The Rake Magazine

Month: April 2005

  • Mara Pelecis: Souvenirs

    While interviewing Vietnam veterans, Mara Pelecis talked with a man named Phong Phan, who told her, “Many people have souvenirs–some souvenirs are very heavy.” Pelecis’s photos explore the kind that can tear people apart. She shows us life after wartime for Native Americans, Vietnamese, women, and her own father. One of her most moving works is a black and white photograph of her father’s lighter, inscribed with his post in Vietnam. The story of this object, which Pelecis rescued from the bottom of a lake, has a lasting impact, especially if you walk away from this stunning exhibit with a matchbook, printed with the lighter’s image, in your hand. 165 13th Ave. N.E., Minneapolis; 612-824-5500; www.mncp.org

  • Gigantic

    Maybe it’s partly due to technology, or the global proliferation of biennials, or even a newish style of exhibition that the art critic Peter Schjeldahl dubbed “festivalism,” but more and more artists have been producing work on an extremely large scale. Given its own cavernous galleries, how could the Soap Factory not offer its own take on this trend? All around this erstwhile industrial space, stupendously large art stretches out and makes itself comfortable. Travis Graves’s industrial trees turn the very joists and floorboards of one gallery into the ghost of the forest they once inhabited. Elsewhere, Tamara Albaitis lets visitors travel the paths of a pulsating maze suggestive of either veins or bowels, which would make the viewer either blood or, uh, bodily waste–your pick! Even Jinnene Ross’s crochet project eschews daintiness: She works in hefty white rope. McKendree Key takes her gallery space and divides it in half–horizontally. In all, the projects in this show make us wonder: If supersized food makes our bodies bigger, how will viewing of supersized art affect us? 110 Fifth Ave. S.E., Minneapolis; 612-623-9176; www.soapfactory.org

  • Rollin' On The T.O.B.A.

    “Laugh to keep from cryin’” was a maxim often employed by black vaudeville performers in the 1920s to endure racism, long hours, and atrocious pay, not to mention performing in humiliating productions. Things were even tougher on the traveling circuit, and yet amazingly, these vaudevillians still managed to bring warmth and quick-witted humor to audiences that viewed them with suspicion and outright hostility. Through the story of vaudeville star Bertha Mae Little, who helps two friends get their big break, Rollin’ chronicles the backstage machinations with both humor and poignance. 270 N. Kent St., St. Paul; 651-224-3180; www.penumbratheatre.org

  • Nixon in China

    Only a handful of North American operas have managed to muscle their way into a classic repertory already crowded with European works; count Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, Bernstein’s Candide, and Nixon in China, by John Adams, among them. Imbued with the kind of quirkiness that only opera (and, arguably, the Nixons) can provide, Adams’s music, along with the libretto by Alice Goodman, brought together satire and epic, parody and propaganda–and, not least, a serious examination of this momentous media event. 651-224-4222; www.mnopera.org

  • The Moon Falls Into Ruin

    In its dedication to adapting literature for the stage, Hardcover Theater is usually narrative-driven. This production, however, is a hallucinogenic journey as told by Georg Trakl, a German soldier-poet who fought in and ultimately took his own life during World War I. Trakl’s dreamy, drug-induced imagery is reminiscent of Arthur Rimbaud, whom he admired, yet his writing moves at a slower, heavier pace. Hardcover dug into Trakl’s past to uncover real people from his life–his mentally ill mother, the sister with whom he had an incestuous affair, his fellow soldiers at the battle of Grodek–who, as characters, bring to life Trakl’s dark and moody prose. The Playwrights’ Center, 2301 Franklin Ave. E., Minneapolis; 612-332-7481; www.hardcovertheater.org

  • Wear, Tear, Repair

    The doctor stared over her glasses and leaned closer. She caressed the stumps where Blueberry’s arm and leg had once been. This grandmotherly surgeon, Clare Erickson, might be our region’s most prominent dollologist, and at this moment she was clearly weighing Blueberry’s prospects. “Do you know what a morgue is?” she said to Lillie.

    Lillie stared back at Dr. Clare, entranced. And afraid. “No,” she said.

    “A morgue is where they keep dead bodies,” said the doctor. “When my husband died in the hospital, I went to see his body, and then they took him to the morgue, down in the basement of the hospital. They kept him there until they moved him for the funeral.”

    “Umm, hmm,” said Lillie politely. Sophie and Max, Lillie’s older sister and brother, looked stunned.

    “We have a morgue here, where we keep parts of dolls,” Dr. Clare continued. “But this baby, she’s a bit on the pale side.” She turned to me. “We’ll take a look, though, and if we have any matching parts, she can have them for the cost of attachment.”

    Antie Clare’s Doll Hospital has been operating in North St. Paul for thirty years. Here, in this strange suburb in the shadow of a huge snowman statue, nine doll doctors and nurses work on up to three hundred doll patients at any given time. Dr. Clare herself has been doctoring dolls since 1968, the year I was born. This feels meaningful, since today the primary patient we’ve brought in is not Blueberry, though her puppy-related injuries are admittedly ghastly, but Jealous, my childhood doll, who is also now mothered by Lillie. Since almost all of the hospital’s customers are adults, Lillie’s presence as an actual child with a sick doll was enough to warrant having her baby rushed ahead of the others, a gesture that surprised and impressed me.

    The problems with Jealous date back to the years she spent in Sophie’s care, which involved frequent bathing with lots of soap. She developed a range of water-related maladies: missing eyelashes, a split down her plastic abdomen, and–worst of all–irreversibly matted hair that emits a mildly disturbing odor. It was also during the Sophie years that the doll acquired her unfortunate name. (Hyper, Jealous’s sister, has since gone missing.) Blueberry (also named by Sophie, who was stubbornly resistant to conventional naming practices) tagged along with Jealous today only as an afterthought, since her ancestry cannot be traced back further than the toy bin at the Goodwill. Sad to say, this means she doesn’t quite merit the cost of any reconstruction beyond bandaging. But free limbs from the morgue are certainly an unanticipated bonus.

    According to the doctor, it’s going to cost less to replace Jealous’s eyes than to repair the lashes. “Anyway,” Dr. Clare said as she pointed to the light blue cornea, “you see how there’s rust in there, and that cloudiness is actually mold.” She explained each procedure directly to Lillie, with the patience of an experienced practitioner. “We can’t fix this hair, so we’re going to shave her head bald and attach a whole new wig. You’re going to like it,” she said. Next, she removed the bandages from Jealous’s torso. “Who did this surgery?”

    We all froze, as if somebody was going to be in big trouble. Sophie bravely owned up to her handiwork.

    “With work like this, you should be helping at the doll hospital,” said the doctor. She told Lillie that instead of fixing the abdominal crack, she’d fit Jealous with a whole new torso (a steal at five dollars, not counting the limb-reattachment labor).

    The paperwork was complete, and it was time to officially check in Jealous and Blueberry. First, of course, they had to be brought up to date on their measles shots, which Lillie and Max administered with relish. The naked, vaccinated dolls had to be placed under a quilt in the crib in the corner of the shop, right beneath the high shelves with rows and rows of headless doll bodies. Nearby sat a wise and watchful Mrs. Beasley, worth a whopping one hundred and fifty dollars–but still humble on account of her drastic homeliness.

    I was aware as we left that it’s probably tragic to spend money–let’s just say it was barely more than a hundred dollars–on a worthless doll. But maybe it’s more tragic the way everything in our lives has become disposable. I can’t say where the truth lies and I don’t even want to. But either way, I cannot deny what an odd comfort it is, knowing the doll hospital still exists, after all these years.

  • Man of Steel

    Being a proud Anglo-American, I have long been a fan of the BBC soap opera EastEnders. (We see it here on TPT–the Twin Cities are a hotbed of British TV fans.) Everyone on this show, set in East London, eventually sleeps with everyone else, and there is an alarmingly high incidence of accidental death, felonious crime, and general high jinks. An episode that aired a couple of months ago got me thinking. Terry, a paunchy, headstrong, but generally likeable store owner, was having some trouble with Irene, his new-agey wife, who’d been struggling with a sort of female middle-age crisis. (She’d slept with one of her son’s friends, she was disgusted by her husband, she wanted more out of life, and so on.) Terry was increasingly agitated over their sex life, because it had, in his view, essentially evaporated–Irene was not “performing her wifely duties.” In intimate conversations with close friends, this was thought to be a very serious transgression indeed. Was it grounds for divorce? You bet it was. Irene was making things absolutely miserable for Terry. They were making love just once a week!

    I have had enough conversations with enough friends to know that once a week means you’re doing pretty darn good; most of my married buddies would be happy as a pig in mud if they were getting that much intimacy. So I’m pretty sure this minimal requirement for “wifely duty” is not a function of English libido. No, I chalk it up to the writers of EastEnders, who have their pride, after all. Who besides a self-righteous celibate would brag about not having sex? Still, if they were shooting for veracity, the idea that once a week is not enough is intriguing. On the other hand, maybe these writers weren’t shooting for veracity, but rather trying to lay out some kind of standard or ideal.

    As I get older, I wonder if most thoughtful, generous men wouldn’t be glad to be freed of the constant biological impulse to make whoopie. It makes life complicated, and it underscores one of the more annoying differences between men and women. (Why can’t the genders want to do this with the same frequency–much less at the same time? God is indeed a jealous god, judged by some of the incompatibilities he created in man and wife.) Sex is fun, of course, but is it worth all the trouble and all the energy it seems to demand of the male mind? I think most honest married women would answer that question with a resounding, “Duh!”

    Being neither a scientist nor a statistician, I am therefore quite unequipped to understand the wild popularity of drugs like Viagra and Levitra. I do think I know why “erectile dysfunction” is apparently such a widespread affliction. Let’s just say “use it or lose it” probably has biological ramifications. But still, why would women suddenly want their husbands functioning at, um, such a high level again? When I try to figure out why the little blue pill has been such a hit, I think it has everything to do with the image men have of themselves. Just as the issue with male pattern balding demonstrates, because we cling to a few signifiers of manhood–a full head of hair, an energetic libido–we are thrown into a crisis of self-identity when these things begin to ebb. Honestly, do you really think that there are huge numbers of women out there who are pushing their men to get to the doctor and get that prescription for Viagra? Honestly, how many wives relish the idea of their husbands sporting a six-hour boner? What could better fulfill a woman’s dream of a meaningful, non-threatening, non-annoying relationship than one that, due to medical issues, is limited to snuggling and spooning and the like?

    It’s been well established, by many different studies in many different ways, that men are more obsessed with sex than women. We think about it twice as often as they do, and our actions bear out our thoughts. Nine out of ten men self-pleasure on a regular basis (as I’ve said before, the tenth man is either a politician or a clergyman), while only five out of ten women do it. Married men are a lot more likely to have an extramarital affair at some point in the marriage–close to fifty percent of them–while only thirty percent of married women cross the line. In short, men like to have sex, even when they aren’t capable of having sex. And if that isn’t screwy, then I don’t know what is.

  • Back to the Drawing Board at the Dome

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  • Heroes and Villains

    There’s a story in the good book, about a cup that is clean on the outside and dirty on the inside. The cup is golden, pretty to look at, and almost certainly the first one that you would take off the shelf. But you wouldn’t want to drink from it, because you’d probably get sick. The point of the story is to illustrate the fact that things aren’t always as they seem.

    Sometimes when I am alone in my car, or before I go to sleep, I find myself thinking about what my own cup is marked with–but usually just for a minute or two, before I go back to concentrating on polishing my shiny external surface.

    I don’t for one second think that I am better or worse than anybody else. Or that anybody is so very much different from me. It’s probably human nature to run down the ol’ laundry list of personal transgressions late at night in the quiet of your mind, when no one is looking and no one can hear. Just as it’s human nature to change the channel if things become too unpleasant to watch.

    After I had a baby, I felt like I understood some very basic truths. That people are simply these sad, crazy sacks of muscle and bone and might. And even though might gets us out of bed in the morning, it will also eventually do us in. In that hot July of ’88, looking into my baby’s eyes, I was overwhelmed by love and terror. To this day, I swear I saw the whole world laid out plain. The helplessness, the hunger, the beauty, and the suffering. The hilarious vulnerability of it all. How ultimately, this is all doomed to failure.

    Sure, that might have been postpartum depression. But things were different back then. Wellbutrin hadn’t been invented yet. What I mean to say is that as human beings, we want love, attention, safety, and food. Our will gives us the ambition to seek and possess these things, but somehow, even if there is enough to go around, there will never be enough seats at the table. It’s this kind of innate selfishness that makes an otherwise reasonable person believe statements like “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.” (Never mind that the chlamydia follows you home on the plane.)

    We’re not meant to be altruistic. I mean, we’re meant to try. And the punch line is that we are also meant to fail, so that we can bear witness to our shortcomings and learn from them. So that we can transcend our base nature.

    So it was then, at my baby’s birth, that I felt like I understood. I understood who we are as human beings and the nature of wrongdoing, of sin: the sin of intent, the sin of omission, and the sin of the spin. The sin of the spin is a tricky one because it happens way down deep inside our hearts where no one else can see. Like maybe when we’re alone and thinking about the thing we shouldn’t have said, or the thing we should have done, or any of the garden-variety activities that make up the sediment of regret each of us carries at the bottom of our cups.

    I don’t know about you, but in my mind what usually happens with the sin of spin is that I identify something I did wrong, and then quickly come up with four reasons why my behavior couldn’t have been helped. If I can’t come up with enough reasons, I change the channel. I don’t get away with this all the time because good lies, even the ones you tell yourself, have to bear the ring of truth.

    You can’t change people, no matter how hard you try. But people do change. I’ve seen it with my own eyes, in others, and in myself. And so, if I believe in the idea of earthly sin, I also have to believe in redemption. In my experience, the quickest route to redemption is forgiveness. To forgive is to free. To salvage what might otherwise be lost. It’s not easy to forgive, or to live with the realization that I am a person who is in need of forgiveness. But few things in life that are worthwhile come easy.

    The words “forgiveness” and “sin” are turbo-charged social no-no’s, but I’m not particularly interested in convention late at night, before I fall asleep. When I’m alone with the contents of my gray matter, I know that forgiveness and sin exist, just as I know that the monster doesn’t live under my bed but rather in it. In my DNA, and in everybody else’s. But it’ll be okay, I think. The hero lives there, too.

  • Education for the Masses

    Seventeen years ago, I received a degree from the University of Michigan Law School, one of America’s top schools. My Harvard undergraduate degree opened doors at Michigan, and both of those degrees have opened other doors ever since–a fact that I have always appreciated. I have since learned that it’s our humanity, not paper credentials, that bolsters self-worth. So that probably makes me a recovering elitist, especially now that I have a son entering the University of Minnesota’s decidedly egalitarian General College. For seventy-three years, General College has fostered academic accessibility by admitting credentially challenged students. That very accessibility now has some U leaders clamoring to close it and create an unabashedly elitist “Honors College”; regrettably, they do not believe that both can peacefully coexist in a well-regarded public university.

    In 1862, Vermont congressman Justin Morrill convinced Congress to allow states to sell thousands of acres of federal land to fund higher education. In return, the Morrill Act “land grant” schools had to promote the “liberal and practical education of the industrial classes.” In plain English, Congress wanted open access to land-grant schools such as the University of Minnesota. Seventy years later, U President Lotus Coffman became troubled by the rates at which freshmen were flunking out. His solution was to establish General College, which focused on helping underprepared students succeed at the university. The college has produced alums like broadcast mogul Stanley Hubbard and Nobel laureate Norman Borlaug.

    Some, however–especially those who envision the U as a “Harvard on the prairie”–have long questioned whether General College belongs at the university. In fact, the current campaign to close the college is not the first. But a few things have changed since the last time the college faced the chopping block, in 1996. For one thing, almost half of those now enrolled at the college are people of color. Moreover, the key players on both sides of the battle this time are African-Americans: David Taylor, the General College dean, and Robert Jones, the university’s senior vice president for system administration. Their dueling views over the fate of the college put an academic twist on the age-old dilemma about deciding how much trust the have-nots can place in the haves to do the right thing.

    Dean Taylor detects racial overtones in the U’s efforts to shut down General College; in fact, he told me, many folks on campus believed its days were numbered once its white population dropped below sixty-six percent. “Cutting General College is not about saving money,” he said. “Only $1.7 million of our $12 million budget comes from the state of Minnesota. This is not about helping the students, improving the college, or increasing access. This is a misguided attempt to move this university up the academic pecking order by sacrificing General College students.”

    Taylor finds it ironic that the many programs designed to support the U’s large international student population are not thought of as an “academic ghetto” in the same way the college is. He believes that some opposition to General College comes from affluent parents whose offspring don’t gain admission to the U.

    Robert Jones, the ranking African-American at the U, thinks this is hogwash. The college, he said, “is a packet of excellence at the university and a national leader in developmental education.” But he also pointed out that “Sixty percent of General College students never get a Minnesota diploma. Something is wrong with this picture.”

    Taylor, in turn, said the university itself has “the worst overall graduation rate in the Big Ten. Only fifty-five percent of the university’s students get through in five years.” He also notes that General College does not grant diplomas. “So if there is a problem, it is because the rest of the university is dropping the ball–not us.”

    I do believe General College can be tweaked and improved. But Jones is right–it should not be used to let the rest of the U escape responsibility for recruiting and graduating underprepared students of color. Yet I also understand all too well why Dean Taylor has trust issues with a majority-run institution such as University of Minnesota, which, outside of General College, has an abysmal record supporting and graduating students of color. I fully appreciate his reluctance to see the college become a department; the stark reality is that in academia, a college carries far more clout than a college department. Ultimately, I want my son to study at an institution where he will receive the best possible support. That’s much more likely to happen at a U with a General College than a U without one.