The Rake Magazine

Category: Article

  • Not Just Kid Stuff

    Last August, a graphic adaptation of the 9/11 Commission Report was published, and the media did what they always do when they notice cartoon artists taking on serious themes. They freaked. “Yes, that’s right, a comic about the attacks is set for publication,” gasped Bravetta Hassell of the Washington Post. “Is the most defining moment of a generation in danger of becoming just another franchise with a Happy Meal tie-in on the horizon?” fretted Vaughn Ververs, editor of CBS News’ Public Eye blog. Wringing her hands, Chicago Tribune cultural critic Julia Keller wrote, “I don’t know if it’s a good or a bad idea to treat serious subjects in terms of comic book art, if such works represent an advance or a retreat for civilization.” Her story was headlined “Are you ready for this?”—as if we, as a culture, could withstand 9/11 itself but might go to pieces if we happened to experience drawings of it.

    All that keening was the product of a common but false assumption: that comic art is inherently a children’s medium. There’s ample proof to the contrary, of course—the works of Art Spiegelman, Marjane Satrapi, and Alan Moore, to pick just three relatively recent examples. But in a capitalist consumer society, those with the money usually get to define the terms under which a culture operates, and Spiegelman’s Maus has never stood a chance against the Mouse. Walt Disney, more than any one person, developed the grammar of modern cartoon art, and thanks to his studio, he remains the chief influence on the way the average citizen consumes and understands this medium. Critics have given him hell for that: In his 1968 book, The Disney Version, Richard Schickel eviscerated his subject for turning his art into a kiddieland and dismissed the Disney oeuvre as “mostly a horror.”

    And Schickel wasn’t alone; his assessment of Disney as a sort of Hitler of wholesomeness remains pervasive. But in his mammoth new biography of Disney, Neal Gabler makes a solid case for his subject as a middlebrow but mature artist, a not-just-for-kids artist, and, in his own way, an occasionally not-for-kids artist. Perhaps as important as his stance, Gabler assumes it without sounding like a company man. A rightfully acclaimed and observant writer on celebrity and film history, he scored unprecedented access to the Disney Archives to research the book, and while he’s not as aggressive as Schickel was, Gabler doesn’t pull his punches, either. In the closing chapters, Disney is a compromised man who’s quite distant from the aspiring animator struggling in Kansas City in the 1920s; his ambition never wavered, but what he was ambitious about changed radically. Heartened by the success of Disneyland in 1955, Disney had all but abandoned animation and plotted to expand his family-entertainment empire by purchasing land in Florida that would become Walt Disney World. By 1966, shortly before his death, his studio was dealing in cheap, unchallenging family fare like Pollyanna and That Darn Cat. The saddest scene in Gabler’s book describes how Disney would regularly call the Sherman Brothers into his office, demanding to hear the songwriting team perform “Feed the Birds,” their melancholy, elegiac tune from Mary Poppins. “Play it!” Disney would order, staring blankly out the window. The brothers would, and their boss wept every time.

    So, what happened to the person who could spearhead a clever Depression-era allegory like Three Little Pigs, or pull off a technical triumph like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs? The cheery, safe Disney style resulted in part from the economic realities with which its creator was forced to reckon. During World War II, Disney dropped much of what he was working on to make government-subsidized films. Plus, a unionization effort among the studio’s animators put a crimp in his obsessively improving ways. These occurrences, thoroughly and compellingly detailed in a chapter titled “Two Wars,” kneecapped aesthetics as a prime consideration at the studio. By the mid-50s, Disney was more concerned with his revolutionary new theme park, and the kiddie TV show explicitly designed to promote it, than with promoting cartooning as a complicated art. Once both those projects became hits, the quality of Disney’s films was even less of an issue.

    Before all that, Disney had made legitimate claims to art that few thought to dismiss as kid stuff. He was proud of his 1946 collaboration with Salvador Dali on Destino, a short that was finished, posthumously, in 2003. And though critics split on his 1940 film, Fantasia, they never argued about whether Disney’s ambitious pairing of animation with classical music was fit for adult consumption. Nor did they question whether a film so abstracted was fit for the cartoon form. Indeed, when Pinocchio and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs were released, arguments often revolved around whether they were fit for children. (When Disney’s four-year-old daughter, Diane, attended a screening of Snow White, she watched it through her fingers and was eventually escorted out when she started bawling.) Disney’s main flaw prior to his post-World War II decline wasn’t his hokeyness but his intense perfectionism—his efforts to keep “plussing” (i.e., improving) his animations and his continuous, abject fear of getting stale. Admitting he overreached with Fantasia, Disney said, a decade later: “Every time I’ve made a mistake is when I went in a direction where I didn’t feel the thing actually. And I did try to be a little smarty-pants.”

    In the late 30s, being a smarty-pants was part of the Disney gospel; it wasn’t until after the war that Disney came to embody middle-class values for postwar America. Still, he was never comfortable with his assigned role as a purveyor of cuteness. In real life, Disney didn’t much resemble Uncle Walt; if anything, he was antisocial and often neglected his wife and daughters to concentrate on the studio. Disney was a bona fide artist for a time, Gabler argues, citing Snow White, Steamboat Willie, and Three Little Pigs as works of art. That contention runs counter to the claims of many of Gabler’s colleagues (the eminent critic David Thomson calls Snow White “pretty pablum”), but even Disney’s harshest critical enemies have laid down their arms when it comes to the technical achievements that those first features represented. More than anything, those movies stand as arguments that animation is a medium where anything is possible, and in Fantasia and abstracted shorts like The Skeleton Dance, Disney endeavored to prove it. “This is not the cartoon medium,” he told a colleague during the making of Fantasia. “It should not be limited to cartoons. We have worlds to conquer here.” It was a great mission statement at the time, and it’s a shame that Disney’s own work ultimately contradicted it; the world he wound up conquering was a small one after all.

    Disney would probably blanch at much of what’s contained in An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, & True Stories, a collection of contemporary North American comic art edited by cartoonist Ivan Brunetti. Robert Crumb’s fetishes, Art Spiegelman’s neuroses, and Chris Ware’s youthful insecurities are all on display in the book, and those themes in many ways directly oppose Disney’s polite, well-scrubbed, heavily controlled postwar works. Sure, Mickey Mouse could be a pervy prankster in his early days; in Steamboat Willie, he uses a winch to lift Minnie up by her undies, swings a screaming cat by its tail, and turns a duck into an ad hoc hurdy-gurdy. But his creator would probably have little patience for Tony Millionaire’s foul-mouthed strip, “Maakies,” or the hooker and street bum in the samples from Archer Prewitt’s “Sof’ Boy,” both of which are featured in Brunetti’s book.

    That said, the editor makes it clear, through his selections, that both Chris Ware and Disney have shared roots in straightforward gag writing. The opening pages of the collection are dedicated to three- or four-panel strips, some of which are the offbeat likes of “Underworld” and “Zippy the Pinhead.” But Brunetti also dedicates space to works inspired by Charles M. Schulz’s “Peanuts.” For most people, the star of “Peanuts” is Snoopy, but for cartoonists, Charlie Brown is the dominating figure—a roly-poly underdog whose intelligence, awkwardness, and self-loathing make him sort of the ur-character for many of the graphic novels published in recent years. (Reading Brunetti’s book, it’s hard not to assume that a lot of its cartoonists suffered from a Charlie Brown-like despair during their childhoods; Chris Ware, for one, cops to that in his tribute.)

    The anthology also includes an essay by Schulz in which he details the amount of rigor required to break into the cartooning business. “You must be in constant search for the characters and ideas that will eventually lead you to your best areas of work,” he writes. Like Disney, who launched drawing classes at the studio to get his animators up to his standards during the making of Snow White, Schulz was fighting against a presumption that cartooning was a naïve, anyone-can-do-it art form, or a repository of kiddie lit. Folks aghast at the notion of a 9/11 comic might make something not just of Maus (which is excerpted in the anthology) but also of Jaime Hernandez’s intimate and mystical redemption tale, “Flies on the Ceiling”; David Collier’s intricate, well-researched “The Ethel Catherwood Story”; or John Hankiewicz’s reminiscence, “A Paragraph by Saul Bellow (1915-2005).”

    Ultimately, Brunetti’s book isn’t arguing for comics’ not-just-for-kids status so much as displaying the form’s many possibilities. (After all, only daily newspapers still play up the “Comics aren’t for kids anymore!” angle.) Cartooning, like any medium, is an empty vessel that’s free to be manipulated and used in any number of ways. Either animated or on paper, it easily lends itself to the gag. And if it fails to become more than that, the shortcoming isn’t with the medium but its makers—Uncle Walt, unfortunately, chief among them.

  • My Gingerbread Essence

    When the A & J Gem Café of Uptown closed, I was despondent. During the hazy days of postcollegiate life, comfort food had a different meaning. What comforted me was anything but mom’s meatloaf and mashed potatoes, which haunted my youth. After college, what comforted me was food that was something I could call my own—something that I chose as a definition. I am a fried-rice girl. I am all about puff pastry. With the closing of the A & J, I was losing another part of my identity—the “I’m a gingerbread-pancake girl” part.

    In college, gingerbread pancakes were a steamy stack of late-morning warmth after a cold, confusing night. My accomplices would gather after the previous night’s adventures and kidnap a table at the A & J Gem. We murmured about who did what while scraping the vestiges of mascara from under our eyes. The conspiratorial tone of the all-night revelry was magnified by the seemingly adult decisions that continued to confront us. Except instead of beer or Jägermeister, we had to choose between treading the safe route between buttermilk and silver dollar or rushing headlong into gingerbread with espresso whipped cream. The terrible memory of all the Bisquick ’cakes of my past dwindled as quickly as the incipient hangover.

    Of all victuals that can be termed comfort food, pancakes are among the top seven. They are one of those meals that transcend class and generational boundaries. Is there any more clichéd image than that of snooty Ms. Fancy Pants waiting for Jeeves to accomplish a perfect flambé on the crêpes suzette? And yet I remember when money was tight enough that pancakes for dinner was a common occurrence. Check out any pancake house; you’re just as likely to see empty nesters there as newlyweds. But perhaps a more telling reason that the pancake fits comfortably into the fabric of culture is that nary a world cuisine is without its particular version of the pancake. Call them hotcakes, flapjacks, griddle cakes, or whatever you like; as long as batter is dropped on a hot surface, then flipped, it’s a pancake.

    Locals of Danish heritage know the golf ball-shaped aebleskiver cakes well. Batter is poured into a special pan with round divots; once the cake begins to set and crisp around the bottom, a knitting needle (or other handy skewer) is used to pierce and flip the little cake. Whether stuffed with tart apples or dusted with cinnamon and powdered sugar, these delicacies are best eaten in July, during the annual Aebleskiver Days festival in Tyler, Minnesota.

    Dutch pancakes, sometimes called Dutch babies, are serious enough to have spawned a restaurant chain. The batter is cooked in a special pan that causes the pannekoeken to rise and roll around the edges. In the eponymous restaurant, servers follow the Dutch tradition of running the pancake to the table the minute it’s out of the oven to show generous hospitality to their guests.

    The French, of course, have an intimate relationship with their crêpe. Created with more eggs and lacking a rising agent like baking powder, the crêpe is a thin, flat vehicle for both the savory and the sweet. On the high end, you have the fantastically flammable crêpes suzette, set aflame with brandy and liqueurs in the finest fashion. More commonly, you have the street crêpe. Paris wouldn’t be Paris without the many crêperie trucks selling their warm wares, oozing with Nutella or simple butter and sugar.

    Hotcakes don’t need to be sweet; many countries consider them a savory item. The Japanese okonomiyaki is a griddle cake made with grated yam in the batter and topped with treats like nori, fish flakes, and ginger. In much the same way, Ethiopian injera is used as a plate or vehicle for the main meal. Indian dosas, Russian blini, Mexican tortillas, even Middle Eastern pitas can all really be considered pancakes.

    The closest rival to our own affection for pancakes may be the Brits’. Celebrating Pancake Day is a long-held tradition in the U.K. On Shrove Tuesday (Mardi Gras) people were encouraged to use up the last of their rich food, to clear their cupboards before the Lenten season. Pancakes came to be the traditional way of doing this. On what has become known as Pancake Day, many towns across the Isles hold grand feasts and festivals—but none so grand as that of the village of Olney. Legend has it that an old village woman was busy flipping her cakes when she heard the church bells calling her to worship. Still sporting her apron, still flipping her pancakes, she ran to church. Her pious act is recreated every year as hundreds of locals race through town, with pan in hand.

    It has always surprised me that the International House of Pancakes is anything but international. What a blown opportunity. The American pancake preference, to which the chain caters almost exclusively, is fluffier and thicker than most others. The same cakes in Britain are referred to as drop scones. We also tend to like them sweeter; it’s quintessentially American to stack them high and drench them in maple syrup.

    The gingerbread pancakes of my youth were an eye-opening experience. That something so elemental and ordinary could become so irreverent and different, while still delivering that relaxed-slump-in-the-booth feeling, was remarkable. When I make them now, in my somewhat more settled life, I often wonder if there is another person somewhere across the planet, teetering between comfort and chaos and tucking into a stack of pure, culturally defined yet sumptuous individuality.

    Gingerbread Pancakes

    3 cups flour
    1 cup brown sugar
    1 teaspoon baking powder
    1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
    1 teaspoon salt
    1 teaspoon cinnamon
    2 teaspoons ginger
    1 teaspoon nutmeg
    1/4 teaspoon clove powder
    1 cup strong black coffee
    4 eggs
    1 stick melted and cooled butter

    Combine all dry ingredients in large bowl; set aside. Combine all wet ingredients in separate bowl. Slowly add wet ingredients to dry, stirring gently until just combined. Lumps are fine; don’t overmix. Let batter rest for five minutes.

    Spray skillet or griddle with nonstick cooking spray or brush with clarified butter and preheat. Test small scoop of batter; flip when edges begin to dry and bubbles appear on the surface. Do not press down on pancake. Serve with sweetened cream. Yields twelve thick cakes.

  • Rouge Almost Noir

    If you go down to the woods south of London, you may be in for a big surprise. Not the teddy bears’ picnic—that seems to be what a good many urban folk seem to expect in the countryside these days, as though farms were all film sets and the animals, a collection of animated stuffed toys. (Was it a wish for revenge on his father that inspired Christopher Robin Milne to sell the rights for Winnie-the-Pooh to Disney? Hush, hush, whisper who dares, Christopher Robin is getting even …)

    The surprise is something quite unforeseen a generation ago. In the 1980s, English farmers, fed up with the agricultural policies of the European Union, spotted that consumers were no less fed up with the way that pork sold in supermarkets tended to taste more and more like blotting paper. Their response was to domesticate and rear wild boar, with exceedingly palatable results. Inevitably, though, some of the boar found their way out into the wild, where they ensconced themselves most successfully with their litters of little stripy piglets in woodland less than an hour from Gatwick Airport.

    Though more than a hundred of the animals were let loose last Christmas when the fencing around a farm near my family home was cut by animal-liberation fanatics, I have yet to meet a boar in the wild. But I have read the description of pig-sticking in India by the British cavalry officer Francis Yeats-Brown in The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, and the speed and ferocity of the aroused boar sound terrifying. Boar are almost the weight of a Harley-Davidson and even quicker off the lights. The Yeats-Brown prescription is to stand your ground, with the spear out in front of you, so that the boar impales himself thoroughly; otherwise, you will get crushed and then rootled by the same sharp tusks that do such a thorough job of carving up farmers’ fields. Naturally, the Yeats-Brown sporting ethic requires that you “honour while you strike him down, the foe that comes with fearless eyes.” No wonder Yeats-Brown was one of the earliest western devotees of yoga. And no wonder it’s illegal to introduce the European wild boar to Minnesota.

    The French, though, have always had wild boar, and nowhere more so than in the Loire Valley, southwest of Paris. Many of the grand sixteenth- and seventeenth-century chateaux along the river were built as hunting boxes for the nobility of the Ancien Régime. I don’t know if they still hunt the boar with hounds through the forests there. They certainly hunt deer in a musical and stately manner, a style that makes English fox hunting seem like a mad cross-country dash. As one might expect in wooded country, hound music is highly prized, and the solemn playing of the hunting horn is taken very seriously, especially to honor dead quarry.

    The Loire Valley also produces a greater variety of wines than any other part of France. Most of them are white; the area is quite far north. But let me commend a red, the 2004 vintage from the lieu-dit Les Poyeux in the appellation Saumur-Champigny. This wine is made from the Cabernet Franc grape (an ancestor of the better-known Cabernet Sauvignon) and is available locally for around $15 in a bottle embossed with the old French Royal Arms. It is powerful stuff; drink it slowly. It improves with acquaintance and would improve even more with keeping. The color is on the red side of bituminous; the initial nose is almost nonexistent except, perhaps, for a whiff of alcohol. There is less fruitiness in the initial flavor than I found in the highly concentrated vintage from the baking hot summer of 2003. What is interesting, though, is the way that the concentrated tannins in the center of the taste open out level by level, unfolding successive, refreshing bitternesses and leaving a lingering, tingling aftertaste.

    This is wine that demands your attention; it comes with fearless eyes. Honor it with the sort of fully flavored food you might eat with a Côtes du Rhône: venison roasted with a bitter cocoa glaze, well-hung wild boar, or a juicy sirloin with lots of horseradish. Your patience should be rewarded.

  • All This Talking About God

    The brightness that sustains me is meant to blow away. Almost every day, I walk down to the college to watch the Buddhist nuns. The young Tibetans fold themselves crossed-legged on the wooden platform, funneling colored sand grain by grain onto a chalked pattern in the center. They wear cloth masks so their breath doesn’t scatter the sand. Grain by grain, color by color, creating a circular mandala, the house of a god. It’s the only thing that brings me peace, makes me forget my empty hands. Silently they pray as they work. Four at a time they bend over the great wheel, heads bowed, hands curled, shaping, as patient as stalking cats. I guess they believe life is only suffering, but they seem so contented.

     

    Talking to God, that’s all some people talk about, at the bus stop, laundromat, the bank. They are full of advice, stories of the Lord’s personal favors. I know that the black woman is supposed to thump on her Bible, serve up the family dinner, and call on God to help her keep it all together. I know that’s my place. But since when did I ever do what I’m supposed to do? Still, these people keep at me, talking about their gods. Even on TV, the running back in the end zone says, “I thank God, he was with us today,” because his god is a Jets fan, his god does not listen to the pleas of the Miami quarterback, the Denver coach. I am told many things by many people anxious to help. They claim to talk to God, and he (or she) tells them things to tell me, things to make me change my ways, my whys, things to make me see the light, to open my heart, and so it does; the chambers open, open, shut, shut, like hands in prayer.

    How I’m raised to judge myself: Woman is the pillar that holds the roof when other support gives way. She is the anchor, the rock, guardian of her family’s health, spiritual and mental. So where does that leave me? I couldn’t help my baby. I’m no help to my husband. I haven’t been on speaking terms with God for years, and certainly not since Daisy died, and her so little, not even talking. People keep telling me God has a plan. If that’s so I’d have to believe He had something to do with her death, too busy taking calls from football players and soap-opera actresses. Who can suffer a God like that? Even cruel nature seems more kind.

    She was such a little thing, eight months, and her symptoms seemed so slight. When I called the doctor back and said, she’s still fevered, they weren’t really worried. We took her to the hospital, then everything went horribly wrong. The fever kept going up and there lay my poor baby, packed in ice like that with all the IVs. She was blotchy and puffy, and then she just quit on me. Something went, her liver or kidneys, then her heart. The doctors leaped in, blowing air into her with a bag, shocking her chest. Even they were shaken. A matter of hours. I could say I prayed good and hard but frankly, I didn’t have time to mumble one under my breath. And I could say that bitter trial strengthened my faith, but it wasn’t much to begin with, and after—well, just another thing dusted over by neglect.

    Then all this crazy comfort, talking about God. Some fool gives me a coffee mug with the story about the one set of footprints in the sand and why, God, did you leave me in my heartache and God says, that is when I carried you—a coffee mug, as if that will mend my heart, clear my head. Well, carry me or not, we aren’t speaking now. Somehow it never took root in me. The church of my childhood was custom more than devotion in my household. My mama, as intelligent a woman as you’ll ever meet, a teacher, wasn’t particularly devout, and she’s got her reasons. My grandma used to “get the spirit” and it seemed to me then, a girl in pigtails, like a demonic possession. Not the Word, a bird, fluttering epileptically inside her. I only saw it happen once or twice; she rarely came to visit. She lived down south, and my mama had a strange pride in saying she would never set foot in Alabama again. We all have lines we won’t cross.

    Gerald and I work at the phone company. Gerald is a lineman, out in all kinds of weather, up in the cherry picker, rotating night shifts. It was always Gerald I worried about, not Daisy. Out in ice storms with the downed electric lines and all. Daisy was safe and warm at home with me. She would grow up, have her chicken pox and skinned knees, get her grown-up teeth, have birthday parties, learn her times tables, and be someone. It was my husband in the dark storm I worried over.

    When I went back to work they all knew about Daisy, so I didn’t have to excuse my bone-tired stare. Checks kept coming in and I kept them credited right. Credits and debits, cool, clean numbers, safe enough; people pay a lot to talk. Lately friends point out to me it’s free to talk to God. That big hearing ear, big piggy-backer, enfolding hand; he’s all there in bits and pieces for some game-show winner, but who’s minding the store for the rest of us? Charlanne just sat quiet with me at coffee break, for which I was grateful, sometimes rattling her braceletty arm toward me and putting a warm hand on mine. Just keeping me company in my devastation. No chatter about taking up the burden, following in His footsteps. You don’t talk that trash to a grieving mother. You don’t go around saying that her baby girl is in a better place.

    One day on our lunch hour Charlanne said, get your coat, we’re going out. We walked down the street to the college. In a room with high ceilings, almost like a chapel, the Buddhist nuns worked quietly. They sat on a big platform in their maroon robes; their heads, shorn to black stubble, all looked alike as they bent over their work. Charlanne and I pulled up chairs and watched the mandala take shape. Now I go back almost every day.
    They are Tibetans living in exile in Nepal, here for some special occasion at the college. At moments when they take a break, smiling, chatting, we realize that they are just girls, college-age themselves. One of the older nuns, perhaps my age, takes me by the hand. Her English is good; she has a lazy eye. Smiling, she explains their rituals, the symbols of the mandala. It represents the home of a deity of compassion, with a central medallion, the four gates, a symbolic tapestry of color. In tempera-bright colors—red, yellow, blue, dark and pale green, orange, and white—they sift tiny lines: scrolls for clouds, religious symbols, small rainspouts for the palace roof. The patterns are bright and fine as embroidery, a quilting of sand, held together by nothing, yet whole. She nods toward the altar, explains the offerings of flowers, waxy cakes, incense. How they asked the Dalai Lama (I guess that is like asking God) to be allowed to learn the sacred art from their brother monks. For this act of devotion they’ll gain merit in the next life, my guide explains. They’ll dismantle the mandala in a ritual, to return the blessings to the earth.

    Sometimes the nuns climb down and refold themselves before the altar at the far end of the room, each clasping a bell and a charm of bronze like interlocking figure-eights. I don’t understand what they’re saying, but they’re talking to God with fine, curling, undulating hands, low chanting that rises and falls. Then they shake out their limbs, chat for a bit, crawl back on the platform and pick up their narrow silver funnels, their meditations.

    The pattern must be a mystery my heart knows, not my head. I come back as often as I can.

    “These things just happen sometimes,” the doctor had said, meaning to be kind, laying a hand on my shoulder—a young woman like me, tired and stunned. “The infection was just too persistent. I’m so sorry.”

    “Don’t tell me that, sometimes—not to my baby,” I’d cried out, throwing off her touch. “Don’t gimme no sometimes, there’s my girl, there’s supposed to be antibiotics, there’s supposed to be—” One minute in my arms, the next, small and lifeless on the bed. I collapsed against Gerald, his own hot tears washing his face, knowing I should be comforting him, that he needed me to hold him up. But I had no strength. We cried into one another’s neck and shoulders, our baby girl before us with a tube in her arm and the mask off her face, done with struggle; cried there without pride, without hope, as the hospital shuttled all around us.

    She was named Danielle after Gerald’s mother, a tall woman with a long face, soft-spoken and fiercely dignified. But I called her my little Daisy. She was born February 7, eight pounds, twelve ounces, with a little mole above her butt on the left. She was only eight months, still at the breast, a child with a sunny disposition, a curious expression of surprise on her fat cheeks, a squeaky laugh.

    I took a week’s vacation and lay around the house crying, or stone-faced, unable to. My mama came for a few days, quietly took over the kitchen, let me cry when I could. “I should’ve taken her to the doctor sooner.” Cold, like it was someone else’s life, a movie I’d seen. “Tell me what to do, Mama.”

    “Times like this it’s hard to find your way, I know,” she said, rubbing my back.

    Gerald and I passed like ghosts, not saying much, brushing closely past each other, grazing fingertips, curling desperately together in bed for fear the other would vanish. I made myself cook him proper dinners, meat and vegetables, potatoes or biscuits, so he could keep his strength up. I couldn’t eat. My breasts were still swollen. I had to express the milk with that pump, everything flowing out of me, all milk and tears, leaving me empty. The doctor said I’d have to stop soon, to let my body adjust to the absence of suckling. Sat in the rocking chair with my hands empty except for that damn breast pump and my body grieved for my child, my arms aching for the weight of that little warm shape. It took all the will in my slack body to do the dishes at night, to rake myself out of bed before noon. Sometimes Gerald got the coffee on, washed the pots.

    One morning, passing the half-open door to the bathroom: Gerald’s face lathered up but only half shaven, his palms braced on the sink, his head hangs, he’s crying so quietly I hear only breath. I hushed past. He used to curl her on one arm like a sack of flour, a football, tickle her chin with a finger to get that squeaky duck laugh. For some reason we tried to smile bravely at each other, but it was grotesque and we sank into wordless touches. I felt like I had no voice.

    It’s Gerald I come home to, but I don’t like being in the house alone. I make excuses to go out, invent errands; the botanical gardens, the mandala-makers, movies, window-shopping. One day I’m driving to work and I hear an ad on the radio for the zoo. I think of toucans and flamingos all day as I sit at my keyboard. It’s not far and I stop on the way home, pay my three-dollar donation. I look at the birds but they don’t hold my interest long; the gorilla is throwing his poop at the spectators. My feet take me to the cats.

    When I was little I begged for a cat like my friend Donetta had, but my mama had a horror of them, I don’t know why—some ancestral voodoo nonsense. I walk down the ramp into that cat smell, and I can see the pens are too small, though they’ve tried to shape them with landscaping and all. A Siberian tiger sleeps on a concrete ledge, its back pressed against the thick glass, half an inch from my hand. I could tap on the window and I bet the big cat wouldn’t even jump. The sign says there are new cubs, but I don’t see them. Her fur looks stiff as wire, luscious black and white paintings on her face; the bristly whiskers twitch occasionally, a paw as big as my face flexes. Some hunting dream.

    In the next pen the leopard is restless—pacing, pacing, a lopsided arc around the oak with its clawed bark. The sunken enclosure must be a good half-acre, but he is hemmed in, no horizons; the autumn sun gives little heat. He belongs someplace huge, the African savannah scorched yellow, not in a grimy northern city. Tongue lolling out, he stops, pants listlessly. I know this look, this dulled perseverance. The look says, what are we doing so far from home? Where’s my sun? However did we get here? Capture, displacement.

    On my way out I pass seals barking, begging children for fish, a polar bear swimming laps in the too-small pool. Someday we would have taken Daisy to feed the seals. The smell of fish makes me want to cry. I am late to make dinner.

    Gerald knew when he married me that I didn’t claim faith. Man and wife four years, and I still marvel at his. My husband, he’s got a man’s God and a man’s minister, all sanctifying and testifying, scouts all in uniform, merit badges shining.

    I love Gerald—but his words have no more wings on them than mine. Yet he stands up and sings his hymns, accepting grace as his due. I sing, too. Rock of Salvation. Someone’s singin’, Lord, kumbaya. Go tell it on the mountain. Someone’s sing-in’, Lord, but it’s for my own comfort; preachers know the power of giving voice.
    Gerald is a kind man, quiet like his mother, confident, without anger. He goes to his church and comes back full of rescue. The world owes him better for his uncomplaining patience. I owe him better. I should be his rock, but right now all I’ve got is blood and milk, tears and sweat, animal things washing through me, things that don’t bear reckoning. I’ll suffer through and give him what I can—my love for him is primitive and holy. He’s my sun. I can’t help it; I love that man more than I could love any god.

    I know it’s a jealous God in the Old Testament, envious of a woman’s love, her ability to bring forth life. Woman is fierce in her loving, like a cat who owns you, commands you or is your equal. A cat wants to sleep up against your heat, to breathe in your face, share your space as close as possible; then walk away, walk the perimeter on the fence tops, before she comes back. A cat has secrets. A cat could talk to God. Never a dog; a dog only wants to please master, whatever the cost. All these people throwing platitudes at me: “Offer it up.” They only understand a god they can be subservient to, give up their will to, cast off the burden of their own hearts and minds. “Give over the burden.” They want me to hurry up already, get it over with, a sudden resolution—as if grieving has a deadline, like it’s not a long, hard walk.
    In bed I listen to Gerald’s breathing go loose and soft; his hand brushes my hip. As I start to doze I see the leopard looking for its big sun. The tiger twitches her paw, her whiskers. Why can’t God be a creature like that? A sensual creature, a thing with fangs and claws. An instinctual god, no promises, no preaching. My spirit has longings, too. I need a god that wants us to dance. One two three, one two three, a fine old waltz, scandalous. A holy roller shaking in the ring of a great colorful circus. None of us want to feel so small, so alone, shut off from the sky. But I need power here at hand: old gods out of the forest, all kinds of howling juju and Mary in her motherly sorrow, animal spirits.

    Beside me the tiger stirs and growls. I feel her warm back pressed against me as in some deep dream she prowls her territory, sniffs the Siberian air, recalls only in sleep the scent of freedom, some other way of being.

    The nuns are serene as ever and I can tell the mandala will be finished soon—the huge wheel is almost filled with intricate shapes, a colorful fever-dream. My guide, the nun with the smile and lazy eye, says there remains only the lotus-petal border of white sand. Her name is Domo. The blessings multiply as they work and pray. In a few days, she says, it will be completed, then demolished, because the devotion of making is enough; nothing is permanent. Domo says the gift remains precious, not less cherished for being destroyed. I guess their gods, too, have ways that come to us as mysteries. In the end they will sweep all the colors together, carry the sands in a procession to the river, return the blessings to water, to earth. Maybe someone will be talking to God meantime, among the waving tangerine sleeves and shaved heads, cymbals and horns. Yes, I think, that’s right. Shouldn’t we dance behind the nurses, the hearses, to celebrate the freed soul, give back its many brilliant reds and oranges and blues to the dark water, stars in the pond? But no; we mutter, wear drab, drape in crepe. Did so, myself. Did not raise a mighty noise. Back into the brown earth, brown child.

    It’s a Saturday, just three weeks after we lost her, when I send Gerald out to the store. I’ve been wearing a cabbage leaf in each bra cup because the doctor said it would help stop the milk flow—folk wisdom, not medicine. But after a couple of days, the soft crinkle and cabbagey smell is making me so sad, I go to the kitchen, peel the wilted greens from my breasts, throw them in the trash can. I take out a box of old friends—Mahalia Jackson, the Clark Sisters, Sissy Houston—music, what’s left of my faith. I pull out an old record of the Terrell Sisters and I turn it way up and let the gospel music full of praise and sorrow wail up around the walls, splatter over the furniture, slide along the floors. Guide us through the storm, oh Lord, through the bitter rain, they sing. I go into the little room we’d made into Daisy’s nursery with the flowered curtains and wallpaper border. My Lord, oh my Lord, speak to me. I know these songs not just by heart, but in my heart, harmony and melody; hymns, that’s what I’ve kept from churchgoing.

    I go in there with boxes and I take out the clean clothes, the onesies and the tiny T-shirts. The little pink knit sweater and cap, the frilly dress from her Granny Danielle, ridiculous for a child so small. Is there only darkness? Only pain and strife? I sing along. I take those things and the tiny booties out of the little drawer and I fold them neatly and pack them away. The little ribbon bows for the barely kinky hair she barely had. The shoes. The plastic pants, little towels, all the while my eyes burning with tears. Do my prayers fail in darkness? Stand on a chair and take down the mobile over the crib, tear off the light blankets, put them in a bag. I start to choke on the words while I let my madness out, singing hard. I pound the wall with my palm, I shout out with the Terrell Sisters, No, no! The Lord shines down a light—but it’s just howling. It’s release but not rescue, just more tears clacketing through my back, my ribs, the wailing that has to come. I take the sheets and the toys—Do my tears go unheard?—and stuff them in a bag to burn them, burn them all, all the traces of the infection that robbed me of my baby girl. Scalding, hacking with sobs, resolute. I turn the record over and get a bucket of hot suds and that’s where Gerald finds me, on my knees, scrubbing Lysol over the crib, walls and everything and wailing at the top of my lungs because Clea Terrell can sing Awake to Miracles but there wasn’t one coming for me.

    “Don’t do this, baby, don’t do this,” he says, taking the brush out of my hand and wrapping his arms around me. I can see he is scared, of me, of my passion; he doesn’t see it’s just the body’s alarm. I hold my hands out to the side with my wet rubber gloves and howl some more, ’til I can get a grip on myself. “It’s okay,” I say between gasps. “It’s okay. I’m okay. I—just been quiet as a church mouse, so quiet, and I need to cry, I need to yell. Oh no,” as the tears well up again. My body has the rhythm of the sobs and it won’t let go. “I just need to cry for a week of Sundays.” Tears in his own eyes, he lets me go, pats my back and nods, and I stand stupidly crying in the middle of that room with my yellow gloves dripping, and wave my husband out the door.

    I cry, I sing, I yell ’til I’m drained, then I put out the boxes of Daisy’s things. I ask Gerald to burn the small bag of sheets, the few crib toys, all infected, tainted—to burn them, burn, I want to see my rage done up in kerosene. He shakes his head at me, no; no, girl, goes and pushes the bag deep into the trash can.

    So the sun keeps rising and somehow Gerald and I do, too, something to be continued, and hold our breaths or silences, and hold each other. The future seems heavy as a roof. And so goes all this talking to God: those Black Muslims down the block calling on Him a dozen times each Friday, the Jews who don’t say His name, and earnest Christians, the football stars and the bottle-blond rappers testifying. But I need a God more fierce and close. Maybe it’s me, in my loss, in my need, that can’t cotton to theology, sermonizing. An old-school African nature-god might suit; some long, masked face that speaks in dance and movement, music instead of testaments. She needs to come shameless and simmering around my leg, saying, You’re mine. A god who wants my speech, she’s got to take it. She’s got to say, you and me, we’re attached; then maybe I’ll start talking. She’s got to make me hers, rake her claws up and down my shabby bark, mark me with her fine, scented whiskers, and yowl.

    More than ever, it’s hard to find my place, my breasts still leaking unclaimed milk, my body missing my baby in ways that won’t meet words. What’s a body to do but go on—it’s in our blood to continue. I guess maybe Gerald and I will have another child someday—I owe him that, too. But right now my body’s still slack from childbearing and weary with grief. I will need to make up some kind of faith before then, a cat faith or a dog faith, something to hang my mortal hat on. I need something to cling to, otherwise there is just the sand sifting in a random dance. Things don’t happen for a reason, not things like that—unless you give them a pattern to fit into, “God’s will.” How else does a people bear strife and loss, oppression and cruelty and downright evil? They say, “God’s will.”

    I’ve got those longings for a thing that might be faith, a wheel swirling with color, a mystery only the soul and body understand. One day I may find myself in veils and trousers, like Khalila who found Islam and a husband in Cleveland. I might yet find my way back to Jesus. Maybe I’ll go Buddhist like Tina Turner, like the nuns, and then I can learn to just be in the universe and lose my prideful pain.

    If there’s nothing else, there are the seasons that govern all creatures, music that dances in our veins, senses beyond knowing. Or I’ll have to find some other way, between the parked cars and rainstorms and monthly bills, the blizzards in my heart, cyclones churning history around our ears until we fall down wailing—because that’s what animals do, in the heat and the storm, without reasons, without shelter; we cry out, we endure, and we suffer.

    “All This Talking About God” appears in Alicia Conroy’s Lives of Mapmakers (Carnegie-Mellon University Press).

     

  • Managing to Win

    About a year ago, after Minneapolis Mayor R. T. Rybak had celebrated his rout of Peter McLaughlin by diving off the stage into the arms of his supporters, I noticed John Blackshaw wandering through the crowd of well-wishers, a slight smirk on his lips and a look of satisfied exhaustion in his eyes.

    Blackshaw had rescued the Rybak campaign after a near debacle at the city DFL convention in May, and now, six months later, he was ready to move on to the next campaign. I congratulated him and asked a couple of well-worn questions about turning points and challenges—queries he artfully dodged.

    Few voters would recognize Blackshaw or any of the dozens of campaign operatives who ply their trade each election cycle in the Twin Cities and beyond. They are, for the most part, passionate political animals with an almost neurotic attraction to candidates and campaigns. Only a select few earn a paycheck from their political work, and those who do aren’t boasting about the hourly wage. It’s work that, as one of Blackshaw’s peers puts it, “can suck up your life.”

    But there always seems to be enough political intrigue, adrenaline-pumping events, and social-change potential to keep most of them coming back—year after year, campaign after campaign. “Besides serving in the military, working in politics is the most patriotic thing you can do,” said Blackshaw, who most recently piloted the Becky Lourey gubernatorial campaign. “It’s the essence of government.”

    In the following profiles, we’ll meet a half-dozen political operatives who are directing or have directed major campaigns at the local or state level. They are deeply attached to the democratic process, brutally candid about the inadequacies of most candidates and their handlers, and surprisingly idealistic about the future of American politics.

    The Natural
    On a recent Friday afternoon, Ben Goldfarb, the architect behind Amy Klobuchar’s U.S. Senate campaign, was in a meeting, as usual. The white-cubicled Klobuchar headquarters on University Avenue in Southeast Minneapolis was mostly quiet. A colorful paper “countdown chain” was looped over one of the nearby cube walls, and a makeshift “Welcome Volunteers!” sign greeted everyone who stepped off the elevator. A bicycle leaned against a far wall. A young woman took calls at the front desk, her ancient computer monitor sitting on a couple of phone books. A single cigarette and lighter lay poised on the desk in preparation for her next smoke break.

    “The candidate,” as her manager always calls Klobuchar, was in Detroit Lakes. Goldfarb was conferring with new recruits; a rush of new volunteers had recently arrived, and he had to find the right role for each of them and brief them on their job descriptions and the campaign’s goals, schedules, and general operations.

    Goldfarb would call me later, the antsy receptionist said, ignoring my request to poke about the premises to look for a little color in the sterile office. Such a preoccupation with security was not surprising, though. The race against Mark Kennedy for Mark Dayton’s open Senate seat had long ago assumed the blistering intensity of a blood sport, with both campaigns running attack ads and challenging any utterance with a salvo of contradictory claims.

    A couple of weeks earlier, Goldfarb had been forced to fire his communications director after he learned she had peeked at a Kennedy ad sent by a partisan hacker. The revelation sparked a media feeding frenzy and put Goldfarb and Klobuchar on the defensive for one of the few times this election season. It was, he said later, in his typically low-key style, “a difficult situation.”

    When we finally connect that evening, twelve hours into his work day, Goldfarb apologizes for his inaccessibility, explaining that when he’s not in a meeting, he’s on the phone. It’s all part of “keeping the ship moving forward.”

    On a normal day, he’ll arrive at the office about seven a.m. to do a series of check-ins with staff on the morning’s headlines and discuss the communications needs for the day. Then he’ll get on the phone with the candidate (Klobuchar seldom shows up at the office; she’s almost constantly on the road) to talk about her schedule for the day. The job, Goldfarb said, is similar to running a small start-up company (he’s been there). There’s a pure management role, as well as finance, research, communications, and policy duties. “You sort of spread your arms and push the whole thing forward,” he said.

    A high-profile Senate campaign operates at an insanely accelerated pace and features daily, sometimes hourly, attacks from the opposition. Every day, Goldfarb said, he has to deal with “incoming” from the Kennedy campaign and ensure that the media are covering those salvos—and his candidate’s responses—in a way that’s favorable to the campaign. “A lot of time is spent thinking about communicating the right thing,” he explained.

    Since late September, Kennedy has been blasting away at Klobuchar’s performance as Hennepin County’s attorney, alleging that she’s giving out too many plea bargains—a soft-on-crime accusation designed to appeal to both Republicans and blue-collar Democrats. An earlier Kennedy ad slammed Klobuchar for her stances against lobbyists, special interests, Big Oil, and the pharmaceutical industry, noting that she was a registered lobbyist herself, that she took money from a “far left” special-interest group, and that she held personal investments in oil and pharmaceutical companies.

    But little of this has stuck, as Goldfarb and his media staff have moved quickly to rebut allegations, cranking out hundreds of media releases to set the record straight. Much of this work is done by the candidate herself while on the stump. In an October 9 campaign stop in Wabasha, Klobuchar lashed out at Kennedy’s campaign ads and vowed to fight back. “They are smearing us. They are swiftboating us,” she said. “I predicted it in June. It’s their strategy, and we won’t let them get away with it.”

    After Kennedy’s soft-on-crime ad, Klobuchar countered with one that used personal testimony from three crime victims to demonstrate her effectiveness in dealing with everything from identity theft to murder. The parents of Tyesha Edwards told how Klobuchar promised them she’d put the gangsters responsible for their daughter’s death behind bars—and then did it. The spot responds directly to Kennedy’s allegations, with Edwards’ mother telling Kennedy he “should be ashamed.”

    That rebuttal is a perfect example of how Goldfarb and his crew have refused to make the mistakes that sank the Kerry campaign. The lesson: Hit back hard, and hit back fast.
    Klobuchar has been running against Kennedy from the beginning of the campaign, despite the DFL endorsement challenge from Ford Bell, and the campaign has been resolute in painting its Republican opponent as too radical for mainstream Minnesotans, too tied to the failed Bush administration, and too ruthless to be embraced by voters who want solutions, not dogma. Despite Kennedy’s attempts to portray himself as an independent voice (and a nice guy) in his ads, he is in some ways still feeling the fallout from his nasty reelection campaign against Patty Wetterling two years ago, during which he did everything but call Wetterling a terrorist. Goldfarb has picked up on that vibe and worked hard to position Kennedy as an attack dog willing to do anything to keep his Washington job.

    Klobuchar, meanwhile, slid through the DFL endorsement battle and is on the verge of a victory by leaning constantly toward the center. In a Star Tribune profile less than a month before the election, she called herself “my own kind of Democrat”—meaning someone to the right of Senator Mark Dayton, the Republicans’ favorite whipping boy.

    That position infuriated DFL progressives who rallied behind Bell’s endorsement bid, but Goldfarb clearly understood that, in these partisan times, DFLers ought to be more interested in winning elections than in making a statement—especially when control of the Senate could hinge on their votes in the Klobuchar-Kennedy race.

    That climate has allowed Klobuchar to dance around many of the issues in the campaign. She refused to take the bait from Bell, who challenged her repeatedly to call for the immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. Instead, she remains committed to a phased withdrawal with a vague timeline. She’s also stayed away from the universal health care mantra and focused instead on “fiscal responsibility” in Washington, a tried-and-true campaign tool as nebulous as it is bulletproof.

    It’s not that this has been an error-free campaign for Goldfarb and his crew. He said he’s had to deal with plenty of emergencies. But none was as serious as when word got out that his communications director looked at a Kennedy campaign ad sent her by a Klobuchar supporter. The news made headlines for a couple days before Goldfarb announced he’d fired the staffer and turned over evidence to the FBI for investigation.

    The story quickly died, and later attempts by the Kennedy campaign to revive it have gone nowhere.

    Goldfarb declined to comment on the Kennedy-ad debacle except to say it was the “biggest fire” he’d had to put out. He said he responded to the dustup the way he responds to any campaign emergency. “I take a little bit of time and be quiet and think about it, and not rush to immediate judgment,” he said. “Then I bring in the senior circle of folks to talk about what we want to do. Then we make quick decisions and go.”

    At the age of twenty-nine, Goldfarb is no newcomer to the political scene, having run Jay Benanav’s unsuccessful St. Paul mayoral campaign in 2001 and coordinated John Kerry’s get-out-the-vote drive in 2004. But few political insiders could have predicted his role in one of the nation’s highest-profile Senate races.

    The New York native cut his organizing teeth doing Saul Alinsky–style community work while taking a semester of urban studies classes in Chicago. He came to Minnesota to study at Macalester College, where he graduated in 1999 with a degree in urban studies. The following year, he ran the St. Paul schools referendum campaign, and he later worked for AFSCME and Progressive Minnesota.

    Goldfarb was working in the private sector when Klobuchar called last February. Part of a Minneapolis-based media distribution start-up called InRadio at the time, he was newly married and negotiating deals with artists and their record labels in New York, where his wife, Nora Whalen, was attending graduate school. “I was enjoying life a lot,” he recalls, and though he was flattered by Klobuchar’s offer (noting “there’s lots of great people who do this stuff”), he actually wasn’t all that keen to come back to the Midwest.

    Whalen wouldn’t finish grad school until May, and Goldfarb admitted that the prospect of being separated from her for several months was not particularly appealing. “It wasn’t like a no-brainer,” he said of the decision. “I took a little bit of convincing.”

    But he and Klobuchar clicked from the beginning. They agreed that the campaign would rely more on grassroots organizing than on massive media ad buys and direct mail. And Goldfarb knew how to build a campaign from the ground up. “We see things very similarly,” he said of himself and Klobuchar.

    Still, Goldfarb hesitated until Whalen weighed in on the matter, and she was fairly blunt: “She thought I was an idiot to consider not doing it,” he says.

    As election day nears, Goldfarb said he doesn’t regret the decision. He’s learned a lot and has had the opportunity to work with some “incredible” people. The schedule is brutal, but he still finds time to play soccer once a week, spend time with his wife, eat periodically (“You’ve got to remember to make time for food,” he advised), and sleep as much as possible. “I’ve had to reduce all the other components of my life.”

    As intense a job as it is, Goldfarb pushes on each day with the knowledge that what he’s doing is really important. “It’s a sense of purpose [driven by the fact] that our elected officials make really important decisions that affect all of our lives,” he said.

    So there’s no sense that this job—especially if your candidate wins—might add a little luster to your résumé?

    “I really only do this because I think it’s important. I have no interest in being a candidate or being in the legislative system or running other campaigns. It’s just the most important thing I could do this year,” he said. “After this, I’m going to do something else.”

    Following the election, Goldfarb will spend “a couple of weeks” closing down the campaign operation before heading off to New York for Thanksgiving and then taking an extended vacation with his wife.

    Any particular destination?

    Not really, he said. “Just a quiet time in a place where there are no Blackberrys.”

    The Pro
    John Blackshaw’s first campaign-organizing effort landed him in the office of his school-district superintendent. He and a fellow freshman at his Pasadena, California, high school wanted to know who the best teachers were. Because there was no other way to obtain evaluations, they conducted a survey among their classmates.

    “We were really serious about it,” he recalled. “But the teachers went nuts.”

    Blackshaw and his pal were summoned to the superintendent’s office, various attorneys were called in, and eventually, the impromptu survey was permitted (with some compromises). Blackshaw later headed a two-person ticket for president and vice-president of the student body—the first time that approach had ever been considered at the school—and won.
    Such leadership aspirations came pretty naturally to Blackshaw. The son of active California Democrats, he had volunteered for Bobby Kennedy’s presidential campaign in 1968 and still vividly recalls watching on television that June evening as his candidate was shot and killed after having essentially secured the Democratic nomination with his California-primary victory.

    But rather than giving up on the political process, Blackshaw dove in. He took his political science degree from the University of California– Santa Barbara to Washington, DC, where he interned for U.S. Senator Harrison Williams during the Abscam scandal, which cost the New Jersey politian his seat in 1982. After law school, Blackshaw rose to the upper echelons of the doomed 1988 Michael Dukakis presidential campaign.

    Two years later, Pat Forceia asked him to come to Minnesota to work on the long-shot U.S. Senate campaign of a Carleton College political science professor named Paul Wellstone. Blackshaw ended up running that campaign and finding a new life in the political arena.

    Blackshaw stayed on as Wellstone’s chief of staff for a year before wandering away from non-stop politics and building his marketing, communications, and public relations résumé. He spent some time with Forceia and the Minnesota North Stars, did some consulting with the Minneapolis-based Tunheim Partners, and headed up ad guru Bill Hillsman’s company for a couple years.

    Blackshaw never completely left the political world, though. Like many campaign operatives, he continued to advise candidates even as he maintained a full-time consulting business. In the end, it’s all about sales. “We’re not selling a product, but many of the same principles apply,” he explained. “We’re selling ideas, selling personality, selling a vision.”

    These days, Blackshaw’s marketing and communications skills, honed inside and outside the world of politics over the past two decades, allow him, like any well-connected consultant, to slide into and out of any political campaign that’s smart enough to call. He was part of the Howard Dean phenomenon in 2004 before getting a call from Rybak last spring.

    The Minneapolis mayor, Blackshaw said, was “very coachable” about ideas and style but had trouble articulating his vision—especially around the issue of public safety. It was clear early on in the campaign that his opponent, Hennepin County Commissioner Peter McLaughlin, was going to hammer him on crime. Blackshaw recalls how long it took Rybak and his staff to grasp the importance of the issue. At a meeting, he told them they needed to put more cops on the street or Rybak could lose the election. “The staff kept saying, ‘We can’t do that. There’s no money,’ ” he recalled.

    “Turn off some streetlights,” Blackshaw suggested.

    After much wrangling, the staff came back with a proposal to hire three more officers. “They were really congratulating themselves for that, and I’m saying, ‘Three?’ ”

    Rybak eventually found the money to hire sixty officers. “He finally got it,” Blackshaw said.

    For all its ups and downs, last year’s Rybak campaign was easy compared to the Lourey contest. Blackshaw came on board early in the game as a comanager, along with longtime local political strategist Joe Barisonzi, and the team soon had the scrappy state senator in a position to win the DFL nomination at the state convention in June. But when Blackshaw arrived in Rochester the first day of the convention, the Lourey operation was in a shambles. “The campaign just imploded,” he said.

    Lourey staffers were obsessed with persuading party officials to remove the Mike Hatch signs that covered the walls of the convention hall, taking away energy and staff from the floor operation, which is so critical to counting and swaying delegates. Distracted by the sign issue, Lourey forces lost valuable ground to both Hatch and Steve Kelley, and wound up finishing a disappointing third.

    “The campaign was decimated after the convention,” Blackshaw said. “We had to rebuild it.” But he couldn’t. In the September primary, Hatch buried Lourey by a margin of almost three to one.

    Just another campaign? Maybe, but Blackshaw moves on knowing that the game has changed. Campaigns are getting more expensive, meaner, and more personal, he said, pointing particularly to the attacks on congressional candidate Keith Ellison. “It’s more of a blood sport.”

    The Rookie
    Running a political campaign, especially a “bottom-of-the-ballot” contest like the race for Hennepin County attorney, is not a glamorous job. At this level, the campaign manager has to do everything: coordinate volunteers, communicate with the media, schedule events, and coach the candidate. But for Gia Vitali, who’s running Andy Luger’s bid to succeed Amy Klobuchar, it’s just part of a larger learning process.

    “Everybody comes to you,” said the thirty-year-old Little Canada native. “You have to prioritize things every day, every hour.”

    The former aide to U.S. Representative Bruce Vento and U.S. Representative Betty McCollum is running her first campaign, and it’s proving to be a test not only of her perseverance and organizing abilities but of her long-term interest in serious campaign work. Vitali, seen by some local politicos as a rising star, admits that she’d love to make this a career even as she wonders how she’s going to survive through Election Day.

    “You don’t get into this business for the money or the job security,” she said. “You’ve got to love it.”

    And to hear Vitali tell it, you have to be in it to win.

    Unlike many of the campaign managers I talked to for this story, Vitali has little interest in the underdog campaign—the principled candidate who’s running primarily to raise a set of issues or to make a certain point about the process. She says she understands that perspective, but she’d avoid such a campaign.

    “If I was going to put everything into this and the candidate was going to put everything into this, you ought to get something out of it,” she said. “There has to be a reality check.”

    Vitali hasn’t always been that competitive; helping to get out the vote for Kerry in 2004 may have lit a fire. When Luger asked her to run his campaign more than a year ago, she agreed only to meet with him and see if he was a serious candidate. “I asked him, ‘Do you know what you’re getting into, and do you really want to work that hard?’ ”

    That’s tough talk from a woman who was entering kindergarten when her candidate graduated from college. But Vitali wanted to be sure Luger was serious before she committed to the eighteen months of grinding campaign work that would be required to place an unknown local attorney in a position to challenge Mike Freeman.

    As the campaign moves into its final days, Vitali has done just that. Luger won the DFL endorsement and is likely to prevail on November 7. But as Vitali noted early on, nothing comes easy. To win, you must surround yourself with committed people who have different perspectives, you must be able to communicate effectively, and you have to work hard—really hard.

    “There’s tons of pressure,” Vitali admitted, but she does her best to maintain a little balance by running twice a week, setting aside some time for family, and remembering that there is a finish line to this and every election. “There are seven more weeks to work for this goal,” she said. “I can do anything for seven weeks.”

    And if your candidate loses?

    “I’m not going to lose,” she snapped. “I don’t think about losing. If you think about losing, you open the door to losing.”

    Vitali’s also trying not to think about what her life will be like on November 8. If Luger wins, there will be transition-team work as he readies himself for office, but beyond that, she really doesn’t know what’s next.

    “I’m not sure I’ll be working another campaign after this,” Vitali said, noting that she has some interest in marketing, lobbying, and the labor movement, but despite the long hours, the anonymity, and the utter inevitability of that first loss somewhere down the road, she’s not sure she wouldn’t dive back in. “There’s a piece of me that fears that if I’m not a part of this, I’ll be missing something.”

    The Captain

    By his own count, Michael Guest has worked on about twenty campaigns over the past decade. He’s been instrumental in guiding underdog city council candidates to victory (including Don Samuels’ hard-fought win over incumbent Natalie Johnson Lee last November) and helped deliver the DFL endorsement to Keith Ellison.

    In fact, it’s not uncommon to find Guest working in the background of several campaigns simultaneously. “I like to shape the dynamics,” he admitted.

    And while the thirty-nine-year-old strategist has been known to characterize his political activity as part public service, part addiction (he says he’s been trying to retire since 2004), he remains one of the area’s most sought-after consultants.

    In January, when her campaign was faltering, Lourey called on Guest to help rebuild morale. “They ended up calling me ‘Captain,’ ” he recalled.

    Not that such demand necessarily translates into a living wage. Over the years, Guest has parlayed his skills and network into a series of political organizing and lobbying contracts on the local, regional, and national scenes. It gives him the flexibility he needs to maintain his connections to local politics while paying the mortgage on his South Minneapolis home.

    His diversity of experience has prompted Guest to forge some concrete opinions about what can make or break a campaign. Chief among these is that too many candidates spew messages that never reach beyond their own inner circle of advisers. “It’s not what resonates with you, it’s what resonates with the public,” Guest said. “And most people don’t spend five minutes a month thinking about politics.”

    That’s what happened in the Samuels-Johnson Lee race, he explained. Four years earlier, Johnson Lee pulled a shocking upset of then City Council President Jackie Cherryhomes. But that was an anti-incumbent year. In 2005, there was no such sentiment, but Johnson Lee still ran as an outsider. “It was a casebook example of not knowing what got her elected,” he said.

    Samuels, on the other hand, turned out to be one of Guest’s favorite candidates. “He understood his shortcomings and took advice.”

    So the message needs to be simple, practical, and relevant to voters. But even when you craft an effective message, it doesn’t guarantee success.

    At least that’s the lesson Guest learned from his own city council run in 2001, when he challenged incumbent Kathy Thurber. That challenge ultimately convinced Thurber not to run for reelection, Guest argues, but it wasn’t enough to win him the DFL endorsement, which went to Gary Schiff—with Thurber’s support.

    Guest doesn’t lose much sleep over the setback. “I like selling other people. I’m not effective selling myself,” he said.

    Besides, there’s a clear upside to being outside of the city hall power structure. A Samuels supporter tiled Guest’s basement floor in thanks for his work on the campaign. And State Representative Tim Mahoney of St. Paul trades plumbing work for Guest’s speechwriting and other services.

    “I can never run for office, because I’d have to give up all the free work,” he said.

    Forrest Gump
    At the 1988 DFL caucuses, Sonja Dahl was standing alone in her Nuclear Freeze/Skip Humphrey subcaucus, wondering whether there were any other principled DFL peaceniks in the hall, when a handsome young man approached her and indicated his support for her cause. It was Norm Coleman.

    This is only one of the many ironies this Minneapolis veteran of the political wars can point to when she recalls her more than twenty-year career as an activist, volunteer, and campaign manager. Dahl was purged, along with most of the campaign staff, during State Senator John Marty’s run for governor in 1994, dispatched to Willmar to work for Congressman David Minge, and helped elect Paul Wellstone to the U.S. Senate only to have him die on her birthday.

    “I’m the person who knows everybody,” Dahl said. Indeed, Rybak once compared her to Forrest Gump. Given that she’s been a fixture on nearly every significant political campaign since the early 1980s, it’s probably an accurate description. Still, the forty-eight-year-old Dahl is more the prototypical campaign worker than the high-octane political strategist. She’s the one who knows how to get your signs up in the best location in a convention hall, the one who knows how to represent your campaign in the ballot-counting process, and the one who can get your phone banks working for those last-minute get-out-the-vote drives.

    Dahl’s résumé ranges from stints at Clean Water Action and the Nuclear Weapon Freeze Campaign to statewide campaigns for Wellstone, Marty, Tom Daschle, and Tom Harkin, a congressional race for Minge, and innumerable local contests. She recalls Marty firing almost his entire campaign about three weeks before the 1994 gubernatorial election despite the fact that his fundraising operation was so effective that he “couldn’t spend the money fast enough” in the days leading up to the election.

    Then there was the Minge race in 1992, when the campaign manager tabbed her to travel to Willmar and organize Kandiyohi County in the two weeks before the election. “We had no volunteers, no phone banks,” she said. “My volunteers were a high school kid and an eighty-year-old farmer.”

    Minge won the election by a mere 500 votes, but he carried Dahl’s county by 2,500 votes. “I really felt like I made a difference,” she said.

    For delivering Kandiyohi County, Dahl was paid $500.

    Dahl can handle the modest compensation; what bothers her is how people look at campaigns and assume the tide turns on some isolated issue rather than on the grueling labor of the campaign workers. The 1990 Wellstone victory is a case in point. Conventional wisdom suggests that incumbent senator Rudy Boschwitz lost the election because he circulated a letter to Jewish supporters claiming that he was a “better Jew” than Wellstone. Dahl points out that the groundwork for that upset was laid weeks beforehand, recalling the moment she first noticed that there were more volunteers for the phone banks than they could use. “The energy and momentum were just palpable,” she said.

    The Insider
    When he was five years old, Peter Wagenius met Walter Mondale, and soon after, he was doing literature drops for his mother’s campaign and making lawn signs out of plywood. He’s not one to idealize politics.

    Wagenius, the son of longtime State Representative Jean Wagenius, now works as a senior policy aide for Mayor Rybak and has worked on more campaigns than he can remember. Yet he’s managed to maintain a reasonable perspective on the process. “If you want to change the world or your community, political activism is the way to do it,” he said.

    Which is not to say that “the carnival of politics,” as Wagenius called it, doesn’t get a bit bizarre at times. After all, those who are most attracted to politics tend to be people who want something either for themselves or for their community, people with too much time on their hands, or people who like to be close to power. This can lead to odd behavior, long meetings, poor candidates, or all three.

    Wagenius recalls his first state convention, in 1990, when convention officials dealt with a bomb threat by debating the pros and cons of evacuating the hall—never deviating from Robert’s Rules of Order. And he remembers without much fondness when the new manager of the John Marty campaign fired the whole fundraising department before realizing that it was the only aspect of the campaign having any success. The manager then tried to keep the newly-fireds from leaving by promising them jobs, when everyone on the staff knew Marty was going to be buried by Arne Carlson.

    Wagenius later helped State Representative Phil Carruthers oust longtime Speaker of the House Irv Anderson. When news of the vote was reported on the radio, Wagenius had to pull over. “I was screaming in my car,” he recalled. “When I got home, I was literally congratulating the furniture.”

    If that sounds pathological, Wagenius wouldn’t disagree. “In order to clock the hours, you need to believe you have history in your hands. You need to believe you can control the outcome if you work hard enough,” he said.

    Those beliefs can lead to heartbreak and “complete and utter helplessness,” of course, as Wagenius learned firsthand when Skip Humphrey “got his clock cleaned” by Jesse Ventura. But it can also bring you the kind of joy he felt when Rybak beat two-term incumbent mayor Sharon Sayles Belton in 2001.

    All of Wagenius’ coworkers thought he was insane to work for Rybak, but he says he was convinced Rybak was going to win. So, as he had done with John Marty and Phil Carruthers, he set out to prove them all wrong—and succeeded.

    “I knew,” he said, with more wonderment than hubris. “Do you know how good that feels?”

  • LOCAL MUSIC: It's Different for Girls

    Excerpted from the forthcoming memoir, Petal Pusher (Atria, June 2007).

    Part 1: Tired of Being a Spectator
    1985—Madison, Wisconsin

    I’m going to start a band with my girlfriends, and we’re all planning a move to the current, or at least closest, music capital of the world, Minneapolis. About that small issue of not having spent our teens locked in our bedrooms jacking off with guitars, but rather, cheerleading and memorizing the choreography from Grease: No problem. We look the part. I can carry a tune. And I know all three chords to “Wild Thing” on guitar, so I’m almost there. As a woman, it’s taken me this long to connect my interest and longing (I’m a twenty-three-year-old college dropout) to something I could actually do—rather than spend the rest of my life just watching.

    We’re keeping our band project a secret until we can acquire skills, equipment, and write some songs. No boys allowed. I want me and the girls to be coddled, protected, and admired like the rock boys I’ve been watching. We will rock you—and all we have to do is jam, fiddle with song ideas on a tape recorder, practice a couple times a week, play a gig now and then, record an album a year, and be wry, clever, and funny. In exchange, we’ll have our choice of the cream of the opposite sex as well as the protection and admiration of our peers. Everyone will want us; everyone will want to buy us drinks. Keep in mind that my favorite song as a little girl was “Daydream Believer.”

    Part 2: The Birth and Toddler Years of Zuzu’s Petals
    1988–1994—Minneapolis

    Another all-women three-piece band in town, Babes in Toyland, has become instantly popular. They regularly sell out local venues and are making records for an ultrahip label out of Seattle called Sub Pop. They’re already touring and garnering international attention. Unlike Zuzu’s Petals, they did a good job when they opened for Soul Asylum .… While Babes lead singer, Kat, spits “Vomit my heart/ Spread my legs apart,” my bandmate, Coleen, hiccups, “Boy, you better buy yourself a spine, ’cuz you ain’t wearing mine.”

    Nationwide, there’s a ton of all-women bands at the moment: Babes, L7, Scrawl, Calamity Jane, The Friggs. There’s also a lot of women singer-songwriters (Brenda Kahn, Victoria Williams, Shawn Colvin) and even more female-fronted bands with ringer dudes filling in on guitar or drums (Hole, Throwing Muses, The Breeders, Salem 66). The word used to describe the hot, hardcore babes making rock is “foxcore.” Their most noticeable fashion statement is the naughty-Lolita look—a phenomenon, perfected by Kat Bjelland of Babes in Toyland, of wearing too-tight schoolgirl dresses. The look is known simply as “kinderwhore.”

    …The music-loving women who are not in bands work for record labels, music publications, radio stations, and in nightclubs. On occasion, we sense a minor backlash from them. Some dislike our lack of in-your-face politics. Some don’t care for our music. Some respond unfavorably to those we date or befriend. When we invade their turf, they glaze over with an icy reserve or they warily just tolerate us. One night, a soundman breaks the news that Zuzu’s Petals will never get another gig in one of his clubs because, for one of the above-mentioned reasons, its female booking agent doesn’t like us.

    Part 3: Why It Doesn’t Last
    Winter 1994—Minneapolis

    “You guys [meaning gals],” says the president of Restless Records, “need to strike while the iron is hot. You need to get into the studio and crank out a new record.”

    “Okay,” I say, not mentioning that our once-prolific songwriting has dried up after a year on the road.

    “I want to get together with you alone before we begin recording,” our new producer, Albhy, requests of me over the phone. I meet him at his hotel’s restaurant in downtown Minneapolis on a frozen January afternoon.

    “How do things work with you chicks?” he asks.

    “We’re a democracy,” I utter weakly, unconvinced of the possibility.

    “It never works, believe me,” he says.

    Part 4: Summer 1994
    —somewhere in the parched Midwest

    I used to envy my bandmates Co and Linda for being sexy brunettes. Now I covet their ability to make the most of our situation by insisting we have a good time. What’s not fun about having larger, more receptive audiences? (Nothing.) We’re more functional onstage than we are during the rest of the day, when we’re left staring at the passing highway, lost in private thoughts. There’s a small chance that we’re about to break through to the next level. But it’s not happening fast enough. I keep comparing our progress with other femme bands like Hole, Belly, and L7; they’re all on major labels while we’re schlepping away on an indie. What if we’ve hit our ceiling, like this is the best it’s ever going to be? That would suck. What if I missed my childbearing years while on the road, forgoing a home and a family? Then my greatest fear would become reality: I would become a rock hag, holed up in some crusty apartment filled with cats and a revolving cast of vaguely impressed (yet apathetic) younger lovers. That would really suck.

  • LOCAL MUSIC: The Audiophiles

    Chris Osgood
    Age: 52 Background: Formed the seminal Minneapolis punk band, The Suicide Commandos, in 1974 and then went on to serve as label manager/producer for Twin/Tone Records. Currently serves as director of artist services for Springboard for the Arts, a St. Paul-based nonprofit dedicated to helping self-employed creative folks earn a living.

    Name some of the local bands you’re listening to.
    The three newest things in my purview are Tim O’Reagan’s new record—I was listening to that just today. I was listening to the Mad Ripple, which is Jim Walsh’s new project. I’ve also been listening to a new band called Texatonka. I listen to a lot of local music because of my gig at Springboard.

    Where do you go to buy music?
    I try to support the indies out there as much as possible—the Roadrunners of the world and, of course, Treehouse. I give a plug to both of them. And a plug to the [Electric] Fetus as well. I throw as much of my business to brick-and-mortar stores as I can.

    What’s your concertgoing schedule like these days?
    I’m not the inveterate concertgoer I used to be. Back when I worked at Twin/Tone, there were years I was out at concerts three hundred days out of the year. These days, there are other things I like to do. I like to fly-fish, and fly-fishing is exactly the opposite of being at First Ave.

    Ryan Cameron
    Age: 46 Background: Owner of Let It Be, the record store that stood on Tenth Street and Nicollet Avenue in downtown Minneapolis from 1987 to 2005. The store hosted many notable in-store performances by local and national bands. Since it closed, “I’ve just been concentrating on selling things online and a few other places—collectibles, out-of-print stuff, and rarities.”

    How do you find out about new music?
    By reading the couple of magazines that I read. Mojo is a good one. Uncut is another good one. The Wire is good for electronic music, although that’s not my forte in terms of what I listen to.

    So, is the good stuff still out there?
    There’s always been really, really good music; there just always has been! Sometimes you just have to dig deeper. And now it’s gotten to be a little confusing. Do you go to a record store? Do you download it?

    Do you have any local favorites?
    I have to be honest and say that I don’t listen to a lot of local stuff. I just don’t. It’s a fault of mine. I just don’t go out and see a lot of local shows, and I think that’s the best way to experience local music.

    Lindsay Kimball
    Age: 23 Background: Intern at 89.3 The Current; former music director at Luther College’s KWLC. She also booked all the campus concerts and wrote all the music reviews for the student newspaper. “They called me the ‘music monopoly.’ ”

    How do you go about finding new music?
    A lot of it is talking to friends and people I run into at shows, just seeing what they’re listening to. The other two ways are, one, going to shows—whether it’s a small local show or a national show—and two, MySpace.

    Name some of the local bands you like.
    I was just listening to the Get-Up Johns this morning—for a completely different style of music, more of an O Brother, Where Art Thou? sound. The Duplomacy disc is pretty good. I’m still digging Coach Said Not To, the Alarmists. At first I wasn’t sure about the Alarmists, but then I saw them live and thought, yeah, they’re pretty fun.

    Warm fuzzies for the Minneapolis music scene:
    The cool thing about the Minneapolis scene is that there’s a huge sense of community. You see the same people at all the shows. The bands go out of their way to support each other. I’ve made tons of friends just by running into people at shows. I don’t want to say it’s a quality-of-life thing—but for me, it is.

    David de Young
    Age: 42 Background: Publishes HowWasTheShow .com, a website that, since 2002, has featured reviews of concerts by local and national acts. “When I go out, say, on a Saturday, I might see ten different bands because I go to four different venues. I try to go to as many shows as possible.”

    Local music scene: alive or dead?
    I’m not one of those people who says these are the heydays as opposed to five years ago, because I’m kind of old and I’ve seen it all—and it’s always kind of been the same.

    Where do you go to hear new music these days?
    For brand-new bands I’ve never seen before, I’ve probably seen more new bands at the Hexagon than I have at First Ave or the Turf Club, because crazy stuff, unexpected stuff, just happens there more often. But the answer is not venues, it’s people. I’d have to say that I hear about new bands from other musicians faster than people who just go to shows.

    What are some of your favorite local bands?
    The Alarmists, White Light Riot, Stook, Espionage! … which I guess includes some former Man Planet guys.

    Are there any bands you haven’t seen yet but plan to?
    Middlepicker, I’ve heard good things about. I haven’t seen ’em but I know I’m supposed to.

    Any local discs people ought to hear?
    I think everyone should buy Tim O’Reagan’s new CD because it’s amazing. For people who like the Minneapolis sound, Stook’s Soundtrack to My Minneapolis is good.

    Sonia Grover
    Age: 31 Background: Started working at First Avenue as a booking assistant in 1998; has since been thoroughly entrenched in the process of booking Minneapolis’ most prominent club.

    How often are you out hearing live music?
    I’m here [at First Avenue] like four or five nights a week. So if I go to another venue, it’s probably just one or two nights outside of First Ave. Sometimes if you get a night off, you just don’t want to go see another band.

    What are some of your favorite local bands right now?
    Well, I’ll always check out Mark Mallman’s shows. I’m a big fan of Chooglin’, or someone like the God Damn Doo Wop Band, or the Dad in Common.

    Any favorite local discs?
    We [at First Avenue] get a lot of music sent to us, so we’re lucky that way. And then I have friends who are experts with downloading, so I tend not to buy a lot of music. But I listen to it. I see most of these bands live or maybe listen to them on MySpace, but I’m not listening to any one local record right now. And you know, there are a lot of stations in town with good local shows, so I just tune into those anyway—like the Homegrown Show [KQRS], Jason Nagel’s show on Cities 97, and the Local Show on The Current. Radio K tends to play local music throughout the day, but also on Off the Record.

  • LOCAL MUSIC: Cubano Libre!

    At times during his monthly performances at the Dakota Jazz Club & Restaurant in downtown Minneapolis, Cuban-born Nachito Herrera seems less intent on playing the piano than on consuming it—greedily, octave after octave—his thick, muscular fingers tenderizing the keys under a barrage of powerful yet precise blows, his stocky frame bouncing up and down on the bench like a little boy waiting to rip open presents on Christmas morning. This is the Nachito described as “Explosive. Crowd pleasing … Jaw-droppingly good” by music critic Tom Surowicz in the Minneapolis StarTribune.

    But there’s another side to Herrera’s playing, a dimension that reflects decades of formal training in classical music. The delicate lyricism and sensitivity he brings to the passages of, say, Bach or Chopin, he weaves unexpectedly into jazz medleys, as he did in a recent show dedicated to the music of Duke Ellington. This is the Nachito Herrera whose virtuoso riffs moved Latin Beat Magazine’s Jesse “Chuy” Varela to marvel at Herrera’s “unbridled freedom,” at the “solos that can melt snow off the sidewalk.”

    “It’s hard to believe,” Varela declares, that Herrera’s music is “coming from St. Paul, Minnesota, and not La Habana, Cuba.

    Hard indeed.

    Long day’s journey to White Bear Lake

    Herrera’s story has a fairy-tale quality to it—a gifted protagonist rescued from the grip of some dark force by a fairy godmother. Only in this case, the fairy godmother was a fairy godfather: Lowell Pickett, owner and founder of the Dakota. It wasn’t Pickett who first brought Herrera to Minnesota, but he’s largely responsible for the fact that this Latin jazz prodigy now resides among stolid, northern European types in a modest ranch-style house in White Bear Lake.

    Like the nineteenth-century graduates of the traditional atelier system in France, who went on to invent modern art, Herrera earned his chops the old-fashioned way, studying classical piano for 16 years before making his name in jazz.

    The pianist was born Ignacio Herrera (“Nachito” is the diminutive of “Ignacio”) on May 31, 1966, in Santa Clara, his mother’s small Cuban hometown. His parents, Ignacio and Romelia, met in medical school but never became doctors. Both were pianists and outstanding musicians in their own right. As Nachito puts it, “My mother had very good ears.”

    Like his son, Herrera’s father was a performer, who also conducted, arranged, and composed music. His father’s pursuit of a music career led to the family’s move, not long after Nachito was born, to a suburb of Havana offering many more performance venues and opportunities than Santa Clara. The family home was also Ignacio’s rehearsal space, and it was here that Nachito first encountered many of the greats of the Cuban jazz world.

    “Through my father, I was exposed to all different styles of music,” Herrera recalls. “He had working relationships with Rubén González, Chucho Valdés, Joseito Gonzales, and the like. Watching them perform, I realized I would be able to play classical and Cuban music, too, if I wanted.”

    At the age of five, Nachito was enrolled in one of Cuba’s top music schools. From there he went on to the National School of Art, a highly competitive institution, and then to the Superior Institute of Art, where he studied piano with a focus on classical training and technique. “Chopin, Liszt, Bach, Gershwin, Beethoven, Rachmaninoff, you name it,” he says. “We were immersed in them all.” Even before he finished school, his prodigious talents stood out. Herrera’s first taste of fame came at the age of twelve, when he performed Rachmaninoff’s notoriously difficult “Piano Concerto No. 2” with the Havana Symphony Orchestra. Today, his extensive classical training is evident even when he’s playing jazz, in the extraordinary touch and precision he brings to the music’s quiet moments.

    After graduation from the Superior Institute of Art, Herrera toured with a number of jazz groups and served as musical director of the Tropicana Club in Havana. His big break came in 1996, when the lead pianist of ¡Cubanismo!, Cuba’s foremost Latin jazz ensemble, fell ill; Herrera was asked to sit in for him at the Montréal Jazz Festival and on a subsequent two-week tour of Europe. A year or so later, he ended up as the troupe’s musical director, traveling around the world (the group performed in the U.S. two or three times a year) as well as arranging music for the ensemble. In the meantime, he met and married Aurora Gonzales, a law student at Havana University. The couple has two children—sixteen-year-old Mirdalys, a vocalist who regularly performs with her father, and David, age twelve.

  • The Genie and His Decorative Light-Diffusing Novelty Lamp

    For a guy who spends all year thinking about Halloween, Will Niskanen could hardly be described as scary. Slight and soft-spoken, dressed in khakis and brown loafers, and exhibiting the good manners of a Boy Scout, Niskanen greets me at one of his favorite haunts, Mill City Cafe, pulling out a chair and offering to order a beverage. His studio is just upstairs, so the café is a great place to take a break from sketching skulls and spiders and tombstones.

    Like several of his neighbors in the California Building, Niskanen is a graduate of the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. What’s rare is the fact that, at age forty-two, after years of “farting around,” he’s gotten to that enviable place of doing exactly what he wants to do. He’s not selling artwork in galleries, however; instead, his creations have names like the Flickering Flame Genie Lamp, the Skull Wall Candle Sconce, and the Flaming Skull Sconce—the last, a popular seller at Spencer Gifts.

    So how did a nice Finnish boy, raised on a Carver County farm, wind up inventing glow-in-the-dark geegaws, light-up novelties, and flaming decorations? Or maybe the better question is, why?

    Part of the answer can be traced back to that rural childhood. Niskanen’s dad, who was a forester with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, bought a run-down dairy farm in 1964, when Niskanen was a one-year-old. “He was really into preservation,” Niskanen said. “I think he bought this farm to try out a bunch of his ideas. My parents went to work picking up all the trash and renovating the barn. We had a horse, we had tractors, eighty acres of corn and soybeans. We always bailed hay. You always have to do that in the middle of a hot, hot day.” The elder Niskanen was also “a real disciplinarian,” his son said. “When we were kids, we all had crew cuts. My dad had a very firm idea of right and wrong.” And on a nice day, said Niskanen, if the kids were inside watching television, “he’d come in and pull the plug and wrap it around the TV.”

    That’s how young Will came to spend a lot of his time tinkering in the barn, using the shop equipment and hand tools to build everything from birdhouses to an elaborate train set, which he assembled in the barn’s loft. Tucked away in the country and on a limited budget, Niskanen had to create all the model-train accessories other kids might buy at a craft store. “I wanted so bad to go into town for more track,” he laughed, “but I couldn’t, so I thought, well maybe I can make it myself. I got a book to learn how other people made their mountains, and I made the mountains out of plaster. Because I lacked a lot of the cool mechanical devices you could buy, it ended up being a lot more scenery. Lots of tunnels and trees made out of weeds,” he said. “I learned how to solder, cut wood, do some carpentry, paint a background.” All of this fostered in him “a sort of self-reliance,” said Niskanen. “My first response when my car breaks down is probably to fix it myself. Most things in my life are like that.”

    Which brings us back to the present, in Niskanen’s modest and currently cluttered studio, where self-reliance has inspired an entire series of odd, glowing contraptions. A purple tube that vaguely resembles a lava lamp is throwing light against a black backdrop. Next to it is a gray light that looks as if smoke is wafting through it. A smaller orange light nearby is meant to sit inside a pumpkin. These are all products born of Niskanen’s pride and joy: U.S. Utility Patent 6,955,440: Decorative Light-Diffusing Novelty Lamp and the mechanical process it employs. For someone accustomed to tinkering and inventing and dealing with a constant flow of new ideas, the patent-application process was a sort of Zen teacher, a lesson in patience and detachment.

    Showing off his official U.S. patent certificate, Niskanen clucks over it like a new parent whose offspring arrived after a difficult delivery. “The whole patent process is this back-and-forth thing of denial and rejection,” he said. Despite all of the labor involved, he said he hopes to have “six or eight of these things someday.” Sitting down at his desk, he read choice passages from the patent, which he finds amusing for their colorful, sometimes titillating language; the wording must be absolutely precise while also addressing the object’s unique contribution to the world of gadgetry.

    “‘Novelty lamps have been used for years to provide entertainment and relaxation to persons throughout the world,’” he read, nodding. “‘For example, many persons are familiar with lava lamps, which by heating blobs of material, induce the material to change buoyancy and thus float and sink within a liquid bath. Sometimes, the blobs are colored.’ Don’t you love it?” he pauses, looking up. “Blobs!” He continues reading.

    “‘Sometimes the blobs may have different colors. The appearance of the floating and sinking globs’—Ha! Now it’s globs!—‘may be further enhanced by the casting of light upon the blobs. In any event, novelty lamps such as lava lamps often induce dangers to the environment.’”

    The various hazards produced by hot and blobby lava lamps were key to Niskanen’s invention, which is seen as a safe alternative for dorm room and bedroom decor. The Decorative Light-Diffusing Novelty Lamp, stripped to its essential bits, consists of a stand, a lightweight fan, a plastic tube, and a piece of silk that Niskanen mentions is officially referred to in the patent language as the “flexible member,” one of those terms that cause him to chortle. It is scheduled for mass production and distribution in 2007, and Niskanen is already building out variations, such as the smaller lamp for jack o’ lanterns, a light-sword toy, and a “wave panel lamp junior” for nightstands. He also envisions a much larger version of the lamp, one that would wave light six or eight feet high and create a cool atmosphere at proms and nightclubs. And there are all sorts of other things in the works. Niskanen is developing “yard luminaries”—those sandwich-board-style decorations with a design cut into the panels, which are lit from within—for all seasons and occasions, including, of course, Halloween. Those versions have waving green, orange, and red lights behind cutouts of a spider’s web, or a witch, or a pumpkin. “For some reason right now, I’m into things that light up,” he said. “And things for parties.”

    Musing over how he came to be an inventor of Halloween novelties, Niskanen noted it’s not necessarily something that he always wanted to do. “It just happens to fit,” he said. “All of the things I’ve done have sort of led me to this place. I’m a late bloomer, I guess.” He received no encouragement from his high school art teacher, whom Niskanen describes as “a load, a real turd.” Luckily, the faculty at MCAD recognized his talent, and he received a first-year scholarship to attend. He particularly admires one teacher who, in Niskanen’s early years at the college, stressed craftsmanship. “He would say, ‘If you’re going to weld on that chair, you better make that weld nice. If you’re going to paint that chair, you better paint it right. If you’re going to do it, do it well.’ Old-fashioned stuff. Do it well; distinguish yourself.”

    That approach was a good fit for the self-reliant Niskanen, who was interested in art’s practical applications. “Even when I was going through MCAD, I knew I had this interest in industrial design, and I had kindergarten knowledge of mechanics, but I didn’t know how to join the two in the real world. I had a good basic drawing skill, but I didn’t know how to apply it.”

    After graduation, he worked for a time designing props for Minneapolis’ Minnefex studio. He lived in Des Moines and worked as an illustrator for a woodworking magazine. After a few years, he found himself in Litchfield, sketching cabs for a construction-equipment company. Then he joined Paper Magic Group, a company that specializes in seasonal decorations and set Niskanen to the task of sketching new Halloween products. “I became a pollinating honeybee for ideas, so to speak,” he says. Soon he began to deal more directly with the buyers, and after a time he noticed he was selling himself short. “They’ve done very well with a number of the things that I designed,” Niskanen said. “I was offering all of this energy and creativity to the company.” And that’s when he decided to pursue his own patents and license his own products.

    These days, Niskanen’s creative process usually begins with sketches for a product. Then he’ll go through a period where he roots around at garage sales and Salvation Army and Goodwill stores. He might browse craigslist for a while, looking for electronics (especially old hi-fi gear) and items under the garage-sale or “free stuff” categories that sound intriguing. Then he’ll go get a coffee or wander the seasonal-product aisles at Target. His studio is littered with spray-paint cans and boxes upon boxes of detritus from his foraging trips: plastic parts from computers, hair dryers, and abandoned kitchen gadgets. He uses all of these in building three-dimensional models of his ideas so that potential buyers and Steven Thrasher, his patent attorney, can better envision the finished product.

    “Will has this unique combination,” said Thrasher, “of combining engineering competence with artistic creativity. But the most interesting part of Will’s story, I think, is his persistence. My granddad once said he spent ten years becoming an overnight success, and Will’s like that—he’s an inspiration to people who are just beginning to follow their passion. And he’s an easy guy to root for.”

    In a sea of Spider-Man costumes, Styrofoam gravestones, and fake Dracula teeth—Halloween is second only to Christmas in terms of consumer purchases, generating several billion in sales each year—Niskanen has managed to carve out his own niche. Last spring, at Transworld’s 22nd International Halloween Costume & Party Show in Chicago, he was gratified by the excitement his pieces generated. “Each time I do a show, I walk around and there are few new ideas. I see a product sometimes and think, Well, that’s great, but they missed the cool thing, the cool thing they could have done with it. “I don’t look at Halloween the way a normal person does,”

    Niskanen said. “When Halloween actually comes, I don’t really participate.” Instead, you can probably find him browsing store displays, trying to figure out the next cool thing to do.

  • Party Doll

    “Lincoln’s deathbed physician said he had the body of a Moses. What do I look like, Bill?”

    The doctor, who had just finished examining my father, dropped the covers. He said, “You can’t put off that quadruple forever.”

    “Isn’t that where you take strips from my ass and sew them to my heart? You keep chopping bits off me, Bill. Christ, what am I going to have left, one nut and my elbow?”

    The doctor smiled coldly and put his hat on. “Happy Thanksgiving,” he said, and left.

    The sick room, the whole house, smelled of turkey and onions. Bernard breathed in slowly. “My seventy-first Turkey Day. Whoopy do.” He turned to me, grinning slyly. “Shouldn’t you be in the kitchen helping your mother?”

    “She isn’t my mother,” I said, “she’s your doxy. She can’t be my mother. She’s twenty-eight. I’m twenty-nine. Remember?”

    My father looked at me with interest. “You almost said that as though you minded.”

    My mother, my real mother, is sixty. Her name is Josephine. She is so short that my father, during his affectionate years, used to call her Runtkin. She gardens all the time, wearing rumpsprung corduroys, although when caught up in the excitement of the growing season she’s been known to weed at dawn in her nightie. My mother smells of cool ferny soaps, except on the days when she doses her plants with fish emulsion. She reads for hours every night, mostly Shakespeare. She rarely understood a joke in her life, and my father, who was a stand-up comedian for forty years, said that in the end that was why he divorced her. Actually he was looking for Shirleen, or someone like Shirleen.

    Shirleen is my stepmother. Her bulgy curves spring in and out under shiny fabrics printed with tiger stripes and jungle flowers. She smells of perfume with violent police-blotter names: Assault, Love Jump, Drug Delirium. When my father introduced her to me, secretly he lifted his eyebrows and shrugged a little.

    “What can I do?” he said to me later. “I like it like that.”

    My mother took the divorce quite well, although initially she was confused at being told that their marriage was terrible. “I thought it was rather nice,” she told me hesitatingly, in her gentle voice. I knew what she meant. She thought it was nice because to her, the marriage included everything she cared about. First of all there was me, Rochelle. I’m a cartoonist, sometimes even referred to in national publications as “rising.” She also included the big garden, the prize legumes with their roots going clear to China. Josephine counted the kitchen, and every meal she and Bernard had shared, from the wedding banquet crown roast and pink Lady Baltimore cake to the driest heel of rye, old maids in the popcorn pot. She’d thought the marriage had music. She would always listen to the Metropolitan Opera broadcast Saturday afternoons. My father liked jazz, and Coleman Hawkins would cool up the living room around midnight. My mother counted everything, and that is where she went wrong. She mistook her life for her marriage. People do this, but it’s the surest way I know to get your face stepped on.

    “Hey,” I said now to Bernard, craftily shifting ground. “Did I show you the cartoon New York Magazine bought?” I reached into my portfolio. “They’re asking me if I’ll do a series on this couple.” I put the drawing in his hand. He studied it silently. The cartoon showed a man and woman in colonial dress. The man was very tall and had my father’s face, with a stupid expression. The woman was very short and looked like my mother. She had her hands on her hips and was saying, “Well, one thing I know for sure, bud. From my heart will grow a red, red rose, and from yours, a briar.”

    Bernard, whose nickname is Bud, looked stone-faced at the cartoon for a long minute. Then he gave his short, harsh laugh. He always laughed this way at my cartoons, grudgingly, as though the laughter had been extorted from him with menaces.

    “Right,” he said, “and from my back will grow the knives you keep planting in it. I sent you to that fancy art school and you got good, good enough to humiliate me nationally. Hell, you’re a gifted little shit. Maybe someday you’ll humiliate me internationally.”

    “It’s what I aim toward,” I said. “But cheer up. Think of it this way. If I’m good, at least you got your money’s worth from the art school.”

    “Oh, did I?” he said, staring at the cartoon in his hand. “Right. What a sweet deal for me.” There was a pause, and then he said, “I’m a little surprised you decided to spend Thanksgiving with the old goat and his doxy.”

    “Mother said she wasn’t going to celebrate Thanksgiving this year.”

    There was a silence, during which we both visualized Thanksgiving the year before. Josephine had been up at dawn, stuffing a turkey the size of a pony and filling the house with bouquets, some in old milk bottles and blue quart jars, and others in Waterford goblets.

    In one instant the memory turned us both furious, short of breath.
    “You blame me,” my father said, “God damn it.”

    “I blame you because you’re to blame. You evicted her—”

    “It was better not to drag it out. Sometimes it’s necessary to be cruel to be kind—”

    “This whole concept of necessary cruelty really fascinates me. Take this year.” I spoke in a soft, innocent voice, as though I couldn’t taste smoking chunks of his guilty heart. “When you half-killed Mom by shoving her out of her own home, it was really all for her own good. Silly old Mom, if only she’d known.”

    “That apartment is a palace, she’s living like a queen, I’m paying a fucking fortune—” By this time he was yelling, climbing out of bed and waving his cane. I knew he wouldn’t hit me, he never had. “You’re lying,” he shouted, “you’re lying like a rug,” and as I dodged the cane without effort, I studied the eggplant-purple of his face. I always could jump-start the old man into near insanity. On the other hand, I didn’t want him to drop dead on me. I held my hand up in a truce. Gasping, he collapsed back on his pillow. For a full minute there was no sound in the room except my father mastering his breath. He made no attempt whatever to hide his terribly working face. His eyes were fixed on me, and neither of us blinked. Finally he spoke.

    “Go ahead, pour it out, swill it all over me,” he assumed a weary burlesque of my face and tone, a sniveling, snot-nosed crybaby, “how I faaiii-iled you and faaiii-iled your mother and flushed her whole life down the toilet. Well, you know what? Things are tough all around. Personally, I like having a wife who doesn’t wander around outside in her underwear, talking to herself—”

    “Your property has a wall around it, nobody saw her! She was wearing that flannel granny gown, it covers her from head to toe, and she was reciting sonnets from Shakespeare—”

    “Well, whatever,” he said. “It gave me the creeps. Then there was always the goddamned second cousin hanging around. Who ever asked him? I never did.”

    “Edward has been her best friend all her life,” I said.

    “Jesus Christ, what could be more pathetic than that? The truth is, I’m happy now, and she could be happy if she tried. She refuses.”

    I said, “You talk about her as if she’s some old cow who won’t let her milk down.”

    He smiled slightly and spread his hands, as though to say, I wouldn’t have put it quite that way, but …