The Rake Magazine

Year: 2005

  • Trans

    Maybe it’s in the air, I dunno. But I’m hoping yesterday’s storms–seen to be literally a wall of brown out the windows of Bunker’s–cleared about ten days’ worth of bad karma. You know, an accumulation of weird breakdowns, bad communication, minor automotive hiccups, moving violations, unspeakable regression, birds gathering in strange symmetric formations on top of billboards, potentially song-ending skips of the needle across the twelve-inch dance-mix of life. (Karl dying, for example.) Sometimes we try too hard, fight too much, get too wrapped up in ourselves. I do, anyway.

    So I’m riding my bike, which I do instead of lunch on Tuesdays, on the bike path past Mill City Musuem just beyond the new Guthrie skyway-to-nowhere. Hot as a two-peckered billygoat. I can see four figures ahead on the bike path: One, a city worker with a weed-whacker, not far from her little John Deere lawn tractor. What appears to be a very large woman in a green tank-top, a lunch-time walker, standing nearby making conversation. And beyond, a doughy couple, recently retired yuppies on nice mountain bikes.

    It goes down like this: I pass the weed-whacker and the woman in the green tank top, who turns out to be a deep-voiced man with huge breasts. She or he is holding out her hand to the weed-whacker, as if to shake hands. The weed-whacker does not take the hand, but keeps holding the whacker, not unfriendly, really, just busy–which suddenly makes me think the man-woman is pointing at something with an open hand. S/he says, “Well, don’t work too hard, it’s awfully hot out here.” His/her hair is really frizzy straw blonde, could be a wig I suppose. My thought was not cynical or sarcastic. I said to myself, That’s a transgendered person. My city. My bike path. My people. Cool!

    As I peddled a little farther, I reached the yuppie couple, who were struggling against a light wind and the powerful heat, same direction only much slower. They were in shorts and tee-shirts, big bubble helments. He was ahead of her. And she called up to him, plainly referring to the person we’d just passed. “What was that?” she said, with plain disgust.

    It made me sad. And a little mad. Like I said, maybe it’s in the air. It can never rain hard enough, I guess.

  • Ho! What Fools These Fardels Be!

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    This guy comes in and says to me, “What’s your goal here? What’s the big idea?” He was a huge man, seriously overweight and clearly laboring to balance there before me at the counter. Moist, wheezing, one of these characters who’s always swiping at his forehead with a handkerchief, and something of a throwback, I suppose, in this regard.

    I took a quick glance at his shoes. Perhaps, actually, a glance is always quick, but I’ve made a long study of the shoes of huge men, and I’ve noticed that they’re always strangely worn. This particular fellow had worn down a good half-inch on the inside sole of each of his shoes. The man was possibly pigeon-toed, I thought, or perhaps the damage to his footwear was simply the inevitable result of bearing the weight of such a resolute human glacier.

    I knew instantly that I didn’t like the tone of this fellow’s voice, and frankly wasn’t much interested in whatever it was that he might have to say. I didn’t like the cut of his jib. There was a compensatory rudeness that one often finds in the very unhappy or the excessively overweight. I am well aware, believe me, of the bigotry implicit in my attitudes toward the very large, and it is people like this character who are largely responsible for it. It seemed like I was always having to deal with them.

    The man swung one of his big arms up on the counter. It sounded like someone had dropped a fat, metropolitan phonebook. He commenced to drumming with his thumb, in the process blowing a wet wheeze in my direction, a wheeze that carried with it across the counter the stale smell of what I thought might have been chocolate milk. I noticed with a combination of fascination and disgust the film of sweat his arm had deposited on the counter top.

    He began to reiterate. Guys like this, I’ve learned, are masters at reiteration, generally of the inexplicable.

    “I would just like for someone to explain to me what it is you people think you’re trying to accomplish here,” he said. “That’s all I’m asking.”

    “I’m sorry” I said. “But you’re asking entirely too much.”

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  • The Wages of Sid

    Sid Hartman’s in a bit of hot water over at the Strib, and we’re not talking jaccuzzi time. Sid is evidently of the opinion that certain silly ethics rules don’t apply to him–and it will be interesting to see how (or even whether) his editors manage to slap the old duffer’s wrists. Kate Parry is certainly taking her whacks, and you can bet Sid’s not going to take any lip from the upstart publisher’s reader’s company spoksperson flack representative, or whatever her title is and whoever it is she actually serves. (The Strib’s twelve summer interns, we guess.)

    There is some truth to Sid’s contention that he’s been the anchor man on the team tug-o-war rope for longer than anyone can even remember, and that different rules should apply to him. It’s just that Sid is not Sid’s best apologist. Allowances have been made. This has long been the spirit if not the letter of the law, which is why Sid can continue to be such a loveable jerk in the press box of every major sporting event that ever takes place in our fair city, and why he has for five decades drawn a paycheck from both the city’s newspaper and its “hometown” AM radio station. Half the edit staff at the Strib weren’t even born before most of Sid’s grand-kids were bouncing on his knee, and Anders Gyllenhaal wasn’t even in knee-pants when Sid was general manager of the Minneapolis Lakers. (While a reporter for the paper. How’s THAT for a conflict of interest, you snotty kids?!)

    See the problem here is that Sid has never been the most diplomatic fella, and this may be a case where, no matter how many stripes he figures he’s earned over the years, that ain’t going to carry a lot of water with the troops. (If Sid can juggle three or four careers, we figure we can mix our metaphors.)

    Does age demand respect and deference? Sure, to a point. But when you grow cavalier and thankless in your grizzled old age, it pays to remember the little folks who will bury you. Sid, it’s never been your strong point, but a little modesty would help your cause. And lose the martyr complex, it’s not very becoming; we know and appreciate your many fine contributions to the Newspaper of the Twin Cities, but have you bought the Strib’s fact-checking department a beer recently? (They may see things a little differently.) Other than that, knock yourself out lending your celebrity to noble causes hither and tither. Just don’t forget the little people–that is, your editors.

  • Uncle Jumbo's Playground

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    –Illustration by James Dankert

    Sunday night –the worst handful of hours in the week– finds me a complete wreck, hoarse, hungover, and ruined by a weekend of stale air and even worse baseball. It doesn’t help matters that my attic apartment is so damn hot that I’ve spent the entire evening sprawled on the floor in my underwear in front of the fan, chasing giant Gary Gaetti souvenir cups full of grape Kool-Aid with Tylenol PM and cans of lukewarm Milwaukee’s Best.

    There’s a cat that I inherited when I rented the apartment, and every time the thing creeps near me I have to summon enough energy to bellow and lash out at the creature lest it try to straddle me and lick the sweat from my chest. I’m not cruel enough to throw the cat out into the street or dump it at a shelter, but neither am I enough of a pervert to take any pleasure or consolation from its caresses.

    Perhaps, actually, I am perverse enough to take pleasure from its caresses, which is why I am so vigiliant about keeping the animal at bay. I recognize what a slippery slope that could be, but lord knows, at the moment I am a man who is sorely in need of consolation.

    Sundays are good for something, at least, and I thank God I don’t have to worry about turning on the radio and hearing the voice of Mike Max, or I’d gouge out my eyes with a soup spoon. Tonight I have no intention of turning on the radio or television, period. I don’t even want to hear a score from the White Sox game.

    What I’d really like to do, if I could summon the energy, is horsewhip the entire raggedy-ass crew of imposters that seems to have taken over the Twins clubhouse. I’d like to lash the bastards within an inch of their lives for the pain they’ve inflicted on me in the last week.

    Did you ever notice that the Twins seem to climb aboard the crap wagon every year about the time the NBA playoffs comes along? Or maybe it’s just the finals; I’ll have to look. But to me that’s the sign of a team that doesn’t have any focus. There are, of course, a whole lot of signs that this is a team that doesn’t have any focus.

    Right now they’re just dicking around, and they look simultaneously desperate and lazy. Ask any reasonably competent psychologist (not that I know any): there’s nothing more dangerous than someone who’s desperate and lazy, other than someone who’s drunk, desperate, and lazy. Take it from someone who knows, and who’s paid a terrible price for that knowledge.

    Maybe I’m overreacting, and should try to sleep off the weekend before making this pronouncement, but this is the closest this team’s been to total ruination since the miserable slide late in the 2001 season. Someone should check the handwriting on the line-up card Ron Gardenhire posted today, in fact, because I’d swear it had Tom Kelly’s fingerprints all over it. That was a line-up from 1999, for God’s sake.

    Yeah, great, let’s move Cuddyer back over to second, push Rivas to short, and toss the Australian out at third in hopes of at the very least dredging up some sort of feel-good storyline. This guy –whatever his name is– is Dan Masteller with an Aussie accent. This is all a terrible joke, and all those promising young players we were gargling like hyenas about at the beginning of the season are either back spinning their wheels in Rochester or doing absolutely nothing to justify the hype. This team couldn’t hit Wayne Terwilliger right now, the pitching is a shambles, and half the roster has some sort of strain.

    Tell me this: what the hell is a strain? A pull, a tear, a fracture, those are all something, but a strain? A strain is the whiny second cousin of a cramp, and neither of them is anything more than an aggravation. Believe me, I’m feeling severely strained at the moment, but I’ll be good and damned if anybody’s going to allow me to use that as an excuse to take the day off tomorrow.

    This team better shake the shit out of its shorts in a hurry, because, I swear, it’s not too late for me to take up a real hobby. I’ll even take up fishing before I sit through too much more of this nonsense.

  • A Brand Is Worth 10,000 Words

    There’s an interesting article on product placement in this week’s Business Week (via Romenesko, naturally). But not product placement like you know and love it–we’re talking product placement in the edit space of magazines. Toyota Corporation apparently approached Hearst, Conde Nast, and Meredith and asked executives to consider “product integration” in their pages.

    The thing is, it’s not the most terrible idea. Well, maybe it is, but there are more interesting things to say about this than merely “never!” The written language has evolved to the point where certain brands are so well marketed and branded that they often communicate an entire lifestyle, attitude, world-view in a single word. Writers, without any extra compensation at all, are beginning to rely on brand names as useful tools of brevity and concision. Rather than using words like “She drives a dependable, mechanically sound, well designed car, kinda cheap sheet metal, corners cut for unecesssary cost, but integrated amenities and options as standard, so-so gas mileage, depending on the model, great 4X4 legacy, a yuppie mobile that appeals across age and gender demographics, a smart little crossover utility vehicle that circumvents the bad reputation of behomoth SUVs, lots of useless but somehow strangely comforting headspace” you can simply say “She drives a Toyota RAV-4.”

    Now of course writers should never be paid, by anyone, for using the WRONG word, if in fact “She drives a Buick Le Baron,” which would surely be a completely different person.

    Aside from using brands as short-cuts in description, which seems like a venal sin at worst, there are several problems with a business model that tries to incorporate product placement into print. FIrst, the comparison to placement in other media is misleading and wrong. Product placement has never been attempted, that we know of, in a non-fiction context. It’s easy enough to insert a can of coke into the latest Tom Cruise vehicle, quite another to insert it into the latest Vanity Fair interview of TOm Cruise–if it wasn’t in fact there. We suppose Toyota could suggest that Vanity Fair interview Tom Cruise in the cabin of his brand-new Toyota Tacoma, but you know, there’s probably a limit to everyone’s patience on this sort of scene manipulation. Lord knows it’s hard enough to get to Tom Cruise anywhere or anytime, and trying to bring in a partner, no matter how much money they’re willing to throw at the problem, seems a lost cause on the face of it.

    All that said, there is this: Google smart ads. We’ve commented on this before, and it’s interesting. It works like this. Google crawls the editorial content of an online magazine, and places ads on the page that correspond to keywords in the edit. This is widely seen as acceptable because editors and writers have no control over the ads that get placed adjacent to the copy. In fact, neither do the advertisers. Thus, on any editorial page that, say, excoriates George Bush for lying, warmongering, and fomenting class hatred, there might be a dozen ads for the GOP or Powerline or whoever has paid google to place their ads next to any “Bush” high-hit edit content. So they run the risk of advertising next to the opposite kind of copy they would choose to advertise next to.

    We thought briefly about how this might actually crossover to print–that is, during the production process, allow some kind of keyword search on magazine edit that also placed keyed ads on the printed page, and we realized that would and could never work. Why? A couple of reasons. Readers, editors, publishers, and even writers are trained to smell this is a big, fat, stinking rat in print. There is the assumption made in print that the people who put the magazine together have full control of the content, and that this sort of bait-and-switch is being done on purporse in order to extract money from the reader and deliver it to the advertisier and to the publisher. Why is that assumption not made with Google smart ads? Because of the technological interface–you’re reading on your computer, dude–you are automatically reassured that it is merely some logorythm (to coin a cool new homonym) at work. Even though humans wrote that code, they were apparently motivated by a more general, universal desire for you to spend your money in a way that would benefit advertisers and publishers

    As the Businessweek story points out, there has been a great hue and cry even online, when this sort of thing happens with any human involvement or agency, or the appearance of it. When people got in a lather earlier this year about the New York Post’s version of keyword ads, courtesy of a Vibrant Media search spider, it was the fact that the technology actually highlighted the keywords in the editorial text itself. That was crossing the line.

    What does all of this have to do with Lucky, Cargo, and their hundreds of city-mag copycats? Uh… we think product placement in editorial is alive and well, and pretty damn lucrative. It’s just that the placement isn’t really happening in a magazine, in that case. It’s happening in a catalog, the print equivalent of QVC.

  • Amen

    I think a lot of people have been saying this lately: the moderates among us Christians have to step up and make our views preeminent over those radically conservative Christians who would take over, and in some cases have tken over, our government.

    We’ve received some unexpected praise here for our cover story this month–primarily because we wrote about Dean Johnson, a minister, for God’s sake, who doesn’t believe he has the exclusive insight into God’s will, and doesn’t try to wield government power as if it were God’s hammer.

    Thank God for Christians like him in our government, and for John Danforth, former senator from Missouri and Episcopal minister. His op-ed piece in the NY Times today is the most eloquent call to moderate Christians we’ve seen in a long time.

    Read it. And when you’re done, say “Amen.” The Revs Johnson and Danforth represent just the sort of Christians we need more of in our capitols–and in our churches, for that matter.

  • Yes, it's another Irish holiday

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    The devilish man himself

    Damn, until reminded a little while ago, I forgot today was Bloom’s Day. Have a fried kidney, walk around town, try to sell some ads, wander into an Irish pub, and think of Leopold Bloom, Stephen Daedalus and James Joyce and all the good books you could have read if you didn’t have a television.

    Stuff like this:
    I know them well who was the first person in the universe before there was anybody that made it all who ah that they dont know neither do I so there you are they might as well try to stop the sun from rising tomorrow the sun shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to propose to me yes first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth and it was leapyear like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all a womans body yes that was one true thing he said in his life and the sun shines for you today yes that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could always get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldnt answer first only looked out over the sea and the sky I was thinking of so many things he didnt know of Mulvey and Mr Stanhope and Hester and father and old captain Groves and the sailors playing all birds fly and I say stoop and washing up dishes they called it on the pier and the sentry in front of the governors house with the thing round his white helmet poor devil half roasted and the Spanish girls laughing in their shawls and their tall combs and the auctions in the morning the Greeks and the jews and the Arabs and the devil knows who else from all the ends of Europe and Duke street and the fowl market all clucking outside Larby Sharans and the poor donkeys slipping half asleep and the vague fellows in the cloaks asleep in the shade on the steps and the big wheels of the carts of the bulls and the old castle thousands of years old yes and those handsome Moors all in white and turbans like kings asking you to sit down in their little bit of a shop and Ronda with the old windows of the posadas glancing eyes a lattice hid for her lover to kiss the iron and the wineshops half open at night and the castanets and the night we missed the boat at Algeciras the watchman going about serene with his lamp and O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down Jo me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

    Kind of gets your heart going, yes?

  • Oh no, now the police have joined the judges arrayed against us

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    To serve and protect

    Not that anyone who has an ounce of time or a brain cell to spare is reading Katherine Kersten’s column, but in case you’ve already been to the dentist as much as you can afford because listening to the high pitched squeal of your dentist’s drill is more pleasurable than reading her whine, I’m gonna give you a little more root canal. I promise to stop soon.

    Today, she scratches the Terri Schiavo scab again. If Kersten had any thought behind her compulsion to lecture us, she’d know that raising this issue, both to genuine conservatives and to liberals, ain’t doing the cause of the attempted Christian takeover of the American government any good.

    She’s trying hard though. How about the image of the “armed policeman”, (presumably in the pay of the gay-marrying, abortion-legalizing, Patriot Act-skeptical, activist judges) keeping the forces of good at bay? Then there’s the inevitable invocation of Nazi Germany at the end. Yup, if we let the Nazis take over, pretty soon our government might be lying to put the country into a war, spying on the reading habits of its citizens, and trying to pass laws discriminating against a class of citizens whom we don’t like.

    Yup, we wouldn’t want a government like that, would we?

  • James Bond, Only A Girl

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    –Senior Citizen Center. Livingston, Montana

    Ella was on the front porch, blowing into an empty bottle with a straw, shivering a fly that was trapped there at the bottom. The fly was woozy and slick with cola, and was rolling and tumbling in the little bottle hurricane that Ella was producing with her straw. The fly was done for, Ella knew that much. It had gotten itself into a pickle, and would spend its last moments at the bottom of the bottle, drunk on cola and flopping itself unconscious.

    Roland Schramm came around the side of the house with a globe in his arms and crawled down under the porch. Ella’s grandmother had thrown out the globe because it had a dent in Asia, and Roland had fished it out of the trashcan out back. Roland’s dog, Perry, followed him everywhere and was under the porch with him. Perry was a first-class leaper, and a shy dog.

    Roland lived across the back alley and went under Ella’s grandmother’s porch all the time to smoke. Ella could see him now through the slats of the porch, hunched beneath her with his head down and his dog curled up in the dirt. The smoke from his cigarette came up through the floorboards of the porch. Ella didn’t mind the smell; it smelled just like Roland under the porch. Her grandmother no longer made a stink about Roland smoking under the porch, because if you hollered at Roland he would spray paint on your garage or break things. It was easier to just let him go under the porch, where he kept a stash of motorcycle magazines with pictures of men with tattoos.

    Ella was bored. It was no good, being a girl in the world. The yards and bushes and woods all around her were full of dirty boys, chasing each other with sticks and throwing things and still hollering into the darkness when she was already in her bed. That’s unfortunate, her grandmother would say whenever Ella complained about her life.

    Have a heart. That was another of Ella’s grandmother’s sayings. If her grandmother were to come out to the porch and see Ella torturing the fly in the bottle, that was exactly what she would say: Have a heart, Ella. That poor fly is one of God’s creatures.

    Ella had never seen her grandfather, but he was in the world somewhere, and her grandmother was sour about it. There was a card on her grandmother’s bed stand, which had been there all the years that Ella could remember. The card featured a funny drawing of a man in a tuxedo. The man was holding a tray on which was a sparkling diamond ring. Inside the card someone had written “If you’re loving me like I’m loving you, baby, we’re really in love.” Those words, her grandmother said, were written by Hank Williams, but the handwriting was Ella’s grandfather’s. They weren’t, her grandmother said, worth the paper they were written on.

    At least once a day Ella’s grandmother would drag her in under her chin, wheeze what sounded like tears into her hair, and murmur, “Bless your little pea-picking heart. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

    Ella could not begin to formulate an answer to her grandmother’s question. All day the old woman sat at the kitchen table, scribbling away at her word search puzzles and watching a television that was on top of the refrigerator. Every afternoon in the summer Ella’s grandmother would send her up the street to the Gas-and-Go to fetch a bag of potato chips and a can of diet Cola. Her grandma would give Ella a five dollar bill and instruct her to get something to eat for herself as well. Ella would ride her bicycle to the library downtown and spend the remaining three dollars and twenty five cents making photo copies of beautiful women and beautiful clothing from fashion books and magazines. Shoved in the drawer of her nightstand and tucked in her school books Ella had hundreds of photo copies of exotic clothing –and shoes; Ella loved shoes– the likes of which she had never seen in Prentice. She also liked to make copies of photographs of sports cars. Ella wanted to be a secret agent like James Bond, only a girl. In her dreams she was often driving a stolen Jaguar through the streets of Prentice.

    Ella’s grandmother was her father’s mother, and she would seldom give Ella information that was helpful in forming an impression of a man she could no longer remember. “He liked to put rocks in his pockets when he was a boy,” her grandmother would tell Ella. “I used to have a basket full of them down in the laundry room. Eddie’s rocks.” When pressed for more information, Ella’s grandmother would say things like, “He used to listen to a radio that was the shape of a motor oil can,” or, “He loved tomatoes.” One time she told Ella that her father had been a crackerjack jumper, the best in his class. “He got a ribbon for it,” she said. All of these details didn’t add up to much in Ella’s mind, and her conversations with her grandmother regarding her father always boiled down in the end to the fact that Ella’s father “hadn’t amounted to a hill of beans.” Men, she was told, were good for three things: running off, killing each other, and making babies they wanted no part of. Ella’s father, it turned out, was good for all three.

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  • Seriously, That Should Have Never Happened Either

    A few things:

    That ugly business in the first inning has happened way too many times now to be dismissed as a mere fluke, but how the hell do you explain it? Beats the shit out of me.

    You know how many times the Twins have scored four or fewer runs now this year? I do, I think. Thirty. That’s ridiculous, and isn’t going to get them deep in the playoffs any time soon. I’m not quite sure how moving Justin Morneau down to sixth in the order is going to help the team score more runs. Seems to me that with Torii Hunter riding out one of his hot streaks you’d want to take advantage of that by letting Morneau hit either in front of or behind him.

    Also, the more I see of J.C. Romero the more I’m starting to understand why Ron Gardenhire has been turning to Terry Mulholland as his bullpen lefty in close ball games. That’s not saying much, of course.

    Finally, check out John Bonnes’ Twins Territory for a great event for a great cause. The date is Tuesday, June 21 (Twins vs. Tigers at the Dome), and the proceeds go to Admission Possible, an organization that helps low-income kids gain admittance to college. A recent update is here. And you can buy your tickets directly here. I’ll be there, and it sounds like lots of other people much more interesting than me will be there as well.