The Rake Magazine

Year: 2006

  • The Basic, The Fundamental, Aspirations

    kiss me.jpg

    To be a good man.

    To do no harm.

    To see clearly.

    To do my laundry.

    To keep an open heart and mind.

    To acknowledge my blessings, to share them.

    To eat something.

    To give away happiness even when I have little or none to spare.

    To feel the pain of others.

    To laugh at myself.

    To turn down this racket.

    To reach out.

    To find the courage of my convictions.

    To find an ottoman at a thrift store.

    To recognize and speak the truth.

    To be gentle.

    To be fearless.

    To allow myself to be known.

    To clean the dog vomit out of the backseat of my car.

    To listen.

    To hear.

    To forgive, and beg forgiveness.

    To wake up and smell the coffee.

    To call my mother.

    To hope.

    To dream.

    To fucking sleep.

    To believe in all the big, clumsy, impossible things.

    To be merciful.

    To be compassionate.

    To either find the fingernail clipper or walk to Walgreen’s and buy a new one.

    While I’m there to also buy some red licorice and a box of crayons.

    To bite my tongue when to do so will spare someone pain or embarrassment.

    To express gratitude.

    To see beauty.

    To pause, to wonder.

    To take out the garbage.

    To praise, to glorify.

    To be whole.

    To be holy.

    To sacrifice, compromise, and comfort.

    To finally go see fucking Brokeback Mountain, even if I have to go alone.

    To reconsider.

    To think carefully.

    To change my mind.

    To be a part.

    To belong.

    To drive like a bat out of hell.

    To spend less time on the floor.

    To alphabetize my record collection.

    To love.

    To be beloved.

    grotto redemption 9.jpg

    We asked the captain what course

    of action he proposed to take toward

    a beast so large, terrifying, and

    unpredictable. He hesitated to

    answer, and then said judiciously:

    “I think I shall praise it.”

    —Robert Hass, from Praise

  • SF Jazz Collective

    Saxophonist Joshua Redman put together the SF Jazz Collective in 2004, and in two short years this ensemble has become one of the more adventurous and diverse jazz outfits working today. The roster includes hotshot New Orleans trumpeter Nicholas Payton, pianist Renee Rosnes, and vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson, a man with one of the most eclectic and distinguished resumes in jazz; plus alto saxophonist Miguel Zen—n, bassist Matt Penman, and drummer Eric Harland. You’ll rarely get so many brilliant players together in one room, and their repertoire sprawls across jazz categories and generations. The collective has already made a couple of local visits to the Dakota, but this time out, a larger, more formal setting should give them the opportunity to really stretch out. 2128 4th St. S.; Minneapolis; 612-626-1892; www1.umn.edu/umato/

  • Peninsula Malaysian Cuisine

    This is not just another Asian place on a street lined with Asian places, as evidenced by the drink menu alone: Peninsula offers a refreshing green bean with grass jelly freeze and a smoothie made from durian, a spiky Southeast Asian fruit that has an odor reminiscent of very old gorgonzola. In fact, the entire menu challenges the palate with authentic but mostly very approachable Malaysian and Southeast Asian dishes, including lemongrass jumbo shrimp, roti (Indian pancakes), beef stew curry soup, clay pot soups, and crispy onion steamed duck. 2608 Nicollet Ave. S., Minneapolis; 612-871-8282

  • Place

    Since Minnesota is not a noted home to the polar bear, one might wonder where the name White Bear Lake comes from. If you believe Mark Twain, it originated with an Indian legend. In his 1883 book, “Life on the Mississippi,” he tells of a Romeo and Juliet type romance between a Sioux maiden and a Chippewa brave. Because the lovers were from quarreling tribes, the story goes, they met secretly on an island in the lake, soon to be known as White Bear Lake. One day, as the brave approached in his canoe, he saw a giant white bear (perhaps an albino) mauling his girlfriend. He rushed to her rescue. “The warrior, with one plunge of the blade of his knife, opened the crimson sluices of death,” wrote Twain, “and the dying bear relaxed his hold.”

    So impressed was the maiden’s father with the brave’s deed, that he gave the couple his blessing, and they lived happily ever after with the white bearskin on the floor of their home. The lake, the island, and the town-to-be, on the other hand, would be haunted by the bear’s spirit for all eternity. That’s why the legendary island is named Manitou, which translates from Ojibwa to mean “great spirit.” Sometimes, if you drive down County Road F, the bear can be spotted still, holding a Chevy sign in front of Polar Chevrolet/Mazda. It also occasionally appears as an ornament on neighborhood lawns.

    As with many lakeside towns, White Bear Lake had its turn as a fashionable resort community in the late nineteenth century. But then, in the 1890s, the town fell out of favor with the leisure class and an anchored community sprang up. Rows of century-old mansions—once summer homes—still tower above the lakeshore, lending the city an air of import. Just twenty miles north of St. Paul, White Bear Lake has its share of stripmalls, fast food joints, and auto dealerships. But near the lake itself, there is still an old-fashioned, clustered downtown that’s quite pleasant. Next to such precious shops as the Avalon Tearoom, where one can get a macaroon with her cream tea, many old buildings are left in their shabby splendor.

    The architecture downtown ranges from Alsatian half-timbering to squat, seventies-era plazas crowned by cedar shake shingles. There are the requisite faux limestone storefronts, of course, but it’s not uncommon to see one-hundred-year-old tin buildings either. The business mix is similarly patch-worked. White Bear Lake has the Twin Cities’ only parrot shop, a Bikram yoga studio, and a store called Needlepoint Cottage. Fifty-year-old Ciresi’s Liquor Store shares its beat-up brownstone with a relatively new Christian bookshop. Boxy, old Hollihan’s Pub looks fortress-like with its dark green façade. The saloon sits kitty corner from Washington Square Bar and Grill, a stylish restaurant and bar housed in an airy, Frank Lloyd Wright-style structure with a low-pitched roof and floor-to-ceiling windows. Here, just as in the old days, we find quarrelling cultures shaking hands.—Christy DeSmith

  • Season of Swag

    Goody bags are getting foisted upon the undeserving in staggering numbers these days. They reward sports fans, conventioneers, talk-show guests, and five-year-old birthday-party attendees. Celebrities, of course, gather oodles of loot throughout the winter awards season, from the Golden Globes and Grammys on up to the Oscars. We decided it’s time that our readers joined the fray, so we’re giving away a sampling of the swag that comes flowing into Rake World Headquarters every day. A Gift Consultant from our new RakeRewards™ program has cherry-picked goodies from every cubicle throughout the office, all of which will go to one lucky Rake reader. To get in the running, send us an anagram composed from one of the headlines in this issue of the magazine.* We’ll reward the author of the most inspired, creative, and/or insulting anagram with a delightful swag basket, containing:

    • T-shirt wardrobe: The Rake, The MinneNAPolis Store,
    and Nanny McPhee
    • Blinking with Fists, poems by Billy Corgan
    • Beijing 2008 baseball cap
    • Rodney Yee “Yoga Remedies” videotape
    • Rake mug
    • Papa Roach concert DVD, Live & Murderous in Chicago
    • Peace Coffee magnet
    • Broaster Company “hen-pen”
    • Vintage Yo! MTV Raps ProSet MusiCards
    • Thymes Perfumed Body Crème
    • Dick Enrico Collectors Edition Bobblehead
    • Minnesota’s Capital: A Centennial Story
    • Rudy! The People’s Governor
    • 50 Ways You Can Show George the Door in 2004
    • Bingo marker
    • Miniature baby set in gel
    • Jumbo roll of 3M Post-it Notes
    • Apple Valley Theater ’98-’99 special edition
    “Season of Fantasy” mug
    • The Allure of the Cowboy, a customized “Torrid Romance” novel starring Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt
    BONUS souvenir studded belt found in the fifth-floor
    women’s bathroom

    *Send anagrams to contests (at) rakemag.com

  • Thin Ice

    Loyal collectors believed that Russell Kern was due for a revival. His dealer had kept faith; the right curators showed interest. But this was still the bad year that dear friends whispered about, the year Kern lost his wife in a car wreck, discharged a load of bird shot into a threatening shadow, burned a pile of drawings, unplugged the fax, and let his beard grow in a ragged, grey nimbus which was the first thing locals recalled about him—the silent fellow from down the road who forgot to leave his summer place when the leaves fell.

    In truth, it hardly mattered where the painter resided that winter. Kern moved in the globe of his own despair, his sole detour to the Blue Moon Tavern—a swaybacked hall whose neon beer signs winked across an arm of the frozen lake. With trees bare, he could see the tavern from his hilltop studio. He was drawn there whenever the sun set—as much a fixture as the ripped vinyl stools and the pool table.

    Most nights, a TV newsman mouthed silently in his box above the bar: a specter to counter the specters that the painter conjured at home. Kern needed such distractions. He needed them as much as he needed a drink, for in the months since sending his wife on her final errand—in the months since her car rolled, struck broadside at a rural crossing by a van full of bow hunters—in all that time, Merrill had clung to him, more now than in life. On that last day, he hadn’t bothered with farewells. He hadn’t turned from the canvas. Now he found Merrill everywhere: in the aria still cued on her CD player, in the blond strand he frantically brushed from his jacket, in the scent of her hand-milled French soap, accidentally pulled from a cluttered shelf, bathing him in the foulest regrets.

    If Merrill never spoke, that only confirmed her presence, for she had always been quiet—cowed might be the better word—listening to Kern’s many theories, to all those views that now seemed as pointless as painting. Just a few months ago, he would have shared his opinions about the night’s news—and the newsman’s haircut; would have bitched about the bar room smoke and the stale beer smell of the carpet; would have tuned out the bartender’s Army stories and his chatter about the winter’s interminable length. But Kern kept things simple these days.

    “Self-medicating,” he said, addressing the bartender. Kern repeated it nightly—the drink and the phrase—for he preferred the ritual to the beverage, sought the weight of the shot glass clasped in his bony fingers, and always returned the gaze of the barman, a blubbery Swede who crossed his arms and waited while his patient took a first sip.

    “That’ll fix you, huh?”

    Kern nodded and that was all, safely seated amid beeping poker machines and the bluster of pulp cutters and small-town mechanics. Left to himself, he studied the mirrored bar back as though it were another unresolved canvas. Why didn’t the welder notice when his wife squeezed another man’s arm? Who was the girl in the fake rabbit coat who ran to the bathroom in tears?

    Kern looked at everyone: the drunks and big talkers, the women who frowned and those who displayed silver fillings whenever they laughed. Silent as bears, the Peterson twins padded around the pool table, calling shots by pointing their cues. A weasel-faced boy with acne scars jostled past an elderly birder, but the old man never spilled a drop, maintaining a posture as ramrod as the binoculars at his elbow. “Don’t let the door hit your ass,” he said. Beside him, three helmets held stools for downstate strangers—snowmobilers who had promptly hoofed to the jukebox in wet boots and coveralls.

    After one such evening, after last call and a zigzag walk through the snow, Kern acted like any wounded animal. He slept through the March night in his paint-spattered studio chair, never stirring to note the dust that settled over him, the drool on his chin, the steady tick of the antique clock that had restarted without Merrill’s hand to wind it. Inured to all things mysterious—except sleep’s mysteries—Kern was spared the heart-thumping visits that so often woke him: the dreamy weight of Merrill’s warmth rolling against him in bed, the imagined creak of the hallway’s plank floor as she paused at the studio door.

  • Trust But Verify & Serve With A Light Burgundy

    A few weeks ago, Twin Citizen waking up to their coffee and toast were surprised to hear that one of our beloved local bakeries, the French Meadow, had been raided by federal agents. Was the French Meadow aiding and abetting terrorists with its awesome vegan lunch menu? Or was its name a tip-off to general anti-American sentiment and brioche? No, the feds seized thirty thousand loaves of bread. The problem, they said, was that it was mislabeled as “wheat-free” spelt bread. Spelt, they argued, is itself a species of wheat. Thus, according to the linguistics professionals at the Food and Drug Administration, spelt bread cannot be marketed as an alternative to wheat bread. It all turned out to be a bit of a misunderstanding, but it publicized an important and timely issue: As food and food marketing become more complex, how do we know for sure that we’re eating what they tell us we’re eating?

     

    And it’s not just new-age foods for new-age allergies. In a manner of speaking, food labeling predates the Holy Bible. Last May, a few sharp-eyed customers in Super Target stores were no doubt surprised to see the little “OU” symbol on packages of pork tamales manufactured by St. Paul’s El Burrito Mercado food company. The OU symbol—it’s called the heksher in Yiddish—is affixed only to foods that are certified kosher by an organization of orthodox rabbis and professional food scientists. You don’t need to be a rabbi to know that a heksher on a pork tamale is farblondget (seriously screwed up).

    Increasing numbers of people want to know precisely how their food is grown and processed. More than ever before, they see a trip to the grocery store as an opportunity to examine their diet and their values, and to practice a kind of consumer activism. They want food that jibes with their ethics, lifestyle, and dietary preferences; they may be worried about potential side effects of genetically modified organisms; they may wish to eat foods produced only in accordance with the current foodie zeitgeist. Perhaps they adhere to religious dietary requirements, or have any number of food allergies. And food producers today are answering the demand with a movement, a marketing angle, and a range of technologies. It is called “Identity-Preserved Processing.”

    The modern food-supply chain is an amazing and efficient thing. A fresh hamburger at a local pub, for example, was probably still on the hoof less than seventy-two hours before landing on a bun on a plate in front of your lunch date. As accelerated as that history might be, it is nevertheless a history: Was the animal a two-year-old Angus steer, or was it a ten-year-old Holstein, retired after a long career as a high-butterfat milker? Under what conditions was it dispatched? How was it treated and what did it eat while it was alive? Did it receive antibiotics or hormones, and if so, what kind and how frequently? (Indeed, the provenance of beef is an especially developed science, thanks to the numerous bio-hazards such as E. coli and BSE that have evolved as a result of modern agri-business practices.)

    There’s a history in your coffee mug as well. Although the sign on the air-pot behind the counter reads “Fair Trade Organic Ethiopian Sidamo,” how do you really know that it came from Ethiopia, much less that the coffee grower was paid a fair price for his effort? Or did the same guy who labeled the kosher pork tamale certify the coffee beans too?

    According to Dr. George John, professor of marketing at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management, a sizeable international trend is under way. That idea is to take traditional food commodities—non-specialized, mass-produced items like wheat, corn, hamburger, milk—and de-commoditize them, not by adding features or changing the taste, but by identifying and preserving information about the way in which they were made and processed. Since verification of this information naturally becomes key, particularly to the end user, identity-preserved processing portends a revolution in food marketing. (Coincidentally, this is happening at the same moment that non-commodities like accounting and journalism are being commoditized and outsourced to call centers in India.)

    The process of kosher designation is an illustrative example, but the real glamour and profit margins of IPP are more easily observed at work in the world of fine wine. The alpha example of IPP, says John, is the value that quality vintners extract from their wine labels. “With wines,” he said, “especially European wines, there have always been geographic appellations. Unless a wine is grown in the right area, you can’t call it a Burgundy.

    “Now that companies have the ability to preserve identity in other areas of agriculture, they sense that IPP is going to be the big marketing opportunity going forward, because agriculture wants to become less commodity oriented.” John explained that if you take a regular worldwide commodity like coffee or cocoa and you start emphasizing its provenance, you begin not only to distinguish it from all the other commodities in its category, but also to insulate it from general market fluctuations. “The commodity prices have crashed, so instead producers try to differentiate themselves. How do they do that? By micro-branding commodity products on the basis of geography, micro-climate, ancestry of the seed, and other non-observable traits.”

    To do this, producers need some way to track and trace products throughout the maze of farmers, processors, transporters, and retailers that make up the food-supply chain. It’s that sort of micro-branding—not just red wine, not just Burgundy, but the detail provided down to the vineyard, the grape variety, and the year the grapes were harvested—that makes fine wines so different and so much more profitable than other goods.

    “Based on new technologies coming on line within the food-production industry,” said John, “it is now possible to provide consumers conceivably everything they could ever want to know about the way the food on their plate was grown, processed, and cooked.”

  • A Tale of Two Tales

    I just saw Memoirs of a Geisha. In the movie, there’s a scene where the geishas play a drinking game with their clients. Somebody tells two stories, and then everybody else has to guess which is true. With that idea in mind, I have two stories for you this month.

    Story #1 goes like this. Some gals send their fellas off to work with a sweet note in their lunch pail. I’m a little more extreme. It started out innocently enough. My guy forwarded me a dinner invitation from a couple we know. He’d added a flirty line at the bottom of the email asking me to be his date.

    I thought … well. I thought, you know what? It’s going to be a busy week for the both of us. We won’t have too much time to spend together, but I can stoke the fire and make him wish he was able to spend more time with me. So I wrote him a dirty email. The filthiest, as in Specialty Magazine Filthy. I can’t even begin to tell you all the sordid details. Just take the raunchiest thing you can think of, multiply it by ten, and pretend you’re tailoring it uniquely to your lover’s eccentricities. Just take a moment and do that. Get the pictures in your head. That’s what I wrote. It wasn’t just a short paragraph, either. Nuh-uh. It was a full page in brilliant, widescreen, black-and-white sleaze-o-vision.

    Screeching and giggling at my own audacity, I read my “scene delicate” over once, and, before I could lose my nerve, hit “Send.” I discovered later that I’d hit “Reply All” and sent the note not only to our prospective host and hostess, but to the entire e-chain of dinner-party invitees.

    Now I find myself considering what to bring as a hostess gift. I’ve got it narrowed down to either a Barry White CD or a block of sno-cap lard and a shower curtain.

    And here’s Story #2. I got into an argument with my husband. This argument was in no way related to the dirty-email story. It’s just that we’re married, and sometimes we argue.

    So, we were in this stupid argument, but we both had to go to work. I had an evening class until 9:00 p.m. and since I had the car, I was supposed to pick up my husband from his office at 10:30 p.m. After class, I decided to take myself out for a glass of wine during my free hour and a half. I chose a place that I’d heard of but never been to before. A nightclubby kind of place.

    It was a weeknight, so the club was a total ghost town. The atmosphere was more than a little bizarre because even though the place was empty, they still had the thumpa music blaring and full disco lights swirling around. I sat at the bar, pulled out a magazine, and ordered a glass of red. Within ten minutes, a woman sat next to me. Before I could even get out a hello, she blurted out her entire life story to me. All the while, the music thumped and the lights swirled. It took almost an hour, and was quite fascinating. After she ran out of gas, she begged me not to tell anyone what she’d just confided. She was absolutely manic about it. I assured her that I wouldn’t tell a soul, that her story was so outlandish, who would believe me? She flashed a mean smile, and threatened to curse me with a poltergeist if I breathed a word of it to anyone. Those were her words. She said, “I will send a poltergeist to you if you so much as breathe a word of this to anyone.”

    I motioned to the bartender for my tab. The woman sitting next to me insisted on taking care of it, because I’d been such a good listener. She pulled out a clean, one-inch-thick bank stack of two-dollar bills. A bank stack. Like in the movies, with a paper band around it. She cracked the band, peeled off five bills for the bartender, and handed one to me without a word. I took it and scooted out of there as quickly as I could. I picked up my husband from work.

    The next day, he asked for a couple of bucks to take the bus to work. I gave him the two-dollar bill. He said, “Where’d you get this?” I told him, “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  • Who are you calling an “underperformer”?

    Close your eyes for a minute and picture a typical academically challenged, underperforming student. If you are really honest with yourself, you probably see one of the “boyz from the hood”—in other words, a black, brown, or Latino male raised in bad circumstances and going nowhere fast.

    For many years, the desire to avoid students like the “boyz” fueled what came to be known as “white flight.” Here in Minnesota, whites ran to the suburbs with just as much enthusiasm as their fellow citizens in other parts of the country. Why? Because for many whites, the unspoken assumption was that the phrases “great schools” and “high minority student population” could not co-exist in the same sentence.

    So why are whites leaving the well-regarded public schools in Cupertino, California, home to Apple Computer and Silicon Valley’s ground zero? According to a recent Wall Street Journal article, the proportion of whites at Monta Vista High School, which boasts some of the highest test scores in California, has dropped to twenty-five percent of the student body—in a town that is nearly half white. No one disputes the quality at Monta Vista or at Lynbrook High, a school with a similar percentage of whites in nearby San Jose. Both routinely send students on to Stanford and the Ivies. They also have a burgeoning population of Asian students, and, as the article attested, it’s the fear of having their children out-performed by these students that is leading many white parents to abandon these schools.

    In Silicon Valley, the kids at the back of the bus, academically speaking, are very often white males. The Cupertino superintendent pointed out the racial composition on two different floors at one of his schools. White faces dominated the first floor, which housed the math class for slow learners; among the kids on the second floor, who were primarily advanced-placement students, whites were an underwhelming presence.

    This stark reality was not lost on the students. Many of them, both white and Asian, simply assumed the Asian kids were smarter, especially in science and math—an assumption that of course aligns neatly with stereotypes about Asians. Even Cupertino’s superintendent said there is a “white boy syndrome” which he characterizes as a kid who feels that he is part of “a distinct minority against a majority culture.”

    In both Cupertino and Minnesota, groups of kids are battling stereotypically based perceptions that they are either human computers or “underperforming” losers. In California, the whizzes are Asian and the “unteachable ones” are white, mostly male, and largely affluent. Here in Minnesota, the academically competent are white and the academically challenged are primarily children of color, male and poor.

    One key difference, and it is a big one, is that white parents in Silicon Valley have the resources to place their kids in environments where the parents perceive their kids are valued and not as academically and culturally threatened. In a word, they are increasingly choosing to segregate them.

    I do not for a minute think that is the answer—either for those affluent kids in California or, assuming we had the resources, for poor minority students here in Minnesota. Some African-American parents have eagerly jumped on the “Afro-centric” school bandwagon. They believe that an ethnically homogenous environment is most likely to lead to academic success for African-American students, and they point to the huge success of historically black colleges, which still produce a majority of this country’s black doctors, lawyers, and engineers, as proof.

    I believe that this approach takes our country’s educational system off the hook for failing to adequately educate all of our students. Beyond that, ethnically segregated schools deprive students of the opportunity to learn from—and learn to get along with—people from different backgrounds.

    Stereotyping usually springs from bigoted assumptions and fear—which makes it a stupid and damaging basis for making decisions about our educating our students. Moreover, it is just as damaging for the haves as for the have-nots. That’s because, for better and for worse—as kids in both Cupertino and Minneapolis can personally attest—perceptions and expectations often do become reality.

  • Four Minute Fellini

    Remember when the first graphical web browsers were developed? At the time, circa 1993, “going online” meant dicking around with dial-up modems and text menus on Gopher and CompuServe. Then the World Wide Web suddenly exploded in full color with pictures, formatted text, and rollover hyperlinks. Almost overnight, the Web gained critical mass; within a single decade, we went from fewer than ten thousand Americans online to more than two hundred million.

    By now we’ve all been ravaged to the point of insensitivity with breathless language about what the “global digital revolution” meant to humankind, and what it means to us now. And it is, of course, still evolving. For example, once high-speed and broadband net access became widespread, high-quality sound files and true moving pictures proliferated the internet. Now full-motion video is becoming normal and even expected.

    So if you’ve been paying attention, you know that yet another alleged digital revolution is under way. Coming quickly on the heels of blogs are vlogs, or video podcasts—clunky names for a form of self-expression that shows great promise. A vlog is a short-form movie (or, depending on how you look at it, a long-form commercial) running between two and four minutes.

    It’s hard to talk about a medium as a “movement,” but blogging already established the precedent. Even though vlogs are relatively few in number, the variety is already infinite. There are extemporaneous and planned vlogs, fiction and nonfiction. There are vlogs along the lines of excruciating home video—dog walking and cooking seem to be common starting points—and there are others that have impressive production values.

    Some that have been celebrated in the national press, like the daily variety show Rocketboom and the monthly “comedy” show Tiki Bar TV, are not exactly inspiring. Their main weakness is inconsistency. More to the point, when they’re bad, they’re fingernails-on-blackboard bad, with mannered or wooden hosts telling jokes that wouldn’t make the cut on community-access TV, introducing the unfunniest out-takes from America’s Funniest Home Videos. At this writing, iTunes offers eighty-three video podcasts, about eighty of which are futile or feeble. Just like non-video blogging, one person’s musings are not necessarily enough to sustain the interest of anyone else on the internet.

    But the best vlogs today take the idea of audience seriously, and compare favorably to what we already see on television and at the movie house. I suspect that by this time next year, there will be thousands more vlogs, and their general quality will have risen dramatically, as truly talented filmmakers see and seize the opportunity presented by video blogging. With a tight focus and premise, vlogs present opportunities for populist creativity that move way beyond what’s come out of the keyboard-pecking blogosphere, with its rictus of righteous indignation.

    It’s a happy coincidence that one of the very best vlogs, Chasing Windmills, is produced by two Minneapolis residents who post a four-minute film each weekday. Television is the model here. The website, chasingmills.blogspot.com, refers to itself not as a vlog but a “daily web video series,” and its creators refer to the current postings, going back to last September, as the “show’s first season.”

    That’s good, because it suggests they’ll eventually give themselves a much-deserved summer break. With monastic self-sufficiency, Juan Antonio del Rosario and Cristina Cordova have developed a daily soap opera with one main storyline and two nameless characters. Chasing Windmills is by and large a domestic situation drama, dealing with mundane disagreements and pleasures between a young married couple. But there are dark elements as well. The edgy Juan Antonio, with his perpetual five-o’clock shadow, shows signs of incipient insanity. He apparently hears voices. Cristina is a voluptuous and sharp-tongued matron. She gets pregnant and is not, at first, overjoyed about it. She sleepwalks. He secretly smokes cigarettes. The main plot engine, though, is an ancient one: the possibility of infidelity and the quiet tearing of unseen things inside a relationship.

    Mid-season, Cristina seems to take special pleasure in henpecking Juan Antonio, especially as he begins to suffer from his demons. If a viewer begins watching episodes somewhere in “mid-season,” perhaps with “Car Trouble” (November 28), and works in both directions, it captures the essential dynamic of the series—love, touched by neurosis. In the uneven early episodes, Juan Antonio is cruel and invulnerable, while Cristina is thoughtful and conflicted. Some of the subplots, while rich in emotional drama and anticipation, are undermined by earlier shows that give away too much, but with no reward. They hadn’t yet learned the paradox of great drama—that what makes it great is what is withheld, what is hinted at, what is unspoken. Chasing Windmills very quickly incorporated this subtle truth, and now uses it to great effect.

    That’s not to say all the early postings are bad. Within the first six episodes there are clear flashes of brilliance. Even though “Quality Time” (October 11) manhandles the characters, it is the first indication of how artful the series would become. The couple get into an argument on the tennis court, and Juan Antonio’s belligerence would, in the real world, justify a domestic-disturbance call to the police. But things end poignantly. A ground-level shot shows Cristina’s feet kicking through leaves that have gathered at the base of the net, apparently looking for lost balls. The multiple shots and setups, seamlessly edited, contrast with the single, sustained verite-type shots used in earlier posts.

    Chasing Windmills is strictly a two-person operation; Cordova and del Rosario seem almost willful about it. Considering that six months ago, the pair apparently had never used a camcorder, it is astonishing how quickly they mastered the basic techniques of modern digital filmmaking. It almost becomes a distraction to figure out how, with just four hands and a tripod, they manage the sophisticated cinematography. The pair agreed to meet me on a Sunday afternoon, when they do most of their filming.

    Cordova and del Rosario met in Puerto Rico, where they worked as journalists and together started a weekly newspaper in San Juan. Giving up on the long hours and the long odds, they moved to Minneapolis last summer. They explicitly wanted to find a low-overhead situation that would allow one of them to work full time on their new passion, video blogging, which they started a few weeks after settling here. Cordova had lived in Columbia Heights when she was in high school. She currently works at an advertising firm, while del Rosario is devoted to the vlog, including composing and recording its spare soundtrack. “This is basically all we do,” he said, gesturing to the living room, a frequent set, and the digital camcorder standing there on a tripod.

    When I asked how they manage what seems like a massive operation, they brought out a large bulletin board that maps three weeks’ worth of episodes, from concepting and scripting the narrative to storyboarding the scenes, filming them, and editing them. Typically editing happens the night before an episode is posted to the web. So while the rest of the work is proceeding weeks in advance, there’s rarely more than one episode ready to post at any given time. It is a staggering workload. “One episode probably takes about twelve hours of work,” del Rosario told me. “Each,” added Cordova, working through the math.

    The pair live on the eleventh floor of the Towers, a high-rise apartment twenty steps from the Hennepin Avenue bridge. Looking out their windows across Hennepin, the scene is dominated by the big gold ball on the last flagpole remaining in the old Gateway area. Though the storyline could be set anywhere, the series is rich in Minneapolis scenery. It is shot mostly downtown, but ventures as far south as Edina. When they visited family in Puerto Rico over Christmas, they took the show with them. Enlisting the help of family members, for the first time they introduced other characters.

    The vlog’s storyline has developed into a rich and noirish soap opera. There are hilarious episodes like “Anal Longings” (December 20) and touching ones like “Cleansing” (February 8), as well as some disturbing, verbally violent episodes like “Pillow Talk” (November 30). With the modern conflation of short films and advertising—BMW’s celebrated serial starring Clive Owen comes to mind, as does the silly yet seminal Taster’s Choice series chronicling the dalliances of “Matthew” and “Alexandra”—it seems like some episodes of Chasing Windmills, with some tweaking, could be hip commercials for, say, Target or Dunn Brothers. Others, however, seem more like mannered homages to obscure, subtitled auteur films. Cordova and del Rosario are clever and self-aware enough even to get meta; in February, they developed a delightful cycle in which Juan Antonio announces he’s going to start a video blog, because “everyone’s doing it.” Thereafter, the couple briefly plots to make money on Juan Antonio’s new vlog by developing a porn storyline. Alas, Cristina was only playing along.

    Fans wonder how fictional Chasing Windmills is. Having spent an afternoon with its creators, I would call it fictionalized memoir. Here, the main difference between life and art is that the couple obviously adore and admire each other, the way co-creators and artists often do. Then too, violent disagreements may be a part of life for people like that, and that may explain how episodes of intense conflict are often followed by serene stories that seem to have forgotten the rough patch. I won’t give away which plot lines are true and which are fictionalized, except to say that both Cordova and del Rosario emphatically agree that it “basically is fiction,” and neither seems serious about giving up smoking.

    Talking with the Chasing Windmills crew, I was reminded more than once of how late-seventies punk rock, as a populist, do-it-yourself movement, revolutionized music and the music industry. It was a moment when the audience bum-rushed the stage and took over the means of production. Of course, punk was not just a means of production; its style, voice, and aesthetic were paramount. In the nascent vlogging scene, there is no comparable core, no there there. Most vlogs that I’ve seen are modeled either on public broadcasting news, network variety shows, or raw home video. Besides Chasing Windmills, very few—in fact, none that I am aware of—are fictional, produced serials. But as more young filmmakers realize that they can simply take the keys of production and the keys of publishing into their own hands, the creative class may yet break free of New York, Hollywood, and even Sundance. Punk rock had the local bar, where you might see a trashy quartet called the Clash, say, or R.E.M., before they got big. As vlogging becomes more common, we may get to see the next generation’s Coppola or Fellini or Wes Anderson while their short, self-produced flicks are still playing on the local podcast.