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Art
by Yasmina Reza
Park Square Theatre, through April 13
What is Art? Three answers come to mind. First, it’s a play that asks the question, What is art? In other words, Art has genuine intellectual content—something we don’t encounter very often in the contemporary American theater. (More’s the pity.) Second, Art is a play with a somewhat misleading title. Yes, on one level it’s about aesthetics; but on another more dramatic level it’s about human relationships. A better title might be The Shock of Discovering Your Best Friend Is a Complete Idiot. That’s what happens in the play: A man buys an all-white painting which he takes quite seriously, thus endangering his friendship with another man who thinks the painting is the height of pretentiousness. Third, Art is one of the most critically lauded new plays to come along in years, and critics aren’t always wrong. This production marks not only the area premiere of Art, but also the return to directing of Richard Cook, Park Square’s artistic director, after a two-year hiatus. Well-known local actors Peter Moore, Jim Stowell, and Peter Gregory Thompson make up the cast. And if you need another reason to see the show, you can tell your friends that you saw Art for art’s sake.

“Don’t worry if you fuck it up. Just go out there and have a good time,” said Jay Leno. That was the backhanded advice he gave Nick Swardson in his dressing room, moments before Nick’s Tonight Show debut a few weeks ago. And Nick didn’t. In the vernacular of stand-up comedians, he crushed.

There’s something creepy and disingenuous about Jay Leno. No, I wouldn’t have been watching, but I owe Nick $100 (he scalped some Radiohead tickets for me last year), and I figured writing about him for The Rake would even our accounts. Regardless of these unusual circumstances, I certainly won’t be the last guy from Minnesota to brag about knowing Nick Swardson. I mean, the guy’s funny enough to skip Letterman. Not many comics love The Tonight Show anymore either. Partly because without Carson behind the desk, booking that show is no longer the crowning moment of a comic’s career, and partly because Jay is perceived as something of an ass. In fact, it was staff turnover that finally opened the Tonight Show door for Nick. “A lot of people really didn’t think my style was Tonight Show,” Nick told me afterward. “The former bookers were old school. And they just thought I was a little too different.”

Nick is different the way Minneapolis rock bands are different. He has that Westerberg impishness that plays as well on First Avenue’s mainstage as it does on a comedy club stage. Sure, he jokes about the “Wheel of Fortune” (“Why don’t the contestants cheat? I would. I’ll take a B, Pat. Sorry, no Bs. I said P, Pat. I’m not stupid, I think I know what I said.”) and his grandmother (“Nicholas! You should fight crime!”), but there’s something a little subversive, a little punk about him. In fact, he talks about his set as if he was fronting a band—Radiohead, to be specific—and says he feels pressure to play the big hits while what he really wants to do is trot out the more experimental stuff. “I just want to do my Amnesiac set because that’s in my head.” Because he’s my friend, and because I’m a Radiohead fan, I forgive him for such a hipster play on words. Besides, his stuff cracks up real rock stars too. Nick recently opened up for band-of-the-moment the Strokes in L.A. after they caught his act in New York.

Ultimately, Nick’s Tonight Show experience softened his opinion of Jay, who asked Nick over to the couch after his performance (there’s still prestige in that gesture). “He was so nice, and that really makes a difference. I really won’t be slamming the show as much,” said Nick prudently.

It was Ole Bull’s eighth birthday party, and the concert master took full advantage of the open bar, rendering himself unable to fulfill his duties with the house band. Bribed with candy, the boy filled in, ripping through a Louis Spohr composition. The performance was so spectacular that an uncle rewarded young Ole with his first adult-sized violin. The self-taught musician’s unusual playing style, memorialized in bronze on the north end of Loring Park, may be a result of countless wrestling matches with that grown-up violin. Ole Bull’s position was unorthodox: He held the violin with the brute strength of one thumb, not clasping it under the chin in the usual way. And that’s exactly how fellow Norwegian Jacob Fjelde sculpted him in 1897. A fierce realism permeates the piece, from the recently restored violin (with strings tightened to the same tension as a real violin and tuned to Bull’s preferred key) to a suit so detailed, according to U. of M. art history professor Karal Ann Marling, “you could practically cut a pattern just by looking at it.”

The thing about the sculpture is . . . well, it’s dull. Instead of seducing the attention, this bronze “Paganini of the North” stands there, stalwart, precise and sturdy. It belies Bull’s made-for-TV life: He struggled with gambling as a young man, masterminded an ill-fated colony for Norwegians in Pennsylvania (named Oleana, after himself), and all but abandoned two wives as he tootled across Europe, the Americas, and Africa. His adventures and virtuosity inspired cameos in works by Ibsen and Hans Christian Andersen. The musician in Longfellow’s “Tales of a Wayside Inn”—roughly an American Canterbury Tales—was a direct knock-off.

But this sculpture is so earnest you just don’t pick up on any of that. There’s no hint of metaphor, no rock star or satyr. Then again, that’s the paradox of great performers, isn’t it. Startlingly human, they’re capable of expressing the transcendent. It’s heartening that Minnesota’s first public sculpture doesn’t honor a deity or a virtue, but a real guy—and an artist at that. For sculpture more like TV, there’s always the legion of bubble-headed Charlie Browns in St. Paul. Or, for that matter, Minnesota’s newest public sculpture, Mary Richards on Nicollet Mall with her hat suspended right here between heaven and hell.

To really appreciate how much the seemingly normal people of St. Paul love hockey, take a look at how they continue to support the Wild as the team finishes its second season in an unnerving display of expansion-team ineptitude. Take one recent loss to the New York Rangers, a 3-2 overtime gaffe that should have broken the hearts of 18,568 paying customers. Despite winning only twice in the preceding 14 games, and sinking in the Western Conference faster than a snowmobile on Lake Superior, they keep showing up for more.

What the hell is this? Why don’t these people behave like all the other sports fans around here and slink away to the ice shack once it’s obvious there’ll be no victory parades at the end of the rainbow? Here’s the answer, friends: There’s something about St. Paulites that breeds in them a near-insane loyalty to anyone or anything that works hard. Win or lose. Inept or exceptional. It doesn’t matter as long as they see you sweat.

Keep in mind that St. Paul has done this before: with the Minnesota Fighting Saints of the World Hockey Association in the freewheelin’ 1970s. Especially in 1974, the Saints united the city behind a sports team like never before. Crowds of 16,000 and more were common then, despite the fact that the Saints’ brand of hockey was an only sporadically successful combination of outrageous goon tactics and exciting offense. In fact, the Hanson Brothers of Slap Shot fame were Saints (though two of them were Carlsons in real life). It helped that league rules eliminated the red line and thus opened the game up to many long passes and spectacular breakaways.

But most of all, the Saints were a tough bunch of characters who worked extremely hard for very little money. And the St. Paul locals loved them like crazy.

“We had a real following of people that truly enjoyed us and everything we did,” says Glen Sonmor, the general manager and architect of the Saints. “I think it was the fact that we had a very entertaining team. We had some real super talents like Mike Walton, Dave Keon, and Jack McCarten. You start with great players. But then you add in a lot of fun and hard work and soon you had something you could build on.” And those loyal St. Paul fans?

“When we got near the end and it was obvious we were going to fold, they actually took up collections to try to keep us going. They organized drives to collect money for future season tickets. They did everything they could, but it wasn’t enough. Escalating salaries and shaky ownership did us in.”

Sonmor now figures it was all for the best. He looks at the Wild and marvels at how its marketing machine can do in one day what it took the Saints weeks to accomplish. But he agrees that the Wild are benefitting not so much from what the North Stars did (because not that many St. Paul folks actually supported the Bloomington-based Stars anyway), but from what the Saints did. They showed the hockey nuts of St. Paul that they could be big time.

The marine iguana, which is found only in the Galapagos archipelago, spends most of its time sunning itself on the volcanic rocks and sneezing. For nourishment, it dives in the sea and feeds on algae. Consequently, it has to rid its body of sea salt somehow. To do so, it expels a salty mist out through its nostrils—unmistakeably a sneeze—leaving a white coating of salt on its crown until the next time it goes swimming.

I found myself trying to hold my camera still, waiting for the large orange lizard to erupt. Inevitably, the moment my arms gave out and I put down my camera, the iguana would let loose a torrent of sea snot worthy of a National Geographic cover.

The peculiarity of the animals on these islands has fascinated visitors for the past 500 years. Although Charles Darwin spent only a few weeks on the archipelago, the observations he made and the samples of species he took back to England were the basis for his theory of evolution.

Today the Galapagos still attract scientists, and they were among the first places that biologists were able to do what Darwin had thought impossible: to observe natural selection in action over just a few years rather than thousands or millions of generations. Evolutionary biologists Peter and Rosemary Grant have observed finches on the small island of Daphne Major for over a quarter century, and, after painstaking measurements and number crunching, they’ve been able to track how different types of birds’ bodies and beaks are selected for different environmental conditions over time.

The casual Galapagos visitor can’t see natural selection in action, but the peculiar specialization of shape, habit, and diet that the islands’ wildlife has developed over millions of years of isolation is on prominent display. The absence of large land predators has left the birds and animals indifferent to tour groups traipsing through their habitat. Bird mating dances and giant tortoise copulation go on uninterrupted, even with the clicking and whirring of thousands of dollars worth of camera equipment nearby. Snorkelers are themselves observed by curious sea lions that dart around them in the water.

Although many visitors sport Darwin T-shirts and marvel at walking in his footsteps, the draw of the Galapagos is much more Dr. Dolittle than it is Darwin. Even my brother, a hard-nosed evolutionary biologist who spends more time on computer models than he does observing nature in the flesh, admits that the main attraction is being as close as we are to very cute and intriguing animals. And who can blame him? If birds landed on our heads at home, or if deer didn’t dart away at the slightest sound, it might be easier to see ourselves as nature’s friend rather than its foe.

Tucked neatly into a shelf of dainty Victorian houses on the bluffs of St. Paul, the home of Charles Arndt and Kelly Bjorklund was the site of U.S. Senate incumbent Paul Wellstone’s February 9 fund–raiser. The Rake was in attendance to savor the food and sample the politics.

Contributors to the Wellstone campaign were confronted with a buffet that looked almost too good to touch. Sliced vegetables, presented attractively alongside a neat array of dips, were crisp on the tooth. In addition to the de rigeur spinach dip and its many variations, Bjorklund gave a clever nod to the Lebanese history of the neighborhood with a bowl of excellent hummus balanced with lemon and garlic. Fresh fruits dominated the west end of the table, where there was a striking presentation of fresh raspberries mounted in a hot pepper raspberry preserve on a foundation of cream cheese.

Senator Wellstone held the center of attention, but a tray of baby shrimp in whipped cream cheese and cocktail sauce with Spanish olives was popular too. Also favored was a creamy artichoke gratin with blue cheese, sweet red peppers, and garlic, though many were kept at bay as the senator’s sincere gesticulations over this area of the table did not stop for quite some time. But with a great selection of red and white wines and a truly international bin of beers within easy reach, guests were happy to a number. And at an entry fee of $25, the value was truly Democratic. Four out of four stars.

On the other end of the cities and the political spectrum, donors to Norm Coleman’s Senate campaign were invited for face time on February 12 at Jazzmine’s on Third Street, just around the corner from Sex World in downtown Minneapolis.
While Coleman has left little doubt that he would eat anything Dick Cheney feeds him to win this election, The Rake sincerely hoped the $100 minimum would win better fare for the party faithful. Alas, after the tedious battle for downtown parking at 6 p.m., Republicans found themselves paying their own way at the expensive bar and filing past a short table of uninspiring victuals.

The dim lighting of the cheese tray was of no consequence, as the selections all tasted about the same. The main attraction, barbecued pork in a sterno-heated tub, was odd given Coleman’s Jewish heritage. It had long since progressed from tender to mushy. Equally underwhelming were the grilled chicken skewers which, though blackened with grill lines, offered no hint of smoke or any other flavor unless dipped in the adjacent green sauce that tasted strongly of rancid mayonnaise. Excusing the pork, a staffer indicated that Norm does not eat at fund–raisers. That may augur a long season of dyspepsia for GOP contributors. One out of four stars.

Thanks mostly to the Walt Disney Corporation, Hans Christian Andersen is generally remembered as a kindly composer of innocent entertainments for children. But the real Andersen was far more interesting. He was a tormented soul who larded his tales with his own psychic misery, apparently in the belief that what kids want from a story is a stew of self-pity and repressed eroticism. Needless to say, the CTC’s new adaptation of The Snow Queen favors the Disney Andersen over the real one; the casting, for example, pretty much rules out any thought of a future romance between the two central characters. Nevertheless this production does manage to capture much of the story’s inherent spookiness. Scenic designer Michael Sommers turns the rather flimsy script into a parade of strikingly beautiful and weird images. Ruth MacKenzie’s pastiche of Scandinavian folk music—the same stuff that made her recent show Kalevala so popular—provides another layer of eerie atmosphere. Co-directors Sommers and Peter Brosius keep the images and songs moving energetically along. And if the show’s message about friendship seems a little tame, well…the CTC is a theater for children.

April is, among many other things, a time for fools and taxes. Not coincidentally, it’s also the time of year when we’re forced by law to take a break from fishing. Your Minnesota angling license expired just in time for you to get your ice shack off the lake, and you can’t renew until May.

A little mandatory distance from rod and reel is a good thing. It’s like a secular Lent: Giving it up for a little while allows us to reflect on how important fishing is to the Minnesota soul. Confronted with increasingly brazen terrorist attacks and health insurance premiums, we find nothing soothes the spirit like staring into the waters of Cedar Lake, say, or Lake of the Isles. As you know, Minneapolis got its awkward name thanks to the 12 highly fishable lakes within city limits. (Whoever proposed combining the Greek polis with the Lakotah minne remains a mystery. Apparently they weren’t too proud of the silly word.) Still, few people have taken the time to plumb the depths of this metaphor. Fishing is all about revelation. Sometimes you send down your worm, and up comes a thing of beauty. Other times, well… the less said the better.

Witness the recent flap over Jackie Cherryhomes. After being chased out of office last December, the former city council president made fish meal out of most of her files from the Brian Herron years. We’re assured this kind of vandalism often happens when bullheaded incumbents lose their jobs. Still, we can’t help feeling like a fishing expedition onto Cherryhomes’ former hard drive might have pulled up some real whoppers.

Although the Star Tribune chose not to run their fishfinder through Cherryhomes’ waters, they have discovered something else. A March 3, 2002 story claims that “Every day, untold thousands of people fire up their computers and log on” to something called “the internet” where self-publishing mavericks create an astonishing array of “web logs.” Apparently they caught wind of this trend because one of their own—the redoubtable Mr. James Lileks—is one of the nation’s most prolix bloggers, and other newspapers around the country have noticed. We’ve long wondered why the Strib chooses to isolate their columnists in the remote backwaters of the Metro section. But it hadn’t crossed our minds that no one at the paper was actually reading their best-paid staffers. It occurs to us now that www.Lileks.com may actually be a cry for help.

Also noted: KARE-11 news was recently awarded the National Press Photographers Association top honors. In reporting this happy news, Strib reporter Darlene Pfister captures KARE-11 photojournalist Gary Knox in action, on the scene last year where two boys were feared to have been swept away in an icy river: “Over the rush of the water and the scraping of a backhoe,” writes Pfister, “Knox’s earphone caught a softer sound. It was the voice of Olivia’s police chief, consoling the father of one of the boys… He zoomed in as the chief stood close to the grieving father. ‘If you want to be with your wife, that’ s a good idea,’ the chief said gently, his words captured by the wireless microphone Knox had attached to his uniform hours earlier… In living rooms across the Twin Cities, that scene made the news report personal. It’s typical of the intimate, storytelling moments that metro-area viewers have become accustomed to in their broadcast news.”

We’d call that a typical case of eavesdropping, but who’s complaining? The Rake itself was recently the subject of a KARE-11 mini-documentary and a Strib investigation, which certainly stroked our egos in the right direction. We storytellers run in packs, and we know that sometimes a carefully placed eavesdropper is precisely what’s needed. You might call it poaching for good publicity, but these lunkers pretty much jumped right into our boat.

You want Russian? This place is real Russian (or as Russian as you can get in the old Robbinsdale American Legion building.) Russian owners, Russian cooks, Russian wait staff, Russian décor, Russian music, Russian customers, Russian food, Russian vodka. Lots of Russian food. Lots of Russian vodka. We’ve been there three times now and have 10 pounds and three headaches to show for it. It starts with the appetizers. Get the smoked fish plate (serves three) and the pickled vegetables. The fish plate comes with salmon, sturgeon and, as you’d expect, caviar. Good bread with lots of sweet butter under the fish gets you going. You cut those nutritious Omega 3 fatty acids with hot pickled tomatoes, spicy carrot slaw and cabbage. Wash it down with the signature St. Petersburg martini, which they should call the Chernobyl, and then proceed to the Chicken Kiev or the Bolshevik sirloin. Or even better, just order another fish plate and martini. Have a salad tomorrow.