Big news from the “Design for All” movement: Starting tomorrow, May 1, Isaac Mizrahi’s new line of bridal wear will be available for purchase at Target.com. There’ll be $160 wedding gowns, bridesmaids’ dresses, even ties and cummerbunds. Now you, too, can wear satin to your shotgun weddings.
I realize I’m running dangerously close to being a two-trick nag on the Star Tribune’s problems with; (1) Charges that publisher Par Ridder plotted abandoning the Pioneer Press for his primary business/financial rival for months before he actually did, allegedly cooking/absconding with executive non-compete contracts in the process, and (2) The paper’s startlingly weak pursuit of provocative local angles on the US Attorneys scandal.
I really should spend more time watching the sweeps months features lining up on 4, 5, 9, 10 and 11. But damn, these two items are so juicy.
Anyway, a couple quick observations before I move on … for a while.
While it was mildly gratifying to see the Strib’s reader rep, Kate Parry, finally address The Ridder Problem in her Sunday column, I’m not sure the difficulty of covering an in-house scandal is the essence of the issue facing her. I don’t doubt it is damn tough to get Ridder to discuss the accusations thrown against him, and I don’t doubt the accusers have been more forthcoming. Nor do I doubt that reporter Matt McKinney, who was handed the assignment is a resourceful pro. And likewise, I’m not at all surprised the Ridder matter hasn’t generated public interest.
From the public’s perspective, why should they care about Ridder? He’s a faceless executive. Unless there are other boots to drop, Ridder isn’t sucking money out of the public’s pocket and the whole thing is as inside corporate baseball as it is snicker-worthy and soapy.
The issue is credibility and the higher standard for recognizing and rectifying appearance problems to which newspapers regularly claim to hold themselves. When it comes to the grunt classes of newspapers — the wretched pecking scribes — there is no end of hand-wringing concern over the slightest appearance issues, with management regularly admonishing writers to step back from proximity to any perception of ethical dilemma.
So why not demand the same — if not more — from the publisher? You can certainly make the argument that his reputation puts a heavier stamp on the credibility of the paper than say, a sports writer who lets a player buy him a couple drinks. (Like THAT ever happens.)
Ridder dodges Parry’s questions on the law suit with the stale ploy of respecting “the legal process”, a process that, as every reporter knows, regularly obfuscates more than it clarifies. If that’s what Ridder wants to say, fine. But at this point OUR reader’s rep owes us at least a paragraph explaining how this dodge reflects rather badly on the paper’s reputation for transparency and why much more — a lot more — is needed to avoid months of lingering suspicions.
One other thing: Parry is big on the rough and tumble competition between the two papers. But the Par Ridder matter has NOTHING to do with the competitive fire of the two newsrooms. This is an executive suite-to-executive suite affair, with the two staffs as bystanders. Far from being competitive, the two newsrooms are unified in preferring complete and satisfying answers to what in the hell has been going on behind the mahogany doors. (The two staffs are also unified in suspecting/knowing that the greatest threat to their continued survival is upstairs in their own buildings, not the reporters across the river.)
On Trick 2: I’m running out of expressions of righteous amazement. Late last week it was revealed that former US Attorney Tom Heffelfinger was in fact on a list of prosecutors … someone in DC wanted fired. You’d think this would be the long-awaited green light for the Strib to put the pedal to the metal and start catching up on this story. Until now the Strib has been running like a soccer mom’s mini-van in the NASCAR race that is the US Attorneys story. A race where its former McClatchy DC bureau has been playing Tony Stewart, denting bumpers and fenders.
So … I fail to understand the value in constantly returning to Heffelfinger for yet another discussion of what he doesn’t know. As I’ve said before, even if Heffelfinger knows something more, he isn’t obligated — yet — to tell anyone, much less a reporter about it. More to the point, the scandal is such a godawful circus of incompetence and arrogance that any sane adult would want to keep a healthy distance from it.
Although by now, the prosecutors who were fired and/or were on a list to be fired are the ones assuming badges of honor. Suspicion is turning to those who MET with Bush administration approval and kept their jobs.
So here’s a word of advice. Tom Heffelfinger’s repeated expressions of surprise and annoyance are not the story. Nor, for that matter, are former Minnesota Supreme Court Chief Justice Sandy Keith’s testimonials for Heffelfinger’s replacement, Rachel Paulose.
Mondays tend to be planning days, right? Well I just want y’all to get this one on your radar…Next week marks Broders’ 25th Anniversary, and they’re doing it up.
Sunday kicks it off with a multi-course wine dinner. Sign up NOW as the dinner benefits the Slow Food MN Educational Fund and space will surely fill up.
And then it’s a week full of love from Tom and Molly Broder at the Cucina Italiana and the Pasta Bar. On special days you’ll find 25% off salumi, fresh pastas, olive oils, Tuscan chickens, and their stunning array of imported cheeses. Enter to win great prizes, like a grocery bar full of cheese and crackers, or take in a cooking class, like one in which you learn to create a fresh pasta rotolo.
On Saturday the 12th, their actual Anniversario D’Argento, stop in for some free cake and a generous public tasting: From 10am-2pm the pasta bar will be open for you to sample comparative tastes of wines, cheese, olive oils, salumi, you name it.
This is an amazing gift from the Broders who have been advocates of freshness and high-quality food for longer than most people have been expecting it. A quarter of a century is a HUGE life span for any restuarant and they show no signs of slowing down … that is something to celebrate. Any of you young culinarians who have yet to sample the Broders’ wares, you’re missing a measurable piece of local food history. Get there.
It comes as a surprise to absolutely no one that newspaper circulation took another dive in the spring numbers released today by Audit Bureau of Circulations. Locally, the Star Tribune registering a somewhat worse than average decline — -4.8% on weekdays and 5.1% on Sundays. Last week the Pioneer Press claimed its daily circulation had increased .3%, with Sunday up .1%
The Strib can take hollow consolation by looking at the once respectable Dallas Morning News, where gruesome gutting by the Belo Corporation hasn’t exactly blunted a circulation meltdown that reached 14.2% daily and 13.3% on Sundays.
Another sign of the apocalypse can be seen in the INCREASE of the New York Post, 7.6% daily and 6.5% Sundays.
1. Warriors in Command
The big news of the first round of the NBA playoffs is obviously Golden State’s 3-1 lead over 67-win Dallas, a series that would have any neutral observer pulling hard for the Warriors even if he/she didn’t know they were enormous underdogs. Golden State epitomizes the coming out of FUN in the NBA this post-season, flipping the bird to the conventional wisdom that you need an airtight freeze-dried stiff upper-lipped dose of disciplined, didactic conservatism in order to win pro hoops in the spring. In fact three of the four most enjoyable teams among the 16 combatants are painting mustaches and spinning whirlagigs on that shibboleth.
No, the new news is that speed, athleticism, transition flow, and ball movement are threatening to be in vogue for the first moment since the Showtime Lakers a pair of decades ago. And joining Steve Nash as the poster child of this stomp-the-throttle fantasia is Baron Davis, who is turning in a folk hero style performance this series. If you like serendipity, your favorite Baron moment tonight was the half-court bank-in to the tie the game at the halftime buzzer. If its plain grit and hustle you hanker for, that jousting with Jason Terry for the steal on the out-of-bounds pass and subsequent transition layup with Terry riding his hip like a bad jockey, all in the last three seconds of the third period, comes out on top. And if seize the moment ingenuity is your thing, Baron’s rebound off his own free throw miss and followup lay-in might be the snapshot.
Of course everybody is going to gush about Golden State–we’ve all got guilty consciences for picking against them, not truly believing until tonight’s gritty victory. That they still might lose is a possibility, of course, but irrelevant to the lasting glory of these first four games. If they keep going, sweet. But it’s that initial rush that really salts away the memories. Golden State fans feel better right now than they will if the Warriors win 55 games and make it to the conference finals next year.
There are a couple of things still worth pointing out about Dallas, however. First, the universally accepted label slapped on the Mavs was that they were stylistically versatile, that they could play Bump and Grind with the Spurs and the Jazz and Beat the Clock with the flyboys. But it wasn’t so. Of the team’s mere 15 losses in regular season play, a third of them were to Golden State, who beat them in all three meetings, and Phoenix, who beat them twice in a row in the final couple months of the season. People mistake the Mavs’ quickness for a team that enjoys transition play. They don’t. Even their fastest players like Devon Harris and Josh Howard have the sort of explosiveness that works best in the half-court for them, and regular rotation guys like Nowitzki, Stackhouse, Dampier, and Terry don’t thrive against teams that love uptempo play. And if you need further convincing, the 45-4 edge the Warriors had in fast break points tonight over the first 46 minutes of the game might be the smoking gun.
Second, this has not been a good series for Avery Johnson, who was the single biggest reason why I decided the Mavs could withstand what was clearly going to be a difficult series for Dallas (but highly entertaining for the rest of us). It began when he went small with the lineup change, a move subsequently discredited by the fine performance of Dasagana Diop in the middle, who has been as much of an obstacle to the Warriors as anyone in a Dallas uniform–the key to tonight’s game was when he picked up his 5th foul with the Mavs up 7 in the fourth period. The other mark against Avery is that his inflammable emotions on the sidelines haven’t inspired his squad and may have contributed to their rattled demeanor. There was no way for anyone to know how the Mavs would react, of course, but if anyone should have had a clue, it was Avery.
Third, as someone who has watched Kevin Garnett be pilloried for playing fundamentally sound, unselfish basketball for lo these many years, I’m a little suspicious on the pile-on Nowitzki is being subjected to right now. TNT announcer Dick Stockton (oh I wish Harlen and Collins could have done this game) was a real asshole about it, justifiably pointing out Nowitzki’s absence of aggressive point scoring, but either deliberately or blindly not noticing all the little things Nowitzki was doing on defense and for ball movement tonight. Granted, Nowitzki has not had a great series by any means, but neither has it been a classic choke–far from it. According to the popcornmachine.net totals, Dallas was +3 tonight in the 47:09 Nowitzki played, and -7 in the 51 seconds he sat.
2. Bullish in the East
Speed kills, exhibit B was Chicago’s sweep over ossified Miami, the pathetic defending champs who mailed in the entire regular season in the belief they could just flip a switch in the playoffs, only to get de-pantsed by the Bulls’ squadron of small, quick, very talented and poised top 5: Deng, Gordon, Wallace, Nocioni and Hinrich, with PJ Brown the token slowfoot.
My advice to any neophyte or otherwise clueless GM: Get some players from Argentina. Like Manu Ginobili, Nocioni seems to kick it up a notch when it matters most–otherwise known as having a killer instinct. Deng, like Baron Davis, is writing his name in neon across these playoffs, sending poor Eddie Jones packing with his combination of strength, size and quickness. Gordon has so much confidence in his shot right now that a priority for opponents should be to frustrate him and get him out of sync, even at the expense of leaving others open a little more. Wallace is the experienced hand, the guy who can battle in the paint and play superb interior D without retarding the high powered pace that is the Bulls metier. And Hinrich, well, he had an off-series, beset by fouls, and if the Bulls are going to beat the Pistons in the second round, he’ll have to raise his game and move his feet better against Chauncey Billups. I wouldn’t bet against it.
3. Hidebound SOB/PhDs in San Antonio
Watching these games for the pure basketball of it all, I found myself rooting for Golden State (even my disdain for Don Nelson abating), Phoenix, Chicago, and….the Spurs. How could this be? AI is one of my all-time couch potato lures, and I dislike Tim Duncan’s “noble carriage but blatant whiner” hypocrisy almost as much as ref Joey Crawford. Worse, if there is a team that can send the NBA back to the stone age in terms of bruise-over-cruise prioritizing, it is Gregg Popovich’s unmerry men.
But damn it if the Spurs don’t have grit and guile and team synergy that isn’t lightning in a bottle but fermented for eight years in oaken casks in the dusky depths of their collective souls. The key plays in Saturday night’s pivotal road win over Denver were Robert Horry’s steal and bucket to trigger a deadly surge at the end of the third quarter, and Michael Finley making them pay for doubling Duncan while keeping close watch on Ginobili and Parker–he buried treys. The key plays that nobody ever thinks about being key plays were all the times the Spurs scrambled back on defense.
I don’t understand why Pops wants to throw Bowen on Iverson every third or fourth possession, especially when Tony Parker is playing decent D for a change and hair-shirt defenders like Bowen are the only guys that usually give Carmelo Anthony fits. But I don’t think it is a very bright idea to criticize Gregg Popovich’s decisions about how to play defense. Still, it’s a head-scratcher that doesn’t seem to be working.
Another reason I swung to the Spurs is Denver feels like a punk-ass outfit. Nene has had a bevy of marvelous moments, but is still prone to putting a little mustard on the rage when he finishes an open dunk with his team down 6 with two minutes to go–and he’s whining more than Duncan. Karl hasn’t worn well since his heyday in Seattle, even, or especially, his fluke year in Milwaukee that bagged him the huge contract. And Melo, well, Melo is the poor man’s Kobe Bryant, and that is not a compliment. Can score in the clutch. Does a lot of things well. Obviously smart, pretty well-spoken, and often fun to watch. But from afar, he doesn’t feel like a great teammate–there’s a distance there that might be arrogance or immaturity or simply a lack of inspirational leadership. In a playoff year when speed and transition are the rule, a squad with Melo and AI should ready for their close-ups. Instead, the Nugs don’t seem ready. Or maybe the Spurs are simply that good.
I realize it’s not politically correct to call things “girlie,” and it’s certainly a disservice to my gender — but then my gender has done me many a disservice, so… take that!
THEATER AND PERFORMANCE
“Okay, first things fuckin’ last!”
This just sounds too interesting to pass up. Imagine that Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs was written by a woman. Imagine the characters were women. Hard to imagine. I know. But what might that be like? Would it be so horridly filled with girlie clichés, you’d run screaming for cover (or Tampax)? Or would it simply be ingenioius? Award-winning Canadian playwright Laura McGhee was listening to the song Stuck in the Middle With You, when she wondered what connotation the dancing torture scene would have had if a woman had been playing the role portrayed by Michael Madsen. Then she started to speculate about what else would have been different. The result was Reservoir Bitches, a dramatic parody of the Tarantino classic. Presenting the midwest premiere is the Red Eye Theater, known for their multimedia stagings and dark exploration of the underbelly of contemporary life.
7 p.m., Red Eye Theater, 15 West 14th St., Minneapolis, 612-870-0309; pay-what-you-can.
READINGS
A Union of Love and Loss
If you’re looking for less violent “girlie” stuff, you might want to go hear author Linda Olsson talk about her debut novel at the Galleria Barnes & Nobles. Olsson’s Astrid and Veronika tells the story of two women — a 30-year-old writer and a septuagenarian recluse — who befriend each other and share their emotional scars while living next door to each other in a small Swedish town. While it certainly sounds a bit hokey, Olsson’s unembellished style stops it from sliding into an overwrought melodrama. She’s a solid writer and has traveled the world from Sweden to Kenya to Singapore, so she ought to have plenty to say.
7:30 p.m., Barnes & Noble Booksellers, Galleria Shopping Center, 3225 W 69th St., Edina; 952-920-0633; free.
MUSIC
Don’t Let the Girlie-Appeal Fool You
The majority of comments I’ve heard about Duncan Sheik in the past few years have been more geared toward his good looks than his great music — and maybe I’m allowing myself to be blinded by his bold break onto the music scene about a decade ago — but I still think the man has something more to offer than a condom reference with a sexy gaze. I mean, he’s even gone and composed an entire score for the new Broadway musical Spring Awakening — and the reviews aren’t half bad. Sheik has certainly mellowed over the years, so if you’re looking for a respectable version of mellow mysticism threaded with pop, he’s your man. And hey, as mystical as the music may sound, the lyrics still have a satisfying darkness: “I think that God’s got a sick sense of humor, and when I die I expect to find him laughing.”
7 p.m., Varsity Theater, 1308 4th St. SE, Minneapolis; 612-604-0222; $23.
Listen to Duncan Sheik.
Watch and listen to Duncan Sheik.
The Awesome Monday Show!
OK. If you really need to throw off all the Monday girlie schlock, join host Rayna Terror at the Bedlam Theater for an evening of head-thrashing, liquor-free rock-n-roll. (And don’t you dare call a booze-free event “girlie.” I see no correlation at all.) Tonight’s show features psychedelic punk-rockers Nudity, with Dreamland Faces, Synchrocyclotron, and Styrofoam Death (remaining members of Styrofoam Duck). It promises to be an interesting show, with plenty of energy, and plenty of… teenagers. Actually, I don’t know how many teenagers are allowed to go to a concert on a Monday night, but it’s a dry, all ages show, nonetheless. Any drinking to be done must be done at the neighboring Palmer’s Bar or one of the other Cedar Avenue watering holes.
8:30 p.m., Bedlam Theatre, 1501 S. 6th St.; 612-341-1038; $6.
ON THE NET
What’s Going on in Our Own Backyard?
For those of you who missed the Konono No.1 show at the Cedar Cultural Center last Wednesday, here’s a clip.
Did you miss the Bright Eyes concert on the same night? Check out clips here, here, and here.
Remember the Bent Festival I wrote about on the 19th? Here’s a clip of Beatrix*JAR live at Bent Fest 2007. See, you really should have gone.
Critical Mass rally on Franklin and Hennepin this Saturday.
Saturday night at Pi, the hottest new gay club for women.
Granted, it’s an ad, but this one happens to be produced by Carmichael Lynch, here in town.
And for the grand finale… and old (1947-1961) video of someone’s great grandfather and his friends performing an acrobatic act from the Minneapolis Aquatenials. Cirque du Soleil meets Charlie Chaplin.
Twin Cities native Tommy Nehls was talking on the phone from Ft. Lauderdale, where he has been living since 1986. Nehls sounded alternately incredulous and bemused that an obscure record he made with a bunch of high school pals had become a hot (and pricey) commodity among a small but international community of vinyl fetishists (as well as garnering playtime on such eclectic public-radio bastions as New York’s WFMU). “The music on that record is thirty-four years old,” Nehls said. “When people first started tracking me down to ask about it I always thought they were friends trying to pull something over on me.”
In 1973, when Nehls’ self-released I Always Catch the Third Second of a Yellow Light, he was a junior at Southwest High School and had been working at a Southdale record store, absorbing the music of the period and squirreling away money to make his first record.
“I was a very serious student and a jock early on,” Nehls said, “but from the time I saw the Beatles at Met Stadium I realized that making music was something I wanted to do, and I’d been playing in bands since I was in seventh grade.”
Nehls’ debut is a dense and ambitious record, even by the trippy compositional and production standards of the time. And he either had incredible good fortune or a real knack for assembling prodigally talented musicians from among his school chums. Either way, the lineup he took into the studio to record Third Second (which was released under the name Tom Nehls) featured a cast of characters that would later make their mark on the Twin Cities music scene and beyond. The engineer for the project (and owner of the studio) was Paul Stark, who would later co-found Twin/Tone Records, the label that would help launch the careers of the Replacements, the Suburbs, Soul Asylum, Ween, and the Jayhawks. Among the credited players were future members of the Wolverines Classic Jazz Orchestra, and Skogie and the Flaming Pachucos. Dorothy Benham, a classmate of Nehls’ who was crowned Miss America in 1977, provided a spooky and ethereal vocal on the apocalyptic “Clean Air” (“The black ash rain that obstructs the sun/has eased those people’s pain/You know they’re relieved from their pressure, they could only think of work”).
Other song titles on Third Second include “No People in the Forest,” “The Underwater Symphony Dream,” and “Your Death.” The instrumentation ranged from the standard guitars, bass, and drums to bells, synthesizer, organ, flute, saxophones, and banjo, augmented with all sorts of period-era studio effects like tape loops, loads of echo, and backwards piano. The insert included with the original album gave a pretty good idea of where Nehls’ head was at in 1973: Among the record’s dedicatees were the Beatles, Frank Zappa, and J.R.R. Tolkien.
“We were just a bunch of kids bouncing off the walls,” Nehls said. “I think the music was a soup that resulted from a lot of good influences and the dynamics of that time and place. This was probably one of the first records Paul Stark worked on, and he turned out to be the perfect person; he was totally patient and supportive of what we were trying to do.”
These sorts of rediscoveries are increasingly common in an era marked by obsessive completism and the fevered research of legions of Internet musicologists engaged in a sort of perpetual game of obscurity one-upmanship. Still, that Nehls’ record would find an appreciative (and covetous) audience decades after it originally appeared is particularly strange given that by his own reckoning very few copies of the original vinyl ever made it into circulation. “I didn’t sell very many of them, I can tell you that,” Nehls said. “I sold some to friends, and the record was played by Howard Viken on WCCO one morning. Most of them ended up in my sister’s basement in Chicago, and I lost a bunch of those to flooding. By the time we were finished recording the thing I knew I was going off to college and I was just happy to have done it. It was like a high school project, really, and I didn’t really think about it for probably thirty years, until I started getting these random calls.”
One of those random calls was from Mark Trehus, longtime Minneapolis record collector and owner of Treehouse Records.
“A number of years ago a copy of the record came into the store,” Trehus said. “I’d never heard of it, but it looked interesting, and after I listened to it a few times I was intrigued. I’m always looking for records that are kind of odd and are of a particular time and place, and this one definitely fit that bill. It had a sort of late-night psychedelic bedroom vibe to it. I did a little poking around and learned that it was something that a few other people in psychedelic-record-collecting circles had heard about, so I went about trying to track down Nehls and found him alive and well in Florida.”
Nehls, it turned out, had been not only alive and well, but steadily making music since the day he left the Twin Cities. He’d gone off to River Falls for college, and then one night while he was home for the summer, he remembers, he played Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony with a pops orchestra at the Lake Harriet band shell. By the next day, he said, he had “driven back to River Falls, packed up my stuff, picked up a pedal-steel player who had gigged with Mel Tillis, and headed west.” A couple of nights later he was sitting in with a band in a Reno lounge, playing “acid Spike Jones-style Dixieland.” Nehls credits Don Stoyke, his old music teacher at Southwest, for instilling in him an appreciation for diversity and versatility. “He really drilled it into us that if we wanted to make a go of this we had to learn to play as many different styles as possible.”
He turned thirty in Reno, after years of traveling and playing a little bit of everything in casinos and clubs on the Reno-Tahoe-Vegas circuit. The eventual move to Florida, Nehls said, was the result of a combination of burnout and opportunity. “I’d spent a long time on the road, and it was getting to be tiring,” he said. “I’ve been writing music every day since 1970—I have over two hundred songs in my BMI catalog—but I really wanted to be able to concentrate on doing my own stuff.”
Fort Lauderdale has been good to Nehls; he stays busy gigging around the area, has written and recorded music for Disney and the Florida Marlins, and has also released a batch of discs featuring his own compositions. He now has ten CDs available on his website (tommynehls.com), including a reissue of I Always Catch the Third Second of a Yellow Light, which he remastered himself from the archived master tapes he recovered from Stark a few years ago. The record has also allegedly been remixed by indie/experimental/improv pooh-bah Jim O’Rourke (producer-in-demand and a former member of Gastr Del Sol, Red Krayola, and Sonic Youth), even though that rumored version has yet to surface.
Nehls’ recent music is a serious departure from the lysergic flights of his debut—he is, after all, fifty-one now. The discs have titles like Beachy Keen and Palm Tree Way, and a Caribbean-inflected smooth-jazz feel with occasional forays into New Age; most of the recordings wouldn’t sound at all out of place on any urban lite-FM station. “I basically do everything myself,” Nehls said. “But I like to hire a very good soloist to add the icing to the cake. There’s a lot of amazing talent down here.”
When Third Second popped up on the radar after all those years, he hadn’t listened to the record in decades. “There were these people finding me,” Nehls said. “People from Japan, a guy from England, another guy from Spain, Mark Trehus in Minneapolis. It was weird. I guess people were learning about it through word of mouth. I sold a couple batches of the records from my sister’s basement to Trehus, and then a couple years ago I typed the album title into Google and was surprised to see these hits from all over the vinyl-collecting community.”
After Nehls got the master tapes back from Stark he finally pulled on some headphones and sat down to listen to his old creation with fresh ears. “Initially I had a hard time hearing it outside of the context of everything I’ve done since then,” he said. “I mean, I was pretty naïve at that time, and I was just trying to be sincere. But overall I’d have to say I was pleasantly surprised. There were all sorts of things on there I’d forgotten about, all these Sgt. Pepper and Hey Jude references. The notion that people can get excited about something I did is always such a pleasure, but I guess the only thing that really bothered me about the record thirty years later is that I had just gotten a wah-wah pedal at the time, and I definitely over-used it.”
Young, a poet and contributor to the catalog for the ongoing Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love exhibition, is appearing as part of the Rain Taxi/Walker Art Center Free Verse series. You hear too much nonsense about poets whose work is steeped in jazz or the blues, but Young’s work is the real deal; it’s truly musical poetry, and as funny, conversational, and hard hitting as dinner with a seriously entertaining, intelligent, and challenging guest. Word has it that he’ll be reading from his own work and also discussing Walker’s use of language in her art. Walker Art Center, 612-375-7600.
About a year ago, on an April afternoon, Al Wolter drove to his neighbor’s house in Sandstone to help with a controlled burn. The neighbor, Cynthia Gamble, a wild-animal trainer, was his best female friend and the two regularly shared cocktails and sang karaoke together on his home machine. “She had an earthy sense of humor,” he said, an affectionate way of indicating that Cyndi could tell a good dirty joke. Gamble seemed to be most comfortable with male friends and often phoned Wolter to let off steam about personal problems. Lately, the problems had been mounting. Her business partner, Craig Wagner, had just left the state with a majority of their holdings, and her fourteen-year-old son Garrett was floundering in school.
Wolter unlocked Gamble’s front gate and, seeing that his friend wasn’t around, shot hoops for a while with Garrett. The two then walked through a pasture where a musk ox grazed and headed toward the modified pole barn Garrett shared with his mother. Inside the barn, the living quarters were separated by sliding glass doors from a row of twenty large cages. Three of the cages contained tigers, the B-grade animals Gamble had agreed to keep when her exotic-cat business, the Center for Endangered Cats, went bust. The animals were not trainable and Wolter knew that Gamble took care of them only because they had nowhere else to go. One in particular, a ten-year-old Bengal named Tango, was notably vicious. Said Wolter: “She knew this tiger was a killer.”
Cyndi wasn’t afraid of the tigers, cougars, jaguars, servals, coyotes, and caracals she’d trained and worked with for more than twenty years. Nor did she kid herself by considering them pets. She followed meticulous feeding procedures, especially with the tigers, which could consume more than ten pounds of food per day. Feeding them wasn’t what you’d call fun. It meant opening a small, six-by-eighteen-inch window and throwing in large chunks of the meat she kept in a freezer. Once, when Wolter was helping out, he tossed a slab and missed the window. When he moved forward to retrieve it, Gamble hollered in a booming voice, “Get out of there!” Wolter leapt back in a heartbeat.
Garrett entered the section of the barn where the cats were kept and walked toward Tango’s cage, which was partially covered by a sheet of plywood. Something made him yell and run for a .22 rifle, calling to Wolter to shoot the tiger. Unarmed, Wolter approached the cage, where Tango was roaring and leaping against the sides. A safety door—a remotely controlled guillotine contraption—had been left open, which was unusual, not to mention dangerous. It was then that he looked beyond the piece of plywood and saw a tableau that will remain with him always. His friend Cynthia Gamble’s nude and destroyed body lay limp on the floor of the tiger’s cage. Tango had stripped her of clothing before eating her breasts and both arms up to the elbows and then licking her clean of blood.
The tiger had to be tranquilized in order to retrieve Gamble’s body. And then, of course, it was killed. The news cameras rolled and reporters tried to explain how such a situation had come to be. They concluded that Cyndi, who two years previously had filed for bankruptcy and taken a job at a local casino, had been struggling to scrounge up enough meat to keep the tigers adequately fed. In fact, she’d fallen back on donations of road-killed deer. The tiger, given the opportunity, had attacked because it was starving. Tango and the other two cats were at least one hundred pounds underweight.
And so it was that Cyndi Gamble—passionate animal lover, professional wrangler in films and demonstrations, author, film editor, conservationist, amateur biologist, mother, wife, daughter, and ultimately victim to her life’s work—became the tragic public face of a very private and reticent network of exotic-wildlife owners. For that brief moment, the lights flashed on and the average person realized that some of their fellow Minnesotans kept tigers and lions and bears in their backyards next to swing sets and tomato plants. And then, just as suddenly, the lights flashed off again.
More videos of wild cat interactions:
Lion hugs a woman.
Lion hugs a man emphatically.
Lion greets an old friend — a man he hasn’t seen for a year.
Lion and ferret play.
Child of the ’80s that she is, when local writer and independent public-radio producer Heather McElhatton decided to write a book, she chose to resurrect the literary model made famous by Bantom Books’ classic Choose Your Own Adventure series. The result, Pretty Little Mistakes, is a novel with 150 endings to choose from, where adults can refuse marriage proposals, experiment with substances, and indulge their bi-curiosity. This got us thinking: If this provocative book had a soundtrack, what might that sound like? We asked McElhatton to describe her top ten favorite albums and songs.
1. “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots” by the Flaming Lips, off the album Live at KEXP
When I listen to this song I feel like I’m eating a fluffy poof of pink cotton candy, while simultaneously getting a pedicure from a sexy robot. I love the Flaming Lips in general, and this album is going to be made into a Broadway musical. I hate Broadway musicals on principle, but I might make an exception in this case. I want to see robots fighting on stage.
2. “Give a Little Bit” by Supertramp
This is one of the songs I blast in the house while vacuuming, which I think has caused my pug, Walter, to hate it. When he hears it, even on the radio or whatever, he’ll start to bark, because he thinks it means the vacuum (his mortal enemy) is about to make an appearance.
3. “Peach, Plum, Pear” by Joanna Newsom
You either love Joanna Newsom or you hate her. She’s got this weird whiskey-soaked little-girl voice like Shirley Temple belting her heart out at the docks. Very hypnotic. Plus, there’s a harpsichord in this song, which is always a bonus.
4. “Goody Two Shoes” by Adam Ant
This song just seemed to change everything when I first heard it. I had formerly been my own brand of Edina Punk (plaid skirts, torn black tights, clompy black shoes) and after this song debuted I realized I wanted to be a New Waver and bought one of those huge economy tubs of Dippity-do. The result was … well, let’s just say that when a gangly, pale, teenaged, redheaded girl tries to look like Adam Ant, the result is tragic. Nevertheless, I loved the song then—and I love it now.
5. “Love Is Like a Bottle of Gin”
by Magnetic Fields
I like the lyrics to this song. “It makes you blind, it does you in/ You just get out what they put in/ Love is like a bottle of gin/ But a bottle of gin is not like love. …” Of course I can’t listen to songs with good lyrics when I’m writing or I just start to absent-mindedly plagiarize.
6. “A Smile and a Ribbon” by Prudence
In the ’50s, the eight-year-old who sang this was part of a little-girl group called “Patience and Prudence.” Patience was Prudence’s sister, and considered the pretty one. Patience usually got more attention and more stage time. This album was Prudence’s moment in the sun, but it didn’t do very well and now it’s out of print. I like the song because it sounds like an eight-year-old on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
7. Hi, My Name Is Jonny by Johnny Polansky
I suspect this could be the theme for many wayward souls past or present: “I am unable to resist your evil scurvy love!”
8. “Granny Do Your Dog Bite?” by Othar Turner
This is a “drum and fife” blues song, a medium they say originated from African Americans serving in the Civil War. It’s blues, but there’s a heavy snare drum beat in it and a definite marching theme. At first I thought the name of this song was “Granny—do your dog bite.” Like, “Granny, go ahead and bite me like a dog!” But now I realize it’s a question, not a command, which makes it a little less interesting lyrically, but a great tune nonetheless.
9. “Sugar Town” by Nancy Sinatra
She’s sassy, she’s sexy, she’s Frank Sinatra’s daughter. Though she’s known for “These Boots are Made for Walkin’,” I actually like this song a little bit better because of its vague cocaine-party reference.
10. “Glósóli” by Sigur Rós
When I write I usually listen to music without lyrics, but the lovely and haunting Icelandic band Sigur Rós lets me listen to vocals without having any idea of what they’re saying.
McElhatton reads from Pretty Little Mistakes at the May 15 Talk of the Stacks event at the Minneapolis Central Library, 300 Nicollet Mall, Minneapolis.
