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  • The Man in the Housing Bubble

    The Man in the Housing Bubble

    Did he die? Or just abandon his house to the “Ugly” people?

    Ug bought my next-door neighbor’s house. I didn’t think it was dilapidated enough to be purchased by the “We Buy Ugly Houses” people, but apparently it was. When I moved in, my landlady warned me that the guy next door was weird, but I figured that was just because she was from the Home Depot school of property maintenance (vinyl siding and lots of pavement), while he preferred a more lived-in look that included randomly planted shrubs and ankle-length grass. The house’s peeling siding was an amalgam of different colors, with holes artfully covered in plywood. More power to him, I thought. My perfectly manicured South Minneapolis block needed some excitement.

    He walked his dog wearing brightly colored hot pants and erected a limp chain-link fence that bisected his front yard, the way one might surround a trailer to protect it from rabid dogs. He hung his birdfeeder so that it leaned into my front yard, which soon became an unwelcome haven for a riot of birds and squirrels. He rarely appeared outdoors. I saw him so infrequently that when I picture him I see a sixty-year-old Andy Warhol, with shaggy grey-blond hair.

    Last fall, his unmowed grass became a vast grass forest, with unraked leaves padding it in wet clumps. The bird feeder sat empty and all signs of life, already infrequent, ceased completely. For weeks I waited for an indication that he was alive, but there was nothing.

    Then one day a few weeks ago, I heard a series of crashes coming from the house. Rushing to the window, I saw two men in blue uniforms throwing the contents of the house into a miniature dump truck marked 1-800-GOT-JUNK? HomeVestors had purchased the house, the dudes in blue told me. “You know, the ‘We Buy Ugly Houses’ people.” These guys would clean the place out, and then HomeVestors would fix it up and put it back on the market.

    HomeVestors is a national franchise with headquarters in Dallas. They pay cash for neglected homes and rental properties, close within a few days, and then fix them up and turn them around at a higher price. The twelve franchises in the Twin Cities combined buy about three hundred properties a year. To HomeVestors, ugly isn’t just multi-colored siding and unmowed grass; it’s more often messy situations. Many houses come into Ug’s possession because of the three D’s: debt, death, and divorce. Others are sold as a way to get rid of a burdensome rental property, which was why my neighbor’s house was sold. It turned out he was a tenant who just wasn’t wanted any longer.

    By the time I got outside, the truck had been stuffed with two refrigerators, a stove, and a dishwasher, and the workers were in the process of rolling another stove down the steps, not on a dolly, but by rolling it end over end. From my side of the house, I could still see the only adornments that had ever been there: a crooked air conditioner and a small American flag, the kind you might see at a small-town Veterans Day parade.

    On the overgrown front lawn there was a mournful display: an old metal kitchen cabinet, a fold-up metal bed, innumerable broken floor lamps, a set of floral TV trays, and a perfectly good basketball. These items looked like a pack of kids waiting for a late parent to pick them up from school. And still more stuff kept coming out of the house. As a second dishwasher was tossed into the truck, a left-behind spoon tumbled out of it onto the street.

    The inside of the house was a scene of bare ruin. The whole place was freezing cold and, without the carpets, overwhelmingly brown. It felt as if I were exploring a house that had been abandoned for years, as if the floorboards would give way at any moment. An empty Xbox box sat in the middle of what was meant to be a dining room. In the threshold between that room and the bedroom lay discarded Herbal Essences shampoo and conditioner bottles and a dirty glass ashtray. What would make my dog-walking, anti-yard-mowing guy leave all of this behind?

    On the wall of the living room was a solemn portrait of a Hispanic family, circa 1992, that had never lived in the house. The father wore a Girbaud T-shirt and a steady expression. His wife and three children were equally stoic. The family stared straight ahead at a spot across the room, where an entire section of the wall had been torn out, revealing the guts of the house, water pipes, and wiring.

    From the porch where neighbor dude had once smoked, the men in blue now heaved the contents of the second floor out onto the lawn. They threw oven racks, stiff sheets of carpet, flattened boxes, and blocks of wood. The American flag was one of the last things to go. Like an autumn leaf floating slowly to the ground, over and over it tumbled, finally landing with a little click on top of the pile of a forgotten life. —Alexandra Kerl

     

  • All the News That Fits (In Eight Pages)

    Nick Hook never envisioned himself as an editor. When he was thrust behind the helm of the Whittier Globe in April of last year, he had virtually no writing experience. Nick had been shuffling between gigs as a rocker with Vinnie and the Stardusters and a lackey in the corporate world when he decided to submit an article to his brother and then-Globe-editor, Jamie. Suddenly, Jamie was fired or quit, depending on whom you ask. And since the Globe’s two-member board president, Ralf Runquist, a spry eighty-four-year-old, had no interest in managing the paper, he allowed Nick to take control on a temporary basis. After three months, another Hook was officially in charge.

    Rarely more than eight pages and printed on the cheapest paper, the Globe has been the Whittier community’s voice since 1976. There are no offices, just a P.O. Box and Hook’s cell phone. Meetings are held nomadically, via the telephone, or at local bars or a favorite Vietnamese restaurant, over mock duck sandwiches and bubble tea. The Globe could be called a poor man’s Onion, a punked-out rag that pokes good-natured, boozy fun at local events and politics. It is unlike any other newspaper in the Twin Cities.

    Under Hook’s tutelage, the Globe has steered away from such yawn-inducing stories as, “City Out of Compliance With Federal Mediation Agreement” and toward screaming yellow journalism like, “Pumpkin Vandals!” On one occasion, when news was slow, Hook sent an inebriated pal to cover a Whittier Alliance meeting. Like a small-scale Hearst kick-starting the Spanish-American War, the “reporter” glommed onto one of the meeting’s many talking points and inflated it into a lighthearted controversy. Accompanying the article was a photo of a young woman dressed in a short skirt, sexy black boots, and a hat and mask, holding a letter said to be offensive. Of course, there have been setbacks and some of Hook’s jokes haven’t gone over so well. After he suggested that readers avoid the Wedge Community Co-op, for example, claiming that organic vegetables are nothing more than conventional food that has been washed really well, his paper lost the co-op’s advertising for several months.

    Hook, in his mid-thirties, is a bed-headed manic with the wide eyes and uncontrolled gesticulation of a guy either tremendously caffeinated or consistently thrilled. Almost immediately after coming on board, he had the idea to make the Globe more of a laugh than a snooze. “This is all for fun,” he said. “It has to be, since we don’t make any money. I pay our writers with beer when I take the staff out every other month and pick up the tab.” Hook himself receives a modest stipend of a couple hundred bucks each month, certainly not enough to live on.

    Editing the Globe is a slapdash affair. Hook rounds up articles toward the end of each month and then pushes them through at the last minute, filling empty space with odd tidbits like dating contests and photos of cats or his friends’ children. Sometimes, when the events calendar is sparse, he’ll add fake happenings like an audition for Subhuman, a musical about the “fascinating life of three modern tow-truck drivers!” During Hook’s tenure, the Globe has launched a variety of oddball columns like “Ask the Nurse,” in which readers (real and imagined) seek medical and fashion advice; “Ask Oscar,” a six-year-old boy answering child-rearing questions as best he can; “Everybody Is A Star,” a horoscope that explains its vague advice in terms of movie plots; and “Don’t Knock It ‘Till You’ve Tried It,” Shannon Keough’s monthly rumination on new adventures, like severing her Achilles tendon or suffering through a personal-finance class. A recent contest, featuring a photo of half-bared cleavage, was called “Win a date with these!”

    No one seems to know who really owns the Globe. Runquist, though, has run the paper for ten years—he took over after the editor at the time literally dropped dead during a delivery run—and seen it through various incarnations. While disapproving of the paper’s newfound interest in boozing, it turns out that he’s generally pleased with the product. “Some of the articles seem strange to me,” he admitted. “But that’s the new generation, I guess. It’s become a fun thing, and I like that.”

    Hook has serious goals for the gabsheet. He’d like to draw more advertisers, pay his writers with money instead of alcohol, and someday print more than eight pages at a go. What he doesn’t want is for the paper to be like all the other neighborhood monthlies. “If we can get five more advertisers, that would be good,” Hook said. “But it’s not going to come at the expense of the articles. There’s a lot of humor in this neighborhood and in the meetings.” He laughed. “Though some day I might just try and please Ralf and have an alcohol-free issue.”

    —Peter Schilling

  • Letter From Shangai >> Breaking Out

    Has “bird flu” already arrived in one of the world’s most crowded cities?

    The other morning an old man spent several minutes mumbling angry Shanghainese phrases at the two parakeets that hang in cages in front of my apartment building. A few of the old women who regularly congregate in front of the gate watched him with mild interest, but nobody seemed surprised by this behavior.

    “Qín líu g?an,” said one of the more assertive women when I raised my brow in her direction. “Qín líu g?an.”

    Bird flu. Bird flu.

    For the last several months, many of this city’s roughly twenty million residents have assumed that a bird flu cover-up has already begun, despite government assurances that transparency would be the rule in the event of a Shanghai outbreak. This is, of course, learned behavior, acquired during the 2003 SARS epidemic when government under-reporting of thousands of infections resulted in large outbreaks that crippled Hong Kong and Beijing. Somehow, Shanghai, China’s largest city and its most powerful economy, managed to survive that period with fewer than twenty infections.

    Regardless, several days after the parakeet incident, I was in Beijing, flipping through China Daily over breakfast, when I noticed a small, below-the-fold beige box packed with unusually small text. The badly camouflaged news was ominous: “A woman may have died of bird flu virus in the first such case in Shanghai, the city’s health bureau said yesterday.” Shanghai’s gossip mill is notoriously efficient, and within the hour I received a phone call from an American friend there who informed me of a reliable rumor that a wild bird market on Nanjing Road, Shanghai’s showplace shopping street, had been shut down and sealed by the authorities. A couple hours later I received another phone call, this time from a Shanghainese friend with the same rumor.

    Two days later I returned to Shanghai and hailed a taxi to the Fengyang Road Bird, Flower, and Antique Market, where, I was told, wild birds had been seized by the authorities. The Nanjing Road location, as I knew it, was a low-rise mall that hawks antiques to tourists from nearby high-end hotels. What I did not know was that behind the clean storefronts is a dirty maze of stalls filled with ceramics and bonsai trees that sprawl northward, until literally spilling onto Fengyang Road. I wandered through this tangle, fruitlessly looking for remnants of wild birds. After a few minutes I was reminding myself of the perils of rumor.

    Then, searching for an exit, I inadvertently stumbled into a tight lane where several intricately carved wooden bird cages hung empty and low over the pavement. At first I thought that I had happened upon a stall selling bird accessories, but ahead was a procession of dozens of cages, some stacked on the ground and some on boxes, and all just as empty as the ones hanging above me. Around the corner there were still more, some the size of tea cups, others the size of the little old ladies who ambled past them. Again, they were all empty. Men in dusty black suits sat around listlessly, smoking and looking a little lost. When I asked around to find out what had happened, nobody was willing to talk unless the topic was the price of bird cages. Whatever had happened, I could tell that the evacuation had been quick: Droppings and seeds still covered cage floors.

    Afterward, I wandered up Nanjing Road and stopped in at a Kentucky Fried Chicken. Last year, KFC admitted that its China sales had been hurt by rumors of bird flu, but in recent weeks the company claimed that sales were beginning to recover. The reprieve, however, looks to have been short-lived: On this Sunday afternoon, at one of many Nanjing Road outlets, the counters were nearly empty and the staff wasn’t even bothering to make french fries. Ordinarily, it would have been mobbed with families on their weekend outings.

    Among the roughly fifty thousand Americans who call this city and its surrounding environs home, many seem to believe that escape will be an option if the situation becomes dire. The Shanghainese don’t have that luxury, however, and they mostly seem resigned to their fate. Two days ago, as I left my apartment building, I noticed that the two parakeets were gone. Where their cages had hung was a ragged, red Chinese knot that, I was told, would bring good luck. —Adam Minter

    Adam Minter, illustration by Serik Kulmeshkenov

  • In the Mailbag This Month

    Since we do listen to our voice mail, it’s a valid way to communicate with us. This month, we had a number of calls about April’s cover subject, Tom Friedman [“A Man of His Times”]. Friedman’s old friends, colleagues, and even rivals phoned us. Tom M. said his mother and Mrs. Friedman were old card-playing chums. Stephanie J. was a St. Louis Park High classmate giving her thumbs up, and Al E. called all the way from Washington, D.C., to say the story was “being passed around here.” George B. left the following message: “I’m glad someone finally pointed out how superficial some of Friedman’s arguments really are.” Ross K. contacted us the old-fashioned way–by email–to let us know that, in the year of Friedman’s birth, “It was Malenkov who replaced Stalin. There were a number of cold war hard-liners before Kruschev came along as premier.” That’s true. Kruschev did not become premier until 1958. But he was Stalin’s immediate replacement in 1953 as General Secretary of the Soviet–the top of the Soviet communist party.

    letters at rakemag dot com. Keep those cards and letters coming! Also keep in mind the following: Unless notified, we assume that submissions are intended for publication. We cannot return materials sent by mail; please don’t send valuable originals. We strongly encourage submission by email. Finally, letters may be edited for length and clarity. Can’t get enough? Is it torture waiting a month for the next issue? Read us daily–no kidding, updates every day at www.rakemag.com/today.

  • Hefty Hamlet

    I’m sure Santino Fontana will be great as Hamlet. But you’re wrong to suggest that casting him is somehow authentic, rescuing the part from inappropriately “fat, bearded, balding guys.” “The Prince of Denmark is twenty or so years old” says Straight Talk [March]. No, Hamlet is thirty. The gravedigger in Act Five, when asked how long he’s been in the job, replies that he started “the very day that young Hamlet was born.” He goes on to explain that he has been at it “man and boy, thirty years.” When Hamlet is deriding himself for cowardice, he calls to the audience, “Who calls me villain? breaks my pate across?/ Plucks off my beard, and blows it in my face?” And when he’s fighting his duel with Laertes, his mother worries that he’s “fat and scant of breath.” OK, this has been interpreted as meaning “sweaty” or “relatively out of shape.” But elsewhere in Shakespeare, “fat” when used to describe a person generally means … well … “fat.” So Hamlet’s thirty, bearded, and on the pudgy side. The skinny young man of our imaginations is a Victorian invention. Not that it matters in production. What’s needed is an imaginative and versatile actor. But the telling-it-how-it-is tone of Straight Talk grates a bit when the initial premise of the article is wrong.


    Bridget Escolme
    London, UK

  • Walkaholics Unite!

    What a lovely article Jennifer Vogel wrote about walking in dear old Minneapolis. I’m a complete walking geek myself–walking to work and many other places because I choose to. It grows from a love of the city (whatever that city may be–Seattle now, or Shanghai, Hanoi, and or wherever I’ve lived) and what I can learn from being in it. When I was living in Minneapolis a few years ago, I attended one meeting on precisely the Block E issue; it was a meeting filled with hopeful citizens looking to voice their opinions on that awful, dispiriting building. The meeting was advertised as such an opportunity, yet its facilitator would have none of it and gave no time (what interests were behind this of course I have no idea) for anyone to say a word. That would have to come at another meeting. She presented a picture-perfect, stern, unimaginative, policy-wonk demeanor to those of us with the naive notion that we might have something important to say. It was a fascinating little game to watch the city keep the voices of people at bay, and these were not your problematic minorities and others that Minneapolitans so struggle to come to terms with. It is a very sad thing for a city that does, as you point out, have so much going for it. I was visiting family a few weeks ago and was lamenting that even for a city bent on car myopia, the actual aesthetic experience of driving is much worse than many places I’ve been–no trees or landscaping along much of the freeway system. This too was not always the case, as my mother comments wistfully about the old Highway 100 when it was originally built with lovely elms and lilacs for miles. I’ve come to the conclusion that it comes down to insecurity, and much of that having something to do with masculinity (men must command space, not walk through it) and class (which is obvious, I think). Such problems are very alive in this more vibrant Seattle, as I must justify my eccentric walking ways to friends and colleagues virtually every week. I’m an urban geographer who does work in China and it is there as well that I have had numerous bewildering conversations trying to convince people that professionals in the United States sometimes walk or bicycle to work. Somehow, some way, we must find a way to alter this vision of car driving as the only properly imagined life and I appreciate your attempt to make an alternative seem at least possible.

    Brian Hammer
    Seattle, WA

  • Happy Walking

    I crave depth. Sometimes I read the McNews but always thirst for more. Your magazine is a deep drink of cool water in an ADD-media world. I can hardly wait for each issue to come out, and I devour every article (and yes, even the advertisements). Kudos especially for “The Long Walk” [April]. When I was on sabbatical last year, I parked my car (being unable to afford the twelve dollars per day for parking at the University of Minnesota that ordinary folks pay). I took the light rail up from the Nokomis neighborhood, necessitating a one-mile walk to/from the 46th Street Station. It was heaven. I even hiked my groceries three quarters of a mile home in any kind of weather. At one point, I parked my car for a full five weeks (nothing close to Jennifer Vogel’s accomplishment). But walking in the city is a great joy and I recommend it heartily. For heart health, among other reasons.


    M. Cecilia Wendler, RN

    Minneapolis

  • View Restaurant & Lounge

    The Calhoun Beach Club’s on-site restaurant wins Facelift of the Year. The rejuvenated space (pictured here), once home to Dixie’s, is now a restaurant worthy of the club’s luxe membership. The warm, orangey colors; clean, modern lines; and cushy pod furniture are invitingly swank, but this place isn’t all about show. View’s sesame-encrusted salmon with an orange beurre blanc, shrimp spaghettini baked in parchment paper, and crispy zucchini fries are notable successes. Even the beautiful people can dine well here without mistreating their bodies: In keeping with the Club’s fitness mission, delicious and healthy dishes like Moroccan grilled tofu and turkey burgers populate the menu. This is the rebirth of a spot that thoroughly deserved to be gorgeous again. 2730 Lake St. W., Minneapolis; 612-920-5000; www.viewcalhoun.com

  • Jerome Liebling

    In 1949, Jerome Liebling left the established New York art scene for the academe, taking up an influential post as professor of film and photography in the University of Minnesota’s fledgling fine arts program. As he set down roots here, his outsider’s perspective drew him toward people and places–scenes from St. Paul’s slaughterhouses, work-worn faces from the Iron Range, children on the Red Lake Reservation–that few others at the time considered artistic fodder. He also witnessed political history as figures ranging from Walter Mondale to JFK made memorable appearances in Minnesota. Today Liebling lives in Florida, but he visited the Twin Cities recently to celebrate the opening of a retrospective of his work at the Minnesota Center for Photography.

    You left New York at a time when it was becoming the world’s art capital. Do you think coming here limited or liberated you as an artist?

    I really grew up in Minnesota, whether I knew it or not. The loss of my home and my friends in New York was tough, but I thought Minnesota was very rich, and I really traveled throughout the state to discover what I could.

    Your presence here was influential in developing a stronger art community and gallery scene. Were you hoping to recreate some of what you’d experienced on the East Coast?
    Well, one of the things going on at the time was the vast expansion of the universities, much of it due to the GI Bill, and the art department at the U of M had just been formed. At that time, I didn’t understand what that meant, but it was a very significant change for young artists. Previous to that, you trained at a conservatory if you were in music or the arts. Suddenly, you could get a respected degree in the arts. So I was part of that change, but I didn’t even know it.

    Your body of work includes some very disturbing images. Are you drawn to photographing the dark side of life?
    Well, those things are there, and at some point we all have to face them. I like to think my work captures the passion and the pain of life. Passion arises and destroys, nature rises again, and things seem to rejuvenate. You have hope and, unfortunately, a little despair. The wonderful growth that you get from nature–young people, beautiful things growing–is amazing. But then eventually things die. And how we resolve that philosophically, I don’t know.

    Have you ever been upset by your subject matter?
    The South St. Paul slaughterhouse project was challenging. I started it in 1952, and I’d been in World War II until my discharge in 1945. When I first went down to South St. Paul and went through some slaughterhouses, it was really a challenge to my memory. That’s when I saw the chaos and the blood and the killing, and absorbing that was just as much a part of what I was doing there as simply documenting how these guys worked.

    Is there a photo out there that you always wanted to shoot, but never got the chance?
    There’s not really a missed opportunity I dwell on, but rather a general desire to keep getting out my camera and working. I’m not really still taking photographs. Well, I do a little bit in the winter. I live in Florida now, and for a long time I’ve done a nature series there.

    What was the last photo you took that you were really excited about?
    Well, I just wrote an article about the people who came to Florida, and I’ve been working on photos that illustrate the whole migration and culture that has evolved there. All the New York people that I knew, and my mother as well, went down there and became the snowbirds, and it was a long time before I understood the connection between their desire to come to Florida and the natural scene, the tropical flora. I’ve found that flora to be endlessly interesting to photograph–as well as the people, of course.

    You’re about to turn eighty-two–is working behind the camera getting difficult?
    It does. I don’t seem to have the energy at my age. And there’s also the conflict of digital. I’m not a digital photographer, and very slowly, the materials that I use are disappearing or becoming hard to get. So there’s going to have to be a change there, but I’m postponing that as long as possible.

  • Alison McGhee

    That old Thomas Edison saw about inspiration and perspiration? It came to mind when we received Alison McGhee’s response to our question about which five things she’d take with her to a deserted island. McGhee, a Minneapolis-based writer who has won two Minnesota Book Awards, didn’t just answer the question–first she wrote an entire essay about the proposition, and then whittled the thing down. Presumably that industrious approach to the creative process has proved useful to McGhee in the writing of her six novels, including the acclaimed Shadow Baby and her most recent, All Rivers Flow to the Sea, a young adult novel–and yet another MBA nominee. Her work also appears this month in The Rake’s first-ever literary supplement. And judging from her annotations below, she wouldn’t let a thing like being stranded on a desert isle hamper her artistic life. Here’s what she’d bring:

    1. The brown, fake-leather Merriam-Webster dictionary that I won at age eleven in the New York State Spelling Bee. This dictionary is the only book I will need, because it contains all the words I’ve ever known, and with enough time and patience, those words can be rearranged into all the books I’ve ever loved. Every day on my desert island I will look for cool words I don’t know, like “testudo,” which is a row of armor made by Roman soldiers when they hold their shields up high in the air, and “palimpsest”: writing that has been partially erased from that which it was written on.

    2. A notebook in which I have copied down my ninety favorite poems. Ninety because my grandmother lived to be ninety, and my grandmother loved poetry, and if A = B and B = C, then ninety poems seems about right. On my desert island I will finally have plenty of time to memorize all my favorite poems.

    3. My piano and the music I brought with me. I’ll play my Hanon scale exercises over and over and over. Maybe I’ll play them ninety times each. And then I’ll turn to my Chopin prelude, the one I can never get exactly right. With all that time, alone on my desert island, maybe I can finally get the incredibly hard part near the end to sound as if it’s not hard at all.

    4. A needle and thread and the small box of old clothes from the top shelf in my closet. These are clothes I have saved over many years: My grandmother’s flowered housedress, my baby’s polka-dot pants, the navy blue shift that my mother looked so beautiful in when I was a child, the shirt my best friend wore every time we went dancing in college. I will cut them all up into scraps and turn them into a quilt that will keep me warm on the sand at night.

    5. A small, sharp knife. I don’t know how to carve, but I’ve always wanted to, and finally I have plenty of time to learn. I’ll carve only the pieces of driftwood that wash up on shore. No coconuts, no plastic flotsam. When I get good at carving, I’ll mount a driftwood sculpture installation beside a poem written on the sand, below the high tideline, for the fish and seagulls to admire. When the tide is high, I’ll play Chopin for the seagulls, and the fish will raise their silvery fins in a testudo, honoring the palimpsest of our art as it washes out to sea.