The Rake Magazine

Month: February 2006

  • A Tale of Two Tales

    I just saw Memoirs of a Geisha. In the movie, there’s a scene where the geishas play a drinking game with their clients. Somebody tells two stories, and then everybody else has to guess which is true. With that idea in mind, I have two stories for you this month.

    Story #1 goes like this. Some gals send their fellas off to work with a sweet note in their lunch pail. I’m a little more extreme. It started out innocently enough. My guy forwarded me a dinner invitation from a couple we know. He’d added a flirty line at the bottom of the email asking me to be his date.

    I thought … well. I thought, you know what? It’s going to be a busy week for the both of us. We won’t have too much time to spend together, but I can stoke the fire and make him wish he was able to spend more time with me. So I wrote him a dirty email. The filthiest, as in Specialty Magazine Filthy. I can’t even begin to tell you all the sordid details. Just take the raunchiest thing you can think of, multiply it by ten, and pretend you’re tailoring it uniquely to your lover’s eccentricities. Just take a moment and do that. Get the pictures in your head. That’s what I wrote. It wasn’t just a short paragraph, either. Nuh-uh. It was a full page in brilliant, widescreen, black-and-white sleaze-o-vision.

    Screeching and giggling at my own audacity, I read my “scene delicate” over once, and, before I could lose my nerve, hit “Send.” I discovered later that I’d hit “Reply All” and sent the note not only to our prospective host and hostess, but to the entire e-chain of dinner-party invitees.

    Now I find myself considering what to bring as a hostess gift. I’ve got it narrowed down to either a Barry White CD or a block of sno-cap lard and a shower curtain.

    And here’s Story #2. I got into an argument with my husband. This argument was in no way related to the dirty-email story. It’s just that we’re married, and sometimes we argue.

    So, we were in this stupid argument, but we both had to go to work. I had an evening class until 9:00 p.m. and since I had the car, I was supposed to pick up my husband from his office at 10:30 p.m. After class, I decided to take myself out for a glass of wine during my free hour and a half. I chose a place that I’d heard of but never been to before. A nightclubby kind of place.

    It was a weeknight, so the club was a total ghost town. The atmosphere was more than a little bizarre because even though the place was empty, they still had the thumpa music blaring and full disco lights swirling around. I sat at the bar, pulled out a magazine, and ordered a glass of red. Within ten minutes, a woman sat next to me. Before I could even get out a hello, she blurted out her entire life story to me. All the while, the music thumped and the lights swirled. It took almost an hour, and was quite fascinating. After she ran out of gas, she begged me not to tell anyone what she’d just confided. She was absolutely manic about it. I assured her that I wouldn’t tell a soul, that her story was so outlandish, who would believe me? She flashed a mean smile, and threatened to curse me with a poltergeist if I breathed a word of it to anyone. Those were her words. She said, “I will send a poltergeist to you if you so much as breathe a word of this to anyone.”

    I motioned to the bartender for my tab. The woman sitting next to me insisted on taking care of it, because I’d been such a good listener. She pulled out a clean, one-inch-thick bank stack of two-dollar bills. A bank stack. Like in the movies, with a paper band around it. She cracked the band, peeled off five bills for the bartender, and handed one to me without a word. I took it and scooted out of there as quickly as I could. I picked up my husband from work.

    The next day, he asked for a couple of bucks to take the bus to work. I gave him the two-dollar bill. He said, “Where’d you get this?” I told him, “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  • Who are you calling an “underperformer”?

    Close your eyes for a minute and picture a typical academically challenged, underperforming student. If you are really honest with yourself, you probably see one of the “boyz from the hood”—in other words, a black, brown, or Latino male raised in bad circumstances and going nowhere fast.

    For many years, the desire to avoid students like the “boyz” fueled what came to be known as “white flight.” Here in Minnesota, whites ran to the suburbs with just as much enthusiasm as their fellow citizens in other parts of the country. Why? Because for many whites, the unspoken assumption was that the phrases “great schools” and “high minority student population” could not co-exist in the same sentence.

    So why are whites leaving the well-regarded public schools in Cupertino, California, home to Apple Computer and Silicon Valley’s ground zero? According to a recent Wall Street Journal article, the proportion of whites at Monta Vista High School, which boasts some of the highest test scores in California, has dropped to twenty-five percent of the student body—in a town that is nearly half white. No one disputes the quality at Monta Vista or at Lynbrook High, a school with a similar percentage of whites in nearby San Jose. Both routinely send students on to Stanford and the Ivies. They also have a burgeoning population of Asian students, and, as the article attested, it’s the fear of having their children out-performed by these students that is leading many white parents to abandon these schools.

    In Silicon Valley, the kids at the back of the bus, academically speaking, are very often white males. The Cupertino superintendent pointed out the racial composition on two different floors at one of his schools. White faces dominated the first floor, which housed the math class for slow learners; among the kids on the second floor, who were primarily advanced-placement students, whites were an underwhelming presence.

    This stark reality was not lost on the students. Many of them, both white and Asian, simply assumed the Asian kids were smarter, especially in science and math—an assumption that of course aligns neatly with stereotypes about Asians. Even Cupertino’s superintendent said there is a “white boy syndrome” which he characterizes as a kid who feels that he is part of “a distinct minority against a majority culture.”

    In both Cupertino and Minnesota, groups of kids are battling stereotypically based perceptions that they are either human computers or “underperforming” losers. In California, the whizzes are Asian and the “unteachable ones” are white, mostly male, and largely affluent. Here in Minnesota, the academically competent are white and the academically challenged are primarily children of color, male and poor.

    One key difference, and it is a big one, is that white parents in Silicon Valley have the resources to place their kids in environments where the parents perceive their kids are valued and not as academically and culturally threatened. In a word, they are increasingly choosing to segregate them.

    I do not for a minute think that is the answer—either for those affluent kids in California or, assuming we had the resources, for poor minority students here in Minnesota. Some African-American parents have eagerly jumped on the “Afro-centric” school bandwagon. They believe that an ethnically homogenous environment is most likely to lead to academic success for African-American students, and they point to the huge success of historically black colleges, which still produce a majority of this country’s black doctors, lawyers, and engineers, as proof.

    I believe that this approach takes our country’s educational system off the hook for failing to adequately educate all of our students. Beyond that, ethnically segregated schools deprive students of the opportunity to learn from—and learn to get along with—people from different backgrounds.

    Stereotyping usually springs from bigoted assumptions and fear—which makes it a stupid and damaging basis for making decisions about our educating our students. Moreover, it is just as damaging for the haves as for the have-nots. That’s because, for better and for worse—as kids in both Cupertino and Minneapolis can personally attest—perceptions and expectations often do become reality.

  • Four Minute Fellini

    Remember when the first graphical web browsers were developed? At the time, circa 1993, “going online” meant dicking around with dial-up modems and text menus on Gopher and CompuServe. Then the World Wide Web suddenly exploded in full color with pictures, formatted text, and rollover hyperlinks. Almost overnight, the Web gained critical mass; within a single decade, we went from fewer than ten thousand Americans online to more than two hundred million.

    By now we’ve all been ravaged to the point of insensitivity with breathless language about what the “global digital revolution” meant to humankind, and what it means to us now. And it is, of course, still evolving. For example, once high-speed and broadband net access became widespread, high-quality sound files and true moving pictures proliferated the internet. Now full-motion video is becoming normal and even expected.

    So if you’ve been paying attention, you know that yet another alleged digital revolution is under way. Coming quickly on the heels of blogs are vlogs, or video podcasts—clunky names for a form of self-expression that shows great promise. A vlog is a short-form movie (or, depending on how you look at it, a long-form commercial) running between two and four minutes.

    It’s hard to talk about a medium as a “movement,” but blogging already established the precedent. Even though vlogs are relatively few in number, the variety is already infinite. There are extemporaneous and planned vlogs, fiction and nonfiction. There are vlogs along the lines of excruciating home video—dog walking and cooking seem to be common starting points—and there are others that have impressive production values.

    Some that have been celebrated in the national press, like the daily variety show Rocketboom and the monthly “comedy” show Tiki Bar TV, are not exactly inspiring. Their main weakness is inconsistency. More to the point, when they’re bad, they’re fingernails-on-blackboard bad, with mannered or wooden hosts telling jokes that wouldn’t make the cut on community-access TV, introducing the unfunniest out-takes from America’s Funniest Home Videos. At this writing, iTunes offers eighty-three video podcasts, about eighty of which are futile or feeble. Just like non-video blogging, one person’s musings are not necessarily enough to sustain the interest of anyone else on the internet.

    But the best vlogs today take the idea of audience seriously, and compare favorably to what we already see on television and at the movie house. I suspect that by this time next year, there will be thousands more vlogs, and their general quality will have risen dramatically, as truly talented filmmakers see and seize the opportunity presented by video blogging. With a tight focus and premise, vlogs present opportunities for populist creativity that move way beyond what’s come out of the keyboard-pecking blogosphere, with its rictus of righteous indignation.

    It’s a happy coincidence that one of the very best vlogs, Chasing Windmills, is produced by two Minneapolis residents who post a four-minute film each weekday. Television is the model here. The website, chasingmills.blogspot.com, refers to itself not as a vlog but a “daily web video series,” and its creators refer to the current postings, going back to last September, as the “show’s first season.”

    That’s good, because it suggests they’ll eventually give themselves a much-deserved summer break. With monastic self-sufficiency, Juan Antonio del Rosario and Cristina Cordova have developed a daily soap opera with one main storyline and two nameless characters. Chasing Windmills is by and large a domestic situation drama, dealing with mundane disagreements and pleasures between a young married couple. But there are dark elements as well. The edgy Juan Antonio, with his perpetual five-o’clock shadow, shows signs of incipient insanity. He apparently hears voices. Cristina is a voluptuous and sharp-tongued matron. She gets pregnant and is not, at first, overjoyed about it. She sleepwalks. He secretly smokes cigarettes. The main plot engine, though, is an ancient one: the possibility of infidelity and the quiet tearing of unseen things inside a relationship.

    Mid-season, Cristina seems to take special pleasure in henpecking Juan Antonio, especially as he begins to suffer from his demons. If a viewer begins watching episodes somewhere in “mid-season,” perhaps with “Car Trouble” (November 28), and works in both directions, it captures the essential dynamic of the series—love, touched by neurosis. In the uneven early episodes, Juan Antonio is cruel and invulnerable, while Cristina is thoughtful and conflicted. Some of the subplots, while rich in emotional drama and anticipation, are undermined by earlier shows that give away too much, but with no reward. They hadn’t yet learned the paradox of great drama—that what makes it great is what is withheld, what is hinted at, what is unspoken. Chasing Windmills very quickly incorporated this subtle truth, and now uses it to great effect.

    That’s not to say all the early postings are bad. Within the first six episodes there are clear flashes of brilliance. Even though “Quality Time” (October 11) manhandles the characters, it is the first indication of how artful the series would become. The couple get into an argument on the tennis court, and Juan Antonio’s belligerence would, in the real world, justify a domestic-disturbance call to the police. But things end poignantly. A ground-level shot shows Cristina’s feet kicking through leaves that have gathered at the base of the net, apparently looking for lost balls. The multiple shots and setups, seamlessly edited, contrast with the single, sustained verite-type shots used in earlier posts.

    Chasing Windmills is strictly a two-person operation; Cordova and del Rosario seem almost willful about it. Considering that six months ago, the pair apparently had never used a camcorder, it is astonishing how quickly they mastered the basic techniques of modern digital filmmaking. It almost becomes a distraction to figure out how, with just four hands and a tripod, they manage the sophisticated cinematography. The pair agreed to meet me on a Sunday afternoon, when they do most of their filming.

    Cordova and del Rosario met in Puerto Rico, where they worked as journalists and together started a weekly newspaper in San Juan. Giving up on the long hours and the long odds, they moved to Minneapolis last summer. They explicitly wanted to find a low-overhead situation that would allow one of them to work full time on their new passion, video blogging, which they started a few weeks after settling here. Cordova had lived in Columbia Heights when she was in high school. She currently works at an advertising firm, while del Rosario is devoted to the vlog, including composing and recording its spare soundtrack. “This is basically all we do,” he said, gesturing to the living room, a frequent set, and the digital camcorder standing there on a tripod.

    When I asked how they manage what seems like a massive operation, they brought out a large bulletin board that maps three weeks’ worth of episodes, from concepting and scripting the narrative to storyboarding the scenes, filming them, and editing them. Typically editing happens the night before an episode is posted to the web. So while the rest of the work is proceeding weeks in advance, there’s rarely more than one episode ready to post at any given time. It is a staggering workload. “One episode probably takes about twelve hours of work,” del Rosario told me. “Each,” added Cordova, working through the math.

    The pair live on the eleventh floor of the Towers, a high-rise apartment twenty steps from the Hennepin Avenue bridge. Looking out their windows across Hennepin, the scene is dominated by the big gold ball on the last flagpole remaining in the old Gateway area. Though the storyline could be set anywhere, the series is rich in Minneapolis scenery. It is shot mostly downtown, but ventures as far south as Edina. When they visited family in Puerto Rico over Christmas, they took the show with them. Enlisting the help of family members, for the first time they introduced other characters.

    The vlog’s storyline has developed into a rich and noirish soap opera. There are hilarious episodes like “Anal Longings” (December 20) and touching ones like “Cleansing” (February 8), as well as some disturbing, verbally violent episodes like “Pillow Talk” (November 30). With the modern conflation of short films and advertising—BMW’s celebrated serial starring Clive Owen comes to mind, as does the silly yet seminal Taster’s Choice series chronicling the dalliances of “Matthew” and “Alexandra”—it seems like some episodes of Chasing Windmills, with some tweaking, could be hip commercials for, say, Target or Dunn Brothers. Others, however, seem more like mannered homages to obscure, subtitled auteur films. Cordova and del Rosario are clever and self-aware enough even to get meta; in February, they developed a delightful cycle in which Juan Antonio announces he’s going to start a video blog, because “everyone’s doing it.” Thereafter, the couple briefly plots to make money on Juan Antonio’s new vlog by developing a porn storyline. Alas, Cristina was only playing along.

    Fans wonder how fictional Chasing Windmills is. Having spent an afternoon with its creators, I would call it fictionalized memoir. Here, the main difference between life and art is that the couple obviously adore and admire each other, the way co-creators and artists often do. Then too, violent disagreements may be a part of life for people like that, and that may explain how episodes of intense conflict are often followed by serene stories that seem to have forgotten the rough patch. I won’t give away which plot lines are true and which are fictionalized, except to say that both Cordova and del Rosario emphatically agree that it “basically is fiction,” and neither seems serious about giving up smoking.

    Talking with the Chasing Windmills crew, I was reminded more than once of how late-seventies punk rock, as a populist, do-it-yourself movement, revolutionized music and the music industry. It was a moment when the audience bum-rushed the stage and took over the means of production. Of course, punk was not just a means of production; its style, voice, and aesthetic were paramount. In the nascent vlogging scene, there is no comparable core, no there there. Most vlogs that I’ve seen are modeled either on public broadcasting news, network variety shows, or raw home video. Besides Chasing Windmills, very few—in fact, none that I am aware of—are fictional, produced serials. But as more young filmmakers realize that they can simply take the keys of production and the keys of publishing into their own hands, the creative class may yet break free of New York, Hollywood, and even Sundance. Punk rock had the local bar, where you might see a trashy quartet called the Clash, say, or R.E.M., before they got big. As vlogging becomes more common, we may get to see the next generation’s Coppola or Fellini or Wes Anderson while their short, self-produced flicks are still playing on the local podcast.

  • Strine Wine

    When I was home in England over Christmas, I caught a liver specialist from (appropriately enough) Liverpool being interviewed on the wireless. He was talking about cirrhosis, that very nasty condition in which the liver turns into little yellowish granules, and eventually packs up completely. When he began in the liver business years ago, he said, this was the disease of older men, brought on by a lifetime’s application to the bottle. Nowadays, though, he frequently found the beds in his ward filled with young women who had managed to achieve the same effect in an altogether shorter time. The young people of Liverpool, he averred, do drink an awful lot these days.

    Archaeological evidence suggests this phenomenon is not confined to Liverpool. As the spring thaw sets in each year along fraternity row in Minneapolis, bottles emerge to view in the snow banks on the boulevard, mostly bearing the names of undistinguished vintages or popular brands of beer. As the melt proceeds, they dribble down into the gutter, where they pose a hazard to cyclists (credite experto … ). The historian Edward Gibbon, writing about Oxford during the eighteenth century, felt that the deep potations of those who were supposed to be teaching him Latin and Greek excused “the brisk intemperance of youth.” I can forgive a good deal of brisk intemperance, but a puncture in my front tire makes me livid (a very nasty condition in which the face goes pale purple with rage).

    In Gibbon’s time, the British government tried to use stiff excise duties to control alcoholic intake. Avoiding these penalties became something like the national sport. The stakes were high; you could get hanged for smuggling, but evading the exciseman appealed to a certain spirit of adventure, as those fortunate enough to have had J. Meade Falkner’s novel Moonfleet read to them in their youth can certainly agree.

    The most unlikely recruit to the government team must surely have been Rabbie Burns, the Scots national poet. This is a man who wrote lines like “Freedom an’ whisky gang thegither,” as well as one of the world’s great drinking songs, “O Willie Brew’d a Peck o’ Maut” (chorus: “We are na fou, we’re nae that fou, but just a drapee in our e’e … ”). Yet he spent the last half-dozen years of his short life (he died of heart trouble, not of drink) chasing down smugglers and illicit distillers in the deep valleys of Dumfries and Galloway. Not that it seems to have cramped his style. One of his wildest poems is a rant about the party put on in a town where the local exciseman had been carried away to hell by the devil; Burns is said to have composed it while waiting on the beach for reinforcements so he could search a smuggling ship that had gone aground on the treacherous sands of the Solway Firth.

    With a reputation like that, it is scarcely surprising that “Bobbie Burns” should have given his name to a vineyard in the Australian State of Victoria (the bottom right-hand corner) founded by a Scots gold prospector called John Campbell. Campbells Wines produced their first vintage in 1870, and their Bobbie Burns Shiraz 1998 (available hereabouts for less than $17) is a worthy scion. The Shiraz grape, widely grown in Australia, is the same as that which the French call the “Syrah,” the variety from which most of the great red wines of the Rhône Valley are made. It has, alas, no historical connection with the Persian city of the same name, home of the Persian national poet Hafiz, a bard altogether more refined than “owr Rabbie,” and one who wrote about wine, it seems, merely as a metaphor for spiritual experience.

    There is nothing immaterial about this good-hearted red. It has little nose, but plenty of fruit and alcohol, as one might expect from grapes which have reached ripeness over a long, warm autumn. The tannins are more spicy than redolent of the oak barrels in which the wine matured. This would make a cheering companion to any red meat, a pork roast say, or even haggis, the great chieftain of the pudding race. Come to that, the tannins suggest it has time still on its side. Buy some now to drink later. But best make sure you like it; sample some now as well, and call to mind Paul’s advice to Timothy: “Drink no longer water, but use a little wine for thy stomach’s sake.” A little wine—no poet (or hepatologist) could have said it better.

  • The Gow Choy Express

    The average home cook, it turns out, has only about a dozen rotating specialties in his or her repertoire. Pot roast, meatloaf, spaghetti, you know the drill. This type of déjà vu dining becomes especially depressing in March. While the lucky few fly away to warmer climes and snack on fresh tropical fruit, the rest of us feel sentenced to a state of not-yet-spring, in which we’d rather eat a travel brochure than another baked chicken. Seeking out the fresh and new may seem daunting, especially as you lie on the sofa with the television clicker on your belly, but there is hope—inside the Asian markets scattered throughout the Twin Cities.

    Asian markets offer glimpses into other worlds, right when you need them most. For those who shop at them regularly, this is hardly a revelation. But if you are like I once was (hugely aware of my tendency to stammer when I don’t know how to ask for something, and frightened to death of being offensive), just stepping through their doors can seem daunting. It turns out that all it takes to get over yourself is one trip to Shuang Hur or Duc Loi. You’ll be mesmerized by the tightly packed shelves of interesting ingredients and overwhelmed by the hospitality of the people who work there. In an effort to reveal the delights of these and other local Asian markets, I undertook a whirlwind shopping spree with friend and food expert JD Fratzke, the head chef at Muffaletta Café in St. Paul.

    One of the best things about Asian markets is the availability of fresh and unusual herbs and leaves. You’ll find, likely near the vegetables, generous bunches of herbs that are less expensive than the plastic-boxed sprigs at the average grocery. Some of the most common are garlic chives (gow choy), which have a grassy top and pungent smell, and sweet Asian basil (bai horapha), with its slight anise flavor. More exciting are the leaves—la-lot leaves, kaffir lime leaves, and sword-shaped pandan leaves—which can be used to wrap fish and meats while they steam.

    Oddly shaped roots are also plentiful. JD proved once and for all that beauty lies within when he snapped open a squat, dirt-covered water chestnut root to reveal its perfectly creamy white inner flesh. The basics include taro root, a starchy tuber that acts like a potato but with a slightly sweeter flavor; spicy galangal, a member of the ginger family commonly used in Thai cuisine; and jicama, tumeric, ginger, and lotus roots. A tip from JD: If you’re looking for bamboo shoots, go easy on yourself and buy the ones that have already been peeled and rinsed.

    Enthralling, but confusing, are the many varieties of leafy greens. Of course there’ll be bok choy on hand, but why not try gai larn (Chinese broccoli) instead? The stems make a vibrant side dish, chopped and flash boiled in salted water. Choy sum is a flowering cabbage often crowned with little yellow buds; both the leaves and stems can be thrown into a stir-fry. Water spinach (kangkung), with its long, narrow leaves, is best wilted in olive oil with a bit of garlic.

    The meat cases in Asian markets are packed with the usual cuts of beef and pork, alongside more unusual offerings like pigs’ feet and snouts, beef stomachs, and what JD calls the Asian movie snack: chicken feet. Fish can be found frozen and whole or sliced and marinated in a traditional spicy chili paste. Many markets offer cooked meats like HOFO duck (head on feet on), or barbecued hog. Both make for very easy meals.

    One of the best treasure troves of all is the frozen foods section. Surprises from the far reaches of the globe can be found behind the glass doors: bags of pond snails, packets of air-dried fish, cases of quail eggs, boxes of Chinese sausages. Great deals can be had on bags of frozen mussels, scallops, shrimp, and other seafood. JD laughed aloud when he saw the same brand of frozen shrimp sold to his restaurant sitting on a shelf for markedly less. The big winner for me is the variety of dim sum treats. It’s so very nice not to have to leave home for a steamy breakfast of bao buns.

    Of course, the basics would only get you so far without the aisles and aisles of vinegars, sauces, noodles, rice papers, spices, canned lychees, and dried mushrooms. The selection of soy sauces alone can be exhilarating. JD is on the constant lookout for an exotic white soy sauce a fellow chef once lent him. The hunt is half the thrill. On one of our trips I found fine French butter, small production Taiwanese honey, and a can of bubblegum-flavored jackfruit.

    Strategywise, JD recommends starting with a recipe and a list of ingredients. And never be afraid to ask questions, he says. While we stood, obviously confused, in front of a meat case, a sweet older Asian man motioned in a gesture of aid. After a few minutes of pointing and a mix of odd linguistics on all our parts, we at last learned via pantomime that the gelatinous mass we’d been eyeing was beef stomach. We all smiled and nodded, feeling lucky to be in Minnesota. Even in March.

    United Noodles 2015 E. 24th St., Minneapolis, 612-721-6677

    Shuang Hur 654 University Ave., St. Paul,

    651-251-2196; 2710 Nicollet Ave., Minneapolis, 612-872-8606

    Duc Loi 2429 Nicollet Ave., Minneapolis,

    612-870-8684

    M&A Food Store 721 Jackson St., St. Paul,

    651-310-0109

  • Money

    With the weather unseasonably warm last month, I was often out walking the dog after dinner. One evening it was particularly nice outside. As we passed bicyclists, runners, and other walkers, Charlie, my twelve-pound Cavalier King Charles spaniel, took little notice. He was content to enjoy weather that felt more like April than January. Only when we approached a man walking a large German shepherd did wee little Charlie become alarmed, growling and lurching at a dog four times his size. I tightened my grip, and the shepherd’s owner did the same. As we strangled our dogs past one another, we each managed a courteous nod.

    I wondered for the rest of the walk whether Charlie would be so courageous had I not restrained him, and let him go ahead and become an appetizer for that dog. Would that temper his enthusiasm for such brash behavior? Would it result in less eventful walks in the future?

    Last week, I had a conversation with a friend who was desperate to get shares of a red-hot and fairly risky I.P.O. I couldn’t help but recall how this same friend, confiding in me a year earlier, had wanted to cash in his blue-chip portfolio and stick it all in risk-free government bonds. The risks of investing, he said at the time, were imminent. Osama, bird flu, Hillary Clinton; too much impending menace to stay in the market, he opined.

    Thinking back, I remembered how past money-talks with this friend had jumped from paralyzing fear to unmitigated risk-taking, so his jumpiness wasn’t completely surprising. He panicked in 1987 when his stocks sunk, freaked out when interest rates rose in 1990 and 1994, and wanted to pour his portfolio into technology stocks in 2000. In other words, he had often exhibited courage when the weight of the world gave him its thumbs-up. But he became fearful after experiencing financial pain. Most investors are like my friend. They are hardwired to make the same mistakes time and time again.

    There is a sub-discipline within the study of economics called “behavioral finance.” It suggests that financial markets are neither rational nor random for the simple reason that its participants tend to be neither of these things. Most investors make pattern mistakes in the same way my dog is inclined to overestimate his bite, but then cowers for a few days every time he takes a beating. Much in this way, investors get excited when the market goes up, depressed when the market drops, and they have no long-term memory.

    The reality of financial markets yesterday, today, and tomorrow is this: Stocks go up when excited people buy, down when scared people sell. Sometimes we become over-stimulated by the world around us, much like Charlie does, and we end up biting off more than we can chew. We lurch at perceived opportunity. We retreat while licking our wounds. This brand of knee-jerk logic, motivated by the never-ending cycle of fear and greed, is subscribed to, in varying degrees, by every investor. It doesn’t add up in the real world. But it makes perfect sense to my dog.—Howard Punch with John Carraux

  • Rake Appeal { Road

    The point of driving a Toyota Prius isn’t really the driving. If you care about driving as something other than mere transportation, don’t get a Prius. A Prius is a hybrid—not only of gasoline and electric—but also of boredom and pedantry. On the other hand, if what you care about is getting from one place to another in an efficient fashion, the Prius is, to recycle a phrase, “The Ultimate Driving Machine.” (My abject apologies to BMW.)

    There is an aesthetic to driving a Prius. It’s just not to be found within the typical rubric of acceleration, cornering, and style. Our concentration when we’re behind the wheel is on the little colorful touch-screen readout in front of us. That’s where the fun is. That’s where the clever computer tells you when the gas engine is running, or when the battery is being charged, or when the battery alone is propelling the car and the gas mileage is infinite. An alternate readout tells you what mileage you got and how much you recharged the battery in five-minute increments since you last started the car. And a line of text below tells you how far you’ve gone since your last fill and what mileage you’ve gotten since that date a couple of weeks ago.

    So, you don’t bury the tachometer needle on a Prius. You bury the instantaneous mileage bar. Hell, the Prius doesn’t even have a tachometer.

    But, I do protest too much. It is a Toyota after all, and that means it’s a damn good car.

    It accelerates just like you’d expect an underpowered compact car to accelerate, except a little better. The electric motor actually provides a little extra boost when you pop into passing gear. It’s absolutely capable of doing anything you ask on Twin Cities freeways, short of blowing the doors off the guy in the next lane, of course. But for running out to Costco or over to downtown St. Paul, you’re not going to be able to go faster than seventy anyway, and the car is certainly capable of that. Even better, when you are averaging fifteen miles per hour on 35W at 5:30 p.m. you’ll at least get some satisfaction in looking at that little screen and seeing that, for the last five minutes, you’ve averaged seventy-five miles per gallon.

    Overall, the mileage for buzzing around town is probably around forty-five miles per gallon. You can do better if you really take it easy, and you can do worse if you drive it like you normally do. One of the foibles of the Prius’ celebrated hybrid system is that the car always runs the gas engine until the system gets warmed up—at least three miles or so, depending on the weather—and that means the mileage isn’t much better than a normal compact for those short trips. So, if you mostly live and drive in the city, the extra several thousand bucks you’ll pay for this car over what a Corolla or a Civic costs aren’t worth it. But, if you live in the suburbs, where the average trips are longer, the savings will add up. Will they add up in the long run to actual savings? Probably not, even with gas prices where they are now. When Iran’s daily oil production is cut off, though, that extra mileage is going to be a welcome mitigation.

    There is one more reason to buy a Prius . I had the opportunity to experience the car’s stability under stressful circumstances first hand. To make a long story short, my companion was driving when we hit a spot of glare ice, which put us into a seventy-mile-per-hour skid sideways across 35W and into the ditch. Instead of rolling us over and over, as we would have done had we been in, say, an American SUV, the Prius was perfectly stable. In fact, it barely leaned as the electronic skid control system kicked in, applying just the right torque and traction to the wheels to keep us stable in the skid. As we banged to a stop in the ditch, my companion said, “Thank God we didn’t roll.”

    “No,” I replied, “Thank Toyota.”—Oliver Tuanis

  • Health

    Back a long time ago, in the olden days of the last century, we all knew how to respond to a set of enormous fake breasts. We stared. We muttered, “Oh my Lordy.” It was new then, and comical in a grotesque, medically questionable kind of way. Pamela Anderson was nothing if not an absurdity, a fifteen-year-old boy’s dream girl blown up to comic-book proportions. Dolly Parton, at least, had the sense to make fun of her extreme, and extremely lucrative, implanted bosom. “I was the first woman to burn my bra,” she once said, in her girly southern lilt. “It took the fire department four days to put it out.”

    Now, things are much different. You can’t go anywhere without encountering boobs that’ve been inflated, a face that’s been peeled, or a butt on the back end of a tuck. In 2004, according to the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, nearly twelve million men and women succumbed to various elective “procedures.” Almost a half million had liposuction. More than 300,000 had their breasts enlarged. Hundreds of thousands more had their eyelids chopped and their noses sculpted. People now walk around with Pete Postlethwaite-sized cheek implants, snipped ears, hair plugs, fraudulent six packs, and lips that look to be melting. It appears that we’ve overcome the aversion to purchasing what nature didn’t, or would never in a million years, provide.

    The question arises, then, as we teeter on the brink of total plastic surgery acceptance: How should the casual observer respond to these sudden changes in the people we know and sometimes love? Because even though Americans are going under the knife in record numbers, we innocent bystanders still seem required to pretend as though nothing’s happened. (It’s no coincidence that teenage girls often ask for breast implants before heading to college, where a new crowd will be none the wiser.) We’re supposed to keep our wrinkly, thin-lipped yaps shut when a once-craggy face suddenly appears taut as the blanket on an army cot, when B cups miraculously turn into double Ds, springing forth from a cocktail dress like beach balls bobbing in a swimming pool.

    There are bodily changes we’re meant to acknowledge, even admire. Like tattoos and purple hairdye jobs. But then, an alteration as dramatic as a new nose is supposed to pass without comment. Perhaps it’s part of our growing collective belief in fantasy, the fuzzing line between truth and fiction, our willingness to be complicit in enormous lies. Spider-Man really can leap from building to building, Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and this is definitely my original butt.

    Conventional wisdom dictates that we wait for those who’ve had plastic surgery to mention it first, to indicate whether the enhancement is intended to be noticed. But that seems ridiculously tactful, not unlike the way you’d treat someone with cancer or a mental illness. It certainly would be a relief if the conversational climate were more open, more breezy. Then a person could come right out and ask whether there are crunching noises during rhinoplasty. We could ask if, as plastic surgeons like to suggest, a man with calf implants truly feels like a butterfly released from a cocoon. How refreshing it would be to stop merely observing the sped-up, tilt-a-whirl evolution of the race, and say, “You know, the cleft in your new chin looks like a tiny butt.”—Jennifer Vogel

  • Three Destinations

    Paula and George Lopuch, of downtown Minneapolis, take Red-Handed to a whole new level with three different trips and three different issues of The Rake.

    Africa: Our trip included a one-week safari in Kenya, where we held The Rake up exactly over the equator, much to the amusement of the locals.

    Mexico: San Miguel de Allende, a most beautiful and historic arts colony in the Central Highlands of Mexico, is four hours’ north of Mexico City. This colonial city was founded in 1542, and the central part of town (El Centro) has been preserved as a national monument, no traffic lights, no neon signs, no fast foods, cobblestones, with a magnificent gothic church in the center (see behind my shoulder). Just wish we could have a copy of The Rake sent to us for the four months we’re away each winter.

    Bali: Had a massage almost every day—at ten dollars for ninety minutes, how could one resist? Got in some temple-viewing as well; there are temples and shrines everywhere.

    Paula and George Lopuch

  • Rake Appeal { Home

    Gardening trends come and go. Vegetable gardens were big (literally) when families had great hordes of kids. English gardens had their day—along with Laura Ashley. “Naturalizing,” in the nineties, reflected a permissive era, but proved a natural habitat for neighbor complaints. Without coming right out and saying I wanted to school the scarecrow next door, I sought the horticultural wisdom of Joan Westby, a master gardener at Leitner’s Garden Center in St. Paul. She has a degree in horticulture. She is a professional. She indulged me with the newest and nowest things yet to come this spring and summer.

    These days, “people are looking to create a personal retreat, an oasis,” Westby replied, obviously on familiar ground. “But at the same time, they are very busy and don’t have time for a lot of maintenance. So instead of reworking the entire yard, they’ll extend their indoor living space with a small, restful outdoor space like a patio.” So that four-level deck you built with the kids’ college fund? So last year. Container gardening is red hot. Custom-planted pots, with all your favorite colors and smells wafting around your personal oasis, are the penultimate. (By the way, Leitner’s has been providing this custom potting service for twenty years.)

    And if your patio space truly is an extension of your living room, it’s going to be cluttered. (Wait, I said that, not Westby.) Sure there’ll be the Weber, but there also should be comfy furniture. (Hint: You can tell if the furniture is right by providing your children with some dry paper and a magnifying glass. If the furniture burns up, as natural materials tend to do, it was right. If it just melts and creates hazardous waste, it was wrong.) Further trappings of the outdoor oasis, said Westby, include a birdfeeder, wind chimes, statuary, a fountain, and definitely one of those rococo outdoor candelabras. This being Minnesota, she also recommended a beautiful copper fire pit as the sensible source of warmth.

    Of course, you’ll want to arrange all this stuff in a pleasing and ergonomic manner, which brings us to patio feng shui. The gargoyles and barbed wire should stay in the rec room, where they belong, and keep planters out of direct-energy force fields. (The easy thing about this brand of gardening is that there aren’t many plants.) Anyway, you get the picture—it’s like a living room, but smells better.

    Plagued by déjà vu, I combed my mind for where I’d already spotted the sort of alfresco bliss Westby described. Not in Provence, nor in Sonoma County. It was in Southeast Minneapolis, near the University of Minnesota, in fact. Some trendsetting undergraduates had created a soothing oasis from the ravages of syllabi and Chlamydia right in their front yard with a comfy davenport (circa 1985), several tattered barcaloungers, some tiki torches, and, in a space-saving coup, bongs that doubled as statuary and aromatherapy dispensers.

    Container gardening was definitely going on, though in an important fallow stage—beer cans and plastic cups were growing a life-sustaining agar-like substance rumored to be more effective than Miracle Gro. These visionaries had moved a giant TV/wailing wall to their outdoor retreat, too—which not only provided mesmerizing, low-res images and womb-like sound but also blocked sun, wind, and drive-by artillery. It all came into place a full semester before it showed up on Westby’s radar. Isn’t that the way? Trends, like viruses, germinate, not in the minds of professionals and academics, but rather in the fecund soil of the Undecided.—Sarah Barker