What was once a kicky, quirky food magazine is now a kicky, quirky website. Chow was bought by the guys at CNet, about the same time they decided to re-work my favorite Chowhounds site. Now the two sites are working together to bring fun and un-stuffy food articles to eaters. With pieces on how to make your own snackie cakes, the rituals of absinthe, and a recipe for watermelon juice with fleur de sel, I like like love it.
Attention theater geeks: if tonight’s Ivey Awards are anything like last year, we’re in for a hot, hot evening (or, at the very least, a hot, hot after-party). Now, I’ve been privy to some speculation about who and what will win these second annual Ivey awards. But who cares, really… We’ve got more important things on our minds, right? Such as what to wear.
Dave and Cathy Burrows, of Green Bay, Wisconsin (frequent Twin Cities visitors), did a three-week tour by a Norwegian nature cruise company that featured Argentina, the Falkland Islands, South Georgia Islands, Orkney Islands, and finally (as shown here), the Antarctica Peninsula. The Gentoo penguins, normally comical, weren’t doing much as they stood in the active snowstorm in late February, the height of Antarctica’s summer. Despite the “Exposed!” cover, the Burrowses were not inspired to “go natural” in Antarctica, but they did jump into some hot springs.
I had a garage sale a couple of weeks ago. I relish regularly purging my home of crap. However, I also think it is a special kind of hell to have to arrange crap artfully on card tables in the driveway, assign a value to each item of crap, and look at the neighbors with a straight face when one of them holds up a crappy McDonaldland-character glass tumbler and tries to whittle down the marked price of ten cents. C’mon, people. It still holds water, and we’re talking about the Hamburglar here.
So, okay. Maybe it actually isn’t hell. After all, it’s a beautiful, seventy-five-degree day spent out in your driveway. But it is purgatory. Because you can’t go anywhere else. All you can do is sit there on a lawn chair and stew in the lovingly hand-painted juices of your own tchotchkes.
I’ll tell you this. I hate figurines. I have never purchased a figurine for myself, but I have had them thrust upon me by people who claim to know and love me. Perhaps this hatred of ornamental figures stems from years of moving from apartment to apartment during my twenties, but I never collected stuff like that when I was a kid, either. Figurines have always made me feel big and clumsy, like King Kong with Fay Wray.
I remember a childhood pal, Shelly, who was abnormally fond of horse figurines. Fond as in boyfriend fond. Abnormal as in no one else could touch them but her! abnormal. These plastic replicas of real horses lived on her dresser in a specific formation, and woe be to anyone who dared draw so much as a pinkie finger across the glossy mane of the centrally positioned Clydesdale. If that happened, the usually sweet, retiring, Sunday-school-attending Shelly would screech, through bared, tinseled teeth, “GET OUT OF MY ROOM, YOU BUTTHOLE! THOSE ARE MINE!” And she would chase you out of her room, down the dangerously creaky, ankle-twistingly irregular staircase of her illegal attic bedroom, through the terrifying Lladro-ballerina-choked formal living room and out onto the religious-icon-ornamented front lawn. There she would grab fistfuls of your unattractive, gender-neutralizing bowl haircut and march you toward the legal property line of her yard, where she would throw you roughly to your knees on the sidewalk and explain that you and your dirty, oily, Ho Hos-icing-stained fingers were never, ever to cross that line again.
Not that this ever happened to me, dear readers, but this is what would happen if anybody ever dared touch one of stupid Smelly Shelly’s stupid plastic horses that lived on her stupid dresser in her stupid room in her stupid house.
Such is the dark power of collectibles, which is why I have made a concerted effort to keep my existence free from any item that requires its own display case or its own Certificate of Authenticity. I’m terrified enough by official documents.
I’m not sure where my dog’s breeding papers are right now. For all I know, his identity credentials may have been sold out of a van idling behind the mercado on Lake Street. Also unaccounted for are my marriage license and copies of my 2002 federal and state tax returns. There are autographed baseballs out there with a better paper trail than mine.
Do you get the feeling that the Certificate of Authenticity was dreamed up by people who feel the need for additional official documents in their lives? Are they expecting art historians to question the provenance of their Thomas Kinkade prints? Are they waiting for the moment they can whip out their certificate and say “Ha! Who dares question the validity of this painting of a lighthouse amid storm-splashed rocks?”
But the art historians could, of course, challenge the authenticity of the Certificate of Authenticity. And then there would be a war of “nuh-uhs” and “uh-huhs.” Feelings would be hurt, and there would be much emotional eating afterwards.
The woman haggling over the Hamburglar glass finally wore me down. I just gave it to her. Looking deeply satisfied, she greedily stuffed her treasure into her large pocketbook and sniffed, “For a single glass, it wasn’t worth much.” It would have been a totally different story if I’d had a set.
Of all the depressing novels I know, Jude the Obscure takes the prize for sustained doom and gloom. Don’t let the film mislead you; it is far too pretty. All those authentic Victorian sets (not to mention the delightfully authentic Kate Winslet) undermine the exposition of Jude’s law, that Sod and Murphy were incurable optimists, because if anything can go wrong it will, particularly when something might seem just for once to be going almost right. It is not Jude one loses patience with; it is his creator, for being so beastly to him. No wonder the nineteenth-century public hated it.
Jude is a country lad with an ambition to study at the University of Christminster, so he starts to teach himself Latin. He swiftly discovers that there is no one-to-one correspondence between English and Latin words, that a foreign language is not simply an alternative set of vocabulary but a wholly different way of putting thoughts together (something that the users of Internet translation services have not always understood). With characteristic determination (doomed, of course), Jude sets about the systematic exploration of Latin grammar and syntax.
I was thinking of Jude’s experience the other day while being lectured by one of those well-fed wiseacres who like to tell us there is no point learning foreign languages because soon everyone will know English. “What can he know of English who only English knows?” I muttered to myself, sotto voce. Those who do not take the trouble to study languages end up like the Monsieur Jourdan in Molière’s Le Bourgeoise Gentilhomme, who is amazed to learn that what he has been speaking all his life is prose.
More to the point, foreigners who learn English do not ipso facto stop talking Foreign. They may know English, and so understand what we tell them. They can say in English what they would like us to hear. But heaven knows what they are muttering about us in the privacy of their own tongues. I wonder how many people in Washington speak Farsi or read Shi’ite theology (though I have it on good authority that at the time of the Tehran Embassy hostage crisis in 1979, the State Department had a computer programmed to simulate the presumed mental processes of the Ayatollah Khomeini). The trouble with my well-fed wiseacre was that the voice he most liked the sound of was his own.
The swiftest method of learning Foreign is, they say, the Horizontal. It usually involves one-to-one tuition and is, in general, employed only in those colleges and universities that have a hearty appetite for protracted and expensive litigation. That said, I know someone who learned French in six weeks by adopting a suitably unclothed and recumbent posture, though the fact that he had come straight from twelve months learning Coptic in an Egyptian monastery may have whetted his whistle. I must say I have not tried it myself, and if I had, I would not be saying.
Wines, too, have their characteristic syntax. Let me introduce you to a red wine that certainly speaks French. It is the 2004 Côtes du Rhône from the well-known Burgundy shipper Charles Thomas (pronounced, of course, Sharl Tomah in the manner of Peter Sellers asking for a rhoom). It is available hereabouts for not much more than ten dollars.
This wine is constructed not in the languorous language of Proust, pursuing evanescent flavors of madeleine and fancy tea down long, convoluted corridors of memory. Rather, like Edith Piaf, it combines sweetness and husky pungency: “No, nothing of nothing. No, I not regret nothing, neither the well which one has done me, nor the bad, all this is for me well equal” (perhaps something does get lost in translation). The initial fruit leads to the tannins at the center of the taste with the inevitability of a well-made sentence. The weather has a lot to do with it; 2004 was not as spectacularly hot and dry as 2003, which produced astonishingly concentrated wines all across France. In 2004, it rained in August. The result is a wine that has both charm and a mind of its own—and plenty of alcohol. Taken with steak frites, it might even put you back on your feet (even if Hardy and his President of the Immortals knock you back down in the very next chapter). Santé!
The werewolf’s life has never been easy. But the complications of twenty-first-century living often result in even more confusion and frustration. Fortunately, a few sessions with a qualified life coach can help today’s lycanthrope adjust to those inevitable crises of confidence.
OWN YOUR ASPIRATIONS.
Werewolves often lack a sense of purpose in their lives, personally and professionally. As any good life coach will tell you, it’s your choice to make. Whatever the lunar phase, whatever your dreams, you must first decide whether you want to go through life as a victim of society’s ridicule and fear or as the latest toast of its reluctant acceptance, like hip-hop performers. Once you own your aspirations, the rest is outrageously simple.
ACCENTUATE YOUR POSITIVES.
Sure, it’s difficult being a monster. But don’t let that spoil your prospects for happiness. Steer clear of negative, stereotypical thinking. Instead, learn how to accentuate your unique, mostly positive werewolf qualities, such as the razor-sharpness of your fangs and your superhuman physical agility.
TRANSCEND YOUR FEARS.
The world can be a scary place, it’s true. But remember, nearly everyone you’ll ever meet will be more terrified of you than you are of them. Nothing frightens a community more than sudden pet disappearances—except possibly when a bunch of tasty babies go missing. The only thing werewolves really have to fear is being shot by a vigilante carrying a gun loaded with silver bullets.
BALANCE CAREER & FAMILY.
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, and it doesn’t do much for werewolves, either. That’s why it’s important to prioritize your priorities to make sure you balance your responsibilities at work and at home. Wandering parks and city streets with your children in the wee hours of moonlit nights is the best way to watch them grow up. Remember, the family that preys together stays together!
BE YOUR BEAUTIFUL SELF.
Body-image issues plague teenage girls, homosexual men, and werewolves alike. Look beyond your hirsute reflection in the mirror and discover the inner beauty hidden beneath the coarse brown fur that covers your body. Once you’ve done that, you may also want to spring for a makeover, or at least a comb.
HOWL YOUR HEART OUT.
Worried that your neighbors will think less of you because you’re always out howling at full moons? Learn how to howl in a discreet, socially acceptable manner. And when ripping out a neighbor’s throat, there’s no need to rub in the embarrassment by behaving like some kind of brute savage. Your victim will feel bad enough already.
You can’t spit in Lowertown without hitting a plaque denoting one historically significant edifice or another. Warehouses stand shoulder to shoulder, erected in a passel of architectural styles—from Italianate to Richardsonian to Beaux Arts—monuments to a zeal for development that’s matched only by the recent condo craze. Many of these majestic industrial buildings, like the Romanesque revival Boston & Northwest Realty Company, were designed by Cass Gilbert, the turn-of-the-century hotshot who went on to draw up plans for the Minnesota State Capitol, the U.S. Supreme Court, and New York City’s Woolworth Building and George Washington Bridge.
Roughly speaking, Lowertown is the area between Galtier Plaza (on Jackson Street) and, to the east, the Saint Paul Farmers’ Market, with its onion-with-a-pinwheel sculpture (on Broadway Street). The farmers’ market has been in operation since 1853, making it one of St. Paul’s oldest landmarks.
Lowertown’s north and south borders are, respectively, West Seventh Street and Kellogg Boulevard. But the strip of land between Kellogg and the Mississippi feels a little forlorn; there, Warner Road shuttles cars past downtown, and a little-used pedestrian promenade offers views of the Mississippi at work.
The river is, of course, why Saint Paul exists at all. In its infancy during the 1840s, the city was occupied by voyageurs too rowdy to mix with the soldiers at Fort Snelling. They made their money trapping beaver, mink, otter, and muskrat while the waters were open, hunkering down when ice made travel impossible. And then, with a belch of smoke and toot of the horn, the railroads—and their attendant robber barons—arrived. Bankers soon outnumbered furriers. Warehouses sprang up overnight as the prosperous businessmen of Lowertown took to architectural one-upsmanship, creating buildings swathed in marble, such as the Merchants National Bank on East Jackson, designed in the Richardsonian Romanesque style.
A closer look at many of these commemorated structures finds that, their glorious façades notwithstanding, they are no longer centers of commerce and industry, but rather parking ramps. In fact, many of the parked cars belong to the office workers who comprise about a third of Lowertown’s weekday population; other neighborhood denizens include artists in live/work lofts (they’ll open their doors during the St. Paul Art Crawl this month, October 13 through 15) and their newer neighbors, the residents of stainless-steel-and-granite rehabbed condos. But still, even at midday, Lowertown can seem sparse. Perhaps it’s the scale of things—all those eighteen-foot ceilings with their massive beams. A building designed to house huge supplies of grain destined for the East coast, or ore heading for the West, or even the trains themselves, is hardly filled by a scant three or four folks sipping coffee at the Black Dog Café (housed in the Northern Pacific Railway Warehouse).
If Lowertown has a crown jewel, it has to be the Saint Paul Union Depot. There, the spirit of the 1920s, when thousands of train travelers passed through daily, is well preserved. Even as jackhammer dust fills the stretch out back where lofts are being built, the depot’s dark, polished wood and hanging lights exude glamour.
If you go to Lowertown by car, take advantage of the free parking by the river at Lower Landing, where steamboats have docked since the 1840s. Walking up Jackson Street, you’ll retrace the first steps taken by many immigrants in their new city. Crest the hill, and brick and stone buildings appear all around. It’ll seem new to you, too.
Autumn is my favorite time of year. Add the beauty of the harvest to deep-blue skies, brilliant foliage, and crisp, cool mornings, and you have the perfect eating season. Throw open the windows, crank up the oven, throw some cinnamon about, and life is perfect. Except Sundays.
On autumnal Sundays, as I focus on the Big Dinner, I am forced into a debate with myself. Because on Sunday afternoons in the fall, I await the return of the duck hunters. My biggest fear is that they’ll come home successful.
I love ducks. I love them prepared Peking-style, brushed with sticky hoisin sauce. I love them with a tasty herbed croûte de sel. I love them slow-roasted for five hours, so the skin is crispy and the inside is moist. I eat them. I don’t shoot them. So I wrestle with myself and wonder: Am I a hypocrite? Shouldn’t I be able to embrace the hunt if I am to enjoy its spoils?
Of late, it seems important that I figure out why I can’t stomach the idea of shooting what goes into my stomach. I can’t really fault my femininity or early family structures; in fact, I consider myself to be what used to be called a tomboy. It’s more for the fact that my sister, the same one who wore prairie skirts and clogs, is a hunter—a big-time hunter. She lives in the Colorado mountains and hunts elk with her family to stock their freezer for winter. I’ve heard her stories. I’ve seen the photos. I’ve tasted her elk steaks. But I’m not a convert to the hunting lifestyle.
It’s not about being squeamish. While walking through markets all over the world, I’ve seen game displayed in ways you’d never find in a local supermarket; and yet my stomach turns only in hunger. Naked hares hanging at La Boqueria in Barcelona made me think of a nice thyme butter sauce. Watching an old woman pluck swimming fish from a bucket and chop heads to order in Hong Kong, I wondered where I could buy a cleaver like hers. At home, I see cattle in a field and think about steak. There’s nothing to be squeamish about, because I see it as food.
Animals in the market or on a farm are destined to become food; they are a product of agriculture, just as potatoes or corn grown by the same hands are. When animals are raised for food, their entire life is to that purpose. They live with human interactions and controls that create the world around them, and that is all they ever know. Not everyone will agree, but for me, it’s easier to reconcile farm-raised ducks, and foie gras, as palatable because those ducks are cared for and living the life they were meant to lead.
Many will say that I’m choosing to ignore the death that befalls my food. Actually, it’s my concern with the way farm animals are being raised and processed on mega-farms that has led me to the path of meditation on hunting. We are living in an age that offers us a wonderful opportunity to reconnect with our food. By searching out local farmers and the markets that support them, we can make choices that have a direct impact on how animals are treated. It’s getting easier and easier to walk away from big bags of frozen meat and toward a fresh meat product that was raised and processed by the guys behind the counters. I talk to them; I ask questions; I read their faces. I don’t want to ignore the animal’s sacrifice. I prefer to honor it.
It’s this real reconnection with our food that has me thinking I should walk the walk. If I really believe that we should know where our food comes from and how it’s been handled, shouldn’t I be willing to take an active role in finding that out? I have no doubt that my hunters are responsible and honorable in their actions. They don’t shoot before dawn, shoot out of season, take more than their limit, or treat the morning with anything other than reverence. They sit in the reeds and watch the sun come up, passing the coffee thermos, quietly teaching the young ones about the cormorants and kingfishers that fly quickly over the water. There have been numerous days when they haven’t fired a shot. On those days, they return full of chatter about the clouds and jumping fish and high-flying flocks that passed over.
My favorite season has always been heralded by the call of geese moving across the sky in their ever-flowing Vs. I took a big step this year and visited the land my hunters use. I stood on the marshy point of the lake where they hunker down. It was a stunningly bright day before the season began, and I tried to imagine crouching and waiting on a misty fall morning for that approaching formation. But for this season, I will again remain in my comfortable hypocrisy as an eater not a hunter. From my kitchen window, I’ll appreciate the ducks and geese in their beautiful flights, and, if my hunters are ever successful, I will celebrate their wonderful gifts at the kitchen table.
Apple Balsamic Sauce for Game Birds
1 cup balsamic vinegar
2 finely chopped garlic cloves
1 tsp freshly chopped rosemary
2 Tbsp freshly mashed apple or apple sauce
4 Tbsp chilled butter
Salt and pepper to taste
1 cup peeled, finely chopped tart apples
(Cortland is good)
Combine all ingredients in sauce pan. Over medium-high heat, bring to boil, then reduce heat and simmer for ten minutes. Pour over slices of roasted game bird.
The local music scene’s ubiquitous and ridiculously busy hot hand, Erik Appelwick has, remarkably, been living in the Twin Cities only six years. Having grown up in South Dakota and Michigan, and then kicked about South Dakota for a while during his collegiate and postcollegiate years, he made the bold decision in 2000 to move east, if only slightly. “I wanted to play music, and there wasn’t really anywhere there to play,” he said of his old South Dakota digs. “I was scared to move to a really big city—afraid of being eaten alive and that sort of thing. Minneapolis was just the closest place. And I was even afraid of moving to Minneapolis.”
That admission turned out to be the most telling detail Appelwick would let slip during the forty-five uncomfortable minutes he spent rehashing his whirlwind music career. For while he has enjoyed many successes of late, he doesn’t particularly relish talking about them.
Appelwick had come ambling into Spyhouse, a South Minneapolis coffee shop known for its loyal patronage of MCAD students and musicians. There he ran into Dan Wilson, the Minneapolis singer-songwriter and frontman for Semisonic. He lingered for a bit to chat, but not long enough to make him late for an appointment. Then the clean-shaven, neatly dressed Appelwick took a seat in the sunlight. “How are you?” he asked quietly, his voice barely audible above Tom Waits’ “Day After Tomorrow.”
According to the brief career history he’d provided in an earlier email, Appelwick’s youthful fascination with KISS—and, embarrassingly, Huey Lewis and Peter Cetera—led to piano and guitar lessons and then, in high school, to playing percussion with his school’s orchestra band. (“First chair, thank you,” he’d written.) He then got a taste of the spotlight while playing guitar with the Harvesters, a University of South Dakota rock band that found its way, in 1996, to the SXSW Music Festival in Austin, Texas. But any exposure SXSW might’ve provided was mostly squandered, as Appelwick and his bandmates spent the bulk of their time getting drunk.
Fast-forward to the year 2000. Appelwick eased into his new hometown of Minneapolis, having quickly hooked up with another South Dakota export, Darren Jackson (Kid Dakota, Alva Star, The Hopefuls). Soon Appelwick was playing guitar with Jackson’s band Cellophane, an infectious power-pop foursome that morphed into Camaro, then The Olympic Hopefuls, and, finally and simply, The Hopefuls. During this same time, Appelwick was also cobbling together an income by gigging with Kid Dakota and Alva Star while trying to persuade others to let him play on their records—“bass and keys or tambourine,” he said. “I can play just about everything. I can come up with a melody for a song if it needs it.”
All this while he was writing and recording his own songs as well. At the urging of Jackson and other new-found Minneapolis friends, those homemade recordings became Blood & Clover, the booty-shaking debut from Vicious Vicious, an enduring solo project on which Appelwick plays “pretty much everything, except drums.” The 2005 follow-up, Don’t Look So Surprised, proved equally groovy.
This past April, after initially offering to help the band with future recordings, Appelwick became bass player for Tapes ’N Tapes. The band quickly became an indie rock sensation, with the requisite grueling tour schedule. The unfortunate upshot of Tapes ’N Tapes’ success was that The Hopefuls tribe came to the conclusion that Appelwick no longer had time for their band and let him go.
The ability of some musicians to carve out a living is an enduring, and sometimes obsessively jealous, fixation for lesser- and non-musicians alike. As for Appelwick, he’s sustained himself on “record sales and money from shows.” Call it dumb luck perhaps, but he’s managed to do so without much knowledge of the financial nuts and bolts of the business; for example, he has no idea whether Tapes ’N Tapes’ July appearance on the Letterman show helped bump sales for the band’s latest release, The Loon. Likewise, Appelwick isn’t particularly fond of marketing. Vicious Vicious, he said, has been heard only by local music aficionados and random visitors to his MySpace page; he hasn’t even bothered promoting his records to college radio stations, an established and time-honored route for most indie bands. “I’m not that good at business,” Appelwick noted more than once. “Talking about it sort of cheapens the experience for me. I’m much better at the process.”
But that’s not to say he’s particularly adept at discussing the process, either. In his defense, by this time, Appelwick was clearly losing steam and admitted to being jetlagged, having returned just the day before from a Tapes ’n Tapes tour of the U.K. His gray eyes had started to glaze over. When asked how he goes about writing his songs, or why, for that matter, he continues slogging his way through the pitfalls of the music industry, Appelwick shrugs. “I’m just doing it because that’s what I do,” he said. “And I like doing it.”
Twenty years ago, one could hardly have blamed Chan Poling if he’d walked away from a music career altogether. His band, pioneering Minneapolis punk-poppers The Suburbs, was in its second abortive go-round with a major record label—this time, A&M. The ’Burbs’ primary ally at the label had left the company, often the kiss of death for an act not well established at a label of A&M’s size, and the band’s phone messages were going unreturned.
“We were right at the height of our frustration then,” Poling recalled last month, during a phone conversation. “It got to be a strain, trying to figure out what the label wanted and what radio wanted.”
The Suburbs were dropped from A&M a short time later, after which the band dissolved. It occurred to Poling at the time that the only way for him to stay happily (and gainfully) employed in the music biz was to concentrate on what he wanted to do.
It’s a strategy that’s paid off with an eclectic string of projects: Poling has scored productions for Theatre de la Jeune Lune; co-composed a musical (Heaven) for Rent producer and former Ordway Center for the Performing Arts president Kevin McCollum; taught music at Moorhead State University, the University of Minnesota, and MacPhail Center for the Arts; written scores and incidental music for movies and TV shows ranging from indie documentaries to Melrose Place; released a solo CD (Calling All Stars); participated in sporadic reunions of the still-beloved Suburbs; and founded a successful downtown studio/jingle house, Pixel Farm Music.
The dexterity needed to cover so much ground is born of more than the musician’s ever-present need to hustle up work; in Poling’s case, it’s a matter of genetic imperative. “Music is in my blood, my biological makeup,” he said. “I wake up thinking about music. I have no choice in the matter; this is what I have to do.”
It’s the rare musician who remains vital even while sustaining a comfortable income from music well past his fortieth birthday. (Poling turns fifty next year.) He has, at the same time, avoided the grinds of touring and running a gauntlet of underpaying saloon gigs.
Poling’s newest passion, at first glance, looks like the hoariest refuge of all for a working musician: a cover band. The New Standards, however, is an entirely different animal from the goodtime combos littering the suburban-bar circuit. Along with Semisonic bassist John Munson and vibraphonist Steve Roehm, Poling is using the band to unearth pop and rock gems from the past few decades that can hang with the evergreen tunes of our grandparents’ generation—in other words, new standards. That might mean anything from playing up the timeless descending chord sequence of Mott the Hoople’s “All the Young Dudes” to tweezing the melody from the roar of Blur’s “Song 2.”
The project started a few years ago during some routine riffing between old friends and music chums. At one point, Poling and Munson found themselves marveling at the structure and nuances of the great (if little-remembered) 1972 Dan Hicks track, “I Scare Myself.”
“I was thrilled that John knew something that obscure and that our common musical songbook was that wide,” Poling recalled. “The next time he came over, he brought his stand-up bass, and we sat around all day going, ‘What about this Kurt Weill song? Do you know this one by Lou Reed?’ We just started playing them in this raw, simple style. And we started realizing that a number of songs, like [the Replacements’] ‘I Will Dare,’ have a real swingy, jazzy feel to them, even if they weren’t written in that style.”
The two agreed that Roehm made for the trio’s obvious third leg, his vibraphone being a natural fit with the piano and bass, and at the urging of Poling’s wife, Eleanor Mondale, the group started gigging and recording. In 2005, a self-titled CD was released, and The New Standards started making waves in unexpected places. A residency at Joe’s Pub in New York resulted in a prominent profile of the band in the “Night Out With” column in the Sunday Styles section of the New York Times.
The band has a new album in the preproduction stages, and it just finished another series of New York shows. Having recently hired Wilco’s booking agency, and in the process of fielding label overtures, The New Standards has quickly become more than a side project.
Nevertheless, said Poling, “It’s still all about fun, because we’re all pretty easygoing, and we share a similar vibe and similar tastes. We have no qualms about taking a song we love and improving it. Or wrecking it.”