The Rake Magazine

Month: August 2007

  • John Hock’s Playlist

    Every year, sculptor John Hock invites a couple dozen fellow artists to come and do their thing at Franconia Sculpture Park, the road trip-worthy destination he co-founded near Taylor’s Falls. The sculptors, who range from established names based in far-flung metropolises to student interns from local art schools, sweat it out all summer; come September, there’s a huge day-long party to show off the fruits of their labor.

    As the park’s artistic director, Hock attends to a host of duties besides making his own work, and music accompanies most all of them. Here are the songs that help him get the job, whatever it is, done:

    1. “New York, New York,” Frank Sinatra
    This makes the list for the obvious reasons: nostalgia and loneliness. Eight years in New York City, I was the shit magnet—people getting killed all around me. This was when Times Square was real! Before it became Dizzy World, middle class tourist Mecca. My first year out here (1993) I named my new dog after Frank. I also brought a copy of this song to my local pub, Romayne’s in Taylors Falls, for their jukebox. Frank helps me feel like my feet really grip the earth.

    2. “Is That All There Is?” Peggy Lee
    She makes you want to drink and smoke (the latter I gave up after thirty-four years), and question art and life. Sometimes I play this song for the artist interns at the sculpture park. They don’t get it. Youth is wasted on the wrong people. I still have a vice or two and Peggy makes three.

    3. “Love Duet,” Madama Butterfly, Puccini
    For me, this is (brain) yoga. It gets me all twisted up and sweaty with meditation and concentration (after all, I don’t smoke anymore); it helps me plan the day, make lists, see what will be truly unique today. Or say, “Is that all there is?”

    4. “Stranded in the Jungle,” New York Dolls
    This ditty from the original glam rock band was on the first album, Too Much Too Soon, I ever bought. It was the early ’70s, I was fourteen. My mother thought the Halloween makeup I was wearing was “very interesting”—but it was Easter. This song makes me smile—always has, always will.

    5. “I’m Bored” (and “Tell Me a Story” and“Girls” and etc. etc.), Iggy Pop
    I’m sick of kicks, stiffs, and dips. Load me into a cannon and shoot me into the butt of a rhino. Show me something new. Just don’t bore me.

    6. “Ride of the Valkyries,” Die Walküre, Wagner
    This is music for installing very large sculpture. You’re in Chicago, you’re up at five a.m.; you’re meeting the 120-ton crane at six, three semi trucks are rolling in, you have seven sculptures to install by three p.m. The meter maids and rent-a-cops are all bent out of shape. You show them your permit and drop on this song: Da-da-da-daaa-da.

    7. “No Sleep Till Brooklyn,” Beastie Boys
    The first raucous dance experience for my son Zane was when this number came on 89.3 while we were babysitting each other (he was two at the time). Upon Momma Tasha’s return, she inquired what we had been up to. I said, “Reading books.” Zane said: “Don’t beweeve the hype.”

    8. “Hot Rod,” Peaches
    Really, almost that whole album, The Teaches of Peaches. That’s the way it’s supposed to be: not stuffy, locked up in some museum. Let it all hang out, play the trombone, challenge yourself, try something new.

    9. “Sex Bomb (Baby Yeah!),” Flipper
    This is a lot like Wagner but is about installing (or deconstructing) something else altogether. Go ahead and upset your audience. This was the 1980s: Ronald Reagan, then George Bush. Who wasn’t pissed off? Gritty, aggressive angst. Nowadays I can only listen to it once or twice a year. Baby yeah!

    10. “Jesus Built My Hot Rod,” Ministry and Gibby Haynes (Butthole Surfers)
    When my energy is running low, this masterpiece (sort of like a twenty-first-century rendition of “Hot Rod Lincoln”) is just what the doctor ordered. This song keeps a sculptor’s paradise running on high octane. If things are slowing down, you’re not sure of your newest idea—screw it. Jesus built my hot rod. Try it, you’ll like it.

    Franconia Sculpture Park’s fall arts and music festival takes place on September 15 with live music, dancing, bonfire, and tours of the new location. 29836 St. Croix Trail, Franconia; 651-257-6668.

  • Small Plates, Big Egos

    We all have to eat, but do we have to obsess about it? Hell’s Kitchen is a top-ten, prime-time show, Ratatouille is teaching our kids to rhapsodize over crème brûlée, and the Food Network force-feeds us celebrity chefs 24/7. There’s a story going around about a teacher who asked her class to list words describing food and one young boy wrote, “Bam!” Supermarket delis boast bars dedicated to olives soaking in various seasoned brines and ultra-virgin oils. Don’t even get me started on Whole Foods’ organic hand-harvested herbs, artisanal gelato, and heritage livestock breeds. How did we scrape by in the days before avocado slicers and rainbow-colored peppercorns?

    This food frenzy is affecting even sane people like my husband. Although he is generous with others, he’s a skinflint with himself, refusing to accept anything but a card for birthdays and holidays. The only loophole in his anti-consumption policy is cooking gadgetry. My last few presents to him have been a diamond-edged professional sharpener, a mortar and pestle made of volcanic rock, and an Italian espresso machine covered with enough gauges and dials and switches to make it look like a little cartoon atom smasher. Our kitchen layout is more elaborate than some of the greasy spoons where I used to waitress, with a knife drawer that would be the envy of surgeons from any of the local hospitals.

    Of course, like so many others who collect gastronomical gadgetry, we’re usually too exhausted to cook dinner. So we’ll toss a pizza in our little specialized pizzeria oven—one of those suckers from Lunds, a “Chef Crafted!” morsel maybe twice the diameter of a hockey puck, dotted with baby artichokes and “rich, nutty Asiago.” It makes me feel a little rich and nutty myself.

    It’s all so precious. Kind of a new-fangled eating disorder, you know? If you had told me ten years ago that I would be eating like a deranged fashionista, I would have put down my kielbasa, wiped my greasy maw with the back of my hand and said you were nuts. Obviously, I’m still not comfortable with it. If some guy at a party tells me the pinot grigio is awfully fruity, it’s hard not to snap, “Same back at ya, Alice.”

    Nostalgia alert: reminiscences on How It Used To Be forthcoming. When I was a kid, growing up in a working-class neighborhood on St. Paul’s East Side, having a spice rack with more than four little McCormick tins was hoity-toity. Gourmets lived in France. They ate crêpes, which was funny to say, and brie, a cheese that echoed their national character by being soft, pale, and runny. Here in America, if you wanted to get creative you’d find interesting things to do with a packet of onion soup mix. The East Side word for a guy who thought a lot about food was chowhound.

    Mancini’s, on West Seventh Street in St. Paul, was the place to go for a fancy meal. It was a sprawling, bustling supper club that billed itself as a Char House and cooked your meal on giant, open charcoal grills. Anything other than beef or lobster on the menu was a misprint. This was the ’80s, but the food was unchanged from the days of tailfins and V-8 Oldsmobiles. Every neighborhood had its version of Mancini’s: Nye’s Polonaise Room, Jax Cafe, Little Jack’s, Murray’s, Caspers’ Cherokee Sirloin Rooms (“Steaks the Size of Idaho”), Lindey’s, the Manor, Kozlak’s, Jensen’s, the Hopkins House, the Carpenter’s Steak House. You’d go there for a big, burned piece of meat, demolish it, down a fishbowl of Johnny Walker, burp, and go home stuffed and content. These places were as honest and Midwestern as the Chicago stockyards.

    The restaurants that get all the attention now are image-conscious temples of hipness, frequently raided by glamour vigilantes and given makeovers to keep them up-to-date. Which leads me to wonder if today a lot of us are using food to satisfy complicated emotional cravings. Plagued by economic insecurity and status anxiety? You could take a Prozac for that, but how about a twelve-dollar duck-breast spring roll instead? As you bite into it, your mouth tells your brain, “If we can afford to eat like this, we must have no money problems whatsoever.” It’s kind of like how wearing a Ralph Lauren shirt indicates you own polo ponies. Worried about your health and the ecosystem? You can save both with organic heirloom tomatoes.

    But this behavior is placing demands on food that it can’t fulfill. Expecting a meal to cure alienation and boredom leads to mental malnutrition. Gourmets must be unhappy. They’re always on a quest for the next thrill. I’m content to remember the Embers.

  • Dans Paris

    This French comedy opens with two brothers in bed with a girl. One looks at the camera, apologizes for speaking directly to the audience, and then asks, “How would someone throw themselves off a bridge for love?” Rest assured, we’ll find out. Dans Paris (Inside Paris, not to be confused with One Night in Paris) unfolds over the course of a single day, when the would-be jumper, utterly despondent over the collapse of his marriage, returns home to live with his divorced father and hyperactive, sexed-up younger brother. .

    It is already being acclaimed as a brilliant character study, a love letter to Paris, and one of the sultriest, most complex comedies to hit our shores in many a year. 612-825-6006; www.landmarktheatres.com

  • Bridge Collapse Media Source

    Congratulations on your coverage of the tragic bridge collapse. Getting individual stories from local media was insightful.

    However, you missed one of the public’s most important media sources for information on that day. Jazz 88, KBEM, broke this story at 6:10 that night…just a few minutes after the bridge fell and provided vital traffic reports directly from the Minnesota Department of Transportation.

    That day, Susan Spongberg sat in for our regular Afternoon Cruise host Kevin O’Connor and at 6:07 she took a phone call from a panicked driver on the scene who called KBEM with the news.

    At the same time, Don Zenanko, reporting from the Regional Transportation Management Center, watched as the MNDOT camera on the bridge went dark. At 6:10, KBEM went into continuous coverage of the collapse and the traffic affected by it, immediately giving people alternatives to their normal route.

    We stayed with continuous coverage until 8, pre-empting our regular music programming with only two short breaks for weather, news and for Don to catch his breath. Don and Susan handled the situation with calm and common sense, providing virtual on-the-scene coverage. One listener told me: “After listening to KBEM, CNN’s coverage sounded like a joke.”

    The next day, and the rest of the week, we continued to provide our audience with detour routes and valuable information straight from MNDOT.

    Your coverage of the media’s response to the bridge collapse was excellent but incomplete when you failed to acknowledge the role KBEM played in providing the public with the most comprehensive coverage. Thank you for this opportunity to congratulate Susan and Don on their great work on KBEM that day.

    Michele Jansen, KBEM FM Station Manager, Minneapolis

  • Per Petterson

    It’s been a huge year for Norwegian writer Per Petterson. The acclaim for his latest novel ranged from Thomas McGuane’s front-page rave in the Times Book Review (“A gripping account of such originality as to expand the reader’s own experience of life”) to the $135,000 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

    .___________________________________________________.

    Award-winning author Richard Ford even chimed in with a ringing endorsement, and if you threw in a hosanna from Cormac McCarthy you’d have a pretty good idea of the sort of literary territory Petterson is exploring in Out Stealing Horses. It’s a quiet, spare, ruminative novel, in which the stoic protagonist wrestles with memory’s powerful undertow while enduring a sort of solitary confinement in a remote cabin. Petterson will spend a busy couple of days on the Minnesota leg of his tour, appearing as part of the Minneapolis Public Library’s Talk of the Stacks series (7 p.m.), and at the St. Olaf College Bookstore (4 p.m.) on September 28.

  • George Saunders

    An entrepreneur who sells his memories for three thousand dollars per decade, a verisimilitude inspector for a Civil War-themed amusement park, ghosts who relive their deaths every night when their son comes home from work: This is the stuff of a typical George Saunders story. What, then, happens when Saunders turns his pen to nonfiction? Consisting of essays on literature, travel, and politics, Saunders’s narratives in The Braindead Megaphone continue his explorations into the absurdities of modern life — only now his writing stems from observation. Here, his humor assumes a doleful tone, as does his subject matter. But it is undeniably real and equally intense and as disturbing as anything Saunders has conjured from his imagination.

  • Junot Diaz

    Junot Diaz’s debut collection of short stories, Drown, appeared ten years ago and drew the kind of attention usually reserved for writers with more established résumés. A big part of that was the cool intensity of the prose, which chronicled the lives of adolescent boys living in hardscrabble communities in the Dominican Republic, or transplanted to equally challenging environments in New York and New Jersey. The stories were alternately grim and funny, and Diaz never condescended, making liberal use of native dialect and slang. So enthused were editors at the New Yorker that they named Diaz one of the twenty top writers for the twenty-first century. Something happened on the way to literary superstardom, however; a novel, A Cheater’s Guide to Love, was scheduled for release in 1997, but never appeared. Perhaps The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao has been salvaged from that earlier project, but who knows. Early indications are that this debut novel—a multicultural, multilingual tale of epic bad luck—more than justifies the decade-long wait. 952-920-0633; www.bn.com

  • Denis Johnson

    Denis Johnson’s new novel — his first in nine years — continues the author’s studies of sympathy and redemption as integral parts of human physiology. Still, as in most of Johnson’s work, a feeling of desolation pervades. Set in the ’60s, each segment of Tree of Smoke: A Novel follows a year in the lives of the narrative’s several characters, all of whom are either fighting in the Vietnam War or dealing with its effects. Sympathy often comes with feeling sorry for a murderer, and redemption is found in a dive bar with air conditioning. Their various plights and salvations coalesce into a single American experience that Publishers Weekly calls “a closure [on the Vietnam War] that’s as good as we’ll ever get.”

  • Speed-the-Plow

    There is Shakespearean language, with its grand soliloquies and sonnets. And then there is the language of David Mamet, who made his name by elevating everyday speech into an art form. This fall, The Jungle Theater brings those trademark machine-gun sentences, stutters, and profanities to the stage with Speed-the-Plow.

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    Jungle Artistic Director Bain Boehlke directs this satire about a Hollywood producer who is torn between art and money when he’s given twenty-four hours to green-light either a spiritual, apocalyptic film (pitched by his gorgeous secretary) or a sex-and-violence-packed action flick (pitched by a close friend). Consider it a palate cleanser after the summer of Transformers and Spiderman 3. 612-822-7063.

  • Fashion 47

    Though she loves classics, Diane Paulus has a penchant for finding inspiration in the more theatrical aspects of pop culture. The New York City-based director recently staged Turandot in a professional wrestling ring, but she’s better known for her production of The Donkey Show, a disco adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. So it’s not surprising that fashion shows, what with all the elaborate costumes, makeup, and entrances and exits, became a recent and ripe subject for Paulus’s picking. By transplanting an ancient Japanese samurai narrative called Ronin 47 to the dog-eat-dog world of high fashion, Paulus has created a surprisingly family-friendly work in the style of Project Runway. Here’s an amusing tidbit from a production in which characters set out to out-design and out-strut one another: Instead of switching off their cell phones, theatergoers will use them, à la American Idol, to vote. Childrens Theatre, 612-874-0400.