The Rake Magazine

Year: 2005

  • Joey D's

    Ah, the Windy City! The sparkling lake, the stunning architecture, and the food, oh, the food. It’s a shame we don’t have more eateries influenced by our great Midwest neighbor. But we do have Joey D’s. Tucked in a quiet patch of South Minneapolis (and more accessible than ever with the advent of light rail), it’s a haven for both Chicago dog lovers and connoisseurs of the cheesy beef sandwich. We have yet to see a better marriage of tender, thinly sliced beef and gooey, glowing cheese sauce, resting blissfully atop crusty bread. Paired with fries crisped to perfection, dripping in greasy chili goodness and washed down with a can of Barq’s, there’s no better way to indulge a midday craving or Saturday hangover. Named in honor of founders Bobby and Tommy Dennis’s brother Joey, who defied Cockayne Syndrome and lived to the ripe age of thirty-two, Joey D’s is under new ownership but still proves there’s no better way to immortalize a loved one than with Midwest soul food. 3101 E. 42nd St., Minneapolis; 612-729-5507

  • Directions in Music: Our Times

    In 2001, keyboardist Herbie Hancock, tenor saxophonist Michael Brecker, and trumpeter Roy Hargrove teamed up under the moniker New Directions to pay tribute to the music of Miles Davis and John Coltrane, and their chemistry clicked so well they decided to keep the collaboration going. This time out, they’re setting their sights on an even broader range of composers from more recent history, namely Wayne Shorter, McCoy Tyner, Chick Corea, Jaco Pastorius, Stevie Wonder, Ray Charles, and, appropriately enough, Hancock himself. That lineup suggests funk and soul will be in the house along with jazz, and we’re certain that Mr. “Rockit” will make it especially groovy. Bassist Scott Colley and drummer Terri Lyne Carrington round out this talent-drenched quintet. 84 Church St. S.E., Minneapolis; 612-624-2345; www.northrop.umn.edu

  • Scraptastic!

    “Can I pick those up tomorrow?” Frank Stone stands at the bottom of a thirty-foot mountain of stainless steel scrap metal and points to its peak—a bouquet of four-foot-long, auger-like spirals, salvaged from crop sprayers, flailing in the chilly wind. Employees at the American Iron scrapyard in North Minneapolis are well acquainted with Stone, who is perpetually on the hunt for metal that he can weld, bend, and hammer into furniture and decorative artworks, such as the fence surrounding the Surdyk’s parking lot in Northeast Minneapolis. After fifteen years of scavenging for scrap, he has accumulated enough brass and copper to fuel a small militia. (“My wife has more copper plant stands than any woman should be allowed to have,” he says.) These days, though, his taste for stainless steel frequently leads him to American Iron, which has a “nice nonferrous department.”

    The American Iron warehouse is a surprisingly spic-and-span place, where Stone’s musings about ancient gears and punch-press skeletons echo across rows of bins of neatly organized alloy. “I’m workin’ on a table and I need some feet,” Stone tells Mark Christensen, American Iron’s manager. The two men wander among four-foot bins of bullet casings and fishing lure remnants. They scoop up handfuls of nispan (the curled remnants from drilling holes in stainless steel, if you didn’t know) and let it slip through their fingers like raw wheat or soybeans.

    “This is probably from a cruise missile,” says Christensen, plucking an aluminum helix from his stash.

    “It’d be better as a coffee table,” replies Stone.

    He doesn’t find feet for his table on this trip, but Stone arranges to pick up the spirals later. Then it’s time to motor a few blocks north to Kirschbaum-Krupp. Whereas American Iron’s five-hundred-pound minimum limits it to corporate giants like Rosemount Aerospace and General Electric, Kirschbaum-Krupp is a more, shall we say, populist yard—a magnet, so to speak, for citizen scrappers with shopping carts filled with aluminum cans and other metals.

    At Kirschbaum-Krupp, where the staff is blasting “American Woman” and tossing footballs, Stone scales heaps of discarded lampposts and dodges forklifts loaded with electrical cords or bales of crushed cans in the warehouse’s littered corridors. He gets excited when he spots a two-foot-diameter gear buried deep in a pile of junk. “I love round things, ’cause you can cut ’em in half.” But after climbing into the pile to investigate, Stone discovers that it’s missing a tooth. Rats! Wading out, he stumbles upon a consolation prize, a copper Washington, D.C., ashtray.

    “Over the years, I’ve learned about shapes,” says Stone, whose playfully functional forms are easily recognized by collectors and copycats alike (he’s not the only artist/scrapyard scrounger). But those who admire his work might be surprised to learn that his artistic roots lie in stained-glass mosaics. “I started off making metal brackets to hold my stained glass,” he says.

    “Then I started having more fun with metal than I was having with glass.”—Christy DeSmith

  • Downtown Hopkins

    We’ve long heard about the charms of Hopkins’ Main Street from folks who once cruised it at night as partying teenagers, and who now enjoy patronizing its antique stores on weekends (just as their mothers do). We, too, appreciate goods from yesteryear, but let’s be honest, antique-shop districts can get a little precious—despite the presence, in Hopkins, of shops like World of Knives, A+ Vacuum, and our favorite, Steve’s Train City. Doubtless this has something to do with “antique” becoming adjective, noun, and verb.

    It was with this in mind that, on our most recent visit to Main Street, we wandered toward the strip’s west end, where the antique stores trail off, to see what we could see. Around Tenth Avenue, past the assertively “new urbanist” Marketplace Lofts, past Tinkerbella and Somewhere in Time, the balance tips—here’s a gun shop, there’s a tanning salon—and the street also gains a more open feel as it heads into what was once farmland.

    Along this stretch, in small-town fashion, no-nonsense enterprises like the MN Low Vision Blind Store, Carpet Resources, and Gopher Cash Register co-exist peacefully with a gift shop whose name—Live! Laugh! Love!—is perhaps overly whimsical but heartfelt, we’re sure. Near Twelfth Avenue, the awning of Munkabeans Café adds color to the street; across the way at Custom Wheelz of Hopkins (“where the players shop”), there’s a wall display of merchandise more dazzling than many a contemporary art installation.

    It’s at this corner, too, where one can take in a full spectrum of arts: the Hopkins Center for the Arts hosts productions by Stages Theatre, concerts, films, art exhibitions, and classes; the Hopkins Cinema 6 is a discount theater that features mainly quality second-run films.

    Out-towering Cinema 6’s neo-retro sign is the plain brick belfry of St. Joseph’s church, a block away. Built in 1953, this church is one of those modern yet still welcoming models. Next door, the former parish school, dating to 1922, recently became the Main Street School of Performing Arts (its students take advantage of the Center for the Arts).

    We were heartened to see all of these institutions, plus a funeral home, lined up together on Hopkins’ Main Street; too often they are flung far and wide throughout a suburb. Watching a woman stroll by St. Joseph’s with a wagonload of day-care kids, the strip felt like a place that incorporates the full cycle of life. This is not just a great shopping street, we realized, but one that puts the very idea of civil society into practice.
    —Julie Caniglia

  • Can the Public Library (and Democracy) Survive?

    On the third floor of the temporary library in downtown Minneapolis—a retrofitted office building that once housed the Federal Reserve Bank—a skinny man with a shock of white hair paced hurriedly up and down the aisles carrying a bouquet of roses wrapped in a wad of shredded newspaper. He looked disheveled, a little like Sam Shepard on a bad day or, maybe, Hume Cronyn on a good day. Though I hadn’t set foot inside the main library for years, I recognized the man immediately as one of the usual cast of unusual characters that inhabit the downtown branch.

    What the man was doing with the roses was a source of speculation, as was his reason for walking back and forth, over and over, past the same aisles of books. And then, finally, he darted right and disappeared. The man, it turned out, had been waiting for an open seat along the floor’s west wall, where large windows overlook Cancer Survivors Park, with its pathways and small grove of birch trees. Along the wall, apparently cherished among library regulars, there is a row of tables and chairs where mostly men sit and read newspapers or books about collecting baseball cards or negotiating real estate contracts. Everyone with their passions and projects and secret missions. Two mustachioed friends, maybe brothers, spoke Spanish over a vocabulary book. At another station, a would-be professor with white paint splattered on his jeans worked feverishly on a series of handwritten documents, a dense manifesto. Beside a stack of yellow legal pads, there were a packet of Kleenex, a driver’s license, and a Social Security card aligned perfectly with the edge of the table. A few places down, the man with the roses sat erect and gazed outside, flowers in hand. He watched as working men lowered windows from the roof of the new Cesar Pelli-designed main library across the park, just a block away. He leaned in slightly for a sniff.

    As I looked down the line, at the faces gazing out the window or nosing through books, it struck me that none of these people would have been sitting here, would never have enjoyed such a pleasant view, when the temporary library was still the Federal Reserve Bank. The opportunity to gaze down at birch trees, to watch myriad passersby, would have been reserved for managers and executives. Higher-ups. Bureaucrats. But at the library, things are more democratic.

    In fact, the library is the ultimate democratic institution. A person, with or without a library card, can hang around all day long, assuming her beverage has a lid on it, without buying anything or being subjected to a single ad. There are no greeters at the door to acknowledge and assess incoming patrons. On the contrary, library staffers understand that this is your place as much as it is theirs, and you may go about your business fully ignored, which ought to be every person’s right. Unless, of course, you need assistance in finding a book about kite-building, or the ownership tentacles of General Electric. Then, you will have at your disposal a dozen experts, better versed than Google in locating what you need from an enormous store of books, magazines, newspapers, DVDs, videos, CDs, pictures, government documents, pamphlets, websites, and even microfiche. If you don’t remember microfiche, it’s the silent film of information technology, crooked photographs of documents that existed before electronic databases and must be viewed through a special, old-timey machine. There is no keyword search in a microfiche document, no clicking down. Just a reel that sends the pages scrolling by at various speeds.

    Libraries are the face of government as it existed before we started hating government and, therefore, ourselves. It is munificent in the way public agencies simply aren’t anymore. A librarian isn’t going to arrest you. Nor is she or he going to tell you, thumb driving back like an umpire’s, two years and you’re off welfare! There is no punitive or moralistic aspect to the library, only trust and goodwill. The library says, Here, please take any of our millions of volumes for free. We trust you to make good use of them. We trust you to bring them back. All you need is an ID and maybe a phone bill and you’re in.

    These are places for people who want to know; libraries nationwide have seen a steady increase in patronage since at least 1990. They hold a special and sentimental place in the minds of the citizenry and are widely regarded as institutions where browsing and borrowing lead to meaningful knowledge. According to a 2003 study from the Marist Institute for Public Opinion, ninety-four percent of Americans rate their local public library as “very valuable” or “valuable.” The majority even said they’d pay more taxes to support libraries—an average of forty-nine dollars more per year. Currently, taxpayers spend around twenty-five dollars per person, the approximate cost of one new, hardcover book.

    Despite that kind of passionate support, libraries everywhere are falling on hard times. The American Library Association (co-founded back in 1876 by Melville Dewey, namesake of the venerable Dewey decimal system) reports budget cuts of up to fifty percent in at least forty-one states. That means reduced staff and operating hours, and fewer new books on the shelves. In John Steinbeck’s hometown of Salinas, California, the city’s three libraries will soon close their doors altogether. Minnesota, long a state that prioritized education and literacy, has hardly taken an enlightened view. Across the state, libraries are paring back essential services, thanks to reductions in state funds to cities and counties.

    In 2003, Governor Tim Pawlenty dramatically reduced local government aid in response to a projected state budget deficit. This, rather than violate a no-new-taxes promise he made during his gubernatorial campaign. Those cuts directly impacted libraries, in some cases brutally. When local governments are forced to cut services, libraries seem like an easy target; people get a lot more exercised about police and firefighters and schools. It’s a pattern in nearly all fifty states, and throughout Minnesota. St. Paul, to secure future funding, created a library board and a dedicated city property tax. Ramsey County closed its North St. Paul branch and, in 2003, saw a forty percent reduction in its book budget. Hennepin County, until recently, kept six of its libraries closed on Fridays.

    Minneapolis was hit especially hard. Because the city’s library board operates independently of the City Council, its budget is less flexible than, say, that of the Public Works Department. Up until the cuts, more than forty percent of the library system’s $20 million budget came from local government aid. Now, some branches are open only three days a week. Money for new books was reduced dramatically: from $2.6 million in 2000 to $1.9 million in 2004. Minneapolis must now rely more heavily on less predictable private funding sources, along with the determined efforts of Friends of the Library organizations.

    “I think libraries are very invisible,” said Minneapolis Library Director Kit Hadley. “I think they have been taken for granted. There have been people who support libraries, but it’s nobody’s big cause.” Yet, she continued, sounding more ardent than your stereotypical librarian, “Libraries are fundamental institutions in a democracy. We talk about the value and importance of libraries in promoting the information necessary to active self-governance, the notion that this kind of availability and discourse is necessary for democracy to be alive. And all of us on the staff feel very strongly about that.”

    It’s easy to be discouraged by the notion that nobody seems to read anymore. There is a distinctly anti-intellectual atmosphere circulating in a country that has a tradition of skepticism toward high-minded ideas. These days, more than ever, being American means making decisions with our guts, not our heads. It has culminated in a president who brags about not reading newspapers and is referred to in international circles as the “Texas twit.” In 2004, the National Endowment for the Arts produced a study that showed a dramatic decline in the reading of literature, with fewer than half of American adults bothering to pick up a novel. NEA Chairman Dana Gioia, sounding a little like Kit Hadley, said, “This report documents a national crisis. Reading develops a capacity for focused attention and imaginative growth that enriches both private and public life. As more Americans lose this capability, our nation becomes less informed, active, and independent minded.”

    No doubt there is a relationship between the decline in reading and the increase in societal fear and jingoism. As a person learns more about the rest of the world, enlightenment and tolerance tend to follow. Higher levels of education mitigate prejudice and increase the support for civil liberties. “These are not qualities that a free, innovative, or productive society can afford to lose,” said Gioia.

  • The Tar Is Boiling, the Feathers Are Dry

    Lots of interesting developments today in the world of Mass Media. Yesterday, we were gratified to see Minnesota Senator Mark Dayton take the stage, front and center, in the New York Times. He launched a blistering (and, no doubt, somewhat fumbling—in a charming way, of course) verbal assault on Condie Rice that should have brought a smile to James Woolcott’s face. Among other things, he sounded like a very irritated dad when he scolded, “I really don’t like being lied to repeatedly, flagrantly, intentionally.” Go, dad, go!

    Of course, Dayton really is a dad (we’ve met one son, and we found him charming). More important, his seat is up in the next general election. The best defense is a good offense, and it’s about time a Democrat from Minnesota lived up to family expectations. The last time we felt this way was when Dayton took on Rummy. He was fighting way out of his weight, of course, but he took some wild swings that landed nicely.

    At least Dayton is getting his message out the old fashioned, honest way—by getting legitimate news coverage, rather than by paying a journalist or columnist to covertly do it for him. Yesterday, Armstrong Williams—the besieged columnist who took $240K to publically support No Child Left Behind policies—called efforts to bring him and his benefactors to task “a witch hunt.” Today, columnist Maggie Gallagher doesn’t understand what all the fuss is about that she accepted $20K to shill for a Bush-sponsored marriage initiative.

    What is wrong with these people? Why don’t they offer us a quarter of a million dollars for our thoughtful, considered opinions?

    Aside from the resounding silence of the right-leaning blog-ons with regard to this tetchy subject, we are highly entertained by these “journalists” efforts to dismiss the matter as no big deal. Indeed, it really is no big deal to many Americans—possibly most Americans. Just like torture is no big whoop. If you’re not guilty, then what are trying to hide? In both substance and style, that is the MO of the neo-con monopoly. Live for today!

    But what these people seem to be genetically incapable of understanding is one of the pillars of this great country of ours: minority rights and representation. When a majority, cultivated honestly or through the almighty dollar, begins first to pooh-pooh dissenters, and then to slowly phase them out—well, that’s called a tyranny of the majority. And that’s when the backlash begins, and the bastards get run out of town.

  • Two good ideas for democrats

    The New York Times has had two good stories in the last two days illustrating what the Democrats need to do to get back into the good graces of the American voter.

    Yesterday a story about Hillary Clinton’s appearance Monday in front of abortion rights activists in New York told of Hillary’s conciliatory tone toward pro-life partisans. Clinton said, “There is an opportunity for people of good faith to find common ground in this debate.”

    What was extraordinary about the reactions to this statement was not the expected Republican outcry that she was trying to have it both ways, but the reaction from the pro-choice types, who greeted her overtures to the pro-lifers with silence, and later, thinly veiled admonitions that Hillary better remember where she stands.

    In today’s op-ed piece, Paul Starr points out an original notion of what when wrong with the Democrats–that, like in Roe v. Wade and the lawsuits to legalize gay marriage in Massachusetts, they have relied too often on the courts to further their agendas by ruling their desired results legal on constitutional grounds, rather than building a consensus of support that would solidify their positions with electoral majorities.

    As Starr and many other have pointed out, the judicially-oriented activism on gay marriage resulted in handing the Republicans a huge issue, and in 11 states (including decisive Ohio) the passage of anti-gay marriage referendums.

    And, even more damaging to their cause, the Democrats made sure that George W. Bush will be appointing the next generation of federal judges who will be doing the ruling for a long time to come. Oops.

    But try to make these conciliatory points sometime, like Hillary did, and the ideolologically pure Democrats are goint to have a hissy fit.

    But now the Republicans are even more beholden to an ideological radical wing than the Democrats. The party that can find its way to the middle ground of reason, compromise and consensus building is the one that’s going to prevail in the long run.

    And one place they should start is this war that Bush, Rice, et al. lied us into, and for which Gonzales wrote the playbook for torture. Kudos to Mark Dayton and the other Democrats who are opposing the nominations of Rice and Gonzales. That’s an issue the Democrats need to make their own–that war mongering and torture are inconsistent with the real American “moral values” that Bush ran on. Too bad so many Dems are so unwilling to oppose an African or Hispanic-American nominee that they won’t do the right thing and vote against these disgraceful shills for war.

  • Suspended Disbelief

    You’ll recall that one of our guilty pleasures—among several, true—is the Fox program “24,” and this fourth season is certainly setting the bar high on a number of levels. First, it is interesting to watch the show’s writers struggle with the whole anachonistic idea of a cliffhanger. A show that dedicates an hour in real time to an hour in the storyline is bound to run into long stretches of sub-plot, while at the same time trying to sustain the main thrust of the show—in this case, a complicated massive terrorist attack on American soil. This is a formidable conundrum. You’ve gotta give your audience some payback along the way, and to do this, there must be some very bumpy conflict-and-resolution cycles… but always with some sort of provocation to bring them back next week.

    Last night may have been the most bold and disturbing episode in the entire series, for a lot of interesting reasons. A quick recap: The US Secretary of Defense has been kidnapped with his daughter. Islamic fundamentalists are holding him in a bunker outside of LA, and they are planning a trial and an execution to be broadcast on the Web. It looks hopeless, so the President—having located the bunker—plans a missile strike to destroy terrorists, abductees, bunker, the whole lot before the execution can take place. Our man, agent Jack Bauer, is on the scene, and he singlehandledly breaks the perimeter and rescues Secretary and daughter.

    The rescue is dramatic, and ends with the arrival of the US Marine Corps in helicopters. They rappel into the scene and, with cool precision, rip the place apart.

    Now, we are well aware of how filmmakers manipulate us emotionally. We were not very surprised to feel a charge of excitement, a sense of justice, a rush of pride in American military might… this is standard operating procedure for a good action film. We have been set up to be sympathetic to the protagonist of the show (the USA, if you’re keeping track), and merciless to the antagonist. We are put in a position of cheering for death and violence.

    What is most interesting about this new season of “24” is that it has removed the last veils of mitigating fiction, and taken the present world-situation head-on. Whereas in previous seasons, terrorist organizations were either a non-specific amalgam of multinational bad guys from some non-existent Baltic state, this seasons bad guys are islamic fundamentalists bent on their well-known goals and methods.

    After last night’s blow-up, it is getting very difficult not to see this program as pro-war propagandizing. It is a terrible emotional mine-field to have to negotiate: If you didn’t feel a surge of pride after seeing all those terrorists cut down, you should worry that you can no longer be reached emotionally by the art-and-flash of mass media. (It’s OK to get excited, and then collect yourself and realize that you have been duped. Willing suspension of disbelief—engage!) Perhaps this point was driven home by the news of the Secretary’s successful rescue, televised within the program on (where else) Fox News. Or perhaps it was effected by the post-show dedication of the episode—”This epsiode is dedicated to Lt.Col. Dave Greene of the Marine Light Attack Helicopter Squadron 775. His sacrifice, and the sacrifice of all our men and women of the military, will not be forgotten.”

    Indeed. Righteous, merciless justice is so much easier in fiction than in real life. Can Americans tell the difference anymore?

  • Freedom to be free with the facts

    I get a semi-regular newsletter from a guy named Jim Crotty, one of the founders of the ultra hip Monk magazine. The one waiting in my inbox today was titled “Bush Throws Dems a Bone: Will they Fetch.”

    Crotty argues that the inagural speech “freedom fest” will set the bar pretty high for the Republicans. Bush, Crotty argues, has now committed his administration to a policy that more closely reflects the late pronouncements of Democratic softies like Jimmy Carter, i.e. that the United States should promote democracy and human rights in the world.
    When you realize that among our biggest friends these days (at least the biggest friends of the Bush cabal) are such vigorous defenders of Jeffersonian ideals as Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and China, you begin to wonder what the hell Bush is really talking about…other that again masterfully co-opting traditional Democratic issues.

    Crotty sees Bush’s pronouncements as a perfect opportunity for Democrats to call him to task–to actually hold him responsible for what he says vs. what he does. But, if we’ve learned anything in the past 4 years is that the Dems can’t hold anybody responsible for anything. What if, for example, they said something like this: “Bush said we started the war in Iraq because Iraq had WMD. Then he said Iraq sponsored terrorism. Then he said Saddam was a terrible dictator that had to go. Then he said Iraq will be an example to other Middle Eastern dictatorships of what freedom can be. Which is it?” Don’t hold your breath.

    Why is it that Bush can change his message at will and get away with it, yet the Dems can’t even get one message across with any consistency?

    Will the Dems hold Bush to his promise for the next four years? All I’d be willing to bet on is that the story will change a lot between now and then, but it will still being the Bushies doing the talking and the Dems wondering what the hell happened to their issue…again.

  • Radio Radio

    We happened to be present this morning at both a death and a birth. About an hour ago, Minnesota Public Radio pulled the plug on WCAL… And like trying to change alarm clocks without having to reset, they quickly plugged in KCMP, the much ballyhooed new “eclectic music” station they are calling “The Current.” Most people don’t pay that much attention to this sort of thing, but there is a decorum to be observed, and people in the industry attach great importance to the moment of switch-over. Normally, after a hostile commercial take-over, a station will switch formats without calling any attention to itself.

    We remember eight years ago when an audibly surprised and upset Shawn Stewart said goodbye with virtually no warning the day Cargill sold REV-105. We don’t remember what song was played at the top of the last hour, but it was some godawful hair-metal song played on a continuous loop for at least 24 hours, while presumably REV-105 staffers were escorted from the building.

    There were other reasons to remember that infamous day—it was the same day that the Village Voice announced it had bought City Pages and the Twin Cities Reader, and would be liquidating the latter. For those of us in the media biz, it sure felt like the day the national corporate monopolies moved into the Twin Cities and started crashing around our quaint little china shop. But of course, death often leads to birth—both processes being almost too painful to endure.

    Old fans of REV-105 will surely expect “The Current” to reprise what they remember, in the sepia-toned twilight of their memories, about that celebrated radio station. And in the intervening years, we find we’ve become jaded about radio. An interesting inversion has occured in the last fifteen years. Commercial radio has so successfully been colonized by the bean-counters, focus-groupers, and poll-takers, that we expect any radio station that wants to compete will have its programming dictated by its format. That is, if your market needs a classic rock station, according to market research, then you will have certain, very limited choices about what kinds of music you can play. Your DJs, it is understood, aren’t a lot more invested in the business than your custodians–their jobs being limited to moving stuff and pushing buttons. Think?! You’re not paid to think, you’re paid to DO!

    When news escaped that MPR was planning some sort of popular-variety music station, we were skeptical. Then, when they began to announce the pending switch-over to “eclectic radio,” we thought they were having trouble deciding what the station would be. In the mouths of radio professionals, “eclectic” is a word with much the same effect as a barber saying “Oops.” Surely MPR was not having trouble figuring this new animal out?

    And then we realized what we most loved about REV-105. That station could get away with programming virtually anything, from Luna to KISS, Jimmie Rodgers to Joy Division. The reason they could do it successfully was because of the station’s ineffable personality. It reflected a group identity that synched and felt natural. The station owners left the programming in the hands of a bunch of passionate kids with great taste in music, and the results now live in immortal legend. (The Big Boss just stepped in to add, soto voce: “Yeah, but what was REV-105’s listenership? Microscopic!”) We like to think the same thing happens here at The Rake. There are no sui generis Rake stories, nothing really off limits. The only thing that dictates what we publish is whether it piques our collective, er, eclectic interests.

    So far, we have to say the new station’s first-day playlist looks completely insane on paper. Opening song by Atmosphere. Last set: Luna, Son Volt, Hank Williams, Matt Pond. But then we had the funny realiziation that it compares favorably to our own iTunes library, set to shuffle.

    Yeah, but can an idiosyncratic mix of unimpeachably cool music succeed as a real radio station with a real audience? We hope for their sake and ours that it can–but idiosyncracy plus mass media normally equals that saddest of all propositions: a critically-acclaimed money loser. It’s neat to think we’re not the only crazy people swimming against the currents of modern commercial media.