The Rake Magazine

Month: October 2005

  • Maureen Dowd

    God, we hope so. At least as far as we’re concerned. This sprawling book is a random collection of observations about women and men, women without men, women chasing men, women chased by men, and men who aren’t worth the chase, unless it’s to hunt them down and exterminate them. It’s wonderfully sarcastic, beautifully reported, and engagingly told. And, even though Maureen Dowd is the most beautiful pundit you’ll ever see on Bill Maher, we love her for her brain. Really. Well, mostly.

    [Editor’s note: as you might have divined, this item was written by a man; but women around here admire Dowd as well.]

  • Galway Kinnell

    As a child, Galway Kinnell says, he was “shy to the point of being mutinous.” Today such a description might be applied to the adolescent writer of a brilliantly destructive computer virus. But Kinnell was born in 1927, which left him little choice but to become a poet. A highlight of his long career would have to be 1990, when his collection When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone was awarded both the Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. Kinnell is also prominent as an anti-war and human rights activist; his poems delve into the destructiveness of mankind toward nature and itself. “Nobody would write poetry if the world seemed perfect,” he has said, which is at least some small consolation. 1900 Nicollet Ave. S., Minneapolis; 612-871-7400; www.plymouth.org

  • Salman Rushdie

    Early this year, the 1989 fatwa calling for Rushdie’s death, originally issued by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini, was reaffirmed–and it’s not just an idle threat; more than fifty people around the world have been murdered because of connections to Rushdie. Nonetheless, the author occasionally risks a public appearance such as this one, at which he’ll read from his new novel, Shalimar the Clown, a tale of hatred and extremism in Kashmir. William T. Vollman, who’s borne witness to his share of hatred and extremism, has noted that “one must congratulate Rushdie for having made artistic capital out of his own suffering, for the years he spent under police protection, hunted by zealots, have been poured into the novel in ways which ring hideously true.” 1200 Marquette Ave., Minneapolis; 612-332-3421; www.ewestminster.org/forum.asp

  • Khaled Hosseini

    Khaled Hosseini gets up at four every morning to write, before he heads off to work as an internist in a private medical practice. During those wee hours, the good doctor works to resuscitate the lost world of pre-Taliban Afghanistan. Hosseini, a diplomat’s son, left his homeland when he was twelve, and grew up in Europe and the United States. His epic first novel, The Kite Runner (the first about Afghanistan to be written in English), tells the story of Amir, a wealthy boy who befriends the son of a servant. Amir’s privilege enables him to flee Afghanistan’s politically unstable landscape, but his conscience compels him to return years later, as an adult, and seek out his friend. 10500 Hillside Lane W., Minnetonka; 952-545-2424

  • Lynne Truss

    We run in circles where people can get into rather heated discussions about prepositions and commas and such. Luckily, we also understand that these topics don’t exactly rock the coolness meter for most. That’s why Lynne Truss’s sassy grammar manual, Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, caught our attention. It was fun! It was a million-plus seller! And not just copy editors were buying it! Apparently, Truss had so much fun fixing people’s language that she was moved to take on an even more ambitious project: improving their behavior. Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of the World Today, or Six Good Reasons to Stay Home and Bolt the Door finds Truss in a state of hilarious outrage over cell phones, litterbugs, and the countless forms of inconsiderateness that are acceptable in what passes for civil society these days.

    Did you encounter a certain boor or witness a specific incident that inspired you to write your new book?
    No, I’ve just been getting more sensitized in the past couple of years. I started noticing that people were behaving in public as if they were at home. I also started to feel nervous about speaking to strangers. And then I started to get very heated indeed about the way businesses are dumping all the work on their customers. My second reason for staying home and bolting the door (“Why am I the one doing this?”) is probably my most heartfelt.

    What do you Brits think of Americans’ manners?
    I think most Brits are impressed by the courtesy they encounter in America. However, there is a stereotype of selfish Americans abroad, who expect to be served first, and so on. A loud voice is interpreted as rude in Britain, so many American tourists are regarded as rude purely on account of their volume.

    Eats, Shoots & Leaves inspired people to take an interest in grammar. Do you think Talk to the Hand will improve their manners?
    It doesn’t have quite the same campaigning aims as Eats, Shoots & Leaves. I’m more interested in digging into the subject of rudeness, just to see where the trouble spots are. At the basis of the subject is simple morality, but there are layers of conditioning that are causing a lot of unnecessary trouble between people who have been brought up differently.

    What do you think would change things? Is there no going back?
    There is never any going back. In any case, people have been feeling similar “It’s all going to rack and ruin” despair since the beginning of time. Evidently, Socrates complained about disrespect in the young two and a half thousand years ago.

    You explain the joke behind the title of Eats, Shoots & Leaves in that book. Do you know the origin of the expression “talk to the hand”?
    The first knowledge I have of it is from the Jerry Springer Show.

    As rude as it is, there’s a certain nerviness to the expression that makes it almost fun to be a jerk. Do you think that’s contributing to general ill behavior–people are just having fun?
    Nearly all of British comedy at the moment is based on people being shockingly rude to each other. It is funny, and it’s probably always been funny. We used to have other strains as well–such as wit–but now it’s predominantly about people being cut down to size. Advertising aimed at younger people is always based on selfishness. Like, a woman will tell her husband that she can hear a noise outside. When he goes out, she shuts the door, runs upstairs, and luxuriates in the freshly laundered sheets, which are too good to share. Lots of things are too good to share. I find all that quite nasty.

    Do you take cell phone calls in public?
    Yes, and, like everybody, I instantly forget my surroundings. When I finish the call, I wonder briefly, “Did other people hear that?” and then I decide they probably didn’t.

  • Maximo Laura

    “Rug” is too humble a term for Maximo Laura’s works. If we encountered one of these woven beauties on the floor, we’d leap back and circle it as if it were electrified. Complex, colorful, and astonishingly detailed, they reward a lengthy consideration with surprises at every turn. Laura, a Peruvian, sets pre-Columbian iconography into modern arrangements of saturated colors and expressive shapes. Animals, illusory images, and even whole stories seem to have taken up residence within the alpaca fibers on his loom, resulting in creations that seem more organic than deliberate. These would be gorgeous paintings; the fact that they are weavings, with all of the forethought and mathematics this art requires, makes them phenomenal. Northrup King Building, 1500 Jackson St. N.E., Minneapolis; 651-430-1848; www.artandes.com

  • Visions of Nature: The World of Walter Anderson

    Beginning in 1947 and continuing until his death in 1965, Walter Inglis Anderson made regular twelve-mile trips from the Mississippi coast to a long barrier island in the Gulf of Mexico. He paddled solo in a small skiff, bringing along a few survival necessities and art supplies. On Horn Island, he lived out in the open, furiously painting and drawing and resting a mind tormented by schizophrenia. At night, he flipped his boat over and crawled underneath it to sleep. At the end of a few weeks or months, he turned the boat back to the mainland and returned to his family, carrying a stack of wildly emotional renderings of the birds, animals, vegetation, and elements that made up life in his rough camp. These journeys may have saved Anderson’s life. They also, it turns out, may have saved the memory of a lost place; the cluster of barrier islands that includes Horn Island was severely damaged by Hurricane Katrina. 10 Church St. S.E., Minneapolis; 612-624-7083; www.bellmuseum.org

  • Luis Gonzalez Palma

    The arresting work of this Guatemalan photographer recollects portraits of Native Americans that Edward S. Curtis captured during the twilight of their traditional tribal life. But Gonzalez Palma’s portraits of Mayan people in traditional dress only look historical. His keen eye for haunting expressions and arrangements, along with a distinctive Kodalith camera and gold-leaf printing technique, which he follows by embedding the piece in resin, give each of his photographs an ancient appearance. In this exhibit, the “Jerarquias de la Intimidad” (“Hierachies of Intimacy”) series is joined by a light-box installation titled “La Luz de la Mente” (“The Light of the Mind”), which is on view for the first time in the U.S. Featuring eight photographs of sculptures Palma created, which were based on the cloths draping Christ’s body in famous crucifixion paintings, a version of La Luz is also on view at the Latin American Pavilion of the Venice Biennale, which ends this month. 908 46th St. W., Minneapolis; 612-822-1722; www.weinstein-gallery.com

  • Villa America: American Moderns, 1900 – 1950

    Sure, it wasn’t until the 1950s that New York finally wrested the “art capital of the world” title away from Paris. But it’s not as if Jackson Pollock et al didn’t have help from their predecessors, especially before the Depression. That’s when innovators like Georgia O’Keeffe, Arthur Dove, Stuart Davis, Marsden Hartley, Gerald Murphy, and Morgan Russell laid the groundwork for that eventual transfer of power, not just by hanging out in New York, but also by consorting with artists throughout Europe. In fact, this exhibition, whose works come from the private collection of Myron Kunin, takes its name from Murphy’s 1924 painting and his home in southern France, where he hosted a number of fellow Yankees. The exhibit also includes works from the thirties and forties by relative homebodies like Paul Cadmus, Grant Wood, Reginald Marsh, Andrew Wyeth, Philip Guston, Romare Bearden, and Charles Sheeler, and a section of portraits, one of the strongest parts of the Kunin collection. 612-870-3131; www.artsmia.org

  • Renata Palubinskas: The March

    At Palubinskas’ debut show in the Cities last year, we heard one wag comment, “If I went off my medicine for a few days, I could paint that.” But just because you hallucinate, it doesn’t make you a painter. Palubinskas is a painter. Trained as an art conservator in her native Lithuania, her technique is spectacular in its skill and detail. Her obsession with unblinking young girls married with Bosch-like images of skeletal death and parading rats is rendered all the more eerie by her fully developed technique. The macabre world she creates is a welcome change to all who’ve been too long sedated by predictable art. 3413 44th St. W., Minneapolis; 612-339-1094; www.theissgallery.com