The Rake Magazine

Month: June 2006

  • The Monster Mash

    It was the Paris Hilton-Stavros Niarchos breakup that did it. I’ve decided that since the average celebrity liaison lasts less time than it takes Britney Spears to endanger a baby, I’m in favor of assigning these jet-set hook-ups shorter, more easily memorable names.

    The TomKats, Brangelinas, and Bennifers of the entertainment world become shorthand for even shorter commitments. David Spade and Heather Locklear came and went as an item before we could even agree what to call their unholy babe-elf union. I would have voted for Spocklear, but I didn’t know whom to contact.

    Assigning concise monikers to celebrity couples would free up hours for me each day by cutting my bathroom reading in half. In the 60s, adulterous Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton were the reigning queen and king of showbiz tittle-tattle, known to all as “Liz and Dick.” But that was a more leisurely era. If they were scandalizing today’s go-go, short-attention-span world, I’d abbreviate them as Lick. A single, recognizable syllable radiating spicy overtones, perfect for efficient cocktail-party chatter. Plus, it would move more copies of supermarket magazines. I imagine some lucky staffer at Cosmo or the National Enquirer has the task of dubbing showbiz couples with kicky pet names. I would love that job: Appellation editor has got to be the most desirable post in the whole gossip industry. It would be like naming perfumes or hurricanes or heartburn medications. Doesn’t Prilosec sound like a ménage between Prince, Lindsay Lohan, and Ryan Seacrest?

    What makes an A-list celebrity couple (other than blinding good looks and oodles of dough) is that everybody knows their name. The easier it is to remember, the more powerful their superstardom becomes. Conversely, lack of an instantly recognizable name is an embarrassing disadvantage. Imagine George Wendt expectantly strolling onto the Cheers set, all ready for a big welcome, and the cast saying, “Oh, hi, you.”

    Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt never had a shared tabloid name during their marriage, and that lack of marketable brand identity probably contributed to their breakup. Ben Affleck and J-Lo had already staked their claim to Bennifer, so Brannifer would have been too close and confusing. By the time Affleck hitched up with Jennifer Garner, becoming Ben-Gar (which sounds like a Tokyo-stomping dinosaur played by a man in a green rubber suit), the damage was done. Beautiful lives were tragically torn asunder, entourages were disbanded, forests of newsprint were leveled—all for lack of a cool, fame-enhancing nickname.

    Now the publicity-challenged Jen—Aniston, that is—is with Vince Vaughn, and the tabs have saddled them with the klunky tag Vaughniston. If she and Vince want to stay in the game, they need a name makeover—something with some zing and pep. A confident, assured new handle that dumps her old marital baggage and proclaims, “Forget those losers Brad and Angelina! I’m having a great time with my hot giant boyfriend whose eyebags totally give his face character and make him more desirable! I am not looking for household cleaning products to swallow!” A super with-it name that tells the world, “Vaughn and Jennifer got it goin’ on!”

    I propose Va-Jenna. Clear. Self-explanatory. Salacious. I can feel the Pulitzer in my hands right now.

    Once Va-Jenna makes its mark, Brad and Angelina will have to respond with a re-branding of their own. Brad faces a challenge here. You can’t use his last name because “Pitt” sounds like something dank that you fall into—or worse, deodorize. So it’s good that he’s with the melodious Angelina Jolie. With Va-Jenna shoved in their faces, their retaliation must be bold and direct. Something that decisively tops their rivals and re-establishes their cred as Sexiest Couple in All of Human History.

    After careful consideration and hours of tricky word games worthy of The Da Vinci Code, I hit the pot of gold: Bagina. I need to get this trademarked right away. Can’t you see the headlines? “Bagina Desperate for Another Baby!” “Bagina Opens Up in Exclusive Barbara Walters Interview!” “Bagina Clamps Down on Pushy Paparazzi!” “Globetrotting Bagina Snubs Tinseltown!” “Bagina Gains Weight in Bid for Oscar Nomination!” “Bagina Discharged from Hospital!” “Bagina Heats Up the Screen in Mr. & Mrs. Smith 2!”

    OK. I’ll stop.

  • Who is “We the People”?

    A few weeks ago, Joseph C. Phillips, one of my childhood “ace boon coons” (black Southern speak for best friends), rolled through the Twin Cities. He’s mainly an actor (The Cosby Show, General Hospital, and the upcoming Vanished), but on this trip he was promoting his book, He Talk Like A White Boy—Reflections on Faith, Family, Politics and Authenticity. In it, Joseph proudly riffs on why he is so “old school,” which he defines as embracing traditional values: love of God, devotion to family, patriotism, and Smokey Robinson crooning about love and marriage. In other words, he is what our label-happy culture calls a conservative. For him, affirmative action is demeaning, hip-hop music is nihilistic and same-sex marriage an abomination.

    While in Minneapolis, he appeared at Raking Through Books, this magazine’s monthly showcase for authors. After his reading, Joseph and I volleyed on the state of racial politics in America, and on affirmative action and reparations, each saying the things that you would expect people with our political viewpoints to say. We have had this conversation so many times and are both so hammy that for us eating pork is akin to cannibalism; the audience loved it.

    However, the warm fuzzies floating around the room grew frosty after an earnest young African-American law student asked Phillips if he agreed that diversity fostered by affirmative action enhanced the value of education for all students. Phillips responded with a passionate denunciation of Gratz v. Bollinger, the 2003 Supreme Court decision that upheld the University of Michigan’s affirmative action program but rejected the school’s policy of giving undergraduate minority candidates an automatic extra twenty points on their admissions scores.

    Phillips’ voice lost the relaxed cadence of our friendly banter. Pointing to the corner of the room where most of the African-Americans were sitting, he shouted, “I reject the notion that African-Americans need extra points to get into an elite school! We have just as much brain power as anyone else!” A few minutes later, the same law student, not so subtly referring to George W. Bush, asked how Phillips felt about people who secured spots at fancy schools like Harvard and Yale due to their money, family name, and connections. Is it OK, he asked, to give these “legacies” a leg up in college admissions but not to do so for members of historically oppressed minority groups? Joseph never really did answer the young man’s question.

    After the event, Joseph and I reconnected with old classmates from George Washington High School in Denver over dinner. He was frustrated that so much of the discussion had centered on affirmative action. “Our country needs to get back focusing on our shared values—the things that unite us as Americans,” he said. Meanwhile, I thought about those long-ago days in Denver, when we both knew that being African-American enhanced our chance of getting into an elite school. We did not doubt for a minute that we had just as much “brain power” as anyone else. However, affirmative action was not about who had the bigger cranium. We saw it as deferred compensation for the brutally dashed dreams of our forefathers and mothers. From that perspective, we felt no remorse for being “affirmative-action babies.”

    There is a scene in the movie Ragtime in which a black man named Coalhouse Walker Jr. barricades himself in an art museum after being disrespected by some white firemen. Booker T. Washington tries to convince him to give himself up, and makes a moving speech encouraging Walker to trust the system. Walker replies that Washington “spoke like an angel,” but that he and the people he cared about most lived “on earth,” with its cold and bitter realities.

    As we finished our meal, I remembered that scene. It so neatly captured why Joseph and I, despite growing up with the same political signs on our lawns, competing on the same high school speech team, and enduring the same racial pressures in our white middle-class Denver neighborhood, have differing views on certain issues.

    Like Booker T., Joseph still trusts that “the system” can work without enforcement tools like affirmative action. I am more like Coalhouse. I want to believe in the lofty rhetoric Joseph espouses in his book. However, just when I am about to take that leap of faith and believe I am truly part of the “we,” something happens to me or my family, like getting stopped for driving at night in the wrong neighborhood, which brings me back to reality of living in a still-unequal America.

    Therefore, I am not ready to give up affirmative action and other institutional safeguards that help to protect “us,” until my country gives me consistent and sustained reasons to believe that the “we” are prepared to actually do—and not just talk about doing—the right thing for all Americans.

  • Magic Potion

    No one ever added more acreage to the Roman Empire than Julius Caesar (the Roman geezer). Until his time, Roman territory in what is now France was the relatively narrow sliver along the Mediterranean coast that is still called Provence, precisely because it was the original Roman province. In ten years Caesar took over all Gaul, and had even paid a couple of visits to the closest of the islands in Ocean, where he found a lot of hairy warriors wearing nothing but woad (blue dye made from a plant like the indigo): “Woad’s the stuff to show men / Woad to scare your foemen / Boil it to a brilliant hue/ Then rub it on your back and your abdomen.”

    Of course there was one village in Brittany which even Caesar could not subdue, the one inhabited by the tough little cartoon warrior Astérix and his oversized friend Obélix, who can eat a whole wild boar at a sitting and makes his living (when he is not beating up Romans) delivering the massive stone obelisks used in Gallic religion. The secret weapon of mass destruction the villagers use against the Roman invader is a magic potion brewed by the local druid Panoramix (yes, they all have silly names). Drinking it makes Astérix mightier than Popeye; Obélix was dropped in a vat of it when he was a baby. Apparently there is to be an Astérix film in time for the next Olympics, in which nos héros will compete against a legionary called Gluteus Maximus (very humerus) and there will be a lot of earnest stuff about the morality of magic potions. Odd how morality can spoil a joke.

    Perhaps one can forgive Caesar for not referring to this determined center of resistance in the rather po-faced narrative he composed concerning his conquests. What is harder to credit is the account he provides of Gallic wildlife. There are, he says, three sorts of deer in Gaul. One sounds like the unicorn, except that its horn has a branchy tip, like an antler (all right, maybe he had seen a stag in summer after only one of its antlers had fallen off). One is the auroch, a mighty ox which the Gauls were accustomed to catch by the same unsporting method Winnie ille Pu used to capture heffalumps—the auroch is extinct but is known from archaeology. But it is the elks which make one wonder. Elks, according to Caesar, have no knees, so they sleep standing up and leaning against trees, and when they fall over they land on their backs with their little legs wiggling in the air. If you want to catch one, you find a tree that an elk is likely to lean against and you cut halfway through it; you then lie in wait ’til an elk sidles up and goes to sleep, at which point Pif, Paf, Boom (as Astérix says when he biffs a Roman legionary). If you believe this, I have a magic potion that might interest you.

    Well, actually I have. It is white and comes from the broad land south of Bordeaux called Entre-deux-Mers. The name is Verdillac—all those French names ending in -ac (Cognac, Cadillac, Carnac) are pre-Roman—and the 2004 vintage, made by the old established firm of Armand Roux, may be had locally for around ten dollars.

    A skillful blend of (mostly) Semillon with Sauvignon Blanc, this is very easy to drink. Semillon is the grape variety used to make the great golden dessert wines of Sauternes (I think of dreamy glasses of Chateau Rieussec 1976 sipped in my misspent youth). What the Semillon imparts here is not sweetness, but a pleasing douceur, an almost oily mildness which kicks in just before the aftertaste; some people would call this the taste of melon, but it is more interesting than that. The Sauvignon gives the wine its central grit—the taste you get from the red frilly bits next to a peach stone—and there is an aftertaste which recalls the scent of elderflowers in high summer.

    Chilling this wine too much would kill some of the cleverly constructed taste. Roast elk or braised auroch would overpower it. But drinking it with grilled chicken should make you grateful that the Romans brought to Gaul the cultivation of the grape. Astérix and his friends did not know what they were missing; “Ô vive lui, chaque fois / Que chante son coq gaulois.”

  • Specimen Days

    Boys will be there but your parents will not,” promised the summer camp brochures that came in winter’s mail like seed catalogs. There were pamphlets for marine biology camp in Florida, space camp in Alabama, and some sort of geology road trip called the Central Rocky Mountain Institute. “I hear scientific greatness calling me,” I said to my parents, handing over the stack of glossy pictures and application forms. “It’s for my education,” I insisted.

     

    “Education” was the sort of trigger word that could induce a highly suggestible trance state in my parents. I could have used this knowledge for evil purposes by turning them into middle-class zombie assassins. But instead I got them to write a check for the road trip science camp, and the state of Wisconsin enjoyed another year’s reprieve from the destabilizing effects of political assassination.

    I would be caravanning with two dozen sixteen-year-olds and a handful of counselors, trekking from our home in Wisconsin to the wilds of Montana, exploring geological points of interest along the way. It was intriguing: How could a point be both “of interest” and “geological”?

    The trip would be my third and final science-camp experience. “Serial Science Camper” was not an instinctive niche for me, personally. If Amnesty International had run human-rights youth camps, it might have been a better fit for my particular enthusiasms. Or if my parents had splurged on installing cable television in August, sitting on the couch watching TV might also have been a good fit. As it turned out, my fellow science campers were just like me. Perhaps not quite as cool or self-assured as the teenagers attending camps for pom pon or basketball, they were definitely on more solid social footing than RenFair types who went to band camp. But the true future geniuses of the Midwest didn’t show up, sleeping bags at the ready, when it came time to answer the call to muster. My guess is that they imagined the relentlessness of the peer contact involved and decided to take a pass.

    The counselors at science camps tended to favor detached observation and note-taking over cheerful boosterism, and I found them to be refreshing counterpoints to the capture-the-flag-loving, sunny-day-hooray! counselors I had crossed swords with during my years at YMCA camp. Y-camp counselors were known to blow whistles while forcing a person to swim farther or run faster, but science-camp counselors refrained from unnecessary noise or motion so as not to scare off a possible specimen. At worst, a science-camp counselor could only bore you, and even then you could just relax and stand there while it happened.

    The first of the camps I attended was held at Pigeon Lake Field Station in Wisconsin’s Chequamegon National Forest. It was a lot like college: We could sleep in, skip breakfast, and then drag ourselves at the last minute to a class that had seemed fascinating when we first signed up for it but in which we quickly lost interest. We dwelt in a forest—a place of gentle shadows, low roofs, screen doors, and instant best friends. We tromped over pine needles and ducked under pine boughs when it was time to learn orienteering or venture out to the nearby bog. My favorite class was the mysteriously titled “Avian Aftermath.” After we took our seats, each student was issued a pair of tweezers and an oblong, fuzzy, gray lump called an “owl pellet” to dissect. As we pulled apart the hairy mass, slender white lengths of bone appeared. These we plucked out of the pellet and delicately placed to the side. When this dissection had reduced the pellet to a large pile of fluff, a stack of tiny ribs, spines, and skulls remained: the inedible parts of the owl’s supper. Our instructor then taught us how to identify the mice and moles by their ingested skeletons.

    One night we hiked into a dark part of the woods, two by two, and placed Wintergreen Lifesavers in our mouths before turning toward a partner and extinguishing our flashlights. On the count of three, we all crunched down on the mints, and were impressed to see blue-green sparks flickering in one another’s mouths. The triboluminescence heightened with increased friction. Wanting to put on a good show, we pulled back our lips and gnashed our teeth violently.

    The next fall, I took part in Trees for Tomorrow, a name that will be familiar to the tens of thousands of students who have passed through the Eagle River, Wisconsin, campus. The program was held over a long October weekend, in a harsh, wet woodland where gray skies misted the unfortunate with a ceaseless drizzle. We trudged to local lumber mills and learned the finer points of forestry “resource management.” Recalls alumna Kristy Robb, perfectly capturing the thrill-inducing gestalt of the place, “We didn’t have enough warm clothing to be standing under a tree for what felt like hours, hearing someone drone on about the damned tree.”

    By the following summer, a combination of hormones and pop culture had dulled my ability to focus during lectures. Luckily, the Central Rocky Mountain Institute was heavy on hiking and exploration. After parents had dropped off their campers in a central Wisconsin parking lot, the counselors confiscated all the Walkmen and informed us that both napping and listening to the radio were verboten during the all-day van rides. “I gave up smoking for this?” I thought. But with nothing else to do, we entertained one another with jokes and stories until we were as close as cousins—kissing cousins, in some cases. We slept in cramped and malodorous tents, cooked our food in a makeshift mess hall, and endured limited access to running water. We always carried canteens, knives, rope, and bandannas. In Montana, we marched up the mountain every morning and tripped down the mountain every night, ankle deep in wildflowers and singing like von Trapps.

    And the geological points of interest were a wondrous backdrop for our bonhomie. No glacier-wrought handiwork went unappreciated. Every volcanic nip and tuck was celebrated. We explored kettle moraines, camped in the Badlands, and wandered through Yellowstone’s geothermal funhouse. A few times we went digging for fossils, and we were allowed to keep our findings, which was a rare treat. Our instructors’ reverence for conservation occasionally conflicted with our natural teenage urge to vandalize. When some of us girls picked flowers to adorn our greasy, unwashed hair, we were tensely reprimanded, “Collection of botanical specimens is not allowed in national parks.” When we were returned to our parents, sunburnt and ravenous, we had a new appreciation for … well, for being away from our parents, I suppose.

    But like the mammoths whose bones we marveled at, the age of the co-ed science camp was coming to a close. I attribute it in large part to Time’s 1982 Man of the Year: the computer. As I grew out of summer-camp age and into adulthood, the concept of “science” became tethered to computers, and computers were tethered to the electric grid. Computer-camp programs sprung up in the vacant lab spaces that universities could spare during the summer, and their success confirmed that students would accept a science camp divorced from actual camping. As the trend grew, math, engineering, and robotics camps blossomed, but ecology field camps withered. At the same time, the academic community recognized that boys were pulling ahead of girls in science achievement, so single-sex day camps were created to free girls from the distraction and self-consciousness of the co-ed classroom. Had I been born twenty years later, I would still have gone to science camp—but I would have left both my pocket knife and my lip gloss at home. It wouldn’t have been an adventure, and it wouldn’t have been nearly as much fun.

    Of the camps I attended, only Trees for Tomorrow, which gets support from “the forest products and electric utility industries” is still active (and, judging from the raingear-clad participants on its website, the fieldwork environment hasn’t changed much in the last fifteen years). The sylvan paradise of the Pigeon Lake Field Station is now available, on a rental basis, for conferences. The Central Rocky Mountain Institute, never much more than some dedicated teachers, a map, and a couple vans, is just a memory. No scientist myself, all I have retained from those summers is a partial mole skeleton and a knack for juvenile puns using the term “kettle hole.”

  • Momentum: New Dance Works

    This year’s lineup of fresh Minnesota dance includes inspired moments like the pairing of the gorgeous music of Spaghetti Western String Co. with Live Action Set, an inventive company of clowns, dancers, and stage performers. Their piece is titled “Percussionist,” even though, yes, Spaghetti Western is a string quartet; it’s the bodies in movement that provide the thump. Other standouts in the series include a hip-hop dance piece, an amalgamation of video and live performance, and “Tiny Town,” in which New York transplant Karen Sherman offers a meditation on the Midwest’s expansive flatlands (pictured). 1420 Washington Ave. S., Minneapolis; 612-340-1725; www.southerntheater.org; www.walkerart.org

  • Crimes and Whispers: A Tango of Despair and Defiance

    While taking tango lessons from an Argentine national, local choreographer Gerry Girouard became interested in the famous Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo—a group whose mission since 1977 has been to track down missing Argentine children, many of whom were born to political prisoners. By teaming his own dancers with Off-Leash Area Productions, a theater troupe adept in physical performance styles, Girouard’s piece evokes the ominous Junta environment that the Grandmothers braved to rescue dozens of children. Expect an imposing and virile spectacle involving wall dancing and impressive upper-body strength. 1940 Hennepin Ave., Minneapolis; 612-724-7372

  • They Sold Their Homesteads

    These days, Stockholm, Wisconsin, is a sweet daytrip for retirees looking to buy Amish quilts or decorative objets from discerning folks who’ve escaped the big-city rat race. But in 1854, this town was the promised land for two hundred Swedish settlers; their compatriot, Eric Peterson, had left Bjurtjärn for America with his two brothers, who then went back to spread the good news to their former neighbors. These brothers must have been highly persuasive—can you imagine your neighbor inspiring you to go anyplace other than perhaps the new Trader Joe’s? Anyway, a good chunk of Bjurtjärn decamped for Wisconsin. After 152 years, the descendants of those who stayed in Sweden have now crossed the Atlantic to present a musical version of a play based on the exodus. As many as fifty members—not counting the animal actors—of this eighty-person troupe appear on stage at a time, a true feat of stage direction. 2600 Park Ave. S., Minneapolis; 612-871-4907; www.americanswedishinst.org

  • Fresh Ink

    What Momentum does for choreographers (see above), Fresh Ink does for playwrights. Among our top picks is Boldly Going Nowhere, a one-man, five-character study put on by Theatre Latté Da veteran Tod Petersen. As wear-tested at the Minnesota Fringe Festival two years back, it demonstrated Petersen’s uncanny ability to pick up the speech patterns and mannerisms of, say, a debutante dabbling in lesbianism or a television addict who exiles himself to his parent’s basement. Also on the docket is a tribute to Gene Pitney, who penned the classic “Only Love Can Break A Heart,” performed by Gary Rue, a musician who was once a roadie for Pitney; a stand-up routine by ex-Twin Citizen Amy Anderson; and more. 528 Hennepin Ave., Minneapolis; 612-339-4944; www.illusiontheater.org

  • The Great Gatsby

    The Great Gatsby is a notably contemporary choice for a company best known for its Shakespeare. But by honoring both the spirit of St. Paul’s favorite son and the opulent Jazz Age epitomized by his classic novel, the company is making quite the symbolic statement for christening its glamorous waterfront playhouse. A second Minnesota son-made-good figures into the production, as well: It’s directed by David Esbjornson, the veteran Broadway director who grew up in Wilmar, and now serves as artistic director for another regional company, Seattle Repertory Theatre. An attractive cast serves to plum things up—West Coast actor Lorenzo Pisoni has the floppy hair and Gallic good looks necessary to play Jay Gatsby, and local songstress Christina Baldwin has the role of car-crash victim Myrtle Wilson. 818 2nd St. S., Minneapolis; 612-377-2224; www.guthrietheater.org

  • Cameron Jamie

    Backyard wrestling, eating contests, re-enactment play, Halloween hijinks—Cameron Jamie takes inspiration from some of contemporary mankind’s most primitive social pastimes. While they may not be great showcases of civility, these subjects do make for grotesque, amusing, and ultimately thought-provoking study in this artist’s first solo museum exhibition. Through film, video, performance, photography, sculpture, and drawings, Jamie presents the strange fruits of suburban boredom—focused around California’s San Fernando Valley, where he grew up—as “social theater.” His collaborations with street performers, celebrity impersonators, and musicians (including the Melvins and Japanese guitarist Keiji Haino) add dimension to these fascinating takes on socially acceptable absurdity. 612-375-7622; www.walkerart.org