The Rake Magazine

Month: November 2006

  • Light and Holy Drinks

    After twelve happy years in Oxford, the happy year I spent in Cambridge was a far greater culture shock than (several years later) coming to Minnesota. The first thing I learned was that in Cambridge, it is not polite to be rude to people. If you say, “I read your book; what a lot of rot,” they think you mean it, acute sense of humor failure occurs, and you will have offended against the precept that “a gentleman is one who never gives offense unintentionally.”

    But there is something about Cambridge books I never entirely understood: It is the emblem that the grandest offerings from Cambridge University Press bear upon their title page. Nobody has ever satisfactorily explained to me why scholars consulting The Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire or an edition of Epistulae ad Familiares should encounter—up front, close and personal—an oval embracing an etching of the upper half of a naked woman displaying, for universal cynosure, what the novelist Thackeray refers to as “famous frontal development.”

    For the learned, Cambridge University Press provides a cryptic clue. Around the oval run the words “Hinc Lucem Et Pocula Sacra,” which my third-year Latin class would render rightly as “Light and Holy Drinks From Here.” If this is an allusion to the excellence of Cambridge college port, I could not possibly disagree; port is one of the more splendid of the superficial similarities between the two ancient English seats of learning. But I fear it is a reference to the famous frontal development. The literal translation of alma mater is, after all, wet nurse; an alumnus is one who has imbibed in the way that nature intended from a lady not his natural mother. (Thackeray indeed was a Cambridge alumnus.) The holy drinks may be on the university, but they are strictly nonalcoholic. Pity. Who wants learning when there is a possibility of port?

    Port rhymes with thought. Unlike the great wines of Bordeaux, port does not absolutely demand that you switch your mind on while drinking it, but, like an intelligent woman, it does furnish substantially more pleasure if you give it your thoughtful attention. Thought requires information. The best place I know to find out painlessly about the finer points of wine is Jancis Robinson’s Oxford Companion to Wine. A magnificent new edition, just out, is a must this Christmas for the oenophile who has everything. From the rosé-tinted pages of front matter to the tables at the end (did you know that Kyrgyzstan produces 951,000 U.S. gallons of wine a year? Rather a lot for a mostly Muslim land), this is a riot of delicious information. You can savor swift pen portraits of famous connoisseurs, such as Robert M. Parker Jr., whose system of scoring wines numerically has been “easily and delightedly grasped by Americans familiar with high school grades,” and Hugh Johnson. You can grieve over phylloxera, wonder at the possible taste of the Roman wine coolers described by Pliny, or come to grips with the difference between Ruby and Tawny, Vintage and Late Bottled Vintage port.

    And while you are about it, sip a glass of Fonseca ten-year-old Tawny Port, available hereabouts for a little over $30 (about half the price of The Oxford Companion to Wine). Tawny port lacks the rich, oily glory of vintage port, but it lacks also the rich, oily price. It needs none of the TLC, cellaring, or meticulous decanting without which vintage port—the product of a single outstanding year, long-matured in dusty bottles—is simply wasted. Tawny port has aged in wood but does not taste of it. The color is comparatively light; there is a whiff of grappa in the nose followed by fruity sweetness. On the palate there is warmth, a good grip, and a lingering pleasantness. Go on, have a second glass.

    It would be genial to savor this port after dinner. Or, let us be honest, to keep it behind the filing cabinet for those long, cold Minnesota Saturdays when inspiration is frozen, when you stare, snow-blind, at a blank computer screen wondering how best to use the next precious moments of research time, when even the title page of The Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire has ceased to please. Put it on a billboard: Fonseca, freeing the ice floes of the scholarly imagination since 1822. Hinc vere lucem et pocula sacra.

  • Global Noshing

    Just beyond the Hong Kong harbor lies Lamma Island, a small, quiet isle with small, hidden beaches and, during the time my husband and I visited, a remarkable butterfly population. After exploring the green surroundings, we sat down at a bar overlooking the water. What I remember most about that hot September day nearly six years ago is the cold bucket of San Miguel beer and the basket of squid—fried crispy brown and given a healthy coating of spices and salt. Sure, it was our first wedding anniversary, but we hadn’t gone to Hong Kong to gaze into each other’s eyes. We were there to eat.

    Aside from the day trip to Lamma Island, we spent our time in Hong Kong scouring alley shops and market halls for unusual delicacies and freshly forged knives. We ate with the elite at the top of the Mandarin Oriental and with the masses at the Jumbo Floating Restaurant. Of course, we saw a museum or two and strolled through a few temples—that’s the best way to walk off dim sum before lunch. But our major mission, not so surprising for two lifers in the food industry, was researching foods for the menu at a new Minneapolis restaurant. What’s surprising is how many people outside the business consider eating the main focus of their vacations.

    Some travelers enjoy making dining part of their adventure, wiling away an afternoon at a random street café just outside their chosen museum. Then there are those who see food as the best way to sample a culture and understand the land and people we are visiting. We make a point of seeking out the best crêpe truck in Paris and the reddest salt in Hawaii. Not content merely to visit a cheese shop, we want to see the mountain and the goats from whence the cheese came. I like to call us gastrotrippers.
    No doubt, the expansion of the industries that have spawned celebrity chefs and twenty-four-hour food television is partly responsible for the rise in gastrotripping. It’s no longer enough to watch Anthony Bourdain get all the goodies on TV. We have passports, too, and refined palates. In fact, according to the International Culinary Tourism Association, a newish organization formed to help food and beverage producers connect with travel professionals, more than one in six Americans expresses a desire to travel with food as the focus.

    Gastrotrips usually fall into two categories: themed tours and self-guided forays. The former involves cookbook authors, food writers, and critics as well as specialized tour companies. For thousands of dollars, you and twenty new acquaintances can spend a week, for example, in Parma, Italy, where you’ll explore a certified parmigiano-reggiano aging room, witness the curing process of a grand leg of prosciutto, and maybe even get a cooking lesson in the kitchen of a local winemaker. You’ll have a great time, you’ll connect with both the local food and the people who make it, and chances are, everything will be handled perfectly and safely. The drawback, as with any themed tour, is that these trips tend to have a rehearsed plasticity. It’s likely that by the time you purchase your olive oil and return to your bus, another group will already have arrived, eager for the next “show.”

    That said, my personal choice is always the self-guided foray. By determining your own schedule and plotting your own destinations, you get more spontaneity and, I believe, a richer taste of the local color. In exchange for extending a hand, stuttering a foreign phrase, and humbly asking for opinions from people who grow, cook, and eat local foods, you are rewarded with the kinds of connections to both food and people that you can’t get with a tour group. If you’re lucky, you’ll be given directions to a lady who makes the best jamon croquetas or the name of the guy who owns the wasabi farm just outside of town. Over the years, I’ve found that it’s not the concierge who points you to the best Cuban sandwiches on Miami’s Calle Ocho, it’s the bellboy.

    All you need for true gastrotripping is a little bravery and a little research. First and foremost, make sure that your accommodations have a kitchen. Vacation rentals across the globe that provide a fridge and a stove offer a good reason to actually buy those gorgeous foods from the market instead of just taking pictures. Second, whether it’s a trip to Seattle or Bangkok, go online or to the library and read the local papers from the last year for food news and events. Third, and most important, consult with your fellow eaters. For instance, the international online community at chowhound.com readily shares opinions, discoveries, and favorite haunts—from Cal Pep in Barcelona to the Shake Shack in New York City.

    On a recent trip to Philadelphia, I was sitting in a little coffee shop, plotting out the afternoon’s adventures. Torn between Pat’s and Geno’s for the better Philly cheesesteak, I asked the student at the next table what he thought. He scrawled onto a napkin the location of a sandwich truck that turned out to be the holy grail of cheese-steaks: a perfect slice of Philly life that the tour buses would have driven right by.

  • On Her Majesty’s Secret Service

    The best news the fans of James Bond books could have heard last year was that Paul Haggis was working on the screenplay for Casino Royale, and that this movie would stick closely to Ian Fleming’s book. Haggis, the writer of Crash and Flags of Our Fathers, teamed up with writers of the last few Bond-taculars to restore some intelligence to what had become a franchise sustained only by a spectacular chase, followed by a fight, followed by an explosion, followed by sex. Repeat as necessary.

    Casino Royale, the first of Fleming’s books, is the purest distillation of Bond. There is a mission. There is a card game. Bond is tortured. He gets the girl, sort of. There is only one audible gun shot, and it’s not even fired by Bond. News that the screenplay was going to stick to the basic plot, and would contain at least some of the nuance of the book, was welcome indeed. (Those who go to Bond movies for the action need not worry, though. The mission setup, which was handled in the book by a conversation in M’s office, features in the film the best Bond chase ever, a couple of explosions, and lots of gunfire. Oh yeah, there’s a woman, too. But once the movie’s financiers have been satisfied, you get some actual Fleming-brand Bond.)

    The Bond literary phenomenon was characterized early on as a mere combination of “sex, sadism, and snobbery.” Those elements are all there, to be sure, but reducing them to the three-“S” formula grossly underestimates Fleming. In 1953, the year Casino Royale appeared, Elizabeth II was crowned monarch of a country that was little better than a vassal state of the United States and an irrelevant player in the battle between its liege and the Soviet Union. Neither power paid much attention to the country that had put on such a poor show in Europe and Asia during World War II, had lost its empire, and had sunk into economic despair.

    But Fleming, a former intelligence officer, knew that intelligence was where Britain actually had made a difference in the war. The Brits were the master German code breakers, after all. Where could a badly needed hero emerge? How could relevance be restored? Only one man for the job, really. Bond. James Bond.

    The plot of Casino Royale is simple, plausible and eschews the grandiose evil schemes that pepper the later books. Le Chiffre is the banker for the Russian spy operation in Western Europe. He’s been embezzling from his employers, and has set himself up at a high stakes Baccarat game in order to replenish the payroll account before the ruthless Russians find out. Somehow the Brits have learned about this before the Russians; they send Bond, the best card player in the service, to bust him at the table. Bond’s not quite as good as all that, however (and Baccarat is a much more difficult game than the Texas Hold ’em of the movie,) and he’s the one who is busted instead. The CIA, which also seems to be way ahead of the Russians, steps in and bankrolls Bond and the poor British, and Bond eventually triumphs on the second go round. (The film version makes a point of rubbing in the Brits’ poverty when Bond asks Felix Leiter, his CIA counterpart, where to send the winnings; the reply: “Do we look like we need it?”)

    Eventually, Bond is tortured by Le Chiffre for the money and, ironically, it is the Russians, who’ve finally realized what MI-6 and the CIA have known for quite a while, who rescue him. After his recovery from the torture, Bond suffers the further indignity of being double-crossed yet again—which adds a subtlety to the plot (thankfully preserved in the movie) that appears far too rarely in subsequent books, and almost never in the films.

    To give away the twist would spoil the movie … and the book. In the book, the twist is the end, and Bond’s discovery of it leads him to the realization that the real game was always being played at one level above his pay grade. It seems that that ending didn’t sit well with test audiences of the film, however, and so we’re made to suffer an unnecessary coda which leaves us with Bond thinking he can actually do something meaningful … and, by the way, sets up the next movie.

    The Fleming books are infinitely darker than the movie franchise. The best of the books build on Bond’s despondence first seen at the end of Casino Royale. In the books there is none of the quipping made famous by Sean Connery or Roger Moore (but plenty of the anomie of Timothy Dalton—the best film Bond.) We do get the occasional gourmet meal featuring caviar and champagne, but far more often, Bond satisfies himself with, believe it or not, scrambled eggs. These are often washed down not with a shaken martini or a bottle of Bollinger ’53, but with the better part of a bottle of bourbon and too many cigarettes. Bond is, in reality, a drunk. The infrequent feasts and frequent hangovers are his reward for what he knows is a lousy life—a life in which he gets many more brutal beatings from his enemies than lusty scenes with his leading ladies.

    The Bond of Fleming’s books can be as brutish as his enemies. When he meets Vesper Lynd, his beautiful fellow agent in Casino Royale, she gazes at him “with a touch of ironical disinterest which, to his annoyance, he found he would like to shatter, roughly.” When they finally do make love, Bond knew “that the conquest of her body, because of the central privacy in her, would each time have the sweet tang of rape.” When it comes to the women of the Secret Service, we’re treated to the contents of their personnel files, including bust, waist, and hip measurements. They all seem to be built like Marilyn Monroe. It’s not surprising that President Kennedy was a fan of the books. Today, we can’t help but wonder if M’s personnel file would contain Judy Dench’s vital statistics.

    But, as Bond goes about making it with a series of women, the reader realizes the only ones that he is able to form any sort of emotional attachment with are somehow terribly damaged, or are out to damage him. There are no happy endings to the books, none of the typical culminating scenes in the movies, where Bond and the girl float away in a tropical island embrace. When there is sex, it’s brutal and impersonal. When there is love, it always turns out badly, more so for the women than Bond. And while one trademark of the movies is their highly suggestive scenes, there are no prurient interludes in the Fleming books. It’s almost as if he were denying his readers the same genuine satisfaction he was denying Bond.

    The best intercourse of the Fleming books is that between Bond and his adversaries. The Baccarat match with Le Chiffre in Casino Royale, the bridge game with Hugo Drax in Moonraker, and the golf with Auric Goldfinger are all more visceral than any feminine interplay. His victories in these encounters are far more satisfying to Bond than his eventual destruction of their evil plots or the bedding of the converted vixen.

    In the last novel Fleming finished before his death, You Only Live Twice, Bond is called “a blunt instrument of policy,” words repeated by M in the film of Casino Royale. By You Only Live Twice, Bond is nothing more than that blunt instrument, and an unrepentant guzzler of sake besides. He’s sent by M to Japan as an expendable commodity offered to the Japanese secret service in return for Russian intelligence that they’d been previously providing only to the CIA, and which the CIA would not share with the British. In addition to the personal service he’s to provide, he also has to listen to a lecture from the head of the Japanese service about why the British are irrelevant.

    The Japanese send him to assassinate a prominent botanist, who has constructed an elaborate poison garden to lure the suicide-prone Japanese to their deaths. Unknown to the Japanese, the British, and Americans, this botanist turns out to be none other than Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the villain of Thunderball and the murderer of Bond’s only true love in On His Majesty’s Secret Service. But by now, like Bond, who no longer gives a damn about Queen and Country, Blofeld also no longer cares about SPECTRE’s avowed purposes: terrorism, revenge, and extortion. Blofeld’s designed his death garden for the pleasure of watching the Japanese annihilate themselves one at a time. It’s a metaphorical mirror held up to Bond’s entire world.

    Bond kills Blofeld in You Only Live Twice, but, in the process, loses his identity and his memory—he even forgets how to make love to a woman. Only at that point does this genuinely unlikable “blunt instrument” finally become a sympathetic character.

    At the end of an earlier book, Diamonds are Forever, Bond muses about trying to write his own epitaph. He comes up with “It reads better than it lives.” That’s exactly what Fleming was trying to tell us all along.

  • Disaster Glam

    Those familiar with glossy nine-dollar magazines might think they know what to expect by now: hundreds of pages featuring cadaverous European models draped in preposterous clothes and posed in surreal lighting, all presented with an editorial attitude that falls somewhere between the court of the Sun King and a Chelsea heroin rave.

    Experiences with that standard model make it all the more startling and disorienting to open the premiere issue of Need, an elegantly designed magazine devoted not to sybaritic excesses but to the Samaritan ethic. Published from a Northeast Minneapolis home, this periodical apparently intends to glamorize—or at least place an artful halo around—people and organizations responding to human crises like disease, famine, and warfare.

    Need, which launched a few weeks ago in a press run of 25,000, has to be one of the classiest if most improbable labors of love we’ve encountered in a long time. After all, run-of-the-mill publications from charitable organizations barely qualify as pamphlets. Printed on borrowed dimes and filled with artless photos of doctors, nurses, patients, and donors, their sole purpose is clearly to coax contributions. And that haphazard production quality can be perversely reassuring; doesn’t it imply that whatever money the organization manages to shake loose from donors is actually going to the cause in question—African victims of AIDS, Sudanese victims of civil war, Malaysian victims of tsunamis, Pakistani victims of earthquakes, whomever—and not toward home-office frills?

    But Kelly and Stephanie Kinnunen see it differently. The thirty-nine-year-old husband-and-wife team publish Need. “What we’ve learned,” Ms. Kinnunen recently explained, “is that charities that put out low-quality materials don’t get as good a response as the few that are providing something better.”

    More to the point, Need isn’t a charitable organization; it’s a magazine about charitable organizations and the people whose energies sustain them. The cover shot on the winter 2006 issue is a poignant close-up of a bright-eyed Afghani schoolboy in a yellow cap, clutching his pencil. It, and an interior series of photographs from Afghanistan, were provided gratis by veteran Magnum photographer Steve McCurry, who’s been shooting in that country since 1979.

    At least in its initial stages, all of Need’s contributors are working pro bono. “Eventually, we hope to offer our writers and photographers some sort of compensation,” Kinnunen said, “but we’ve been pleased at the response we’ve gotten from people like Steve McCurry.”

    The magazine’s first-rate design is the work of another fledgling company, Fusion Hill, also located in Northeast. Cofounder Kasey Worrell Hatzung said her thirteen-person company is on board for at least the next three issues, partly because she and business partner Kerry Sarnoski are simpatico with the Need mission and partly because an “image-driven” magazine like Need is a terrific calling card for their careers.

    Included in the premiere issue are a piece on the American Refugee Committee’s work in the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami and a series of before-and-after photos of people with cleft palates and massive tumors who have been treated aboard the mercy ship Anastasis. While it’s a bit strange to see the cruelly impoverished and disfigured displayed with the same aesthetic sheen as international clothes horses, on the other hand—why not?

    “It is a really well-done magazine,” said Therese Gales of the Twin Cities-based American Refugee Committee. “We like that it treats the people who have suffered in these faraway disasters like actual individuals. That’s very important in terms of making an audience respond.”

    What is perhaps more difficult is to look at a magazine with the coffee-table manners of Need without running the basic expenses—chief among them, the costs of a lovely, lustrous paper stock and top-notch printing—in your head. Conceived as a quarterly, Need’s first issue was produced, said Kinnunen, on a budget of “about $50,000. Maybe a little more.” She also admitted they sold “only $4,200 in ads” for their inaugural issue and that she and her husband have pretty much “maxed out our credit cards.”

    Need Communications, Inc., originally hoped to be a nonprofit. But the Kinnunens were quickly confronted with an inescapable irony: In order to tell, in a compelling and artful style, stories about the people and agencies they wanted to help, they would have to compete against those very same people and agencies for donor dollars. So for now, Need is a for-profit corporation—at least in the eyes of the IRS. Even Kinnunen conceded, “We’ll probably never turn a profit.”

    Now that, folks, is what you call charitable giving.

  • Caged Heat

    Americans have long suffocated under the dead weight of silly, made-up sports like World Wide Wrestling and American Gladiator. Football, basketball, hockey, baseball, NASCAR, even golf and tennis have grown corpulent with corporate money and more branding than you see at a cattle ranch.

    Then there’s boxing, the oldest sport in the world, which has become a sterilized show-off between billion-dollar babies in silky shorts and puffy red mittens. When Norman Mailer and Joyce Carol Oates are the only writers still buzzing about a sport, you know you’ve got a big bloated corpse on your hands. Then this young Turk writer Palahniuk comes along, writes Fight Club, and all of a sudden, pugilism is back off the mat. It’s been seven years since the movie version of Palahniuk’s novel came out, and guys in the Twin Cities are still strippin’ down to their skivvies and engaging in bare-knuckle fighting for no apparent purpose and with few rules.

    Ultimate Fighting, or Mixed Martial Arts, is the punk rock of combat sports. As one local promoter puts it, “We have for-real people beating each other up, for real.” The best place for action around the Twin Cities is the Myth, the Maplewood nightclub that’s the size and shape of a Best Buy. Once you’ve passed the “no gang colors” dress code, the friskers, and the metal detectors, the club bursts its tethers and blasts off on Red Bull-powered rocket boosters to a galaxy where the men, women, drinks, and action are all served straight up. The shoulder-height stage at one end of the room is reserved for patrons, who sit on metal folding chairs. The octagonal cage fills the dance floor on a five-foot-high riser. About one hundred people have paid a couple of hundred dollars each (or been comped) for the VIP seats and tables that sit back about fifteen feet from the action. Several collapsible tables and chairs are pushed right up next to the cage for the medic, judges, or fighters’ mates, who cling to the black-plastic-wrapped fence and holler advice or fling water bottles over the top of the twenty-foot wall to the fighters between rounds. The entire club is dark except the ring, which is tented in a hot pool of lights. Backlit silhouettes of heads and waving arms are visible behind a railing in the second deck, the equivalent of nosebleed seats at a football game. In this galaxy, only the royalty below get within spitting, sweating, and blood-spurting distance of the gore.

    Once the fighters make the long walk through the cheering crowd and into the cage, the referee locks the gate. The combatants aren’t the ones fighting to get out; it’s the audience that wants in.

    Fights go three rounds, five minutes a round, with a minute-long break in between. The amateurs kick things off, grappling around in a double crab walk most of the time. When two guys just wrestle around on the floor, it’s easy to forget the lawlessness of the sport—until someone wriggles an arm free and starts punching the other guy’s face while the referee does nothing but watch. It’s amazing how much a face can swell in just a couple minutes.

    After a particularly bloody recent bout, the winning fighter stood up long enough to have his triumph declared, then promptly bolted from the cage and landed on all fours over a bucket. “Now folks,” yelled the announcer, “you know you’ve seen a good fight when the winner is puking!”

    Half the crowd is made up of women, and they’re screaming, not wincing. Most look like sorority girls hoping for a glimpse of Brad Pitt. Two Asian women perched on their white boyfriends’ laps in the front row don’t look like they go to school or do anything but what they’re doing right here: jumping up and down and screeching, loud enough to be heard over the rest of the crowd, “Kick his fucking ass, you motherfucker!” So much for the cultural cliché about passivity and obedience. Then there’s a cadre of women thin and sparkly enough to be dangled from their own magenta cell phones. On the professional Ultimate Fighting Championship circuit, they’re called “Octagon Girls.” They go everywhere in a single-file line, wrapped in shreds of hot-pink fishnet and tottering on Kiss-style white platforms like candy stripers in a Russ Meyer fantasy. This night, they lent an especially poignant accompaniment to the announcement from the promoters of a new breast-cancer-awareness project.

    During the next round, a fighter went down and out. A blue-gloved medic rushed to his side. Every pair of eyes in the house was on the body of the inert man while the victor stood awkwardly off to the side until his opponent was revived and wobbled out of the ring.

    A current topic of hot debate in the Ultimate Fighting Championship world concerns groin attacks. Opponents of the nut-punch ban say that freestyle fighting should be exactly that. And if groin kicks become legal again, the only rule from Palahniuk’s vision—“You do not talk about Fight Club”—could be rendered completely moot.

  • Sweet Salvation

    In January, when the Winona Pie Lady, aka Mary Zimmerman, baked her one-thousandth pie, she called up Governor Tim Pawlenty to see if he would accept it. She talked to someone in his office but never heard back.

    So the seventy-three-year-old great-grandmother phoned Representative Gil Gutknecht, the Republican congressman from Rochester. Gutknecht agreed immediately and showed up on Zimmerman’s doorstep. His much-publicized visit resulted in a fifty-dollar donation for Zimmerman’s landmark caramel apple pie decorated with two tiny American flags and the number “1,000.”

    During a twenty-minute conversation—“I thought he would talk all afternoon, but whoever drives him around said, ‘We’d better get going,’ ” she recently recalled— Gutknecht even told Zimmerman that he would eschew his previous plan to pack chocolate-chip cookies for an upcoming trip to Iraq, instead taking some of her pies. She never did get his order, though she was too busy filling other requests to notice.

    Zimmerman began baking pies and selling them for charity (at a cost of six or seven dollars each, depending on the filling) after the tsunami struck Southeast Asia in December 2004. The conservative Christian spent a week praying for a way that she could help; meanwhile, she kept thinking about how popular her pies were at church bake sales. “I don’t have many talents, but making pies came to mind,” she said. Zimmerman, a slight woman with brown curly hair, has been periodically hospitalized with depression and found that baking pies kept her mind occupied. She hoped to make five hundred dollars to donate to a missionary priest she knows in Sri Lanka. But after she was featured in the Winona Daily News, her phone began “ringing off the hook,” she said. “I’d bake into the evenings sometimes, and sometimes I would get up at 4:30 in the morning.” One anonymous local paid $250 for a pie. Someone else sent her a hundred-dollar bill in an envelope with no return address. A local orchard donated several bushels of apples. People began to recognize her in public, nicknaming her the Pie Lady. She raised $7,500 in nine months—enough to build three houses and support a shelter for homeless youth.

    Zimmerman bakes all her pies in a small, 1970s-style kitchen dominated by a wooden dining-room table the size of a twin bed. The table allows her to lay out ingredients for an entire day’s worth of baking the night before. She started off making apple and cherry pies (the latter is her favorite; the former, the most popular request) and later expanded her repertoire to include caramel apple, blueberry, and pumpkin. At a customer’s request, she even added sour cream pies.

    When it comes to the baking process, Zimmerman has two tips, both of which she’s more than willing to share. The first: canola and vegetable oils. “I would never use lard,” she said. “It makes good pie crusts and people used it years ago, but it has more cholesterol.”

    The second: “When my granddaughter helps me, we put lemonade Kool-Aid in the apple pies to make them more tart.”

    Zimmerman was initially uncomfortable in the spotlight but soon learned the value of publicity. When she baked her five-hundredth pie, she aimed straight for the top: In a letter to President Bush, she made it clear that she was willing to mail him the pie if he couldn’t make it to Winona to receive it personally. Some time later, she received a letter with the presidential seal at the top and Bush’s signature stamped at the bottom. “Thank you for taking the time to write and for the enclosed material,” the letter said. “Our nation faces great tasks and we’re meeting them with courage and resolve … Thank you for taking the time to share your views.”

    Zimmerman interpreted the note as Bush’s rejection of her invitation—this being the era of Homeland Security and six-week presidential vacations—so she sold the pie to the local bishop instead.

    In August of 2005, Zimmerman burned out. Then Hurricane Katrina struck, and she knew she couldn’t stop. She raised two thousand dollars from pie sales for Catholic Charities, and another six hundred dollars went to a local girl who suffers from spina bifida, bringing total donations to over ten thousand dollars.

    This past summer, however, her depression returned, and Zimmerman stopped baking after selling around eleven-hundred pies. She thought briefly about abandoning her pies altogether, then thought again.

    “I was very happy about being able to do what I did,” she said, looking longingly at her spotless kitchen. “I don’t know what to do with myself right now. When my health gets better, I would like very much to continue making pies.”

    She paused. “I would like to bake pies right now. People liked them a lot. They said they’d never had a pie like that.”

  • Pipe Dreams

    Pipe smokers like to claim they live longer than nonsmokers. More than four decades after the fact, they’ll still cite a 1964 Surgeon General’s report on smoking, which stated: “Death rates for pipe smokers are little if at all higher than for non-smokers …”

    That report and others that followed warned of negative health effects for practitioners, including oral and lung cancers, but there’s a state of mind—a “calm and objective judgment in all human affairs,” according to pipe smoker Albert Einstein—that enthusiasts claim the habit enhances.

    “Pipe smokers are just more relaxed people,” said Rich Lewis, the owner of Lewis Pipe and Tobacco. “Especially compared to cigarette smokers.” Despite lean times, Lewis himself, a fifty-four-year-old pipe maker and tobacconist, definitely fits that description. Adorning the walls of his tiny shop, located on the street level of the historic Rand Tower in downtown Minneapolis, is an assortment of antique pipes. Tiny nude figures and stags’ heads are carved atop pearly meerschaum bowls amidst stranger contraptions made of metal and briar—the hard, ball-shaped Mediterranean burl from which most pipes are made. Cases hold the cigars, pipes, and tobacco that make up most of Lewis’ sales stock, along with some imported and domestic cigarettes.

    The current seventy-percent wholesale tax on non-cigarette tobacco products has hurt business, as have the smoking bans that eliminated many cigar customers’ and downtown corporate accounts. Since laying off a longtime employee this past spring, Lewis has been running a one-man operation. Yet he seems to take all the glum news in stride, just as he did the chaos of relocating from Nicollet Mall last summer. This despite the fact that for five months, while his workshop was in shambles and he waited out construction next door, Lewis was unable to make a single pipe—his true love and talent.

    Lewis hopes the new workshop, visible from the Rand Tower lobby, will interest passersby in his arcane craft. He also agreed that the Rand is a good fit for his business. The building’s Art Deco design evokes an era when tobacco was as ubiquitous as the fedora, another anachronism in the twenty-first century. Calling his business “kind of a dinosaur in that sense,” Lewis said he’d hate to go the way of the haberdasher.

    Lewis has run the shop since 1972, when his father passed away. (His mother worked with him until 2001.) Nearly thirty-five years later, he is the authorized U.S. repairman for many of the world’s top pipe makers, and some believe he deserves a place among their ranks.

    “When I tell you that Rich Lewis is the best pipe maker in the world, I am not blowing smoke,” quipped Tony Soderman, president of the locally based Great Northern Pipe Club and a pipe collector for forty-two years. “I have heard two of the world’s foremost pipe makers say the same thing,” Soderman added. One of them, Giancarlo Guidi, tutored the previously self-taught Lewis in 1986 and 1989 at Guidi’s Ser Jacopo factory in Pesaro, Italy (just above the calf on the Adriatic coast).

    These days, the number of master pipe makers is dwindling, Lewis said. After World War II, European factories brought in train cars full of briar to craft hundreds of thousands of pipes. Now, those companies are gone or have whittled their ranks of craftsmen to a handful. Even the gathering of briar, which is done by hand, is a dying art relegated to the older generations.

    Lewis says he’s not in danger of going out of business but admits it’s a struggle to be the only employee. In addition to tending the store six days a week, he fronts the Rich Lewis Band at night, playing covers and Lewis originals—New Orleans-style R&B and boozy, bluesy rock ’n’ roll—as an acoustic trio at Erte Restaurant in Northeast Minneapolis or with a full band and horns at Neumann’s in North St. Paul.

    What keeps Lewis Tobacco going is a core of regular customers, both in-store and online, who buy cigars, pipes, tobacco, and related accessories. Les Pettit has been a Lewis patron for twenty years. “It’s the only place I can find this particular brand of weed,” he said. Pettit smokes Upshall “estate” (a fancy name for used) pipes, which Lewis buys and sells. The shop owner even makes custom mouthpieces to fit Pettit’s teeth. “I chew a pipe a lot,” Pettit said as he stepped behind the counter to weigh out his tobacco.

    Neither man smokes cigarettes, an experience they differentiate from the fine feel of a burning briar bowl. Both spoke calmly, if not quite objectively, about the smoking ban and the tabooing of tobacco. Pettit referred to pipe smoking as a dying art, and Lewis admitted doubt about future demand.

    “Will the boomers pick it up as they get a little bit older?” Lewis wondered. “I don’t know.” Despite that professed uncertainty, the question didn’t seem to raise his blood pressure much.

  • A Thanksgiving Turkey

    Five years ago, when we looked at the Twin Cities publication scene, one of the things that struck us was the editor’s column in the front of the various mags. Almost without exception, each month’s installment would feature a list of all the cool things they’d done that month. There was the businessperson they’d lunched with. There was the trip with the wife. There was an inventory of stuff they’d bought from their advertisers.

    At The Rake, we were determined to differentiate ourselves. Our columns would be thoughtful, significant. We would talk about intellectual issues, not about the society folk we ran into that month. We’d write essays, not snippets.

    Sorry, but to hell with that. It’s two weeks ’til Thanksgiving, I’ve got a lot to be thankful for, and you’re going to have to bear with me for the next six hundred words or so.

    First, though it may be trite to say so, I’m thankful for my parents. The best thing a parent can teach a child is right and wrong, and I can imagine no better teachers than my parents. My dad sold insurance—still does, in fact, at age 84. Every morning, he got up, got dressed, had a glass of water for breakfast, and was at his office before 7. He never avoided a household task and openly enjoyed hands-on projects such as refinishing the basement, building furniture, and rewiring lamps. When I was interested in something, he’d teach me, but he didn’t force it on me if I wasn’t. Although he was a decorated veteran of World War II, he taught me that all reasonable people should hate war.

    My mother is Motherhood personified. She made sure the clothes were clean, the lawn got mowed, our homework was done, and we got to the dentist. She kept in touch with the family as it dispersed and still writes letters, by hand, every week. All family members get cards on their birthday, anniversary, Valentine’s Day—you name it. Mom also made sure we got to church, which for three boys seemed like punishment for all the fighting she’d had to put up with during the week. But the church, too, was instructive. There was no dogma. Every week we were read the epistles and the gospel, and those were followed by a short explanation from the priest. It wasn’t an oppressive religion; it was sort of like dinner at our house. Mom never made us eat all our vegetables, and she never made us swallow the church whole, either.

    I won’t bore you further with all I’ve learned from my wife and partner and my two perfect children other than to say they never let me get away with anything, yet always prick my balloon with humor rather than the pique I’m sure they often feel.

    I’m particularly thankful this week that I was born in the United States. Whatever your politics, most Americans respect the process and recognize the great gift of free speech and free press that—ideally, at least—informs our debates and ensures the good sense of Americans eventually wins out. The best news of the recent election is not that one side won and the other lost; it’s that the politics of fear and suspicions of other Americans has been pushed back, at least for now.

    I’m thankful I get to work in an industry where no government inspector can tell us what to do. I’m grateful that this industry is best represented by the reporters who are relentless in their search for true stories, despite their constriction by some corporate editors. Please don’t be discouraged, friends.

    Finally, there are all the friends we’ve made over the last five years of publishing The Rake. The subjects of our stories, our clients, our freelance writers, and our readers have supported what we’re trying to do beyond all of our expectations.

    Our staff makes it easy to come to work. Everyone puts his or her best effort into this magazine every day. They work very long hours. They suffer criticism of an impatient boss who doesn’t always think before he opens his mouth. But most of all, they laugh. This office is loud with laughter at least a couple of times every day. Sometimes I have to close my office door to drown it out. But mostly, I revel in it.

    Thanks for reading The Rake. Next month, we’ll be back to our regularly scheduled lineup of sarcasm.

  • Buzz Kill

    In “Pep Personified” [The Rakish Angle, November], Nancy Nelson’s husband explains that he gives his wife bee-themed jewelry as a private joke, because, “Aerodynamically, a bumblebee shouldn’t be able to fly … but the bumblebee doesn’t know that, so it just soars merrily along.”
    At the risk of depressing the sales of the bee-themed jewelry industry, I’d have to argue that the idea that any scientists ever seriously believed that bumblebees can’t fly is an urban legend. It can be traced back to a theory proposed in the 1930s by one Andre Saint-Lague, was corrected almost at once (he’d based his calculations on fixed-wing rather than moving-wing models), and has subsequently been debunked again several times— but, like all such legends, it refuses to die.

    Dennis Lien, University of Minnesota Libraries

  • Persuasive Geography

    I really enjoyed the story about Circle Pines [“A People’s History of Circle Pines,” November]. I have spent a large chunk of my life living in the N.E. metro and have memories of Circle Pines from back in the 70s. (Yes, I still can remember!) What really caught my eye was the map on page 56. Right away I realized that something was not right with the geography that the map displayed—like Hodgson Road, located west of Lexington. I then “Google Mapped” the location. Not only was the map flipped left to right, it was also flipped top to bottom. Also, maps almost always have north at the top, but not this one. Since the caption stated that it was from a brochure, it’s obvious that the developers put their own spin on Circle Pines’ existing geography (location, location, location) to market the place.

    Jeff M., Columbia Heights