The Rake Magazine

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  • The Mortarboard, the Sheepskin, and the Dixie Cup

    Nothing was normal on the morning of Wednesday, November 5, at Stratford High School in Goose Creek, South Carolina. For one thing, there were no drugs in the school. If there were, the fourteen police officers plus one drug-sniffing dog should have found them when they swept into the school, guns drawn, and sent students sprawling against their lockers and on the hallway floors. Some students were handcuffed, others covered with guns. A stocky officer dressed in blue jeans with a Kevlar vest over his T-shirt grabbed an African-American boy off the floor, spinning him in a 180-degree arc and slamming him back to the floor. The surveillance video that captured this scene, despite its jerky, stop-motion quality, shows a bit of swagger as the officer walks away. Stratford Principal George McCrackin had reported “an influx of drug activity,” though police found no drugs or weapons.

    The video clip, widely aired around the country last fall, got the attention of school administrators and parents but only, it seems, for a couple of weeks. Though it is destined to become classic footage from the war on drugs, it no longer truly shocks. On one hand, local communities have always used public schools as a crucible for social activism. On the other, the federal government tends to pursue policy goals in schools, in the name of its educational mandate, that have rarely been achieved in the extracurricular world. Between the two, the force of the law tends to land on schoolchildren with surprising regularity.

    In 1963, Alabama Governor George Wallace famously blocked an entrance to the University of Alabama with his own person to prevent the scourge of black scholarship. Six years before that, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus called on the National Guard to prevent the entry of nine black students into Little Rock’s Central High. The U.S. Army was then deployed to forcibly desegregate schools (though the GIs didn’t stick around to combat mortgage redlining and other forms of discrimination that persisted outside public schools for years afterward).

    Now, under the flag of drug prevention, dogs and feds are back at the schoolhouse door. And this time they brought specimen cups. Urine testing of students to detect drug use has now begun to march across the U.S., with new support from the Bush administration. The decision that opened the doors to testing without suspicion originated in Oklahoma. In 1999, a student named Lindsay Earls took umbrage when, in order to remain in her school choir, she was required to produce a urine sample under the supervision of school faculty. She was not suspected of drug use, but the school board had implemented a policy that required testing of students participating in all extracurricular activities. With counsel from the American Civil Liberties Union, Earls challenged the policy and scored a victory in the Tenth Circuit. But on June 27, 2002, the U.S. Supreme Court decided in favor of the school district. To many concerned about civil rights, this decision marked the sudden and complete expulsion of the Fourth Amendment from public schools.

    Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches have eroded gradually in public schools for about eighteen years. Back when Nancy Reagan was urging kids to Just Say No to drugs, the U.S. Supreme Court just said no to probable cause. In 1985, the justices decided against a New Jersey high school student who argued that getting caught smoking cigarettes did not constitute probable cause to search her purse. The court held that “The Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures applies to searches conducted by public school officials and is not limited to searches carried out by law enforcement officers. Nor are school officials exempt from the Amendment’s dictates by virtue of the special nature of their authority over schoolchildren.” While this upheld a portion of the Fourth Amendment, Justice Byron R. White went on to state that “school officials need not obtain a warrant before searching a student who is under their authority. Moreover, school officials need not be held subject to the requirement that searches be based on probable cause…” This deletion of warrant and probable cause left only the more subjective barrier of “reasonableness” between students and searches.

    A further erosion of the Fourth Amendment came in 1989. The Veronia school district in Oregon had decided it was reasonable to test the urine of athletes, regardless of individual suspicion. With probable cause no longer a concern, Justice Antonin Scalia found abundant justification for random drug testing because “in small town America, school sports play a prominent role in the town’s life, and student athletes are admired in their schools and in the community.” Apparently, admiration of these athletes declined when, in Justice Scalia’s words, “Students became increasingly rude during class; outbursts of profane language became common. Not only were student athletes included among the drug users, but as the District Court found, athletes were the leaders of the drug culture.”

    Justice Scalia agreed that the student body at large needed protection from the decadent-yet-admired athletes, and found it easy to dispense with the privacy expectations of the unruly jocks. He did this by reaching back past the Fourth Amendment to a legal source from eighteenth-century England, in which Sir William Blackstone wrote that a parent may “delegate part of his parental authority, during his life, to the tutor or schoolmaster of his child; who is then in loco parentis…” In this case, however, the parents of student James Acton had declined to delegate authority over his bladder to the school. Nevertheless, again citing “reasonableness,” the court decided in favor of the school.
    So by 2002, the reasonableness of testing urine without a basis in suspicion had been well established. That’s when the case from Oklahoma appeared to test the reasonableness of the Supreme Court itself, as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s fourteen-page dissent observed: “The particular testing program upheld today is not reasonable, it is capricious, even perverse…. If a student has a reasonable subjective expectation of privacy in the personal items she brings to school… surely she has a similar expectation regarding the chemical composition of her urine.”

    Writing for the majority, Justice Clarence Thomas reviewed the urine-collection procedure: “Under the policy, a faculty monitor waits outside the closed restroom stall for the student to produce a sample and must ‘listen for the normal sounds of urination in order to guard against tampered specimens and to insure an accurate chain of custody.’” While Justice Scalia seemed to prefer eighteenth-century British law to the U.S. Constitution, it’s hard not to speculate that Justice Thomas drew on personal experience in describing the process used in Oklahoma as “even less problematic” than the “negligible” intrusions in Veronia, Oregon. In the end, the court decided that if Lindsay Earls wanted to sing for the choir, she would first have to pee for the principal.

  • The Sharpie Marathon

    At one table, two devils wandered through a postapocalyptic wasteland. At the other end of the room, a boy and girl passionately embraced, but tragically, she turned into a robotic killing machine and chased him all over the city. (Modern love is like that.) Across from them was another pair of lovers whose affair was much more traditionally romantic, if you overlooked the fact that he was a square and she was a triangle.

    They were all stories drawn in ink, pencil, and marker by a collective of artists—eight bespectacled, nerdy guys mostly in their twenties. They call themselves the Cartoonists’ Conspiracy, and they were hunkered down at three tables at the downtown Grumpy’s. Each was focused intensely on a sheaf of thick, white Bristol one-hundred-pound paper. They were participating in the Twenty-Four Hour Comics Day, an endurance contest that took place a couple of weeks ago. Each artist had a single day to complete a twenty-four-page comic, with no advance planning or preparation.

    The idea was proposed about ten years ago by author and cartoonist Scott McCloud. While our local crew was inking away, five hundred others in sixty similar groups were putting pen to paper as far away as South Korea.

    Around eleven p.m., with an hour to go, the mood was calm but determined. It was surprising there weren’t more cups of coffee scattered around, but then, at this point caffeine might cause jitters and splotchy inking. Of the eleven cartoonists who started twenty-three hours ago, three have dropped out. The survivors are mostly making final revisions, cleaning up hastily inked lines, or brainstorming their final panels. Only one clearly was not going to make it: Damian Sheridan, whose double-sized drawings took up an entire table, was still on page eleven—less than half way.

    Though his artwork was impressive, he’d had trouble finding a solid storyline to ride through two dozen pages. He inked a mermaid spearfisher and her encephalopod sidekick, but admitted, “before the spearfisher, it was about a kid who dies in a tragic kite accident, and before that two robots who fight each other with accounting jargon.” He was gamely plugging away anyhow, and vowed to finish after a good night’s sleep. According to the official rules, that’s a “noble failure” common enough to have its own name, the “Eastman Variation.”

    If the intention of the event was to put on a big show for the public, it was not a great success. While The Rake was there, cartoonists outnumbered audience members two to one. And as a spectator sport, watching people draw is not too dissimilar from watching paint dry. But tonight was also about team-building—hanging out with buddies to lend moral support to each other’s creative drive. In the end, each cartoonist’s biggest battle is with the blank paper in front of him or her. And when midnight chimes, the finished stories are taken to the nearest all-night copy shop and turned into a two-hundred-page book, on sale thereafter at Dreamhaven and Big Brain comic-book stores.

    “The goal was to push ourselves,” said Brian Roberts, who goes by the nickname “Doctor Popular.” One of the club’s organizers, Doc supplements cartooning with gigs as an ad salesman, writer, and professional yo-yo player. (Who knew there was money in that?) His twenty-four-hour story, about a Cro-Magnon man named Trog who becomes the world’s first celebrity cave painter, is one of the evening’s most inspired. But true to the spirit of the event, he thought it up on the spur of the moment. “I had an idea I wanted to use, and I can’t even remember what it was now. At midnight, I just started drawing this caveman.” He was only six panels away from finishing, and sketched quickly but confidently in rough pencil, playing with a way to condense that final bit of plot into those half-dozen boxes.—Christopher Bahn

  • The Man of Steel

    My dad is tougher than your dad. Yep. I speak the truth, so don’t even try to talk to me about it. My dad is taller than your dad, he’s funnier, and cooler, and you know what? He’s smarter, too. There’s proof. Uh huh, shut up there is!

    My dad once swam across White Bear Lake with two of his kids clinging to his back—just for fun. And then there’s the time he threw a softball way the hell down Arcade Street. It was almost bar time so there weren’t any cars out, a warm summer night at Vogel’s Bar. All the guys went out there and bet on him, some one way, and some the other.

    It’s important to get the facts straight and keep the myths alive, because dad is sick, and he’s not getting better. He’s getting ready to graduate to the Promised Land. The rest of us, his wife, his kids, grandkids, his sisters, and mother, we’ll be left behind to do the remembering.

    My dad is here, for now. He wakes up and he goes to sleep, such as it is with his illness. He sometimes sits in a lazy-back chair where his feet don’t touch the ground. It is not comfortable. My dad is brave. He can hear and speak and see and eat and sometimes he is right there with you, and sometimes he’s not. He holds dear the sound of our mother’s voice. When he hears it, he knows where he is, at least; he’s with her, and he loves her. There might come a time when he no longer recognizes her voice, and will have to take solace in touch. Like we all did, at first.

    My dad’s hands are thick and hard. They are the kind of hands that have always worked. He can kill mice with his bare hands. He can kill bats with a tennis racket. My dad would never play tennis. But he would kill a bat for you anytime. No trouble at all.

    My dad is very handsome, and wore a white dinner jacket à la James Bond to his wedding. He was most comfortable, and equally as handsome, in blue jeans. Once, a long time ago, I made my dad a pair of ugly slippers out of potholders. He could look good in anything.

    My dad has a heart of steel. People who know him appreciate the design. The flaws, the dings and scratches, only accentuate the authenticity of a classic. He loves his family, a fine meal, and a good laugh. He loves it when a job is well done and the bills are paid. His resting pulse is forty. My dad’s heart is like a powerfully built muscle car. A ’74 Mustang or maybe a mint ’79 Ford F-150.

    My dad knows things before anybody else does. If something bad is going to happen to you, say you’re about to get screwed on a used car or your rain gutters are loose, he’ll be the first to warn you of impending danger. If you don’t listen to him, then that’s your problem. What is he? Your mother?

    My dad is a superhero. One time my dad’s car got stuck deep in some mud, and he lifted the whole front end of the car out of the rut. No kidding. If you ask our mom about it, she shrugs it off. “It was a Volkswagen.” My dad does things that you should not try at home.

    Recently, I related the Volkswagen story to my husband. He gave me a sweet sideways half-smile, a look I know too well. It means he doesn’t believe me. Since I am the Prime Minister of Exaggeration, there are grounds for this breach of faith. My husband knows my dad is a good guy, an honorable guy, but also a human guy like the rest of us. My husband also knows that one of my recent hobbies is to babble on about my dad in order to stave off the tide of anxiety I feel about losing him, so he draws me close. “Tell me some more about your dad.”

    And in those indulgent arms I gabble, remembering everything I can, working around what I can’t. Every word of homage and praise a qualifier for sainthood.

  • Ties That Bind

    Assigning guilt by association is as American as motherhood, apple pie, and Chevrolet. The thinking goes something like this—if X is a bad person, and you are somehow tied to X, then you must be a bad person, too. This becomes especially true if those ties are familial, and person X is accused of a crime considered so heinous that the governor wants to bring back the death penalty because of it. In fact, in the eyes of some, you must be even worse than the accused if you are part of the family that spawned such a monster.

    Just ask Angela Dellatorre, sister of Alfonso Rodriguez, Jr., the accused murderer of Dru Sjodin. Dellatorre, who asked that I not use her real name, lives near New York City and called me after she heard about a previous column about the level of publicity generated by the search for Dru Sjodin, compared to cases involving missing women of color.

    “I had to thank you,” she began, “for not writing something that trashed my family the way the press has in the Grand Forks area.” I replied that I did not necessarily write a piece supporting Alfonso Rodriguez. I simply wanted to point out that the blond, blue-eyed Sjodin’s disappearance garnered far more media coverage than the disappearance of a black or Mexican woman ever has in Minnesota.

    “I understand that. Still, by pointing out that race makes a difference in how people have viewed this, you were supportive. You cannot imagine how hard this has been on my family, especially my mother, who is seventy-two years old.” Angela said there is a gag order that prevents her family in Crookston from talking to the media. However, she added, “the gag order has not stopped the people in Crookston and Grand Forks from writing the most hateful things you can imagine about our family to the local newspaper. Hearing all this stuff just reminds me how tough it was growing up poor and Mexican in Crookston. Our family was never really accepted in that town.”

    How did the Rodriguezes end up in such an inhospitable part of the country? Angela’s parents were migrant workers who came north every spring from Laredo, Texas, to pick vegetables. “Eventually, they got tired of the back-and-forth and decided to put down roots in northern Minnesota,” she said. “We were one of the first Mexican families in town. I am not making excuses for Alfonso or anything like that, but it was hell. I cannot count how many times we were called ‘dirty Mexicans.’ We were a different color and lowly migrant workers. We got harassed in school constantly. I remember a teacher telling me, ‘I am sure that someday I will see you barefoot and pregnant with a bunch of babies.’ Within a year of graduating from Crookston Central High School I was on my way to the East Coast, vowing to never come back to live. And I have kept my vow.”

    Angela continued: “We have a good family. My mother was a wonderful mother—quiet, gentle, and hard-working. She and my dad raised five kids—three girls and two boys. My brother who lives on the West Coast has a good job and so do the three girls. Two of my sisters have college degrees.”

    Angela’s summary of her family’s accomplishments had one painfully obvious omission—Alfonso. As much as I wanted to, I carefully avoided directly asking about the Dru Sjodin accusations. And Angela, at some intuitive level, sensed my curiosity. Whenever the conversation drifted too close to the events of the past six months, she wearily said, “I do not know if I should be talking to you.” At one point, Angela whispered, “They are putting my family though hell up there. My poor mother… she has beat cancer twice, but this is killing her. She says now that she does not want to live anymore. My sister who lives in Crookston tells me that her three kids get tormented at school every day. What are we going to do, Mr. Collins?”

    Unfortunately, the destruction of the family and close associates of a notorious accused person is simply considered “collateral damage,” especially if the victim is a member of a socially privileged group and the accused is not. I cannot offer any advice to Angela Dellatorre and her family. I can’t even assure them that things will get better for them. Because in the months to come, now that the feds are prosecuting Rodriguez and will most certainly ask for the death penalty, they’re bound to get worse.

  • The Parachute Opens

    This year, it seems like there are more serious bike riders than ever, judging by the proliferation of Lycra on city paths. The Twin Cities have long been the secret capital of cycling: Two of the world’s largest bike-parts wholesalers are headquartered here, some of the best bike frames are built here, and we may soon replace San Francisco as the epicenter of bike style—you know, courier bags, single-speed bikes, vintage wool jerseys, and so on. With the increased bike traffic, there is naturally a collective rise in blood pressure among the belligerent motoring class. While it’s not legal and it’s not nice to harass cyclists, one can indulge in a genteel form of sadism later this month by posing as a fan of bike racing.

    On June 13, dozens of professional cyclists will arrive in Stillwater to race what is billed as “the toughest criterium in North America.” The culmination of the Nature Valley Grand Prix is Chilkoot Hill, a heartbreaking climb from the floor of the St. Croix River valley. The road will be reserved from curb to curb for the riders, all of whom will be in a world of pain.

    “Chilkoot is primeval,” said David LaPorte, director of the Grand Prix. Cyclists tackle it on the final leg of a stage race that stretches over five days and takes riders to courses throughout the state. Like a miniature Tour de France, the rider who completes all five stages with the lowest cumulative time wins. But things change quickly on that hill. “Chilkoot is so brutal that riders can gain or lose huge amounts of time,” said LaPorte.

    For some perspective on how discouraging Chilkoot is, imagine I-35 as it climbs south out of Duluth. That hill has a six percent grade, the maximum allowed on federal highways. Chilkoot has a twenty-four percent grade. It rises one hundred feet over a distance of seven hundred feet. It’s so steep that the city of Stillwater closes it during the winter, because the north-facing parts are too treacherous for driving. Naturally, this improves conditions for other kinds of sport. “I used to slide on it as a child,” said Sara Russell, a veteran cyclist who grew up not far from the hill.

    “We created that monster a few years back,” Monty Brine said with a laugh. He is the Stillwater businessman who brought bike racing to Chilkoot in the seventies, mapping a course that included the hill because he knew its cruelty would create some dramatic publicity. That first race attracted a handful of amateur cyclists. They were supposed to attempt three laps on the course, but Brine estimates that eighty percent of the racers dropped out early.

    The Grand Prix resurrected the course for professional riders in 2002. This year, racers ride the circuit for seventy minutes, tackling Chilkoot more than twenty times. After only a few climbs up the hill, “Your legs will start to give out because they’re full of lactic acid,” according to Russell. “They’re wasted! They’re trashed!”

    In planning the first pro race in 2002, LaPorte made arrangements to install pedestrian barricades along Chilkoot. But when workers arrived to install them, they took one look at the hill and turned around. “They said, ‘You can’t put fencing on that hill. It’s too steep and it’ll slide down,’” said LaPorte. Without fences, the race has a European feel that cycling fans compare to watching Lance Armstrong approach a mountaintop finish in the Pyrenees; spectators stake out the best spots. As the day wears on, the crowd jams the hill, leaving riders only a narrow passageway up. “Spectators scream support just a few feet away with nothing in between,” said LaPorte. “It’s awesome.”

    Of course, what goes up must come down. While the struggle up Chilkoot can make for some comedic outbursts, the downward slope is terrifying. Last year, a thunderstorm and high winds made for slick conditions and the race was momentarily halted after a violent crash. The incident struck fear into Russell. “You’re not going to die going up the hill, but you could die going down,” she said. —Christy DeSmith

  • The Unreformed Bus Rider

    It’s become apparent that our little Metro Transit system isn’t exactly a municipal moneymaker. “Dismantle it!” come a hundred basso-profundo bellows from the radio’s right end. What good is it? It drains the city coffers, has no effect on congestion, and some are now claiming, in the wake of the bus strike, that crime actually goes down when buses aren’t running. Maybe all those well fed Land Rover pilots are right: We should just be content to ferry our bulk from cubicle to triple garage on either end of our hour-long commute. Our isolation from other citizens will become perfect, a complete and even Zen-like drone of absence. At night we will sleep the Ambien-induced sleep of the slightly restless from lack of exercise, and in the morning there will be no schedule to read, no bus driver with whom to exchange obligatory pleasantries.

    I won’t be able to join this particular somnambulists’ parade, because I’m hooked—helpless and chronic—on public transportation. It began decades ago, in another life in New York, and it’s followed me here like some mangy boy whose eyelashes are too long to be anything but trouble. I was at that age when mortality is nothing more than a tragic phenomenon affecting only the old and unstylish, so when the subway shot out from the underground and sped over the causeway toward Broad Channel, naturally I got up and rode outside between the cars. Riding on a causeway is like flying over water: The railway and the sanded silver girders beneath the car are all invisible as it streaks through the sky. The train roared and rattled, my hair dancing in the wind like crazy black ropes. Brooklyn was behind me, cluttered yet vast. Ahead was the Atlantic Ocean, blue and spangled with white-gold sunlight. That train was flying faster than human thought; the boy I was with stepped out and kissed me, and I fell in love forever. Not with the boy—I couldn’t tell you his name on a bet—but with the New York City subway system, and with mass transit in general. Nowhere in the world did my private longings mesh so well with public utility.

    It wasn’t just subways. Buses were okay, too, though they were not as fast as the A or even the 9 or the C, which, in turn weren’t as fast as the next ten years that sped by in a blur of compulsion, dropping me off with a thud on West Seventh Street in St. Paul on a February morning, outside of a red brick halfway house, under a gray and empty sky, waiting for a downtown local.

    And waiting.

    My feet were shod in stylishly pointed leather shoes, whose sleek cut left room only for thin nylon hosiery. They began to hurt so badly that I began to cry, hot salty drops of self-pity. I cursed my fate, I shook my fist at the indifferent heavens, I bemoaned the bleak road, the endless winter, and the lousy minimum-wage job that I had to suffer so much just to get to. If my attention wandered, I brought it immediately back to my situation; I was enjoying the warmth of my own tears. By the time the bus came, my feet no longer hurt, but neither could I use them. It was as if they’d been replaced by rubber stumps belonging to someone else. More tears from the little trooper, verging on hysteria, and the bus driver, with only a minimum roll of his wet asphalt-colored eyes, called the halfway house on his emergency line.

    The nurse who came to get me was nice enough to wait until my feet were safely soaking in a bowl of lukewarm water before snapping a question at me: “Well, what kind of shoes are those to wear? It’s eighteen below zero—I’m sure we announced it.”

    “What kind of bus,” I silently shot back, “takes twenty-seven minutes for the next one to arrive if you miss the eight-sixteen? What kind of place is this, anyway?”

    It turned out to be the kind of place where one year later I was standing in the same gray weather on the same bleak road, waiting for the same bus, the critical difference being that I had learned it was important to read the schedule. It was a little warmer, not much, and my job was a little better, not much. Yet as the bus pulled up and I stepped aboard, I became aware of a strange, unknown sensation, something I had trouble naming. It seeped into the air like the smell of wet dirt that signals spring even when it’s still cold out. What was it? I kept still and waited for it to come to me. It was happiness. So began my new love affair with Twin Cities Metro Transit—slow, unreliable, but it got there, eventually.

    Transportation maps are anatomical diagrams. Get to know them and you know your city’s blood vessels, its arterial flow. Any West Seventh route, for example, was a showcase for why people don’t bus in from the suburbs in any great numbers. I was
    getting it together back then—chemically dependent, clinically depressed, talking too loud, and using too many hand gestures. I was mentally ill, in other words, but I still wasn’t a patch on half of my fellow bus-riders, who were often mad as coots, mumbling, inebriated, on assistance. The other half were working their second or third job, on their way downtown to sit in dirty parking-ramp booths, bus dirty dishes, scrub dirty toilets, and do all the dirty things we’d prefer not to think about in our more comfortable spheres—for the sake, as always, of a better life for their children. Some of their children will be grateful when they look at their tired parents, and some, for a variety of reasons, will be only uncomfortable.

    “It’s weird,” I told my mother during one of our semi-weekly phone calls. “In New York it’s democratic—everyone has to take the subway. Here only marginal people take the bus.”

    “Well, sweetie,” my mother sighed, “you are marginal.” I continue to call her twice a week, years later, but that’s probably just a residual symptom of the mental illness.

    When the most recent strike rolled around, I heard a gentleman from the Taxpayers League of Minnesota suggest on the radio that the solution was for every low-income person in town to buy a car. I actually recorded his comments and replayed them again and again, but I still couldn’t figure out where he thought the money was going to come from. Did he think that, absent the enabling effects of a public transportation system, the working poor would stop frivoling away their income, pony up for insurance, and finally fill out all that car-loan paperwork they’d been putting off?

    All I knew was that when my 132,000-mile, 1989 Pontiac Grand Am finally lost its drive axle, I missed several important doctors’ appointments and couldn’t reschedule sooner than ten weeks out. Additionally, I couldn’t make good on my promise to take my elderly, carless friend grocery shopping, and so he ate Slim Jims and nachos from the skyway convenience store for three weeks. I began to believe that the lights of the city, seen from an airplane, actually spelled out the words “screw the poor.”

    Perhaps I am carping at the inevitable. If I want to live in a place like New York I should just bite the bullet, give up the idea of living space, and move back there. The truth, however, is that I like this ridiculous, unhip, goofed-up spot on the Mississippi River as much as any other place. We’ve got our own thing going here, and I want only the best for the town that saw me go from constant misery to intermittent happiness. I want what the Hmong did to University Avenue to spread through the entire area—I want us to be vibrant, unique, possessed of our own public character made up, like any public character, of our personal longings. But there’s no way around it: If we want to be anything but a tepidly connected series of bedroom communities with adjoining, invisible shantytowns serving as servants’ quarters, then we had better develop the political will to make transportation genuinely public—public meaning people like me, the ones who are getting up early to take the bus in from the margins to the middle, the hardworking ones and the ones who can’t work, the able-bodied and the mangled. Citizens.

  • Riverfront Follies

    By coincidence, two relatively new bandstands have come to grace the St. Paul riverfront less than a thousand yards from each other. The Heilmaier Memorial Bandstand is situated on Raspberry Island, a neglected little spit of land in the middle of the river below the Wabasha Street Bridge, while the Target Stage hulks over the southern edge of the broad greensward of Harriet Island Park. One is a work of great poetry. The other is an eyesore.

    Created by celebrated architect and designer Michael Graves and bestowed upon St. Paul citizens by the Target Corporation, the Target Stage is the kind of “gift” that, as soon as you see it, you start to look for ways to get rid of it. Implicit in a gift like this, however, is the expectation that the simple folk of St. Paul prostrate themselves with gratitude—not just for Target’s beneficence, but for Graves consenting to give us anything at all. Minnesotans are mortified that anyone might find us in any way “critical” or “negative,” so good manners require us to lap up whatever is set before us. In the face of celebrity, we are not merely bovine, we are cowed, and therefore probably stuck with this monumentally ugly necktie till it rusts away.

    The shelves of Target stores are piled high with the fruit of Michael Graves’ approach to design: fun hamburger flippers, twee teakettles, chubby toasters, and toilet bowl brushes with rubbery, turd-shaped handles. All of these objects (there are almost three hundred) whimsically “democratize” design so that now, thanks to the architect’s feeling for the little people, the humblest home in America can have a shot at the elegance of Pee-Wee’s Playhouse.

    Graves’ Target Stage is whimsy gone berserk. It consists of a raised concrete platform flanked by a pair of looming steel towers shaped like oil derricks. Suspended by cables between them is a skimpy canopy, embellished at the front with what looks like a piece of cupcake paper or the edge of a shop awning. This wavy bit of decoration is apparently meant to symbolize musical gaiety, or the shape of a sound wave, or a slice of bacon, or the wiggly Mississippi River nearby, or some damned thing. Graves would have done better to suspend a gigantic Target credit card between a colossal pair of shopping carts—it would have been more honest.

    The whole thing looks like a gallows, but Graves’ towers are evidently meant to quote the skeletal industrial structure of the old railroad lift bridge a few hundred yards downriver. The bridge’s cross-braced steel towers powerfully but matter-of-factly express or diagram the forces acting on them. They embody the job they were engineered to do. The stage’s reference to them, however, is empty, perfunctory, and visually inept. If you agree with Goethe that architecture is frozen music, then this is evidence that Graves has a tin ear.

    The stage’s other salient feature, its apron, is faced with panels of native Mankato-Kasota stone. A beautiful material, it’s applied here like pancake makeup, the words “TARGET STAGE” incised in foot-high, inch-deep letters, staring the audience in the face. As if this were not subtle enough, another panel to the right is carved with a greatly enlarged simulation of the architect’s scrawled signature, putting us all on permanent notice that what we have here is no ordinary edifice, but a signed canvas, a veritable work of art. The Target Stage oppresses the ground it stands on with its clumsy, hamfisted egotism. Let’s hope that Graves’ current project in the Cities, the addition to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, is done with greater feeling for the art it is supposed to shelter.

    A quarter of a mile downstream, meanwhile, is the Heilmaier Memorial Bandstand on Raspberry Island, designed by the architect and glass artist James Carpenter. Carpenter was one of the finalists for the commission several years back to design the new Wabasha Street Bridge. His bold proposal for a bridge centrally suspended from a soaring, V-shaped mast was rejected as too daring, too “modern,” too “different,” and probably too expensive; the bandstand is the only part of it that survived. It is owned by the Schubert Club, a non-profit musical group that privately raised most of the two-million-dollar construction cost (the city of St. Paul chipped in a hundred thousand dollars from a state grant). A jewel almost lost in the weeds of redevelopment, its elegance is a rebuke to the pointlessly busy detailing of the bridge that eventually got built, and to the programmatic mediocrity of so much of the rest of the St. Paul riverfront’s redevelopment, from the uninspired, pharmaceutically named “Centex Homes” townhouses upriver on Shepard Road to the blank and sterile faces of the corporate campuses across the river from downtown.

    The Heilmaier bandstand is an architectural folly in the best sense of the word, a work of fancy, both ridiculous and sublime. From the standpoint of flatfooted practicality you could say it’s nearly useless, but on another level it’s a deeply necessary thing, a lyric structure that sings to the eye and to the heart; a materialization—a shockingly beautiful one—of music itself. Strictly speaking, it’s more a band “shelter” than a band “shell.” It doesn’t reflect the sound acoustically like the Hollywood Bowl, but it is an acoustical portal, a cornucopia for music to spill out of.

    In the language of topology, the overall form of the Heilmaier structure is a hyperbolic paraboloid; in other words, it’s shaped like a saddle. From certain angles, its curves look like the wave patterns on the screen of an oscilloscope. Like the instruments of a chamber group, each material used in the structure has a distinct voice, clearly articulated from the others. The palette is simple—steel, glass, concrete, and wood—but this puts it too simply. The steel is stainless, carefully machined. Each of the sandblasted glass panels is actually a face-to-face lamination of two pieces, which influences how light is refracted. The wood, identified as “ironwood,” is a local species resistant to the weather, like teak. The massive pair of canted, prefabricated concrete buttresses is formed with unusually close attention to the fairness of the curves.

    Whichever detail of the structure the eye lights upon, uncompromised workmanship is evident: the precision of the steel fabrication, the finish of the concrete, the way the planks of the stage have been laid, the dramatic cantilever of the benches tucked under the arch, and their boomerang-shaped supports that seem to grow right out of the stage floor. Everywhere you turn, there is a sense of craft consciously brought to bear, and of the pleasure the builders took in their work. That is not to say that the workmanship is precious; it isn’t there for its own sake, but to serve the structure as a whole.

    Roofed in glass but open to the weather, Carpenter’s bandstand lets in not only light and air but also water, and in just about every form: rain, snow, sleet, icicles, hail, and the rising waters of the river when it floods. On sunny days, the canopy’s panels of laminated, translucent glass—each one oriented at a slightly different angle to the continually shifting position of the sun—refract rainbows onto the floor of the stage, rainbows that will at certain moments spill onto musicians as they perform.

    Former Mayor Norm Coleman used to make it sound as though “bringing hockey to St. Paul” in the Xcel Energy Center just upstream was a feat equal to causing the waters to spring forth and the desert to bloom. The Heilmaier bandstand, meanwhile, surely one of the most beautiful works of public art ever built in the Twin Cities, seems to have gotten lost in the shuffle for the puck and the rush to get a Peanuts figure plopped down everywhere you look. Porous to the light—even to the waters that can flood through it—the Heilmaier bandstand, its roof diaphanous as a summer moth, is an embodiment of musica
    l fluidity and grace. Strapped for funds, however, the city may be turning to the private sector to take care of it. A proposal is afloat for the same outfit that owns the Wild, Minnesota Sports and Entertainment, to complete the landscaping, seating, and lighting, then to take over management of Raspberry Island as a site for music, poetry readings, and weddings. It will be interesting to see if they can do this without slapping the Wild’s logo on everything in sight.

  • Louie the Wine Guy

    June 20, 2004

    Well, the time has finally come. Hennepin-Lake Liquors’ Summer Wine Sale is in full force, running through July 3rd. Reportedly, this is the sale to beat all sales, and I pretty much have to agree. Be advised, however, that newcomers to Phil’s place, or those who are at all claustrophobic might become overwhelmed. With that caveat in place, let’s dive into the sale.

    Henn-Lake Liquors, as comapred to Surdyk’s, has a huge selection of high-end wines. This is one of the standout elements of the Summer Sale. California, France, Australia, Italy: If the name is prestigious, Phil more than likely carries it. If only two cases came to Minnesota, he probably bought them both. Haskells might argue the point, but while they excel with European wines, they can hardly compete in the domestic category.

    Being a California wine guy, need I say more? To put a finer point on it, let’s look at the Cabernet/Meritage list from the Henn-Lake’s sale catalogue. Some big names like Quintessa, Viader, Chateau Montelena, and Opus stand out from the rest. Some even better, though perhaps less-familiar names that stand to offer more “value” in the high-end world of wine are O’Shaughnessy, Atalon, Cain, and Flora Springs.

    Just to be fair, there are also more than twenty wines among Cabernet/Meritage selection that are on sale for under $10 a bottle. The list is as broad as it is deep, and the prices, overall, are very good, about twenty-five percent off “other’s price” (which, as usual, is a somewhat inflated idea of full retail). You will find better values at Sam’s Club & Costco, but on a much smaller selection. A few examples from Sam’s: Viader ’00 is $54.99 (Henn-Lake is $69.95); Clos du Bois “Marlstone” ’97 is $24.99 at Sam’s and $35.95 (for the ’99!) at Henn-Lake.

    Now, Phil always says he will match anyone else’s price, but you do have to wonder if that means he could go head-to-head with the buying power of Wal-Mart (the Sam’s Club mother-ship). Still, I would make Henn-Lake the first choice for stocking up on a few mixed cases of very special wine. Phil even teases us in saying that he might have some Harlan for sale!

    Henn-Lake’s kick-off tasting did not reflect well on the overall quality of the sale. It was held on Wednesday, June 9 in a large tent in the parking lot behind Campiello’s, just a block from the store. Unfortunately, the tent was not nearly large enough, and by 7pm the crowds were hardly navigable. Luckily I arrived early and made quick work of the large selection of wines.

    The first group was from Phillips and included the Atalon ’00 Cab (young, a bit hot, but massivea great wine), three zinfandels from Edmeades (the “Piffero Vineyard” my favorite), Archipel ’00 meritage (very nice), and the best at the table, the Verite “La Joie” and“La Muse” (two beautifully structured Bordeaux-styled wines (are a bit pricey at $77.95 on sale). Also sampled at the Phillips table were Cambria’s “Julia’s Vineyard” Pinot Noir (always solid), Hartford Pinot Noir (just ok), Heitz ’00 Napa Cabernet (a bit disappointing), Tommasi’s Amarone ’98 (very nice), and the organic cab from Bonterra (surprisingly good).

    The quality really picked up at the Grape Beginnings table! In the three-stars-or-higher category were the Altamura ’00 Sangiovese, the Paradigm ’99 Cabernet (amazing!), and Ehler’s ’01 Napa Estate Cabernet (my pick for the best quality/value at the tasting at just $24.95). At two-and-a-half stars we had Liberty School ’02 Cab and Treanna ’00 blend; and at two stars were Paul Hobbs ’00 Cab and the Vieux Telegraph ’00 Chateauneuf du Pape.

    Paustis was pouring some fine selections such as the Steele ’01 Pinot Noir “Durrell Vineyard” – three stars, very fine, the best Pinot of the tasting, along with Cat & Fiddle’s Handley. Also a standout at this table was Fess Parker’s ’00 Syrah and Whitehall Lane’s ’01 Cab (both two-and-a-half stars). At the Grigg’s table I tried their Hungarian Egri Bikaver and was not impressed; also, the Phelps ’01 Pastiche was disappointing, as I have been long-time fan.

    On the Johnson Bros. table, who showed one of the top wines of the show, the Chimney Rock ’01 “Stag’s Leap” Cabernet (was a three-and-a-half-starswow! Also decent, but not worth the price ($75) was the Raymond “Generations”; Raymond’s ’00 Reserve Cabernet was just about as good and is on sale for $23.95. I also tried the Freemark Abbey ’99 Cab, which was smooth and solid (two stars).

    Two nice pinot noirs at the Wine Merchants table were from Archery Summit (the ’01 Premier Cuvee, two-and-a-half stars) and Rex Hill (two stars). At the nearby Vintage One table I sampled Van Duzer’s Pinot Noir (also two-and-a-half stars), the Badger Mountain organic merlot (simply not good), and the Powers ’01 Cabernet (nasty! have they ever slipped from their ’00 “best buy” perch).

    World Class Wines, one of my favorite distributors, had few selections that I chose to sample. These included cabs from Provenance (two stars) and Terra Valentine (the ’01 Napa two-and-a-half stars), and the zinfandel from Seghesio (also two-and-a-half stars). Next door Cat & Fiddle wowed me with the aforementioned Handley Pinot Noir and with the best chardonnay of the event, from Solitude (three-and-a-half stars). Also a standout was the Elyse D’Aventure ’01 rhone blend (three stars), and both the cab and merlot from Grove Street (two stars).

    The Wine Company showed the top zinfandel of the tasting, the Dashe Cellars ’01 Dry Creek (three stars and best value at the sale price of $16.95). But the real stunner at this table was the Flora Springs ’01 Napa Cabernet, which I thought superior to the Trilogy from Flora Springs and about half the price. Wow! Wow!

    I greatly appreciated the few dessert wines offered, especially the fabulous Muscat from Bonny Dune. At eighteen-and-a-half percent residual sugar, this dreamy potion earned my only 4-star rating of the night, but then I am a real sucker for dessert wines, especially on the tail of such a great tasting. My only real complaint, though, Phil, is how come you couldn’t spring for glasses? To drink so many gorgeous wines out of plastic cups was a real travesty. The distributors provide all the wine; Campiello, the food; couldn’t you supply some glassware?

    Now, in contrast, a great tasting was put on by our friends Down Under, the Australian Wine Bureau. They showcased over three hundred wines last Wednesday night at the lovely Nicollet Island Pavilion. This event helped me redefine my image of Austalian wines; like many, I tended to think of them only as producers of fine shiraz and shariz/cab blends. Au contraire!

    At one table in particular, I learned how great Australian wine can be. It showcased the wines of Penley Estate and Giant Steps and all that these chaps Down Under can do. The Penley Estate ’00 Reserve Coonawara Cabernet ($65) was truly remarkable, and by far the best cab of the evening. It rated the top four-star rating, as did both the Pinot Noir and the Chardonnay from Giant Steps (both sell for $35). I never realized that I might find California- and Washington State-style wines being made in Australia. Sadly, so far we don’t see these in our retail market, but maybe this tasting will begin to change that. Another truly great offering from Giant Steps was their Innocent Bystander ’02 Barossa Yarra Valley Sangiovese Merlot (three-and-a-half stars), and very good was the Innocent Bystander ’03 Central Victoria Shiraz Viognier (the Aussies have got to shorten the names of their wines!). I learned the value of blending a white grape like viognier into a red wine to add silkiness and perhaps a touch of sweetness.

    Great wines abounded at the Leeuwin Estate table, shared with Jasper Hill, who produce a knockout shiraz, “Georgia’s Paddock” ($100). At half that price, and my pick for the best of all the shi
    raz at the event, was Charles Melton (Epic Wines) ’00 Baroosa Valley ($45, four stars). Amazing wine. Charles Melton also makes a killer rose for $22. Another four-star shiraz came at the next table, a wine compared to Penfold’s Grange but at a fraction of the cost. The Mount Langi Ghiran ’99 “Langi Shiraz” Grampians Shiraz (what’s with these names?) was fabulous ($45, four stars)

    Again, it was the dessert wines that really stole my heart. Southern Starz was showing two wines from R.L. Buller, one a Muscat and the other a tokay. Both were absolutely delicious. Even more remarkable, though, is that these wines, rated 97 and 95 by Robert Parker, retail for only $15 per 375 ml bottle. That, my friend, is a steal and you should demand your local wine dealer pick up a few cases. The dessert wine that I saved for the very end was a Mt. Horrocks “Cordon Cut” Watervale Riesling which, even at $27 for 500ml, was sensational.

    This California wine guy has to include Down Under on his amended list of the best wine regions of the world. Now if only it wasn’t such a long flight to get there, I could start thinking about touring Australian wine regions next winter!

    But hey – no time to be dreaming of winter travels today. It’s summer, and the air is perfect today, so I’m off to share coffee and a game of chess al fresco, followed by a round of golf, a barbecue and some fabulous wines. Can life get any better than this?

  • Louie the Wine Guy

    June 9, 2004

    The near-monsoon rains and sudden burst of heat tell us two things: 1) summer is arriving, and 2) it’s time to prep the barbeque for the long grilling season ahead. And, besides a frosty beer from time to time, nothing goes better with grilled meats than the big-fruited wines from California, Oregon and Washington State. Read on for news about several tastings featuring these domestic offerings, as well as aand preview of Hennepin Lake Liquors’ sale—arguably the best summer wine sale in the metro area.

    First, the tasting reports. I was lucky enough to sit down with Mikael Thollander and Robert Croce of The Wine Doctor, sampling a lineup of their very best from the West Coast. After a light warm-up of a couple South African Chenin Blancs, we tasted a lovely Riesling from Brooks Winery in Oregon. Charlie Trotter, the Chicago celebrity chef, buys up almost all of Jimi Brooks’ Riesling, but a small amount is available locally at $17.99. Top quality.

    Next we moved on to a few wines from Walter Schug, a premium Carneros region producer. The Heritage Reserve Chardonnay was sublime, with a rich fruit and oak balance. Schug barrel ferments its wine and ages it sur-lie (with the fermentation sediment in the barrels for big extract flavors). This chardonnay is one of the few worth the $31 price tag. Great with a grilled salmon or halibut. The Heritage Reserve Pinot Noir—the grape that Walter Schug has devoted his whole life to mastering—was even more stunning.. Elegant yet full of gusto, it would accompany a grilled lamb or salmon entrée perfectly. Also $31 retail. Schug’s ’99 Merlot was massive, but a $42 merlot is a tough sell in my opinion (I’ll contradict myself in just a few minutes!). It was a bit herbaceous in the nose, which is characteristic of merlots from cooler regions like Carneros and Oregon.

    Those same regions are emerging as the very best sources of Pinot Noir. The next one we tried, from Maysara, was majestic. This ’01 Delara Pinot Noir, made by the aforementioned Jimi Brooks, was perhaps the finest example I have ever sampled of this sometimes awkward grape. Worth the $45 if you can find it. Ask Phil at Hennepin Lake Liquors to pick up a case and add it to his Summer Sale inventory.

    The tasting got even better with two top producers from Washington State. Robert Parker named the first, DeLille Cellars, as the very best in Washington right now. Chris Upchurch, winemaker, produces a couple of estate bottled Bordeaux-style blends, namely Chaleur Estate & Harrison Hill, both of which retail at around $60 a bottle. Then there is the D2, the “deuxieme” or second wine, which blends the remains of the top estate wines. This ’91 D2 retails at about $40, and I found it at first very tight and hot, but as I “followed” the wine over the next 48 hours, tasting it at various points, it opened beautifully to show its full pedigree. It’s as good as, say, a Silver Oak Cellars or Jarvis from Napa Valley, at about half the price.

    We ended our outing with two products from Andrew Will, second perhaps only to Delille as the premiere Washington State winery. Both wines, the ’01 Klipson Merlot and the ’00 Seven Hills Cabernet, were amazing. I could only use extreme superlatives in my tasting notes—“incredible!,” “stunning!” (though admittedly, this could have been partly due to the effects by then of about a dozen wines). These wines both retail at $50, which might seem steep, but not if you actually drink the wine. It’s all relative.

    The next tasting to report was a benefit fundraiser for a local Humane Society. Greg Varner, proprietor of Excelsior Vintage wine shop , chose most of the lineup.. Whites included Monte Volpe Sauvignon Blanc ($12)(very well received), Bonny Doon Big House White($12)(always a good quaffer for grilled chicken or pork), Gallo of Sonoma Chardonnay($12)(a standard in value chards), and Cambria’s “Katherine’s Vineyard” Chardonnay ($18)(an even nicer accompaniment to grilled chicken, pork, or even salmon).

    For the reds, things became a bit more interesting, as Greg’s lineup accented a few selections from my spring Napa trip. The showcase wine of the evening was Duckhorn ’98 Howell Mountain Merlot, and it proved every bit the winner predicted. We sampled from a magnum, so it was showing a bit young but opened nicely over the evening. Also on the sample list was a nice merlot from Andretti Winery, a relatively new Napa producer owned by the race-car legend Mario Andretti. At $12, this is a lovely wine with enough structure to complement a grilled rib-eye. A “Fleur du Cote Rouge” from Torii Mor was medium-bodied and delightful—another example of why Oregon is tops for Pinot Noir and rhone-style wines. This wine would go perfectly with grilled pork tenderloin.

    We got a most pleasant surprise from a Meritage from Hahn Estates in central California. A classic five-grape Bordeaux style blend with merlot leading the way, this wine, for under $20, is a great choice to accompany any sort of beef done on the grill. Likewise, the Napa cabernet from Liparita ($25 in California, but not yet available in Minnesota) was powerful and smooth, with enough backbone to stand up to a grilled steak. We also enjoyed a Zinfandel from Chateau Montelena, brought back from Napa, but luckily now available in town. $25-$30 may be a bit pricey for a Zin, but hey, it’s Montelena. Not many know that this premiere cab-chard producer even makes Zin (they make a Riesling too, but only sell it at the winery).

    Speaking of Zinfandel, I was fortunate enough to try a bottle of 7 Deadly Zins, an old-vine zinfandel from Central California. Very big fruit for the price (around $20), and a great choice with barbecued ribs. Yummy!

    The last tasting in this report was a small, private BYOB event at which a few interesting bottles showed up. Among the three that stood out were two from Gundlach Bundschu, the $12.99 Bearitage and the $19.99 Mountain Cuvee. Both are blends, and great wines for summer beef grilling. The Bearitage is a perfect burger wine, whereas the Mountain Cuvee would show better with a nice sirloin. The third pick was the Steele “Pacini” Zinfandel, long a favorite of mine and also a great accompaniment for ribs or steak.

    UPCOMING EVENTS

    “G’day in a Glass” is a huge Australian wine tasting on June 16 from 6:30pm to 9pm at the Nicollet Island Pavilion. There is a Trade Only tasting in the afternoon and an event for the public that evening. Over 300 wines will be shown!

    Hennepin Lake Liquors Summer Wine Sale
    This sale runs through July 3. Come back for details on both the sale and its kick-off wine tasting event in the next report. In the meantime, get grilling!

  • Soundtrack to Mary

    I can’t think of anyone whose career I am more interested in or more forgiving of than Prince’s. Let it be known, I’d follow the tiny man who penned “Shockadelica,” “The Cross,” “House Quake,” and “Bambi” into the gates of hell if he asked me to. In the nineties I was one of those diligent tools who would drop everything and hightail it to Chanhassen to happily sit outside Paisley Park for hours in sub-zero temperatures for his “surprise three a.m. gigs”… that sometimes never happened. Let’s see, I can’t feel my feet, I have to be at work in two hours, and all I got was this lousy souvenir tambourine shaped like a part of the male anatomy? Cool. Let’s do it again tomorrow night! To this day I could cry that I loaned a cute boy my “sold under the counter” vinyl copy of The Black Album that he forgot was left in his car that had been towed to the impound lot where it sat in his back seat for five record high temperature days one August.

    In case you think I’m some drooling Prince-can-do-no-wrong Minnesotan, I’ll risk public stoning by saying I think Purple Rain is ass. I stumbled upon it recently while channel surfing, all I could think was “ouch, there’s a time in history that hasn’t aged well.” Guitarist Wendy Melvoin’s many saucy stage threads made my teeth ache: miniskirt, nylons, and white basketball high tops? No, please. And I’m sorry, “Dr.” Fink, but somehow your stage persona seems like an afterthought. “Get the keyboard player some scrubs and be sure to cover his Jheri Curl and his face.”

    The vast cavern between P’s hits and misses is what makes him so fascinating to me. I don’t think he consciously thinks, “Hmmm… Let me write a real stink-burger opus, with an amateurish screenplay to match, just to irritate the haters.” On second thought, maybe he does. Oddly enough, I could respect that. Other than his ill musicianship, it’s the mystery of the man that I love. It’s all very Wonka-like. In fact, rumor has it Around the World in a Day was produced by Oompa-Loompas.

    I’m still surprised by the sound of his speaking voice coming out of that tight l’il body. You think it’s going to be squeaky and small and then out comes the sound of chocolate melting in the mouth of a baritone pre-op transsexual. Much like my curiosity with the pope, you can’t picture either of them doing normal, everyday things. Plunging a toilet, waiting for the cable guy? Not so much. It’s also very important to me to know if either of them owns jeans. I like to think that Prince even has four-inch heeled slippers built into the feet of his jammies.

    Send your purple prose to Mary Lucia at popularcreeps@yahoo.com.