The Rake Magazine

Category: Article

  • Tales of an Urban Deer Slayer

    Sitting thirty feet up in an old spruce tree, on a little metal throne tied onto the trunk, I’ve got quivering legs. My fear is intensified by the knowledge that old spruces are brittle, and this one is waving gently in a fairly stiff breeze.

    A few hundred yards away, traffic and voices from the local shopping mall can be heard. Dogs from a nearby neighborhood bark. I’m observing the city deer hunt in Duluth, and one of the designated tracts is located on twelve acres near Miller Creek, sandwiched between the mall and a residential neighborhood. The hunters use bows and arrows, and special licenses include provisions to ensure that only deer are shot; that they are cleanly shot and killed, and not just wounded; and, finally, that their numbers within city limits are substantially reduced. (This means prioritizing the hunting of does over bucks, which are far more prized among deer hunters.)

    Duluth is plagued by deer, apparently. This year alone, I’ve nearly hit three of them driving city streets, and that experience is common. My neighbor used to walk at five a.m. every day, and he routinely saw deer strolling right down Superior Street. Part of the problem is that Duluth has a lot of deer habitat. The city was originally supposed to be the new Chicago, so it was laid out with borders ranging far into the surrounding woods. Of course, Duluth never quite reached Chicago’s size, and in fact, it’s lost one-fifth of its human population over the last several decades. For the past two years, the city has called on bow hunters to stem the overpopulation of deer.

    The ungulates probably don’t outnumber the primates in the city, but no one really knows how many deer there are. The only numbers are those that come from the hunters. Last year, hunters took twenty-two deer per square mile of hunted land within the city. According to the DNR, that statistic likely represents about one-third of the deer living in those areas, which matches up with another statistic suggesting that about one-third of any deer population needs to be killed (by wolves or coyotes or hunters) in order to remain stable and not overwhelm its own food supply. Which means there are quite possibly fifty to seventy deer per square mile of woods in Duluth.

    This seems crazy, because when you walk those woods, you seldom see deer. They’re there, though—watching and hearing and smelling you. As I rambled the woods with Phillip Lockett, head of the Arrowhead Bowhunters Alliance, he noted that when people walk at a constant speed through the forest, the deer stand still, watch them go by, then proceed with their business. If you stand quietly for an hour or so, however—or better yet, climb a tree and sit still—you will see them.

    During the three hours I spent up in the spruce, I saw four deer—and realized that had I not been looking out for them, I wouldn’t have been able to maintain such concentrated stillness and attention.

    Bow hunters, bound by this attentiveness, are generally guys who really enjoy perching twenty or thirty feet up a tree, on a platform not much bigger than their boot soles, sitting stock-still and watching the forest. While not necessarily possessed by bloodlust, they do want to get their deer. After all, it’s an ancient instinct, hunting, and much of its appeal stems from the fact that it seems to open ranges of perception and emotion that are otherwise inaccessible. Bow hunters tend to be thoughtful, even meditative, and in love with the environment in which they spend so much time. (Deer season for bow hunters is three months long, and to be successful, hunters should be well acquainted with their stretch of woods in all seasons.)

    Oftentimes, bow hunters return with tales of marvels. Lockett recounted the time two owls swooped together right in front of him, in close combat in the canopy of the tree he was sitting in. He told of hawks perched on a limb of the tree harboring his stand; they did a double-take, then flew off. There were stories of watching pine martens chase squirrels and hearing grouse move through the woods, making as much noise as any buck.

    The strange juxtaposition of the wild and the urban—a man in green clothing pulling his prey, as big as himself and felled by a bow, out of some trees and onto a city street—is a thing that somehow pleases me. There is an essential honesty in this, the presence of some cold and merciful eye, and, ultimately, a recognition of the basic rules of life, which are not of our making but are what we must live by.

  • A People’s History of Circle Pines

    Photo courtesy city of circle pines; An early brochure touts the cooperative, courtesy minnesota historical society

    The landscape of Circle Pines is bleak. Entering town off I-35W, drivers are greeted by a stretch of newly constructed townhouses in varying shades of fawn and ecru. The wayside scenery along Lake Drive, the main thoroughfare, is similarly hued by swampy meadows peppered with sandburs. In the middle of town, there’s a blip of a strip mall. Then, finally, the landscape offers up a few splashes of blue and green, mostly in the form of the cracked and peeling paint of the city’s old ranch homes and split-levels.

    Outsiders seldom have reason to pass through Circle Pines. Those who do, I’ve learned, are often there to visit an area gun range.

    This, my drab little hometown, is located just fifteen miles north of Minneapolis, in the famously unprogressive northern suburbs—an area formerly, and not long ago, considered a last bastion of white flight, a collection of communities in which conservative Star Tribune letter-writers and talk-show hosts are known to live. A kid who grew up in Circle Pines in the 1980s and 90s probably hasn’t forgotten the racial slurs commonly bandied about, even though few people of color actually lived there in those days. She might also remember the time dozens of bagels were thrown onto the ice when the Centennial Chiefs hockey team played Edina High School, Circle Pines fans having assumed there’d be Jews on the opposing team.

    Given these memories, and the realities of the city’s present, it’s hard to imagine that a visionary once set his sights on Circle Pines as the breeding ground for a socialist utopia of sorts, a model of cooperative living.

    On a sunny afternoon in the summer of 1945, V. S. Petersen was sprawled along the shores of Golden Lake, located on the northern side of Circle Pines and these days, lined with the city’s most upscale homes. Petersen, a left-leaning Danish immigrant and peripatetic banker, was, at the time, an employee of Midland, an organization of credit unions and other cooperatives; at the time he was in charge of building a lakeside picnic-area pavilion for credit union employees. While enjoying his day off, the proverbial lightbulb lit up in his mind. Or so the story goes. He sat up suddenly, turned to his wife, Fylla, and said: “I have an idea.” Petersen would proceed to spend the rest of his days, numbered though they were, organizing, financing, and promoting his vision for a carefully planned community featuring such modern conveniences as public water, electricity, and sewage systems. In this case, however, the maintenance costs involved would be split equally among residents, and in fact, the utilities would be resident-owned. This dream—fueled by Petersen’s dedication to socialist principles and constructed from an inexpensive prefab building material called Cemesto —was christened “Circle Pines.”

    This being the World War II era, building materials were in short supply and prices were high. Working folks couldn’t shoulder the cost of building their own homes. “V. S. Petersen thought that savings could be achieved through mass production of houses and with the dollar-saving benefits of cooperative living. Profits from any cooperative venture would be redistributed to members.” So writes Stephen Lee, a Circle Pines local, in his exhaustive portrait of the city’s past, Circle Pines & Lexington, Minnesota: History of the 1800s to 2000. In other words, by buying a home in the community and paying cooperative association fees, residents would own shares of the town’s café, grocery, meat market, and tavern. In theory, profits from these businesses would be shared among citizens, but that part of the plan was never actually realized.

    The reality, from the very beginning, was that Circle Pines’ creators confused idealistic “social protections” with capitalist aspirations. Although Petersen played the central role of visionary and cheerleader, in his quest to make fiscal sense of his project, he had enlisted the help of two others—Tom Ellerbe, essentially an urban planner, and Paul Steenberg, a Danish-born contractor. The success of the community hinged on the trio’s ability to lure residents. But even while they scrambled to entice buyers, Petersen couldn’t resist screening potential residents to ensure that their politics aligned with his own. This made a certain sense, considering that Petersen would later invite residents to his family’s Golden Lake estate for rousing house parties (his version of a parade), featuring bean-bakes, sing-alongs, and homemade wine. Ellerbe and Steenberg, sympathetic though they were to Petersen’s ideologies, meanwhile proceeded as though Circle Pines were any other suburban, moneymaking venture. Theirs was to be a short-lived experiment. Although the three-man team had projected that Circle Pines would have about 500 homes by 1948, only eighty-four had been built by 1949.

    Then there was the issue of financial backing, which proved elusive. Even organizations like Midland, which had a history of supporting cooperative ventures, weren’t sure bets. Ellerbe and Steenberg imagined the most lucrative homesites would be along the shoreline of Golden Lake (around which Petersen wanted to pave a public walkway), but that stretch was never actually developed during the cooperative’s lifetime. Of greater consequence was the ultimate failure of Petersen, Ellerbe, and Steenberg to attract enough residents to sustain the cost of utilities and city services. Adding insult to injury, those who did buy into the community discovered that their homes were of substandard construction; the builders hadn’t adequately sealed the seams between the cheap, cement-like slabs of Cemesto at the four corners of each home, making the houses drafty during harsh Minnesota winters.

    The cooperative was already in dire straits when an influential group of University of Minnesota sociology professors, sympathetic to the cooperative model and interested in joining the community themselves, approached Petersen about inviting minority groups to live in Circle Pines. It was the professors’ thinking that families of color were in greatest need of the financial benefits the cooperative could, at least in theory, yield. After deliberation, Petersen, Ellerbe, and Steenberg agreed that the banks and savings and loan companies would be unwilling to shoulder the credit risk for minority applicants, and they held back on issuing an up-front-and-open invitation to families of color. Instead, minority families would be quietly accepted, so long as their down payments were in hand. It was a painful decision for Petersen, a lifelong bleeding heart, and the professors responded angrily. Ultimately, they refused to relocate to Circle Pines, and their defection from the project turned out to be a huge financial and ideological blow for the cooperative.

    Meanwhile, the shortage of building materials continued, and slow home sales as well as profit-mongering among the Ellerbe-Steenberg sect took additional tolls. Townspeople responded with increasing anger to the cooperative’s mismanagement and the resulting rise in association fees. As Stephen Lee notes: “On April 7, 1950, the citizens of Circle Pines voted 89-5 in favor of incorporating as a village, thereby abandoning the idea of a cooperative community.”

    And, adding further drama, according to an old article from the local newspaper, Circulating Pines: “Just hours before the polls opened and the people voted to incorporate Circle Pines as a village, V. S. Petersen had been struck down by a cerebral hemorrhage [at age 54]. Stunned mourners felt without his inspired leadership Circle Pines would probably never become the cooperative community he had envisaged … and some wondered if the strife and disappointment had not brought about his premature death.”

    As a young person growing up in the town, I always thought “Circle Pines” had a funny ring to it. I thought it sounded fictional, eerily reminiscent of, say, “Green Acres,” “Mayberry,” and other such Xanadus. When, at age 18, I left Circle Pines for the University of Minnesota, I was embarrassed to tell my classmates, whom I presumed were all big-city types, the name of my hometown. No one had ever heard of Circle Pines—though a mere half-hour away—but the schmaltzy name nonetheless inspired eye-rolling from my hip new friends. As it turns out, I might’ve been able to impress the cosmopolitan lefties of my acquaintance if I’d known then that the name pays homage to a classic emblem of cooperative organizations: a pair of encircled pine trees. To me, it looks reminiscent of a smil-ey face, but the symbol stands for the idealistic vision of shared responsibilities and resources. All over the country, the twin pines logo can be spotted in credit union lobbies, at cooperative campgrounds, and on the packaging for organic foods.

    Even the street I grew up on—the blandly named Edge Drive—is a nod to the old Circle Pines order. My childhood home was a no-frills Cape Cod, built in 1954, after the Petersen era, as part of a development that went up quickly and on the cheap for returning veterans and their families. These houses had lured a new crop of working-class families to Circle Pines, and it’s safe to say that, given the burgeoning postwar economy, the ideals of these new residents stood in stark contrast to the values of the old Circle Pines order. Still, the peculiar, half-moon-shaped grid to which my childhood home belongs was part of Petersen and Ellerbe’s master vision for the city’s planning: a clustered, walkable community in which a park is never far away. An aerial view shows that the town’s layout mimics Circle Pines’ round emblem. There are few cul-de-sacs; instead, the streets loop back into themselves. Inner Park sits at the center, where Petersen wanted it—at the heart of the community.

    Growing up there, I saw no obvious remnants of the socialist ideals to which my city once aspired. But as it turned out, I’d need to venture out into the world before coming to appreciate any of Circle Pines’ amenities or off-beat characteristics. Even today, the town thumbs its nose at corporate Minnegasco by maintaining its own cooperatively owned gas utility. As for electricity, residents get that from Connexus, the state’s largest customer-owned utility. And until 1994, Circle Pines had its own rather left-leaning news rag, the aforementioned Circulating Pines, a long-lived outgrowth of the old cooperative broadsheet. As a young reader, I enjoyed its witty columnists and primitive political cartoons, oblivious to how slanted they were. In an interview, town historian Lee laughed as he recalled how Andrew Gibas, Circle Pines’ first-ever village clerk and founder of the paper, used to chronicle his own civic activities in the paper. In a story about a city council meeting, he wrote, of himself: “Citizen Andy Gibas rose and addressed the council.”

    As I learned more about Circle Pines, I became eager to swap stories with old friends and neighbors. But I was disappointed to learn that few Circle Pinesians, even some folks I regarded as old-timers, had ever heard about the city’s cooperative origins. And among the handful of people who were clued in, there was ambivalence about what it all meant. Lee, by far the most knowledgeable source on Circle Pines history, was unwavering in his characterization of the founders’ socialism. Petersen’s own son, 80-year-old V. S. Petersen Jr., responded with a blank, confused stare when asked how the pinko little city of Circle Pines had fared in the early throes of the Cold War (he was serving in the military during the cooperative’s earliest days, including the time of his father’s tangle with the University professors). Joel Hogstad, the brother of one of my childhood friends, had discovered Circle Pines’ history while writing a college paper. His take was that Petersen had simply tried to create an affordable community for working-class families, not necessarily a socialist refuge. And Jim Keinath, a twenty-year veteran in his post as Circle Pines city administrator, wasn’t comfortable de-scribing the founders as “socialist,” choosing instead to refer to them as “Scandinavian.”

    There’s an interesting contrast between the city plan of Circle Pines (population: 4,663) and that of its closest neighbor, Lexington (population: 2,214). While Circle Pines’ streets—not just Edge Drive but also North, East, South, and West roads, and Inner and Outer circles—are ringed with homogenous, two- and three-bedroom homes, Lexington is a ragtag collection of apartments and one-of-a-kind houses. It’s dominated by Paul Revere Manufactured Home Park, which appears as vast as a white-pine forest but is less stark than most trailer parks thanks to residents having enthusiastically added flower gardens, lawn ornaments, and other decorative elements to personalize their homes. The roads in the patriotic-themed development have names like Minuteman and Patriot lanes.

    These street signs demonstrate that there had been some tension between Circle Pines and Lexington in the old days. Back when Circle Pines was being designed as a stringently planned, circular community, Lexington was being populated by the sort of resourceful folks who built homes out of found materials. Not happy with what they saw taking shape across the border, Circle Pinesians took to calling Lexington “Shack Town.” Representing Lexington in the skirmish was a prominent landowner named Art Otte, a man V. S. Petersen Jr. likened to “a Republican farmer,” who spoke out fervently against the “socialist-community experiment” next door. “This cooperative concept was out of his league; he called it all sorts of names for a while,” said Petersen Jr. He believes Otte penned an anonymous 1957 letter to the Circulating Pines signed “Lexington Old-Timer,” which opined: “They did not like our houses. We did not like their ideas.”

    Nearly fifty years later, Circle Pines’ idealists and Lexington’s individualists have been absorbed by the melting pot. Both remain blue-collar towns, and a downtown business district has grown up on the border, bleeding into the two communities. They share a police department, a school district, and a post office, and sit on the same inhospitable marshland that was regarded by a Minnesota state surveyor in 1847 as “almost unacceptable for either men or beast except when frozen up …”

    More to the point, as housing costs have skyrocketed, especially in the last ten or so years, lots of working-class families have found both Circle Pines and Lexington to be especially welcoming. Housing prices there have remained among the lowest in the Twin Cities, though for me, including “Circle-Lex” as part of the metropolitan area remains hard to swallow. Developers have been gobbling up every available inch of Circle Pines and putting up townhouses, condos, and other glossy new structures that reek of gentrification; still, there’s an ample supply of “starter” homes, including a block with six of the original Cemesto houses and the development where I grew up. In Lexington, the Paul Revere enclave continues to provide an affordable option for some of those in the Twin Cities’ lowest income brackets. In an interesting turn of events, the park’s residents incorporated Paul Revere in 2005, making it one of just two resident-owned trailer park cooperatives in the state.

    As a kid, the thing I appreciated most about Circle Pines was all the sandy, open space. I could go snowmobiling, dirt-biking, or salamander hunting pretty much wherever I pleased. On summer evenings, my friends and I played football in the sandbur fields. Or we hopped on our Huffy bicycles and traced every line of the town’s semispherical blocks, which never took us very far and eventually wound back to our homes. Back then, there was a small grocery, a shopping strip (technically in Lexington), a gas station, a balloon shop, Mar-Dee’s diner (where I worked throughout high school), and always plenty of kids to scuffle with. But I certainly didn’t regard my town’s growth as a bad thing; I remember the arrival of McDonald’s, circa 1982, and how cool that was to my second-grade friends and me.

    These days, Circle Pines is swimming in fast food and increasingly resembles a first-ring suburb—an aesthetic cousin of Roseville or Maplewood. Upon the demolition in 2002 of a block of Army-green, Petersen-era Cemesto motels collectively known as Circle Court (an eyesore with a bad reputation; it had long been the least expensive place to live in Circle Pines), condos and townhouses immediately went up in its place. Since then, more spacious (and beige) townhouses and condos have appeared on nearly every available plot, including former swamp acreage that’s been sucked dry to fuel the boom; like Circle Court, they all look exactly alike.

    Plenty else has changed as well, of course. Nearby, just across the borders into Blaine and Lino Lakes, there’s a growing constellation of the usual chain-retail behemoths— SuperTarget, Wal-Mart, Home Depot, and strip upon strip of familiar shops and restaurants—to lure Circle Pinesians away from their city’s remaining businesses. Petersen’s old farmhouse still sits along Golden Lake, though it’s been remodeled to the point of being unrecognizable. As for that central body of water itself, it’s become so tainted by overdevelopment and storm runoff (being the terminus of a wetland system that’s dried up) that it’s taken on a deep, not particularly attractive shade of its namesake color.

    Despite Circle Pines’ drastic modern makeover, V. S. Petersen Jr. maintains an attachment to the place that goes far deeper than anything I’ve ever managed to feel. When we met for lunch recently at Matthew’s, the restaurant that now inhabits the former Mar-Dee’s site, he showed up wearing a tan flannel button-up and a black-leather driving cap, which he removed before sitting down, revealing a thatch of gray hair. As we talked, he leaned across the table, clearly relishing the conversation. He enjoyed telling stories about the good old days in Circle Pines and how he and his wife, Stella, have kept busy over the years, remaining active in the Democratic party, at their local Lutheran church, and as volunteers at a nearby battered women’s shelter.

    In 1946, when he returned from World War II, Petersen Jr. enrolled at the University of Minnesota and helped his dad with odd jobs around Circle Pines. After his father’s sudden death (the younger Petersen was twenty-three years old at the time) and the demise of the cooperative, he embarked on a career as an insurance salesman. “When I first started selling insurance, the company I represented sent me to Edina because that was where all the money was. After a year, I was so sick of it, I wanted to throw up on my chest,” he said. He moved back to Circle Pines, started selling insurance to its residents, and became even more entrenched in the community. “I enjoyed the working people and they enjoyed me,” he said. He went on to become a prominent local landlord, eventually buying the building in which Circulating Pines was published. Today, two of his sons run the family insurance business, which is still located in an inconspicuous office building just off Lake Drive.

    But with the passing years, Petersen Jr. confided, he and Stella have felt less and less at home in Circle Pines. “We’re kind of stuck,” he said with an uncomfortable laugh. The feelings of uneasiness first surfaced in the 1970s, when, sensing the same intolerance and stifling homogeny that I felt in the town’s school system, the Petersens contemplated sending their children to school elsewhere. More recently, they downsized, selling the home they owned at Golden Lake and moving into a nearby townhouse. “We’re believers in the simple-living concept,” said Petersen with a smile. But they’d also started feeling ill at ease with the sociopolitical climate that was developing around Golden Lake, which has housed Circle Pines’ most affluent families since the mid-1950s. “Stella and I just had to get outta there,” he said. “They simply weren’t our people.”

    Before meeting with Petersen Jr., I had a brief phone conversation with Jim Keinath, Circle Pines’ current city administrator, who remarked that Circle Pines’ cooperative history had still been a strong influence when he first arrived on the job in 1984. Back then, the city’s “founding families” were highly regarded and still played prominent roles in community affairs. But today, Keinath said, the cooperative is all but ancient history. When I asked Petersen about this, he strongly disagreed. He sees his dad’s influence on everything from the city’s plentiful park space to the credit union and gas utility, both of which are still going strong. Still, he admitted, it’s been sad to watch the progressive roots of Circle Pines wither. For example, along with Shoreview, Arden Hills, and Lino Lakes, the residents of Circle Pines are represented by the staunchest fiscal conservative in the state legislature, Republican Phil Krinkie. (“He’s sick,” Petersen Jr. said. “I think he’s illiterate.”)

    Perhaps Circle Pines has been swept into the gulf of working-class, independent voters to which it now rightfully belongs—Minnesota’s sixth congressional district, a block that stretches from the northern suburbs up through St. Cloud and that likely represents our state’s best showing of the “NASCAR Dad” demographic. At any rate, the city’s obviously not the stronghold of liberalism it once aspired to be.

    “Circle Pines has always been progressive—up until three years ago, when we started dropping off the liberal side,” Petersen Jr. said, remembering a version of the town history very different from my own. He was bothered that Circle Pines seemed to be turning against the founding principles of his father. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that precious few of the town’s current residents—let alone anyone outside the city limits—had heard of the Circle Pines Cooperative in the first place.

  • Let There Be…

    I lived for a year in a basement apartment with roommates who, despite our subterranean situation, were always switching off the lights. They hated overhead lighting, they explained, and yet no one was willing to invest in even the cheapest floor lamps. I was, for my part, unwilling to fund this improvement on my own, so we dwelled together in an atmosphere of perpetual gloominess, no matter how abundant the sunshine outdoors. As fall turned to winter, one roommate slid into a depression. While several factors were probably involved, it occurred to the rest of us that lack of light could have been a significant one.

    Light—or more precisely, the desire for it—is on many minds this time of year as we plod through increasing post-daylight-savings-time darkness toward the solstice. It’s well known that poor lighting strains the eyes, produces fatigue and irritability, and that, in fact, it can be a drag on people’s moods, not to mention their productivity. So why, despite all the studies, are badly lit rooms the norm? Why all the glaring sodium lights, buzzing fluorescent tubes, gloomy corners, and harshly overlit expanses?

    Lighting in the workplace gets a fair amount of attention, probably because of concerns about safety and productivity. But residential lighting is another story. Consider that for the next five months or so, free time for people with day jobs will occur mostly after sunset. Leaving the office in the dark, they will return to dark homes that they artificially illuminate—how?

    Through purely personal observations, many conducted during a solid year of house hunting, I have identified three types of abhorrent domestic lighting practices. If they were outlawed, I wouldn’t be surprised if the psychological state of our union saw an instant improvement. First and foremost is the low-hanging fixture, common to dining rooms, that has one or more lamps cast downward and shades that expose bare bulbs to diners’ eyes. The resulting atmosphere is more conducive to interrogation than to civil or scintillating conversation. Many so-called vanity bars in bathrooms produce a similar effect: glaring light that rakes down over the face and body, doing no one’s self-image any favors. As for the living room—here, at least, my erstwhile roommates were right not to tolerate overhead lights. Yet stuck to the ceiling like primordial insects, and ruining many otherwise pleasant living rooms (bedrooms, too), are those ungainly ceiling-fans-with-light-fixtures—many of which also have multiple glass- or metal-shaded downlights.

    Not that downlights don’t have a purpose. It’s their misuse that’s the problem, and this points to a broader observation: In most homes, lighting is an afterthought. This seems strange, given the vast home-improvement industry developed over the last couple decades, with its attendant TV programming and proliferation of shelter publications. Why don’t we see lighting featured in more magazine articles or addressed in televised home makeovers, “extreme” or otherwise?

    Compare lighting to color. Both can drastically alter the mood of a space, not to mention the perception of its size. Using both to their best advantage also involves quite a bit more than merely selecting a pleasing paint swatch or lamp. Good lighting involves balancing and combining sources; considering glare, shadow, and the color of light; planning for different purposes; and so on. There’s decorative lighting, which becomes part of the overall aesthetic of a room; accent lighting, for specific objects or spaces; ambient lighting, for overall illumination; and task lighting. Then there are the numerous fixtures for each lighting type: table lamps, chandeliers, cove lighting, pendants, and tracks, to name just a few.

    Using color effectively is no less complicated than selecting the right lighting, and yet this element of décor has been popularized and made to seem quite doable. Take a look, for instance, at the paint department at any Home Depot, which is outfitted with all manner of touch-screen computer displays, videos, books, CD-ROMs, and even design services. Then compare these resources to what’s available over in the lighting department.

    Granted, some improvements in the domestic-lighting sector would have to come from changes in the home-building industry—in how homes are designed, wired, and outfitted from the start. But until that happens, the home-improvement industry could exert a lot of influence. It’s not so much a matter of popularizing lighting, but rather encouraging people to stop taking it for granted. Ultimately, lighting that’s not just adequate, but that actually makes you feel good, should become as desirable (and obtainable) as a faux-stainless steel fridge.

  • Glamour in the Age of Macy’s

    About seventy-five people who had not won the lottery waited outside the Department Store Formerly Known as Dayton’s at Rosedale Center. The manager of the store talked into a microphone that rendered his voice unintelligible, then some instigators tried to incite the crowd with a rousing countdown. After a lackluster “ … two, one,” the manager cut a ribbon, a deejay summoned upbeat music, and consumers shuffled into Macy’s North, clutching complimentary ten-dollar gift cards that, I discovered two weeks later, expired on opening day, September 9.

    I’m not sure what I was expecting—maybe orange-haired, Brooklyn-accented salespeople—but everything was as before: wool skirts and matching sweaters, Nine West shoes, crystal, Ralph Lauren bedding, ties, gifts-with-purchase. The Oval Room was looking very White Plains/Hamptons, with Michael Kors up to there. Evening gowns were overwhelmingly long and black. I drifted through departments with disconcerting names like Better Sportswear, touching things, until I was drawn into the juniors department by something pretty and inappropriate for my age. As I flipped through the sale rack—thick with droopy modal tunics, chunky sleeveless turtleneck sweaters, and size-zero pants—a red Asian-inspired top jumped out. What had we here? Heavy silk that didn’t slither off the hanger, a unified design statement, and the dignity of a tired refugee washed up on some benighted shore. The tags read Prada, a line once harbored in the exclusive Oval Room but jettisoned when the store became Macy’s North.

    A few weeks later, there was a much larger and very much giddier crowd skittering across the red carpet outside the Orpheum Theatre turned out for the fourteenth annual Glamorama, née Fash Bash (ouch). Sponsored by whomever is currently residing at 700 Nicollet Mall, this fashion show-cum-pop music extravaganza is one of the Twin Cities’ few opportunities to dress up for the sake of dressing up—top down, no-holds-barred, well-shut-my-mouth glamour. So where—in this day of Target whores, ateliers.com, vintage on celebs, revolving-door department stores—does one find the perfect outfit for such an occasion? I asked around in Macy’s downtown Minneapolis store for the specially created Glamorama Shop and was sent, serially, to third floor, the Oval Room, Cosmetics, Handbags, and “by the loud music on first floor,” only to learn from a floor manager wearing a headset that glamorous pieces are endemic to Macy’s, like chipmunks in Minnesota. They’re everywhere.

    Obviously, the 2,100 style mavens at Glamorama had spent considerable time and money exploring the glamour question as well, and it appeared that many of the sisters had got themselves down to Fiftieth and France, in Edina, to snag something fluttery, with smocking or pleats and a fetching finish. Certainly, there was a whiff of A. B. S. by Allen Schwartz and BCBG, and some prom-like dresses, sparkly and low-cut, that might have been of Macy’s origin, but the feeling was that shopping at Macy’s for a Macy’s-sponsored event was a bit too formulaic. Glamour calls for risk, creativity, and provocative spirit—none of which has ever been stocked by department stores.

    Considerable cleavage, bare backs and legs—all staples of glamour—held their own without a lot of props. Manicure? Si, si. Hair professionally constructed? I don’t think so. Accessories were limited to a delicate necklace and a man. A Profound Geo-Fashion Thought occurs: Maybe stepping out in the middle of the country is a lot like a tectonic meeting of the coasts: West Coast sexy (without the ballistic breasts ’n’ baubles) merges with East Coast sophistication (minus the Upper East Side snarl). Oh, on with the show!

    The gilded lobby fairly bubbled with air kisses, shiny faces, and camera flashes as a photographer captured somebodies at their botoxed best. Thumping house music gave way to a bilingual announcement that we were about to enter the Glamosphere, where the official languages were Beauty and Spanish. Since Beyoncé—the philosophical, musical, and stylistic muse of Glamorama—could not be present, she delivered her fundraising message that fashion rocks, and so does children’s cancer research, via video. Fast-flashing international images, including a sweat-slicked torso and a bare international bum, got us in the right frame of mind and, bing bang, the magic began. Cavalli, who has gotten a lot of good ideas from Keith Richards over the years, put an obi over a gothic shirt and some thigh-high boots and, herro, Kyoto-infused business casual. The designers behind Tuleh found it elementary, my dear Watson, that formfitting tweed solves the case of the missing ass. In a design coup, Badgley Mischka transformed a chenille bedspread into the most stunning flamenco evening gown. A hot Latin beat ran through that collection like pink-eye through a kindergarten class. YMCA: Moschino sent out a sexy cowboy, a sexy priest, a sexy conductor, a sexy boxer … and just in time for Halloween.

    On and on; it only got sexier with a brief interlude for hideous by Marc Jacobs. Wrapping things up, House of Deréon kind of took advantage of its connections (founder Tina Knowles is Beyoncé’s mom, for heaven’s sake) to show a whole compound’s worth of curvaceous clothes: House of Excitement, House of Hotness, House of Mild Interest (housecoats, pants liners, compression socks, and that ilk).

    As the lights blinked on, those 2,100 surprisingly nimble fashionistas sprinted the three blocks to Macy’s for more sensual pleasures at the after-party. But little did the partygoers know that the hot-blooded, Rio-flavored frocks from the runway would not be hanging in the Oval Room and, in fact, can be ordered only through Macy’s personal shopping service. At the click of a mouse, however, they could be in Temperley’s ateliers. Or they can always pop over to Neiman Marcus or Stephanie’s, in Highland Park, to try on that drop-dead gown. They can shop Bluefly or Girlshop or any of a myriad online boutiques for that upwardly, utterly flare-out-to-there-wardly, sell-my-clothes-I’m-going-to-heaven incarnation of glamour. Macy’s may have whetted the appetite for glamour, yet I wondered, can it deliver the whole feast?

  • Dance Dance Lilliputian

    Rimming with myriad curiosities, the Uptown office of Jawaahir Dance Company looks something of a crowded bazaar. Persian rugs, strewn end to end, cover the floor. A herd of carved wooden camels congregates on a shelf lined with gold fringe. A tangle of brightly hued scarves is heaped in a corner. And in the entryway hangs an enormous replica of a Bedouin wedding necklace—a stage prop painstakingly detailed with faux silver, turquoise, amber, and carnelian.

    Cassandra Shore, the founder of both Jawaahir and the Cassandra School, appears no less exotic than her surroundings, carrying herself gracefully on bare, hennaed feet. Her long black hair is offset by a vivid turquoise blouse, and her gold earrings resemble the jingling coins that cover the hip scarves favored by her belly-dance students.

    After studying Oriental dance in California, Shore came to Minneapolis in 1977—a serendipitous occasion, as she soon discovered an unexpected richness and diversity within the city’s dance scene. She established her school in 1978, and now, twenty-eight years later, the name “Cassandra” reigns supreme among Minnesotans who’ve fallen in love with Middle Eastern dance.

    Among the trove gathered during Shore’s travels through Egypt, Turkey, and North Africa, her collection of dolls immediately catches the visitor’s eye. Surprisingly, they originate closer to home, having been handcrafted by a former student who now lives on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington state. Designed to represent the various folk styles of Middle Eastern dance, the six exquisite dolls are rare; only a few of each character were made.

    The Ottoman “Rom” dancer is outfitted in traditional Turkish gypsy style, with white pantaloons and a vest detailed with gold embroidery and tiny sequins. A pillbox hat accented with a pink lotus-like flower perches on her braided hair, and a festive smile is painted across her face.

    Another doll, dressed in a brown and turquoise striped caftan and braided yarn belt, represents a Tunisian folk dancer artfully balancing a water jug on her head. In Tunisia, it is traditionally a woman’s duty to collect water, Shore explained, and this utilitarian skill becomes art via a vigorous dance of twisting and twirling during which the full pot remains stationary on her head.

    The Moroccan Guedra doll, with hair of braids and beads, maintains an atypical stance; she’s planted in kneeling position. Hers is a trance/blessings dance enacted through the upper body, predominantly with the hands—a style Shore referred to as the “finger ballet.” Draped in indigo fabric, the doll’s arms are positioned as though presenting a gift. The collection also features dolls depicting Khaleeji (Persian Gulf), Ouled Nail (Algerian), and Moroccan Schikhatt dancers, each modeling an embellished costume, painted fingernails, superbly detailed jewelry, and an evocative expression.

    Serving as both decorative objects and instructional aids, these gorgeous dolls couldn’t ask for a more fitting home than Jawaahir, a word that, in Arabic, means jewels. “I’m trying to expand people’s horizons,” Shore explained when asked about the utility of her collection. “Everyone knows belly dance, but there’s a lot more to Middle Eastern dancing than just that.”

  • God on the Corner

    For anyone who grew up out in the sticks and harbored big-city dreams fueled by pulp novels and Hollywood noir, Minneapolis’ Elliot Park neighborhood is living evidence that there are still little pockets around the Twin Cities that could give Brooklyn and Chicago’s Southside a run for their money.

    Tucked away south of downtown, penned in by interstate highways and dwarfed by the city’s skyline, Elliot Park is an inner-city neighborhood in every sense of the word. Its poverty and unemployment levels are historically (and substantially) higher than those for Minneapolis in general, and its once aging population has been thinned out in recent decades, making way for the sort of dizzying sidewalk diversity that is now most commonly associated with older and larger eastern cities. It is also, in places, a model of the hardscrabble picturesque, and seems an inevitable candidate for gentrification.

    The neighborhood—which includes the Hennepin County Medical Center and North Central University (founded in 1930 by the Assemblies of God church)—is one of the city’s oldest, having sprung up in the wake of the mid-nineteenth-century industrialization of the river around St. Anthony Falls. The park itself, one of the first in Minneapolis, is nudged up against South Eighth Street. Originally a farm, the land was donated to the city in 1893 by the neighborhood’s namesake, a physician.
    Though the area was thought swank, however so briefly, in the late nineteenth century—evidence remains in the handsome mansions along Park Avenue—it has almost always been a working-class neighborhood.

    Elliot Park’s melting-pot meeting place is the tiny Band Box Diner, since 1934 the anchor of the tangled, off-the-grid intersection of East Fourteenth Street and South Tenth Street, just west of Chicago Avenue. The Band Box, a locally designated historic landmark, is the last survivor of what was once a small regional restaurant chain. It’s an architectural gem, done in the style of streamline moderne, that’s been preserved and expanded but still retains the feel of an authentically scruffy greasy spoon. The place has a no-nonsense attitude coupled with an obvious pride in its history as a neighborhood institution. It also has terrific (and cheap) burgers and American fries that are out of this world. Walt Whitman would be right at home on one of its counter stools, as would Iceberg Slim or H. L. Mencken.

    Directly across the street from the diner is a row of tidy brownstones that wouldn’t look out of place in lower Manhattan. They share a block with the Del Kingsriter Centre for Intercultural Relations, which additional signs announce is home to such apparent adjuncts of North Central University as Cross Cultural Ministries, Deaf Culture Studies, and the Deaf International Bible College.

    On the opposite side of South Tenth, there’s a string of abandoned storefronts, formerly the headquarters of Gateway of Hope’s Eshkol Mission. The spaces have been completely cleared out with the exception of a window display of a painting of Jesus on black velvet, framed by a hand-lettered sign: “Sin would have fewer takers if … the consequences were immediate.”

    On a recent bright autumn afternoon, a man wearing an eye patch and a worn suit with the pant legs rolled up to his knees and secured with Ace bandages was standing on the sidewalk outside the empty storefronts. He was hunched over and peering intently into the rearview mirror of a parked car as he ran an electric razor over his face.

  • Armed with Art

    I was ten years old when I first encountered the Swatch. I was flipping through the pages of Seventeen, idly rubbing perfumed strips on my wrist, when a glimmer of high design caught my eye and never let go. There, starkly positioned on a blank white page, was a black plastic watch covered with mysterious symbols. Bacteria-like symbols. Japanese kanji, in fact, but this was 1987. Hello Kitty was the way you greeted a pet; sushi was regarded as a health risk; anime was a Jungian reference misspelled. Nonetheless, that watch spoke to me. “Own me,” it said. “Wear me.” That Christmas, I obeyed (with help from Santa). And thus began my lifelong affair with Swatch—the greatest product, I humbly submit, in the history of watchkind.

    In the event you missed the Great Swatch Explosion (you never admired the sophisticated double-watch look on a classmate’s wrist, never positioned your sleeping bag under the face of a giant Swatch wall clock—oh, how I wanted one!), Swatches are the zany plastic watches that rocketed onto the market in 1983. Before then, watches were pricey and breakable, or, in the case of Timex, sturdy and plain. Swatches, on the other hand, were cheap, gorgeous, and hard to destroy. The company has since released a new line of watches every season, and, along the way, jewelry, eyeglasses, and even a car. And while I defy you to name another watch company with the cojones to bring an automobile to market (Breitling? Rolex? Cartier? Non!), we shall limit our present discussion to the Swatch watch itself, a holy union of artistry and performance.

    First, the artistry: Fifteen years before Michael Graves began flinging spatulas around Target HQ, Swatch hired artists to design its products. Before Swatch, a watch might have consisted of a white face with a leather band. “Stiletto,” a Swatch designed by Mexican painter and sculptor Cisco Jiménez, was made of lime-green plastic and festooned with images of an egg beater, a bunk bed, a stiletto heel impaled on a dagger, and an oven that appeared, somehow, to be bleeding. The late video artist Nam June Paik—better known for airborne performance art and magnetized TVs—designed a Swatch, as did Yoko Ono, Keith Haring, and hundreds of other artists whose genius defied the strictures of good taste and brought high art to everyday accessories. With their help, Swatch injected the workaday world with other-worldly visions, including “Missing Spoon,” a gingham picnic-scene watch; “Space Sheep,” a sheep-heads-floating-in-space watch; and this season’s hot-orange number, “Instantaneous Fresh.”

    As for performance: In an era of routine corporate overpromise and underachievement (Eye cream that makes you look younger! Beer that makes you more popular!), Swatch actually underpromises and overachieves. For example, Swatches are virtually indestructible. While company literature modestly describes them as “water-resistant,” I can attest to their absolute waterproofness. At the height (or depth) of junior high, a black kanji Swatch remained strapped to my wrist continuously for three years. I washed the dishes, I swam in the ocean, I dove through a Slip’n Slide made of garbage bags—without removing the watch once. And it lasted for more than a decade.

    This is not to say Swatches are perfect. As with any relationship, Swatch and I have had our ups and downs. There was that ninety-four-degree day when, in the middle of a church picnic, a Swatch melted to my wrist. Then the harrowing encounter involving my mother, my second Swatch (the Cisco Jiménez model), and a jet of instant-dry aerosol hairspray. There was also, sadly, that afternoon in college when I opened the battery compartment of that very first Swatch to find something I can only describe as “corrosion explosion.”

    These incidents, however, are but specks of dust next to the blaze of Swatch majesty. What’s remarkable is that Swatch has survived being a trend without ever bowing to the pressure of trends. While Martha and the Gap offer us products carefully designed to have universal appeal, Swatch continues to inject the idiosyncrasies of art into our daily lives. This season’s collection features a silver-and-blue model cryptically titled “Bathroom Smiles” as well as a watch covered with line drawings of rabbits caught in flagrante delicto. Title? “Bunny Sutra.” But it’s perhaps the Swatch company’s literature that best describes the watches, in language as insouciantly surreal as its wares: “A selection of watches to welcome our space brothers to Planet Earth.” One day, I hope to personally entertain these space siblings by designing a Swatch myself. Until then, I’ll be flashing my wrist toward the sky. Space brothers, welcome.

  • An Aunt’s Letter to Her Activist Nephew

    Yo, Steve-O . . .

    Just finished reading the Bozeman Chronicle articles on ATR (A Thoughtful Revolution / Alternative to Rage) and am impressed by your movement’s mission to ease the town’s growing pains: cyclists fearful of cell-phoning drivers, Peach Street becoming the local speedway, the scary dawning of “Boze Angeles.” These days, you could toss a dart at a map and hit a burg where the newcomers, natives, long-timers, and everyone in between might benefit from a movement like yours—a hands-on effort to help the members of the new settlement find their common ground.

    In fact, ATR has inspired me to name my door-opening movement here in the Cities: HIP (for Hold It, Please). As the name implies (and implores), its aim is to get people to hold doors for each other as they move about the marketplace. Based on a gesture easily performed by the average pedestrian, HIP transcends language barriers—if not all cultural and age-related norms. (My friend Lydia’s seventy-something dad recently advised her to let men do the door-opening; I’m looking forward to trying out my nascent HIP proselytizing tactics on him one of these days.)

    Of course, ATR and HIP could be just the beginning. I’m solidly behind a PUT (Pick Up Trash) crusade to deal with the loathsomely littered urban landscape. And what about GAB, a Give-a-Brake effort designed to make tailgaters back off a bit? Maybe even a rally to cheer up those pinch-faced shoppers—the ones with the peace-and-love stickers plastered on the bumpers of their imports but themselves wearing Oscar de la Grouch faces as they navigate the aisles of Consumerville; the LYS (Lose Your Scowl) movement might help address that social scourge. These are all subsets of ATR, and the list of actions we might take to live more harmoniously with our city mates, old and new, is endless. We’re on the journey, regardless; might as well make it a copasetic trip.

    So, neph . . . you take the ATR road in Bozeman, I’ll forge the HIP course here in the Cities, and let’s see if our small but concerted efforts can nudge our fellow citizens toward a renewed belief in each other and in that higher power known as Good Ol’ Decency.

    Yours in the effort,
    Anti P

    P.S. If all else fails, there’s my standby Bernie Mac slogan—fit for tongue or bumper, and the perfect antidote to those bossy “Calm Down” stickers: Chillax!

  • The Unseen Perils of Getting Fit

    I’ve been going to the gym pretty early these days: Monday through Friday, 5:30 a.m, whether I want to or not. I’ve turned over a new leaf, you see. I now realize that abdominal muscles do not appear magically as a result of wishing on Starburst wrappers. I have now reached an age at which I have to do my best to protect what natural assets I have left rather than book a one-way ticket on the gravy boat cruise to an untimely frumpitude.

    I go so early because, after much trial and error, I have found that it is better to hit the gym before my brain can fully register how much exercising totally and royally sucks.

    Because I am a highly suggestible person—a vulnerable adult, if you will—I was initially afraid that I would lose myself in this candy-colored spandex universe and morph into the kind of person I have always regarded with scorn. Because I come from strong, dedicated, working-class stock, I could easily see myself swelling into a female Tony Little—tank-like and relentlessly, horridly FIT! Complete with a thin, creepy ponytail and bulbous calves. But I never should have worried. There is too much of the old me at the core. The old me who, left unchecked during a bad breakup, once polished off an entire fried chicken in one sitting. Fee, fie, foe, fum.

    So, to get to the gym on time, I have to leave my house by about 5:15. I walk down a set of four concrete steps that lead to my driveway. Every morning, at the third step, I lurch face-first through a line of sticky spider web. Because I am generally tired when this occurs, I swat blindly at the air around my face like a half-hibernating bear and growl.

    One day, I told my husband about the foolish spider in our backyard. I wondered aloud why it always builds its house in the same location when it just gets ruined every day.

    And my husband said the creepiest thing of all.

    “Maybe it’s not his house you’re ruining. Maybe it’s his trap. Maybe he’s just really ambitious. Maybe he sees you stumble out of the house every morning and thinks: ‘Hmmm … all I have to do is land that big clumsy one, and I’ll be set for life.’ ”

    So, I’m the Moby Dick of South Minneapolis, hunted by Ahab the Arachnid. I’ve got an eight-legged, net-casting maniac in my backyard. I’ve seen the spider in question, and he’s damn near big enough to take down cetacean prey. He’s tan, big as a Jordan almond, and when I put on the porch light to spy on him as he sleeps, I swear I can hear him snoring.

    I grew up in a house that had bugs. Not roaches, but millipedes in the basement, kitchen ants in the summer, and water bugs behind the washer—all sorts of extracurricular critters that weren’t paying their rent by being cute. My friends who grew up in newer, nicer houses turned out idiotically compassionate. They’re the ones who solicitously sweep up indoor spiders and gently place them outside. If I find one of those little crawly buggers near me, I flatten it with a hardbound copy of Charlotte’s Web. Why? Because I’m some pig. In fact, I would like to catch all those bug lovers in less-than-humane traps and set them free in Colorado.

    I look at a bug inside my house and I say, “I know what you’re thinking. Is that can of Raid empty, or has it still got one squirt in it? Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement, I kind of lost track myself. So you’ve got to ask yourself a question: ‘Do I feel lucky?’ Well, do ya, punk?”

    Outside the house, the rules are different. It’s their turf. You won’t find me terrorizing them with a magnifying glass, only trying to stay out of their way. So when I’m on my way to the gym, I just hope old Ahab doesn’t immobilize me and suck out all my juices. But if he’d take about two pints off my keister, we could make a deal.

  • Utterly Clueless, Ahead of the Curve

    Today, Tom Green’s profile in the world of pop culture is so marginal it’s easy to forget how prominent he once was. But in 1999, after MTV imported his eponymous show from Canada, the hyperactive slacker hit America like a virus. “He’s become famous faster than anyone I’ve ever been associated with,” exclaimed Brian Graden, head of MTV programming, in April 1999. That was a mere two months after Green’s show debuted on the network, and all the hallmarks of A-list stardom soon followed. Green guest-hosted Saturday Night Live. He made the cover of Rolling Stone. He landed a deal to write, direct, and star in his own movie. He married a major Hollywood star. And then the big fade commenced.

    But it didn’t happen because we tired of Tom Green’s shtick. To the contrary, our appetite for the sort of antics he displayed on his show—sucking face with a butchered lamb’s head, asking the prime minister of Canada to sign his balls, playing pranks on his long-suffering parents—has only increased.

    So when Green stopped production on his show at the height of its popularity—first to deal with testicular cancer, then to pursue a movie career—countless others stepped in to meet the demand for transgressive cathode mayhem. For the last six years, NBC has made squid guts and liquid sewage a key part of its prime-time lineup with Fear Factor. When Jackass: Number 2, the big-screen prankfest starring Johnny Knoxville and his wondrously shatterproof troupe of masochists, catapulted into theaters in late September, it grossed $29 million its opening weekend. Jackass spin-offs Wildboyz and Viva La Bam are MTV2 staples. And then, of course, there’s Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. It’s the only show on TV that features as much real-life wanton destruction as Green’s once did—and the only one with a host, Ty Pennington, who can scream as loudly, moronically, and incessantly as Green once did. (Where Pennington makes use of a megaphone to achieve his effects, Green mostly worked acoustic.)

    Ultimately, Green’s influence is felt most deeply on the Internet, on sites like YouTube and Google Video, where thousands of his aesthetic heirs upload clips of themselves spazzing out in their bedrooms, taunting security guards, and engaging in various other Greenian theatrics.

    Green himself is part of the Internet fray now, too. Last summer, with support from a company called ManiaTV, he started broadcasting a live call-in talk show from his living room four nights a week. So far, technical difficulties are more common than not, and his worldwide audience is only around twenty-five thousand people, a fraction of the millions who once watched him on MTV. Compared to his previous level of stardom, this may seem like a fairly mediocre prize. Still, Green commutes from his bedroom to his living room, no longer has to worry about network censors, and, if he feels like going on for an extra half hour any given night, he can. So maybe the Internet’s not such a bad place to be—in fact, it’s actually where Green was headed all along.

    Back in 1993, when only Al Gore and a few other techno-prophets knew what the Internet was, a twenty-two-year-old community college student in Ottawa, Ontario, was busy inventing its future—on a Canadian public-access channel. On his weekly, hour-long show, Tom Green did whatever it took to create a few visceral, visually arresting moments in no-budget, handheld fashion. He descended on city streets and shopping malls, saying things that people just don’t say in public, rubbing his “bum” against strangers, and otherwise invading their space with fearless abandon. He tortured his parents, painting their house plaid while they were away on vacation and dumping a severed horse head in their bed in the middle of the night as they slept. He harassed his best friend, Glenn Humplik, an amiable human punching bag whose unfortunate surname apparently gave him a tolerance for constant abuse. Slouchy and slack-jawed, swinging from catatonia to mania in the blink of a haunted, heavy-lidded eye, Green looked like a guy who’d end up stalking a beautiful blonde movie star, not marrying one.

    Somehow, this haphazard approach to TV worked incredibly well, perhaps in part because Green’s shtick wasn’t exactly revolutionary. In fact, his show was modeled very closely on the traditional late-night talk-show model. He interviewed guests on a studio set and ended with a musical performance by a local band. He and his crew performed short comic sketches, and he did man-on-the-street bits, too—just like one of his major influences, David Letterman. The affable, endlessly accommodating Humplik served as Green’s Ed McMahon-like sidekick.

    But while the Tom Green Show shared the same DNA as Letterman et al, it also bore a strong resemblance to COPS. There were long stretches of noisy, repetitive tedium, with Green screaming nonsense at strangers on the street, followed by bursts of inspired lunacy: a surprisingly clever ad lib on Green’s part, or a moment of inspired rage from a benign-looking soul whom Green had pushed too far.

    But compared to other lo-fi, vérité shows, like the Real World and even the amateur submissions of America’s Funniest Home Videos, the Tom Green Show seemed shoddily made. Segments often had no discernible rhythms or structures, and overall, the show’s aggressive artlessness didn’t play as faux-authentic contrivance—the work of self-conscious, shaky-cam auteurs—it just looked bad and cheap and incompetent. Where, one wondered, was the craft? Where was the desire to hone a comic premise until it reached its full potential, to perpetrate some ingenious, Candid Camera-style prank? Green just turned on his video camera and started throwing shit at the wall. If it stuck, great. If it slid, even better.

    For all its lazy, sloppy, and grating qualities, the Tom Green Show was also quite compelling. It didn’t matter if Green was donning scuba gear to dive for change in shopping mall fountains, or trying to convince his sweet, clueless grandmother that a box of neon-colored vibrators was actually a collection of kitchen gadgets, or simply smashing a platter of fresh meat with a baseball bat. More often than not, whatever he was doing was the most arresting thing happening on TV at any given moment, and restless channel surfers stopped and paid attention. Here was a show that adhered to none of the conventions that lent all TV programming, good and bad, a certain sameness. For a few months, at least, the Tom Green Show pulled off that rarest of TV tricks: It looked like nothing else on the tube. That’s why, after just a few episodes, it became a local cult favorite, then a hit on national Canadian cable, and ultimately, an MTV classic.

    So it was that, as the twentieth century ran down, Green had figured out where twenty-first-century entertainment was headed. Before Jackass, before Fear Factor and YouTube, Green proved that punch lines weren’t necessary. That plots weren’t necessary. Even the themes that unified similarly plotless clip shows, like World’s Wildest Police Chase Videos, weren’t necessary.

    Green’s efforts echoed the innovations of late-80s gonzo pornographers like John Stagliano and Ed Powers, who realized that their viewers weren’t particularly interested in storylines, dialogue, costumes, character development, or any of the other Hollywood conventions that the adult-film industry had traditionally aped. What drew viewers was raw, unrehearsed spectacle—unexpected moments—so that’s what Stagliano and Powers gave them.

    Demonstrating that what worked for porn videos worked even better on mainstream TV—where the competition for viewer attention was (and is) relentless—Green liberated his audiences from having to follow complicated storylines, or watch from start to finish, or even watch all that closely. No matter when you tuned in to his show, there was always some kind of confrontation or disturbing imagery, or at the very least, a skinny, disheveled slacker who appeared to be in the midst of a psychotic breakdown. After just six episodes on MTV, the Tom Green Show had established itself as the network’s highest-rated series.

    The show’s success marked the ascendancy of the amateur, bringing a punk-rock, DIY spirit to corporate television. Once Green became a certified network hit, the medium that had once been the most exclusive was suddenly accessible. Inspired provocateurs were no longer consigned to the ghetto of public access. A fifteen-year-old delinquent in the middle of nowhere could actually compete against Hollywood production companies—he just needed a handheld video camera, some wacky ideas, and the nerve to pull them off.

    Green’s time at the top didn’t last long. Like many other purveyors of ambush TV, who rely on unsuspecting individuals to pull off their tricks, he found that his new notoriety made guerrilla street theater difficult. The objects of his attention began responding to him not as a random lunatic, but as Tom Green, MTV icon. His bout with cancer and an unsuccessful foray into movies further sidetracked his career. His first run on MTV ended in mid-2000, and a 2003 resurrection of the show, in a somewhat different format, lasted only a few months before being canceled due to low ratings.

    Even so, Green’s initial success had a permanent impact on viewers, other rogue auteurs, and industry executives. It was suddenly clear that there was a lucrative market for all kinds of raw, surreal, caught-on-tape spectacles, no matter how slapdash or tasteless. For years, critics had accused TV executives of pandering to the lowest common denominator, but Green’s success proved that those execs were actually tight-assed gatekeepers. Even the scuzzy laughs and cheap thrills of Fox staples like Married with Children and World’s Wildest Police Chase Videos looked like Masterpiece Theatre compared to Jackass, Girls Gone Wild, Bumfights, and all the other DIY fare that followed in the wake of the Tom Green Show.

    While it’s been more than a decade since Green first went on public-access cable, the style of programming he helped pioneer is still in its infancy. As the Internet evolves, it will become only more prominent; nothing else delivers the same bang for the buck. In the same way that traditional print-media operations, with their large staffs, cumbersome production processes, and expensive payrolls, are trying to find success while competing against bloggers, who can amass sizable audiences at virtually no cost, traditional TV producers will also face the democratizing wrath of the Internet.

    When prime-time audiences ultimately splinter into pieces too small to underwrite the likes of Lost or even the Amazing Race, producers will turn to the kinds of shows that can aggregate eyeballs on a budget. In Nielsen terms, the twenty-five thousand nightly viewers at TomGreen.com is nothing; but what other regular producer of independent programming for the web—one that doesn’t involve naked women—can claim such numbers? Just a few years ago, few people believed that independent amateurs like DailyKos.com and Instapundit.com could crash the insular world of the news media elite in any significant way, but now, major players like Time and the New York Times have adopted the tools, techniques, and attitudes that such bloggers pioneered. Once again, Tom Green finds himself ahead of the curve.