The Rake Magazine

Month: August 2007

  • Lend Me Your Ear

    Lips can spit. Eyes can blink. The nose can sneeze. But the ear—that delicate wormhole into the skull—is defenseless. Perhaps this vulnerability explains our horror of earwigs.

    The earwig is a damp-loving, creepy-crawly creature that looks like a cockroach with a lobster claw on its rear end. If you think you’ve seen more of them around in recent years, you’re right. Originally from Europe, the bug made its way across the Atlantic at some distant point in the checkered history of this nation, and has been conquering us inch by inch ever since. The insect launched its invasion of Minnesota relatively recently, after breaching the Wisconsin state line a decade ago, according to Jeffrey Hahn, an Extension entomologist with the University of Minnesota. “Fifteen years ago, it wasn’t here,” he says. “It is expanding its range, but why or how isn’t clear.”

    Across the border in the wilds of Wisconsin, we’ve had a damp summer. As a result, we’ve encountered a larger number of earwigs than is pleasing: on the porch, in the laundry room, perched on the rim of a drinking glass. An earwig dropped out of my pants cuffs the other morning as I dressed. Another, I flicked off a plate of broccoli and pasta seconds before I plopped it in front of my eight-year-old daughter, narrowly averting disaster. Irene, not an insect lover, has been particularly worried about earwigs after she learned from neighborhood kids that the bugs got their name because they crawl into your ears and proceed to eat your brains.

    Not true, says Hahn. By his lights, earwigs are largely harmless little beasts who enjoy snacking on decomposing plant matter and the occasional smaller bug. But doesn’t that lobster claw pose a danger? “If you were a small bug, that’d be one thing, but they’re just not strong predators,” Hahn says. And on the subject of ears, the entomologist is adamant: “I’ve never heard of a case where an earwig has gone in someone’s ear. If that happened, it would be by the purest of accidents.”

    Yet the earwig has had its reputation for at least two thousand years.

    “They like to crawl into all kinds of cracks and crevices,” explains Phil Pellitteri, an entomologist with the University of Wisconsin in Madison. “But there’s nothing in particular about an ear to attract them. In the old days, though, when people would sleep in barns, you know … ” More recently, in 1972 to be exact, Rod Serling explored the ear from the viewpoint of an earwig in an episode of Night Gallery, his less-remembered follow-up series to The Twilight Zone. In the episode, an earwig does chew through the protagonist’s brain, leaving behind a trail of eggs.

    At Snopes.com, the urban legend website run by Barbara and David Mikkelson, the earwig story is classified as false. The entry, however, includes a reference to the Victorian-era explorer of Africa, John Hanning Speke, who recorded his experience when a small black beetle crawled deep into his ear. There it “began with exceeding vigour like a rabbit in a hole, to dig violently away at my tympanum. The queer sensation this amusing measure excited in me is past description.” Speke tried to dig the insect out with a knife, but only killed it. That caused an infection that, wrote Speke, “ate a hole between the ear and the nose, so that when I blew it, my ear whistled so audibly that those who heard it laughed.”

    Speke might have deprived his traveling companions of their little joke had he paid better attention to his grammar-school Latin—for one of the earliest mentions of the boring habits of earwigs comes in one of the world’s first encyclopedias: Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia, circa 77 AD.

    Pliny was an accountant who shuttled from province to province in the early years of the Roman Empire, according to Trevor Murphy, a scholar at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Pliny the Elder’s Natural History: The Empire in the Encyclopedia. “He was intensely curious,” says Murphy. “In all his spare time, he had slaves reading to him. One slave on his right would read to him, and another slave on his left would take down notes that Pliny dictated.”

    His goal, according to Murphy: “To describe the world.” Naturalis Historia begins with comets, stars, and weather, then narrows in to plants and minerals. Along the way, he has this to say of earwigs (in Philemon Holland’s 1601 translation): “If an earwig … be gotten into the eare … spit into the same, and it will come forth anon.”

    Good advice from the ancients to bear in mind during these final hazy weeks of summer. Just don’t tell Irene.

    A version of this story first appeared in Viroqua, Wisconsin’s Kickapoo Free Press (www.kickapoofreepress.com), where the writer serves as managing editor.

  • Living Room Licks

    Fifty twenty-somethings crowded into Two Pines, a dark living room in South Minneapolis, on a sweltering Sunday night, flowing into any space not filled by six musicians and their guitars, mandolins, and banjos. The singer, clad in drooping denim overalls, strummed a few chords of a Mazzy Star song and chuckled. “What does this song remind y’all of?” he asked in a gravelly, whiskey-soaked baritone. “When Napster was free!” called a girl standing on a couch and clutching a beer. “Right now!” someone hollered, “The best night of my life!” The singer laughed and proceeded to hammer away on his guitar, jumping up and down as the crowd packed in around him.

    Great music does live here, as a certain local radio station proclaims. It’s just not always where you might expect it. The punks call them basement shows. Classical and folk musicians prefer “house concerts.” Whatever the phrase, house shows, once an avenue for aural experimentation, have become trendy alternative venues for new bands, strange bands, underage music lovers, and anyone who doesn’t want to pay for a five-dollar cover and four-dollar beers.

    House shows, of course, are nothing new. Typically they have been havens for musicians scorned by mainstream audiences. Ernst Krenek, the famous composer who lived in St. Paul during World War II, teamed up with players from the Minneapolis Symphony (now the Minnesota Orchestra) to introduce atonal works in homes across the city. In the 1970s, jazz artists like Don Cherry and Ornette Coleman played lofts in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. Shortly after, punk’s DIY attitude turned basements nationwide into instant venues.

    Those shows, however, were exclusive and unpublicized; in other words, they occurred during the pre-MySpace era. Now, anyone with a basement or living room or even spare bedroom can promote the space to thousands of bands and potential audience members with a few keystrokes. While there aren’t solid figures on the number of house venues—they’re ephemeral, after all—they’ve proliferated in recent years. Some achieved fame, like the now-closed Bremen House in Milwaukee that hosted indie darlings like The Faint and The Rapture and emo rockers Jimmy Eat World. Others, like the Metric House in Minneapolis’ Seward neighborhood, just hosted shows until the cops were called one too many times.

    There are at least a dozen active house venues in the Twin Cities, including two just blocks from each other on Minneapolis’s Lyndale Avenue South. At the Two Pines house—run by Andrew Jansen, an amiable folk musician in his twenties, and his roommates—shows are acoustic and free. They used to be scheduled a few times a week with as many as six bands a night. Then Jansen realized they were testing neighbors’ patience and scaled back to a few each month. Down the street, the Pocketknife hosts punk shows every week or so. The two places, like most, promote modestly (mostly through MySpace) and draw dedicated crowds, mostly friends and neighbors.

    There’s also Castle Greyskull (yes, named after the evil fortress from He-Man) elsewhere in south Minneapolis, a venue that tends toward “spazzy electronic weird shit that makes you want to puke rainbows while you dance,” said Max Clark, who lives there. They haven’t had issues with neighbors, he claimed, except once when an especially ebullient music fan raced around the block drunk and naked, prompting a call to the police, who showed up to find several other naked revelers.

    For some bands, houses are their favorite venue: they’re intimate and all-ages, and most have no trouble getting dozens of people out any night of the week. And they’re the only place to hear music that commercial venues won’t touch—like at Two Pines earlier this summer, where a guy in a ragged T-shirt banged away on a contraption of cooking pans and other metal objects, screaming unintelligible lyrics. (He received raucous applause.)

    The people who run these neighborhood clubs say they want to promote musical diversity and give bands more options. “We aren’t at war with the bars or coffee shops,” said Jansen. “It’s a place for friends and for people that love each other to get together and celebrate friendship and social issues. It’s a home.” His comments seem to put twenty-first century house shows on the level of the free-love collectives of the Haight-Ashbury era, but he’s got a point: While attendees may celebrate brown-bagged bottles more than berate the status quo, they also meet their neighbors, as well as possible bandmates, friends, and dates.

    The jury’s out on whether house shows affect the bar-and-coffeehouse circuit, but, according to a June survey in the national trade mag Atlas Plugged, most promoters and owners are happy to have them. When bands that start out in basements advance to club stages, they tend to bring a crowd with them. And as long as there’s local music, there will be local house venues.

    It follows, too, that as long as there are house venues there will be neighbors to overhear the goings-on. To wit, that recent Two Pines party ended promptly at 12:30 a.m. after a stern-faced policewoman arrived for the third time that night, following a neighbor’s complaints. One attendee muttered something unprintable about cops as he stomped out, and a girl with him socked his shoulder. “Come on,” she said. “They gave us six hours. I bet they came the first time for the show.”

  • Third Time’s a Charm

    Contrary to recent media reports, local artist and performer Faith Farrell is not the self-proclaimed Spam Queen. “I don’t know where that came from,” Farrell told me. “My friends were the ones who started calling me the Spam Queen. I would never be presumptuous enough to proclaim myself the queen of anything.”

    Farrell is technically the 2006 Great American Spam Champion, a title earned in the aftermath of her first-place prize in the Spam cooking competition at last year’s Minnesota Sate Fair. Since then, there have been articles, interviews, a parade appearance as Miss Spamerica, and even an invitation, a few weeks back, to appear on David Letterman (alas, she got bumped at the last minute, but hopes to return). “So I’m the grand champ, I guess,” she said. “And I do a lot of performing things, but really I’m more of a visual artist. I don’t know what I am. I’m still trying to figure that out.”

    Ostensibly, Farrell is a forty-year-old artist living in Northeast Minneapolis, with an informal specialty in meats, mostly processed. Every Saturday night, Farrell performs in “Meat Raffle” at the downtown Grumpy’s, “a meat raffle and game show and variety show all in one,” where she does crafts demonstrations using meat. “Last week I did a ring-bologna tiara, also using some hot dogs. Tubular Meat Tiara is what I should call it, now that I think about it.” She also plays in local bars as part of a two-woman band called Lady Hard-On. “The majority of our songs are meat-related,” she noted, regarding the name. “We sing about all different types of sausages and meat products. I don’t know when it started, this meat thing of mine. It could be that my first high school job, working at a deli, provided those formative building blocks of my meat love.”

    Spam entered the picture four years ago, when Farrell and friends toured Hormel Foods’s Spam Museum. That was where she discovered the State Fair cooking contests. “Every year, I enter the crop art contest at the State Fair, and I always try to get something into the Fine Arts building. But I had never done a recipe.”

    Her first creation, “a Mediterranean pizza thing with apricot jam, feta cheese, kalamata olives, and, of course, Spam” did not impress the contest judges. “Flavors don’t go together,” they wrote. “Unappealing.”

    The next year, she concocted Spamadillo, a recipe based on the Spanish picadillo, a stew in a base of tomato and hot peppers with cinnamon, onions, and dried cherries, served with rice and fresh cilantro. Friends sampled different versions and recorded their impressions on scorecards that Farrell recreated from those she’d received from Fair judges the year before. She lost again, but her overall score was better, especially for appearance. The judges said it was a beautiful arrangement. But they thought the flavors were too overpowering. “I realized that I may have inadvertently hidden the flavor of Spam,” Farrell admitted.

    The light switched on: Winning recipes offered comfort and simplicity. “A lot of elbow macaroni and mayonnaise,” Farrell said. “Exotic ingredients would be, like, soy sauce. This made me consider what the contest was really about.” She imagined the most comforting food she knew, and then figured out how to create Thanksgiving leftovers in one dish. A little cranberry sauce, some Turkey Spam, a handful of sage, a dollop of mashed potatoes, Durkee fried onions, and cream cheese. Wrap it up in a Pillsbury Crescent Roll and bake: You’ve got yourself some Spamsgiving Day Delight. (The complete recipe can be found at Spam.com.)

    “One of the appeals of Spam is that it’s so easy. I think I was getting a little too fancy,” Farrell said. Her instincts were spot-on: her Spamsgiving Day Delight took first place at the 2006 State Fair. She was thrilled, initially — and then bowled over when she got a call the following February saying she had won the national contest. “I thought it was a prank. I said, ‘Oh my gosh, shut up.’”

    “We really enjoy Faith’s enthusiasm,” said Cyndi Harles of the Blue Ribbon Group, which has handled the Spam contest since 1990. And Faith is the first Minnesotan to win the national grand prize in the Spam contest, which, Harles pointed out, is Blue Ribbon’s longest running and most popular contest at state fairs all over the country, with upwards of a thousand entries each year. Farrell won a $3,000 cash prize for her recipe, which was judged by cooks in the Hormel Foods test kitchens on its taste, originality, and presentation.

    The only downside to being Spam’s grand champ is that Farrell is banned from competing in the Spam contest at this year’s State Fair. But, she says, “I saw this new competition, ‘Frying With Canola Oil,’ where you deep-fry something on a stick. And I thought, hey, I can enter that and still sneak in the Spam.” She’ll also continue her tradition of entering the crop art competition with an image of a vintage Spam can. “It’s very time consuming doing this, bean by bean.”

    Possibly most thrilling, though, is having earned the privilege to be an official judge for this year’s Spam contest. As last year’s first-place winner, she’ll now fill out scorecards on other people’s processed-meat dream dishes. “It’s a huge honor,” she said. “I wonder if they’ll have palate cleansers between each course.”

  • Hotdish, Rehabbed

    Seasonally, the time is right for hotdish. The weather is turning cooler, the oven has waited patiently while the grill has had its many days of glory. People are coming off their summer buzz and organizing, whether to boost a local sports team or join a church choir. And in this neck of the woods, anything that involves organizing usually also involves a potluck. Hotdish, of course, is part of the holy trinity of potluck, along with Jell-O salad and bars (that is, calorie-rich baked desserts, not drinking establishments).

    Newcomers to this area—that includes second-generation residents—tend to look at a hotdish and say “oh, casserole.” But here hotdish (single word, no article necessary) is not casserole, and we’re just as sure of that as we are of our favorite childhood circle game, Duck-Duck-Gray Duck.

    While hotdish and casserole may share the same culinary history, they’ve split in evolution. Both are a one-dish meal served directly from that dish, yet where casseroles have been accepted by the hoi polloi, hotdish has been relegated to nostalgic reminiscences about mom-cooking and church basements. Blame it on the cream of mushroom soup.

    Put simply, hotdish is a meat, a veg, a starch, a binder, and cheese thrown together into a Dutch oven or baking dish. The binder is often that cream of mushroom soup (otherwise known as Lutheran binder). If you use a red sauce as a binder, go ahead and call your creation goulash, but if you use beaten eggs, it’s no longer hotdish, it’s an eggbake. I don’t make the rules.
    At any rate, the timing may be right for a hotdish renaissance. The food mood has turned slightly nostalgic and cunningly comfortable:

    Witness the up-scaling of burgers, meatloaf, roast pork, and mashed potatoes at local restaurants. Why not hotdish? Tater Tot hotdish, arguably the crowning achievement of this food family, could be tweaked and improved on. Tuna-noodle hotdish could sing in the hands of a masterful cook.

    Nor, in our quest to update a classic, need we remain dependent on a gelatinous blob of canned soup, just because our mothers were. A roux is a fine binder, and making one is a skill easily mastered. We can use fresh herbs; we can use cheese that comes right off the farm. In short, it is within our power to evolve the hotdish and spread its warm love beyond the Midwest! I have a vision of millions of Lutheran ladies, Le Creuset crocks cradled in their oven mitts, marching forth in a campaign for the new hotdish.

    Some will argue that we should leave well enough alone, that a good hotdish is one well remembered, not updated into some upstart version of itself. My response? You can embrace tradition and still advance. I say make the hotdish of your youth when your heart calls for it. But create your own version, too—after all, the next generation will need to remember you.

    Chicken and Orzo Hotdish
    2 1/2 cups chicken stock
    1 1/2 lbs. skinless boneless chicken breasts
    3 Tbsp. butter
    3 Tbsp. all-purpose flour
    3/4 cup heavy cream
    1/2 tsp. salt
    1/2 tsp. black pepper
    1/2 cup freshly chopped sage
    1/2 cup chopped shallots
    1/2 cup crème fraîche
    1/2 cup chopped prosciutto
    1 cup freshly chopped spinach
    1 cup orzo pasta
    1 cup panko bread crumbs
    1/2 cup grated parmesan

    Preheat oven to 350 degrees. In a 4-quart pot, bring stock to a slight boil. Add chicken and simmer, turning once, for about 6 minutes. Remove from heat and cover pot, letting chicken stand until just cooked through, about 15 minutes. Remove chicken to bowl to cool, but keep stock in covered pot.

    Over low heat, melt butter in 2- to 3-quart saucepan. Add flour and stir for 3 minutes, making a roux. Add warm stock while whisking, and simmer gently for 10 minutes, whisking occasionally. Whisk in cream and simmer for 5 minutes, whisking occasionally. Remove from heat, transfer to large bowl and stir in salt, pepper, sage, and shallots.

    Remove 1/2 cup of sauce to separate bowl and stir in crème fraîche. Chop chicken into 1-inch pieces and stir into remaining sauce.

    Cook orzo in boiling water until just al dente, then drain. Stir into chicken mixture along with spinach and prosciutto. Transfer the mix to casserole dish, spreading evenly. Spread crème fraîche topping evenly.

    Toss bread crumbs with parmesan and sprinkle over surface. Cover with foil and bake in the middle of the oven till bubbly (about 25 minutes), then uncover and turn on the broiler for 5 minutes to brown the top. Remove from oven and transport to your community function with care and pride.

  • Alaska

    The hardiest breed of Minnesotan can’t get enough snow, even in summer. That’s why Kami Brueshaber and Jason Aide of Minneapolis chased winter all the way to Talkeetna, Alaska, a “teeny town in the shadows of Mount McKinley,” wrote Brueshaber. She added: “Everyone there has a real laid-back attitude. Don’t expect much to be happenin’ before 11 a.m.”

    As exciting as a visit to the towering mountain might be, the pair also took care to peruse a favorite reminder of their flatland home. What other publication besides The Rake could entice them to expose their hands—ungloved, mind you—to the chill air?

    Kami Brueshaber

  • Calcutta, India

    Reading The Rake in a hand-pulled rickshaw is not recommended for a weak
    stomach. Tim Leone-Getten and Leslie Olmen visited Calcutta, India with
    other area teachers on a South Asia teacher exchange program with Hamline
    University and Relief International.

    Leslie Olmen

  • Come to the Mill City Farmers Market Today

    Got plans this morning? Come over to the Mill City Farmers Market, at 2nd and Chicago in downtown Minneapolis (next to the new Guthrie Theater). It’s the peak of the growing season, there will be lots of fresh produce and locally made products on hand, and besides, I will be judging a pie contest. The contest starts at 10 a.m. – hope to see you there.

  • FORECAST:

    The outlook is rosé

    Ch Grande Cassagne Rose.jpg

    My father is a Harvard-educated economist and a Jew of the highest moral order, who believes it is what a man leaves behind him on this earth — from offspring to good works — that determines his worth.

    He’s also wont to say things such as: “I believe that, in his heart, George W. Bush just wants to do what’s best for our country.” and “I don’t care if gay people want some sort of civil union, but they shouldn’t call it marriage.” and “No scientist has proved to my satisfaction that global warming even exists.”

    I love, admire, and respect my Dad. But on most issues, we’re simply going to have to disagree. Violently.

    And so it is with Bill Summerville, partner and wine expert at La Belle Vie. (Well, except for the love part. Sorry, Bill, I just don’t feel we’ve gotten that close.) Summerville is one of those ridiculously young culinary savants [he wouldn’t disclose his age, but when I guessed he was in his 30’s, the bartender guffawed] who got into the business via D’Amico and has shot straight up through the ranks. At Solera — Tim McKee and Josh Thoma’s other restaurant — Summerville was staff: a front of the house man who put together a wine list made up mostly of Spanish wines. When the partners moved LBV from Stillwater to Minneapolis in late 2005, they promoted Summerville. A good move.

    He’s confident and well-dressed — like one of those guys who runs the dining room in a Gregory Peck film — and he knows his stuff. But Summerville is wont to say things like: “Robert Parker favors these wines with gobs of hedonistic fruit so his descriptions don’t mean anything.” and “As you become more sophisticated, you go from appreciating big wines such as Zinfandel to liking lighter, more ‘feminine’ wines like Burgundy.” and “In the summertime a red is too heavy; real wine lovers drink rosé.”

    I’m not saying Summerville is 100 percent wrong, but I happen to disagree on all counts. I concur with Parker eight times out of ten. Anyone who’s been reading this blog knows that I adore a big, sexy Zin. And if it’s 95, I’ll just move inside to drink it. I like a lot of whites, too. But rosés? Frankly, most of them take me back to junior high and strawberry lip smackers. They have that eau de Bonne Bell.

    Yet, I’m always willing to rethink my opinions. Not about gay rights or global warming, but about wine.

    So I sat down with Summerville to taste several pinkish varieties. And one of them — I have to admit — was interesting. I could drink this with a spicy paella or a really meaty fish. The Chateau Grande Cassagne Costieres de Nimes; I would give you a link but I’m damned if I can find the winery’s site. It’s a Rhone blend with a rubier color than most, a fruity scent, and the oddly admirable taste of wet shale on the flat of the tongue. This wine has character: a long, sort of starchy finish and a mystical, herbal echo in the mouth.

    Remember, too, that Summerville has a bunch of other rosés he’d love to have you try. In fact, he’ll pour you a flight of four for $10. And given the sumptuous Man in the Gray Flannel Suit quality of the La Belle Vie bar, that’s quite a deal.

  • City Pages Drama Continues

    If it’s attention they want, they’ve got it. According to Minnesota Monitor, new City Pages editor Kevin Hoffman sent a memo to staff announcing the weekly is cutting long-time film editor Rob Nelson’s position. The Rake’s own Britt Robson (also a former City Pages writer), along with a host of others, immediately replied with harsh words.

  • How They Do It In San Diego

    I am not offended if none of you are as interested in what ex-Strib publisher Joel Kramer will announce next week as the scurvy brother/sisterhood of newspaper wretches and I are. We are praying for a second coming of the written word, and hold out hope that the Denny Heckers, TCFs and Targets of the world will soon lavish Kramer et al with advertising that allows us to resume our grand, elitist lifestyles. The one with three lunches a week at Chipotle, happy hour at Bunny’s and new tires for the ’98 Corolla.

    Until then … I had an interesting chat this morning with Scott Lewis, co-editor of voiceofsandiego.org , the two and a half year-old non-profit on-line news”paper” that Kramer has mentioned as something of a model for his venture.

    Lewis, 30, was riding in his car when we spoke. The key bits of information — for those of us dreaming of barbacoa burritos — is that Voice of San Diego does indeed have a full-time staff of nine … with annual salaries ranging from $25,000 to $40,000. Both Lewis and his co-editor, Andy Donohue, 29 (or so Lewis believes), also write copy. The site has “one photo/video guy” and “one education/web guy” in addition to five full-time writers.

    Here are photos of the good-looking staff.

    Lewis comes off as a pretty bright guy. He talks about the value of good editing, story coaching and a lot of vital skills that sour bastards like me sneer at. He says Donohue and he took over in November ’05, after a rocky first half year under other leadership. Somewhere along the line they quickly gave up on the idea of free-lancing out all their reporting — and established investigative and enterprise reporting as editorial mission goals one and two. They ditched the idea of free-lancers because of all the quality control issues you get in to, although, Lewis says, occasionally they’ll still dial someone up, “but the most we can throw at them is $150-$200.”

    He says their annual budget is $560,000 and that they’ve had something like 700 individual donors. “Every time we ask for money we get checks from everywhere from $35 to $100,000,” but their well-being is still largely dependant on one guy, a San Diego venture capitalist named Buzz Woolley who co-founded the site. There’s some ad support in PBS-style underwriting fashion, Lewis says, where pages are “sponsored by Lexus of San Diego” and a trickle of traditional display ads, but mainly its Woolley’s money that makes it go.

    Lewis says they occasionally consider expanding out into sure-fire traffic drivers like sports and entertainment, but invariably their board reins them back, reminding them that their core mission is filling a void in aggressive coverage San Diego institutions that the major paper — the frankly woeful San Diego Union Tribune — has ignored. (The city of San Diego’s near bankruptcy was the big story they rode hard in their launch phase.)

    Based on what I know about Kramer’s plan — starting with his desire to use established journalists and not high-energy kids — there are some clear differences.

    We’ll shall see what Monday brings.