The Rake Magazine

Year: 2006

  • Pistol Opera

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    I happen to be of the mind that there’s nothing very interesting happening tonight… And you know what that means: movie night!

    Cinema des Artistes is the fittingly pretentious name for a recurring event sponsored by Cinema Revolution, that foreign and indie DVD shop that’s located just above one of the three-dozen new Dunn Bros. in south Minneapolis. (I don’t mind.) Tonight’s feature being Japanese director Seijun Suzuki’s very artsy and very colorful action flick, Pisutoru Opera.

    If that fails, that interesting-seeming Thank You For Smoking plays the Uptown. I just saw the preview for that one last week, and I want to see it very badly. But the boyfriend is promising to make catfish and has just rented Good Night and Good Luck, so I’ll be watching that instead.

  • Driving Above .300

    Hitting a baseball is one of the most difficult feats in athletics. Engineering a car that is well-engineered at the right price is equally tricky. A lot of things have to come together at the right time and price. That is why getting a car that’s one-third right rarely happens.

    While rare, the Americans have finally built a mid-sized sedan that gets it at least half right and then some. That car is the Chrysler SRT-8.

    From a chassis, engine and design perspective, this car exemplifies a near-perfect raid on the Daimler Chrysler parts and chassis bin. It drives like a Mercedes because it is a Mercedes–from the chassis up. It’s fantastic 425 HP Hemi engine can burn rubber in third gear. The styling is sensational and is just too chunky to be transient.

    Both cars are worth what you pay for. My advice, with a few caveats, would be to wait until it comes off two-year leases then buy it.

    The first caveat is that both cars seem to have inherited the good and the bad traits of modern Mercedes–the first being abysmal quality. A 300 that I recently rented had a stuck parking brake and needed a valve job at 3000 miles.

    The second caveat is that the interiors of both cars belong in a Rubbermaid store at the outlet mall. While the basic design is there, the execution is as insulting as anything from GM. You are surrounded by grey rubber and cheap switchgear everywhere you look. While the 300’s rubberized plastic is softer to the touch than GM’s thin melted cotton-candy quality variety, it envelops you in cheapness. I am willing to trade a certain cheapness for performance; I just don’t need to shoved in my face.

    Yet, today the styling and driving dynamics of the 300 have been enough to make this car a bonafide hit. Until they fix a few things, however, its only batting around .500.

  • It's Time To Get Behind The Mule

    I guess this is really it, huh?

    My God, it doesn’t seem possible.

    One of my problems with baseball of late is that everything that could conceivably be said about the game in its past and present incarnations has already been said. I feel like I’ve said plenty myself, and the older I get the more I’m certain that I spend much of my time repeating myself.

    But what the hell, I guess I’m back to repeat myself some more.

    I think it was Tom Boswell –or maybe it was Tom Bosley, or possibly even James Boswell– who once said “Time begins on opening day.”

    That’s utter hogwash, of course. For anybody who’s really helplessly conscripted to baseball, time ends on opening day. From here on out, right up until winter starts tearing down the autumn foliage (which generally and cruelly coincides with the precise moment when the last out is made in the last World Series game), my days are pretty much shot to shit.

    I spent the winter trying my best not to even think about baseball (this was a first, at least since those lost adolescent years when I was too busy snorking into a bong to pay proper attention to hygiene, let alone professional sports). I was tired of steroids, whose presence in Major League clubhouses over the last decade was apparent to anyone with even compromised eyesight and half a brain. I was disgusted when the baseball establishment ignored this obvious reality as records were being obliterated and power numbers were going through the roof.

    We all knew what was going on, of course, and why Bud Selig and the baseball establishment was pretending nothing was going on. Nobody wanted to acknowledge the presence of steroids and the effect they were having on the game for the obvious reason that baseball needed all those fireworks and all the attention they brought.

    Because without Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa and Barry Bonds et al, Major League Baseball would have been in big, big trouble, and the Pooh-Bahs might have had to acknowledge the serious economic problems they were facing. Without all those home runs and all the money and attention they brought to the game, I’d have to imagine that an awful lot of those new stadiums –many of which will spend much of the coming season half empty– would never have gotten built.

    I’m still sick to death of steroids and inflated offensive statistics and the ever escalating economic absurdities of the sport, but I’ve realized in the last few months that I still love baseball. I can’t help myself. Kirby Puckett died and I was shattered, but I was also reminded of how much pleasure –personal and, more importantly, communal pleasure– and real joy baseball has given me over the years. The game is hard-wired in my brain, and the moment the snow started disappearing from the city parks and the baseball fields –the baseball diamonds— started to emerge, I realized I was getting antsy.

    One night a few weeks ago, without even quite realizing what I was doing, I found myself in the bookstore, standing in the checkout line with a pile of baseball annuals in my arms. I started picking up the newspaper again, and scanning the notes from the spring training camps.

    Yesterday, as I read through the baseball previews in the Star Tribune and the New York Times, I recognized that I was genuinely excited. My hiatus from the game, which stretched back to sometime around last year’s all-star break, was good for me, but it’s time for me to take baseball back, to bring it back into my life.

    I’m ready for another season to begin, ready for the old comfortable routines of box scores and evenings at the ballpark and Baseball Tonight, for road trips and radio broadcasts. And, as always, I’m fully prepared –well, perhaps not fully prepared– for the usual surprises and disappointments, and am holding out hope for more of the former than the latter.

    I will also say this, as prelude to a whole bunch of other crazy and contradictory stuff I’ll eventually get around to saying: I think the Twins are going to be a pretty damn good baseball team. That might be wishful thinking, but there haven’t been a whole lot of years where I’ve even been willing to indulge in that sort of wishful thinking on opening day.

    And from a purely personal standpoint, that’s as good a way as any to kick off another baseball season.

  • Notes on 'The Natural Look'

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    Did any of ya’all see the done-up harlot modeling the “natural” look on the back page of the Signature section in yesterday’s Star Tribune? Hmpf! Here I’d been thinking I was rocking the natural all along–for some ten years now, ever since I gave up on foundation, back in college, when I figured how poorly it stood up against my bike commute. Of course, I was wearing drug store varieties–cheap Cover Girl and Maybelline stuff. In any case, it’s disappointing to know that achieving the natural look will require hauling back out the powder, and then smearing on rose-colored blush and lipstick. Oh, and I see that natural girls don’t get to wear eyeliner. But gobs of black mascara is okay. Does the natural look require freckles? And will Sephora be carrying freckle appliques this fresh, new season? (And do they carry those nibble appliques? That’s a sort of natural look too, right?) The natural look: isn’t that what casper-white Keira Knightly and Scarlett Johansson were doing on the cover of Vanity Fair last month, while that uber-icky Tom Ford whiffed ’em over? Ew!

  • Conversations Real & Imagined: Brushes With Fame!

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    Detail from “Brushes With Fame!” by Steve Willis (scroll down link for bio).

    I once dated the guy who held Schwarzenegger’s cigar on that awful Christmas movie, I forget what it’s called. Man was he proud. Bo that is… I don’t think Arnold cared one way or the other…

    …

    Yeh, I worked at this deli in Chi-town where Bob Balaban used to come, nearly every day, I swear. The guy could eat. Pickles. Loved his pickles, had to have two or three with every sammich. And he could eat the biggest one’s we got, lotsa meat, lotsa sauce, that seemed to be his motto. Sammich-wise.

    …

    You ever touch Tom Cruise? Sister’s girlfriend used to do his nails, on the set of one of those Mission Impossible movies, and I guess the guy was cold. Dead o’ summer, this guy’s paw’s as cold as ice, man…

    …

    In the late 70s, I flipped off Madonna. That was back in Bay City, Michigan. It was her, too, Madonna. Cut me off on Euclid Avenue.

    …

    If there’s anyone I’ve ever met with a warm handshake, it’s Philip Seymour Hoffman.

    …

    My wife and I decided we were going to go have brunch in Stillwater, because everyone keeps telling us we should. Oh, it’s so pretty, downtown is pretty, the bridge to Wisconsin’s pretty, the leaves, the rocks, all that. Well, we walk around, impressed I’ll admit, and we get to this little cafe. Looks good, think we’ll have some breakfast. So we go inside, and there’s Jessica Lange sitting there with Sam Whatsisname, the cowboy she’s married to. I elbow Sue and nod and she’s impressed, and we go to order our breakfast–it’s one of those places where you have to place an order, a cafe, not so much a restaurant.

    Anyway, the barista flips. I mean he flips. “Don’t you look at Jessica Lange!” he says, none too quietly, I might add. We both give him a look like he’s the nut that he is, and he repeats, almost yelling. “Do not look at Jessica Lange or Sam Shepard. They are members of this community and not here for you to gawk at!”

    So I told him we weren’t staring and he starts to bray some more and finally Jessica and Sam stand up and walk out, looking pretty pissed. Now the guy really goes off. “Look what you did! You drove out Jessica!” So Sue and I take off, not before I curse him out.

    As we walk out, Jessica Lange’s pulling her coat on and my wife bugs her eyes out at Lange and says “How’s that for staring!” Jessica, I have to admit, looked pretty bummed. Pff… you can keep Stillwater for all I care…

    …

    It was weird. For as much a fan as I am, I never met Walter. Even when he was in town for the Grumpy series. I always just missed him. I’d go into my favorite cafe, and the waitress would nod at an empty coffee cup and say, “That was Walter’s”. Damn. Then I’d go to the convenience store, right in downtown on St. Peter, and there’s be an empty can of cream soda. “Walter’s?” I’d ask. Sure enough. Or in the park, a pal would say, “See that guy?” “What guy?” “That one, with the… hell you missed it! Walter Matthau!” This kept going on and on and on and on, and finally, I just sat down one day in Rice Park and decided to wait until he walked by. Well, I only did that for about an hour or two, ’cause I realized it was pretty stupid.

    But you know, it’s like I sense his presence. I look at objects in town and wonder, did Walter touch that?

    …

    I think my sister sold Girl Scout cookies to the Coens. She’s got all her old receipts, I should ask her to look it up.

    …

  • Long Ago And Far Away, As Some People Would Say

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    Out there in the country where I grew up there was once a pond that was said to be full of wonders.

    People always referred to the pond as “brackish.” I don’t have a dictionary at hand –I am a refugee now, and am reclining in the backseat of my car at a fogbound rest area somewhere along the Mississippi in the American south– so I’ll have to take their word for it that the pond was brackish.

    It was a brackish pond, then, and the country around it was rough country, made difficult by stones, boulders, and prickly scrub brush. There was a lot of what I think you’d call rubble as well, or perhaps detritus. There was also a lot of junk left over from the lives of the people who used to live out there and had long since fled.

    Here and there you’d still encounter a weathered hut on stilts, and there were a bunch of ragged sheep wandering around in the rubble, most of them gone feral. I can tell you that a feral sheep is something to be avoided.

    There wasn’t much else to recommend the community, such as it was, and it was a brutal place to be a child. There were only a handful of kids in those days, every one of us an accident born to people who were old enough to be our grandparents.

    The men who remained had once been fishermen, before their lake evaporated from all the poisons pumped in there by the old munitions factory. The lake was long gone by the time I was a child, and the old fishermen would occasionally emerge from their homes and wobble along the lousy roads on bicycles. Most of the old men had long, flowing white beards.

    I do still remember the pond, though, and as I said, this pond had once allegedly been full of wonderous things; teeming with wonders, was what we were always told: mermaids –a whole extended family or tribe of mermaids– and some sort of mutant creation that was said to be a cross between a dragon and a sea serpent. Pond dragons, these creatures were called by the locals.

    The fishermen, bored by the loss of their livelihood, jigged every last one of those pond dragons out of the brackish pond and hauled them along the roads to be gutted and strung from clotheslines and rusty flag poles.

    I never saw any of the pond dragons alive, but I do still have a vague memory of the mermaids. Old women used to go to the pond to throw stale bread and popcorn to the mermaids, which would flop up onto the ragged shore and fight among themselves for the offerings. Most of them I recall –or perhaps recall hearing– were horribly obese.

    The idle fishermen, having exhausted the pond’s supply of dragons, and grown desperate and lonely from their spartan and solitary existence, turned their attention to capturing the mermaids, and began to trap, net, and wrestle them from the pond. I believe, if I’m not mistaken, that these randy old bachelors made bathtub pets of most of the remaining mermaids.

    The pond, like the lake before it, eventually dried up completely, and the government sent in soldiers and heavy equipment one morning to enforce the long-ago-ordered evacuation of the land. Those of us who remained were loaded into trucks with our belongings and carted away to a relocation camp in the desert of Nevada.

    I escaped from that camp some years ago, but not before hearing the rumor that one of the original mermaids from that old brackish pond of my youth is now on display in a traveling carnival somewhere down south.

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  • I Am What I Am, But I Ain't What I Used To Be

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    I remember a darkness, real, yet stirred with a thousand fireflies, perhaps my earliest recollected encounter with true wonder.

    The mosquito trucks crawled through at dusk and left behind a moving cloud embroidered with the bright fragments of skreeing children.

    Even then two people armed with nothing but sticks could have a good time, could make music, could poke out each other’s eyes, could destroy a hundred lives, could start either a fire or a war that would last a lifetime.

    We didn’t exactly understand that, of course. There was no way we could know that there would come a day when one of us would find himself wandering the halls of a detox ward in hospital pajamas, shivering, his face a blister, a seemingly permanent grimace. Or that another of our old, happy neighborhood tribe, so afraid he would end up just like all the other people on the planet, would allow himself to become so different that he could no longer look even his closest friends in the eye.

    Couldn’t we all try to remember how magical we once thought our time in this world was going to be? How magical it once was?

    Do me a big favor: Take a good look around and tell me what the hell you think you’re doing?

    I’ll sit right here and wait for the fog to burn off, for the music to work its way back in, and for the words to once again start moving in me like a dance, like a dance that doesn’t even know it’s dancing.

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  • Hollywood for a Day

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    Fresh from the wire:

    Mark your calendars for Wednesday, May 3 and make a date with a curbside in St. Paul, MN: A Prairie Home Companion, the film version of our beloved (or not-so-beloved, depending on your tastes) public radio programme, will be making its “Minnesota Premiere” at the Fitzgerald Theater. What does that mean for you, ladies and gents? Why nothing more than the finest in stargazing. According to the friendly press agent:

    In addition to Garrison Keillor and Robert Altman, the following actors are expected to attend: Kevin Kline, Lindsay Lohan, Virginia Madsen, John C. Reilly, Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin. Others may join the event.

    You are, of course, not invited. But who says we can’t crush against security, ogle and wave and even scream with joy at the sight of Lindsay Lohan?

  • Cheese Parade

    of livestock and mold

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    Starting in the upper left and moving clockwise.

    French Brin D’Amour
    The “sprig of love” is a cheese made from Corsican sheep. The rind is encrusted in the aromatic herbs with which it spends three months curing. The juniper berries and rosemary give its pale ivory paste a floral flavor. It’s a pretty, pretty cheese. This is the cheese to come home to after a bad smelly cheese experience, a bad date or a bad marriage. It restores the faith.

    Chimay Bierre
    This cheese is washed with Chimay, the beer of Belgian monks. It’s a smooth cheese with nuttiness and a tart finish, but I kept thinking: Why aren’t I just drinking Chimay?

    Bellwether Farms San Andreas
    The sheep on this California farm have the San Andreas fault running right through their land. I expected the cheese to have a flavor of foreboding with a hint of grassiness and fear (you know how animals can sense forthcoming doom and all). And yet, this is an easy table cheese that is mild with a piquant finish. My three year old ate nearly the whole wedge.

    Tome Verte
    Fresh goat cheese is soft, lilly white and cuts the normal tangy nature of goat by more than half. This French version is coated in fennel, thyme and pink peppercorns which give it a nice herbal flavor. Don’t expect the richenss of aged cheese, instead think of a wind-swept meadow exploding with spring clover.

    Red Hawk
    This triple cream cheese from the Cowgirl Creamery in California is somewhat of a darling in the cheese world, garnering awards from the American Cheese Society left and right. Washing the rind provides the signature sunset-orange tint, but it also gives the cheese its smell. Stinky. Bad-celery-melting-in-my-veggie-drawer stinky. My first taste was overwhelmed by the stinkiness, making me think of creamy cabbage. But the second taste (after I had presumably primed my tastebuds) was mellower and creamy with a nice earthiness. I’m eating this with some Caymus Conundrum on Saturday when my sunny patio hits sixty degrees.

    Bleu des Basques
    A nicely balanced bleu from the French Basque region. There’s just enough saltiness to work with the tang, it’s full of character without having that overbearing ego. Be warned, when you bring the cheese to room temp (which you should do before eating) it might sweat a little due to the lovely fat content. Just keep it loosely wrapped in wax paper while it warms up, and never hold fat content against a cheese.

    All these cheeses can be found at Surdyk’s.

  • The happy soldier bears belligerent offspring

    Here’s something that pisses me off. I mean, it’s cool and all to be making monster trucks for the vulnerable soldier sect, but what irks me is how this fellow was originally thinking more along the lines of a pimped-out, rap star-style ride. And now of course, he’s making a killing off the war.

    Yes, I saw Why We Fight last week. And here we have some happy fluff about the military-industrial come to downtown Stillwater.

    Why We Fight went out of its way to illustrate the prophesy in Eisenhower’s famous “military-industrial complex”-themed farewell speech–which strikes me as not an entirely difficult thing to illustrate. We’re surrounded by the corporatization of the military, even in a charmed, planned community on the outskirts of Stillwater. But there was another comment made in the film that struck a deeper chord, and I won’t be able to quote it verbatim.

    The filmmaker spent much time with a one Karen Kwiotkowski, a retired Pentagon intelligent officer who resigned (after twenty years of service) at the onset of the Iraq War, once it donned on her how officials were interested in manipulating intelligence. Late in the film she said something along the lines of not allowing her sons to serve in the military because the U.S. military, as she sees it, is no longer interested in fighting to preserve freedom. Rather, soldiers are fighting to further the Bush Administration’s imperialistic agenda.

    I have a photo album that my grandfather compiled after the three years he spent fighting in WWII. It’s a precious heirloom, made even more so because he painstakingly labeled and documented dates, places, even his moods. His little handwritten notes preserve something of my grandfather’s personality; so while I don’t remember him well (he died when I was eight), I feel as thought I’ve gotten to know him somehow by way of this book. He was an armorist so there are lots of pictures of old bombers. He got a picture of General Paton inspecting the troupes. He took pictures of obliterated cities. It’s a point of pride, and I like showing off the photo album.

    My dad fought in Vietnam on the other hand, and all I have of that is a picture of him playing a guitar outside his bunker and looking twelve-years-old (in truth, he was nineteen at the time). Of course, I got to know my father much better as a person, but we spoke very little of his wartime experiences. The first thing I did once I got to college was take a “U.S. History from 1950” class, mostly because I wanted to study the Vietnam Era. But still, my dad wouldn’t discuss it with me. And from the little we did talk, I was able to gleam that he didn’t fully understand the politics that had sent him there. He died of lung cancer in 1999. He was a non-smoker. Because he was infected with some sort of aggressive, small-cell carcinoma, his oncologist believed the illness to be related to pesticide exposure in Vietnam. And for what? That, of course, really pisses me off.