the water.

It was 2:30 p.m., and traffic was already building rapidly at both ends of the bridge, clogging downtown Stillwater and stacking up the hill on the Wisconsin side. Boats moved underneath. We began our descent. Going down can be tricky, Byard said, because some hot-rod boaters try to squeeze under at the last moment. “I can’t stop this real fast,” he said. “But I haven’t clobbered anyone yet.”

The tender’s house offers little in the way of comfort. The traffic rumbles past just a few inches away. The roughly four-by-eight-foot space bristles with circuit boxes and wiring harnesses. The windows don’t open; the only ventilation beyond a propped door is a tiny air conditioner with one setting—frigid.

We sat out on a small adjacent platform and watched the traffic. Some people waved, most wore expressions of annoyance. A decent breeze kept the exhaust fumes from becoming thick. Some days are certainly worse than others, Byard said. “But I’ve spent thirty-one years working with diesel equipment, so I’m probably half brain-dead anyway,” he joked. —Mike Mitchelson

It’s not hard to get away with rigging an electronic voting machine. No matter how thoroughly the machine is tested, you could always hack it to, say, give every tenth vote for Candidate A to Candidate B, but only if it’s November 4. Anyone testing the machine on November 3 or 5 would find everything functioning properly.

Electronic rigging is irrelevant if people can verify questionable results by hand-counting the ballots. The problem is, a lot of new touch-screen technology doesn’t create anything hand-countable. You touch the screen, the machine asks you, “Are you sure you want to vote for X?” and at the end of the day, it announces a winner. The correlation between the voters’ intentions and the recorded results is purely a matter of faith.

Although touch-screen voting machines are becoming more common in elections nationwide, there are no federal laws requiring that a paper ballot be kept and stored. “We have much more control over cement trucks in this country than over voting machines,” says Rebecca Mercuri, who wrote her doctoral thesis on electronic voting technology. She spends much time testifying before various government bodies and officials, and they largely ignore her.

Our fair state has not. Minnesota statutes require that paper ballots be kept after every election. Secretary of State Mary Kiffmeyer personally contacted Mercuri to discuss security issues, and told voting-machine companies that Minnesota will only consider machines that meet certain requirements, including voter-verifiable paper ballots.

Minnesota is looking at new technology in order to comply with the 2002 Help America Vote Act. Unfortunately, our statutes only detail the certification process for optical scanners, which read and tabulate results from paper voting cards. We will have to come up with new statutes to certify touch-screen technology—and some voting-machine companies will certainly try to persuade us that the paper ballot is obsolete.

During last year’s election, three companies provided machines for free demonstrations in St. Cloud, Minneapolis, and Elk River. After casting their real ballots, voters could try out the new machines, choosing between candidates such as Abraham Lincoln and Mickey Mouse. This November, Minnesota voters will be testing machines provided by Diebold, ES&S, and Avante.

Avante machines have always printed out a paper ballot (“only because I yelled at them,” insists Mercuri, who lives down the street from the company’s headquarters). Both Diebold and ES&S, however, are fighting hard against voter-verifiable paper trails, and there may be some doubt as to whether either of them will fulfill the requirements laid out by the Minnesota Secretary of State. Becky Vollmer, a spokesperson for ES&S, told The Rake that their machine prints out a paper audit when the election is over and stores ballot images in the computer’s memory. But voters have no way to verify that the image stored actually matches their vote.

Diebold brags on their website that their technology has managed to “eliminate the need for paper ballots” — this despite a recent study by Johns Hopkins saying Diebold’s machines are rife with security flaws. And more than a few eyebrows went up when Diebold’s CEO, Walden O’Dell, wrote in a fundraising letter for the GOP that he was “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year.”

ES&S has had its own share of scandals, especially when it was learned that Nebraska senator Chuck Hagel was a former chairman of the company that became ES&S. Eighty percent of the election results in Nebraska last year were calculated on ES&S machines, and Hagel won by a landslide. According to the electronic vote, he was the clear choice of every demographic group in the state and won in communities that decided to vote Republican for the first time in history.

No one yet knows what Minnesota will use in future elections. With any luck, we’ll keep our paper ballots and use frequent hand recounts to keep our computers in line. It is discouraging, though, that no one seems to know who is responsible for testing the accuracy and security of the machines. They are certified at the state level, but who monitors last-minute patches and upgrades and vulnerabilities? Well, according to Kent Kaiser at the Secretary of State’s Office, “County by county, they test the machines before elections.” But Ramona Doebler, auditor treasurer for Sherburne County, has other ideas. “Security? That’s all handled through the Secretary of State.”—Katherine Glover

Jim Stowell will literally go halfway around the world just to get a good story. A prominent force in the local theater community for thirty-five years, the actor and playwright has developed a specialty in the last decade and a half as a master monologuist. His deeply personal tales—funny, angry, politically aware, and wry—draw from his experiences in places like Cuba, Nicaragua, and the Amazon. His current project, Family Values, was originally produced at Bryant-Lake Bowl Theater in 1999. (You may also have seen him that year in the Jungle’s Macbeth.) Family Values depicts Stowell’s experiences growing up in a small Texas town on the Mexican border, and his late-nineties trip to war-torn Northern Ireland. The play explores why people hate each other, and why anger in the blood so often leads to the spilling of blood. Like many of us, Stowell found his perspective on that subject irrevocably altered in September 2001, and he decided to completely overhaul the play in light of the way we live and feel now.

The RAKE: The original version of Family Values was, to some extent, about the Cold War. You begin with boys throwing rocks at each other, and end with Americans and Soviets threatening to shoot rockets at each other.

STOWELL: That was the original concept, that direction. Guys in jets doing exactly the same thing as those boys. But we got to talking about that ending, and Richard Cook, the director, said, “Because of the changes in the world, I’m already way ahead of that business with the atomic stuff. We’ve just zoooomed past all those things.” And I agreed with him. We’ve completely redone the ending.

So where does the play go now?

What we’re looking at now is the connection between what I learned in Belfast and how that connects to 9/11, and us. There’s a story in the play about a woman named Maggie who’s caught on the bus in Belfast with a bomb strapped to her. That story was told to me in Belfast, but it was never explained that she was going to the airport and putting the bomb there and then getting in a car and driving away. It was assumed that I knew that. When I told the story in 1999, I never had to explain.

And after September 11th?

I sent the script off to some people, and they asked about the “suicide bomber.” The unspoken assumption had changed: not “bomber”; “suicide bomber.” Willing to live versus willing to die. A life and death difference. The world’s fundamental assumptions have changed. In the play, I say to an Irish woman, “You’re taking a bomb out to the airport, you’re going to blow up all these people like me. I’m an innocent civilian. What the hell is that? What’s the strategic value in killing somebody like me?” When I was in Belfast, I saw myself as an innocent bystander. Everywhere I went in the world, I saw myself as an innocent bystander. And that’s just not true now. None of it necessarily was true even then.

What is true now?

The world is not Belfast anymore. The world is Tel Aviv. It used to be Belfast, where the bombers try to make a getaway. Now they don’t even try to. And that fundamental change in consciousness we’re now bringing to the script.

You’re also changing the structure of the story around, breaking up the narrative from the original three solid chapters.

In the past, I’ve always written things integrated like a movie. There will be flashbacks. I’ll go back to Texas, and then come back up to the present. For this play, initially, I thought, “Gee, I’d like to do something different. I’ve been doing this for a long time.” And I got to thinking about it, and I realized that everyone who’s going to come see this play, ninety-nine percent of them have never seen any of my other work. 1998 was my last big show. Five, six years, that’s a generation of theatergoers. So I changed it back to the way I like to be doing it.

You’ve been doing monologues like Family Values since the eighties. How did you become interested in the form?

This was at the end of fourteen years as a playwright, so I was ready to evolve to the next step. I had a great working relationship with Patty Lynch of the Brass Tacks Theater; we did three or four monologues together. The first one we did, we didn’t know what we were doing—nobody had ever done it! We didn’t know what the hell to do. We showed up at rehearsals at night and said, “Jeez, what are we doing tonight?” We put our heads together and figured stuff out.

This was before Spaulding Gray?

This is what happened: Spaulding Gray came to the Illusion and filled their house twice. Two or three nights in a row. So the producer looks at that and says, “Ah, hm… Full houses. One person. No set. This really looks good.” Then she brings Kevin Kling and I, we do a show, and there are so many people every night they had to move the set back to put in more seats. The producer didn’t have to be a genius to go, “Oh, big hit, no expenses. Good idea, let’s do this again.”

It’s hard to strip it down any more than that.

It is. That’s just about as far as you can go with one person. Almost no set, and no costumes, and almost no music.

If only we could get rid of the actor, we’d really have something.

Yeah! They’re a pain anyway.

Jim Stowell’s Family Values
October 30-November 16
Park Square Theatre
20 W. Seventh Pl., St. Paul
(651) 291-7005
www.parksquaretheatre.org

But you should still protect your investment! Here are some tips for extending the life and enjoyment of that silly, useless contraption.

Prevent snow from falling in the first place! Throughout the year, you should start and run your snowblower for a half hour at least once a week. This will ensure you’re doing your part to contribute to greenhouse gases.

If you’re a green thumb, consider converting your machine into a dirtblower for your new winter garden. Current projections by the EPA suggest that Minnesota gardeners will be able to grow oranges by 2010!

If you have lots of other vehicles that are already providing plenty of particulate exhaust, go ahead and change the oil, drain the gas, and carefully replace at the back of your garage. It’s a great place to hang those dangerous oily rags, and provides shelter for small birds and mice.

Advertise in colder-climate classifieds. You could buy an ATV! (Hint: Avoid snowmobiles.)

Your snowblower has a powerful engine that can readily be used as a woodchipper. Why not get rid of all those dusty old skis?

The Twin Cities have recently been through a golden Age of fine dining, but times are tough. From Heartland to Pickled Parrot, Minnesota struggles with its identity by way of its appetite.

AS chef de cuisine and proprietor of Heartland, Lenny Russo has say over every ingredient, every wine selection, and every hire, but what he can’t seem to control is his disbelief. “Last night a four-top came in, sat down, looked at the menu, got up and left,” he says. “‘Too weird,’ they said, even though every ingredient on the menu comes from within a two-hundred-mile radius of the restaurant.” Russo and I are standing at the service counter; the restaurant opens for dinner in one hour. Grabbing last night’s menu, Russo points to the “pan-seared squab breast with roasted golden chanterelle mushrooms, toasted black walnuts, and heirloom tomato catsup” and takes it one step at a time. His voice is calm and persuasive, and he sounds as if he were defending the dish in a court of law.

“There’s a chance someone at the table is a hunter, and has hunted for squab, so they know what that is,” he says. “People have black walnut trees in their backyards, and everyone knows someone who has foraged for wild mushrooms, right? But you put it all on the plate together and somehow it’s ‘weird.’” He lays down the menu and shrugs. I, for one, am convinced. When you put it this way, a pan-seared squab breast with roasted and so forth is perfectly logical. Somehow Russo has taken an example of Midwestern haute cuisine and made it seem as grounded in everyday life as a hamburger.

“This food speaks to people’s roots,” he says, referring to Heartland’s fierce, almost evangelical commitment to indigenous and locally cultivated ingredients and organic, sustainable agriculture. In theory, he’s right, and if people were as serious about maintaining good health, appreciating their heritage, supporting American farmers, and eating delicious things as they say they are, then Heartland should be a roaring success. Yet the restaurant is struggling. Heartland opened in October 2002 to critical acclaim, grateful neighbors, and a small, but growing clientele of regulars, but one year later Russo is having a hard time bringing in enough people to make his restaurant viable. “We know we’re doing a great job,” he says. “But we’re barely keeping our heads above water.”

It’s not because of a lack of ability or knowledge. Russo, who hails originally from Hoboken, New Jersey, has over twenty years of kitchen experience, including stints at Faegre’s, the Loring Café, and W.A. Frost. When I went to Heartland on an undercover mission to sample the experience, I found the food artful without being overly fussy, with rich, complex flavors and in portions that satisfied but didn’t make me feel like I’d entered an eating contest. The service was prompt and unobtrusive; the wine was excellent and very reasonably priced; and everyone was enjoying themselves. So why wasn’t Heartland full?

Part of the problem could stem from the general business climate for restaurants in the Twin Cities. Talk to restaurateurs and you’ll hear conflicting stories of opportunity and doom. According to the National Restaurant Association, we rank fourth in terms of per capita dining, and in recent years have been as high as number three. Even after the Internet bubble and September 11th, the Twin Cities market is a hopeful place to open a restaurant. JP American Bistro, Mojito, Solera, and Heartland all took the gamble despite a soft economy and a flattening of business travel and convention activity, while the suburbs are practically exploding with mid-level casual chain restaurants such as P.F. Chang’s, Maggiano’s and Big Bowl.

In the mid-nineties, the Hang Ups were the most prominent purveyors of what was sometimes called ’Sota Pop. Lead singer Brian Tighe and his bandmates eschewed bar-scene three-chord punk for heart-on-sleeve harmonies and shimmering layers of melody, best exemplified on songs like “Runway,” “Top of Morning,” and “Jump Start,” the latter two of which you may have heard in the film Chasing Amy or on TV’s Dawson’s Creek. After a major-label merry-go-round for 1999’s Second Story, they’re back on indie turf and set to release their fourth album, simply titled The Hang Ups. It’s the group’s most musically complex and layered album yet, but less harmony-laden and even a little melancholy. Tighe’s other band, the Owls, has released a sublime MP3 single called “Air” and will follow it with an EP in January. The Hang Ups play First Avenue on November 21, and the Owls the Turf Club November 8.

THE RAKE: What approach did you take recording the new album?
TIGHE: What really gave the album its start was Brad Kern, who worked a lot with Semisonic. We were interested in doing it in a way where we’d work on it in the studio, but then be able to take it home. We all have digital systems at home where we can add to what we do in the studio. And so we were all able to really think about how we wanted to flesh the tracks out. The songs are still being written in that stage. You’re deciding on melodies and countermelodies and textures and all the things that make a song what it is.

THE RAKE: Is this the first record you’ve been able to work and rework to that extent?
TIGHE: It really is. It’s almost too much. You can get bogged down, and I certainly did at times. Endless possibilities. Brad was so good at pulling all these ideas together and really hacking through them that at a certain point we said, “We can just leave Brad to this, and not worry about how it will come together.” Then we were free to explore the endless possibilities, and it would just create more and more of a headache for Brad. But I think he loved it too. That’s his form of creativity.

THE RAKE: Is there a single story running through the songs?
TIGHE: I think that one arose through the selection of the songs, but it wasn’t intentional. But it goes through these different aspects of a love life. It goes through some mournful states; there’s this excitement at the beginning of a possible new love. It goes through some pretty weird territory. Loneliness. “You’ve Come Home” is the arrival at the end where you realize that this is true love. And then the last song [“Light Green Sails”] is a send-off, a light note after you’ve come to this pretty heavy realization.

THE RAKE: And it’s classic Hang Ups, in that it’s got that theme of motion that runs through so many of your songs.
TIGHE: Right. The traveling, the scenery, and the quality of light. Things that seem to come up a lot.

THE RAKE: You’re averaging three years between albums. Will we have to wait that long for the next one?
TIGHE: We recorded at least 20 songs, so there may be a pretty healthy EP not too long after this. We take our time (laughs wryly). But I think the product has always been the most important thing for us, and not so much the promotion of the product. We love the closure when something is finished and you have something to show for it. It’s the best feeling, and really important to the process. I found it really hard to write any new songs in the last year or so, because I knew we were wrapping this thing up, and we had to get these out.

THE RAKE: How did you feel about your songs “Greyhound Bus” and “Caroline” being picked up and covered by Muzak?
TIGHE: Apparently “Greyhound Bus” is still going strong in elevators and grocery stores. I was tickled by that. And flattered, because the song has to make it without the lyrics to be easy listening.

It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing, as the saying goes, and Leslie Johnson’s Mississippi Rag has devoted thirty years to keeping the swing alive. Her Bloomington-based newspaper is a torchbearer for early-twentieth-century ragtime and jazz. It may not have Rolling Stone’s circulation numbers, but it has worldwide reach; the Rag is read by jazz fans and musicians in 26 countries. (Locally, it’s available at Shinder’s and through www.mississippirag.com.) Contributors include modern-day ragtime master Butch Thompson and Will Shapira, longtime Twin Cities jazz journalist and Johnson’s husband. The Rag’s specialty is comprehensive profiles of the talented but obscure sidemen of the Jazz Age—like the recent eight-pager on trumpeter Ziggy Elman. It’s invaluable historical documentation of a set of artists often overlooked. For Johnson’s trip into our imaginary island exile, she chose five great singles from the heyday of traditional jazz.

1. Louis Armstrong and the Hot Five, “West End Blues.” There are some classics that just have to be in there, even though I thought, “Oh jeez, I’d really like to come up with different stuff.” But actually, you just can’t get any better than this. So guess what—that’s number one.

2. Benny Goodman, “Sing Sing Sing.” That’s the song from his 1938 Carnegie Hall concert. The whole concert is just fabulous, but that’s really a barnburner.

3. Jelly Roll Morton, “Mournful Serenade.” One of my absolute favorites. It’s melancholy and rhythmic and creates an incredible mood. Twyla Tharp, the dancer, did choreography to it for a single dancer who did the entire dance within a spotlight, confined just to that, and it was wonderful.

4. “Ragtime Nightingale,” which was written by Joseph Lamb, and I love it played by Max Morath. It’s a classic ragtime tune, with a lovely, irresistible melody. And Max has a touch on piano where he gets a certain poignance to his playing that’s very identifiable. We recently published a two-part article on Joseph Lamb—the first detailed article ever done on him—with the help of his daughter.

5. George Lewis’s New Orleans Jazz Band, “Burgundy Street Blues.” Lewis had a distinctive style. It has a lilting quality, a dancing quality, and yet on this song it’s sweet and mournful, and very true. He plays an Albert-system clarinet—that’s the old-style New Orleans clarinet. It has a woodier sound and a beautiful, rich lower tone. This blues I can listen to again and again and again. It just goes right to the heart.