Month: November 2003

It’s not just women, of course; it takes two not to tango. So why do married couples have such a hard time talking about sex? Part of the problem, I realize now, is that women are uncomfortable talking about sex apart from all the other things that go into a relationship. Men have an easier time talking about strict issues of plumbing. Women, on the other hand, go Def-Con Five without a lot of stage setting and context- framing and handholding. We sensitive males know how to jump through these hoops. But we often choose not to, because it makes a simple conversation with your loved one so much more work than it ought to be. (There’s an obvious parallel there having to do with foreplay, but never mind.)

This is something I’ve learned through hard experience with this column. Most men enjoy reading it, most women do not. (Though I note that angry women are much more loyal readers than amused men. I assume the women like to get mad at me. All I can say is that if this is your kind of thing, you really ought to listen to Tom Barnard for thirty seconds on any given morning, you’ll have enough rage to keep you titillated for a lifetime.) As I’ve pursued conversations with the incensed women in my life, I realize that ninety percent of the time they think I’m “objectifying women.” By which they mean I am not talking about something other than their bodies. This is undoubtedly true, given the title of this column.

Sex is a lot of things to a lot of people, of course. But generally, can’t we agree that the single common thread in all of it is that it’s a physical thing, involving the interaction and reaction of bodies that are attracted to one another? In some ways, I think this whole line of thinking—the “objectifying women” argument— is hogwash. Speaking philosophically, it accepts the traditional Cartesian distinction between mind and body, and then discredits the body as a lower stratum of being. The mind, the soul, the spirit—these are what distinguish us from animals. Our bodies, on the other hand, are dirty. Our physical impulses and appetites are hollow at best, and wicked at worst. If that’s the way you see the body, and sexuality, then I can see why women get upset. I just think the premise is wrong. Why not enjoy the gifts of sensuality? Why not revel in bodily pleasure—with or without a higher purpose? Why get so pissed off at your humble, male sex columnist? Funny that no one complains to The Rake’s food columnist that she objectifies eaters by reducing them to nothing but their tongues. Maybe they do, but I doubt it. [They don’t.—Editors.]

There was an interesting study recently. A university in Israel developed a software program that could determine what the gender of a text’s writer is. The program is amazingly accurate. We writers are childish and egocentric maniacs who want our names in lights, so it’s not like there’s a widespread problem identifying whoever wrote that fabulous review of Guided By Voices or Jonathan Lethem. But what the study did prove is that women and men use language differently. Very differently. It seems that men essentially talk about objects. Women talk about relationships.

Actually, marketers have been on to this for decades. They know that women tend to prefer advertisements that are emotional, that establish relationships between people. (This sounds like a stereotype, and it is. Most stereotypes exist because they have some basis in fact.) So anyway, my point is this: Women have a very hard time talking about anything in isolation and without emotion. It is not possible for women to talk about sex the way men do, at least not without blowing a gasket.

Pete wants to buy his wife a sex toy, but she does not want one and will not discuss it. Don asked his girlfriend if she’d like to have a little shaving party in the bathtub, and she couldn’t believe he would ask her such a thing, end of discussion. Ben is dying for a change of position, but his wife thinks the suggestion itself is misogynist. If the basic problem with sex and the married man is that we are entrenched in the same old patterns, the same old positions, how can we ever break out and make sex exciting for both of us again—if you ladies won’t talk about it? If married men agree to talk about all the other aspects of our wonderful relationship, will you finally loosen up a little?

American Guitar Stallions, by Keith Pille
Reviewed by Keith Pille

I come to bury American Guitar Stallions, not to praise it. Which is good, because burial, not praise, is what this stinking sack of crap merits. Deep burial. In a fortified and lead-sealed vault. American Guitar Stallions is easily among the worst novels of the new century. If anything, its very status as a novel is doubtful. It possesses some, but certainly not all, of the commonly- accepted elements of a novel. Characters? Well, there’s one, at least, and a few supporting cutouts—most notably a sex-crazed girlfriend who appears only in wordy smut scenes. Plot? Not really. Theoretically, we’re reading about a lovable rogue’s efforts to win an unlikely American Idol-style guitar contest; but for each page of competition we get six of verbose description of how it feels to play “Back in Black” through a vintage amp. A unifying theme? Insight into the human condition? Emotional hooks? Nowhere to be found.

What Stallions does have is words—38,614 of them. This number, in fact, represents half of Stallions’ claims to being a novel; any collection of words that large must be some sort of book, and this is certainly no technical manual. The rest of its claim comes from Stallions’ having been willed into existence during National Novel Writing Month.

For the past five years, a growing crowd of masochists around the world have dedicated November to clogging their computers or notebooks with awful prose in pursuit of writing a fifty-thousand-word novel in thirty days. They register at the NaNoWriMo website, where they post information about themselves and their projects, and where they can log on daily to update their word counts. FAQs and forums provide tips for reaching fifty thousand (set a daily quota and stick to it; don’t be afraid to write total dreck) and a supportive community.

And now a confession: I am the wretch responsible for American Guitar Stallions. And while I have left the world of forced-march fiction for the greener pastures of weirdly self-referential journalism, the Twin Cities have emerged as a hub of NaNoWriMo activity. More than three hundred people in the state of Minnesota signed up for this year’s campaign, working on projects ranging from “sort of the great American immigrant novel, with the Yugoslav civil war as the backdrop” to a Norwegian adaptation of Goodfellas.

Gathering at a St. Paul coffee shop shortly before the ordeal was to begin, this year’s participants were giddy with optimism. A rookie who went by the handle “Tomislav” (naturally, he’s the one working on the immigrant novel) drew cheers by boasting, “This is going to be my first year finishing NaNo!” Others related cautionary tales. “Sasha’s novel had a breakdown,” warned participant Cory Strode, speaking of a previous-year participant. “In about the last ten thousand words, where she was literally telling herself she couldn’t do it in the novel itself…the novel was going along and then all of a sudden, ‘There’s no way I can do this. I am such a horrible writer and this completely sucks.’ Ten thousand words of that.” I had grown accustomed to the silly grin usually affixed to Strode’s face, but now it had twisted into a kind of there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I horror.

Reaching that final goal requires the novelist to produce an average of just about seventeen hundred words a day, a daunting task even without worrying about quality. Why do people put themselves through this? The most common answer to this reasonable question is that everyone says they want to write a novel, but no one ever sits down and does it. NaNoWriMo (yes, we really call it that; it’s both a nod to the postmodern impulse to reduce everything to an acronym, and a willful kind of rule-bending that, I think, says a lot about this whole stressful misadventure) offers a tough-self-love way to beat the urge to procrastinate, to silence your inner censor by drowning him in sheer volume. Grinning Strode falls into this camp, estimating that he writes more every November than he does in all the other months of the year combined. Mischievously confusing his first- and second-person, Strode said, “I honestly think that without the pressure, you don’t write.” Other writers nodded their heads in agreement, and I remembered my own because-it’s-there feeling of challenge that resulted in Stallions.

Balancing the pain, all NaNos look forward to the sweet feeling of logging onto the website on November 30 and recording that they have forced themselves across the fifty-thousand-word finish line. Megan Spencer finished previously by “giving myself a word count, every single day….I managed to stick to it last year.” And then? “I printed it out, put it in a binder, and thought about editing it, but didn’t because I was almost failing a few classes and had finals.” Harsh, yes, but she’s still finished one more novel than most people.

Binder-banishment sounds like just the thing for American Guitar Stallions. The prose feels as though it had been written by a sixth grader with more ambition than vocabulary. Stallions possesses a strange, lurching rhythm; the text leaps forward with something resembling writerly energy for maybe two paragraphs before settling into a tired, forced plod in which the English language is visibly stretched and disfigured by an apparent insistence to use five words where one will clearly do. Invariably, this continues for bursts of seven pages (which, coincidentally, would be about seventeen hundred words) and ends awkwardly, without warning, often in mid-action. The cycle repeats itself. At one point, possibly the climax, there is a seven-page transcript of pointless jokes emailed between the main character and his friends that feels suspiciously genuine, almost cribbed from real life.

Stallions’ ending is appropriately incompetent. You can identify the exact spot at which the author flamed out from the effort of churning out word after word of egregious crap, the psychic burden of bringing so much verbal violence into the world finally taking its terrible but inevitable toll. One minute, the main character is preparing himself for another round of competition. The page turns, the goal is within reach, and “He loses and his girlfriend leaves him. THE END.” Given the book’s near-total absence of plot progression, it’s tough not to find this fitting. Anything else would have looked out of place at the end of this miserable milk-mustache on the face of American letters.

Don’t ever let anybody tell you that fabulousness can’t be found in the first-tier suburbs. Since her cabaret debut in 1996, the former beauty queen and current post-office switchboard operator known as Miss Richfield 1981 has been wowing audiences with her combination of civic boosterism and flamboyant fashion sense. (Sometimes she answers to the name Russ King, who really did graduate from Richfield High in 1981.) Besides her frequent local shows, Minnesota’s answer to Dame Edna has branched out nationally over the past couple of years, including a regular gig on the Atlantis cruise line, where she calls bingo and helps promote the Richfield-area business community to tourists visiting Cancún. She’ll regale us with tales of her travels at her annual holiday show, playing through December 20 at the Illusion Theater. Fall on Your Knees’ fifth outing will be a familiar mix of old and new comedy bits, hilariously mangled carols, and plenty of good-natured teasing of the audience, accompanied by pianist Todd Price and dancers Megan McClellan and Brian Sostek, whose show Trick Boxing has been a hit on the national fringe-festival circuit. Knowing she’s had some recent experience on boats, we asked the divine Miss R. to play our monthly what-if game and tell us what five items she’d take along if she wound up stranded somewhere far off the cruise ship’s trajectory. We’re not entirely sure that she quite understood what “marooned” meant—though unfailingly cheerful, she does tend to live in a world of her own—but she answered with the aplomb you’d expect of a pageant finalist.

1. Stamps, so I can send postcards back home. [But you know there aren’t any mailmen where you’d be, right? –Ed.] Yes, but I have faith in the U.S. Postal Service to deliver anywhere, even deserted islands.

2. My Miss Richfield 1981 sash, crown, and tiara, just in case there are any formal occasions or parades.

3. Hot rollers—even though we’re going to be alone, we still look our best at all times!

4. A mirror, so I’ll have someone to talk to.

5. My purse, with all the usual items I carry in it: lipstick, nylons, Pamprin, Sanka, lighter fluid, a signal flare, a shortwave radio, and duct tape.

Wisely, the makers of Shattered Glass have not pitched their story to viewers—or the media—as being about the inner workings of a hundred-year-old publication or the pitfalls of modern political journalism. No, according to the film’s writer-director, Billy Ray, Shattered Glass is “bigger than journalism”—it’s about “right and wrong.” Reviewers and critics have generally bought into this point of view, agreeing that Shattered Glass is, if not “bigger than journalism,” still about journalism’s big issues: It “puts journalistic ethics on trial,” according to blurb-whore repeat offender Peter Travers. Rex Reed raves (does he ever not?) that it “will teach you something about ethics gone awry.” The Washington Times sees it as a “vivid morality play.” David Edelstein, writing for the Glass-obsessed organ Slate (by my count, they’ve run ten stories about Glass in just the past six months), gets rather scarily into the spirit of such moralizing, writing that Shattered Glass “makes us feel the way our forefathers must have felt after a really good public stoning.”

This is all quite a windup for a movie in which the central moral quandary isn’t much of a head-scratcher: Is it wrong for a journalist to make up stories? Well, yes. Not since Saving Private Ryan’s faux-philosophizing—“Is the life of one man worth risking the life of many?”—has such a simple question generated such a flurry of non-answers.

To be fair, critics would have to do some fabricating themselves to find a true ethical dilemma in the story of serial myth-maker Stephen Glass as told by Ray. While superficially compelling, the Shattered Glass version of the events that brought down a rising young magazine writer and threatened a venerated magazine feels less like a meditation on right and wrong than a police procedural. In May 1998, Glass was fired from the perennially almost-relevant New Republic after a writer for the unfortunately named (and now defunct) Forbes Digital Tool unraveled the first of what would prove to be a string—nay, a whole skein—of almost totally invented feature articles. Shattered Glass tells that story and nothing else: None of the ulcer-inducing questions about the propriety of using anonymous sources, or the legitimacy of using the press as judge and jury—questions whose thorniness would exemplify a true dilemma. There’s just Glass and his made-up stories, presented with all the depth of character of an episode of Law & Order.

Much has been made, for instance, about Ray’s decision to keep Glass—in a manner of speaking—opaque. We don’t find out much about his motives, hear little about his past, and learn only the barest outline of the mechanics of his fraud. On this score, the movie fails as even a genre flick; the best part of any film about a con is finding out how it’s done.

And it was undoubtedly necessary to telescope Glass’s two-year career at the New Republic, but the events of the movie feel as though they take place over a matter of days. No sooner are questions raised about a Glass story on hard-partying young Republicans than the magazine’s editorship changes hands: The fatherly Michael Kelly (played by Hank Azaria of Simpsons fame) is replaced by the young (and, as played by Peter Sarsgaard, almost reptilian) Charles Lane. Impervious to the writer’s nebbishy charm, Lane senses that Glass is up to something almost, it appears, immediately. Questions arise about another story, Lane smokes out Glass’s lies. The magazine prints an apology to the readers. Wham, bam, we’re sorry, ma’am. While this quick-cut approach might have stemmed from a desire for more effective movie-making, it has the effect of making Glass’s tenure at the magazine seem brief, and absolves the magazine’s management from responsibility for the twenty-two stories—twenty of which the magazine later repudiated—that appeared between the first hint that something might be wrong and the final, ugly proof that it was all a sham.

The result of this temporal sleight of hand and, more significantly, characterless shadow-play is a film that feels small in a dozen different ways—not just made-for-TV-movie small (it was produced by HBO Films) but small in scope, small in ambition, small in moral imagination. The questions that Ray wants the audience to deal with all have simple answers; that’s part of the problem, and it makes Shattered Glass feel less like a morality play than a morality skit.

The other problem with Shattered Glass is more subtle but also more substantive. If the “dilemma” set out by Ray is whether to lie or not lie, the stakes of the choice are absurdly, insultingly low. By the moral calculus of the film, Glass is wrong to lie because he made the New Republic look bad. But those most damaged by Glass’s falsehoods were the New Republic’s readers, and they—unlike the people Glass defamed—don’t even get to sue. The closest the movie gets to realizing that journalism is a public service and not a personality contest is a line that’s really meant to underscore how important the magazine itself is: “What you write gets read by people who matter.” This, and the movie’s repeated assertion that the publication was “the in-flight magazine of Air Force One,” suggest that the journalistic line Glass crossed is worth holding not just because he hurt the feelings of those he worked with but also because, you know, “people who matter” might make decisions based on what they read in the New Republic. If they’re no more trustworthy than the CIA, we’re in trouble.

Maybe focusing on the difference between Glass’s lies upsetting his colleagues and Glass’s lies influencing public policy is nitpicking. After all, Glass didn’t write about anything as important as ethanol subsidies. In fact, throughout the movie, magazine staffers use “a piece on ethanol subsidies” as shorthand for the kind of dry, wonky inside-the-Beltway journalism that Glass didn’t practice. Glass wrote about people and pop culture ephemera with just enough attention paid to politics and policy that it didn’t feel irrelevant; Glass had a feel for what would make a fine zeitgeisty, counter-counterintuitive snapshot of the country’s mood—or, rather, the mood of the moderate-liberal intellectual readers of the New Republic. The magazine still publishes these kinds of pieces; my personal favorite was a 2001 cover story entitled “In Praise of Conventional Wisdom.” But many of the New Republic’s most famous and infamous stories of the modern era fit into this rubric, from the mild endorsement of racial essentialism of “The Bell Curve” to the passive-aggressive anti-SUV harrumphing of “The Axle of Evil.”

Which brings us to the question I kept hoping Shattered Glass would ask. As interesting as the answer to “Why did he lie?” might have been, discovering “Why did anyone believe him?” could be a more fruitful investigation. Ray tries to make the answer to this question easy as well. “We were entertained,” one character says, and that’s pretty much the end of any discussion about the true journalistic dilemma at the heart of Shattered Glass. What do you do when a story seems too good to be true? When you love a story idea so much you ignore its veracity, whose fault is it? These are questions for editors, not for reporters like Glass.

In hindsight, almost all of Glass’s stories have the “if it ain’t true it oughta be true” ring of urban legends: Wall Streeters who worshiped Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, bored executives who paid outdoorsmen a bundle of money to be dropped in the middle of nowhere, a trade show specializing in trinkets commemorating the Monica Lewinsky affair, those drunk young Republicans, and, of course, the story that brought him down, the hackers employed by major electronics companies to use their powers for good, not evil. Glass’s stories made it into the pages of the New Republic because the magazine’s staff and its r
eaders wanted to believe they were true. This willingness to believe is not, by any means, as great a sin as the many transgressions Glass committed, but it’s a sin nonetheless. If, as David Edelstein put it, Shattered Glass makes those whom Glass betrayed “feel the way our forefathers must have felt after a really good public stoning,” I would hope that what he means by that is “guilty.”

I don’t know what the exact clinical classification would be of my particular personality defect, I’m a person who regrets nothing and yet dreads everything. Maybe there isn’t even a name for it, and one day I could have this dysfunction named after me. “Yep, we finally had our aunt committed due to her lifelong struggle with Manic Lucia.”
My close friends know me well enough not to take offense when I cancel last-minute plans. I’ve even gotten so comfortable that I no longer feel the need to make up fake excuses. To be my friend, you have to understand that when I say that, while, yes, I did excitedly RSVP months ago to attend your daughter’s first birthday party, now that the actual date is here, I’d rather open-mouth kiss David Gest, and then jump through a flaming hoop of dog crap, nothing personal though. And I should explain that it doesn’t matter how appealing the plans are. I could have a date to get free highlights with Steven Tyler, eat lobster, and have hundred dollar bills shoved into my pockets. Yet somehow when it comes time to actually jump into the toxic twin’s limo, I’d really rather stay home, troll around on Ebay for hours looking for red lampshades, then turn the ringer off and curl up with Psychopharmacology for Idiots or some other light reading.
To add to the twistedness of this, when I do follow through with plans, I usually have a fine time. Hence the “no regrets” aspect of my Manic Lucia. I’m not proud of the fact that some people have nicknamed me “Anne Frank” due to my infrequent social outings. On the rare occasion I do make it out to a show, I know I have to be prepared to answer the question, “Do you still live in town?”—and that’s coming from my own sister.
Listen, I’m not an entirely undesirable pal. Say you want the kind of friend who, when you call, you know you’ll always get the machine. A friend who will never actually see the inside of your apartment. If you’re looking for someone who you can easily bail out of dinner plans with at the last minute, I’m your man. You can take comfort in knowing that we won’t hook up next week, and I won’t call you later.

Send birthday party invitations and/or flaming hoops of dog crap to Mary Lucia at popularcreeps@yahoo.com.

No, they’re not giants yet. But they loom pretty large. Brooklynites John Flansburgh and John Linnell, aka They Might Be Giants, now wield the awesome power that comes with winning a Grammy for writing a sitcom theme. But they’re still very much the same lovably eccentric cult rockers, singing about James K. Polk, purple toupees, and nightlights that daydream of being lighthouses. We spoke recently with Linnell—the lanky one with the accordion—about the duo’s current projects, including the pleasingly quirky documentary Gigantic: A Tale of Two Johns. TMBG also just finished its second kids’ project, an illustrated book and CD called Bed Bed Bed. They’ll play a short, free set and sign books December 8 at Wild Rumpus bookstore.

THE RAKE: Was making Bed Bed Bed different than No!, your first kids’ record, now that you’ve got your son?

LINNELL: That’s a good question. Obviously I had a lot of experience with getting my son to go to bed by that time. But part of it was, we just wanted to do this thing that was cool. We often think, for instance, how cool it would be to have a picture book with a CD stuck inside, this bizarre thing. We don’t always think in strictly practical terms about how the thing gets used. With Bed, we discovered pretty quickly that you can’t flip the pages that fast and really take in the illustrations. So really what the experience is about, I think, is the picture book is for bedtime, and it’s enhanced by these songs that the kid may already know, or can hear later.

THE RAKE: Even before you made those records, your music was already pretty well attuned to children’s sensibilities. How did you change your songwriting to make it “officially” children’s music?

LINNELL: We didn’t define it very fully when we started working on No! In some ways we were being a lot freer than usual. We felt no obligation to write the college-radio single. Normally we’d throw in a bunch of those. And we sometimes have stuff on our grownup records that’s a little too death-obsessed or in some other way dark for children.

THE RAKE: How do kids like the live shows?

LINNELL: They’re really engaging with it a lot of times. But they’re not ashamed to turn their backs if they’re bored, or run around. That’s tough. It’s a hard crowd to play for. We don’t want to do just anything to get their attention. We want to feel like we have some pride left at the end of the show.

THE RAKE: Last time you played First Avenue, I recall, the crowd filled the entire bar. How can you fit in these comparatively tiny bookstores?

LINNELL: There’s something about a bookstore that makes people behave themselves. But the young kids, there’s this chaos factor generated just by that. That’s been our main security problem, tiny hands grabbing electrical equipment. But the shows have been really fun. They’re not really just kids’ shows. Adults should come even if they don’t have kids. And maybe we can trick them into buying this book.

THE RAKE: Although you’ve been doing a lot of soundtrack work lately, it must have been pretty strange for guys who aren’t all that interested in going mainstream to win a Grammy.

LINNELL: The Grammy was totally weird. It meant a lot for us professionally because it legitimized the work that we do for hire. We’re much more of an institution now, in a weird way, even though we feel like that’s a ridiculous idea. A lot of people that liked us a long time ago when they were in college are now in jobs in places like Disney, and NPR, and Cartoon Network, so we get to do all kinds of things. But we still feel it’s a very personal project, that we just goof around and come up with stuff.

THE RAKE: Which is why you still devote so much energy to offbeat things like your CD soundtrack for McSweeney’s sixth issue.

LINNELL: The stuff that we get most excited by is what’s not trying to be huge. The only real problem for us is cooking up those ideas. That’s the challenge, to think of something interesting that isn’t just what everybody else already thinks of for you to do.

Wild Rumpus, 2720 W. 43rd St., (612) 920-5005, www.wildrumpusbooks.com

When ex-president Millard Fillmore led a steamboat expedition up the Mississippi 149 years ago, it may have looked like a publicity stunt for the Know-Nothing party. Maybe he was just looking for a good cup of coffee brewed fresh from organic, shade-grown beans. Of course, in 1854, all coffee was organic and shade-grown by default. Dow Chemical had not yet invented the hazardous compounds now in widespread agricultural use, and the hybrid beans designed for growth on deforested mountainsides were not available. Even so, when the Grand Excursion reenactment of Fillmore’s expedition arrives in St. Paul next summer, you can get a shot of the future with an otherwise historically correct cuppa Joe. This is something you could not have found in the metro area as recently as last year: a bean roasted with solar power.

The solar roasting recently began at Old Man River Café on Smith Avenue, just south of the High Bridge. Historian, publisher, and restaurateur Jon Kerr admits the roaster won’t be powered directly by the bank of six photovoltaic panels installed on the café roof in October. “Truth be told,” he said, “it goes into our general electrical supply.” But the 1.1 kilowatt array will deliver thirty amps, roughly the same amount of power required to run the roaster Kerr and co-owner Chuck Debevec use for the shade-grown organics they sell.

When The Rake arrived to have a look, electrician Mike Berg was boring a hole through the Victorian-era brick foundation to admit a conduit that will carry the current from the roof. One of the fifteen-square-foot “Sunny Boy” solar panels was on display inside the café, looking like a blue formica table-top propped against a wall. Nearby, a charity-fundraiser-style thermometer poster showed the cost of the project—an impressive and daunting $12,030.

Like the 1854 expedition, the Sunny Side Project, as it’s been dubbed, has been a bit of an odyssey. Kerr was approached about a year ago by neighbors who thought someone ought to showcase solar technology. On St. Paul’s West Side, environmental causes take on extra clarity in the shadow of Xcel Energy’s High Bridge coal burner. The plant has operated for decades under the EPA’s grandfather clause, which grants exemptions from emission control requirements to older facilities that have not been remodeled. When Kerr agreed to let the café be the poster child for solar power, a small group formed to raise funds. Memberships in “the Sunny Side Club” were sold for fifty dollars and up. More than seventy-five donors have now brought the total to within five hundred dollars of the goal. The end product? Sunny Side Blend, an aromatic medium-light roast of Nicaraguan, Peruvian, and Colombian beans.

It’s unlikely that members of Fillmore’s expedition had much in common with the activists behind the Sunny Side Project, some of whom reportedly chafed at the apparent male bias in the brand name of the solar panels. Fillmore was noted for sponsoring compromise slavery legislation that included the Fugitive Slave Act, which required the return of escaped slaves to their owners even if they were captured in the free North. Fillmore ran for a second term as a member of the evanescent Know-Nothing party on the rather narrow platform of seeking to ban Catholics from holding public office and increasing restrictions on immigration. The expedition reenactment reaches St. Paul next summer, and Kerr has already developed a coffee to bridge the gap: Expedition Coffee is a darker roast than Sunny Side and features the grim countenance of “the Last Whig” himself printed on every bag of beans. Even if the reenactment carries a little baggage from Fillmore’s dubious views, the team will be treated to the most politically correct cup of coffee in Minnesota, and they’ll like it.—Joe Pastoor