The Rake Magazine

Year: 2006

  • Volver

    Almodóvar’s latest film is another feast of color and homage (this time to Frank Capra and Mildred Pierce) and also his first set in the backwater province of La Mancha, where the filmmaker grew up. Penélope Cruz stars as a woman who is—guess what?—pushed to the edge of insanity by her husband’s murder. Turns out the old bastard was trying to rape their daughter, who killed him in self-defense. Naturally, Cruz decides to bury the guy in a freezer and take the blame herself. Add to these female troubles the return of Cruz’s long-dead mother, a ghost who seeks forgiveness from her daughters. Oddly, critics here and in Britain have lashed out at this film (along with the recent Viva Pedro! retrospective), wondering why Pedro’s films are essentially manless, and, in the words of one detractor, do little more than rehash old themes and “flatter a [woman’s] self-esteem.” Like the best auteurs, Almodóvar will take his knocks … and keep on creating exactly what he wants.

  • The Good German

    Could this be a subtle homage to wartime classics (read: Casablanca and The Third Man) that manages to stand on its own? Or is it a tired, nostalgic retread, the last refuge of an artistically fatigued director? Although it’s been six years since Soderbergh enjoyed a critical hit, word on the street is that he’s back in form with this one, a much-anticipated adaptation of Joseph Kanon’s acclaimed novel. When a magazine writer returns to Berlin to cover the Potsdam Conference—you know, that event that allowed the superpowers to carve up Germany like a Christmas turkey—he also stumbles on old loves and new murders. Along with moody, black-and-white cinematography and high-wattage stars (George Clooney, Cate Blanchett, Tobey Maguire), The Good German offers the possibility of some well-scripted, thoughtful holiday entertainment—the kind of movie the studios pumped out by the dozens in the golden age.

  • Children of Men

    Seemingly timed for the darkest month of the year, this is a dystopic vision of a world in which the women suddenly become infertile, forcing society to examine—in short order—just what it means to be alive. The youngest human on earth, all of eighteen, is killed, and society’s falling apart at the seams. But when a woman is discovered to be great with child, the forces of good and evil work to deliver or destroy her baby … and hope for mankind. Children of Men is a celebration of gray and brown tones, exploring terrorism and environmental destruction and featuring Clive Owen doing his downbeat existentialist shtick. Along for the ride are Julianne Moore and a long-haired Michael Caine to add some heart to an otherwise morose story. With Children, the newly released Fountain, and the forthcoming Pan’s Labyrinth, this is looking to be one of Hollywood’s most ambitious sci-fi seasons ever.

  • Caleb McEwen

    Caleb McEwen is fast on his feet, but we suspect the artistic director of the Brave New Workshop has been running himself ragged as of late. Not only has he been directing plenty of comedy revues, but he and his wife Katy (the workshop’s assistant artistic director) welcomed a bundle of joy into the world last August. Nevertheless, McEwen remains as quick-witted as ever—so much so that we grew nostalgic for his legendarily funny improv performances. (When, oh, when will he appear onstage again?) In fact, McEwen was unfazed when asked to compose a list of necessities for a hypothetical sojourn on a desert isle. “Strangely, I may be one of the few people you’ll ever meet who has actually been stranded on a desert island,” he said. Was this just another of his improvisations? It’s hard to say, although McEwen did note that his experience made our little game, for him, “less hypothetical and more practical.” Here are the no-nonsense items he’d take along:

    1) Von Neumann’s theoretical “Universal Constructor.” This machine is capable of powering and replicating itself, given the proper raw materials. Mine would be made out of the theoretical stuff from other people’s theoretical duffel bags, as these things would be littering the theoretical island—things like Joni Mitchell albums, Sopranos DVDs, and supermodel Gisele Bündchen. I would simply initiate Task No. 1: Start Universal Constructor Sequence. Then I’d relax as my machine begat one duplicate, then four, and so on until they formed a bridge to the mainland. I would then immediately initiate Task No. 2: Stop Exponentially Increasing Universal Constructor Horde from Devouring Earth.

    2) Flava Flav. If derivative fiction has taught me one thing, it’s that uninhabited islands are rarely uninhabited. Eventually, someone is going to show up. When they do, I want to make the proper impression. Thus, I would bring along the greatest hype man of all time to properly introduce me. Flava Flav’s energetic and skillful announcement of my presence would prevent an unwelcome bum rush. Also, Flav is one of the few people who could properly appreciate my Universal Constructor.

    3) Weapons-grade plutonium. When you’re in possession of some plutonium-239, someone will find you. To alert the world to my ownership, I would post a bulletin on MySpace.

    4) A panda. They have to be endangered for a reason. I’m betting it’s because they’re delicious.

    5) A recording of that sound Aquaman uses to control fish on Super Friends. I believe this is self-explanatory. How is Carnival Cruise Lines going to react when Flava Flav, an irradiated panda, and I roll up—Ben Hur-style—atop a flotilla of angry tuna?

    Caleb McEwen directs Christmas: The Other White Holiday, which runs through January 27 at the Brave New Workshop Comedy Theatre, 2605 Hennepin Ave. S., Minneapolis; 612-332-6620; www.bravenewworkshop.org

  • Richard Linklater

    Director Richard Linklater has been on the independent movie track for over twenty years now, and he’s built an oeuvre that’s as interesting as it is eclectic. He recently abandoned the romantic comedies and plotless, stream-of-consciousness work he’s been known for, turning out instead a pair of cynical flicks—A Scanner Darkly and now Fast Food Nation—that would’ve fit right in during the 1970s. A self-taught filmmaker who, in a former life, worked on oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, Linklater has a special feeling for people who labor on the lower rungs—something that’s especially evident in his latest movie.

    What attracted you to adapt Fast Food Nation, a nonfiction book, as a fictional film?

    I had a real desire to do a piece about industrial workers—auto assembly and the like. I know what it’s like to work at the absolute bottom, and I wanted to make a film from that viewpoint. It was Eric [Schlosser]’s [the author of both the book and the screenplay] idea to base the film around these fictional characters … When I heard that idea, I got on board immediately. Documentary’s not my thing, and, besides, you’ve got the documentary in the book itself. It would be redundant.

    No one seems able to really change the system in Fast Food Nation.
    It’s cynical in a way that’s almost hopeless.

    Eric and I tried to be honest. Take Greg Kinnear’s character—he’s not a hero or a bad guy. One of the messages in the film is that none of us are heroes or villains, we’re just people trying to do our best, and we can make choices. But if you try to sum everything up too simply in a film like this one, you end up weakening the message. If I made someone embody everything that’s wrong with the story, I’m giving that one guy a lot of power he doesn’t really have.

    The gore involved in meat production is pretty diminished in this film. Did you want to avoid desensitizing your audience?

    Oh, yes—that stuff is pretty powerful. But I felt that if I stuck my camera in the blood and guts, it would be exploitative. I wanted to be somewhat abstract but still get to the reality of the situation. Billions are spent to get you to ignore the reality of your food. You look at fast food … it’s John Wayne and Montgomery Clift on a cattle drive, bringing you the beef. But it’s never fifty thousand cattle crammed into a small space, gorging on hormones and standing in their own feces.

    Which processing plants were crazy enough to let you in?

    We had to go to Mexico. Amazingly, those facilities are cleaner and safer than those in the United States, and they treat their employees better. The economics are much different, of course: They handle forty to fifty head of cattle in an hour, while in the U.S., they’re doing ten times that. The people who owned that slaughterhouse liked the fact that we focused on the migration north. That’s a very mythical story to them, leaving Mexico to find better work in the United States. Granted, we didn’t tell them everything we were doing, but we didn’t lie, either. It was the same with the fast-food joint—“Mickey’s” is a real place, this little chain from Texas. I’d shot film there before, and the owner allowed me to shoot Fast Food Nation there as well.

    And Bruce Willis? I heard that you and he were of similar minds when it comes to things like September 11th conspiracies.

    Well, I don’t know about that. He’s a freethinking, wild guy—analytical. He’s crucial in the movie, playing a guy who’s on the inside and doesn’t really care about what’s going on. Working with Kris Kristofferson, too, was an experience. I’ve been a huge fan of his from way back. This was just another small part for him, of course, but when I came away from meeting him, he exceeded my wildest impressions. How often can you say that about meeting one of your heroes?

  • 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.