The Rake Magazine

Category: Article

  • Big Box Theater

    A few months ago, while walking along the Stone Arch Bridge with a friend from Manhattan, the bright blue Guthrie Theater looming above us, I realized that Jean Nouvel’s big new thing might be one of the few places in Minneapolis that would actually impress a New Yorker. So we wandered into one of its many bars and, though it was early in the afternoon, ordered cocktails. Why not? In the dim interior light, we quickly lost track of time. Patrons for the 2:00 p.m. matinees and the 7:00 p.m. evening shows meandered through while we sank deeper into the seductive leather seats, drinking and talking and drinking. We considered seeing a show ourselves, but ordered a six-dollar bowl of almonds instead.
    By 9:00 p.m., we were standing out on the “Bridge to Nowhere,” squinting drunkenly at the lights reflecting off the Mississippi River and talking about how beautiful theater in the Twin Cities can be. (When I’m drunk, I say “beautiful” too much.) If the purpose of theater is to entertain, then the new Guthrie succeeds, beautifully. We never even bothered to enter any actual theaters, and we were happy.
    On the other side of the river, just north of downtown St. Paul, the Gremlin Theatre company lives in the back of a building on an astonishingly isolated stretch of Sibley Street. Their performance space used to be the loading dock for the rug company that occupied the space after the shoe factory vacated. In 2002, Gremlin renovated it for—no joke—five thousand times less than it cost to build the new Guthrie Theater. The only visible sign that a theater lives inside is a wooden sandwich board set out on the sidewalk on show days.
    Sometimes, at an intermission for a show in the Loading Dock Theater, the owners of a coffee shop in another corner of the building remember to open. But they’ve always appeared deeply bewildered by the line of customers waiting to buy something from them. Once I ordered a cup of tea, and the guy behind the counter asked me how to make it.
    In fact, the experience of live performance at Gremlin appears on the surface to be so different from the Guthrie experience that I wonder whether they’re referring to the same thing when they refer, in their names, to “theater.”

    So what do we—and should we—look for when we go? Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie, currently playing on the Guthrie’s McGuire Proscenium stage until March 25, inspires an interesting analogy to the local theater community. Indeed, Tom, the narrator, informs the audience that the play is, in part, about what theater can and should be. Other theater folk, he tells us, “give you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I intend to give you truth in the pleasant guise of illusion.”
    Tom is the play’s writer. He works in a shoe factory (coincidentally apropos of Gremlin’s current digs), though he has bigger dreams. His coworkers call him “Shakespeare,” and he eventually gets fired for writing poems on shoeboxes. At night, he escapes to the movies, avoiding an equally suffocating home life in a St. Louis tenement apartment. (Most living playwrights, too, can be seduced by the movies on the off chance they’ll make some real dough.) He lives with his overbearing mother Amanda—who is like your annoying-but-amusing theater friend from high school who speaks in a distracting, slightly put-upon accent and always wants you to appreciate her—and his terminally shy sister Laura, both of whom await the arrival of Jim, the Gentleman Caller.
    Tom describes the Gentleman Caller as “the long-delayed but always expected something that we live for.” We, the audience, are to the theater community what the Gentleman Caller is to the The Glass Menagerie. Without us, the drama doesn’t happen. Yet when we head out for the evening, we, like Jim, are almost always oblivious to the nature of the drama we are about to enter. Generally, we’re just out looking for a good time.
    Finally, Laura is theater itself. She can be hopelessly awkward, embarrassingly sensitive, torturously maladjusted, and uniquely beautiful. Sometimes, you just want to scream at her to grow up, get away from her mother, and get a real job. But then, when the lights are magically altered just so and music wafts in from some unknown location, you surprise yourself by suddenly falling for her. As Jim tells Laura in the play, “ … different people are not like other people, but being different is nothing to be ashamed of … They’re one hundred times one thousand. You’re one times one!” And before you realize what you’re doing, before you can think better of it, you have to kiss her.
    Laura reminds me of a young girlfriend who loved me even when I didn’t deserve it. In retrospect, I wish she had given up on me sooner and found healthier, more practical ways to expend her energy. Yet her unwillingness to turn off her emotions—the way she insisted on taking seriously things that the rest of the world takes for granted—is a quality that I still admire in theater. The flaws make me reach out to her more tenderly and hopefully.

    All the other theaters in the Twin Cities exist in the shadow of the new Guthrie. None of the others have such a grandiose physical presence or sleek production values; in fact, few theaters in the entire world, let alone the Twin Cities, provide as luxurious an experience. Even the almonds are expensive. The Guthrie is to the theater world what the New York Yankees are to baseball, paying large-market premiums to showcase world-class talent—and occasionally nabbing actors from productions at smaller companies that can’t compete with the salaries it offers.
    Unlike the Yankees, however, the Guthrie’s presence so changes the landscape that it can take some credit for actually supporting theaters that nominally compete with it for audience. By employing so many artists and technicians, it helps keep talented people in the Twin Cities year round. It makes leftover props and furniture available to many small companies at reasonable cost. It has even begun to help bring these companies to larger audiences by running their productions in the new Dowling Studio. (You can see four top-selling shows from last year’s Fringe Festival in the studio February 1–4.)
    Finally, the Guthrie experience is alluring to people who don’t normally consider live performance a part of their life. An evening there is an event in the same way that going to the Metrodome includes more than a baseball game. You can have food, cocktails, and a beautiful view. If the show disappoints, at least there are pretty lights and booze.
    At the same time, unfortunately, many people never have an alternative experience. (One full house at the Guthrie is a good-sized audience for an entire four-week run of a Gremlin production.) For them, the Guthrie is synonymous with theater—even more so now that even New Yorkers are willing to acknowledge its grandeur. I wonder, however, whether this showplace fosters false expectations in its audiences and, even sometimes, its artists. If the Guthrie has the expertise and financial wherewithal to create on the stage the type of clean, luxurious, virtually perfect experience that it offers in its numerous bars, why should it hold back? But on the other hand, should a play be that comfortable? Should it be that shiny and impressive? Watching incredible sets fly in and out, for example, you may find yourself marveling at the quality of air-traffic control rather than the quality of the play.
    And what then becomes of Laura, whose strangeness makes her so special? “Art is a kind of anarchy and theater is a province of art,” as Tennessee Williams himself insisted, in an essay titled “Something Wild.” “It runs counter to the sort of orderliness on which organized society apparently must be based.” (By his measure, purchasing tea at Gremlin Theater may actually be the more beautiful theater experience.)
    Theater, at its best, not only entertains but also nurtures what Tennessee Williams called a “highly personal, even intimate relationship” with us, the audience. We enter a unique, often-flawed world that nonetheless sometimes offers a closer approximation of truth than we see in our day-to-day lives. “It is sad and embarrassing and unattractive,” Williams admitted in another essay titled “Person to Person,” “that those emotions that stir [the playwright] deeply enough to demand expression, and to charge their expression with some measure of light and power, are nearly all rooted, however changed in their surface, in the particular and sometimes peculiar concerns of the artist himself.” In The Glass Menagerie, for example, Williams recreates his memory of his sister in such a way that the true, heartbreaking beauty beneath her odd, fragile exterior can be more easily seen. We simply cannot experience theater if we substitute, consciously or unconsciously, comfort for this peculiar, sometimes “embarrassing and unattractive” light and power.
    Of course, no theater should be defined by the experience you have in the lobby. Good theater—being alive and different every night—may seduce us like Laura on the Guthrie’s grand proscenium stage, up in its Dowling Studio, and just as well, down at the Loading Dock Theater (where Gremlin is producing a fun new play, Bach at Leipzig, by a young playwright named Itamar Moses)—or anywhere in the Twin Cities that wants to call itself a theater. Afterward, I recommend going to the new Guthrie for cocktails. I hear the cheese plate is good, too.

  • Mick Jagger as You’ve Never Seen Him

    As a relative newcomer to the Rake family, I was reassured and gratified by fresh research asserting that you, the average Rake reader, are not much of a couch potato. Or if you are, your eyeballs are fixed to a book or magazine rather than a TV screen. The numbers say twenty-six percent of you are more likely to have “no exposure to TV on an average weekday” than the tubers next door.
    This is good for you and me.
    After fifteen years of neuron-shriveling exposure, covering what passes for prime time entertainment television for the St. Paul Pioneer Press, I can tell you I’m dangerously close to a cumulative toxic meltdown. I can’t take much more contact with the sprawling, roiling, highly profitable, knucklehead media universe around us. Like you, apparently, I would just as soon spend my media time absorbing what’s valuable—even, I dare say, artful and edifying—and ignoring the latest cross-pollinated fodder for the high-profile, lowbrow, Paris-and-Britney-go-prancing-with-the-stars, eighteen-to-thirty-four-year-old target demo.
    When I do pull myself away from the work-related computer screen long enough to watch television, it no longer occurs to me to spend a half-hour with a sitcom. I mean, come on. There’s a playoff game on ESPN, an airliner crashing on National Geographic’s Seconds from Disaster, and a bunch of embalmed white guys sneering about Nancy Pelosi on Fox News. This stuff is real, I’ve decided, and to some extent unpredictable. (OK, not Fox News, but you catch my drift.)
    Unfortunately, I have a hard time maintaining aesthetic purity. I thought Borat was genius. I’ll lose a half-hour watching some part of Dumb and Dumber every time it pops up on TBS, which is about three times a week. And I believe the Cohen brothers deserve a lifetime achievement award for The Big Lebowski alone.
    Likewise, I have a thing for a certain kind of sitcom. The problem is the kinds of sitcoms I like never seem to last long. They get good reviews, and then, a few weeks later, a pink slip. WTF? Well, one reason is that people like me—and you—have lost the habit, probably forever, of making appointments with entertainment television.
    Take for example The Knights of Prosperity, a new sitcom on ABC. It only caught my attention because I saw that David Letterman’s company, Worldwide Pants, was producing it, along with Mick Jagger, who also has a small, recurring role. “David Letterman,” I thought. “And Mick Jagger. How stupid could this be?”
    Turns out it wasn’t stupid. In fact, it was pretty funny. The shtick here has actor Donal Logue, your classic fleshy, compulsively amusing Irishman, and his band of multi-cultural minimum-wage warriors deciding to make their grab for the brass ring by ripping off Jagger’s fifty-two-million-dollar Manhattan apartment.
    The show worked. Or, I should say, the pilot worked, since I haven’t seen episode number two. Someone at Worldwide Pants obviously enjoyed the time he spent researching dialogue in blue-collar bars, and left feeling something for all the impossible, implausible dreams submerged there. I get Mick Jagger pimping himself and much lesser celebrities. I like the idea of sitcom characters that look and sound like the streets of New York.
    But Knights of Prosperity is doomed, and here’s why: Because you and I, dear highbrow, literary-loving Rake reader, are the show’s best audience. The thing is toast because you’ve never heard of it, and I’ll probably never watch it again.
    My theory is that uncommon sitcoms, sitcoms with some sense of artistic risk, daring, or refusal to conform to stale norms, appeal best to people—you and me—who have for the most part blocked sitcoms from our cultural radar. The only thing our experience with crap like According to Jim, Two and a Half Men, and King of Queens ever validated was that sitcom watching was a waste of time, time better spent shouting back at Bill O’Reilly, breaking down defenses with John Madden, or listening to some C-SPAN policy wonk explain the roots of the Sunni-Shia schism.

  • Babysitting the Monkey

    When I was a kid, I wanted to grow up to be a lot of things. I wanted to be Carol Burnett. I wanted to be a trapeze artist, performing death-defying loop de loops high above the crowds while wearing a dazzling bikini made entirely of rubies and sapphires. I wanted to be a kindergarten teacher. I also wanted to work with monkeys in some way, but I wasn’t totally sure what a person could do with monkeys that wouldn’t involve being a monkey doctor, which I was pretty sure would involve a lot of expensive schooling. I was also pretty sure that funny kindergarten teachers didn’t make that kind of money, even if they did moonlight as trapeze artists on the weekends. So, I figured I’d have to settle for being a monkey babysitter. On the upside, that would involve feeding monkeys from baby bottles. On the downside, it would also involve changing monkey diapers.
    The point is: I never wanted to be a wife. I never dreamt about it, like you hear about some girls doing. I never once imagined my wedding, or honeymoon, or any kind of happily ever after with anybody but me, my circus friends, my tidy classroom full of brilliant children, and a smattering of mischievous primates.
    I was a TV junkie. Watching television, I saw being a wife as just about the worst thing that could happen to you. It wasn’t as bad as today, when every TV wife is trim and sassy and confident yet married to a dump truck, but it was still pretty bad. In my TV adolescence, the wives yelled and were married to doofuses who were either controlling egomaniacs and/or bumbling bigot nano-wits. You know, inmates like Alice Kramden or Edith Bunker. Either that or the TV wives oozed a kind of sanitized, tranquilized, infantilized version of grown-up womanhood that spooked me to my core. Like Caroline Ingalls or Mrs. Cunningham.
    There were times when I longed to reach my hand through the looking-glass screen and slap some sense into Carol Brady, tell her to wake up out of her suburban Seconal fog and go to school. Tell her to quit living vicariously through Marcia and get out there and live! Damn it! Live! She could afford to do it. And no one would miss her. Alice did all the work around that place, anyway.
    I got older, and my dreams changed. I wanted to be Steve Martin. I still wanted to be a kindergarten teacher. I wanted to be a rock singer, wailing out my tortured yet stylishly sexy soul in an arena full of dancing fans. (I’d still be wearing the sapphire-and-ruby bikini, but now with Kiss monster boots.)
    The point is, being a wife was still the last thing on my mind—even after I had my kids. Still, I eventually did get married…no sitcom, despite its cancellation after two seasons. And then a funny thing happened. I met this guy. We hit it off. He had a line for it—he said the rocks in his head fit the holes in mine. I wanted to hang around with him as much as I could every day, and getting married seemed like the perfect way to rope that dogie.
    So I’m a wife. And I still have crazy dreams. I no longer want to be Carol Burnett or Steve Martin; I want to be me, but a better version of me. I would rather take a rusted ninja star to my windpipe than supervise a roomful of five-year-olds. Hanging out with my husband’s writer pals satisfies my desire to volunteer time with nit-picking chimps.
    I haven’t surrendered all of my fantasies. I would still love to strut around in a jeweled bikini and dragon boots like some video-game babe. I will have to do this one on my own, since my husband refuses to wear his emerald codpiece and cape (except when the Packers are in the playoffs).
    I even have new crazy dreams. I would like to own a solar-powered bed and breakfast. I would like to produce an evening news show for cable access where sock puppets deliver all the news. And of course, there is this guy I’m married to. I want to hang out with him, every day.

  • When Harry Met Betty

    One of life’s great truths—one that we desperately seek to avoid with proverbs and catechisms and even magazine articles—is that beneath its surface lies complexity. Our beloved fictions of heroes and villains crumble with scrutiny, leaving only convolution, shifting meanings, and unstable realities. The same is true of things. Even the simplest object has its hidden history of longing, love, and despair. Take, for example, cake. Chiffon cake.

    Ask someone who lived through the 1950s to name the icons of that era, and chances are that—along with the ’57 Chevy, Lucy and Ricky, and the cul-de-sac rambler—chiffon cake will make their list. The recipe was introduced by General Mills in 1948 with a major marketing blitz that featured Betty Crocker, another 1950s icon. Betty, of course, is the fictional marketing persona invented in the 1920s by Marjorie Child Husted, a General Mills executive who sometimes posed as her creation. With Betty’s help, chiffon became a nationwide sensation. Billed as “the first really new cake in a hundred years,” thanks to its “mystery ingredient,” chiffon was light and fluffy like angel food cake, yet also rich and moist like butter cake, and it rapidly became a favorite of housewives from Syracuse to Oceanside.

    Even today, the towering tube cake conjures a Kodachrome image of Mother, in lipstick and swing skirt, offering up love via food: the idealized feminine of mid-century America.
    But just as the post-war feminine mystique had its dark, unspoken places, so, too, had the chiffon cake. The real mystery lurking beneath its lemony glaze is not a secret ingredient, but the secret life of its reclusive inventor: the appropriately named Harry Baker.

    The shorthand version of his history, repeated in a thousand cookbooks, notes that the insurance-salesman-turned-baker invented the cake in Los Angeles in 1927. He baked his chiffon cakes in his apartment kitchen in the Windsor Square neighborhood and sold them to the glamorous Brown Derby restaurant, where they pleased the palates of Hollywood’s studio stars. In 1947, Baker sold his closely guarded recipe to General Mills for an undisclosed sum—“because,” as one General Mills publication quotes him, “I wanted Betty Crocker to give the secret to the women of America.”
    The complete version of Harry Baker’s life is more complicated, and you won’t find it in any cookbook, or anywhere else for that matter. “Just to mention his name was forbidden,” said his granddaughter, Sarah Baker, who is an attorney in Portland, Oregon. “I remember, maybe about 1964, my grandmother had a tea party for one of her sisters,” she recalled. “I had gone down to the kitchen to help her. She had her back to me, getting dishes out of a china cabinet, when I asked her, ‘Whatever happened to Grandfather Baker?’
    “She whirled around faster than I knew she could move, looked at me absolutely furiously, and said, ‘We don’t talk about him.’ ”

    Although it was wildly popular in the 1950s, the chiffon cake had been figuratively gathering dust for decades by the time I discovered the recipe in the late 1990s. It was the tail end of the glorious dot-com boom years and I, a hopeless liberal-arts kid from way back, had landed a job, mainly out of curiosity, at a prestigious design firm in downtown Minneapolis. Visions of John Cheever and Darrin Stephens launched my wife and me into a sardonic but passionate craze for everything retro-1950s. Dressed for cocktails, she would greet me at the door after work, martinis in hand; during one such happy hour, while browsing in our 1956 edition of Betty Crocker’s Picture Cook Book, I stumbled upon the recipe for chiffon.
    The job, the dress, the quest for fifties kitsch: forgotten. But my Betty still falls open to the creased and batter-spattered pages with the step-by-step photo directions for chiffon cake because, symbolism aside, it makes a truly splendid dessert.
    Before chiffon, there had been but two types of cake. Foam cakes, like angel food, contain no shortening and rely on eggs for leavening; while butter cakes rise with baking powder. Chiffon combines the two, relying on both eggs and baking powder, and, the clincher, adds Harry Baker’s secret ingredient: vegetable oil (or, as it was called in those days, “salad oil”—another General Mills product, as it happens). The recipe calls for seven eggs. Their yolks are mixed with flour, sugar, leavening, and the oil to make a batter, which is folded into their whipped-hard whites.

    The result delivers on every one of Betty Crocker’s promises: Chiffon is simple, virtually foolproof. Light, moist, rich. And above all, “glamorous.” The lemon version (the only one I make) speckles starry citrus against a snowy sky of sweet, voluptuous crumb. Never dry, never cloying, never dull, it is, in short, the perfect cake. And the rave reviews earned by my first attempt brought me back to it time and again. Members of our extended family bring pies to Thanksgiving dinner. I make chiffon.

    I had been an enthusiastic baker of the cake for some time when one day, drooling through back issues of Cook’s Illustrated magazine, I chanced upon an article on chiffon by food writer and Joy of Cooking contributor Stephen Schmidt. If you’ve read Cook’s Illustrated, you’ll already know that Schmidt tinkered exhaustively with the original Betty Crocker recipe to end up with something just a little better. (So he claims. I stick with the original.)

    What caught my eye, however, was a sidebar article about Harry Baker. Schmidt repeated the standard biography: insurance salesman, 1927 discovery, service to the stars, etc. But he also uncovered some new details. For one thing, he noted that Baker, during his Hollywood heyday, shared his apartment “with his aging mother.” And the sale of the recipe to General Mills took on a new twist in Schmidt’s telling: “Having been evicted from his apartment, and fearing memory loss, the usually reclusive Baker trekked uninvited to Minneapolis to sell his recipe,” he wrote.

    Every one of us is blessed with curiosity, and there are those among us who can keep it at bay. I’m not one of them. Taken together, these few scraps of information hinted at a story. One thing led to another, and eventually it turned out that I spent five years, on and off, chasing the elusive Hollywood inventor of my beloved chiffon cake.

    In 1923, Paramount released Hollywood, a silent film that follows the misadventures of Angela Whitaker, a hapless girl from “Centerville” who can’t land a film part in the land of dreams come true. The film is laced with nearly eighty cameo appearances by virtually every star of the silent era: Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, Pola Negri, Cecil B. DeMille, Will Rogers.

    That same year, tycoons who owned the Hollywoodland Real Estate erected an enormous sign to advertise their corporation. Years later, Peg Entwistle, a real-life Angela Whitaker, would throw herself off the four-story “H.” Eventually, the Hollywood chamber of commerce toppled the last four letters of the sign and it’s been an icon of American dreams ever since.

    1923 also saw the arrival of Harry Baker in Hollywood. He, too, came from Ohio. He was forty years old. Behind him he’d left his wife, Mary, and two children, Harry Jr. and Mary. His insurance business had gone sour. He was broke. Looking for a new source of cash, he turned to his lifelong hobby: fudge. A confectioner in the tony Wilshire neighborhood bought it from Baker for fifty cents a pound. It was enough to afford him a living.

    Harry also began to tinker with cake recipes, and he would have put Cook’s Illustrated’s Stephen Schmidt to shame. He devised more than four hundred different recipes in his quest to bake a sweeter, moister angel food cake. He varied ingredients, measurements, and the baking time and temperature. Nothing satisfied. In later years, he described the eureka moment that led him to salad oil in almost mystical terms: It was, he told a reporter at the Minneapolis Tribune, a “sixth sense—something cosmic” that revealed his secret ingredient. And it worked.

    During the time that Harry Baker was handing out experimental cakes to his neighbors, a handful of entrepreneurs pooled resources to launch a restaurant on Wilshire Boulevard. The Brown Derby opened for business in 1926, in a building shaped to match its name. Two years later—call it another cosmic twist—Harry Baker walked in with a sample of his unbelievable cake. It became one of the Derby’s signature dishes.

  • Go Down Moses

    A recent intercepted email exchange between Monica Moses, executive director of product innovation at the Star Tribune, and Steve Perry, editor of City Pages, provided both a good laugh and good fodder for online discussion of “What the hell are newspapers and why are they seemingly dying?” 

    The exchange (posted on The Rake’s media blog) was precipitated by City Pages’ extensive coverage in January of the fire sale of the Strib by its parent company, McClatchy. In particular, Perry laid blame for the Strib’s recent circulation declines squarely at the feet of Moses, who had been the prime mover behind last year’s “redesign” of the Minneapolis daily. To summarize the emails, Moses thought Perry was full of crap, and vice versa.

    Reading between the lines of the emails, though, it was possible to see much more than an internecine spat between journalists. (Of course, extending the title “journalist” to Moses would be a stretch, even though her title during the redesign was “deputy managing editor for visuals.”) What became clear was the vast chasm that has grown between today’s corporate-newspaper person and an old-styler like Perry, who operates under the quaint notion that newspapers are something other than a means to deliver demographics to advertisers.

    If you need further evidence of the abyss, have a look at the statement McClatchy CEO Gary Pruitt made to the Wall Street Journal at the time of the Strib’s redesign in 2005: “The Star Tribune … is about to take the wraps off a redesign that we hope will make it a model for a Twenty-first Century newspaper.” That’s exactly the worldview Moses was defending: A modern “model newspaper” is defined by its design rather than its actual content. And as soon as the reporters who grew up on Watergate realize that, nowadays, their job duty is to “attract eyeballs” rather than “report stories,” they’ll be much happier. That the “model newspaper” is now worth about half of what McClatchy paid for it in 1998 should help to drive the point home, too.

    To be fair, though, the paper’s pretty visual presentation, which takes up so much space that used to go to words, is perhaps a logical response to the falling circulation numbers at newspapers nationwide. If you want a newspaper to be more attractive to more people, make it more like the things they are attracted to: the pretty visuals and superficial content of TV and the Internet. (The smart youth-oriented television show Veronica Mars sent up this attitude perfectly a couple of weeks ago. When teen detective Veronica was shown a controversial newspaper story accompanied by slick visuals, her comment was, “Colored ink! It must be true.”)

    So, while you are rethinking your newspaper in terms of colored ink, don’t forget to further transfigure your “readers” into “viewers” by shortening all stories. Don’t stop there, though. Where there is some room for words among the illustrations, fifteen-word summaries, and huge section titles, you can add features and columnists who are transparently chosen to appeal to a niche readership—one defined by its age or religion or politics.

    The perfect example of the latter two criteria is columnist Katherine Kersten, who is profiled by Brian Lambert in this issue. No honest observer would deny that she was added to the Strib’s lineup as part of a package intended to appeal to political and religious conservatives. (She came on board around the same time several syndicated conservative writers began to appear regularly on the opinion pages.)

    The fact that she’s conservative is not remarkable, per se. The fact that she’s so utterly predictable in her “family-values” brand of conservatism, and so consistently trite in her expression of it (her last two columns were about, respectively, the gentle old couple who met at Bible school and founded the Minnesota Family Council, and the evils of pervasive television violence) tells me that Strib editors have as little respect for the intelligence of their conservative readership as they do for the rest of us.

    The reporters and editors who create whatever value remains inherent in the Star Tribune are nearly unanimously discouraged. They know the fate that chopped at the hamstrings of the Pioneer Press after its sale also awaits them. The Pioneer Press’ managers professed surprise when so many veteran reporters gladly took the offered buyouts. They clearly underestimated the acrimony they had created. And now it’s happened on the other side of the river, too.

    Most reporters and editors believe, perhaps naively, that the essence of a newspaper is the news, not the packaging of the news. Increasingly, this puts them in conflict with their owners, who have no patience for idealistic notions about the crucial role a vigorous press plays in our culture, and no empathy for a work force that actually begs to do its job better.

    Maybe what Pruitt really meant when he called the Strib a model newspaper was that it’s a poor excuse for a real one.

  • Meaningful Minimalism

    I’m wearing yellow in honor of Jupiter,” declared design-cum-business maven Stephanie Odegard. The Minneapolis native was in her twelfth-floor studio in the New York Design Center, cosseted in a modest office near two large showrooms that feature her acclaimed carpets and furniture. Odegard Inc. has six sales offices in the United States, operations in Nepal, and twelve thousand employees worldwide. She pays her workers a living wage, sponsors schools, and is one of the forces behind Rugmark, a program that certifies carpets made without child labor. But the strong impression one gets of Odegard is not of a capitalist titan but of a metaphysical seeker. Odegard’s company earns more than a million dollars a month, yet she takes the time to don a yellow scarf in observance of Jupiter’s Day, which, according to ancient astrological tradition, is Thursday.
    Although Odegard “craves color,” she describes herself as a design minimalist. Her carpets are quiet seas of aquamarine, cerulean, tanzanite, and scarlet, sometimes with dashes of black at the borders. When she does include patterns, they are often subtle, just shades different than the background hues. Her home is a 1,200-square-foot Soho loft that she strives to keep empty. “You have this impulse to say ‘Here’s an empty space, I should put in a chair.’ It’s easy to fall into that, but I don’t want a house that’s filled. I can’t stand kitsch,” Odegard said, with a shudder and wave of the hand. “I live in fear of people giving me little presents. I don’t like lots of small things.”
    Yet her office, where she spends most of her waking hours, is filled with small things. This is where a secondary aesthetic comes into play: object as memento. There are many gifts on the shelves, including a miniature collection of brown clay houses and temples arranged like a Nepalese Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. On a lower shelf sits a set of four white ceramic cups from India, each painted with abstract, blue flowers. There are also ceramic, glass, and silver vases as well as many awards and a few framed photos of Odegard with the Dalai Lama.
    Odegard came to design for unusual and idealistic reasons. She longed to see the world and make it better. In interviews, she often speaks not of design but of the need for people to be well nourished and educated. She travels the globe trying to accomplish these missions, creating jobs and buying materials. The gifts and oddities she’s collected—the spinning toy tops kept in a vase, the metal inlaid mirror of the Hindu elephant-headed god, Lord Ganesh—represent alliances, friendships, and business well conducted. Having them around creates an atmosphere of positivity. By her own account, Odegard travels so lightly that she often runs out of clothes, but you get the distinct feeling she would dutifully lug home a bag of bricks if they were given to her by someone she liked or attached to a meaningful event. Suddenly the paradox of the minimalist with an office full of things makes sense. To seek objects is noisome; but to reject what arrives is to court bad karma.

  • The End of the High Road

    Even casual strollers of downtown St. Paul will most likely notice the majestic High Bridge, just west of the business district. Towering above the other bridges of the city’s scenic Mississippi River valley and summiting at 160 feet above the Big Muddy, the High Bridge carries Smith Avenue from the bustling West Seventh Street commercial strip to … where, exactly?
    Even for many St. Paul natives, this can be a tough question. To the naked eye, Smith Avenue crosses the river to the high bluffs on the city’s West Side, and seems to disappear up a steep hill into a leafy residential area known as Cherokee Park. But if you follow the Avenue to the top of that incline, you reach Annapolis Street eleven blocks later, the dividing line between St. Paul and the suburb of West St. Paul. While some West Side merchants hope Smith will become the next Grand Avenue, plenty of locals hope that it doesn’t. Unlike its bigger-scale cousin, which has been colonized by chain stores, Smith Avenue still boasts that rare hip-yet-unpretentious vibe. This is still essentially a working-class neighborhood full of pre-war, single-family homes with modest yards, so pick-up trucks outnumber SUVs on the streets, and neckties are few and far between. Here, the West Side’s large Latino population mingles easily with the hipsters and elderly white folk who live nearby.
    The Annapolis intersection is anchored by several retail businesses. Thanks to two of them—the Old Man River Cafe and Caspers’ Cherokee Sirloin Room—it’s possible to walk down Smith and smell roasting coffee and sizzling steaks all at once. The coffee shop, owned by a pair of former journalists, occupies an old brick building that for seventy years was a pharmacy. Today, it serves not only as an outlet for its own line of java, but as a hub for the neighborhood’s social and political life, attracting a cross-section of local residents, Smith Avenue commuters, and West Side political junkies and activists.
    Across the street at the Sirloin Room—an excellent example of a family-owned institution that stuck around long enough to circle back into relevance—a dark, woody bar captures that feel of the comfy neighborhood joint, but with a hint of edge, especially on weekends. The place has been there since 1970, longer if you count the twenty-some years it was the Cherokee Tavern, before the Casper family bought it.
    West St. Paul Antiques is the corner’s cultural attraction. While it has a fine collection of antiques for purchase, it’s also fascinating as a museum. In its basement is perhaps the most overwhelming collection of St. Paul Winter Carnival memorabilia ever assembled in one place. Where else could you find the marching band uniforms of the Northern Pacific Railroad’s 1948 Torchlight Parade Drill Team?
    Farther down Smith toward Dodd Road, a few more small shops build on the arts-and-crafts theme of the corner. The Lisan Gallery of Art and Design shows mostly local artists such as June Young and Jodi Hills but is also providing a venue for artists from the Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, scene that was devastated by Hurricane Katrina. Next door at Fine Restorations, woodworking artisan Vanya Hoeffding does complicated repair jobs on treasured antique furniture while Classic Upholstery handles the more rank-and-file cases. Throw in a pair of picture framing shops, and you have a reminder of what it was to walk Grand Avenue in the 1970s.

  • Elif Shafak CANCELLED

    PLEASE NOTE: THIS EVENT CANCELLED.

    “If there is a thief in a novel,” said Elif Shafak recently, “it doesn’t make the novelist a thief.” Nevertheless, the Turkish novelist faced three years in prison for the purported crime of “insulting Turkishness” by having an Armenian character in her novel The Bastard of Istanbul refer to Turks as “butchers.” What’s more, Shafak was forced to watch her televised trial from the hospital bed where she had just given birth to her first child. Though she was acquitted, the case shed light on the culture clash within Turkish society. Shafak herself pointed to “those who want an open and democratic society” on one side, and, on the other, “those who speak the language of fear … [who are] so aggressive that they manage to manipulate the political agenda and give the country a black eye.” Sound familiar? 300 Nicollet Mall, Minneapolis; 612-630-6174; www.friendsofmpl.org

  • A Truly Worldly Bird

    There are a few unwritten rules of food snobbery that come into play, especially when dining in a new hot spot or restaurant run by a big-name chef. One is for the dining party to order as many courses as possible, making sure to hit all areas where the kitchen’s repertoire is considered notable. Another prohibits the same dish from being ordered by more than one person, thus permitting a wider circle of tasting as everyone passes plates and forkfuls loaded with the perfect bite. Superceding those rules, however, is one that, when broken, has been known to create uncomfortable moments of silence among even very good friends. That rule is: Never order the chicken.
    Food snobs believe that restaurants offer chicken simply to provide something for your Aunt Sally from Iowa who just happened to invite herself along to dinner. It’s on the menu as a concession, or a bribe to be offered up by more adventurous gastronomes to the lesser inclined: “Well, I’m sure they’ll have some chicken you can order.” The self-proclaimed elite eaters pass over the chicken entrée because they wonder why anyone would choose a common rock when faced with a choice of precious stones. This is why, when I think my friends might be heading down the slippery slope of snobbery, I love to watch their faces when I choose chicken.
    In truth, chicken is king. Seriously, can you imagine a world without it? I challenge omnivores to find a week when they didn’t consume chicken in one form or another. Besides being the universal yardstick for the flavor of all things (“tastes like chicken”), the bird plays the role of prime protein in countless cuisines all over the planet. Instead of thinking of chicken as pedestrian, we should be celebrating its versatility—it can be satisfying as both a vehicle for a star chef’s signature sauce and as a bucket of crispy fried goodness.
    The domestic chicken we know today is believed to have descended from the jungle fowl of India and Southeast Asia. Like so many things, chickens date back at least to the ancient Egyptians, who perfected a method of mass incubation, hatching thousands of eggs at once. Trade routes and travelers helped deliver domestic poultry to the growing world. Because they are so easy to raise, adaptable to all types of climates, and prolific progenitors, it’s not hard to see how chickens came to feed the world.
    For many cultures, the chicken is more than just a food source. During Hindu cremation ceremonies, a chicken tethered by a leg acts as a channel for any evil spirits that might be in attendance. Ancient Greeks considered roosters to be god-like in their valor, and the Romans used hens as oracles by feeding them a special grain cake. If the birds reacted noisily, the omen was bad, if they ate the cake greedily, it was good.
    If ever there were a question concerning the culinary merits of chicken, consider this: Why would France, one of the most food-centric countries in the world, use the Gallic rooster as its national emblem? On these shores, our most familiar chicken emblem may be that of Harland Sanders’ bucket of Original Recipe, but as anyone responsible for six or seven family meals a week well knows, chicken is a home cook’s best friend.
    The IQF (individually quick frozen) breast may be one of the most popular ways to buy chicken. Bags of easily thawed, tender white meat have probably done more for the average American cook than any other product. Those who venture into more intensive cooking can always take on a whole bird. The capon, for instance, is a castrated rooster that has more white meat and a higher fat content than other types of chickens; this makes its meat extremely tender and flavorful (it is also among the largest birds, weighing from six to nine pounds). Roasters are young hens, about four months old, ranging from three to five pounds. Two- to five-pound broiler/fryers are the most commonly sold whole chicken.
    Of course, the industrialization of meat processing is one of the reasons why chicken has become so cheap and easy to get anywhere, at any time. Some disgusting common practices used by large chicken factories, like haphazard electrocution or bacteria-rich water baths, have come to light in recent years, causing unease among people who love to eat chicken. As a result, the market for fresh, naturally raised and processed chicken has been gaining momentum to the point at which even massive companies like Gold n’ Plump now attempt to trade on their wholesome qualities. More important, small producers like Lori Callister and her Farm in the City at the Midtown Global Market have found an audience for flavorful, naturally grown chickens. After choosing your bird, you can curry it and cook it in a tagine; throw it in a stir-fry in the manner of General Tso; or grill it on a skewer with a tangy Thai marinade. Maybe you are what you eat, or maybe you are what kind of chicken you make for the night. It’s often said that even a professional cook’s skills are best judged by sampling his hard-cooked eggs and roasted chicken. Creating simple, flavorful elegance from something so common seems the antithesis of pedestrian—surely this achievement should be heralded by people, even food snobs, the world over?

  • Anjou Reviver

    Heaven knows the European Community (or whatever they are calling it this week) fails to warm the cockles of the English heart. (How would you like life in Minnesota regulated in detail by a bloated bureaucracy, living on expense accounts in a foreign land?) But one of its pleasanter side effects has been a scheme of international town-twinning—“Partnerstädte in Europa,” the bumper stickers call it. Sometimes the partnerships between cities in different countries are rather elegant. Oxford, for instance, is twinned with Leiden, seat of the oldest university in the Netherlands.
    Indeed, sometimes these seem to be matches made in heaven rather than in Brussels. The committees responsible have been rather kind in twinning the small town I come from in southwest England, Tiverton in Devon, with Chinon, an even smaller town on a tributary of the Loire River in western France. I am not sure what we did to deserve this good fortune. Although Tiverton is more than twice its size, Chinon has by far the more distinguished history. It was a stomping ground of Joan of Arc, Rabelais, Cardinal Richelieu, and King Henry II of England. Tiverton was a place where the medieval Earls of Devon stayed to hunt stags; it then grew into an industrial center that did very nicely thank you in the early modern cloth trade—solid and lovely—but not the scene of great romantic deeds.
    In fact, the only thing I can think of that the two places have in common is that each has a twelfth-century castle that towers high over a river. Tiverton Castle, though, preserves little from the Middle Ages. The Parliamentary armies captured it during the English Civil War (a lucky cannon ball broke the chain holding up the drawbridge) and they did not leave a lot standing.
    The remains of Chinon Castle, on the other hand, are massive. And its origins were royal—it was built by Henry II of England (who was also Count of Anjou). Connoisseurs of cinema will know it as the setting for The Lion in Winter, where Peter O’Toole, impersonating Henry II in robes remarkably ragged for a monarch, trades swift Stoppard-like repartee with Katherine Hepburn posing as a rather unregal Eleanor of Aquitaine, “that fertile and fateful female,” as my old tutor used to call her. The only hint that the characters in this film are anything more than spoiled celebrities is a long shot near the beginning showing the castle massive and mysterious from across the water. Shakespeare did royalty better than this. (So did Helen Mirren in The Queen.)
    The wines made around the two towns are not really comparable, either. Tiverton lies on the same latitude as the Moselle River. So there is every reason it should produce good wine, but I have never seen our local Yearlstone vintages for sale in the United States. The Loire Valley, on the other hand, produces more different sorts of wine than anywhere in France. They range in flavor from the Granny Smith bite of Muscadet to the dark mysteries of red Saumur. After a hot summer, Rosé d’Anjou comes somewhere in between—light, fruity, and refreshing.
    Try a delightful rosé made just upstream from Henry II’s crenellated residence. Charles Joguet’s Chinon Rosé 2005 (just over sixteen dollars hereabouts) is made wholly from Cabernet Franc grapes, the same variety used to make red Saumur, but for the rosé the juice is taken from the must (the crushed grapes) before the skins have had time to color it much. The result looks just like the pink juice of mountain-ash berries as one boils them down to make rowan jelly, the perfect foil for roast lamb or venison. The wine also has the same sequence of tastes that you find in rowan berry juice—fruit followed by delicious, long, waxy bitterness. Think pink grapefruit without the acid, but with a little tingle in the taste. This wine drunk with a venison paste would have revived a royal palate jaded by a difficult day inventing the Assize of Novel Disseisin; with appropriate charcuterie, it might refresh a Brussels apparatchik after hours in committee-making regulations about straight bananas. And for us, in the dark time of the year, it could fuel an entire dinner party, from smoked salmon through rack of lamb to a baveuse wheel of Brie. Vive les Angevins.