The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

Absolutes. I love them.

This is a recent discovery, however. Till very recently, the only way I could trounce a full-time forum--like MN Speak--with post traffic was with salacious words.

Now I find that all you have to do is issue is an absolute. You don't have to prove it but you must invite your enemies to meet you face to face so you can shove it down their throats before they reveal themselves to be little girls with asexual names like my own. This being said, let's get to an even more useful list than my previous post.

Matt Bakkom believes the essence of who we are as Americans is just a nail scratch below the surface. The Minnesota artist has made a career of scouring through dusty records, exploring a changing America through documents that capture the ideas and accomplishments of everyone from the infamous to Joe the Plumber.

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.

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

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.

 

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.

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 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.

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.