The Rake Magazine

Category: Article

  • Bikram Blues

    It’s 105 degrees in here, and I can’t place the smell. Somewhere between hot feet and freshly popped kettle corn. Not distractingly smelly, but enough to remind me that I’m not at the Y, and I didn’t fall asleep in the sauna. This is Bikram Yoga.

    I am currently performing my favorite pose, called Savasana. Also called the "corpse" pose, Savasana is my favorite because it only requires me to lie on my back in full relaxation on my yoga mat and towel and imagine how awesome it’s going to be when I can actually make it all the way through class without a) feeling like I am going to die, or b) wishing death would release me from this yogic torture chamber.

    I started coming here two months ago, at the behest of my close friend, Kellie, who said I’d like it. I guess she thought that because she knows me to be a self-loathing ex-catholic with a penchant for punishing myself in new and varying ways. That’s my best guess, anyway.
    Today, because there are only a few of us in class, our instructor has elected to "practice" with us and put on an instructional CD of Bikram Choudhury himself. Bikram Choudhury is the world renowned guru of yoga, and is known as much for his eccentricities as he is for his patented style of "hot yoga."

    (Normally, our instructor gives us live commands and guides us verbally through the 26 poses, but does not perform them with us. If you’ve ever experienced Bikram Yoga, you will know why no human being could talk and pose simultaneously. This ain’t no step aerobics.)

    We start out with breathing exercises. Bikram says, with a sweet Indian accent, "Welcome to Bikram Yoga, 90 minutes of hell. Somebody get me a Coca Cola."

    All I do is breathe deeply, and already I am sweating. In fact, just standing up from Savasana has caused several beads to form on various plains and crevices. Somebody in the room is breathing like Darth Vader, which would normally make me giggle, except I’m trying to be a good, focused little yogi and not a flibberty-gibbit. The atmosphere inside the Bikram Yoga studio, outside of stiflingly humid, is one of quiet concentration.

    Next we are asked to perform a sideways bend followed by a back bend. In and of itself, the sideways bend is not a big deal. In 105-degree heat, and held for 60 seconds with locked elbows and knees, with hands clasped above the head, and wrists rod straight, the sideways bend is a form of torture utilized by war-torn third-world countries.

    From the sideways bend, we go into to the backward bend, which we hold for about 20 seconds, or until I start to hear the voice of the exorcist from Poltergiest: Caroline! Don’t go into the light!

    As we bend, Bikram says, auctioneer-style: Bend back, way back, go back, far back, back, back, back, back, back, back, back, don’t stop, no fear, way back, far back … and release.

    In Bikram, the words "release" and "change" are used to let us know we are finished with a given pose, for the moment anyway. (We perform each twice.) Release and change have shot to the top of my favorite words list with a bullet, bumping bakery, Belize, and HGTV, down to three, four, and five, respectively.

    One might ask just what I’m doing here, and indeed, anyone I’ve talked to about "hot yoga" who hasn’t experienced it, does ask that. What is the attraction?

    Some say they’ve lost weight. It makes sense. You lose about three pounds of sweat just walking into the place. Some say it gives them energy, and I can testify to that. After 90 minutes of Bikram, (after the initial 10 minutes wanting to vomit) I feel like I could run a marathon. Or at least tackle Cub Foods on a Saturday afternoon without wanting to ram anyone with my cart.

    The biggest benefit you hear about is from the chiropractic crowd, who’ve finally found some relief after suffering from computer-induced aches and pains most of their professional lives. Bikram bends and twists the hurt out of you. Bikram says it best: You endure 90 minutes of torture to avoid 90 years of torture. I don’t plan on living another 90 years, but you get the point.

    Over the next hour and a half, I proceed to stretch and move my body parts in ways I wouldn’t dare to do in 68 degrees. The philosophy is that my muscles and bones are like a Blacksmith’s metal, much more bendable when heated.

    At last, we are done. I exit the studio, and 68 degrees actually feels like 30 until my body re-adjusts to room temp. In the locker room, my fellow yogis and I smile at each other knowingly, as though we are buddies from back in The Nam.

    We’re an interesting bunch, standing around kibitzing over our three-dollar coconut waters. Generally, it’s an even mix of men and women, who appear to be middle or upper class folks. At an average of $12-18 per class, Bikram is an expensive addiction. And it is a bit of an addiction. It feels bad, but then it feels so good.

    We will go from here in good health, knowing we have done something many couldn’t, and ready to take on whatever the world throws at us.

    That is, after we’ve had a good long shower.

     

    Caroline Burau is the author of Answering 911, Life in the Hot Seat. Read her blog here.

  • Sydney Pollack Gave Me a Boner

    The Twitter post sat under my profile
    photo for almost two days.

    "Bummed about Sydney Pollack."

    It was pithy, but it was
    all I could muster at 2:30 in the morning. Sydney was dead. I had woken
    up in the middle of the night and rolled a drowsy finger over the laptop’s
    touchpad to light up the screen. The news feeds, usually dormant on
    Sunday nights, served up the reports.

    In the information age, we pay tribute
    to the fallen by obsessing over their lives. Their likes, their affairs,
    their habits, their addictions, their maledictions. And everything in
    between. And like bulimic cheerleaders at an all-you-can-eat buffet,
    as soon as we are done stuffing our faces, we look for the first, most
    inviting place to vomit the newly acquired information. For the next
    weeks, we’ll jam these new factoids into unsuspecting conversations,
    until we convince ourselves that we have completely exorcised the subject
    from our bodies and are ready to move on. It sounds shallow, but so
    is putting flowers on graves.

    Pollack’s tributes were particularly
    crass. Robert Redford reminisced about Pollack’s proclivity for big
    commercial films, as if he was talking about a good friend with an appetite
    for prostitutes. And the New York Times plunked out an obit that almost
    apologized for his apparent lack of visual style. By the time I was
    ready to go to work, I was sick of the spectacle. A bulimic cheerleader
    without an appetite.

    I admit, Pollack didn’t have Antonioni’s
    sophisticated eye, Fellini’s imagination, Scorcese’s bravado, or Coppola’s
    Kurtz-like drive. But so what? His work moved me! In fact, Pollack’s
    work moved me on such a deep level, that in the summer of 1999, I masturbated
    to Tootsie.

    I’m gonna let that soak in for a
    minute…

    Yes, I whipped it out for the Tootz!

    I was living in Puerto Rico at the
    time, and I had just moved out of my girlfriend’s apartment, after leaving
    a Dear Jane letter on her pillow. It was a shitty thing to do, but it
    was the third break up in 10 months, and I just didn’t want to argue.

    My new place was a dump, but like
    the cheap motel it smelled like, it included cable TV. The furnishings
    consisted of a LazyBoy chair in front of a TV set, atop a cardboard
    box. It was dismal. The only activity to complement the decor would
    have involved a crack pipe.

    I suppose I should have been hitting
    the town now that I was single again. But relationships are a lot like
    cigarettes: even when they give you cancer, you still want one. Besides,
    despite its tropical wonderment, nightlife in San Juan was going through
    a weird phase (or maybe I was). The ’80s were clinging with a vengeance.
    Air Supply and REO Speedwagon were still selling out arenas, and it
    felt like every bar in the city had an ’80s cover band polluting the
    air. It was a strange time, and I was trying to sift through the cultural
    DMZ without getting my ass blown off. So I mostly stayed in.

    By all standards, I shouldn’t like
    Tootsie. The gender-bender story of a man disguising himself as a woman
    to get out of a jam is a premise that Hollywood has been repackaging
    ad nauseum ever since Billy Wilder slapped a wig and lipstick on Jack
    Lemmon and Tony Curtis in Some Like It Hot.

    But under Pollack’s unobtrusive direction,
    and Dustin Hoffman’s over-caffeinated performance, Tootsie is a revelation.
    Here was the perfect woman. A good listener. Smarter than everyone around
    her. And always able to handle a man with sticky hands. I couldn’t help
    myself. I fell for her.

  • I Have Fun Everywhere I Go

    I have no tolerance for pot dealers
    who insist on sharing a bowl every time they conclude a transaction.
    I don’t need to seal my drug deals with shiny happy-people vibes; that’s
    what I bring the money for. But that’s just me; when it comes to harnessing
    good vibes, I’ll take the mayhem of Altamont over the "brotherhood"
    of Woodstock every time.

    Mike Edison’s memoir I Have
    Fun Everywhere     is the perfect summer reading companion for anyone
    who would rather lace their weed with the Ramones than with the Byrds.

    I Have Fun Everywhere chronicles Edison’s
    twenty-something, ’90s rampage through the second tier publishing world
    of male-American fetishes (wrestling, porn, drugs), his first-person
    explorations into rock n’ roll excess (through numerous European tours
    with numerous punk bands), and a sliver of a love story that feels more
    like a kick in the balls than a kiss on the lips.

    The book kicks off with Edison dropping
    out of NYU film school, and discovering wrestling. In his stoned view,
    wrestling is a pure art form, a performance art for the masses that
    plays on classic archetypes. A few wrestling fanzines lead to the editorship
    of Main Event, the flagship publication of the wrestling scene.

    The Main Event gig doesn’t pay much, though,
    and Edison soon broadens his literary wings by pumping out the ragged
    porn novels that used to be a staple in Times Square sex shops before
    Giuliani and his Disney squadron stormed the city walls.

    Through it all, Edison continues
    to rally his various punk bands through small European tours that
    produce just enough money for the plane tickets and the drugs
    on the road. It’s a good life that keeps on giving and eventually leads
    him to his dream job, publisher of High Times magazine.

    At High Times his first mission is
    to push the magazine out of the hippie squalor of irrelevance in which
    it is living, and bring it into the new decade.

    "The first person who suggests
    putting Bob Marley on the cover is gonna be looking for a new job," he says to his new staff, by way of introduction.

    A generational clash is inevitable,
    and the lines are clearly defined by footwear — black Gen-X Chuck
    Taylor high-tops against Boomer Birkenstocks.

    "YOU CAN’T BE THE EDITOR OF
    HIGH TIMES," a High Times veteran yells at him during a meeting.
    "YOU DON’T EVEN LIKE THE BEATLES!"

    No Gen-X memoir is complete without
    a good dose of manic depression and bi-polarity. While Edison struggles
    with constant near-mutinies in High Times, he falls in love and moves
    in with a bi-polar chick who manages to finish law school between bouts
    of self-loathing.

    If there’s one thing Edison knows,
    it’s his audience. A bunch of dateless wrestling fanatics with punk
    music in their stereos, boutique buds in their bongs, and porn on their
    TVs, have little tolerance for a story that ends with the redeeming power
    of love. In their lore, every woman is a Yoko. An empty, heartless,
    sexual succubus.

    (Porn lovers also like their women
    dehumanized, and Edison complies by replacing his girlfriend’s name
    with a simple ________.)

    After finishing law school, _______
    fails to invite him to the graduation.

    "I really appreciate everything
    you’ve done for me," she tells him. "But I don’t need you
    anymore, I can do it on my own."

    It’s a harsh blow, but Edison is
    not one to stay down long. After a lost weekend in Vegas, he returns
    to New York with a new mission: make the High Times movie.

    "How could it possibly fail?"
    he asks.

    Let us count the ways…

  • Why My Novel Is Set in Minneapolis

    I lived in Minneapolis
    for a few years, some years ago, and during that time I came to love
    the town and the quaint Midwestern customs of its citizens. People
    smiled at you on the street—without asking for money. If you were lost,
    they gave you directions—without asking for money. They even assisted
    the elderly across the street; in DC, we use them as decoys for the
    onrushing traffic.

    Minneapolis was
    especially inspiring for me as a writer. You could write about the
    Human Drama of Snow. Or use Snow as a Metaphor for the Universal
    Condition. Or hurt your back shoveling Snow so that you had more Time
    to Write.

    As Shakespeare wrote:

    Snow is the Winter of our Discontent.

    But during my residence
    there, the aspect of Minneapolis that I loved most was the chain of
    lakes inside the city limits. The prevailing theory is that a glacier
    created the lakes, though this story is less than credible to me since
    never once during my stay did a mile-high wall of ice come down from
    Canada.

    Two separate paths
    circumnavigate the lakes of Minneapolis. The Outer Path is for
    Speeders: bikers, inline skaters, and other mobility enthusiasts. While
    I admired their balance, dexterity, and tight clothing, I always
    thought it was odd to be in such a hurry when you are traveling in a
    circle.

    The Inner Path around
    the lakes is for Footers: joggers, walkers, and plodders like me. The
    Inner Path often floods during the spring thaw, forcing both Speeders
    and Footers onto the same ground. This is a recipe for disaster.
    There’s just no getting around me.

    I lived in the top two
    floors of a Victorian house only two blocks from my favorite of the
    lakes: Lake of the Isles, known for its urban wildlife. In the winter,
    around the south side of Lake of the Isles, you could sometimes sight
    the rare Snow Serpent, a Norse American cousin of the Loch Ness Monster
    who hibernates in summer and prowls the icy lake in winter. Many a
    snowman has been devoured by this sly leviathan. In the spring, an
    armada of Canadian geese invades the lake. Each evening, the royal navy
    embarks from the lakeshore to their island harbor, a squadron of
    goslings in regal tow.

    Lake of the Isles is
    also known for, well, isles-two of them near the northwest lakeshore.
    The island closest to land is very close; I always felt that I could
    jump across the narrow channel, or in January, slide across. But
    I never did, because there was a small sign standing akilter near the
    shore and nearly covered by the tall grasses. The sign read ‘Game
    Preserve’, in wavering letters that might have been painted by webbed
    feet.

    Of course, in my imagination, Game Preserve
    referred to some place magical and forbidden, to a Velveteen Rabbit,
    Puff the Magic Dragon, Chutes and Ladders sanctuary in a clearing
    hidden deep in the interior of the tiny island. How I wanted to ignore
    the sign and explore! But I never did.

    After I left
    Minneapolis, the magical island continued to feed my imagination. I
    could never forget the lake, and the sign, and my urge to break the
    rules, step onto the island, and discover that forbidden sanctuary just
    beyond the tree line. So finally I created a character who could.

    I wish there had been a
    bench, there where the path curves and the shore and the island almost
    touch. I think I might be there still.

    Stephen Evans is the author of The Marriage of True Minds, a novel set in Minneapolis, to be published in May by Unbridled Books. He will be reading from his new novel on Saturday, June 7, 2008, 7 p.m., at Magers & Quinn, 3038 Hennepin Ave. S., Minneapolis.

  • Living the Dream

    Taghazout, Morocco — It’s a postcard Malibu Beach view from the second floor balcony of a reclusive African surf camp. There’s a warm breeze. A few rocks and a broken formation of surfers crown the sea. The offbeat tinkle of a distant camel bell mixed with cries from trinket vendors is the lazy rhythm on this beach. The scene is so exotic you want to keep it a secret — then again, it’s such a beautiful place, you have to tell someone.

    Horizon chaser Craig Martinson has been dreaming up adventure trips since he was a kid. He discovered this faraway Moroccan beach location while surfing online in his suburban Minneapolis home. As trip planner and co-founder of the Boys of Summer & Winter Adventure Club, Martinson has organized off-the-beaten-track, budget vacations for Twin Cities extreme sports enthusiasts and thrill seekers for over ten years. Aptly described by his wife Cindy as "a value-oriented traveler," Martinson and his buddies have skied the black diamonds and off-trail powder from Val d’ Isere, France to the Chilean Andes, and surfed waves off the Brazilian and African coasts on shoestring budgets. After visiting forty-four countries as a competitive athlete and roaming photographer, Martinson has thousands of photographs to show and captivating stories to tell.

    The dream of getaway adventures in pristine surroundings began for Martinson after seeing a picture of Senator Bobby Kennedy climbing an Alaskan mountain in LIFE magazine when he was seven. He was a kid from Eau Clare, Wisconsin who routinely coaxed frightened third graders into exploring the woodsy trails around Half Moon Lake and thought mountain climbing would be fun.

    After outgrowing the lakeside trails he moved to Crystal, Minnesota and played conventional team sports throughout high school. In his spare time he planned inexpensive wilderness canoe trips by requesting maps and brochures from government agencies, and read books about mountain climbing and indigenous mountain people. Decidedly nonviolent at an early age, Martinson discovered that bullies would sometimes take an interest in the outdoor sports he organized for friends. Thinking of himself as more of an organizer than a leader, the soft-spoken lad grew up believing that bullies simply "lacked maturity and common sense."

    His boyhood dream of climbing mountains turned into the grit and substance of heart-thumping exhilaration after hooking-up with the Northstar Mountaineers of Minnesota at age 17, while studying photography at Hennepin Technical College in 1972. The following summer he wandered out west, living meagerly on granola and orange juice, like a hippie Boy Scout, out of a sleeping bag and junker car. He took the hazardous Gooseberry Route up Devil’s Tower in Wyoming and tagged the tops of the Bugaboo, Snowpatch, and Pigeon Spires in the British Columbia Bugaboo Range his first year.

    "Craig was like a member of our family," said fellow climber and Twin Cities peace activist Roger Cuthbertson. "We used to pick him up and drive him to climbs when he was just a teenager. He soon surpassed me with his technical climbing skills, but I remember him as a person who would always help someone else."

    By the fall of ’73 Martinson had set his sights on climbing abroad after being lured to the continent by Europeans camped out in California’s Yosemite Park. Soon he was tackling increasingly difficult mountains throughout Europe and Canada alongside top North American climbers such as Rick Sylvester, Henry Barber, Chris Jones, and George Lowe. On the European side, he roped-up with climbing luminaries Leo Dickinson and Eric Jones, from Britain, as well as Italian climbers Giorgio Bertone and Carlo Mauri, and the Czech Tomas Gross. Martinson thought, "Why would anyone not want to climb — it’s so much fun."

    His feelings of "invincibility without cockiness" caught the attention of mountaineering living legend Fred Becky in a chance meeting in Yosemite Park during 1975. They soon became friends, spending nearly two years sniffing out new climbing trails from Arizona to Alaska.

    "Craig Martinson was one of my favorite climbing partners: a natural athlete who always had a cheery disposition and a determination to be successful on a challenging route. One of our challenges was the first ascent of the West Buttress of the Fremont Peak, and the Sheer Face of the First Tower of Mt. St. Helen in the Wind River Mountains. While testing a series of difficult moves on Fremont, I took a short fall and scraped some skin. Craig took over with zeal and led right through — making it look very reasonable.

    "Craig, Eric Bjornstad, and I once drove an old Cadillac along the Alaskan Highways to pursue the climb of the Tusk (a sharp spire in the Alaska Range). Despite fourteen flat tires, we reached Alaska and experienced grand weather in an almost unknown glacier region without any communication with civilization until a ski plane returned two weeks later. Then, we had to drive the car home, and Craig did his share of tire changes."

    —Fred Becky, mountaineer; Seattle; Oct 18, 2007

    News of the Becky/Martinson alliance spread quickly, and it wasn’t long before Martinson accepted a spot on the Soviet-American Climbing Team during the Cold War, under the Ford administration. Surmounting language barriers, the climbers moved cautiously around corners communicating with hand signals while trusting their lives to one another. "It was nerve-wracking if you couldn’t see the person ahead of you and didn’t understand his language — we had to be very careful." recalled Martinson. Climbers overcame political differences by sometimes using Communist propaganda sheets distributed at Russian airports for toilet paper.

    After three climbs in the Pamir Mountains, Caucasus, and Tian Shan ranges of Asia, Martinson was considered one of the premier mountain climbers of North America. He became the new poster boy for Fila athletic clothing, and a smiling picture of him glossed department store windows across Europe.

    Returning to America, Martinson took an interest in Native American culture, reading up on the Apache, Hopi, and Navahoe Indians before climbing the Moses and Titan Desert Spires with Italian climbers Mauri and Bertone, near Moab, Utah. He was a team member on the second ascents of the Moses and Sundevil chimney routes among the lofty, wind-carved Titan Spires pinnacled in the Fisher Towers region. A film made about Martinson and these climbers on high, vertical spikes in the American Southwest won an award at the 1977 Trento Film Festival in Italy.

    His most memorable climb was the Corona Peak Route in the Central Asian Tien-Shen Range with American George Lowe and two Russian climbers. The most challenging route was the North Face of the Dru in the French Alps with Czech Tomas Gross. "The Dru was imposing, scary, dark, and foreboding; but it was exhilarating to reach the top," beamed Martinson.

    It wasn’t all triumphant shouts and breathtaking views from the top, though. Martinson somberly recalled the disappointments of having his photograph
    s rejected by National Geographic after working as a climbing photographer in the Canadian Baffin Islands, and the shaky exhaustion he felt after retreating from unsuccessful climbs. "Sometimes I couldn’t wait to get off a mountain. I didn’t care how far back it was to the car; it felt so good to walk on flat ground, and I’d tell myself, ‘I’ll never do that again.’"

    But, he would do it again, and he did it until he stopped climbing professionally. After losing twelve friends in climbing-related accidents, Martinson recalculated the odds. He already had five major climbing expeditions under his belt, along with numerous side trips throughout North America. He’d climbed in Greece, across the Dolomite Region of Italy, near Chamonix in the French Alps, and around the Lake District and Devon areas of England. After earning the moniker El Tigre, Martinson decided to pack it in when he figured he had "better than a fifty-fifty chance of dying" if he continued the pace.

  • Mikenastics: 50 Years and Tumbling

    They don’t know what to expect, and why would they, they’re just passing by with dogs or strollers on this sleepy Coon Rapids sidewalk, and out of nowhere a stout bald man wearing nothing but cutoff jeans or tight shorts comes bolting down the side yard, throws his hands forward, leaps toward a padded sawhorse, and, if all goes well, flips up and lands on his feet.

    They stop, some of them, cheer him on, call out that he should be in the Olympics. Cars slow down or honk, and more than once they’ve circled the block and stopped to watch some more. Because who can help it, watching this middle-aged man launch himself at homemade gymnastics apparatuses, and actually, as it turns out (if they watch long enough), doing it pretty well?

    Not that Mike Geronsin notices. Or at least tries not to. He’ll put on headphones and rest for three minutes and then take off again toward the vault and—assuming, again, that all went well, that he flipped up and over and landed on his feet and held the pose for three seconds—he’ll clap his hands and clamp them on his hips, chuckle to himself, peer into an old VHS camera mounted on a tripod, and announce: "That’s a ten right there." Or, "I stuck it."

    Twenty-five repetitions—why twenty-five? It’s always just twenty-five—and then on to the next exercise.

    Geronsin, better known to the cult following of his public-access shows as Mikenastics, never tried gymnastics until ten years ago, when he was alone in his home for the first time. (The above 1969 photo is just him goofing around on a clothesline bar in the backyard
    of his parent’s house.) "Everyone has voids, feel they were deprived of something in their earlier years," he says. "At forty-three, the youngest of my three kids moved out. I’ve been through two marriages that failed. You get to my age and you start thinking to yourself, ‘now what, where do I go now?’ You start recalling what you enjoyed in your previous life, and for me, that was gymnastics."

    It wasn’t so much something he enjoyed as it was an absence he regretted. In high school, after acing routines in gym class, he was asked to join the gymnastics team. But his wrestling coach talked him out of it, and Geronsin never had another chance: He dropped out after his sophomore year.

    So there he was, a quarter-century later, with an empty house and that void and the nagging idea that even though he didn’t like change, he needed to try something new.

    He briefly considered buying professional equipment, but it was too intimidating, too polished, too expensive. So he built some. The high bar, steel piping attached to his deck. The basement practice floor, a rubber mat on top of plywood on top of 168 regulation foam squares. The rings attached to his garage rafters, first wood until he broke one and now steel from an industrial supply company. The vault, a sawhorse wrapped in Styrofoam, the poleless pole vault, a mini trampoline and a bamboo bar set on sticks anchored by tires, the balance beam, a slab of wood on top of two stools, and so on.

    He sized everything for indoors because he couldn’t bear waiting out winter, and besides, he had that space to fill. For the poleless pole vault routine, for instance, Geronsin sprints from an upstairs bedroom down the hallway and into the living room, where he leaps on the trampoline and dives over the bamboo bar.

    He developed a personal scoring system. Seven for completing the exercise, and a point for each second, up to three, that he holds the landing. For certain exercises, like rings and the high bar, it’s seven for getting up and ten for holding himself upside down for three seconds. Sometimes he practiced routines a few times a week, sometimes almost daily, rotating them. He loved it. He couldn’t believe he had waited this long to try. He obsessively recorded each routine’s results. The void began to vanish.

    Nobody was going to see any of this. Geronsin started recording his practices only so he could critique himself. Then one day his son asked if he could put together a highlight reel and send it off to public access channels, just for fun.

  • Art Market: Gather around art and home

    In an age when we can fill our homes with an abundance of uniform, sleek, inexpensive, mass-produced goods, the gracious imperfections of handmade objects provide a particularly human comfort. A few artisanal pieces incorporated here and there into your living spaces, whether it’s a simply constructed paper pendant lamp or a bit of ornate whimsy for your yard, lend your surroundings the warmth of a maker’s hand. And with the variety of lovely, functional objects offered up by Minnesota’s talented craftspeople, the hunt for just the right piece for your garden or living room may prove almost as gratifying as the pleasure you’ll get once that one-of-a-kind treasure has taken up residence in your home.

    Music Stand by Ross Peterson, wenge, quilted maple, Goncalo Alves.
    This elegantly crafted music stand by Ross Peterson, for which rare figured woods have been re-sawn and laid out to showcase the natural grain, is similar to one commissioned from the artist by President Bush as a gift for Japan’s Emperor Akihito. www.mnartists.org/Ross_Peterson


    Cocktail Cart (top) and Treadirondack (bottom), by Dean Wilson
    Wilson’s whimsical cart offers a playful, stylish home to the booze that sits atop it. His retrofitted lawn chair-cum-vehicle will be the envy of your friends. www.mnartists.org/Dean_Wilson

    Neruda Pendant by Claire Moyle, recycled paper, 2006.
    Claire Moyle’s contemplative play on word and light is a thoughtful accent for any reading nook. www.mnartists.org/Claire_Moyle

    Ellipsoid Table by Tim Gorman, maple, walnut, bird’s-eye maple, bubinga veneer, ebony, oak, birch plywood, brass, 2006.
    This opulent, Deco-inspired table by Tim Gorman would be equally at home in sleekly modern or eclectic, antique-filled living spaces. www.mnartists.org/Timothy_Gorman

    Birdhouse by Mari Newman, wood and paint.
    The homey charm of Mari Newman’s rough-hewn birdhouse is designed to warm up any garden corner. www.mnartists.org/Mari_Newman

    Jack Splash Lotus by Holly Anderson Jorde, glazed stoneware & acrylic painted wood, 12"h x 24"w x 16"d
    Jorde’s beautifully executed ceramic sculptures are both elegant and fanciful like childhood toys refashioned for grown-ups. www.mnartists.org/Holly_Anderson_Jorde

    Perpich Bench by Glenn Gordon, Mesabi black granite, steel, curly redwood, 2004.
    This bench, constructed in 2004 in honor of Rudy Perpich, is made from black granite native to Perpich’s Mesabi Iron Range and
    an extraordinary plank of highly figured curly redwood recovered a few years back from a lightning-struck stump left standing by 19th century redwood loggers. www.mnartists.org/Glenn_Gordon

    Modular Media Shelves by Keith Moore, birch, 2002
    These funky shelves offer functional storage with playfully fluid lines.
    www.mnartists.org/Keith_Moore

     

  • The Mice

    For the Greeks, who had no word for irreversible death, one did
    not die, one darkened.
    —Mark Strand

    Where the Japanese iris right
    now stand ready to
    accept the inevitable
    purple blossom

    she found four dead mice
    in their nest of dirt and dusty fur
    all with their small ears pointed like pilgrims
    toward the trunk of the huge cottonwood.

    What happened here?
    Cat? Owl? Dog? A silent disease?
    Or had they just frozen one night as the air
    on their bodies fell back to winter?

    Their dusk bodies were soft as she picked them up
    unsure of whether to leave them buried where they would
    melt back into earth, first fur, then intestine,
    vertebra, and finally small pocket of skull.

    She put a rock over them but came back later,
    removed them to a black plastic bag, afraid
    of something, some disease, that the cat
    would chew on them, get sick, maybe die.

    Now where the grave was there is a space
    in the clump of iris, a darkness, an open mouth.

     

  • Zoom In: Charles Beck

    On the wrong side of the tracks in Fergus Falls, we drive past homes patched together by peeling paint, and climb up through the cement factory’s back lot. At the top of the hill, there’s a silver mailbox: C. Beck. A trail of faded wood steps carries us through the woods, over a ravine; the path becomes a bridge, the bridge becomes a porch lightly dusted by snow.

    Among the firs is a driftwood-colored Bauhaus-style house. Charlie Beck comes to the door in a worn flannel shirt. He has the freckled complexion of a farm boy, faded into a pale chamois and framed by wild white hair.

    Beck’s studio is much like any garage workshop in rural Minnesota. Cluttered work benches are pigeonholed with drawers, and punctured boards on the wall hold hooks for hanging tools. Duck decoys in various stages of disrepair congregate on a shelf. At one end of the room, light from a skylight spills onto a single woodcut print of winter poplars, illuminating a pattern of notched trunks. I notice a note on the woodcut reading "Cathedral." This is the road less taken, where tiny panes of light glimmer through the crisscrossed branches.

    Beck is not so different, on the surface, than his deer-hunting, farming, small-town neighbors. As poet Mark Strand put it, Charlie Beck is "a modernist in regionalist camouflage." It is autumn when we talk: open fields of turned earth, the startle of a cloud, wisps of snow between the great skeletons of trees. Quarreling geese resolve on point, and the ancient gilded light lingers over bent grasses. "It’s this," Beck waves his hand at the world around him: the trees, the fields, the little barns on hills. "It’s a feast. The temptation [to create art] is everywhere."


    Excerpted from a profile published in access+ENGAGE. Subscribe to this free arts e-magazine at mnartists.org/accessengage.

  • Zoom In: Michael Thomsen

    Michael Thomsen was born into a line of circus people and performers and, in a way, he’s continuing in the family business. Thomsen grew up in Austin, Minnesota, "in the shadow of the Hormel meatpacking plant." His first job as a kid involved sorting through the junk drawers and closets of the recently deceased for his grandfather, the proprietor of a successful carnival midway business who worked as an auctioneer in the off-season. "I loved going through those old drawers," he says. "It is powerful to touch all those small, personal things-keys, playing cards, watches, little odds and ends. After all that handling, they have life in them. In fact, some of the things I pocketed back then still show up in my work."

    Thomsen’s creations-lying somewhere between collage, sculpture, and painting-are self-contained marvels of both engineering and art, peopled by found objects and laden with dream symbols. In Thomsen’s wonderlands, you get to be Alice. Turn a nondescript crank on the side of Clock and the tinny melodies of a hidden music box emerge; peer closely into the crystal ball at the center of Roundabout and you’ll find a tiny painting tucked inside. The imagery of Thomsen’s work hails straight from the carnival lurking in the recesses of our childhood wishes and fears. Menace lives cheek by jowl with the sublime. Harlequins and fortunetellers, cherubs and horned beasties, mirrors and gears-they all bark for your attention. "To me, the little worlds in these pieces have the same balance of light and dark that the outside world has," Thomsen explains. "Everything’s there-the good and bad, ugly and beautiful. The real world doesn’t always make sense to me so, in these pieces, I arrange things in a way that reflects how I see things, by the rules that make sense to me."

    Excerpted from a profile published in access+ENGAGE. Subscribe to this free arts e-magazine at mnartists.org/accessengage.