The Rake Magazine

Year: 2006

  • The Hulk in the Kitchen

    Right beneath our noses, an underground clutch of vintage appliance enthusiasts is quietly buying up all of the redeemable old stoves and classic refrigerators. To the uninitiated, it looks like a hobby, not unlike repairing and collecting classic cars. But some of the new converts to the vintage appliance game aren’t buying them because they want to resuscitate an era, or because they want to embark on a tricky renovation project; most lack the kind of accompanying home décor that marks the “vintage enthusiast,” a designation they casually shrug off. Lots of people have been outfitting their kitchens with vintage pieces because, for the money, they are some of the best buys out there. With a quick tune-up and a polish, many of these octogenarian appliances continue to work with faithful precision. Of course, the retro curves and colorful porcelain surfaces don’t hurt, either.

    Every vintage appliance buff has a story about how a love affair with an old range caused their conversion, and to this I am no exception. Chambers, Wedgewood, O’Keefe & Merritt … there are websites devoted to fans of each that forsake the others. Mine’s a Roper, a brawny, sure-footed hulk of a stove, manufactured a few years before World War II.

    Some nights after dinner I take care to detail my stove, from the top of the clock all the way down to the footed legs. I deep-clean the burner plate weekly. This uncharacteristic fastidiousness is a testimony to my love for this old thing. If to scrub it is to know it, I’ve learned that mine is a more solid and more beautiful machine than any stove made today. The fine features are legion: the generous coat of white porcelain enamel, pouring over the corners thick and creamy like milk off the farm; the design dimples and ripples in the chrome; the pretty little clock; the flourish of the Roper brand name dashed across its front. Every small detail reveals that its makers had high hopes for this stove. While it would devote its life to a relentless cycle of work, it was meant to be a thing of beauty, too.

    The latest in a lineage that began with fireplaces and then wood-fired cook-stoves, mid-century gas and electric ranges assumed the place and prominence of a hearth in the center of the kitchen—but with a sleek, modern look. Examining the smooth, clean lines of the shiny chrome and glowing Bakelite features, you’re struck with the sense of bold optimism inherent in these appliances. Their makers were obviously smitten with modernism and had great hopes for the possibilities of the future. This was the era when new devices in home technology were so darn exciting that it seemed as if they had dropped into the home from outer space—and they looked like it, too.

    Flash forward to today, when weekend gourmets with expensive stoves cook a little and fantasize a lot about being professional chefs. Meanwhile, when the professionals cook on the home front, they want to feel comfortable, like they’re cooking at home. I say this as one of them. Having spent the last eight years cooking on professional suites—and the last thirty minutes of every twelve-hour day scrubbing the shine back into the range top—the last thing I want to see when I get home is a hunk of industrial stainless steel. I have nightmares about the dark crevices where stainless steel corners meet, about what kinds of desiccated (or horrors, living!) creatures hide in the greasy grime. So for me, perhaps the strongest attraction to my old stove lies in its lovely porcelain façade: It looks nothing at all like work.

    Visual appeal has in large part driven the demand for retro stoves. According to Floyd Harvala (that’s “the Wild Finlander” to me and you) of Harvala Appliances in Park Rapids, my hometown, vintage pieces, especially those manufactured from the 1930s to the late 1950s, have increased in desirability over the years. “You usually get two or three people in a summer asking about them,” he said. “Mostly people in their forties, or younger.” Note that in a town of three thousand, two or three fairly constitutes a trend. Burt, the son-in-law who recently took over the store (thenceforth assuming the moniker “the Mild Finlander”), stocks and sells a great many contemporary appliances, but shares Floyd’s understanding of the older pieces’ appeal, noting that they “have a lot more character, more little features, neat-looking legs, and stuff like that.” Both Finlanders admire the thicker gauge of the porcelain and the steel foundations on these stoves, as well as the durability of the old cast iron burners. New burners are constructed of aluminum and even Floyd admitted that in comparison, they are “not very good.”

    Detractors might say that the older appliances lack technological advances that have since become commonplace. In reference to refrigeration, I must concede that these claims have validity. Fridges like my 1930s Royal, a compact model by General Electric, look glamorous in the kitchen, but they are not without problems. Food placed in the back tends to freeze, and after a few weeks of operation, opening the little inset box freezer is like looking at a diorama of the Ice Age: Squinting, you can barely make out a box of peas in butter sauce back there, frozen in time. With advances in compressors and insulation, these fridges just can’t compete with new ones. It takes more energy (and money) to run them, as most of the cold air just leaks out the door. Burt surmises: “Old fridges take a dollar a day to run. For new ones, it’s ten cents a day.” Hard truths like these have turned many a vintage fridge into a vanity piece: They look cool, but are not, in fact, actually cool. They’re commonly found in garages, demoted to holding the summer stock of fish bait and soda pop.

    Vintage stoves, on the other hand, possess the cooking power to compete with today’s top-of-the-line models. Is it possible for my Roper to pump out more Btu’s (British thermal units, the measure of heat output) than the average contemporary range? “Well, it depends,” said Jack Santoro, founder of the Old Appliance Club and publisher of the Old Road Home, a quarterly for vintage appliance buffs and hack restorers. He has been restoring vintage American stoves for thirty-seven years, with enthusiasm to spare. “In these old stoves, the valves which control the size of the orifice are adjustable.” The Btu level depends on the amount of pressure, natural gas or propane, squeezed through the orifice. Now that he mentioned it, I remembered the propane service guy asking me if I wanted it hot. I must have said something like, “Hell yeah, hot as she goes!” which would explain the power I now enjoy. Water for pasta boils in about eight minutes. Flames shoot up the sides of a wok, giving stir-fried greens the authentic Chinese lick of fire. By this estimation, my four Roper burners sport Btu’s in the ten thousand to twelve thousand range—hotter than a new budget stove (averaging nine thousand Btu’s) and comparable to those strapping, faux-commercial ranges (whose burners range from two thousand for the simmer plate to eighteen for the power burner on the priciest model).

    But beyond Btu’s, it’s the physical scale of my range top that makes it conducive to the bouts of intensive cooking, pickling, and jam-making in which I sometimes indulge. Like most of the stoves from this era, mine was built to handle some serious production. Its burners were widely spaced to accommodate huge canning kettles and stockpots of simmering broth, hog’s heads slowly melting into head cheese, pots of spurting apple butter, and, of course, the ever-warm pot of coffee.

    Currently, the market for these stoves is at that middle point: They are popular enough to sell for six thousand dollars on the Internet (totally refurbished and gleaming clean), but you could just as easily find one lolling amongst the old sinks at the local dump. That is, not everybody knows they’re desirable—not yet. The use of the Internet by rural junk dealers has gone a long way toward ruining, perhaps forever, the prospect of the insanely good deal. Now little dusty storefronts on deserted main streets that once promised the bargain of a lifetime are run by clerks who sell most of their stuff on eBay. They know what a Chambers stove is and how much it’s worth.

    Luckily for me, my husband got our Roper from a relative, and we bought the fridge from Burt for thirty dollars and a case of beer. But that was last year.

  • Man in Love: Barbra Streisand, Barry Gibb, and the Autobiographical Criticism of Doug Belknap

    Some of you I would hope have read Dianne Hart’s monograph Enough Is Enough: Prodigality Celebrated and Condemned in the Carter-Era Recordings of Barbra Streisand. Although Dr. Hart’s study is limited in scope, her thinking is expansive. My own forthcoming book on Streisand’s middle period is indebted to her penetrating analyses. I must also thank Hart for exposing me to the criticism of Doug Belknap. A footnote in Enough Is Enough led me to the man’s review of Guilty, Streisand’s 1980 collaboration with Barry Gibb, and I have since become an admirer of Belknap’s idiosyncratic and loudly autobiographical work. The review of Guilty appeared that year in the September issue of Spunk magazine, a formerly influential rock monthly by then considered debased by the relevant tastemakers. Spunk at the time was mostly devoted to rock of a decidedly masculine cast. One imagines that Spunk readers were united in enmity or at least apathy toward Streisand and Gibb, and would have considered an endorsement of Guilty distasteful and a pan gratuitous. It’s odd, then, that the magazine gave the album any coverage at all, odder still that they ran Belknap’s long, discursive review.

    What I’ve since managed to learn about Belknap is that he lived in Minneapolis, briefly attended the University of Minnesota, and worked, moonlighting presumably, as a freelance writer, most provably during 1979 and ’80. I found one piece published in the University’s Minnesota Daily in May of 1972, a recommendation of Weather Report’s I Sing the Body Electric notable for employing two food metaphors. In the first paragraph Belknap calls the album a “spicy gumbo of New Thing jazz, acid rock, hot-buttered soul, classical gas, and Latin passion”; in the closing paragraph he likens it to a “steaming bouillabaisse.”

    Belknap may have written as well for community newspapers throughout the 70s, but his byline doesn’t return to an officially archived publication until late ’79. Again it’s attached to a review of a Weather Report album—the concert recording 8:30—penned for the short-lived Rhythm-A-Ning magazine. A warm appraisal of the music quickly gives way to a digression about a record reviewer, apparently a gastronome and fusion buff, who constructs a model suspension bridge from clippings of the 147 reviews he has written for a jazz newsletter. Each review contains at last one food metaphor, a feat of stylistic persistence that apparently went unnoticed by the newsletter’s subscribers or its alcoholic editor. The reviewer then takes a fatal dose of sleeping pills and lies down next to the model bridge, in effect jumping off his own work.

    Belknap wrote three relatively restrained reviews for Spunk in the summer of ’80, followed by the Streisand piece, which is quoted in its entirety below, and which seems to mark the end of his career in music criticism. My efforts to track down Belknap have been unsuccessful. If you know anything about his whereabouts, please contact me. I remain eager to speak with him.

    Barbra Streisand

    Guilty

    CBS Records

    Reviewed by Doug Belknap

    I see that Guilty’s liner notes have Richard Tee playing electric guitar on the “The Love Inside.” If you know your session men, you’ll raise an eyebrow at the credit, and sure enough, the electric instrument Richard Tee is playing is a piano, not a guitar. One thing Barbra Streisand’s latest success is guilty of, then, is shoddy liner-note composition. Otherwise it’s pretty much blameless.

    Maybe you’ve already seen the jacket, with Gibb, who wrote or co-wrote all of the album’s songs, wrapping his arms around a coquettish Streisand, both dressed in angelic white, à la Johnny Mathis on the cover of Heavenly. It would be too much to call this music heavenly, but it is ethereal, so light you have to adjust your tone arm to play the LP version. And yet the album’s consommé of pop and Broadway, disco and light R&B isn’t wholly insubstantial. I find it moving. Streisand and Gibb haven’t lent great stores of genuine emotion to their collaboration, but they’ve given the listener the tools to do so: the bravura phrasing, a drama in nearly every measure; the voluptuous, occasionally capricious melodies and chord changes; the trademark vocal harmonies, both transcendent and rodential, that Gibb honed with the Bee Gees.

    I’ve liked Barry Gibb ever since I heard “Massachusetts” on the radio of a cream Mercedes 450 SEL belonging to Linda Morgan’s mom. We kissed that night, Linda and I, standing up in front of the car, and her breasts were large and her sweater was softer than any fabric I had ever felt. I hadn’t previously associated with people who could afford cashmere sweaters, or even cashmere socks. Our subsequent outings, however, were washouts.

    Let me return to “The Love Inside,” which is indeed lovely, and not only on the inside. Expansive, resigned, middle-aged, it’s like a Sondheim ballad minus the erudition. The clever turns of phrase have been replaced with clichés—“I’m just an empty shell” and so forth—but the lachrymal high notes are present, yearning and wheedling. During this song one might pause for a pensive break from preparing something out of Elegant Dinners for Two, perhaps absentmindedly taking a sip of economical red wine. I did just that earlier this evening. Also, I cut the recipe in half. “The Love Inside” isn’t free of the breathless histrionics Streisand brings to nearly every performance, but it is sung with the proper subtlety, which is to say, neither too much nor too little. Streisand remains a stage singer, of course, a belter for whom amplification is a luxury rather than a necessity. Only a fool would refuse to use such a voice to its full capacity.

    A fool or an ascetic, because it must be a pleasure to sing like that. It must be a pleasure to be outstanding at something. Yesterday I was given my United States Tennis Association rating. I’ve decided to play competitive tennis in a league, to meet new friends as they say, and because Sharon once said I looked good in white. Before signing up, you must have a coach rate your game on the official scale. There’s an official scale that goes from one to seven. One is a paraplegic three-year-old with imperfect vision and a carelessly strung racket. Two is a paraplegic three-year-old with perfect vision and a decent lob. A 6.9 is John McEnroe. I’ve been judged a 3.2, just below the mean. I’m competent, obviously no beginner, but also not impressive, not the sort of player whose strokes inspire admiration from passers-by in the park. I suspect I’m a 3.2 in general. Once I asked a girl from work how she would rate my looks on a scale of one to ten. She said I was a seven, maybe even an eight. I’m not sure how that translates to a one-to-seven scale, but it beats a 3.2. Of course she would never have called me a six or below to my face. And she wouldn’t have given me a suspiciously generous nine or ten. Really, then, she was working on a two-point scale, seven acting as one and eight as two. And she went with one, approaching two on a good day. So that probably is a 3.2.

    Sometimes when Sharon would play her Barbra Streisand records, I would make noises of disapproval. One time she responded by hissing, “anti-Semite,” jokingly. I laughed enough for the joke to become a ritual. Sharon wasn’t routinely funny, but when she was, she was, I thought, quotable. My complaints were good-natured, you see, in contrast to how she and Donald would disparage my Weather Report and Chick Corea albums, once quite harshly when I was allegedly reading in the other room. “Oh, don’t take off the Chick Corea album, Sharon,” Donald said, coaxing a laugh out of Sharon. “I’d love to hear it again and again!” His sarcasm was strictly of the meat and potatoes variety, never clever.

    I doubt it would interest Donald or Sharon to know that Steve Gadd, featured on the Chick Corea album derided that night, also plays on Guilty. He plays superbly, with manly assurance. Thanks to his hiccupping fills toward the end of “Promises,” even Barbra Streisand can claim to have almost made a funk single. What a sad, strange song that is, Gibb’s hooks like icicles, Streisand’s singing joyfully desperate. “I am the love, don’t let me die away,” she sings, with several Barry Gibbs answering “Die away” in harmony, appropriately stretching out “die” like a last breath. I wish I could hear this album with Sharon. I could listen to it every night with her, twice. I would gently rub it with a pink felt record-cleaning cloth after each airing, apologizing for the tiny needle pricks.

    When we first started dating I perhaps mislead Sharon by saying that I liked Barbra Streisand, too. What I meant is that I found her charming in the mid-60s, especially on the “My Name Is Barbra” TV special, flirting with kettle drummers and singing songs about poverty and against materialism while vamping and hamming, by turns enviously and contemptuously, through Bergdorf Goodman. She was brilliant, funny, and gorgeous. I watched the show with my mom. I guess I was fourteen. My mom grew up in New Jersey, and although she was estranged from her family, she missed the East Coast, missed the Italians and Jews she used to hang out with. Not that there aren’t Italians and Jews in Minneapolis, but they’re much scarcer. My mom loved Streisand, loved her misfit glamour, her wit, her Jewishness, her abnormal voice. “She has the lungs of a beluga whale,” said my dad, passing through the room. “You flatter the beluga whale,” said my mom.

    I also sheepishly enjoyed The Way We Were, which I saw on an inauspicious first date with Lorraine Ibsen. But for the most part though, prior to Sharon, I ignored Streisand. I mainly listened to jazz and rock and fusion and hardly ever tuned in AM radio. Streisand’s sometimes maligned attempts to sing contemporary material couldn’t bother me because, except for the hit she had with Laura Nyro’s “Stoney End,” I didn’t hear them. I was unaware of her version of John Lennon’s “Mother,” for instance, until Sharon and I moved in together and Sharon’s extensive collection of Streisand records and memorabilia arrived as an unwelcome dowry. “She’s singing it like it’s called ‘Second Cousin Twice Removed,’” I cracked, as Sharon arranged the furniture. It came out more cuttingly than I intended, but Sharon chuckled. Later we made love on a mattress on the floor, and the night proved to be the apex of our predominantly healthy sexual relationship. There are at least two images from that night that I still use, not always happily, as masturbatory aids.

    Every morning, except Tuesdays and Sundays when she didn’t work at Carson Pirie Scott, Sharon would do her ablutions to Streisand’s “I Can Do It.” Most evenings she would play a Streisand album or two, and occasionally Donald would come over for a “Babsanalia.” Mostly this just meant talking and playing records, but sometimes they’d pantomime and dress up, Donald in half-drag, or they’d reenact scenes from Streisand’s movies. The Babsanalia were always spontaneous, usually involved pot or coke, and often lasted into the small hours, at which point the accuracy of the reenactments was suspect. My only contribution to these endeavors was the coinage “Babsanalia.” I participated once, on a night when I felt it was important for me to get high. It was hard to be the third wheel. I was insufficiently equipped with knowledge or enthusiasm.

    Sharon and Donald were too sophisticated to be truly idolatrous, but not sophisticated enough to blend sincere passion and self-aware irony in the manner of high camp. That was how I saw it anyway. The frivolity of it all chafed me. Nothing important was important to Sharon or Donald. Their Streisand club was purely escapist, of course, a means of pretending not to be of our generation and not from Minnesota, or to be witty and urbane and to have a bona fide witty and urbane gay friend instead of a dim closet case. I was never explicitly excluded from the Babsanalia but it became clear that these evenings were for serious fans only and that I should find other amusement. Usually I’d read in the bedroom. Sometimes I’d go to a bar alone.

    Donald also worked at Carson Pirie Scott, in the men’s casual wear department. He was not an ethical man. When a shirt came in that he liked he would hide it the backroom until it went on final clearance. Then he would sneak it back to the sales floor, as if it had been languishing on the rack the whole time, and he’d get it for even cheaper than his employee discount. Donald was reportedly straight, but I knew this to be untrue, at least not entirely true. Sharon accepted his bluff, though she was attracted to his apparent gayness in the way my mom was attracted to Streisand’s Jewishness. Sharon did acknowledge that Donald moved and talked in a way that would lead many if not most to unfairly question his sexuality. Then there was his Streisand fixation, his interest in clothes (though he dressed badly if you ask me), his passion for the theater, his insistence on being called Donald and never Don, the fact that he had once lured me into the bathroom at Deborah Curtis’ Christmas party, and that once inside Deborah Curtis’ bathroom he had whipped out his cock or at least not strenuously protested when I slowly unzipped his jeans and executed my first and only act of fellatio.

    Sharon didn’t know this last piece of evidence regarding Donald’s homosexuality.

    Donald had one good male friend that I knew of, a short, part-time actor with Aryan features and the physique of an amateur weightlifter who was even dumber than Donald, and lazy. He didn’t work other than the three or four parts he landed a year, usually one lead in a community-theater embarrassment and a few spear-carrying gigs at the big theater in town. Mostly he cadged from girlfriends and half-heartedly sold drugs. I called him the Slothario, which Sharon, who didn’t like him either, thought was clever. Donald and the Slothario would go to nightclubs often, reportedly to pick up women. They even bought notch-less belts from a neighborhood cobbler and leather worker, stole a leather punch from a hardware store, and would actually add notches to their belts in commemoration of successful seductions. Of course anyone can punch a hole in a belt, and no way was Donald getting it up for all those girls. My theory was that Donald and the Slothario were lovers. Donald also had steady girlfriends, including a tiny, laconic brunette named Sara with no “h” who, when she worked as a peep-show model, called herself “Sar-ahh!” Donald and Sara dated for almost a year. My theory was that Sara was also gay, either by birth or as an occupational acquisition. During the year that Donald and Sara were going out I sometimes found myself in situations that led me to wonder how effectively the tinted windows at Paulie’s Hot Tomatoes cloaked the peeping customers. I figured I caught a break when Donald and Sara broke up.

    It was around that time, though, that Donald and Sharon started spending even more time together, mostly away from our apartment. By then there were a few clubs in Minneapolis where one could disco, and they would do that, sometimes going to a party after the bars closed so that Sharon wouldn’t return to our bed until 3:00 a.m. One Easter Sunday I remember she was logy and irritable all day. It didn’t occur to me until late in the afternoon that she was hung over. I was so slow on the uptake, such a dolt. She started telling me about a group of East Indian guys who were also going out dancing, how charming they were. One, an aloof, lanky guy named Divyanga who was said to have fallen out of favor with his Brahmin parents, came to a party that Sharon insisted we throw. He said, “It’s nice to meet you. Sharon’s a great dancer,” as if I had given her instruction. He wasn’t charming.

    One night I bought a new edition of Password, the game, and suggested we share a bottle of wine and play a round or two. Sharon and I both liked Password. She however had plans to go out for drinks followed by dancing and then who knows what with Donald and the Slothario and the East Indians. I was welcome to come, she insisted. But I wasn’t. I noted that she took almost forty-five minutes to get ready, roughly twice as long as usual. I also noted that she looked really good. After she left I tried to read but couldn’t concentrate and resorted to TV, which, predictably, only aggravated my depression.

    That night Sharon came into bed around

    3:00 a.m. again, maybe 3:30, and her breath smelled like vodka and orange juice and cigarettes and she tried to arouse me but I rolled over and feigned sleep. The moment was not unlike those described in “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers.” Later, I suspected that she had gotten horny dancing with the East Indians and had hoped to seduce me in order to pretend I was someone else. Once during lovemaking she had asked me to portray Hubbell Gardiner, the Robert Redford character from The Way We Were, but that was different. I didn’t mind. After Divyanga moved into our apartment and I moved in temporarily with Gary the building manager, I also began to doubt the plurality of the East Indians, a ruse no doubt to make de facto dates seem like non-threatening group socializing. Only Divyanga, whom Gary the building manager seemed to know well, had come to our party, and when I asked Sharon, a poor ad-libber, what the others were named, she pretended not to hear and then when asked again came up with “Ravi” and, after yet another pause, “Big Ravi.”

    Two days after my Password proposal was rejected, Sharon told me that she did love me, but she was no longer in love with me. I had no use for the distinction. I fell from the couch sobbing, not a long fall, but dramatic. I held on to the coffee table, my legs were folded up like a little boy’s. Sharon was faced with the situation in which you want to comfort the person whom you have just discomforted. She sat there quietly until I stopped blubbering. Stupidly, we slept in the same bed that night. In the morning I stared apocalyptically at her un-blanketed body. She was wearing only underwear, which I took for effrontery. In fairness it had been a warm spring night.

    I’ve been crying with decreasing regularity, though still frequently, during the six months since. Actually, my crying has increased over the past few weeks, since I was assigned to review Guilty, in six hundred words. Guilty is a sad record, a record about being made foolish by love, about desperation and deceit. Gary the building manager is an AC/DC fan and will be glad when my assignment has been dispatched. Gary’s a good guy. Divyanga is cheesed with me for extending my temporary stay at Gary the building manager’s, and seems to think I’m not allowed to do my stair-climbing and hall-walking exercises throughout our apartment building, as if I had access to some other building. But I guess Divyanga isn’t the boss of me. I notice that Donald never comes around anymore. Divyanga has barred him, no doubt. The guy is paranoid, though he’s right about Don.

    Guilty ends with a song of romantic betrayal called “Make It like a Memory.” But that’s silly because what’s worse than a painful memory? Barry Gibb has not read his Proust, at least not carefully, though his melodies sometimes approximate Proustian delicacy.

    My current favorite is “Never Give Up,” quasi-Arabic funk to my ears, potentially a showstopper, but comparatively paired down, the string and horn players sent home for the night, the bass creeping or maybe skulking. Streisand is self-important where she used to be self-deprecating, but she’s jive talking on the verses and it’s funny, deliberately funny. The lyric has her suffering from a dry throat. She’s non-metaphorically lovesick. “I will never give up,” she sings, stretching out “I will” for a full measure, eliding the “r” in “never,” making the word an even more emphatic “neva!” The point is reiterated on its way to the chorus’ staccato conclusion and the album’s summary question: “I will never give up, never give up, never give up. I will follow you home. How can you turn me away?”

  • Watch Your Words!

    On a recent sultry afternoon, three of us bellied up to the cool oak bar at one of our favorite hangouts and engaged in two age-old writers’ past-times, tall drinks and short stories. For the next few hours the air grew thick with bold-faced names and barbed commentary, and while the bartender kept the booze flowing discreetly, I caught him snickering several times at some of our verbal acrobatics. One of my companions finally said, “You’re getting an earful today, aren’t you?”

    Thank Christ we tip him well or we’d be in danger of reading our reckless remarks on the Twin Cities’ newest voyeuristic website, overheardinminneapolis.com. Subtitled “What Happens in Minneapolis … Goes on the Internet,” Overheard in Minneapolis urges eavesdroppers to post anything they hear—the more asinine or acidic the better—thus creating a great place to take the pulse of our Midwest metropolis, one earful at a time.

    The site was launched by a woman who wants only to be known by her first name—Angie—“for the time being.” Originally from Northern Minnesota, Angie lived out of state for several years, returned to the Cities a year ago, and currently has a day job at “an office in St. Paul.” She spends five to six hours a night on the site.

    So far, many of Overheard in Minneapolis’ comments are coming from bars and restaurants, where the tables are close and liquored-up lips often flap most loosely.

    Here are some recent postings:

    Drunk Woman: The race of women has been held down too long!

    Sober Man: What in the hell are you talking about? I think you mean gender.

    Drunk Woman: You don’t know shit, you’re just a stupid immigrant.

    Sober Man: I was born in Roseville.

    —Bulldog Bar, Uptown

    Nurse #1: I want to be 23 forever!

    Nurse #2: Oh, really. Why?

    Nurse #1: Yeah, ‘cuz like, 25 seems so old.

    —North Minneapolis Hospital

    A personal favorite, from the Rail Station Bar:

    Drunk man: What are you going to school for?

    Girl: Journalism.

    Drunk man: Ohh, can’t beat that. Can’t beat that at all. That’s GREAT.

    (long pause) … what’s journalism?

    Our local Overheard site is not a novel idea—Angie was inspired by overheardinnewyork.com. Still, compared with the often profane muscularity of NYC eavesdroppees (“there’s definitely a lot more crazy people in New York,” she notes), we seem a little timid coming out of the box. Here’s a Manhattan sampling:

    Tween Boy: Mom! Let’s go already!

    Mom: If you’re so bored, go play in traffic.

    —Victoria’s Secret, Lincoln Center

    From two men passing each other on the street:

    Middle-aged man #1: Hey!

    Middle-aged man #2: I didn’t recognize you with clothing on.

    —62nd & Broadway

    Or take these one-liners on Jesus:

    Chick: Whatever. I could’ve annihilated Jesus at beer pong.

    —Wall Street

    Girl on cell: Listen, the only ass I kiss is Jesus Christ. Got that?

    —Key Food, 235th St.

    Still, what the Twin Cities may lack in swagger and oddball panache, they more than make up for in whacked-out smarts. Here’s an exchange overheard at Coffman Union at the U of M:

    A girl smiling, listening to a boy on an escalator:

    Boy: English is the only language where you call things what they really are. (holds up a pencil) Like, what is this?

    Girl: Der ist ein Bleistift!

    Boy: No, no it isn’t! It’s a pencil!

    Whereas, in New York, you get incidents like this, in Macy’s:

    Saleslady: Where are you from?

    Tourist: Kansas City.

    Saleslady: There’s a city in Kansas? Like with buildings?

    Tourist: Yes.

    Saleslady: Tall ones?

  • Letter from Wisconsin { Suspended in Time

    The Hunky Dory resort sits atop a small knoll overlooking Lake Clare, in Balsam Lake, Wisconsin. It’s changed little since 1902, when it first operated as a working farm called the Hunky Dory Farm Resort. Brochures advertising the place look exactly the same as they did in the 60s. Nor have the kooky cabin names been updated: “Rest a While,” “BonEcho,” and the favorite “Kozy Knook.”

    Matriarch Marvel Nielsen runs the resort with her daughters, Marly, Julie, Lori, and Joy, and an assortment of grandchildren and in-laws. Her husband Al died in ’88, leaving the silver-haired and aptly named Marvel to command this tight ship. While similar hand-hewn Midwestern resorts have gone under, Marvel says Hunky Dory remains vital due to her family’s home cooking. “What brings them back are the good swimming and the food,” she said of her guests. “You don’t have to have a fancy place, just have it clean. Cook good food and you’ll have a full house.”

    “When I first married Al in ’55,” recalled Marvel, “there was a full-time cook here, and I only cooked one day a week. She died in ’84 and I’ve been cooking ever since.” Growing up in North Dakota, she learned to fry and bake from her mother, who perfected the art in order to feed and inspire the farmhands.

    For ten weeks in summer, three square meals are served each day. All are made from scratch. “We don’t use anything from a box, no microwaves here,” Marvel said, carrying a bowl of flour-dusted chicken to a stove. Her two Vulcans, a six-burner oven and a grill oven, are vintage 50s, and they’ve typically got chicken frying on their stovetops, hams and turkeys in their ovens.

    The day for Marvel and family begins at 6:00 a.m. They’re in the kitchen by 6:30, when they turn on the grill, brew coffee, mix pancake batter, and fry bacon. Breakfast is served at 7:30. When the lodge bell rings, as it does three times each day, guests come running or walking at a brisk pace.

    It’s difficult to reserve a Hunky Dory cabin. Some of those guests are from families that have been coming to Hunky Dory for four generations; many have never missed a year. “Mom has a running list of people in her head who say ‘If someone cancels, call me up,’ ” said daughter Julie Grimsley. Otherwise, tough luck. There’s a great deal of jockeying for position, behind-the-scene intrigue over who gets which cabin, or which families may be forfeiting their cabin.

    My three brothers, now with their wives and children, have been Hunky Dory regulars for years. Each July, they succumb to the lake’s velveteen waters, which have the ability to soften hair, skin, and soul. The affinity for the resort runs deep. When we were kids, our family didn’t stay at a Hunky Dory cabin; we used to rent an old hunting shack across the lake. From there we’d row over to Hunky Dory to get gas for the boat. On hot nights, there would be ice cream, and back then there were horses for rent, too. And when my mother, exhausted by bats, ticks, and children, had had enough of life in the woods, my father would treat us all to Marvel Nielsen’s famous fried-chicken dinner.

    A few weeks ago, on a stifling Sunday morning, I watched the fried-chicken ritual that’s taken place every week since 1902. As soon as breakfast was finished at 9:00, Marvel and her daughters began working on the lunch. “I don’t want to know how hot it is, that’s why there’s no thermometer in here,” explained Marvel, tending four cast-iron skillets filled with chicken pieces that spat grease into the air.

    Typically, the system works like this: Marly flours the chicken, Julie cuts and cleans it, and Lori oversees the baking-powder-biscuit operation. But on this day, Julie shouted across the kitchen, “Mom, I think I’m going to start the biscuits.” She’d taken over for Lori, who was in the Twin Cities that day. But Lori later called her sister. She was so worried about the biscuit-making that she hopped in the car and drove the two hours back to Hunky Dory.

    It’s that kind of commitment, to the rituals of cooking, and the rituals of summer, that is vanishing. I’ve watched helplessly as the fixtures of my childhood from the 50s and 60s have been sold off and remade by big-box retailers. But Hunky Dory remains suspended in time, a little like an insect in amber. Still, Marvel can’t cook and work forever; like me, she worries about Hunky Dory’s future. “It’s not easy to answer,” she said, when asked about it. “This is 2006, and people automatically sign up for 2007; they don’t question it.” She knows that someday it will have to end. “And I’ll know when it will have to end.”

    “But,” she added, “the lake will still be here.”

    So will Marvel’s daughters, and in-laws, and grandchildren who want to protect Hunky Dory’s legacy. And the generations of families willing to fight for a week in the run-down “Kozy Knook.”

    Angela Frucci

  • The Junk Lady

    “I consider myself extremely lucky,” artist Judy Onofrio has said. “Every day, I have the opportunity to construct a world of memory, humor, and stories through my work in the studio. Best of all, I live in that world and invite others in.”

    It is in this spirit of openness that the 2005 McKnight Distinguished Artist recently ushered an entire busload of adult learners into her home and studio and allowed them to roam her three-acre backyard hillside garden, populated by plastic swans and sculptures like the odalisk made of Jell-O molds. Onofrio is perhaps best recognized by Twin Citizens who remember her 1993 exhibit at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, titled Judyland, which featured huge conglomerate pieces made of Mrs. Butterworth’s syrup bottles. Before our private tour, those of us who’d signed up for the University of Minnesota Curiosity Camp course “Come One, Come All to Judyland” had already been treated to a morning lecture on the artist’s work, as well as a boxed lunch on the bus en route to Onofrio’s solo exhibit Come One, Come All at the Rochester Arts Center.

    In her studio, two assistants were busy building the foundations for new pieces. Ryan worked in metal, and Jeremy, sitting at a large table littered with wooden parts, explained, “My task for today was to make a whole bunch of birds.” Those birds, which would be covered in an epoxy, smoothed, and painted until they looked like delicate porcelain creatures, represent a new direction in Onofrio’s work, an artist taking flight. Despite having a studio stacked high with storage boxes labeled “hummingbirds,” “lamp parts,” “bottle caps,” “door knobs,” “swans,” “animals and parts,” “fish,” “lids,” “dogs,” “tile,” “tiny tile,” “castors,” and the less-specific “political,” Onofrio is relying less on the found objects that are her trademark. Though she’s long had a penchant for bringing home buckets of garage sale junk, she admitted that she recently has been casting off entire warehouses of stored stuff. “Most of the found objects are pretty meaningless to me now,” Onofrio said.

    Onofrio began working in clay in the 60s, then moved on to large, soft textile works with an overt, overstuffed sensuality (think three-dimensional O’Keeffe paintings, think sea cucumbers). For a time she was creating large-scale wooden structures that, once finished, were set ablaze. (Onofrio confesses to being something of a pyromaniac.) It was after back surgery limited her mobility that she turned to her trademark assemblage, beginning with small brooches made from found objects—buttons and broken cups—and moving on to much larger pieces inspired by such diverse projects as Gaudi’s spiraling masterpieces, the Watts Towers in Los Angeles, and the Grotto of the Redemption in West Bend, Iowa.

    Onofrio approaches her work with that same sort of religious fervor and devotion. Her pieces, noted University of Minnesota Professor Robert Silberman, are “a testament to the decorative impulse,” but also are notable for the attention Onofrio pays to “both detail and coherence,” achieving in their chaos an incredible balance of color and form.

    The pieces in Come One, Come All were inspired by Onofrio’s memories of and dreams about the circus. The serene, ceramic-looking faces of women and monkeys, with their ruby lips and high cheekbones, call to mind Jeff Koons, but without the insincerity. Onofrio’s work is sensual, open, playful. And while recent pieces rely much more on movement, balance, and created forms—monkeys, elephants, acrobats, a crab, birds—closer inspection reveals that same attention to surface decoration, in cut shells and beads, along with the occasional cup handle, juice squeezer, or squirrel figurine found at a flea market.

    In the studio, demonstrating how she’s been experimenting with the positioning of objects in a new sculpture, Onofrio commented, “It’s like constant change and revision, playing with how the object interacts with the figure … I [still] have a collage aesthetic. I’m always moving things around and looking at the relationship between objects.” Onofrio spends hours in her studio fiddling around until she finds the right balance. “It’s like, you make this precious thing, and does it work? And you have a big band saw up there if it doesn’t.”

    Perhaps Onofrio’s transition to creating her own forms, instead of relying on found pieces, represents a kind of confidence in her own internal narrative and impulses. In a recent piece, Delicate Balance, for example, a woman does a one-handed balancing act, held aloft by two men, with a parrot poised on an index finger. Her new work, said Onofrio, is “about finding the content, and not having to show all my junk to everyone.”

  • The Gatz of Hazzard

  • Capote II?

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    Hot off the wire! David Thomson, one of my favorite film critics, writes in the British broadsheet The Independent of a new film on the life of Truman Capote, called Infamous. This one is based on George Plimpton’s Truman Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career. Unlike Capote, Infamous details Truman’s triumphs and tragedies in writing the masterpiece, In Cold Blood.

    No, wait, that is exactly what the last film was about.

    So this is pretty freakin’ bizarre. Thomson claims that Infamous is far superior to Capote, a film the irascible bastard actually admires. He writes that “if you thought it was too soon for another Capote, think again!” Well, I didn’t think it was too soon, I simply didn’t think anyone would make this story ever again… it’s not as if people are clamoring to remake these silly biopics.

    Infamous boasts a supreme cast, which includes Daniel Craig (the new Bond), Jeff Daniels, Peter Bogdonovich, Hope Davis, Sandra Bullock (yes, that’s not a supreme actress, but a popular one), Gwyneth Paltrow, Isabella Rosellini and Sigourney Weaver, with relative newcomer Toby Jones playnig our favorite screechy writer (I’m only partially tongue-in-cheek as I truly adore his work). Thomson claims that Jones is Capote, whereas Phil S. Hoffman was merely a mimic. Though I liked Capote, I didn’t think P. S. Hoffman was deserving of an Oscar, or the unanimous praise. Then again, I get sick of all this mimickry.

    In any case, this could make for an interesting film, a rousing success, or a case of bad timing, much like Valmont following on the heels of Dangerous Liaisons a good decade back. Right now, I don’t have any clue when this will hit the states, if it will hit our shores on the big screen, or die a quiet death and head straight to DVD. I’ll keep you posted.

  • Apple Dreams

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    I have an apple tree in my yard.

    This astonishing discovery came only a short while ago. We’ve lived here for six years.

    This tree sits in the back corner of the yard and has never been pretty or fragrant or useful in any way. Too low for a good climb, too spindly for a rope swing, too close to the swamp for a good sit.

    Last fall, I spied a round greenish bauble hanging on a low branch. At first it didn’t even register that it was an apple. Close inspection revealed a pink glow beginning of the back side. Glee. I quickly searched the whole tree and found only one other apple, near the top branches. That was it. Two apples.

    Despite their rough appearance, a brown spot here and a worm hole there, the bites I took were tart, sweet and crisp, not at all mealy or bitter.

    And I thought that was it. The tree was old and having one more fling with two apples. It always seemed weak and frail anyway.

    As luck would have it, we built a shed last year. Because the dimensions of the shed grew beyond what we originally planned, we had to cut off one of the limbs of the apple tree. I had already plucked my two apples, I thought it wouldn’t kill the whole tree.

    To the contrary. As of this week, my tree is draped with promising green orbs. Branch after branch, little apples peek out from under leaves. I’m not an idiot, I understand the principles of pruning, I just thought there was no hope after years and years of nothing.

    Now, in this heat that makes stove cooking unbearable, I’m dreaming of apple pie and apple muffins. I can almost smell the crisp autumn air dappled with cinnamon. Brats with apple-onion relish, pork roast with mashed apple sauce, baked apples with cream, all the things I couldn’t bear to eat in this heat are living in the back of my mind, patiently.

    But I see even further, to the harvest after this one. Because now that she’s given me the sign, I can figure out how to best prune her and protect her from worms. Feverishly, I’m online trying to find the best organic means of helping her thrive. And I don’t even know her name.

    We bought this house from the original owners, the people who built it over 30 years ago. How long was she neglected? How long did her apples go unpicked? Years of nothing, waiting.

    Waiting for me.

  • Screwballs and Supercops

    Scoop and Miami Vice

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    Scoop, 2006. Written and directed by Woody Allen. Starring Scarlett Johansson, Allen, Hugh Jackman, and Ian McShane.

    Now showing in theaters around town.

    Used to be that you could spot a Woody Allen fan wherever they could be found sulking. Nebbishes to an extreme, they often were seen in oversized corduroy jackets with leather patches, didn’t care that their glasses were out of touch with the trendsetters, and could be heard in the arcades and K-marts debating the merits of Stardust Memories against Manhattan with their Allen-loving friends. Too often they would steal away from their high school dances to watch Hannah and Her Sisters, marveling at their own intellectual superiority, returning home at night dreaming their dreams of New York City and how much more superior it was to lousy Mt. Pleasant, Michigan.

    But that’s just me. In the years since I’ve come to wish that I had gone to more dances and seen less of Zelig and Radio Days, decent films but no match for the girls I passed up because they actually enjoyed Night Ranger and St. Elmo’s Fire.

    Still, there is some part of me that yearns for the old Woody Allen. I miss the guy who used to cast his muse/lover (Lasser, Keaton, Farrow) and gather his flock of fantastic supporting actors to wrestle with his humor and angst. And all this in the fantasyland of Manhattan, my personal Oz. For Manhattan in Woody Allen is so much more reasonable than Manhattan in real life.

    Woody isn’t haunting New York these days, having moved his shrunken frame to the upper class apartments and country estates of London. For whatever reason, this has seemed to resuscitate him. For although Scoop is not a very original film, it is a very funny film, more enjoyable than his very good Match Point. Scoop has no weight or meaning, and doesn’t address moral and philosophical issues. It has plot fashioned from cotton candy, a cast that includes Allen doing his stand-up shtick from start to finish, and a fairly predictable ending. I loved it.

    The facts: Joe Strombel (gravely-voiced Ian McShane) is an ace reporter who has just recently died. Lolling along on Charon’s barge, still baffled at his sudden demise, he meets a woman who claims to have found herself in the underworld due to poisoning. This poor lady was offed because she knew a dastardly secret: she discovered evidence that her employer, Peter Lyman, wealthy son of Lord Lyman, is the Tarot Card Killer. Lyman overheard, she had afternoon tea, now she’s dead. The math is simple.

    Strombol still has his reporter’s wits about him, so he jumps into the river hoping to escape Death just long enough to get the news back to the living. Enter Sondra Pransky (Ms. Johansson), a student reporter on vacation with some friends in London. She and her girlfriend take in a magic show by Sid Waterman (Woody), aka Splendini!, and, while making Sondra disappear into his ‘dematerializer’, she comes across Strombel’s ghost. He reveals his scoop: Peter Lyman is the killer, and Sondra has to investigate. With Woody Allen in tow, they meet the dashing young Mr. Lyman (Hugh Jackman), and hijinks ensue.

    And boy do they ensue. My wife loathes Woody Allen, and anyone who is of the same mind would do themselves a favor by staying away. Perhaps I’m reacting to a summer’s worth of virtually brainless fare, and am hungering for drawing rooms and jokes that equate Anthony Trollope with ‘trollop’. But I loved Allen’s shtick here, which is rolled on thick as wallpaper paste–it’s a nice reprieve from the jokes of You, Me and Dupree and the newest Pirates film, at least. I haven’t seen Allen do his thing for a good long time, and here he’s going for straight stand-up. His magic act is wonderful and spot-on (and I should know, my pop’s a magician), a combination of tics and stutters designed, like all great slight of hand, to distract.

    Woody seems to have found a new muse in Scarlett Johansson, who pushes him around and exchanges rapid-fire banter without blinking an eye. Forced to act like father and daughter, they dig at one another throughout, but manage to stir up a winning chemistry that is never discomforting sexually (though my wife, without having seen the film or any preview, shouted ‘pedophile!’ when I mentioned this). Hugh Jackman is light on his feet, and the love affair between him and Scarlett could almost be the heart of a Gene Kelly musical, it’s so breezy. Allen remains perhaps the best director of women in America–in fact, he is perhaps only surpassed internationally by Almodovar.

    Scoop flags a bit toward the middle, but then rights itself with a goofy ending that ties up its loose ends with magic tricks on the River Styx. There are some weird touches in the film, most notably the Diane Arbus-like characters wandering in the background, dwarves and hideously made up women. And I give kudos to a guy who wants to make his silly plots twist and turn on the word of ghosts. Hardly a masterpiece, Scoop is nonetheless a film whose maker cares about the people he’s written about, cast actors who can fill the roles with wit and energy, who’s still got his comic timing, and believes his audience has at least half a brain. The other night, that was more than enough for me.

    Miami Vice, 2006. Written and directed by Michael Mann. Starring Colin Farrell, Jamie Foxx, Li Gong, Luis Tosar, Naomie Harris, John Ortiz, Ciarin Hinds and Barry Shabaka Henley.

    For God’s sake, this is playing everywhere…

    I was never keen on Miami Vice back in the day–as mentioned above, I was too busy checking out Woody Allen to care about Crockett and Tubbs. The pastel tales of the Miami PD, not to mention that grating theme song that played everywhere, got on my nerves. I hear tell that the show had its fair share of humor and cool, that it left an influence on Miami even today, but there was always something about Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas… I think it was the fact that they both can’t act their way out of a dry cleaning bag. That’s a problem in a pair of leading men.

    For whatever reason, Michael Mann has decided to resuscitate the TV show, but he’s changed the look and the style, and replaced two easily identifiable hams with two overpraised actors who are also easily identifiable hams. Sure, everyone knows Foxx and Farrell. But Foxx’s ill-deserved Oscar has sent him to the top of a heap he doesn’t deserve; Farrell is just plain lousy. Li Gong stands out as the lone actress trying desperately to give this soulless film some heart. And Michael Mann? Well, I have to wonder if ever a director has assembled such a daring collection of arresting images and visceral moments to support such a hollow plot?

    Like most of Mann’s films, the facts don’t amount to a hill of beans: The film opens with Crockett and Tubbs involved in a big mess. A pair of FBI agents is brutally murdered by some kind of informer leak (I didn’t really get what was going on for all the confusion), shot to death by what appeared to be anti-tank guns in a parking lot by the Miami piers, disrupting no one (large booms and explosions are obviously the norm in South Florida). The boys go undercover to take down a giant drug cartel. They are, of course, dressed in the finest clothes, surrounded by other cops equally sharp, who stand around our heroes looking like the gangs from the novels of S. E. Hinton. Once undercover, Crockett and Tubbs meet a number of hoods with greasy hair, have the usual tough-guy standoffs, get betrayed, get smacked around, fall in love, and in the end there’s a big, Saving Private Ryan-style gunfight (spot-on sound effects, verite camera work). The pair are shown making love to their women and falling for them, which, as reliable as Chekov’s gun, means that the girls will get kidnapped and/or beaten.

    Miami Vice is a gorgeous movie to look at. Mann’s cinematographer captured the sullen beauty of the Miami summers, with its endless thunderstorms creeping in from the ocean, the wide expanses of water that criminals can run and hide in like a jungle, and the highways stretching out to nowhere. But although Mann clearly seeks to make his film stand out above the rest of the usual action fare, Miami Vice isn’t worth caring about. What do the characters want from life? Is there even a society to protect? Their primary concern seems to revolve around lovemaking, shooting things, and keeping their Armani’s pressed. What is this movie if not a string of the usual cliches with a great score and top-notch costume design? But it doesn’t mean anything and moves too slow to be mindless entertainment.

    Even worse, there is no chemistry whatsoever between the actors. “I trust you,” Tubbs says to Crockett, an obviously important statement since we don’t see it for ourselves. Everyone here seems to exist in a narcissistic bubble, staring ahead, looking grim, flexing their muscles as they walk.

    Miami Vice is moderately entertaining–“Not as bad as I thought it would be”, my colleague admitted–but you could do better with a dozen other films in the theaters or on DVD. With its supercops and their superduds, Miami Vice says nothing about Miami, nothing about crime, nothing, even, about people. Failing all that, what’s the point?

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  • That's what I'm talkin' about (not the weather)

    What’s really goin’ on this weekend in all this hot hot heat:

    Well, for one, the Momentum Dance Series, as sponsored by the Southern Theater and Walker Art Center, will pick up much speed tonight when a troupe of dancers, performers, and clowns (but not in the Mooseburger sense) known as the Live Action Set (they’re famous for their show Please Don’t Blow Up Mr. Boban, which was a Fringe Festival hit a few years back) marries their work to the pretty music of Spaghetti Western String Co. Also showing with Momentum this weekend/tonight is a video/movement hybrid called Holiday House. (But I don’t know as much about the performance troupe in this case–The BodyCartography Project.)

    Then on Saturday, the Lit 6 Project is performing another radio show at the Bryant Lake Bowl–but not until the late hour of 10 p.m. Woe is me, how ever will I make it awake that long?!?! But it should be worth it since they’re not doing another show till September!!

    NOTE: There will be no Secret on Monday, as I’ll be locked in a wireless-free zone from 6 a.m. on. (Fashion shoot, not prison!)