Category: Article

^{Boots provided courtesy of Mall of America. Left to right: spike-heeled
boots by Jessica Simpson, $128.95, at Nordstrom, thigh-high boots by
Aldo, $169.99, at Aldo, lace-up boots by BP. Shoes, $109.95, at
Nordstrom.}

Anyone who likes watching women (which is pretty much everyone, including women) doesn’t like summer to end, for all the obvious reasons, but there is consolation. As the leaves turn and fall, as the temperatures drop, as the flesh gets covered back up, the FMBs return.

FMBs are women’s knee-length black boots. If you’re unfamiliar with this mostly British acronym, the “B” stands for boots, the “M” for me, and the “F” for something that makes the earth move and the world go round.

To put it bluntly: I’m a fan.

Beta versions of these boots, not quite so calf-hugging, with heels not quite so tall and deadly, were everywhere when I was a kid, often paired with miniskirts. I saw them on television (Lt Uhura on Star Trek, Catwoman on Batman) and in magazines (dark-haired models with sunglasses pushed up on their foreheads). These weren’t the shorter, whiter, go-go variety worn by Nancy Sinatra and others to dance their little pony steps to. FMBs had something dangerous (Catwoman) and militaristic (Lt Uhura) about them.

Still do. My friend Courtney, a twenty-nine-year-old editor, wears them, she said, “when I feel like kicking ass—mine or someone else’s.” She wears them not so much to attract, but not quite to repel, either. “A girl in a short skirt and tall boots,” she said, “drinking a Cuba Libre and kicking ass at pinball, is a girl to watch out for.” Another friend, Arlene, a grad student in her early thirties, said the boots “cause you to sway and stomp just enough to make people think twice about messing with you.” In this context, they are less FMBs than FYBs: the podiatric version of the rebel’s black-leather jacket.

Boots in general have a long military tradition, and the tall black variety has often been associated with officers. High heels once designated not the FM in FMBs, but rank and class. The higher up you were, the higher up they were. They designated power.

Still do. “They add height, and height equals power,” said Arlene, who at 5’1" is more aware of the height/power dynamic than the tall and obtuse. Kim, a forty-nine-year-old literary event planner, said her FMBs “are a mix of a power and sex thing. You just feel like you can do anything with them on.”

Ah, yes . . . the sex thing. “I just feel sassier wearing them,” my girlfriend Patricia, a fifty-two-year-old graphic designer, said. “I swing my hips more.”

Indeed, long before Lt Uhura and Julie Newmar filled my dreams with props, the German actor and director Erich von Stroheim used his own tall black boots to represent power and sex in silent films like The Wedding March. The son of a Jewish hatmaker, von Stroheim passed himself off as a German aristocrat and military officer after immigrating to the U.S. in 1909. He pretended in life to be what he pretended to be onscreen: a classic case of American self-invention. Which is exactly what the boots offer: a socially sanctioned way to be something you might not be. “They feel like an affectation,” Kim said, “as if you purposefully know what you are doing when you put them on. It’s like a Superman cape or something.” Patricia agrees—“You can’t pretend you don’t know what you’re doing when you put them on,” she said—but at the same time, she uses them less for transformation than for aspiration. “You have to be up to your boots,” she said. “You can’t wear them if you have bad hair. That’s not how the boots work.”

Arlene recalled the first day she wore her FMBs to work: “A male coworker peeped out of his office—and I mean peeped. He said, ‘Is that you? I heard that sound and thought something big and mean was coming.’ You might think that he saw me and adjusted ‘big and mean’ to ‘small and cute’ but actually, it’s the other way around. I swear that, subconsciously, he expanded his approach toward me to include Can be scary and make loud noises. Unpredictable. Proceed cautiously.”

I would argue that this young man wasn’t truly scared. He wanted to be scared in the way that Arlene wanted to be tough. That’s the game, the pretense, the sexual charge. If you be that woman, I’ll be that man.

Makes you wonder who the “me” in FMBs really refers to.

I used to be an overdressed runner. For example, at my first marathon, Grandma’s in 2002, I sported a pair of cropped cotton pants despite the steamy weather that day along the North Shore. The reason for this is that I, like many runners, was born bearing an extra-heavy burden, so to speak. But it’s not what you think; it’s not the half-moons stuck to the hips that plague so many women. In my case, rather, the saddlebags are slung on the other side, around the inner thighs. Long pants were my attempt to wrangle them.

Aesthetically speaking, I don’t find inner-thigh fat at all displeasing. Like large breasts or shapely hips, it’s one of those essential, carnal ways in which females differ from males. The plumpness draws a womanly curve that’s especially appealing, I’ve found, to any number of men. From a biomechanical perspective, however, “thunder thighs” aren’t always so pleasant. Though mine barely brush against each other when I’m walking, the instant I pick up the pace, they begin rubbing violently—unless they are harnessed. The result is that wearing shorts puts some of the tenderest flesh on all the human form at risk for getting rasped into red, smarting rawness.

A few months after that first marathon, an angel swooped down from the heavens and, masquerading as a clerk at my favorite running store, handed me a stick of BodyGlide. Previously, I had relied on petroleum jelly, which was successful in ameliorating but not eliminating some types of abrasion, as long as they occurred from the waist up. For instance, Vaseline shielded my chest from the stabbing seams of my sports bra. But it could not solve the problem of my thighs. Before I’d run so much as a mile, friction would have whisked the jelly away, and my thighs would be chafing along just as before. I had resigned myself to wearing Lycra yoga pants and biking shorts, which kept friction at bay but made me feel stickily and sweatily confined.

BodyGlide changed everything. It isn’t greasy in the same way Vaseline is because it was invented by surfers who didn’t want to muss their expensive neoprene wetsuits. Neither is it gunky or sticky. Instead, BodyGlide is a silky balm. It’s made from plant-based triglycerides, better known as aloe vera and vitamin E, so in cold, windy weather, it staves off cracked, dry skin, too. Then there’s the packaging, much like that of a deodorant stick, which makes it a snap to apply. Amazingly, BodyGlide doesn’t absorb into the skin, nor does it rub off. One inner-thigh application lasts through an entire marathon. And, of course, this allows me to comfortably wear short-shorts (including those sexy, retro, Steve Prefontaine-inspired looks) again, for the first time since, oh, about fourth grade.

So delightful have I found BodyGlide that it has inspired me to experiment with secondary uses. It’s wonderful when wearing summer skirts on especially hot, sticky days, and a few daubs on the ankles relieve the dig of the hard leather on those shoes that are too fashionable not to wear. Indeed, BodyGlide has ascended my list of household necessities and now ranks right up there with toothpaste and AA batteries.

This product is hardly ubiquitous, however; it’s carried only at running specialty shops and other stores, like REI, that cater to endurance athletes (and ironically, are often staffed by skinny folks with no use for BodyGlide). So while it might require a special trip, stocking up on BodyGlide is never a problem. In the process, I can usually justify picking up a pair of hot new running shorts.

The antique barber’s chair in Rocco Altobelli’s office—brick-red leather, brass studs, beautifully carved wood—stands as a reminder of his roots. Having just graduated from high school in Dilworth, Minnesota, the young Altobelli dreamed of becoming a photographer. But he opted for a safer bet: attending his uncle’s beauty school, Josef’s School of Hair Design, just across the state line in Fargo. “My father worked on the railroads,” Altobelli said. “My options were limited.”

But the tide started to turn when, in the late 1960s, Altobelli traveled to London to study with Vidal Sassoon. There, he encountered more sophisticated, geometric cuts. This was the first indication that, rather than small-town barber, Altobelli was to become a big-city style icon. And while he’s done hair shows around the world and his products can be found in salons across the country, Altobelli has kept his business small and family-operated. His chain of salons—the first of which opened in St. Paul in 1974—have never reached past Rochester, Minnesota.

Today, Altobelli looks more Geppetto than Giorgio with his signature shaggy paintbrush mustache. His eyebrows, still dark, are tipped with white, and silver sideburns accent his green eyes. But a penchant for refinement is confirmed by his Italian shoes—brown with an aerated white strip along the tongue. “I bought these in Japan,” he said, hinting at the shopping trips that are a favorite diversion while traveling. “I only have time to shop while out of town.”

These days, you won’t find Altobelli behind a chair at any of his salons. “My son, Nino, is in charge of the artistic end of the business,” he said. “I basically oversee and work on new stuff.” By that, he means alto bella, his salon’s product line, and Greenway Research Lab, where salon products are tested and developed. As of late, Altobelli has been working on his dermAstage skin-care line. A forthcoming product is still under wraps, though Altobelli hinted at a seed-oil blend that’s applied by roller so that tiny holes can be punctured into the skin—a revolutionary method for the penetration of antioxidants, he claimed.

As things turned out, Altobelli grew up to become a photographer of sorts, too. He proudly showed off his eight-by-ten photo (pictured here) of a cattle roundup at his friend’s ranch near Deadwood, South Dakota. This image points to another of Altobelli’s most fervent passions—horsemanship. (He collects artisan saddles and even keeps his own steed, Peso.)

More of his work, mostly black-and-white images, lines the hallways of the Rocco Altobelli corporate offices. On display are photos of models sporting looks ranging from the Dorothy Hamill to the Farrah Fawcett to the shag—three ’dos Rocco swore would never die. The photographs chronicle the various hairstyle fashions Altobelli has seen in his thirtysome years in the business—some beautiful, some bizarre. They also favor the drama of shadow, lending much to the sideways, almost deconstructivist gaze Altobelli casts upon his models and the often geometric sculptures atop their heads. Of his artful use of the lens, he said: “Hairdressing is a lot like photography. They’re both very mechanical, and they both require a good eye.”

The ancient Romans had an annual religious celebration called the Terminalia. It consisted of neighboring landowners coming together at the marker that divided their land to give thanks to Terminus, the god of boundaries. At the end of the Roman year, an altar was built, a sacrifice of a lamb or suckling pig was made, children offered grain and honeycombs, the fire was lit with coals brought from the families’ hearths, and the neighbors would feast on the riches they have shared with the god and each other. As the Roman poet Ovid explained it in his Fasti, “You [Terminus] are the limit of peoples, cities and vast reigns; Without you, all land would be strife.”

Now that the political boundary lines have clearly been drawn after the September primary, would it be too much to hope that candidates concentrate on the common concerns that merit discussion, compromise, and possible solutions? Evidently and unfortunately, the answer to that question is a stentorian yes.

The primary victory of Keith Ellison as the DFL congressional nominee in the Fifth District is the best wedge issue the Republicans could have possibly hoped for. Ellison represents the “perfect storm” of everything Republican strategists would like people to be afraid of. He’s African American; he’s Muslim; he’s liberal; he’s personally disorganized; he filed his taxes and other government reports late; and he said some really stupid things when he was a college student. Except for the African American and Muslim parts, he sounds a lot like me.

Then there’s Alan Fine, the Fifth District Republican candidate. “Alan Fine will be a mainstream voice, and the kind of consensus builder the 5th Congressional District needs to cut through the partisan rancor”—or so says the quote from Ron Carey, Chairman of the Minnesota Republican Party, on the home page of Fine’s website. From Fine himself, though, we get this last week: “[Ellison] is unfit to represent the voters of the Fifth District. … He is the follower of a known racist, Louis Farrakhan … a person who believes that the white man is the anti-Christ, a person who believes that Jews are the scourge of the Earth. I’m personally offended, as a Jew, that we have a candidate like this running for U.S. Congress.” (Did anyone besides me think it odd that Farrakhan would be misquoted to the extent that he would imply being an anti-Christ would be a bad thing?)

If this is what we get from a “mainstream consensus builder,” I naturally wondered what a partisan hack could come up with. As if in answer to my question, Senator Norm Coleman, who is also Jewish, weighed in: “I think folks in the Jewish community are going to have to look closely at that, with his associations with Farrakhan.”

Hey guys, remember the last guy who tried the “Self-Righteous Jew” argument? Does the name Rudy Boschwitz ring a bell?

To cap things off, that old admirer of consensus building, Chairman Carey himself, tried to stick Democratic candidates Amy Klobuchar and Mike Hatch to the Ellison-Farrakhan tar baby, calling for them to “let all Minnesotans know if they support Ellison.” (As of this writing, Klobuchar and Hatch have bravely not commented.)

Sounds to me like Fine, Coleman, and Carey are toeing the party line—a line drawn by someone in Washington to emphasize that some of us are on one side of it and some on the other. You want some strong circumstantial evidence of the party hand? Fine refused to answer Strib columnist Doug Grow’s question about whether he wrote his anti–Ellison statement himself. Evidently, he can play the “no comment” game just as well as Klobuchar and Hatch.

I’m not saying Democrats aren’t engaged in similar guilt-by-association tactics, although they usually don’t so blatantly rely on religious differences. Their core strategy this year is to associate every Republican candidate with George Bush, Iraq, Katrina, tortured prisoners, gas prices, and warrantless electronic eavesdropping. Calling Bush a tar baby would be a gross underestimation of the Democrats’ allegorical aspirations. The Democrats hope Bush will be the whole damn La Brea Tar Pit of politics. If their wish comes true, the symbol of the Republican Party will morph from an elephant into a mastodon and be sucked down into oily oblivion.

If both parties’ proscriptions prevail, your choice in November boils down to this: Who is more repulsive—a candidate who once associated with the blithering idiot who heads the Nation of Islam or a candidate who once associated with the blithering idiot who heads our nation?

Two thousand years ago, Roman citizens got together at the cairn that divided them to celebrate the common interests that united them. Today, we tear up that pile of rocks and use the stones for weapons. No matter who wins in November, the feast we consume after our version of the boundary ritual will be bitter indeed.

Shopping is supposed to be about getting stuff and the resultant happy glow of ownership. Yet how did it come to be that retail, as we know it today, is based around wanting but not necessarily getting? While it’s counterintuitive, it does explain the stacks of miserable, desperate-looking people at the mall. Jeans, perfume, boobs—there are always better yet unattainable models.

Let us observe a different shopping paradigm—that of Savers, the world’s largest for-profit thrift-store chain. Savers is about getting stuff. This explains its stores’ universally buoyant ambience despite their rawboned appearance and their clientele, many of whom have every reason to be miserable or desperate: seniors who forgot to contribute to their 401(k)s, madonnas with children at their feet, college students living on thirty-seven dollars per semester, roofers, writers, people who got laid off in 1995, people who live with a lot of cats.

A recent trip to the Savers on East Lake Street in Minneapolis got off to a glad start as a woman flowing with robes and children exited. One cub was skipping and energetically pulling the cord on his new (to him) See ’n Say. Another walked in awe as the sun glinted like a million rubies off her red sparkly shoes, the ones with the tag still stuck to the bottom. Inside, Shakira was on the sound system as a middle-aged guy inspected a pair of size-nine women’s knickers. It was Steve Miller time when a chick with impressively architectural hair and I both reached for some six-inch, clear-acrylic platforms. When she saw they were size eight, she said, “Uh-uh, I need size nine-and-a-half.” But she watched as I tried them on, and kindly said I could really carry them off. Go on, take the money and run. A bouncing, shiny-red, hundred-percent-rubber dress turned up for $4.99. The Hansons mmmm-bopped, and a large woman sang along as she flipped through miles of jackets representing the design inspirations of everyone from Jaclyn Smith to Balenciaga.

Outside the dressing room, two generations of a Hmong family waited restlessly until the narrow door opened and tiny grandma stepped out, looking positively transcendent in a floral dress, plaid men’s sport coat, stocking cap, and black Chuck Taylors. It might have taken her three days to quit smiling as her family gathered around, approving. Rock my body …

Family-friendly and family-run, Savers is firmly grounded in reality shopping—the type of shopping in which thirty dollars can net a decent, even hip, wardrobe, or maybe a couch. The seeds of this enterprise were planted by Ben and Orlo Ellison, who worked with the Salvation Army in the 1930s. The next generation, Bill Ellison, opened the first Savers in 1954 in San Francisco and is succeeded at the helm by his son, Tom Ellison. Savers now runs more than two hundred stores in twenty-five states, Canada, and Australia. There are five here in the metro area, including the newly opened Maplewood location. A business that expands into Canada and Australia instead of, say, Japan and Switzerland cannot be accused of grandeur.

Kaycie is a suitably pragmatic supervisor for a place that calls Miami-divorcée-goes-bad a dress. She started out pricing at the Eau Claire, Wisconsin, store and did a stint at the Bloomington location before transferring to St. Paul. Willingness to relocate is one of the things Savers looks for in an employee. “That, and a good work history,” she said. “They like to know you’re a hard worker.” In-store announcements are broadcast in English and Spanish, and the checkout staff, in particular, makes frequent use of second languages, though that is not required. In fact, diversity of customers, staff, and merchandise is what Kaycie likes most about her job. “Every day is different,” she said, expecting a wild day, as always, on the upcoming fifty-percent-off storewide sale. But lately, Tuesdays have been especially busy. Tuesday is seniors’ day, with forty-percent off Savers’ already modest prices for those fifty-five and older.

Along came a wizened optimist, sporting an eclectic ensemble, who paid for a silk tie in coins. Noting the butter-soft, hand-stitched Donald J Pliner boots clutched to my chest, he smiled and said, “Blue tag. Good deal.” Blue price stickers were fifty-percent off that day, making these boots, which once cost someone hundreds of dollars, $6.49.

At the former St. Croix Hilltop Drive-In Theater, on Sunday mornings from Memorial Day through Labor Day, the Cougar lies down peacefully with the Mustang, the Falcon with the Sunbird, and the Cobra with the Impala. These worship services, held by Trinity Lutheran in Stillwater, are the longest-running show at the Hilltop, which is about a mile north of the Stillwater lift bridge in Houlton, Wisconsin. For twenty years, rain or shine, the faithful have crowded their autos into the lot at this 1960s-era single-screen drive-in, and propped Bibles against their steering wheels.

There are other drive-in churches in the Twin Cities area (Augustana Lutheran of St. Paul holds summer parking-lot services), but Trinity Lutheran is the only service held at an actual drive-in. (The theater closed in 1991, and the land is now owned by a member of the Trinity congregation.) The curtain will soon be coming down for good, however, when nearby Highway 35 is expanded to a four-lane divided highway in 2008. In the meantime, a committee is searching for a new outdoor location, but most drive-in worshippers lament the decision to pave this particular paradise.

Sunday mornings at “Drive-In Trinity” might overall resemble a thriving car dealership, but attending church here is in many ways like worshipping at any other church. Congregants sing hymns, pray, and listen to a sermon—but all from their automobiles. Deacons walk past with wicker offering baskets, and arms stretch from car windows, proffering donations. Able-bodied worshippers leave their cars to take Holy Communion in front of the movie screen; those who can’t instead turn on their headlights, and celebrants bring Communion bread and wine to them. (Cars sometimes have to be jump-started when drivers leave their lights on throughout the service.) Pastor T.J. Anderson, who has been with Trinity since April, understands that churches must change with the times. While at St. Andrew’s in Mahtomedi, he created the “noisy service,” where energetic youngsters are free to run amok. Founded in 1856, Trinity is “always asking, How can we be innovative?” Anderson said. Having never seen a drive-in service before this year, though, he worried that “it wouldn’t feel like a real worship service. And I was wrong.” The only concession he makes in preaching to a sea of windshields is to use more theatrical gestures. For instance, in illustrating the concept of strength in faith to the assembled vehicles, Anderson did an exaggerated Hulk Hogan-style bicep flex. When he called for an “amen,” the response was a joyful noise of honking horns and the occasional high-pitched compressed air siren. And when the faithful are moved by their preacher, they don’t wave their hands, but flick on their windshield wipers.

Tom Thiets has attended the drive-in church since the 1980s. Back then, the Hilltop functioned as both a Saturday-night passion pit (where God only knows what went on in the cars) and a Sunday-morning place of worship. Thiets, who is forty-eight and works as a trade-show supervisor in Stillwater, recalled that when his buddies first went to movies there, “it was a place to party and hang out with people. Now, years later, we sit in the same place going to church. We changed and so did the drive-in. But it’s still a very good gathering place.” The atmosphere is relaxed: part tent revival, part tailgate party. Many of the faithful are active types, dressed for boating or the golf course, and it’s common to see vehicles with kayaks or motorbikes in tow. Other congregants set up lawn chairs, combining their devotions with a little sun worship. Some even arrive on horseback.

On the last Sunday of August, about 350 people worshipped at the drive-in, decisively outnumbering the assembly at Trinity’s home base in Stillwater. “We might have fifty percent more people at the outdoor service than in the traditional church,” said Pastor Anderson. “We’re inviting people to come and be themselves, come unshaven, in their pajamas, with their pets. In a building, it’s like we’re supposed to be quiet and reflective. The drive-in worship allows this kind of different freedom. I would say it’s fun.”

Beautiful, too. No church in town has a finer ceiling. “Most every weekend, we see three or four eagles soaring on the air currents over the St. Croix Valley,” Thiets said. Appropriately, the welcoming song at a recent service was “On Eagles’ Wings.” “It’ll be sad when the drive-in closes,” he said, “but we’ll find a way.” Amen to that.

Somewhere in the archives at the Richard M. Nixon museum in Yorba Linda, California, is a photograph of Nixon playing the piano in the White House with his wife, Pat, sitting in the foreground, clapping and singing along to some popular show tune.

I was reminded of this scene recently while sitting stage right at the Varsity Theater in Dinkytown, listening to Alan Fine entertain a standing-room-only crowd with his own piano compositions as part of an evening of “Piano and Policy.” No, Fine’s wife wasn’t singing along. But Fine is an old-school Republican, like Nixon, and apparently a man of some intellectual depth.

In the lobby before the show, Fine campaign workers were hawking his book, an impressive-looking hardcover called Empower Your Self: A Framework for Personal Success.

But the Republican faithful who filled Jason McLean’s cabaret weren’t there for the reading—or for the policy discussion that would follow the concert. They were intrigued by the notion of a political candidate doing something other than campaigning.

“I love anything that’s different and out of the box,” said Barry Hickethier, a Northeast Minneapolis Republican who took a break from his own campaign against State Rep. Diane Loeffler to stop by. “Besides, if you have special talent, you might as well show it.”

Hickethier was one of an army of young Republicans who showed up for the gig, a turnout that seemed to indicate something of a resurgence in the city’s long-dormant GOP. When I asked McLean whether the event might cast aspersions on his own political leanings, he suggested that any assumptions would be futile. “I think I’m a Republican, but I just don’t understand Republicans,” he said.

He does seem to understand—and maybe even admire—Fine, whose daughter attends the same swimming class as McLean’s. “My first meeting with him was in a Speedo,” he noted.

You or him or both?

“He was in the Speedo. I’m more modest.”

How did he look?

“He was ripped.”

Fine does look pretty trim for a 44-year-old business consultant and college lecturer. He got a nice intro from one of his campaign workers, and made his way through the crowd like a president making his way down the aisle in the House of Representatives to give the State of the Union address.

But once at the piano, the maestro turned out to be less formal than the setting. “Don’t you feel like we’re on a music set?” he asked, as he surveyed the crowd.

But he quickly launched into “God Bless America” (this is a bunch of Republicans, after all) before sitting down at the keyboard and warming up with a little “Chopsticks” and a bar or two of “An American in Paris.”

“I didn’t write that,” he quipped.

By way of explanation, Fine said he’d had a dream last December in which his late father asked him why he hadn’t been playing piano. The incident sparked a series of compositions. “It was kind of an eerie feeling, a conversation between me and my dad,” he admitted.

The three short études that followed were parlor pieces, the sort of easy-listening classical music designed to produce a pleasant grogginess after a couple of glasses of wine. On number four, Fine said, “I think I’ll try to wing one without my music.”

Moments later, he changed his mind: “I think I’ll get my music.”

Much laughter and applause.

Fine played eight pieces in all, displaying enough virtuosity to convince the faithful that he was no piker. But the evening was dragging a bit. Three young men sitting near the American flag planted by the bar got up to leave. And when Fine asked, “Is it okay if I sing a song?” the applause was rather muted.

“Have you heard of South Pacific?” he ventured.

Polite silence.

“Well, I’m not going to sing anything from South Pacific,” he said, laughing, and he offered a lovely rendition of “That’s All,” the 1952 Alan Brandt and Bob Haymes love song that cropped up most recently on American Idol 5.

“I can only give you love that lasts forever . . . ,” he crooned, and I wondered whether maybe there would be a CD. But before I could ride that idea to its conclusion, Fine finished up with a spirited, “That’s all, folks.”

Later, Fine told me that it had been 15 years since he last performed in public and that he’d actually scheduled the concert before he decided to run for Congress. But he was happy to play during the campaign, he said. “It lets people know I’m a human being.”

I wanted to bring up the Nixon analogy, but I found myself distracted by the nearby presence of Jens Christensen.

Christensen, dressed this evening in cutoff denim shorts held up by thick suspenders, served on the Minneapolis City Council from 1965 to 1974, the year of Nixon’s resignation, back when Republicans ran the city. So I asked him about his reaction to the lively turnout of young Republicans and the polished performance of the city’s GOP standard bearer. Could we be seeing the resurgence of the Republican Party in Minneapolis?

He allowed that the crowd was “a good mix” but said it’s a conservative resurgence he was pining for.

Nixonian? I suggest.

“I’m more of a Gingrich fan,” he said.

And tonight’s piano player?

“I need to check him out more,” he said. “Where does he stand on abortion?”

Barely two hours after the first round of American Idol auditions began, the sidewalk outside Target Center is abuzz with distressed-looking people on cell phones, seeking, no doubt, some form of satellite consolation. Some of them are tearful. Some are stone-faced. These folks are among the many who sang their hearts out for thirty seconds, were thanked, and told to go home. The few who made it through to the next round are trying to be quiet about their success, because they were told they had to be, though some of the good news has leaked out anyway.

One woman props a large sign up against a brick pillar, thunks her Coach bag on the ground, and flips open her cell phone. The homemade sign, decorated with glitter, reads “I can get Simon to peel me a grape.” She’s dressed in a striking red cape, skinny black pants, and a black-lace bustier à la Vanity from the 1980s. She holds an empty martini glass. When she finishes her call, I ask her if she made it to the next round. “I can’t tell you,” she says, somewhat blithely. When I tell her that a few other people already told me she had, she says, “Can’t say. You know, they’ve got their rules.” When I ask her name, she says, “I can’t tell you.” When I ask her if she can tell me what song she sang, she says she can’t do that either, but looks at the sign and offers this description: “It’s a fun one. It’s about a woman telling a man what to do to make her happy.”

Whether her apparent success is the product of her promise of carnal pleasures for the show’s nastiest judge or her raw talent is anyone’s guess. Shannon Thompson of Edina and Sheila Romero from West St. Paul met during a production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat at the North Como Presbyterian Church in Roseville and decided to try out together. Of her audition, Shannon said, “It was horrible. I messed it up and added an ‘oh, crap,’ to the chorus.” Sheila, who’s had voice lessons since she was ten, said, “It’s hard to compete with 6,999 other people, or however many they’re saying are here.”

Which sort of begs the question, why bother? The answer to which is surprisingly universal.

“American Idol is going to go down in history as a huge part of pop culture,” said Kalii Palmer from Nashville, “and I can say I was part of it.”

“It’s kind of a rush,” commented Janel Sorenson. “And I like the attention. I can say that I did it.”

She and her friend Joshua were both still waiting on the sidewalk for their auditions, and both had tried out last year in different cities. Joshua spent a big part of his childhood on the Ivory Coast because his parents were missionaries and now works as a shift manager at an Arby’s in a Minneapolis suburb. “I’m goin’ for salary manager!” he shouted, with some apparent irony, pumping a fist in the air. At last year’s tryout in Denver, he didn’t make the first cut but was allowed to sing his entire song, and was hoping for at least the same good fortune this time.

American Idol seems, indeed, to be a sort of contemporary Woodstock. For most, there’s the feeling of having been part of a big cultural happening. But there is also the appeal of being chosen, the promise of that fleeting, Warholian fifteen minutes, though the selection criteria are as elusive as Osama bin Laden. Actually, it all seems to have less to do with singing and more to do with singing as a vehicle for celebrity.

Andrea Leap is an instructor at the MacPhail Center for Music and helped two of her students prepare to audition. “There’s personal taste, and that’s hard to account for,” Leap comments. “They’re looking for a very special aesthetic, something with broad appeal, all-American, whatever that is. You can’t be too threateningly unique.” (So we can assume that had Bjork tried out, she would’ve gotten the chop.)

“It’s certainly increased the enrollment in voice lessons,” Leap says of the show. But she’s quick to add that the students who’ve been inspired by watching American Idol “aren’t necessarily into being singers, they’re into being famous. I don’t know how to teach that.”

For his part, Tiki Cross will stick to smaller venues. After singing a few bars of Kenny Rogers’ “She Believes in Me” for the Idol judges, he was told his voice was too strong, despite the fact that a previous audition had gone really well. That one had been in his living room, before a different panel of judges: his three children. His oldest son, eight-year-old Dajeon, had played Simon. His daughter, Gloria, ten months, was Paula. And Taveon, Gloria’s twin brother, had played Randy. “Randy sang along with me,” said Cross. “Paula said, ‘Good, Daddy,’ and Simon actually clapped. I was really surprised by that. So I thought I was doing pretty good,” he laughs. “But you know, they all said, ‘You’re our American Idol, Dad,’ and that’s what counts.”

To each his or her own consolation. “We’re going to do retail therapy at the Mall of America,” said Kalii Palmer, who had brought her mother along for support. “And I need a big thing of fries.”

It was a good dog-weather day. Several hundred onlookers, kids clad in hooded sweatshirts and parents in Patagonia zip-ups, crowded around a roped-off rectangular strip; a painted finish line glowed white against the still-green grass at Wayzata West Middle School. More than one of the contestants was shivering under its cape, though it wasn’t clear if this was a result of the early fall weather or simply excitement. One auburn-colored dachshund, in what appeared to be a hunter-orange life preserver, yapped happily at its owner’s feet. “I put a coat on him today,” shrieked the middle-aged woman to her friend.

The stage was set for the 22nd Annual Dachshund Races, “Where every dog is a WEINER,” as the T-shirts declare. The Animal Humane Society mobile unit was on hand, a canine emergency-aid station of sorts, and a concert tent arched against the background, set up for the evening’s musical climax to Wayzata’s James J. Hill Days.

The event began with the Parade of Champions. “Just as in the Kentucky Derby, the racing silks are very important,” the announcer intoned from beneath a watermelon umbrella. She continued, describing the conditions of the track and the quality of this year’s competition (there was talk of a littermate of last year’s winner being the favorite), while off to the side, volunteers sold—you guessed it—hot dogs.

The big dogs had come to watch. Away from the crowd, a pair of bull terriers wrestled gently between their leashes; one man reclined in the grass against his golden retriever. But the day was for the little guys; 120 were entered in the day’s festivities, and they came in a rainbow of colors. There were black dachshunds and brown ones and blond and brindle and spotted. Short-haired, wire-haired, and long-haired with fur growing out between their little toes. The day had the feel of a family reunion. Some participants were veterans of the event, and they greeted each other, dogs and owners alike, with familial enthusiasm.

The name dachshund is German for “badger dog,” in honor of the wild game the dog was bred to hunt. In the WWII era, the literal translation was briefly adopted as the dog’s name to disassociate it from its German roots. The American Kennel Club places the dachshund in the hound group, for its hunting prowess and keen sense of smell.

There are absurd but necessary ground rules at the dachshund races—namely, no throwing your dog from the starting gate and no pulling him over the finish line. The judges are lenient about false starts, and “do-overs” are frequent. Half a dozen dachshunds race in each heat, jumping three hurdles in the process. Usually, two or three of them race competitively, two zigzag around the hurdles, and one runs in circles. It’s also common for a contestant to run just short of the finish line before turning around to do another lap. During the semifinals, the barking level was elevated a notch, getting almost loud enough to drown out the exhortations of the owners. Some used deep, commanding voices; others were high-pitched and encouraging; one simply yelled, “La la la la, la la la-ah!” All manner of attention-getters were employed: jingling keys, the waving of encouraging signs and squeaking of favorite toys, and, of course, the enticement of treats. One woman pulled what appeared to be a massive barbecued chicken leg from a plastic bag.

The contest is about beauty as well as athleticism. Owners clearly took seriously the challenge of designing their dachshunds’ outfits. One dog wore a royal purple cape with braided gold trim; another contestant arrived in full Superman garb—the blue shirt, the red cape; and still another wore a matching green-felt cloak and cap with a Robin Hood-style orange feather. Literary names were prevalent—Dante, Atticus Finch, and Gretel—as were names from pop culture: Prada, Gonzo, Siegfried, and Lucy Liu.

One could protest that it is cruel or patronizing to dress up a pooch and race it around for the entertainment of laughing and pointing onlookers. The American Kennel Club officially opposes dachshund racing, citing the exploitation that’s befallen the greyhound as well as concern for the dachshund’s propensity for back injuries. While that’s all well and good, these dogs were clearly much-loved family pets, and they surely, with dachshunds’ tendency toward extra weight in the middle, can use a little exercise. In the end, perhaps the spirit of the event was best summed up by the advertising slogan of its sponsor: “Everything your pet doesn’t need but you love.”

I first encountered an Uta Barth photograph six years ago, wandering through a group exhibition of eleven artists at the prestigious Getty Center in Los Angeles. The works were high-concept, low-execution, clearly the product of expensive art school educations, and, like pretentious dinner guests, unjustifiably boring.

Then, turning a corner, I stopped dead in front of a massive photo of a white couch, delicately brushed by the shadows cast from a window frame. The photo next to it showed little more than the feet of the same white couch and a slice of impeccably clean gray carpet. With perfectly balanced lines and angles, these exquisite compositions seemed to serve no other purpose than to highlight the exceedingly good taste of the owner of this living room. I had never before so carefully examined the feet of a couch, and for some reason, as I wandered through the otherwise insipid show, I found myself repeatedly circling back to these images. After a half-hour of this, I realized it wasn’t just the composition that attracted me, but also a sharp sense of the deficiencies of my own living room. Try as I might, I just couldn’t get that languid, well-designed, luxurious feeling from the shadows cast by my window frames. The untitled photos, part of a landmark series named … and of time, were created by Uta Barth, a German-born artist who has spent the last two decades revolutionizing photography from her perch as a studio art professor at the University of California, Riverside. Since that first encounter with her work, I have spent countless hours fixated on Barth’s exhibition catalogs, filled with gorgeous photos of easily overlooked everyday subjects from her life: that sofa, an empty backyard, the power lines above her house. They are riveting because they are unexpectedly beautiful, particularly for the majority of us who find little in the way of unexpected beauty in and around our domiciles. This month, Barth’s newest works, forty-eight untitled images, are on view at Franklin Art Works in Minneapolis (1021 E. Franklin Ave.; Minneapolis, through November 4)—their first-ever U.S. showing. Measuring roughly two feet by two feet each, the mounted images wrap around the gallery in a single line. The images are grouped into sets of two to five, each of which examines still lifes on Barth’s window ledge.

For example, one grouping features an exquisitely composed image of a water glass and vase, both holding flowers, framed against hot white sunlight coming through the window. The first image in the group has an easy elegance and beauty, and if it were framed just a bit downward and to the right, the Martha Stewart Living magazine logo would be right at home in the left windowpane. Next to this image is a polarized version of the same scene, rendered in blood-red, highly saturated ink—an art student’s mere trick of the light. Finally, on the opposite end, the still life becomes a totally unfocused wash that resembles nothing so much as blood in water. It is a stark, menacing contrast to the flowers it complements, yet in its echo there is something familiar.

Moving from left to right—from the elegant flowers to their final, bloody exposition—Barth seems to be embracing and then repudiating her attachment to the still lifes that have defined her work. According to her, however, the new images are actually about “what happens with your eyes closed.” She is literally representing the process of getting over an image. As she was quoted in db artmag:

“Those images are pretty much blood red and reenact optical after-images seen after staring into the light. At first, you’re still registering the blood through your eyelids and everything is a flash of red. After a few moments, the after-image becomes the opposite color of what you’ve looked at.”

Barth’s is a hard, domineering vision. Not content to just show you a picture, she’s determined to demonstrate how you will experience it when you blink or after you look away. Nothing is left to the imagination, to the sense that one’s personal experience can define the photo in an individual way. The images are about seeing, and the flowers are just a means of exploring that topic. Barth said she chose flowers as the subject for her new series because “they are completely invisible” to her. Over the course of several months, she photographed them at odd angles, imitating how a passerby might briefly notice them, then not notice them at all. In time, as viewers linger on the images, she hopes they will see “that something else might be happening other than describing my home.” The images are not, she insists, “a reverie about flowers.”

Of course, that’s a highly esteemed professor of art talking. As a fan of the artist (not the professor), I unabashedly admit that I find the flower photos awfully pretty, and I’ve spent enough time reveling in them to have had my own epiphany of sorts. It is this: Professor Barth keeps fresh flowers around the house, and I don’t. It may be the case that she buys so many flowers that they’ve finally become invisible to her, but I can’t remember the last time I had a vase of fresh flowers perched on my window ledge. Whether she recognizes it or not, I (the audience) have a connection to the flowers that Barth doesn’t. For me, her work is aspirational, the fine-art equivalent of the Room & Board catalog. Like Barth, I once lived with a white couch (purchased from Room & Board, no less). Sure, sunlight used to fall across it, but I swear it never looked quite as timeless as Barth’s.

In the introduction to Barth’s 2004 catalog of photos, which includes images from …and of time, one critic declares her work “the visual equivalent of silence,” and another comments that they are a “study in sameness that attempts to reduce all activity and purpose to pure observation.” In interviews, Barth says similar, deeply philosophical things. But for me, the real draw of the … and of time couch photos is the way in which they induce an almost visceral desire for a living room just like Barth’s. The artist and her admirers, however, are insistent in their denials that object lust might have anything to do with her work’s appeal (or, dare I say, its beauty). “It is hard to imagine subject matter that is less compelling than a living room floor,” is how the Albright-Knox Art Gallery explained its decision to purchase images of Barth’s living room carpet. Never mind that the average American bookstore is bursting with shelter magazines and decorating books that detail why living room floors are compelling; the lush images in most of them could have served as poor concept studies for Barth’s living room artworks.

To my eye, what makes this artist’s images so compelling, so utterly hypnotic, is how they take the conventions of object-lust publications—magazines like Metropolitan Home and Dwell—and recast them as fine, minimalist art. Instead of photographing her couch straight on, in blinding Mediterranean light (see: Architectural Digest), Barth allows us a view of just the top few inches of the cushions and a shadow of window frame across the wall. In effect she is saying—to me, at least—“here are the object and the feeling you’d have if you were lucky enough to have my time and the means to enjoy it.” Or more directly: “Enjoy my couch.”

To the best of my knowledge, Barth has never said anything of the kind, and who knows, maybe she’s never so much as flipped through an issue of Dwell. I doubt it, though. In fact, in the same way she insists that her new untitled series of flower images is not about flowers, she declares that her photos have nothing to do with her at all, and that, to the contrary, she strives for anonymity in creating them. “I don’t want to become the subject I’ve tried so hard to erase,” she says. “Shoes on the floor, clothes, letters, and objects on my desk immediately construct a narrative and identity of the person, and there you have it: I’m the subject.” But how can Barth spend months photographing her surroundings—her couch, her electrical cord, her carpet, her windows, her backyard, the telephone poles above her house, her flower arrangements, and her window ledge—and somehow believe that her audience will automatically erase any readings into the personality of the owner of these objects?

For me, these photos are far from anonymous. It is precisely Uta Barth and no other who emerges from them. Intended as patient studies of the nature of time, they also serve as patient studies of a character or personality who not only owns nice things but knows how to look at (and photograph) them in unique and exquisite ways. It is those barely revealed quirks, quirks that hint at a personality, that endear Uta Barth to me. The intentions and theories that she and her critics generate about her work are interesting and occasionally relevant, and I’m pretty sure I’ll start paying more attention to the blood-red retinal aftereffects of looking at photos in Architectural Digest. But really, in the end, it’s the lovely simplicity of her images that moves me. For whose couch, in the history of art, is more sublime than Uta Barth’s?