South 12th

A beacon for all Twin Citians.

One of my favorite pieces of anything I read last year was Dan Sinker’s extended, real-time novella of fake @MayorEmanuel tweets. It was great for many reasons, but principally because it started as a not-that-funny one-off joke (Rahm Emanuel likes to say “fuck”), and then, once it had captured its audience’s attention, slowly built into this sprawling, surreal love letter to Chicago. Sinker’s identity wasn’t revealed until it was all over, but even when the real author wasn’t known, the whole thing was clearly written by a person that knew and loved Chicago very well. It was actually quite touching. 

The following is my favorite passage, where Rahm ascends to the top of a tower in the clouds. Not coincidentally, it involves one of my all-time heroes:

It’s motherfucking beautiful up here, the sun making this tower of junk glow with the righteous power of millions of saved parking spaces. I‘ve climbed up to another landing. Up here, the motherfucking heart of Studs Terkel is shining like a fucking beacon. A figure walks in front of the heart, its bright light still filtering through his translucent form. “Thumbs up, my friend.” Siskel!

Gene Siskel’s smile competes with the light of Studs’ heart. His thumbs are fucking enormous. He’s floating just slightly above the ground, but Siskel speaks with fucking gravity: “Studs’ heart beats for all Chicagoans. Their shoulders are broad, but their hearts are fragile. You have to feel the pulse of the city,” and he waves me towards the fucking heart. I’m hugging the glowing fucking heart of Studs Terkel, and it’s wet and it’s bright, and I can feel all of you beat inside it. And now Siskel is trying to pull me away with his giant fucking thumbs, but I want to stay holding this glowing heart forever.

(Studs Terkel, not Gene Siskel, being of course the hero in question here.)

I was thinking about this passage last week, after coming across a City Pages article from 2002 written by my friend Brad Zellar. It was brought to my attention by Noah Keesecker, and after reading it, I can’t believe I’d never seen it before. It should be required reading for everyone that lives here.

Specifically, this passage struck me:

It says something—it says a lot, actually—about the Twin Cities and their notoriously short-sighted institutional and cultural memory that there is so little sense here of a literary history. The average Twin Cities resident perhaps knows that F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul. There is some recollection, diminishing every year, that the poet John Berryman jumped to his death from the Washington Avenue Bridge on the University of Minnesota campus. There’s A Prairie Home Companion, of course, and the wide recognition and acclaim accorded Garrison Keillor and his fictional creation Lake Wobegon. But what else is there? What else do you know? Could you, for instance, name a definitive Twin Cities novel, one book that has defined these cities to the world outside our borders? Not much comes to mind.

This brings me back to Mayor Emanuel. Let’s imagine a similarly surreal journey through the heart of Minneapolis — your protagonist scales one of the dozens of interchangeable parking garages along Washington Avenue. He or she comes across a motherfucking heart, shining like a fucking beacon for all Twin Citians.

Whose heart would it be? Who is our Studs Terkel?

…

Exactly. No one comes to mind. 

Maybe you argue it would be Prince, and that’s a fair point. Minneapolis has always taken better care of its musical heritage than those of other disciplines. It’s possible to walk through any part of Minneapolis and feel the weight and depth of the musical history (really, ask anyone in Uptown where the “Let It Be” house is — they’ll know). Any glowing, beating mystical heart one would imagine would probably belong to a musician. Maybe Paul Westerberg. That makes sense, too.

But don’t tell me “Bob Dylan.” It always astounds me how much tribute we pay here to Dylan, and Charles Schulz, and Sinclair Lewis, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, when we think about our cultural icons. What did all of those artists share in common?

They absolutely hated being here and they got out as soon as they had half a chance.

I pass the statue of Fitzgerald in Rice Park on my way to work every day, and every day I shake my head and smile and think to myself, “Sorry, F. Scott. If your immortal soul is trapped in there, you must be screaming in agony continuously.” I like Fitzgerald a lot, and I love The Great Gatsby as much as anyone, but to claim him as our greatest favorite literary son is borderline insane. I imagine he might tell you as much.

The fact is, we do have our own Studs Terkels. We do have a literary tradition, in the way we have an artistic tradition, and a musical traditional, and a theatrical tradition. Many of these figures working in this tradition are overlooked, or not well-known beyond the region. For me, there’s Meridel Le Sueur, an amazing 20th Century activist, writer, actor, stuntwoman (!), union organizer, journalist, and historian, whose books North Star Country and The Girl are two of the best about this place ever written. Honestly, I’d put Brad Zellar up there, as well — his writings on the cities resonate with me deeply, and I am awfully lucky to know him.

My point here is this: if you’re a writer in the Twin Cities, you’re a part of this tradition. This is your time. Write about Minneapolis. Write about St. Paul. Write about Loring Park and Highland Park and Uptown and Lowertown and Frogtown and the Southside and the West Side and the East Side and the North End. Write about the neighborhoods where you grew up, or live, or work, or visit. Write about what these places mean to you. Write in your own voice about them. Don’t fall back on Wobegone cliches. Celebrate the histories and heritages you find, but be disrespectful — be contemptuous, even! — of the received wisdom that this is a nice, quiet, modest little prairie town full of milquetoast Scandinavians and quirky DSM-IV disorders. That’s complete bullshit. This is a weird, sprawling, multifaceted pair of cities with millions of stories in them.

Start telling those stories. 

Over lunch yesterday, I rented a car in order to drive an Irish artist I know — formerly living in New York and now temporarily residing in Minneapolis — around town to scout for a location for a public art piece he was working on. Specifically, he was looking for abandoned billboard support structures, and a mutual friend had told him that of all the people in town, I’d be best able to help him navigate the landscape. I said of course, I thought I knew of lots of stretches of city road that were home to clusters of billboards. Surely a few must be abandoned.

I picked him up at the U, and we drove down Cedar and Minnehaha to East Lake Street, where I thought we’d find forests of billboards. I take the bus down East Lake into St. Paul every day, and I seemed to recall seeing a lot of billboards from my seat.  

Actually, it turns out there’s not so many. There’s a few, on top of commercial buildings, but all appear to be in use. Most depict local network weather people, sleazy bilingual attorneys, or gurgling babies mouthing platitudes about their fingers and dreams. There is one billboard near Cedar of a corpulent local conservative talk radio host, wearing a billowing white shirt so massive it looks like it was draped over him by Christo.

The artist tells me in New York, billboards are a bigger part of the visual landscape. He thinks it’s because of the aboveground trains. Most Minneapolitans see the city from a car. A billboard is really too high up and too fleeting to be effectively seen from that space. On city streets, anyway.

I’d forgotten how unattractive Minneapolis is, as seen from car. Unattractive, and even ugly. At 40 miles per hour, behind glass, most of the city is a bland, indistinguishable blur of one- and two-story buildings, on a flat, unending grid that stretches off to the horizon in all four directions, broken up only by massive parking lots. There are no curves, and there are no diagonals. There is little variety in the elevation. Just a grid; just a blurry one- and two-story x axis blowing past you, and an infinite y axis around you. And half the year, it’s all covered in snow.

Minneapolis wasn’t built for the automobile, which is something I didn’t understand at all until I started seeing the city from mass transit and bike and foot. The city was laid out for streetcars, starting mostly in the 1890s, with most of the layout done by the 1920s.On public transit, you see that Minneapolis is really a thousand classic small-town Main Streets, low-rise strips of brick buildings, sewn together in a tiled pattern stretching over sixty square miles centered around the St. Anthony Falls on the Mississippi.

The start-and-stop rhythms of mass transit mirror the way the city blocks are organized: each suite of blocks begins with a cluster of brick commercial buildings and storefronts, where the streetcar or bus stops to collect passengers. Here, during this pause, the eye rests on the commercial signage and the window displays and the people entering and exiting the shops. Then, as you begin to move again, a short collection of quiet, tiny brick and stucco houses on small lots, of all colors, passing by with increasing speed, then decreasing speed, and then drawing to a close at the next intersection, another cluster of brick buildings and storefronts, back to the activity and color and visuals of the street corner.

I think of it almost in musical terms: the four or five blocks between stops a bar of music, each little structure you pass — a house, a church, perhaps a storefront — comprising a note, all working as a melody, and then at the end of the bar, a rest.

Really, the only things that look truly great from a car are the neon liquor store signs — Franklin Nicollet, Minnehaha, Skol, Zipps. I had a visitor from New York in town this weekend, the mutual friend that introduced me to the artist. The one feature of the landscape she was consistently bowled over by was the liquor stores’ neon signage. “There’s that one liquor store sign I liked again,” she’d say when we passed one on the street. “No, that’s a different one — the one you liked before was Hum’s. That’s Lowry Hill.” I’d say. “Another one!” she’d exclaim. The liquor store neons were meant to be seen from a car, which is why half of those stores have drive-in windows. They’re absurdly garish, and they’re one of my favorite things about the city.

This gridcentricity is one of the reasons, I think, why so many people bike around the city, and why even committed automobile users will usually snowshoe or cross-country ski in the city parks as a winter hobby — they just need to be able to move diagonally. When you see the city from bicycle or foot (or snowshoe), it’s a richer, more self-directed experience. You are freed from the grids, and you may move through parks and past rivers and lake shores and through alleys and side streets and plazas and parking lots in more rambling, discursive sorts of ways. 

Back to my friend the artist. I felt as if I’d let him down; I’d disappointed him and made a poor case for the city. I’d wanted to help him find what he was looking for, though what he was looking for possibly doesn’t exist in the same way. Minneapolis isn’t a city that gives up what you’re looking for easily. It’s not always eager to help you. As I have written here before, it’s not a city that wears its eccentricities on its sleeve. You really have to get out and look around.

As it happens, we did find a potential site for him — not a billboard support, but a railroad bridge. A beautiful, iron-wrought industrial design that lifts a segment of a major road up over a series of rail lines that meander through the grid below grade. Minneapolis can often seem stubborn, and unwilling to help. But if you’re willing to look on its terms, you can usually find what you’re looking for.

All photos by Eric Neely.