The Rake Magazine

Category: Article

  • The Cheese Man Speaks

    When Bruce Wry was a marine stationed in Vietnam, he spent some time studying the local language. He never would have guessed that, forty years later, the Vietnamese he learned during the war would come in handy for selling cheese at the Minneapolis Farmers’ Market.

    “It’s nice. When the Vietnamese come here I can talk to them,” he said. “Over the years the ethnic mix has changed. Once, you didn’t see any Russians, now, there are a lot of Russians. The Hmong, if you got it for two dollars they want it for a dollar, if you got it for a dollar they want it for fifty cents.

    “There was one Amish family that sold cheese. They came up here and they only sat in their chairs, didn’t offer samples or anything, you know. They were right across from me, they were cheaper than me. They lasted about a month. You’ve got to sample and talk to people.”

    Every weekend, he’s on his chrome bar stool at stall #248 in the long, tin-roofed arcade at East Lyndale Avenue North and Third Avenue North, sandwiched between Koa Vang produce and the Sleeping Cat Organic Farm, where the aromas of basil, cilantro, mint, and lemon grass intersect. In the multicultural hurly-burly of vendors, Wry is a standout: a towering, friendly fifty-six-year-old in an orange foam hat that resembles a thick wedge of Swiss. He sells twenty varieties of Wisconsin cheese, driving in every market day from New Richmond, Wisconsin. He’s not a farmer, but a reseller who understands merchandising and the value of brand identity.

    “‘The hat?’ I started wearing this, I don’t know, six, seven years ago. Kids call me ‘the Cheesehead.’ They get up in the morning and say, ‘Let’s go down and see the Cheesehead.’ I hear that from a lot of people. And I laugh all the way to the bank.

    “They know I’m from Wisconsin. It gets bad during football season. People ask me, ‘What the blank happened to the Packers last week?’ from a block away. My wife used to wear the horns, for the Vikings. People would say, ‘I don’t want to buy from you,’ so I’d ask if they wanted to buy from my wife. People would ask her, ‘Are you horny?’ Then she wouldn’t wear it anymore. That was that.

    “People want me to wear this so they can tell where I’m at when they walk up and down the aisle,” Wry said, but the rubber headgear proved impractical during this summer’s record heat wave. “If I fell over from the heat, there’s nobody here that’d want to give me mouth-to-mouth. They’d say, ‘Too bad, that’s the end of that story, you’re gonna die.’ ”

    Wry has had one full weekend off in twenty-seven years and maybe three days off besides that. He gets up at 3:30 in the morning for the Thursday market on Nicollet Mall. For the weekend market, he gets to sleep in until 4:00 a.m. He drives fifty miles before dawn, when there’s hardly anybody else on the road, in his battle-scarred, rust-pocked blue GMC van. It’s got half a grille missing, and the right-headlight-and-turn-signal assembly is held in place with probably half a roll’s worth of duct tape.

    On a good day, Wry sells five hundred pounds of cheese. A regular refrigerator, packed tight, holds around two hundred pounds. About eight pounds of each day’s inventory goes to tasters. Just as Wry has regular customers, he knows the moochers on sight.

    “We have people who sample every week who have never bought in seven years. And the worst is downtown. On the Nicollet Mall. You know ’em. Here he comes again. They take enough to feed a whole family. But you have to give samples because some people walk on a little ways and come back again and buy.”

    Wry counts people watching as one of the great fringe benefits of his job. “That’s why I enjoy selling here. I fall in love a hundred times a day,” he said. “Downtown it’s worse. You wonder where some of these gals are working at. They’re sure showing it off.”

    Wry’s customers aren’t looking for exotic varieties; he doesn’t offer anything fancier than Gouda. “Everyone thinks it’s from Holland. It’s from Holland, Wisconsin, about fifty miles south of Green Bay,” he said with a broad, knowing smile.

    “Provolone, Muenster, feta—they don’t move. You can’t carry everything. If they ask ‘Do you have blue cheese?’ I just tell ’em, ‘No ma’am, I just carry happy cheese.’ ‘You got any goat cheese?’ ‘No, they’re too hard to catch.’ ”

    People sometimes ask for help choosing the right cheese for a certain wine, he said, “but I don’t know a damn thing about it. I haven’t drank in so many years. I’ve had twenty-seven years of sobriety. See how it falls in line with my job? Otherwise I probably wouldn’t be doing it. I couldn’t get up that early.”

    Does Wry have a personal favorite among his wares?

    “Extra-sharp cheddar,” he said. “The older, the sharper it gets. Women, wine, and cheese get better with age. That was told to me by a woman. She was pretty old.”

  • Sol Food

    The call came on a cloudless weekday afternoon. “Hey, it’s Luther, I’m going to take off early and fire up the parabolic.” Needless to say, I rushed right over.

    “Fire” is not exactly the right word in this instance, as the only flame involved in the parabolic’s operation is more than ninety-one million miles from Earth.

    “Luther” is Luther Krueger, a crime prevention specialist with the Minneapolis Police Department, and “the parabolic” is the German SK14, which looks like a satellite dish four feet in diameter, a shining concavity of aluminum that reflects the sky above Luther’s South Minneapolis backyard.

    Krueger collects and builds solar cookers. When I arrived, he was dropping potatoes into a pot held fast above the parabolic’s focal point, which can reach a thousand degrees.

    The SK14 is the glittering gem of Krueger’s collection, but, an hour later, the yard was cluttered with other models. There’s the twenty-dollar Sunspot, made of cardboard and plastic that folds into a Trivial-Pursuit-sized box. The HotPot is basically a casserole-within-a-casserole surrounded by reflective panels. The Tulsi–Hybrid has a heating element for cloudy days and packs up like a red suitcase. One model, by the Sunstove Organization, is made out of salvaged aluminum lithograph plates from old printing presses.

    In the two years since he caught the solar bug, Krueger has amassed about ten different models and given away a half dozen homemade ovens—the Hallacy model—built out of plywood, glass, and insulation. Most heat to between 250 and 350 degrees, and, with a little patience and sunny skies, can cook breads, beans, stews, casseroles, meat and fish, cakes, cookies and pies—anything you don’t need to sauté or fry. “Last summer, I put on twenty pounds,” Krueger said.

    Krueger’s wife arrived home just in time for dinner—moist, delicious salmon, soft potatoes, and near-caramelized garlic in bubbling-hot olive oil. She’s all right with her husband’s hobby. “He could be rebuilding motorcycles,” she said.

    For Mike and Martha Port, solar cooking is more than a novel way to bake their daily bread. The couple cooked their first solar meal—beef roast with potatoes and carrots—in 1988. Almost twenty years later, their locally based Solar Oven Society, a project of the non-profit Persons Helping People, has produced and sold nearly five thousand ovens in more than forty countries. The goal is to provide people in developing countries with a safe way to cook and pasteurize water without the laborious collection of fuel, related deforestation, and harmful fumes produced by open fires in poorly ventilated kitchens.

    Martha Port told of women in Kenya who walk seven hours a day, six or seven days a week, to collect firewood.

    To fulfill their mission, volunteer sponsors transport the recycled plastic Sport Solar oven to developing countries, sometimes one or two ovens at a time. The society has conducted four larger pilot projects that sent Sport Solars by the hundreds to the United Arab Emirates, Nicaragua, Haiti, and Afghanistan.

    Currently, the society is working on a major contract that will deliver thousands of ovens, Port said, but full details have not been announced.

    Port related her story of bringing the first prototypes of the current Sport Solar to Haitians on the island of La Gonave. Nine people were trained to teach others how to cook with the sun.

    After the weeklong course, Port sailed to another village on the island to find that one woman from the training had walked home with the Sport and “was already telling a crowd of fifty to sixty people about it,” Port said.

    “The environment, nutrition, health, economics—it’s win, win, win,” Port said.

    Most of the solar society’s ovens must be purchased either with money or “sweat equity,” Port said. “Things that are free aren’t valued as much,” she said.

    The Solar Oven Society is just one of the organizations worldwide preaching the gospel of solar cooking. While Krueger supports the cause, he is not sure he’s seen the perfect philosophy yet. He’d like to see a self-sustaining system, in which local people not only use but manufacture and profit from the ovens.

    Back in the United States, Krueger lent me his Sport Solar, which I “fired up” in the backyard before hosting friends for the final match of the World Cup in July. The sun-cooked veggie quiche was a clear favorite over the pesto pizza prepared in a conventional oven. So far, though, my solar-cooking career has ended there; the tree cover in our yard limits me to mid-morning brunch. Ironically, it will take a little deforestation for me to truly join the ranks of the solar-cooking fanatics.

  • Syria, Somalia, and Soccer

    On a warm Friday evening, most of the lights were out at the Coffman Union bookstore on the U of M campus. In the back, though (the place is the size of a department store), a hundred chairs were set up and people milled about, greeting one another and conversing in English, Arabic, and Somali. Some of the women were covered; most, however, weren’t. In typical Arab fashion, the scheduled program started a little bit late.

    Kathryn Haddad eventually stepped to the podium. “Welcome, everybody, to the release of the eighteenth edition of Mizna, the United States’ only Arab-American literary journal.”

    Mizna began in Minneapolis in 1999 as the brainchild of Haddad, a playwright who is also the journal’s director. These days, it’s in libraries and universities all over the country and the world, and has received honors from the Utne Reader and Pushcart Press.
    Between the program’s opening, a moment of silence for the wars in the Middle East, its closing, coffee and sweets, and a peaceful Minnesota evening, there were readings from Mizna’s new issue. The inspiration for the material fell between those disparate worlds, too.

    The crowd members’ diversity, shared equally among Arab-Americans, African-Americans, and European-Americans, was rather unique for a literary event in Minnesota. The third of these groups was primarily middle-aged and seemed mostly indifferent to fashion, favoring instead practical clothing, canvas bags, and pins with messages. At least three pre-program discussions were fueled by loathing for the current administration. The Arab-Americans and the African-Americans, who were mostly Somali, appeared, in general, more professional in their style and less overtly liberal.

    The first reader, Ahmed Yusuf, was Somali, which seemed slightly incongruous given Mizna’s focus. “We struggled with that for a while,” said Haddad after the event, “but we eventually decided to include anyone who can speak to the Arab-American community.” Yusuf’s sing-song delivery of a story about an underdog soccer team from a blighted Somali town addressed sport, rivalries, and war-induced poverty—subjects that would surely have resonated in most Middle Eastern countries. Yusuf rolled his r’s just like an Arab, so delicately that even if he had spoken about raids, interrogations, and external rendition, the inattentive would easily have been lulled into thinking his words were almost sweet. They’re not, of course, and politics were understandably at the heart of many of the other featured readings.

    The subject matter wasn’t all the expected politics, however; the readings didn’t always begin and end with a pro-Palestine stance and anti-Bush rants. Poet and playwright Ismail Khalidi was born in Lebanon but grew up in Chicago. In the two poems he read, he directed the same vitriol toward “Chicago’s finest” as he did toward the occupiers of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. While the first arrested him on the way to sunrise prayers and barked ignorant orders, the second “stripped Gaza of their pride and ego.” Khalidi questioned the motivations of the police with as much heartache as he questioned Rumi, the thirteenth-century Persian poet, about a proper response in the face of Israeli occupation.

    Brooke Anthony, a volunteer at KFAI radio, read two poems inspired by news coverage of the war in Iraq. She looked every bit the longtime activist behind the podium, a woman opposed to war on general peace-loving principle. As a native-English speaker, she didn’t quite pronounce the names in her poem correctly—the kh in Khayat sounded like a straight hard k, not a soft, gentle, throat-clearing sort of kh. And the r in Ibrahim didn’t roll as charmingly as Ahmed Yusuf’s r’s. In a way, through her imperfect language, Anthony showed that the American cultural struggle to blend aspects of ourselves isn’t restricted to newcomers.

    Amid all the strife and difference, this blending, as individuals and as Americans, is at its sweetest when there is a recognizable common ground. Mazen Halabi, who was born in Syria and now works as a software consultant in Fridley, approached the podium with the humble grin of someone who more often reads to his children than to a crowd. His voice gaining in confidence, he told a story of his childhood in Damascus. With the tale’s adolescent humor and grumpy sandwich vendors, Halabi painted a picture that didn’t sound much different from that of a Minnesotan childhood’s—until a friend was taken away by secret police working for the Syrian dictator Hafez al-Assad. But then, grieving mothers are common to stories from all over, too.

    Amid Somali soccer matches, the Chicago police, the anti-war movement, and the secret police, the topic of a poem by P.A. Pashubin, a Polish-American, stood out. She compared the plant purslane to Republicans. While it’s considered a garden weed in this country, several pairs of Arab eyes lit up as she passed around samples of the leafy culprit. “I know this,” one man said. “This is baqli, we use it in fatoush.” The traditional salad of Lebanon, fatoush is served at every important meal. What is viewed as pernicious here is regarded as delicious in a country somewhere else in the world, and as the purslane made the rounds, that typically contradictory notion was not so much reconciled as recognized.

  • Looking, but Not Seeing

    Lance Bass is gay? You’re kidding. Does this mean he’s not going to be an astronaut? Because I really, really wanted him to go to outer space. Joan Collins has a paid-in-full ticket to go on the Virgin 2010 flight, but she’s kind of old, and though I love her, I think Lance Bass is probably more suited for the rigors of space travel. Joan’s eyelashes seem as if they might ignite upon re-entry.

    I don’t care if Lance Bass is gay. It’s just that I’m always the last to know these things. As a young girl, I managed to harbor crushes on both Paul Lynde and the lead singer of Judas Priest. I’m into guys with a wild sense of humor who aren’t afraid to laugh at themselves. And who doesn’t prefer her rock stars swathed in studded black leather?

    When I was a teen, my “gaydar” antennae could only pick up the strongest of signals. In the early eighties, I thought that maybe Boy George might be gay, but I wasn’t totally sure. Wearing muumuus and eyeliner could just be his look. Maybe under that stringy weave he was simply a Hawaiian with a Maybelline fetish.

    As the eighties progressed, I was better able to discern the sexual orientation of celebrities by carefully examining the photo captions in People magazine. Any matinee idol who was a “confirmed bachelor” or starlet who had a “gal pal” could be batting for the other team, as it were. I had to keep up on these things because I didn’t want my romantic hopes to be dashed again, like they were with Paul Lynde.

    Think of it this way: You don’t nurture the crush on the married Beatle. You go for the eligible one—the one you actually have a shot at a date with—in Pretend Town. (By the way, can you imagine, if on the Beatles’ historic Ed Sullivan appearance, under John Lennon’s camera shot the caption read, “Don’t bother girls—HE’S GAY!”)

    When I was a young adult, k.d. lang’s refreshing lack of ambiguity drew these sorts of things into sharper focus. (It only took me a moment to discard the possibility that k.d. might be e.e. cummings’ soul mate.) Melissa Etheridge never tried to hide which chromosome she craved. The album titled Yes I Am, and the accompanying videos which featured luscious women as the objects of her desire, were obvious enough, even for me. But some fans missed the signals. I remember reading in an interview with Etheridge in Rolling Stone magazine that she had to keep dodging calls from country western star Billy Ray Cyrus—he of the “Achy Breaky Heart” and the magnificent man mullet. Apparently, Billy Ray just didn’t get it. He kept asking her out. She finally said that she had to tell him point-blank. The interview never got into specifics on what his reaction was. Judging from his public persona, I imagine it could have gone like this:

    (Melissa picks up the phone.) “Hello? Oh. Hi, Billy Ray. Uh, no, I really can’t go out to dinner with you. I’ve got a girlfriend and we’re going out that night. What? No, I don’t want to bring her along. I know the more the merrier, but see, uh … My girlfriend and I are going out to dinner that night. On a date. Just the two of us. No men. No, you don’t understand. It’s not so we can have a heart-to-heart girl talk. I’m gay. She’s gay. I date women. Not men. You are a man, Billy. I don’t date men. No, that is not kinky! Cut it out, will you! I AM NOT JUST SAYING THAT SO YOU’LL GET TURNED ON! DON’T CALL HERE ANYMORE!” (Hangs up.)

    Hands down, the woman with the worst gaydar in the world is, of course, Liza Minnelli. She’s the Wrongway Peachfuzz of sexual orientation. Her husband Peter Allen was a protégé of her mom and a Broadway dancer, for heaven’s sake. This may come to you as awful news—(or a relief, depending on your inclinations) but her fourth husband-for-a-minute—the eyebrow-plucking, Lalique Crystal-collecting producer David Gest—insists he’s not “that way,” as the worldwide homosexual community breathes a giant sigh of relief.

  • Fighting Over North

    If you were watching the news August 11, you probably saw Rev. Jerry McAfee hijack Mayor R.T. Rybak’s press conference on fighting crime. Rybak and Council Member Don Samuels were standing on West Broadway Avenue when, the cameras showed, McAfee got into Rybak’s face. The next images were of Rybak scurrying to his waiting car.

    This was another skirmish in the ongoing battle for the hearts and minds of North Minneapolis residents between Rybak-ally Samuels and activists such as McAfee, pastor of the New Salem Baptist Church. This tension between those African-Americans “workin’ with The Man” and those down in the trenches “struggling against The Man” has deep roots, going back to the “house Negroes”-versus-“field hands” days.

    Since both McAfee and Samuels want (in McAfee’s words) to have the police “target those that need to be targeted,” why can’t they “just get along” and focus on getting things done? Because each man has a different view of how to interact with the majority culture and establish political legitimacy. McAfee, who calls Samuels “Rybak’s house Negro,” claims that Samuels has let scarce city resources, such as video-surveillance cameras, go to more affluent parts of the city. Samuels counters by saying that McAfee is a “wannabe power broker and professional hell-raiser,” who “makes a living off the suffering in North Minneapolis” while he retreats nightly to the relative safety of Brooklyn Park.

    McAfee, whose two-thousand-member church is one of the largest black congregations in the city, boasted to me about how his organization is working. “We have a crack-fighting team, a mentoring team, and a team that works with people in prison. We are on the streets daily. We respect the members of our community and we demand respect from people outside our community.”

    Were his actions that day motivated by his fears of racial profiling, along with pique at not being invited to participate in the press conference? “Absolutely not,” McAfee said. “The mayor came up here with an attitude. Me getting in the mayor’s face only happened after he repeatedly ignored my questions about why it took him so long to focus on crime in North Minneapolis. I wanted to know—why did South Minneapolis get surveillance cameras before we did, even though twenty-six of the forty-one murders so far this year have been in this community?”

    Samuels denies that Rybak disrespected McAfee. “It is Lord of the Flies time up here, and McAfee is crying about getting ‘respect.’ Well, the grown-ups are coming and we are prepared to face the thugs and guns that McAfee, who does not live in this community, apparently cannot deal with. What happened at the press conference tells these immature, morally deprived kids that it is OK to be violent and stay stupid.”

    The major difference between McAfee and Samuels revolves around their relationships with Rybak. McAfee dislikes Rybak and sees him as someone who only comes to North Minneapolis to record sound bites. Samuels makes no apologies for his relationship with Rybak. “The mayor is advocating a targeted precision strike for a limited period of time by forty cops. This is a good thing! My relationship with the mayor is an asset for this community. McAfee’s attempt to publicly humiliate and excoriate me because I can work with him is wrong.”

    The harsh political reality is that North Minneapolis desperately needs the juice that both men bring to the table. Samuels is North Minneapolis’ voice on the council. Suggesting that he is an Uncle Tom for creating a political alliance with the mayor only makes it less likely that Northsiders will get city resources. Nevertheless, Rybak and Samuels have got to forge a working relationship with people like McAfee. He has credibility with factions of the community that distrust Rybak—and by association, any politician who is at his side whenever he comes to the hood. Neither man can claim political legitimacy without maintaining an effective bond with the other. And both should realize that claims of political legitimacy do not mean much in comparison with the twenty-six people who have been blown away in less than eight months.

  • Greg Brown

    This Iowa singer-songwriter, whose low-down, come-hither grumble is to women in Birkenstocks what Barry White’s silken mumble is to women in heels and negligees, has kept a low profile the past few years. But now the prolific fellow has a new album, The Evening Call—and a new wife, the singer Iris DeMent, about whom he does not much talk. If American roots music had more fans, this super couple would be outrunning the paparazzi in a dusty pickup. The razor-shirking, work-boot-wearing Brown will pop into town for his first Twin Cities show in two years, perhaps offering a duet with his wife—we can always hope. 651-290-1221;
    www.fitzgeraldtheater.org

  • The Gatz of Hazzard

  • The Junk Lady

    “I consider myself extremely lucky,” artist Judy Onofrio has said. “Every day, I have the opportunity to construct a world of memory, humor, and stories through my work in the studio. Best of all, I live in that world and invite others in.”

    It is in this spirit of openness that the 2005 McKnight Distinguished Artist recently ushered an entire busload of adult learners into her home and studio and allowed them to roam her three-acre backyard hillside garden, populated by plastic swans and sculptures like the odalisk made of Jell-O molds. Onofrio is perhaps best recognized by Twin Citizens who remember her 1993 exhibit at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, titled Judyland, which featured huge conglomerate pieces made of Mrs. Butterworth’s syrup bottles. Before our private tour, those of us who’d signed up for the University of Minnesota Curiosity Camp course “Come One, Come All to Judyland” had already been treated to a morning lecture on the artist’s work, as well as a boxed lunch on the bus en route to Onofrio’s solo exhibit Come One, Come All at the Rochester Arts Center.

    In her studio, two assistants were busy building the foundations for new pieces. Ryan worked in metal, and Jeremy, sitting at a large table littered with wooden parts, explained, “My task for today was to make a whole bunch of birds.” Those birds, which would be covered in an epoxy, smoothed, and painted until they looked like delicate porcelain creatures, represent a new direction in Onofrio’s work, an artist taking flight. Despite having a studio stacked high with storage boxes labeled “hummingbirds,” “lamp parts,” “bottle caps,” “door knobs,” “swans,” “animals and parts,” “fish,” “lids,” “dogs,” “tile,” “tiny tile,” “castors,” and the less-specific “political,” Onofrio is relying less on the found objects that are her trademark. Though she’s long had a penchant for bringing home buckets of garage sale junk, she admitted that she recently has been casting off entire warehouses of stored stuff. “Most of the found objects are pretty meaningless to me now,” Onofrio said.

    Onofrio began working in clay in the 60s, then moved on to large, soft textile works with an overt, overstuffed sensuality (think three-dimensional O’Keeffe paintings, think sea cucumbers). For a time she was creating large-scale wooden structures that, once finished, were set ablaze. (Onofrio confesses to being something of a pyromaniac.) It was after back surgery limited her mobility that she turned to her trademark assemblage, beginning with small brooches made from found objects—buttons and broken cups—and moving on to much larger pieces inspired by such diverse projects as Gaudi’s spiraling masterpieces, the Watts Towers in Los Angeles, and the Grotto of the Redemption in West Bend, Iowa.

    Onofrio approaches her work with that same sort of religious fervor and devotion. Her pieces, noted University of Minnesota Professor Robert Silberman, are “a testament to the decorative impulse,” but also are notable for the attention Onofrio pays to “both detail and coherence,” achieving in their chaos an incredible balance of color and form.

    The pieces in Come One, Come All were inspired by Onofrio’s memories of and dreams about the circus. The serene, ceramic-looking faces of women and monkeys, with their ruby lips and high cheekbones, call to mind Jeff Koons, but without the insincerity. Onofrio’s work is sensual, open, playful. And while recent pieces rely much more on movement, balance, and created forms—monkeys, elephants, acrobats, a crab, birds—closer inspection reveals that same attention to surface decoration, in cut shells and beads, along with the occasional cup handle, juice squeezer, or squirrel figurine found at a flea market.

    In the studio, demonstrating how she’s been experimenting with the positioning of objects in a new sculpture, Onofrio commented, “It’s like constant change and revision, playing with how the object interacts with the figure … I [still] have a collage aesthetic. I’m always moving things around and looking at the relationship between objects.” Onofrio spends hours in her studio fiddling around until she finds the right balance. “It’s like, you make this precious thing, and does it work? And you have a big band saw up there if it doesn’t.”

    Perhaps Onofrio’s transition to creating her own forms, instead of relying on found pieces, represents a kind of confidence in her own internal narrative and impulses. In a recent piece, Delicate Balance, for example, a woman does a one-handed balancing act, held aloft by two men, with a parrot poised on an index finger. Her new work, said Onofrio, is “about finding the content, and not having to show all my junk to everyone.”

  • Watch Your Words!

    On a recent sultry afternoon, three of us bellied up to the cool oak bar at one of our favorite hangouts and engaged in two age-old writers’ past-times, tall drinks and short stories. For the next few hours the air grew thick with bold-faced names and barbed commentary, and while the bartender kept the booze flowing discreetly, I caught him snickering several times at some of our verbal acrobatics. One of my companions finally said, “You’re getting an earful today, aren’t you?”

    Thank Christ we tip him well or we’d be in danger of reading our reckless remarks on the Twin Cities’ newest voyeuristic website, overheardinminneapolis.com. Subtitled “What Happens in Minneapolis … Goes on the Internet,” Overheard in Minneapolis urges eavesdroppers to post anything they hear—the more asinine or acidic the better—thus creating a great place to take the pulse of our Midwest metropolis, one earful at a time.

    The site was launched by a woman who wants only to be known by her first name—Angie—“for the time being.” Originally from Northern Minnesota, Angie lived out of state for several years, returned to the Cities a year ago, and currently has a day job at “an office in St. Paul.” She spends five to six hours a night on the site.

    So far, many of Overheard in Minneapolis’ comments are coming from bars and restaurants, where the tables are close and liquored-up lips often flap most loosely.

    Here are some recent postings:

    Drunk Woman: The race of women has been held down too long!

    Sober Man: What in the hell are you talking about? I think you mean gender.

    Drunk Woman: You don’t know shit, you’re just a stupid immigrant.

    Sober Man: I was born in Roseville.

    —Bulldog Bar, Uptown

    Nurse #1: I want to be 23 forever!

    Nurse #2: Oh, really. Why?

    Nurse #1: Yeah, ‘cuz like, 25 seems so old.

    —North Minneapolis Hospital

    A personal favorite, from the Rail Station Bar:

    Drunk man: What are you going to school for?

    Girl: Journalism.

    Drunk man: Ohh, can’t beat that. Can’t beat that at all. That’s GREAT.

    (long pause) … what’s journalism?

    Our local Overheard site is not a novel idea—Angie was inspired by overheardinnewyork.com. Still, compared with the often profane muscularity of NYC eavesdroppees (“there’s definitely a lot more crazy people in New York,” she notes), we seem a little timid coming out of the box. Here’s a Manhattan sampling:

    Tween Boy: Mom! Let’s go already!

    Mom: If you’re so bored, go play in traffic.

    —Victoria’s Secret, Lincoln Center

    From two men passing each other on the street:

    Middle-aged man #1: Hey!

    Middle-aged man #2: I didn’t recognize you with clothing on.

    —62nd & Broadway

    Or take these one-liners on Jesus:

    Chick: Whatever. I could’ve annihilated Jesus at beer pong.

    —Wall Street

    Girl on cell: Listen, the only ass I kiss is Jesus Christ. Got that?

    —Key Food, 235th St.

    Still, what the Twin Cities may lack in swagger and oddball panache, they more than make up for in whacked-out smarts. Here’s an exchange overheard at Coffman Union at the U of M:

    A girl smiling, listening to a boy on an escalator:

    Boy: English is the only language where you call things what they really are. (holds up a pencil) Like, what is this?

    Girl: Der ist ein Bleistift!

    Boy: No, no it isn’t! It’s a pencil!

    Whereas, in New York, you get incidents like this, in Macy’s:

    Saleslady: Where are you from?

    Tourist: Kansas City.

    Saleslady: There’s a city in Kansas? Like with buildings?

    Tourist: Yes.

    Saleslady: Tall ones?

  • Man in Love: Barbra Streisand, Barry Gibb, and the Autobiographical Criticism of Doug Belknap

    Some of you I would hope have read Dianne Hart’s monograph Enough Is Enough: Prodigality Celebrated and Condemned in the Carter-Era Recordings of Barbra Streisand. Although Dr. Hart’s study is limited in scope, her thinking is expansive. My own forthcoming book on Streisand’s middle period is indebted to her penetrating analyses. I must also thank Hart for exposing me to the criticism of Doug Belknap. A footnote in Enough Is Enough led me to the man’s review of Guilty, Streisand’s 1980 collaboration with Barry Gibb, and I have since become an admirer of Belknap’s idiosyncratic and loudly autobiographical work. The review of Guilty appeared that year in the September issue of Spunk magazine, a formerly influential rock monthly by then considered debased by the relevant tastemakers. Spunk at the time was mostly devoted to rock of a decidedly masculine cast. One imagines that Spunk readers were united in enmity or at least apathy toward Streisand and Gibb, and would have considered an endorsement of Guilty distasteful and a pan gratuitous. It’s odd, then, that the magazine gave the album any coverage at all, odder still that they ran Belknap’s long, discursive review.

    What I’ve since managed to learn about Belknap is that he lived in Minneapolis, briefly attended the University of Minnesota, and worked, moonlighting presumably, as a freelance writer, most provably during 1979 and ’80. I found one piece published in the University’s Minnesota Daily in May of 1972, a recommendation of Weather Report’s I Sing the Body Electric notable for employing two food metaphors. In the first paragraph Belknap calls the album a “spicy gumbo of New Thing jazz, acid rock, hot-buttered soul, classical gas, and Latin passion”; in the closing paragraph he likens it to a “steaming bouillabaisse.”

    Belknap may have written as well for community newspapers throughout the 70s, but his byline doesn’t return to an officially archived publication until late ’79. Again it’s attached to a review of a Weather Report album—the concert recording 8:30—penned for the short-lived Rhythm-A-Ning magazine. A warm appraisal of the music quickly gives way to a digression about a record reviewer, apparently a gastronome and fusion buff, who constructs a model suspension bridge from clippings of the 147 reviews he has written for a jazz newsletter. Each review contains at last one food metaphor, a feat of stylistic persistence that apparently went unnoticed by the newsletter’s subscribers or its alcoholic editor. The reviewer then takes a fatal dose of sleeping pills and lies down next to the model bridge, in effect jumping off his own work.

    Belknap wrote three relatively restrained reviews for Spunk in the summer of ’80, followed by the Streisand piece, which is quoted in its entirety below, and which seems to mark the end of his career in music criticism. My efforts to track down Belknap have been unsuccessful. If you know anything about his whereabouts, please contact me. I remain eager to speak with him.

    Barbra Streisand

    Guilty

    CBS Records

    Reviewed by Doug Belknap

    I see that Guilty’s liner notes have Richard Tee playing electric guitar on the “The Love Inside.” If you know your session men, you’ll raise an eyebrow at the credit, and sure enough, the electric instrument Richard Tee is playing is a piano, not a guitar. One thing Barbra Streisand’s latest success is guilty of, then, is shoddy liner-note composition. Otherwise it’s pretty much blameless.

    Maybe you’ve already seen the jacket, with Gibb, who wrote or co-wrote all of the album’s songs, wrapping his arms around a coquettish Streisand, both dressed in angelic white, à la Johnny Mathis on the cover of Heavenly. It would be too much to call this music heavenly, but it is ethereal, so light you have to adjust your tone arm to play the LP version. And yet the album’s consommé of pop and Broadway, disco and light R&B isn’t wholly insubstantial. I find it moving. Streisand and Gibb haven’t lent great stores of genuine emotion to their collaboration, but they’ve given the listener the tools to do so: the bravura phrasing, a drama in nearly every measure; the voluptuous, occasionally capricious melodies and chord changes; the trademark vocal harmonies, both transcendent and rodential, that Gibb honed with the Bee Gees.

    I’ve liked Barry Gibb ever since I heard “Massachusetts” on the radio of a cream Mercedes 450 SEL belonging to Linda Morgan’s mom. We kissed that night, Linda and I, standing up in front of the car, and her breasts were large and her sweater was softer than any fabric I had ever felt. I hadn’t previously associated with people who could afford cashmere sweaters, or even cashmere socks. Our subsequent outings, however, were washouts.

    Let me return to “The Love Inside,” which is indeed lovely, and not only on the inside. Expansive, resigned, middle-aged, it’s like a Sondheim ballad minus the erudition. The clever turns of phrase have been replaced with clichés—“I’m just an empty shell” and so forth—but the lachrymal high notes are present, yearning and wheedling. During this song one might pause for a pensive break from preparing something out of Elegant Dinners for Two, perhaps absentmindedly taking a sip of economical red wine. I did just that earlier this evening. Also, I cut the recipe in half. “The Love Inside” isn’t free of the breathless histrionics Streisand brings to nearly every performance, but it is sung with the proper subtlety, which is to say, neither too much nor too little. Streisand remains a stage singer, of course, a belter for whom amplification is a luxury rather than a necessity. Only a fool would refuse to use such a voice to its full capacity.

    A fool or an ascetic, because it must be a pleasure to sing like that. It must be a pleasure to be outstanding at something. Yesterday I was given my United States Tennis Association rating. I’ve decided to play competitive tennis in a league, to meet new friends as they say, and because Sharon once said I looked good in white. Before signing up, you must have a coach rate your game on the official scale. There’s an official scale that goes from one to seven. One is a paraplegic three-year-old with imperfect vision and a carelessly strung racket. Two is a paraplegic three-year-old with perfect vision and a decent lob. A 6.9 is John McEnroe. I’ve been judged a 3.2, just below the mean. I’m competent, obviously no beginner, but also not impressive, not the sort of player whose strokes inspire admiration from passers-by in the park. I suspect I’m a 3.2 in general. Once I asked a girl from work how she would rate my looks on a scale of one to ten. She said I was a seven, maybe even an eight. I’m not sure how that translates to a one-to-seven scale, but it beats a 3.2. Of course she would never have called me a six or below to my face. And she wouldn’t have given me a suspiciously generous nine or ten. Really, then, she was working on a two-point scale, seven acting as one and eight as two. And she went with one, approaching two on a good day. So that probably is a 3.2.

    Sometimes when Sharon would play her Barbra Streisand records, I would make noises of disapproval. One time she responded by hissing, “anti-Semite,” jokingly. I laughed enough for the joke to become a ritual. Sharon wasn’t routinely funny, but when she was, she was, I thought, quotable. My complaints were good-natured, you see, in contrast to how she and Donald would disparage my Weather Report and Chick Corea albums, once quite harshly when I was allegedly reading in the other room. “Oh, don’t take off the Chick Corea album, Sharon,” Donald said, coaxing a laugh out of Sharon. “I’d love to hear it again and again!” His sarcasm was strictly of the meat and potatoes variety, never clever.

    I doubt it would interest Donald or Sharon to know that Steve Gadd, featured on the Chick Corea album derided that night, also plays on Guilty. He plays superbly, with manly assurance. Thanks to his hiccupping fills toward the end of “Promises,” even Barbra Streisand can claim to have almost made a funk single. What a sad, strange song that is, Gibb’s hooks like icicles, Streisand’s singing joyfully desperate. “I am the love, don’t let me die away,” she sings, with several Barry Gibbs answering “Die away” in harmony, appropriately stretching out “die” like a last breath. I wish I could hear this album with Sharon. I could listen to it every night with her, twice. I would gently rub it with a pink felt record-cleaning cloth after each airing, apologizing for the tiny needle pricks.

    When we first started dating I perhaps mislead Sharon by saying that I liked Barbra Streisand, too. What I meant is that I found her charming in the mid-60s, especially on the “My Name Is Barbra” TV special, flirting with kettle drummers and singing songs about poverty and against materialism while vamping and hamming, by turns enviously and contemptuously, through Bergdorf Goodman. She was brilliant, funny, and gorgeous. I watched the show with my mom. I guess I was fourteen. My mom grew up in New Jersey, and although she was estranged from her family, she missed the East Coast, missed the Italians and Jews she used to hang out with. Not that there aren’t Italians and Jews in Minneapolis, but they’re much scarcer. My mom loved Streisand, loved her misfit glamour, her wit, her Jewishness, her abnormal voice. “She has the lungs of a beluga whale,” said my dad, passing through the room. “You flatter the beluga whale,” said my mom.

    I also sheepishly enjoyed The Way We Were, which I saw on an inauspicious first date with Lorraine Ibsen. But for the most part though, prior to Sharon, I ignored Streisand. I mainly listened to jazz and rock and fusion and hardly ever tuned in AM radio. Streisand’s sometimes maligned attempts to sing contemporary material couldn’t bother me because, except for the hit she had with Laura Nyro’s “Stoney End,” I didn’t hear them. I was unaware of her version of John Lennon’s “Mother,” for instance, until Sharon and I moved in together and Sharon’s extensive collection of Streisand records and memorabilia arrived as an unwelcome dowry. “She’s singing it like it’s called ‘Second Cousin Twice Removed,’” I cracked, as Sharon arranged the furniture. It came out more cuttingly than I intended, but Sharon chuckled. Later we made love on a mattress on the floor, and the night proved to be the apex of our predominantly healthy sexual relationship. There are at least two images from that night that I still use, not always happily, as masturbatory aids.

    Every morning, except Tuesdays and Sundays when she didn’t work at Carson Pirie Scott, Sharon would do her ablutions to Streisand’s “I Can Do It.” Most evenings she would play a Streisand album or two, and occasionally Donald would come over for a “Babsanalia.” Mostly this just meant talking and playing records, but sometimes they’d pantomime and dress up, Donald in half-drag, or they’d reenact scenes from Streisand’s movies. The Babsanalia were always spontaneous, usually involved pot or coke, and often lasted into the small hours, at which point the accuracy of the reenactments was suspect. My only contribution to these endeavors was the coinage “Babsanalia.” I participated once, on a night when I felt it was important for me to get high. It was hard to be the third wheel. I was insufficiently equipped with knowledge or enthusiasm.

    Sharon and Donald were too sophisticated to be truly idolatrous, but not sophisticated enough to blend sincere passion and self-aware irony in the manner of high camp. That was how I saw it anyway. The frivolity of it all chafed me. Nothing important was important to Sharon or Donald. Their Streisand club was purely escapist, of course, a means of pretending not to be of our generation and not from Minnesota, or to be witty and urbane and to have a bona fide witty and urbane gay friend instead of a dim closet case. I was never explicitly excluded from the Babsanalia but it became clear that these evenings were for serious fans only and that I should find other amusement. Usually I’d read in the bedroom. Sometimes I’d go to a bar alone.

    Donald also worked at Carson Pirie Scott, in the men’s casual wear department. He was not an ethical man. When a shirt came in that he liked he would hide it the backroom until it went on final clearance. Then he would sneak it back to the sales floor, as if it had been languishing on the rack the whole time, and he’d get it for even cheaper than his employee discount. Donald was reportedly straight, but I knew this to be untrue, at least not entirely true. Sharon accepted his bluff, though she was attracted to his apparent gayness in the way my mom was attracted to Streisand’s Jewishness. Sharon did acknowledge that Donald moved and talked in a way that would lead many if not most to unfairly question his sexuality. Then there was his Streisand fixation, his interest in clothes (though he dressed badly if you ask me), his passion for the theater, his insistence on being called Donald and never Don, the fact that he had once lured me into the bathroom at Deborah Curtis’ Christmas party, and that once inside Deborah Curtis’ bathroom he had whipped out his cock or at least not strenuously protested when I slowly unzipped his jeans and executed my first and only act of fellatio.

    Sharon didn’t know this last piece of evidence regarding Donald’s homosexuality.

    Donald had one good male friend that I knew of, a short, part-time actor with Aryan features and the physique of an amateur weightlifter who was even dumber than Donald, and lazy. He didn’t work other than the three or four parts he landed a year, usually one lead in a community-theater embarrassment and a few spear-carrying gigs at the big theater in town. Mostly he cadged from girlfriends and half-heartedly sold drugs. I called him the Slothario, which Sharon, who didn’t like him either, thought was clever. Donald and the Slothario would go to nightclubs often, reportedly to pick up women. They even bought notch-less belts from a neighborhood cobbler and leather worker, stole a leather punch from a hardware store, and would actually add notches to their belts in commemoration of successful seductions. Of course anyone can punch a hole in a belt, and no way was Donald getting it up for all those girls. My theory was that Donald and the Slothario were lovers. Donald also had steady girlfriends, including a tiny, laconic brunette named Sara with no “h” who, when she worked as a peep-show model, called herself “Sar-ahh!” Donald and Sara dated for almost a year. My theory was that Sara was also gay, either by birth or as an occupational acquisition. During the year that Donald and Sara were going out I sometimes found myself in situations that led me to wonder how effectively the tinted windows at Paulie’s Hot Tomatoes cloaked the peeping customers. I figured I caught a break when Donald and Sara broke up.

    It was around that time, though, that Donald and Sharon started spending even more time together, mostly away from our apartment. By then there were a few clubs in Minneapolis where one could disco, and they would do that, sometimes going to a party after the bars closed so that Sharon wouldn’t return to our bed until 3:00 a.m. One Easter Sunday I remember she was logy and irritable all day. It didn’t occur to me until late in the afternoon that she was hung over. I was so slow on the uptake, such a dolt. She started telling me about a group of East Indian guys who were also going out dancing, how charming they were. One, an aloof, lanky guy named Divyanga who was said to have fallen out of favor with his Brahmin parents, came to a party that Sharon insisted we throw. He said, “It’s nice to meet you. Sharon’s a great dancer,” as if I had given her instruction. He wasn’t charming.

    One night I bought a new edition of Password, the game, and suggested we share a bottle of wine and play a round or two. Sharon and I both liked Password. She however had plans to go out for drinks followed by dancing and then who knows what with Donald and the Slothario and the East Indians. I was welcome to come, she insisted. But I wasn’t. I noted that she took almost forty-five minutes to get ready, roughly twice as long as usual. I also noted that she looked really good. After she left I tried to read but couldn’t concentrate and resorted to TV, which, predictably, only aggravated my depression.

    That night Sharon came into bed around

    3:00 a.m. again, maybe 3:30, and her breath smelled like vodka and orange juice and cigarettes and she tried to arouse me but I rolled over and feigned sleep. The moment was not unlike those described in “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers.” Later, I suspected that she had gotten horny dancing with the East Indians and had hoped to seduce me in order to pretend I was someone else. Once during lovemaking she had asked me to portray Hubbell Gardiner, the Robert Redford character from The Way We Were, but that was different. I didn’t mind. After Divyanga moved into our apartment and I moved in temporarily with Gary the building manager, I also began to doubt the plurality of the East Indians, a ruse no doubt to make de facto dates seem like non-threatening group socializing. Only Divyanga, whom Gary the building manager seemed to know well, had come to our party, and when I asked Sharon, a poor ad-libber, what the others were named, she pretended not to hear and then when asked again came up with “Ravi” and, after yet another pause, “Big Ravi.”

    Two days after my Password proposal was rejected, Sharon told me that she did love me, but she was no longer in love with me. I had no use for the distinction. I fell from the couch sobbing, not a long fall, but dramatic. I held on to the coffee table, my legs were folded up like a little boy’s. Sharon was faced with the situation in which you want to comfort the person whom you have just discomforted. She sat there quietly until I stopped blubbering. Stupidly, we slept in the same bed that night. In the morning I stared apocalyptically at her un-blanketed body. She was wearing only underwear, which I took for effrontery. In fairness it had been a warm spring night.

    I’ve been crying with decreasing regularity, though still frequently, during the six months since. Actually, my crying has increased over the past few weeks, since I was assigned to review Guilty, in six hundred words. Guilty is a sad record, a record about being made foolish by love, about desperation and deceit. Gary the building manager is an AC/DC fan and will be glad when my assignment has been dispatched. Gary’s a good guy. Divyanga is cheesed with me for extending my temporary stay at Gary the building manager’s, and seems to think I’m not allowed to do my stair-climbing and hall-walking exercises throughout our apartment building, as if I had access to some other building. But I guess Divyanga isn’t the boss of me. I notice that Donald never comes around anymore. Divyanga has barred him, no doubt. The guy is paranoid, though he’s right about Don.

    Guilty ends with a song of romantic betrayal called “Make It like a Memory.” But that’s silly because what’s worse than a painful memory? Barry Gibb has not read his Proust, at least not carefully, though his melodies sometimes approximate Proustian delicacy.

    My current favorite is “Never Give Up,” quasi-Arabic funk to my ears, potentially a showstopper, but comparatively paired down, the string and horn players sent home for the night, the bass creeping or maybe skulking. Streisand is self-important where she used to be self-deprecating, but she’s jive talking on the verses and it’s funny, deliberately funny. The lyric has her suffering from a dry throat. She’s non-metaphorically lovesick. “I will never give up,” she sings, stretching out “I will” for a full measure, eliding the “r” in “never,” making the word an even more emphatic “neva!” The point is reiterated on its way to the chorus’ staccato conclusion and the album’s summary question: “I will never give up, never give up, never give up. I will follow you home. How can you turn me away?”