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  • Family’s Value

    Here we go again. A young, white, blond-haired blue-eyed woman is abducted, presumably by some dark-skinned nefarious person. The media play swells into hyper, almost orgiastic über-coverage. The military gets drafted to search for the damsel in distress, and, in the latest round, the governor calls for the death penalty and holds candlelight vigils.

    Excuse me if I sound just a little bit cynical about the overwhelming national outpouring of emotional stuff about Dru Sjodin. Yes, the abduction and presumed murder of Sjodin is tragic. However, I cannot shake this deep-seated resentment that wells up inside me whenever I read yet another story about her abduction.

    I want to shout in anguish: What about the nameless black women and American Indian women who have been and continue to be stolen, raped and murdered? Do we launch dramatic rescues to save them? Do we send the National Guard looking for them? Does the governor make an impassioned plea to bring back the death penalty because something bad happened to them?

    Are you kidding? This is America, where certain lives have a greater value than others.

    A good friend of mine told me to be careful about this column. After all, I have a blond-haired, blue-eyed wife. Yes, I do. And I also have a dark-haired, dark-skinned sister and mother. As much as I love my wife, it makes me mad as hell to realize that, in all probability, her abduction would rate more media attention than one of her dark-skinned sisters-in-law.

    With our nation’s sordid past of measuring one’s worth based on appearance and ethnicity, why should we expect anything different? The men who wrote our Constitution explicitly held that black people were worth three-fifths of a white person, placing into law what most white people accepted without much thought—that a black life was worth less than a white one.

    There is a collective memory that most black people share, at some deep level, of the day-to-day humiliations, of beatings, cross-burnings, and Jim Crow, that even bourgeois black folk cannot completely exorcise. And the goal of the beatings and burnings was to keep the races separate, lest white women be ruined. Ever since we have been in America, we have seen white women held up as a commodity to be protected at all costs, especially from the swarthy men who were most likely to do them harm. Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas knew full well what he was doing when he called his confirmation confrontation a high-tech lynching. He knew that black people, regardless of political orientation, would instinctively circle the wagons to keep another brother from being lynched from the tree of sexual impropriety.

    Now, Alfonso Rodriguez Jr., Sjodin’s alleged abductor, is not a “brother”; however, with his Latino surname and less-than-ivory skin tone, he is close enough for many Minnesotans. Governor Pawlenty has had a year’s worth of criminal mayhem to pick from as the launching pad for his death penalty crusade. Yet this so-called pro-life governor picked the snatching of an attractive Scandinavian princess, and not the murder and/or abduction of a dark-skinned Minnesotan, to bring back the state-sanctioned snuffing of a life. That speaks volumes about whose lives have the most value.

    I am sure that some of the more jaded readers are thinking, “There he goes again, playing the race card.” I am upset about Dru Sjodin because it was such a terrible crime. Race had nothing to do with it.

    Many readers probably believe that I am race-baiting. OK, name one abduction of a woman of color in Minnesota that led to any of the following—national media coverage, a National Guard search, a gubernatorial press conference complete with a vow to kill sexual predators that prey on the Dru Sjodins of this state.

    I am not advocating that we ignore things like the Dru Sjodin abduction. I readily admit that it is newsworthy and it is upsetting when these kinds of crime happen to people. I just want the people who look like Dru Sjodin to be just as concerned and outraged when the people who look like my sister have bad things happen to them. Why is it news only when the victim is white?

  • Ben Jones, The Rope Eater

    What an impressive debut! Disaffected Civil War vet Kane drifts aimlessly into a job on an Arctic vessel called the Narthex, where he discovers that his crewmates are a collection of eccentrics, murderers, and freaks (the engineer even has three hands). The purpose of the voyage is obscure and mysterious, but it has something to do with the plans of creepy ship scientist Dr. Architeuthis, whom Jones names after the Latin for “giant squid.” That might all make the book sound rather silly, but it isn’t. Jones knows his era and setting well—he immersed himself in it as editor of Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s The Worst Journey in the World, a nonfiction account of the disastrous Scott expedition to the Antarctic. (See this month’s Letters to the Editor). Rope Eater is a Melvillean literary take on adventure fiction; it’s dreamlike, macabre, and tinged with ominous overtones of doom, like the voyages of Ernest Shackelford as narrated by Edgar Allan Poe.

  • Anne Tyler, The Amateur Marriage

    In a typical “opposites attract” love story, the clash factor usually serves to fan the flames of torrid passion. They fight, they pine, they end up in bed. Repeat until one of them dies. Nothing is quite this simple in Anne Tyler’s reality. The Minneapolis-born author’s sixteenth novel, The Amateur Marriage, focuses on the Antons, a Baltimore couple whose unwavering disdain for each other plagues three generations with grievance and heartache. It’s early in WWII when their relationship begins, innocently enough, with the impulsive Pauline staggering into Michael’s family shop, injured from one of her crazy stunts. Cupid hits them with an electric case of love at first sight, followed by a shotgun marriage, three children, and thirty years of wedded misery. Tyler’s often bleak storylines are ameliorated by her Sahara-dry humor and detail. But the genuine sentiment between hubby and wife that seeps in throughout the story—followed by the fact that they just can’t make it work—might leave the average reader frustrated by Tyler’s uncharitable conceit that love doesn’t always conquer all.

  • Standing History

    I am upstairs in a dilapidated building. The room is empty and exudes a sense of its age. Wood floorboards and cracked plaster are coated with dust. Late afternoon sun pours through windows that nearly fill one wall, while their grime casts odd shadows. Crouching low, I’m holding some loose cardboard-thin pieces of the floor. I’ve collected several. Although plain at first glance, I turn them over and am alarmed to find text in grand 19th-century typeface, interspersed with fragmented portraits. In one, a youngish, clean-shaven man in a high, starched collar stares past the photographer’s shoulder. His present image can only whisper the care with which he dressed for the sitting. Grainy black-and-white is now nearly gray-on-gray. My heart skips as I realize that I have seriously screwed up. Why didn’t I notice this before? I know I wouldn’t have moved these if I’d seen the printing, and I’m sure it wasn’t there before. My confusion grows as I try to remember specifically where I picked up each piece. Why would printed images be part of a floor?

    The rest of the floor soon distracts me from these questions. Quite ordinary at the edges and toward the middle, it curves sharply upward at the center in a sort of inverse funnel. This area is about the diameter of a tree trunk and flat on top like a stump, about a foot higher than the rest of the floor. Some parts of it have the texture of bark, while otherwise the weathered saw-cut floorboards follow the impossible contours. Before this can begin to make sense, a wooden lid on top wiggles and then falls as a beaver scurries out of the floor. This startles me, of course. The beaver immediately starts to chase a fat cat with matted fur that’s been hanging around the room. I’m concerned for the cat (beavers do have big teeth, after all) but can’t seem to intervene.

    Thankfully, I wake up in the constrictor grip of a coiled sheet. My face is in the pillow, head angled slightly for air, arms folded in tingly flightless wings underneath me. Mid-morning sun pours through a clean window, helping me identify the guest room of a friend’s house.

    The dream comes back to me later, as I drive home from Deerwood. I ponder while I dodge Sunday traffic and warble along with Jimmy Buffett. The first part of the dream is easy—the setting was very similar to the front, upstairs room at the Schneider-Bulera House. While that name doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue, it does nicely honor the extended family that lived there from 1869 through 1987. The house has been a preoccupation for me lately, and to varying degrees for several years. An unsung landmark in St. Paul’s Uppertown neighborhood, it is notably old for buildings in this part of the world, which is all the more exceptional considering its unassuming appearance. This is a small wooden house that’s very rough around the edges, but that’s the beauty of it. This is not a rich person’s mansion, or a piece of monumental public architecture. The Schneider-Bulera House is a real family’s house—a home—that somehow wasn’t washed away by the tides of decades, turning to centuries, of ongoing transformations within a growing city. St. Paul was born through structures like this, and nearly all have vanished.

    I’m an archaeologist by training, and through my trade have acquired the habit of trying to look beneath the surface of pretty much everything. All landscapes are layers of stories, whether forest or prairie, rural or urban. For archaeologists, looking for what’s hidden in even the most boringly normal places eventually becomes an occupational hazard. Evidence is a vital aspect of archaeological research, as is provenience—the location and relationship in which objects are found. Like disturbing a crime scene, moving things around before the recording is done can result in an investigative dead end. In my dream, I was upset to realize that I’d been removing artifacts without recognizing their importance, and without proper documentation. This is an archaeologist’s version of dreaming that you’ve accidentally gone to school in your underwear.

    Normally one doesn’t excavate inside an extant building. The Schneider-Bulera House is different. It’s been on my mind more than usual lately because a good friend of mine, a fellow archaeologist, is rebuilding it, using archaeological methods to guide the process. Excavations are sometimes conducted to help rebuild destroyed buildings, but in this case the fabric of the structure itself is the subject of the investigation. This is a new approach to archaeology in Minnesota. The house is currently a shell, gutted and stabilized, thus exposing a myriad of clues about its mysterious origins. It’s a professional challenge too. Most of these clues are subtle at best, such as the way a saw was used to cut a joist, layers of ancient paint, the form of old iron nails, the dimensions of a splashboard and so on. The right eyes are needed to recognize, analyze, and interpret them.

    I met the Schneider-Bulera House in 1999, when I joined an archaeological dig in the backyard. The loneliness and disrepair of the place shrouded a rich history, which started edging into my imagination immediately. By afternoon, I was picking through a nest of mummified rats at the base of a fallen chimney, and decided that I wanted to live there. The house needed an owner. It had been unoccupied for more than a decade, and it fit my admittedly eccentric tastes. My attraction wasn’t the rats (although they were cool, and now are skeletonized in an archaeology lab). I think it might have been the charm of Uppertown, and the subtle role of this house in that strange brew of history.

    The excavations have illuminated the legacy of generations of children and noisy family life. The artifacts are the everyday objects of another time—a broken bone toothbrush, a cast-iron clothes iron, carriage parts, scraps of a German-language newspaper, shards of bottles and pottery, fragments of porcelain dolls and handmade marbles, buttons and cufflinks, pipe stems, fruit pits, nutshells, eggshells, and animal bones. A test pit outside the kitchen window produced dozens of chicken bones (feet in particular). One of the bottle fragments is embossed “DR KING’S NEW DISCOVERY FOR CONSUMPTION.”

  • Desert Island Duffel

    If you go to a movie at the Heights Theater and there’s a man in front blocking your view of the screen, check to see if he’s playing a pipe organ. If so, he might be Karl Eilers. He’s one of three organists who perform on weekends and during silent-film screenings on the Heights’ lovingly restored Wurlitzer pipe organ, one of the few of its kind left in the U.S. Eilers knows his work literally from the inside out—for decades, he not only played organs, but also built them. These days, he worries that there aren’t enough new players to replace the old guard, but he loves performing for theatergoers as much as ever, savoring the improvisational skill it requires. “Sure, you’re playing standards, but like jazz, it’s new every time,” he says. “Even if it’s written by Duke Ellington, when I play it, it’s mine.” Here’s what Eilers would bring along if cast away on some lonely Pacific island.
    1) The Heights organ, of course. This would have to be a very well-planned shipwreck, because that took three years to put in. But that’s the only entertainment choice I can think of that’d do me forever. That, or a big Steinway grand piano.
    2) I’m going to cheat—I’m going to burn my own CDs. CD one: Mozart’s and Gabriel Fauré’s requiems. The Mozart, it’s universally regarded as one of his greatest works, even though half was written by somebody else because he died in the middle of it. The Fauré Requiem isn’t like any I can think of. It’s sometimes called the “Dream Requiem,” all peace and light. Very nice. You should try it.
    3) CD two: Alicia De Larrocha’s Spanish piano stuff. Spectacular and extremely well played. I’d tack on “The Chairman Dances” by John Adams, something he wrote but didn’t use for his opera Nixon in China. It has everything—emotion and complex structure, but also superficial charm.
    4) CD three is a bunch of stuff. Piano jazz from Sergio Salvatore, Brian Setzer, Don Henley, and actually a cut or two from Justin Timberlake. Now, if I’m marooned forever I’ll get tired of those, but at the moment they’re still fresh.
    5) Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand. You can read it ten times and still find worthwhile stuff. And also a boxed set of the Harry Potter books.

  • Straight Talk

    You’ll remember Mark Mothersbaugh as the leader of Devo, the New Wave band with the red plastic ziggurat hats who stormed MTV with clever synth-pop songs like “Whip It” and “Girl U Want.” Though the band is semi-dormant, Mothersbaugh has continued to produce new work at a jealousy-inspiring pace. He and his bandmates stay busy at his Mutato Muszika studio with film and commercial soundtracks ranging from Rugrats to The Royal Tenenbaums. But he has also been a visual artist since before the formation of Devo in the early 1970s, and in the last several years he has embarked on an ambitious serious of small-gallery shows across the country. His latest, a series of photomanipulations called Beautiful Mutants, kicks off at Ox-Op Gallery in Minneapolis on January 3.

    THE RAKE: Tell me about the Beautiful Mutant series.

    MARK: It’s a collection of pieces I’ve been working on since 1998 or ’99. They’re somewhere between Rorschach prints and a literal portrait. I’ve always been kind of obsessed with symmetry in human form. It’s actually a lie, because we aren’t really symmetrical, we’re only vaguely symmetrical. We’re as close to the potato as we are to a perfect mineral or a snowflake.

    THE RAKE:How many photos have you done?

    MARK: I’ve done quite a few experiments, one or two thousand, and I’ve done about 350 that I think are really compelling. The ideas behind Rorschach art were intriguing to me, that people are compelled to attach meaning to abstract forms.

    THE RAKE: Though the band’s often remembered for the robotic dancing and the wacky hats, Devo was always more than just a novelty band.

    MARK: Everybody in Devo has always felt this attraction to come up with something so strong that it couldn’t just be confined to “weirdo art.” Devo at its best was always able to straddle that line between commercial art and fine art. We were hoping popular culture was going to take a quantum leap. Our surprise was that it was so easy to misuse sound and vision and turn it into something banal. When we were first making films, we had high hopes [for MTV]. What it turned out to be was a less interesting version of Home Shopping Network, because it had a smaller range of products—they were all just records.

    THE RAKE: Are you happier as a visual artist than a musician? You’re completely in control of your message that way, and don’t have to worry about your record label passing you off as a novelty act.

    MARK: Well, you know, it’s two-sided. Obviously, music is such a big art form. And I do like the challenge of being able to make something that’s relevant to you personally into successful public art. With Beautiful Mutants, it may not be as important to people as if I was showing at the Museum of Modern Art. But I’ve found an audience [at small galleries] that’s fervent about ideas and challenging imagery. The last tour was really satisfying.

    THE RAKE: The cliché about artists is that they hate doing commercial work, but you seem to get a charge out of it.

    MARK: It goes back to being influenced by Andy Warhol. He played with that edge between commercial and fine art and attacked it very overtly with things like the Campbell’s Soup can. I grew up with the hippies, and watched them get crushed at Kent State while I was there, and became aware of the fact that in this country, rebellion was obsolete. The ironic thing about the punks is that they never learned that lesson from the hippies and became a commodity so quickly. We always felt like the best way to change something was through subversion.

    THE RAKE: You’re swinging through Minneapolis twice in 2004, returning for a December show at Creative Electric gallery. What keeps drawing you back here?

    MARK: We love Minneapolis. That’s where we first worked with Chuck Statler on the very first Devo film. I remember going up to his place about 1975, and we got to his house and his garage had been crushed by snow. You have a number of good galleries—what can I say? Most cities in the world can’t get one good gallery, so I’m counting my blessings in Minneapolis.

  • No Stuart!

    I just read your article on strip clubs [Sex & The Married Man, “Should Married Men Go to Strip Clubs?” August]. Strangely enough, someone posted it on our bathroom stall in my college dorm. So your friends regularly attend strip clubs. Good, wholesome fun, right? They’re not hurting anyone. I could not disagree more. One question I raise to men and women who go to strip clubs is, Did they ever think about the actual person inside of that body? I doubt it. I don’t know all the reasons why people choose to strip, but I know some. Although strippers probably say it’s good money (or “I’m so hot why wouldn’t I show off my body”), I think they are all neglecting to dig deeper for the real problem. All female strippers have low self-esteem and this is how they make themselves feel better. A backwards way of doing it, if you ask me. Because by showing off their body to these men who call out to them, fantasize about them, call them “baby,” they are objectifying themselves completely. They are losing their identity and being valued solely for their fake breasts and painted faces. And your friends, you say they are capable of healthy relationships. I disagree. If they objectify these women so often and so callously, how could they truly value their wives? And what about how their wives feel? Do you think they enjoy being compared to an unreal standard of beauty? By going to strip clubs, they are disrespecting their partners.
    Jenna Sophia Hanson
    Minneapolis

  • Go Stuart!

    Stuart Greene [Sex & The Married Man, “Dancing With Myself”] has guts. Yes, we all do it. No, we never admit it. And I think his statement that sometimes sex for men is just a physical thing is true. That doesn’t mean we can’t have deep loving relationships, and we prove it all the time. As he said in a previous column, any men who claim they never “go solo” are either liars or politicians or both. Hell, let’s all pretend we never watch TV while we’re at it; it’ll make us seem smarter and more responsible than we really are. Just don’t get moralistic on me, or I’m liable to go all Kiefer Sutherland on your ass.
    Nick Harding, Roanoke, VA

  • The Wind and the Wire

    Bravo to The Rake on its series of stories on shipwrecks [“Too Deep, Too Dark, Too Cold,” November] These were very well-researched and well-put-together articles and I very much enjoyed reading them. As a result of your articles, my husband and I will be attending the Gales of November conference in Duluth next weekend and we are considering making the trip to Michigan for the Ghost Ships conference next spring as well. We have a sailboat on Lake Superior, which provides us an intimate link to her, and we always enjoy reading these stories.
    Karen Brown
    Andover

  • Who’s in Charge Here?

    Remember those low-budget horror films from the 1950s? Other-worldly music would play, and then a creepy creature would land its spaceship in a swamp in the middle of nowhere, slither out, and tell the first startled Earthling, “Take me to your leader.” Now, as then, we laugh at the idea that there could possibly be “one leader” of anything—unless you’re talking about black people. Sadly, most white people and even a few misguided black ones expect that there must be one, two, or maybe three individuals who speak for all black people. This is a stupid, racist, outmoded view of the world that must be discarded once and for all.

    During slavery, “Massa” would often appoint one or two trusted field hands as overseers of the other slaves. Instead of having to interact with many slaves, Massa would simply give the word to the “head nigger in charge,” who would take it from there. For slave owners, who viewed black people as simple-minded chattel, the system made perfect sense. Why deal with fifty to a hundred darkies when one could easily limit contact to a manageable one or two? Underpinning this system were two concepts—first, that the HNIC was selected, not elected. Second, and more important, the HNIC was merely a go-between for the white and black folks. The HNIC could never really serve as an advocate for fellow blacks and sure as hell could not tell the white folks what to do.

    Now, many people think things have changed. We have Secretary of State Colin Powell, and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice—African-Americans who have risen well above HNIC status. But when it comes to the bread and butter stuff that most of us care about, the impulse to find the HNIC is still pervasive, at least here in Minnesota.

    Consider one of the most recent examples—the fallout from the allegation by Stephen Porter that Minneapolis cops sodomized him with a toilet plunger during a drug raid. In the tense days that followed, a number of good ol’ white boys openly questioned who speaks for black folks (in other words, who’s the HNIC) in this town. Mayor R.T. Rybak got publicly sliced and diced at a North Side rally. Referring to Spike Moss and Rev. Randy Staten, he asked aloud, “Who do these people represent?” Rybak probably thought he was asking a legitimate question—who do you speak for? Why should I listen to you? He failed to grasp that, given our country’s shameful racial legacy, any white person asking that question in a racially tinged crisis about black community activists would hit a nerve of deep resentment and distrust. Once again, black folks made Massa mad for failing to have him anoint the next HNIC.

    Star Tribune columnist Doug Grow, picking up where Rybak left off, decided that by venturing into what he perceived as hood central, a North Minneapolis barbershop, he could talk with a few brothers and, working on the presumption that all black people think alike, verify who the real HNIC is.

    Think about that—imagine me going to an Edina barbershop and telling the locals there the equivalent of, “Hey, white people, take me to your leader.” Who would take me seriously?

    I am not trying to beat up—at least not too much—on the well-meaning Doug Grow or our politically challenged mayor. After all, there are those in the African-American community who do believe that we should march in political lockstep. But that doesn’t excuse Rybak. His blundering attempt to find an “authentic voice” of the African-American community is arrogant and unenlightened. I do not think that Spike Moss or Rev. Randy Staten speak for all black people in Minneapolis, any more than I believe Rep. Arlon Lindner (who seriously believed that gays were not persecuted during the Holocaust) speaks for all white Minnesotans.

    Hopefully, people like R.T. Rybak will come to understand that they cannot expect to act like Massa on the plantation and talk to one or two trusted HNICs to find out what the field hands are thinking. He, along with the Doug Grows of the world, must learn that African-Americans in this town do not think, talk, or act as one big monolithic block. Bottom line: Y’all ain’t Massa, and we ain’t slaves.