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  • A Picture is Worth 5,000 Years

    “A photo is all I have left of her,” Chris Lang, the boyfriend of murdered college student Dru Sjodin, told a Judiciary Policy and Finance Committee at the Minnesota House of Representatives. His testimony culminated with a heated statement about Level Three sex offenders: “They’re not like normal people. I think they’re wired wrong. They’re like animals. They need to be treated like animals, and animals are kept in cages.” The committee, including freshman legislator Cy Thao, remained impassive. Lang stepped down, and discussion moved on to child abuse, crystal-meth addiction, and other problems.

    “We don’t have time to do all the emotional stuff,” said Thao later that day, by way of explaining how legislators can seem inured to the personal horrors their legislation is meant to address. Capitol business is often conducted at a safe remove from emotional issues at hand, but that doesn’t mean Thao, who was elected to office in 2002, sometimes finds the impersonal nature of policy and politics hard to take. A thirty-one-year-old Hmong-American whose round face is accentuated by a close-cropped haircut, Thao came to politics by an unusual route, as a painter and former arts organizer in St. Paul’s Frogtown district. “Artists have to be passionate and emotional,” he believes. “When I’m painting, I put my emotions into it. That’s what drives me. But as a legislator, you’ve got to contain your emotion and turn it into strategies. You just have to focus on the policy.”

    When I met Thao several years ago, he attributed his political views to his college internship experience at the state Capitol: “I saw a lot of people who would only pay attention to people with wealth and people who knew the system. They just didn’t pay attention to the little guy.” Thao’s frustration with the system led him to add an art double major to his political science major while at the University of Minnesota, Morris in the early nineties, and he’s swung between the two ever since—much to his advantage. His stint some years ago as an organizer at the Center for Hmong Arts and Talent, an arts center on University Avenue, gave him skills crucial for politics: raising money, maintaining a grassroots organization, and conducting community outreach, as well as publicly addressing social issues through the Center’s theatrical productions and mural projects.

    Meanwhile, Thao confronts issues through his art that are anything but small, addressing such horrors that would move even the most impassive of observers. Fifty of his paintings will be on display at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts beginning May 21 in The Hmong Migration, an exhibit that is part of the Minnesota Artists Exhibition Program. In this series, Thao creates a compressed visual record of the troubled history of his people and his family.

    Using a technique that is simple, raw, and unpolished, with quickly applied daubs of paint indicating simplified figures and forms, Thao draws from both Hmong folk-art quilting traditions and an interest in the work of Jacob Lawrence. Each work in the series depicts an episode in the history of the Hmong, starting with their creation myth and ancient history and continuing through the culture’s dispersion and its struggles against China in the late 1800s, the French in the mid-1900s, and Communists during the American war against Vietnam and Laos. Thao focuses heavily on the aftermath of that war in works featuring long lines of families fleeing through mountains, across fields and rivers, and corpses left behind on paths or floating in water. In one particularly gruesome image, a Communist leader directs his soldiers to open fire on Hmong approaching a bridge, the passage to freedom in Thailand. Other images poignantly depict life in Thai resettlement camps, conjured from Thao’s memories of the four years he lived in one; and still later the series conveys the difficult move and adjustment to Minnesota, where Thao arrived twenty years ago.

    Thao had proposed exhibiting The Hmong Migration at the MIA before he was elected to the Minnesota legislature; it was a time when he had not yet learned to consider how the public or peers might receive his work. “An artist just wants his work to be shown,” Thao says, adding that he probably wouldn’t apply for an MAEP show now because of his work’s emotionally raw nature. “I have some worries because in that art there was no holding back. I wanted to address every important issue. As a state representative, saying one word out of context or choosing one wrong word can result in different meanings and bring different outcomes. When I painted, I didn’t worry about that at all. I just painted how I wanted to… But I think I will let the art speak for itself. If it hurts me politically, then it just does.”

    At noon, Thao abruptly leaves the committee room. Though the discussion on amendments to the Sex Offender Judiciary/Finance Omnibus Bill is not finished, Thao is unconcerned. “The decision on the bill was made back in February when the chair met with the governor,” he says, and indeed, voting on the amendments had been running on strictly party lines. Thao makes his way to the steps of the Capitol, where Ann Bancroft, the polar explorer, is stirring up a crowd of several thousand at a rally protesting the amendment to ban gay marriage. “Laws that discriminate are just plain wrong,” she shouts. “One thousand benefits received by married couples are not available to me and my partner, Pam. This includes education, health care reform… a home, for God’s sake.” The crowd cheers at her rising pitch, and Thao leans toward me. “She’s got it right,” he says.

    Thao has his own early experience with discrimination and prejudice; among the most poignant of his paintings are those depicting the trials that his family and other Hmong faced upon arriving in Minnesota in the seventies and eighties. Parents visit the welfare office with kids in tow; an assembly line in a large colorless warehouse is manned entirely by Hmong immigrants, with the only hint of the outside world coming through a single small door; teenaged Hmong gang members fight in the streets. One painting depicts the projects in north Minneapolis as a zoo-like maze. Barred windows are the most prominent feature on the plain brick buildings, and on a wall someone has scrawled: “Chink go home.”

    Leaving the rally, Thao passes a tall, young legislator just arriving. Thao asks if he is going to make a speech. The lawmaker gives a gruff “no,” without breaking stride. Thao laughs, and explains, “He’s one of the most conservative members of the House.” He is nothing if not feisty, having earned a reputation for passionately expressing his side of an issue—despite how futile it may seem in the current legislative atmosphere. Thao got into politics during the brief antiestablishment frenzy of the Jesse Ventura era. He had been peripherally involved in Ventura’s 1998 campaign, and so was tapped by the governor to appeal to the Hmong community for the 2000 election. “I figured this would be the only chance that a governor would help out our community,” recalls Thao, “and since no one else wanted to do it, I did it.” He gained national attention for a TV commercial, filmed by two artist buddies, in which he chased prostitutes and criminals from Frogtown with a broom. He also tapped artist friends to run the campaign—going door to door, painting a van, silk-screening posters by hand. Though Thao lost that election (by a surprisingly small margin), the strategies he developed worked for him in 2002.

    After an almost two-year hiatus taken as he learned the ropes at his new day job, Thao hopes to return to painting later this year. After his MIA exhibit, and after the current legislative session, he plans to begin a new series about America. “I think it will be interesting to see the history of this country from the point of view of an immigrant who was a product of American policy.”

    Thao had expressed concerns about a negative reaction to his exhibit, but I asked if his paintings might actually help his political cause. “It could work both ways,” he says after a pause. “Especially during this time when the country is at war and has invaded another country and is imposing its will on people who have no clue about us. My paintings speak to that. Their imagery is critical of misguided policies, regardless of which president the policy comes from. We have a bad foreign policy in this country… But I’m an optimist. If we don’t win this year, we always have next year.”

  • Routine Maintenance or Major Overhaul?

    Today you are nothing unless you have flawless, supple skin. Lustrous, thick, bouncy hair. Icy white teeth and breath so fresh it cryogenically freezes your date to the couch. (Take that, Fear-of-Calling-Back Man!)

    Never mind that things are even worse for women. As more and more straight guys get “queer eye-tized,” I fear that it sets the bar even higher for girls, grooming-wise. I’m all for my man having clean teeth and fingernails, but I gotta tell you, sometimes a little butt fuzz is just about all that separates me from my favorite ape.

    My friend Lori recently said, “Men are the new women.” Then what, dear God, are the old women expected to be? Every time I turn around, it feels like there’s some horrid new procedure or potion that I never knew I needed in order to be well put-together.

    I am the kind of person who derives her beauty routine from what’s on sale at the all-night Walgreen’s and how much time is left at the end of the day. If I were to write a beauty book, its title might be something like Fifteen Bucks & Fifteen Minutes: How to Blindly Stab Your Way to Beauty—Some of the Time!

    Some days I moisturize, some days I tone. Some days I pluck when I should really be exfoliating, and Lord knows, I’m doing it all wrong. I’ll pay for it later, unless I pay for someone to help me with it now. Either way, I’ll pay.

    Every woman knows that achieving a “natural” glow for a night out can easily take two hours and involve ten different shades of powder, ranging subtly from champagne to mochachino. Somehow, this doesn’t bother most of us. We’ve accepted it. We even purport to enjoy it. Who doesn’t like to kick back, drink a glass of wine, and slather our scaly, tired feet with a microwavable packet of peppermint-oil sloughing mud? (Feels refreshing! Like you’re dancing on coals in hell!) You know, maybe round out the night drunkenly counting pores while gaping into a lighted, magnified mirror. A little “me time.”

    Undoubtedly, this is the seed of narcissistic desperation that eventually gives way to total self-absorption implosion. Or at the very least, complete body hairlessness. I’m no expert, but stay with me here, I’ve got a theory. If you look at something long enough, its meaning is pliable. Sometimes your makeup mirror is like those holographic mind-bender posters. Stare in it for too long, and you see David Gest staring back at you. Next thing you know, you’ve got a $10,000 Visa bill, six weeks of unpaid post-op recuperation time, and Melanie Griffith’s upper lip.

    Personally, my biggest beauty beef is that I’m at that “tween” stage of life where the lines around my eyes don’t disappear anymore when I stop smiling, and yet I have just about as much acne as your average tenth-grader. I’ve been to see the dermatologist and the pimples just keep popping up in all the same spots. My next step is to see a priest, because it seems that my chin is possessed. Once the holy man wrests the demon pustules from my visage, perhaps then, with a clear face, a clear heart and mind will follow.

    Or maybe the curse of boils has been visited upon me by the Big Kahuna himself—as a reminder to take care of myself, but not put too much stock in what is only surface politics. Those fifteen minutes at the end of the day for me might be better spent cultivating attributes like integrity and kindness to others. Girlfriends, any stylist worth his weight in false eyelashes can tell you that beauty is only skin deep, but ugly—now that’s an inside job.

  • Our Word, Not Yours

    My mother taught me that little ditty in 1968, when I was nine years old. We had just become the first black family within a country mile of our new home in the then lily-white southeast Denver. I was no stranger to the word “nigger.” I heard it often from the lips of black people. However, hearing it come from white people was a new experience for me and my mother wanted me to have a retort ready when it happened.

    So when I got “niggered,” I dutifully whipped out my rhyme, along with my fists and some other new words I learned that summer, many with only four letters. In 1974, I saw Blazing Saddles with some of the “brothas” and laughed at loud at the dialogue, which was laced with “nigger this” and “nigger that”. In fact, my posse was so badass cool that we could allow white people to sit next to us and laugh along with us.

    After all, it was “our” word. Only we could say it with the right attitude and inflection. How else could I accept my family’s regular references to blacks as “nigger” without simultaneously acknowledging that we were hypocrites for trashing white people who“niggered” us?

    I got my sisters—Renee, who lives in Huntsville, Alabama, and Rosalyn, who lives in suburban Denver—on a conference call to do my own family reality check. I told them about the political firestorm that consumed former Minnesota Public Safety Commissioner Rich Stanek over his admission that he had said “nigger” and told racist jokes twelve years ago. I told them that even before this came out, Stanek had been the target of at least two police brutality lawsuits, and not trusted by many black leaders around town. Both agreed he deserved to go down in flames.

    However, when I asked them if it was wrong for black folks to call each other “nigger,” the line went quiet for a long beat. Then, virtually at the same time, they both replied, “it depends.” I pushed them harder. “So, when it comes to using this word, we are privileged and white people are not?” Renee, who, along with her husband, boasts a Ph.D., replied, “Black people know the rules and understand the context. When my husband tells me that he is going out with ‘the niggas,’ I know what that means. We’re talking about ‘us.’”

    Okay, I said, let’s take it one step further. “We all agree that my Swedish-Irish wife is part of our African-American family now. Does she now have the right to use ‘the word’?” Again, there was another very long pause. Rosalyn offered, “If she is willing to work within our cultural norms, our context, and not use it to slam us, well, I suppose it would be okay.”

    My sisters’ views are consistent with those discussed in Randall Kennedy’s bestselling Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word. Kennedy, a Harvard Law professor, wrote that acceptable use of “nigger” depended on whether the user was trustworthy as far as black people were concerned. If the person was not a true friend of the “brothas and the sistahs,” then he or she was not to be trusted with the word. By that definition, for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to be caught saying “nigger” would be a lynchable offense. Most African Americans see him as a Judas. Lyndon Johnson, however, who, as architect of the most sweeping civil rights legislation since the Civil War gained considerable credibility among black people, could be forgiven for his remarks to an aide in choosing to appoint the dark and well-known Thurgood Marshall over the lighter skinned and virtually unknown A. Leon Higginbotham: “The only two people who have heard of Judge Higginbotham are you and his momma. When I appoint a nigger to the Supreme Court, I want everyone to know he’s a nigger.”

    Are there any lessons from my musings with my sisters for the Rich Staneks of the world, who, as they floated along the river of life, have said “nigger,” “spook,” or “jigaboo.” Clearly, “nigger” is a loaded word, one that must be handled with extreme care, especially if the user is anyone other than a black person.

    However, it doesn’t matter if it’s Rich Stanek or Clarence Thomas, if a person has not demonstrated that he can be a trustworthy ally of black people, then being outed as having uttered “nigger” is a crime for which the statute of limitations never runs out.

  • This Animal 'Rochs!

    Michael McDermott and his family may have been the only people to move out of Seattle in the early 1990s, when that city’s high-tech grunge cachet was at its peak. The McDermotts moved to an abandoned dairy farm in Kelliher, Minnesota. The place was soon hopping with strange cattle—tall, hairy bovines with big horns, which arrived in a range of colors from specialty breeders all over the world.

    There is something about these animals that have a hold on McDermott’s imagination, something that transports him back to his ancestors among the Highland clans of Scotland. “Can you imagine the ancient Scots going to war riding their Highland cattle, with their bodies painted blue … fighting alongside their Highland cattle?” McDermott asked me, by way of an unsolicited e-mail, a few months ago. “I am a bull tamer, and through my understanding of the form and function, I have recreated the ancient aurochs. You are invited to view our site and begin an adventure with the use of Highland genetics and its connections to ancient Highland culture.”

    While driving hundreds of miles to his two-hundred-acre spread in northwestern Minnesota, it occurred to me that McDermott might have been inviting me to his website, not his actual farm. But I was practically there, and determined to see for myself what he was talking about.
    According to McDermott, the Highland cattle and Highland crosses he breeds are well suited to the forests and bogs of northwestern Minnesota, able to survive outside and even give birth during harsh winters with no shelter. These are the cattle he envisions as the center of his Highland forefathers’ world, the ones clansmen rode into battle against the Romans. More tangibly, he says his bulls’ ability to graze on a wide range of rough forage helps create a natural balance of forests and their fauna, and keeps trees and shrubs in place, minimizing soil erosion. As if that weren’t enough, they provide jumbo-sized rib-eye steaks that are relatively low in cholesterol, which he sells by mail order.

    When McDermott wrote to me about recreating the ancient auroch, I didn’t know what an auroch was—a monument à la Stonehenge? A Celtic symbol? A Bronze Age bagpipe? Turns out it’s a now-extinct breed of wild cattle, Bos primigenius, which is thought to be the ancestor of domestic cattle. The prehistoric cave paintings in Lascaux, France, featured aurochs prominently. Julius Caesar wrote about the animal he encountered in the Black Forest in the first century B.C., saying, “They are but a little less than elephants in size… Their strength is very great, and also their speed. They spare neither man nor beast that they see. They cannot endure the sight of men, nor be tamed.”

    Aurochs were hunted throughout most of Europe during the Middle Ages until only a small number remained in a royal forest in what is now Poland. The last auroch died in 1627.

    Through modern genetic methods and ancient breeding stock, McDermott claims to have recreated the auroch by accident when he bred his Highland cattle with Belgian Blue cattle. To my untrained eye, the hairy, muscular hybrid he has created does bear a striking resemblance to pictures of the wild cattle species of yore. Yet even at eight feet long and five feet high, the bulls are considerably smaller than some of the huge auroch skeletons unearthed in Europe, which have stood nearly six feet at the shoulder. But, hey, a miniature poodle is still a poodle, right?

    Well, sort of. As close as McDermott appears to have gotten to an auroch look-alike, scientists say there is virtually no chance that he has reverse-engineered the original auroch’s genetic makeup. Still, it’s kind of a kick to see McDermott pet and calm a big animal that looks like the one Caesar declared untamable. I decide I’d be willing to ride one into battle alongside McDermott should the Canadians ever attack his farm from the north.—Dan Gilchrist

  • Being Beige and Nothingness

    It started innocently enough, with a casual decision to gradually weed beige out of my wardrobe. What has beige done for me lately? What does it do for anyone, really? Have you ever received a compliment on a beige blouse or scarf? Later, while car shopping, I eagerly clicked on a web listing for a Plymouth Volare, an old favorite. I was crestfallen, then oddly annoyed to learn that the sedan was an indescribably innocuous shade of beige. You could compare it to the cream filling of a four-day-old bismarck. It made the car unbuyable. In the same way that tinted windows can impart a pimpish feel to certain automobiles, I realized that a beige Volare just immediately signifies “child molester.”

    Whence all the beige in our world? I began to wonder. The more you look, the more there is. And the more you see, the more perplexing it becomes. Two years ago, you may recall, astronomers declared the universe to be a turquoise shade—the New York Times even ran a little Pantone-ish square of the shade on its front page—but weeks later they said sorry, we got it wrong. The real color of the universe is beige. Somehow that seems only fitting, and foreboding: Beige is as infinitely mysterious and ever-present as the universe itself. Beige is the universe.

    Red is supposed to stimulate the appetite, while yellow is agitating. Certain shades of blue promote tranquility. What affect does beige have? Color theory tells us simply that beige represents practicality, conservatism, and neutrality. In other words, it has earned a reputation as the ultimate no-nonsense color. This explains how it has come to dominate in millions of square feet of corporate and institutional workspaces: copy rooms and kitchens, waiting rooms and lobbies, walls, halls, bathroom stalls… In its sheer abundance, beige collapses on itself to become stasis, obsolescence, mountains of computer monitors exported to Chinese junkyards.

    Even now, despite the inroads white, gray, and black have made in the computer-equipment color palette, beige stubbornly holds sway in the average office (the sliver of candy-colored Macs is so small as to be insignificant). Post-it notes provide a small bit of solace—they’re not only useful, but yellow. But overall it’s a losing battle. Think about it. Did you ever get file folders in any other color than “manila” without specifically asking? A friend of mine just started a new job in a one-hundred-percent beige cubicle. Looking up at the white ceiling is his only form of relief, he says. No wonder half the workforce is on antidepressants and the other half hates its job. That’s the effect of an economy fueled by business-like beige.

    Both in and outside the workplace, beige does dress up and try to disguise itself in more evocatively named colors—puce, taupe, cream, buff, oatmeal, biscuit, ecru, mushroom—but these many guises only reinforce its ubiquity. Tan and khaki are excluded from beige classification, however. They, like those food-oriented agents of beige, have other associations that give them some dimension. Beige, however, can only be a color. Or rather, it—not white—is the true non-color.

    Beige creeps in when nobody is around to make a choice otherwise. Beige is absence: of care, of taste, of opinion. It is a void or vacuum (which further supports its recent scientific designation as the color of nothingness). Beige as “neutrality”? It’s more like beige as the intersection of mediocrity and apathy. This is why beige is simply everywhere, once you start looking, the visual residue of some weird, dull-minded neurosis, hiding in plain sight.

    If you had to write the most boring book in the world, it would be hard to top the so-called Beige Book. This tome is published not once, but eight times a year by the Federal Reserve Bank—one of those all-powerful agencies that we really ought to know more about. (I, for one, simply can’t summon the interest. Maybe that’s the point.) The Beige Book itself is off-putting enough; purporting to gather “anecdotal information” from each of the twelve Federal Reserve Banks, its title is probably more effective that any form of obvious censorship could be. Then there’s Minneapolis’ own Federal Reserve Bank, whose designers seem to have made a point of choosing the beige-est possible shade of Kasota limestone (a favorite among institutional architects in the upper Midwest). Standing aloofly beside the Mississippi, the layers and textures of the complex deflect curiosity by radiating a willful blandness, such that a passerby’s natural impulse is to direct her attention toward the river—which is probably just the way the Fed wants it.

    Often you notice beige only in the presence of some other more assertive color. The Déjà Vu Showgirls club, just down Washington Avenue, provides a welcome contrast. One could argue that it’s intentionally garish and tasteless, given what the building’s tenant is up to, and it’s certainly no architectural wonder. However, let’s all be thankful for the pink paint on its frosted-stucco façade. It could’ve been beige. After all, beige was good enough for the multitudes of upscale lofts and townhouses that have sprung up all around it in recent years, importing a suburban, monochromatic, tract-house-style atmosphere into the downtown area.

    One of my most-ever hated buildings was the Vision Loss Resources rehabilitation center on Franklin and Lyndale. For years I passed it almost every day, an overwhelming monolith of windowless beige. The people using the building may be blind, but why does it follow that VLR should pretend to make this hulking monstrosity disappear for the rest of us by making it beige? Finally someone saw the light and painted it brick red. Not that it stemmed the tide. There’s a strikingly similar monument to blank beigeness at 28th Street and Nicollet, which I am told is a meatpacking plant (further evidence that beige is a perfect foil for mysterious goings-on); a tour of this particular neighborhood would be incomplete without noting the amazingly full-on beige McDonald’s, right down to the crushed-rock landscaping, a few blocks away. (McDonald’s brief flirtation with repainting its restaurants their original fire-engine red must have died out before they got to this one.)

    Beige is a cover-up. In a mass-produced environment, one governed by efficiency and not aesthetics, it is the default choice to offend no one, and so it is imposed on everyone. Unlike white, it is said not to show dirt; thus the beige linoleum, carpet, blinds, walls, and appliances in apartments owned by real estate management companies. But what does the bounty of beige say about us as a nation? Political pundits yammer on about red states and blue states. (Republicans apparently having forgotten about the Red Scares, which could mean it’s now okay to call moderate conservatives pinkos.) However, given all the trouble that simmers just below the surface of our economic fantasies and melting-pot mediocrity, it seems depressingly likely that the true color of the USA is, like the universe itself, beige.

  • Anatomically Incorrect

    Annie Neeley is a former Rochester courtroom sketcher and police composite artist now living in Florida. She’s been working on this one guy for quite some time. When she met him, he was attractive enough, but hardly dream man material… more of a fixer-upper, really. At first sight, Annie knew she was up to the task. A few short months later, he’s romantic, sexy, and almost the spitting image of Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean. And now that she’s got him just as she wants him, she’ll do the same thing she did to all her dream men before: Auction him off on eBay for around $1,500.

    “Jack the Pirate” is fifteen glorious inches of fashion-doll makeover, and Annie Neeley is one of a growing number of doll artists making a healthy income selling One of a Kind (OOAK) repainted dolls.

    OOAK repaints are commercially purchased dolls—Barbie, Bratz, Gene, and so on—that get stripped of their original paint and costuming and completely made over. While she was working in the Rochester transit system, Neeley was a collector of regular dolls when she stumbled into the world of artful reconstruction. “I saw the repaints for sale on eBay and I thought ‘I can do this, and I can do it better,’” she told me.

    It’s something like cosmetic surgery for dolls. The procedure may include erasing the doll’s facial features with nail-polish remover and repainting her face; taking her head off and removing her hair in order to re-root a different ’do; straightening bent arms or bending straight ones by making an incision in the arm with a razor blade, boiling the arm in water to soften the plastic, arranging the limb to the desired position, and then filling in the cut with putty; or using putty to augment facial features. Perhaps the most disturbing of the makeover processes is the “boil perm,” in which a doll’s hair is set by boiling her head.

    DIY plastic surgeons find help and solace in the work of Jim Faraone. He is the co-chair of the International Fashion Doll Convention, an organization that sponsors a contest and maintains an email list dedicated to repainting techniques. Do you need to know how to rethread Barbie’s hair? Detach her head, and use a piece of wire as a needle. If the wire gets lost in there, you can use a crochet hook to retrieve it. “The wire held up well and it only took me about three Star Trek episodes to reroot the whole head,” wrote Laurie Samford. Several books have also been published that compile this wealth of information.

    There is a brisk market for remade dolls. “I’d venture to say there are twenty-five to thirty repaint artists on eBay who do this,” Neeley explained. “And there are probably ten of us that do the best and have the top sales. There’s a little niche of very wealthy ladies who collect these dolls, and they will fight each other tooth-and-nail for them. Sometimes I think it’s a gambling thing.”

    In other words, this can be not only a spendy habit, but a highly addictive one. Neeley slyly confides that she has one repeat client who has sixty of her dolls stashed in her bedroom closet, while a special doll showroom is being added on to her house.—Sarah Sawyer

  • Louie the Wine Guy

    May 11, 2004

    “To a wine grape, it’s Eden.” That’s a trademark of the Napa Valley Vintner’s Association. For this wine guy, the Napa Valley Vintner’s Association tasting this past Thursday was heaven on earth. About eighty Napa Valley wineries showcased their best products, filling The Depot in Minneapolis.

    Being that the afternoon tasting for the trade industry was only two hours long, I should have made up a better plan of attack. As it was, I only got around to about fifteen of the eighty wineries, getting delayed by great conversation as well as great wine. Many of these wineries are looking for distribution in Minnesota, so I was quite excited about introducing a few of these hot commodities to The Wine Doctor, one smaller distributor looking for some new labels.
    One of my personal goals with the smaller Napa Valley producers, those yet to have distribution here in our fair city, is to introduce their wines myself to the public, through a variety of tasting events. It’s a pleasure to show people who love these wines how easy it is to pick up a cell phone and place an order directly to California. Shipping is “free” when you consider the savings on sales tax.
    Anyway, back to the wine tasting, which also showcased many familiar names, such as Shafer, Duckhorn, Terra Valentine, Raymond, Burgess, Clos du Val, Freemark Abbey, Phelps, Heitz, and Schramsberg. Many great wines were offered at their tables, but I found myself giving most of my attention to names like Frias Family, Gargiulo, Long Meadow Ranch, Howell Mountain Vineyards, Von Strasser, and Atalon.
    For instance, I spent some time talking with April Gargiulo, the daughter of the vineyard owner—turns out he’s the CEO of Sunkist, and the Napa vineyard is his “hobby”. Well, he may be a mere hobbyist, but the product is amazing! That was the only word I found apt to describe the cabernet, the merlot, and the “Aprile” super Tuscan blend of sangiovese & cabernet.

    A whole different story is unfolding at Fife Vineyards, whose owner, Dennis Fife, had been working in the industry forever, for the likes of Inglenook, BV, and Stag’s Leap. His 1999 Reserve Cabernet “Spring Mountain” evoked a similar one-word description in my wine notes: WOW! The experience of Fife only strengthened my devotion to mountain-grown wines, especially those from Spring Mountain. (Remember that the current reigning “champion,” The Wine Spectator’s “best in the world,” is the Paloma merlot from Spring Mountain.)
    My pick for best wine at the tasting has to go to the Frias Family (from Spring Mountain, naturally). Fernando Frias was generously showing his ’95, ’99, ’00, & ’01 cabernet (the only wine they make), each vintage a polished gem. Jon Sevigny of JV Wines & Spirits in Napa considers this cabernet the only one worth cellaring for a number of years; it’s very Bordeaux-styled, with great structure and great fruit. I will be showing the ’91, ’95, ’97, ’98 & ’99 at a tasting event coming soon. Stay tuned.

    A few other top picks to share: Bell Wine Cellars merlot & cabernet; Freemark Abbey ’99 “Sycamore” and “Bosche” cabernets; Howell Mountain Vineyards’ ’01 “Beatty Ranch” and “Black Sears” Zinfandel; and Turnbull ’01 cabernet “Oakville.” A few others I would be raving about, but had no time to taste (though I have in the past), are Shafer’s “Hillside Select” cabernet, anything from Viader, cabs from Schweiger and Von Strasser, and Reverie’s ’99 Special Reserve.

    What did some of the other local pros enjoy? Mikael Thollander of The Wine Doctor reports that his favorite winery was also Frias Family, followed by Gargiulo (do great wine minds think alike, or what?), and Peju. Mikael will be doing all he can to become the distributor for Frias Family wines. Another colleague, Tim Nordland, longtime manager of Lunds/Byerlys wine shops, concurred on the Frias and loved the Viader, though he commented that the latter wasn’t as good as past vintages. He added that the Volker Eisele wines were “killer stuff.”

    This pretty well sums up the powerhouse cabernets, merlots and blends from Napa Valley. Killer stuff indeed, and to many minds, surely to my own, worth the high price tags many bottles command. Again, my recent trip to Napa Valley convinced me that this is so. “For a wine grape, it’s Eden.” To a wine lover, this region is truly paradise.

    OK, back to the lovely reality that is springtime in Minnesota. What else is happening around town, as pertains to all things vino? Spring wine sales, like our gardens, abound. As a new wave of flowers replaces the last wave as it’s fading, so with wine sales. Following up on Haskell’s, Byerly’s, and Surdyk’s sales, now two fine shops, France 44 and South Lyndale are in full bloom!

    Scanning the extensive list from South Lyndale’s website (www.southlyndaleliquors.com) in preparation for a tasting I am hosting for the Northwoods Humane Society in early June, a couple of great wines jump out: Murphy-Goode “Wild Card” (sale price $11.99) and Steele “Pacini” Zinfandel (also $11.99). This is a good time to consider a perfect spring wine, Bonny Dune’s Cigare Volant: big, Rhone-style, as good as a forty-dollar Chateauneuf-du-Pape—at only $22.99. For the imports, try the wider selection at France 44—check out details about their sale at www.france44.com.

    Enjoy this most precious springtime ever, with food and friends, and, of course, with wine. And please email me via The Rake or via my website at www.louiethewineguy.com with your picks for the best al fresco dining and best wines-by-the-glass lists in town. I will report on these in a couple of weeks.

    And please stop in and visit me at the “Art-a-Whirl” in Northeast this weekend. I will be pouring some “Two Buck Chuck” merlot and a few other esoteric offerings at Old Science, right next door to Dusty’s Dago Bar, 1317 Marshall St. NE, on both Friday and Saturday nights. If you haven’t yet been a part of this art crawl, check it out!

  • Louie the Wine Guy

    May 3, 2004

    There is a lot going on in town right now, with some big sales ending and another in full swing. Byerly’s/Lunds’ sale is done, and the Haskell’s Nickel Sale goes through May 8. Surdyk’s is back on the scene with its “20/20” Sale through May 8,, during which they are featuring twenty percent off all wines in the store that “normally” sell for twenty dollars or more. This is another case where I should make my “consumer alert” about inflated “normal” prices. One small example: Surdyk’s lists Conundrum (a must-try this summer season!) at $26.99 regular price; with twenty percent off, it would be $21.59. By comparison, Wayzata Wine & Spirits (not known for its good values) lists Conundrum at $23.99, and if you attend the “Sipping by the Bay” tasting/fundraising event (more on this later), you get a fifteen percent discount for a sale price of $20.40.

    Another brief plug for Sam’s Club & Costco. They feature great prices for low-end wines, but are of special note in the high-end category, which you would not expect. For instance, Sam’s carries Viader regularly. This fabulous product, a Cabernet, Merlot & Cabernet Franc blend, retails at most places for around $90 a bottle. At Sam’s they sell the 750ml for about $55, and the 375ml for $29.99. If you want to have something very special for a Mother’s Day toast, pick up the 375ml bottle. It is a treat.

    The big news this week is a tasting report from three events last week. The first was a tasting and fundraiser for the Twin West Chamber of Commerce, where some twenty wines were shown. Among the whites, where a regional comparison of chardonnay was the focus, the entries from Napa (Burgess) and Sonoma (Clos du Bois) showed best over the central coast offerings from Concannon and Castle Rock. The fifth entry in this group was from Pedroncelli of Dry Creek region of Sonoma, and this was picked last.

    A special bottle, not available in our market but worth ordering directly from Napa, was the Husch sauvignon blanc. Very clean and smooth, it’s a great wine for summer fish dinners. Topping the list in the white wine department was Bonny Dune’s Muscat Vin de Glaciere dessert wine. Wow! At eighteen percent residual sugar, this luscious treat would be the perfect finish to that special evening which you began with Viader. The “ice wine” sells for $18.99 for the 375ml bottle.

    On to the reds! My collection here offered a wide range, from the “good value”of Penfolds “Rawson Retreat” merlot ($6 at Sam’s) to the wildly eclectic and very over-priced ($45) Blockheadia Zinfandel. Nevertheless, this Rhone-style wine was by far the hit of the evening, though the ’99 Burgess Zinfandel showed very well, as did the ’99 Mt. Veeder Cabernet (my favorite, but then I am a fool for Napa mountain-grown cabernet!).

    Other reds of note: Laurier Pinot Noir, Charles Shaw (of “2-buck Chuck” fame) Merlot, River Oaks Cabernet, and Purple Moon Shiraz, all direct from California entries and all worth checking out if you travel anywhere Trader Joe’s has a store. (There are rumors about TJ coming to Minnesota. If anyone has inside information about this development, please let me know.)

    A very special finale for the red wine enthusiasts at this event was a port from Shafer Vineyards of Napa Valley fame. Absolutely spectacular! Worth $30 for a half bottle? Most definitely.

    The second tasting event was the aforementioned “Sipping by the Bay” fundraiser put on at the Wayzata Country Club by the local Lions. This was your more typical tasting event with around seventy wines offered, with perhaps one-third of those worth tasting. I guess that they want to offer something for everyone, but really—Yellow Tail Shiraz?

    To give the French a break, I did try the Louis Jadot Pouilly Fuisse, and it was pleasant, but was it worth $21.69? Perhaps my palate has become dulled by the over-fruity and sometimes over-oaked California chardonnays. The French white Burgundies just don’t do it for me like they used to. Perhaps this would not be true if I were tasting a $50 Mersault or Puligny Montrachet, but, then again, how great are the high-end California chards, like Ferrari Carano and Newton? At the lower end of the spectrum, I’ll take California any time. And the Australian chards? They do etter, in my opinion, with the reds. Among the better chardonnays shown were Fess Parker, Kunde, Clos Pegase, and Toasted Head (very oaky!). And, of course, the Conundrum, which unfortunately still gets listed as a Caymus product, which it isn’t. Conundrum is a blend of chardonnay with several other grapes…a touch sweet, but very smooth. A truly perfect picnic wine.

    The other “Burgundy” grape, pinot noir, was well represented by David Bruce, La Crema, Kenwood, and Morgan. All very nice to my taste, and even more to my nose. There isn’t a better wine bouquet than pinot noir. (A word of note about Tin Roof’s rose of pinot noir—there are more and better dry rose wines appearing on the market all the time. Check them out. They are great summer wines, and many, like Tin Roof and Bonny Dune, are available with screw caps, which only makes them easier to sneak into parks and other places you are not supposed to bring alcohol.)

    The bigger reds like merlot and cabernet and zinfandel were topped by the Terra Valentine Cabernet from Spring Mountain. Don’t get me started on how great the Spring Mountain appellation truly is! Terra Valentine may not be the best producer on Spring Mountain (they have some amazing competition with the likes of Pride Mountain, Frias Family, Guilliams, and Paloma, to name a few), but their product is very good and they are owned by the Minnesota Wurtele’s. Gotta support our friends and neighbors. Clos du Val showed very well (if that is news), and the Trefethen Cab was solid. A bit disappointing to my taste were the cabs from Alexander Valley, like Geyser Peak and Frei Brothers.

    In my next report I will share my experience at the Napa Valley Vintner’s Association event on May 6. And we will also look further into what is happening on the local wine scene during May. As we Minnesotans can all agree, everything begins looking lovely in May, when the season opens on outdoor grilling, picnics, boating, cabins, and al fresco dining in the city. What a great time to share exciting new wines or old favorites. Enjoy this fabulous month!

  • Spring Forward

    I have never been a big fan of Chenin Blanc. If grapes were people, this variety would be your alcoholic uncle, all hail-fellow-well-met as he comes through the door, but a bit bland, short on attention span and interesting conversation, and liable to leave behind him a sensation somewhat different from the initial affable salute.

    A memorable 1961 Vouvray comes to mind, the pride of the cellar at a place where I used to work (such was the state of the academic job market in the Reagan-Thatcher years that I was in six establishments in seven years before the U of M snapped me up). Vouvray is always one hundred percent Chenin Blanc. It is a pale yellow wine from near Tours in the Loire valley, south of Paris, and is known for its keeping qualities. 1961 was a year with a fine reputation. Those in the know spoke in subdued tones of this treasure—it amounted to several dozen bottles. Quite enough, thought some, for one to be tested. The experiment was a revelation. Over the two decades these bottles had sat in the cellar, the contents had developed a flavor which combined the vapid nastiness of a Macintosh apple with the heady aroma of dry-cleaning fluid.

    The solution adopted to the problem of their disposal was not particularly kind. It followed the gospel principle that “every man at the beginning doth set forth good wine; and when men have well drunk, then that which is worse” (John 2:10). Some people at that particular staff farewell party may have been surprised at the lavish provision of liquids, but there were no complaints, which goes to show that even thinking people do not always think when they drink.

    Imagine then the pleasure of finding recently not one but two Vouvrays tasting as good as their mellifluous name (thrill to the delicious labiodental fricatives). Both are from the 2002 vintage, a year with a long sunny autumn—important if grapes are to ripen and become sweet in an area which is both inland and quite far north. Both may be had locally for about $10.

    The drier of the two is from the well-known domaine of Sauvion. It is a clear pale yellow. Its initial sweetness is followed by bright acid, but what lingers long after you have swallowed each mouthful is a delicious bitterness, like that of fresh grapefruit. I detected one note in it which would pick up the taste of gouda cheese. This would go down very nicely before dinner on a sunny evening, a pleasant variation from fashionable Sauvignon Blanc. Nor is it any dispraise to say that it would be an ideal wine to drink with potato salad, or one of those cold amalgams people put together for graduation parties that involve multicolored rigatoni, turmeric, and yogurt (or is it cottage cheese or mayonnaise—surely not Miracle Whip). It went well with a pasta sauce I make out of eggplants, browned onions, ricotta, and tinned tomatoes. It is surely no mistake that it comes from the region where the 16th-century French queen Catherine de Medicis had several chateaux, for it is she who is said to have introduced white sauce into French cooking from her native Italy—an Italy whose cuisine had in her day not yet integrated the tomato, a New World vegetable (or fruit—I am not getting into that one).

    Our other Vouvray is a similar pleasing pale yellow, but tastes somewhat sweeter. It is from the caves of Jean-Paul Poussin; caves not only in the French sense of “cellars” but also in the English sense, for M. Poussin’s bottles age in grottos cut out of the creamy local tufa limestone, caves which in the Middle Ages were used for disposing of bodies in times of plague. The wine gives the mouth a sense of fullness, in much the same way that champagne does (though this wine is not in the least fizzy).

    These are jolly good value, if you ask me, fine and fresh for spring. This is what wine might have tasted like in Eden, before the accumulated misdeeds of mankind made us sad and bland and boring. Drink them young.

  • Parmesan!

    Don’t let the imposters win. You are encouraging their success when you order a rum and Coke and settle for Shasta. When you allow people to offer a cup of java, then serve up Folgers crystals. The worst offense is to say “pass the Parmesan” as you’re looking at a rotund shaker of a fluffy white substance like artificial snow. These substances are not so much fake as they are shadows of a truer form. The cheese in that shaker at the pizza joint or in the green cylinder jar at the supermarket has almost nothing to do with the cheese it purports to be. Unfortunately, the phony version has more fame, not unlike a certain leggy, blonde Law & Order actress with the same name as a certain short, sassy, rakish food writer. But if the masses knew the flavorful and amazing truth about the original, they’d shun the green jar and grab their graters.

    “Parmesan” has unfortunately become a general term for Italian-style grated cheese. Parmigiano-Reggiano is the true name for the cheese you think you shake so well. Like Champagne or Bourbon, Parmigiano-Reggiano is named for the area in which it is produced, in the River Po River valley in Italy’s Emilia-Romagna province. The same cheese produced outside this region is called Grana Padano. The art of the cheesemaker has remained the same for more than eight hundred years, and it all began in a place called Parma.

    A story from Boccaccio’s Decameron, written around 1350, tells of a city by a mountain made of cheese. The good people of the mountain did nothing but make macaroni and ravioli, rolling the gifts down the peak to the hungry below. Ah, Parma. History is littered with instances of the appreciation of Parmigiano, in Italy and abroad. Taillevent, one of the first French cookbook authors, uses the cheese abundantly. Some accounts of Molière’s death witness him asking for a slice of the heavenly cheese on his deathbed.

    In 1400, the humanist Platina observed that Italy’s most renowned cheese, Parmigiano, was also called maggengo because it was produced in the month of May. By his time, the process had already been perfected for some two hundred years, and it is the identical process that is used today.

    Today’s artisans could be tempted by mechanization, but most still use milk, heat, and tradition to turn a good cheese.
    High-quality milk is one of the secrets to parm. The cows eat well, munching young grasses, herbs, and flowers in the spring and robust grasses and straw come autumn. Cheeses produced with spring milk have a lower butterfat content and may be drier and lighter than winter’s, but will also have a more delicate flavor. Milk’s butterfat is highest in the fall, lending the cheeses of October and November a deeper color and more intense flavor.

    The weather in Emilia-Romagna is another deciding factor. The humidity and variations of temperature help activate enzymes in the cheese that are responsible for creating its unique characteristics of flavor, color, aroma, and granular texture. Patience is another virtue of true Parmigiano, which takes from twelve to thirty-six months to mature. The standard chunk you buy will likely have basted in Italian breezes for eighteen to twenty-four months. Kraft proudly ages the stuff in its green jars for six months.

    The final factor is love. It’s the love of a process that requires myriad subtle and delicate operations in which a tiny variance could affect quality and value. Rigorous testing by the Consorzio del Parmigiano-Reggiano, a group that’s quite serious about cheese, decides whether the labor of love is a worthy one. If a one-year sampling of cheese fails the standard testing, it is stripped of its rind and not allowed export.

    Parmagiano-Reggiano is born as a seventy- to eighty-pound wheel whose rind is iron-branded with the Consorzio-approved stamp, the farm code and the date of production. By law, every piece cut from the wheel should have some marking on it (make sure you can see the rind on any piece you buy, or see the wheel from which it was cut). Then the cheese will fall into one of three categories. “Prima Stagionatura” identifies a cheese with a minor defect, but one still good enough for market; its rind is marked with parallel lines. “Extra” gets an oval stamp certifying at least eighteen months of ageing. “Export” is stamped as such and signifies first-grade quality after eighteen months.

    While most think of Parmigiano in its grated form, let’s please think outside the shaker. This cheese is wonderful shaved into thin slices and eaten with fresh fruit—pears and Granny Smith apples are ideal. There is nothing better than a beef carpaccio with capers and thin, blond shavings of Parm, which, at Arezzo Ristorante, is something they do fairly well. I recently watched (and later dreamt of) my chef-husband tossing warm fettuccini in the belly of a carved-out wheel of Parmigiano, the cheese melting slightly and coating the pasta.
    Want your own wheel? It can cost $800 to $1,200, without shipping. Scott Pikovsky of Great Ciao imports all sorts of crazy goodness from the Mediterranean area. Otherwise, for a slice here and there try some of the local Italian shops like Delmonico’s or Buon Giorno Italia. Even Lunds and Byerly’s have stepped up with good cheese. If you think grating your own is a bother, and you’re tempted to grab the “domestic Parmesan,” you may want to recall a colorful proverb from your childhood: Mr. Yuk is mean, Mr. Yuk is green.