Tag: history

When Harry Met Betty

admin — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 00:00:00 -0600

One of life’s great truths—one that we desperately seek to avoid with proverbs and catechisms and even magazine articles—is that beneath its surface lies complexity. Our beloved fictions of heroes and villains crumble with scrutiny, leaving only convolution, shifting meanings, and unstable realities. The same is true of things. Even the simplest object has its hidden history of longing, love, and despair. Take, for example, cake. Chiffon cake.

A People’s History of Circle Pines

admin — Mon, 23 Oct 2006 00:00:00 -0500

Photo courtesy city of circle pines; An early brochure touts the cooperative, courtesy minnesota historical society

Daughter of God

admin — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 00:00:00 -0500

Sometimes, Grace Kolenda Deters dreams in Portuguese. Ordinary dreams are of her daily life in Nevada, her home five hundred feet above Lake Tahoe, with its shore-to-shore views. Or scenes from past decades spent in Minneapolis: graduate school, therapy, her daughter’s ice-skating lessons, snow.

Gimme Grain!

admin — Mon, 31 Jul 2006 00:00:00 -0500

At 9:28 a.m. thirty-one grain traders are milling around a trading pit—an octagon about the size of a pontoon boat, recessed into the hardwood floor—at the Minneapolis Grain Exchange. Steps are wide and lazy, chests are thrust outward. Several of the men (and they are all men) discuss the price of downtown real estate; a few ruminate on Gophers football; nearly everyone chews gum, frantically. Then, at five seconds before 9:30, voices trail off, order books open, and feet are squared.

"We went crazy for a decade."

admin — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 00:00:00 -0500

On a chill December night last year, hundreds of artists and art lovers of a certain age poured into the Minneapolis Institute of Arts to view a departed friend’s art collection. Dressed in eclectic attire, including one necktie that had formerly been its wearer’s ponytail, they milled about, hugging and shouting and laughing. They seemed thrilled to see one another, to see their art on the walls, and to recall, loudly, the rare and raucous scene they had created two decades ago.

The Ruin

admin — Wed, 24 Aug 2005 00:00:00 -0500

The Sixties—Dead By Self-Inflicted Gunshot

admin — Wed, 24 Aug 2005 00:00:00 -0500

The moment flickered past while I realized that the last of them was gone, the last of the sixties counterculture iconoclasts, those world shakers and rainbow revolutionaries: Lenny Bruce, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, John Lennon, Abbie Hoffman, Edward Abbey, Timothy Leary, Ken Kesey, Hunter Thompson—all gone, the last by his own hand.

Erased from Memory

admin — Fri, 20 May 2005 00:00:00 -0500

A waiter hurries a tray of tall drinks toward a café table. A dapper trio sits there: A young man wearing a straw boater, a suit in candy-colored stripes, and a silk cravat is entertaining two beauties resplendent in crinoline, swathed bodices, and elaborate millinery. The dandy leans forward to finish the story that holds his two young companions in rapt attention.

Stand Down

admin — Wed, 23 Feb 2005 00:00:00 -0600

Exit 127 off Interstate 90 doesn’t seem to go anywhere. There are no towns, no farms, no apparent reason to build an exit in the middle of the driest, flattest section of South Dakota, a desolate expanse of land. If you steal a glance at the right moment, though, you may notice a nondescript vinyl-sided building sitting just off the highway. It’s surrounded by a tall chain-link fence and topped with a yellow weather vane.

“It vibrates. But is it, y’know, a vibrator?”

admin — Tue, 19 Oct 2004 00:00:00 -0500

I’d just been dumped by a guy when I first heard about the Bakken Museum’s vibrator collection. Minneapolis’s Bakken, for the record, bills itself as “The Museum of Electricity in Life,” and since my bulb had just gone out, I thought looking into the long history of self-satisfaction might be a pleasant diversion.