Month: July 2002

Sword-and-sorcery tales are not easy to pull off. Perched over the twin chasms of Ludicrousness and Pomposity, it’s all too easy for a ham-handed filmmaker to fall prey to that terrible Dark Knight known as Dorkiness. And so Peter Jackson’s first installment in the three-part film version of J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1,000-page Middle-Earth trilogy is a genuine treat. It’s a lovingly faithful, action-packed distillation true to the spirit of the book in every important respect, if necessarily breezier and more popcorn-friendly. Jackson previously created a believable fantasy realm with Heavenly Creatures , and here again takes the right approach—childlike wonder and an unapologetic sense of grandeur. He’s helped enormously by lavish CGI effects and the natural beauty of his native New Zealand, which stands in nicely for Tolkien’s craggy mountains and valleys. But the movie wouldn’t work if the characters were twee or wooden. As in any great film, script and acting are the saving graces. Ian McKellen’s nuanced portrayal of Gandalf holds the film together, but special mention goes to Viggo Mortenson’s heart-throb hero Aragorn and longtime horror villain Christopher Lee, icily evil as the corrupt wizard Saruman.

The Funniest President traveled to Wall Street recently, on a mission to kick shins and take names. Since entering public life W has scattered behind him a string of linguistic pearls the likes of which many older Americans still recall fondly from the TV show Kids Say the Darnedest Things. “I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family.” “I am mindful not only of preserving executive powers for myself, but for predecessors as well.” “Teaching children to read… will make America what we want it to be—a literate country and a hopefuller country.” “For a century and a half now, America and Japan have formed one of the great and enduring alliances of modern times.”

But he was at his deadpan best in the financial district speech: “In the long run, there is no capitalism without conscience, there is no wealth without character.” Ah, but seriously, folks—seriously! Telling one of these CEOs not to cook the books is like telling a crack whore to dress better and keep off the pipe until the cocktail hour! Ba-dum-PAH.

Enron begins to seem like the good old days. That was only a billion dollars or so in flim-flammery, and onlookers could pretend it was an isolated instance of malfeasance rooted in the looking-glass world of energy derivatives. Then came Worldcom at $4 billion and Merck at $14 billion. And sandwiched between them, to less fanfare, a series of brewing scandals involving Xerox, ImClone, Tyco, Kmart, Adelphia, Qwest, Global Crossing, and Halliburton—the last concerning alleged improprieties that took place in the late 90s when Dick Cheney headed the company. The business press is taking all this much more seriously than mainstream media. As Joseph Nocera wrote in Fortune, “Phony earnings, inflated revenues, conflicted Wall Street analysts, directors asleep at the switch—this isn’t just a few bad apples we’re talking about here. This, my friends, is a systemic breakdown…We have reached the tipping point.” Nocera and his colleagues correctly call the present ferment the worst U.S. financial crisis since 1929.

The saner heads on Wall Street, endangered species that they are, want some regulatory reform to ensure that such scandals don’t flare again anytime soon to disrupt their affairs. But talk like this is bound to seem not only reckless but silly to the president, who has never known any other way of doing business. W is a man who never registered a single success in his chosen trade, the oil business, but nonetheless managed to parlay the family name into a handsome stake in Harken Energy, which he cashed in just before his father’s war on Iraq sent Harken stock tumbling. Stock sales by insiders are supposed to be registered at the SEC within two months’ time; W waited over half a year without adverse consequence. He likewise turned a $600,000 investment in the Texas Rangers, and a role as greeter at The Ballpark in Arlington, into a $15 million payday when the team was sold. Double-dealing, something-for-nothing cronyism, and the absolute entitlement of the powerful to grab as much as they can are no more than Bush’s birthright. Privately he must be mystified by all the fuss.

Small wonder his get-tough talk to Wall Streeters was a piece of puffery. If Bush gets his way there will be a few show trials, a hundred additional bodies at the SEC—which, under GWB, is headed by a former attorney for the very accounting firms that have played such a vital role in the crimes at hand—and a shiny new executive commission to study the problem. Bush uttered nary a word concerning any of the grosser forms of institutionalized lying, cheating, and stealing that allowed the stock market bubble to assume such epic proportions—the rules that allow accountants both to audit corporate books and to consult with those same clients on how best to cover up problems, for instance, or the ones that let brokerage analysts participate in deals they are “analyzing” “dispassionately” for the suckers who comprise the investing public.
The Democrats are licking their chops over the likely electoral dividends of all this come November, but it doesn’t mean Democratic pols as a class are any likelier to push substantive action than the Republicans. At the national level the party is more thoroughly dominated than ever by the Democratic Leadership Council and its clones, whose entire enterprise over the past decade and a half has consisted of making the party a more attractive vehicle for the same corporate dollars that flow so unstintingly to Republicans. It’s foolish to suppose the complicity of the Democrats is any less monumental than that of the Republicans, and one of the worst offenders is the man many consider prime presidential timber for 2004, Tailgunner Joe Lieberman. (As I write, Lieberman is being quoted exhorting Democrats not to lose their heads and turn “too populist” on big business’s perfidy.)

If ever the time was ripe for mavericks from both parties to step forward in the interest of doing a little good—and, not incidentally, making names and power bases for themselves—that time is now. And once again we must ask, where the hell is Paul Wellstone? (Or, for that matter, his protégé in public obscurity, Mark Dayton?) You can pore through Wellstone’s web sites or any news archive and find only a scant few discouraging words on the corporate crime wave. Maybe he is afraid of drawing more wrath and more Republican dollars in his race against Norm Coleman; maybe he is being Senatorial, nattering privately and uselessly to his party superiors about the issue; maybe he is just too busy fighting mostly losing battles in the Agriculture committee and rescuing kittens from trees in Willmar. Or perhaps he is awaiting word that one of the CEOs under investigation has snapped and struck his wife—Paul and Sheila are adamantly opposed to domestic violence, you know.

One thing’s for damn sure: In this most pungent domestic scandal of the past few decades, the man The Nation once called “the senator from the Left” is scarcely on radar. By staying on the sidelines this way, Wellstone is both shirking a duty incumbent to his populist pretensions and missing a golden political opportunity. About a year and a half ago, in the pages of Mother Jones, I went on record with the observation that if Wellstone broke his two-terms-and-out pledge to run again, he would probably lose. But with fresh financial scandals breaking every week, the ground under our feet has moved considerably since then in ways that should only benefit Wellstone. Is there a politial candidate anywhere this year who, as a matter of style and presence, embodies the toothsome, glad-handing, reptilian ethos of corporate America any better than Norm Coleman? Yet Wellstone manages to continue running neck-and-neck with him. Quite a feat when you think about it.

Steve Perry is a contributing editor to The Rake. He can be reached at steve@rakemag.com.

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As we speak, the conservative men’s religious/political organization, the Promise Keepers, are right smack in the middle of their 2002 National Conference Season, and on September 6 and 7, they’ll be rallying at the Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul. “In 12 years, we have held 140 stadiums and arena events, reaching 4.8 million men. And yet our focus has never changed,” says PK founder Bill “Coach” McCartney, a former University of Colorado football coach. “We’re still keeping promises, one man at a time.”

Which isn’t as heady as one million men at a time. A mere five years ago, on October 4, 1997, between 600,000 and one million men descended on Washington D.C. for the PK gathering “Stand in the Gap: A Sacred Assembly of Men.” It was the largest religious get-together in U.S. history. After that last stand, PK attendance bottomed out and the organization suffered massive cutbacks. That nose-dive, however, was mostly the result of dropping the entrance fee. Promise Keepers thought if events were free, they’d raise attendance and get by on passing the hat. Instead stadiums sat empty, and, adding insult to injury, the average donation at events was a measly $4. Since the ticket price was reinstated ($69 for the St. Paul event), attendance has been on the climb for two years running, and financially speaking the PKs are “doing fine.”

The St. Paul event has a capacity of 10,000 men and boys. According to Fred Ramirez, event organizer and director of U.S. Ministries at the PK headquarters in Denver, more than 4,000 seats are already booked. Ramirez says the “Storm the Gates” theme for this year’s conference is a metaphor for storming the gates of Hell, and has nothing to do with storming anyone else per se. “It’s a battle that men must fight against our own worst nature,” he explains.

This sets my teeth on edge. But why? Who am I to judge a bunch of guys hanging out and staging mock crucifixions to praise God, expressing their feelings, and committing to keep their promises to their wives and children? After all, do I want my son to be a Promise Breaker? Maybe I do, if the alternative is for him to embrace the misogynistic, homophobic, racist underpinnings revealed in the rhetoric of some prominent Promise Keepers (despite the organization’s fervent denial of all that leftist whining).

As McCartney puts it, all you men out there need to “Sit down with your wife and say something like this: ‘Honey, I’ve made a terrible mistake… I gave up leading this family, and I forced you to take my place. Now I must reclaim that role…’ I’m not suggesting you ask for your role back, I’m urging you to take it back… There can be no compromise here.” This is the brand of infamous and widely reproduced quote that gives the Promise Keepers a bad name with arm-chair feminists like me. That, and the fact that although women do most of the grunt work to pull off these glitzy events, tickets are for men only. “But women can buy tickets and go to any event,” protests Ramirez. “Women are never barred from attending. Women are just discouraged from being at the events because they are really geared toward men. Men are the guys who don’t understand in terms of emotions and all that. Women are far ahead of us, so we have to work harder with the men, because they don’t get it.”

This, according to Ramirez, explains why up to two-thirds of the 300 to 600 volunteers scrambling behind the PK scenes are female. “The reason we get such a large number of women volunteers in because they want to free their men up to attend the event. The women support us 100 percent.”

If my instincts are right, the time is ripe for a PK resurgence. The outrageous popularity of the fire-and-brimstone Left Behind novels reveals a mass-culture inclination toward just the sort of highly moralistic message that PKs deliver with unparalleled panache. Noteworthy, as well, is the position of one of the most fiery and controversial PK leaders, Tony Evans, as one of George W. Bush’s closest spiritual advisors. During the presidential election Evans told the New York Times that Bush “believes that God has a place in government, that religion has a place in society, and it is not to be marginalized and put on the periphery as though it is some sort of extra. There is no America without a theistic world view.” And that, I predict, is a promise the PKs will surely cash in on.

Jeannine Ouellette is associate editor of The Rake.

The Fringe Festival arrives again, this year with more corporate sponsors than ever, and I’m feeling the same sense of anticipation and obligation. So many options, so much creativity, so many challenging theatrical experiences to seek out. As always, it’s the seeking that intimidates. Must I really drag my sporadically employed butt out of the house in all this heat and humidity to sit in some barely ventilated venue fanning myself with the program like a fat woman at a gospel meeting on the out chance that I will see something that’ll change my life? The answer’s yes, of course. But the question’s “why?” Why, just because something calls itself the Fringe should I believe it’s any more fresh and original than all the dazzling assertions of individuality I can find on the Internet? A whole world of original thought can be mine—from skate-chick rants to entire web rings devoted to a single poem by Rainer Maria Rilke. All I have to do is get out my credit card and pay Qwest (A WorldCom Subsidiary) $52.95 a month. Certainly, those pop-up adverts for car insurance and software security that litter my screen with all the graphic subtlety of fast-food wrappers are suspiciously slow to click off, but it’s a small price to pay for the world at my fingertips. Besides, there’s no real Fringe anymore, no alternative, just a bunch of various phenomena waiting to be absorbed and distributed at a reasonable price.

I use cynicism to disguise my laziness. The truth is that the Fringe is worth leaving the house for. In the first place, it’s live theater, and live theater, almost by definition, resists repackaging. Once it’s on video, DVD, CD-ROM, or cable TV, it’s no longer live. More important, however, is the question of whether there is still a fringe at all, and if so, will I find it at the Fringe Festival?

Of course the first Fringe Festival wasn’t called that. It happened in Scotland 56 years ago and might just as easily have been called “Eight Disgruntled Theatre Groups Get Turned Away From The Edinburgh Theatre Festival and Decide To Put on Their Own Damn Show.” By the next year the practice of staging dramas in unofficial venues began to attract attention and the term Fringe was coined by (who else?) a cultural critic. It’s no surprise that half a century later the phenomenon has grown up and solidified into a world-wide theatrical happening, taking place in cities all over the western hemisphere. Coca-Cola and Target banners flutter gaily in the press releases, and on all these flags, it’s the artists and performers who are the fringe.

Lest you think I’m one of those bitter, unsuccessful artistes who cry sell-out at any event not staged behind a grain silo at 2 a.m. in February, let me assure you I am an entirely different type of bitter, unsuccessful artiste. I think creativity should sell. I happen to think it should be fetching a much better price. If we artists are not going to get paid in dollars and sense, then we should be collecting the wages of fear. Being alternative, avant-garde, or simply on the Fringe, should carry with it the license to disturb and even enrage, not just the “mainstream” but your very own peer group. Alternative art of any kind ought to be scary, like rejection or death, especially when it’s funny. It should be something no one would dare turn into a beer commercial.

But speaking more broadly, what is Fringe anymore? I’m not sure, but I know it looks something like a guy I’ll call Capricorn the Poet. In 1982, when slamming was just something poets did with shots of whiskey, the open mike scene in the East Village was already churning it’s rusty gears into action. This was years before MTV showed up, before the phrase “spoken word” was coined, and before the poets themselves got suspiciously good-looking. Like verbal karaoke, everybody, lousy or excellent, got famous for exactly three and a half minutes before the proprietor’s egg-timer started buzzing and you were out of there. Naturally this democratic forum attracted a lot of furloughed mental patients of whom Capricorn the Poet was the most notable. For one thing he actually wrote metered verse. With his furious black-socketed eyes, a mop of dreaded-out unruly hair, and a precise Eastern European accent, he seemed to come from another century when poets thought they had the right to demand respect. He bellowed out his poems, giving each line the biblical weight he knew it deserved, his English antiquated and ornate, as if learned solely from books. His words themselves are unprintable in a non-fanzine context, consisting of violent, graphic smut that would make William Burroughs squeamish. His oratorical brio made it impossible to tune out. Feminists would leave the room in confusion, since you couldn’t really take a lunatic to task for commodifying women’s bodies. Even the young guys would get uncomfortable, all their bohemian posturing diminished before this literal onslaught. Capricorn, oblivious to audience response, would simply continue his philippic diatribe against aristocratic women who dared to tell their Lord and Master, Capricorn, that they were too good to have sex with donkeys for the purpose of increasing his onanistic delight, and I’m really giving you the lite version here. Finally some people wanted to 86 Capricorn from the open mike, but there were no grounds—he would always dismount the stage in a fit of verbal abuse when his time was called. “Sycophant, may you choke on a hemorrhoid!” was one of his tamer exclamations—but he would dismount. Capricorn stayed.

There are still open mikes in the East Village, though now everyone takes the subway, since the rents are too high for anyone who can even pronounce the word poetry. Miraculously, Capricorn is still there, arrogant, pompous, obscene, and insane as ever. Twenty years of what had to be hard times have not affected his confidence in the least, even though Russell Simmons is never going to put him on HBO.

It’s incredibly foolish to romanticize mental illness, which is no more an alternative to homogeny than pancreatic cancer. But when I think Fringe, when I think Alternative, I think of Capricorn’s enviable inability, or refusal, to understand his position. I am the choice, he seems to shout. It is you who are the Alternative! I am the flag, it’s you who are my fringe!

The Minnesota Fringe Festival takes place August 2-11 at various locations. See www.fringefestival.org.

Emily Carter is a Minneapolis author. Her collection of short stories, Glory Goes and Gets Some, was nominated for a Minnesota Book Award in 2000.

With the grand opening of Hormel’s $8 million Spam Museum, there’s not much mystery left in the story of the world’s strangest can of food. The Rake dives in—only to learn the “Spam Gelatin Jump” has been canceled.

Now it’s just a savory memory. Marion Ross, Barb Billingsley, Tom Brokaw, and other dubious TV superstars were there. Southern Minnesotans bit into free Spamburgers. Teenie boppers bounced to the sounds of former Gear Daddy Martin Zellar, Austin’s hippest native son. Kids scrambled around a pork-themed amusement park. Tourists hauled around bags loaded down with cans of Spam extracted from a stack that spelled “SPAM” in six-foot high letters. “A lot of people come to stock up on it for the whole year, since it only costs a buck a can,” said a salesman who had already bagged his own year’s supply. Meanwhile, the line grew longer to buy Spam boxer shorts, Spam key chains, Spam license plate holders, and anything else that could conceivably be emblazoned with this four-letter word.

This was Spam Jam 2002 in Austin, Minnesota, and an occasion to celebrate the long-awaited inauguration of the $8 million Spam Museum and a new era of nostalgia. Even this all-American Spam (short for “spiced ham,” you know) suffered from the attacks of the pork-abstaining terrorists; the museum’s opening was postponed from mid-September 2001 until this summer.

The museum represents Hormel’s struggle to keep Spam a relevant pop cultural icon—like Coca-Cola, say, or Hershey bars—as opposed to shelved as a kitchsy reminder of a bygone era, outdated and mediocre American cuisine synonymous with unwanted email.

To clean up Spam’s image for the annual festival, some long-standing games have been nixed. There was a time when Spam Jam featured such events as the ever-unpopular Spam Gelatin Jump. “It’s basically all the white stuff around Spam in a big vat. You stick your arms in and pull out a golf ball for a prize,” said an attendant a few years ago when I last visited.

Even the beautiful blue and yellow Spambelle has been warehoused. The mini paddleboat, dating from 1956, used to give little rides to big eaters on Austin’s East Side Lake. But then the little steamboat sunk in 1999—on live TV. “They had to pull it out with a crane,” one eyewitness explained to me. “I guess the captain ate too much Spam!”