The Rake Magazine

Month: August 2006

  • Cheese Parade 2

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    A few nights ago, we started a dinner partywith a cheese tasting. I would have posted pictures, but it was like a frenzy. Honestly people.

    Old Kentucky Tomme / Capriole Farms, Indiana
    This was an aged, raw milk goat cheese (much like my beloved Humboldt Fog). It develops a natural rind that helps develop the rich flavors. Raw milk cheeses are greatly influenced by whatever the goats have been eating, grassy fields, natural woodlands, etc. This cheese was great because there was a hint of earthiness a little like mushrooms that you don’t usually find in goat cheese.

    Roquefort / Le Vieux Berger, France
    This Roquefort comes from Aveyron, the smallest of the AOC designated cheese caves. I think Mother Nature specifically carved out the land so that there could be a place where cheese would mature and mold to such a tangy and brilliant intensity.

    Ubriaco del Piave / Italy
    Our friend, the notable Doctor From New Zealand, was wild about this cheese. The legend of this cheese comes from the Veneto region during the first World War. Wanting to hide precious cheeses from invading soldiers, someone threw some fresh rounds into the wine cellar, in the vats of must under the fermenting vinasse. Genius! Now called Ubriaco, meaning “drunk”, the cheese is cured about 4 months with the must from cabernet and merlot wines. The flavor has a touch of fruit, but has an earthy mellowness that makes it a great wine cheese. Duh.

    Sottocenere / Italy
    If you’re a truffle fan, this is your cheese. Because it’s not overwhelmingly truffle, like some people think things should be, which leads to too much of a good thing like lobster ice cream and foie gras burgers and ridiculous heaps of caviar. Stop the madness. The beauty of the truffle is that one only need a hint, an airy breath of flavoring to bring about the perfect bite. This cheese is studded with bits of black truffle and the ash-coated rind includes nutmeg, cloves, cinnamon, fennel and coriander.

    Ossau-Iraty / France (Basque)
    A raw sheep’s milk cheese from the Pyrenees, Ossau-Iraty kicks Manchego’s ass. That’s it.

    All cheeses available at the new cheese heaven, Premier Cheese Market on 50th and France in Edina.

  • The Pugilist At Rest

    Jesus H. Tapdancin’ Christ on a popsicle stick I’m busy. So I’m going to be lazy and lead you to an obituary of a very interesting person. I love characters like this, and would’ve given up fifteen weeks of coffee and beer (not mixed) to have sat with this gent and just listened, over drinks, in some cozy New York bar.

    Notice the crooked eyes, the weary smile. “You don’t have to tell everybody. They already know.” A classic line from what appears to be a classic fellow. Mr. Roger Donoghue, RIP.

  • Lowering the roof

    Not much going on ‘cept the cheaper showing of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Tonight it’s fifteen dollars as opposed to the usual eighteen. How many times can she recycle one secret, you ask?

  • Guide Dog

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    The way you throw your head

    back and show your broken

    teeth to the stars.

    How you laugh laugh laugh,

    nodding, your eyes pinned

    back to your perfect ears.

    I love that.

    The places you take me

    and the way you allow

    yourself to be taken,

    wherever you might be,

    so suddenly by sleep–

    I love that.

    Especially that.

  • Early

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    Early Berleson had long since grown accustomed to the static routine of his middle years. He would sleepwalk through the day at work, make his way home in a sort of empirical blackout, and then, eventually, the night would just fall out from under him and leave him floating in murky space, listening to the strains of Mahler from someplace far off. It sounded almost like a transmission from a ghost satellite.

    The planet felt frozen in his skull like a starfish paralyzed in amber. He could sometimes convince himself that his bones were locked up in his skin, and he supposed he would never again shimmy to an ecstatic piece of music.

    As a younger man, life had rolled through his veins like a carnival ride, and he had found great and simple pleasure in those moments alone in his bachelor apartment, lunging around –often enough naked– to his old records. It frequently depressed him to recognize that he would in all likelihood die from shame if he were ever subjected to a videotape of himself in the midst of his happiest moments.

    Now, outside his windows in the night there was a humid scrim crouched on the neighborhood and he could hear the dense rattle of bugs and the sound of idling air conditioners and sprinklers shaking their sand maracas up and down the block. Beyond that, the city, a wash of white noise interupted by the occasional burst of something sleepless.

    It would likely be fair to say that people who wrote about concrete for a living couldn’t write for squat, and Early had made his peace with the fact that it wouldn’t do him any good to try to sprinkle a little fairy dust on the copy. Who really gave a rat’s ass?

    Even after editing the damn magazine for almost ten years he still didn’t have the foggiest idea who read the thing, but assumed increasingly that no one did or could. It was clearly just one of those things that people in the trade received and threw on the coffee table at the office.

    The journal had a peer review process that essentially made Berleson’s job unnecessary; he was supposed to edit the thing for grammar and style. If he was feeling particularly bored or ambitious he might go through the copy and clean up obvious messes, but lately it took more gumption than he could muster to read through most of the stuff even once.

    Every once in a great while he’d receive a letter from someone complaining about the virtually unreadable nature of the journal, and these letters gave him immense pleasure. Berleson relished one letter in particular, so much so that it was hanging in a frame above his desk. “I realize it’s only a concrete magazine,” this person had written, “but, Jesus Christ, I’d think you could at least find some better writers.”

  • Greg Brown

    This Iowa singer-songwriter, whose low-down, come-hither grumble is to women in Birkenstocks what Barry White’s silken mumble is to women in heels and negligees, has kept a low profile the past few years. But now the prolific fellow has a new album, The Evening Call—and a new wife, the singer Iris DeMent, about whom he does not much talk. If American roots music had more fans, this super couple would be outrunning the paparazzi in a dusty pickup. The razor-shirking, work-boot-wearing Brown will pop into town for his first Twin Cities show in two years, perhaps offering a duet with his wife—we can always hope. 651-290-1221;
    www.fitzgeraldtheater.org

  • California

    Ladies and Gentlemen, our very own Cindi Barthel!

    Cindi Barthel

  • Kauai

    I was on Poipu Beach in Kauai last week and made sure to have my current issue of the RAKE with me! Thanks!

    Jim Settle

  • Hispaniola

    Here’s a shot aboard the Royal Caribbean vessel, the Navigator of the Seas and from the beach of Labadee, Hispaniola (aka Haiti).

    Thanks for the great issue- it made wonderful reading on the trip!

    Bryan Thao Worra

  • Corrections

    True, the erratic boundaries that mark “east,” “west,” “north,” and “south” St. Paul are forever confusing the Minneapolitan editors at this magazine. Mr. Frame and several others wrote and called to check us on this point—Jerabek’s New Bohemian, the neighborhood café featured in our August issue, is not on St. Paul’s East Side, as the story suggested; it’s on the West Side. And, of course, West St. Paul is its own city entirely … Anyway, we regret the error(s).

    Also, our August issue’s Table of Contents page incorrectly listed the web address of that month’s cover illustrator, Kyle Webster. The correct URL is: www.kyletwebster.com.