The Rake Magazine

Month: November 2006

  • NYC Recap

    bfast.jpg

    So….the New York trip was fun. The marathon was super cool, basically it was a mass of humanity moving in one direction.

    Telepan was by far the best service, our server was invisible yet attentive. He helped us pair the best flavors for our tasting menu choices, but never over-asserted himself. Top bite was a poached egg over frisee with lardons and a light mustard dressing.

    Cafe Cluny was homey and tightly packed and dimly lit and we loved it. I had some scallops on a cauliflower puree that was simple elegance.

    Morimoto…food was innovative and fun, and the sushi quality was amazing, but. The room was FREEZING and it seemed like none of the staff wanted to be there. Our server was completely bored and ineffective. When I ordered the appetizers, he kept pushing a couple of orders of the Kobe carpaccio for $50 a pop. And our empty cocktail glasses collected on our table until we finally pushed them into a large grouping in the middle of the table. It was like a pretty, dirty centerpiece.

    Big finds: Doughnut Plant on the LES. Hello pumpkin doughnuts, Vahlrona doughnuts, fluffy glazed Krispy-Kremes-are-rocks morsels of love.

    We ducked into Tisserie for a coffee and a snack. They had cases packed with portable yummies like Nutella tartlets and chocolate filled blobs of dough called tiger eyes. Nice surprise.

    Chocolate by The Bald Man: Max Brenner is a Wonka wonderland shop/restaurant of amazing chocolate. Huge slices of double chocolate pizza, vats of fondue, a chocolate filled syringe for the quick blast, chocolate spread on chocolate bread … I think I’m in love with this man.

  • Shall I compare thee to a squeezebox?

    Hate to plug the obvious, but The Lit 6 Project‘s having another show this weekend. And they’ve been inviting some musician friends into the fold as of late, which makes things pretty interesting. This time that’ll be Chris Koza. There’s also a film preview/fundraiser for a long-in-the-making documentary by local filmmaker Melodie Gilbert. Her most notable project to date is probably Hole, a documentary about amputee wannabes. But this new flick’s about “urban explorers”–you know, the sorts of folks who like climbing about caves, sewer systems, and what not. (Yuck.) And finally, up about Northeast Minneapolis, there’s gonna be the NEMAA Fall Fine Arts Show as well as the NE Accordion Festival. Oompah!

  • What Lies Beneath

    isabella.gif

    Once again I’m ignoring this weekend’s top releases–especially Stranger Than Fiction, which does not look appealing in the least (sorry Amy). Instead, dear readers (or reader), there are two films outside the mainstream worth checking out:

    The Mill City Museum is hosting the documentary Urban Explorers: Into The Darkness tonight at 6:30. Director Melody Gilbert will be on hand to answer questions and schmooze with the audience. The movie follows a group of people with punk superhero names (Max Action, Slim Jim, Katwoman) as they pull manhole covers off the city streets and climb down into the sewers to find adventure. I’d love to have the backbone to be able to descend into the guts of the city, or break into to old abandoned buildings and see what’s there. I don’t (have the guts, that is), so this film will have to suffice.

    Also: The Walker Art Center is giving us Blue Velvet on the big screen tonight and tomorrow! This movie blew me away when I saw it in college, long ago. Those billowing silk curtains to open the film, the stroke that brings the hero back into town, and Lynch’s camera diving into the grass to expose a cruel world where insects devour anything at will… if that’s not enough, on comes Isabella Rossellini, Dennis Hopper, and my personal favorite, Dean Stockwell singing “A candy colored clown they call the sandman”. I’ve seen this picture only once on the big screen, over twenty years ago, and if you’ve never seen it in a theater, make it a point to do so. Blue Velvet screens as part of the Isabella Rossellini: Illuminated, and plays tonight at 9:45 and tomorrow at 7:30.

  • The top of a privet hedge

    Jon Ferguson‘s new show, Ligustrum Vulgare, is playing tonight at the Bryant Lake Bowl. (And I’m dragging Peter Schilling to go see it.) If you don’t already know, Ferguson is the Brit-born director who, in 2005, created the anti-war “clown show” Please Don’t Blow Up Mr. Boban, which starred many members of the Live Action Set. Even now, it stands out as one of my all-time favorite theatergoing experiences…

    Now Ferguson is turning his attention to the smaller battles we wage with, say, those oddball neighbors of ours. Ligustrum Vulgare was inspired by a newspaper article he once read about a guy who killed his neighbor in a dispute over the appropriate height for a privet hedge (thus the name Ligustrum Vulgare, Latin for privet hedge). I interviewed Ferguson earlier to week about this show (we’ll be running a short preview in our December issue–just in time to alert folks to the last two performances) and, not knowing much about it, the thing that struck me most was the method he used in casting the show’s actors. He purposefully sought out performers with “qualities of stillness and melancholy,” he said. And I knew this to be the case, at lease in one instance. One of the cast members is a mutual acquaintance of Ferguson’s and mine. This person embodies the very definition of a malcontent. I thought it pretty remarkable though, that Ferguson was able to view this characteristic as a strength. Lesser artists would’ve cast all their friends, since they’re so easy to get along with.

  • The World's Best Investigative Newspaper

    The Star Tribune finally managed to get a story in about Minneapolis School Board member-elect Chris Stewart’s “Tammy Lee and Everyone Who Supports Her Hate Black People” web site.

    They couldn’t get the story in before the election for some reason, probably because, as they said, Stewart didn’t return their call until after the election.

    I spoke to Stewart on Monday, though, which I guess means the Strib should hire me to replace Steve Brandt, their school board man.

    Brandt didn’t go into much detail on the story of course, because, after all, the Strib had to leave plenty of room for Katherine Kersten to tell us again how wonderful Michele Bachmann is. But I so admire his apparently pungent questioning of Stewart–which elicited this response: “It breaks down to some frat-blog type humor that never was meant to get out to the public and it’s completely inconsistent with my politics.”

    Some questions I might have asked: “Stewart, what you really mean is it wasn’t supposed to be revealed that you wrote it. Right?” and, “Since you did write it, how can you say it’s inconsistent with your politics?” and, “If we accept your explanation that it was frat boy humor, how do you think the citizens of Minneapolis ought to feel about having just elected someone of such awesome intellect?” and “Would you have returned my phone call if I had left the message that we were going to run a front page story on Election Day that exposes you as the author of patently racist diatribe and we wanted to give you a chance to explain yourself?”

    A question Brandt might ask his own editorial board is, “What sort of research did you do on this guy before we endorsed him?”

    And he might ask his own editor “Why do you tolerate an excuse at the level of ‘He didn’t return my phone call?’ for not getting this story to the voters?”

  • Low Five

    chef.JPG
    juggling, juggling, juggling …

    Did you hear the news about Five Restaurant?

    Chef Stuart Woodman, the one who was recently named a Best New Chef by Food & Wine, was asked to leave his restaurant by his partners. This was supposed to be the best new restaurant in the state, an epiphany of foodie dining. What happened?

    There have been rumors, I have to admit. Woodman is an old-school chef, and his temper is not a secret. Were pots thrown? Were guests asked to leave the restaurant just for sending back tepid soup? I can’t confirm, I wasn’t there, I do not know.

    I do know that, not long ago, they sent out a discount promotion, so much off on Tuesdays or a certain percentage off here or there. For an upscale restaurant, that’s a red flag.

    I guess it’s the classic Fhima question: Is being a great cook enough to run a successful restaurant?

  • The voice that is great within us

    Whether you be toasting liberally or crying in your beers about the election results (I have a feeling that, like me, my readers are doing a little of both), it’ll probably be a good night to go way, way back (before you were too young or unborn to care about this shit): there’s B.B. King at Orchestra Hall and, if you’re really hating life, some sort of Johnny Cash backup band playing over at Lee’s (with opener “Johnny Trash”).

  • This Is Better

    The founders planned for it to work out this way: one party controls the executive; the other party controls the legislature. Except for the fact that the chief executive is George Bush, things could be a lot worse. God knows they have been for the past 6 years.

    If there is one thing that’s been clear, it’s that old saw about absolute power corrupts absolutely. With few exceptions, the power party was clearly governing for the benefit of the party, not of the country.

    But what I’m most encouraged about is that the American people may be slow, but they’re not completely stupid. It took them longer than it should, but to be fair, the Democrats certainly put up some dreadful candidates. (John Kerry, Coleen Rowley and Patty Wetterling come immediately to mind.)

    But they also came up with some good ones, like Tim Walz.

    Now the Democrats have to actually prove that they have some ideas. We know that Bush’s strategy in Irag is wrong. However, we don’t know what is right. The Democrats better figure it out soon, because the people seem to be demanding it.

    Congress, you’re on. Don’t screw it up.

  • One More Morning In America

    circus-tigers.jpg

    A morning like this, a morning on which you will not truly wake up, but rather go through the habitual motions of waking up –brush your teeth, shower, change your clothes, walk the dog, and go off in the usual stupor to work– you’re left wrestling with the old, hard-wired reactions to nights like the one now behind you.

    All night you heard ridiculous phrases like “the tide of history” and “the winds of change.” You understand, even if you cannot reconcile, the cyclical nature of politics and public opinion. Waves break on the beach and roll back out to sea. Stuff always gets washed up and left behind. The moon works its reliable and spectacular magic and the sun comes up in the east.

    Still, you hope and you doubt. A morning like this you like to think your world has been transformed, that things will be somehow different, if only in terms of a heightened sense of solidarity and shared values (which would be no small victory, really); yet you know that whatever actual changes might result from our collective yawp into the void of representative democracy will likely be small, incremental, and subject, as all such changes are, to swift and arbitrary reversal.

    Meanwhile, some things seem both inevitable and irreversible, things like enchantment and disenchantment, which somehow manage to eternally coexist in their inevitability and irreversibility. The former a blessing that comes with simply being alive in this world; the latter an affliction that unfortunately also comes with simply –or not so simply– being alive in this world.

    If your little red “I Voted” sticker is some acknowledgement of a small and utterly painless investment in faith, what exactly is the nature of your investment? What is the nature of that faith? And what sort of return, if any, do you expect to earn on that investment?

    You’re not so sure, really. Maybe it ultimately boils down to little more than a feeling, a hope, a sneaking suspicion that this country might still work, might still be a better, more compassionate, more peaceful place. Or at the very least that it might one day soon make more sense.

    Maybe whatever happened last night just means that you, along with millions of other people, are exhausted by a political and cultural climate of virulent dishonesty, a strain of dishonesty so fierce and prevalent that you no longer feel safe in your own skin, and can no longer trust the words that are lobbed in your direction every day, or even the words that tumble around in your own head and roll off your tongue.

    This, however, is another day, another pure opportunity to be stunned. The first bruise of sunlight is creeping behind the houses across the alley. Does the world this morning feel like a better or safer place? Maybe you’re one of the lucky ones, and can’t answer that question with any real honesty or perspective.

    You know this much: When you drive downtown the hobbled parade of scrap metal entrepreneurs will still be pushing their grocery carts slowly along the streets around your office, and your desk will be exactly as you left it yesterday afternoon.

  • In Case You Missed It

    And those of you who depend on the newspapers or the TV for your news did, Minneapolis School Board Candidate Chris Stewart wrote and posted this “spoof” of Tammy Lee’s website front page on his blog, americanhotsausage.com.

    It’s since been removed and the blog has been passworded so you can’t see any of his previous scurrilous screeds unless you have the secret password, which I’m guessing is probably “honky” or “ofay” or whatever is slang for “white motherfucker” these days.

    Stewart goes by Rev. Rahelio Soleil on his blog and as a letter writer (to The Rake, among others) and frequent commenter on local blogs. If you want to google him, you can, and you can read some of his stuff if you click the “cached” link on the google listing.

    He commented here the other day as RS2, and stopped just short of calling me a racist. On the Tammy Lee page, he didn’t hesitate to put racist words in my mouth.

    I spoke to Stewart yesterday and asked him point blank if he’d written the site. He refused to answer a simple yes or no question.

    Chances are Chris Stewart will be elected to the Minneapolis School Board today, and by God, we’ll be proud to have a thoughtless cowardly racist like him representing us. Especially one who says such things behind a pseudonym.

    (Pardon us while we laugh our ass off when we quote what Stewart says he stands for on his website: “A intense focus on core knowledge, character education, and civic accountability.”)

    At least Keith Ellison put his name on stuff he wrote. Too bad Stewart can’t muster the same courage.

    And too bad none of the main stream media couldn’t do so either. Maybe the Strib just didn’t want to make themselves look any stupider than they already do by ignoring this story about their endorsed candidate.