The Rake Magazine

Year: 2005

  • Letter from Modena >> Devil in the Details

    Apart from the usual stuff—saving four-leafed clovers, never opening an umbrella inside the house, throwing a broken mirror into a stream—Italians observe a mind-boggling array of superstitions. When I walk with Italians on the street, I notice many little tics and odd gestures. Most Italians have elaborate routines designed to bring good luck and avoid bad. As I add up all the possible pitfalls, I wonder how anyone can bear to step out of doors.

    If you don’t wear a scarf when it’s the least bit chilly, you will surely fall victim to the dreaded colpo della strega (the witch’s hit). You must watch where you walk. Some towns have an arco del cornuto (the cuckold arch). If you unwittingly pass under one, your lover will betray you. To undo the damage, you can try to squeeze between a couple carabinieri. These special policemen always walk in twos, reportedly one to read and one to write. (They are notoriously dim, according to the Italians.) If you walk between two nuns, however, it will have the opposite effect. You do not want to be on the receiving end of the Church’s holy anger. But your situation may not be entirely hopeless. You can find a cigarette butt still smoldering on the ground and stamp it out. This will transfer all the luck of the smoker to you. Also, accidentally stepping in dog poop is considered one of the luckiest omens of all. (Interestingly, this does not result in a tremendous rush to every little pile on the boulevard.)

    The Italian national pastime is not bocce ball. It is sitting around the dinner table for hours at a time. This is one of the most perilous things you can do. If you’re unmarried, never sit at a corner, unless you plan to stay single for the rest of your life. When clinking glasses, never cross arms with fellow toasters across the table, unless you have a death wish; making a cross means someone in the group is doomed. Never pour wine overhand with your wrist turned outward, or the recipient will be insulted. Also, make sure your guests’ glasses are filled before your own; however, you are allowed to sneak the last drop for yourself. This is an elaborate form of good luck that ensures romantic interest from guests with the opposite hair color. It goes on and on. Spilling the salt is bad; accidentally tipping over your wine glass is good.

    A recent survey reported that just under half of Italians believe in the evil eye. My students assure me those people are just gullible and scared. Then I notice some of the students carrying around a little pepperoncino (red hot chili pepper) to ward off evil. They tell me it’s just for fun and characteristic of southern Italy. It’s a little more difficult for them to hide it when they make the corna gesture. They stick out their pointer and little finger (like the American gesture for rock ’n’ roll) and vigorously point their fingers downward. This is a way to avoid being jinxed.

    I explain that, in America, we cross our fingers to prevent bad luck. The boys stand up and say, “In Italy, we touch our balls! Here, touch my balls for good luck! You must touch my balls!” I pass on the offer and should really change the subject, but I can’t help asking: “What do girls do?”

    The boys scramble to their feet, grab their pants, and yell, “Girls, too! They must toccate le mie palle!” Luckily, the principal doesn’t happen to be walking by the classroom. (That’s another thing. Just mentioning the name of the principal is bad luck and leads to failing a test.)

    The lesson has already digressed, so I ask my students to list all of their superstitions. Each requires commentary, however. Never wear purple on TV (“It’s true! No one ever dares risk it!”); if you get bat droppings on your head, your hair won’t grow (“It’s a myth, but I do always wear a hat at night!”); if you’re sweeping and you brush your shoes, you’ll never marry (“I insist my mamma always does the cleaning”).

    Now that they’ve explained their system of beliefs, I know why all the boys seem to be digging in their pockets with a look of fear each time they hear an ambulance or see a hearse go by. They don’t want to be next.

    In spite of myself, I’ve become more careful while living in Italy. I don’t pass under ladders, I never toss my hat on the bed, and I would never kill a spider (certainly not a seven-legged one). When Friday falls on the seventeenth of the month, I feel a new sense of dread. Like any true Italian, I don’t plan anything too important.
    —Eric Dregni

    Eric Dregni

  • 511 is a Joke

    Here’s something we never thought we’d say: We were very sad to hear about the end of traffic reports on the radio. Public radio station KBEM, which is owned and operated by Minneapolis Public Schools, was on the receiving end of a pink slip issued by the Minnesota Department of Transportation when the new year dawned. With MnDOT canceling its fifteen-year relationship, KBEM will lose nearly half of its operating budget. It’s unclear whether one of the country’s last, best jazz stations can continue—though we hear it is accepting your redoubled financial contributions as a matter of emergency life support.

    It was a happy marriage, or at least it seemed to be. We never heard KBEM and MnDOT argue. They were always respectful of each other, even if occasionally there were long, embarrassing silences. At a time when everyone agrees that transportation is one of the biggest challenges facing the state, MnDOT’s decision is breathtaking in its boldness, and could reverberate down to the next statewide election. After all, through KBEM, MnDOT was the state’s most visible (audible) agency and office. It may be the only voice of local government the middle-class taxpayer ever heard.

    The press release we received from MnDOT was a model of bureaucratic deflection. In its most telling lines, spokesman Kevin Gutknecht wrote, “access to travel information has grown markedly since MnDOT began its relationship with the station fifteen years ago. This fact contributed to the decision.” Gutknecht could probably use a lesson in cause and effect. If we understand him correctly, it is because the relationship worked so well that it must be ended.

    It is silly to claim that KBEM has plenty of viable substitutes today. Commercial traffic radio is the biggest joke in all of broadcasting. A typical traffic report on, say, KQRS, consists of a ten-second advertisement for foot powder pronounced over the throb of a helicopter, cut with five seconds condemning the Bloomington Strip—a daily riddle that is about as surprising as sunset and moonrise.

    We’re told we should now call 511 for up-to-the-minute traffic reports, or, alternatively, point our browser to 511.org. So far, we have been unimpressed with these second-string technologies, and given MnDOT’s motherly tut-tutting about safety on our highways, we wonder how it can, in good conscience, recommend using the phone or the laptop while we are driving. This will eventually convert the solution into the problem.

    We have to admit, too, that we have grown fond of KBEM’s programming and how well it came to play in traffic. Fifteen years ago, “jazz and traffic radio” seemed like a miserable billing. But our cold hearts were melted, first by “Bluegrass Saturday Morning,” and then by the whole goofy package, from “Engines of Our Ingenuity” to “String Theory” to “Brisas Latinas.” Even in the midst of the most heinous violin jazz or harmonica fusion, we smiled when we heard the reports from Tuttle Elementary, which had achieved a kind of rumpus-room legend all their own. It is a terrible irony that there are now fewer than a dozen full-time stations in the nation dedicated to jazz, the most purely American art form, and that another one may bite the dust.

    KBEM is not down and out, not yet, but neither are we sure what the road ahead looks like. If we had a spare half-million laying around the office, we’d be tempted to, you know, diversify our media holdings. But even in the best-case scenario for KBEM, the outlook is heartbreaking for anyone planning a sensible response to rush hour; it looks like we’re stuck with foot powder and the Bloomington Strip.

  • Thorstein Veblen and the New Barbarians

    In 1899, the maverick economist Thorstein Veblen proposed a unified field theory of American civilization. In his savage and oracular masterpiece, The Theory of the Leisure Class, Veblen theorized that wasteful extravagance isn’t a mere byproduct of consumer capitalism, but its underlying rationale. After all, without gross displays of wealth—“conspicuous consumption” was Veblen’s memorable term—how do the rich differentiate themselves from the democratic rabble? In contemporary terms, a purse is a place to keep Kleenex; a twelve-thousand-dollar Louis Vuitton handbag is conspicuous consumption. A Honda Civic is an automobile; a thirty-seven-thousand-dollar Lexus RX SUV … you get the picture.

    Given their obvious applicability to modern life, Veblen’s ideas about money and social class have never really gone out of fashion among progressive intellectuals. Lewis Mumford, for instance, compared Leisure Class to a stick of dynamite wrapped up to look like a stick of candy. John Kenneth Galbraith was a fan, as was Albert Einstein. Just this past December, a group of prominent thinkers, including Harper’s editor Lewis Lapham, held a symposium at New York’s New School for Social Research to discuss, in the Boston Globe’s words, how Veblen’s ideas might “help revive the Progressive tradition in the age of NASDAQ, branding, and bling-bling.”

    Veblen’s progressive legacy is also the subject of the recent Thorstein Veblen and the American Way of Life, by Louis Patsouras, a history professor at Kent State University. “[W]hy did Veblen, from a relatively affluent immigrant family, who then scaled the heights of academia, become a socialist?” Patsouras writes. “Some tentative answers: His rapid upward social mobility reinforced his outsider immigrant awareness, undoubtedly heightened by his encounter in academia with the Yankee upper-class academic elite, the contrast and attendant tensions between his life situation and theirs being more than obvious.”

    In other words, Veblen was not just a socialist—he was a perpetual misfit. While Thorstein Veblen and the American Way of Life is a primer on Veblen’s socialist tendencies, it’s rather a shame that it doesn’t include a biographical sketch of its subject, since Veblen was such an endearingly eccentric figure. A lazy, deeply disorderly man, he was caricatured by no less a snob than H.L. Mencken as “Prof. Dr.”—the stereotypical befuddled professor. As a teacher at the University of Chicago and Stanford University, Veblen delivered his lectures in an inaudible mumble. He was, according to his earliest biographer, Joseph Dorfman, an incurable philanderer who lost at least two academic jobs through his inability to keep his hands off his colleagues’ wives. He proposed making clothing out of paper. Also, Veblen hated dogs.

    “He is the filthiest of the domestic animals in his person and the nastiest in his habits,” Veblen writes in a typically acidic passage from Leisure Class. “For this he makes up in a servile, fawning attitude toward his master, and a readiness to inflict damage and discomfort on all else. The dog, then, commends himself to our favor by affording play to our propensity for mastery.”

    And he hated shaving: “There has of late years been some slight recrudescence of the shaven face in polite society.”

    And sports: “The addiction to sports, therefore, in a peculiar degree marks an arrested development of the man’s moral nature.”

    So how did a nice Norwegian boy from Minnesota turn into such a misanthrope—indeed, the most caustic grump of his age? In fact, the place where Veblen grew up, a modest farmstead just outside the southern Minnesota town of Nerstrand, may have had a great deal to do with the formation of his idiosyncratic views. The rural Midwest was, in Veblen’s time, awash in radical Populism. Only three years before the appearance of Leisure Class, William Jennings Bryant had delivered his famous “Cross of Gold” speech to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. And a few decades earlier, a Minnesota farmer had founded the Grange to fight against the moneyed interests of the Gilded Age. Veblen seems to have internalized certain aspects of his home state’s character: the ornery independent streak of sod-busting pioneers, along with a crippling sense of inferiority. The latter certainly had something to do with Veblen’s disdain for showy displays of wealth. One has to be pretty alienated, after all, to imagine, as Veblen did, that high society is nothing more than a grotesque masque.

    Veblen regarded the rich as Charles Darwin regarded Galapagos tortoises: They were a faintly ridiculous foreign species lost in time. In Veblen’s view, the idle rich of the Gilded Age weren’t just ludicrous, they were less evolved. Their brand of laissez-faire capitalism, he argued, was a residue of our barbarian heritage. All the trappings of wealth were signifiers of antiquity; fancy clothes, servants, and racehorses merely replaced the warring and slave-owning that had distinguished the ruling elite in pre-civilized times. This tendency to define economic class in terms of taste in material goods Veblen called “invidious comparison.” Today, it is Lexus and Louis Vuitton that signify your standing. Veblen understood, though, that this distinction wasn’t expressed only in luxury goods; the barbarian elite also emulated the poor—the only other idle social class—by adopting their “archaically simple” tastes. This is especially true today in the retail marketplace. A French peasant pedestal creamer; shade-grown organic Angolan coffee; a climbing vacation in Nepal: All fit Veblen’s definition of “pecuniary emulation” because they mimic rustic simplicity while in fact costing an arm and a leg. To Veblen, these displays of wealth and waste amounted to a “symbolic pantomime.” The rich who indulged in this parade of uselessness were the evolutionary equivalent of extravagantly plumed flightless birds.

    Not that you’d really get any of this from reading Thorstein Veblen and the American Way of Life, which, weirdly, is about neither Thorstein Veblen nor the American way of life. Rather, Patsouras spends the majority of his time broadly outlining the history of socialism—a worthy undertaking, perhaps, but one that sheds little light on Veblen or his ideas. And Patsouras’s scholarly authority is somewhat undercut by an embarrassment of misspellings and grammatical errors. Veblen, who pilloried academia for its lack of rigor and stultifying atmosphere, would not have approved.

    Moreover, Patsouras’s program may be fundamentally flawed. What he’s attempting in Thorstein Veblen and the American Way of Life is, essentially, to draft Veblen for Team Marx. But while Veblen may have expressed sympathy for the Bolsheviks in Russia, saying he was a Marxist is sort of like claiming Jesus was a Republican. He seems far too much the intellectual iconoclast to go in for Marxism’s dogmatic pieties. Indeed, in 1906, Veblen even wrote that “the Marxian system is not only not tenable, but it is not even intelligible.”

    Veblen’s significance may lie neither in his memorable coinages nor his politics. Thorstein Veblen in the Twenty-First Class, an essay collection published to mark the centenary of Leisure Class, argues that the economist’s greatest contribution was inaugurating the field now known as cultural studies. Prior to Veblen, economists tended to view individuals as rationally self-interested actors; Veblen, however, understood that consumerism was a sort of pathology, a species of madness. His genius lay in recognizing the complicated, emotionally fraught relationships we have with our cars and our shoes, our alma maters and our lawns, with all of our stuff. But Veblen’s innovation was less in his ideas about materialism and culture than in his attitude toward it—roughly, that of a pith-helmeted anthropologist studying the strange rituals of the
    natives. Leisure Class became a model for a certain style of sociological inquiry: the field guide to American civilization.

    Take, for example, much of the work of David Brooks, the New York Times columnist. Generally speaking, he is the sort of conservative liberals can imagine having over for supper. He’s not screechy or reactionary. Plus, he wears dorky glasses and has the tonsure of a small-college professor. Recently, Brooks has had a great deal to say about the reported culture rift between “red” and “blue” states. His latest book, On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense, extols the sensible utopianism of America’s exurbs. But it was his 1999 book Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There, a breezy and amusing survey of what the author calls America’s “meritocrats,” that basically put him on the map, pundit-wise. It might even be fair to call him the Veblen of the New Economy—which is to say, a sham Veblen.

    Brooks’s Veblenesque approach is apparent from his introduction to Bobos. “The idea,” he writes, “is to get at the essence of cultural patterns, getting the flavor of the times without trying to pin it down with meticulous exactitude.” Like an intrepid naturalist venturing upriver, Brooks goes on to search American culture for signs of a new Mandarin elite, the Bobos, or “Bohemian bourgeoisie.” He finds evidence of their habitations and rituals in the New York Times nuptials section, with its accretion of Ivy League brainpower and old money; in an Anthropologie store in Wayne, Pennsylvania; in the wide availability of lattes in Vermont. Describing what he calls this elite’s “code of financial correctness,” Brooks writes, “Cultivated people are repelled by the idea of keeping up with the Joneses. Nothing is more disreputable than competing with your neighbors by trying to more effectively mimic the style of the social class just above you. Instead, as members of the educated class, you reject status symbols in order to raise your status with your equally cultivated peers. Everything about you might be slightly more casual than your neighbor. Your furnishings must be slightly more peasanty. Your lives should have a greater patina of simplicity.” What Brooks is describing is a twisty, irony-laced form of invidious comparison—that is, pecuniary emulation by way of archaic simplicity.

    Like Veblen, Brooks proposes a theory of American social class based on consumer culture. In his view, the Bobos aren’t just a new permutation of the old class pantomime, but a new species of elite, taxonomically speaking. But just because someone affects democratic tastes doesn’t mean he isn’t also part of the old-school hereditary aristocracy (Hello? John Kerry and George W. Bush?). As Thomas Frank asserts in What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, another popular recent work of anthro-punditry indebted to Veblen, Brooks manages to discuss the culture of wealth—the pantomime—without ever substantially discussing wealth itself, still the sine qua non of any elite. This disengagement of hard economics from the discussion of social class in America also owes a great deal to Veblen. Brooks is no Veblen, however: Even a century later, Leisure Class makes the musings of today’s punditry seems as insubstantial as the froth from one of those Vermont lattes.

    Of course, if you want to see real proof of the currency of Veblen’s ideas, you shouldn’t be reading books; you should be watching TV. Those commercials urging you to express your rugged individualism by buying a luxury sedan? That’s invidious comparison. Fawning coverage of the lifestyles of celebrities and swashbuckling capitalists? There’s your leisure class. And, as a postmodern spin on Veblen’s symbolic pantomime, consider The Apprentice, a program in which a make-believe Robber Baron turns the social-Darwinian business world into a limp burlesque. I wonder if Veblen himself could have invented a more sublime illustration of the self-parodying barbarian class than The Donald.

  • You Can’t Take It With You

    Last year, my kumquat and I deemed mid-February a good time to soak it up in South Beach. Sunshine, not booze. At 8 A.M., he was off golfing, while I was setting up my kit on the pure white shingle (had I been naked I would have been perfectly camouflaged), lapped by azure waves. By 8:15, I was painfully aware of two things: sunburn and my one-piece suit. Never mind that this was a sexy one-piece suit, cut in, cut out, cut up—I might as well have been wearing a burqa. Casting my eyes up and down that long, long strip of sand, I took in equally vast proportions of exposed flesh. Regardless of shape, age (including a fair number of people I could call old), gender, or sexual orientation, there was not one single sun worshipper wearing even half the amount of fabric I was. Triangles the size of Doritos held together by string was the uniform in this school. Not just bikinis, itty bitty bikinis. Bikinettes. I felt like a jigging nun. I was waiting outside a cheap beach shop at the opening bell, where I charged in, grabbed some shreds of fabric off the rack, and headed for the checkout without trying them on. I knew how I would look. I would look like everyone else. I spent a surprisingly comfortable week as a hedonist, considering I’m suspicious of hedonism, not to mention public nudity. And my ass was hanging out.

    The kicker to this story comes later that year, when warm weather finally made it up to Minnesota. I donned my snack-sized suit and decamped to my favorite beach on the St. Croix. Exposed? You have never seen the like. Mothers were shielding their children and even beach-blanket high-school chicks were like, “ho.” That suit now lives in exile, in the bottom of my lingerie drawer.

    When I vacation, I like to sponge up the local culture, go native, do as the Romans do. It takes only about twenty-six hours before I’ve acquired some local color: an accent, crawfish étouffé, a tattoo, chaps. This is not whimsy; it’s pragmatism. Through exhaustive and often painful trial and error, I’ve learned that most regionally specific fashion statements don’t travel well. “You can’t take it with you” is not about death; it’s about lavender bustiers. To wit: In South Beach, if your naughty bits are covered, you are dressed for any occasion up to and including the opera. But what passes for body-conscious Italian swank in South Beach is full-on skank in Minnesota. Allow me to once again raise the curtain of decency for the sake of enlightenment.

    New York City is a dressed-up kind of place, so I thought I’d debut at a fashion magazine event in an elegant, Oval Roomish wool skirt, sling-back pumps, foundations, the whole nine yards. Imagine my pique when one Vassar graduate after another swanned into the reception in jeans, hipbones, Chanel jackets (knockoffs, I like to think), and the kind of shoes that would be comfortable if you had really, really, really pointy feet. I was off by a dowdiness factor of two, at least, and spent a fair amount of the afternoon behind a potted palm nursing some bitterness and a cocktail. Big Apple Do’s and Don’ts gleaned from the incident include: Do strive for a certain severity via rigorous accessory editing or thin lips, whichever comes easiest. Do go for a narrow silhouette but nothing that would ever suggest that you have actual body parts such as elbows or back fat (how gauche). Do develop an interest in East Asian art or Sanskrit, or at the very least wear rectangular glasses. Don’t smile. It smacks of effort.

    The following day in New York turned out to be twenty degrees below cold, to my surprise, so I emptied my suitcase and wore it all at once—skirts, pants, my I (HEART) NY T-shirt, sweaters, three or four pairs of underpants, topped off with this grotty argyle vest my daughters call “Mr. Rogers” and a table runner I’d bought, worn as a scarf. I was virtually indistinguishable from everyone else in the Village and felt very good and warm. Thrilled by my accidental discovery of a look I will generously call “bohemian,” I reprised the ensemble in the MinneApple and earned fifty cents from a woman in the restroom of the Dain Bosworth building, who took me for an attendant. She was wearing jeans, a Chanel knockoff, thin lips and really, really, really pointy shoes.

    Now, let’s consider the Southwest. It has an oddly narrow definition of style––all cowboy, all the time. Bostonians don’t go around in Pilgrim duds; Chicagoans are not pinstriped and armed (at least not visibly); nuns don’t even wear habits anymore. Why can’t Southwesterners embrace anything that doesn’t go with spurs? I think they’re xenophobic, that’s why. And in a petty gesture that undoubtedly has the boots-and-bonnets industry in a snit, I have banished cowboy boots from my sartorial vernacular. This gambit has nothing to do with an incident involving a pair of aggressively authentic Western boots purchased in Arizona and brought across state lines, a lone particle of ice, my pride, and an appreciative audience of at least three hundred and fifty hurrying, rubber-soled commuters.

    Because this time of year so many Twin Citians leave the I-494/694 circle of love for floating holidays, bounding up and down the gangplank from ship to shore and buffet line to buffet line, it’s appropriate to say a word about cruisewear. Cruisewear designers, inspired by the vivid painted facades of old Kingston town and all that tropical fruit, outdo themselves with remarkably evocative results: The victim looks as big as a house, tilted, and about twelve hours from spoilage. As a corollary to my sordid swimsuit tale, bear in mind that anything louder than taupe in your hometown is likely to be run up a flagpole.

    While we’re on the subject of looks that don’t translate north of Juarez, let me address cornrowed hair. Every spring finds me wedged into an economy-class seat on a no-frills airline, murmuring a fervent prayer that goes something like, “Please, God, move in mysterious ways so that the approaching toasted coed in the Senior Frog T-shirt that’s three sizes too small, who is quietly hiccupping, who emits a strong scent of Red Bull and tequila when the plane’s ventilation shuts off, whose gray-white scalp is showing between her cornrows in a way that makes me think of a post-nuclear disaster or lutefisk, whose beads at the end of those Methuselah braids rattle like a witch doctor every time she turns around to snort at her friend and tell her to shut up—please let her not take the seat next to me.” Later, when the freshly raked head has lolled over onto my shoulder and the naked scalp is so close I can see the dark roots emerging from each individual follicle, I intone, “Thank you, Jesus, for showing me that there are others who need this souvenir sombrero more than I do.”

  • to the Editor

    HARD-SCRABBLE LIFE
    In “War of Words” [the Rakish Angle, January], Tim Bewer is kind enough to cover the National Scrabble Association’s activities here in the Twin Cities, as well as mention the All-Stars tourney in Rhode Island, which was also on ESPN, and finally he acknowledges that two Scrabble-oriented movies are soon coming out of Hollywood. Though I am pleased that big fish like these enjoy our populist game, it would have been nice if one mention, one teensy, eensy mention, had been reserved for a true “Secret of the City,” an actual bit of “Scrabble Underground” lore. I am, of course, referring to the late night Scrabble sensation on Minneapolis cable access: Totally Scrabble Tuesday. The show airs on the Minneapolis Television Network’s channel 17 at 11 A.M., but I forget on which day of the week. Viewers call in as “Team Minneapolis” and play their tiles (one play per call) against the host. The callers are good and bad at the game (also: mediocre, first timers, prank callers, and wrong numbers). As play proceeds, there is casual banter. Families, college dorm dwellers, businesspeople, stoners, Ph.D. candidates, and racists call in, without being screened. Frequently, their efforts would upset any NSA purist. Finding the Team Minneapolis mantle too vague, viewer-players sometimes subclassify themselves. For example, Team Fresh frequently calls in, as does Team Fooligan, Team Tony Danza, Team Tour de Bong, Team Grove Street, and Team Lick My Nipples. The show is sometimes fun, often boring, and it is beset by technical difficulties. Despite its crappiness, there are always participants—secret, underground, off-the-grid, and local participants. I guess now would be a good time for me to reveal that I am the host of Totally Scrabble Tuesday, which makes this entire letter a shameless self-promotion. I do appreciate it when anyone writes about this game, and it certainly has taken hold in Minneapolis. I saw people playing Scrabble at 1:30 A.M. at the Red Dragon a few weeks ago.
    Hamil Griffin-Cassidy
    Minneapolis

    BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU
    ASK FOR, STUART
    I faithfully read Stuart Greene’s column [Sex & the Married Man] every month, and I just have to ask: Stuart, do you have any cute single friends who aren’t married, engaged, or have a girlfriend? I swear, I want to meet someone in this town who can communicate. Yeah, I just might need to find myself a writer. I’ve lived in the Twin Cities for three years now and I’m still getting used to that passive-aggressive “Minnesota Nice” stuff—and most of the time my confusion of that very thing is what gets me in trouble. I am that gal who tells my man that I want to show him a trick on my “beautiful instrument.” Oddly enough, it usually freaks him out, at least a little bit. The average Minnesota man, in my experience, is too proud to admit he doesn’t necessarily know what turns me on. However, as any woman will tell you, that thing that made your last girlfriend scream at the top of her lungs just isn’t quite right for your current girlfriend. I totally agree that women really should take a more active role in their own physical happiness, but please, could you introduce me to someone who can appreciate that in a woman?

    RedLin S. Murphy
    Minneapolis

    WE REPORTED, YOU DECIDED
    Ms. Guimond’s beef (“Stay Tuned,” the Rakish Angle, January) doesn’t seem to be with the ubiquity of televisions in public places, but that some of these televisions—gasp—are tuned in to Fox News. Even more horrible in her eyes is that nobody is complaining. Jesusland Bible-beaters are not the only fans of Fox News. It is possible that the majority of workers in a politically diverse office building in a liberal downtown don’t automatically retch and convulse at the sight of Shepard Smith like she would want them to—and it’s not the end of the world.
    Gentry Boeckel
    St. Paul

    FLATTERY GETS YOU
    EVERYWHERE—WELL, AT LEAST
    IT GETS YOU ON THIS PAGE
    I am highly impressed with your magazine and website. You are a hard-working, honest, and ethical publication that ferrets out breaking news. MPR had a diddy on Eric Utne this morning. You beat them to the punch there. I recommend you to anyone when the occasion arises.

    Killairne Jewell
    St. Paul

    THIS STALL ALREADY IN USE
    I am writing in response to Colin Covert’s piece, “Rated ‘R’ for Dirty Situations” [the Rakish Angle, January]. First off, I was impressed to learn from the article that Jon Thompson, founder of Restroom Ratings, is the son of a plumber. I have often wondered where his inspiration came from. Secondly, as minor as it may seem, I cannot resist the temptation to correct a few factual errors in the article. The outhouse with the baby birds is in Lyon’s Park in Taylors Falls, not Interstate State Park. I know this because I wrote the review. One of my reviews (Mankato Wal-Mart) was also quoted without being credited. To be fair, it was not credited on the Restroom Reviews website, either, so Covert may not have thought to inquire about the review’s origin. Some of the reviews on the site are credited and some aren’t. Regarding the gender disparity concern, Covert should not assume that men’s-room reviews far outnumber women’s. On my review visits, I bring my girlfriend and she always checks the ladies’ room, assuming there is one. Often, a unisex restroom is available for either sex. My review is a summary that applies to both men’s and women’s unless otherwise noted. Also, Covert forgot to mention Jon Thompson’s original, top-notch artwork that adorns many of the feature reviews. Anyway, thanks so much for highlighting the public service work of the Restroom Ratings website. There are not many people who are willing to walk into a public bathroom with a camera. I’m proud of the work Jon has done, his ability to follow through on his vision, and having the chance to personally contribute to it.

    Justin Teerlinck
    St. Paul

  • No Matter How You Slice It

    I love food. I’m a food lover. Maybe the infatuation started when I was bartending to put myself through school; I always seemed to end up with the kitchen guys at 2 a.m., cooking up a mess of eggs and leftovers. But my real journey didn’t start until I fell in love with a chef––now my husband––over a sandwich.

    People had cooked for me before, and I had made dinners for dates in the past, but then came along a tall, boyish man who laughed at all of my stupid jokes. One day, while working the same shift, he offered to make me lunch. It has come to be known as The Sandwich, that divine combination of salami, red peppers, and provolone that he threw between slices of focaccia that day. Those ingredients created some kind of alchemy: after one bite I was smitten with this green-eyed kitchen guy, tossing knives and flipping pans in his starched whites. From that point on, food and love intertwined and have taken me all over the world, from Paris to Bangkok. And yet over the years, and through all the amazing food I’ve eaten, it is still a sandwich that truly quickens my heart.

    That may well be because no matter where you travel, there’s a sandwich to suit your need for simple yet tasty sustenance. Crusty and flavorful bahn mi in Vietnam; Mexico’s filling and voluptuous tortas; a smorgasbord of open-faced delights in Denmark; the injera of Ethiopia, cradling spicy morsels. It’s clear that the universal language of good eating is sandwich.

    Even though sandwiches, like love, are a very personal matter—I don’t tell you whom to date, you don’t tell me what to put on my sandwich—the beautiful thing is that with so many possibilities, no one need be left out. Whether you’re a panini buff, a muffuletta fan, or a Monte Cristo or croque monsieur aficionado, you may well be seated with a po’boy, a hoagie, a Hot Brown, or classic submarine sandwich-eater, and life will be richer for it. If you’re craving something greasy (see hot Italian dago) or going on a health binge (see pita pocket), there is a sandwich that satisfies. For some people, what matters the most is the type of bread (crusty, soft, dense, airy, one slice or two); for others it’s the filling, from the unusual and fancy to something as simple and wholesome as the beloved PB&J, that makes the perfect sandwich.

    Since we’re basically talking about those two elements, bread and fillings, what were these things before they came to be known as sand-wiches? The idea of eating saucy beef off of a hunk of bread goes back at least to the Middle Ages, when the hard, stale slices were called trenchers. It appears that a portable meal of bread and meat was sold on the streets of England as early as the sixteenth century. But it wasn’t until John Montague (1718–1792), the Fourth Earl of Sandwich, began spending late nights at the card table and ordering his valet to bring him salty beef tucked between bread slices, that fashionable people started ordering “the same as Sandwich.”

    While the City of Brotherly Love might claim that its Philly cheese steak makes it the sandwich capital of the U.S., every city has rewards for the sandwich seeker, and it’s time to share the love. The sandwich most on my mind lately has been a giant roast beef number on the menu at Maverick’s (1746 Lexington Ave., Roseville; 651-488-1788). There’s no ambience, and there’s no need. Not long after grabbing this Kaiser roll and gazing upon its piles of soft, pink, thinly sliced beef, you’ll be looking at nothing but your empty plate, wondering if you should get another for the road.

    For pastrami, the recently opened Louie’s Habit (1179 E. Wayzata Blvd., Wayzata; 952-249-7700) is turning out a fantastic, New York-style thick-cut version that is rich and spicy and falls apart in the dense rye bread. Unfortunately, Louie’s has yet to get my complete order correct, but I forgive them, as would any true pastrami addict.

    It’s impossible to consider the gyro, with its lamb/beef combo that gets vertically roasted, without also accounting for the tzatziki sauce, which makes this sandwich so alluringly tangy and so messy at the same time. Gardens of Salonica (19 Fifth St. N.E., Minneapolis; 612-378-0611) turns out the Twin Cities’ best, partly because it’s drenched in the tangy cucumber sauce. If you’re craving a gyro on the run, Dino’s version (3355 Plymouth Blvd., Plymouth; 763-553-2040; and other metro locations) is good enough that you probably won’t mind if you stain your shirt as you drive.

    The Mexican torta can be an after-bar savior or late-night companion. The Manny’s Special at Manny’s Tortas (2700 E. Lake St., Minneapolis; 612-728-1778) is distinguished by its zippy chipotle mayo, generous piles of beef, ham, and Swiss, and wealth of toppings, including fresh avocado, chorizo, and jalapenos. Just around the corner, Taqueria La Hacienda (1515 E. Lake St., Minneapolis; 612-728-5424) throws together an al pastor alambre that might as well be a hot pork, bacon, onion, and cheese gift from the Hangover Gods.

    When it’s a barbeque pork sandwich you want, you go see Scotty. Tucked into unassuming digs in South Minneapolis, Scott Ja Mama’s (3 W. Diamond Lake Rd., Minneapolis; 612-823-4450) kicks out a killer version soaked with a zesty-sweet sauce that renders the bread defenseless. But call ahead—there are only two seats (and no sandwiches on the weekends).

    When the mood for something more upscale strikes, go for the grilled panini at the La Brea Bakery kiosk in Marshall Field’s at Southdale (Sixty-Sixth Street and France Avenue, Edina; 952-924-6600), the newest surprise on the scene. This outpost of Nancy Silverton’s Los Angeles bakery, which is justifiably famous for its sandwich offerings, is sure to be the best quick-grab sandwich around. Having sampled a beauty like the grilled turkey and prosciutto with provolone, bitter greens, and fried sage, all I’ll say is: More, please!

    Of course, this is just a smattering of the outstanding sandwiches out there in the larger world, and it doesn’t even scratch at the surface of possibilities that live in every kitchen. Think how limited life would be if we were stuck singing the same old turkey-with-lettuce/tomato/mayo chorus every day! It doesn’t take much to be a true sandwich artist—you need merely be a hungry and resourceful person who knows what you like. Being a bit of a risk-taker helps, too: Throw in some pieces of chorizo. Hold the mayo and use pesto instead. Take a few minutes to sauté mushrooms. Search out the most pungent piece of Wensleydale cheese you can find. After all, if something doesn’t seem to be working (too many pickles? sprouts gone wrong?), you can simply remove the offensive ingredient and continue with your delicious meal. That’s the beauty of sandwich building. Like love, it’s about working out the kinks.

    The Sandwich

    If your beloved is a kitchen guy like mine, then you know that Valentine’s Day is a working day—which usually means you will be curling up with a nice sandwich that evening. So it might as well be The Sandwich:

    Slice a loaf of focaccia in half; slather bottom half with aioli (garlic mayonnaise). Layer Italian meats, including mortadella, capicolla, and salami. On top of that, lay roasted red and yellow peppers. Next, place medium slices of provolone cheese to cover. Then scatter chopped and drained pepperoncini and thinly sliced red onion. Fold thin slices of prosciutto on top and douse the whole thing with herbed vinaigrette. Replace the top of the loaf and place on top rack of hot oven (about 400 degrees) for no more than a minute. Slice, eat, do laundry.

  • Honey, You Married a Pervert

    My buddy Ben saw an advertisement for a little boutique that specializes in sex toys for smart women—a small, independent shop owned and operated by women. It got him thinking. He told me it made him want to buy something for his wife, Val, as a surprise for their anniversary. Ben started to sort of drop hints, trying to figure out if Val would be into this. As far as he knew, Val has never had any little “marital aids”—so his assumption was that she would be horrified by the idea.

    He was exactly right. When he jokingly said he thought it would be fun to buy her a vibrator, Val looked at him like he was a first-class pervert. Ben could not detect the slightest hint that she was putting him on for the sake of modesty, and that made him a little sad. Apparently, she sensed that Ben was half-serious, and said, “Honey, I want the real thing. You’re enough for me.” That’s sweet, of course, but maybe too sweet. Indeed, Ben told me he is afraid he married a puritan. He wishes Val could allow herself to be a little less orthodox about their love life—or at least be open to new ideas. How do you know you like something unless you try it? They still have fun in the sack, sure, but their repertoire is limited to a standard routine—which, he says, gets exercised less and less frequently. Yes, it’s the dread disease that one of my readers likes to call “SMBD”—sudden marital bed death.

    Yet what’s interesting is that we horny married men tend to assume that Val is not being honest. Why do we insist that she is not interested in sex toys because of some kind of politically correct hang-up or sheer embarrassment? If I am serious when I say married couples should allow themselves the freedom to be whoever they want to be, then I must be prepared for the possibility that there are women who don’t want to be, well, all that sexy. That is, they don’t have much need for sex, or they have vanilla tastes in bed, and that’s that. At some point, we simply have to accept our lover’s words at face value. If Val does not want a vibrator, it is possible that she really does not want one. Then Ben will have to examine why it is such a big deal to him. Who knows—maybe he wants a vibrator, and is merely projecting his desire.

    Part of this depressing, deterministic view comes from having seen the recent film about Alfred Kinsey, the legendary sex researcher. Kinsey’s groundbreaking work did two things: It proved that sexual variety—deviance, if you’re a fundamentalist preacher—was normal, or at least a significant, measurable phenomenon. Second, it categorized and quantified this variety in a scientific way. This is slightly depressing, because it suggests that even sex, one of the most transcendental and mysterious facets of life, is subject to a certain scientific repeatability. We know, but would prefer not to believe, that we have patterns and routines that we probably will never escape. Paradoxically, hardcore Bible-bangers and lefty women’s libbers can agree on loving to hate Alfred Kinsey for robbing sex of its divine spark, and seeming to legitimate a lot of uncomfortable fetishes and perversions.

    And yet, the choice is, as ever, between what we are and how we see ourselves. Between reality and perception. If Val does not see herself as a person who wants to use a vibrator, what does that really say about her? Apparently, she falls into a Kinseyan category (women who do not wish to use vibrators). Should she feel reassured that there are others like her, or upset that there are so many others unlike her? (I suppose it depends on how she feels about other women using vibrators.)

    So, does Val fall into the category of the radically normal, unexperimental women who begrudge their sexuality, just because she claims not to be interested in sex toys? Kinsey’s work has been so heavily politicized in the past fifty years that we forget: It is possible to strip sexual research of its heavy moral baggage, invariably projected onto it by the prudish and the frigid and the enraged. It is possible to actually read it in a merely descriptive sense, in a way that celebrates diversity in human sexual behavior. But does that automatically belittle those who are perfectly happy with missionary position, lights turned out, once a week? Maybe repression is a healthy, normal choice. What would Kinsey think?

  • Better Off Without Him?

    My dear friend Julie wants to marry Louis, our nearly house-trained Yorkie-Poo puppy. A lot of people might think it’s offbeat and even disturbing that Julie imagines matrimony with a small, furry dog, who, charming though he may be, has certain disgusting habits, like snacking on my nephew’s dirty diapers.

    Mostly, I’m used to the oddity of Julie’s passion, and I trust that when she says “marry,” she’s exaggerating. Still, I cringed a little when she got super-friendly with Louis in front of the nice, normal neighbor couple. Their laughter at the spectacle of “girl loves dog” bordered on nervous hysteria. But the guy who gets most uptight about Julie’s puppy love is her boyfriend, Tony. Julie says Tony is jealous of Louis. More likely, he’s simply embarrassed about being edged out by a poofy fella with bad breath and an excessively hairy back.

    Either way, I’m not about to tell Tony—or Julie, for that matter—that, according to a 2002 study conducted at the State University of New York at Buffalo, an animal friend often provides more comfort than a spouse. Researchers measured signs of stress, such as spikes in blood pressure, while study participants performed mental math or held their hands in ice water. People completed the tasks alone, with a spouse, with a friend, or with a pet, and those with pets fared best. Meanwhile, numerous studies have shown that the mere presence of domesticated animals can help lower blood pressure and cholesterol levels, raise survival chances after a heart attack, and mitigate loneliness and depression.

    Spouses, on the other hand, offer no such proven benefits. Sure, married people are consistently healthier and happier than their single counterparts, and are less likely to be smokers, heavy drinkers, or be plagued with headaches or psychological problems. But that, say researchers, is probably because married people started out happier, healthier, and more content than others who don’t marry. A Michigan State University psychologist synthesized fifteen years of interviews conducted with twenty-four thousand Germans and concluded that marriage itself doesn’t make people the slightest bit happier. Well, at least not in the long haul. Their self-reported happiness scores, on a scale of one to ten, rose slightly from 7.28 to 7.56 immediately after the vows, but by the second anniversary, they were right back down to their starting points.

    I read all about this research on pets and marriage and the science of happiness in the recent “Mind and Body” special issue of Time. (That’s one of many magazines Jon inexplicably signed up for the last time someone came to the door, which was right after the sixty-pound box of grapefruit arrived, sold by a previous door-knocker. Grapefruit smoothies leave a lot to be desired). I was reading all this about how Julie would probably be better off adopting a dog than marrying a man a mere forty-eight hours after Jon and I finalized reservations on a place for our wedding this summer. Wouldn’t you know. I’m always a beat behind.

    Oh, well. I’m marrying him anyway, even if he continues to order grapefruit. Because I’m not sure that marriage is, in the end, supposed to have a whole lot to do with happiness. It’s about the profound comfort of trusting someone to put up with you despite the fact that you are not a dog, that you are unfortunately much more complicated and ornery than a dog, and frequently less adorable. This open-eyed love is in contrast to that of Louis, who quite plainly loves us because he doesn’t know any better.

    So we’ll have a homemade ceremony in Duluth, at Brighton Beach on Lake Superior. We went there years ago, when both of us were gasping through the first year of marital break-up. Jon had never been to the North Shore, and I brought him there because it has always been a healing place for me. But that particular early winter day was wickedly cold and windy. Sharp rain pelted our faces, and the lake was dark and roiling. The whole scene matched the landscape of our lives exactly, yet the moody darkness held a strange peace. We ventured out on the rocks together, but the freezing wind and rain drove me back to the shelter of the car. Jon stayed out there on the jagged shore for a long while. I thought maybe he was soaking in the desolation, merging his personal rawness with the brutality of the elements. But I was wrong. Later, much later, Jon told me that what he’d experienced out there in the howling wind and crashing waves was an unbidden moment of grace. He’d looked out at that dark horizon and seen, to his surprise, an open space for possibility. The space filled up with a picture, mottled through the rain, of us spending our lives together, of our enduring. And now we’re returning, not with hopes of unbridled happiness, but of enduring grace, just grace.

  • Ten Steps to Increased Anxiety!

    Hello, everyone. My name is Colleen and I am a women’s magazine addict. I am addicted not to Harper’s Bazaar, not to Vogue, but to the kind of women’s magazines that are displayed at the checkout lanes of your mid-range grocery store chains. It’s embarrassing, but it’s true. Whether I’m on the Stairmaster at the gym, or idling in the dentist’s waiting room, I hypnotically reach for the periodicals whose headlines promise to teach me how to “Organize My Life Once and for All!” and lose pounds fast on the grapefruit diet. You know—the types of magazines that feature Kelly Ripa on their covers. I’ve never seen the show she hosts, never heard her speak. But I know who she is. Because of women’s magazines, I know that Kelly Ripa has two high-profile jobs, a hunky Hispanic soap-star husband, and lots of children. And perfect skin.

    Never mind that I don’t really need to know any of this trivia; I read it anyway. And then I can’t find the delete button for it in my brain. Useful information, like basic math skills and cursive writing, seems to vanish, perhaps obliterated by the onslaught of Kelly Ripa Fun Facts. Until someone over at the Mayo Clinic invents a neurological defragmenter, I will stockpile celebrity minutiae in my brain, and I fear that on my deathbed, instead of remembering my own children’s names, I will recall only the names of famous peoples’ offspring. Gwyneth begat Apple.

    I now feel compelled to bring home at least one monthly cover image of Kelly Ripa with a turbo-fan flying mane of hair and a full-on, open-mouthed, manic rictus. (By the way, this type of smile, which celebrities have perfected, also happens to be a sign of aggression in chimpanzees. Keyword: Julia Roberts.) Never mind that I need this image like I need another hole in my head, or like I need its inevitable accompanying article, “Kelly Ripa’s Energy Makeover!” I know from direct personal experience in the glamorous world of show business that numerous celebrities derive their get-up-and-go from a glass pipe. Despite all of this, I feel powerless to stop reading, drop, and roll the hell out of the store without purchasing two or even three of these dirty little lifestyle rags. Yes, I do buy newsstand copies, furtively. If I subscribed to these magazines and the letter carrier knew my secret shame, I would expire of complications stemming from acute embarrassment.

    I wish I could figure it out. It’s not like the magazines help or comfort me in any way. Despite repeated warnings from Good Housekeeping to “Get Started Now!” I remain a terrible procrastinator. The most cynical of all is Family Circle, which employs the double-whammy approach when putting together those hard-to-resist covers. Family Circle covers always have a mouthwatering picture of seasonal baked goods tumbling in artful abundance off dessert trays. A recent one features rich cream filling oozing out of a petit four that has been split in half—right next to a coverline, “Walk Ten Pounds Off In Ten Days!” But what really frosts my tips are the self-help articles. Talk about poisoning the well. Back in December, I read “Dr. Phil’s Family Sanity Guide for the Holidays.” I came home from Christmas dinner convinced that my family is but a Whitman’s Sampler of psychological afflictions. I used to think we were just colorful.

    Flipping through them at the newsstand, I suspect that these magazines are actually mocking me and the other women who buy them. I think they’re edited by loveless, style-obsessed spinsters in New York City who don’t have families because they couldn’t fit them into their studio apartments. Instead they smoke and watch reruns of Sex and the City. I imagine them sucking down lychee martinis while brainstorming folksy, homespun articles designed to humiliate me. “Make Monogamy Sizzle!” Ha, ha, ha. Then they throw up lunch and go buy shoes.

    I wonder if Kelly Ripa knows that her day in the media’s hot sun will end. Because these things are cyclical. Really, I wish Kelly Ripa no ill, for I feel I have come to know her. I wish her safe passage to the land of former women’s magazine cover girls. Marilu Henner, Lynda Carter, Marie Osmond. Pricilla Barnes, Vicki Lawrence, Dinah Shore. One day soon Kelly Ripa will join the ranks of these bygone celebrity Everywomen, who were recognizable and pretty, but not too sexy. Until then, may her beautiful countenance smile upon us from the magazine rack, a beatific, if disposable, Madonna extolling the virtues of low-impact aerobics, slow-cooker meals, and “Goof-Proof Eyes, Lips, and Hair!”

  • Love It and Leave It

    African-American comedian Dave Chappelle has a recurring feature on his Comedy Central show, Chappelle’s Show, called “Ask a Black Dude.” During one segment, someone asked the Black Dude (aka Paul Mooney) why black men walk with a certain attitudinal swagger. Mooney responded that black men have a style that makes us the most imitated people on the planet, a style that tells the world that we are somebody, even if no one else hears or cares. Ironically, Mooney added, “Everyone wants to be a nigga, but nobody wants to be a nigga.”

    Mooney’s quip points to one of the most enduring conundrums of American history, one that becomes painfully clear every February during Black History Month: America’s passionate embrace of black culture and its simultaneous disdain for black people (particularly black men). During Black History Month (which, interestingly, occurs during the shortest month of the year), we get our token moments. And then, like an artificial Christmas tree, our history gets stowed away till next year, while our “yo”s and “wazzup”s continue to get imitated and co-opted, assimilated and mainstreamed.

    The truth is, ever since we got to this country, white people have exploited the way we walk, talk, sing, and dance. Our style, an amalgamation of African rhythms seasoned with our bittersweet and tumultuous New World experience, is vibrant, rebellious, funky, and edgy—in a word, cool. To take only the most obvious example: If there’s a reigning musical genre today, it would have to be hip-hop, which, besides its artistic value and innovations, is also blessed with legions of young white gangsta-wannabe fans. However, many of those same white hip-hop consumers know little or nothing about the history of the people who spawned the culture that created the hip-hop beat.

    Why does America continue to diss our history while devouring our culture? Because America’s founding fathers had to strip us of our history, and thus our collective humanity, in order to reconcile African slavery with their pronouncements that “all men are created equal.” Since we were “property,” our “owners” could freely exploit the things we produced. Should that “property” start to act like a “people,” with both a history and a future, then the whole corrupt system would collapse. Any threat to that system—such as a strong black male who could conceivably lead an uprising—had to be crushed. And today, despite the civil rights movement, affirmative action, and “diversity training,” we remain an object of fear and derision for most non-black Americans, who, despite their affinity for “nigga” culture, would never willingly trade places with us.

    Joseph, my eighteen-year-old eldest son, and I have had a running discussion about this phenomenon. Joseph’s biracial heritage has provided him with a Tiger Woods-like complexion that, by day, keeps white folks guessing. They thereby feel safer around him. By night, however, white people’s behavior leaves little doubt that they view him as a “soul brotha,” which is how he views himself.

    Joseph has learned firsthand that for many white Twin Citizens, black + male = threat. Recently, he had dropped off a friend late on a Saturday night in a well-to-do south Minneapolis neighborhood when a white cop drove up, shined a flashlight in his face, and yelled, “What are you doing in this neighborhood?” Joseph told me, “I thought about what you have always said—be very polite to the cops and do not argue with them. So I told him where I lived. But I knew I was being treated badly for nothing. So I politely asked him for his badge number. He muttered something under his breath and then sped off.”

    I have always counseled Joseph and his younger brother to not become paranoid about white people—after all, his mother and stepmother are white, as are many of his relatives and friends. And let’s be real—a disproportionate number of African-American men are involved in the kinds of activities that we all fear. Yet I fully understand and share my son’s ambivalence about being a “man of color” in a society that loves what “niggas” can do but has a hard time dealing with where we came from and who we are. Especially during Black History Month.