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Tom Dunlap owns the coolest slingshot I’ve ever seen. It’s mounted on the end of an eight-foot pole, and he can aim the whole apparatus like a crossbow. Amazingly, this is a professional tool, one he uses when he climbs and prunes trees. He also uses it for recreation, as he did the other day when he took me tree climbing.

In addition to running his tree service company, Dunlap teaches climbing to professional arborists and recreational climbers, and he serves as adviser to the U of M Urban Forestry Club. He accompanied the club on a trip to Seattle last year to attend an international arborist conference, and to climb “superlative trees,” as he calls them. As student Sarah Folger recalled, the highlight of the trip was climbing a 200-foot old-growth Douglas fir in Seward Park on Lake Washington. “It was awesome,” she said. “We went with people who were really good climbers. You could even see Bill Gates’ house across the water.”

With The Rake in tow, Dunlap’s target was more modest: the canopy of a 65-foot American elm tree on the U of M’s St. Paul campus. He shot a small bag of lead shot through the upper branches and used its tether to thread a heavy climbing rope along the same route, eventually anchoring one end of the rope to the trunk.

Tom sent me up the free end using a technique adopted from spelunking; I used two handle-like devices called Mar Bars, one on my feet and one for my hands, to ratchet my way up the rope like an inchworm. I was quickly reminded that the sports I enjoy on the ground don’t require much strength in the biceps.

After taking a few breathers on the way up, I arrived at the lower branches about 25 feet up, and Tom quickly followed on another rope. In the midst of 30 mph gusts of spring wind, one difference between tree climbing and rock climbing quickly became apparent. Rocks don’t sway disconcertingly in the wind. The view from above was nice, but more appealing was the invisibility of the climber, even among the spring buds on a relatively bare tree. Students walking by were mostly oblivious as we spied on them from our living aerie. This climber noted how much of people’s lives are lived in a small zone between zero and seven feet off the ground. It was with some reluctance that we eventually lowered ourselves back into it.

June is the month when Twin Citizens get out and really enjoy their parks in staggering numbers—especially our chain of lakes. More than 5.5 million joggers, skaters, dogwalkers, cyclists, and ersatz nudists visit our city parks annually. That’s nearly twice as many visitors as Yellowstone National Park gets each year. We can thank our city founders for laying down the law. The lakes are public property, and should ever remain thus. In Minneapolis, private estates directly on the waterfront are an abomination. (The egalitarian tradeoff is that the park system was laid out so that there is greenspace within six blocks of every residential home.) Except for a shameless pocket of fiefdoms on the southeast shore of Cedar, every lake in the city is surrounded by uninterrupted parkland. Theodore Wirth was a champion of this noble vision.

In the big pavilion in the sky, superintendent Theo is undoubtedly fretting about the development on the western side of Twin Lake (known in the vernacular as the home of “Bare Ass Beach”) in the park bearing his name. The city of Golden Valley and a rogue’s gallery of profiteers have conspired to sell this prime greenspace to the highest bidders, who are dedicated to building—what else?—yet another outbreak of McMansions bejeweled with No Trespassing signs.

The Hidden Lakes development is not news. Five years ago, one lucky homeowner named Jean earned the distinction of occupying what is probably the first new house built on the shores of a Minneapolis lake for 100 years—her own private paradise. The elysian metaphors get lots of play in Hidden Lakes Development literature, which describes the peninsula between Sweeney and Twin lakes as “indeed, a private paradise. Imagine your own estate on this precious parcel dotted with majestic oaks and maple with sunset views to the west.” We can well imagine. That’s because, in point of fact, this is a public paradise, accessible to anyone with the courage to make the hike from the Minneapolis side, through the wildest stretches of Wirth park. The city of Golden Valley recently approved the peninsula for development of private homes (“starting at $1.5 million”) on this “precious parcel.”

Sharps like Barry Blomquist and Robert Schmid have cashed in on the parkland inheritance, having bought the 100-acre parcel fair and square. “So what?” say their critics. That their side of the lake is not in Minneapolis is no argument—it’s simply a testament to the fact that avarice, unlike love, recognizes borders. Less than a dozen homeowners easily trump a century-old ethic simply because the line between the enlightened and the benighted happens to bisect this beautiful lake.

It’s a done deal, so get your bids in now. But there is hope for the tree-huggers. Plans suggest that the new estates will be built on the Sweeney side, and the forested shores of Twin will escape the blade. Hidden Lakes owners will undoubtedly stake their claims on the west bank of Twin (indeed, they’re already trying to change the name from “Twin” to “Hidden”—which seems an exercise in counterproductive publicity), but they’ll have the unpleasant job of dealing with an intransigent population of park users who aren’t always burdened by normal expectations of “Minnesota Nice.” What’s worse, Minneapolis may require a 10-foot easement on the shoreline providing for public access (as they do on Cedar Lake, much to the chagrin of homeowners there who would prefer you didn’t know that). This may insure the expansion of “Bare Ass Beach” all the way around Twin Lake, into the backyards of Golden Valley. To paraphrase Hemingway, the moon also rises.

Here is Jim Carrey, telling you pretty much everything you need to know about Jim Carrey: “I just knew [from an early age] that I needed a lot of attention from a lot of people and I needed to prove to the world that I was magic. That was the underlying factor in everything. It’s the underlying reason why I do this.”

Don’t a lot of actors say things like this? They do. The difference is, Carrey means it. He really really means it. In a Hollywood where there is rarely very much at stake anymore besides money, Carrey’s quixotic quest for the best that Hollywood stardom has to offer is the most interesting high-wire act around—maybe even the only one around, at present.

His career as a topline star commenced in 1994 with Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, an unusually apt vehicle in that Carrey was allowed to take what started as a fairly straight B-picture (think Jim Belushi and K-9) and turn it into a farce on the strength of his manic mugging and ad-libbing. Two things were immediately evident: He could do physical comedy like no one else in generations, and he’d stand on your throat to get your attention. But it was more than attention Carrey meant to command. He wanted love, adulation, respect—whatever you had. It’s hard to think of another male actor quite so needy. He’s practically an Y-chromosome version of Marilyn Monroe.

And Carrey was nothing if not likeable. His comedy contained nothing of its era’s defining cynicism, which was less a creative decision than a reflection of the fact that Jim Carrey is not wired to understand cynicism. Cynics stand outside. Carrey wanted in. His métier was not the smirk but the full-bore anarchic grin that only grew wider the harder he chomped on the scenery. There was no malice and no condescension in anything he did, just a gleeful sense of the untapped absurdities lurking in every scene.

But there was an undercurrent of menace, too, without which the rapid-fire gags would have worn out pretty quickly. If Carrey seemed a little like a stray dog that licks your hand and follows you home, you always half-expected this particular mutt to attack anyone who tried to leave the room while he was doing his tricks. Ben Stiller’s The Cable Guy (1996) is Carrey’s best performance, and his best movie, for exactly that reason. It was also his first box-office stiff. Nobody wanted a Carrey who wouldn’t go home, who held on to your ankle and gnawed until he drew real blood. Nobody wanted a comedy that played fast and loose with the kind of bottomless loneliness that turns its victims into dangerous people.

He followed The Cable Guy with two movies that represented much safer bets: the gloppy, wholesome Liar Liar (1997) and The Truman Show (1998), a concept movie of middling merits that posed considerably greater risks for director Peter Weir than for Carrey. It’s tempting to suppose that Carrey made them partly because he wanted no part of roles like The Cable Guy that put his rising star at risk, but it’s not so; the lead times of Hollywood productions being what they are, he was signed to both projects before The Cable Guy bombed. The path his career has followed is the one dictated from the start by his aspirations and the way he defines success. What a friend of mine lamented a couple of years back as the “Tom-Hanksification” of Carrey—the process of turning him into a latter-day Gary Cooper, a totem of idealism and uprightness—has been in the cards all along. And each step of the way it has involved discarding a little more of what Carrey does best in the pursuit of what he needs most.

I’ve always suspected that Carrey isn’t as interested in acting as he lets on. Yes, he takes pride in his craft, approaches it with diligence and usually intelligence, seems to enjoy the challenge of unraveling a character. That’s not the point. What I mean is that it’s all a means to an end—that he wants to be a star and an idol much more than he wants to be an artist. That’s a crucial difference. In the end Jim Carrey needs to mainline adulation. He has to be loved for being Jim Carrey, not for anything he manages to create as an artist (hence all the painful, compulsive confessionalism in his interviews). It leaves him little room to differentiate himself from the parts he plays (remember all the bizarre tales of his transmogrifying into Andy Kauffman on the set of Man on the Moon), or conversely to differentiate the parts he plays from the way he wishes to be seen. And he wishes to be seen as someone who never gives offense, is impossible not to like.

Which leads inevitably enough to Opie Howard’s shining, saccharine Grinch and the even greater depths of The Majestic, the execrable little post-WWII fable that’s being released to home video this month. They call it “Capra-esque,” but Capra never made anything this treacly. Carrey does everything but lick the camera to pull you nearer, but it’s a con. You know there are plenty of things he’s too afraid to show you. Even the Academy Award nominators, usually suckers for simpering flattery, were repelled this time. But no matter. “Carrey has never been better,” raved Roger Ebert. The show must go on.

Don’t bet that he’s through, though. He’s presently linked to three projects, and two of them sound like stinkers—a God-for-a-day comedy called Bruce Almighty; a social drama called Children of the Dust Bowl that’s sure to be Spielberg-ian in its middlebrow sentimentality; and a Howard Hughes biopic with Memento director Christopher Nolan. After that he would probably run for president if he could. But as a native-born Canadian he can’t, so he’s stuck in the movies. Once he’s Forrest-Gumped his way to an Oscar and sees how little it assuages in him, it’s hard telling what Carrey may do. He might even get interested in the work for its own sake.

The Majestic is available on DVD beginning June 17.

“Forget the stereotypes of sugar and spice. Girls are mean…,” begins Amazon.com’s plug for Rosalind Wiseman’s hot new book, Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends and Other Realities of Adolescence, just one of a whole spate of books and articles about surviving the terrors of girlhood. Terrors so fierce that according to Rachel Simpson, author of Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls, at least one girl in every group interview she conducted for her book admitted to wishing she’d been born a boy, because boys can just fight and “get it over with.”

Girls, say girls themselves, are not only mean, but have an aspect of evil that is not in boys. Girls are sneaky, deceitful, unforgiving, and manipulative. They know how to target your weaknesses and they destroy you from the inside out.
When I look back on my own adolescence, I find I’d rather avert my gaze. After spending seven idyllic years in cozy elementary schools, I experienced Westwood Junior High as a hellish shock. All of us girls despised the way cool boys with their rough, groping hands cornered us between rows of colorful lockers, grabbing at our breasts, at our jeans. Although we were also confused enough to think this attention was flattery, and we hoped it meant the boy of the moment might be about to ask us to “go with him.” But no one is confused enough to be flattered when she is tipped off by fits and howls of laughter that the note she forged for herself to get out of swimming (“Please excuse Jeannine from swimming today because she has her period and she is not allowed to use tampons”) was dropped on the school bus, and found by the worst of the boys. And who really wants to remember the revolving door of belonging to the “right” group of girls? Or, perhaps most dreadful of all, the guilty horror of participating in the shunning of someone else?

The worst case I recall happened to a tall blonde, “Carla,” who was a peripheral member of our “popular” group of girls and boys, but never at the center of the clique. Somehow someone started the rumor that Carla enjoyed putting her curling iron into her vagina. To this day I can see the shape of Carla’s face, the startling blue of her eyes, the lankiness of her thin body in the tight designer jeans of the day. Her image was burned on my brain in the days following the rumor, as she shrank and folded in on herself right before our eyes. We watched silently as she withdrew from us, stopped coming to school, and then appeared briefly escorted by her parents for a meeting with the principal and school counselor. Within a couple of weeks she left Westwood and I never saw her again. I’m ashamed I couldn’t reach out to Carla when she tumbled into the sudden hell of a psychic stoning. I remember acutely what prevented me from rallying for her, and it was the same thing that kept everyone else’s mouth shut, too: the fear—and knowledge—that what happened to Carla was contagious, and that getting too close to the precipice of her personal hell was a sure way to fall in with her.

So I’m no Pollyanna when it comes to girlhood. But I disagree that girls are mean. I would say, rather, that adolescence can be a very mean time, particularly for children warehoused in large, anonymous factory schools with little parental involvement and no safety net. Perhaps it’s not girls who are cruel, but a culture that confines them in environments in which, as Joan Ryan put it in the San Francisco Chronicle last week, they “wander anonymously along a path of least resistance and low expectations,” without the benefit of a positive relationship with even one adult at the school.

As school size increases, so does student alienation, and more than a decade’s worth of studies suggest that students fare better in smaller schools. Mary Anne Raywid, one of the foremost researchers in the field, says the superiority of smaller schools over larger, more impersonal settings has been established “with a clarity and a confidence rare in the annals of education.” Minneapolis, with the help of a $3 million grant from the McKnight Foundation, is transforming seven large high schools into more than 30 “Small Learning Communities,” and St. Paul is exploring a similar restructuring.

This could be great news for girls—and boys. Because in addition to shining the light on the worst of what’s wrong with modern adolescent culture, we have an obligation to ask why this is so and what we can do about it.

In our ongoing survey of bars that serve good food at odd hours, we’re pleased to report that Grumpy’s features an exhaustive—though occasionally sticky—menu of sandwiches, burgers, and delightful comfort foods, all of which we’d stand right up against the menus of any other bar anywhere in the city. We recently worked through a bad case of writer’s block by ordering the cajun pepper burger at about 3:30 p.m. It was accompanied by french fries so hot they made us stop worrying about our brains, and start worrying whether we’d ever regain feeling in our tongues. But let’s face it—we come to a place like this for the ambience, for the feeling we get, the people we see, the vibe. OK, we come for the beer. Still, we hope we’re not the first ones to tell you that Grumpy’s has quietly become the Uptown or the C.C. Club of the new millennium. The music is hard, the place fills up with single-speed cyclists and bike couriers, the reassuringly seedy downtown contingent takes over the pool tables and dartboards, and there seems to be an endless loop of Jackass videos on the numerous TV sets stashed around the place. (It’s art, y’know.) If genuine Minneapolis subcultcha has gone back underground to hibernate, this is where it comes to water itself each night. But the place is big enough and magnanimous enough that you can walk right in and feel at home without being a boho or a regular or both. (Grumpy: We’re sorry if this notice brings in the yuppies, but they can fend for themselves.) Grumpy’s, (612) 340-9738

On the shelf in my fourth grade classroom—north wall, near the front—there sat the obligatory set of junior encyclopedias. Now and again during lulls in study time, either Brenda S. or I would go and retrieve the R volume. Then, hunched conspiratorially near the back of the room, we would inspect at length the cross-sectioned diagrams of the human reproductive anatomy. The details of interior plumbing were of no great interest to us, but we always lingered over the sketched male and female forms that surrounded them like sausage casings—the ample, pendulous breasts on one side, the dejected-looking penis on the other—while exchanging fraught, knowing looks. Proust had his madeleines; I have Brenda, the book, and the occasional glimpse of her training bra straps. Without question it was one of the most enlightening experiences of my elementary school years. Nowadays, alas, it would be grounds for throwing one or both of us in the kiddie calaboose and tattooing Sex Offender on our foreheads.

Do I exaggerate? Not by much. Judith Levine’s endlessly reviled Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Kids From Sex contains numerous stories of youngsters branded sexual predators and forced into humiliating regimens of “counseling” for behavior no less benign. Surely by now you have heard of Levine’s book, published a couple months ago by the University of Minnesota Press after being declined by a string of commercial publishers. Before the ink was dry, pols and shrinks were rising as one to condemn it. The charge? Soft on child sex abuse, which in the present climate is as good as being soft on communism (and lord, how we miss communism) or brown-skinned terrorists.

Levine’s book is a fine, brave, doomed effort at putting into perspective various matters concerning children, adolescents, sex, sex abuse, and sex education. It’s true that Levine starts by debunking the child sex-abuse hysteria that has caused convulsions all round the U.S. since the spate of day care sex abuse scandals in Jordan, Minnesota, and across the country in the 1980s. Despite the fact those cases proved to be fictions promulgated by zealous interrogators and small children anxious to please them, the stranger with candy—the adult predator seeking children to sodomize, or worse—has become one of our more durable icons and useful political props.

Levine commits two principal heresies against right-thinking. First, she asserts that the stranger with candy is not really the problem we make him out to be. (On the special matter of priests with candy—who, call them what you will, can scarcely be termed strangers—more in a second.) She notes that a great many incidents of extra-familial “sex abuse” involve consensual liaisons between adolescents a little below the age of consent and boyfriends or girlfriends a little above it. As regards the great bogeyman in all this, the pedophile moving with stealth through Internet chat rooms, she makes two interesting points: first, that the manufacture and distribution of kiddie porn through the Internet is controlled almost exclusively by police agencies running sting operations (an LAPD detective is quoted boasting as much); and second, that the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children places the total number of reported adult/adolescent assignations arranged through the Internet from 1994-96 at a whopping 23. The Internet was young then; if you assume the number has tripled or quadrupled with the growth of online households since then, you come to 50 or so cases a year across the entire country. Hardly the epidemic we’re led to believe, particularly when you bear in mind that a high proportion of these involve nerdy guys not much over the age of consent and lonely girls not much under.

The terrible irony is that it’s not the stranger with candy putting kids at risk. The vast majority of such abuse occurs in or near the home at the hands of male adults in positions of authority and trust—the father, the uncle, and to a far greater extent than even the most cynical supposed, the parish priest. Interesting factoid from the May 11 Star Tribune: In 1989, at the time of Jacob Wetterling’s disappearance, there were no fewer than 11 priests cooling their heels after sex abuse allegations at St. John’s in nearby Collegeville, news that surely must have astounded all those Church officials now pleading ignorance to the scope and duration of the problem.

Levine’s second and more radical heresy rests in her belief that post-pubescent teens are bound to explore sex, entitled to do so, and perfectly capable of having constructive sexual experiences. In these abstinence-only days, parents do not like the idea that their kids are sexual beings for many reasons, some practical and worthy, some selfish and narrow. The abstinence movement, notes Levine, is partly about “reversing, or at least holding back, the coming of age, which for parents is a story of loss, as their children establish passionate connections with people and values outside the family.” This being America, we should also ask how many parents do not feel a pin-prick of resentment over their kids’ newfound power to explore pleasures unsanctioned by the parent. So it’s hardly surprising they’d rather tell their kids not to think of it. But in the age of AIDS and of dwindling abortion rights, “child protection” of this sort comes at a terrific cost.

Steve Perry is a contributing editor to The Rake. He can be reached at steve@rakemag.com.