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  • For the Love of Oysters

    Casanova was a scoundrel. He was a scalawag, banned from Venice and disqualified from a career with the Church. He scammed rich and poor alike at every turn. And he was a lawyer. Yet, if he were to make a few appearances between now and November, he might get elected president. For despite all his failings, or maybe because of them, Giovanni Giacomo Casanova knew how to make the ladies smile. By his own account in his famous History of My Life, he canoodled with 122 or so lovelies, from nuns to noblewomen. Though some think gossip fueled much of the reputation that made him such a titillating figure in Europe’s eighteenth-century society, many more pore over his multi-volume memoirs looking for the secret to his amorous success. These Casanovitiates try to emulate his behavior in hopes of getting similar results. Of course, to truly follow his lead, they’d have to squander fortunes, be imprisoned in numerous European cities, lie, cheat, steal, and eat at least fifty raw oysters a day. To some, it is the latter that is most reprehensible.

    Throwing back more than a dozen raw oysters before every meal was de rigueur for Casanova. Some of his most pleasurable memories have him eating them in the bathtub (not by himself, of course). Could this be the secret to his potency? Ever since Aphrodite, the goddess of Love, sprang forth from the sea foam on an oyster shell, giving us Eros, oysters have been known as an aphrodisiac. In this day and age, the era of Viagra and the Penis Enlargement Patch, it seems almost too easy to just suck down a few oysters and have a roll in the hay. But perhaps slippery things aren’t for beginners. Quite possibly, they’re advanced cuisine and meant only for those serious about the arts of eating and love.

    To quote Jonathan Swift, “He was a bold man that first ate an oyster.” It seems astonishing that someone could find along the shore an object that looks like a rock, pry it open, and think the viscous contents fit to eat. The first connoisseurs had to be the Romans, who were so passionate for the bivalves that they sent scores of slaves to gather them from the English Channel and paid their weight in gold. Aristotle first tried to understand how they bred in 320 B.C., when he described their spontaneous generation. While oysters do have gender, they may change their sex a few times throughout their life. An oyster releases “spat,” which must attach itself to a fixed object like a rock, tree roots, or pilings in order to grow into another oyster.

    The old oyster code declared that one should never eat an oyster in a month without an r, namely May through August. Whether that was because of natural breeding schedules or poor refrigeration in hot months, it’s no concern now. Today’s farming techniques and health codes allow us to slurp oysters all year long.

    There are three general classifications of oysters: Atlantic, Pacific, and Olympia. Within each classification are hundreds of varieties named for the specific waters in which the members of the Ostreidae family grow. As oysters filter their surrounding waters, they take on properties of the area. An oyster grown in Chincoteague Bay will have different flavors from one grown near Pine Island.

    Atlantic oysters are also generally known as Blue Points. To many, they provide the quintessential oyster experience. The cold waters of the eastern seaboard lend a clean, salty taste and firmer flesh, best for eating raw. Good bets include Malpeque, with its bright flavor and crisp lettuce finish, and Belon, with a lemony flavor and zingy aftertaste. Also look for Tatamagouche, Glidden Point, Caraquet, and Wellfleet.

    Pacific oysters can grow to be twelve inches long and end up as quite a mouthful. But their meat is creamier and mellower than that of their Atlantic brethren and, in some varieties, quite delicate. Totten, Malaspina, and Little Skookum are all great. Plump, smoky, and a touch sweet, Hog’s Island is the most flavorful of the West Coast oysters. Kumamoto should be every oyster virgin’s first. Small and easy to handle, it’s buttery with a fruity finish.

    The Olympia is in a class of its own. Native to the Pacific Coast, it naturally grows in Puget Sound. Although small in stature, rarely exceeding two inches, the Olympia has a firm texture and salty, metallic taste. Now let’s face it, it’s the texture that’s scary. (But if you liken it to snot, you should be slapped. Grow up.) Yet there are other things you put in your mouth that, if you think about it, are far more disgusting. Some people are unsure about how to eat an oyster—tilt it back or use a fork, to sauce or not to sauce, and do you chew? Just remember, there is nothing sexier than confidence. Pick up the half shell. You may want to loosen the meat a bit with a fork, but don’t dump out the water. Do a nice, brief squeeze of lemon, bring the shell to your lips, and tip it in. Close your eyes. Think of the ocean and chew your oyster a few times before letting it slip down. Dare to taste the metallic tinge on your tongue and the cucumber in the finish. Do not “shoot” the oyster.

    Knowledge is the base of true confidence, and Kitchen Window in Uptown offers classes with Chef Rick Kimmes of Oceanaire, who is a true oyster addict. Now you are ready to get a table with your baby at the romantic and alluring Lurcat. Order a couple of trays, confidently choosing a selection of East and West Coast varieties, and know that not only is it a fun thing to do with your mouth, but oysters contain a lot of zinc, phosphorus, and iodine, which are conducive to stamina. Go, you scalawag!

  • No Deposit, No Return, No Love

    It was 5:30 a.m. and it was pushing thirty below outside the Kemps Dairy on Minneapolis’s North Side. Mike White whistled a sunny tune as he loaded milk crates into the back of his truck. Like Dick Gephardt’s dad, he’s a milkman. Unlike Dick Gephardt’s dad, he’s still on his route. He delivers five days a week, fifty-two weeks a year—in the snow, rain, heat, or humidity. “Just another day for a milkman,” White said, with a wink. “We’ve done this before.”

    The milkman legacy runs three generations deep in the White family. It began with his grandfather, Emmett White, who delivered for the Ewald Dairy on Golden Valley Road in the late thirties. Back then, most of the deliveries were made by horse, although the first Divco trucks were just then going into service.

    When people think about home delivery today, they picture mega-companies like SimonDelivers or Schwan’s, operating with hundreds of employees. Mike White is a member of a group of fifty independent milkmen. In a kind of nod to the new competitors on the block, the loose association is called Milkman Delivers. White thinks both the association and the competition are good for his own business, because they promote the idea of home delivery—an idea that has more or less vanished in a cloud of single-occupancy cars headed to the grocery warehouse.

    The stars were fading from the blue-black sky as I followed Mike to the door of his first stop. It was a two-story house with a gray Volkswagen Passat parked in the driveway. “These people won’t mind if you come in,” he said. Mike and I walked right into the kitchen without so much as a knock. The mother of the household, Mary, greeted us as if we were family. She was still combing out her morning hair. “Girls,” she called. “Mike’s here.” Two girls ran down the steps to spy on us. “I love my milkman,” Mary said. “I just like it simple. Old-fashioned. I’m not into technology.”

    Mike got hooked on the business as a kid. His father, Jim, took him to the dairy to watch the bottles getting filled. “We would grab a chocolate milk right off the line,” he recalled. He helped his dad pack the truck with ice and ran the glass bottles to the doorsteps.

    Some of Mike’s customers have been with him for twenty-six years. A few are second generation—kids he watched grow up, now with families of their own. “I have all kinds of customers, from everyday people just scraping by, to some who have so many millions they don’t know what to do with them,” Mike said. He loaded cottage cheese for his next stop. Decades on the truck have made it possible for him to divine the empty spaces in the refrigerators on his route. “Some customers don’t even give me a list. I just put it in the fridge. They come home and it’s all taken care of.”

    A typical day spans ten to twelve hours, and he carries as much as sixty pounds of dairy and frozen food into a customer’s home. “I wouldn’t recommend it for the non-hardy,” he said, stooping for a plastic crate. In almost three decades, he’s had a total of two weeks’ vacation. “I don’t break. I eat my sandwich as I go. No time for lollygagging.”

    The snow crunched under our feet as we approached a Kenwood home. Mike pulled a doggy biscuit from his pocket. “Secrets of the trade,” he said, as two freshly trimmed poodles circled in the kitchen. Darla, a pretty blond housekeeper answered the door. There was an antique Ewald Dairy milk box at her feet. Milkman and loyal client chatted amiably, but Mike suddenly looked alarmed and stopped short. “I forgot something!” He jogged back to his truck, and Darla looked at me with a coy smile. “Sometimes he brings me a treat,” she confided. Mike returned with a box of orange creme bars.

    Back on the truck, I asked him how the milkman was different from the dot-com upstarts, and he laughed. “We’re the guys who show up and the old lady asks, ‘Can you change the light bulb?’” he said. “We deliver. They drop the stuff off at the curb and run.”—John Tribbett

  • Where Art Thou?

    If you hold on to your hat and hustle over to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, you might catch the Werner Bischoff exhibition. Bischoff did as much as anyone to define photojournalism in mid-century magazines like Du and Paris Match. His work appears on the walls in sixty or seventy frames, a pretty healthy sampling. The MIA staff have helpfully provided about 940 more images on a CD, for a grand total of about one drop in the bucket of Bischoff’s collected work. Which is a telling conundrum. Typically, no museum worth its endowment can exhibit more than a tiny fraction of what it owns.

    More recently, the Web has allowed museums to hold their cards a bit further from their vests. I was pleasantly surprised to find out about the MIA’s extensive photography holdings beyond the Bischoff materials. In an idle moment scanning their collection online, I saw one of my favorite photos ever—a rusty tricycle composed by William Eggleston, titled “Memphis.” Personal obsession and screen resolution being what they are, I called the MIA right away to find out what it takes to get inside to see the real print, in the flesh. Ted Hartwell, the curator of photographs, agreed to be my guide with such eager grace that I wondered if they let just anyone off Third Avenue paw their priceless stuff.

    In tweed and eyeglasses with gray hair and a charming smile, Hartwell fits nicely in the MIA’s small, book-lined photography offices. Meeting with him feels a little like talking to a professor in his office. On the other side of an unmarked door, thousands of photographs sit in a sort of platonic netherworld, art waiting to be reclaimed by living eyes.

    The room is cold and bright, and it brims with black boxes stacked like drawers on metal shelves. The only hint of treasure within is printed on small white labels. Some bear anonymous catalog numbers, others show off iconic names like Hine, Evans, Friedlander, Muybridge—the heavy hitters of photographic history. Basically, it’s the most comprehensive collection in the region, outside of Chicago.

    Though “Memphis” has made its way to the upstairs exhibition gallery within the last year, many works can go years without a public appearance. “What’s on the wall at any given time is only the top layer,” noted Hartwell. Less than five percent of the Institute’s 100,000-piece collection is on display at any given time.

    After an appetizer of Gary Winogrand photographs—I’ve always enjoyed his slightly skewed New York street scenes—I asked Hartwell to track down the Eggleston print. In a moment, “Memphis” was perched without pretense in front of me.

    To remove the added layer of a frame, to touch the matting and carefully peek beneath the protective film, to look as long as you like—well, think of it as the difference between merely meeting someone and establishing a relationship. You may think you like the look of her, but a relationship implies a whole other level of interaction, a deeper connection. Looking at the Eggleston print in person, I notice more, I relate more. It demands all of my attention.

    Hartwell started the collection from scratch about thirty years ago. Through a carefully tended arbor of relationships with photographers, collectors, and donors, he has created a highly personal, stridently “balanced” collection. The holdings do have surprising breadth, ranging from Hartwell’s very first acquisition, a complete set of Alfred Stieglitz’s Camera Works periodicals, to one of the nation’s definitive collections: the work of Gilles Peress, one of the contemporary artists who pioneered photography in the New Yorker.

    Hartwell’s own list of rarely shown favorites from the collection includes both the famous and the obscure. He’s a fan of the relative unknowns Bruce Davidson and Bernice Abbott but is not afraid to embrace the overexposed Edward Weston. At the moment, he’s particularly fond of Adolf Fassbender. If I didn’t know how easy it is to request an audience with all this wonderful art, I’d be jealous of all the alone time Hartwell gets here and how frequently he must revise his list.—Stephanie Xenos

  • You Gotta Pay to Play—not!

    I read with gratitude Joe Pastoor’s recent article “All Shook Down: Is ASCAP kneecapping your corner coffee shop?”[November]. As one of those interviewed for the article, I offer these observations. BMI spokesman Jerry Bailey is not correct when he says that “if a business owner is not playing BMI music, he/she has nothing to worry about.” For fifteen years I have scrupulously avoided singing “cover tunes” (songs written and copyrighted by others) solely because of copyright considerations. And yet I lost a steady job as the only musician at Schemmy’s Restaurant in Rhinebeck, New York, after the owners received a series of threatening letters from BMI. Despite several communications on my part, BMI refused to concede my right to play my own songs copyrighted in my own name, and traditional folk songs in the public domain, anywhere I want to, whether or not the venue has a performance license from BMI. “We’re not going to give you that,” said Craig Stamm, director of general licensing for BMI. Ultimately, the U.S. Copyright Office ruled in my favor on both counts. But, as Pastoor notes, by then I had lost the gig. Schemmy’s Restaurant decided not to have live music or even play CDs, rather than face a protracted battle with an unrepentant BMI. The net result is indeed that there are fewer places for artists to get started. Laurie Hughes of ASCAP denies this by saying,“If a club is playing all original music, they don’t need a license. Copyright holders don’t need permission to play their own works.” This is true, of course—but I had to wage a seven-month battle with BMI to secure this right for all songwriters across the country. BMI had attempted to extort royalties from my employers for my performance of my songs, and of my arrangements of the traditional songs of my ancestors. I believe BMI essentially thought they could obtain royalties for my music, even though I have never joined BMI. They cannot. This is America. We have the right to remain independent.
    Richard Hayes Phillips, Canton, NY

  • Uh, Start Here: Missingchildrenmn.org

    I will share Clinton Collins’ outrage over the alleged disproportionate amount of coverage given to the Dru Sjodin abduction if he can provide the name of a young female university student of color who was abducted from the parking lot of her part-time employer in Minnesota/North Dakota. Does the fact that I can’t think of a single incident prove Collins’s point, or have there simply not been similar cases? The claim that there is an increase in the uproar over this crime because the suspect has “swarthy” skin color is ridiculous. What concerns many people is that our criminal justice system allowed an untreated convicted violent sexual predator to commit another crime by not providing for indefinite incarceration. Finally, Clarence Thomas was not a competent candidate for the high position to which he was eventually confirmed. His incompetency had nothing to do with his race but rather with his lack of demonstrated experience and intellectual depth. If those who objected to his confirmation had broached these matters, they would certainly have been accused of racism. The allegations of sexual impropriety were made by a black woman who was consequently crucified through unfair and untrue allegations by the right wing proponents of Thomas’s confirmation. Does Collins have a concern about the racist condemnation of Professor Hill?
    J.M. Workman, St. Paul

  • Free Fact-Checking, with Interest!

    About the book Bly published of Neruda translations in the mid-sixties, author Jon Zurn quotes Bly as saying “I think that was the first time he’d been published in the U.S.” That’s not so. The first Neruda poems in English that were published in a book in the U.S. seem to have been in Three Spanish American poets: Pellicer, Neruda [and] Andrade (Albuquerque, Sage Books 1942). But subsequent editions devoted solely to English translations of Neruda’s writings were issued by the estimable New Directions in 1946, New York-based Masses & Mainstream in 1950, Grove Press in 1961, and City Lights in 1962.
    Chris Dodge
    Utne magazine librarian
    Minneapolis

  • Bly or Blithe?

    I grew up in Madison, Minnesota. My school bus downshifted on the gravel road right in front of Robert Bly’s familial home every day for nearly twelve years. That area is my home and my people. I know them and I miss them. And far from what you imagine, they have plenty of “intellectual musings.” Far more than any genius found at Harvard or Princeton. Most of those folks don’t need to contemplate anything any further than the end of their own grass and the gravel-covered driveway. They “get” life. They just understand it without having to go to the farthest ends of the Earth looking for some way to explain it all. They just know it because they just do. Just because Bly didn’t fit in isn’t the fault of anyone out there. Those pointy-headed intellectuals who feel they think “differently” delude themselves into thinking they are the bright ones. Every day, farm folks live their lives with just as much generosity, strength, savvy, and grace as you will see anywhere else you’d care to look. Those folks have more horse sense than all the intellectuals on Lowry Hill rolled into an oatstraw bale. Never underestimate the intellect of a farmer.
    Sue Connor Mills, Carver

  • Bly, Bly Love

    As both a feminist and a longtime admirer of Robert Bly’s work, I find myself wanting to respond to your excellent, in-depth article [“The Dude Abides,” January]. Not so long ago I ran into one of Bly’s “woodsy drummers,” who expressed amazement that I didn’t find anything wrong with what he was doing. Unless Bly and his drummers are propounding things I haven’t heard of yet (or clandestinely burning women at the stake), I fully support his movement. What’s wrong with men recognizing that there’s something wrong with men in this society, and trying to make themselves more whole? We have—statistically—one of the more violent countries in the world, and more than ninety percent of our violent crimes are committed by men. Something is very wrong here. Like many women I know, I’m tired of trying to teach men how to become human. If they want to do it themselves, I for one am all for it. (Yes, of course I’m speaking in generalities; I know there are also very well-balanced men…on occasion.) When we relegate emotional and cultural work to females, both sexes lose out. Having said that, I would also like to note that many of the early alarmist responses by feminists are also understandable. They were justifiably afraid of the directions this idea might go; groups like the Promise Keepers and the “white men’s rights” bunch bear out their concerns. But that is certainly not the fault of Robert Bly or his movement. As for you, Mr. Bly: Please keep on drumming, dancing, dreaming, writing, and working the clay of those archetypes.
    Gail Cerridwen, Anoka

  • Designer Labels

    “Wigger” is just another stereotype put upon a certain group of people to criticize who they are [“Has Your Shizzle Gone Fazizzle?,” January]. Ethnicity doesn’t greatly affect personality. It is mostly a person’s environment that influences their behavior. One should feel free to be him or herself without worrying if they are acting like everyone else in their own racial category. America categorizes people who act similarly, and makes a smaller category for those who are considered out-of-the-ordinary. As long as your true character shows, race doesn’t matter. I do agree with the article about this: If you’re going to use Ebonics, at least know what they mean. I get tired of whites exaggerating in their attempts to mimic black culture.
    Caitlin Rolf, Minneapolis

  • Cry for the Others, Too

    Clinton Collins’ essay [Free the Jackson Five, January] on the Dru Sjodin case and the inequities of valuing lives due to skin color really hit home with me. Long ago, when I was a student at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, I was raped by two men who threatened to kill me and dump my body in the nearby Mississippi River. It was nighttime. I wasn’t sure I’d make it out alive. The year was 1968. I never reported the incident. Now, I watch more than closely any article on a woman who “disappears.” Some are found dead, some are never found. In the past several years, I’ve noticed the difference as to how much press the disappearance of a white women gets as opposed to women of color. Having come very close to being one of the disappeared, I feel very strongly for each of these women I hear about and the horrific circumstances I know they’ve endured. Thank you for being a voice for the women who are only mentioned on page two or three of the newspaper—whose disappearance or death only gets small mention, or perhaps no mention at all. As a community, we need to examine ourselves. Why do we allow this inequity to exist? We need to wake up.
    Jeanne Cowan