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The setting wasn’t exactly Marshall Field’s. Merchandise was stacked on folding tables under fluorescent shoplights in a concrete warehouse. Customers were dressed casually, but some accessorized with Rolex watches and gold jewelry, which they proudly proclaimed had been purchased for a fraction of their original price.

“I’m surprised at what is able to be stolen,” said Deb Ruetter, attending her first general merchandise auction put on by the Minneapolis Police Department. Ruetter wasn’t referring to the predictably high numbers of camcorders and power tools for sale. It’s easy to imagine how these items came into thieves’ hands before cops confiscated them and put them up for auction. But other objects were more curious: a six-foot long baseboard heater; industrial arcwelding equipment; an old Schwinn exercise bike; couches; and a brand new Whirlpool dishwasher, complete with instruction manuals. The most ironic item available? A Safe and Sound wireless home security system. Never used.

Much of this property wasn’t carried off under dark of night, but rather, purchased in broad daylight directly from retailers, usually with stolen credit cards and checkbooks. When these items are no longer considered evidence, explained property and evidence supervisor Kerstin Hammarberg, they are generally unwanted. Stores won’t sell used merchandise, and they have already filed insurance claims. Insurers don’t want to unload the stuff. So the police department auctions it off to earn money for law enforcement and the city’s general fund.

Some things don’t show up for sale. Bidders at the August auction could buy holsters, scopes, and ammo belts, but no guns—they aren’t allowed. Many knives were available—from switchblades to kitchen sets—but none had a known notorious history. “We won’t put a knife that stabbed someone up for auction,” Hammarberg said.

Other items are off-limits for less obvious reasons. Evidence technician Dan Dick said police took grow-lights and triple-beam scales off the market after noticing frequent bids from “hippies in the back,” some of whom looked familiar from narcotics busts that yielded the merchandise in the first place.

Nevertheless, there were plenty of hot products to go around. During three-and-a-half hours of bidding, buyers snatched up weed whackers, sewing machines, boxer shorts, and a cookie jar in the shape of a pink Cadillac. The event drew more than 150 people and raked in $14,000.

Minneapolis police collect 300,000 pieces of property and evidence per year. Directly behind auction bidders—blocked off by yellow tape and a clear plastic sheet—were shelves of evidence currently being held for criminal investigations. These included items such as duffel bags, skateboards, a box of Saran Wrap, and a thick, two-foot diameter disc wrapped in brown paper and flagged with a biohazard warning sticker. A handwritten caution simply read “Bloody.”

My neighbor Venus is the front person for a band called All the Pretty Horses. He or she sports a lovely pair of partridge-sized breasts that peek out over a leather bustier, a talent for fearsome guitar licks, and a vocal apparatus that effortlessly blends the power of Diamanda Galas with the decadence of David Bowie. The subject of Emily Goldberg’s upcoming documentary Venus Of Mars, my neighbor redefines notions of rebellion and where it comes from: It’s one thing to be a transsexual glam-goddess in Manhattan’s seen-it-all Meat Packing district, where trannies strut their stuff as a matter of course. It’s quite another to walk into Mill’s Fleet Farm in Oakdale at eight in the morning, wearing a lace-up midriff and standing six feet tall in platform boots. So when All the Pretty Horses went to New York City a few weeks ago to promote their new album (title: Dolls With Balls), I tagged along just to see the effect this inexplicable band would have on the city that’s supposedly been there and done that.

One thing is immediately obvious. For all its recent tragedies, all its supposed jadedness, New York has not seen everything. The Pretty Horses still make a strong visual impact, even on Third Avenue and 25th Street on a hazy summer afternoon. They look like a Jim Rose circus act without the irony. The back-up dancers’ flaming neck tattoos and Mohawks aren’t retro, and they aren’t kitsch. It’s hard to explain, but they’re just… plainly sincere. And it’s the sincerity more than anything else that shocks, whether it’s New York or Minneapolis.

We settled into the Carleton Arms, a hotel where every room is an art installation. From there we trudged over to Le Bar Bat, where the Horses were scheduled for a “showcase” gig. The promoter assured everyone that there would be plenty of “industry” present. The Horses were to headline. The show got underway, and the warm-up bands presented the usual neo-punk, garage-rock tropes—New York Dolls and Ramones references, young boys in black playing a half-step off time. It was good, but it’s the usual.

Then All the Pretty Horses took the stage. Venus and the band rocked the house in ways it has not been rocked before. It was practiced, professional and, unlike all the punk posturing, genuinely disturbing. What did all these little rock and roll kids make of a six-foot tall transsexual jumping off the stage and getting down with the guitar like a heavy metal god crossed with Marlene Dietrich? I walked up to one drop-jawed member of a band naughtily named Smack Darts and asked if he liked them.“I have to admit,” he said, “I’ve never seen anything like it before.”

“What is that,” I asked, “when you see something you’ve never seen anything like before?”

“I guess…” He stops to think. “Originality.” I can’t help thinking an old-fashioned, punk-rock thought: Originality is always threatening, especially when paired with quality. And that’s as true on the edge of the country as it is in the middle.

Bill Parreault owes his life, or at least his current livelihood, to Big Tobacco. Of course, at his current rate of smoking two packs a day, the 62 year old may eventually also owe them his death. But he can’t quit. And judging from the number of cigarette butts he sweeps up during his daily rounds as Uptown’s custodian, neither can you.

It’s been 15 years since Parreault took the part-time, $8-an-hour job sweeping the streets and picking up trash. He works for a private contractor hired by the Uptown Association. When he started, they would power-wash the sidewalks every night, the most efficacious way to remove all the chewing gum that ends up there. He took a pay cut—and a cut in respectability—when the Association decided they no longer wanted to shell out so much cash for those clean-as-a-whistle sidewalks. Now, Parreault sets out in his pick-up truck six days a week, stopping every few blocks to get out and hand-sweep the bus transfers, removing the soda bottles and cigarette butts that frequently lay just a few feet from one of the area’s numerous trash cans. Parreault doesn’t really mind the public’s laziness, he says. It’s not really in his demeanor to get angry, not since he quit drinking about ten years ago, anyway. But people who throw butts at his feet are another story. “It’s as if they don’t even see me,” he said, his ever-present accent not a wholesome Minnesota twang but rather a gentle Maine roll.

It’s possible that people don’t see him, although anyone who has ever stopped at Lagoon and Hennepin for a morning coffee (or a pack of smokes) has most likely crossed paths with the short, gray-haired man in the blue coveralls and the baseball cap emblazoned “Sturgis 2002.” He’s slight, almost gaunt, and his face is a cartographer’s dream, with endless rivers and tributaries of wrinkles, running every which way across his tan, impossibly soft skin. He’s quiet, polite, and looking forward to retirement at the end of the month, which will bring great things: a respite from his afternoon job fixing motors, work he enjoys but would rather be doing on his own. But Uptown will continue to owe its clean sidewalks and empty trashcans to him.

Parreault owes his relative poverty to hourly jobs, an affinity for the lottery, his appetite for smokes, and two of his grandkids, who took a liking to their grandparents when they fell out with their next-of-kin. He wasn’t always a custodian. Over the years he’s been a farmhand, a Marine, a lobster and crab fisherman, and, most often, a truck driver. To trucking he owes his bad back and his residence in Minnesota; it was a cross-country-trip-gone-bad that found Parreault prudently unloading here, with $25 in his pocket and nothing else, while his beer-drinking, pill-popping partner carried on westward. Parreault found a place to crash, and pretty soon it was back to work as usual.

He hopes retirement will mean more than free afternoons. He’d like to start his own business, a sort of motorman-on-wheels who makes house calls to fix small engines in lawnmowers and maybe even cars, a craft in which he earned a degree from the Dunwoody Institute. Five clients have already signed up for the service. What he’s lacking is a van to haul all the necessary tools and the generator. Unfortunately, no one owes Parreault any money.

There are a few people who notice Parreault’s hard work, like the retired military man who sips coffee at Starbucks and the waitress at Lucia’s who greets him with a sunny “Good Morning!” One woman gives him a hug every morning before she gets on the bus and heads downtown for work. She doesn’t owe him anything—but he collects it anyway.

On the one-year anniversary, security checkpoints at Minneapolis St. Paul International Airport’s Lindbergh terminal looked-well staffed and efficient. Most ticket holders moved through with only a whiff of delay, even young men dressed entirely in black. And if a profiling pattern emerged at all, security staff appeared to select elderly white men for closer inspection at about double the rate of other demographics. They were ushered to the side where adjacent stations were installed to allow passenger flow to continue. Green-gloved screeners with metal-detector wands drew outlines around the men, requested unbuckling of belts and shoe removal and maintained a calming stream of barbershop patter. Surviving this trial, the old men shuffled in socks to a chair, recovered their shoes, and headed to the concourse, in no discernable way bent on jihad.

The nascent Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has taken pains to alert the flying public to new rules about what you can’t take with you on a plane. But in a state where folks take only ten weeks to forget how to drive on snow, the security process still produces a reliable stream of dangerous items orphaned at the checkpoints by people who head for the airport with corkscrews, scissors, lighter fluid, mace, lock-blade knives, and daggers. Believe it or not, one year after the main event, nice Minnesotans still occasionally show up with box cutters. All of the above were harvested in about three hours at a single checkpoint the other day. Asked to name the strangest thing he’s come across, Northwest employee Ken Lahti’s memory was fresh. “This morning I found a quart of acetone.”

The bulk of these items are surrendered voluntarily, says Acting Deputy Director for the TSA’s local field office, Becky Roering, a polished 30-something from Melrose, Minnesota who learned her chops as an air marshal. “Two months ago we put amnesty bins in front of the checkpoints for passengers to get rid of these prohibited items and save themselves some time in the screening process. We’re going to find it anyway, and here’s a chance to get rid of it before you get to the area,” said Roering. Other accommodations recently offered to passengers include a mail station at Traveler’s Assistance where you can mail your Swiss Army knife back home instead of tossing it.

The bins are well marked to avoid being mistaken for trash cans, but the compression of decision-making in this situation has yielded an odd slice of traveling life: Sandwiches, salt and pepper shakers, sewing kits, and marijuana have all found their way into the bins. Mace and pepper spray are common. One security staffer who declined to be named also declined to name the specific items in a collection of “sex toys” that had been discovered in the bins recently. Nor could he guess exactly how they might have been used to threaten the security of a flight.

Most of these orphans are the product of idiocy, not evil. Many end up here precisely because their owners are not in the habit of leaving home without them. Keepsakes or keychains tossed by habit into a briefcase can undergo a surprising transformation when they are brought near an airplane, where a humble pen-knife can receive a field promotion to a Legitimate Threat To The Free World. Marc Mannes, a research director for a local non-profit, lost his Swiss Army knife in just this way last year, not long after it was proved that you could take on the world’s only superpower with $20 worth of utility knives. “I just had it in my pocket with my change,” said Mannes. He wonders to this day if his confiscated treasure has found a new home.

It has not. Checkpoint jetsam is inventoried, but not saved. Northwest Airlines runs an incinerator on site, said Roering. “It’s all dumped in there and melted down.”

The Vikings thought the northern lights were the unearthly spirits of Valkyries pointing the way to the warrior’s afterlife in Valhalla. Eskimos thought they were evil spirits who decapitated the heads of children for sport. A former BBC documentarian tells a true story no less strange and tragic in The Northern Lights . Turn of the century Norwegian scientist Kristian Birkeland was obsessed with unlocking the mystery of what causes the aurora borealis, believing (correctly, as it turned out) that it was the interaction of solar wind with the Earth’s magnetic field. It was a gifted deduction, but after that his career was guided by an unlucky star. Other scientists refused to accept his unorthodox theories, forcing him to scrounge for money as an inventor. Despite some spectacular successes, that backfired when his business partner attempted to cheat him out of his profits, and even scuttled Birkeland’s Nobel Prize nomination out of jealousy. Meanwhile, Birkeland became so fixated on scientific pursuits that he absentmindedly double-booked his own wedding, and began to spiral into drug abuse. Strung out and paranoid, he died alone in a Japanese hotel room, armed with a pistol to protect himself from the British spies he thought were out to steal his ideas. (A fear that may not have been entirely unfounded.) As is so often the case, his ideas were accepted only years later, long after it was too late to halt his downward spiral. Jago’s clear prose, quoting extensively from the letters of Birkeland and contemporaries, is a worthy attempt at posthumous vindication. It’s also a compelling portrait of an archetypal unheralded genius, destroyed by forces both external and internal. Ruminator Books, (651) 699-0587, www.ruminator.com

The persistent claim that it’s the “Greatest Movie Ever” leaves us a little cold—it seems a little too easy to put this at the top of the list, a safe choice nobody can really argue with. And the Rosebud mystery that bookends the drama seems more heavyhanded and gimmicky every time we watch it. Those quibbles aside, Orson Welles’ film debut is a true milestone, with fine acting and writing, direction and cinematography that from a technical standpoint were light-years ahead of their time. The most impressive achievement is that it was made at all, given that the motivating force was Welles’ ferocious loathing of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. It was no mean feat to get away with such a stealthy character assassination, deserved or not, on one of the most powerful multimillionaires of the time. And of course Welles didn’t escape unscathed—Hearst’s counterattacks poisoned the rest of his career. But even if he’d never made anything else, Kane assured his place in cinema Valhalla. This new three-disc special edition has all the behind-the-scenes story you could want: It is essentially last year’s two-disc set that included the terrific documentary The Battle Over Citizen Kane plus HBO’s RKO 281 , a dramatic retelling of the same events featuring a perfectly cast Liev Schreiber as Welles.

When the wind is right, a battalion of vents pushing through the roof of 3753 Nicollet Avenue pump a fried, spicy scent into the sky that can reach you as far away as Stevens and 38th. There are throngs of eaters who are cultishly devoted to the soul-food of Shorty and Wag’s Wings and Ribs. They come from as far away as Stillwater, Faribault, and north Minneapolis. For 23 years, this take-out stand has been getting people four-cornered on the cheap. On a recent afternoon, The Rake met the master of the joint. Not the famed Art Song, under whose name the establishment first opened in 1978, and not Wag, who left about five years ago. It was Harold Preevish, a.k.a. Shorty, the only constant in a series of partnerships at this location for more than two decades.

A full-time staffer named Carrie led me through a Wonka-like stainless steel maze of kitchens, coolers, and food-processing machines. There stood Shorty and his fry-cook. They had been forcibly relocated to the most remote of his kitchens when city workers broke the gas line serving his main operation. With a long pole, he worked a massive pot of greens in smoked-turkey broth. The short and soft-spoken chef took the accident in stride. Luckily, his redundant kitchen is served by a different gas line, so half of his dozen deep fryers kept the wings moving to the front.

At 2 p.m., he unloaded 60 pounds of ribs from his vintage electric smoker. They had slowly roasted since 6 that morning. The smoker, which has lasted longer than most marriages, is fed with hickory sawdust. Shorty proudly described how he repairs and maintains it himself. Another machine he demonstrated looked like a stainless-steel raffle-ticket barrel; a motorized crank tumbled dozens of wings in batter and spices. A salted bucket then received the wings for delivery to the fryer.

In a reversal of its decline as a functional part of living chickens, the wing has here undergone a dramatic evolution in the after-life. It dominates over menu habitat once shared with Art Song’s egg rolls and the legendary Siamese hot dog (a hot dog slit length-wise to accept a strip of cheese, wrapped in a wonton skin, deep-fried and covered with spices). Like Art Song and Wag, egg rolls and Siamese hot dogs have left the partnership, but chicken wings thrive.

On a wall-mounted calculator, Shorty figured how many wings he serves in a two-day production cycle. “Forty-three cases, 240 wings a case. Let’s see… that’s 10,320 wings.” He seemed dumbstruck by the number, and did the math again. It was true.

The retail end, a window-walled store front in the southwest corner of the building, has changed nothing but the prices since this writer first stepped through the door 13 years ago. Cravings and budgets still reach their compromise during long staring matches with the light-up menu. There is fried okra, greens, hush puppies, black-eyed peas, and other sides to the wings-and-ribs staples. Chit-chat is sparse to none among the counter crowd gathered over the boomerang-patterned Formica.

A customer named Jenny, packing off with a carton of wings, had come some distance. She professed her taste for Shorty’s hushpuppies, which I had never tried. She promptly produced a bag from her take-out carton, and offered one. It was smooth, light, hot, and deep-fried. “I’m eating them on the way home in the car,” she said. I could understand why.

We are flat-landers in fly-over country. There is nothing spectacular about the geography of Minnesota. Sure, we have our granite-rimmed lakes and our occasional tracts of pine, aspen, birch, and oak. We even have the relatively inspiring North Shore, Taylors Falls, the bluff country of Winona, and Cabella’s. But there is nothing here that compares to the grandeur of, say, the Rocky Mountains or the Maine coast. Instead, the geography of Minnesota is a thing of subtlety, its beauties not particularly lavish. Big Blue Stem and Norway Pine? Let’s not kid ourselves. Our natural attractions are as understated as we are.

If you need to be reminded, consider the Minneapolis Institute of Art’s staggering American landscape show, currently in progress. Aside from the remarkable fact that “American Sublime” came to our humble burg at all, we note that Minnesota was never a huge inspiration to the likes of Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Cole, or Frederic Church. Which serves to remind us that we often cling to the slimmest references to ourselves in American arts and letters. A Thomas Moran painting in this show depicts “Hiawatha,” one of our more durable local myths (a myth which, incidentally, has no grounding in reality or history). At least Moran traveled to Minnesota in 1861, researching his painting on the shores of Lake Superior. The poet who inspired him, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, couldn’t be bothered to set foot anywhere near here. (In composing “The Song of Hiawatha,” he was provoked by photos and descriptions of Minnehaha Falls.) No wonder we suffer from low self-esteem.

This perennial inferiority complex fits so well that we barely notice it anymore. If people start to look like their pets, then why shouldn’t they start to take on some of the qualities of their natural environment? In these parts, there are notable similarities between the people and the plains, a notion that dates back at least as far as Ole Rolvaag. We are not a loud and gregarious mountain people, nor are we mysterious and complex like desert dwellers. We are not expansive and dramatic like people who live near the ocean. Essentially, we are farmers and freshwater fishermen—in spirit, at least—and those with other pretensions move to New York or L.A., where they are praised for their work ethic and mocked for their hard R’s.

Those of us who remain, of course, are modest and stoic, and we like our natural surroundings that way too. Autumn is as spectacular as it gets around here. That’s pretty spectacular, to be sure, but it’s fleeting. The landscape artists of the 19th century might have been inspired by our favorite season, but they were frightened off by the inevitable intimidations and depredations of winter. No, if we want to believe that the clouds have parted and the hand of God has lighted permanently on our fair state, we’ll have to look for more mundane evidence, like the arrival of West Nile and the immutability of KQRS Classic Rock. God is in the details, right? Or is it the Devil?