The Rake Magazine

Month: July 2006

  • Red-Blooded Australian

    It is a drear thought that if you can remember the Pudding Shop on the north side of Divan Yolu in Istanbul you must be well into middle age. “Those were the days, my friend,” the Seekers sang, “We thought they’d never end, we would be young for ever and a day.” As the Roman poet Horace said, eheu fugaces, alas, the fleeting years.

    Divan Yolu had been one of the grand-processional avenues of Byzantine and Ottoman Constantinople. Between its marble colonnades, purple-robed emperors and their retinues passed ceremoniously from the circular Forum of Constantine to the great Church of the Holy Wisdom.

    By the 1970s, it was distinctly dingy. A small Ottoman mosque still broadcast the call to prayer over a crackly public address system, just about audible above the geriatric gearboxes of nose-to-tail Turkish taxicabs. Across the road there were inexpensive kebab shops, the sort of places where you might spot the management replenishing the mineral water bottles from the tap. The upper stories of these eateries were crumbling hotels whose small-bore plumbing pipes had not been designed with western lavatory paper in mind—the blockages and bursts caused by inconsiderate guests smelt awful. So much for the Romantic East.

    The Pudding Shop stood in the center of this heterogeneous parade. The puddings were puddings in the American sense, little bowls of dairy glup, with or without rice. The clientele was long-haired youth from all over the western world—what the Turks called hipi (Turkish spelling is relentlessly rational). On one wall there was a notice board on which people advertised for traveling companions to go with them eastward: Persia-Afghanistan-India-Kathmandu.

    The Hipi Route to the Mystic East (farther east than the Romantic East) would be impassable today. It finally died at Christmas 1978 with the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. But thirty years ago, it was a long, thin line stretching across Asia, drawn by folk inspired by a lust to know what cannot be known. You saw them, always in groups, hanging around the bus stations at Erzurum and Tabriz, wild-eyed, thin from inanition, sometimes begging, often clutching paperback selections from the Buddhist Scriptures.

    For all their preoccupation with spiritual traditions, the hipi seemed quite uninterested in the Christian and Islamic heritage of Turkey and Persia as they passed through. The poet Peter Levi, who recounted his own adventures in Afghanistan in The Light Garden of the Angel King, found them remarkably unenterprising people. You seldom saw the hipi anywhere except in the places where they all congregated—the Pudding Shop in Istanbul, Nasr-i Khosrow in Teheran.

    It is odd too that a movement of free spirits with lofty spiritual aims has left so little in the way of literature. I can think of no bahnbrechend, or groundbreaking, spiritual odyssey recording the hipi Drang nach Osten. That is not to say that their travels had no consequences. Many decent people in the Near East had never seen westerners in the flesh before the hipi passed through. Heaven knows what effect they had on the lands they traversed.

    True, they were not guilty of building vulgar concrete tourist hotels, but their practices and appearance were scarcely such as to commend the West to those who in the next decade were to animate the Muslim moral re-armament of Persia and Afghanistan.

    There were other folk who frequented the Pudding Shop. They were going in the opposite direction. These were not etiolated seekers after truth; they were beefy blond Australians, big men for whom the shish kebabs of Divan Yolu, one felt, were slim pickings. The destination to which they were working westward was the area of London around the Earls Court tube station, then known as Kangaroo Gulch. Their idea was to see the world before they went home to settle down. They were no better informed than the hipi (“Who were these Byzantine guys?”), but their bluffness was refreshing.

    You might find similar genial refreshment in a bottle of Lindemann’s Reserve Merlot, a warm-hearted red wine from the southeast of Australia, available around here for less than twelve dollars a go. This is a rich round wine, compounded of equal parts of Merlot and sunshine, with spicy touches derived from the oak barrels it matured in and fine plummy flavors that will, if you are not careful, have you uttering the broad, relaxed vowels of the Antipodes. It would go well with kebabs. And you do not need to traverse all Asia to get it.

  • New Pleasure from Old Recipes

    I had a German grandmother who could cook, but she lived in Michigan. During our summer and holiday visits, this silly American girl didn’t know how to appreciate her cooking. I thought meat wrapped in pancake was weird and wondered why the potato salad was pink. When I finally realized what I could have learned, it was too late. I have a copy of the Baltisches Kochbuch from which many of her recipes came, but it isn’t her original copy, the one with her scrawlings in the margins. My grandfather didn’t think anyone was interested, so he gave it away.

    Not long after my grandmother’s death, I began to search antique stores and musty old bookshops for copies of the book. Part of me thinks I will find her copy someday. In the meantime, I have found a diversion: collecting vintage cookbooks.

    My first was The Modern Priscilla Cook Book: One Thousand Home Tested Recipes, published in 1928. The crackled cover and yellowing pages caught my eye. Inside were recipes for dishes I could barely imagine: Wild Rose Mousse, Shrimp Wiggle, Chicken Timbales, Grand-mother’s Piccalilli. I was hooked immediately. Although many recipes, such as Pork Cake, Hot Lettuce Sandwiches, and Fried Calves’ Brains will never come out of my kitchen, Ada’s Famous Gingerbread, Eggs Baked in Whole Tomatoes, Tosca Sauce, and Zephyr Potato Squares have inspired me to work through the terse, sometimes vague directions to bring forth an arcane taste of the past.

    I am not alone in this odd hobby. In 1999, the Wall Street Journal called the antique cookbook sector the hottest in the rare book field. Collectors range from food historians and book lovers to beginning cooks and professional chefs. Probably the most rare collectible would be American Cookery by Amelia Simmons, which was published in 1796, and is known to be the first American cookbook. Collectible cookbooks are hard to find in good condition. A first edition of The Sun Also Rises might have been read once and then stacked on a shelf for years, but you can bet The Modern Priscilla was consulted daily, splattered with buttermilk, and used as a coaster. For rare book dealers and hardcore collectors, this detracts from the value of the book. For me, it only adds to it.

    There was something else, besides the recipes, that enchanted me about my Modern Priscilla. It was Miss Myrtle Finden McIntosh, presumabley the original owner of the book. On the inside cover she inscribed her name, followed by “Should this book take a notion to wander, box its ears and send it home.” Her graceful handwriting can be found throughout the book, reminding herself to add one cup of sour milk to the sugar cookies, checking off and rating the good dishes (“yes sir!”), and re-naming the oatmeal cookies “rocks.” Once-blank pages are covered with hand-written recipes for versions of Overland Banana Pie, Scalloped Oysters, Honey Pumpkin Pie, even a “Hands-Off” recipe for soap. And then there’s the phone number for Dr. Chowning, the addresses of friends, and the small, seemingly quick notation that Marie died on the 6th of February in 1935. Miss Myrtle Finden McIntosh not only used this book, she loved this book. And now, so do I.

    I began hunting down the tattered and worn old cookbooks. I wanted only books that had lived in a kitchen. I came across a Text-Book of Cooking by Carlotta Greer, published in 1915, which instructs the reader not only in the preparation of food, but in its scientific composition. A discussion of starches and carbohydrates is followed by a number of practical experiments and a recipe for Cream of Wheat. Mary Tretter dutifully penciled notes throughout, checking off the questions she’d been assigned, working through a chart of one-hundred-calorie portions of food, and doodling a caricature of, I assume, her instructor. On October 25, 1921, she mastered French Toast.

    My copy of The Household Searchlight Recipe Book, published in 1935, has only one or two handwritten notations, including a name I can barely read as Mrs. A.J. Slemin. The recipes are interesting, but it was the four four-leaf clovers pressed in separate parts of the book that really attracted me. Did she think it was a safe hold for her good luck? Was it the singular site she could call entirely her own, where no one else would look?

    I started out searching for a grandmotherly figure in old cookbooks, the kind of figure many famous cooks claim as their inspiration. But I never found her. Instead I found a collection of women who were closer to my own age, doing what I am doing, cooking and learning. Without glossy photos or guidance from celebrity chefs, they invented, adapted, and grew confident. Their cookbooks were as significant to them as any diary, marking their successes and failures, giving them a place to record daily life. I feel tied to these women when I cook something that fails, and then turn to Priscilla for an easy molasses cookie recipe that I know will work and bolster my bruised ego. Most of my recipes are stored on my computer and I am guilty of countless glossy cookbook purchases, but, if I ever find a four-leaf clover, I’ll press it between the pages of Priscilla, right next to my favorite Miss Myrtle notation: “Abra-ca-dab-ra, one two three, magic magic, come to me.”

    Eggs Baked in Whole Tomatoes

    adapted from The Modern Priscilla

    3 medium-large tomatoes

    3 eggs

    salt and pepper

    3 T toasted bread crumbs

    1 t chopped rosemary

    1/2 t garlic salt

    3 slices prosciutto, diced

    Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Slice off top of tomatoes and carefully scoop out centers. Break one egg into each tomato, sprinkle with salt and pepper. Set in shallow baking dish. In separate bowl, mix bread crumbs with rosemary and garlic salt. Cover each tomato with some of the bread crumb mixture and top with pieces of prosciutto. Bake for 30 minutes. If prosciutto isn’t crisp enough, place under hot broiler for less than a minute.

  • The Buck-Naked Truth

    A couple of years ago, Pacific Drift, a public radio show produced in Southern California, featured a segment on “three very successful writers who all got their start,” according to host Ben Adair, “in sort of a surprising place—Hustler magazine.” In particular, they all credited as their mentor Allan MacDonell, the former executive editorial director of Larry Flynt Publications, which publishes Hustler. For instance, Evan Wright, a contributing editor at Rolling Stone and the author of Generation Kill, recalled MacDonell telling him that he “might have been one of the top two or three writers for Barely Legal” (one of the many other porn titles published by LFP). “I was flooded with this sense of achievement,” gushed Wright. “I can tell you that it actually felt better than getting the National Magazine Award for my reporting on Iraq.” Pause. “Is there any irony in that,” the interviewer asked, “or are you being serious?”

    MacDonell was fired from —Hustler in 2003, after some twenty years on the job; not surprisingly, he has written a book about his experiences working there. Anyone who can put fingers to keyboard and has worked in the adult industry has likely been tempted to write about it; not only do such titles stand a better-than-usual chance of getting published, but they might actually sell well. Oftentimes those writing on the porn industry employ one of two methods in order to distance themselves from their subject. They might observe and record activities in an anthropological way, that is, without engaging in the described activities (e.g., Luke Ford’s History of X: 100 Years of Sex in Film; Legs McNeil’s The Other Hollywood: The Uncensored History of the Porn Film Industry); alternatively, they can go “behind the scenes” so as to offer a more accurate rendering and a greater understanding of the described activities (e.g., Lily Burana’s Strip City: A Stripper’s Farewell Journey Across America; J. McIver Weatherford’s Porn Row).

    MacDonell, however, is neither an anthropologist nor an interloper, but rather an industry veteran who wasn’t expecting to be fired. For that matter, he never really expected to be hired: “I’d come in as an assistant nobody and risen to the top, like scum on a cup of hot chocolate,” he writes in the introduction to Prisoner of X: 20 Years in the Hole at Hustler Magazine. “If this progression had occurred at Condé Nast, I’d be pushing my publicist for a five-page profile in Forbes. When we met during the filming of The People vs. Larry Flynt, actor Woody Harrelson, who portrayed Larry in the movie, said, ‘You’re the guy who’s got the best job in the world.’ If so, why did I start my car every morning, then sit behind the wheel for 10 minutes debating whether or not to open the garage door?”

    It’s hard to imagine that anyone with this kind of sensitivity would work nine-to-five, for twenty years, on a monthly product that most people secrete away and “use” for just minutes at a time, if at all. There is genuine humanity in this memoir, though, not that any of it is uplifting or inspirational. Chances are slim that anyone will finish Prisoner of X and think, “Here is the path for me!” Nor does MacDonell romanticize the porn industry; its denizens are not revealed to have hearts of gold.

    Instead, he writes about his career at Hustler with journalistic detachment and a novelist’s eye for telling detail; imagine Gore Vidal describing the psychological impact of being subjected to a video of, purportedly, a post-post-post Barbarella-era Jane Fonda wearing a strap-on and taking care of business with Ted Turner; imagine if the radical feminist Andrea Dworkin wrote pornographic criticism about government officials and other public figures instead of pornographers; imagine if Vanity Fair’s Christopher Hitchens wrote a feature-length article about fellatio as one of America’s great pastimes (oh wait, you don’t need to imagine that—Hitchens’ “As American as Apple Pie” appeared in the July 2006 issue of Vanity Fair).

    I worked for MacDonell shortly after arriving in Los Angeles from New York. It was December 1999 and I had a résumé and a pile of writing clips, but no job. My first stint at Larry Flynt Publications involved writing for Leg World, which catered to men with such fastidious fetishes that it was difficult to come up with content that would please any majority of them. Some threatened cancellation of their subscriptions unless more shots of models wearing sheer stockings, preferably black with opaque, reinforced toes, were provided, while others forcefully argued in favor of the un-garbed foot. Seven months later, I was promoted to editor of Chic, Hustler’s presumably less raunchy twin. At one time, the Chic masthead included an editorial director, managing editor, associate editor, and cartoon editor, along with a list of contributors like Nat Hentoff, Norman Mailer, and John Ehrlichman. By the time my name appeared there in slightly bastardized versions (Allison Jenks, A.J. Ferguson), the magazine had been put on a starvation diet. Editorial content was stripped to the bare essentials, which meant the pictorials were broken up by a few Cosmopolitan-style “non-fiction” features (“Carnal Corporate Challenge—Get Sexually Harassed”), confessionals (“ ‘Does One Time Make You A Lezzie?’—Tattooed Love Girl Slips on a Clam”), and expert advice (“What Her Lingerie Reveals: More Than You Think!”), all intended to help the reader better understand the female psyche in order to get laid.

    During my tenure at LFP, I was always treated respectfully by MacDonell—more than I deserved, seeing as I was frequently late and spent a lot of time reading back issues of the New Yorker, which I hid between the covers of Penthouse and Juggs (if anyone asked, I was analyzing the competition). Nor was I a special case. He rarely, if ever, reprimanded anyone for being late or for dressing like a bum, even though he himself dressed to the nines and his door was always swung wide open by 9:00 a.m. He also taught new skills to everyone on his staff, from the editorial assistant to his managing editor, and was quick to champion their promotions. It was from him that I gained an appreciation for the art of photo selection, creating paginations, and working with the graphic designer to create eye-catching covers and layouts.

    MacDonell insisted on excellent writing and attention to graphic detail. By word and example, he instilled in his staff the idea that writing was an act of service—no matter the topic, you put forth your best effort within the parameters of the assignment. That meant consulting the LFP style guide to, say, see if you’d used the word “ass” too many times; scouting out synonyms for “buttocks”; noting that “blowjob” was one word (not two, and no hyphen); and remembering to capitalize Lycra—and, in fashion text, include a registration mark: Lycra®. These things mattered.

    All Chic cover lines, every last punctuation mark, and each faux letter from the readership was scrutinized by MacDonell. (Real letters were generally too depressing to run; Chic’s editorial content, he explained, was supposed to infuse the reader with hope for a hot sex life, not remind him that he was in prison, or had never had a girlfriend, or was subject to other unpleasant but all-too-common realities.) He read your copy carefully while you sat across from him, waiting. His pen would hover over the page and then suddenly strike, slash, add, omit—it was always an instant improvement, and usually a lesson in correct usage. If you wrote something, anything, that he didn’t touch, you felt proud, even if it was only a caption for the table of contents.

    Unfortunately, sales never picked up at Chic, and I lost my job when it folded. A couple of years later, I was surprised to hear that MacDonell had been fired. Rumor had it that his command performance at Flynt’s celebrity roast had crossed the line of taste and decorum, which must have been a difficult line to discern. “From the very beginning of my employment at Larry Flynt Publications, I joked that any day could be the last,” he writes in Prisoner. “It happened just as I had predicted, although the ax took almost 20 years to fall.”

    Reading MacDonnell’s memoir, it’s clear that, all the more to his own discomfort, he is acutely and instinctively aware of the motivations and feelings of those around him. You might not think that someone who penned a column titled “Asshole of the Month,” chock-full of highly creative and even more highly obscene invective, would have a highly developed sense of others’ feelings, but there it is: empathy. In one section, MacDonnell describes a long elevator ride with Flynt’s first wife, Althea, who then was succumbing to the effects of AIDS and drug addiction. “Althea slouched to the back of the box and slithered down the wall. A pair of giant, mullet-headed bodyguards bookended her, but did nothing to prop up her slide … This harried vision was a far cry from the firebrand who had slammed her fists down on a long marble tabletop and menaced a conference room full of Judases. The elevator dropped down a floor, opened, and three suits stepped in. They checked Althea with the black contempt that they would toss at any bum. It was easy to feel for Ms. Flynt in this state. She faced the arrogant suits and responded to their dismissive sneers in a manner that justified you pulling for her: ‘I am you and you are me, and we are all together,’ she sang in an opiated drawl.”

    The scenario might serve well as an analogy for those unable to understand—or believe—that the literary line between “legitimate” publishing and porn is imaginary, mainly serving (self-serving) those who chose to draw it. MacDonell was an editor and writer on par with and perhaps superior to any in the “legitimate” publishing world. His tenure at LFP gave him a unique vantage on American celebrity, culture, politics, and sexuality, and because it was a view that many would prefer not to see, his perspective is all the more interesting.

    “There are some former Hustler editors who have overcome the anti-Hustler prejudice and done quite well in ‘mainstream’ journalism,” MacDonnell wrote in response to an emailed question about whether he’s been snubbed professionally because of his résumé. “Laziness, lack of focus and narcissistic, arrogant aspects of my personality are factors that have contributed to my failure to be embraced by the journalism industry at large, along with the anti-Hustler prejudice. That said, I do have one anecdote: a week or two after I’d been fired by Flynt, I was looking through the Media Bistro site at their job listings, and I saw a Q&A with longtime GQ editor Art Cooper. Cooper was being interviewed upon his induction to the Magazine Hall of Fame. He talked a bit about his short stint at the editorial helm of Penthouse magazine, back in the 1970s. Cooper said he realized that he had to quit Penthouse when the men’s sophisticate niche was irrevocably perverted by the arrival of ‘Hustler magazine, a disgusting magazine.’

    “That’s when I realized that my jump to Vanity Fair contributing editor would not be without obstacles.”

  • Light of My Life, Fire of My Paddle

    Seliga, splitting the water, slipping over its surface. Se-li-ga. Three syllables sliding off the tongue: Se—sibilant and schwa; Lee—light-hearted, quick, cascading into the primitive finale of Ga. That would be Joe Seliga, specifically, a maker of canoes—of craft—for the water.

    A wood-canvas canoe, generically. The shape familiar: the sides rising from the water, seventeen feet long, tapering at the ends, a subtle arch from tip to tail. The inside surprises: With its glowing cedar planks and ribs, the wood-canvas canoe’s exposed skeleton distinguishes it from cheap variations. Fifty-four curved ribs set the form; then the planks, their grain running perpendicular to the ribs, solidify the hull. Outside of that, the taut canvas, painted smooth, makes it seaworthy. Perched above the hull are two seats of oak and cane, two mahogany thwarts, and a yoke, framed by gunwales of spruce and mahogany. Sleek and radiant, my Seliga.

    As a girl barely old enough to babysit I set out for YMCA Camp Widjiwagan near the Boundary Waters, into the woods for a weeklong canoe trip. The well-mannered middle child of Southern parents, I knew guilt and care-taking well, so I quickly absorbed the camp’s doctrine: Canoe before self. Widjiwagan has more than a hundred wood-canvas canoes, and bears the responsibility for them proudly. Paddling these beautiful wood-canvas artifacts was a privilege, and we took great care never to allow their bellies to touch (let alone scrape) the unhallowed ground. Hands, fine. Water, perfect! But if contact with anything harder was imminent, we used our life jackets and even our bodies to intervene. Years later, in a mishap, I would throw myself under a falling canoe as a buffer—the lessons inculcated early on bearing plump, bruised fruit.

    Despite the epiphany that my ribs might be more important than the canoe’s, my veneration for these vessels has gone far beyond the simple camp ethic. The wood-canvas canoe is so perfect because it is the blending of form and function, an embodiment of history and craftsmanship that is most beautiful when in use. Se—smooth on the water, a slender wake cascading from either side of the hull, straight in the wind, steadied by the keel. Lee—the wood gleaming, sunlight encapsulated, warm, rich, and earthy, sweeping me away from the busy world into serenity. Ga—merging with the environment, the happy juncture where sky settles into wood sitting on water, and myself, a part of it, embraced by its gentle rocking.

    Joe Seliga is but one maker of these masterpieces. He spent more than sixty-five years building them in Ely, Minnesota, until his death last December. Now collectors’ items, they sold even before he died for thousands of dollars—a price I could never afford. But as an heir of the Widjiwagan tradition, I have access to their Seligas; so for a slip of time each summer, one becomes my own.

    The wood-canvas canoe took shape in the 1700s when French fur traders used sailors’ materials to transform the Native Americans’ delicate birch bark vessels into sturdy war-horses of international trade. Until the 1960s, companies like Penobscot and Chestnut were manufacturing recreational wood-canvas canoes, but today they are always built by hand, primarily by individuals like Joe.

    Other paddlers, tossing about their Kevlar We-no-nahs and hauling their Royalex Mad Rivers on land, scoff at my antiquated Seliga. They ask derisively why I paddle such a beast, and more to the point, why I portage it. Old and waterlogged, it easily weighs 120 pounds. These travelers, I see, are too lazy and ignorant to appreciate the splendor of my Seliga. In fact, I like it old and heavy, just to keep out their kind of riff-raff. I am content to leave them prancing about with their garish boats, far away from my loyal companion.

    Because companionship is really what the wood-canvas canoe provides. Traveling with me, accompanying every paddle stroke, it supports me effortlessly and brings me joy. It tells its own stories: Here are the scratches from paddling the river in low water; these are the new gunwales, which had to be replaced after spending ten summers’ worth of nights on the wet ground. Unlike synthetic factory boats, wood-canvas canoes bear these scars proudly, a testament to the value of creating and tending equipment by hand. It may be heavy and out-of-date, but I know that before me and after me the wood-canvas canoe has and will endure, beautiful and familiar, a slim streak on the lake as it glides ever onward.

  • Passing on Your Right

    The first ride I ever had in a Mercedes sedan was on the German autobahn in 1975. In case you aren’t familiar with the autobahn, it’s a speed freak’s dream: There is no speed limit, and the German autobahn cops drive Porsche Turbos so they can keep up.

    The right lane moves along at about 120 kilometers per hour—or seventy-five miles per hour. This is where you’ll find the Volkswagens. The left lane is where the fun is. There is where you find the sort of blitzkrieg spirit that inspired German automotive excellence and the manifestations thereof, such as BMWs, Audis, Porsches, and the venerable Mercedes Benz. There is where you get to experience the sheer terror that is 240 kilometers per hour in heavy traffic.

    Until a few years ago, it was my impression that the basic philosophy of Mercedes was to build the best (and most indulgent) car possible, and never mind the cost. The company was dominated by its engineers. The sales guys just had to sell a great car that would go 240 on the autobahn to people who knew the difference between left and right lanes, even in America.

    That all changed a few years back—about the time Toyota decided to make the Lexus. I understood what Mercedes’ problem was going to be perhaps before Mercedes did when my friend’s father, who got a new Mercedes every two years, came home one day with a Lexus. He wasn’t in a Mercedes for the rush. He was in it for the plush. And if he could get that for fifty thousand dollars in a Lexus instead of about twice that in a Mercedes … well, he didn’t get to be a business big shot by miscalculating the value of his investments.

    The upshot of this is that Mercedes began to build cars like the fifty-seven-thousand-dollar E-350 to compete directly with the Lexus. In doing so, they make some compromises. Are these compromises apparent to the pure left-laners. Yeah. But if you’re interested in keeping it real in the gridlocked Twin Cities, this car will do just fine.

    The first thing the Road Rake and I noticed was how eerily quiet it is. We were rolling down 494 at eighty-five miles per hour when RR said, “This car is really quiet.” And I replied, “Yeah, it doesn’t seem like we’re going eighty-five, does it.” “That’s eerie,” he replied.

    After taking pretty much the route the aforementioned friend’s father used to take from Edina to Minneapolis every day, mostly at a boring fifty-five miles per hour in traffic, the RR and I decided that this was about the perfect car for doing just that. It was the epitome of the smooth, compliant highway ride. The handling was responsive, but not as nimble as a smaller BMW-like sedan would be. You don’t have the feeling you can, or should, take a corner at ninety, but there’s no call for that on the Twin Cities freeway system anyway.

    The car, even with the six-cylinder engine in the E-350 (there’s an eight-cylinder model, the E-500), had more than ample power. At eighty-five miles per hour, there was still plenty of room for acceleration.

    The interior is huge, and as comfortable and well appointed as a wealthy man’s home office. There’s plenty of room in the back seat for double-dating, or whatever other endeavors you might find a back seat useful for. The overall look of the car is Mercedes classic. To my mind, one of the beauties of the Mercedes is that it doesn’t change much from year to year. It won’t be outdated any time soon.

    My only complaint about the car is the so-called “Command System,” which requires its own two-hundred-page manual. There’s the radio, the navigation system, the climate control, the mpg, the miles remaining in the gas tank, etc. ad nauseam, all contained in a less-than-intuitive dashboard control panel that rivals a 747 for complexity. I’m more of a purist who isn’t interested in information that isn’t relevant to the task at hand—driving—but if you are one of those people who hates being away from a computer, well, you shouldn’t be disappointed.

    Mercedes is still the benchmark for luxury, ride, and comfort. If you’re headed for the autobahn, even if it’s just the part between the burbs and downtown, you could do a hell of a lot worse. And if you ever do have an open left lane in front of you, this car will do what you ask it to. Just keep your eye out for the Highway Patrol in their Porsches.

  • Sun So Hot I Froze to Death

    There are few things as merciless as office air conditioning. When I graduated from college and started temping in giant office buildings I made the grave mistake of dressing as if it were summer. Armed with a vague sense of professional attire and deep conviction that I had a cute post-collegiate bod, I had purchased a series of ill-advised (OK, OK, I mean “skimpy”) outfits. I was so cold I felt nauseated. In short course I learned to bring a sweater to work, and in shorter course I tired of selecting a different sweater every day, as if it were winter. There was no putting together of a proper outfit—heavy patterned-snowflake and Fair Isle sweaters looked uniformly bad with summer dresses and skirts. It was then that I joined the legions of women who keep a huge wool sweater, fleece jacket, or wrap at the office to keep warm.

    Forget the thin, matching cardigans recommended by fashion magazines. If you are going to sit still in an office environment that’s cooled to the lower sixties, then you are going to need some serious warmth, with enough bulk to fit over whatever else you’re wearing. This will be your second-tier sweater. It’s about two years from being donated to the Salvation Army. In other words, in Yiddish words, your schmatta—literally the word meaning “rag,” it has also come to describe the shapeless article of clothing you throw on in a pinch.

    The office schmatta is a career killer. As has oft been writ in those how-women-can-get-ahead-at-the-office books, nothing screams “unimportant functionary” like a rug-type thing worn over business attire. Can Kleenex up the sleeve be far off? Add spectacles on a chain and you have completed the thought for your boss that “Peggy is great at contracts” rather than “Peggy should be at the table for major contract negotiations.” Note that I am not equating doom with being secretarial. Powerful executive assistants at the companies I worked for were impervious to the chill, wore short-sleeved dresses in the latest style (this was in the early 1990s when there were annual styles and hemlines), dispatched the requests quivering junior professional staff, and seemed steam powered. If there were sweaters anywhere near them, they matched the dress and nevertheless were usually flung beside their work bags. Senior professional women, on the other hand, could combat the chill by wearing high-necked blouses and business suits of summer-weight wool, never poplin or linen. You also got the feeling that they were thinking so hard in their offices that their metabolism must have been boosted, unlike me, left shivering in my cubicle over dull spreadsheets when not making personal calls or sneaking peeks at Vanity Fair.

    My years in the workforce have taught me that there are two solutions to prevent freezing in the office. One is menopause. Is it terrible that I feel envious of my colleagues in short-sleeved blouses with fans blowing on them as they sip ice water? I recently padded over to a retirement-aged coworker—“padded” because I had put on my gym socks after my toes, exposed by sandals, felt at risk for frostbite—and asked, like a piteous child out of Dickens, “What is it like to be warm?” “Oh honey, it’s something!” She laughed with furnace-like warmth.

    The other solution is shameful, yet incredibly effective: The personal space heater. On top of the heaps of electricity that are used to reduce hot air to frigid temperatures, I add even more kilowatts by heating it up again. It’s so wrong, and yet so right—I leave my house sweater-less, dressed in proper summertime clothes, and I show up to meetings and walk the halls of my office looking perky and professional. I can leave behind the bedraggled sweaters and fleecy smocks. It is bad to waste our planet’s resources, yet when I contemplate the ultimate punishment for this all I can think is, I know, I know, I’m going to hell. But it’s warm there.

  • The Hulk in the Kitchen

    Right beneath our noses, an underground clutch of vintage appliance enthusiasts is quietly buying up all of the redeemable old stoves and classic refrigerators. To the uninitiated, it looks like a hobby, not unlike repairing and collecting classic cars. But some of the new converts to the vintage appliance game aren’t buying them because they want to resuscitate an era, or because they want to embark on a tricky renovation project; most lack the kind of accompanying home décor that marks the “vintage enthusiast,” a designation they casually shrug off. Lots of people have been outfitting their kitchens with vintage pieces because, for the money, they are some of the best buys out there. With a quick tune-up and a polish, many of these octogenarian appliances continue to work with faithful precision. Of course, the retro curves and colorful porcelain surfaces don’t hurt, either.

    Every vintage appliance buff has a story about how a love affair with an old range caused their conversion, and to this I am no exception. Chambers, Wedgewood, O’Keefe & Merritt … there are websites devoted to fans of each that forsake the others. Mine’s a Roper, a brawny, sure-footed hulk of a stove, manufactured a few years before World War II.

    Some nights after dinner I take care to detail my stove, from the top of the clock all the way down to the footed legs. I deep-clean the burner plate weekly. This uncharacteristic fastidiousness is a testimony to my love for this old thing. If to scrub it is to know it, I’ve learned that mine is a more solid and more beautiful machine than any stove made today. The fine features are legion: the generous coat of white porcelain enamel, pouring over the corners thick and creamy like milk off the farm; the design dimples and ripples in the chrome; the pretty little clock; the flourish of the Roper brand name dashed across its front. Every small detail reveals that its makers had high hopes for this stove. While it would devote its life to a relentless cycle of work, it was meant to be a thing of beauty, too.

    The latest in a lineage that began with fireplaces and then wood-fired cook-stoves, mid-century gas and electric ranges assumed the place and prominence of a hearth in the center of the kitchen—but with a sleek, modern look. Examining the smooth, clean lines of the shiny chrome and glowing Bakelite features, you’re struck with the sense of bold optimism inherent in these appliances. Their makers were obviously smitten with modernism and had great hopes for the possibilities of the future. This was the era when new devices in home technology were so darn exciting that it seemed as if they had dropped into the home from outer space—and they looked like it, too.

    Flash forward to today, when weekend gourmets with expensive stoves cook a little and fantasize a lot about being professional chefs. Meanwhile, when the professionals cook on the home front, they want to feel comfortable, like they’re cooking at home. I say this as one of them. Having spent the last eight years cooking on professional suites—and the last thirty minutes of every twelve-hour day scrubbing the shine back into the range top—the last thing I want to see when I get home is a hunk of industrial stainless steel. I have nightmares about the dark crevices where stainless steel corners meet, about what kinds of desiccated (or horrors, living!) creatures hide in the greasy grime. So for me, perhaps the strongest attraction to my old stove lies in its lovely porcelain façade: It looks nothing at all like work.

    Visual appeal has in large part driven the demand for retro stoves. According to Floyd Harvala (that’s “the Wild Finlander” to me and you) of Harvala Appliances in Park Rapids, my hometown, vintage pieces, especially those manufactured from the 1930s to the late 1950s, have increased in desirability over the years. “You usually get two or three people in a summer asking about them,” he said. “Mostly people in their forties, or younger.” Note that in a town of three thousand, two or three fairly constitutes a trend. Burt, the son-in-law who recently took over the store (thenceforth assuming the moniker “the Mild Finlander”), stocks and sells a great many contemporary appliances, but shares Floyd’s understanding of the older pieces’ appeal, noting that they “have a lot more character, more little features, neat-looking legs, and stuff like that.” Both Finlanders admire the thicker gauge of the porcelain and the steel foundations on these stoves, as well as the durability of the old cast iron burners. New burners are constructed of aluminum and even Floyd admitted that in comparison, they are “not very good.”

    Detractors might say that the older appliances lack technological advances that have since become commonplace. In reference to refrigeration, I must concede that these claims have validity. Fridges like my 1930s Royal, a compact model by General Electric, look glamorous in the kitchen, but they are not without problems. Food placed in the back tends to freeze, and after a few weeks of operation, opening the little inset box freezer is like looking at a diorama of the Ice Age: Squinting, you can barely make out a box of peas in butter sauce back there, frozen in time. With advances in compressors and insulation, these fridges just can’t compete with new ones. It takes more energy (and money) to run them, as most of the cold air just leaks out the door. Burt surmises: “Old fridges take a dollar a day to run. For new ones, it’s ten cents a day.” Hard truths like these have turned many a vintage fridge into a vanity piece: They look cool, but are not, in fact, actually cool. They’re commonly found in garages, demoted to holding the summer stock of fish bait and soda pop.

    Vintage stoves, on the other hand, possess the cooking power to compete with today’s top-of-the-line models. Is it possible for my Roper to pump out more Btu’s (British thermal units, the measure of heat output) than the average contemporary range? “Well, it depends,” said Jack Santoro, founder of the Old Appliance Club and publisher of the Old Road Home, a quarterly for vintage appliance buffs and hack restorers. He has been restoring vintage American stoves for thirty-seven years, with enthusiasm to spare. “In these old stoves, the valves which control the size of the orifice are adjustable.” The Btu level depends on the amount of pressure, natural gas or propane, squeezed through the orifice. Now that he mentioned it, I remembered the propane service guy asking me if I wanted it hot. I must have said something like, “Hell yeah, hot as she goes!” which would explain the power I now enjoy. Water for pasta boils in about eight minutes. Flames shoot up the sides of a wok, giving stir-fried greens the authentic Chinese lick of fire. By this estimation, my four Roper burners sport Btu’s in the ten thousand to twelve thousand range—hotter than a new budget stove (averaging nine thousand Btu’s) and comparable to those strapping, faux-commercial ranges (whose burners range from two thousand for the simmer plate to eighteen for the power burner on the priciest model).

    But beyond Btu’s, it’s the physical scale of my range top that makes it conducive to the bouts of intensive cooking, pickling, and jam-making in which I sometimes indulge. Like most of the stoves from this era, mine was built to handle some serious production. Its burners were widely spaced to accommodate huge canning kettles and stockpots of simmering broth, hog’s heads slowly melting into head cheese, pots of spurting apple butter, and, of course, the ever-warm pot of coffee.

    Currently, the market for these stoves is at that middle point: They are popular enough to sell for six thousand dollars on the Internet (totally refurbished and gleaming clean), but you could just as easily find one lolling amongst the old sinks at the local dump. That is, not everybody knows they’re desirable—not yet. The use of the Internet by rural junk dealers has gone a long way toward ruining, perhaps forever, the prospect of the insanely good deal. Now little dusty storefronts on deserted main streets that once promised the bargain of a lifetime are run by clerks who sell most of their stuff on eBay. They know what a Chambers stove is and how much it’s worth.

    Luckily for me, my husband got our Roper from a relative, and we bought the fridge from Burt for thirty dollars and a case of beer. But that was last year.

  • Man in Love: Barbra Streisand, Barry Gibb, and the Autobiographical Criticism of Doug Belknap

    Some of you I would hope have read Dianne Hart’s monograph Enough Is Enough: Prodigality Celebrated and Condemned in the Carter-Era Recordings of Barbra Streisand. Although Dr. Hart’s study is limited in scope, her thinking is expansive. My own forthcoming book on Streisand’s middle period is indebted to her penetrating analyses. I must also thank Hart for exposing me to the criticism of Doug Belknap. A footnote in Enough Is Enough led me to the man’s review of Guilty, Streisand’s 1980 collaboration with Barry Gibb, and I have since become an admirer of Belknap’s idiosyncratic and loudly autobiographical work. The review of Guilty appeared that year in the September issue of Spunk magazine, a formerly influential rock monthly by then considered debased by the relevant tastemakers. Spunk at the time was mostly devoted to rock of a decidedly masculine cast. One imagines that Spunk readers were united in enmity or at least apathy toward Streisand and Gibb, and would have considered an endorsement of Guilty distasteful and a pan gratuitous. It’s odd, then, that the magazine gave the album any coverage at all, odder still that they ran Belknap’s long, discursive review.

    What I’ve since managed to learn about Belknap is that he lived in Minneapolis, briefly attended the University of Minnesota, and worked, moonlighting presumably, as a freelance writer, most provably during 1979 and ’80. I found one piece published in the University’s Minnesota Daily in May of 1972, a recommendation of Weather Report’s I Sing the Body Electric notable for employing two food metaphors. In the first paragraph Belknap calls the album a “spicy gumbo of New Thing jazz, acid rock, hot-buttered soul, classical gas, and Latin passion”; in the closing paragraph he likens it to a “steaming bouillabaisse.”

    Belknap may have written as well for community newspapers throughout the 70s, but his byline doesn’t return to an officially archived publication until late ’79. Again it’s attached to a review of a Weather Report album—the concert recording 8:30—penned for the short-lived Rhythm-A-Ning magazine. A warm appraisal of the music quickly gives way to a digression about a record reviewer, apparently a gastronome and fusion buff, who constructs a model suspension bridge from clippings of the 147 reviews he has written for a jazz newsletter. Each review contains at last one food metaphor, a feat of stylistic persistence that apparently went unnoticed by the newsletter’s subscribers or its alcoholic editor. The reviewer then takes a fatal dose of sleeping pills and lies down next to the model bridge, in effect jumping off his own work.

    Belknap wrote three relatively restrained reviews for Spunk in the summer of ’80, followed by the Streisand piece, which is quoted in its entirety below, and which seems to mark the end of his career in music criticism. My efforts to track down Belknap have been unsuccessful. If you know anything about his whereabouts, please contact me. I remain eager to speak with him.

    Barbra Streisand

    Guilty

    CBS Records

    Reviewed by Doug Belknap

    I see that Guilty’s liner notes have Richard Tee playing electric guitar on the “The Love Inside.” If you know your session men, you’ll raise an eyebrow at the credit, and sure enough, the electric instrument Richard Tee is playing is a piano, not a guitar. One thing Barbra Streisand’s latest success is guilty of, then, is shoddy liner-note composition. Otherwise it’s pretty much blameless.

    Maybe you’ve already seen the jacket, with Gibb, who wrote or co-wrote all of the album’s songs, wrapping his arms around a coquettish Streisand, both dressed in angelic white, à la Johnny Mathis on the cover of Heavenly. It would be too much to call this music heavenly, but it is ethereal, so light you have to adjust your tone arm to play the LP version. And yet the album’s consommé of pop and Broadway, disco and light R&B isn’t wholly insubstantial. I find it moving. Streisand and Gibb haven’t lent great stores of genuine emotion to their collaboration, but they’ve given the listener the tools to do so: the bravura phrasing, a drama in nearly every measure; the voluptuous, occasionally capricious melodies and chord changes; the trademark vocal harmonies, both transcendent and rodential, that Gibb honed with the Bee Gees.

    I’ve liked Barry Gibb ever since I heard “Massachusetts” on the radio of a cream Mercedes 450 SEL belonging to Linda Morgan’s mom. We kissed that night, Linda and I, standing up in front of the car, and her breasts were large and her sweater was softer than any fabric I had ever felt. I hadn’t previously associated with people who could afford cashmere sweaters, or even cashmere socks. Our subsequent outings, however, were washouts.

    Let me return to “The Love Inside,” which is indeed lovely, and not only on the inside. Expansive, resigned, middle-aged, it’s like a Sondheim ballad minus the erudition. The clever turns of phrase have been replaced with clichés—“I’m just an empty shell” and so forth—but the lachrymal high notes are present, yearning and wheedling. During this song one might pause for a pensive break from preparing something out of Elegant Dinners for Two, perhaps absentmindedly taking a sip of economical red wine. I did just that earlier this evening. Also, I cut the recipe in half. “The Love Inside” isn’t free of the breathless histrionics Streisand brings to nearly every performance, but it is sung with the proper subtlety, which is to say, neither too much nor too little. Streisand remains a stage singer, of course, a belter for whom amplification is a luxury rather than a necessity. Only a fool would refuse to use such a voice to its full capacity.

    A fool or an ascetic, because it must be a pleasure to sing like that. It must be a pleasure to be outstanding at something. Yesterday I was given my United States Tennis Association rating. I’ve decided to play competitive tennis in a league, to meet new friends as they say, and because Sharon once said I looked good in white. Before signing up, you must have a coach rate your game on the official scale. There’s an official scale that goes from one to seven. One is a paraplegic three-year-old with imperfect vision and a carelessly strung racket. Two is a paraplegic three-year-old with perfect vision and a decent lob. A 6.9 is John McEnroe. I’ve been judged a 3.2, just below the mean. I’m competent, obviously no beginner, but also not impressive, not the sort of player whose strokes inspire admiration from passers-by in the park. I suspect I’m a 3.2 in general. Once I asked a girl from work how she would rate my looks on a scale of one to ten. She said I was a seven, maybe even an eight. I’m not sure how that translates to a one-to-seven scale, but it beats a 3.2. Of course she would never have called me a six or below to my face. And she wouldn’t have given me a suspiciously generous nine or ten. Really, then, she was working on a two-point scale, seven acting as one and eight as two. And she went with one, approaching two on a good day. So that probably is a 3.2.

    Sometimes when Sharon would play her Barbra Streisand records, I would make noises of disapproval. One time she responded by hissing, “anti-Semite,” jokingly. I laughed enough for the joke to become a ritual. Sharon wasn’t routinely funny, but when she was, she was, I thought, quotable. My complaints were good-natured, you see, in contrast to how she and Donald would disparage my Weather Report and Chick Corea albums, once quite harshly when I was allegedly reading in the other room. “Oh, don’t take off the Chick Corea album, Sharon,” Donald said, coaxing a laugh out of Sharon. “I’d love to hear it again and again!” His sarcasm was strictly of the meat and potatoes variety, never clever.

    I doubt it would interest Donald or Sharon to know that Steve Gadd, featured on the Chick Corea album derided that night, also plays on Guilty. He plays superbly, with manly assurance. Thanks to his hiccupping fills toward the end of “Promises,” even Barbra Streisand can claim to have almost made a funk single. What a sad, strange song that is, Gibb’s hooks like icicles, Streisand’s singing joyfully desperate. “I am the love, don’t let me die away,” she sings, with several Barry Gibbs answering “Die away” in harmony, appropriately stretching out “die” like a last breath. I wish I could hear this album with Sharon. I could listen to it every night with her, twice. I would gently rub it with a pink felt record-cleaning cloth after each airing, apologizing for the tiny needle pricks.

    When we first started dating I perhaps mislead Sharon by saying that I liked Barbra Streisand, too. What I meant is that I found her charming in the mid-60s, especially on the “My Name Is Barbra” TV special, flirting with kettle drummers and singing songs about poverty and against materialism while vamping and hamming, by turns enviously and contemptuously, through Bergdorf Goodman. She was brilliant, funny, and gorgeous. I watched the show with my mom. I guess I was fourteen. My mom grew up in New Jersey, and although she was estranged from her family, she missed the East Coast, missed the Italians and Jews she used to hang out with. Not that there aren’t Italians and Jews in Minneapolis, but they’re much scarcer. My mom loved Streisand, loved her misfit glamour, her wit, her Jewishness, her abnormal voice. “She has the lungs of a beluga whale,” said my dad, passing through the room. “You flatter the beluga whale,” said my mom.

    I also sheepishly enjoyed The Way We Were, which I saw on an inauspicious first date with Lorraine Ibsen. But for the most part though, prior to Sharon, I ignored Streisand. I mainly listened to jazz and rock and fusion and hardly ever tuned in AM radio. Streisand’s sometimes maligned attempts to sing contemporary material couldn’t bother me because, except for the hit she had with Laura Nyro’s “Stoney End,” I didn’t hear them. I was unaware of her version of John Lennon’s “Mother,” for instance, until Sharon and I moved in together and Sharon’s extensive collection of Streisand records and memorabilia arrived as an unwelcome dowry. “She’s singing it like it’s called ‘Second Cousin Twice Removed,’” I cracked, as Sharon arranged the furniture. It came out more cuttingly than I intended, but Sharon chuckled. Later we made love on a mattress on the floor, and the night proved to be the apex of our predominantly healthy sexual relationship. There are at least two images from that night that I still use, not always happily, as masturbatory aids.

    Every morning, except Tuesdays and Sundays when she didn’t work at Carson Pirie Scott, Sharon would do her ablutions to Streisand’s “I Can Do It.” Most evenings she would play a Streisand album or two, and occasionally Donald would come over for a “Babsanalia.” Mostly this just meant talking and playing records, but sometimes they’d pantomime and dress up, Donald in half-drag, or they’d reenact scenes from Streisand’s movies. The Babsanalia were always spontaneous, usually involved pot or coke, and often lasted into the small hours, at which point the accuracy of the reenactments was suspect. My only contribution to these endeavors was the coinage “Babsanalia.” I participated once, on a night when I felt it was important for me to get high. It was hard to be the third wheel. I was insufficiently equipped with knowledge or enthusiasm.

    Sharon and Donald were too sophisticated to be truly idolatrous, but not sophisticated enough to blend sincere passion and self-aware irony in the manner of high camp. That was how I saw it anyway. The frivolity of it all chafed me. Nothing important was important to Sharon or Donald. Their Streisand club was purely escapist, of course, a means of pretending not to be of our generation and not from Minnesota, or to be witty and urbane and to have a bona fide witty and urbane gay friend instead of a dim closet case. I was never explicitly excluded from the Babsanalia but it became clear that these evenings were for serious fans only and that I should find other amusement. Usually I’d read in the bedroom. Sometimes I’d go to a bar alone.

    Donald also worked at Carson Pirie Scott, in the men’s casual wear department. He was not an ethical man. When a shirt came in that he liked he would hide it the backroom until it went on final clearance. Then he would sneak it back to the sales floor, as if it had been languishing on the rack the whole time, and he’d get it for even cheaper than his employee discount. Donald was reportedly straight, but I knew this to be untrue, at least not entirely true. Sharon accepted his bluff, though she was attracted to his apparent gayness in the way my mom was attracted to Streisand’s Jewishness. Sharon did acknowledge that Donald moved and talked in a way that would lead many if not most to unfairly question his sexuality. Then there was his Streisand fixation, his interest in clothes (though he dressed badly if you ask me), his passion for the theater, his insistence on being called Donald and never Don, the fact that he had once lured me into the bathroom at Deborah Curtis’ Christmas party, and that once inside Deborah Curtis’ bathroom he had whipped out his cock or at least not strenuously protested when I slowly unzipped his jeans and executed my first and only act of fellatio.

    Sharon didn’t know this last piece of evidence regarding Donald’s homosexuality.

    Donald had one good male friend that I knew of, a short, part-time actor with Aryan features and the physique of an amateur weightlifter who was even dumber than Donald, and lazy. He didn’t work other than the three or four parts he landed a year, usually one lead in a community-theater embarrassment and a few spear-carrying gigs at the big theater in town. Mostly he cadged from girlfriends and half-heartedly sold drugs. I called him the Slothario, which Sharon, who didn’t like him either, thought was clever. Donald and the Slothario would go to nightclubs often, reportedly to pick up women. They even bought notch-less belts from a neighborhood cobbler and leather worker, stole a leather punch from a hardware store, and would actually add notches to their belts in commemoration of successful seductions. Of course anyone can punch a hole in a belt, and no way was Donald getting it up for all those girls. My theory was that Donald and the Slothario were lovers. Donald also had steady girlfriends, including a tiny, laconic brunette named Sara with no “h” who, when she worked as a peep-show model, called herself “Sar-ahh!” Donald and Sara dated for almost a year. My theory was that Sara was also gay, either by birth or as an occupational acquisition. During the year that Donald and Sara were going out I sometimes found myself in situations that led me to wonder how effectively the tinted windows at Paulie’s Hot Tomatoes cloaked the peeping customers. I figured I caught a break when Donald and Sara broke up.

    It was around that time, though, that Donald and Sharon started spending even more time together, mostly away from our apartment. By then there were a few clubs in Minneapolis where one could disco, and they would do that, sometimes going to a party after the bars closed so that Sharon wouldn’t return to our bed until 3:00 a.m. One Easter Sunday I remember she was logy and irritable all day. It didn’t occur to me until late in the afternoon that she was hung over. I was so slow on the uptake, such a dolt. She started telling me about a group of East Indian guys who were also going out dancing, how charming they were. One, an aloof, lanky guy named Divyanga who was said to have fallen out of favor with his Brahmin parents, came to a party that Sharon insisted we throw. He said, “It’s nice to meet you. Sharon’s a great dancer,” as if I had given her instruction. He wasn’t charming.

    One night I bought a new edition of Password, the game, and suggested we share a bottle of wine and play a round or two. Sharon and I both liked Password. She however had plans to go out for drinks followed by dancing and then who knows what with Donald and the Slothario and the East Indians. I was welcome to come, she insisted. But I wasn’t. I noted that she took almost forty-five minutes to get ready, roughly twice as long as usual. I also noted that she looked really good. After she left I tried to read but couldn’t concentrate and resorted to TV, which, predictably, only aggravated my depression.

    That night Sharon came into bed around

    3:00 a.m. again, maybe 3:30, and her breath smelled like vodka and orange juice and cigarettes and she tried to arouse me but I rolled over and feigned sleep. The moment was not unlike those described in “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers.” Later, I suspected that she had gotten horny dancing with the East Indians and had hoped to seduce me in order to pretend I was someone else. Once during lovemaking she had asked me to portray Hubbell Gardiner, the Robert Redford character from The Way We Were, but that was different. I didn’t mind. After Divyanga moved into our apartment and I moved in temporarily with Gary the building manager, I also began to doubt the plurality of the East Indians, a ruse no doubt to make de facto dates seem like non-threatening group socializing. Only Divyanga, whom Gary the building manager seemed to know well, had come to our party, and when I asked Sharon, a poor ad-libber, what the others were named, she pretended not to hear and then when asked again came up with “Ravi” and, after yet another pause, “Big Ravi.”

    Two days after my Password proposal was rejected, Sharon told me that she did love me, but she was no longer in love with me. I had no use for the distinction. I fell from the couch sobbing, not a long fall, but dramatic. I held on to the coffee table, my legs were folded up like a little boy’s. Sharon was faced with the situation in which you want to comfort the person whom you have just discomforted. She sat there quietly until I stopped blubbering. Stupidly, we slept in the same bed that night. In the morning I stared apocalyptically at her un-blanketed body. She was wearing only underwear, which I took for effrontery. In fairness it had been a warm spring night.

    I’ve been crying with decreasing regularity, though still frequently, during the six months since. Actually, my crying has increased over the past few weeks, since I was assigned to review Guilty, in six hundred words. Guilty is a sad record, a record about being made foolish by love, about desperation and deceit. Gary the building manager is an AC/DC fan and will be glad when my assignment has been dispatched. Gary’s a good guy. Divyanga is cheesed with me for extending my temporary stay at Gary the building manager’s, and seems to think I’m not allowed to do my stair-climbing and hall-walking exercises throughout our apartment building, as if I had access to some other building. But I guess Divyanga isn’t the boss of me. I notice that Donald never comes around anymore. Divyanga has barred him, no doubt. The guy is paranoid, though he’s right about Don.

    Guilty ends with a song of romantic betrayal called “Make It like a Memory.” But that’s silly because what’s worse than a painful memory? Barry Gibb has not read his Proust, at least not carefully, though his melodies sometimes approximate Proustian delicacy.

    My current favorite is “Never Give Up,” quasi-Arabic funk to my ears, potentially a showstopper, but comparatively paired down, the string and horn players sent home for the night, the bass creeping or maybe skulking. Streisand is self-important where she used to be self-deprecating, but she’s jive talking on the verses and it’s funny, deliberately funny. The lyric has her suffering from a dry throat. She’s non-metaphorically lovesick. “I will never give up,” she sings, stretching out “I will” for a full measure, eliding the “r” in “never,” making the word an even more emphatic “neva!” The point is reiterated on its way to the chorus’ staccato conclusion and the album’s summary question: “I will never give up, never give up, never give up. I will follow you home. How can you turn me away?”

  • Watch Your Words!

    On a recent sultry afternoon, three of us bellied up to the cool oak bar at one of our favorite hangouts and engaged in two age-old writers’ past-times, tall drinks and short stories. For the next few hours the air grew thick with bold-faced names and barbed commentary, and while the bartender kept the booze flowing discreetly, I caught him snickering several times at some of our verbal acrobatics. One of my companions finally said, “You’re getting an earful today, aren’t you?”

    Thank Christ we tip him well or we’d be in danger of reading our reckless remarks on the Twin Cities’ newest voyeuristic website, overheardinminneapolis.com. Subtitled “What Happens in Minneapolis … Goes on the Internet,” Overheard in Minneapolis urges eavesdroppers to post anything they hear—the more asinine or acidic the better—thus creating a great place to take the pulse of our Midwest metropolis, one earful at a time.

    The site was launched by a woman who wants only to be known by her first name—Angie—“for the time being.” Originally from Northern Minnesota, Angie lived out of state for several years, returned to the Cities a year ago, and currently has a day job at “an office in St. Paul.” She spends five to six hours a night on the site.

    So far, many of Overheard in Minneapolis’ comments are coming from bars and restaurants, where the tables are close and liquored-up lips often flap most loosely.

    Here are some recent postings:

    Drunk Woman: The race of women has been held down too long!

    Sober Man: What in the hell are you talking about? I think you mean gender.

    Drunk Woman: You don’t know shit, you’re just a stupid immigrant.

    Sober Man: I was born in Roseville.

    —Bulldog Bar, Uptown

    Nurse #1: I want to be 23 forever!

    Nurse #2: Oh, really. Why?

    Nurse #1: Yeah, ‘cuz like, 25 seems so old.

    —North Minneapolis Hospital

    A personal favorite, from the Rail Station Bar:

    Drunk man: What are you going to school for?

    Girl: Journalism.

    Drunk man: Ohh, can’t beat that. Can’t beat that at all. That’s GREAT.

    (long pause) … what’s journalism?

    Our local Overheard site is not a novel idea—Angie was inspired by overheardinnewyork.com. Still, compared with the often profane muscularity of NYC eavesdroppees (“there’s definitely a lot more crazy people in New York,” she notes), we seem a little timid coming out of the box. Here’s a Manhattan sampling:

    Tween Boy: Mom! Let’s go already!

    Mom: If you’re so bored, go play in traffic.

    —Victoria’s Secret, Lincoln Center

    From two men passing each other on the street:

    Middle-aged man #1: Hey!

    Middle-aged man #2: I didn’t recognize you with clothing on.

    —62nd & Broadway

    Or take these one-liners on Jesus:

    Chick: Whatever. I could’ve annihilated Jesus at beer pong.

    —Wall Street

    Girl on cell: Listen, the only ass I kiss is Jesus Christ. Got that?

    —Key Food, 235th St.

    Still, what the Twin Cities may lack in swagger and oddball panache, they more than make up for in whacked-out smarts. Here’s an exchange overheard at Coffman Union at the U of M:

    A girl smiling, listening to a boy on an escalator:

    Boy: English is the only language where you call things what they really are. (holds up a pencil) Like, what is this?

    Girl: Der ist ein Bleistift!

    Boy: No, no it isn’t! It’s a pencil!

    Whereas, in New York, you get incidents like this, in Macy’s:

    Saleslady: Where are you from?

    Tourist: Kansas City.

    Saleslady: There’s a city in Kansas? Like with buildings?

    Tourist: Yes.

    Saleslady: Tall ones?

  • Letter from Wisconsin { Suspended in Time

    The Hunky Dory resort sits atop a small knoll overlooking Lake Clare, in Balsam Lake, Wisconsin. It’s changed little since 1902, when it first operated as a working farm called the Hunky Dory Farm Resort. Brochures advertising the place look exactly the same as they did in the 60s. Nor have the kooky cabin names been updated: “Rest a While,” “BonEcho,” and the favorite “Kozy Knook.”

    Matriarch Marvel Nielsen runs the resort with her daughters, Marly, Julie, Lori, and Joy, and an assortment of grandchildren and in-laws. Her husband Al died in ’88, leaving the silver-haired and aptly named Marvel to command this tight ship. While similar hand-hewn Midwestern resorts have gone under, Marvel says Hunky Dory remains vital due to her family’s home cooking. “What brings them back are the good swimming and the food,” she said of her guests. “You don’t have to have a fancy place, just have it clean. Cook good food and you’ll have a full house.”

    “When I first married Al in ’55,” recalled Marvel, “there was a full-time cook here, and I only cooked one day a week. She died in ’84 and I’ve been cooking ever since.” Growing up in North Dakota, she learned to fry and bake from her mother, who perfected the art in order to feed and inspire the farmhands.

    For ten weeks in summer, three square meals are served each day. All are made from scratch. “We don’t use anything from a box, no microwaves here,” Marvel said, carrying a bowl of flour-dusted chicken to a stove. Her two Vulcans, a six-burner oven and a grill oven, are vintage 50s, and they’ve typically got chicken frying on their stovetops, hams and turkeys in their ovens.

    The day for Marvel and family begins at 6:00 a.m. They’re in the kitchen by 6:30, when they turn on the grill, brew coffee, mix pancake batter, and fry bacon. Breakfast is served at 7:30. When the lodge bell rings, as it does three times each day, guests come running or walking at a brisk pace.

    It’s difficult to reserve a Hunky Dory cabin. Some of those guests are from families that have been coming to Hunky Dory for four generations; many have never missed a year. “Mom has a running list of people in her head who say ‘If someone cancels, call me up,’ ” said daughter Julie Grimsley. Otherwise, tough luck. There’s a great deal of jockeying for position, behind-the-scene intrigue over who gets which cabin, or which families may be forfeiting their cabin.

    My three brothers, now with their wives and children, have been Hunky Dory regulars for years. Each July, they succumb to the lake’s velveteen waters, which have the ability to soften hair, skin, and soul. The affinity for the resort runs deep. When we were kids, our family didn’t stay at a Hunky Dory cabin; we used to rent an old hunting shack across the lake. From there we’d row over to Hunky Dory to get gas for the boat. On hot nights, there would be ice cream, and back then there were horses for rent, too. And when my mother, exhausted by bats, ticks, and children, had had enough of life in the woods, my father would treat us all to Marvel Nielsen’s famous fried-chicken dinner.

    A few weeks ago, on a stifling Sunday morning, I watched the fried-chicken ritual that’s taken place every week since 1902. As soon as breakfast was finished at 9:00, Marvel and her daughters began working on the lunch. “I don’t want to know how hot it is, that’s why there’s no thermometer in here,” explained Marvel, tending four cast-iron skillets filled with chicken pieces that spat grease into the air.

    Typically, the system works like this: Marly flours the chicken, Julie cuts and cleans it, and Lori oversees the baking-powder-biscuit operation. But on this day, Julie shouted across the kitchen, “Mom, I think I’m going to start the biscuits.” She’d taken over for Lori, who was in the Twin Cities that day. But Lori later called her sister. She was so worried about the biscuit-making that she hopped in the car and drove the two hours back to Hunky Dory.

    It’s that kind of commitment, to the rituals of cooking, and the rituals of summer, that is vanishing. I’ve watched helplessly as the fixtures of my childhood from the 50s and 60s have been sold off and remade by big-box retailers. But Hunky Dory remains suspended in time, a little like an insect in amber. Still, Marvel can’t cook and work forever; like me, she worries about Hunky Dory’s future. “It’s not easy to answer,” she said, when asked about it. “This is 2006, and people automatically sign up for 2007; they don’t question it.” She knows that someday it will have to end. “And I’ll know when it will have to end.”

    “But,” she added, “the lake will still be here.”

    So will Marvel’s daughters, and in-laws, and grandchildren who want to protect Hunky Dory’s legacy. And the generations of families willing to fight for a week in the run-down “Kozy Knook.”

    Angela Frucci