The Rake Magazine

Category: Article

  • Sympathy for the Devil’s Game

    In a world gone mad with wi-fi, razor-thin laptops, and Xboxes, Dave Slabiak is fighting to preserve a questionable American icon—the pinball machine. “I live, breathe, and eat pinball,” he said the other day, staring through his Buddy Holly glasses to make sure his interviewer took in the gravity of the statement.

    Slabiak is a charitable guy who will pump a couple bucks of quarters into a pinball machine after he’s done playing, in hopes that some teenage slacker might chance upon the freebie and take a liking to it. He is also a founding member of the Twin Cities Pinball Enthusiasts (TCPE) who are dedicated to all things having to do with pinball.

    They meet once a month to drop quarters into their favorite public machines and to practice their “bangbacks” and “drop stops” while talking shop. Players like Jen McGaffey, one of the few women in the group of mostly 30-something men, reconnoiter the Twin Cities in search of surviving pinball machines. “We just drive by spots, mostly bars and bowling alleys, and pick ’em,” she said, explaining her scouting technique between sips of a tall Long Island Ice Tea.

    At a recent meeting, enthusiasts gathered around three dinging cabinets in a back corner of the American Sports Café on Como Avenue. There was trouble: The lights on the Attack from Mars playfield were burnt out, so you couldn’t see the silver ball jetting off the bumpers.

    “Geez,” 34-year-old Jeff Kasten lamented. “I did recon on this place for the guys who maintain the machines. I told them the lights were out and there was gunk on the flippers making them stick and that ten to fifteen people were showing up to play. You’d think they could fix them.”

    Indeed, operators who view the machines as dinosaurs and fail to maintain them are especially scorned by the TCPE. Several big vending operators own machines in locations all over town, but they tend to focus on video games because they generate the most cash. It’s a catch-22, said Slabiak. They don’t see pinball as a big money-maker so they let the machines deteriorate, then fewer people want to play them.

    “It’s all about being analog in a digital world,” said one aficionado who was clad in a tight black T-shirt and refused to give his name. “It’s not a Luddite thing or about embracing the old. It is about putting it all in context and enjoying what remains valuable.” After some needling, he explained his need for anonymity. It seems pinball’s unseemly reputation would not be looked upon sympathetically by his boss; he works as a governmental policy analyst.

    Pinball’s association with hoodlum culture is long-standing. The image of the greaser with the Camel straight dangling from his lips while he bangs the flippers, or of freaked-out rock operas (think Tommy) don’t help. But the bad rap goes back further than that. It all stems from pinball’s historical roots as a gambling device.

    Even though pinball’s precursor, bagatelle, was played by Honest Abe Lincoln himself, many of the early 20th century versions had cash payouts. And when they didn’t, tavern owners would frequently offer prizes for high scores. Early laws actually made pinball illegal in several states until the 70s.

    Twin Cities enthusiasts embrace the outlaw image. “It’s an introvert’s way of gaming,” mused the government worker. “You’re turning your back on a crowd in a bar and engaging in something you are trying to get better at—by yourself.”

    The game’s more recent evolution has mirrored other dark aspects of American culture. Like six-figure inflation. In the old days of chime-ringing reels, scores in the thousands earned you the knocking sound of a free game. Today, there’s been a clear case of score-inflation, where tallies in the ten-millions are mediocre. Games are also heavily commercialized today. South Park and Austin Powers are recent pinball themes. These newer games are not necessarily a hit just because they’re pinball machines. “Now they are catering to Attention Deficit Disorder,” complained our Deep Throat.

    “The arcades, the 7-Elevens—that’s all gone now,” said Slabiak ruefully. “We are just people who are trying to enjoy this hobby and promote the sport.”

    As The Rake made our way to the door after a night of free games and mixed drinks, it was put more succinctly by the guy with the backwards baseball hat. “Pinball kicks ass,” he slurred. “Put that in your newspaper.”—John Tribbett

  • What Can You Do For Brown?

    Katy is very proud of her pair of UPS brown socks. She bugged the UPS guy continually to bring her a catalog of all the UPS clothes she could order. Even after weeks of pestering, he never came through with this alleged catalog. One day, however, he handed her a brand new pair of heavyweight socks with the gold UPS logo embroidered on the cuff. When she asked how much she owed him, he replied hastily, “Forget about it,” and sped away in his square truck. Perhaps they were “hush socks” to stop her from asking about how she could get a UPS uniform.

    Who wouldn’t want one of those pairs of UPS shorts to impress their friends? More certain than the first appearance of milfoil in Lake Harriet, all the UPS, USPS, and Fed Ex carriers show up one day in short-sleeved shirts, short pants, and those color-coordinated socks. Do they all decide at the same time when summer has begun?

    I queried Mark, the UPS man who comes to my office, about these mysterious-yet-casual uniforms. He appeared relaxed—perhaps a little too relaxed—when he responded. “We can pull out our shorts anytime. There’s even a UPS guy in the skyways who wears them all year round.” Do they have a dress code? “Oh yeah, we always have to wear our uniform every day. UPS gives us our five uniforms, one for each day of the week.” Doesn’t that make for a lot of laundry? “They wash our uniforms and even mend them when they have holes. We only have to buy our socks and shoes.” Aha! Finally we’re getting somewhere.

    Before I could ask Bob if he got tired of wearing brown and if they let him bring his uniforms home, he dashed out the door. (They always seem to be in such a rush.)

    I soon learned the reason for the secretiveness surrounding the man in brown. A rumor spread across the Internet a few months ago that UPS trucks had been stolen and a large quantity ($32,000 worth, supposedly) of UPS uniforms had been purchased on the Internet auction site eBay by Al Qaeda terrorists hoping to use them as disguises to enter office buildings.

    My regular mailman, Denny, had more time to chat, so I asked him if United States Postal Service regulations were as strict. “They give us an allotment every year of about $300 and have all sorts of catalogs of clothes you can buy,” he replied. “I usually order my uniforms off the Internet, though, just because it’s so cheap. When postal carriers retire, they usually just donate their old clothes. That’s where I picked up these shorts. They have holes in the pockets, but I don’t care.” Apparently his dress code isn’t super-rigid, since Denny also prefers to spice up his wardrobe with a Harley-Davidson headband.

    In any case, the urban myth of terrorists posing as UPS carriers was debunked. UPS spokesperson Kristen Petrella said, “Totally untrue, 110 percent false, no substance. UPS does not condone the sale of its uniforms and we do investigate any reports of unauthorized use.” With the one exception of UPS socks. Perhaps socks were deemed not enough of a uniform to fool anybody.—Eric Dregni

  • West Nile, MN

    Dave Neitzel’s view of the dog-eat-dog, mosquito-suck-bird world begins from his third-floor office in the faceless Minnesota Department of Health building, which sits quietly on the University of Minnesota’s East Bank campus. Neitzel is an ornithologist and entomologist who works on vector-borne and zoonotic diseases. He’s an expert on the West Nile virus.

    It turns out the virus had a fairly innocuous arrival here in Minnesota last year. Slowly making its way across the state, it sent a few horses to Elysian Fields and several hundred birds went talons-up. But there were relatively few human infections.

    “Fortunately, there were no West Nile virus deaths here in Minnesota,” remarked Neitzel. He said there were 48 cases, most of which resulted in not much more than a hat-stretching headache. Sixteen were more serious cases of meningitis and encephalitis, but no one died. On the wall behind him was a big state map with the 2002 West Nile data on it. I pointed to it and asked, “Any big surprise from last year’s Tote Board?”

    “Yeah, there was,” he explained. “About three-quarters of our human cases were out in western or central Minnesota, and only a quarter of the cases were in the seven-county metropolitan area. That’s different than in the East, where most cases occurred in urban areas.” Down in Illinois, they had almost 900 cases—and most were right in Chicago.

    It turns out that the mosquito that carries the virus is different here than down there. “Once you get west of the Mississippi River, the main bird-feeding mosquito becomes Culex tarsalis, a much more rural mosquito that develops in plains and semi-open country,” he explained. “We have some of those bugs that get into the metro, but mostly they’re out farther west.” I suppose they hate the traffic and vote Republican like everyone else.

    This summer the Department of Health is asking Minnesotans to report any birds they believe may have died under what they call on their web site “unusual circumstances.” Now, short of flying kamikaze into the picture window, I wonder whether the public knows what the usual circumstances of avian death might be. “Right, it was kind of hard to word that,” Neitzel chuckled. “We certainly appreciate the help from the public—this surveillance is public-driven. But there has to be an understanding that we can’t test every bird. I had one guy in particular who was very mad because we didn’t pick up a crow he had seen on the side of Highway 394. And I tried to explain that was a bird that was most likely hit by a vehicle, and he said, ‘Well, it may have been sick and unable to avoid the vehicle…’” Neitzel trailed off, sensing the ridiculousness of the conversation all over again. But he was just getting warmed up.

    “We had one person request that we test a mosquito they had found.” Neitzel laughed. “Another guy wanted information on Chronic Waste Nile Disease.”—Craig Bowron

  • Vanilla, Vanilla, Baby!

    He’s so vanilla, she said. She meant he was plain and simple, an accountant type with no spark, not an artist. She meant he was boring and uninventive, without passion and not worth my time. But when food is your language, definitions begin to skew. I understood her to mean he was delicious and seductive in ancient and darkly mysterious ways. That he remained unique while cultivating a universal appeal, worldly yet homey. That he was an artist and could show me the sweet nuances of life, all the while smelling like freshly baked cookies. If he truly was vanilla, he was certainly worth my time.

    In point of fact, it’s hard to find anyone who truly doesn’t like vanilla. Some of us (although not the majority) go for the zanier ice cream flavors, but that’s hardly a full rejection of vanilla itself. Have you ever come across anyone on a strict vanilla-free regimen? On the contrary, vanilla seems to be doing a bit of a spotlight dance lately. Witness the vanilla flavoring in high-end vodkas, leading to vanilla martinis in fashionable hands across the land. Vanilla Coke, while marketing to a new generation, is really reviving an old classic, though I think it tastes like liquid frosting. And in the past decade vanilla has become a signature scent among marketers who peddle candles and perfumes for enticing the opposite sex. All this from a “plain and simple” plant?

    The Totonaca people of the Vera Cruz region of Mexico have long known the divine properties of vanilla. Their ancestors were the first to cultivate the crop. They believed it to be a gift from the gods, with a mythology surrounding a pair of fallen lovers whose sacred blood marked the spot where a strong vine and beautiful flower grew to fill the air with the aroma of true love and beauty.

    The lovely flower is what links vanilla to the vast family of orchids, of which vanilla is the only edible fruit produced. It starts with the climbing vine that is pruned and trained to keep within reach of workers. After three years, the vine is ready to bear the small, trumpet-shaped celadon orchids. These temperamental flowers bloom for one day and must be fertilized in order to produce vanilla beans. Fortunately not all the flowers open on the same day, but over a period of a few months. In Mexico, the native Melipone bee took on the Herculean task of pollination—creating a 300-year monopoly on its home turf. It wasn’t until the 1800s that hand pollination took over and opened up markets all around the world. The plant is sustainable within a 20-degree band around the equator. Today Madagascar and Indonesia grow the best and the most vanilla, with Tahiti following close behind.

    The vanilla pods are ready for harvesting six to nine months after pollination. Growers need to have a bit of a gambling soul, because the longer they leave the bean on the vine, the bigger the pod and the more valuable the crop. But they risk that pesky old burr in the behind, vanilla rustlers! Somebody might sneak into camp and liberate those pods before you wake up. Robbery was so bad in Madagascar that growers began to brand the green pods with markings that survived the curing process.

    It’s only after the curing process that the beans take on distinct flavors and aromas that differ so greatly among varieties. Like wine, vanilla nuances are affected by climatic differences, soil composition, and processing techniques. Mexican vanilla comes from indigenous plant stock and has a very smooth and creamy flavor. Bourbon vanilla originated from the same plant stock of Mexico, but was cultivated in the Bourbon Islands off Africa; this is the familiar and the most commonly used vanilla in extracts. Indonesia is the second largest producer of vanilla, with a vanilla that is woody, astringent and phenolic. Tahitian vanilla comes from the same Mexican stock, but has mutated over time into a separate species that is distinct in its own right. Tahitian vanilla tends to be sweeter and fruitier with a fatter bean and more floral fragrance than the other vanillas.

    This worldly vision of vanilla might be shocking to those who know it only as the small brown extract bottle nestled in the cupboard between the baking powder and the cinnamon. But originally, it was all about the bean—extracts have only been available for the last 100 years. The first vanilla extracts were made by pharmacists searching for stomach soothers. Variations on the bean now include vanilla flavoring, imitation vanilla, vanilla paste, vanilla powder, double strength extract, etc.

    But people these days are looking back to the bean. Definitely more expensive than the extract, the long dried pods look like something out of a voodoo recipe. To get at the good stuff you must delicately slice open the dried pod and scrape out the seeds into whatever concoction you choose. The sweet, damp darkness holds much of the flavor, but the pod still embraces its own fragrances and can be used for many more infusions.

    Vanilla sugar is one of those rare treats from the bean. Chopped vanilla infuses granulated sugar with the mellow and soft tones of the pod, making your morning coffee and cereal a divine revelation. The locally made Golden Fig’s version seems perfectly balanced and can be used in baking and cooking, or dabbed behind the ear.

    In past years, Mexican vanilla has fallen on hard times, with much of the former growing region dedicated to oil wells and orange groves. But a group of growers are working to re-establish ancient land rights and ritual techniques. These boutique vanillas are aiming to re-educate the world about the story of vanilla and many of them offer a unique vacation opportunity to witness firsthand the production of the sweet nectar of the gods.

  • Home and Abroad

    Imperialists come in all shapes and sizes. Some claim their god gave them the right to take away other people’s land and market the produce of their orange groves. Others never visit the places or people whose lives they dominate through the sale of brown sticky drinks and their cinematic equivalent.

    And then there are the unlikely ones, such as the poet Catullus. In the middle of the first century B.C. Rome was taking on territory at a greater rate than ever before. It was the custom for young men who aspired to a political career (or whose fathers aspired to one for them) to spend a year or more in a province as an honorary attaché on the governor’s staff, picking up tips, both informative and financial. Catullus did not find the wide plains of what is now northwestern Turkey at all to his liking. He was clearly happier in a sleazy pub off the Forum in Rome (“salax taberna,” as in “salacious tavern”), even if he did accuse its regulars of rogering his lady love Lesbia, “than whom no woman will ever be more greatly loved.” He was especially bitter about a Spaniard called Egnatius who favored as a dentifrice (so Catullus claimed) a fluid for the production of which he held, shall we say, an unassailable monopoly. [Uh, his own urine.—Editors]

    Perhaps Catullus could have learned to like living abroad for his country. One thinks of that remarkable generation of British Arabists who tried to put the Near East back on its feet after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War. Hamilton, who engineered the Hamilton Road through the Zagros Mountains, the first road to link Persia with northern Iraq, was perhaps a natural for strenuous service. Lawrence, too, of course. But less so Canon Wigram who spent years living in the remote mountain villages of the Assyrian Christians, not proselytizing but providing every kind of help—medical, liturgical, typographical, political.

    Still less, one might have thought, Gertrude Bell. When that formidable lady first came to the East it was to fall in love with a young diplomat under the plane trees of the British Legation in Teheran and to translate the wine-and-roses poems of Hafiz, the Persian national poet. Yet she learned to travel rough, to do astounding amounts of pioneer work in Byzantine and early Islamic archaeology (she was the power behind the Baghdad Museum, the one recently looted) and to become the trusted political counselor of the first King of independent Iraq (while remaining resolutely against Votes for Women at home).

    The memoirs written by this generation shine with love of the Levant, the land, its languages, its people. Try Sir Arnold Wilson’s S.W. Persia or Hamilton’s Road through Kurdistan (and if it’s you that has my copy of the latter, please could I have it back). Alas, it will have been papers precisely of this period that were lost in the holocaust of the Iraqi National Archives horrifyingly described by Robert Fisk in the last week of the recent war.

    Gertrude Bell died in Baghdad. Catullus sailed a yacht back from Asia Minor, down the Bosporus, past Byzantium, through the Greek islands, up the Adriatic. He made his homecoming not to Rome, but to northern Italy, where his family lived. The yacht was allowed a serene retirement on the limpid waters of Lake Garda. No serene retirement for young Catullus. He went on writing, riling other poets, especially Julius Caesar’s Chief Engineer, a multifutuent but incompetent versifier whom Catullus liked to call Mentula, (crudely translated by the late Professor Swanson as Mantool and by the witty James Michie as John Thomas). Catullus’s father invited Caesar to dinner when the great man was in northern Italy and made his son apologize.

    One does not know what they drank, but the enterprising firm of Bitari has invented a pleasant red wine grown in the hills near Verona, the poet’s home, and named it after him. Catullo is 60 percent Cabernet (not a grape one associates with this part of the world) and 40 percent Corvino (which one does—it is the main variety in Valpolicella). The blend is mighty successful; my friend the wine merchant, with whom I discussed a bottle of this one sunny evening, thought it tasted rather like Pinot Noir, which is to say that it slipped down all too quickly, promoting pleasure more than thought and pastime with good company. Order it at your salax taberna, or take it to the lake and listen to the water chuckling up against the dock sharing your pleasure at being home.

  • Lady Madonna

    Regardless of how much you admire Madonna’s ability to reinvent herself over the last 20 years, there’s a point at which you see her on your TV screen for the millionth time and snore. No matter how many expensively-produced albums and impeccably orchestrated world tours Madonna churns out, no matter how many new styles and images and ideas she borrows from bohemian or gay or alternative culture, no matter how many times she makes headlines by giving birth or learning to enjoy a frothy pint of Guinness in an English pub or buying a new mansion or changing her hair color, at some point, she just doesn’t seem that interesting or relevant anymore.

    But, like a relationship that ends suddenly, you don’t realize the feeling’s gone until it’s way too late. For me, it happened right before the release of Madonna’s latest album, American Life. She appeared on an MTV special called Madonna On Stage & On The Record, and despite the fraudience of hard-core fans assembled to gasp and swoon and hang on her every word, she looked sort of awkward and unspectacular. Even as she hit every mark like a career politician, providing just the right answers to each difficult question from the crowd, she averted her eyes and seemed uncomfortable with the role she chose for herself way back when she was a teenager.

    Still, it’s strange to even contemplate a downward slide in popularity for Madonna when, just a few months ago, it seemed certain that her new album would be a hit. Her video for the title track, a montage of military images paired with an unapologetic attack on the crass commercialism of American culture, seemed both unnervingly in step with the times and remarkably bold, considering that so few artists saw fit to express their contempt for the hawkish shift in the public’s consciousness since September 11. In an uncharacteristically self-conscious move, she pulled the video, lest it be mistaken as a crassly commercial move to profit from the war in Iraq. While many have proclaimed her wise to do so, it signaled a more sensitive, caring Madonna. The question is, Do we really want a more sensitive, caring Madonna?

    It seems that, while we weren’t looking, Madonna has become a little too evolved to be interesting. Her relentless flow of so-called exclusive interviews reveals a woman whose bluster and delusions of grandeur have dissolved into circumspection and philosophical musings, whose focus on the Kabballah has turned out to be more than the passing interest most initially assumed it would be. We’re all happy for her, of course, for finding religion and for having a seemingly satisfying family life. But the sad truth is that a mature, measured Madonna will never be nearly as exciting as the slutty bride who rolled on the floor singing “Like a Virgin.” As much as we learn about the perils of materialism and the joys of enlightenment and the evils of American arrogance, all delivered in that eerie British accent that makes you want to shake her until she snaps out of it, Madonna was a lot more fun when she wasn’t quite so intent on appearing healthy and well adjusted. While there’s still something unnerving about watching her calmly outline her newfound openness and spiritual rebirth on MTV, all the while barely masking her disdain for the fawning teenagers around her, such undercurrents of emotional dissonance hardly compare to the woman who, in her 1991 biopic Truth or Dare, interrupted a visit with her very Catholic father by dashing into the next room and flashing her boobs for the camera.

    Setting aside her obvious skill for co-opting the underground, dysfunction has always been a big part of Madonna’s appeal. From “Papa Don’t Preach” to “Live to Tell,” her image and her music are an elaborate acting-out against her parents, society, overbearing men, and a parade of other demons. Her blatant hunger for fame and power at the start of her career, her vanity and self-involvement and shallow concerns in Truth or Dare, her isolation and paranoia and disdain for her fans during the filming of Evita, the masochism of her relentless, punishing exercise schedules—the contrast between her invincible image and such hints of mental and emotional weakness were tragicomic and mysterious and unfathomable. We felt privileged to understand Madonna better than she understood herself. And, like Princess Diana, despite her omnipresence in the media, Madonna’s weaknesses gave us the feeling that she needed our support.

    Granted, there is some satisfaction that comes from seeing Madonna deriding her own bad taste and shallow interests, as she now does regularly, flinching at her big hair and shameless attention-seeking. But as much as her honesty might reflect a newer, healthier Material Girl, her evolution as a person may not coincide with an ability to maintain her dominance as an artist, considering we loved and embraced the sleazy, whiny, obsessive, out-of-control Madonna more, not just because she was more entertaining, but because she truly required our love more than this toned, centered, pitch-perfect specimen we now see before us.

    Madonna, for one, doesn’t seem concerned about the price she might pay for evolving. When MTV’s John Norris asked her if she felt a responsibility to her audience to give them what they expect from her, she answered, “I think that my fans tend to be pretty expansive-thinking people who are always themselves looking for something new and something different, who are adventurous. So, I think we’re on the same wavelength. I think we’re feeling each other, so I don’t have to keep them happy; I think they’re on my journey with me.”

    As expansive-thinking as such an answer may be, Madonna can’t ignore the fact that she designed herself as a multi-media pop artist, formed around images and gossip and grandiose visions and hints of emotional turmoil far more than around talent. While it’s perfectly fine for Beyonce not to boast and flounder and flaunt herself publicly because her appeal lies in her talent, for Madonna, talent has always been entirely beside the point. Her voice is remarkably trained and polished but never that rich or interesting, her dancing, when it’s not painstakingly choreographed, leaves much to be desired. That said, her knack for hiring talent is legendary. With the help of a revolving door of quality musicians, producers, choreographers, stylists, and designers, she manages to create the kind of spectacle—both in her videos and her stage shows—that’s absolutely irresistible to the public. Add to that an uncanny ability to stay in the headlines, paired with a skill for crafting tunes so catchy you can absolutely hate them on first listen and still find yourself humming them seconds later, and it’s clear that Madonna will always find a way to stay in the public eye.

    Even so, every star has to fade eventually. Like Michael Jordan retiring for the third time or Celine Dion staging another fake-out farewell tour, Madonna’s turn as mild-mannered, spiritually fulfilled, middle-aged mother may be the one reincarnation that doesn’t spark the public’s interest. Her latest role may bring her happiness, but it does seem less likely to bring her fans.

    Does that mean Madonna should give up what she believes just to maintain her popularity? Of course not. In fact, losing her power of celebrity may be the final stage of Madonna’s personal journey toward happiness. And I’m happy to see Madonna happy—as long as I don’t have to see her quite so often.

  • Not For Sale

    Artist Santiago Cucullu has worked himself into a corner. In recent months, the twenty-something former Minneapolitan has struck proverbial gold in the art world—appearing in the Walker Art Center’s multinational blockbuster exhibition “When Latitudes Become Forms,” and also landing a one-year residency at the Core Artists Program at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts. So what could be wrong? Well, Cucullu wants to achieve material success commensurate with his venue success. That is, he dreams of making money even though he makes art that, by its very nature, can’t be sold.

    “I go back and forth,” Cucullu said recently of his direct-to-wall applications of various tacky (in both senses) wood-grain or red-vinyl contact papers. “It takes money to make money, and given that ‘man makes the money to buy things from the other man,’ I also make drawings. I have not yet made a direct jump from one to the other—from the wall and the experience to something that is portable… I think that the market will come around, and that collectors will see that it is not a big jump.”

    Despite its lack of commercial viability, Cucullu’s work is distinctive. He cuts shapes out of the contact paper and arranges them on the wall. The resulting image—of overlapping two-dimensional silhouette figures, landscape elements, indistinct shapes, occasional words—is a pastiche that calls to mind the fragmented collages of Kurt Schwitters, and the graffiti-inspired pastiches of Arturo Herrera and Lily van der Stokker.

    Substituting the wall for canvas was an easy way to set his art apart from the mainstream. “I started doing wall pieces because it felt transgressive for me,” Cucullu said. “I had often felt a hesitation about taking away the physical support, although I am actually just replacing it.”

    If such direct-to-wall art is truly “transgressive,” then there is a lot of transgressing going on in the local art scene of late. In the past year or so, dozens of local, national, and international artists have taken to tossing out the middle-ground—that is, the conventional canvas, paper, board, or other surface that allows someone to carry away an artwork—and putting their work directly on walls, ceilings, or floors. These trans-temporary murals, as I have taken to calling them, have appeared at Franklin ArtWorks, the Soo Visual Art Center, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Midway Contemporary Art, and the Walker with increasingly frequency.

    Among the examples, heavily tattooed French artist Jean-Luc Verna applied tattoo-like images of vamping angels and skeletons to the floor and walls of Midway last spring. San Francisco artist Alicia McCarthy painted swaths of Midway’s walls with goopy plaid-like eruptions of color. Last year, Minneapolis artist Colin Gatling lived in the Soo Visual Art Center for three weeks, painting and repainting a black-and-white mural in the gallery through the run of a show. And four other artists besides Cucullu made direct-to-wall work in the Walker’s “Latitudes”; this included a stunning floor drawing by Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla that would make Michel-angelo proud. Called “Charcoal Dance Floor,” it was a large charcoal image of dancing figures drawn with precise illusionistic “di sotto in su” perspective that was slowly erased over the show’s run as viewers walked directly on the image.

    We can only guess where this temp-muralizing impulse comes from. Some people I spoke to cited the graffiti aesthetic of the mid-1980s as an influence; others mentioned strategies by minimalist artists of the 1960s to activate the architecture through their work. Philippe Vergne, the Walker curator most responsible for “Latitudes,” claimed that contemporary artists are interested in history—citing cave paintings, Renaissance murals, and frescos. I’m not sure I buy it, given the ephemeral nature of what these post-modern artists are doing compared to their forebears. I’m inclined to think it has more to do with simply breaking the rules.

    Then again, the absence of money in the arts may be a more direct cause of this trend. While there has always been a sense that it’s difficult to make money as an artist—with the possible exception of Reagan’s tax break-fueled art market of the 1980s—we’ve entered a period of financial realism in the arts. Artists may have once imagined it was possible to make money by selling art to collectors, and they tended to avoid making ad hoc art. “I never think of it as highly salable,” said Thomas Barry, owner of the for-profit Thomas Barry Gallery in Minneapolis, of direct-to-wall art. “Moveable objects are always much easier to realize for people who are selling or are buying them.” With the arts taking an inordinate hit in the current economy, however, all bets are off.

    Temporary art works thrive in an atmosphere where artists’ main goals are to get grants and university teaching positions. A line on the resume for a temporary work slapped on a wall is just as good as one for a well-crafted artwork that someone may or may not buy. In fact, the incentive not to have to cart around such work is strong. According to Suzy Greenberg, director of the Soo Visual Art Center, one artist chose to make her trans-temporary mural at Soo in order to save space in her studio. Temporary art is easily portable across time-zones and through strip searches. There are no shipping fees, no canvas or frames to buy, no insurance to purchase—what could be easier?

    It’s unfortunate that the resulting art, made under deadline pressures by artists on the spot, often has a rather unappealing tossed-off quality and lacks the craft and grace of a more fully realized art work. For instance, Jean-Luc Verna’s photographic self-portraits of his sculpturesque body are more interesting by far than his gallery tattoos. And pretty as Alicia McCarthy’s goopy wall abstractions are, they’d be prettier still if it were possible to take one of them home.

    In the end, we may have to live with this new aesthetic. In the post-consumerist art world of today, art is not precious, and it is made less for purchasing than for encountering. Or as Vergne put it, “There is a very sustained practice by artists who want to move away from painting as an object—that is, color on canvas—to embrace art that is more experiential.” One can only hope that this trend doesn’t go much further, or artists bent on sharing their experiences may skip making art altogether.

  • Sealing the Deal

    You’ve heard the rumors: Deep in the bowels of TPT’s St. Paul studios, former governor, pro wrestler, and Navy SEAL Jesse Ventura is preparing for his debut as an MSNBC television host. Sadly, the launch date of the Ventura show (and the triumphant return of our favorite public servant and bloviator) keeps getting postponed. What on Earth is the problem?

    • Scheduling conflicts with Young and the Restless Reunion & Convention Tour
    • Guest-hosting Tom Ryther’s swinger parties through July
    • Chin-dimple spackle keeps melting under the klieg lights
    • Crank-calls Leslie Davis every fifteen minutes
    • MSNBC wardrobe staff unable to find peacock-print Zubaz
    • Leg-wrestling match with Chris Matthews stretching into its 13th day
    • Still separating green glass from brown glass at governor’s mansion
    • Too busy writing phony reviews for his books on Amazon.com
    • Roasted Chestnut or Old Mahogany?—the mustache-dye quagmire
    • Rehearals at TPT studios constantly interrupted by Erik Eskola coughing loudly
    • Still trying to find a willing volunteer to take over Predator fans listserv
    • Television technicians not sure how to get that big head into the little box
    • ESL classes not going as planned
    • Hammering out contract riders for “lifetime supply” of Slim Jims and Cheez-Its in green room
    • Keeps getting lost driving to St. Paul
    • Going “commando” backstage, causing massive staff turn-over
    • Finally getting to all those TiVo’ed episodes of Judging Amy
    • WWF not giving any deals on “breakaway” folding chairs or suspended cages
    • Secretly scared to death of Lester Holt
    • Stalling for six to eight weeks before mandatory MSNBC urine test
    • Waiting until after man-hunting season is over

  • Alan Lightman, Reunion

    MIT physics professor Lightman is best known for Einstein’s Dreams, a brilliantly elliptical series of spare, magical-realist vignettes which explored what it would be like if the laws of physics worked differently—what-if tales not so much science fiction as brief essays on the limits of human nature. He switched gears for The Diagnosis, a National Book Award finalist, a paranoid J.G. Ballardesque tale about an executive whose body rebels against him with amnesia and paralysis. His latest novel, Reunion, is a downbeat bit of midlife-crisis angst about a 50ish professor who starts seeing hallucinatory reenactments of a disastrous, life-changing love affair from his college days. Lightman’s distanced, even formal prose style, which we enjoyed in his previous books, fits well with the book’s theme of sadness at the road not taken. But even at only 231 pages, Reunion reads like an overextended vignette from Dreams. Lightman reads at Ruminator Books August 1.

  • Sherman Alexie

    He may be one of the most prominent Indian writers around today, but Sherman Alexie doesn’t play to the expectations of either white or Native American audiences. Though he almost always writes about characters who are, like himself, Indians from the Seattle/Spokane area, he feels no obligation to the traditions of identity politics and aims for stories that are, if necessarily filtered through his experience, about the wider human condition. He’s a deft ironist, but also knows how to mingle his humor with pain and pathos. His short-story collections include The Toughest Indian in the World and The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, which he later adapted into the script for the indie-film sleeper Smoke Signals in 1998. His new collection, Ten Little Indians, adds nine more tales to his catalog, and some of his most mature writing to date. He’s also branched out into directing, with The Business of Fancydancing, featuring Smoke Signals star Evan Adams as a gay Spokane Indian writer shackled by an uneasy relationship with his past. The film is currently making the festival circuit and out on DVD July 8. Black Bear Crossings, 1360 N. Lexington Parkway; call Birchbark Books, (612) 374-4023, for more information