Max "Bunny" Sparber

WRITTEN UPON READING about an Ohio woman who was arrested for creating a disturbance while dressed in a cow costume.

Lieutenant Muterspaw
He knitted his brow
And said Michelle Allen
Was dressed as a cow.

She peed on a porch
And chased after kids
And nobody in town
Could explain what she did.

It's the damnedest thing ever
In North Verity;
There usually ain't cows
In the parkway.

And they usually ain't drunk
And threatening to fight
But I guess Michelle Allen
Was drinking that night.

She'll be spending a month
In the local hoosegow
And that's what you get
When you dress like a cow.

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PROPERLY SPEAKING, this is a performance piece by the Off-Leash Area, and primarily a movement piece by Jennifer Isles. I provided dialogue for the play, but the majority of the performance is movement based, and, I think, fascinating. Inspired by an actual local court case, The Jury looks at scenes from the trial of a young woman who had a role in a tragic New Year's party in which one of her lovers shot her other lover to death. Isle's choreography explores experiences in the life of the women, while the set, by Paul Herwig, recasts the trial as an archeological dig.

This is the second "garage play" I have done with the Off-Leash Area -- these are productions that they literally stage in their garage, which they have reconstructed into a bijou theater space that seats about 25. Last year, I wrote the text for A Gift for Planet BX62, which likewise combined text and movement in telling the story of a solitary girl on a distant planet whose life is ruined by the arrival of an interplanetary salesman. I enjoy working with the Off-Leash Area -- years ago, when I reviewed theater for City Pages, their productions often wound up on my year end best-of list, so it's been very gratifying to work with them.

Here are the details regarding the show:

"The Jury"
WHEN - Dates/Times: October 3-4-5 and 10-11-12: All shows at 7p.m.
WHERE - in Our Garage
TICKETS - Advance Reservations required. Call 612-724-7372.
Suggested minimum Donation of $10-$15.

Photo by Coco Ultramod.

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LIKE ALL CLASSIC COCKTAILS, the Cosmopolitan has numerous origin stories; this drink, a mix of vodka, Cointreau, and lime and cranberry juice, has two. It is credited to some anonymous bartenders in Provincetown's gay community in the 1970s, but that seems to be just guesswork. It is also credited to one Neal Murray, who in 1975 was a bartender at the Cork & Cleaver steakhouse in Minneapolis. Here is his creation story, quoted by The Almanac in 2004:

"I had to learn to make all those drinks, like the Gold Cadillac and Pink Squirrel, in three days," recalls Mr. Murray. A favorite cocktail at the time was the Kamikaze, a blend of vodka, Cointreau (a sweet orange-flavor liqueur) and lime juice.

Fooling around behind the bar, the novice added a splash of cranberry juice to a Kamikaze. He garnished the pink drink with a twist of lime and offered a patron a taste. The fellow took a sip and said, "How cosmopolitan!" Thus the name.

His story is plausible, and is the earliest origin story for the drink that actually credits the bartender, so we're going to give it to Mr. Murray, although it is certainly likely that some Provincetown bartenders came up with a similar drink at the same time.

The Cosmopolitan has enjoyed a resurgence lately, the result of it being a favorite drink on Sex and The City, and it's exactly the sort of drink people who are afraid of alcohol tend to like. It's made with vodka, which is the preferred alcohol of amateur drinkers, as it is relatively flavorless, and then it is mixed with fruit flavors. But we're not going to hold that against the cocktail, which is, in our opinion, nonetheless excellent. It's certainly a better drink than a vast majority of the newly created local cocktails which find themselves poured into martini glasses and added to the "specialty cocktail" menu of upscale bars. Most of these are quite dreadful, as they are made by bartenders who cater to unsophisticated palates and consist mostly of infused vodkas mixed with whatever they think sounds fancy.

The Cosmo, by comparison, is constructed using the traditional structure of a well-made drink, with a base (the vodka), a body (the Cointreau and lime juice), and a perfume (the cranberry juice). The resulting drink is balanced, crisp, and delicious, and has earned its status as a classic.

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WRITTEN UPON reading that the government's $700 billion Wall Street bailout plan failed in congress, voted down by a majority of Republicans, who blamed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for giving a speech that upset them. The DOW immediately plunged more than 700 points.

Why did the market have to plunge?
What's with the DOW's frantic reelings?
The Republicans tell us it's quite simple:
"Nancy Pelosi hurt our feelings."

Next time I am in a wicked mood
And set out on some dirty dealings
If I am caught, I'll just explain
That Nancy Pelosi hurt my feelings.

I think I'll get a pistol soon
And try my hand at crimes and stealings
And why not! I have my reasons:
Nancy Pelosi hurt my feelings!

And the murder they pin on me?
Ratted out by a stoolie's squealings?
Did the squealer happen to mention
That Nancy Pelosi hurt my feelings?

There's no limit to the evil I do;
It's a house of crime built without ceilings.
And why? Why do I commit such wrongs?
Because Nancy Pelosi hurt my feelings.

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SEVERAL YEARS AGO, I met my mother and a friend of hers for lunch at the Women's Club of Minneapolis, near Loring Park. We sat outside on their narrow balcony and ate, and after a while, I mentioned that I had always wanted to visit the Women's Club, because that's where the entertainer Tiny Tim died.

"Oh yes," my mother's friend said. "I killed him."

I leaned forward. "Tell me the story," I said.

She told me that he had seen Tiny Tim at a gala benefit the Women's Club had thrown in 1996, and noticed that the performer had his ukulele with him. She went up to him and asked him if he wouldn't mind playing a few songs, and he said he would be happy to. He stood before the assembled guests and played a medley of popular standard from the 20s and 30s, culminating in his signature song, "Tiptoe Through the Tulips." As he played this, according to my mother's friend, he turned pale, and shortly after completing it he collapsed. He was rushed to the Hennepin County Medical Center, where doctors attempted to resuscitate him for an hour and a half before declaring him dead. "But I saw him when they took him away," my mother's friend told me. "He was already dead."

She then told me that whenever she is watching television with her husband, and Tiny Tim is mentioned or footage of the singer is shown, her husband turns to her and says "Oh, there's that guy you killed."

And so it is that New York native Herbert Khaury, better known to the world as Tiny Tim, took up permanent residence in the Twin Cities, in the mausoleum in Lakewood Cemetery (3600 Hennepin Ave, Minneapolis).

People have been dying in the Twin Cities as long as they have been living here, dating back to about the Last Glacial Period, at least 15,000 years ago. So, naturally, Tiny Tim isn't the only interesting person to have made is way into Twin Cities cemeteries. Here is a small sampling of other permanent Twin Cities residents:

John Berryman (Resurrection Cemetery, 2101 Lexington Ave S, Mendota Heights, section 60, block 34, grave 107): Poet John Berryman won the Pulitzer Prize for his poetry cycle 77 Dream Songs. He had come to Minneapolis in 1955 to teach at the University of Minnesota; incidentally, Berryman's father, whose suicide haunted the poet's writing, hailed from Minneapolis. Berryman wrote most of his Dream Songs here, but also struggled with depression and alcoholism. Berryman committed suicide in 1972 by throwing himself off the Washington Avenue Bridge.

Callum L. de Vellier (Lakewood Cemetery, 3600 Hennepin Ave, Minneapolis, Plot: Section 11, lot 1072): There's not much information out there about Mr. de Vellier, who died in 1973, but his gravestone hints at a hell of a story. "World champion marathon dancer," it informs us. "3780 continuous hours." If that's right, it means Mr. de Vellier danced continuously for more than 157 days. This accomplishment is even more remarkable when you consider that dance marathons were illegal in many states due to the death of Homer Moorehouse in 1923, who died after dancing for a mere 87 hours.

Andrew I. Myrick (Oakland Cemetery, 927 Jackson St., St. Paul, block 3, lot 51): You would think that after Marie Antoinette reportedly got an unexpected hair trim upon uttering "Let them eat cake," people would be cautious with "let them eat" comments. Not so Lower Sioux Agency trader Andrew I. Myrick, who refused to extend credit to Native Americans who were waiting on late payments from the U.S. government. "So far as I am concerned," Myrick said, "if they are hungry, let them eat grass or their own dung." This comment is supposed to have helped instigate the Dakota War of 1862, and Myrick lost his life in it. His body was found with grass stuffed in his mouth.

Hedvig "Sammy" Samuelson (Crystal Lake Cemetery, 3816 Penn Ave N, Minneapolis, section N-A-15, lot 11, grave 11): This young North Dakota native wound up in Minneapolis after her death, thanks to family she had here, but before she was buried, Hedvig "Sammy" Samuelson took quite a trip. She ended her life in Phoenix, where she had moved when she contracted tuberculosis. She was shot to death in 1931, along with her friend Agnes Anne LeRoi, after a dinner party with friend Winnie Ruth Judd went horribly, and inexplicably, wrong. (Both other women, incidentally, also suffered TB.) Judd consulted her boyfriend, who is thought to be the source of the argument, and he suggested the best course of action would be to stuff her friends' bodies into suitcases and head for Los Angeles. LeRoi fit nicely into a steamer trunk, but poor Sammy Samuelson wouldn't fit into the remaining suitcases, and so the boyfriend dismembered her. En route to LA, the bags began to leak and emit a terrible odor, leading to Judd's arrest and commitment to a psychiatric hospital, from which she escaped seven times. Samuelson was committed to the Crystal Lake Cemetery, from which, to the best of our knowledge, she has yet to escape.

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SONGS WRITTEN BY MAX "BUNNY" SPARBER between and June 27 and August 31, 2008 at his small apartment in the Drexel Apartment Hotel in Minneapolis. All songs were written by Max Sparber and performed by him on ukulele, with some added voices and instruments where listed. The songs were generally recorded immediately upon completion and recorded by a Casio Exilim digital camera in digital video mode. The sound was then stripped off the digital video and tweaked in Garage Band and Audacity, and then uploaded.

DOWNLOAD THE ENTIRE ALBUM AS A 44MB ZIPPED FILE!

Click on the song titles to learn more about the songs and to download individual songs:

1. GLORIOUS MANSION ON THE HILL: A country gospel song performed in tight two-part harmony about uncertain salvation.

2. NO TIME TO CRY: An old-timey country murder ballad.

3. CHAMPAGNE FOR BREAKFAST: A countrypolitan song about dreaming of a lover and waking to find her gone.

4. THE BOYS OF THE 10TH: An Irish-ballad inspired soldier's tale.

5. MY FRESH PIE: A pop country song about a bad man.

6. THEY NEVER FOUND HER HEAD: An uncommonly bleak and maudlin crime tale.

7. ELLEN: A country blues song about love and loss on the road to Los Angeles.

8. A BOWERY CHRISTMAS: A New York holiday song from a drunk.

9. GONE: A blues number with hints of ragtime about Max "Bunny" Sparber's terrible habit of just packing up and leaving without warning.

10. COCAINE IS THE HARDEST DRUG: Sometimes you just find yourself writing a Johnny Cash song.

11. A WIDOW'S PRAYER: A ballad of a rowdy man and a bad end.

12. WHEN THE WATER RISE UP: A ballad of storms, levees, and floods.

13. A MAN IS COMING: A country-blues song about terrible things.

14. YOU CAN'T GO BACK TO LONDON: A tale of love and addiction.

15. GLORIOUS MANSION ON THE HILL (GOSPEL VERSION): A reprise of the first song with a full gospel treatment.

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ST. PAUL-BORN WRITER Max Shulman is probably best known for having created the character Dobie Gillis, a chipper young fellow whose thoughts mostly revolved around money, dating, and popularity; Gillis had no particular aptitude for any of these, however. Shulman first wrote about the character in a series of finely crafted comic stories; later, the character inspired a sitcom that ran on CBS between 1959 and 1963, and is probably best known for the wacky names of its characters. Among these were Zelda Gilroy and Maynard G. Krebs, who was not only televisions' first beatnik, but also introduced the world to the still-underappreciated talents of Bob Denver, who later starred in "Gilligan's Isle." (Incidentally, the show also provided early work for Warren Beatty, playing Gillis's antagonist, Milton Armitage.)

But it is not for Dobie Gillis that we remember Shulman today, but for an earlier creation, a decidedly daffy coming of age novel called Barefoot Boy with Cheek. This story follows one Asa Hearthrug, a new student at the University of Minnesota (Shulman's own alma mater), and his shifting allegiances between his fraternity (Alpha Cholera) and his lefty girlfriend Yetta Samovar, who encourages him to join the Minnesota Chapter of the Subversive Elements League. The humor of the book is sloppy and slapdash -- Time once described Shulman thusly: "a kind of roadhouse Wodehouse, a breezy, rattlebrained funnyman whose books can and probably should be read with the TV set on." But he was also a very funny writer, with a knack for a quick joke that reads like a hit and run prank: "St. Paul and Minneapolis extend from the Mississippi River like the legs on a pair of trousers," Shulman wrote. "Where they join is the University of Minnesota." Although the book describes the University during the 30s, it's still surprisingly contemporary, perhaps because Asa Hearthrug shares with Dobie Gillis a boyish concern for status and female affection, and one supposes these things never really go out of style. It's still one of the funniest books set in the Twin Cities, and, best still, it's darn easy to find; most local used books stores will have several copies on hand, often selling for a dollar or less

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THE TWIN CITIES, alas, have a short theatrical memory. Even the now-sainted Star Tribune critic Mike Steele, who covered theater in the Cities for 30 years, never seemed to get around to the really interesting stuff. Where, as an example, are the Fiji Cannibals? Why no mention of the fact that, at the end of the Victorian era, the State Fair exhibited an embalmed whale for the edification of fairgoers? Who among us remembers that the diminutive Tom Thumb repeatedly visited Minneapolis in the 1890s, to universal acclaim?

The first 30 years of Twin Cities theater often seemed like a celebration of the odd. Early Twin Cities newspapers offered occasional commentary on popular theater, usually with a dismissive sniff. There is also a voluminous compilation of variety performances collected by Lawrence J. Hill for his 1979 Ph.D. thesis from the University of Minnesota (with the unsensational title A History of Variety-Vaudeville in Minneapolis, Minnesota, From Its beginning to 1900). Hints of the Twin Cities' early years of theatrical grotesquery pop up here and there in Frank M. Whiting's Minnesota Theatre: From Old Fort Snelling to the Guthrie. Otherwise, these early performances have been lost to history.

Well, no longer. Let us take a glance back at a few of the more extraordinary stories from the days when the frontier seemed to be one big sideshow. (The earlier carnival barking of the good Doctor Hill is the source for many of our tales here; it can be found at the Minnesota Historical Society.) Those with faint constitutions and those who are easily offended should be warned now: These are stories to raise gooseflesh and inflame the senses, and you would be wise to find yourself in a recumbent position before you begin to read.

Life on the Frontier is Such a Drag: What to do if you are stationed at a fortress at the mouth of the Mississippi, the year is 1821, and you are bored to distraction? The answer, long a tradition both in the military and in alternative theater, is to dress in women's clothes and prance about onstage. That's what one 16-year-old drummer boy did in a performance of Pizarro, or the Death of Rollo. "We were one of the performers," reminisced the drummer boy, Joseph R. Brown, in the Henderson Democrat in 1856, badly abusing the editorial we. "We done Elvira."

Even years later, the critics' knives remained sharp.

St. Paul's Weekly Pioneer & Democrat had this to say, reflecting on young Brown's performance, which they had not witnessed:

He measures nearly six feet in height and about as much in circumference....We don't think that even thirty-five years ago he was very delicately formed or strikingly handsome. The idea of his representing tragedy at any time in his life, in any character, strikes us as being sublimely ridiculous, but to attempt the impersonation of a female character....Why, Brown, this was the most graceless, impudent imposture ever perpetrated.

Getting Wood: Lumberjacks Force Their Way Into Minneapolis's First Minstrel Show: "Our citizens are not generally aware of the true character of this band of Concert Singers now performing in Woodman's Hall, Minneapolis," began an advertisement in the St. Anthony Falls Evening News on April 7, 1858. "The phrase 'Ethiopian Minstrels' has been too often (and too justly) associated with noise, vulgarity, and low aims, and it is but simple justice to say this Troupe is just the opposite of all this."

The ad sought to rescue the reputation of ministrelsy, then one of this country's most popular forms of entertainment. The acts themselves consisted, for the most part, of white men with burnt-cork-blackened faces performing burlesques of African-American folk songs and cruel satires of "authentic" African-American behavior. But it is hard to imagine that the young city of Minneapolis, a coarse place then mostly supported by the lumber industry, would be overly concerned with the morality of a minstrel show that looked to be a rollicking good time. Perhaps the ad was intended to preserve the reputation of Minnesota Chief Justice Lafayette Emmett, as this particular group of minstrels, the Melodem Troupe, featured Emmett's brother Dan.

Whatever the relative merits of the Melodem Troupe, their Woodman's Hall appearances generated considerable excitement when, on the first night, a group of lumberjacks showed up and loudly demanded free admission. The bewildered ticket seller gave them comps, and the following night a larger contingent of burly sawyers arrived, also demanding admission without charge. When the ticket seller refused, the lumberjacks forced their way into the building. Having had advance warning of a possible ruckus, the staff inside Woodman's Hall bolted the doors, and, when the woodsmen began to beat on them, armed themselves and the audience with clubs. The doors held, however, and the lumberjacks eventually wandered home. While the Melodem Troupe would continue to play for one more evening, the woodcutters did not repeat their performance, as the hall was guarded by a constable and 50 persons enlisted to help keep the peace.

Professor Anklebreaker: The Velocipede Takes the Twin Cities Stage: The bicycle came to the Twin Cities in 1869. Nowadays, bicycles are so commonly seen hung in garages and clipped onto the fronts of our city buses that we don't think twice about the bike lanes that ring our lakes and flank our thoroughfares. In the 1860s, however, they were very much a theatrical phenomenon. Scores of self-proclaimed "professors" took to Twin Cities stages, showing standing-room-only audiences the essentials of riding the velocipede, a bony, wooden bicycle that would eventually earn the nickname "The Boneshaker."

From the sound of things, audiences turned up for reasons beyond mere curiosity. A feature of each demonstration was the opportunity for local citizens to take the stage and attempt to ride the rickety bike. The results? The Minneapolis Tribune reported as follows: "At Harmonia Hall, yesterday, several in their enthusiasm in attempting to ride were rather severely tumbled around, in some instances causing fractured clothing and in others peeled shins and lamed legs."

And think about how much of a fuss Ron Athey's 1994 Patrick's Cabaret performance caused! It's surprising that Athey's 4 Scenes in a Harsh Life, which featuring him cutting another performer and blotting the wounds, would generate any complaints, as local audiences have long enjoyed a little sadism in the theaters.

Sideshow Slavery: The Unhappy Wildman: The Minneapolis Tribune ran this story in August 1869, a rather light-hearted description of a relationship between a showman and his talent that, to modern sensibilities, is quite appalling:

WILD MAN OF MADAGASCAR--The itinerant showman who has been exhibiting "The Wild Man of Madagascar" and other remarkable curiosities in this city for the past week, yesterday pulled up stakes and started down the Milwaukee, St. Paul and Minneapolis Railroad for some of the towns on the line of this road. At the depot, he had some trouble with "The Wild Man of Madagascar," who, it appears, is nothing more nor less than a deformed Negro. The Negro said he "wouldn't have nuffin more to do wid dem dar fellers, and wouldn't go wid'em anyhow," but the showman couldn't see in that light, and seemed to be well accustomed to that kind of talk, and proceeded to pick him up by the arms, and throw him into the baggage car in the most business like manner, as though it was an every day occurrence. The darkey attempted to get out again, but a guard was placed over him to keep him in, and by this time he is probably the chief attraction in a poor show at some of the towns below us. The showman claims that the fellow had been drinking, and that it always affects him in that manner.

Lord of the Dance, the Early Years: It seems worth mentioning briefly that 1872 saw the start of the Varieties Concert Saloon, one of the first "variety theaters" in the Twin Cities. The variety stage was a bawdier predecessor to vaudeville, featuring any number of animal acts, jugglers, "poppets," dancing girls, and comedians, usually playing to a drunken audience sprawled out on a sawdust floor. The Varieties opened with a dancing duel between local favorite John Deenan and Sam Shephard, the champion of the West. Both were clog dancers. Mr. Shephard's early, whimsical roots in the Midwest may surprise fans of the man's dark, surrealist plays of the 1970s, or his film career thereafter. That Mr. Jessica Lange lives on today, well into his 16th decade, is a miracle of modern medicine.

What About His Teeth? George Washington (or Part of Him, Anyway) Visits the Twin Cities: Among the many attractions moving through Minneapolis in 1877 was an exhibit showing George Washington's knife, fork, razor, and camp lantern. Also on hand, according to an ad, was "a piece of his coffin." How this was obtained is not clear. Patriotism, it seems, has been making people do strange things for a long, long time.

The Music Was Terrible, but the Haunting Was Magnificent: In September of 1878, the Minneapolis Tribune ran this review of a popular magic act:

A magnificent show has located itself on Washington Avenue in the Morrison building, and hourly exhibitions are given of ghostly figures which appear and disappear by well known principles of illusion. The exhibition of ghosts is accompanied by the reiteration of most execrable poetry, by a libel of an elocutionist, and some very heavy comedy acting. The crowds are drawn in by the most diabolical of music that ever went up from an amateur brass band. But the show of its kind is however good.

Blondes Have More Booze: May Fisk's Fire: While "British Blonde" acts had been part of Twin Cities entertainment since April 1871, when Eliza Webber's Blondes performed semi-clad readings from Hernani and Daughter of the Regiment, it is May Fisk that we have to thank for making such entertainment newsworthy. These acts, which were an early form of what later became known as burlesque, featured a bevy of buxom beauties, usually dressed in gauzy, form-revealing gowns. They would strike statuesque poses onstage and produce some painful amateur theatrics. (The audience, naturally, attended primarily for a peek at the female form; talent was secondary.)

In July 1879, in Stillwater, after a minor altercation with some of her performers concerning unpaid salaries, May Fisk (of May Fisk's Blondes) was arrested a little after midnight for drunk and disorderly conduct. According to a newspaper account, she was "locked in a cell at the calaboose, and a couple of hours later it was discovered that the interior of her cell was a mass of flames, the bedding having taken fire from some cause, and it is thought she set it on fire purposely, although she says it took fire in some manner from a candle which she left burning, and which she thinks was overturned by her dog, who was locked up with her."

Fisk then moved on to Minneapolis, where she and her performers continued to squabble over payroll issues. A Tribune report of her Minneapolis performance has her blondes telling jokes and taking up poses, until, at the end, Fisk herself offered a temperance lecture "with an eloquence probably born of bitter experience."

Was Joe Biernat in the Elephant Licensing Business? The circus was big business in the Twin Cities: Press accounts show that three or more troupes typically passed through town each summer. And our fair city, keen then as now to the financial bottom line of the culture, did as much as possible to wring every last dollar out of the traveling enterprises. This led circus pressman Charles H. Day to pen these dismissive words in 1885 in the Sporting and Theatrical Journal:

I'm sorry to hear that both Sells Bros. and Forepaugh paid an extravagant license at Minneapolis. It would do no good to state the amount here. It would be a good day's receipts for a small show. It would have been better to let Minneapolis go without a circus....Merchants and the local authorities of towns and cities will often appropriate large sums to subsidize horse trots, balloon ascensions, displays of fireworks, agricultural exhibitions, and the like, to make business. But when a showman comes along and assumes all risks, some of these same parties will put an obstacle in the way, in the way of a robbing license. Skip the high license towns, Mr. Managers, and let the councils of those burghs encourage the cultivation and growth of grass on the highways.

Get Your Freak On: The Dime Museums: September of 1885 saw the start of Sackett and Wiggins's Dime Museum, located at 214-216 Hennepin Ave., and featuring a Curiosity Hall, Monster Museum, Lecture Room, and the Luxurious Theatorium. The headline performer for the museum's opening week: Che-Mah, "Barnum's Famous Chinese Dwarf."

It is hard nowadays to imagine the high weirdness that was the dime museum, a nationwide fad for assembling vast collections of oddities and displaying them all under one roof. Luckily, a Minneapolis Journal article from the time offers some marvelous hints as to Sackett and Wiggins's contents: "The top floor has become the home of the freaks, big and little freaks, old freaks and young freaks, freaks human and freaks of nature. The next floor below it is devoted to the exhibition of birds and animals."

Sackett and Wiggins's Dime Museum specialized in bringing traveling acts to Minneapolis, and in their first year offered Punch and Judy shows, Zulu warriors, Chinese giants, an elastic-skinned man, a three-legged man, a human skeleton, and a living mermaid. In its second year, the dime museum grew even more creative, offering a series of bizarre conventions, including an albino beauty show and a "fat people's convention," where topics under discussion included "The Width of Doors." Oddly, in their grandly named Theatorium, the Dime Museum also offered a production of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado.

Sackett and Wiggins would run into competition in 1892 with the arrival of the Palace Museum, which opened with a headliner far more impressive than Sackett and Wiggins's presentation of the Chinese Dwarf. This was a Russian youth by the name of Fedor Jeftichew, who suffered from hypertrichosis, or excessive hair growth. Because his face and body were covered by a thick mat of brown hair, Jeftichew was better known by his stage name, Jo-Jo the Dog Faced Boy. Jeftichew had been an employee of Barnum for many years, becoming a worldwide sensation, despite Jeftichew's ongoing refusal to bark on command.

Not only did the Palace Museum offer a better headliner, but its promotions tended to be wilder. Where Sackett and Wiggins might offer a convention of fat people, for example, the Palace offered a "crawling fat woman." Also present was a two-headed wild giant, Joltum ("He Catches Cannon Balls"), and Josephine Myrtle, the dancing four-legged woman. Occasionally at the Palace it was possible to see women boxing kangaroos, and roller-skating horses. But the museum outdid itself in 1895 when it showed a waxwork re-creation of a notorious local murder, including the buggy and mare used to transport the victim to the scene of the crime. Eventually, the Palace added to the exhibit, tracking down the gallows used to execute the ringleader in the murder, as well as a pirated Edison recording of the ringleader's last words. This, unarguably, was a show that killed.

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THE MARY TYLER MOORE SHOW was great. It really was. But it was often obviously written by California writers who had never been in Minneapolis and didn't really care to do any research about the city. There is an episode that has always annoyed me, in which Mary and Rhoda go to a Mexican restaurant, and behave surprised to discover that the owner is Mexican. They didn't know there were any Mexicans in the Twin Cities. "Just me," the owner says. "There used to be two."

What happened, the ladies ask.

"My brother moved back home."

Now, I won't completely detail how extraordinarily ignorant this scene was, but I will say that, as a newswoman, Mary Richards would certainly have been aware that there have been Mexican immigrants in the Twin Cities since about 1912, and by 1970, there were at least 5,000 people of Mexican heritage in Hennepin County alone, with another 6,000 in St. Paul. By contrast, there were about 10,000 Jews in St. Paul at the same time, so, if Mary were to have wandered Wabasha, she was almost as likely to meet a Mexican as she was to meet Rhoda Morgenstern.

But perhaps the writer of this episode of the Mary Tyler Moore Show shouldn't be judged too harshly. Twin Citians often seem equally ignorant about their own ethnic and minority enclaves. Few, for example, know that the godfather of Twin Cities' rock and roll was the son of Mexican immigrants. Heck, locals barely even know that Twin Cities' rock and roll has a godfather. Augie Garcia, alas, has been all but forgotten. His records are long out of print, and there doesn't seem to be any effort to republish them. It's rare you'll even find mention of the man, although his name pops up now and then in a purely historical context. At St. Paul's History Center, as an example, they have a photo of Garcia, in his trademark tuxedo top and bermuda shorts, and you can listen to his regional hit "Hi You Silver." It is, to my knowledge, the only place on earth where you can do so.

There isn't the space here to really dig in to Garcia's story. Suffice it to say that in his time he was bigger than Elvis, at least locally. This native to St. Paul's west side opened for the King in 1956 at the St. Paul auditorium, and Garcia and his Quintet were reportedly quickly pulled from the stage. Their crime? They inspired too much excitement in their audience, and Colonel Tom Parker had added a clause into Presley's contract prohibiting opening acts from competing with the Hillbilly Hepcat.

But if there isn't the space here to do Garcia's biography justice, there is room to offer up a sampling of his music, to redress the injustice of its ongoing unavailability. Garcia made rhythmic, four-bar, back-beat heavy rock and roll, heavily inspired by jump blues. His songs featured slapped bull fiddle bass lines, blasting saxophones, pounding boogie woogie piano parts, and his own excitable singing voice, which clearly drew its influence from blues shouters such as Big Joe Turner and Louis Jordan, but punched up with the sort of novelty showmanship of Louis Prima and his gang. Additionally, Garcia's songs, especially "Hi Yo Silver," features terrific call and response with his band.

What follows are for songs by Garcia and his quintet, including "Hi Yo Silver." These demonstrate that the godfather of Twin Cities rock and roll is no mere historical curiosity. No, the thrill is still there in these old recordings, which sizzle with frenetic energy. It's easy to see why Augie Garcia, after quietly selling out the bijou River Road Club in Mendota for years (a club he references in his song "Be My Guest"), might suddenly become a threat to Elvis Presley.

LISTEN TO "HI YO SILVER":



LISTEN TO "IVY LEAGUE BABY":



LISTEN TO "GOING TO CHICAGO":



LISTEN TO "BE MY GUEST":



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WALLY WOOD'S CAREER was dazzling, and, if you know anything at all about comics, you know his name. The artist, born in Menahga, Minnesota, provided some of the defining work for several success generations of the industry. He started with the legendary Will Eisner, providing backgrounds for The Spirit (and eventually would cocreate The Outer Space Spirit, a short-lived, but astounding, attempt to revitalize the character.) He was one of the star artists for EC's notorious line of science fiction- and horror-themed comics, which met their doom when a quack named Frederick Wertham insisted they were one of the causes of juvenile delinquency and pulled the comics' creators before a congressional committee. The resulting Comics Code led to the birth of Mad Magazine, and Wally Wood wound up being one of the magazines most frequent, and beloved, contributors. He also worked with Marvel, and created the iconic costume for Daredevil. In the Sixties, Wood self-published his own comic book, witzend, which, with its radical and uncensored contents and status as an independently published comic book, puts it as being one of the first -- and perhaps the very first -- underground comic. And, to fans of the Sixties counterculture, Wally Wood made be most notorious for an illustration he provided for Paul Krassner's Realist: The Disneyland Memorial Orgy, a massive double-truck spread that showed a vast array of Disney characters engaged in obscene, and often pornographic, activities.

Wood was uniquely flexible as an artist, comfortable with a variety of genres (although he particularly excelled at science fiction) and could handily alternate between realism, caricature, and cute, although his illustrations were quickly identifiable. For one thing, he had was an extraordinary inker, one of the best the industry has ever seen, and tended to provide his illustrations with deep, ominous, cinematic shadows borrowed from Hollywood crime and action films, which he obsessively viewed. He also loved small details, and his science fiction illustrations, in particular, always contained an eye-popping assemblage of little buttons, wires, lights, and doohickeys, which Wood placed on spaceships, spacesuits, and sometimes directly on spacemen. Most importantly, Wood liked to draw voluptuous women, and dabbled in softcore illustrations (and, eventually hardcore), an aspect of his biography that is frequently given short shrift, but work that he evidently loved. But even in his mainstream comics work, Wood's women are visions of desire, which couldn't have hurt his popularity with male comics fans, who were then, as now, the financial backbone of the industry. But Wood's work had an unexpected sophistication to it as well, like all of the artists and writers from EC. They were caustically ironic, possessing a vicious black humor, and Wood could imbue his characters with unexpectedly conflicted personalities.

Wood's life was the subject of a recent biography, Wally's World: The Brilliant Life and Tragic Death of The World's Second-Best Comic Book Artist, by Steve Starger and J. David Spurlock. The books opens with Wood's death by suicide on Halloween of 1981 -- his vision had started to fail and his health was quite poor, and so he shot himself in the head, as he had apparently threatened to do for years. The books then traces Wood's life, from his childhood in Minnesota and Wisconsin and continuing on to his harrowing experiences in the Merchant Marines during World War II. (As a result Wood produced some extraordinary illustrations for EC's line of war comics.) The book sums up the man's career with great care -- it is obviously the product of meticulous research -- but paints a strange portrait of the man himself. Wood was obviously someone who lived through his art, and the authors describe his almost 24-hour work schedule at the start of his career; as a result, Wood doesn't have an especially interesting biography. He married, divorced, remarried, had a drinking problem, liked socially conscious folk music, collected guns, and had some disquieting personality quirks, but he really did very little.

You read some biographies and walk away with an astounding collection of anecdotes. Some travel to exotic locations, some toss off astounding bon mots as though it were the most natural thing in the world, some scramble and make epic bad decisions, some are on hand for the events that define a nation, and some make it their business to meet and befriend extraordinary people. Wood did none of these, or, at least, not deliberately (arguably, Mad Magazine's "usual gang of idiots" was a collection of talent and personality as magnificent as any ever assembled, but Wood apparently did not get along very well with many of them, and his most notable tale from the era is of going off on vacation with them, getting drunk, and disappearing for a while.)

As a result, Wood's life is, in many ways, defined by one essential contrast: That he was a man who imagined, and could put down on paper, the absolutely extraordinary, but who experienced life in a way that seems fairly quotidian. But, in the long run, perhaps it did not matter that Wally Wood was bad enough at life that he frequently tried to escape it, through drinking and eventually through suicide. Wally managed to create another world -- multitudes of worlds, in fact, filled with a surplus of horrors and wonders, all finely detailed and existing in deeply shadowed portraits. We live in Wood's every day world, which is mundane and difficult and which we likewise fail at, again and again. But, thanks to the work he produced, we are able to visit Wood's other worlds again and again, his meticulously crafted, sharply ironic visions of gibbering horrors, pornographic cartoon characters, and voluptuous women.

The little pains and failures of the world fade over time, and it is where we were exceptional that sticks. In the former, Wood may have been a squalid, squinty eyed man with petty jealousies and drinking problem; in the latter, Wood was a legend, and that's what lasts.

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WRITTEN IN RESPONSE to John McCain's attempt to suspend the presidential debate so that he could focus on the economy.

I will not have a debate today
I have to work on the economay
Our finances are in disarray
And that's not good for the economay
There's a lot of money we're gonna pay
To prop up the old economay
It can't be done if I stay away
It's the debate or the economay
It must be done without delay
And so I say, with some dismay
That I will not have a debate today
As I have to work on the economay.

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WRITTEN AS A RESPONSE to Reverend Fred Phelps, leader of the Westboro Baptist Church and a virulent homophobe, who recently attempted to picket the National Conference of Editorial Writers, claiming that the group is "responsible for the satanic milieu in this evil land" and for assisting the "satanic agendas" of "baby-killers and fags." The Westboro protestors were driven away by counter-protestors dressed as pirates.

What a hateful man
is Reverend Fred;
What hateful things
That man has said;
What a wasted life
That man has led;
What evil thoughts
Must busy his head;
What a twisted Bible
That man has read;
What a lunatic text of
Loathing and dread.

If you need to start sobbing
I've found it helps
To think that this world
Has in it Fred Phelps.
Nothing brings sorrow and
Moaning and yelps
Like the knowledge that the world
Has in it Fred Phelps.

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WE MUST by now have reached the moment that The Trashmen predicted: At long last, it must be that everybody's heard that the bird is the word. After all, when this local teenager surf-rock band welded together two songs by West Coast R&B group The Rivingtons and added their own hysterical gibberings, they created a song the only song to be covered by both The Ramones and Pee-Wee Herman and to be featured in films by both Stanley Kubrick and John Waters. We speak, of course, of "Surfin' Bird," one of the Twin Cities' first national hits, which peaked at #4 on Billboard's charts in 1964.

The song was quite influential, in its own way. For one thing, The Rivingtons attempted to capitalize on its success by releasing a sequel to their own "Papa Ooh Mow Mow," one of the two songs the Trashmen had mashed together to create their classic ("The Bird" was the other). They titled their new song "Mama Ooh Mow Mow," and threw in their own gravely voiced gibbering. For another thing, post-"Surfin' Bird," hundreds of bands sprang up in the Twin Cities and their suburbs, grinding out their own lunatic anthems in their parents' garages. When they went into the studio to record their own platters, it became obvious that Minnesota was in the throes of birdmania, as an astounding number of these bands recorded tunes that referenced "Surfin' Bird" in one way or another. Here are five of the best:

"Bird Dog," The Del Counts. In the greatest of garage bands traditions, the Del Counts' guitar part for this song is only two chords, one less than "Louie Louie." "Everybody's heard about The Bird, and everybody's heard about The Dog," the song tells us. "Put them together and what do you get?" We'll let you guess the answer to that.

LISTEN TO "BIRD DOG":



"Buzz, Buzz, Buzz," Gregory Dee & The Avanties. Backed by a propulsive organ part, Gregory Dee soulfully sings of the beauty of his girlfriend: "Buzz, buzz, buzz goes the bumblebee, Papa Ooh Mow Mow goes the bird, but the sound of you're little voice, darling, is the sweetest I've ever heard."

LISTEN TO "BUZZ, BUZZ, BUZZ":



"Cuckoo," The Monks. Now wait a minute, some will protest, The Monks were a group of GIs stationed in Germany during the 60s, and not a Minnesota band at all! Well, we're including them anyway, and for two very good reasons. Firstly, two of the five bandmembers were from Minnesota; secondly, the recent Monks revival has largely centered on Minnesota, mostly because singer/guitarist Gary Burger lives in Bemidji. Additionally, of the five songs on this list, it is "Cuckoo" that closest matches the insanity of the original. The Monks sing much of the song in a high falsetto, and chant-sing the rest of it in a manner that recalls the best work of Frank Zappa. "Someone took my cuckoo!" Burger cries out. "I want to know who who!"

LISTEN TO "CUCKOO":



"Old-Mo-William," Gregory Dee & The Avanties. You can't blame Gregory Dee and his band for repeatedly borrowing from "Surfin' Bird," well, a few times. After all, the Trashmen revisited their hit on at least two occasions, with "Bird '65" and a superb Beach Boys pastiche called "Bird Dance Beat." "Olds-Mo-William" is a rollicking number that tells of a sad sack who is inspired to dance by the irresistible sounds of a rock and roll band. And what dance does he attempt? "I'm gonna do the bird if I can, if I can."

LISTEN TO "OLD-MO-WILLIAM":



"Surfin' Crow," The Jades. Opening with a shrill "Caw! Caw! Caw!," The Jades' instrumental rave-up is a guitar-propelled surf number similar to Dick Dale's "Miserlou." In point of fact, it sounds almost exactly like "Miserlou," minus a few notes, as though the band had wanted to cover the Dick Dale number, but weren't sure of how to acquire the rights (ironically, it's a public domain song). No matter—The Jades put a distinctive stamp on the recording, particularly with middle bridge that features a soaring second guitar.

LISTEN TO "SURFIN' CROW":



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FOR THOSE OLD ENOUGH TO REMEMBER, the blond-tressed, cigar chomping Reggie Lisowski -- better known to wrestling fans as "The Crusher" -- was responsible for an indelible television commercial. In the Seventies, televised wrestling was most often interrupted by ads for LP compilations of popular polkas, but, once in a while, The Crusher would fill the screen, scowling and holding a television set. "Sick a'yer old teevee set?" he would ask in a working class Milwaukean accent. "T'row it away!" Which he would then demonstrate -- forcefully.

By the time his commercial debuted, The Crusher was already a quarter-century veteran of wrestling. For decades he had battled, cage fighting wrestlers with florid monikers, such as of "Mad Dog" Vachon and "Blackjack" Lanza, often with his tag-team partner Dick the Bruiser. He preferred to wrestle (or "wrassle," as he usually called it) in the Midwest, and so could often be found at such local venues as the Minneapolis Auditorium and the St. Paul Civic Center.

The Crusher obviously loomed large in the imagination of The Novas, a group of high schoolers aspiring to be rock and rollers. The Novas hailed from from Morningside, a suburb of Minneapolis that is now part of Edina -- and that simultaneously birthed such classic Minnesota garage bands as The Avantis and The Chancellors. In 1964, upon being signed to the newly opened Dove Recording Studio in St. Louis Park, they made use of their free recording time to cut a notorious novelty single. Impersonating The Crusher's gravel voice and famed phraseology (including the weird epithet "you turkey necks"), The Novas created the only song that might compete with Fred Blassie's "Pencil Necked Geeks" as the greatest wrestling-inspired rock song of all time.

"The Crusher," with its intermittent cried of "Rage" and it's grinding, minimalist instrumentals, was deemed awful enough to be included on the Rhino compilation The World's Worst Records, along with such infamous outsider artists as John Waters mainstay Edith Massey, rockabilly howler the Legendary Stardust Cowboy, and paranoid-schizophrenic rocker Wild Man Fischer. The song also inspired The Cramps enough to record a note-for-note cover.

The Crusher's legacy is responsible for an additional, unrelated song by The Ramones, but to our tastes, it is The Novas version that best captures his memory. That being said, The Novas might yet best themselves; there are rumors that the band recorded a longer, obscene version that was never released. Perhaps the original master for this lost treasure is moldering in some basement in Edina, awaiting rediscovery.

LISTEN TO "THE CRUSHER":



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ALMOST SEVENTY TEARS after their prime, Minneapolis-born sisters Patty, Maxine, and LaVern Andrews have about as solidly square a reputation as you're likely to find. They are the sing-songy, swinging voice of WWII optimism and innocence, singing too-cute, whitewashed popular jazz about reveille buglers who play boogie woogie. And, sure, compared to, say, Lester Young, who also did a tour of duty in Minneapolis and also emerged from the swing milieu, the sisters weren't exactly pushing the outer envelope of the sonic possibilities of jazz.

But a lot gets lost in this picture of the Andrews Sisters. Firstly, it forgets that their origins were in real jazz. Their primary inspiration, beginning when they were performing in the Midwestern vaudeville circuit, was a New Orleans act called The Boswell Sisters, a close-harmony singing trio whose influence in jazz was significant enough that Ella Fitzgerald patterned her singing style after them. You can hear the similarities between Ella and the Andrews, too: Lead soprano Maxine often affects the same sassy girlish voice that Fitzgerald was famous for.

And the sisters swung mighty hard. They frequently performed duets with Bing Crosby, and their responses to his laconic singing style involved radical time-shifts, wild syncopations, and sudden changes in pitch and key. They had an experimental sense of rhythm that would have left Buddy Rich gasping for air, and their understanding of harmony was unparalleled. They were, first and foremost, musicians, and highly skilled.

But there's another aspect of the Andrews Sisters that is frequently forgotten. They were viewed as a "fun" trio, and so a large percentage of their voluminous output consisted of novelties, often ethnic, beginning with their first hit, a reworking of a Yiddish standard called "Bei Mir Bist Du Schon." With their broad smiles, conservative looks, and pale complexions (never mind that they were half Greek), the sisters were "safe" in a way that darker-skinned, darker-themed artists wouldn't have been, and so the Andrews Sisters were often the ones exposing a mass audience really wild artists of their era. These included the babbling hepcat Slim Gaillard, who often sang in invented foreign languages, and jump blues honker Louis Jordan, who would sometimes flop on his back while playing long saxophone solos and push himself across the stage with his legs.

As a result, among the thousands of songs recorded by the Andrews Sisters, you find some really lunatic material. Here are five of their wildest:

1. Civilization: Recorded in 1947 as a duet with song and dance funnyman Danny Kaye, this novelty tune, which reached #3 on the Billboard charts, is shocking to modern ears. Also knows as "Bongo, Bongo, Bongo (I Don't Want to Leave the Congo)", it tells the story of an African tribesman who dismisses the words of a missionary, making his case that his so-called "primitive" life is far more civilized than what you might find in America. Unfortunately, the lyrics paint the Africans in broad, grotesque caricatures, with them hanging from bamboo trees like chimpanzees (worsened by the fact that Danny Kaye chatters like a primate when impersonating them in the song). In all fairness, Kaye's primary influence is almost certainly Slim Gaillard, in a pitch perfect impersonation of Gaillard's singing in ersatz foreign tongues, but it takes a moment to get beyond the song's cartoonish sensibility regarding Africans to appreciate the lyric's devilish, stinging satire.

LISTEN TO "CIVILIZATION":



2. I Didn't Know the Gun Was Loaded: Every so often, the Andrews Sisters would do a Broadway-styled cowboy song. Two of their bigger hits were "Don't Fence Me In" and "Lay That Pistol Down," both duets with Bing Crosby based around a rollicking, clopping horse rhythm; the latter song has the sisters brandishing pistols at a philandering Bing as he begs for his life. "I Didn't Know the Gun Was Loaded" is a sort of sequel to this, telling of a sharpshooting cowgirl named Effie who has the bad habit of shooting holes in her suitors, and then instantly proclaiming her innocence. The song features one of the sisters' wildest arrangements, with a clarinet occasionally breaking in to play what sounds like klezmer riffs, and the entire orchestra occasionally breaking into a New Orleans jazz funeral-style rave up.

LISTEN TO "I DIDN'T KNOW THE GUN WAS LOADED":



3. A Man is Brother to a Mule: "When a man meets a woman, she's liable to think he's human," the Andrews Sisters warn us in this vaguely Latin American-styled tune. They know the truth: With their ornery tempers and sheer contrariness, a man's closest biological relative is the ass.

LISTEN TO "A MAN IS BROTHER TO A MULE":



4. Strip Polka: Perhaps the clearest indication that the Andrews Sisters were Minnesotans was their tendency to record polkas, which they did with alarming frequency. Their oddest is this one, recorded in 1942, about a burlesque artist names Queenie who, for unaccountable reasons, pulls her clothes off while her band plays oompa oompa music. The song's middle bridge has the Andrews Sisters' band playing history's sleaziest polka as the sisters cry out "Take it off! Take it off! Take it off!"

LISTEN TO "STRIP POLKA":



5. The Yodeling Ghost: Not to be mistaken for the Patsy Montana song of the same title, this is a duet with Bing Crosby about a mysterious yodel, the product of a dead Swiss man who is haunting the girl who rejected his affections. What could be less terrifying?

LISTEN TO "THE YODELING GHOST":



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WRITTEN UPON reading of the controversial Federal economic bailout plan, which gives $700 billion to Wall Street with virtually no oversight.

I wish I was a rich man:
I'd spend money like rich men,
And no matter how poor I got
I'd soon be rich again.
I'd throw away a fortune,
Just like old Freddie Mac,
And every penny spended
Is a nickel I'd get back.
Oh, to live without comeuppance!
No creditors! No jail!
You can't go broke like us poor folks;
You're just too rich to fail.

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TAKE A WALK AROUND MINNESOTAN SUBURBS and you'll see a lot of prefabrication, most of it awful. Virtually all contemporary architecture is, to some extent or another, built from kits. Yet most suburban homes badly ape early American home designs, often incoherently: Classical Revival columns will support Colonial homes, or Tudor roofs will spring from the tops of Queen Anne houses. And yet, whatever stylistic flourishes these little ticky tacky boxes adopt, they nonetheless all look the same, as Malvina Reynolds complained back in 1963.

The bewildering thing of it is that these contemporary suburban homes adopt the techniques of prefabrication -- the use of premolded, consistent, factory produced elements -- without bothering to look at the design revolution it created. For some reason, the suburbs have wholly rejected modernism in favor of a blandly nostalgic eclecticism. It's pretty rare that you'll find one of Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion Houses out there, even though Bucky Fuller's aluminum yert was specifically designed to be a low-cost alternative to more expensive homebuilding techniques, and, unlike the mobile homes it vaguely resembled, was tornado-proof.

Neither are you liable to see many of the modernist prefab homes that were all the rage in the mid-20th century, when sleek, elegant, Bauhaus-inspired designs sudden came into international vogue. You won't find many (if any) of Walter Gropius's boxlike Package Houses, or Walter Frey's imposing concrete bunker-like Aluminaire Houses, or Kisho Kurokawa's modular towers. The strange thing of it is, Minnesotans historically have a taste for modernism.

For example, there is a notable regional love for the sophisticated, arching wood and metal furniture that comes out of Scandinavia. Similarly, when the Swedish furniture store IKEA, boasting inexpensive designs clearly inspired by Atomic Age-designers, opened in Bloomington in 2004, it was mobbed by locals; the store quickly sold out of its most popular items, and was faced with hour-long checkout lines. Beyond that, Minneapolis boasts two modern art museums -- the Walker Art Center and the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum -- both acting as local champions for such mid-century art movements as Minimalism, Pop Art, and Fluxxus. Our downtown skyline is crowded with the sorts of geometric glass structures that look simultaneously futuristic and retro mod, a Sixties' vision of the modern city.

And yet, in Minnesota's suburbs, everything reverts to a generic idea of homely Americana. When these suburban homes are not bland, they are ugly, and, most frustratingly, they are expensive. What is the point of purchasing a home that is, for all intents and purposes, prefabricated, when you lose the greatest benefiting of prefabrication: low costs? Why spend a half-million dollars or more on a home that is poorly and lazily constructed?

Well, we can thank two Twin Cities companies for providing us with an alternative that is more in keeping with the modernist tradition of prefab architecture. Minneapolis's Lazor Offices offers the FlatPak, a home built out of interlocking 8' wall components that can be configured in a dazzling variety of ways, and, with its spare wood and glass elements, looks like a house might if designed by IKEA .(Incidentally, IKEA also designs prefab houses, with less satisfying results.) The FlatPak home features open floorplans that feel enjoyably futuristic, something like the house that James Caan inhabited in Rollerball, and the house's construction is relatively affordable, costing considerably less that a typical house of the same size.

In the meanwhile, the St. Paul firm of Alchemy Architects are responsible for the weeHouse, a tiny prefab home that looks like a little wood and glass box perched on round stilts. The weeHouse is modular, so several of them can be placed next to each other, or stacked on top of each other, to form a larger unit. The weeHouse is remarkably inexpensive. There are additional costs, of course: the plot of land, transportation of the module, setting the foundation, and renting a crane to place the module. Nonetheless, in all, the weeHouse comes in at much less cost than your standard house.

Like the FlatPak, the weeHouse has a distinctly modernist look to it: the structure is elegant but undecorative, it's attractiveness based, in part, on its stripped-down functionality. These are not homes for people who read Country Living magazine, or fill their houses with comfy, oversized furnishings featuring quilt-like fabrics decorated with embroidered flowers. There are, instead, no nonsense homes that allow precious little room for the sentimental nostalgia that guides so much contemporary decorating and design. These are houses that should feature Vespas parked outside and robots on the inside, straightening plastic furniture and answering Sculptura telephones. These are the homes of the future that the 1960s promised us, and that the suburbs turned its back on.

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LOCALS WITH SWEET TEETH often pine for Minnesota's great lost candy, a chocolate bar with seven compartments, each with a different filling: Cherry, coconut, caramel, fudge, jelly, maple, and Brazil nut. This little flavor miracle was called the Seven Up Bar, and was originally manufactured by Trudeau Candy Company of Saint Paul. In 1951, this company was acquired by another great Minnesota candy company, Pearson's, who had been manufacturing salty confections since 1909, including the Nut Goodie Bar and something that for years Pearson's called the Choo Choo Bar -- nowadays known to us as the Salted Nut Roll.

The Seven Up Bar is a casualty of the Seventies, unfortunately, when Pearson's fell into a the hands of series of out-of-state owners who proved inept at promoting the company's signature products. The company was eventually purchased by two of its own employees, and thanks to them, Pearson's signature candies are easily available in the Midwest.

Until Pearson's decides to rerelease the Seven Up Bar, we shall have to stay satisfied with their other confections. And this suits us, because their other candies -- including Mint Patties, Bun Bars, and their newly released Flurries -- are terrific. But it is their Salted Nut Roll that truly draws our affection. A combination of nougat, caramel, and Virginia peanuts, the candy is a lip-smacking mixture of sweet and salty. There's nothing on the market quite like them; even their most similar competitor, the Snickers Bar, simply tastes like an ordinary chocolate bar with peanuts thrown in. The Salted Nut Roll is notable for eschewing chocolate, a rarity in today's candy market, and, as a result, the Nut Roll tastes like nothing else out there.

Admittedly, the candy has a rather dopey mascot, a rollerblading, beanie-wearing creature called Dudley P. Nutt who looks oddly like a bloated, pink version of Twinkie the Kid, but will let this fact pass with scant comment. The mascot only appeared in 1997, and so, we hope, will have a mercifully short life. The Salted Nut Bar, in the meanwhile, dates all the way back to 1933, and managed pretty well without a yellow-glove and red-coverall wearing cartoon to act as its booster. We'll continue to eat the Salted Nut Roll and try to ignore Mr. Nutt when he shows up at various local sporting and charity events.

We know the company is capable of better promotions. In 2001, on the opening night of playwright Kevin Kling's Gulliver's Travels-inspired Gulliver: A Swift Journey, Pearson's provided an appropriately Brobdignagian opening night snack: a massive Nut Roll. The play was great fun, but the candy bar was the biggest treat of the evening.

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I KNOW that there is a side to the media that is contemptible. A sort of mutual benefit society of reporters who get fed by PR agents and publish whatever they are told to, and, because they are writing about celebrities, or fashion, or upscale living, they benefit from this. You see the work produced by these so-called journalists when you stand in line in grocery stores, in glossy magazines that produce fawning portraits of movie stars and take lavish tours of movie star homes. You see it on television, with shows that feature shrieking, badly dressed nobodies talking to Harrison Ford as though they had known him for years, and then go on to gossip about Lindsay Lohan's latest stint in rehab.

Or, at least, you read and see these things if you care enough to do so. I don't. I have been an art and culture critic for quite a long time now, and I only care about the personalities behind the art as it directly relates to the art they produce. Everything else is gossip, and gossip is what idiots use in place of conversation.

So here's a note to the people who run and manage to new W hotel in downtown Minneapolis: If you're going to throw a party for the opening of your new hotel, and you're going to invite the local press to cover it, don't treat us like we're some star-struck fans who will be so dazzled to see a parade of z-level celebrities that we'd be happy to do your publicity work for you. That's not our job, and we're going to resent you for assuming it is.

I write about cocktails. That's all I can really offer the W Hotel. I do it pretty well, and they have, on their 27th floor, a superlative bar called Prohibition. I stopped by the bar on the opening night of the hotel several weeks ago, and have been eager to get back. They have an unusual and excellent selection of pre-prohibition cocktails, including the one I drank that night, a rum swizzle. Swizzle sticks get their name from this cocktail, which originates in Bermuda and consists of rum, the juices of lime, pineapples, and oranges, and is stirred with a stick of sugar cane -- the original swizzle stick. Not only does Prohibition make a very tasty Rum Swizzle, but they also serve it with the sugar cane stirrer, a much appreciated nod to history.

Now, the drinks are moderately priced, starting at about $10, and I'm not in the habit of dropping a lot of money on cocktails all at once, so it has been my plan to go back to Prohibition every now and then, sample another of their cocktails, see what the bar is like from night to night, and piece together a story in this way. But I got an invite to the W's opening party and thought, what the hell, it's a party.

Check in time for the press was 6:15, which is when I showed up.

I was let into the party at about 9pm.

So what was I doing for the two hours and forty five minutes between when I was asked to show up, you may ask? I'll tell you.

For the most part, I, and the rest of the local press, were sequestered behind a velvet rope in front of the building. The hotel staff had a series of screens set up with the name of the hotel emblazoned on them, and they paraded people in front of this wall of screens to get their photos taken. We were informed that this was the only opportunity we would have to take photos. Specifically, the invite said "Please know that press/photographers/cameras are not allowed to wander the party at your leisure. We will have people there to escort you in to get the shots that you want."

I am not a photographer, primarily. I carry around a little digital camera that I use for snapping pictures on the spot, but I'm mostly a writer. And when I take photos, I do so journalistically. They are photos of the subject I am writing about. I am not a gossip columnist or a paparazzi. I am not interested in taking pictures of z-list celebrities. There aren't even enough z-list celebrities in Twin Cities to justify having such a parade, on the off-chance that one of our very few gossip columnists or paparazzo might be there (at least one was: C.J. from the Star-Tribune.) Nobody seemed to have any idea who was being brought in front of them, and I don't think that was the point. I think the W merely wanted to make local businessmen and investors feel special, feel like celebrities for one night, and they enlisted the help of the local press to do so. Except, in my case, they didn't tell me that I would simply be pretending to be the press this night, playacting a scene to make very rich men and their severe-looking wives feel extra-wonderful for one evening. I do playact on occasion, but I have always been very careful about my resume as an actor, steering clear of projects I thought were worthless. I would have steered clear of this one.

And so I sat in front of the W, for the most part, for almost three hours, wondering when I was going to be let in. And the W staff were uncommonly ungracious out there. If a photographer strayed too far from the roped off press area, they were commanded to return. I stepped over the rope once to speak to someone I knew, and was barked at by a busybody of a little man in glasses: "Next time, GO AROUND," he snapped.

They did take me on a brief and useless tour of the hotel, along with a group of other reporters. I have been in the Foshay Building many times, and had already visited the hotel on its opening night, and so all I got was a short reprieve from the interminable boredom of waiting outside. I was useless out there anyway. I don't know whose brilliant idea it was to sequester the writers with the photographers, but nobody was pleased with this. It's simply not wise to put writers behind ropes and keep them out of a party, especially when there is liquor inside. They get surly.

I did learn a few things on my short tour of the W. Firstly, the whole building is done up in a high, modern style that is going to look badly dated in a few years, and comes across as cold and tacky, unless you like furnishings that look like knockoffs of modernist furniture made by people who like modernism only because they think it looks cool. In that case, the hotel looks cold and somewhat modernist. I also learned that the W may have one of the most embarrassing corporate cultures I have ever experienced, refusing to call anything what it is, but instead referring to things like maids and minibars using painfully self-important euphemisms such as "talent" and "nosh bar," or something like that. The hotel looks like it would be a nice enough place to stay, if you should find yourself making too much money per year and need to try to figure out some way to spend it that would make you feel terrifically self-important.

I also discovered that the staff is strangely circumspect about the history of the Foshay. On the tour, one of the photographers asked what had happened to Wilbur Foshay, the fellow who built the skyscraper, and the PR people waved their hands vaguely. "Oh, he lost all his money somehow," they answered.

Somehow? He lost it in the stock market crash of 1929 and then did prison time for mail fraud, never getting to enjoy the tower he had built. Perhaps the W staff didn't wish to mention this because of an awkwardly timed recent stock market crash, but still -- anyone worth their salt can Google Wilbur Foshay's sordid tale of ambition and ruin, and it seemed a little precious to behave as though there was some vagueness about what happened to him. Perhaps it's a small point, but it was a minor irritation that reflected the larger irritation of the evening: That the PR people apparently viewed the press as a wing of their business, and thought the way reporters got stories was to be led around by the nose, given talking points, told where to stand, and told who to take photos of. And that shows a contempt for the press that I find, frankly, shocking. It also strikes me as damned stupid. The W is going to need the local press down the road, and they succeeded in alienating quite a few local writers and editors by expecting them to be their paparazzi, if the grumblings I heard in front of the W are any indication. There simply is no point in segregating writers to the front of the building, with photographers, and marching strangers back and forth. There's nothing writers can do but sit and wonder why they have been kept away from the actual story, inside the building. And then to have them sit, as I did, for almost three hours? That simply shows a terrific ignorance, and lack of concern, for what it is reporters do.

Eventually we were let in. The party was pretty nice, with attractive women dressed sort of like flappers might look if they had been stripped down to their undergarments. These young ladies were put inside boxes with sliding panels, and they danced to music from the 80s, sliding the panels open and closed to reveal legs or midsections or arms. Waitstaff -- uh, excuse me, talent -- moved about, serving some truly abominable cocktails. These were all too sweet and made in such a way that the taste of the liquor was masked, which is what you do when you serve a drink made with bad alcohol, which was almost certainly not the case, and so was a waste of good alcohol. But I felt pretty defeated at that moment, and also felt misused. Had whoever did PR done one second -- one second -- worth of research, they could have made good use of me. They could have shown me the bar, and talked about the difficulty involved in finding many of the ingredients found in old cocktails, and given me samples, and introduced me to their bartenders, and I could have put together a story about Prohibition, which deserves to be written about in a meaningful way. And it's not as though they were completely oblivious to what I do. I emailed that I might be writing about this for The Bottle Gang, and sent them a link.

But perhaps that's too much to ask on the evening of their opening party. Fair enough. Then the best thing they could have done would be to let me into the party when it began, let me wander about with my little camera, and had PR people on hand to answer questions. Reporters know how to find a story. We really need little assistance. We certainly don't need to be managed, as we were that night.

But they didn't seem to want the press there. They wanted a simulacrum of the press, to act out a performance inspired by red carpet scenes in Hollywood films. And so the only story I got that night was one of pure artificiality, in which people pretending to be celebrities were marched in front of people pretending to be journalists.

More Bottle Gang!

WRITTEN UPON reading that Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin's emails had been hacked.

What was found in Palin's email?
What potentially deadly Palin detail?
Did she spend time in a Tennessee jail?
Does she take her bribes in the form of free ale?
Does she dine on the flesh of endangered sea whale?
Does she bury her dead along a ski trail?
Is she the one that made the economy fail?
Is it true that Ann Coulter is a she-male?

Tell us, tell us, tell us please:
What forged documents, what faked degrees?
What scandals revealed? What evil decrees?
What? Photos of her children? Nothing else?

Tease.

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MINNEAPOLIS NATIVE George Roy Hill's 1977 film Slap Shot is a terrific, vicious satire, following hockey coach Paul Newman's deliberate efforts to turn his ailing team from mediocre to champions simply by encouraging them to be as violent as possible on the ice. The team, dubbed the Charlestown Chiefs and based on the real-life Johnstown Jets, takes to Newman's plotting with varied levels of enthusiasm. One, a rather dim dimestore mystic, renames himself "killer" and begins wearing a cape when off the ice, while the team's only college-educated player spends most of the movie rolling his eyes in disappointment and refusing to, in his words, "goon it up" for Newman.

The Chiefs' three newest players, a trio of stringy haired, coke bottle-bespectacled brothers named Hanson, require no encouragement at all from Newman. They're naturally goons: For them, hockey is as much about fighting as it is about skating. When Newman first meets the brothers, they are assaulting a soda machine. He later catches them playing with slot cars in their hotel room, screaming at each other and flinging the cars off the tracks. Hurrying back to the hockey rink, Newman confronts the Chief's manager. "You cheap son of a bitch!" he cries. "Those guys are retarded!"

On the ice, however, the Hanson brothers are murderous. They tape aluminum foil to their knuckles ("Puttin' on the foil!" they proclaim. "Every game!"), assault any player within reach, and even climb into the stands and throw wild punches after an audience member tosses a keychain at them. As the Chiefs begin to win games, the Hansons become local celebrities, and busloads of girls wearing novelty Groucho glasses start to follow the Chiefs' tour bus. "They're folk heroes!" Newman declares. "They're criminals," a policeman responds, and Newman shrugs. "Most folk heroes started out as criminals," he retorts.

Slap Shot sometimes seems to be a sibling film to 1977's Rollerball, a dystopian science fiction film in which the most popular game of the future is an ultraviolent game of roller derby. Much of Slap Shot seems intended as farce, such as the film's repeated references to an unseen player named Ogie Ogilthorpe, a creature of such uncontained violence that he has been banned for life from the game of hockey and deported to Canada, which, in turn, deported him back to the United States.

But a little bit of digging reveals that Ogilthorpe isn't as absurd as he first seems. The character is based on a real player, Bill "Goldie" Goldthorpe of Thunder Bay, Ontario, who was also led to games with a police escort, had once leaped out of penalty box to attack a referee, and was regularly jailed for off-ice scuffles. In fact, Goldthorpe was reportedly slated to play himself in the film, but lost the role after flinging a soda bottle at Paul Newman's brother.

Slap Shot began life as an idea for a documentary. Screenwriter Nancy Dowd, who would later write for Saturday Night Live, followed the Johnstown Jets for a year when he brother Ned Dowd was a teammate. (Ned would eventually fill the role as Ogie Ogilthorpe in the film). She approached George Roy Hill with anecdotes from her experiences, and he suggested that they might make for a terrific comedy, rather than a documentary. As a result, Slap Shot is set in an unusually authentic setting. Charlestown is an ailing mill town, looking at mass layoffs, filmed in the actual town that inspired it: Johnstown, Pennsylvania, where the steel mill was actually closing.

Dowd based the Hanson brothers on a trio of sibling players she had watched in Johnstown, and she didn't exaggerate them much. They didn't tape foil to their gloves, as in the film, but they did wear golf clubs soaked in ice water. They played with slot cars. They were jailed for attacking audience members. One kept a brick as a pet, keeping it in his locker at the stadium; during a scene in Slap Shot, that exact brick is visible in one of the Hanson Brother's lockers.

Casting these characters proved difficult. A number of actors auditioned (including, reportedly, Donny Most from Happy Days), but could not skate with the necessary skill. So the casting directors turned to the brothers who had inspired the characters, three teenage siblings from Virginia, MN, named Steve Carlson, Jeff Carlson, and Jack Carlson. Just prior to filming, Jack Carlson was hired for the Edmonton Oilers, as so was replaced by Steve Hanson, who, confusingly, was originally hired to play a character named Carlson. Steve Hanson was also a hockey player with the Chiefs, and all three actors would go on to long careers in professional hockey.

Their notoriety as Slap Shot's Hanson brothers followed them for much of their career -- they relate having to spend hours after games signing Groucho noses for appreciative fans. The two Carlson brothers and Steve Hanson also reprised their roles in an ill-conceived sequel in 2002, a direct-to-video release starring Stephen Baldwin, but a better legacy of the Hanson Brother's taste for hockey mayhem was Extreme Championship Wrestling's stable of wrestlers dubbed the Dudley Family, who claimed a common father and all wore taped, thick-rimmed glasses, inspired by the appearance of the Hanson Brothers. Two of the Dudley Family, Brother Ray and Brother Devon, are best known for their use of folding tables as weapons in the wrestling ring. One suspects the Hansons would have approved.

More of the Sparber Guide to the Twin Cities!

WRITTEN UPON reading that Vice President Dick Cheney is refusing to turn over his records to the National Archives and Record Administration for eventual release to the public, claiming that he is not a part of the Executive Branch, but instead a "barnacle on the legislative branch."

Barnacles they are anthropods
That affix themselves to man-made facades;
They belong to the infraclass Cirripedia --
Or such are the claims of the liberal media;
They are in the subphylum Crustacea
And excrete amonia and urea;
They are sessile suspension feeders --
It's the sort of thing we want from all our leaders;
Each has an impermeable calcite shell
For in desiccated zones barnacles dwell;
Their sessile lives make reproduction hard
But Marjorie and Richard Herbert produced Richard;
He rose to preside in the White House halls
Making him a legend among barnacles;
Of fouling organisms, there are many
But there is only one Richard Cheney.

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WRITTEN UPON READING of the collapse of Wall Street financial institutions and the Dow Jones industrial average falling 300 points.

It's never good to be poor and usually better to be rich,
And I'd be rich if I could have chooseded it;
But right now, I guess it's better to be poor
Because at least I'm already used to it.

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THE HISTORY of Twin Cities garage band music isn't very well remembered, but when it is, its origins tend to go something like this: In Christmas of 1962, three Minneapolis band members vacationed in Balboa Beach. These fellows had played in a variety of local party bands, and they spent their vacation looting California record stores for surf instrumentals when they weren't stretched out on the beach. These fellows returned to Minneapolis and cut a record that welded together two songs by a raucous L.A. doo-wop band called The Rivingtons: "Papa-Ooh-Mow-Mow" and "The Bird." This they performed in gravelly, excitable vocals and a pounding surf beat, creating "Surfin' Bird," which tore up the national charts, and also birthed the local garage scene.

This is a pretty good history, as histories go. It forgets that there were already hundreds of teen bands in the Twin Cities, actively rehearsing in their parents garages -- The Trashmen themselves were in a few, including the Strings Kings, who recorded some genuinely wild rockabilly inspired shouters for the Gaity label. But never mind. Stories have to start somewhere and "Surfin ' Bird" is about as good a start as any. Besides, surf instrumentals hadn't really found an audience in the Twin Cities and, after "Surfin' Bird," you'd be hard-pressed to find a local band that hadn't incorporated the sound into their act in one way or another.

But there is a local 45 rpm single that's worth mentioning as a sort of transitional album, existing somewhere between the hillbilly rock and roll of the '50s and the stripped-down garage beat of the '60s. A local performer named Richard A. Caire released a song called "Trashman's Blues" under the name Kai-Ray in 1961 (currently available as a vinyl single from Norton). The song is an uptempo country blues number with a rollicking Bo Diddley beat, and features Kai-Ray asking his local sanitation worker the cost of hauling away a pile of garbage. The song was a popular regional favorite, and is important to this story because The Trashmen took their name from it; Kai-Ray later penned a number of songs for the Trashmen, including their a Beach Boys-inspired anthem, "New Generation."

But it is the flipside of "Trashman's Blues" that interests us here. The song is called "I Want Some of That" (also often called "Jungle Talk"), and it's a real oddity. The essential melody is a fairly straightforward rockabilly shouter, but it is bookended by a wild, deliberately primitive chant. Over a relentless tom drum beat, Kai-Ray lets loose with a high keening, sounding something like the lampoon of Native American tribal music that accompanies the Tomahawk Chop. Kai-Ray also makes a sort of melodic Bronx cheer before launching into his song, which, despite its lyrics, is also deliberately primitive, consisting of simple pidgin English phrases repeated over and over again. "Baby take it on back," he exhorts. "Big coconut hat!"

The song is a very early example of a few features that would be hallmarks of '60s garage music, particularly in the Twin Cities. His song's faux-primitive sensibilities would pop up frequently in '60s garage rock: It was a decade of caveman vests, pounding tom-toms, and pidgin lyrics. And Kai-Rasy's lunatic vocals throughout the song was the first of dozens, if not hundreds, of local tunes in which the singers had license to go haywire—most famously in the gibbered middle bridge of "Surfin' Bird." Kai-Ray's song may not be the Twin Cities' first garage band song, but it certainly is father to the scene—an early example of the weirdness and wildness that would pour out of Minneapolis for the next decade. It's no wonder The Cramps, themselves known for weird and wild tastes, have covered so many songs from local rockers, including "Surfin' Bird"—the compilation album, "Songs the Cramps Taught Us," even included Kai-Ray's "I Want Some of That."

LISTEN TO "I WANT SOME OF THAT":



More of the Sparber Guide to the Twin Cities!

WRITTEN UPON learning of the suicide of author and essayist David Foster Wallace.

Who will sponsor this
The very worst year
The very worst year we've had?
What corporate name
Will we place here
As we leave the Year of the Glad?
Tracy Austin broke your heart
And you've done the same
To all us.
What footnote can
Contain the works
Of David Foster Wallace?

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THERE IS a terrible misconception that the Twin Cities had little to offer rock and roll before 1964, when The Trashmen enjoyed national success with "Surfin' Bird" and encouraged a decade of similarly raucous garage band music from Minnesota. Of course, this ignores the fact that rockabilly pioneer Eddie Cochran hailed from Albert Lea. It likewise ignores the dozens of '50s-era rock and roll bands and close-harmony R&B groups who languished in obscurity due to never having recorded, or because they recorded with small studios that produced a few hundred platters at most and could offer only the vaguest gesture at distribution. In fact, in the fifties, the Twin Cities produced one of the best rock and roll songs ever, but nobody knows this fact, because the song and its performer are unjustly forgotten.

The song is "Do I Do Right," and it's credited to Lou & Ginny. The latter was almost certainly one Ginny Charland, a local nightclub performer who was still appearing with the Twin Cities Show Chorus up until her death in 2003, and who is credited as the song's author. As to who Lou is, well, we just don't know. The album was recorded sometime in the 1950s by a St. Paul company calling itself Hep Records. And that's it. There, in a nutshell, is everything we know about the song. "Do I Do Right" will occasionally pop up on collections of obscure rockabilly, and, to their credit, the Minnesota Historical Society includes the song on a jukebox as part of their marvelous Twin Cities rock music exhibit. But otherwise the song is unjustly obscure, because it's fantastic. In fact, it's beyond fantastic—it's transcendent.

Over pounding toms and violently strummed guitar, in a mournful, panicked minor key, Ginny pleads with her deceased father for advice. She has fallen in love with a rock and roller and fears eternal damnation as a result. "Does the Lord up in heaven approve of rock and roll?" Ginny begs. "Please tell me daddy, for I want to save my soul." Her father must know the answer, after all, as Ginny wails in the chorus, he's "closer to the Lord in Heaven."

Written at a time when American clergymen where genuinely arguing that rock and roll was one step on a path to eternal torment, "Do I Do Right" finds a perfect tone, somewhere between fascination and terror. The song doesn't answer its own question; the singer is left with her questions unresolved, but the expressive melody and Ginny's powerhouse vocals provide their own answer. She might, in fact, be damned for rock and roll. But it might be worth it.

LISTEN TO "DO I DO RIGHT":



More of the Sparber Guide to the Twin Cities!

IN RESPONSE to news that a North Texas homeowner lost his house in a fire because the neighborhood hydrants had been turned off. Why? To "prevent vandalism or any kind of terrorist activity, including something in the water lines."

I don't understand why we can't
Use the fire hydrant
When our house combusted?
They say we are at war now
So the hydrants are off for now
Because the enemy can't be trusted.
It's a small price that we pay now
To strip the hydrants of their spray now
To address the terrorist threat.
For the small price that we pay
The terrorists, on a hot day,
Won't be able to open a hydrant
And cool off in its jet.

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MUSICALLY, there's not too much to say about these two mid-60s local party rock hits by St. Paul's The Deacons. They're both three-chord wonders, the first using the same chord progressions as "Louie Louie" and "Wild Things," a I-IV-V progression that served as the musical nuclear core of 60s garage band music. The second song is essentially a remake of the first, replacing it's blurting saxophone with a propulsive drum pattern. Both songs, lyrically, are invitations to dance ("It's real neat to do the Baldie Beat; you move your arms and you grind your feet"), and the songs benefit from the sneering, laughing tone of The Deacon's singer, as well as assorted shouts from the band, which give the songs the feeling of having been recorded live at a particularly wild frat party.

However, the songs become quite a bit more interesting if you know that they are celebrating a legendary -- and possibly semi-mythical -- youth gang from the Twin Cities (no direct relation to the antiracist skinhead group of the same name that originated in the Twin Cities in the 80s). Nobody seems to know anybody who was actually a member of the group, but you meet quite a few people who claim that their older brother was friends with someone in the gang. The baldies are supposed to have shaved their heads, at least up until 1964, when they all switched to Beatles haircuts. The Baldies were middle class and mod, with their uniform of choice being Gant shirts with a loop at the back of the neck and high, tight trousers that they cinched with belts with oversized buckles, which could be removed quickly and wrapped around the hand to serve an an improvised brass knuckles. But their real weapon of choice were their feet: The Baldies liked to kick, and wore steel-toe wingtip shoes to make their kicks vicious.

The Baldies rumbled with a more working class gang, The Animals, a group of greasers in blue jeans and white t-shirts who carried around metal combs with long points, which they sharpened into makeshift shivs. The Animals reportedly also filed their teeth to sharp points, and it was a point of pride among The Baldies to kick them in the teeth, in order to leave Animal toothprints (perhaps even teeth!) embedded in their shoes. The local law didn't seem to take these rumors of youth gangs too seriously, tending to dismiss them as either exaggerated nonsense or as a problem for school supervisors; interestingly, a number of Baldies are supposed to have gone on to joint the Twin Cities police force.

The Deacons make no real reference to their eponymous youth gang in their songs, although one supposes they probably actually played the song at parties where Baldies were in attendance. It is, however, a little unnerving to hear The Deacons insist that their dance involves grinding the feet, as, when actual Baldies ground their feet, teeth may have gone flying.

LISTEN TO "BALDIE STOMP":



LISTEN TO "BALDIE BEAT":



More of the Sparber Guide to the Twin Cities!

I REMEMBER when I found the baby on my doorstop. It was a tiny thing, and pink, and crying. Maybe I should have called the cops first, but, honestly, the crying was getting to me. It was so high and shrill and uncontrolled. I worried the neighbors might hear. So I bundled it up in its bantlings and did for the baby what I did the last time I cried like that: I poured it a big glass of scotch.

The baby slept, and while it slept, I thought about my options. I stared at the phone. I could call 911, but then the police would come, and how would I explain myself? This is a gated community, and everybody knows each other. This sort of thing wouldn't go unnoticed. I would have to defend myself at the next community board meeting, and what would I say? It was just left there? With a note? People would talk. They would probably say the baby was mine. They would make up stories, I know it. They are such terrible pests. They already invent stories about my drinking. They claim those two weeks I spent in the hospital last year were the result of me drunkenly climbing on my roof and shouting abuse at them and then falling off. That's not true at all. I was cleaning leaves out of the chimney, and I hadn't had more than one glass of scotch. So I can't imagine what they might say about this baby. Probably say the mother is a crack whore. Say I forced myself on her and paid her in crack, and I was drunk when I did it.

No. The police would not be called.

I thought about the flower garden in the back, and a midnight funeral, but quickly put those thoughts out of my head. I couldn't do it. At least, not sober. And there was so much risk. What if someone saw? I would have a hard enough time explaining a living baby. But this?

I remembered my unused room in the basement. I thought about it for a long time. I could slide flat food under the door. Crackers. Pop Tarts. Matzoh. Nobody need ever know anything. The baby would live out its life in relative comfort, although, I suspected, that life would be terribly lonely. But what's so bad about being lonely. I'm lonely. I'm so lonely that sometimes I just cry and cry and cry.

But it wasn't so simple. I didn't know what to do about toilet issues. And the baby might make a lot of noise. And it's a flimsy door. Sure, a baby couldn't break through it, but a ten-year-old can, and babies live a long time. This idea was not going to work, as appealing as it might be.

The baby stirred and it stared at me, cross-eyed and gurgling. I panicked. I bundled it up again and ran out my front door. I paused a moment and looked around. There was nobody.

The Luteson's wouldn't be home for at least another half-hour. I sprang across my yard and up to their door, clutching the baby, and set it there. Then I turn and bolted back to my house, slamming my door, panting hard. I opened the door a crack and peered out.

Nobody saw.

I went for my scotch. Later that night, I fell off my roof again.

I was in the hospital for two weeks. I came home on a Tuesday afternoon. There was something on my front step.

I didn't even look. I just carried it over to the Luteson's and set it there. I don't know if it was a new baby, or if the same baby had just been circulating from house to house for 14 days.

Tonight I reinforce the door in my basement. Tomorrow, I'll figure out how to create a crawlspace to the bathroom down there. In case it comes back. Then I'll stock up on matzoh. Matzoh for the little one. Scotch for me.

Read more of I'm Just a Bad Boy, a Fake Memoir.

ST. LOUIS PARK natives Joel and Ethan Coen are arguably responsible for the most quotable film of all time, 1998's The Big Lebowski. But they've had a taste for stylized, florid dialogue ever since their earliest films, which demonstrated an early love for ornate turns of phrases, peculiar regionalisms, and a profound sense of irony that would be their hallmarks. Everybody has their favorite line (or, more often, lines) from a Coen Brothers film -- these are mine.

BLOOD SIMPLE (1984)
The Coen Brother's first film, self-produced, was an exercise in modern noir, telling of a cheating couple and a murder gone horribly wrong.

Private Detective Visser: The world is full o' complainers. An' the fact is, nothin' comes with a guarantee. Now I don't care if you're the pope of Rome, President of the United States or Man of the Year; somethin' can all go wrong. Now go on ahead, y'know, complain, tell your problems to your neighbor, ask for help, 'n watch him fly. Now, in Russia, they got it mapped out so that everyone pulls for everyone else... that's the theory, anyway. But what I know about is Texas, an' down here... you're on your own.

RAISING ARIZONA (1987)
In their first foray into manic comedy, the brothers cast Nicholas Cage and Holly Hunter as a childless couple who decide to steal a child for themselves, an act that unleashes unpredictable mayhem.

Evelle: [about the balloons he just bought] These blow up into funny shapes and all?
Grocer: Well no... unless round is funny.

MILLER'S CROSSING (1990)
A pastiche of hard boiled gangster films, Miller's Crossing took great pleasure in reinventing the language of 1920s mobsters, who greet each other with a jaunty "What's the rumpus?"

Lazarre's Messenger: Hey, horses got knees?
Tom Reagan: I don't know... fetlocks
Lazarre's Messenger: Well if I was a horse, I'd be down on my fetlocks praying you don't bet on me.

BARTON FINK (1991)
Coen Brothers regular John Turturro here plays a self-absorbed playwright who moves to the Hollywood of the 1940s to break into writing for motion pictures, and whose relationship with a short-tempered neighbor at a decaying deco hotel (played by John Goodman, another Coen Brothers mainstay) leads to unexpected violence.

Barton: Who cares about the fifth Earl of Bathsdrop and Lady Higgenbottom and... and... who killed Nigel Grinchgibbons?
Charlie: I can feel my butt gettin' sore already!

Jack Lipnick: We're only interested in one thing, Bart. Can you tell a story? Can you make us laugh? Can you make us cry? Can you make us want to break out in joyous song? Is that more than one thing? Okay!

THE HUDSUCKER PROXY (1994)
The brothers (along with longtime friend and Evil Dead creator Sam Raimi) recreate, on a vast scale, the capitalist screwball comedies of the 30s and 40s, telling of a young man (a wide-eyed Tim Robbins) who is put in charge of a massive corporation in the hopes that he will bankrupt it.

Beatnik bartender: Martinis are for squares, man.

FARGO (1996)
The Coens took the Academy Award for best original screenplay, and star Frances McDormand won the Oscar for best actress, thanks this film about a kidnapping gone brutally wrong in the brothers' native Minneapolis. Dark to its core, Fargo nonetheless takes great care in gently mocking the Scandinavian inflected accents and relentless passive aggressiveness of its Minnesotan characters.

Airport Lot Attendant: There's a minimum charge of 4 dollars, long term parking charges by the day.
Carl Showalter: I guess you think you're... you know like an authority figure, with that stupid fucking uniform, huh buddy? King clip-on-tie there, big fucking man huh? You know these are the limits of your life man. The rule of your little fucking gate here. Here's your 4 dollars you pathetic piece of shit!

THE BIG LEBOWSKI (1998)
The Coen Brothers created a cult sensation with one of their oddest films, a tale that transposes the 1940s crime novel to Los Angeles of the early 90s, and replaces the hard boiled detective with a White Russian-swilling aging hippie with a taste fr bowling, played by Jeff Bridges.

Walter Sobchak: Nihilists! Fuck me. I mean, say what you like about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it's an ethos.

Maude Lebowski: What do you do for recreation?
The Dude: Oh, the usual. I bowl. Drive around. The occasional acid flashback.

Jesus Quintana: What's this day of rest shit? What's this bullshit? I don't fuckin' care! It don't matter to Jesus. But you're not foolin' me, man. You might fool the fucks in the league office, but you don't fool Jesus. This bush league psyche-out stuff. Laughable, man - ha ha! I would have fucked you in the ass Saturday. I fuck you in the ass next Wednesday instead. Wooo! You got a date Wednesday, baby!

O BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU? (2000)
Naming their film after the title Joel McRea proposes for a dreadful socially conscious film in the screwball classic Sullivan's Travels, the Coens make what is, essentially, a hayseed comedy, in which three escaped convicts, lead by a grandiloquent George Clooney, flee the police and the KKK in the depression-era south. The film borrowed heavily from an unlikely source: The Odyssey of Homer.

Ulysses Everett McGill: A woman is the most fiendish instrument of torture ever devised to bedevil the days of man.

Pomade Vendor: I can get the part from Bristol. It'll take two weeks, here's your pomade.
Ulysses Everett McGill: Two weeks? That don't do me no good.
Pomade Vendor: Nearest Ford auto man's Bristol.
Ulysses Everett McGill: Hold on, I don't want this pomade. I want Dapper Dan.
Pomade Vendor: I don't carry Dapper Dan, I carry Fop.
Ulysses Everett McGill: Well, I don't want Fop, goddamn it! I'm a Dapper Dan man!
Pomade Vendor: Watch your language, young feller, this is a public market. Now if you want Dapper Dan, I can order it for you, have it in a couple of weeks.
Ulysses Everett McGill: Well, ain't this place a geographical oddity. Two weeks from everywhere!

THE MAN WHO WASN'T THERE (2001)
A milquetoast barber, played with deadpan cool by Billy Bob Thornton, finds himself caught up in a series of events that seem directly borrowed from men's magazines of the 40s and 50s, including murder. The Coen brothers made perhaps their greatest use of another regular cast member in this film, Tony Shalhoub, who plays a breezy, supremely cocky lawyer who rattles off dazzling monologues at a pace usually reserved for auctioneers.

Reidenschneider: They got this guy, in Germany. Fritz Something-or-other. Or is it? Maybe it's Werner. Anyway, he's got this theory, you wanna test something, you know, scientifically - how the planets go round the sun, what sunspots are made of, why the water comes out of the tap - well, you gotta look at it. But sometimes you look at it, your looking changes it. Ya can't know the reality of what happened, or what would've happened if you hadn't-a stuck in your own goddamn schnozz. So there is no "what happened"? Not in any sense that we can grasp, with our puny minds. Because our minds... our minds get in the way. Looking at something changes it. They call it the "Uncertainty Principle". Sure, it sounds screwy, but even Einstein says the guy's on to something.

INTOLERABLE CRUELTY (2003)
The Coen returned to the genre of screwball comedy in this tale of a divorce lawyer, played by a ferociously mugging George Clooney, who falls in love with one of his clients' wives.

Freddy Bender: Objection, Your Honor: strangling the witness.
Judge Marva Munson: I'm going to allow it.

THE LADYKILLERS (2004)
The brothers remade a classic English comedy about a crime gone wrong, setting it Mississippi and saturating it in the sounds of Gospel music. Tom Hanks here donned oversized buck teeth and a Kentucky Colonel goatee to play the mastermind of a riverboat casino robbery whose plans collapse when he matches wits with an elderly church-going woman.

Marva Munson: This is a Christian house, boy. No hippity-hop language in here.

Marva Munson: [walking in after the explosion in the basement] Professor, I'm surprised!
Professor G.H. Dorr: Well... uh... properly speaking, madam, we are surprised. You are taken aback. Though I do acknowledge that the sense that you intend is gaining increasing currency through its use, yes.

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN (2007)
The Coen brothers adapted a celebrated novel by Cormac McCarthy about a hunter who stumbles across a drug deal gone wrong, and decides to make off with $2 million left at the crime scene. He finds himself pursued by a garrulous psychopath, played by Javier Bardem, who has a habit of wagering people's lives on the flip of a coin. The resulting film received Academy awards for Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay, as well as winning the Oscar for Best Picture.

Wendell: It's a mess, ain't it, sheriff?
Ed Tom Bell: If it ain't, it'll do till the mess gets here.

Wendell: We goin' in?
Ed Tom Bell: Gun out and up.
Wendell: [Wendell draws his pistol] What about yours?
Ed Tom Bell: I'm hidin' behind you.

Ed Tom Bell: Now that's aggravatin'.
Wendell: Sheriff?
Ed Tom Bell: [points to a bottle of milk] Still sweatin'.
Wendell: Whoa, Sheriff! We just missed him! We gotta circulate this!
Ed Tom Bell: Well, okay. What do we circulate? Lookin' for a man who recently drunk milk?

BURN AFTER READING (2008)
With their newest film, the Coens return to screwball sendups of serious genres, in this instance the spy thriller. They tell of a tickheaded gym employee (Brad Pitt) who stumbles across a disc owned by a CIA agent (John Malkovitch), leading to blackmail, double-crossing, and mayhem.

Harry Pfarrer: Go around the corner, we'll do it in the back.
Katie Cox: You're so coarse.
Harry Pfarrer: Back of the car... not the rear entry situation...

CIA Officer: We'll ... interface with the FBI on this dead body.
CIA Superior: No, no. God no. Burn the body. Get rid of it.
CIA Officer: Okay.

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WRITTEN IN RESPONSE to an article questioning why people who would benefit from liberal politics vote against their own interests when voting Republican.

Just as the mad scratch
To relieve the area
Where one day they might itch
The poor vote Republican
To protect their wealth
On the day when they are rich.

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FOR A MOMENT, let's not talk about locally grown talent who have made a splash in Hollywood; there are many of them, and each will be given their due. Instead, let's talk about the University of Minnesota, with its massive, sprawling campus and enormous student body (fourth largest in the country!) With its longstanding program of tuition reciprocity with nearby states, and with many of its departments ranked in the top 20 in the country, it attracts a large number of out-of-state students who briefly bivouac in the Twin Cities, earn their degrees (or not; at least a third of enrolled students never graduate), and then head on out for brighter -- or at least warmer -- pastures.

The University has produced its share of Hollywood actors, a surprising number of whom have produced iconic work or cult favorites. Without the following alumni from the University of Minnesota, Hollywood would be missing the key players in some of its wildest productions.

Eddie Albert: Best known as the straitlaced former New York attorney whose dreams of retiring to the life of a gentleman is tested by the absurdist country folk of Green Acres, Illinois-born Eddie Albert is as close to a local as you're going to get on this list. After all, he moved to Minneapolis when he was a 1-year-old. As a young adult, he majored in business at the University of Minnesota, but his timing was unfortunate, as he graduated just about the time of the stock market crash in 1929, just as the moment when many businessmen were permanently retiring, often out top story windows. He worked as an amateur singer for a while, and then as a trapeze artist, before finding work on the radio as an actor, where he quickly transitioned to film work, often finding roles as a wet-behind-the-ears soldiers, most notoriously in 1956's Attack, in which his sniveling, incompetent Fox company CO manages to piss off both Jack Palance and Lee Marvin in what must be the most grotesque error in judgment in film history. Eddie Albert never seemed to completely leave Minneapolis behind, showing up in almost every one of the few films film set is his adopted hometown, including 1972's The Heartbreak Kid and 1980's Foolin' Around (alas, he wasn't in Airport, lensed in 1970 in Minneapolis, but he was in one of the later, and most ridiculous, sequels: The Concorde ... Airport '79). Eddie Albert films also worth checking out: The Joker is Wild (1957), The Take (1974), The Devil's Rain (1975), The Big Picture (1989).

John Astin: Baltimore native John Astin attended the University of Minnesota to pursue an advanced degree in mathematics, but found fame as the amorous, mustachioed, morbidly eccentric paterfamilias on the television show The Addams Family (1964). Also worth checking out: Candy (1968), Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990), The Frighteners (1986)

Henry Fonda: Father to two generations of film actors and one of Hollywood's most enduring male leads, the Nebraska-born Henry Fonda specialized in plain spoken, rugged men with fierce integrity. Fonda briefly studied journalism at the University of Minnesota before going on to create such iconic film roles as Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath and Juror #8 in 12 Angry Men. But Fonda could also make an effective film villain when cast against type, most notably as the murderous, black-clad outlaw in 1968's Once Upon a Time in the West. Also worth checking out: My Darling Clementine (1946), Mister Roberts (1955), Madigan (1968), The Swarm (1978).

Ernie Hudson: Perhaps unfortunately, Michigan native Ernie Hudson is best knows at the "Black Ghostbuster" after his performance in the 1984 hit film (although screenwriters Harold Ramis and Dan Ackroyd have confessed that when they realized the role wasn't very well fleshed out, they compensated by giving him all the best lines). Hudson enrolled in a PhD program at the University of Minnesota after some early disappointments in Hollywood, worked in local theater for a while, where he turned in a famously intense performance in a Theatre in the Round production of The Great White Hope. He later became a mainstay on shows such as Oz and Desperate Housewives, but fans of Blaxpolitation remember him best for his performance in Dolemite's Human Tornado (1976) and taking over the role as the brutal convict "Half Dead" from Badja Djola in 1982's Penitentiary II. Also worth checking out: The Octagon (1980), The Crow (1994).

Kevin McCarthy: Like Eddie Albert, Kevin McCarthy moved to Minneapolis when he was a boy -- his parents both died in the flu epidemic of 1918, prompting a relocation, at age 4, from his hometown of Seattle. McCarthy bounced around a fair amount, graduating high school in Wisconsin and attending college in Washington DC before returning to Minneapolis to complete his education. McCarthy was a strapping, square-jawed young man and won an early, and impressive, film role as Biff Loman in the 1951 adaptation of Death of a Salesman. A few years later, he starred in the role that would be his most memorable, as the earnest Dr. Miles J. Bennell who uncovers an alien invasion in the classic science fiction film Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), which ends with him frantically running through traffic, screaming "They're here already! You're next! You're next!" (Interestingly, he had a cameo in the 1978 remake recreating this scene.) Also worth checking out: The Misfits (1961), Piranha (1978), The Howling (1981), Trail of the Screaming Forehead (2007).

Michael Moriarty: Towering character actor Moriarity did not attend the University of Minnesota (he's a Dartmouth grad), but he's included on this list because, more than any actor mentioned here, he's a product of the U of M. You see, his parents met and married while students at our august academy, so unlike every other actor mentioned here, he literally would not exist were it not for the University of Minnesota. He's also included in this list because his body of work is too significant to be ignored. Never mind his popular work as a television actor, including a 4-year stint on Law & Order. It's his work with genre director Larry Cohen that must be mentioned. Moriarity starred in several of Cohen's maddest creations, including 1992's Q, in which a winged serpent terrorizes New York City, and 1985's The Stuff in which a mind-destroying goo is marketed as a health food. Moriarity also starred in the last entry into Larry Cohen's It's Alive series; the story is as entertaining as it is improbable, in which an army of murderous mutant children is shipped to a isolated island. Also worth checking out: The Last Detail (1973.)

Ron Perlman: Tall, broad-shouldered and -featured actor Ron Perlman hails from New York, but he received a Master of Fine Arts at the University of Minnesota, attracted by its proximity to the Guthrie Theater. Since then, Perlman has become one of Hollywood's most idiosyncratic actors, gravitating toward roles that take advantage of his imposing physicality, wry sense of humor, and wild characterizations. He's probably most famous for his titular roles in Hellboy (2004) -- a role he has revised recently in a sequel -- and in the overwrought television romance Beauty and the Beast (1987-1990). He is equally comfortable in big budget Hollywood films and independent art house productions, even showing up occasionally in foreign-language films, such as the exquisite and bleak childhood fantasy City of Lost Children (1995), and he is frequently hidden behind bizarre makeup, including his performance as a caveman in Quest for Fire (1981) and as a hunchback in The Name of the Rose (1986). Even in flawed films, he can be relied on for scene-stealing performances, such as his bullet-toothed sniper in Enemy at the Gates (2001). Also worth checking out: Too many to list, but start with Cronos (1993), The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996), Alien: Resurrection (1997), Blade II (2002).

Robert Vaughn: Best known for his role as the debonair spy Napoleon Solo in the long-running series The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Vaughn originates in New York, but relocated to Minneapolis in his childhood. He spent a short while at the University of Minnesota pursuing a degree in Journalism, but left after a year to move to Los Angeles. He began to get regular work in television, and, in 1959, he nabbed a role as Paul Newman's best friend in The Young Philadelphians, a role that garnered him an Academy Award nomination. His next film role, as Lee, a gunman on the lam, in The Magnificent Seven, was to be one of his most popular; he eventually reprised the role (albeit in a different setting) in 1980's Battle Beyond the Stars. Also worth checking out: Bullitt (1968), The Towering Inferno (1974).

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ONE OF THE most amusing qualities about supernaturally themed novelty music is the genre's tendency to take movie monsters and stick them in unexpected situations. Typically, classic characters of horror cinema such as the Wolf Man and Frankenstein's Monster are sent to some old castle to participate in a ghoulish variation of a teen sock hop. But every so often, a songwriter gets it into his head to have a screen fiend do something really unexpected. Take a fellow named Aki Aleong, as an example. On his 1963 album Come Surf with Me, Aleong decided to take a mad scientist's assistant and send him out on a surfboard.

The song itself is a relatively mellow number in the style of "Sleepwalk" by The Shadows, featuring a laconic guitar playing an appealing arpeggio while a drummer plays a gentle (albeit speedy) pattern on cymbals. Over this, a cultured voice, presumably Aleong's, calls out to his assistant Igor, demanding that he ride the wild surf: "Stop chewing on the surfboard and start paddling." A second voice, mic-ed low in the mix, cackles and babbles in response in a vaguely Peter Lorre accent. As the two surf together, Igor slips off his board and presumably drowns. "Where Igors, I gores," the narrator declares sadly, before leaping off his own surfboard and disappearing to the sound of an emptying drain.

Aleong himself had the quality of being a character who had tumbled off the screen into some unexpected roles -- quite literally, as Aleong is an actor with an impressive resume of screen roles dating all the way back to 1957, when he appeared in an early biker film called Motorcycle Gang. He's worked in film and television ever since -- fans of V, the alien invasion miniseries from the 1980s, will remember him as Mr. Chiang, while Babylon 5 viewers might remember him from his recurring role as Senator Hiroshi in the show's first season.

But it seems when he wasn't in the movies, Aleong was surfing, or, at the very least, making surf music. Aside from his surf recordings, he is credited as having written "Shombalor," one of the rowdiest Doo Wop songs ever written, performed by Sheriff & The Ravels. He also spent years kicking around the music industry as a promoter and producer, including producing an album for Roy Ayers. He also owned a fast food joint in Hollywood called Gingham Dog.

Come to think of it, compared to the dazzling variety of offscreen jobs Aleong has on his resume, there's nothing that spectacular about Igor going surfing.

LISTEN TO "IGOR GOES SURFIN'":



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INSPIRED BY the ghastly tale of two farmworks who woke to find an intruder rubbing one with spices and attacking the other with a sausage.

This dreadful sausage crime recalls
My encounter with a popcorn ball,
And the attack at the hands of a lunatic
Who beat me with a Pixy stick,
And to this day I wonder why
I was assaulted with a kidney pie,
And I think back with mortal dread
Of my near death by baguette bread,
And still I whimper and I shiver
At my brutal night with flash-cooked liver.
But nobody can find neither reason nor rhyme
As to what inspires such gastronomic crimes.

Of legal recourses
I'm afraid there is none,
As if fine dining is outlawed
Only outlaws will have buns.

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MINNEAPOLIS is generally treated as a footnote in the history of jazz. Sure, it had its clubs, and it had its bands, and it was part of several jazz circuits, but Minneapolis didn't produce an identifiable sound, or a distinct scene. And, as far as most historians are concerned, Minneapolis cannot lay claim to a defining jazz artist in the way New Orleans can claim Louis Armstrong or Kansas City can claim Charlie Parker.

Here, the jazz historians are wrong. Minneapolis gets Lester Young, the porkpie-clad titan of the tenor saxophone.

Most biographies make a cursory mention of Young's stay in the Twin Cities, but because he lived here before he began recording, and before he joined the Count Basie Band in Kansas City, his years here are given short shrift. Lester Young first moved to Minneapolis at as young an age 10, and spent a majority of his time here from the age 17 on, when his family settled in the Twin Cities. Lester Young played in his family's band, the Billy Young Jazz Band, also known as the New Orleans Strutters, founded by Lester's father. They traveled the Midwest during the carnival season, with Lester initially playing drums, until he got tired of assembling and disassembling the kits, whereupon he switched to saxophone. The band held down residencies at the Radisson and St. Paul Hotels when they were not on the road.

Even after Young later settled in Kansas City, where he made his reputation, he returned to Minneapolis for extended stretches, playing for local bandleaders such as Leroy White and Rook Ganz; in fact, Lester Young spent most of 1934 and 1935 gigging in the Twin Cities. All told, Lester Young lived and worked in Minneapolis, on and off, for more than a decade, and they were his formative years as a saxophonist.

More importantly, Lester Young became an avid record collector while in Minneapolis, as recounted in A Lester Young Reader: "Lester began his disc acquisitions after the move to Minneapolis. Once there was a firm base, there was less traveling, which also meant fewer bands to hear. Records had to become a more important resource. Moreover, by that time, the winter of 1926-27, a lot more jazz was making it onto 78RPM discs that were newly utilizing microphones, rendering a better sound. At home in Minneapolis the trio of Pete Jones, Phil Phillips, and Lester Young would make their way to the record shop almost daily. In those days, you could preview a disc in the store before purchasing. The three would buy a few records each time, so they built up quit a collection."

Lester Young listened to these records with great interest, paying close attention to jazz soloists, such as Louis Armstrong, whose solos Lester Young learned on saxophone. By the time he began recording with Basie, he had already developed an idiosyncratic personal style -- he was a sort of proto-hipster, exuding a deadpan calm and speaking a self-invented slang -- as well as a unique style of saxophone soloing. At a time when the tenor saxophone was a brassy, noisy instrument, Lester Young's approach was cool, melodic, and understated, with an exquisite sense of melody and a tendency toward unexpected pauses. Some of this Lester Young had learned from years of gigging on the road, but much of the credit for his distinctive style must be given to his time in Minneapolis, listening to locally purchased records and memorizing the sounds he liked.

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GENERALLY, if you head into a comic book store and ask for whatever is being made locally, you'll get a little stack of photocopied scrawls containing various degrees of incoherence and amateurism. So it's surprisingly to walk into Minneapolis's Big Brain Comics and find, near the counter, a professional-looking cardboard display selling small quantities of extraordinary comics, locally printing in limited amounts, going under the hilariously inflated brand name of King Mini International ("Publishing the finest line of mini comics the world has ever seen"). The brainchild of Vincent Stall, these are bijou works of idiosyncratic storytelling and careful craft, bearing titles like Iskabibble and The Devil Wore Hypocrite Shoes, and are sometimes only eight or so pages in length. Stall's style is jagged and deeply shadowed, somewhat resembling the works of noir-obsessed European cartoonists who used to appear in Raw Magazine, such as Jacques Tardi, and sometimes his tales are bleak, telling of ugly people trapped in oppressive urban environments. In Franz Kafka, for example, the hero wears a sack suit, timid mannerisms, and a mouse mask; he is surrounded by bolder, crueler men in cat masks. But Stall's mini comics can be oddly sweet as well, such as Robot Investigator, in which a curious, camera-wearing robot befriends a small animal on an alien planet, and finds unexpected help when he is attacked by a group of feral, post-apocalyptic humans.

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HOLLYWOOD sometimes has a reputation for ersatz glamor and phony class, which is a bit unfair. Sure, the town has produced it's share of junk, but it also can claim a real history of elegance and sophistication, sometimes in the most unlikely places. Horror actor Vincent Price, as an example, was a world-class art historian and collector, while Dragnet creator and star Jack Webb was a dyed-in-the-wool jazz fanatic; come to think of it, so is Clint Eastwood.

Hollywood also sometimes has a reputation for having a short memory, which is also unfair. Sit in on film pitches with even the tackiest filmmakers and you'll discover cineastes with an encyclopedic knowledge of classic film. But if Hollywood's memory is often long, it is also often shallow. People might be able to point out the former home of Errol Flynn, near Hollywood Boulevard, but they won't be able to point to the spot where the hot fudge sundae was invented, just a few blocks away. There's a lot of interesting snippets of history that get lost out there and are just waiting to be documented, from Hollywood's rather active garage band scene, which has almost completely been eclipsed by the popular folk rock pouring out of Laurel Canyon at the time, to Hollywood street gang problem in the 50s, which found teenagers battling out near Hollywood high with switchblades -- and some of these teens went on to be advisers on Rebel Without a Cause!

But this is the Bottle Gang, and so we'll take responsibility for the piece of history that concerns us -- namely, cocktails. Hollywood has produced a few classics and a few that have slipped into obscurity, all of which are worth revisiting and enjoying a new. And so we give you a drinker's tour of Hollywood, because there are few things you need more on the Boulevard of Broken Dreams than a good, stiff drink.

THE MOSCOW MULE: It's hard to imagine now, but there was a time when vodka was virtually unknown in America, drunk almost exclusively by expatriates from Eastern Europe and Russia. When John G. Martin, who had purchased the recipe for Smirnoff vodka from distillers who had fled the October Revolution in Russia, attempted to market his liquor, he was met with such disinterest that he briefly began calling it "white whiskey" for sale in the south. Martin met with a fellow named Jack Morgan, proprietor of the Cock 'n' Bull saloon on Sunset Boulevard (9170 Sunset Boulevard, to be precise) in 1941, and Morgan had a similar problem -- he had produced quite a lot of ginger beer, and it wasn't selling well. The two decided to combine the ingredients and add lime, and a new cocktail was born, the Moscow Mule. Some stories place the actual birth of the beverage at New York's Chatham Hotel, but wherever it was born, it quickly became associated with the Cock 'n' Bull, and fast became a cocktail craze in Hollywood. As a result, vodka began to gain popularity in the US, and it is now the most popular liquor in the world.

The Moscow Mule is relatively easy to make, consisting of one part vodka, one part lime juice, 3 parts ginger beer, and a dash of Angostura bitters. Unfortunately, people get tripped up on the subject of ginger beer, believing they need a beer that is flavored with ginger (which actually exists, and can be found in some of the better liquor stores). In fact, Cock 'n' Bull's ginger beer was a soft drink, similar to ginger ale, but with a greater ginger "kick" to it, and can be hard to track down. If you're patient, you can order some online, and if you're crafty, you can make it yourself, but, however you go about it, the ginger beer is really he key to making a proper Moscow Mule. In a pinch, it can be made with ginger ale, but it won't have the intense ginger flavor of the original drink, and you're going to want to cut back on the lime, which will otherwise become quite predominant. Just mix the ingredients together and serve over ice; traditionally, the Mosocw Mule was served in a copper mug, and you can often find authentic Moscow Mule mugs on eBay. It's a terrific warm weather drink, especially since the copper mug keeps the cocktail especially cool.

THE MAI TAI: A New Orleanian named Ernest Raymond Beaumont Gantt is almost singlehandedly responsible for the Polynesian craze of the middle part of the 20th century. You know him better as Donn Beach, proprietor of Don the Beachcomber, a bar and restaurant that opened in 1931 in Hollywood and operated fr decades at 1727 North McCadden Place. Donn Beach personally invented hundreds of tropical cocktails, and we will detail two of them here. The first is the Mai Tai, and it's a tricky one to pin down, as a competitor also claims to be the inventor: Victor Jules Bergeron, Jr. of the Oakland-based Trader Vic's. (Donn Beach's recipe is said to date back 11 years before the Trader Vic version was invented.) The two men had significantly different recipes, and so we shall give you Donn Beach's here:

2 oz (or 1/4 cup) water
3/4 oz or 1-1/2 tablespoons fresh lime juice
1 oz or 2 tablespoons fresh grapefruit juice
1 oz or 2 tablespoons sugar syrup
1 oz or 2 tablespoons dark rum
1-1/2 oz or 3 tablespoons golden rum
1/2 oz or 1 tablespoon Cointreau or triple Sec
1/4 oz or 1/2 tablespoon Falernum syrup
2 dashes or scant 1/2 teaspoon Angostura bitters
1 dash or scant 1/4 teaspoon Pernod or other anisette-flavored pastis

Shake all the ingredients in a shaker with ice and strain into a tall highball glass filled with crushed ice. Garnish with fruits and serve with a straw.

Those determined to make this version might have trouble with one ingredient, Falernum syrup, which is a mix of almond, ginger and/or cloves, lime, and sometimes vanilla or allspice and is an essential of tropical drinks, but is not widely available for purchase. Better liquor stores may have the version that is manufactured by Fee Brothers, but your best bet is probably just to buy it online; it's also possible to make it for yourself.

As to where the name came from, well, that's a good question. Trader Vic tells of making the cocktail and giving it to Tahitian friends to taste, whereupon one of them called out "Maita'i roa!", meaning "It is good!" in Tahitian. And this story is plausible, but there is evidence that Donn Beach, who had originally called his drink "Original Beachcomber Rum Concoction," had changed it to Mai Tai on his menu before Trader Vic ever got around to making his.

Ultimately, the disputed origin doesn't really matter much. Donn Beach's Mai Tai is so different from Trader Vic's that it should be considered an entirely different cocktail that coincidentally has the same name, and Donn Beach's version is indisputably from Hollywood.

THE ZOMBIE: While Trader Vic and Donn Beach battled over who invented the Mai Tai, there is one concoction that is indisputably Beach's. We speak of the notorious Zombie, a drink so potent that when Beach first made the drink in the late 30s, he complained that the cocktail had left him feeling like a zombie all weekend, inadvertently giving the drink its name. Indeed, Beach's Zombie was so potent that his restaurant limited customers to purchasing two, and it's no wonder -- Donn Beach's cocktail contains three and a half times the amount of alcohol contained in a typical cocktail.

The trouble with the Zombie isn't its history, the trouble is in it's recipe. Specifically, the trouble is that Donn Beach was pretty cagey about his recipes, and often wouldn't even reveal them to his bartenders, instead simply premixing the drinks for them to pour. As the cocktail became popular, other Polynesian restaurants attempted their own version, and, in the end, the drink became diluted down to a fruity rum concotion, which is the fate of many tropical cocktails. Also, Donn Beach played with the recipe himself, and so there are several recipes that we know to be authentic, but all are slightly different. You read about these recipes in the recently released Sippin' Safari by Jeff "Beachbum" Berry, and, if the mood strikes you, experiment with them -- all are delicious. In the meanwhile, we'll give you one to start with that was written down by Donn Beach himself in 1950:

1oz unsweetened pineapple juice
1 oz fresh lemon juice
1 oz fresh lime juice
1 oz passion fruit syrup
1 teaspoon brown sugar
1 dash Angostura biters
1 oz gold Puerto Rican rum
1 oz 151 proof Demerara rum
1 oz white Puerto Rican rum

Dissolve the brown sugar in the lemon juice. Combine it with everything else in a cocktail shaker with crushed ice. Shake well, and pour it all into a collins glass. Garnish with a mint sprig.

THE EMBASSY COCKTAIL AND SATAN'S WHISKERS: There's a lot of history on Hollywood Boulevard. The addresses 6765-6773, as an example, once held the Embassy Club, a private club-cum-speakeasy that catered to the stars of the silver screen with a sort of glamor only seen in the movies -- and no wonder, as it's interior was credited as being designed by the same man who would later design the sets for Casablanca, presumably George James Hopkins. This club produced two cocktails that are still with us. The first, named after the club, is almost identical to the Boston Sidecar, but for the amounts of liquor -- this is somewhat lighter on the rum and somewhat heavier on everything else, and includes a dash of bitters, which is never a bad idea.

3/4 oz. brandy
3/4 oz. Cointreau
3/4 oz. Jamaican rum
Juice of 1 lime, strained
Dash of Angostura bitters

Combine ingredients in a cocktail shaker with cracked ice. Shake well, strain into a chilled cocktail glass and garnish with a twist of lime.

The Embassy Club also gave us the wonderfully named Satan's Whiskers, which is a bit like a Perfect Martini mixed with orange.

1/2 oz. gin
1/2 oz. dry vermouth
1/2 oz. sweet vermouth
1/2 oz. orange juice
2 teaspoons Grand Marnier
1 teaspoon orange bitters

Shake with ice and strain into cocktail glass. Garnish with orange twist.

There is also a version of this that is called "curled," and substitutes orange Curacao for Grand Marnier, but, as the book Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails points out, it's hard to get a decent orange Curacao and the better versions can be dauntingly expensive. Orange bitters used to be impossible to find as well, but now most good liquor stores will stock the Fee Brothers version, and it is increasingly easy to get the Angostura version, which I hear is quite good.

HI HO COCKTAIL, THE LOS ANGELES COCKTAIL, AND THE MARLENE DIETRICH: There's not much available online about Hollywood's Hi Ho Club, except that it was a popular club in the 1940s and managed to introduce an astounding three cocktails to the American public. It's signature drink, the Hi Ho Cocktail, is an interesting variation of the classic martini, but substitutes white port for vermouth. The drink was originally made with Old Tom Dry Gin, which was a lightly sweetened gin that is now all but extinct. Hayman's distillery reportedly produces some, but you may be best off just using London dry gin and adding a dash of simple sugar.

2 oz gin
1 oz white port
4 dashes orange bitters
Lemon peel for garnish

Shake the gin, white port, and bitters with ice; then strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with lemon peel.

The next cocktail from the club is named after Los Angeles itself, and so it's a bit surprisingly that it has become almost completely obscure. I suspect it's because the drink calls for one whole egg, an ingredient that still causes bartenders to fly into a panic.

1 1/2 oz blended whiskey
1/4 oz sweet vermouth
juice of 1/2 lemons
1 tsp powdered sugar
1 whole egg

Shake all ingredients with ice, strain into a whiskey sour glass, and serve.

This cocktail can also be made with rye whiskey, for those with bolder palates.

The final cocktail takes its name from one of Hollywood's great stars, a naming tradition that produced any number of undistinguished cocktails and specialty sandwiches. But the mix of whiskey and citrus here is a pleasant one, and the addition of bitters undercuts the sweetness of the drink while adding a touch of complexity.

2 ounces Canadian whiskey
1/2 ounce orange Curacao
3 dashes Angostura Bitters
1 wedge lemon
1 wedge orange

Shake well with ice and strain into a rocks glass filled with ice. Squeeze lemon and orange wedges into drink and drop them in.

We would be remiss in making this list if we didn't include the classic non-alcoholic cocktail that came out of Hollywood, the Shirley Temple, whose origin is supposed to be at Chasen's Restaurant in Beverly Hills, although the Royal Hawaiian Hotel at Waikiki in Honolulu, Hawaii, also claims to have invented it. The drink was reportedly invented for the child actor Shirley Temple, and originally called for The original drink contains two parts ginger ale, one part orange juice, and a small splash of grenadine; nowadays the orange juice is almost always omitted, which is too bad. The cocktail can also be made alcoholic with the addition of a shot of Johnny Walker Black. Rather hilariously, this drink is called the Shirley Temple Black, which was the actress's name after she married.

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INSPIRED BY TALES of hipster prostitutes in New York City.

Men often make passes
At thick-framed girl glasses
And bikes with fixed gears
And PBR beers
And bang-cut hairstyles
And white lipsticked smiles
And workboots with gowns
and ironic put downs
From Jezebel and Bust;
They inspire such lust
For girls who arouse
You as they casually browse
Your MP3 playlist
Then they doggedly insist
To see your collection of books
And with a few expert looks
They tell you their price
For an evening of vice.
The cost is expensive,
And reasons extensive:
Your Ivy education,
Your hedge fund vocation,
Your shirt with popped collar
All add dollar after dollar;
Your Ayn Rand collection
Nearly inspired rejection
But your stack of rare vinyl
Made the decision less final.
If you were a drummer in Kings
It wouldn't cost you a thing;
It's an inexpensive all-nighter
For an Rockaway writer;
But you, with your teeth capped
And your Abercrombie knapsack
And your life in the fast track
And your American flag tie tack?

She offers bohemia
And pleasure without end
But if you want to be with her
Get ready to spend.

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THE WALKER ART CENTER sits on the edge of downtown looking, thanks to the recent addition by Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron, like some malevolent robot. Locals either adore it or despise it, the way people always adore or despise modern and contemporary art. Some treat it like a con game, pointing out individual pieces that bewilder them, such as Lawrence Weiner's text-based sculpture that hangs on the side of the building and reads "BITS AND PIECES PUT TOGETHER TO PRESENT A SEMBLANCE OF A WHOLE." Or they will deplore individual works of minimalist art, or pranks by Fluxus, or especially bizarre installations, as nonsense, or madness, or amateurish.

And it my be nonsense after all; some of it is certainly, deliberately, and provocatively nonsensical. And it may be madness. After all, art patrons have a well-defined love for the art of the insane, dubbing it art brut. And it may be amateurish. The Walker has certainly celebrated it's share of outsider artists, who, by definition, are untrained amateurs. If your idea of art is a well composed still-life painted in oil, you will find a lot to hate at the Walker.

But there are those who enjoy modern art for its idiosyncrasies, its wit, its adventurousness, and its sheer wildness. Here are some of the wildest works in the Walker Art Center's permanent collection:

"Playboy #1, Peace," Lutz Bacher, 1991. Imitating the style of cheesecake pinup illustrations, Baker's acrylic from 1991 shows a topless girl sprawled on her back on a vibrant orange blanket, legs high in the air and slightly spread. The girl smiles widely a us from underneath oversized and white-rimmed round glasses, while calligraphic text reads "You make your peace sign. I'll make mine." The painting's colors are garish and artificial, signaling that Bacher is satirizing nudie kitsch, rather than celebrating it, but still -- va va va voom!

"Office at Night," Edward Hopper, 1940. Hopper is often credited with influencing noir film, a credit that is verifiable in contemporary crime film, which directly or indirectly reference his nighttime scenes of urban alienation. (Some samples: the diner massacre in L.A. Confidential, the "Nighthawks" sequence from Pennies from Heaven, the entire look of Blade Runner.) But even if films by his contemporaries didn't draw direct influence from his paintings, they share a bleak world view. Hopper's paintings always hint at a narrative, but the story is left ambiguous: characters inhabit the same space, as do the two late-night office workers in this painting, but look past each other, faces darkened with unspoken thoughts. Has an affair just ended? Is a murder about to be committed? Hopper's painting creates a palpable -- and unsolvable -- mystery, and, in the end, work in the way a great crime film does. The mystery is not especially important. What is important is the creation of a portrait of lonely people and their desperate environment.

"BB 2000," Cameron Jamie, 2000. The Walker Art Center has an impressively large collection of films in their collection, many of which are legitimately that rarest of things in the United States: art movies. (For good or ill, the Guthrie was an early adopter of Matthew Barney, whose Cremaster Cycle, whether you like the films or not, can't be mistaken for anything but art.) Cameron Jamie is what is sometimes known as a multidisciplinary artist, working in a variety of mediums, but his most startling and funny work is in film and video. For sheer lunacy, you're not going to beat his prankish Kranky Klaus, in which a group of men dressed something like sleigh-bell bedecked Yetis randomly attack and beat passers by in rural Austria. But BB 2000 might be his most poignant work, focusing on the rituals and theatricality of backyard wrestling matches, in which American boys paint their faces, dress in outlandish costumes, and beat the holy hell out of each other in makeshift rings.

"Suaire de Mondo Cane (Mondo Cane Shroud)," Yves Klein, 1961. Exploitation documentaries from the 60s all seemed to contain a scene in which a beatnik artist applies paint to a nude model, painting abstract swirls directly onto her breasts and buttocks. These scenes, as with most of what appeared in this particularly crass form of filmmaking, were the invention of the filmmakers, and all borrowed from a single source: 1962's Mondo Cane, and Italian documentary by Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi. Among scenes of dogs being used as food and Italian Catholics beating themselves until bloody in a fit of religious ecstasy, there was a long scene of a tuxedo-clad man painting a group of naked women blue. These women then pressed their bodies against a cloth shroud while an orchestra played the movie's Academy Ward-winning theme song, "More." But this scene is unlike the hundreds of similar scenes in exploitation documentaries that it inspired, in that the artist, and the art, is real. The artist is, or rather was, Yves Klein, a French neo-Dadaist who liked to paint things blue, and the painting that resulted is on display at the Walker. It's also worth noting that the painting may have killed Yves Klein, or, rather, the film of the painting may have killed him. Klein believed he was participating in a serious documentary, and when he saw that his painting process had been edited for maximum titillation and was bookended by grotesque and absurd images from around the world, he had a series of heart attacks and died at age 34.

"No title (My god, was)", Raymond Pettibon, 1990. Raymond Pettibon has a claim to a punk rock aesthetic that no other artist can match. Not only has his crabbed, cartoonish illustrations found their way to dozens of punk album covers and fliers, but he actually named the band Black Flag, designed its famous logo, and briefly played brass with them. The Walker has dozens of pieces by Pettibon; this particular one is an ink-spattered sketch of the most self-reflective character in the history of comics, Batman, facing a woman with a gun while disconnected passaged from his endless internal monologues crowd his head. Most of the quotes a vaguely sexual, or explicit, such as a comment from Robin saying, "I have studied the bats trying to understand Batman's complex psycho-sexuality." This actually seems intended as a retort to Batman's first quote. "Robin," he says, "you came too soon."

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HOT SAM'S, in Lakeville, Minnesota, calls itself an antique store, but that isn't quite right. Antiques are generally old and finely crafted. What Hot Sam's sells was almost all made in the past half century and mass produced. You might call them "collectables," but that's not quite right, either. The owners of Hot Sam's, including 40-year-old founder Gladys Hood, take great pleasure in elaborate arrangements, and often add details to the items they sell that didn't exist when they were first manufactured. Sometimes it's as simple as affixing a surfboard to an old Woodie, and sometimes they elaborately paint their objects and set them up as a sort of life-sized collection of dioramas, so that a small three-wheeled car has Mickey and Minnie Mouse as driver and passenger, and an old wooden water tanks has "Petticoat Junction"" painted on it, just like the one from the television show. (Although, who knows, maybe it is the one from the show!)

In this way, Hot Sam's is a little like a work of junk sculpture, and a little like a roadside attraction. In fact, they have set up and irresistible display along I35W in Lakeville, consisting of a submarine and a giant shark, to attract passers-by. People can spend hours just wandering around, taking in the weirdness of it all: the wooden sculptures, the rusted cars, and the surprising number of oversized rooster sculptures, which so completely attract the attention that visitors may not notice the actual roosters roaming the grounds.

ORIGINAL PHOTOS HERE.

WRITTEN UPON reading about a new film featuring Paris Hilton, REPO! The Genetic Opera!

Paris Hilton, Paris Hilton --
What a shame your fame is built on
Inherited wealth and upskirt flashes,
Plastic surgery and mascara'd lashes,
Illicit sex tapes and tiny pets,
Rumors of racism and cigarettes,
Stunt casting and Red Bull drinks;
You could be better than everyone thinks.
Sometime I wonder, darling heiress,
How great you could have been
If you weren't Paris.

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HAVE YOU EVER seen that Warner Bros. cartoon titled "Book Revue," set in a drugstore late at night? The camera flashes over row after row of magazines from the 1940s, and one after another they spring to life. As a peculiar jazz score swings in the background, Daffy Duck--dressed in a zoot suit, his hair coifed into a pom-pom of blond curls--launches into a breathless scat. In turn, characters pull themselves from the pages of real-life glossy weeklies with titles like Rogue and Photoplay.

Interesting, those magazines. Flipping through them nowadays, we get a look at a Forties not preserved in Tom Brokaw's The Greatest Generation. I used to be obsessed by them, the men's magazines and the crime magazines of the period. While weeklies such as Life presented an optimistic America--a country returning from World War II to an unlimited future of high-paying jobs, comfortable suburban homes, and family outings to ballparks--the crime stories showed a side of society that simply wasn't making it. Here were the stories of dope fiends holed up in seedy hotels, rolling drunks for their pocket change. Here were prostitutes, their throats slashed in the back seat of taxicabs. Here were photographs of children, sleeping seven to a bed in a row apartment, asphyxiated in a fire. And here were stories of homosexuals. The vice squads would storm public restrooms or private apartments, leading dozens of men out to the paddy wagon, each man covering his face with his hat or his coat to hide from the blinding flash of the press photographers.

The magazines printed photographs of drag queens, still in their dresses, sitting unhappily behind bars, giving the photographer a weak smile. The caption underneath the photograph was inevitably surprising: She stormed the beach at Normandy!, it would say, or This "lady" was once a priest!

Homosexuals turned up only in the crime magazines--where they were arrested--or in the men's magazines--where they were attacked. There was a language used in these latter magazines that is not often found anymore, a style intended specifically to describe "weak" men. Effete male movie stars were described as "simpering" or "flouncing." When homosexuals appeared in stories, they inevitably "giggled" and "twittered." Gay men could be expected to "screech" at each other when they were fighting, and "coo" at each other when they weren't.

In a typically hard-boiled manner, these magazines told stories of bartenders de-queering their bars with baseball bats, or of tough guys slapping uppity queens at parties. Indeed, our noirish Daffy Duck cartoon returns repeatedly to a nelly newspaper columnist clapping and laughing like a little girl, and the closing image has a brutish criminal repeating the gesture. Come to think of it, just how many Warner Bros. cartoons ended with one of the characters suddenly being struck queer and waggling a finger, decrying the others as "thilly"?

These images seem strikingly merciless nowadays, and maybe we shouldn't be surprised to discover that as far as homosexuality in the Forties went, these were close to the only public images available. Gays and lesbians kept a necessarily low profile in those days, even with one another. "The only point of reference we had was Oscar Wilde," one writer from the era explains bitterly, "a man destroyed by the public discovery of his homosexuality, a scandal so great that it came down to haunt even people like us half a century later, despite the conspiracy of silence, censorship, and hypocrisy."

The author of that line is Ricardo J. Brown, writing about a working-class gay bar in downtown St. Paul during the Forties in his book The Evening Crowd at Kirmser's, published by the University of Minnesota Press. "We never just walked into Kirmser's," Brown writes at the beginning of his memoir, "nothing as simple as that. We scouted the terrain to see who might be watching us. If the coast was clear, we stepped forward quickly, yanked the door open, and lunged inside, head down, moving toward the cover of a booth or the safety of a barstool out of range of that small, oblong window."

Brown's book is a document of such furtiveness--after all, Kirmser's itself was nothing outrageous. It was a small, nondescript bar, "long, narrow, and deep, like a tunnel," according to Brown. It wasn't even a uniquely gay bar: "Kirmser's was a workingman's bar," Brown writes, "straight in the daytime and queer at night. Its daytime customers were day laborers, cabdrivers, old clerks, pensioners, railroad men, and a few tough old barflies who found the dim, quiet interior restful and the prices reasonable." Brown confesses that most St. Paul residents were unaware that the evening crowd at the bar was gay--in fact, many St. Paul homosexuals didn't know about the place. So why all the secretiveness?

Because, Brown explains, any breach in anonymity could have devastating results. Brown's narrative is a document of camouflage, and of the terrible possibilities that could accompany any breach of discretion. Voices were kept low at Kirmser's, last names were never used, and customers sat, almost unconscious of doing so, with their backs to the window. When they saw each other outside the bar, they would avert eyes and refrain from speaking, or fabricate blustery explanations for their families as to how they knew each other. "We didn't like to take chances," Brown writes.

In turn, Brown relates the tale of a friend of his, Dale, who was fired from an office job at Central Coal and Oil. Someone had made an anonymous call to the company saying, "You got a cocksucker working for you. His name's Dale."

"Dale was out of the door and out of a job that same morning," Brown continues, "and he spent the afternoon in the Garrick Theater, hiding in the dark, slumped down in his seat, sick to his stomach, sure he would never get another job, and panicked at the thought that he would have to go home and tell his mother that he had lost his job." To a generation that had grown up in the Depression, Brown explains, "A job was a sacred thing."

Because we are dealing with a community that took such necessary caution to protect its privacy, there is virtually no record left of its experiences, which makes Brown's book unique. Gay St. Paul? In the Forties? What do we know of it? Kirmser's itself is gone: The building it inhabited at 382 Wabasha St. was razed, replaced by the courtyard to the Norwest Center.

Even those homosexuals who went across the river, to the Viking Room in downtown Minneapolis's Radisson Hotel, have little to look to for memories. Brown speaks of this group disparagingly (he calls them "Ribbon Clerks" and "piss elegant"), his distinctly working-class tastes chafed by their pretensions to sophistication. The Viking Room, with its dark-stained oak finish and Arthur Wilberg murals showing scenes of Scandinavia, was "too high-class for us," filled with "bored-looking fellows who sat around in vested suits and Countess Mara neckties, drinking martinis and gossiping about the latest antics of Mae West as if they actually knew her." The Viking Room is gone too, along with any memory that it once catered to a homosexual crowd. All that remains of the place is a silver scale-model Viking ship designed by Edward Caldwell that currently hangs in the similarly named but nowhere near as fabulous Viking Lounge of the new Radisson--an artifact from Minnesota's gay history, misplaced and mute.

Brown's memoirs do much to give the era a voice, and it's a distinct one. A lifelong journalist, having worked as a court reporter for the Alabama Journal, court reporter and sports editor for the Fairbanks Daily News Mirror, and as the Minneapolis bureau chief for Fairchild Publications, he writes in a spare, no-nonsense style. There is something bleak about Brown's book--"deadpan," as the book's editor, William Reichard, describes it. Although Brown enthusiastically recalls his first encounters with the work of Willa Cather, his clipped descriptions bring to mind authors like James M. Cain and David Goodis. It's memoir as noir, describing the grim, grotesque experiences of huddled, hunted figures (in this, the book recalls another of Brown's favorites, Sherwood Anderson).

Take a look at Brown's description of a gay-bashing in Kirmser's: The style is uncluttered and terse, a series of short, jolting sentences, followed by the sort of cruel denouement that noir authors adored. Brown, having interfered with the fight and taken a knockdown punch to the jaw, returns to his booth to discover his blandly handsome boyfriend glaring at him. "They looked at me as if I were a stranger, an unexpected and unsettling appraisal," Brown writes. Finally, the boyfriend speaks: "Why did you get into it?"

In fact, Brown's tough, common-Joe voice sometimes parrots the tone of the men's magazines described earlier. He rankles at effeminacy; it is almost possible to see him shudder in horror at the more camp characters who inhabit his book, such as wedding guest in Bette Davis drag, or the characters he meets during a brief, unsuccessful move to Greenwich Village. Brown moves there fresh out of high school, lured by the promise of a city where he might feel normal. Instead, he is appalled at what he sees. Describing a drag show, he says of the performers, "There was something vivid about them, almost exciting, except for their eyes. Their eyes were not alive, but blank, cold, and glittering, hard as steel; they were ball-bearing eyes, machines that measured and challenged every member of the audience." The audience, it should be noted, didn't seem to mind--but then Brown is repelled by them as well. When the drag show ends, and the emcee rises and calls for applause, Brown notes that "the beasts in the audience obeyed."

He flees to St. Paul, and then into the navy, with equal failure (he eventually reveals himself to be a homosexual to his commanding officer, receiving a dishonorable discharge that, Brown notes, was not overturned until 1981). He secured part-time work in the circulation department of the St. Paul Pioneer Press, lying about his discharge (he claimed he was 4-F because of a punctured eardrum--a real ailment, but not the source of his dismissal). And then he found his way to Kirmser's.

There was nothing spectacular about the bar; as the book makes clear, it attracted an evening crowd of homosexuals simply because it tolerated them. The owners, always referred to in the book as Mr. and Mrs. Kirmser, were a middle-aged Alsatian couple who had met while working together in a butcher shop near the turn of the century.

Their son, Philip Kirmser, now a professor emeritus at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas, tells of his parents growing up under German rule in Alsace following the Franco-Prussian war. Kirmser fled Alsace at the start of the century to avoid being drafted into the German army, and he found work in restaurants in Chicago. He brought his wife out a few years later and moved to St. Paul to work at the Saint Paul Hotel. The Kirmsers opened their bar/restaurant in 1930, working long hours, as Brown describes: "They opened in the late morning, cleaned up from the night before, put on the noon soup, and made the coffee, then worked straight through until closing at 1:00 a.m. every day except Saturday, when state blue laws dictated a midnight closing the minute the Sabbath began."

Both Brown and Philip Kirmser, who sometimes worked in the bar, make it clear that the Mr. and Mrs. Kirmser were fully aware that they had a different crowd in the evening. "If some of our conversations got a little loud or a little careless when [a] stranger was present, Mrs. Kirmser would 'Shoosh' the offender, adding a curt nod toward the straight customer nearby," Brown writes. "We always enjoyed these little acts of conspiracy on Mrs. Kirmser's part, her willing participation in the ruse that kept all of us safe."

"My parents were tolerant people," Philip Kirmser says of them. "They accepted Negroes in the bar when some people frowned on that. After all, they had some experience with intolerance," here referring to their childhood in occupied Alsace.

Mr. Kirmser died in 1954, and the business proved to be too much for an elderly woman to run on her own. She sold it a few years later. As quietly as it had existed, the bar faded from public view, and the secret community that had dwelled inside it went elsewhere.

Brown's book, written in Minneapolis during the 1990s after his retirement, brings this lost world back into the present. Which is, in some ways, a fitting place for it. Many of Brown's frank observations of gay life 50 years ago could easily slip into a memoir about Club Metro or the Saloon: the role of cruising and promiscuity in gay identity and the competing significance of stable partnerships, the sometimes uneasy alliances between gays and lesbians, the injustice of discrimination in the workplace and the military, and, last but not least, the status of the bar as a locus for homosexual culture.

Brown himself died in 1998 after having sent his manuscript to the University of Minnesota Press. His rough draft was smoothed into shape by poet and short-story writer William Reichard, who cleaned up the text's elliptical narrative and pared the book down into a tight, tough little collection of memories. Here is a look at a St. Paul that has seldom been documented, and at a moment in gay history that is usually shrouded in silence. Those who experienced the history had so much to lose if they were exposed. In one of his most sharply drawn paragraphs, Brown describes the haunted look cast upon him by the officer who presided over his dismissal from the navy. "Odd, how in just a second you can find so much exposed in another man's face: horror, compassion, and something else, something like recognition."

More of the Sparber Guide to the Twin Cities!

YOU KNEW he was coming. He came every year. He spoke at assembly and, if you were a kid who got into any sort of trouble at all, you met with him as part of a group of 30 or so, all fellow troublemakers. Most found him hysterical, with his home realtor sportscoat, his Ivy League haircut, and his badly out of date slang. He claimed to talk to kids in their own language, but nobody used phrases like his for a decade. Things were "way out" to him, and the world was "cool" or "square." He fell firmly on the side of the "square," and was proud of it, and that made his jazzbo jive talking even that more ridiculous.

But some kids claimed he had turned them around. They were the tougher kids, mostly, the ones who nobody had ever paid much attention to, except to steer clear of them. They talked with him, sometimes one on one, and said he gave it to them straight. They said he talked to him like no adult ever had, without talking down to them, or trying to boss them around. They said he made a lot of sense. And hadn't that greaser from the shop class gone from failing out of school to getting a c-average? Sure, that ain't exactly honor roll, but everyone pretty much figured that kid was going to go straight from high school to prison. Now he's working part-time at a body shop, and he's even got himself a steady girl.

So, why not check the guy out. Just to see what he has to say. You're not a bad kid, really. There was a fight, and your friend was getting his ass handed to him, and you don't leave your friends behind like that. You all got pulled in front of the principal, and there were meetings with the parents, and there was after-school suspension, and now this. This ain't so bad, you figure. What could it hurt to hear the guy talk?

So you go, and you sit in an empty classroom, and he's there in the front in his powder blue blazer, talking with the principal like the two are old friends. The other kids come in, and find their seats, and you all sit, waiting to hear what he has to say. He rises, smiling, and nods at the class.

"Let me start by telling you about a way-out dude I know of," he says. "His name was Jesus Christ."

You fight the urge to flee.

More Vinyl Oddities.

I DID NOT move on to be one of the 18 semi-finalists in the Mad Men contest. In this instance, I am not going to fault the system. The ones who actually did move into the semi-finals are, for the most part, well-acted, and, in many cases, actually staged and carefully lensed. So congratulations to the finalist, and note to Bunny: You're going to have to step up your game in contests like this.

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I WAS in the top 10 for a few weeks, and then my score started dropping -- considerably. Here is the current leader, who seems to be popular exclusively for his ability to impersonate Chewbacca. He has 807 votes to my 56, and, while I won't argue that my video was a masterpiece, it wasn't orders of magnitude worse that the current leader. (Far from it; my video actually addressed the subject of travel, while the one linked to above consists of the filmmaker talking about himself using a series of accents and personas, none of which he does particularly well, except, of course, Chewbacca.) I suspect this may be an ongoing issue when I enter contests where people on the net vote for the ones the like the best, as, really, who is just going to stumble on a contest, watch through a group of videos by strangers, and then start voting? Instead, the ones who garner the most votes are likely to be the ones with the most friends, or those who have figured out how to game the system in some way. But never mind; the point of this exercise is not to win every contest I enter, but instead to enter every contest that looks amusing to me.

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I DID NOT progress to the voting round with my last entry into the New Yorker Caption Contest, but I am not easily rebuffed, and so have entered a caption in the latest contest (it's monthly). This time, the cartoon is of a large table with dozens of people sitting around it, all with massive glasses of tea or coffee in front of them. My submission: "We're out of cream."

I try to keep them simple.

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WHILE IT IS TOO EARLY to know if the jingle I wrote for Chicken of the Sea has made it into the semifinals, I am already a winner. The first contestants to submit won themselves an iPod Shuffle, and, as you can see from the above photo of my chest, I was one of those winners. I have named my new iPod "Chicken of the Sea" in honor of this victory.

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WRITTEN in response to Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani's address to the Republican National Convention, in which he complained that the Democrats during their national convention "rarely mentioned the attacks of September 11, 2001. They are in a state of denial about the biggest threat that faces this country."

They remind us that two towers fell
And they remind us again;
They show us pictures of two airplanes,
And say a noun, a verb, a when.
They thrust their fingers and say: go vote!
And remember when you do,
There are bad men out there with evil schemes --
They've got their hateful eyes on you.

We cast our votes with shaking hands;
We cast our votes with dread;
We cast our votes in the towers' shadows;
We cast votes haunted by the dead.
It's a war we fight against terror now
So we vote as we're directed,
But the ones that benefit from terror most
Are the ones that we elected.

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AMERICANS don't like the taste of liquor. We're sort of notorious for it. We've made vodka, a relatively flavorless beverage, the top-selling alcohol in this country, and we favor sweet cocktails that mask the taste of their base liquor. Oh, sure, there are a few scotch fans out there who wax poetic over the mossy flavor of peat, and there are some gin maniacs who can opine endlessly about the various junipers and herbs and whatnot in their drink of choice, but these people are, frankly, weirdos. This is America, damn it. We make our martinis out of vodka and return them to the bartender, disgusted, if we taste a hint of vermouth. If we're not mixing alcohol with sweet sodas such as Coca Cola or 7-Up, we're downing Daiquiris or Buttery Nipples or Red Bull mixes. If you want to frighten most American drinkers, just set a bottle of bitters, a bottle of vermouth, and a bottle of rye whiskey on the bar. Never mind that these are the ingredients for the Manhattan.

And that's the problem. The Manhattan is not a sweet drink. To use a phrase that's become popular over the past few years, it is a savory cocktail. This phrase was primarily borrowed from wine snobs, who use it to describe a wine that is interesting to drink, and that makes it just right when it's applied to a cocktail. Savory cocktails tend to have qualities that popular American cocktails don't: There's often a bitterness to them, or herbal favors, or unusually flavorful alcohols, or spices. Jeff Hollinger, co-author of The Art of the Bar, has made a case that savory cocktails are better pairings for meals, saying "If you start drinking too many citrus-based cocktails, you'll strip your palate," but we'd like to make a simpler case for savorness: It tastes better. Many of the ingredients may be acquired tastes, but we're adults and not children, and so it's time to start learning to love the flavor of alcohols, and the sophisticated ingredients that go into mixing classic cocktails, most of which were savory. (I have several old books of cocktails, and half of their drinks are made with vermouth, while the other half are made with absinthe.)

To that end, the Bottle Gang has invented our own savory cocktail, and we consider it a classic. The basic drink was concocted by Steve McPherson, with elements added in by me, Bunny Sparber; the drink was named by Coco Mault, after the film actor Steve McQueen, who she adores. The drink has a touch of sweetness to it, thanks to the presence of Benedictine, an herbal liqueur beverage, but this sweetness is made dry with the addition of brandy (we tend to make it with B&B, an elegant bottle in which the Benedictine and the brandy come premixed.) The drink is given a real punch by adding in a small-batch bourbon (we favor Knob Creek), and then we add in bitters for some balance. We've found a wedge of orange to be the right garnish, and is imbues the whole drink with a very subtle fruitiness. Here's how it's made.

THE MCQUEEN:

1/2 B&B
1/2 Bourbon
Splash of bitters
Wedge of orange
Serve on the rocks

So far, responses to the McQueen have been overwhelmingly positive, although it is such a strong drink that drinkers who know their limits often become worried upon having their first sip, knowing that two or three of these might have them swinging from chandeliers and cross dressing by morning. And it will, but it's worth it.

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IT'S FUNNY that we use a French term to describe a distinctively American film genre. We don't call cowboy movies cinema de vachegarçonnes, but we do call hardboiled crime films noir, a phrase invented by film critic Nino Frank to distinguish films about crime that had a weird moral ambivalence, a quality that another French critic, Jean-Pierre Chartier, described as a vision of "pessimism and disgust for humanity"

Pessimism and disgust for humanity. These are not qualities generally associated with Minnesotans, who, according to popular opinion, are generally seen as mild-mannered folk who are slow to anger and have trouble making eye contact. In fact, it was exactly that meek regional character that the Coen Brothers played off of in Fargo, in which even prostitutes are so eager to help the police that they relentlessly nod their heads like bobblehead toys.

But Minnesota produced its share of noir antiheroes, actors who were perfectly suited to noir's grim vision of tough talking lowlifes and crooked cops. In fact, this state produced two of noir's cruelest antiheroes and one of its classic victims. Let us take a look at the state's contribution to Hollywood's cinema of pessimism and disgust:

Richard Widmark traveled quite a lot in his childhood, but he began life in Minneapolis, and, from his first film appearance as a giggling killer in 1947's Kiss of Death, he was Hollywood's go-to man to throw color into genre films. He was particularly good with crime films. He was so good, in fact, that he won a Golden Globe and was nominated for an Academy Award for Kiss of Death, an otherwise rather by-the-books crime melodrama starring Victor Mature.

With his quick eyes and wiry features, Widmark had a special talent for playing smart hustlers -- men who brooked no small talk and who could always be counted on to think themselves out of a jam. In Night and The City (1950), he played an American on the grift in London, concocting a grotesque and doomed scheme to manipulate the career of a professional wrestler. The film was notable for its refusal to make its characters sympathetic, and Widmark's performance in it is monstrous -- he is a man entirely without scruples or compassion, ready to use or double cross anyone in his life to forward his own petty ends. In the same year, he portrayed a good-hearted military doctor leading the a chase through the streets of New Orleans in Panic in the Streets, where he heads up a desperate attempt to catch three killers who are infected with bubonic plague. 1950 was also the year in which Widmark turned in a savage performance as a virulent racist in No Way Out, so relentlessly abusing costar Sidney Poitier (in his film debut) that Widmark felt compelled to apologize after every take.

In 1953, Widmark starred in Pickup On South Street, a hysterically anticommunist film that has Widmark playing a pickpocket who accidentally intercepts state secrets stolen by a spy ring. The film might have been just more Red Scare propaganda if it wasn't for writer/director Sam Fuller's eye for odd details, such as the way he lenses Widmark's nonchalant stare as his nimble fingers creep into a nearby purse during a bus ride, or the way Widmark keeps his beer cold on his houseboat -- by hanging it out a window and in the river on a rope. Additionally, it's a tough script, one of the toughest Widmark appeared in, with a script that was rejected by the Production Code as containing "excessive brutality and sadistic beatings, of both men and women". Widmark plays his character with endless nerve, becoming unexpectedly sympathetic, such as when he shrugs off the hard sell by g-men who suspect him of having pickpocket microfilm. "I know you pinched me three times and got me convicted three times and made me a three time loser," he sneers at them "And I know you took an oath to put me away for life. Well you're trying awful hard with all this patriotic eye-wash, but get this: I didn't grift that film and you can't prove I did!"

Ralph Meeker: Despite his boyish good looks, there was a sadistic quality to Minneapolis native Ralph Meeker's face, which featured arch eyebrows and cruel smile, which may be why he was often cast as troublemakers. In 1955, he nabbed a role that must be the ne plus ultra of bullying brutes, that of Mike Hammer in Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly. Hammer was the creation of author Mickey Spillane, a private investigator of unflinching brutality and misanthropy. Aldrich's film never shied away from the character's unpleasantness -- one female character sums Hammer up with these words: "You. You're one of those self-indulgent males who thinks about nothing but his clothes, his car, himself. Bet you do push-ups every morning just to keep your belly hard."

Meeker's limning of Mike Hammer is as cold and inscrutable as any put onscreen. He hardly seems capable of human emotions, but for scorn, and he gets to his dirty business with a minimum of fuss, a maximum of sarcastic back talk, and a propensity for violence that is legitimately terrifying. Even now, in a time when torture is chic enough to have spawned several film series and one very popular television character, Hammer is a harder boiled than we're used to, casually smashing treasured record collections or breaking men's hands. He doesn't do these things because there is no other way to get information, but because brutality is the fastest means to an end, and Mike Hammer does not favorite sophisticated or subtle methods.

The plot of this movie has him chasing down a valise with glowing contents, an image cribbed by Quentin Tarantino for Pulp Fiction. Meeker's Mike Hammer chases this mysterious suitcase with the relentlessness of an onscreen monster, until its contents, once exposed, quite literally set the movie on fire. Aldrich and screenwriter A. I. Bezzerides despised the amoral character they had brought to the screen, and, in some versions of the film, we are left uncertain that Hammer himself hadn't exploded as well.

Coleen Gray: Coltish brunette Coleen Gray wasn't a Minnesota native -- she hailed from Nebraska. But, as an actress, she was a product of Minnesota, having graduated from Hamline. She was also a favorite of genre directors, frequently popping up as a fresh-faced naïf terrorized by psychopathic criminals in small-budget noir films. She was, in fact, stalked by Minnesota native Richard Widmark in his debut film, 1947's Kiss of Death. In the same year, she turned in a fine performance in a grim crime fable, Nightmare Alley. In it, she portrayed a fresh-faced sideshow performer who falls in love with a carnie (Tyrone Power) whose bogus psychic act briefly propels him to the national spotlight before sending him careening down into alcoholism, madness, and, finally, to working as a sideshow geek.

Gray also had high profile roles in other lurid crime melodramas, such as Kansas City Confidential (1952) and Las Vegas Shakedown, and she was part of an exceptional ensemble cast in 1956's The Killing. This tense tale of a race track robbery gone wrong was the film that established Stanley Kubrick as a master filmmaker, and it's told in a nonlinear style that directly influenced Quentin Tarantino. Gray plays the wife of mastermind Sterling Hayden, and she agonizes beautifully on the sideline as a series of histrionic character actors (including Elisha Cook, Jr. and filmic wildman Timothy Carey) threaten to unravel Hayden's careful plans.

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A TWO-LINE RESPONSE upon seeing photographs of the pierced and tattooed genitalia of a member of The Mutual Tattooed Penis Admiration Society.

I wasn't quite sure just what "obscene" is,
until Sailor Sid showed photos of his penis.

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WRITTEN UPON reading about Dick Hafer, a cartoonist with a strange and hateful fascination with homosexuality.

I ducked into a public bath
To indulge in a little erotic math:
One is a solo, and two is a pair,
Three is a party, and four is a dare;
Any higher number in the lavat'ry
Is just that much more fun for me.
Because what could be better than cottaging
When you're in the mood for frottaging?

But there was a man that we knew of
Who illustrated a review of
And made an ado of
His interest in taboo love.
Wherever we went, there he'd be
With a pencil and paper set on his knee
Through the glory hole in the lavat're
Peering through to see whatever he could see.

He watched us there quite greedily
And his pencil flew quite speedily
And he begged for more quite needily
As he illustrated in the lavat're.
He was a cartoonist he repeatedly asserted
And he would remain long after the john was deserted
And would take down notes with his eyes averted

But we always figured that he was just perverted.

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THERE WILL COME A TIME when everything produced by man will be digitized and made widely, and freely, available via the Internet. Until then, however, there is still a lot out there for the intrepid explorer. If you would like to see actors Ron Moody and David Soul performing an impromptu harmonica and tapdance duet, well, there was a movie made based around such an event, 1975's Dogpound Shuffle. But it's not available on DVD. Or let's say that you want to read about the various vicious animals in this world, and the specifics of how the chew or sting to death any errant human that crosses their path. Well, there's a book for you called Man is the Prey, written by James Clarke and published in 1969. But you're not going to find it as an ebook anytime soon.

And then there is music. There has been a lot of it recorded since Edison created the mechanical cylinder phonograph in 1878. As far back as the 1920s, music was already being marketed to small but interested niches, generally available on the hard, heavy, and almost indestructible 78rpm platter. There's been a collectors market for these old records for years, but generally focusing on a few areas of collecting, particularly New Orleans-style jazz. The once popular "sweet" jazz of the 20s has often gotten a dismissive shrug from audiophiles, who consider it inauthentic pablum. So there is a lot of it still floating around, along with other ignored genres -- old polkas, ethnic comedy, forgotten early crooners.

Many of them are on hand at the Vintage Music Company in south Minneapolis, near the intersection of Cedar Avenue and 38th Street. This enormous storefront is filled to overflowing with ancient 78s by forgotten musicians, some of whom have not had an audience for almost a century. It's a terrific place for just wandering and looking at titles, many of which are quite hysterical. Pop music fans can be forgiven for mistakenly believing that a majority of recorded music consists of love songs. They're wrong. Romance comes in a distant second to novelty in this history of recorded music. This is where the real opportunity comes for the musical adventurer. There's no problem finding digitized recordings of what were once rare and terrifically expensive old 78s, such as Louis Armstrong's work with the Hot Five and Seven. But if you find a really crazy novelty song, with a title such as "He Ate The Chicken, Beak and All," there is a good chance you are the first person to have heard the song in decades, and it will only cost you a couple of bucks to own it. Wander the aisles, look at the titles, and let the adventure begin.

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ST. PAUL is currently saddled with a rather generic city name, that of the apostle Paul of Tarsus; it shares this name with a city in Brazil, a half-dozen cities in Canada, almost 50 cities in France, and, in fact, 12 other American cities. But St. Paul was once Pig's Eye Landing, named after a bootlegger who opened a saloon with the terrific name Pig’s Eye Pandemonium. The name has lingered, with both a locally produced beer and a sanitation plant still bearing it. To this day, it is possible to refer to St. Paul as Pig's Eye without generating too much confusion.

Minneapolis, in the meanwhile, is stuck with its name, one that welds together the Dakota word for "water" with the Greek word for "city" into an ungainly new construction. This was the suggestion of one Charles Hoag, the city's first schoolmaster (properly, his suggestion was even worse: "Minnehapolis"). He concocted this after the Hennepin county commissioners had already voted on a name for the city: Albion, the ancient name of Great Britain. This lost name for Minneapolis is worth reviving as a nickname, which the city currently lacks. After all, you can't be a properly epic city without a similarly epic nickname. Consider New York, which Washington Irving called Gotham after a fictional city of idiots, and has stuck. Or London, which occasionally goes by the nickname "The Great Wen," which translates as "The Big Wart."

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PHOTOS of police in riot gear taken at a protest outside the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota, on September 2, 2008, mostly shot on the corner of 7th Street and Wabasha. The police, in full riot gear, formed a gauntlet on either side of protesters and formed a second perimeter, about a block away, to keep people at a distance (so much of a distance that the protest was not visible.) Many seemed quite displeased at this enormous police presence, and hurled abuse upon them. One policeman, in riot gear, seemed hurt by this. As he changed out of his helmet and put on a gas mask, he said "You see, we have faces! We're human beings too!" The police eventually pushed the onlookers far back, and then set off tear gas and concussion grenades to disperse the protesters.

See the original photographs here.

LISTEN, SWEETHEART, I know it seems like a little thing, and I know I'm being a pain in the ass about this, but is it too much to ask that we keep the hors d'oeuvres tray filled? I don't want to have to run around this gig like a lunatic, looking after every single little detail, so I need you to help me. Can you do that? Can you help me, darling? Just keep your eye on the tray and if it looks like the snacks are getting low, get some more from the kitchen. You'd be an angel if you would. An absolute angel.

And, you, you there. There's a stack of bumper stickers and pins upstairs in the office. Do me a solid and bring them down. Stack them up by the front door so people can take them as they're leaving. Leave a clipboard and a pen there so people can sign up for email updates, whatever, and leave a stack of donation envelopes. We don't want to be too obtrusive about this sort of thing. Everybody is here for a good time, after all. But, if they want to get more information, or donate money, let's not make it too hard for them.

Jen! Jesus. I've been looking everywhere for you. You look scrumptious by the way, baby. Give me a quick kiss. Now tell me what I want to hear -- that you've printed up a copy of my revised speech. Oh, good, good! You're an absolute gold-plated lifesaver. Did you read it? Yes? What did you think? I know, I know, much shorter. I just want to touch on a few points and let people get back to the party. I can give the longer speech next week, when we have our first proper rally.

I'm a little tense, yes. How did you know? Oh my God, I would kill for a back rub right now. You've been a real doll, you know that? I couldn't have done any of this without you. All right, do me a favor and call Inga in here, and we'll go over the checklist, and maybe you can work a few knots out of my back. That would be glorious.

Inga! Inga! Do you have a minute? I know we're busy, darling; that's why I want you in here for a minute. I just want to run through a quick list of things, to make sure everything is ready. All right, do we have enough towels, and have they been set out where people can get them easily? Everywhere? Even the laundry room downstairs? How about the kid's bedroom? I know we went over that, and said it would be off limits, but if someone sneaks in there I want to be sure they won't make a mess of anything. All right? Thank you.

Ouch! A little more gentle on those knots, baby; that hurt like a bastard.

Anyway. Inga. I bought a bunch of literature this afternoon. Oh, you know, magazines, old books, stuff like that. I was just driving past that store downtown that I like, and I got it into my head to go in and buy them. They're in a box in my car. Would you mind sending someone out to get them and set them up around the house. I figure they might help put people in a party mood, or give them ideas, or something.

Don't be cross with me, Inga. I know it's a last minute thing, and you don't like those, but it seemed like a good idea to me, and we want to make today special, don't we? Thanks you, Inga.

Tell me about the guest list. I know there were a few people who didn't RSVP. Did you manage to get hold of any of them? Tony Montero said he might swing by? Trust me, baby: He will be here. He likes to play it cool about these things, but he can't stay away. Any word from Dan and Harriet Hartman? Oh, what a pity. I hope they show. It just isn't a party without them. They're usually the first to start the festivities.

Who do we have watching the doors? Who? Oh, Christ? Are you kidding? The Mueller brothers? We've had trouble with them before. They always end up watching the guests instead of the doors. Nobody wants to have a police raid just because the bouncers couldn't stop leering at the party guests! I know it was short notice, Inga, but Jesus! Well, we'll just have to make do. I'm going to make keeping an eye on them your responsibility, and I'm sorry if that means you get left out of some of the activities. The safety of our guests is just too important.

God, Jen, I feel like I'm nothing but one huge knot. Do I feel that way to you? I do? I knew it.

Anyway, Inga, I shouldn't have to ask this, and don't think I don't trust you, but lubricant? Don't roll your eyes at me, you remember what happened last June. I know that wasn't your fault, but I still need to double check. We have enough? You're sure? Okay, okay, I'm not going to hassle you on this. I trust your judgment. I'm not even going to ask you about prophylactics.

I'll let you get back to work. You too, Jen. I know I'm being a putz. I know it. You know how I get, and the both of you have been my absolute heroes. I just know this party is going to be a smash. I can't wait to hear back what the guests think. I have a feeling they're just going to be wild about tonight, and they have some very particular tastes.

We have to keep them happy to count on their vote, after all. There's been some rumblings about defections, and we can't afford that. We need our constituency to vote the way they always have. We need them to go into the polling booth, look at the ballot, and mark a straight ticket. We want them to put their mark next to every candidate from our party.

We need them to vote Swinger.

Read more of I'm Just a Bad Boy, a Fake Memoir.

IT'S NOT EASY TO WRITE ABOUT VODKA. It's a relative upstart in the world of hard liquor, having little audience outside of Eastern Europe until the 1950s. And it's an oddity in the world of cocktail ingredients. Unlike every other liquor used as a base for making cocktails, such as gin and whiskey, most popular vodkas are essentially flavorless. In fact, a large selling point in premium vodkas is the sophistication of their distilling process. Our subject for today, an Icelandic vodka known as Reyka, is distilled through lava rock, and made with steam from a 4,000-year-old lava field. The resulting liquor is so pure, according to Wikipedia, that its level of dissolved solids is less than 1/15 that of Evian bottled water. And the purer the vodka, the less it tastes like anything at all, specifically.

This might be part of the appeal of vodka, which has fast risen to be one of America's most popular liquors. There's a joke in cocktail snob circles: When you hear a customer at a bar say "I don't like the way it tastes," you can immediately translate that as "I can taste the liquor." Contemporary drinkers just don't like the flavor of traditional alcohols, it seems, unless they are easily masked by sugars and fruits, which may be why rums and tequilas sell so much better than gin.

For such drinkers, flavorless vodkas are ideal. They essentially function as a diluent: Making a cocktail with them is a little like adding alcoholic water to a drink (note that vodka, translated liberally, actually means "little water.") This is part of the reason we at the Bottle Gang are so opposed to the idea of a vodka martini. The taste of the martini is based around the complex relationship between the flavors of gin and vermouth. With a vodka martini, you are basically drinking a cocktail that tastes like diluted vermouth. And, since many bartenders are afraid even to use vermouth, as customers complain about the flavor of it, in many cases, you're drinking a drink where the strongest flavor is the garnish. We suspect this is why infused and flavored vodkas are starting to gain in popularity. After all, just because a drinker doesn't want their cocktail to taste like alcohol doesn't mean they want their cocktail to taste like nothing at all.

But don't let these prefatory comments fool you: Our complaint is not against vodka. Firstly, there are many vodkas that do have a native flavor, or are infused in a distinct way, such as Bison Grass vodka. Secondly, there is a place in mixology for a well-made neutral spirit. There's a great logic to Ian Flemming's use of vodka in the Vesper, for example. Without it, he had concocted a drink that was just gin and Lillet, which, at the time, was high in quinine, and quite bitter. The addition of vodka to the recipe diluted the bitterness, making the final drink far more palatable.

The first popular vodka cocktail was the Moscow Mule -- in fact, in the 1950s, it created the vodka craze in this country. At that time, Smirnoff was just trying to break the American market, without much success: it was actually marketed as "white whiskey" in South Carolina. But the owner of the distribution rights to Smirnoff, a fellow named John G. Martin, happened to have drinks in an LA bar called the Cock 'n' Bull Tavern with the proprietor, Jack Morgan. As it happened, Morgan had purchased quite a lot of ginger beer, and was having trouble moving it, and so the two conceived a cocktail that mixed these two unpopular ingredients. And so: vodka, ginger beer, bitters, and lime juice, and you have a Moscow Mule. The resulting drink was a smash, and with good reason -- it's delicious. Ginger beer has a very strong flavor, one that is not vastly diminished by the addition of vodka. The result tastes much like you would expect: Like beer with lime and ginger added.

So there are great cocktails out there for vodkas, assuming the liquor is being used as an ingredient, rather than as a substitute for an ingredient, as in the vodka martini. It is worth noting that with a really good neutral vodka, such as Reyka, the favor of the cocktail is going to be defined by the other ingredients -- if you're going to make a Screwdriver or a Harvey Wallbanger, it won't do to use anything but fresh orange juice. If you're going to make a White Russian, get a quality coffee liqueur and fresh cream. Also, forget about drinking it in shots: The only native flavor to Reyka, and other premium vodkas, is the taste of ethyl alcohol, which tastes exactly like rubbing alcohol smells. Reyka does take on other flavors exceptionally well, though. We tossed in a few grains of freshly ground pepper, and the resulting shot of vodka was one of the best pepper shots we've enjoyed. For people who make their own infused vodka at home (a topic we plan to cover soon), Reyka is an excellent choice.

There is one thing we can say about premium vodkas, and particularly about Reyka. They have been among the most ecologically conscious liquors manufactured. Reyka is proudly green, from the geothermal steam used to heat their plant to the indigenous lava used to filter the vodka. Most vodka, by comparison, is filtered through charcoal made from trees. This is a strong selling point for Reyka, as it is hard to select a neutral vodka on the basis of which tastes better.

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THE AMERICAN HIGHWAY got a lot less interesting in 1963. That's the year that Phillip Morris bought a Minnesota company, Burma Shave, that manufactured a brushless shaving cream. The company had advertised for years using a distinctive campaign, running a series of small signs along highway, each containing a line from a poem touting the product. It had become an American pasttime to read these poems aloud while traveling, and have even confused singer Tom Waits in his childhood -- he mistaken believed "Burma Shave" to be the name of a city, and not a shaving product. He even wrote a song about it for the 1977 album Foreign Affair.

But Phillip Morris came to the conclusion that the American automobile had just gotten too fast for motorists to effectively read the sings, and so the signs came off the highways, where they had been since 1925, when the first was placed on what is now I35W in Minneapolis. This was not simply the end of an advertising era, but also the end to a a uniquely American poetic form. The doggerel used to advertise Burma Shave was often sharply comic, mocking such popular pastimes as fast cars and hot dates, even as the ads were pitched toward exactly the audience who enjoyed both. The best Burma Shave signs were like short, wicked jokes, sometimes with surprisingly gruesome twists. Here are some of the best:

Careless / bridegroom / dainty bride / scratchy whiskers / homicide / Burma Shave

With glamour girls / you'll never click / bewhiskered / like a / Bolshevik / Burma Shave

They missed / the turn / car was whizz'n / fault was her'n / funeral his'n / Burma Shave

Grandpa's / out with / junior's date / old technique / with brand new bait /Burma Shave

I know / he's a wolf / said riding hood / but grandma dear, / he smells so good / Burma Shave

She put / a bullet / thru his hat / but he's had / closer shaves than that / Burma Shave

The bearded devil / is forced / to dwell/ in the only place / where they don't sell / Burma Shave

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THE MOTEL HAD "REGULAR" GUESTS AND THE REASON WAS BARBARA.

AMONG THE REGULARS:

Barbara Blake -- blonde, curvaceous assistant manager, temporarily without husband. Make animals were perennially interested in Barbara.

Sam Arrowsmith -- big-wheel financier, whose business interest in the motel included a personal, beguiling interest in Barbara.

Alex R. Brown -- sophisticated, world-wise management consultant, whose review of the dollar affairs of the plush motor inn also embraced the sundry pleasures offered by Barbara.

Steve Trumbull -- teen-age lifeguard, whose youth and virile buoyancy proved a tantalizing attraction to Barbara.

Mike Billings -- athletic, available and anxious to please -- Barbara.

... plus Pedro, the bellhop -- on call for any caller.

They all tangled -- and the sex sparks began to fly.

A revealing, punch-packed novel of those American phenomena -- the luxury motel and the new breed it spawns!

More Dirty Books!

INSPIRED BY tales of romance made complicated by an incompatible taste in literature.

I just don't think I could ever love
Anyone too fond of Nabokov;
My fancy won't ever settle upon
Those I hear quoting Khalil Gibran;
I will not adore anyone who says
That their life it was changed by Márquez;
And spare me the romantic affections of
Those who simply swear by Bulgakov.

I will peruse your bookshelf and see what's displayed
And if its too la de da I will be fast dismayed;
Despite your keen wit and your fabulous looks
I cannot love someone unless I first love their books.

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ALL RIGHT, TOUGH GUY. So you brew your own beer. So you’ve dropped a few hundred dollars on a home brewing kit and you’ve spent the last six months regularly churning out a frothy, bitter tasting mash. Nobody is impressed. After all, in Europe, children drink beer. Far from being a master brewer, you’re a manufacturer of kids’ drinks.

It’s time to step up into adulthood. It’s time to buy a still.

What are you waiting for? After all, it’s been 1200 years since an Arab alchemist by the name of Jabir ibn Hayyan developed a method of distilling alcohol; the word alcohol itself is Arabic. Hayyan discovered that ethyl alcohol boils at a lower temperature that water: 173 degrees Fahrenheit, as compared to water’s boiling point of 212 degrees. Therefore, if you toss a fermented spirit atop a flame and heat it to 173, you’ll produce a steam of relatively pure alcohol. Collect this steam, cool it and let it condense, and there you have it. If you started with wine, you'll have a more potent drink called brandy. If you started with fermented molasses, you now have rum. And if you started with beer, you now have whiskey, or, if you flavor the liquid with juniper berries, you have gin, a favorite of home distillers during the Prohibition.

It’s quite easy to purchase a still online. Type the words “Alembic stills” or “pot still” into any search engine and you’ll come up with a dozen or so companies that sell the item. The stills tend to look something like an old-fashioned potbellied stove made of copper, although some of the newer models have parts fashioned from stainless steel. Stills also have a length of copper wire, or, nowadays, plastic tubing emerging from the top, snaking downward (often through a bucket of cold water, to condense the vaporized alcohol), and then dumping its contents into a container. This length of copper or plastic tubing is called the “worm.”

Our favorite still on the market is this one, which actually markets itself as a water distiller — the very same nudge, nudge, wink, wink technique used to market home stills during Prohibition! For those with a taste for something a little more traditional, we would point you to this site, which offers handcrafted copper stills of the sort traditionally favored by Ozark mountain moonshiners. For hard-core hobbyists, you could even build your own stills: instructions can be found online, some sophisticated, some wildly inventive, and some probably suicidal. There is a long tradition of making stills out of anything at hand — during the Second World War soldiers used to make stills out of salvaged parts and automobile radiators — but caution must be exercised. Firstly, the alcoholic vapor produced during distillation is highly flammable, and more than one eager home distiller has lost limbs or lives to exploding stills. Secondly, a poorly manufactured still runs the risk of producing poison instead of potable: a recent study of Virginia moonshine showed potentially toxic levels of lead in the liquor.

Keep in mind, home distilling is still illegal in the United States, although, generally, if you’re distilling spirits for your own use and not for profit the law will turn a blind eye. And the pure lawlessness of the activity is part of its appeal, isn’t it? Think about it: Who will enjoy the maddest props at the next meeting of your local home brewing club? The hobbyist with the tepid, foul tasting lager, or the outlaw who strolls in with a half-dozen clay jugs, all marked XXX, filled with throat-burning pure mash liquor?

So go ahead and buy yourself a still! Sure, there’s a risk of incinerating yourself in an explosion of vaporized liquor, poisoning yourself with adulterated liquor, or spending time in the pokey for manufacturing liquor without a license, but if you’re ready to distill adult drinks, you’re ready to take adult risks.

Otherwise, well, there’s always beer. As we understand it, Europeans sometimes mix it with 7-Up, to make it taste better when their children sip it.

More Bottle Gang!

IT HAS BEEN A LONG TIME since cartoonist and St. Paul native Dick Guindon left Minneapolis for Detroit -- since 1981, to be exact -- but there's still traces of him everywhere. At the futuristic Central Library in downtown Minneapolis, there is a series of folders, neatly tied with string, containing Guindon's cartoons for the Minneapolis Tribune, clipped out and glued to acid-free paper by some obsessed librarian. Copies of his cartoon collections can be found in almost every local used bookstore, a series of single-panel, carefully illustrated images of people who look like they were constructed out of potatoes engaging in sweetly daffy behavior. The Brave New Workshop still proudly lists Guindon as one of their alumni.

But he's been gone long enough that he's not well-remembered. Sure, an older generation remembers his Tribune cartoons, but they've probably forgotten the pretension-puncturing character he created for the Minnesota Daily, an overcoat-clad and bearded bohemian named Huggermugger. They've probably also forgotten that Guindon cartooned for Esquire in the 60s, back when that magazine still defined sophisticated modern living for young American men. And even Guindon's own books don't collect his bawdier cartoons for Playboy; you have to flip through back issues to find them, which is not a bad way to spend an afternoon or several.

But what's least remembered about Guindon, alas, is that, for a short while in the 60s, he was the premiere cartoonist for Paul Krassner's The Realist, one of America's earliest and most savage examples of the underground press. Unlike the pudgy and amiable Midwestern lunatics drawn in his later work, Guindon's cartoons for The Realist were seemingly inspired by the Jules Feiffer school of trembling lines and loquacious neurosis. Guindon's illustrations from the time have the quality of a dashed-off sketch, and sometimes a distorted, geometrically cartoonish quality that calls to mind that of illustrator Saul Steinberg. But Guindon's Realist cartoons contain a political fury that is absent in Feiffer and Steinberg's work, and would disappear when Guindon began working for a daily paper. His most notorious cartoon of the era, published on the cover of issue 39 of The Realist in November 1962, show the planet at a helpless, naked female menaced by two barechested, hulking, faceless men, one with a Soviet hammer and sickle tattooed on his arm, the other wearing American flag boxer shorts. "It's his turn now," one says, "and then me again ..."

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