Blog

Back a long time ago, in the olden days of the last century, we all knew how to respond to a set of enormous fake breasts. We stared. We muttered, “Oh my Lordy.” It was new then, and comical in a grotesque, medically questionable kind of way. Pamela Anderson was nothing if not an absurdity, a fifteen-year-old boy’s dream girl blown up to comic-book proportions. Dolly Parton, at least, had the sense to make fun of her extreme, and extremely lucrative, implanted bosom. “I was the first woman to burn my bra,” she once said, in her girly southern lilt. “It took the fire department four days to put it out.”

Now, things are much different. You can’t go anywhere without encountering boobs that’ve been inflated, a face that’s been peeled, or a butt on the back end of a tuck. In 2004, according to the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, nearly twelve million men and women succumbed to various elective “procedures.” Almost a half million had liposuction. More than 300,000 had their breasts enlarged. Hundreds of thousands more had their eyelids chopped and their noses sculpted. People now walk around with Pete Postlethwaite-sized cheek implants, snipped ears, hair plugs, fraudulent six packs, and lips that look to be melting. It appears that we’ve overcome the aversion to purchasing what nature didn’t, or would never in a million years, provide.

The question arises, then, as we teeter on the brink of total plastic surgery acceptance: How should the casual observer respond to these sudden changes in the people we know and sometimes love? Because even though Americans are going under the knife in record numbers, we innocent bystanders still seem required to pretend as though nothing’s happened. (It’s no coincidence that teenage girls often ask for breast implants before heading to college, where a new crowd will be none the wiser.) We’re supposed to keep our wrinkly, thin-lipped yaps shut when a once-craggy face suddenly appears taut as the blanket on an army cot, when B cups miraculously turn into double Ds, springing forth from a cocktail dress like beach balls bobbing in a swimming pool.

There are bodily changes we’re meant to acknowledge, even admire. Like tattoos and purple hairdye jobs. But then, an alteration as dramatic as a new nose is supposed to pass without comment. Perhaps it’s part of our growing collective belief in fantasy, the fuzzing line between truth and fiction, our willingness to be complicit in enormous lies. Spider-Man really can leap from building to building, Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and this is definitely my original butt.

Conventional wisdom dictates that we wait for those who’ve had plastic surgery to mention it first, to indicate whether the enhancement is intended to be noticed. But that seems ridiculously tactful, not unlike the way you’d treat someone with cancer or a mental illness. It certainly would be a relief if the conversational climate were more open, more breezy. Then a person could come right out and ask whether there are crunching noises during rhinoplasty. We could ask if, as plastic surgeons like to suggest, a man with calf implants truly feels like a butterfly released from a cocoon. How refreshing it would be to stop merely observing the sped-up, tilt-a-whirl evolution of the race, and say, “You know, the cleft in your new chin looks like a tiny butt.”—Jennifer Vogel

Gardening trends come and go. Vegetable gardens were big (literally) when families had great hordes of kids. English gardens had their day—along with Laura Ashley. “Naturalizing,” in the nineties, reflected a permissive era, but proved a natural habitat for neighbor complaints. Without coming right out and saying I wanted to school the scarecrow next door, I sought the horticultural wisdom of Joan Westby, a master gardener at Leitner’s Garden Center in St. Paul. She has a degree in horticulture. She is a professional. She indulged me with the newest and nowest things yet to come this spring and summer.

These days, “people are looking to create a personal retreat, an oasis,” Westby replied, obviously on familiar ground. “But at the same time, they are very busy and don’t have time for a lot of maintenance. So instead of reworking the entire yard, they’ll extend their indoor living space with a small, restful outdoor space like a patio.” So that four-level deck you built with the kids’ college fund? So last year. Container gardening is red hot. Custom-planted pots, with all your favorite colors and smells wafting around your personal oasis, are the penultimate. (By the way, Leitner’s has been providing this custom potting service for twenty years.)

And if your patio space truly is an extension of your living room, it’s going to be cluttered. (Wait, I said that, not Westby.) Sure there’ll be the Weber, but there also should be comfy furniture. (Hint: You can tell if the furniture is right by providing your children with some dry paper and a magnifying glass. If the furniture burns up, as natural materials tend to do, it was right. If it just melts and creates hazardous waste, it was wrong.) Further trappings of the outdoor oasis, said Westby, include a birdfeeder, wind chimes, statuary, a fountain, and definitely one of those rococo outdoor candelabras. This being Minnesota, she also recommended a beautiful copper fire pit as the sensible source of warmth.

Of course, you’ll want to arrange all this stuff in a pleasing and ergonomic manner, which brings us to patio feng shui. The gargoyles and barbed wire should stay in the rec room, where they belong, and keep planters out of direct-energy force fields. (The easy thing about this brand of gardening is that there aren’t many plants.) Anyway, you get the picture—it’s like a living room, but smells better.

Plagued by déjà vu, I combed my mind for where I’d already spotted the sort of alfresco bliss Westby described. Not in Provence, nor in Sonoma County. It was in Southeast Minneapolis, near the University of Minnesota, in fact. Some trendsetting undergraduates had created a soothing oasis from the ravages of syllabi and Chlamydia right in their front yard with a comfy davenport (circa 1985), several tattered barcaloungers, some tiki torches, and, in a space-saving coup, bongs that doubled as statuary and aromatherapy dispensers.

Container gardening was definitely going on, though in an important fallow stage—beer cans and plastic cups were growing a life-sustaining agar-like substance rumored to be more effective than Miracle Gro. These visionaries had moved a giant TV/wailing wall to their outdoor retreat, too—which not only provided mesmerizing, low-res images and womb-like sound but also blocked sun, wind, and drive-by artillery. It all came into place a full semester before it showed up on Westby’s radar. Isn’t that the way? Trends, like viruses, germinate, not in the minds of professionals and academics, but rather in the fecund soil of the Undecided.—Sarah Barker

The ingenious inventions and dazzling artifacts left to us by the fallen superpowers of millennia past cannot help but raise the question, “What went wrong?” Ancient Rome, China, Britain, and other countries have enjoyed a few shining centuries in the sun, only to sink into the shadows of subservience and mediocrity when another region took over. For many decades, the top dog has been the United States, but Kevin Phillips sounds a dire warning. Our time is almost up, if the lessons of the past are to be trusted. In this fascinating analysis, he pinpoints four factors behind the downfall of every major world power in history: global overreach, radical religion, resource problems, and ballooning debt. Sound familiar? 3225 W. 69th St., Edina; 952-920-0633

“I never had a business dream,” admitted Dave Kapell, founder of Minneapolis-based Magnetic Poetry Inc. “I aspired to be a starving artist.”

In 1993, he was a thirty-year-old musician struggling to write song lyrics in his living room. He picked up a newspaper. He picked up a pair of scissors. He picked up adhesive, magnetic tape, and a pie tin. In the space of an afternoon, he had created Magnetic Poetry, which would, within three years, earn something like six million dollars. “The thing that happens when people see words bump up against each other; it takes their brains to a completely weird place they never would have gone.”

Kapell’s brain has no problem going to completely weird places. His office in Northeast Minneapolis looks like a cross between an artist’s studio and a toy store, and it suits him perfectly. Hardwood floors sparkle beneath warehouse walls alternately painted bright yellow and sea-foam green. Directly across from the front door, huge black-and-white magnets spell out things like “ask / his / behind / for / sizzle / time,” “long days / are not blue,” and “my music plays / a sad & sweet / symphony of life.”

Perched on the edge of his desk-chair, Kapell gestured toward his shiny red violin. “I took my first violin lesson on 9/11. What a bizarre day that was. My teacher was this elderly woman who was sort of rigid in her ways, you know. And I walked in and had to convince her to turn on the TV.”

He pulled a ukulele out from behind a potted plant. “Music started for me with my mom. She used to do tours to Hawaii back in the fifties—it had just become a state—and she’d wear this grass skirt and teach people ukulele songs. She taught them to me when I was really young; the ukulele’s great for small hands.”

These days, Kapell’s hands are busy building featherweight canoes. “I wanted to build a fiddle,” he explained. But after outfitting his “creative lab” with woodworking tools, Kapell decided to begin with something simpler. “It’s a similar process … you build molds, and stretch the wood over the mold.”

After one canoe, Kapell was hooked. He built one for his wife. He built one for his son. And then he built another so his son could bring a friend. Kapell’s single-person canoes look like topless mahogany kayaks. On one, a small wooden block attached to the bottom houses a unique Kapell accessory: a cello string. “You’re in the middle of a lake, and you pull it taut and pluck it, or use a bow … it vibrates the whole boat.”—Julie Bates

The spring collections usually lend levity to our wardrobe, but this year, that’s not necessarily the case. Many of the season’s prettiest party dresses and tissue tops are coming fully loaded with all manner of heavy metal hardware. Surely you noticed such chains, charms, pendants, and toggles stitched onto last season’s winter things. Now the gossamer fabrics of spring—the chiffon, the linen, the silk—must also bear this burden of alloy. We were wondering how the featherweights might hold up, until, at one of the Twin Cities’ most exclusive boutiques, we spotted a light cotton neckline drooping with bullet casings.

This metal fetish is not so surprising, of course. We’ve had years of frothy gauze, ribbons, ruffles, and lace. Gold, nickel, and bronze seem only

a natural progression. But if trend reports are to be believed, the fashion capitals are growing tired of such fripperies, and design houses will be circling back to nineties-style minimalism shortly. A few designers are applying pleats and bandaging to shirts and dresses, offering angular contrast to all the curlicue finishes we’ve grown accustomed to. Pantsuits aren’t far behind.

Yet there’s no shortage of femininity in the spring fashions. Openwork crochet; skirts and dresses in layered mesh; frayed edges; elaborate, almost Elizabethan collars; and floppy, over-sized bows play the season’s other central characters. Vibrant colors inspire a bounce in our step as we slog through winter’s lingering slush in the strappy wedge heels we simply can’t wait to wear. The indication is that rich hues have drained from the palette as of late, in favor of so-called “naturals” and “organics.” However,

if you insist on contrasting with your muddied, Minnesota-in-March surroundings, as we do, then you’ll favor apple greens, intense yellows, and azures as well as flamboyant, African-style florals

and kimono-inspired acetates.

These are the insurgents against white, buff, and nude.

For most of us upper Midwesterners, occasions that would compel us to slip into that Monique Lhuillier daffodil dress (pictured at left) are rare. Still, there’s good reason why Lhuillier, the Beverly Hills designer whose creations for autumn 2006 caused a modest ripple at New York’s Fashion Week last month, chose to open her second-ever boutique at Fiftieth and France. The two-year-old shop is known for its wedding gowns. But the perennially single will admire her long, bias-cut dresses, done up in an array of cheerful colors and botanical prints.

There are other places to fortify your optimism for Twin Cities fashion; they include Alfred’s Grand Petit Magasin, the Bergdorf Goodman-inspired department store in Edina; the downtown Minneapolis Neiman Marcus (of course); stalwart clothiers Grethen House, in Edina, and Bumbershute, in Wayzata; and some of the new boutiques that have been popping up like crocuses around the metropolitan area: Stephanie’s in Highland Park; Ivy in Uptown;

and Ensemble in Linden Hills,

to name a few.

For the beaus, designers have been thinking Rio de Janeiro, rolled-up trousers, and Panama hats. Of course, most area gents will ignore such impressions, adhering to a Twin Citizen’s night-on-the-town uniform:

a vertically striped dress shirt, often left untucked over distressed jeans or fresh black denim. Note how this favorite look can be updated with simple, bold strokes—and we’re not talking straight up-and-down strokes, mind you. The Italian label Etro, for example, offers adventurous alternatives to such inveterate preppiness with classic-cut shirts in easy floral prints. No pansies here! These shirts lend their wearers a look of sophisticated courage.

—Christy DeSmith