The Rake Magazine

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  • Bring It On, Beige

    Finally, someone who hates beige [“Being Beige and Nothingness,” Over the Coals, May] as much as I do! My entire family thought I was finally going insane, when I open The Rake and there’s an article on what a horrible color beige is. Are people now realizing that they don’t have to paint their houses beige? That it’s freakin’ ugly and annoying? If you’re thinking about painting anything beige, please, call me! I guarantee I will find a better, happier color then the so-called “neutrality” of beige. Your article will stay safe with me so I can pull it out and prove that I’m not the only one!
    Sophie Vranian
    Minnetonka

  • Ordinary People, Bus Style

    I loved reading Emily Carter’s public transportation manifesto [“The Unreformed Bus Rider,” June]—it’s the kind of writing that grabs you, pulls you in, and, well, takes you for a ride. However, I disagree with some of the key points—ironically, points that those right-wing folks on the radio also made, that only the marginalized and poor use public transportation. As an artist and freelance writer who composts and bikes wherever possible, I am perhaps occupationally marginalized but lead an otherwise conventional bohemian middle-class life, a life that fits right into the profile of a twenty-to-forty-something, educated, politically progressive Twin Citizen. Depending on the route you take, plenty of green-loving, efficiency-appreciating, even-thicker-into-the-mainstream-than-me people are sitting in bus seats. In fact, when I have a project that requires me to show up in the same place at the same time, I see that those people are sitting in those seats on a daily basis. People above the poverty line do choose public transportation because it’s smarter environmentally, puts you into contact with folks with whom you’d otherwise never interact, and feels better than getting all cranky in your own metal bubble. What better contribution can you make to the life of the city than your bus fare? Like Ms. Carter said, it’s downright civic.
    Shari Aronson
    Minneapolis

  • You Can Take a Toke, but Don’t Do the Coke

    In “One Toke Over the Line” [Over the Coals, June] Nathan Rabin does a commendable job of dumpster-diving beneath the surface of our government’s cesspool of anti-pot propaganda. However, I think Rabin may have gone one toke over the line himself. He writes that once kids see through the government’s lies about pot, “who’s to say they won’t wonder if genuinely destructive drugs like cocaine and speed aren’t as dangerous as advertised either?” Maybe I’ve misread his intentions, but this makes me a little queasy because it seems to make use of one of the oldest scare tactics in the prohibitionist’s own arsenal: the gateway myth. Multiple studies have concluded with certainty that pot simply does not lead to the use of other drugs. Even if he wasn’t intentionally soft-pedaling the dreaded gateway myth, Rabin still used tenuous reasoning to reach the sort of open ended “what if…” conclusion that prohibitionists often deploy to present a worst-possible scenario as the typical case. Pot’s crusaders often appear to be against prohibition, but in their eagerness to defend marijuana, they end up restating arguments for prohibition on their own terms. Of course alcohol, cigarettes, cocaine, and speed are all more dangerous than marijuana—that’s why all these drugs need to share a level, legal playing field. Even tacit acknowledgement of drug-war hysteria surrounding other drugs gives a boost to the notion that we need this drug war, because society would collapse without it, what with all these crack babies, tweekers blowing themselves up in their “clandestine drug labs,” and pill-popping redneck Oxycontin freaks—or whatever drug panic is currently in vogue. When we contribute to the marginalization of other drugs and drug users, we take one step forward and two steps back on the way to our shared goal of humane, rational, and compassionate drug policies. While I may disagree on a few of the finer points of Rabin’s reasoning, I still thank him for an articulate article that takes a firm stand against the moralistic bastards in our government who wish us to wallow in paranoia and ignore the obvious.
    Justin Teerlinck
    St. Paul

  • Nothing in the Water

    Readers would be well advised to remain skeptical before swallowing the water peddled by Dr. Masura Emoto [“Message in a Bottle,” the Rakish Angle, June]. Dr. Emoto has no scientific or medical credentials; his title refers to a degree from the Open International University in India, where such degrees may be obtained by mail for under $500. Chemists knows that water has unusual and unique properties that result from the tendency of its molecules to associate by hydrogen bonding, forming short-lived and ever-changing polymeric units that are sometimes described as “clusters.” The snowflake patterns are the result of crystallization of the water on some contaminant such as a speck of dust, and are highly dependent on the local conditions and rate of cooling. Yep, at the core of each of Dr. Emoto’s snowflakes is a speck of filth. The learned professor’s photographs of ice crystals are wonderful, but anyone who has seen the beautiful, intricate patterns of frost on a windowpane could attest to this. Dr. Emoto, however, makes the dubious claim that words, music, and prayer can somehow affect the crystallization of water, and that this modified water can somehow cure whatever ails you. He, of course, provides no proof for his claims, although they could be easily tested. These tests have not been done, because they would fail to support Dr. Emoto’s claims. So where is the harm? First, it separates people from their money. Like the snake oils and other nostrums that have been peddled to an unsuspecting public for centuries, much is promised, but nothing is delivered. More important, there are many who would take unproven or useless “cures” and forsake treatments whose efficacy has been proven. Before using any unproven or “alternative” treatment, I would advise readers to consult Dr. Steven Barrett’s guide at www.quackwatch.com. Information regarding specific water cures and other water-related pseudoscience can be found at http://www.chem1.com/CQ/.
    Kent S. Kokko, Ph.D
    Roseville

  • Praised Be

    I first landed on the St. John’s campus almost sixty years ago as a prep school student. In six decades I have come to know the place and the Benedictines well, as a high school and college student, lay staff member, parent of several students, and board member of the university and some of its ancillary enterprises. I obviously love the place, which has influenced my life as much as anyone (excepting my mother). The article by Adam Minter [“Force of Habit,” cover story, June] was a classic, thoughtful, and accurate portrayal of the Benedictines and St. John’s. Thank you. I have never read a better story about St. John’s.
    Tom McKeown
    Mendota Heights

  • Wine, wine, wine! Wine from the Hills

    Why do people admire Napoleon? I don’t mean the French—they have reasons of their own for boosting Bonaparte, such as a dearth of more recent political heroes. But what inspires so many ordinary Anglophones in their cloying fascination for the great dictator? It’s not just the sticky puff-pastries and the Napoleon brandy (but what has that to do with Napoleon?), nor the English eccentrics who put In Memoriam notices for him on appropriate anniversaries in what these days passes for the Personal Column of the London Times.

    Something more sinister runs through the websites devoted to Napoleon—dozens of them when last I looked at Google—adulation of a species of power rooted in populism, fed by violence, and dressed in glamour. It would not be fair to condemn Napoleon for his most effusive modern admirer, Bokassa I, former ruler of the Central African Empire. It is said that after he was finally ousted from power, his freezer was found filled with human flesh.

    Napoleon was not that bad. But the dapper little French tyrant forms quite a contrast with his most persistent opponent, that amiable old duffer George III. Maybe “Farmer George” should have noticed sooner than he did that his North American subjects were falling out among themselves—though surely it was equally unreasonable of John Hancock to expect His Majesty to read his signature, however big it was written, from the far side of the Atlantic.

    Of course there were contemporaries who saw through Napoleon. Beethoven withdrew the dedication of his Third Symphony, the Eroica, when Napoleon crowned himself emperor. Dr. Stephen Maturin’s passion for rescuing his native Catalonia from the Corsican corporal inspired him to serve as a surgeon in the Royal Navy and to star in Master and Commander (wonderful film, all those chaps getting really wet). The Duke of Wellington admitted that Napoleon’s hat on the battlefield was worth forty thousand men, but also said (with his customary damning pithiness—Earl Stanhope’s Conversations with Wellington is one of the finest collections of one-liners in the language) that Napoleon was no gentleman.

    It was Wellington’s army’s long campaigns on the Iberian Peninsula (aided by indigenous guerrillas—which is how the word entered English) that slowly wore down Napoleon’s power. The battle that broke the French grip on Spain took place in July 1812 outside the city of Salamanca, halfway between Madrid and Oporto on the coast of Portugal. Skillful use of “dead ground” in the hilly terrain contributed much to Wellington’s victory, but all the same the loss of life was terrible. Seven thousand French and five thousand allies killed and wounded—ten percent of the force.

    The hills near Salamanca have recently begun to produce a very pleasing red wine, which can be had around here for about $10. The makers are called Bodegas Valdeaguila and have been in business only since 2000; their wine is called (appropriately enough) Viña Salamanca. Given a little air it is ripe and fruity, with a pleasantly leafy flavor in the aftertaste. At the center there are tannins which tingle somewhat; they would battle effectively with spicy sausage or a paella laced with pepper. These effects are produced by equal quantities of two grape varieties, the Tempranillo, the grape of Ribera del Duero (north of here) and Rioja, and, less familiar, the Rufete, an endemic variety suited to the long sunny days, cool evenings and low rainfall of the hill country (the rain in Spain, you will recall, falls mainly in the plain).

    Wine, olives, grain, the perennial staples of Mediterranean life—this will go onward the same, though dynasties pass, as Thomas Hardy said. No bad thing, maybe, that a winemaker’s alliance with nature can furnish distraction from man’s misuse of power.

  • Walking the Talk

    Mayor R.T. Rybak was scheduled to deliver the opening remarks at the 2004 Walkable Communities Workshop a few weeks ago, but he must’ve run up against a few obstacles on his way to the Coyle Community Center, tucked into the northernmost corner of Cedar Riverside, near the I-35/Washington Avenue interchange. According to the workshop, such obstacles could include narrow sidewalks, faded crosswalks, construction barriers, or even ugly buildings. And Minneapolis is riddled with these types of liabilities.

    The workshop’s unusually large turnout of enthusiastic walkers—plus a smattering of Metro Transit workers, city planners, community leaders, designers, and a police officer—caused the parking lot to overflow with cars, mini-vans, and SUVs. For my own part, I wedged my little sedan between two dumpsters, rather than parking and walking from two blocks away. I know now what my trepidations were: There are just too many impediments to walkability, like the shattered sidewalk I spotted earlier on Cedar Avenue as I was speeding past the Triple Rock Social Club. No thanks.

    The workshop was led by Deb Spicer and Peter Moe. They are from the National Center for Bicycling and Walking, and they are fluent in the language of pedestrians. “Signage,” “visioning,” and “wayfinding” were favorite words, and they also dwelled on “obesity” for a moment. According to the journal Obesity Research, Minnesota taxpayers fork over $1.3 billion each year to pay for obesity-related medical costs. Spicer said that major contributing factors to the continuing rise in the gross domestic weight are urban sprawl and a transportation system designed for cars rather than pedestrians. This situation, according to Moe, is totally “old-school.”

    Based on old zoning laws, residential areas have been separated from commercial and civic centers. Thus getting to most post offices, schools, and shops requires a fair amount of driving. Moe was enthused about Excelsior Boulevard in St. Louis Park, which was recently renovated. New condos are mixed with ground-level retail sites. He said this is an example of a good new-school community plan. The wider sidewalks, numerous benches, and delightful architecture create an environment that encourages pedestrian behavior.

    This is not the case with Cedar Riverside, where the group went on a “walking audit” to identify “barriers and opportunities.” Even though there were no local business owners in the group, and only two women were from the neighborhood, attendees were willing to offer their thoughts before we even got to the sidewalk: “We need signage!” “That hill is too high. It’s not safe!” “Maybe we can get some pretty, antique-looking lights, ones that arch and hang over the trees.” “Hey, what if that parking lot were turned into a little road?”

    Many believe the light-rail train now running through Cedar Riverside will further boost the neighborhood, which is already viewed as a vital gateway for new arrivals, immigrants, and refugees. According to the walkability group, Cedar Riverside also needs to be an active, safe zone for pedestrians, cyclists, and transit riders. “This is where vision comes in,” said Moe, “an opportunity to turn a space into a place.” We passed in front of a housing complex, an empty lot punctuated by broken chunks of pavement and scrappy, meager landscaping. “Hey, wouldn’t this make a great plaza?” quipped a perky college student. “Maybe we could erect signs in different languages to assist with wayfinding,” said an earnest older woman. —Molly Priesmeyer

  • Too Much Is Not Enough

    “I am big,” sneered Norma Desmond, the superannuated silent-movie star in Billy Wilder’s mid-century classic, Sunset Blvd. “It’s the pictures that got small.” Today, Ms. Desmond must serve as the patron saint for any number of superstars wondering where the magic went. But now, of course, it’s not just the pictures that have gotten smaller. Audiences have shrunk too, and so has our interest in just sitting back and watching. When we’re not playing videogames, we’re starring in reality TV series. When we’re not starring in reality TV series, we’re blogging. In a world of niche markets and interactivity, it’s almost impossible to be big like Norma Desmond was big, and one day soon, our own disgruntled superstars will descend upon suburban shopping malls and cineplexes with AK-47s blazing.

    But even as the potency of superstardom diminishes, the idea of it remains as tantalizing as ever, and thus I direct your attention to Superstar USA, an anti-talent show that aired on the WB in May and June. A deft amalgamation of Fox’s American Idol and MTV’s Punk’d, eager hopefuls who turned up for the show’s open auditions thought they were participating in a search for the next overnight pop star. Superstar was really on the prowl for karaoke Kevorkians, song-butchers so lethal they could kill classic hits in five notes or less.

    Superstar employed three judges, all closely modeled after their American Idol forebears. Eighties novelty rapper Tone-Loc provided mechanical urban flava in the manner of American Idol’s Randy Jackson. (However, understanding that it is technically impossible to jam more “dawgs” and “a’ights” into a sentence than Jackson does, Loc simply played it cool.) Second-tier pop star Vitamin C was a revelation in the Paula Abdul role of MILFish nurturer: Who knew the woman behind generic hits like “Graduation” and “Smile” was so funny and appealing? Lastly, there was television producer Chris Briggs, an acerbic, leather-clad cad, Superstar’s Simon Cowell.

    Together, this trio dispatched talented performers with hilarious poker-faced viciousness. “I didn’t sense there was the preparation with that song, which is disrespectful to Gladys Knight,” exclaimed Briggs to one singer. “And it’s a little disrespectful to the Pips.” Awful performers, on the other hand, were greeted with equally exaggerated deadpandering. “You made love to that song,” Briggs told a finalist named Tamara after her semi-narcoleptic performance. “You seduced it over dinner. You massaged it. You led it discreetly into the bedroom. You disrobed it. You laid it upon the bed gently. You found a rhythm.”

    No matter how tone-deaf or rhythmically challenged, the performers ate up such praise like Ruben Stoddard attacking a box of donuts. Eventually, twelve finalists were flown to Hollywood to compete for a recording contract and a $100,000 prize. There, they received state-of-the-art celebrity processing (image enhancement, vocal triage, dance lessons, etc.) and engaged in more performances. Rosa, a pretty twenty-two-year-old from Mexico City, sang in a quavering soprano that transformed hackneyed pop lyrics into strangely beautiful Martian poetry. High-kicking, hip-grinding Nina Diva favored costumes that made her look like a hooker moonlighting as an aerobics instructor. Eighteen-year-old Frank, a manorexic clothes-horse from New Jersey, belted out “Survivor” in a nasal monotone while stalking the stage in high heels and flared slacks with fishnet cuffs.

    As I write this in early June, the WB has yet to air Superstar’s final episode, wherein host Brian McFayden reveals the truth behind the show and destroys the visions of superstardom swooshing around inside the contestants’ fame-addled heads. At times, it has seemed like the show is actually a hoax on its viewers, with the contestants in on the gag. After all, could sweetly confident Mario, a cadaverous nerd with the dance moves of a depressed flamingo, really think he had a legitimate shot at international superstardom? Didn’t he have friends or family to give him a reality check?

    In the end, Superstar USA was real: The contestants’ inventive vocal flourishes, performance tics, and singular fashion choices were too off-handed and variegated to have been crafted by some reality-show writer. Which, of course, means that Superstar USA was indeed a pretty mean-spirited enterprise, capitalizing on unsuspecting oddballs, and using predatory editing techniques and off-screen manipulation to exaggerate their haplessness and their hubris. One example: The contestants were apparently told which songs to sing only minutes before their performances, and thus didn’t always know the words. Jamie Foss, a beautifully upholstered blonde from Erskine, Minnesota, met this challenge with can-do aplomb, writing the lyrics on her hand. The producers loved her ingenuity and promised that the cameras would cut away from her whenever she needed to consult her notes. In reality, of course, they zoomed in on her hands repeatedly.

    The idea that people whose aspirations run circles around their abilities deserve to be publicly humiliated for such folly gains currency with each passing TV season. MTV laid the groundwork for this conceit, perhaps inadvertently, with shows like FANatic (crazed fans meet their favorite stars) and Becoming (crazed fans don their favorite stars’ clothes and make music videos). True, these shows were somewhat subversive in relegating superstars to bit-player status and making fans the biggest stars of all.

    Very punk concept in theory, it was often the opposite in practice. As everyday teens interacted with their heroes, the differences were thrown into bold relief. The superstars were beautiful, self-assured, worthy of worship. The fans were awkward, tongue-tied geeks, obvious and unsightly trespassers in the realm of celebrity.

    On Fox’s American Idol, designated dream-killer Simon Cowell explicated the subtextual cues of FANatic and Becoming with bracing clarity. “You’re absolutely dreadful,” he tells aspirants who don’t measure up, because for him, it’s not enough to break bad news, he wants to break spirits too. For American Idol, the old order still holds. A precious talented few belong on stage; the rest belong on Barcaloungers, and they need to know their place. The artistic sanctity of near-gods like Barry Manilow and Elton John must be preserved.

    At Superstar USA, the ruling forces are more attuned to the zeitgeist. They know that talent is just another commodity now. Sure, it may be relatively scarce on a per-capita basis, but in an age where services like iTunes put thousands of songs at your fingertips, it’s still available on-demand. In fact, there’s actually a talent glut: Thousands of expertly styled, technically accomplished Stepford singers are milling around out there who know exactly what’s expected of them and exactly how to deliver it. They’ve studied, they’ve polished, they’re suffocatingly professional. Indeed, how else to explain the popularity of William Hung, American Idol’s own Johnny Rotten, except as the audience’s collective gasp for fresh air? Gently wobbling to “She Bangs,” politely dismissing Simon’s fussy strictures, Hung reminded viewers of Punk Rock 101’s primary lesson: that technique can be oppressive and limiting—an uptight, middle-aged, British-accented drag.

    American Idol remains resolutely married to the idea of talent. In contrast, Superstar USA just wanted to entertain. “Cookie-cutter pop star wannabes with good voices need not apply, because we’re looking for someone different,” declared host McFayden. “There is an infectiousness to these people that’s fun to watch,” said judge Briggs. And however conveniently such sentiments helped to mitigate the show’s inherent sadism, they were also true. If Mario and Nina Diva and all the rest had merely been bad singers, the show would have gotten old fast. What kept it engagi
    ng was their personalities, their unique twists on stale pop-star conventions, their style, and their spirit. Sure, none of the WB’s superstars are likely to go platinum, but for a few weeks in the spring of 2004, they were the most interesting thing on TV—candid, vulnerable, full of enthusiasm and irrepressible confidence. Best of all, they were completely unpredictable.

    They were also pretty disposable, but these days, who isn’t? While Superstar USA drew criticism for exploiting naïve dreamers—the Parents Television Council dubbed it the “ultimate sick joke”—it also poked fun at its own inconsequence in an era where superstars are a dime a dozen and loyal fans are the scarcest resource of all. Indeed, remember who got hired as judges. Tone-Loc was a superstar himself once, going double-platinum on his 1989 debut album. Vitamin C was a viable commodity even more recently, with a platinum album and five Top 40 singles between 1999 and 2001. Both are smart and personable, both have musical talent, and yet despite their successful track records, look where they are now. In her time, Norma Desmond would have been too big to participate in a low-budget, gimmicky reality show that hardly anyone watched, but in 2004, fame’s a bitch, and real-life former icons have to pay the bills somehow. That, perhaps, is superstardom’s cruelest joke of all.

  • A River Runs Through Us

    If you follow pop culture’s magic rule of three, then the Mississippi River counts as a bona-fide trend this summer. There’s the promotional extravaganza called the Grand Excursion, and the Minneapolis Institute of Art’s ambitious exhibition, Art & Life Along The Mississippi River, 1850-1861 (which covers the time of the original 1854 Grand Excursion), plus all of their attendant hoopla. On the heels of those events is the July 9 opening of Sleeping by the Mississippi, a series of photographs at the Weinstein Gallery by Alec Soth. This exhibition might not have the grandness of the Excursion or the breadth of Art & Life, but it’s one ripple created by the splash that Soth made in the past year.

    The Minneapolis photographer was one of the standout artists at the 2004 Whitney Biennial this spring; a concurrent show at Yossi Milo, Soth’s New York gallery, satisfied the demand to see (and, of course, purchase) more work from the Mississippi series. There has since been another gallery show in San Francisco, and a book will be published this September.

    What is it about this body of work—forty-five images of people, landscapes, and interiors shot in and around small towns along the river—that struck such a chord with the art world? It’s not just the cognoscenti, it’s thousands of museumgoers eager to see what the Biennial branded as the latest and greatest American art; it’s art directors at major glossy magazines calling to commission a Soth photo shoot. It’s Gerhard Steidl, the legendary German publisher of art and photo books, taking on a relative unknown.

    At the Biennial in particular, which displays the wares of more than a hundred artists, it’s a feat for any work to truly captivate. These ritualistic surveys, regardless of the thematic declarations of their curators, inevitably end up more like a bazaar than an art exhibit, and are just as exhausting to take in. After dozens of galleries filled with sprawling wall paintings, arid conceptual sculptures, videos demanding ten minutes (or more!) of your time, and room-sized installations of psychedelia, Soth’s “straight” photography served as a welcome and earthy respite. The stark, large-format images invited, even demanded scrutiny: a jumpsuited man standing on a roof, holding two model airplanes; the garish green walls and tapestry armchair in an Iowa brothel; a rusting bed frame nearly swallowed by foliage in a swampy backwater. At the Biennial, these were like the wallflowers at a school dance that the guys suddenly found compelling for their freshness and honesty.

    Soth himself has a simple explanation for his work’s reception at that exhibition. He told me, “I think it was popular because it’s accessible.” Fair enough. But it’s possible that viewers also somehow intuited what this series meant to its creator. Finally acting on a long-standing dream, Soth set out to travel south along the Mississippi, with no objective in mind other than to satisfy his own boyish wanderlust. He was also, however, quite consciously following in the tradition of American road photography embodied by Walker Evans and other WPA photographers in the thirties, Robert Frank in the fifties, and William Eggleston, Joel Sternfeld, Robert Adams, and Steven Shore in the sixties and seventies.

    Unlike those artists, however, Soth seeks a kinship with the bohemian figures and eccentrics that he both admires and photographs. “One of the things I love about the river is how, as you follow it from north down south, these different types of personalities emerge,” he says. He admits to being particularly drawn to personalities that reinforce the national narrative about the Big River—the slow decline of this once-glorious economic engine, so essential to the nation’s growth; the shores, small towns, and people that now embody a lost America full of picturesque oddities; a dreamy obsolescence. Certainly Soth didn’t choose to photograph the million-dollar lofts along the Mississippi in Minneapolis and elsewhere. Nor did he take in the riverboat casinos or factories or suburbs or golf courses—all of which his teacher, Joel Sternfeld, with whom he’s often compared, might have photographed had he undertaken a Mississippi River series. While Sternfeld tends to train his lens on the socio-economic landscape, Soth’s sensibility is shamelessly romantic: the artsy, weathered domicile in “Peter’s houseboat, Winona, Minnesota”; the fluorescent glow of a gas station that falls on gravestones in “Cemetery, Fountain City, Wisconsin”; the battered furniture in “Luxora, Arkansas” gathered to create an outdoor living room for vagrants.

    In the forthcoming book, images are edited so that they move from the frigid north in early spring to the blossoming of New Orleans during Lent and Easter. Throughout, beds are among the most overt of themes, with their intimate allusions to dreaming, loving, sex, illness, death, religion, and rebirth.

    Particularly dreamy instances of amateur art, and the art of self-transformation, are another compelling thread: a cartoonish rendering of a headless muscleman’s body drawn on a vivid blue wall; a black-haired figure painted on a sliding glass door. A Mississippi matron poses proudly with her own “photograph of an angel” (as seen in a cloud formation), while a Louisiana prisoner has written “Preacher + Man” on his T-shirt collar. And toward the end of the book, a strapping, bewigged cross-dresser in Easter finery sits primly on a Disney princess bedspread.

    These images all play with a familiar Mississippi River narrative, but they also touch on Midwestern exoticism and the Southern Gothic, and reveal the river itself as the common thread between the two. Ever since Lewis and Clark, and even before, civilized folk on the East Coast have periodically looked westward to renew their surprise and delight at what curious things are to be found in the hinterland: Convicts, preachermen, hookers, wrestlers, all-around oddballs.

    Soth’s romanticism leads him constantly to strike at the tyranny of literalism that plagues photography as a point-and-shoot medium. This body of work is intricately composed, using a cumbersome 8×10 format camera—the old-fashioned type set on a tripod, which requires the photographer to throw a cloth over his head and shoulders. In this regard, Soth is not so much a photographer but a picture-maker, scrupulously manipulating colors, angles, poses, props.
    This is shown to advantage in a work like “Mother and daughter, Davenport, Iowa,” with its amazing contrasts in focus—the clarity of the daughter’s fingernails and cigarette, or the mother’s toes—and the slight blur on legs, feet, fabric. You begin analyzing the poses of arms and legs, and thinking about the conversation that transpired during the long set-up of the camera and the scene it would record.

    Elsewhere, Soth’s eye can become a bit too fastidious, even obsessive. In “New Orleans, Louisiana,” the position of a chair seems so intentional that you want to find the blocking marks taped on the floor. This begins to impugn the rest of the composition: Did the photographer sweep that small pile of detritus into one corner of the image in order to counterbalance the light bulb in the opposite? Similarly, there’s a whiff of heavy-handed staging in “Immaculate Conception Church, Kaskaskia, Illinois”—in the way an old armchair is situated in a brick-walled corner beneath a picture of priest, draped with a gold vestment, with a large, cheap mountain landscape leaning on its side in a doorway. Soth cheerfully admits that the aura of one image would be “ruined” if the viewer knew its “true story.” (He wouldn’t reveal the story, and I won’t reveal the image—and I’m not sure it makes a difference anyway.)

    Soth is probably the last person who could have predicted his good fortune. A few years ago, he was “mister conservative,” a workaday guy tied to his job and hi
    s home, where he helped his wife care for her mother, who lived with them and recently succumbed to cancer. “I was always painfully shy, even in college,” he says, noting that his classmates must be shocked to find that he ended up photographing people.

    Instead of waxing poetic about his vision or his determination, Soth credits his success to good timing and good luck. He received the Minnesota trifecta of artist grants (the Jerome, the McKnight, the state arts board) in relatively quick succession, which brought him attention from Walker Art Center, which in turn led to the Whitney Biennial and the 2003 Santa Fe Prize for Photography. Now that he’s got a post-Biennial bandwagon (something that doesn’t happen to all hundred-plus artists in that show), he’s taking it as far as it will go. “My philosophy is to take advantage of as many opportunities as I can,” he says. “I’m a pragmatic Midwestern boy!”

    There’s a savvy edge to that pragmatism, too. Sleeping by the Mississippi has deep roots in the tradition of American road photography, but Soth is leery of being branded “the Mississippi River guy,” or even the “8×10 format guy.” He notes wryly that in turning in his work for an editorial assignment, the art director was disappointed to see digital images instead of negatives shot with his 8×10 camera: “I was shooting while riding a bike,” he says, laughing. “I was shooting moving vehicles.”

    He’s also chosen to ignore the advice of an art-world “goofball” who urged him to move to New York. “First, that’s cynical,” he says. “Second, I absolutely disagree that as a photographer, you have to live in New York to be successful. Where would photography be if everyone lived there? Look at what that does to other art forms.” But perhaps most important, Soth is well aware that his status as the “exotic Midwesterner” carries a certain amount of mileage with Eastern art and media figures. Why relocate there? Here is where he can be pragmatic and romantic at the same time.

  • Ménage à… Nah

    I got a call from an old girlfriend recently, and we agreed to meet for lunch. It had been a good relationship and an amicable parting. Catching up for old time’s sake seemed like a fun idea—each of us was curious about how the other had turned out after all these years.

    If there is a little place in your heart for each of your former lovers, I’ve learned to think of it as fond memories and selective sentimentality, nothing more. After ten years of connubial bliss, I don’t carry a torch for anyone but the wife. Even so, it can be hard to separate memories from other kinds of more complicated feelings—like lust. And there were enough messy endings that might have been happy ones, if only I’d had my act together when I was younger. Maybe that’s why my first impulse was not to tell Mrs. Greene about lunching with my old girlfriend. Also, she can be an awfully jealous woman.

    But the more I thought about this, the more I became annoyed: What did I have to hide? I had no reason to feel guilty, nor did I have to take responsibility for her jealousy. Besides, she’s still friends with a few of her old boyfriends. I don’t find that threatening in the least. To be fair, though, she’s as loyal as she is jealous, and if I had to be objective about it, I’d admit that between the two of us, I’m the more likely to have unclean thoughts about a past lover.

    Claire was a knockout when we dated fifteen years ago. Everyone has that first relationship with someone they learn the ropes with. You’re young, you’re beautiful, you’ve got time on your hands, you’re horny as a billy goat. Claire and I had a lot of fun together, though within about six months we realized the only thing we really had in common was our mutual appreciation for frequent sex—one of life’s pleasures that is wasted on youth.

    I didn’t realize it then, but now I’ve come to believe that Claire is probably addicted to sex. I realized this because, as we dug into a banana split with two spoons, she was astonishingly frank about her love life, which sounds a bit like Valleyfair for adults. She’s married, but claims it’s an “open” thing. She and her husband frequently invite others into their bedroom. I was curious about how this worked, and Claire admitted that it’s really her thing. She’d had relationships with women over the years, and she liked going to bed with both sexes—at the same time. Her husband has been a willing if not enthusiastic partner.

    Of course, this is just about every man’s fantasy. A lot of women fantasize about going to bed with two men, too. But we all know by now that fantasy and reality are frequently polar opposites, and if you’ve been silly enough to try to make your sexual fantasy a reality—especially if it involves bringing another person into the bedroom, either in addition to or in place of your spouse—you have probably been disappointed at best or deeply hurt at worst.

    This was not the case for Claire. She said she and her husband had a perfectly healthy and normal relationship, other than the fact that she liked to pick up other women and bring them home for kinky three-ways. I found it interesting, though, that there were some pretty strict rules about the scenario. Claire said that her husband was free to ogle their playmate, but he could not touch her. This seemed unfair to me—but only within the parameters of what was a pretty screwy larger picture.

    Most sexperts these days seem to have a laissez-faire attitude about such activities—as long as no one gets hurt and everyone has a “safe word,” nothing too awful can happen. On the other hand, the ones who aren’t afraid to delve deeper into moral and psychological issues seem to agree that humans are essentially monogamous by nature, and that this type of sex-play is usually evidence of some kind of dysfunction, often something very serious and hurtful.

    I can’t speak for others, but to me Claire seems still to be obsessed with sex after all these years, and her obsession is apparently doubled by her bisexuality. It seems like she’s setting herself up for lot of long-term pain for a moment’s pleasure.

    Lunch was fun. Despite the dirty conversation, Claire confided in me in a way she never had—in a non-sexual, just-friends manner that never made me uncomfortable. Still, I remembered the main moral of our story, the Affair of Me and Claire: Great sex does not make a relationship, just like split bananas don’t make a banana split.