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Emily Goldberg’s childhood memories of the Twin Cities are profoundly blurry. Literally. Growing up on Long Island, she traveled regularly to Minneapolis with her family to visit Dr. Irving Shapiro, a friend of the family and an ophthalmologist. The Goldbergs would get their eyes checked by Dr. Shapiro. Goldberg remembers the doctor’s dilating drops; they gave her a somewhat hallucinogenic idea of what the place looked like.

“Maybe Irv’s magic drops are why I moved here,” said Goldberg the other day. “I knew New York, Chicago, and Boston—but despite my time in Minnesota, I had no idea what the place looked like. It was almost like I had to move here.” And she’s never left.

In the intervening years, Goldberg became a documentary filmmaker, with an international reputation for her unique vision. The loudest hosannas have come for her most recent work, Venus of Mars. A documentary about the Minneapolis glam-rock band All the Pretty Horses, it debuted last November at the Amsterdam International Film Festival. That was followed by noted appearances in Greece, Romania, and Spain. Later this month, it will screen in New Zealand.

Goldberg earned her chops as a producer at Twin Cities Public Television. She thought it would take about eighteen months to make Venus. When she finished, it was almost four years later. “If I knew then how long it would take, I might not have done it,” she said. She is not a natural self-promoter; sitting in her Lowry Hill apartment, the most she would say about herself was that “people have always told me I’m a good listener.”

Venus partly follows the typical pattern of a Behind the Music episode, asking the straightforward question, “Will this particular band make it?” But the focus of the film is the band’s singer, Steve Grandell, and his wife, Lynette Reini-Grandell. They were high school sweethearts from Duluth who’ve now been married more than twenty years. Grandell was part of the Rifle Sport artist collective in the 1980s when he tied the knot with Reini. Today, she is a tenured English professor at Normandale Community College who also hosts KFAI’s “Write On Radio,” an author interview show.
Here’s where the story gets tricky: Five years into their relationship, Grandell told his wife he wanted a sex change. The evolution of Steve, Lynette, their marriage, and the band was gradual, and took place years before Goldberg began filming. At various points along the way, Grandell decided he didn’t want “the operation,” but wanted to grow breasts by taking hormones. By the time the film begins, he has adopted the name “Venus,” and the hormone pills have done their work.

Goldberg doesn’t sensationalize the story, and what emerges aren’t easy answers about the world of transgenderism, but hard questions about how any couple makes it over the long haul. Goldberg’s success is in showing that the hardest parts of the relationship aren’t the more spectacular differences between Lynette and Venus, but the usual frictions that plague even the most normal relationships. “Money,” Lynette says in the film, is what she and Venus fight about most.

But as a heterosexual married to a transgendered person—someone literally living between two sexes—wasn’t Professor Reini-Grandell afraid of being diced on film? “We felt Emily’s empathy the moment she started filming,” Lynette said.

Last year, Goldberg was walking the streets of Manhattan when she had a fleeting thought. “Why don’t I live here? Isn’t this where it’s happening?” Then she came to her senses. “If I’m in New York and Irv Shapiro is in Minneapolis,” she said, laughing, “I wouldn’t know where to get my eyes checked.”—Neal Karlen

Victory is especially sweet after so many defeats. Pete is going to be a father after working at it for almost two years. He was starting to get worried that he and Amanda weren’t going to be able to get pregnant. Amanda had gone to her doctor, and they had figured out that if they were having any trouble, it wasn’t down to her. So Pete had some concerns about his own virility. A couple of months ago, he called me and wanted to go out for a beer—just the two of us. I knew something was up.

“I’m worried that I’ve got mutant sperm or something,” Pete said. “Or maybe they’re just lazy sperm. What if I don’t have any sperm at all?” I could certainly empathize with him. We’ve all done a lot of stupid things in our lives, having mostly to do with drugs, drink, and debauchery. How can a man in his late thirties today not be worried that he hasn’t done some genetic damage along the way?

We tend to dismiss the shrill moral cops of our parents’ generation; the old farts who claimed that pot would reduce your sperm count were the same old farts who said masturbating would make you go blind, right? In other words, we tended to believe exactly the opposite of what they told us.

On the other hand, I seemed to recall that there was some hard science behind the claim that LSD, for example, could damage your DNA, and it was an intense and scary drug—the kind you could easily believe might screw up your genes. So, anyway, you can see how Pete was suddenly having second thoughts about the viability of becoming a father. Come to think of it, in all his years of sexual activity, he’d never had a close call with any of his girlfriends. (Despite the college drought that led to Maureen, the inflatable sex doll, Pete was no slouch.)

But what if Amanda got pregnant with some mutant sperm and they had a six-fingered baby? Pete was beginning to get very nervous. Eventually, after they’d been trying for ten months, he had to deal with the inevitable: a sperm test.

Now, Pete and Amanda had also been discussing options for a worst-case scenario. There was a whole battery of procedures, from the fairly simple (like artificial insemination) to the expensive and complicated (like in-vitro fertilization). Amanda felt strongly about being a mother, and she was adamant about wanting to adopt if it turned out that they could not be biological parents. “There are thousands of kids who need good parents out there. We want to be parents. Why wouldn’t we adopt?” she asked, reasonably.

Pete was embarrassed to admit that he didn’t think he wanted to be a parent if he couldn’t be the biological father. In fact, he was afraid to tell Amanda this, but he told me. I think I understood where he was coming from, and it seemed important to at least understand his point of view. Maybe it’s a selfish and ugly feeling. But then again, these days we’re all about honoring our biology and the imperatives of the physical body. Is there a more pressing imperative than to reproduce? Should we think less of Pete because this imperative seemed to be more literally biological than social or moral—i.e., if he couldn’t father a child, he didn’t want to be a dad? Needless to say, things would be so much less complicated, emotionally speaking, if he and Amanda could just get pregnant the natural way.

So, with these muddled feelings, Pete set off for the fertility clinic, ready to donate some sperm to find out if he had any, and if they were normal or if they were swimming in lysergic circles. Amanda had to work that day, so Pete went alone. When Amanda wanted to know how Pete had managed to perform his duty at the clinic, Pete told the truth: He had been provided with and used a dirty magazine. Amanda went ballistic and called the clinic, but when she started to chastise the nurse on the other end of the line, she was cut off mid-sentence. The nurse told her to “grow up”—and then hung up on her. Amanda was speechless. Though Pete would never tell his wife this, he counted it a small victory for Neanderthal Man, who seems to need the occasional visual stimulant, especially considering how hard it is to get in the mood at a fertility clinic. Why is porn okay for the fertility doctor’s office, but nowhere else? It’s a moot point with Amanda and Pete, now that they’re pregnant.

There are few things the Irish enjoy more than a decent pint or an English football team falling from grace ungracefully. Having both at once, now you’ve hit the jackpot. This month, the more worldly local sports bars—or at least Hibernian pubs with DirecTV—will provide dozens of opportunities to tickle the fancy of an Irishman.

Since 1960, Europe’s finest footballing nations have gathered to contest the European Cup. In a pre-arranged location, they do battle in front of thousands in the stadium, and millions in the sports bars. There was a time when Europeans were a bit more barbaric about their entertainment—Christian-munching lions, public head-chopping—but modern football is no less passionate as a way of settling old scores.

The English are fond of saying they invented football. Their contribution since then has not yet been matched. One hundred and fifty years after a pig’s bladder was kicked unceremoniously through the streets of the “empire,” the former colonialists are still struggling to evolve from the “kick and riot” style of the late nineteenth century.

This year’s Euro Cup host nation is Portugal. Since they are playing at home, they’ll be expected to excel. Other superpowers such as Italy, Holland, Spain, Germany, and France (the current champions—mon dieu!) will have their own parochial crosses to bear. Frosh Latvia is just happy to get an invite to the party. Russia is always strong, yet their outdated red kit could be replaced; purple would better symbolize the choking affliction that seems to manifest itself each time they reach a tournament. Likewise with the Danish and Swedish sides, which carry on the tradition of just being cannon fodder. The Greeks have discovered that looking to their past glories is not only painful to the neck muscles, but counter to world domination. Still, they will be satisfied with winning one game, then returning home to get the advertising boards together for the Olympics. Making up the numbers are Croatia, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, and Switzerland (who qualified at Ireland’s expense and had better bring enough Toblerone for everyone to maintain their neutral status).

In the Twin Cities, the viewing ex-pat community has the opportunity to watch the drama unfold on a daily basis from June 12 until July 4. As the Emerald Isle has no representative, we Irish take up the mantle of ABE (Anyone but England) and can be counted upon to cheer raucously at each inevitable English failure on the field.

Watching a football game in an Irish pub carries with it certain responsibilities. As most games are on at midday, a wide range of work-absent excuses or long lunch meetings will have to be created. On the daily menu, a side salad will accompany the main course of Guinness pints. Dessert will be a whopping England defeat or a small serving of dyspepsia, as the case may be. The alternative to viewing the games in an Irish pub is to stay at home and pay a subscription fee to a satellite company. This, though, is comparable to watching church on TV, that is, without a congregation. Communal faith brings much more than group prayer. With Guinness on the menu, we can all sing from the same hymn sheet.

Russians, Greeks, and Spaniards can mix freely, chat courteously, and exchange pleasantries pre-match. However, when the game kicks off, all European Union alliances are tossed like a haggis at the Highland games. Patriotism reaches new heights. Defeat plumbs unprecedented lows.—John Cosgrove

1938’s Reefer Madness occupies a special place in stoner lore. Originally conceived as an urgent message film about the dangers of the demon weed, it was rediscovered in the sixties and seventies by scruffy, long-haired countercultural types who grooved on the film’s all-around ineptitude, hysterical tone, manic overacting, and patently false portrayal of pot as a Pandora’s Box unleashing a wave of insanity, murder, and sexual assault. Of course, it didn’t hurt the film’s popularity as an unintentional comedy that many of its second-wave viewers were stoned out of their collective gourd while watching it. Pot smokers in that more progressive, open-minded era no doubt delighted in the surreal contrast between the psychotic, aggressive, and out-of-control behavior of the pot smokers onscreen and their own infinitely more mellow experiences with the drug.

Watching Reefer Madness in 2004 is a different, far darker experience. For one thing, it was released April 20 (4/20—get it, dude?) by no less a corporate behemoth than FOX, owned by right-wing gazillionaire Rupert Murdoch. For another thing, FOX has created a cheekily packaged, inexplicably colorized “special addiction” DVD featuring an audio commentary from Mystery Science Theater 3000’s Mike Nelson. Nelson insists early on that he’s here as an expert on bad movies, not on the deplorable practice of smoking marijuana—though it seems mildly incredible that a guy who has made a profession out of wisecracking through cheesy old movies hasn’t inhaled once or twice.

What’s striking today is how far we haven’t come as a society in our attitude toward pot. In fact, we may have ended up where we began. It is remarkable how closely the film’s histrionic anti-pot message is echoed today in the shrill, fundamentally dishonest anti-pot propaganda that’s being pushed on children by, for example, the Partnership for a Drug-Free America.

The most memorable and disturbing anti-pot ads don’t just recall scenes from Reefer Madness—they practically replicate them. In the film, for example, a previously wholesome, clean-cut American Youth gets hopped up on the wacky tobaccy and obliviously drives over an unfortunate pedestrian, an incident echoed by a notorious Drug-Free America PSA in which stoners on a munchies run pull out from a drive-through window and run over a little girl on her bike.

In another PSA, a pair of stoned teenaged boys exchange baked small talk before one finds his dad’s loaded gun and accidentally shoots his friend, which eerily mirrors a pivotal scene in Reefer Madness in which two stoners wrestling for control of a gun accidentally shoot and kill a woman. It says something profoundly sad about our values that in a scenario in which two stoned kids have access to a loaded gun, marijuana is presented as the villain. In some strange parallel universe (or, say, the Netherlands or Canada), the gun might be considered the real cause for concern.

In America, however, we apparently send children the message that alcohol, cigarettes, and guns are things they should feel free to indulge in at an appropriate age, while marijuana is an evil to be avoided at all costs. (Could this have something to do with the fact that powerful lobbying organizations back the gun, tobacco, and alcohol industries, while pot’s main advocates are belligerent rappers, unlaundered hippies, and Woody Harrelson?) It’s not clear what makes marijuana so much more dangerous and destructive than say, a fifth of Jagermeister, a pack-a-day Camel addiction, or a 9mm Glock.

In the two creepiest anti-pot ads (and there is plenty of competition), marijuana is implicated in the unwanted pregnancy and sexual assault of twelve- or thirteen-year-old girls, a claim that has its historical precedent in Reefer Madness’ depiction of potheads as insatiable, deranged sex fiends who simply won’t take no for an answer. Never mind that a stoned thirteen-year-old boy is more likely to take a nap or launch a full-frontal assault on a family-sized bag of Doritos than pressure a stoned girl into unprotected sex. In the looking-glass world of anti-pot propaganda, naked appeals to emotion will always trump plausibility. Then again, these ads are no more manipulative than commercials for beer—which actually can be implicated in a number of sexual assaults and unwanted pregnancies—that link alcohol to a sense of fun and freewheeling, uninhibited sexuality. And that’s not even mentioning those horrifying ads linking pot smokers to terrorism.

Perhaps what makes these Partnership ads so annoying to a thoughtful person is their artfulness. Reefer Madness’ ineptitude and lunacy make the film easy to dismiss and ridicule. While these ads send the same message—smoking pot leads to sexual assault, shattered lives, and death—they do so in a far more clever fashion. It reminds me of those hyper-ironic ad campaigns in the nineties that insisted the best way to stick it to the man and to express your individuality was to purchase whatever consumer product was being advertised. (Remember Jeremy Davies insisting that a Subaru was like punk rock, only a car?) These ads speak the vernacular of youth and the counterculture, using irony, sarcasm, and quirky, deadpan slice-of-life comedy to deliver a profoundly conservative message.

The problem is, it’s a bald lie. These commercials establish a disturbing and potentially disastrous precedent by prevaricating to kids about the dangers of drugs. For better or worse, smoking pot with friends has become a rite of passage for many young Americans, especially those enrolled in institutions of higher learning, and it has been for several decades now. When today’s kids find out (as they inevitably will) that marijuana is nowhere near the sinister force demonized in anti-drug propaganda, who’s to say they won’t then wonder if genuinely destructive drugs like cocaine and speed aren’t as dangerous as advertised, either? There are plenty of legitimate messages society should be sending children, but all it takes is one transparent lie to lose credibility permanently. Kids are smarter than that.

Pot smoking is essentially America’s dirty little open secret. Nearly everyone who isn’t Ned Flanders does it at some point, but it’s been so thoroughly stigmatized, villainized, and criminalized by reactionary entities like the Partnership for a Drug-Free America that we as a society are more or less obligated to pretend that it’s something far worse than it is. Far from steering kids away from pot, these ads only add to its outlaw allure by insisting that it’s dirty and wrong and—most horrifying of all to horny, confused teenagers—could very well lead to sex. All it takes is a trip to the Netherlands (incidentally, an increasingly popular rite of passage for young Americans) to see that a culture won’t disintegrate completely if pot is treated as something other than a felonious moral failing. If we came clean about the actual danger posed by pot, maybe we could start dealing with it in a more reasonable and responsible manner.

Reefer Madness is still sort of funny in an unintentional way. But given the current climate surrounding pot, don’t be surprised if the laughs stick in your throat a little. Today’s tactics and techniques might be more sophisticated, but the anti-pot brigade is still peddling the same old lies with a straight face. And that, ultimately, isn’t very funny at all.

Before she got into it, Sonja Tengdin thought her kids could scoop dog poop for money. “We started talking about it at the dinner table,” she recalled, winding around Lake of the Isles en route to her kids’ school one recent morning. “I said I’d pay them ten bucks. They refused. Then I thought, I’ll pay myself. How many can I get in an hour?”

A year and a half later, Sonja is one half of Scoopy Poo, a dog waste-removal service. For twelve dollars a week, Sonja and her partner Dan Myers will come to your lawn and do the job your stubborn kids will not do. Both have left the professional world for something a little, ahem, closer to the ground.

“I would never say this to a customer, but it isn’t that bad,” Sonja confided. “Two days outside, it’s dried up. You get maybe one or two fresh ones that are disgusting.”

Business is at its best (worst) in spring, when the snowdrifts bare the fruits of winter. “We’ve taken up to two hundred pounds out of yards,” Sonja said, alluding to the vernal harvest. “We have thirteen to fifteen bags of at least ten pounds each. And these are little Southwest Minneapolis yards! The dogs are working hard,” she said. “So are we.”

Scoopy Poo customers get a bag left on their doorknob that contains a couple of tootsie rolls, a dog biscuit, and a “poo haiku.” (Scoopy’s website has dozens, including such nuggets as “I watch where I step/Determined not to mash poo/Ugh, my cross trainers.”) Company stickers are printed with the slogan, “Always on Dootie.”

Southwest Minneapolis has become the business’s profit center. Sonja said she is chagrined that her Kenwood neighbors don’t use the service. She has some ideas why, though. Kenwood residents don’t get poopy lawns because they are aggressive dog-walkers: As a rule, they are self-scooping down at Lake of the Isles or Kenwood Park.

By contrast, Southwest Minneapolis dogs are more apt to poop where they live. Are their owners just lazy? “Well, they won’t walk across Xerxes to go to Lake Harriet,” Sonja allows. Other than Southwesterners, she said they have identified another prime demographic for their business: “The gay population, because dogs are extremely important to them, they have disposable income, and they are extremely particular about the way the yard looks,” she explained, after dropping the kids off and easing her Chevy Suburban out of the parking lot.

Sonja said the company tends to pursue the more upscale customers, and it shows—she wears a nice skirt and stylish jean jacket. “We try to project a certain image,” she said, scooping a few logs. “It’s not like it’s a hick from Hodunk, pulling up in a Gremlin with a cig in his mouth.”

Dan took the lead and Sonja followed, as they baby-stepped their way to a clean lawn. The first yard was heinous, but the next few on the route were relatively benign.

After they’ve walked the last yard following a thorough grid pattern, Sonja hangs a gift bag on the client’s door and Dan sprays off his boots. They hope to grow the business to the point where they don’t have a lot of contact themselves with the raw materials.

“We are interested in eventually franchising it and setting up around the country,” said Dan. Sonja added that Columbus, Ohio, has a flourishing scoop service. Why can’t Minneapolis? “They have seven hundred scoops a week!” she said. Scoopy Poo currently picks up about fifty yards a week.

“Our goal is for Dan and I not to be scooping,” she said, throwing a partially loaded bag into the garbage. “Obviously, we have to put in the elbow work first, you know, whatever you call it, the hard work.”—Geoff Ziezulewicz

Wynne Yelland and Paul Neseth are partners in Minneapolis’s design firm Locus Architecture. They recently set down what looks like a spacecraft over by Cedar Lake. It is a polycarbonate-walled, metal-roofed, four-bed, four-bath, postmodernist machine for living. They call their sleek structure Nowhaus 01, and it stands out from the ramblers and cottages on its block like a pink Prada frock at a PTA meeting.

From the outside, behind the translucent sheathing panels, a passerby can discern the indistinct shapes of billboards—hey, is that a PT Cruiser ad trapped in there?—recycled as weatherproof insulation. Inside, 3440 St. Paul Avenue is a beautiful, harmonious house. Daylight streams through a corner bank of windows into the gracious two-story living room. The colors are warm; the walls are birch veneer paneling and slate, set off with inventive industrial details. A steel staircase hangs in midair like a sculpture. One bedroom window offers an artistic view of tall pine trees; another frames an intriguing composition of the copper gutters on the neighboring house.

It could be the dream home of art-loving hipsters. In fact, it’s strictly the architects’ vision, unencumbered by the questionable taste or idiosyncracies of an actual client. Whiles most houses are designed like a personal ad, not to attract anyone specifically but only to avoid rejection, Nowhaus was created to showcase Locus Architecture’s style, generate buzz—and ultimately, of course, snag a buyer. With an asking price just south of one million dollars and its radical chic look, Yelland and Neseth concede that it’s a house in search of a very special buyer.

Some neighbors have reacted with gasps of admiration, others with snorts of derision. Jay Isenberg, a residential and commercial architect who lives across the alley, is enthused. The Locus partners are “stretching ideas, pushing boundaries, using different materials in new ways,” said Isenberg, who has lived for twenty years in a traditional cottage he designed. “My design motif is far different from theirs, but I respect what they do. Without taking risks, architecture would never move forward.” He has invited the Locus partners to speak at the architecture courses he teaches at the University of Minnesota.

Nowhaus’s next-door neighbor, Dave Alan, is irritated. A homebuilder responsible for seven high-end houses on St. Paul Avenue, he is exercised by the alien presence beside him. He summed up his reaction in multiple-choice form: “What the hell is that?”; “You’re kidding!”; and “When’s he going to paint it?”

While Locus had no legal obligation to present its plans to the neighborhood association for approval, Alan feels it was disrespectful of the firm not to explain what it was planning, initiate a dialogue, and consider the residents’ comments—a process Alan said he has been through himself. “These neighborhood committees have a lot of cool people on them. Why wouldn’t I want to listen to their viewpoints? What is Locus Architecture really committed to—building relations in the community, or making a statement in architecture?” Still, Alan gives the designers their due. “On the inside, I think it’s pretty cool. It really is. I could see myself living in that home.”—Colin Covert

I’m getting married this fall, I hope, if we can manage—between three jobs and six kids—to plan a wedding celebration. We wanted to wait until the dust from our previous marriages and divorces had settled. Then one day I woke up and realized that the “dust” might never “settle.” What’s more, the fallout from divorce is not annoying yet relatively harmless, as dust is—it’s more like a fine mist of napalm. It is, as everyone says, hell.

When I was twelve, my sister and I moved in with our dad, his wife, their dog, and two cute, perfect preschool kids. Our dad’s wife didn’t really want to inherit two adolescent daughters, and all the black eyeliner that came with them. So, after a couple of miserable years as a distinctly unblended family (frequent notes in the fridge stuck to premium food items warned, “If you can read this, do not eat, do not touch”), my stepmother insisted that my dad and my sister and I go see a counselor.

The three of us traipsed off to the counselor’s beige, low-rent office in the local strip mall. We sat on a scratchy couch, and he listened to the saga of our unhappiness, especially that of our stepmom, who, of course, was not there. Then this counselor (whom we never saw again) said the most shocking thing to my dad: “If your wife can’t get along with your daughters, why don’t you get a divorce?” Wow, I thought. Would my dad actually do that? “Never,” said my dad. Why not, I wanted to know. “Why not?” asked the counselor. “Because I am never, ever going through that hell again,” said my dad.

A few weeks ago, a Japanese book arrived in my mailbox. Turns out that a local magazine publisher is now marketing an anthology in Japan, and one of my articles was included. This means I’ve finally been translated (and believe me, I’m boasting about it whenever casual conversation veers anywhere near Japan). But it also means I’ve been telling people in a faraway land that divorce is not really a bummer for girls after all, and that in some cases girls even benefit from observing their mothers change their lives for the better after a marital breakup.

Yeah, right. The problem is that despite the impeccable research and interviewing I did for that piece, it was total hogwash. On a very basic level, divorce sucks. At minimum, your kids have to slog back and forth between two houses and deal with parents in constant combat. What I probably should have told those unsuspecting Japanese folks is that they ought to hunker down and enjoy their miserable marriages as best they can.

Not that they—or you, for that matter—can’t perhaps find a partner with whom you’re more compatible now that you’re over the legal drinking age and have sanded down your most jagged character flaws through the sobering and selfless activity of parenthood. But is it worth the torment, the stigma, and the godawful endless warfare of divorce? It is true that for some, staying together is an even hotter hell, and I would never urge someone in a genuinely abusive relationship to stick it out. In many cases, divorce is the lesser of two evils.

It is also, ultimately, a selfish act—never mind that it’s also about as much fun as exploratory surgery, and lasts far longer. In my case, I’m not sure I had ever done anything truly selfish before getting a divorce. After all, I was raised not to ask for things (and I’m also the middle child). You get the picture: “Where should we go for dinner?” “I don’t know… where do you want to go for dinner?” Or, “Which movie should we rent?” “Either is fine with me, which one do you think we should rent?” Or, “When would you like your lobotomy?” “I’m not sure, when would you like me to have my lobotomy?”

Marriage changed me; motherhood changed me more. But divorce and its aftermath changed me the most. I no longer have the energy to be desperately deferential. I’m turning into everything I never was before. I merge fearlessly in traffic. I park in tight spots (and sometime miss). I say no. I talk about my problems. I sometimes hang up on telemarketers (though I still cringe to admit it). And now I love someone again, someone who seems to love me more than I can explain, and I’m getting married again—even though it’s hardly perfect, given our kids and our pasts and our complicated present. Now, however, I don’t give a damn about perfect. I have what I need, and mostly what I want. I’ve paid for it all, and with that I can do well enough by everybody else, most of the time. So listen up, after all, Japan, and good luck to you all, every last one.

Along with its pollen counts during spring and summer, the local news should also offer an index on real estate fever. My case is rather acute this year. No doubt it has something to do with a recent move from a city with an obscene real-estate market to one where it is merely overheated (and said to be cooling—bring on the deep freeze, please!). Who hasn’t gotten pumped up in the past few years with stories about record-low interest rates, refinancing bonanzas, the next hot neighborhood, loft conversions, and so on? Everyone talks real estate these days, not just New Yorkers. Banks are hawking home loans with Day-Glo posters in their windows, just like the coffee-and-donut specials at the gas station down the block. Then there’s the host of expos, parades, tours, showcases, and other home-and-garden events that further stoke the fires—of domestic inspiration (and consumerism) in some, and of other, less charitable, and sometimes petty feelings in others.

The annual Minneapolis & St. Paul Home Tour, which took place for the seventeenth time last month, is distinctive in that participants put their homes on display as part of a broader showcase of urban neighborhoods—and civic boosterism. It’s also a publicly run event, rather than the private or nonprofit affairs organized by trade associations, garden clubs, and the like. Coordinated by the city’s Neighborhood Revitalization Program, with help from both the city and Hennepin County, the Home Tour originated in 1988, when urban flight was a problem. Emphasizing its civic component, this year’s tour included several city- or county-rehabilitated homes for sale, and other homes that had been the beneficiaries of NRP investment.

Nevertheless, the Home Tour is also a marketing opportunity, both for its government sponsors and the host of advertisers in the twenty-eight-page Home Tour guide, which mapped out and profiled the fifty homes on view. It’s a way to “sell” a city of proud burghers busily upgrading windows, remodeling kitchens, planting bulbs, and generally plowing money into the homestead.

For the participants, however, the Home Tour didn’t seem to be so much about marketing as simply showing off. That’s partly because urban flight (or blight) is not the problem it once was—things have turned around, and how. “Minneapolis has never been more vibrant!” wrote Mayor R.T. Rybak in the Home Tour guide. He might also have crowed about vibrant home prices, which have doubled over the past ten years in some neighborhoods (the same cannot be said about the income of most people, notwithstanding the Clinton boom years and the Bush tax cuts). Homesteads around these parts once literally were people’s livelihoods; now the home is the future—the goose we nurture, counting on it to lay a golden egg when we trade up or retire.

So it’s not surprising that homeowners’ pride—once the righteous preserve of urban pioneers toughing it out in downtrodden neighborhoods—now seems glazed with a measure of boastfulness. It was detectable without even visiting the homes; one need only read the profiles in the tour guide, written by the homeowners themselves, which are riddled with the real-estate and interior-design jargon that has been adopted by the broader population: “charming Tudor cottages,” a sunroom that “boasts large windows and a vaulted ceiling,” “a custom-made granite-topped vanity,” and “prize-winning gardens and a spectacular Minneapolis skyline view.” Kitchens are updated “in an English country style” or with “a peninsula that seats three,” while a bungalow “boasts coved ceilings, hardwood floors and custom-made maple cabinetry.” Another home shows how “wall color, refinished hardwood floors and a Corian bathtub surround make big difference in comfort, style and maintenance.”

And what of the spectators, the thousands of us who followed each other around the cities all weekend, tour guides and “passports” in hand, rows of our slip-on shoes flanking the sidewalk outside each featured home? The comparison between house-hunting and dating (or mating) is, like most aspects of love (or sex), a well-worn cliché. As a subset of this practice, home tours have a peculiar pornographic twist—if you define pornography beyond sex, which is not hard to do. Countless cookbooks and magazines substitute sexed-up food for human bodies; in motivational posters, screensavers, and Sierra Club calendars, nature is the stand-in. Shelter mags from Architectural Digest to Nest, along with the dozens of domestic-makeover and home-design television shows (even public TV has one), count as professional purveyors of domestic porn—which makes home tours the domestic counterpart to amateur porn. As with those salacious home videos, home tours involve consumers/voyeurs and performers/exhibitionists. Both parties get what they want—to see and be seen—while leaving out the middlemen (snooty interior designers, television producers, magazine editors).

Another key similarity is that, unlike a real-estate open house, the goods put up for display on a home tour are not for sale: You can look all you want during these periodic orgies centered around granite countertops, open-plan baths, attic renovations, historic restorations, and sleek birch cabinets—without committing to anything. It’s fantasy. (Don’t ask me what this says about people who go to open houses not intending to buy, but just to nose around someone else’s dwelling. That’s perverted!)

On a more wholesome level, the home tour is also localized and populist. It’s not lifestyles of the rich and famous, it’s jus’ folks. Still, someone has to decide which lucky homeowners will get a coveted spot on the tour, which means that people have to submit themselves (and their homes) to judgment by some sort of organized body. In this sense, home tours tapped into a particular impulse—the average Joe’s desire to compete and show off in the public realm—that would later be exploited by the reality-TV juggernaut.

These days, the home tour has become a real real-life counterpart to the television’s real-life domestic programs. So maybe your charming Tudor cottage or woodsy urban retreat struck out in the big leagues of Homes Across America or Building Character—it could still make it on the home tour circuit. On the Minneapolis & St. Paul Home Tour, a proud papa showed off the regiments of gorgeous maple cabinetry in his remodeled South Minneapolis kitchen; not far away, people were lined up almost to the street to get into a 1950s Lustron house constructed with enamel steel panels, whose owners must have been both overwhelmed and overjoyed at the attention.

Playing host is one thing. But home tours, and the larger remodeling/home improvement industry, emphasize that grown-ups also enjoy playing house—they just spend lots more money on it than their children. Do you want Ralph Lauren preppy or something vaguely ethnic? Soft contemporary or the edgier urban contemporary? Log-cabin rustic or an explosion of blowsy chintz? The home is a cluster of miniature stages on which we play out a series of wish-fulfillment dramas, all in the service of achieving that ever-elusive “dream home.” Whether it’s five or fifty or five hundred projects away, the dream home continues to hold out hope that the right abode can fix everything else wrong with our lives.

As with cosmetics, the marketing of home-improvement and interior décor products is couched in positivity and potential, even as it targets our anxieties and deficiencies. What it comes down to is that your windows are not insulated well enough. You don’t have the right kind of partyware. (What, no margarita glasses?) You’ve got winter draperies and rugs out in summertime, and your accent pieces are all wrong. Your lawn is not lush or green enough. Your neighbor’s home theater system is more awesome than yours. Your down comforter is declassé, and more important, it has no cover. Let’s not g
et started on your sham-less pillows or the thread count of your linens…

Not to add insult to injury, but despite this continual dissatisfaction with our surroundings, we also can be frequently misguided in our attempts to change them. Just the other day a real estate agent showed me a place that was a nightmare conglomeration of home-improvement projects, from the mint-green, too-short Formica kitchen counters to the carpet-glue residue still coating the floors in the master bedroom. The do-it-yourself movement has wreaked untold havoc on our built environment: otherwise winsome homes appended with clunky wooden balconies and front stoops, plastic picket fences, tawdry lampposts, and the biggest trespass of all, vinyl siding. Somehow, the army of people, services, and products put into place to help us do it ourselves just isn’t passing muster, which proves that you can foist “good design” on the masses, but you can’t give them taste.

On the Home Tour, my friend and I saw some rather dubious ideas about what it means to preserve history, including smoked floor-to-ceiling mirrors flanking an antique fireplace; acoustic ceiling tiles; cheap paneling and spongy carpeting made spongier still with a pair of Isotoner foam slippers (literal padding from the harsh world outside). My friend took special umbrage at one place whose gorgeous parquet floors were almost entirely covered with cream carpet.

Overall, the atmosphere of the Home Tour was quite convivial, if also tinged with that peculiar brand of Minnesota reserve. One domicile had snacks, both sweet and savory, set out—and an owner that immediately started asking questions. We felt trapped. Was the food a lure? Were lengthy, expository conversations compulsory with each home visited? We didn’t see a check-off for this on our “passports” (really just a survey tool). Each home also had volunteers stationed everywhere, most of them middle-aged ladies, their nice-o-meters turned way up. It was impossible to ignore the fact that, like the professional greeters at Target or Wal-Mart, their presence was intended both as a welcome and a warning to the tourists: Ogle all you want, but don’t go trying to pilfer the soap or rifle through the lingerie drawers.

Beyond its marketing value, the Minneapolis & St. Paul Home Tour has the quasi-civic function of “community-building.” Ultimately, it seems difficult to discern between the two. Is it real community when people stand around talking real estate and school quality, or trading tales from their home-improvement ordeals? Probably it’s just as valid as any other community—the canine-lovers who meet daily at the dog run, the tattoo crowd, the bikers at Bob’s Java Hut. Still, there seems to be something a tad disingenuous, or maybe just sad, about a home-tour brand of community. It’s a staged way of socializing. Come ogle my home. Come make our neighborhood “hot” (we’ve already bought). Help us jump-start those property values. We’re all in this together, right?

Selling water in Wayzata would be like selling beer in Baraboo. How then to explain the one thousand people who streamed into Wayzata Community Church the other day to hear a lecture called “The Hidden Messages of Water”? The pews were brimming and the ushers tersely redirected latecomers to folding chairs spilling out into the lobby. The lecturer himself was surprised at the overflow crowd: After his introduction, he paused to take pictures of the audience, who cheered and waved.

Who was this conservatively dressed, tousled, middle-aged Japanese man, and why did all these people—mostly women—dress up and fill the parking lots and streets with their Lexuses and Volvos? How was it that he came to sell water to people who paid twenty-five dollars each, and probably all lived within a mile of a lake?

It was Dr. Masura Emoto. He is a half-scientist, half-evangelist whose books have sold more than a half-million copies. Trained in Japan in alternative medicine, Emoto fills bottles with water, exposes them to words, music, or prayer, and then freezes them. He then photographs the resulting crystals. The images are either “beautiful” or “ugly.” Many of them, as he indicated with his laser pointer on the huge screen suspended above him, actually reveal apocryphal images. In one experiment, he “showed” a picture of Niagara Falls to the water and the water responded by producing a crystal that resembled, according to Emoto, the eye on a dollar bill. The word “war” produced a fuzzy, irregular crystal that suggested a jet flying into the World Trade Center, while the Japanese word for “mother’s cooking” generated a brilliant, symmetrical crystal.

The audience oohed and aahed at each picture, as if they’d never seen a snowflake before. (They also oohed and aahed at the spinning graphics of his PowerPoint presentation.)

Emoto played music to the water. Beethoven and Tschaikovsky were among water’s favorites. For some reason, he then led the crowd in a karaoke sing-along of “Red River Valley,” though the PowerPoint text was so tiny the lyrics were unreadable. “Someday,” he said, “our pharmacies will be filled with CDs, not drugs!” The audience loudly applauded. (It was not clear whether Emoto had been inside an American drugstore recently; CDs are gaining fast.)

Emoto then pronounced the three steps to personal and global health: First, drink good water. Though he didn’t elaborate on what constituted good water, there were small bottles of grocery-store water for sale in the lobby that presumably fit the bill, along with a vendor selling a water purification pump. Second, said Emoto, listen to good music. Fortunately, there were also CDs for sale in the lobby from the opening act, a piano-and-recorder duo. (Emoto didn’t give any examples of bad music, perhaps because of his alliance with Yoko Ono.) Third, and probably hardest to copyright, “keep consciousness to be positive.”

Dr. Emoto roamed the stage with a wireless microphone. He talked about atoms and solar systems and elementary particles. He said that our bodies are like miniature solar systems. He said that the vibrational energy produced by MRIs was the technology with which breast cancer could be cured. He said that water could pick up messages from outer space, that groups of people who held their hands in prayer formed better crystals than groups who merely held hands. He said that the world’s major viruses like AIDS, SARS, and the “chicken flu” were each released soon after a major war.

The most precious moment may have come when the sun started to set in the airy and cavernous space and Emoto, reduced to a dim silhouette, read a verse for the audience.

With the words projected on a screen above him, Emoto recited in halting, robotic English: “Imagine. There’s. No. Heaven. It’s. Easy. If. You. Try. No. Hell. Below. Us. Above. Us. Only. Sky. Imagine. All. The. People. Living. For. Today.” Domo arigato, Dr. Emoto.
—Sari Gordon