Category: Article

Smitten Kitten, the South Minneapolis sex boutique, recently launched its own version of the in-home sex-toy party, at which such wares as lubricants and vibrators are passed around for taste-testing, manhandling, discussion, and, of course, purchase. These “Pussy Parties” are geared to have a more urban, less hetero bent than, say, “Passion Parties,” which is what the industry leader calls its gatherings. Lindsey, a roaming sex educator employed by Smitten Kitten, presided over a dozen randy partygoers a few weeks ago. The hostesses were college students, Jessie and Jacqueline, who had booked the party in honor of their soon-to-be-married friend Liz. For the occasion, they’d wallpapered their Southeast Minneapolis living room with pornographic images—cutouts of naked men taken from Slurp and other similarly tasteful 80s-era publications. Seasoned pro that she is, Lindsey didn’t bat an eye. During a lecture on male anatomy, in fact, she pointed to one of the photographs of a gentleman in full recline and said, “This guy, there’s his taint!”
Suited up as if to assert an authoritative air, the twenty-six-year-old Lindsey wore a short red skirt, black tights, and a pair of tall, calf-hugging black boots. She’d applied a light dusting of makeup to her baby face, and her closely cropped auburn hair was wispy and spiked. Providing a hint of what was to come, she announced, “I’ve got the Cock Box,” and opened a vintage trunk to reveal a fantastic display of satin and hard plastics. Lubricants were stowed in satchels and side pouches, while vibrators were belted down by what looked to be a series of frilly garter belts. “I’d like you to know that my mom helped me make this box,” Lindsey said.
In the next hour or so, she would educate (“Semen comes out at twenty-eight miles per hour”), boggle (“You don’t have to worry about losing things in your vagina—your butt, now that’s a different story”), and pitch with equal zeal. She waxed poetic on the virtues of such products as Rocket Balm (“sort of like a hot, sexy Bengay”) and O’My Clitoral Stimulating Gel. As guests passed around the Fukuoku Finger Vibe, Lindsey suggested this inconspicuous massager would pack well for travel. It isn’t likely to bring its owner unwanted attention from airport security agents, although such a scenario didn’t seem much of a concern for Lindsey. “When I travel I put a big dildo on top of my suitcase,” she said. “I think it’s funny and I want them to check it.”
Among a batch of scary-looking toys, many of which bore a vague resemblance to weapons of torture, Lindsey introduced the Sea Goddess, an aquamarine, cactus-shaped contraption. This two-headed creature, she said, both pulses and “does a Ricki Lake-like neck twist.” An imposing doodad called the Echo resembled a chocolate soft-serve ice cream cone and had the all-important flared base. “You can put this in a harness or in a butt,” Lindsey said. “You can also put this in the dishwasher.”
She was also more than candid regarding her own sexual practices. For example, as a motivational reward to herself, she said, she inserts something called Smartballs every time she does housework. “It makes you shake your butt a little more while you’re vacuuming,” she said. More shocking still was her claim of having convinced men (yes, more than one) to insert things up their backsides; because of the opportune placement of their prostates, or P-spots, they’d all thanked her for it later, she said.
Shortly after bowling over the room with this last statement, Lindsey packed up the Cock Box and carried it upstairs, making herself available in one of the home’s private bedrooms so that partygoers could discreetly place orders and ask questions. Having spent the past sixty minutes under Lindsey’ erotic spell, no one in the living room seemed quite certain of how to proceed in her absence. One woman sighed. Another stretched her arms as she looked around. A few had their heads buried in their order forms, presumably pondering purchases of Body Wax Candles and Kama Sutra Honey Dust. Finally, a Pussy Party attendee named Alison spoke up. “I feel like I’m ordering Girl Scout Cookies,” she said.

Aquatennial and Winter Carnival to merge.

More Speedo time!

Northwest Passage soon to be completed.

Global Warming: Beats the hell out of an ice age.

It’s treatable! Sort of like a meteorlogical bi-polar disorder.

Won’t that hole in the ozone be a handy escape hatch when the planet blows up?

In 1967 an article with the headline, “Mentally Ill Take LSD at U” appeared on the front page of the Minnesota Daily. The story recounted the experiences of “William,” a patient in the University of Minnesota’s psychiatric ward who was administered LSD by Amadeo Marrazzi, a professor of pharmacology, as a “clinical yardstick” to determine how the nervous system handles impulses in mentally ill patients. According to the reporter, “William sat in front of the room, put on some goggles, and was instructed to rotate a bar on the far wall, by means of a dial, until it was parallel with the floor. He did so. But after a minute, the floor was no longer parallel to the bar; it now inclined downward to the right.” William had been set up in an eight-foot-high, windowless room with three walls. His goggles were fitted with special lenses that distorted the shape of the room.
Marrazzi had already discovered that rats tripping on large amounts of LSD showed indifference to their surroundings, a phenomenon he labeled “behavioral dissociation.” In a 1966 speech to students at the university titled “LSD and Man’s Search for Understanding,” he described how one human user of the drug lost all sense of time, to the point where fifteen minutes seemed like three hundred years. This work was carried out with the help of Sandoz Laboratories, which at the time was supplying LSD to any scientist interested in conducting experiments, as well as with funding from the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research. Marrazzi’s findings led him to report that the use of mescaline and DMPEA (a chemical similar to LSD) “might, indeed, be a factor in the causation of some types of cerebral and mental illness.” Fortunately for patients who received heavy doses, he also discovered that “the effects of both mescaline and DMPEA can be offset by a tranquilizer drug.”
Meanwhile, the recreational use of LSD was also being promoted to the U’s student body at large. In 1966, hippie godfather and drug pioneer Timothy Leary had hooked up via an early conference call—thanks to the advice of “media is the message” visionary Marshall McLuhan—to speak to a crowd of six hundred students gathered at Coffman Union. As they took in a psychedelic light show, Leary advised them to join an estimated three million other Americans in taking LSD. “Are you going to sit back and take canned positions to life?” he asked. “When you take LSD, you talk directly to yourself.” LSD was not a drug, he argued, but a chemical that opened up the cellular level to the point where a person “goes beyond his own body.” Humans, Leary said, were caught up in “an endless round of self-deception and routine behavior,” and LSD could expand their consciousness.
Leary’s pupil, Andrew Weil, “an expert in the field of mind-altering drugs” (and current medical guru), spoke to students at the Mayo Memorial Auditorium in 1971 and pronounced that humans had an innate need to get “high.” Weil claimed to have viewed drugs from “every angle,” beginning when he was a Harvard freshman in 1960. That was when, under the tutelage of Leary, he took his first mescaline. He wrote about his psychedelic experiences in a newspaper, and said his articles were instrumental in getting Leary fired from Harvard.
Though LSD experiments at the U of M were initially publicized, today the medical records of psych patients dropping legal acid are strangely unavailable. After much investigation, I received a note in early 2006 from Jim Rothenberger, a professor at the U. He said that sometime around 1971 he had heard about the mysterious psychotropic experiments at the university from Dr. Gordon Heistad. “Gordon was then head of a unit called Psychiatry Research, which was housed in Diehl Hall. I remember that as we were talking he opened up an unlocked desk drawer and showed me that it was full of Sandoz LSD.”
Now that the paper trail for the university’s LSD experiments has conveniently disappeared, the only readily available information regarding the experiments is found in newspaper articles in the Minnesota Daily from the time.
From the 1950s through the 70s, during the height of the Cold War, the CIA conducted LSD experiments under the code name MK-ULTRA, in hopes of controlling social engineering and finding a truth serum for more effective interrogation techniques. MI6, the British spy agency, also tested LSD on patients who were told that the purpose of the experiment was to find a cure for the common cold. Perhaps the documents pertaining to the U of M experiments were removed when, sometime in the 70s, the CIA ordered that all such records from the period be destroyed.
Just a few years later, however, the drug experiments—and the open championing of drugs by counterculture gurus—had become little more than a strange and unreliable flashback. By 1976, for instance, Dr. Joseph Westermeyer had conducted a study at the U on sixty-one drug-addicted patients, from which he concluded that “drugs substitute for religion … A person may adopt a drug habit as a substitute focus for social interaction if he or she has stopped going to church.” Or as Marshall McLuhan told Timothy Leary, “Wave reassuringly. Radiate courage … You must be known for your smile.”

Local 219 of the International Union of Showbiz and Theater Entertainers was recently called to order over breakfast at the Edina Perkins. Bob Anderson, at seventy-nine still an imposing presence with broad shoulders and a strong handshake, pushed his omelet aside, pulled out some notes, and addressed his audience—myself and a waiter. “There are about eight remaining union projectionists,” he explained. “Only a few of us are still working, and I’m the one with the most seniority …” He cleared his throat. “Which means I’ll probably be the next to go.”
It used to be that if you owned a movie theater, you relied on union labor to show the picture. Once upon a time, in fact, a person could make a decent living doing the work—in Fritz Lang’s Clash by Night, one of the characters earns his wages looping film late into the evening. This is in stark contrast with today’s reality, where teenagers get your blockbuster rolling with little more than the push of a button.
Anderson got his start as an apprentice projectionist back in 1947, and, before the rise of the multiplex, worked in literally every theater in the Twin Cities. He was on the staff at the opening of the Riverview, got the arc lights burning when the drive-in was king, and has had a hand in each of the twenty-four Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Festivals. From his perch in the booth, he’s watched the cinema’s transition from primarily black-and-white affairs to Technicolor and 70mm; he sat through the auteur movement of the 1970s, treaded Hollywood’s shallow waters of the 80s and 90s, and weathered the assaults of television, videotape, and DVD.
As a young boy, Anderson’s curiosity was piqued when he was given a toy projector with a Felix the Cat cartoon one Christmas. This was a simple, hand-cranked number with a light bulb, but he was instantly entranced. “Since then, whenever I see a movie I have to turn and admire the silver light from above,” he said. “I can’t help it.” His passion grew over time, and throughout junior high, high school, and college, Anderson played the part of resident audio/visual geek. “You could find me hauling the projector and cans of educational films between classes. That was a lot of work.”
After graduation, Bob entered the nine-to-five world, working for a local advertising firm and settling down with his wife and kids. But the bug never left him, so he would steal away to the local movie houses each night, determined to break into the insular world of Union projectionists.
It was a tight-knit community: You couldn’t just walk in and become a certified Union projectionist. There weren’t a lot of jobs to go around, and projectionists were famously reluctant to retire, so it was difficult to get a foot in the door to the booth. After a few months, however, Anderson was finally accepted into the union as a registered apprentice, shuttling between theaters. A projectionist had to know every machine, from the military green and imposing Simplex projector to the sleek, silver Philips Norelco. Back then, the nitrate film was tricky and dangerous stuff, highly flammable. “The projection booths were like an Alcatraz jail cell,” Anderson explains, and it was his job to get the hell out if the thing caught fire—the booth, with its reinforced concrete, was designed to contain the blaze and keep the theater from burning down, at considerable risk to the poor souls inside.
While the story was unfolding on the screen, Anderson would be wrapped up in his work, cleaning and splicing the celluloid or maintaining the machines. In the early years, he found himself in the projection booths of dozens of different theaters, filling in for a sick or vacationing colleague. He finally landed a regular gig at the Lucky Twin drive-in, where he remained until the theater was closed and slated for demolition. “People didn’t pay too much attention to the feature there,” Anderson admits. “It was necking heaven.” Once, a wiseacre rearranged the wording on the marquee’s traction board to read, “START YOUR FAMILY AT THE LUCKY TWIN!”
Watching Anderson work today is a clinic in professionalism—he handles his machine like a man who knows what he’s doing and has flexed this knowledge on an almost-daily basis. With a seasoned hand, he threads film, carefully oils his machine, and listens to the rhythm of the movie rattling through the reels for any odd sound indicating trouble. Recently, at the Bell, where he had been hired to screen a preview of an already-forgotten movie, Anderson seemed at ease in the overheated projectionist’s booth, which had the damp, dusty aroma of an old radiator. This was clearly the refuge of an organized man, with its oil-stained toothbrushes, film cutters, screwdrivers, and tools all neatly in place. I couldn’t help but imagine all the masterpieces Anderson had brought to moviegoers over his career—fifty years is a lot of film history. When I mentioned all the time he’s spent in the projection booth, he nodded and said, “God, have I ever. See, there’s two of me—the guy with the nine-to-five job and the wife and family, and the projectionist. Everyone leads a double life—mine just happens to be up here.”

Many years ago, someone scratched these words on the metal divider of a men’s room stall in a pizza joint near Hamline University in St. Paul: “Anonymous dialogue is a means of sanity.” The self-reflective statement could hold many meanings. It might look inward to the author’s motives—one can almost hear the sigh of mental relief—or to the motives of all graffitists. If not a means, is graffiti at least a measure of social sanity? Unfiltered and anonymous, it might be even more than a measure: a glimpse beneath the accepted veneer, a push to the boundaries of the collective conscious.
Or it might just be dirty doodling.
Garvin Davenport, the recently retired dean of Hamline University’s undergraduate school, and former chairman of Hamline’s English department, asserted that graffiti is secure text, emboldened by anonymity. “The writer can express … [with] no accountability or liability,” said Davenport.
Numerous studies of the subject trace “latrinalia,” as researcher Alan Dundes dubbed it in 1966, back to ancient times and across many cultures. In some cases, the content was remarkably similar to modern graffiti, like this message found in the ruins of Pompeii: “If you want to make love, ask for Attice. The price is 16 asses.”
A relatively recent survey of more than thirty local lavatories produced a fair sample of stall scrawl. The majority of the restrooms are now graffiti-free, thanks either to fresh coats of paint or ink-resistant walls, as at the Red Dragon on Lyndale Avenue in Minneapolis, where this macabre proverb once appeared: “Build a man a fire, and he’ll stay warm for the night. Set a man on fire and he’ll stay warm for the rest of his life.”
Much of the graffiti was of the classic, unprintable variety: F-bombs and sexual boasts or invitations, explicit come-ons and vicious threats, ugly racial insults and attacks on sexual preference. Some restrooms feature a mess of florid, unreadable tags that express little more than “I was here.”
Of the printable graffiti, there was a lot of talk about God and religion. Politics and September 11th were discussed, and even the pure language of mathematics proved controversial, with corrections to a hypothetical equation and this scolding: “No, man, you cannot divide by zero!” Among the more rarified offerings were posthumous quotations of Dorothy Parker, James Dean, Baudelaire (in French, no less), and even the occult-/Wiccan-/pagan-goddess figure Babalon: “But to love me is better than all things.”
Perhaps the most thought-provoking—and chilling—example was a message at the Hard Times Café: “I lost my love and now I can’t make it anymore. So I’m going home. And I’m ending my sorry life. P.S. I had fun here, live for me.” The note inspired a rare signed response, this reassurance from a well-known regular whose girlfriend had recently died: “I didn’t write this.”
Here is a sample of other notable finds, organized by topic. “(R):” denotes the responses.
Religion: There is no God. (R): Is that your final answer? (R): Let him in your heart.
(R): Heaven is true. Satan will eat science alive.
Inspiration: Things may suck, but we can fight against apathy and make ’em better!
The optimist is the person who’s really in revolt.
Politics: No war but the class war.
Terrorism: 911 was your fault anyhow, honky. (R): If it were me, I’d 911 your punk ass next. This plane is a tower bomb.
Comments on the graffiti or its author: Unthinking redneck. (R): Overthinking hipster activist college student. (R): Over analytical tough guy with almost no teeth left. (R): People with too much time on their hands.
Hip-Hop and metaphysics: High North Hip Hop celebrate the culture of intelligent life by respectin’ the conscious said-rappahz of the past, present and future 2 elevate the said-culture of hip hop to its rightful place both mentally and musically. Long live the re-evolution of man space & time.
Sex: Toussaintt’s hot PS I did him PSS Really multiple times PSSS And I kissed him and his name is on my shirt—biotch!
Bad poetry (men’s room): I do not know what I may appear to the world/ but I myself I have seem to be/ like a boy playing on the shore/ and diverting myself in now and then/ finding a prettier shell
Bad poetry (women’s room): I want to make your ego bleed … Let it sting so you’ll never forget/ The past pain/ Through midnight rain/ Insecurities pool on the/ Grimy floor … (R): Don’t quit your day job.
Health: The superior doctor treats when there is no illness.
Rehabilitation: Harry was here! Finally recovered from drug and alcohol addiction, Oct. 2006 (R): Thank God! Keep up the good work, Harry. Congrats! (R:) God isn’t real.
Reformation: I will only write nice things now.

The first time my father drove past the original Ax-Man Surplus location on University Avenue in St. Paul, he pulled over immediately. This was some thirty years ago, but he still becomes radiant when recounting the momentous occasion of his first visit: “I was overcome—I didn’t know where to look. Finally, I calmed down, got a hold of myself, and started looking.”
More than a surplus store and not quite a dollar store (though a dollar will go a long way), Ax-Man is a sort of curiosity shop with a bit of an art-gallery vibe. On any given day, Ax-Man’s extensive, eclectic stock includes marbles, vacuum tubes, wading boots, and crime-scene tape … and French mess kits, hazmat suits, and plastic bottles of every shape and size. That’s just for starters; put simply, you haven’t known stuff until you’ve visited Ax-Man.
That may well be because “no one needs [Ax-Man’s] stuff,” as owner Jim Segal admits. And that may explain why Ax-Man is so mesmerizing, luring artists, tinkerers, inventors, do-it-yourselfers, handymen, hobbyists, and the curious to its three metro locations on a regular basis. They are all looking for something just so.
Like many Ax-Man disciples, my father is part craftsman, part artist, mostly do-it-yourselfer. On a recent visit, the two of us pawed through barrels and bins and crates and boxes of gemstones, wheels, bowling pins, magnets, gas masks, leather scraps, home-alarm key pads, and doll limbs of various skin tones. The giant phone is not for sale, but plastic brains were, for $19.95. There were Beetle Bailey lunch pails, wrapping paper, and bullets in various stages of rusting. Pop poked at stuff, bounced small objects in his palm, and examined everything through his bifocals. “Usually I don’t even know what I’m looking for,” he said. “But if I see what I’m looking for, I’ll know it.”
Sometimes even Segal isn’t quite sure about the stuff he has for sale, but that’s no matter: “The customer comes up with how it should be used,” he says. Many items are broken down, their various components sold individually. “I love seeing the creative process at work with the customers, when they don’t rely on preconceived notions about what a thing should be used for.”
Segal, who has a business degree from the University of St. Thomas, doesn’t consider himself particularly creative. “But I like the idea of creativity,” he says. That’s why he lets the staff create the signs for the merchandise—a small perk, he admits, in an otherwise routine retail job. This artfully executed signage usually consists of sassy dialogue pasted onto photos from old magazines. Shelves displaying various mugs and glasses, for instance, feature the iconographic photo taken at the conference of Yalta, with speech balloons emerging from the mouths of Franklin D. Roosevelt—“Can you believe Churchill showed up hammered again?”—and Joseph Stalin: “Da, da.”
Segal, who bought the business in 2001 and is its third owner, is circumspect about where Ax-Man gets its inventory. “Sure, I could tell you,” he says, “but then I’d have to kill you.” This much he’ll say: It comes from basements, warehouses, manufacturers with leftover parts, and trade shows. “We want to give things a second chance,” he says.
Things like flashcubes. Segal describes discovering a pallet of those little glass cubes for old Instamatics at a car-parts distributorship. Ax-Man now has a lifetime supply. Caught up in the spirit of the place, I suggest over-enthusiastically, “Christmas tree ornaments! Earrings! Pretend ice cubes!”
My dad and I left, however, not with flashcubes, but with armfuls of small wheels that my father will use on toy trucks he makes for the grandchildren. His favorite purchase ever was an oversized porcelain hand-and-forearm, perhaps once a glove display in a department store, which stands upright in a graceful twist. “My vision was to use it for a display for your mother’s jewelry,” he grumbled. Mother, however, was disturbed by the shiny disembodied hand emerging from the dresser like the scene at the end of Carrie, so my father’s great find is now used to hang wet rags and gloves in his workshop.
Arriving home from our Ax-Man visit, my father remained in a trance. Thumbs hooked on his tool belt, he had a faraway look in his eyes, perhaps imagining some distant past where he himself might have lorded over all that stuff. “It’s a young man’s game, I guess, but that would have been a fun business,” he said. “I would have loved digging through all that crap every damn day.”

One recent Sunday afternoon, upon sighting a candy-apple red contraption maneuvering the chilly streets of downtown Minneapolis, a shopper called out from the sidewalk, “What is that?” It’s a question Paul Selcke finds himself answering frequently. “It’s a conference bike,” he said, dinging his bell for emphasis. Monday through Thursday, Selcke makes his living teaching ESL at the Mall of America, but on weekends he’s the entrepreneur behind Cycle Seven, the first conference-bike-tour company in the Midwest. The bike, which essentially looks like an overgrown tricycle built to accommodate seven riders, is available by the hour to business groups, family parties, tourists, and whoever else—it’s even been used by speed-daters. Riders benefit twofold, from the exercise and an innovative design concept that inspires conversation among the participants; hence, the “conference” in the appellation. Selcke originally planned to start a pedicab company, but online research led him to the conference bike, and he became smitten with its efficiency and unique design.
A frigid afternoon in December may seem an unlikely time for a leisurely bike ride, but the jovial Selcke insists that, like any other winter sport in Minnesota, the key to comfortable conference biking is to dress for the weather. Clad in Sorels, a green, puffy jacket, and woolen hat, Selcke, who officially took Cycle Seven to the streets in the fall of 2005, leads by example. He likens the level of activity to cross-country skiing, and even suggests a family jaunt on the conference bike as “the modern alternative to the sleigh ride.” Though Cycle Seven operates year round, business in the winter months is, predictably, slow: Selcke books an average of two to three hours a week, compared with the ten to twelve weekly hours he has the bike out and about in more inviting weather.
The conference bike is equal parts form and function. The circular frame creates a round-table environment in which all passengers face one another—a set-up that facilitates conversation and, according to the inventor’s website, “lowers inhibitions.” While riding the conference bike, one person steers and operates the brakes, leaving the remaining six passengers free to pedal, or not, depending on respective energy levels and inclinations. Currently, riders must be at least twelve years old, but Selcke says that a new seat is in the works to allow kiddies in on the fun.
The creation of Eric Staller, an American living in Amsterdam (ground zero for global bike culture), the conference bike was designed as a part of his ongoing public artwork series Urban UFOs. The first in this succession of mobile, socially interactive art pieces was a Volkswagen Beetle covered in more than 1,600 computerized lights, appropriately dubbed the “Lightmobile.” The conference bike first appeared in 1991 as the Octos: an eight-seater tricycle with a circular frame. The bike as it now exists emerged in 1996.
At four hundred pounds, the conference bike is by no means lightweight, and the mechanics are correspondingly sturdy. In fact, the contraption is a marvel designed by automobile engineers, who borrowed here and there from the bike’s motorized counterparts: The steering is made by Porsche. The frame is crafted from powder-coated steel and outfitted with motorcycle wheels and hydraulic brakes. Over flat terrain, its average speed falls between ten and twelve miles per hour, but the hills of St. Paul are another story entirely. “With seven passengers, it’s gone as fast as thirty to thirty-five [miles per hour] down Kellogg and Wabasha,” boasts Selcke.
Perched on the bike, one feels rather like a pageant princess, returning the smiles and waves that are the almost-universal reaction generated by the appearance of this innovative transport. (Visibility has proven to be Cycle Seven’s best advertising: Selcke cruises populated areas of the Cities, giving free rides to drum up business.) Cars honk their horns in appreciation. On one recent trip, an SUV pulled over to better allow all four of its college-aged occupants to hang out the windows and yell, “You guys are awesome!” According to Selcke, this kind of thing happens all the time. He’s had a few negative experiences as well—run-ins with drunks and rude or inattentive drivers (as frequently happens with riders on run-of-the-mill bicycles), but overall, the response has been overwhelmingly positive. As one conference bike rider put it, “I don’t know when I’ve ever seen my fellow citizens being so friendly!”
While Cycle Seven may be a part-time endeavor at the moment, Selcke has big plans for the future. “This is a back-up now,” Selcke, his glasses fogged from the cold, admits. “Eventually I’d like to do it for a living.” Ideally, he says, access to the bikes could be free and underwritten by sponsors, which would be a perfect fit at public events and around shopping malls. He’d also like to have more bikes stationed around the city so he could retire the trailer he now uses to transport the bike, thus rendering the operation entirely fossil fuel free. This environmental consciousness is an integral part of Selcke’s philosophy, and part of the reason why he thinks he can be successful. “There have to be alternative ways to get people around. This is efficient transport,” he says. “Look around. All of these cars are emitting carbon. We’re leaving no footprints.”