Month: November 2003

On overhearing the rumor that the eccentric Kottke’s Minnetonka home was, well, untidy, when he sold it recently, harp guitarist Andy Wahlberg told us he would gladly help shovel out some of the master’s legendary guitars. In the thirty-four years since his first recording, Kottke has cultivated a collection of instruments that bring other guitarists to their knees. Onstage at the Ordway, Kottke’s instruments of choice will likely be a polished set of custom-built Taylors. Other than them, he’ll be on his own up there, since Phish bassist Mike Gordon, who collaborated on last year’s very well-received Clone, is out on tour with his regular gig. But Leo on his lonesome is just fine with many Kottke fans, who’d rather make a meal of his (self-described) goose-fart voice and extraordinary fretwork without a side order.
Ordway, 345 Washington St., St. Paul,
(651) 224-4222, www.ordway.org

When Frank Weiland walks into a barbershop, he’s typically not looking for a trim. “I look for the shop license,” he explains. “Then I look for the individual licenses.” For the last eleven years, Frank Weiland has served as Minnesota’s only barber inspector. He’s in rare and elite company. Weiland’s predecessor held the job for twenty-five years.

“Eighteen-ninety-seven!” Weiland exclaims, his voice rising in a suburban bagel shop. “That’s how long Minnesota has had a barber law.” He leans forward intently. “The first barber law in the union!”

Inspector Weiland is an intense man with a passion for barbering (he asked that he be described as having “a face better suited to radio”). He points out that in medieval times, barbers were surgeons, “And it was barber-surgeons, not surgeon-barbers.” Today, Minnesota’s four-member Board of Barber Examiners operates in much the same manner as our Board of Medical Practice. It licenses practitioners and oversees professional education. It also responds to consumer complaints. In other words, “Sanitation.” Weiland says it with finality, authority. “It is what I do.”

According to Weiland, most barbers look to the health and safety of their customers just fine. “But if you don’t care…” He raises his right hand in a kind of traffic-stopping gesture. “Hi!” Of particular interest is the upkeep of the blue sanitizer in which barber tools are dipped after use. It’s known as barbicide. “There’ve been guys who use blue food coloring instead of sanitizer,” he sighs. “But I have a way to check for that.”

Weiland is one of only two employees of the board (the other is an administrative aide), making him a significant part of what he jokingly describes as “the big bureaucracy.” Officially, he is known as a “legal compliance officer,” but what gives him real standing in the barbering community is the fact that he’s a licensed barber, too. In fact, when Weiland works in outstate Minnesota, he’s been known to help handle overflow customers at small-town shops. “If the barber looks busy, like he’s not going to get home in time, I offer to help him out.” Often, the shop owner expresses reluctance. “So I say, ‘What? The inspector gonna get us?’” Weiland never accepts payment, “But I’ll fight for my tips.” Though he is a modest man, in regard to his barbering skills, he admits, “I’m good, damned good.”

So who cuts Frank Weiland’s hair? “Lawn Boy.” Lawn Boy is Kenny Kirkpatrick, chair of Minnesota’s Barber Board. He is an affable white-haired man with soft hands and a warm laugh. And, as chair of the National Association of Barber Boards of America, Kirkpatrick might exceed Horst Rechelbacher as the most influential Minnesotan in American hair. “We try to standardize regulations between states,” he says, while cutting the hair of a National Guard officer in his Capitol Barbershop, located beneath the State Office Building. “And if a state needs help in setting up its own barber board, we consult on that.”

Like Weiland, Kirkpatrick exhibits a real love for the culture and traditions of barbering. “Where else can you go into work, BS, and watch TV?”

Unfortunately, all is not well at the Barber Board. This year, Minnesota legislators in pursuit of fiscal excellence expropriated $53,000 from the board’s $191,000 budget. This galls Weiland, in particular, who points out that the board is self-sufficient; its revenues derive entirely from industry fees, not taxpayers. The reduction in funding affects the Barber Board’s oversight of the profession, though Weiland is reluctant to go into specifics.

Nevertheless, Weiland’s passion for barbering transcends any momentary displeasure with current circumstances. “Look, I could make more money and have more family time in a different job,” Weiland concedes. “But I like the barbers.” He smiles as he recounts the practical jokes that frequently punctuate the profession, including the pickles and goldfish that have appeared in the barbicide, just for an inspector’s benefit. “Barbers like to have fun. There isn’t
a better job.”—Adam Minter

The lilting soprano of Dublin-born Katie McMahon gained worldwide attention during her time as lead vocalist for Riverdance, the mid-nineties Irish-dance smash. These days, she’s happy being the boss of her own solo career right here in Minneapolis, where she lives with her husband, Ben Craig, a local rockabilly musician who met her backstage after a Riverdance show and won her heart swing-dancing at Lee’s Liquor Bar. Katie’s music still keeps her as busy as ever. She recently returned from a five-week tour of Norway with duo Secret Garden, just in time to release her third CD, Celtic Christmas, on which her lovely vocals soar through a choice selection of carols and traditional Irish tunes. Her annual holiday concert attracts larger crowds each year, and for 2003 moved on up to the larger confines of the O’Shaughnessy, accompanied by Irish dancers from the local Scoil na dTri school. (Read our interview with McMahon at www.rakemag.com.)
O’Shaughnessy, 2004 Randolph Ave.,
St. Paul, (651) 690-6700, www.stkate.edu/oshaughnessy

Is there a band on the planet that cares more for its fans, or does more to satisfy them with a steady stream of amazing albums, videos, one-offs, DVDs, and an encyclopedic website? Of course, it would mean nothing if Wayne Coyne and his friends weren’t also brilliant musicians. This new EP is one of those internecine releases that looks forward and back at the same time; four new songs are complemented by two previously unreleased tunes. We’re not saying they’re the Beatles, but Soft Bulletin and Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots are two discs that your grandchildren will know about. It pays to watch what the Lips’ next move will be.

There is a subtle way to measure progress. Every time we head north to God’s country, we’re forced to bring along the cell phone. Normally, we refuse the electronic leash. But when we’re on the road in a secondhand mini-van full of kids, or when we’re trying to rendezvous with people who have already gone over to the dark side, who conduct their many important affairs, and also their petty ones, by cell phone—well, sometimes you just have to join them.

We notice the cellular networks have gradually and dependably migrated north to the Canadian border. It’s a mild entertainment to watch the rising column of connectivity in the LED window in our palms, where we used to watch the dip and rise of the passing phone lines out the car window. It is our particular cross to bear that our cell service is superior in the city where we never need it, and lousy where we do. North of Duluth, we would need another phone—one that would roam promiscuously in search of other, larger networks.

Until a couple of weeks ago, that would have necessitated a new phone number. We’re not sure what the impediment was, exactly, but federal regulators have removed it—the one preventing consumers from keeping their old numbers when they migrated across service providers or bought a new phone. One would have thought the marketplace sorted this out a long time ago. Now that 130 million Americans—nearly 70 percent of all adults—are sold on the idea of cell phones, they’ll undoubtedly be tempted to change phone companies and handsets, while committing for the long haul to one number.

In the past, most cell phones were used for an average of eighteen months, practically a lifetime. There are already 500 million decommissioned cell phones in the U.S. Another 100 million are thrown on the pile or in the sock drawer each year.
Increased coverage in rural areas, along with stepped-up competition among phone companies, suggests that soon there may be more cell phones than televisions, which cannot be a good thing. We don’t have much patience for the casual Luddite who grumbles every time he sees someone using a cell phone out in the bass boat, but there are good reasons to be worried about this growth.

In the north, it’s a special example of the hen coming home to roost where the eggs are being hatched. Anyone who has paged through the literature that accompanies a Minnesota fishing license will tell you that it’s not exactly smart to eat Minnesota fish—even if you’ve caught them in the most isolated BWCA backwater. The lake at the foot of Will Steger’s middle-of-nowhere homestead, for example, contains walleye and northern pike that a wise person would not eat more often than once a week.

The culprit, long known and understood but still ubiquitous, is mercury. It is brought on the wind and in the rain, even to virgin lakes that have never been churned by an outboard. Mercury is a common component in batteries, and because wireless technologies are becoming more common, not less, we can expect this problem to increase. We’ve slipped dead batteries into the trash often enough to realize that general public awareness of the problem is no guarantee that it will go away.

We are accustomed to thinking of this “information age” as being environmentally benign at worst—virtual worlds, paperless offices, telecommuting, and all that. But this ignores the serious environmental impact of numerous toxins and heavy metals that go into a PC, a Palm Pilot, or a cell phone. If we learn one thing from our newly networked world, it should be this: What you can’t see can hurt you.—Hans Eisenbeis

When Billy Bragg paints you a picture, there’s always a lot of red in it. His music alternates passionate expressions of his socialist ideals (“There Is Power in a Union”) with more personal songs of love and heartbreak, the best of them remarkable for their emotional incisiveness. It’s a dichotomy he once acknowledged with the self-mocking couplet “Mixing pop and politics, he asks me what the use is; I offer him embarrassment and my usual excuses.” Though his political commitment hasn’t lessened a whit over the years, it’s that genuine affability and sense of humor that have probably kept his career going for more than twenty years. For a polemicist like Bragg, such qualities are vital for avoiding the sin of stridency, a turnoff whether or not you agree with his views. Though it’s a pity there wasn’t room for another half-dozen songs, this two-disc career-spanning collection does a pretty decent job of cataloging Bragg’s high points from his early days as a fiery solo guitarist to his terrific collaboration with Wilco, breathing life into a set of unfinished Woody Guthrie songs.

Although it would be a mistake to overpraise the last decade of the Man in Black’s career, it’s certainly true that the four albums in his American Recordings series more than rehabilitated his eighties-era reputation as an irrelevance. The work he did with producer Rick Rubin was of such consistent high quality that when he died in September, his status as one of the century’s great American singers was unquestionable. No posthumous rediscovery needed here. The new box set Unearthed treats his legacy with due gravity, even while its raison d’etre is largely to clear out Rubin’s vaults of the Cash material that didn’t quite make the cut for the initial releases. This wouldn’t be the place to begin exploring Cash’s work, but the sixty-four previously unreleased songs here include any number of must-hears for the initiated. Among those are an entire disc of acoustic spirituals Cash learned from his mother as a boy, and his duet with Joe Strummer on Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song”—beautifully low-key and dignified, a worthy song to remember both of the dearly departed by.

FOX canceled this sketch-comedy show ignominiously after only half a season in 1992, but in retrospect it’s clear that its chief fault was being too hip for the room. There’s the posthumous Emmy, and the ongoing success of cast members Stiller, Janeane Garofalo, Bob Odenkirk (Mr. Show) and Andy Dick (NewsRadio), repeatedly proving their satiric skills on other projects. Truth be told, the show was so obscure that until Comedy Central picked it up briefly a few years later, we’d only seen clips when Stiller guested on Later With Bob Costas (now there’s another gem of the TV dial gone missing). It wasn’t unfailingly brilliant, but the show was a clear precursor to the smart, razor-sharp absurdity that Odenkirk and David Cross generated on Mr. Show. And, more to the point, it was very funny very often. Years after seeing the sketches, we still laugh when we think of the surly, ALF-like sock puppet called Skank, or Stiller’s wonderfully overearnest parody of U2’s Bono, crooning his heart out over a cereal commercial as if marshmallows were going to singlehandedly save the world. This two-DVD set collects all thirteen episodes of the series, including one never broadcast.

You know, Disney always left us cold, even as young Rakesketeers. Mickey and his tedious, bland bunch… Feh. Bugs, Daffy, Yosemite Sam—now, those are cartoons. Brash and anarchic. Gleefully punning, with their comic timing perfect to the second. Ducks getting hit with frying pans. That’s our America. (We’re choosing to ignore Space Jam and Back in Action.) For the classic toons, this set is just about everything you could hope for. Fifty-six of some of the best cartoons, mostly from WWII to the early sixties. “Duck Amuck.” A couple of Marvin the Martian appearances. The ones where Bugs Bunny bullfights and meets the Tasmanian Devil. Enlightening documentary extras, not just promos for other WB product. Ducks getting hit with frying pans, then calling rabbits despicable. With more than a thousand cartoons to cull from, some omissions are inevitable. But still, how can you leave out “What’s Opera, Doc?” The “kill the wabbit, kiiiilllll the waaaaabbiiiiit” Wagner parody was the first one we looked for. Surely that’s not all, folks.

It’s exponentially less likely than, say, Cold Mountain to pick up an Oscar nomination, but Bubba Ho-Tep’s got the makings of some glorious kitsch. And this inventive horror-comedy, based on a story by Texan novelist Joe R. Lansdale, has already succeeded wildly on its own low-budget terms, picking up enough good word-of-mouth at festival screenings to avoid direct-to-video hell and garner a theatrical release. Evil Dead’s Bruce Campbell stars as Elvis Presley—and if you’re like us, that’s when you decided to buy your ticket—who didn’t die in the seventies, but now lives crabbily under an assumed name at a rundown east Texas old-folks home. The King’s best friend is a fellow pensioner (Ossie Davis) who insists he’s really John F. Kennedy, despite being a black man. As happens so often when dead celebrities meet, the two join forces to defeat a soul-sucking Egyptian mummy. Campbell was born to play Elvis, and his Bubba performance is one of his best. It’s not merely camp, but a well-rounded portrait of a bitter old legend who rediscovers his heroic nature. Bubba’s also the career zenith for director Don Coscarelli, whose B-movie auteur status previously rested on Phantasm and Beastmaster, neither of which are titles we’d want carved on our gravestone. No fool, Coscarelli’s already talking sequel, pitting a Clambake-era Elvis against a squad of she-vampires—staking care of business in a flash.
Uptown, 2906 Hennepin Ave.,
(612) 825-6006, landmarktheatres.com