BY BEN WINTERS
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Wednesday, May 22 was a busy day for Jesse "The Body" Ventura. The erstwhile wrestler now entrusted with the State of Minnesota pushed his Predator souvenir pen across 13 pieces of legislation that day. He signed into law $13 billion in terrorism-fighting money, new money for a sports stadium, and an unprecedented Internet privacy bill. The last item got a fair amount of national press, as did Governor Ventura’s veto of legislation that (according to the Associated Press) "would have required Minnesota’s public school students to recite the Pledge of Allegiance at least once a week."
Drawing much less national press was another gubernatorial decision, this one exceedingly unpopular with Minnesota’s arts community. In a series of line-item vetoes to bill HF3618, Governor Ventura denied state funding to various cultural institutions, including the Bloomington Arts Center and the famed Minneapolis Children’s Theatre. Hardest hit was the historic Guthrie Theatre, which was denied $24 million in funding it had been promised—or thought it had been promised.
Theatre reporter and reviewer Graydon Royce of the Twin Cities Star Tribune found the Guthrie’s leading man waxing furious: "Gov. Jesse Ventura is 'destroying the infrastructure of the arts,’ said Guthrie artistic director Joe Dowling, reacting to the governor’s veto…" wrote Royce. "Dowling hid no emotion Wednesday, blasting Ventura for refusing to meet with Guthrie representatives and for making what he called erroneous statements on radio broadcasts.
"'It’s a shameful act,’ Dowling said in a phone interview from New York. 'We’re all told that the arts and culture are one of the reasons that make Minnesota a special place…the governor sees them as utterly irrelevant to the quality of life in Minnesota and I think that needs to be remembered when people assess his record.’"
The Royce article then details the pickle in which the Guthrie now finds itself. The theatre had planned to use the state money for "a 125 million three-theatre complex designed by French architect Jean Nouvel on the Mississippi River in downtown Minneapolis," and now has (according to Dowling) "no Plan B" to continue with the project.
Royce’s article is unabashedly biased. No quotes are included from the Governor’s office defending the decision, letting stand Dowling’s assessment that the decision was "a body blow" to their theatre. But on the Governor’s Web site—which features a giant and vaguely menacing picture of Ventura at his desk ready to sign things—The Body defends the move: "…some of the projects that I vetoed may have had value for all Minnesotans, [but] no matter how valuable a vetoed project was deemed to be, the legislature spent too much money on capitol projects and therefore I felt compelled to bring the total cost of the bill down to a reasonable level."
The Guthrie and the Children’s Theatre represent two of the nation’s better known regional theatres, but local arts news like this very rarely gets national play. The Associated Press offered an item on the Pledge of Allegiance veto; the Washington Post ran a piece in its "Newsbytes" column on the Internet privacy thing. Among its national news round-up, the New York Times had a paragraph by Jodi Wilogren on Minnesota’s legislative flurries; after two sentences on the Pledge, it read "The governor also vetoed money for a new Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis. The Guthrie is a major regional theatres [sic]."
The Times did come through on May 24 with a piece by Stephen Kinzer putting the Guthrie cuts in a larger (and largely distressing) context: "After years of steady expansion, public financing for the arts has begun to drop substantially as a long economic boom ends." Kinzer details arts cuts in California, Massachusetts, Georgia, and Seattle, before returning to the Minnesota situation: "[O]n a radio program on Monday in which Governor Ventura emphasized the state’s fiscal problems, he asked, 'Is government in the theatre business?’ He added: 'What was wrong with the old theatre? Seems fine to me.’"
And there are definitely some art forms to which the Governor remains committed. On May 18, four days before the vetoes, the AP reported his plans to "have his staff look into who to contact" in order to bring the new Rolling Stones tour to Minnesota.
RETURN OF THE 175 FOOT BUDDHAS
In the months prior to last September, rarely did this nation’s eye turn to Afghanistan. One instance was last March, when the 15-century old Bamiyan Buddhas were destroyed by teams of fundamentalist demolitions experts, in a pique of anti-idolatrous fervor by the Taliban government. In May, Wired Magazine carried a report on a visionary attempt to restore their glory.
"Using the latest in 3-D computer modeling techniques, Professor Armin Grün and his team at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, have painstakingly reconstructed images of the Buddhas," wrote Dermot McGrath. "Its backers hope that the virtual reconstruction will mark the first step in the process of physically rebuilding the Buddhas on their original site."
Those backers are at the 7 Wonders Foundation; the group’s founder, Bernard Weber, told McGrath he hopes the model reconstruction "will serve as a platform for debate among scholars to agree on the method of reconstructing the original one."
In other words, the pen is mightier than the sword, and 3-D computer modeling techniques are mightier than fundamentalist demolitions experts.
OH, SAY, CAN YOU SING?
The Wall Street Journal, where one does not generally turn for one's arts criticism, offered a comically scathing piece by Tunku Varadarajan on how God-awful public performances of the "Star Spangled Banner" have become. He said most pre-ball game run-throughs are "pop-baroque, over ornamented renditions by soul diva[s] that make it impossible for anyone to sing along…Readers will be familiar with the genre, for there isn’t a public rendition of the anthem in America today that doesn’t come wallowing in a melismatic sludge."
Varadarajan has a simple solution—next time you hear one of those crappy versions, just don’t clap. That’ll learn ’em.