Blog

Back in the early 1980s, when the Commodore 64 first hit the market and Apple became the first personal computer manufacturer to hit the $1 billion mark for annual sales, Mark Hull had a wife, two kids, a nice house in Fridley, tailor-made suits from Madrid, and a nine-to-five systems analyst job with benefits and a fancy title that progressed from Big Shit to Holy Shit. Two decades later, fighting a constant battle with depression that keeps him from steady employment, he’s avoiding calls from a landlord who is apparently too kind to toss him to the wind, and after many trips to a nearby food shelf, he’s just regained the thirty pounds he lost last year from sheer hunger. It’s simple, alright: You don’t eat, you lose weight.

With this in mind, Hull started Hulles, a blog that he describes in his first post—dated August 16, 2006—as “a how-to manual and a survival guide” for living in extreme poverty.

The result is a haphazard journal of real and imagined recipes, humorous anecdotes and narratives that highlight the suckiness of poverty, and of course, man’s favorite endeavor: cataloging.

Hull’s offerings toggle between Spartan functionalism and pure Athenian aesthetics. Consider toilet paper: “There are too many other things you can use instead, no matter how poor you are,” he writes. “What you are looking for is something that disintegrates in water and doesn’t feel like the business end of a belt sander.” Something like newspaper.

Smoking, however, is a ritual whose dignity must be preserved. “Believe me,” writes Hull, “when I get money, the very first thing I buy is not food or gasoline or coffee, it’s a pack of Camel straights. … That must be why they call it an addiction.”

“I find I have become an accomplished butt-breaker,” he jokes in his typical, innuendo-infused humor as he explains the practice of splitting up cigarette butts and smoking the leftover tobacco out of a pipe.

The mission is simple: Lose all the weight you have to, but don’t lose your dignity. When all you have left in the kitchen is an airline-size bottle of cheap Dominican rum a friend brought back from a trip and the liquid dregs from a can of pears, mix a cocktail and toast your great fortune.

It is precisely this attitude—Hull’s unflinching grasp on his dignity—that has raised suspicion among the more hesitant internet voyeurs stumbling into his world. A MNSpeak thread about Minnesota’s first poverty blog called him a fake, a phony, a no-good, lazy, gold-brickin’ … you get the idea. “He must be greatly exaggerating his plight,” wrote one anonymous commentator. “If you are depressed and broke to that degree, blogging does seem like it should be pretty low on the list of priorities.”

Ironically, blogging provided just the distraction Hull needed. “It was therapeutic,” he explains, “a great way of combating the isolation of depression.” He pauses as a longtime employee at Costello’s Bar & Grill in St. Paul greets him with a kiss. You’d never guess today’s social butterfly suffers from depression. He speaks matter-of-factly about his illness, and is all smiles and coquetry as the server announces the start of happy hour, signaling Hull’s switch from Hamm’s beer to Black Russians.

While it may seem a bit offbeat for a guy in such dire straits to spew self-deprecating humor and witticisms, the blog provided Hull with a means of communicating with the outside world. Hull quickly learned that “funny” was, in fact, all people wanted. “They didn’t want to hear about what I had to go through during the day,” he says with no hint of bitterness. “Nobody really cared about what happened to me, only in so much as it made for a good story.”

By September, Hull was stretching his writing muscles. The poor man’s recipes dwindled, replaced by underwear confessionals and raunchy narratives derived from cocktail napkin missives. And by October, his readership was growing from a few sentimental fools seduced by the notion of a poverty blog to a loyal, international crowd that, judging from the commentary laced with literary references and sophisticated humor, is highly educated and heavy with writers.

From the confines of Nina’s Coffee Café, where he usually blogs since he is clearly without cable or phone connection, Hull has plugged into what he describes as a “whole world of people who are brilliant, interesting, and fun.”

“The thing that fascinates me about writing a blog—as opposed to other media—is the interactivity,” says Hull. “You instantly get people’s reactions, for better or worse … Works in progress can be affected by reactions and suggestions.”

This interactivity has led to new projects. After commenting on a computer graphics image created by a Michigan blogger who goes by the name of Visual Snark, Hull found himself collaborating on an illustrated story starring a sexy P.I. by the name of Cuervo Korbel, and a cohort of other characters. “The graphics are so great that it’s very intimidating to write to,” he confesses. “With every word I think, ‘Fuck. This has to be as good as the illustration.’” Now the project, which is not yet public, has spun out to include blogs for each character, allowing for seemingly real interaction with readers that could affect the story’s plot.

As he enters his second year of blogging, Hull can catalog his past successes. He learned enough Portuguese to flirt with an attractive Brazilian reader. He ate Garrison Keillor’s sandwich. (Sorry. You’ll have to see the blog for that one, but perhaps it accounts for his recent weight gain.) And he even had a couple of stories published in Avenues and The Highland Villager, for which he actually got paid.

These new opportunities are keeping Hull busy enough to neglect his blog, but it’s not staving off his landlord. And while this would certainly be fodder for his MNSpeak critics, Hull has no complaints. “Now I have an excuse for being broke,” writes Hull in a celebratory post. “I’m a writer, dammit, I’m supposed to be poor.”

My brothers and my mother were all dancers, outside of whatever else they did, like acrobatics, high wire, trapeze,” Donald O’Connor once said. The Hollywood dance icon knew inherently why a dancer is like a circus performer: because both create physical illusions by subverting gravity and harnessing momentum. During his classic and clownish “Make ’Em Laugh” routine in Singin’ in the Rain, O’Connor abandons himself to pratfalls and klutzy collisions with consummate grace and timing. Conversely, a hundred years earlier ballets used a system of wires to enhance the ethereal nature of their fairies and sylphs by making them literally fly. Today, contemporary choreographers increasingly incorporate circus techniques into their dances, along with moves from extreme sports and gymnastics, as a way of pushing physical, political, philosophical, and high/low cultural boundaries.

Streb/Ringside, a popular New York-based company, sends performers crashing through glass, dangling from harnesses and flying through the air dodging metal objects with split-second timing. Artistic director Elizabeth Streb views these moves not as a series of audacious tricks, but as a rigorous exploration of the nature of spatial and temporal dimensions, the aesthetics of grace, even the treatment of gender. Either way, it’s compelling theater that has drawn audiences from kids to dance cognoscenti. On the other coast, and at the other end of the cultural spectrum, “clowning” as dance evolved as a frenetic off-shoot of hip hop in L.A., in the aftermath of the Rodney King riots. Featured in David LaChapelle’s film RIZE, it took off when reformed drug dealer Thomas Johnson set out to heal ravaged South Central neighborhoods by getting kids into freestyle dance; they donned clown makeup instead of gang colors and started entertaining at neighborhood birthday parties.

Locally, Sally Rousse, a dancer with the James Sewell Ballet, has been experimenting with aerial work for almost a decade, relinquishing the bravura aspects of circus for a more meditative take on anti-gravity. Her 2002 dance/theater work trickpony, with aerialist Chelsea Bacon, explored autism and the workings of the “savant” state of mind. Risa Cohen, another local dancer, learned circus skills to make her choreography more accessible and exciting; she views aerial work—which covers everything performed on apparatuses above ground, including the trapeze, “silks” (swatches of suspended fabric), and diabolical-sounding contraptions like the German Wheel—as an exciting new direction for dance. “More dancers are looking for other ways to illuminate the stage,” says Cohen. “You can say a lot in the air. It opens up a new movement vocabulary for dance.” For modern dancers who usually work to ground themselves and release into gravity, aerial work offers another expressive realm. As an acquaintance of mine once put it, “Dancers are spatial carnivores. They can’t let all that space above them go to waste.”

Of course, mime and theatrical clowning schools like L’École Jacques Lecoq in Paris have long played a role in the style of physical theater companies, including our own Theatre de la Jeune Lune; on a more erudite level, there’s the team of gymnast philosophers tumbling through life’s absurdities in Tom Stoppard’s Jumpers.

So even as dance and theater nudge toward the center ring, contemporary circus increasingly takes cues from the sophisticated visual spectacle and dramatic gravitas of dance and physical theater. Just look at Cirque du Soleil, the hugely successful and influential troupe whose lavish productions include forays into Chinese philosophy, as well as New Agey undercurrents of alienation and nomadic souls. Pretentious? Peut-être. But also compelling, because the history and mise en scène of circus is chock full of highly charged analogies just waiting to detonate—especially when it’s a youth circus.

Under a permanent big top in St. Paul, high above the rapt audience, four teenagers maneuver through a web of bungee cords with the purposeful panache of Spiderman. They manipulate and support one another in dazzling visual designs and spine-tingling drops and rebounds, reality-based superheroes who, like the great arachnid himself, demonstrate that with power comes responsibility. All are students at Circus Juventas, a school and company that accommodates everyone from toddlers to teens. As performers they execute death-defying acts with aplomb, in an atmosphere that touts safety first and an awareness of one’s limits. As kids, they experience the high of finding their personal best while developing a powerful sense of esprit de corps.

“We don’t get the standard-type jocks here,” says Dan Butler, who with his wife Betty cofounded Circus Juventas in 1994. “We get the kids who don’t want to be part of the competitive sports world. Through teamwork they develop a sense of purpose, belonging, and self-esteem—you can’t do the bicycle-built-for-ten routine unless everyone shows up.”

“We have kids doing things they never thought they could do,” adds Betty Butler. For instance, seventeen-year-old Gemma Kirby’s favorite act is the flying trapeze, the one least suited to her body type. “I’m tall for the flying trapeze. Most of the girls who do that act are small and muscular and have had gymnastics training, which I have not,” says Kirby, who explains that while flying and flipping through space, you need a finely tuned gymnast’s sense of “where you are in the air.” Kirby also had to overcome a fear of heights. “The first show I was in, I was up there hyperventilating. You need to totally trust your muscles, your catcher, your entire team.”

Trust is a key part of the drama that happens in the ring. During performances, the Big Top transforms into a highly caffeinated playground where rambunctious kids indulge in hyperbolic versions of childhood games, sibling interactions, and forbidden behaviors like playing with fire and swinging so high that you flip over the top bar of the swing set. There’s the “I double-dare you” frisson of danger and one-upmanship, but also the comfort and safety of belts, lines, and “spotters,” coaches or older children who hover nearby, ready to catch a falling flier or help a grade-schooler through a walkover.

Then there are the “rigger dads,” the parent volunteers who augment the team of professional riggers and coaches. They raise apparatus on pullies, tighten guywires, and move mats and equipment in and out. Dressed in black, the riggers and coaches shadow the kids like a race of mysterious, benevolent ninjas.

What’s interesting about this supporting cast, as it were, is how they also underscore the task-driven nature of Juventas’s very specific and highly complex circus routines. The aesthetic appeal lies in the intense focus of the performers’ bodies and their aerodynamic, seemingly effortless style. But there’s an emotional impact, too, intensified by the sense of serious play that defines Circus Juventas’s attitude toward learning and performing and makes it so alluring to audiences. Here one of the great paradoxes of parenthood is made patently physical, as adults lurk on the sidelines, pushing children into the maelstrom of life with one hand while strapping them in with the other. As theater it can’t be beat, not even by the burnished perfection of Cirque du Soleil stars flipping seamlessly through sophisticated routines, enhanced by high-end production values.

True, Circus Juventas, like Cirque du Soleil, presents circus as an art form rather than a string of spectacular stunts. This year’s main show, Atlanticus spins out a complex narrative about the lost continent of Atlantis that incorporates Plato’s dialogues, music, and dance (July 26–August 12; www.circusjuventas.org). But their performances also bear some resemblance to postmodern dance, a radical form that developed in the 1960s. Choreographers like Yvonne Rainer and Steve Paxton wanted to get rid of the heavy symbolism and hyper-theatricality that they believed had encumbered dance, so that movement could be viewed afresh and on its own terms. They drew attention to ordinary people and pedestrian movement to demonstrate the beauty of the things most dance was trying to disguise, like effort and awkwardness. Attempting to break down the boundaries between art and real-life experience, they exposed the process of decision making by improvising in performance. Likewise, while Circus Juventas productions feature snazzy costumes, sets, and lighting effects, they also reveal the backstory by showing the mechanics of safety paraphernalia and other supporting infrastructure, as well as the misses and recoveries. Those rough edges, of kids publicly performing skills they are still attempting to master, are at least part of what gives the audience goose bumps.

It may sound paradoxical, but while circus celebrates excess, it also honors the dictum that everything extraneous to the task potentially gets in the way. Postmodern dancers often turned to sports as a model of task-oriented behavior because they wanted the clarity and focus that athletes bring to achieving a goal. In professional sports toned bodies moving gracefully, dangerously, powerfully are just the icing on the cake. Yet among many fans there’s a kind of subversive appreciation of sport as an art form. “Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty,” says the writer David Foster Wallace in a New York Times article on the tennis player Roger Federer. “The human beauty we’re talking about here is beauty of a particular type; it might be called kinetic beauty. Its power and appeal are universal. It has nothing to do with sex or cultural norms. What it seems to have to do with really is human beings’ reconciliation with the fact of having a body.”

Perhaps we see this process of reconciliation most clearly in children—the determination with which they approach the job of exploring, understanding, and coming to terms with their bodies and the tangle of impulses, both physical and emotional, that animate them.

As Gemma Kirby observes, “You’re out there on your own, doing these crazy things.”

A race car with a dorsal spoiler careened over a jump and passed through a flaming hoop. Then it followed the racetrack in a loop-d-loop and drove through another flaming hoop. Rolando, a video-game tester for Activision Publishing, guided the car via a Playstation 2 controller over a series of flashing, fluorescent arrows that somehow gave it extra speed. He wore a brown, collared shirt, and an excess of hair gel that gleamed under the fluorescent lights. There was no hint of satisfaction on his face when his car finished ahead of his computerized rivals. Tinny victory music played. Rolando took a sip of Mountain Dew and began another race. “I’m trying to unlock all the secret levels,” he said, serious and glassy-eyed.

A video-game tester’s main objective is to identify precisely what causes the glitches that arise in the early stages of a game’s development. Problems can stem from an action as trivial as pressing the “start” button at the wrong time, so pinpointing a bug is an incredibly tedious task. Rolando’s specific assignment was to unlock every secret level using every permutation of car type and character, to make sure the game ran smoothly no matter what. He drank frequently from his soda, and was maybe just a bit over-caffeinated, swiveling rapidly in his leather-upholstered chair.

The testing pit at Activision’s Minnesota headquarters was enclosed by the sound dampening cubicle walls one finds in any office (and, as in any office, the walls did little to dampen sound). Situated in an Eden Prairie corporate mall, near the intersection of Equitable Drive and Executive Drive, this is the home of Activision Value. The games developed here are as addictive as any, but usually they are less known than Activision’s top big-budget creations such as Tony Hawk Pro Skater. Posters pinned high on the walls celebrated offerings like American Chopper, Cabela’s Alaskan
Adventure, The History Channel: Civil War, and American
Chopper II: Full Throttle. There were half a dozen long countertops with three televisions on each, video game consoles connected to the A/V plugs, their power buttons glowing. Empty pop cans and coffee cups were plentiful. Perched on one counter was a family of Star Wars bobblehead dolls. (“We’re comfortable with our nerd level here,” one tester said.) A piñata hung from the ceiling, though no one seemed to know why.

About three-quarters of the forty or so testers had been hired within the last month to comb through games due for release during the holiday season. The majority of them will work the summer and never come back. Many were drawn to the job because it seemed a way to get paid for pursuing what was already a hobby. Others, though, had their minds set on the long term: Rolando recently finished coursework in animation at The Art Institutes International and aspires to design games one day.

It may have been a disappointment, then, to learn that testing is much like any other office gig. True, tattoos and cargo shorts were permissible, and there was a pinball machine in the break room. But, overwhelmingly, the gamers sat quietly at their consoles, staring straight ahead, writing data reports, and, of course, anticipating breaks—during which the main activity was to play still more video games. “Most people end up eating lunch while playing,” said a tester named Reggie.

Across the aisle from Rolando, Annamarie ran a video poker game in several languages to make sure it didn’t freeze when the settings were changed. The only female tester, she wore a purple shirt with lace trim and kept her purse slung over her shoulder. After studying comic art at MCAD, she said she’s still “trying to figure it out,” meaning her career path. The monitor read in French, and Annamarie waited somewhat anxiously, biting her lower lip, as the game loaded. Her chair was pushed so close to the counter it touched her stomach. On screen, a recognizable poker celebrity sat stone-faced, possibly bluffing—it is remarkable how, in these contemporary video games, familiar faces look so familiar. (Although, Reggie said, “No one is sure if the guy who looks like Ron Jeremy is supposed to be Ron Jeremy.”)

The midmorning work break was announced. Some reached for cigarette packs and headed outside, but most gathered near a screen where two testers played a round of Street Fighter II. One employee pulled a Nintendo DS from his
pocket and leaned back in his swivel chair. Annamarie popped Final Fantasy
XII into the Xbox 360 at her workstation; she’d brought the game from home. “It’s my favorite,” she said. A coworker stood behind her, watching silently. Fifteen minutes later, everyone returned to their posts, and the images on their screens changed back to those mandated by their employer.

People who work in fine dining tend to be night owls who eat their first meal of the day around two p.m. They carry a wine service wherever they go but often lose their car keys. They’re rock ’n’ roll junkies who, more often than not, have been married multiple times. They put up with exorbitant urban rents in order to be close to the action. As a rule, they don’t balance their checkbooks. I’m not being critical here, simply stating facts, based on four years of reporting on restaurants, which also happen to apply to me. They do not, however, describe Karl and Annamarie Rigelman.

We meet at Brix, the suburban bistro on Excelsior Boulevard in St. Louis Park. Karl orders a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc, pronouncing it “light, crisp, and simple.” He bicycled eighty-seven miles that afternoon and this—in addition to plenty of water, his wife reminds him—is exactly what he needs. After the glasses have been poured, the Rigelmans sit close to one another and speak in voices so soft, I have to strain to hear.

They met at the Culinary Institute of America, in Hyde Park, NY, early in 1986. He was a 20-year-old from Red Wing. She was an older woman—26—and Southern. After graduation, they went to Alaska for their first chef jobs, surviving for a year despite the fact that Annamarie hates cold weather.

“So what did he do?” she deadpans. “He moved me from Alaska to Minneapolis.” They married in 1988. Karl was working as a cook on the line at Goodfellow’s. This was when the art deco space with enormous chandeliers and somber, tuxedoed waiters was a top-rated fine dining spot. Then Karl encouraged Annamarie to apply. “Goodfellow’s had the most extraordinary pastry kitchen,” she says. “It was climate-controlled, with its own thermostat. It had a sheeter, a steam-injected oven—and all this in the tiniest space.”
She’s a morning person and always has been. This is one of the reasons Annamarie became a baker. She liked the solitude: “starting off when the kitchen was empty and quiet and still.”

Karl, on the other hand, loved the movement and buzz of a busy restaurant at night. After a second tour of Alaska, where he bartended by night and ice climbed all day, the Rigelmans returned to the Cities in 1990 and he managed the bar at Azur.

“That’s where I found out I love wine,” Karl says. “The flavors, the styles, the parts of the world they come from. Every wine I taste, I keep notes—I have scribbles going back to the mid ’80’s. I like to taste blind and guess what a wine is and where it comes from. I can do it, too.” His wife touches his leg and he laughs. “About half of the time.” He loves the wines made from European varietals grown in California, what he calls “developing international style.”

For some couples, working opposite shifts would be a problem, especially in an industry that encourages the every-night’s-a-rock-concert mentality. But for Karl and Annamarie, it was a means to an end. Their daughter, Sophia, was born in 1992; the following year, Annamarie took the job she still holds as pastry chef for Lucia’s restaurant. She gave birth to Celeste in ’94.

“Being a bar manager was surprisingly great for when the kids were young,” Karl says. “I was the day shift, Annamarie was the night shift, and we were able to raise our kids without any daycare at all.” Adds Annamarie: “I think it was easier on our marriage to be apart so much during those years. We were actually glad to see each other at the end of the week.”

Shortly after Celeste was born, Karl took a demanding job as general manager of the downtown Minneapolis Table of Contents—a glitzier reincarnation of the former St. Paul location that was once attached to the erstwhile Hungry Mind bookstore—but Annamarie had built a career at Lucia’s by this time.

“Lucia [Watson] is tough,” Annamarie says. “But as long as you’re turning out good food, she’s pretty flexible. When my kids were out of school for summer, she let me work a schedule with three days off in a row.”

Meanwhile, after the St. Paul storefront closed in 2000, TOC-Minneapolis began to flounder. Karl eventually left to help JP Samuelson open jP American Bistro, and stayed on as general manager for several years. Then Lucia’s Bakery and Take Home opened, with an emphasis on baked goods, and Annamarie’s job became more demanding. So last year Karl went to work for the Minikahda Club as food and beverage director; he misses the activity and late-night vibe of a real restaurant. But this job is secure and consistent. And it was his turn to step back.