The Rake Magazine

Year: 2006

  • Car Candy Kills

    I have a pusher. He pushes a drug called speed.

    Guys that own hot rods, however, do not call this drug “speed” but “candy.” I guess that way it sweetens the blow that hits your wallet, the small side of your back, and the ever-present possibility of your forehead projecting through plate glass.

    Guys that own hot rods rarely talk about how “fast” a “ride” travels. They are more interested in how you’ve “candied up” your car to cover short distances at G-force inducing velocities. They really want to know how much you’ve “paid to play.” Or in other words, how many automotive updgrades you’ve added to your stock car to make it perform at a respectable level for the average gearhead.

    What’s more, what really makes them happy (and my pusher, in particular) is to see you candy up your car only to see it implode at the dragstrip or careen out of control on the street. The Germans call this schadenfreude or the “malicious enjoyment of other’s misfortunes.” I can assume most car candy pushers feel the same way.

    I am not quite sure how to stave off this addiction. Its nihilistic. Its so German. And yet, my current addiction is being fed by a American 2003 Mustang Cobra. This car delivers the most bang for hot-rod buck in history. While there are some that many argue that point, let me leave you with a recent anecdote.

    Yesterday my pusher called me to say that my car was ready (I had to replace the clutch after frying it doing upteenth burn-outs). The bill was in the low 4 figures.

    …However…

    My pusher informed me that he had just received a shipment of Whipple Superchargers and that while my car was in the shop he could easily put one on.

    “How much?,” was my first question.

    “About 640,” he replied.

    “At the wheels?,” was my second question.

    “Duh,” he replied idignantly.

    The conversation continued for a few minutes before we ever got around to discussing price. For you see my pusher was telling me that by simply switching out the supercharger my car could go from 470 horsepower at the rear wheels to over 600.

    It may be clear to all of you but just in case that is horspower at the rear wheels–not the flywheel–which is how all manufacturers report their horsepower figures. All cars lose approximately 16% of their horsepower from the flywheel (where the clutch engages at the transmission) to the rear wheels (where the rubber hits the road so to speak.).

    That means, for example that my Cobra currently produces something like 560 horsepower. Hardly enough for my pusher.

    In case you’re wondering, this upgrade would cost me about $4,500.00. Its quite the deal for over 150 more HP. Classically you paid about $1000.00 for every 10 HP but that was before the age of modular engines and computer-controlled engine management.

    The Germans make you pay far more for every ounce of power.

    To make their schadenfreude more delicious, perhaps?

    Alas, car candy is equally lethal in any flavor.

    I am telling my pusher “nein.”

  • Absentee Voting

    This week I voted absentee for the second time in three years. I have to say I love it. Seems like a lot of people love it too. The Star Tribune’s article really only skims the surface of the issue. What isn’t stated is the oppotunity that a lot of poor people will have to actually vote if they vote absentee. Many work all day on election day and don’t get to the polls. If they knew they could do it via mail at their liesure it could significantly raise voter turn-out. And significantly change the political landscape.

  • The Hate That Laughs Produced

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    Briefly: Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat has been hailed by many as the last refuge of shock humor, carrying on a tradition that included the likes of Lenny Bruce. But listening to any Lenny Bruce album–a joy in my mind, albeit an often times challenging one–there wasn’t any loathing for his subjects. When he would riff on, say, words that were incendiary (f–k, s–t, n—-r, etc.), Bruce did so because he was tired of all the crap people had to go through because some words were considered dirty, and some held the power to reduce a man, woman, or child into feeling like less than a human being. For all his faults, Lenny Bruce cared deeply about his audience, and the world he lived in.

    Cohen shows no such concern in Borat, a film whose misanthropic tendencies soon grate after only a few minutes. If there’s a story it’s this: Borat comes to America to make a film for his homeland, falls in love with an image of Pam Anderson in Baywatch, and drives across the country, through the south, to find and marry her. Along the way, he gets to insult feminists, southern gentility, backwater rodeo fans, and, of course, Pam Anderson. If anything’s shocking, it’s the scene where Borat and his manager wrestle buck naked on a bed, and, to be honest, it’s disturbingly funny. But as for the rest of the film, it’s akin to, as I wrote in The Rake, throwing dynamite in a barrel of fish: southern bigots are just too easy. Would a bunch of New York liberals–like say, those that populated the Al Franken movie–have been welcoming to a man who offers his host of bag of feces and, later, a surprise visit from a black prostitute? Something tells me the answer is no, and that the results would be equally funny, but more damning. New York and L.A. emerge virtually unscathed, while frat boys, evangelical Christians, and the aforementioned rodeos and southerners get the skewer. And that’s just too damn easy.

    …

    Death of a President, playing at the Oak Street, is a triumph of verisimilitude–that is, the filmmakers did a pretty damn good job of imagining the chaos and fear that would follow an assassination of George W. Bush. The problem isn’t that they get it right, it’s that they get it so right as to be tedious. They detail nearly every facet of this awful weekend in the future, including long shots of actual speeches and fictional foreign policy crises drains the life right out of the movie. Ask yourself: why would anyone want to listen to actual footage of Bush telling jokes about Chicago mayor Richard Daley, just because it’s been altered slightly to look as though it’s taking place in the future? We all know it’s not real, and a film like this needs to rise out of its context and include some actual hysteria (a woman who is one of Bush’s top speechwriters, and there with the First Lady when he dies, shows virtually no emotion), and maybe even humor, in order to get to the heart of what this would mean to us in real life. For a movie as controversial as Death of a President, it’s one of the least thought-provoking films you’ll find.

  • Why I'm not voting for Keith Ellison

    There are many answers to that, some of which I’ve already articulated, but I felt the need to do some more research. So I looked up the bills that Ellison introduced in the last session of the Minnesota Legislature.

    Many of them are innocuous. Most are well meaning. But the two that got me were this one and this one.

    The first would remove the state’s ability to revoke the driver’s license of a “dead beat dad” in order to pressure him to pay up, and the second would decriminalize making a false report of police brutality. The latter, in particular, is troubling, especially in light of another bill that he introduced which extensively spells out the affirmative obligation of a police officer to explain exactly why he may have stopped someone who is African American.

    I’m not the first to point these out, but they are right there for anyone who cares to look. To me, the two bills relating to civilian contact with police betray a world view that Ellison’s perceived constituency and the police are essentially at war with each other. That’s probably, unfortunately, very close to the truth.

    But, that world view doesn’t get us anywhere near where we ought to be going. It’s a hopeless view, in my opinion, and we should get more than that from our legislators.

  • Powdered or malaprop?

    Of course, the hottest tickets in town are for tonight’s Sankai Juku performance. (Got ’em! Check!) That is, of course, unless you’ve gone some to see my best friend Andrea over at the Jungle Theatre; it’s opening night for their production of The Rivals… This play being the famous etymological source of the world malapropism. In other words, all the MFAs and language geeks will go crazy for it. And the music geeks will too, since Andrea is such a fantastic singer! As is the rest of the cast, I’m sure.

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    There she is! Just look at that face! And that dress!

    I’m going to see The Rivals next weekend, and so you can’t accuse me of being a bad friend.

  • NYC Eatathon

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    the first order of business in nyc…

    I’m headed to New York this weekend for the marathon. No, not running, cheerleading. One of my Girls and her future sister-in-law will be huffin’and puffin’ while I, and the rest of the gang, stuff our faces with lox and try to find them in the crowd.

    It’s been interesting trying to figure out our eating patterns. We have to consider the size of our group (eight), the times we want to eat, the pre-marathon food, carbo/protein intake, and the fact that I need to eat at places that are worth the ticket and hotel cost.

    Dinner Friday is at Telepan, the new Upper West Side joint by Bill Telepan who used to cook at the JUdson Grille. His menu is simple but fresh and has a very reasonably priced tasting menu.

    Saturday is the harder day. I wanted to go “no reservations” at a couple of tapas bars: Boqueria or Tia Pol. But since it’s pre-race, I think the runners might want to eat early and turn in early, so I booked a couple of tables at the brand-spanking-new Cafe Cluny (much chit-chat in the food world about this one…). If the rest of us get hungry later, we’ll head to Momofuku Ssam Bar where they put out an innovative tasting menu after 10:30pm.

    Sunday morning, I think we’ll drop the runners off and breakfast at Balthazar with good strong coffee, good strong bread, and maybe a soft-boiled egg? After the run, I know the Girls will be craving a wide slice of which ever pizza is closest (I probably should indulge for the sake of commaraderie). Dinner will be at Morimoto in celebration of sake and sushi and girls who will be barely able to walk in heels.

  • Survivor

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    I’m the guy who walked out of the building and the building fell down.

    That’s certainly the sort of experience that’s going to stay with you, but I sure as hell never thought it would come to define me to such an extent.

    A close call like that is all it takes anymore to make a man a celebrity in America. I guess it bothers me, though, to think that might be it for me, that an accident, an utter fluke, might represent …what? My legacy? My entire life boiled down to one terrible moment?

    Because in that instant I became a career survivor, the most hapless sort of success story, a kind of superstar of random fate, almost, you’d think, a hero.

    You’ve probably see the video footage, the tape that was replayed thousands of times on the television news, a tape that was itself an accident, shot by a German tourist who was panning the square outside the building. It was purely happenstance. They had to blow the sequence up, of course, but there I unmistakably am, purportedly the last person to make it out of the building alive.

    I’ve just exited the revolving door in the west lobby, my briefcase dangling from one hand and the other arm swinging free of the entrance. I take three steps into the square and then duck instinctively, covering the back of my head with my right hand. And then, almost as if fleeing a crime in which I had some complicity or foreknowledge, I run, ambling like a drunk right into the inescapable arms of what now passes for history.

  • Last Chance

    I’ve been remiss: there are two fascinating films in town, and tonight’s your last chance to one of them. Unfortunately, I can’t speak to Death of a President, as I’m going to tonight’s 7:15 show, but I’ll weigh in on it tomorrow–it’s around for another week.

    So I’m hoping, gentle readers, that you go instead to a film that I believe will someday be a B-movie classic, in line with many of the great 50s noirs: 13 Tzameti. There is one showing, at 9:00 tonight, at the Lagoon. Tzameti is a movie of surprising power and tension, well acted (not a requirement in a B-movie), and a treatise for beginning filmmakers on exactly how to make a movie on the cheap. Focus on your characters, on your plot, keep your actors engaged, and can the fancy stuff until you get your hands on a real budget. I’m already dreaming of the day, hopefully in the not-too-distant future, when I’m walking the midnight streets of some forlorn city, Detroit or L.A. or New York, and I come across this little flick at some run down theater in a bad part of town. If all went well it would be raining afterward, and I’d spend the next few hours in an overlit coffee shop, watching the nightowls and thinking of poor Sebastien and his fate.

    Since this may never happen, you owe it to yourself to stay up late this evening with 13 Tzameti.

  • Putumayo's Acoustic Africa: The All-Stars

    Now, there’s a show I wish I had the ticket to see ‘n hear! Love the sound of an acoustic guitar… Love Habib Koite.

    But I’m actually going to see Death of a President tonight… Finally. And because I’ve already written plenty about that flick, I figured I’d just put tonight’s happening-est music event front ‘n center. I find I’m a bit behind on my moviegoing as of late, in any case. And so I’m trying to pour energy there. I just got around to seeing Marie Antoinette for heaven’s sake! And I’m afraid I had to give that my thumbs down. Way down. This was about the most amateurish piece of art I’ve ever seen–from Dunst’s premature gazing into the camera, well before we felt any sort of empathy for the character (if we ever felt it at all), to the Chuck Taylors tucked amidst the queen’s stash. Having loved Sophia Coppola’s other films, The Virgin Suicides and Lost In Translation, I’ve been taking mental inventory ever since. Was I seduced by a pretty girl who trails off her sentences? Pretty clothes? (Wouldn’t be the first time.)

  • Meat and Fish

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    Sausage

    Sausage Sisters! I know how you love them at the Mpls Farmers Market, with their cute little hats and funky sausage treats. Well, now that the market is over you can still get your sistah fix. First of all, they’re having a Sausage Garage Sale (which sounds kinda funkish, but they are professionals) on November 4th from 11am-2pm at Sister Cherie’s house in Bryn Mawr (229 Upton Ave S, 612-986-7298). Secondly, they deliver in the metro and as far a-field as Buffalo, for cryin’ in the barn! And lastly, don’t forget to check out their gift boxes…I’m thinking the Poppa Joe Breakfast Box (sausages, Sturdiwheat pancake mix, pure maple syrup for under $30) ia an appropriate delivery for Christmas morning.

    Fish

    Apparently, eating fish isn’t the only way to make you smarter. Through The Oceanaire Seafood Room’s website, you can learn about different species of fish, what their flavor profiles are like and where in the world they swim. Bigger bonus, the checkmarks on the menu page are updated to reflect the fresh fish that are actually in the restaurant. So if you are a Coho Salmon lover or, like me, often dream of Opah you can check the page and head on down. I hope they soon do the same for oysters (mmmmmm…Malpeque).