The Rake Magazine

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  • Desert Island Duffel

    All this year, the French-American company Theatre de la Jeune Lune has been celebrating a quarter-century of existence by restaging and revisiting works from previous seasons, culminating with a return to the Georges Bizet opera Carmen, running through August 15 and directed by co-founder Dominique Serrand. Given Jeune Lune’s reputation as one of the most imaginative theaters in the country, we knew that Serrand would certainly have intriguing responses to our desert-island quiz. And he didn’t disappoint. In fact, Serrand seemed to have a whole marooned-chic lifestyle mapped out and ready to go: “The food would be terrific,” he told us. French cuisine? “On a desert island? Oh, no, it would be fusion!” But he did admit he’d miss living among the rest of humanity. “You have to leave people behind [in this game]—that’s the trouble I have.” So we suggested that, instead of five objects, he could take any five actors in the world along to stage plays on the island with him—an offer he refused with a laugh, noting that “I’d make a lot of enemies that way,” since he’d inevitably have to leave out some friends. But in the end, he even devised an elegant solution to that problem.
    1. “For my first choice, I’d take either Plato, Descartes, or de Toqueville’s essays and reflections on democracy.
    2. “Foure’s Reqiuem. A most celebrated piece of music. I don’t know that I would actually choose to hear the music; I might just want to bring the score, and read it and try to remember in my mind.
    3. “I would bring a big knife. A nice thing to carry around. I don’t mean it as a weapon, but as a tool.
    4. “If I could, and I don’t know if this is too much of a sci-fi version of an object, I would take Camille Claudel’s hands. That would be a nice thing to have. She was Rodin’s girlfriend, and a lot of people think he stole some work from her. She had formidably muscular hands.
    5. “And last, I would take several puppets in one box. It could be Saddam Hussein, George Bush, different puppets. People I could play with. I could bring the whole collection. We would make a new play every day, and pretend it was true!”

  • Olympic Spirit

    You can find the best-looking man in Minnesota, my female colleagues tell me, at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. He is well over six feet tall, poses naked, and has a relaxed, arrogant look about him—there’s that jutty chin that women find irresistible. I am led to believe (by the same authorities) that the view from the rear is particularly gratifying—this baby got back, as my daughter’s favorite rapster once said.

    And perfect proportions. In fact, mathematically exact proportions; every one of his measurements is a planned and precise multiple of one of his knuckles (or digital phalanges, as they call them in the trade). Man is the measure of all things, as Protagoras said. Nothing illustrates more elegantly than this muscular specimen the ancient Greek conviction that the basis of beauty, indeed of all reality, is actually mathematical.

    Before you ask, we will never know how many digital phalanges were allotted to the part of him which was most masculine; it must have broken off some time in the last couple of thousand years. The plow-gash on his left thigh looks pretty painful as well.

    This is not one of your modern males, with an intense and sensitive inner life. It is impossible to discern what he is thinking, beyond perhaps that he feels relaxed and confident. A knee and an elbow are bent, the latter to hold a no-longer-extant spear (hence his name, the Doryphoros or Spear-Bearer). Despite the severed tree stump behind him, he does not seem as dim as Paul Bunyan. One imagines him as frozen poetry in motion, like an Olympic athlete: elegant in action but inarticulate when faced with a gabbling journalist.

    Beauty here is only skin deep. But what a skin—smooth white Pentelic marble (a Greek marble, though he is a Roman copy of a long-lost Greek original). You may think marble is merely parboiled limestone, of no more interest than potatoes. For Greeks and Romans it was a pleasure to be savored like wine. They looked at the green marble of Thessaly and saw in its white and yellow flecks the flowers and pasture on the spring hillsides from which it was cut. The more decadent emperors enjoyed building baths faced with the creamy stone quarried from the island of Skyros, with its distinctive gold and maroon veins, the colors of the Golden Gophers. (Could that be why Skyrian marble was used for the staircases in the Minnesota State Capitol?)

    A plainer creamy marble came from the island of Paros. Its noble simplicity and calm grandeur belies the wild life enjoyed by its ancient inhabitants. Lesbos might be famous for luxury and the poetess Sappho, but for the real strong stuff one turns to Archilochus, the poet of Paros. Too bad his works survive only in fragments. But you will get the idea from the title of a lecture about one of his recently rediscovered poems: “Last Tango on Paros.”

    Nowadays Paros is also home to wine marketed by Boutari, the best-known of all Greek wine makers. (Mr. Boutari is known also as a campaigner against dancing bears, but that is another story.) Unusually, this wine is red and robust, not white or resinated (retsina is surely one of those pleasures that are best enjoyed in the land of their origin); it is made from the distinctive Greek grape Xinómavro (“acid black”), with a strong, consistent flavor and a slightly brandified twang at the end.

    Its taste, indeed, is monochromatic enough to allow one to mix it with water in the ancient manner, in a krater or mixing bowl. (Just as “crater,” as in volcano, comes from krater because they are the same shape, so “acetabulum”—for the hip-socket —comes from the ancient name for little bowls that Greeks and Romans put vinegar in). Only barbarians drank their wine neat. Do you think the drinkers and thinkers at Plato’s Symposium could have been half so witty if they were in a condition that would have rendered them incapable of operating a motor chariot?

    So sit back, add a little water if you wish, and watch the marbly patterns swirl around your glass (or red-figured skyphos). You can do this while you watch the Olympics if you like. For myself, I would rather be among the cypress trees on a Hellenic hillside, balancing the aromas of pine and sunshine, of crushed thyme underfoot, and a whole lamb spitted and roasting succulently to celebrate the Greek festival of the Dormition of the Mother of God.

  • Unhappy Trails

    Guthrie, Minnesota, is not much more than a sleepy little huddle of buildings nestled between Lake Itasca and Leech Lake. It’s classic lake country, where tourists have been coming to summer resorts for generations. Cabin season is short and the impact of tourism can be dramatic, especially since logging and mining have ebbed. The locals have quietly tried to adapt. Here, the famous Paul Bunyan Trail, which runs one hundred miles from Brainerd to Bemidji, is still unpaved. Maps describe the Guthrie section as “natural surface,” which means it is open primarily to snowmobile use in the winter. It is a dirt-and-gravel path that used to be a railroad. The plan is eventually to pave it for bicycles, in-line skaters, and dog-walkers. Today, though, it is penned in by “No Trespassing” signs and a cloud of animosity, rather than the pizza and ice-cream joints that typically sprout up along state trails. As if to wear its troubles like a war scar, the trail here is badly damaged, torn up by outlaw ATVs, which aren’t supposed to use the trail but do anyway.

    In a scrubby spot a few miles outside of Guthrie, the trail runs across the property of Brian and Mike Sandberg. Despite their desire simply to be left alone, the Sandbergs may be the most famous men in the county. Along with some of their neighbors, they are involved in a case that is now under consideration by the Minnesota Supreme Court. They believe they own the land on which the trail is built, and they’re asking the court to close their section of the Paul Bunyan Trail and give it back. If they win the case, it could be the beginning of the end for recreational trails in Minnesota and across the nation.

    Though he grew up in the Guthrie area and owns seventy acres here, Brian Sandberg is an itinerant welder. He works construction jobs in Iowa and Missouri, where he specializes in fabricating huge agricultural tanks. Brian told me he desperately wants to return and retire on his land, although he claims the controversy, and the actions of the Minnesota Department of Resources, have made that impossible. But it’s not clear what stands in his way.

    His brother Mike lives in a tidy new home on twenty acres adjoining Brian’s. Marlaine and Mike are a pleasant, fiftyish couple. Clad in shorts, with his dirty blond hair casually brushed back, Mike Sandberg could easily pass for a tourist on his way to jig for walleyes. He is quietly intense as he walks with me on the Bunyan trail, which runs just a few yards from his house. A muscular black dog dashes out menacingly from behind the garage. But Sunny is only trolling for playmates as she prances around mouthing a tattered tennis ball. Mike shows me where he and some of his neighbors erected barricades across the path, and where DNR crews tore them down. The tension hangs like the humidity in the summer air. It’s difficult to think of humble Guthrie as the vortex of a bitter fight involving property-rights advocates, barricaded trails, local recreational businesses, snowmobilers, ATV jockeys, and spandex-clad bicyclists.

    Minnesota has thirteen hundred miles of recreational trails. Most were built on narrow strips of land that once were owned by railroads. Minnesota’s first modern trail was built on a former railroad corridor near Pipestone. The Casey Jones State Trail opened in 1967 and was so successful that it set a pattern for the following thirty years: As the railroad industry yielded to overland trucking and air transport, the state would purchase abandoned rail corridors from companies like Burlington Northern for the purpose of developing them into public trails. In fact, the idea of converting miles of disused rail easement into recreational trail was so successful that bike and jogging paths began proliferating all over the country. National organizations such as the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy began springing up “to enrich America’s communities and countryside by creating a nationwide network of public trails from former rail lines and connecting corridors.” But, as it turns out, they were making two huge assumptions: that the railroads actually owned the land they were selling, and that Americans would universally embrace the idea of a public trail. The Sandbergs are here to say that neither assumption was sound. They don’t want the trail, they say the land legally belongs to them, and they intend to prove it in court.

    Mike sees the issue in straightforward terms: “What it all boils down to is that Brian has an abstract which states that when they stop using that property for railroad purposes that it reverts back to the landowner. Now Brian has land that he cannot even get to.” According to the Sandbergs, there is no access to Brian’s land other than the former railroad grade that is now the Bunyan trail. But this is a little misleading, because, according to Mike himself, the DNR offered to provide access by building a tunnel or a road, at state expense, through the grade. It seems their main problem is less with a stretch of trail than with the idea of government, and its arrogant bureaucrats trampling on the Sandberg’s private property rights. The idea that the state can exercise its will at the expense of a property owner is abhorrent to them.

    And their stubborness may have basis in law. There are two legal issues in their case with the DNR, and considering that it has landed in the state’s highest court, their chances are better than even. First, was the railway abandoned prior to the land being turned over to the state? Even though the railroad finished removing tracks by 1987, there is still a dispute in the community, as well as in the courts, about what constitutes abandonment. After all, right-of-way is a legal principle, and the question becomes whether the railroad had the right to cede its rights to the state, instead of to the current holder of the deed. Did the original 1898 deed give actual title to the land, or simply an easement to use it—and would it make a difference? And when the railroad abandons an easement, to whom do the rights revert—the current landowners, or the owners at the time the easement was granted (in many cases, the state)? This most contentious issue hinges on verbiage written into deeds more than a century ago, when the railroad first appropriated land.

    Brian Sandberg’s property abstract says, “so long as the land shall be used for Right of Way and for Railway purposes; but to cease and terminate if the Railway is removed from the said strips.” That language seems pretty clear. But weighed against the possibility of throwing the entire state trail system into disarray, or at least into the courts, one can see why trail advocates might quibble just the same.

    Marlaine and Mike’s home, a tidy pre-fab, was built in Canada and trucked onto his property two years ago. He is still putting siding up on parts of the house. The quarter-mile road leading to the home runs parallel to the old rail easement.

    Mike bought his property from Brian. The rest of what Brian owns is, according to Mike, “landlocked.” Brian farmed some of that land, and used the railroad grade to get to it. “We had it blocked off, I think, since 1998,” says Mike. “He had cattle. He just ran them across it.” From the Sandbergs’ point of view, there was nothing broken, and therefore nothing to fix. The DNR’s offers to compensate Brian, build a tunnel, or otherwise work out a solution allowing him to legally cross the trail fell on deaf ears. The Sandbergs see any claim to or meddling with their land as unreasonable.

    This was not the first time that local residents have had issues with the DNR. Some had worked out deals, but the Sandbergs and a few others were not willing to compromise. Some placed barricades across their sections of trail. The DNR responded by removing the fencing. Landowners only became more enraged. “DNR officials think they can do whatever they want,” says Mike Sandberg. After a feeble negotiation and intense posturing on both sides, the DNR took the landowners to court. Hubbard County District Judge Jay Mondry ruled that the Burlington Northern Railroad had title to the property and that the sale of land purchased by the DNR in 1991 for $1.5 million was legal.

    The Sandbergs and the other landowners fought back, adamant that the language in the 1898 deeds clearly transferred ownership of the hundred-foot-wide sections of land back to them if the land was abandoned by the railroad. So they took the case to the Minnesota Court of Appeals. Last September, the state Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the landowners. The court ruled that the railroad only had easement to the land, which ended when the tracks were removed.

    At the DNR’s Division of Trails and Waterways, officials were thrown into a panic; suddenly the trails themselves were embattled. Tasting victory, the Sandbergs and others in Guthrie began erecting fences barricading the Bunyan trail, and the practice threatened to spread. As Mike Sandberg explains, “There are a lot of people on down the line here who have this same language in their deeds.” Immediately, the DNR asked the Supreme Court to overturn the appellate court’s decision. The Supreme Court agreed to review the case, and began doing so last February.

    Trail advocates came together quickly. The Parks and Trails Council of Minnesota, the Paul Bunyan Trail Association, and the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy filed a friend-of-the-court brief in support of the DNR position. Surely, they said, there is a great deal at stake here.

    Nationally and locally, trail use by pedestrians, bicyclists, in-line skaters, and others is on the rise. Millions use rail-trails each year, and they spend a lot of money. Food and drinking receipts in Lanesboro, Minnesota, increased by eighty-four percent the year after the Root River State Trail opened there. The Cannon Valley Trail in Red Wing and the Willard Munger Trail in Duluth are models of success in every measurable way. Tourism and recreation are big business, and the trail system is an integral component of what Minnesota has to offer. But some people reject the emerging tourist economy. Brian Sandberg would rather travel hundreds of miles to the south to find welding work than cater to bicyclists on a weekend jaunt from the Twin Cities.

    Plenty of people in Guthrie see their community as a haven. Theirs is a lifestyle removed from the clamor of outsiders. Mike says, “If we wanted to live in town, we would live in town. You don’t want people running around in your backyard. It’s ownership, pure and simple.”

    From the trail advocate’s perspective, opposition to trails is simply fear of change. Terry McGaughey is credited with conceiving and naming the Bunyan trail and now acts as volunteer coordinator for the Paul Bunyan Trail Association. McGaughey moved from the Twin Cities to Bemidji in 1968. He was instrumental in introducing the idea of the Paul Bunyan Trail to the state Legislature, which first authorized the trail in 1988. McGaughey suggested that opposition to trails fades once trails are fully developed. Although the unsurfaced, rutted base of the rail bed is perfect for ATVs, once the trails are fully improved, the nuisance of illegal use goes away. The Sandbergs admit they have never seen or heard a bicycle on the trail passing through their land—though a mountain bike could easily ride it. It’s actually the noise of ATVs and the obtrusive behavior of ATV riders that is most irksome.

    Motorized vehicles other than snowmobiles are legally prohibited on the trail. McGaughey understands that no one wants ATVs running around his land, but insists that the problem vanishes once the trails are complete. He stresses the health, fitness, recreational, and economic aspects of the trails. He points out that the trail has expanded the tourist season for local businesses, and effectively turned the community into a year-round attraction. McGaughey said that there is actually a lot of enthusiasm and pride for the trails in communities where they have been completed. Portions of the Paul Bunyan Trail that are paved and complete have become an attractive destination for perfectly well-behaved bicyclists, hikers, and snowmobilers. This has created and expanded businesses at just about every point along the trail. Trails preserve the environment, create parkland, cultivate community pride, and preserve a corridor of green space that can help dampen the effects of urban sprawl—an ugly reality that threatens recreation and natural resources even this far north.

    But the Sandbergs aren’t really interested. In a January 24 letter to the Brainerd Dispatch, Brian Sandberg wrote:

    One of the reasons for writing this letter is to let the public know that there are still many of us, that are willing to take the time and money to fight for our Constitutional rights and to ensure that local and state governments can not come in and take property from one person and give to another, in the name of progress or for play. And after the final decision is made, I should have the right to use, sell, rent, or donate any part of the nine-acre strip in question. And also, there is great hope for those, that after the last decision is made on this case, hundreds of Minnesotans will have their rights restored. And they will also have the same right to use their property as they wish.

    On the phone from Iowa, Brian’s voice is raspy. He speaks in the odd, vaguely Southern accent of men everywhere who see themselves as hardworking and close to the land. He talks about how he quit his job in Alaska and drove four thousand miles in fifty-below weather, moving back to the lower forty-eight in order to fight for his property rights. For such a rugged man, he has many fears: He strongly believes that the trail will drive property values down and lead to crime, primarily manslaughter and rape. His wife is afraid to live alone back in Guthrie, while he is on the road welding. He says it is an outrage that he was threatened with being charged as a public nuisance for putting up “No Trespassing” signs on his own property. “It just pissed me off,” he hisses. Brian also refers to the web page of the National Association of Reversionary Property Owners, which claims that its “major goal is to assist property owners in maintaining their complete land ownership and resisting government confiscation.”

    Dorian Grilley, executive director of the Parks and Trails Council of Minnesota, is more philosophical. Grilley doesn’t expect much of a problem elsewhere in Minnesota, even if the Supreme Court rules in the Sandbergs’ favor. In other parts of the state, the sequence of abandonment of the rail easement actually favors the DNR’s acquisition plans. If the courts rule against the DNR in this case, it won’t exactly be the end of the line. The fact of the matter is that the state really can “do what it wants” no matter how loudly the Sandbergs or anyone else protest. Grilley puts a point on it: “The state Legislature certainly has the right to compensate the landowners and take the property.” However, this would mean that in some instances the state would have to pay for the property twice. “Millions of people use the trails each year and there is an increased awareness of the value they serve. The outcome will depend on the community and on statewide values,” Grilley says.

    Dick Kimball, the DNR’s longtime manager of Trails and Waterways, lives and works in the Paul Bunyan Trail area and knows just about everybody involved in the issue. Though some might think of him as an evil agent of the government, Kimball is actually a thoughtful man who understands the need to balance limited resources and the difficulty of reconciling various community interests. Kimball spoke frankly about the growing pressure on resources. “In the Park Rapids, Walker, and Bemidji area, there are probably 150,000 people up here at any given time. I lived in Walker, and the traffic today is fifteen times what it was in 1980. Our biggest issue with these state trails right now is money for maintenance and staff visibility. The more often people see our officers on that trail, the less likely it is that there will be problems. Right now, Brian and Mike are right: The ATV traffic on that unmaintained, unused trail is incredible. In my twenty-five years up here, this is the most contentious issue I have had to deal with. We work on rectifying things without going to the legal side, but some people are bullheaded. Now, whatever the courts decide, we will all have to live with it. It should never have gotten to this point. We should have worked it out.”

    Often the issue comes down to competing ideas about how the environment should be managed and used. Yuppies from the city sometimes believe it should all be off-limits to motor vehicles and logging; locals want to be able to drive ATVs; landowners want everybody to stay away. “People think this is a wilderness area,” said Kimball. “This is not wilderness. It’s a working forest. What we have to do is balance all of our uses, and that’s the goal of our planning process. We are attempting to separate and zone the forest. In 1971, snowmobiles came within one vote of being banned in Minnesota because of all the issues: trespass, damage to private property, wildlife harassment.”

    In some senses, the Pandora’s box has been opened. If the Sandbergs can enforce the language of their original deed, what’s to stop anyone who lives adjacent to disused rail corridor from doing the same? The court itself cannot answer the real question: For an opinionated, hard-working middle-class person, is a solitary, backwoods lifestyle even possible in the already changed economy of what was once Minnesota wilderness? Is Brian Sandberg an intractable mouthpiece for landowners’ rights or a grumpy migratory industrial worker stubbornly attempting to hold onto a dream?

  • Getting Baked

    “My issues with tanorexia go way back to high school, when tanning beds first hit the scene,” said Julie Dey, a pretty twenty-eight-year-old from Apple Valley. “Girls would make tanning appointments and get out of school to go tanning. I have pictures of girls at my prom who look like they were painted in blackface!”

    Since the explosion of artificial tanning in the mid-eighties, we’ve all known people who couldn’t seem to get tan enough. Back in my day, there was a bleached-blonde cheerleader with such a severe case of tanorexia that she looked like an orange Oompa Loompa in a crotch-length miniskirt. A few years after high school, she was arrested for doing the dirty work for her drug-dealing boyfriend. During her two-year stay behind bars, she wrote a letter complaining about losing her ten-year tan because the gawd-awful place didn’t have a tanning bed. She was just the kind of person who would go to prison and gripe about its effect on her skin.

    But not every tanorexic is a felon. Tanorexia can afflict the most innocent booth-bather. Take, for example, our dearly departed KARE-11 anchorman, Paul “Major Tan” Magers, whose pastel ties and handkerchiefs were the perfect foil for his constantly copper kisser. Or that beefy dude running around Lake Harriet whose wee jogging shorts show off his perpetually tanned legs of steel. Or the workout-happy mom in the cubicle next to yours who removes her wedding band at least twenty times a day to check her tan line. Unfortunately, tanorexia has many faces. (Albeit all really tan.)

    According to the American Cancer Society, more than one million new cases of skin cancer will be diagnosed this year. Residents of the Sunbelt states have a one-in-three chance of being diagnosed with skin cancer, while UV-deprived Minnesotans have the lowest rate in the United States. The number of cases has doubled in the last thirty years, which experts attribute to exposure to higher levels of UV radiation and increased use of tanning beds. Booths are less likely than sun exposure to cause melanoma, the deadliest skin cancer, but they are still a factor. Despite the risks, more than thirty million Americans use tanning beds. And it’s not just Americans going under the lights. Doctors in the U.K. recently endorsed the term “tanorexic” to describe Britain’s growing legion of tanning-bed enthusiasts, though the word has been murmured among the self-deprecating fake-bakers for years. (“My friend Travis is tanorexic, too,” Dey said. “We always say, ‘Omigod! We are so tanorexic!’”)

    A more genteel form of tanorexia can be found among those who use spray booths and gel applications, which mimic a deep tan without the dangerous radiation. “We have tons of clients using Mystic Tan, old and new,” said Laura Johnson. She is the manager of Boss Tanning in Golden Valley, which hosts the metro area’s highest concentration of tanning salons. The salon also uses high-pressure tanning beds, which Johnson said block ninety-nine percent of the UVB rays that cause painful booth burn. “People sometimes shy away from the lights for aging reasons. But a lot of people are tanorexic. They just like tanning. We have about fifty or so people who come in at least four times a week who I’d say are tanorexic, I guess.”

    Despite the availability of gels and mist, Dey prefers tanning the old-school way. “I tried the Mystic Tan once and I went pumpkin girl,” she said. She wears her tanorexia like a gold medal (OK, maybe a bronze), and becomes defensive about her love for UV rays if lectured about their dangers. “Don’t tell me what to do with my life when you smoke a pack a day and don’t wear your seatbelt. I mean, we’re all gonna die some day. Seriously, dude.”

    And for the folks who ask her where she got that great tan in the middle of February, Dey offers this: “Ummm, yeah. You just saw me yesterday? OK, I was on planet Mercury. You too can go there and get a wonderful orange glow on your skin!”
    —Molly Priesmeyer

  • What Are You Looking At?

    It’s a curious thing that women like to look good, but they don’t want to be leered at in public. More and more, I’m convinced that women want to look good for each other, as a kind of competition thing. My precious won’t cop to this directly, but I often rib her about getting gussied up when we’re heading out for dinner or a movie. If she’s happy with the man she married, who is she trying to impress?

    It’s an unfair question. She wants to look good for herself, she says. Looking good feels good, she says. And besides, just because we’re married doesn’t mean she doesn’t want to look good for me—although she didn’t say that, I did.

    Men, of course, do this in their own way too—though probably less consciously. We have our style and we stick with it. Maybe it’s a Titleist baseball cap, a T-shirt, and jeans. Maybe it’s an Armani suit. One of the funniest things is catching a guy wearing clothes he’s not used to wearing. We all know that fashion is about ninety-five percent confidence. You can see a power executive’s shriveling confidence from a mile away when once a month he puts on the pressed and starched Levi’s in an effort to loosen up for custody weekends.

    Anyway, our style sort of advertises the type of person we are; on some basic level it tells you what you’re dealing with in another human being, though this is never a sure bet. My wife may dress like a slut, but that does not make her a slut, necessarily. And even though I dress nicely for the office—I have a satisfying long-term relationship with Banana Republic—my wife would be the first to tell you that I am a shameless slob. I may shave and shower every day, but hell will probably freeze over before I am able to properly clean the kitchen.

    So anyway, my point was about boob jobs. Why are so many women getting them, while at the same time insisting that men not notice? Do you think women are secretly flattered when men check them out approvingly, while they know they have to toe the PC line publicly? More important, did Steve’s wife get a boob job, and is it kosher for me to ask?

    I have said in the past that I’m not particularly obsessed with boobs the way some of my friends are, and yet being a normal red-blooded male, I couldn’t help noticing that Steve’s wife, Suzy, has an astonishing chest, and it beggars the imagination how she is able to go around without a bra the way she does. Now, I would never want to be caught by Suzy or Steve even glancing at her chest. I make a special effort never to let my eyes wander below her chin, but it’s become such a conscious effort that I have to admit it’s making me a little uncomfortable. Why am I working so hard to not look?

    I don’t know what the answer is, and I’m not quite ready to broach the subject with Steve. We married men, despite our overall degraded state, do have our boundaries, even if they are arbitrary. It is generally considered bad form ever to speak about your buddy’s wife in this way. It’s perfectly fair to make general comments about beauty, but the moment you go into specifics is the moment you’ve overstepped the foul line. But in certain circumstances, I’m thinking a very close male friendship could lead to an opportunity to ask—in the most delicate, clinical way of course—are those real?

    Now I understand from my precious that women are very particular about what is considered a safe and healthy assessment. It should be discreet and tasteful, and sunglasses are a useful tool. There is a fine line between checking out and leering; men need to understand that women have been ogled much of their lives, and they are highly attuned to the wide range of attentions both welcome and unwelcome. Women know all too well that “checking out” can easily cross into creepy and threatening territory.

    Men have virtually no experience on the receiving end of being ogled, for the simple reason that women don’t do it—or when they do it, they are expert at hiding it. (They also fart, but you would never know it. Maybe not even after you marry one.) We thirty- and forty-something men are smart enough to know that we aren’t supposed to be checking out women other than our wives, but we also know that there’s probably nothing wrong—and indeed, nothing really very sexual—about noticing the finer points of the other women that pass through our field of vision. Our wives don’t need to feel threatened by this, as long as we come nowhere near crossing the line into obvious and gross male behavior.

  • Fire and Rice

    In a good year, the wild rice grows thick on the lakes and rivers in northern Minnesota toward the end of August. The rice stalks multiply into such dense thickets that the waters become nearly impassable—to everything but the sleek canoes that glide through for harvesting. This job takes two people: one to knock rice into the canoe, and the other to propel the canoe through the water. Last year, I took the canoe’s middle seat, and my ricing partner stood tall in the back, pushing at the bottom of the creek bed with a twelve-foot pole, hand over hand, maintaining a gentle pace. With a stick like a fat pool cue in each hand, I poked one end behind a hank of rice stalks, bent it over the canoe, and used the other to softly strike the bursting seed heads: A shower of rice rained into the canoe. All the while, rice spiders, tiny and albino-white, skittered down my arms. Between swatting at them and keeping up with the canoe’s steady pace, it made for arduous work in the heavy, late-summer heat. But on and on it went, until the canoe became heavy with a belly full of rice and we slowly weaved our way to shore.

    Hand-harvesters like us generally yield small batches. In our case, we brought in around two hundred pounds of raw, or green, rice. Compared to the professional harvesters, or even the ambitious amateurs, it’s considered peanuts, and hardly enough to process. All rice must be cooked, or as they say, parched, in order to solidify the milky, soft kernel inside its sheath. Everyone we talked to pointed us to Lewie DeWandeler and Donnie Vizenor, friends and business partners who have been parching wild rice at Lewie’s farm for more than twenty-five years. Just like Donnie’s father and his father before that, they use a steel barrel that rotates over a blazing wood fire. Standing by, their eyes, ears and sense of smell are expertly attuned to the rice. “Some people use propane for parching, but you can taste the difference,” says Donnie. “We like to use wood, so that there’s a certain amount of smoke in the rice.” The heat dries out the soft kernel, but it’s the smoke that lends the wild rice its flavor.

    There’s also history to consider. Then and now, the many hours spent hand-harvesting rice provokes a desire to finish it in the right way. People from this area of the state have always parched their rice over wood fires because it’s the best, most precise treatment for a precious grain. Wood-fire parching also requires a great deal of intuition. Knowing when to raise the temperature and when to slow the barrel’s rotation are skills maintained through generations only by the act of doing. In this age of mass production of wild rice and other grains, those few who have kept the craft of wood-parching alive seem to sense that they are the last inheritors of a great tradition.

    Lewie DeWandeler and his wife Betty live on the Ponsford Prairie within the White Earth Indian Reservation, where fields of bright green hay give way to lush clumps of beans in rows. Abandoned farmhouses and the occasional one-room school sit squat in the middle of fields, shedding their whitewash.

    My partner and I had been told to show up at Lewie’s at the crack of dawn, no later, but when we get there Lewie leans out the kitchen door and says, “Come in. I have to eat my breakfast yet.” We stomp the mud off our boots as we climb the rough steps to the kitchen. It’s been drizzling for hours, and looks to be a day of pure gray sky and soaking wetness. The three dogs standing at well-spaced intervals across the long driveway glare at us, standing proud in their heavy wet coats. One, to be polite, gives a slow wag.

    Inside, Lewie is whipping eggs into flour to make pancake batter. His eyes have the glint of a true Midwestern prankster—someone who works hard but can make light of it. He makes a triple stack of pancakes and fried eggs, one on top of the other, and pours dark Minnesota maple syrup, thick as caramel, over all of it. We watch Lewie eat, we drink coffee, shoot the bull, and wait. Donnie Vizenor shows up, cheerful for the early hour, wearing bright blue workmen’s overalls.

    By 7:45 we are all well-fed and, holding our coffee cups, heading out to the parching shed. A wind-worn but stubborn structure, it’s open on two sides, and a lush green mess of baby oaks and bindweed comes in through one of them. The other side, next to the fire, is open to the grand sweep of the Ponsford Prairie. Like many people who live on the prairie, Lewie DeWandeler has learned to diversify: he logs and traps in the woods in the winter, farms hay and pinto beans in the summer, parches rice in the fall, sugars maples for syrup in the spring, and in this way generally survives the extremes of Minnesota weather.

    Over the years Donnie and Lewie have filled the shed with equipment for processing wild rice, an operation that begins and ends on the behemoth 1912 scale given to them by Donnie’s father. With its smooth white enameled shoulders, it stands as tall as a man and weighs in up to thirty-four thousand pounds of green rice each year. Donnie’s father, who grew up on the White Earth Reservation, updated the original parching method with a gas-powered motor: His first barrel parcher used a Ford Model A engine. As he scaled back on parching, Lewie and Donnie took on more of the job, eventually trading in the Model A engine for an electric motor to turn the barrel. They also invested in a thresher (often pronounced “thrasher”), which looks something like a washing machine and sports rubber rudders that gently beat the chaff loose from the parched rice. A large screen-lined grain separator shakes the whole kernels of rice down into a bucket, leaving a cloud of rice dust and chaff to blow out the side of the shed.

    While the rice is in the barrel, it is tempting to lean in close, to get the full force of the steamy smell of grain toasting—but the fire beneath is intensely hot. Lewie and Donnie keep a large but well-controlled blaze going from logs of white pine and oak, whose smoke perfumes the rice. Lewie stands next to the fire, leaning on a tall, blackened stick, which he uses every few minutes to adjust the logs and maintain the temperature. Parching rice demands full attention, but also allows those involved plenty of time for leaning on sticks and reminiscing. “Back when everyone brought in local rice, we used to be able to tell what lake the rice came off of,” says Lewie. “Some is almost yellow, some brown, some almost white. Rice from Mitchell Dam is short, fat, like coffee beans. And then there’s that lake just north of Highway 200—the rice from there is blond, almost transparent, once it’s parched.”

    Just like a cook, he’s keeping half a mind on the rice as we talk. He stops mid-sentence, turns a switch to speed the barrel. Opening the shed’s wide door to cool the place off a bit, he says, “Smell that? It’s going a little too fast.” When I ask how he can tell when it’s done, he gives my simplistic question a poker-faced, smartass response: “Standing here for twenty years looking at it has something to do with it.”

    Then he responds seriously, for Lewie is serious about this: “When the rice is just right it rattles against the barrel and sounds heavy.” He could parch it just enough to make it edible, but he works toward something a little better than that. Crafting a superior product with great flavor takes someone who again and again chooses to bring each batch precisely to the point of perfect doneness. “I toast the rice almost until it burns,” he says, winking, “but just almost. That gives it a nice smoky flavor.” And it does. Steaming a mere cup of rice that Lewie and Donnie have parched will fill an entire house with its earthy fragrance, as if you can smell at the same time both the fire it was parched in and the water it was raised in. Each taupe-colored kernel cooks up separate, tender and gently bent, barely splitting.

    Lewie’s and Donnie’s parching method closely resembles the Native American method practiced around the turn of the century. At that time, the rice spent a day or two drying in the sun before it was toasted in a large cast-iron kettle over a wood fire. After parching, it was then stamped upon with soft, moccasined feet to loosen the chaff. Once cool, it got poured it into shallow grass baskets and flung expertly into the air. The breeze carried the chaff away, and the rice fell back into the basket.

    Ricing on lakes within a reservation is limited to enrolled tribe members, but lakes on public and private land outside of the reservation are open to anyone. The best ricing lakes on reservation land (such as the aptly named Big Rice Lake near Mahnomen, Minnesota) throw annual lotteries: Names of tribal members go into a bucket, and only a lucky handful win the right to go ricing.

    Today the portrait of a small-time harvester is an interesting amalgam of Native American and European settler, with some of the ricing and processing being done by Native Americans on reservation soil, some on private land, and some by mixed teams on reservation lakes and on public lakes. The fact is, wild rice is a northern Minnesota foodstuff and its gathering is intertwined with the history of the northern territory. Settlers learned to rice from the Indians who lived here, in this place where rice grew wild on most every lake and in nearly every stream. When the Depression hit, all kinds of people took to harvesting and selling rice on a larger scale than ever before. At that time, the extra money and source of food nicely supplemented what could be, for both the settlers and the native people, a lean life on the northern prairie.

    Since then, people devised ways to produce wild rice on large scale, and today, most commercial producers have eliminated the fussy steps: They flood a field to grow rice, drain it to harvest, dry the grain until it’s completely black, and then parch it with steam until it’s solid. There’s not a lot of aroma surrounding this kind of operation, and zero romance. And having eaten plenty of this solid black commercial rice, I have to say that there’s not too much flavor in it, either.

    Cream of wild rice soup, a staple at diners in every small town across Minnesota, should be made with the old-fashioned, wood-parched rice. The steam-parched kind doesn’t cook evenly, so you end up with a few fully exploded kernels swimming among a lot of chewy, half-cooked rice. Wood-parched rice cooks more gently and evenly, and seems to thicken the creamy broth with its smoky, tender kernels.

    I like wild rice best when it’s prepared most simply: steamed with a bay leaf, a sprig of thyme, and a few cloves of garlic for perfume, with a thick pat of butter melting on top. (Contrary to popular myth, wild rice doesn’t take an hour to cook. Rinse it and cover it with enough water so that the tip of your finger touches the rice and the water reaches your first knuckle. Then bring it to a simmer, cover it, and steam for half an hour.) But this grain is also amazingly addictive when popped, salted, and buttered like popcorn. The kernels swell and explode when poured into a pan of hot oil; smaller than popcorn, the little puffed grains retain all the smoky flavor from the parching, and it’s a challenge to get the little bits in your mouth in enough quantity to satisfy.

    This year, Lewie’s son is parching some of the rice. As my grandma would say, it’s nice to see young folk take an interest. Because while small processors like Lewie and Donnie parch rice year after year, they’re not exactly besieged by apprentices. And like any artisanal process, rice parching must be taught, not described.

    Back in the day, families would bring their raw products to someone who would finish the processing. The cream went to the town creamery for butter and cheese; the wool was taken to someone who would spin it; the wheat was brought to the mill for flour. In this way, producers developed finely tuned skills for processing or finishing different products. With these kinds of cooking and processing, intuition is usually more precise than science.

    In northern Minnesota, many people enjoy getting out onto the lakes, gathering the rice, getting it parched, and taking that simple pleasure in eating all winter what they reaped in the fall. “People like to come to us because they get their own rice back,” says Lewie. “We could parch two small batches from two different people together, but you don’t know what that guy did with his rice before it got here.” Though I hadn’t thought about it before, I too was thankful that we got back the very rice we brought in. When Lewie said “the taste comes from right here,” he may have been pointing to his barrel parcher, but he was also talking about this northern place, those logs on the fire, this creek bed, and the one down the way.

  • Par-Tee On

    On a sunny June afternoon, Mark Vogt and Azure Marlowe have been given the enviable job of replacing bowling pins on hole number three of the mini-golf course-cum-art exhibit installed for the summer at the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden. Hole three, titled Bolfing for Gowlers, is designed to look like a tiny bowling lane, and after two weeks of play and several saturating rainstorms, its wood is warped and several of its pins have been plucked like rotten teeth. And so, released from their usual gigs in Walker Art Center’s comparatively dim indoor galleries, the construction supervisor and lead tech for the mini-course have jacked up the hole and then balanced it on saw horses; Vogt is drilling screws in from underneath to replace the bowling pins that create one of the mini golf world’s most impossible approach shots. (The bowling pin placed directly in front of the hole seems to preclude any chance of scoring a hole in one, and the gutters on each side take most balls hopelessly, irretrievably out of play.) When asked if the pins have regularly been swiped as fond souvenirs, or ripped mightily off their screws by frustrated players, Vogt says, “I think it’s called ‘picking up a spare.’”

    The Walker seems to have bowled a strike with “Walker in the Rough,” located at the Sculpture Garden’s north end, between the Calders and the jutting arms of Mark di Suvero’s Molecule. Shortly after opening the ten-hole mini-golf course, the hours were extended to accommodate crowds that have sometimes waited up to three and a half hours to play. “I don’t think they had any idea it would be this popular,” says Marlowe.

    Indeed, on a Wednesday, when the course is officially closed, at least two dozen hopeful golfers have come to keep their elbows straight and swing through the ball, only to be disappointed by the locked-up shack that houses score cards and clubs.

    “Is there anywhere else to golf around here?” asked one woman, a tourist whose group finally went to their cars, retrieved their own clubs, and played a couple of holes anyway.

    And perhaps this is one reason for the exhibit’s runaway success. Until this summer, there really hasn’t been anywhere to play mini-golf right in the city. Now, though, St. Paul has also joined the game with the nine-hole “EarthScapes” course at the Science Museum. Even before that, the suburban course at Centennial Lakes in Edina had become quite the hotspot. Clearly, the draw of the Lilliputian links is not to be underestimated.

    In the 1920s, mini-golf was the United States’ fifth-biggest industry, as popular as baseball and the movies. With courses designed in homage to Scotland’s rolling greens, the game was a sophisticated pastime whose popularity spread from New York rooftops across the country with an almost feverish intensity. Opening a mini-golf course became one of the era’s most foolproof get-rich-quick schemes; soon, local ordinances were being passed to keep enthusiasts from playing late into the night, and widespread worry emerged about the pastime’s corruptive and corrosive influence on America’s youth. (Think Footloose: Those kids and their crazy dancing!)

    Alternatively called dwarf golf, pygmy golf, midget golf, and a variety of other things unpalatable to the modern sensibility, mini-golf as we mostly know it emerged during the Depression, when course owners had to get a little more creative, trading in pre-fab groomed holes for homemade links, which is when the windmills, tiny bridges, clown mouths, pendulums, and the like came into play. While eventually its popularity began to decline—clearly Hollywood is currently faring better than the mini-golf industry—mini-golf’s manageable challenges still have a draw.

    But that can’t be the only reason so many people have come here this June afternoon. Of the disheartened golfers who showed up on an off day, most settle happily for wandering from hole to hole as they might in the Walker’s indoor galleries, reading the didactic labels and clucking appreciation, disapproval, or just plain confusion:

    “An ice-fishing house. Ice fishing in the summer. Fantastic!” “This one looks like you could skateboard up it.” “Gosh, what is this? I thought this was going to be a real golf course.”

    Good point. So is it a real golf course? A mini one, that is? Is it golf? Or is it art? Or some strange hybrid created by the seemingly unlikely bedfellows of sport and art? And with ten holes instead of the usual nine or eighteen, you have to wonder if the Walker had any idea what it was doing—should artists really design golf courses? Even tiny ones?—or if, as usual, this avant-garde institution is asking us to think outside the box, bending the boundaries of our understanding. What does it mean that there are ten holes? Is it a comment on our blind acceptance of the status quo, of a kind of lockstep reverence for obscure numerological Kaballa?

    “We put out a request for proposals and we picked eight that we liked,” says Christi Atkinson, the Walker’s associate director of education. “And then we got to design one. And Target [the course’s corporate sponsor] got one. Oh. So how does a mini-golf exhibit fit with the Walker’s usual challenging fare? “It’s true that we’re often challenging art, opening up people’s ideas about what art is. But the purpose of this isn’t to deconstruct mini-golf,” Atkinson patiently responds.

    But how many golf holes are, well, curated? And, in such close proximity to the gnomic declarations that Jenny Holzer carved into her marble benches, one can’t help but read things like “Keep club head below knees and do not loft ball” as some kind of metaphorical directive. After strolling the course long enough, even the adjacent Coke machine’s “Thirsty?” came to read as a metaphysical question.

    Take hole number four, Mini Golf Smackdown!, whose creators have devised a point system rewarding schadenfreude and raw aggression, and “questioning the passive competition of traditional golf.” (Passive? Have they ever played golf with my sister?) Assuming that most people are essentially playing against themselves and to better their abilities, Takuma Handa and Daniel Vercruysse here instruct players to whack their way around a grid of raised and inverted pyramids, encouraging you to knock other balls off the course, chip your own ball back onto it using most any means, and to “laugh at others’ misfortune.” On a hole where it’s essentially impossible to line up a shot, the first person to actually sink the ball in the hole is rewarded with one point (three under par), the second gets two points, and so on—that is, your score for the hole has nothing to do with how many shots you actually took.

    For mini-golf, this is sort of complicated, and one steamy Thursday night, the line backs up quickly. “It’s a good thing there’s a ten-stroke limit,” comments one player when asked about her success on the Smackdown, “or we would have been there all night.”(Actually, the stroke limit for the course is six.) When I asked a member of another group what she thought of the idea behind the Smackdown, she said, “The one with the pyramids? Yeah. We didn’t read the instructions.”

    The creators of Pachinko Generation, hole number two, have constructed a combination skateboard half-chute and Plexiglas-encased wall of spinning blocks that have screws in them, and which looks something like a medieval torture device. The didactic label states, “A surprising discovery about pachinko machines is that the more evenly its metal pins are spaced, the more unpredictable the ball’s bounce becomes.” More surprising still is the raw aggression (extra Smackdown points here?) that players use to get their balls unstuck from the pachinko machine, something like trying to get a jammed Snickers out of a vending machine when your blood sugar has dropped. Most players resort to shoving their clubs behind the Plexiglas to sp
    in the blocks, which does have the desired effect of “remix[ing] the machine’s images,” though not as organically as the designers might have hoped.

    Other holes are more straightforward. Winter in Summer; Ice Fishing House pays homage to a Minnesota pastime, and Frank’s Frolic is a nod to a Frank Stella painting in the Walker’s permanent collection. (Its maddening diagonals prompted my partner, after several bad shots, to bellow, “Stella!”) Point of fact: If you’re actually competitive about mini golf, you’re out of luck here.

    “One of my friends is a high school math teacher,” noted Charles Weed, who was golfing the course with his wife, Jennifer Prestholdt, and their two young children. “He kept saying ‘This is clearly designed by artists! The angles are all wrong!’” Jo Schultz, an MCAD student in a black T-shirt that said “Kill ’Em All. Let God Sort ’Em Out,” was playing a second round with her boyfriend Parker. “I’m competitive about it,” she said. “It’s a little frustrating to not be able to kick his ass so bad.”

    Most golfers seemed to quit keeping score after a while and simply surrender to the heat and the giddiness of the game. (“Get over here now or I’ll club you like a baby seal,” one golfer entreated her son, and then broke into gales of laughter.)

    The question remains: Is it sport or is it sculpture? “They are sculptures,” Christi Atkinson asserts. Are they? “I think they are,” said Rose Park, golfing with her co-workers from the Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights office. “But it’s artists creating art for a certain purpose. They’re practical sculptures.”

    The most practical of which turns out to be Bullseye’s Bunker, the hole created by Target. Perhaps it’s just that adherence to the bottom line so necessary to the corporate world, but as one player laughed, “That’s the only hole I got it in.”

  • It Wasn’t the Magical Elves

    Though I am happy to see positive publicity for air guitar [“Mock & Roll,” the Rakish Angle, July], I do have some problems with your article. First off, the production company filming the documentary on air guitar is not associated with Project Greenlight or the Ben Affleck/Matt Damon production company Live Planet Productions. The producers of the film, who worked as executive producers on season two of the Project Greenlight series, are shooting the documentary of their own accord, under their own company, Magical Elves Inc. There is no connection between the two productions. Secondly, I take offense to being called a “ringer” in your article. Though I have a history working with Magical Elves, I was not assisted by the production, especially when it came to the results of the competition. (There are specific guidelines that each regional must follow which, I believe, are created by the founders of the Air Guitar World Championships.) My decision to participate in the Minneapolis regional air-guitar championship was due to my love of air guitar and my desire to perform in front of friends and family in my home state of Minnesota (something not mentioned in your piece; I am from St. Paul and a graduate of St. Paul Academy). I also wanted to bring my vision of air guitar to the Twin Cities in hopes of inspiring others to participate in future competitions and to help establish a fan base of air-guitar enthusiasts for years to come. In all honesty, I didn’t believe that I could win the competition, nor did I go into the evening with intentions of winning. I just wanted to give a good show and to put some smiles on the faces of my friends and family. I believe that I accomplished my goal.

    Michael Rucker
    Los Angeles

  • Thank You, Mr. Collins

    Collins’ column echoes many of the feelings and frustrations that my neighbors and I have. I live in the Old Highland neighborhood and have been battling crime for more than ten years. In my book, criminal acts in a community include those that contribute to the deterioration of a neighborhood. Abusive and violent behavior (which includes loud profanity), littering, loud stereos and parties, and general neglect of one’s home and yard perpetuate the “ghetto” mentality and are serious crimes. Last year at our neighborhood Clean Sweep, a friend of mine was reprimanded by a so-called “neighbor” for picking up the trash in this person’s yard. His comment—“leave my trash alone, I like living in the ghetto”—elicited the response, “Well, you might as well move, because this is no longer the ghetto.” It was refreshing to hear Collins express a zero-tolerance attitude. I have no intentions of moving and no intentions of lowering my standards to accommodate a victim mentality. Thanks, Mr. Collins; we need more neighbors like you.

    Tracy Loso
    Minneapolis

  • The American Nightmare

    Thank you so much for Clinton Collins, Jr.’s column [“Ghetto is as Ghetto Does,” Free the Jackson Five!, July]. I built a house in North Minneapolis in 2002 and am now regretting that I did. Before I moved, I thought that the brothers were always getting hassled by the police. My views have changed now. I wanted the American dream. My dream has turned into a nightmare. My neighbors rarely come outside. I can sit in my window and watch a drug deal or prostitutes walking the street.

    Name Withheld By Request
    Hawthorne Neighborhood, Minneapolis