Tommy B and the Indians

I got to know Tom Barnard back in the late eighties/early nineties, in my days at the Twin Cities Reader. For those of you who remember, he was a straight-shooting voice of candor in a sea of make-nice “good neighbor” or contrived celebrity-pablum radio. Tom broke a lot of content barriers to become the most successful broadcaster in modern Twin Cities history.

Over the years he’s become embroiled in controversies for evoking a death wish for certain liberals (the great Paul Wellstone) and taking after minority groups, most recently American Indians. Right now, nothing fascinates me more than what drives a guy who has it all to risk his position. In that sense, Tom is still breaking barriers.

Tom’s ratings are so high, his lifestyle so secure, that he does not need anybody anymore, and has not submitted to a wide-ranging media interview in at least a decade. If I remember correctly, he’s a North Side kid from a tough background who worked for everything he’s earned.

The Barnard I knew, back when, was not the bombastic ideologue of today, but a complicated guy with his own insecurities and demons who tired of all the B.S. inherent in being a radio personality. He still, I suspect, fashions himself as a truth-teller, but he is an outsider only in that he does not travel in local media/celebrity circles. Many days, he does his radio show from a studio in his home.

I’ve been saddened over the years to see Tom make a name among non-listeners as a bigot and a bully, because that’s not the guy I knew. But Tom has evolved in a fairly typical way for a self-made, up-from-nothing guy, in that there’s little that seems to offend him more than people who don’t show the same gumption and work ethic or who get something for nothing.

Barnard’s is the worldview of the little man, which endears him to his broad middle-class audience. It’s genuine, but much of it does not go down well coming from a guy whose life is so privileged. There is truth even among the mangled facts and suppositions in his disdain for Indian casino monopolies, racial activists who seem more focused on press conferences than solving problems, people who won’t work, or raise their kids properly, or victimize others and want to live off the fruits of those of us who don’t.

But there’s also a painful lack of nuance to his worldview. Many of the Hmong immigrants his show once mocked have raised kids who are class valedictorians. And there are people whose lives are too sad to be made the butt of jokes from a guy earning millions of dollars a year.

Barnard is an enormously influential figure among his listeners (which is why politicians leech off him and cozy up to him). But I fear he is not merely making take-no-prisoners social commentary, but sowing a fundamentally divisive worldview among people without a very diverse set of information sources.

I don’t know if Tom Barnard fancies himself as an entertainer or philosopher these days. I haven’t had a serious conversation with him in a decade. But he’s a smart guy who clearly uses his show to serve an intellectual agenda as well as an entertainment one. In that sense, he’s stayed true to what he started. In that sense, I wish he’d bring something deeper to the table these days. Being best known as the guy who was always willing to bash the wretched is not the legacy he deserves, but it may be the one he earns.

Charity Begins on the Plane

This posting is probably going to irritate a lot of people, but so be it. I’m uncomfortable with the growing nexus between businesses and charitable causes. Let’s start with the phenomenon of solicitation for charities in the course of commercial transactions.

+ Borders employees used to routinely ask for charitable donations at the checkout counter. It would be suggested, as you made your purchase, that you donate to a cause Borders was pushing.

+ At the newspapers I subscribe to, when I put my home delivery on hold, I’m always asked whether I’d like to donate the papers to literacy causes. (They don’t mention that there’s no credit to the bill unless you ask.)

+ Caribou Coffee, where I buy iced tea, is in its annual solicitation for breast cancer awareness. I’ve been asked whether I’d like to buy a bag of beans for donation to a place where people are being treated for cancer.

+ I flew Delta Air Lines last week. Before I was offered my free glass of water or pop, I was asked whether I wanted to purchase a $2 pink lemonade to fight breast cancer.

In all these cases, businesses are putting their customers in situations where they have to actively decline to give to charity. The process is so intimidating that much of the giving surely comes from people too embarrassed to say no.

Let me put it back on these businesses for a minute: If Borders, the Strib, Caribou, and Delta care so much about these causes, why don’t these massive, multi-million or –billion dollar concerns just cut a check, without putting me in a position where I have to play Scrooge? When I told that to the employee at the Richfield Borders, he looked at me like I stabbed his puppy.

I want to know something about the charities I donate to. I want to know what percentage of their costs go to those in need and what percentage goes to administrative costs (it varies widely). And I don’t like the idea that Caribou seems to be taking a profit on a bag of beans I buy to give to people with cancer.

I don’t trust most large corporations. I think Americans have ample reason to be cynical about their motivations. My guess is these businesses love the PR benefit of attaching themselves to a charitable cause and maybe even figure out some tax or accounting benefit for doing so. I’d like to credit companies such as Target, which eschews the song and dance and just donates a percentage of its profits. That’s real charity.

United Way week just ended at my office. Workplace contributions drive this massive charitable aggregator’s good works. What large office or company doesn’t have such a week? There are games and promotions and bake sales and auctions, all for the purpose of getting me and my colleagues to contribute. In my workplace there’s no pressure, no hard-sell, and managers have no role in the solicitations. It’s a great way to provide a venue for charity while keeping the giving based on real charitable motivation.

But we may not be the norm. One of my colleagues recently left a Fortune 500 corporation. After her hire, she was approached to set up a payroll deduction for United Way. Failing to do so, she learned, would reduce her department’s participation rate and have consequences for her boss. If the boss was scapegoated, that couldn’t be good for her. So she set up the deduction.

Another colleague, who worked for a much smaller company, tells of how his boss would take individual meetings with staffers to discuss donating to United Way. The pressure was palpable.

I doubt the United Way wants folks earning modest salaries or even working multiple jobs to pay the rent to be shaken down by bosses for contributions. But itis going on.

I didn’t take a lot away from religious school, but one thing that stuck with me was the Jewish belief that God most values the charity we do anonymously, without credit, for no motivation beyond helping.

I’m with God on this one. The means don’t justify the ends, even though the end result might be less charitable giving. A lot of what’s being done in the name of charity today seems less than magnanimous, and at worst, almost venal.

Can You Hear Me Now?

Do you love your cell phone carrier? Do you love your cell phone? If “no” and “no” aren’t your answers, I’m surprised. We’ve acclimatized ourselves in the U.S. to dropped calls, “no signal” dead spots, onerous contractual obligations, and a lack of flexibility in the choice of technology we use. I really want an iPhone, but I really don’t want to sign on to AT&T, which always comes in last in Consumer Reports carrier rankings. So I’m stuck, because the iPhone works on no other system.

In Monday’s Wall Street Journal, the paper’s heroic technology columnist, Walt Mossberg, unleashed a broadside against the cell carriers and the U.S. government for the anti-competitive restrictions it has set up that allow carriers to provide lousy service, control which phones we can use, and bind us to them for years at a time. (There’s also a related video for wsj.com subscribers.)

I was shocked five years ago to be in Switzerland and find comprehensive cell coverage in every small town, alpine hamlet, and mountain trail. That’s common in most of the world, because instead of authorizing many carriers to build out networks that largely serve big cities, others nations built or required a network that served everyone, on a continent-wide technological platform, and then let companies bid to offer service over it.

If the Swiss were running our cell system there’d be good coverage at 46th and Xerxes and in Two Harbors, two places T-Mobile has failed me consistently over the years.

It’s time to unshackle cell phone users, and give us the freedom to use whatever device we want with whichever company we want. We need a system that requires the carriers compete on service and network quality, not subsidized phones and two-year unbreakable contracts. Read the article and make some noise.

Scary on Seventh

It was Monday, 12:15 p.m., cloudy, in the fifties, with a threat of rain. In five minutes I saw most of what you need to know to understand why downtown Minneapolis always seems to struggle.

I passed eight people on 7th Street from Hennepin to Nicollet. The first group was three African-American men and one African-American woman. They appeared to be drunk or high, and one had a pit bull on a leash. They were laughing and swearing at one another. The dog, unmuzzled, was straining against the leash.

Then came two young white men, one of whom looked homeless. He was addled, and his companion glowered at me from under his hooded sweatshirt.

Finally I passed two white females, unfamiliar with downtown, looking for “2nd,” but not sure whether it was Street or Avenue. They looked liked they wished they were somewhere else.

The rest of Minneapolis, this busy lunch hour, was in the skyway. Rain, snow, or temperatures under sixty degrees reduce street-level pedestrian traffic to nil, while the skyways are so crowded there are jam-ups. We’ve destroyed downtown pedestrian culture and left our streets to a combination of the sad, the despicable, and the frightened. You make streets safe is by flooding them with activity. The city fathers who encouraged the skyways put downtown perpetually behind the eight-ball.

The other piece of the urban vibrancy puzzle is valuing the rights of the overtly menacing (distinguished from lawbreaking) below that of people who want to feel safe. I don’t buy the idea that this is merely about suburbanites panicking at the sight of black people and beggars. And I don’t buy the idea that appearing menacing is a cultural attribute of the hip-hop generation.

In context, those rushing through downtown with their heads down have it easy. They don’t have to live in urban neighborhoods that are zones of terror, grow up in homes with addicts for parents, or feel unsafe every minute of every day. You or I can stay in the skyways.

I listened to Midday on MPR last week; author Malcolm Gladwell seemed to imply that curing the cancer in urban black culture (inconceivable rates of addiction, criminality, and incarceration) is within the ken of the white majority through a reforming the justice system. Listen to it online and tell me if you’re convinced. To me, it’s an earnest idea that’s rooted in a liberal fantasy, sort of like the war on drugs.

Perhaps the only achievable solution for downtown is closing the skyways. Let’s try it for just a month. (I know, how will D. Brian’s survive?)

Or perhaps we’ll end up like downtown Cleveland. Gladwell says we are at the tipping point.

Stadium Games

The long slog to settle the land cost of the new Twins Stadium has concluded, and the team has agreed to kick in an extra $15 mil to cover the overrun that the negotiated settlement of $28.5 million exceeds the legislature’s limits on what the county can spend on land and infrastructure. There’s been so much spin on this topic that it’s hard to tell where the facts lie, but both sides obviously felt their case was tenuous enough in a court battle to split the difference in a settlement.

Now’s the time to start discussing what this area will look like in three years' time. Take a walk around the immediate ballpark area. It’s not inviting. The county garbage burner is hideous, its adjacent office building even uglier. They are surrounded by a no man’s land of wide streets and commercial structures. Target Center is a wall of concrete that looms over the site. An I–94 freeway ramp separates the ballpark from the adjacent “village” being planned, a massive physical barrier that inhibits connecting the ballpark with the adjacent neighborhood.

Real efforts are going to be required to overcome these things, but the ongoing real estate crisis is likely to limit additional short-term residential development in the area. The city of Minneapolis appears ready to fulfill county commissioner Mike Opat’s fears, and under-fund the infrastructure for which it is responsible, resulting in a rebuilding of the 5th Street bridge that will not accommodate a pedestrian crossing to the “ballpark village” and public plazas that are Spartan and unwelcoming.

Now I know the council is weighed down by a core of liberal activists who spend more time preoccupied with social justice than working to make the city function, but decisions that make the adjacent area unfriendly to visitors only serve to deter them from finding their way into downtown to spend their money.

If the council looks at the Pohlad family’s bailout of the stadium land purchase and sees more money raining from the heavens to absolve the city of its obligations, it may be in for a rude awakening. The land purchase had to get funded. I’m not sure the Twins need attractive plazas and good pedestrian flow from downtown. But downtown Minneapolis’s merchants sure do.

Update: The Tuesday Strib revealed that “the county will forgo some planned street improvements in the Warehouse District around the stadium, such as plantings, new streetlights and repaving.” I’m pretty sure these were the improvements the county was hoping to get the city to fund.

I would also note for the Pohlad bashers out there that the Twins’ payroll is higher than three of the four teams competing for baseball’s league championship, and well below at least one of the upcoming World Series contenders. Small-market teams can win with 52 percent of their revenues going to player salary.

Abandoned By the Watchdog?

Many of us have been waiting to see if this year’s staff purges at the Star Tribune would diminish the newspaper’s role as community watchdog. The answer is becoming clearer, and it’s not good news.

The best recent example is the I–35W bridge design coverage. Globally renowned architect Santiago Calatrava wanted to design the bridge, a coup which would have resulted in a design that honored the victims of the collapse, brought even more architecture-driven tourism to the Twin Cities, and created a lasting monument of beauty for Twin Citians to enjoy every day of the year.

Spend some time on Calatrava’s site (click on “Projects,” then “Past” or “Recent Projects”), examine his bridges, and ask yourself if what we are getting is even a fraction as compelling.

Calatrava was consulted on a hastily assembled design by Walsh Construction/American Bridge, but the extent of his involvement in the proposal is unclear. Of the four options offered to MnDOT, the (selected) Flatiron and (rejected) Walsh proposals were the best of an underwhelming group. Had the process allowed the state and city to actually engage Calatrava, the result could have been momentous.

The Strib bought out longtime architecture reporter/critic Linda Mack earlier this year (she will be writing for Joel Kramer’s Minn-Post.com when it debuts). She did pen an important commentary for the paper in August on the new bridge, but the newspaper’s ongoing coverage was limited to articles by metro reporters and transportation writer Jim Foti, and seemed to lose track of the question.

There was never a coordinated effort to explore the process and its unfriendliness to a great design, or to have MnDOT and the governor justify shunning the greatest living bridge designer. The paper’s meek after-the-fact editorial about the design neglected to even mention Calatrava.

Had Linda Mack still been on staff, the topic would have been followed in proper context, and Mack’s credibility would have allowed the paper to galvanize discussion around the issue.

Make no mistake, I blame MnDOT for this mess, and, of course, Governor No, not the paper. But the largest newspaper in the region needs a staffer who can write with expertise about design and architecture. The Star Tribune’s death by a thousand cuts is making it ever less useful, and increasingly irrelevant.

Next Year

I grew up in a suburb of Chicago called Wilmette, where the L train ends its run north from the city. Three blocks from our house was Marie’s Restaurant, a little greasy spoon across the street from the train station.

Marie’s was run by a German immigrant couple, Adam and Marie, who talked with thick accents and worked from about 4 a.m.—when Adam arrived to make doughnuts—to 7 or 8 p.m., when they closed. The place had more counter than table seating, all of it yellowed Formica.

Marie’s was the hub of the neighborhood and resolutely old-fashioned. It cut fries from fresh potatoes (today they call that “hand-cut”), the soft drinks were mixed from syrup and soda water, and Adam formed burgers in his hands from fresh ground beef. He was the only person I knew who shared my name for my entire childhood.

The place jumped at breakfast and lunchtime, but I usually arrived after school, around 3 or 3:30, when Central Elementary or Howard Junior High let out. Jim from Demas Fine Foods would be sitting there, Johnny the barber was smoking, or asleep, a huge woman with a black wig drank milk shakes, one of the guys from Shawnee Service in greasy overalls nursed coffee, and a couple of the CTA motormen idled between runs of the Evanston Express.

There was a Zenith TV high up in the corner, and every afternoon it was tuned to WGN. The Cubs played eighty-one home day games, at 1:15 p.m. Jack Brickhouse (Hey, hey) did the play-by-play.

I started following the Cubs in 1970 at age six, the year after their historic collapse of 1969. The seventies were lean times at Wrigley Field; the Cubs were bad, or worse. A seat in the bleachers—scalped today for $150—could be had two minutes before game time for $3 from the ticket window.

I didn’t start ditching school for the ballpark until high school, so usually I would be at Marie’s, watching the end of games after school with Brian Kelly or by myself with a plate of soggy fries sided by little paper cups of ketchup. These were my first ventures into independence—my money, my fries, my people, my Cubs. Frosted with personal nostalgia, those grim years of sporting malaise seem preferable to today’s wall-to-wall yuppie scene at sold-out Wrigley.

The common denominator, though, is failure. The Cubs were eliminated from the playoffs over the weekend by the Arizona Diamondbacks—which play in a plastic ballpark (that feels like Block E) with a hot tub in the outfield. The Cubs did not win a game.

Back in the day, during May or June, in the waning innings of a particularly ugly losing streak, Adam would pronounce, “Cubbie not going anywhere this year.” The Cubs, to most Chicagoans, are the Cubbies—a diminutive evoking a naïve little bear getting kicked around by Cardinals, Pirates, and a big Red machine. Cubbie, in fact, had not gone anywhere for many years, their last World Series victory being 1908. One of these years, the Cubs will win it all, and many of us will momentarily rejoice. But after that day it will probably never be the same.

Winning is easy. I’ve lived and cheered through two Twins championships, six playoff runs, Cy Young MVP, and batting championship seasons, and they don’t collectively equal what I learned as a kid in Chicago: That the brass ring will inevitably elude, so you find joy in small moments.

You learned to appreciate a beautiful old ballpark, ivy clinging to its walls, the magnificence of a sunny day, a great play by Ron Santo at third, an Oscar Mayer Smokie Link fresh from the griddle with French’s mustard, or, if you missed the game, a blue light shining above the scoreboard in the darkness. You watched for it as you passed by Addison Street on the L: Blue meant smiles all around, white meant back to the newspaper.

Baseball is the most evocative sport because it is so local, so personal. The ballparks are all different, a city’s baseball culture uniquely its own. The 162-game season is six months long, a marathon to which the playoffs are merely a short coda. Even the worst teams win sixty to eighty games, meaning there is joy and wild abandon amidst all the failure.

Today, I am a Twins fan, and proudly so. I have lived in Minnesota longer than in Chicago. But a huge piece of my history and a very soft spot in my heart remains in the land of the Cubbie. I knew them not as a yuppie phenomenon now reviled by many through overexposure on cable TV, but as the guys who perpetually broke our hearts. As this year’s Cubs bowed out over the weekend, I remembered one of the CTA motormen, who, after a particularly dispiriting loss, bemoaned, “These motherf**kers are going to do this to us for 100 years.”

Adam and Marie left the restaurant the same day we moved out of our house in 1985. My mom and I wandered in for the first time in months for a nostalgic burger as they trained-in the new owners, shocked by the synchronicity. I wonder if Adam will be around or aware next October, when the motorman’s prophecy becomes historical fact.

Jews have a prayer that reaffirms their faith in one god, uttered at every religious service. As a child, I remember the rabbi referring to it as “The watchword of our faith.”

To the Cubs fan, whether at Clark and Addison Streets or here among the diaspora, that watchword is wait till next year. It always comes, but it doesn’t either, which is fine with me.

Al Franken Is Not Funny!

I wrote a sarcastic post a couple weeks ago. I thought it was pretty obvious and people would get the point. I intended to mock gossip columnist CJ chasing down sex scandals among TV anchors who haven’t worked in Minnesota in years and nobody remembers anyway. I mean, if CJ can’t find a good TV anchor sex scandal in town, is she really worth the $100K or so the Strib devotes to her in an era of plummeting resources? But it hardly seemed worth explaining, so I went the sarcasm route.

I asked, ironically, whether anyone would want to bother with Joel Kramer’s MinnPost.com when such sterling stuff was coming out of the Strib. Yesterday, a reader questioned why I would slag Kramer’s fledgling effort.

Humor or sarcasm is apparently tough to relate the way you intend it. That’s why so much beloved humor is silliness and pratfalls. And that perhaps explains why Al Franken, if you believe the Strib’s Minnesota Poll, has such high negatives.

I like wit and sarcasm. Sometimes that’s all a topic deserves. And humor makes life far more interesting. But a lot of people don’t get or like it. The president of my company equates Bill Maher with Ann Coulter. The two couldn’t be more different. Maher is a trenchant social commentator without rigid political alliances who is willing to make unpopular points. Coulter is a dogmatic bomb-thrower who exists to outrage and call attention to herself.

But Maher is irreverent. He mocks when he could merely feign outrage. He demeans when he could be offering a white paper. That means his point is lost to a lot of people. And I think that’s what Franken may be suffering from. (Though I would argue most of the Franken coverage to date has been the media pushing a GOP talking point: Franken is angry, irreverent, disrespectful. Is he electable?)

We live in strange times. Our president is a draft-dodger who trumped up a war that has cost thousands of American lives and may yet bankrupt the country. Our senator who represents him is a political chameleon who postures and preens but appears to have no core values. To me, Al Franken looks like a guy of real substance: smart, passionate, well-informed. You’re entitled to disagree with him, but not because he made jokes for a living twenty years ago.

So he called Rush Limbaugh a “big, fat, idiot.” So he called Norm Coleman Bush’s “butt-boy.” That’s the same crap all of us say at the office or the gym or the bar. Why is it we say we want candidates who keep it real and then vote for the phonies? Why is it that we say we want politicians who believe in something but become uncomfortable when they manifest that passion (see Howard Dean). And why is it that humor is the currency that makes life interesting but politicians who use it are always pilloried?

Reverence, as Jesse the Body would say, is for the weak-minded.

Flies Everywhere!

If you’re not watching the American TV iteration of Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, you are missing the best TV of the season. Episode three airs Wednesday night on Fox and I have high expectations, since the first two episodes have been a running horror show/comedy panic. Even if you hate Hell’s Kitchen, and there is good reason to, this show will rock your Wednesday.

For the uninitiated, RKN is an American version of a show Ramsay does for the UK’s Channel 4 (which offers some of the old shows on-demand), and has aired in the U.S. on BBC America. In each episode, the über-chef spends a week at a small UK restaurant whose fortunes are flagging and attempts to fix its problems. The series showed the often-explosive Ramsay to be a passionate and savvy restaurateur who is able to translate his high standards to operations lacking the kinds of budgets and monied customers his restaurants cater to.

The British RKN was occasionally funny, but more often a fascinating look into the lives and eccentricities of small businesspeople. Fox’s version, so far, has focused on more dysfunctional people and operations: A Sopranos-wannabe Italian restaurant in Babylon, Long Island, and a filthy Indian joint in Midtown Manhattan. The sight of Ramsay losing it as the goombah fulminates and the roaches scurry, his incredulousness at the sheer depths of the incompetence at play make it hard to turn away from the screen.

The UK episodes, not so much the Fox freak shows, were an endless litany of evidence of the idiocy of so many chefs and the owners who enable them. Time after time RKN subjects were trying to pawn of third-tier haute cuisine in communities that could neither afford nor appreciate it, simply because it satisfied a chef’s ego. Ramsay’s response is always the same: know your customer, keep things fresh, simple, and of good value. It would seem so easy.

The British shows are now in hiatus, but another season is in the offing. The Fox show is earning mediocre ratings up against Bionic Woman and Private Practice. But it deserves to live to see a better time slot. Compared to the piffle of Hell’s Kitchen, either version of Kitchen Nightmares is well worth experiencing.