Year: 2006

Tonight, the Rake’s happy hour book club meets with regular Rake contributor Eric Dregni and his brother, Jonathan. These two co-authored the new book Follies of Science: 20th Century Visions of Our Fantastic Future, which rehashes all the more fantastical, mid-century predictions for the new millennium, most of which never came true, of course. We’re talkin’ jet packs and hovercrafts, robot warfare, space colonies, babes clad in little more than pleather bunhuggers and plastic breastplates, and what not.

I don’t know much about the following event, other than the fact that it touches upon something that we, as a culture of collective music-heads, have all felt. Before The Music Dies is a documentary film dealing with music-making in the wake of its corporatization. I suspect it is, for the most part, comprised of interviews with various industry figures and musicians, such as Erykah Badu and Dave Matthews… You can check out the film’s website to get a lil’ taste. And if then you want the full feast, the film screens at the Kitty Cat Klub tonight at 7 p.m.

Steve Brandt, the Strib reporter whom I criticized yesterday, has posted a response to that blog and another comment I made at e-democracy. (The rules of the e-democracy forum prohibit me from making a response because I’ve hit my daily post limit already due to my own stupidity. The daily post limit is two, btw.)

So here is Brandt’s response to me:

Those who followed Tom Bartel’s link to The Rake might have been better served had Bartel gotten his facts straight. He suggests that he ought to be hired by the Star Tribune to cover schools (my beat) because he was able to speak to Chris Stewart on Monday. That’s great, but I wasn’t trying to reach Stewart on Monday. Another reporter was. That’s because this began as a 5th District campaign issue. I cover schools. I did try to reach Stewart on Tuesday night as returns came in, for normal campaign coverage. He didn’t return my call, nor that of the reporter who originally tried to reach him. I got someone else’s mess dumped in my lap after the election.

As for why no story was printed out of the Lee press conference for the election-day paper on the basis of one candidate’s assertion, the Star Tribune is very cautious about printing last-minute charges without a response from the target. That’s something that differentiates the MSM from blogs. Some people like to throw up anything and see if it sticks. If that’s your threshold for reporting, fine. But for all the Star Tribune’s faults, that’s not our M.O.

Steve Brandt
Star Tribune
Not The Rake

And here is mine to him:

I notice that Brandt didn’t deny anything I said in my blog, except that he hadn’t made the original call to Stewart. Here’s what the story Steve Brandt wrote said: “Stewart didn’t return calls until after his election.” Please forgive my inference that Brandt had made the calls related to a story that Brandt wrote.

However, the substance of my post was that Brandt, or whoever makes his calls for him, blithely accepted Stewart’s “explanation” of the site. He didn’t question why Stewart had published it under a pseudonym, or why he’d linked to KKK and Nazi sites, or why, when Lee first confronted him, he posted a response along the lines of “Thanks, Tammy for making us famous,” or any of the other questions I suggested. Finally, he never asked (or at least didn’t print the reponse to) the question of why Stewart refused to return calls until after the election.

The answer to that last one, though, Brandt does supply himself. It’s because Stewart well knew that the meek Star Tribune reporters wouldn’t actually do any digging, or threaten to print the truth without his comment, and that Stewart would be safe from widespread bad publicity until after the election. Hey, Steve, papers print things all the time like: “Stewart refused to return repeated calls for comment.”

That’s part of the story–that Stewart was stonewalling admitting his involvement, wasn’t it?

Brandt calls this caution. I call it sloth or cowardice. Take your pick. If that’s the Strib’s M.O., you can have it.

Tom Bartel
The Rake
Not the Star Tribune

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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