The Rake Magazine

Month: December 2007

  • moe.

    In terms of wank-out psychedelia, this Buffalo, New York-based jam band is more peyote than purple microdot: organic, smooth, and offering a slightly shorter trip than the Grateful Dead or Phish, or their friend Umphrey’s McGee. After using concert improvisations to flesh out the tunes that run like flowing ribbons through previous albums like Wormwood and The Conch, moe. cranked out their latest, Sticks and Stones (due January 22), in three weeks of recording, customizing ten songs to clock less than forty-one minutes total. But between the dual guitars and the wanton back catalogue, the new stuff should be shaggy enough to win over the self-proclaimed “moe.rons” in the audience.

    First Avenue, 612-338-8388.

  • Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis

    Ever since Wynton Marsalis seized the reins of the JLCO in the early ’90s, both the orchestra and the organization have been hallmarks of supreme scholarship and top-notch quality control in the effort to enshrine jazz as America’s classical music. The only danger was that Marsalis would smother his project with love, favoring hermetically sealed technique over goosebumps. But the theme chosen for JLCO’s twelfth tour—Duke Ellington’s love songs—banishes those worries. From “Sophisticated Lady” to “Satin Doll,” to “In a Sentimental Mood” and “I Got It Bad and That Ain’t Good,” the repertoire should set the stodgiest stick-in-the-mud all atwitter. And with a stellar fifteen-piece band—the trumpet section alone includes Ryan Kisor, Marcus Printup, Sean Jones, and Marsalis—channeling some of Duke’s most heartfelt compositions, the gig shapes up as an ideal Valentine’s date, albeit three weeks and three days early.

    Orchestra Hall, 612-371-5656.

  • Abbado Conducts Schubert

    Italian conductor Roberto Abbado knows the difference between flair and flash, or sophistication and ostentation. After a series of typically elegant performances with the Minnesota Orchestra earlier this decade, he became an artistic partner of the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra two years ago and ascended the podium for five weeks of solid Beethoven last February and early March for performances that enhanced this undeniably crowd-pleasing music with rigorous exploration. This season’s three Abbado dates concentrate on another early nineteenth century Viennese master, Franz Schubert. The program includes Schubert’s Ninth Symphony, the “Great C Major”, preceded by his Overture to Rosamunde and Kirchner’s 1960 Concerto For Violin, Cello, Ten Winds, and Percussion, featuring Steven Copes (violin) and Ronald Thomas (cello).

    Ordway Center &
    Ted Mann Concert Hall    , 651-291-1144; www.thespco.org

  • Bill Carrothers’ Armistice Band

    Jazz pianist Bill Carrothers was born in Minneapolis in 1964 and, even as a tyro getting his artistic bearings, elevated the local jazz scene with his cerebral gravitas (No one, for example, untangled the Gordian knots of altoist Lee Konitz better than Carrothers in concert.) While his best-known disc is probably Duets with drummer Bill Stewart, his masterpiece is the two-hour epic, Armistice 1918, which won the Charles Cros Award (the French equivalent of a Grammy) in 2004. It opens with the innocent pop songs of the pre-World War I era, such as “Hello Ma Baby” and “Let Me Call You Sweetheart,” and then wends through a wellspring/maelstrom of affecting originals and period-covers, brimming with impressionistic details regarding, as Carrothers put it in his liner notes, “the call to battle, separation of loved ones … night raids, rum rations … the disillusionment with ideals and finally the silence of Armistice Day.” Many of the original musicians will join Carrothers for this extraordinary U.S. premiere, including cellist Matt Turner, percussionist Jay Epstein, and vocalist Peg Carrothers. Rounding out the ensemble are bassist Jean-Philippe Viret, drummer Dre Pallemaerts, and bass clarinetist Jean-Marc Foltz.

    9 p.m., Artists’ Quarter, 408 St. Peter St., St. Paul; 651-292-1359; $15.

  • Strike Anywhere

    Not content as one of the world’s foremost cartoonists (don’t call her a graphic novelist—she loathes that designation), Marjane Satrapi has now made the leap into directing movies, starting with an animated adaptation of her highly acclaimed Persepolis. This modestly budgeted film is a brilliant hybrid of black-and-white and color, fable and memoir, at turns hilarious, deeply moving, and sad. (It is also France’s official selection for the Best Foreign Film Oscar.) The story concerns the young Marjane reminiscing about her childhood in Tehran during the transitional years between the Shah’s oppressive régime and the leadership of the equally oppressive Ayatollah Khomeini. Satrapi is gregarious and wonderfully opinionated, and also a proud smoker: the venue for our interview was changed so that she could puff away freely in her hotel room.

    You had tremendous success with both Persepolis and its followup, Persepolis 2. What made you want to make a movie?

    I always thought it was the worst idea in the world to turn Persepolis into a movie. That’s probably why we made a good one—we knew all the dangers. A friend of mine who is a producer wanted me to turn this into a picture, so I told him that I wanted it filmed in Paris, that I wanted Catherine Deneuve, I wanted it hand drawn and mostly in black and white, that I wanted this and I wanted that. And he said yes to everything! So I thought, “Shit, now I have to do it.” It was like diving into the water and realizing you can’t swim.

    Now that the results are satisfactory, of course I can invent 256 good reasons to have made Persepolis. But the reality is that there was no good reason from the beginning.

    If there’s any disappointment I had about Persepolis, it was realizing certain scenes in the book were absent from the film, great scenes. But obviously you’re not going to make a four-hour movie …

    There’s sixteen years of my life to try and condense, and so you have to choose a focus. At the time we started writing the script I was feeling very nostalgic. I hadn’t been back to Iran for five years. That’s why the movie is based on the exile. If I made Persepolis today, I would be less nostalgic and the turning point would be something else and we would have focused on some other story. It’s a question of choice.

    There was a great sequence where your father is telling a young Marjane the story of how the Shah came to power. The scene is reminiscent of puppetry …

    Yes. We had to find ways to tell the story without it being a “historical” film. I don’t have the pretension to be the historian of Iran. Whatever is about history uses these puppet-like scenes. We wanted to use different narration to communicate different things.

    You have mentioned that you are interested in the filmmaker F.W. Murnau and German Expressionism, and I noticed that some of the castles in your movie have that look of foreboding, as in Murnau’s Nosferatu.

    I wanted to take from something that moved me, that was brilliant—like Nosferatu. I can still go and watch that and feel that it is so modern, it moves me today. That movie is from 1922! If they could watch my movie in eighty years and think it was still modern, I’d be happy.

    Do you go back to Iran?

    I could go back, but then I couldn’t get out. My parents are there, and they visit me in France. Me, myself, I’d have some problem. I am not a brave one—people say what I say in Iran and they end up in jail. They write articles, not comics, and they end up in prison and tortured. I’m in Paris …

    Can you buy Persepolis in Iran?

    Yes, especially the English version. Because of course in Iran if we speak a second language it’s English, not French anymore. English is the new Esperanto, which I really like. Some people complain “Oh, this is English culture,” but this is Esperanto. Everyone can speak this language, what does it matter. It’s a good thing whether it’s English or German or Japanese, if we all speak the same language it’s a good thing.

    One of the scenes that impressed me, both in the film and the books, was where you were homeless in Vienna and calling your parents for help. You tell them, “I’ll come home but don’t ask any questions.” Obviously when they read Persepolis they found out about your sleeping in the park and almost dying—what was their reaction?

    Well, they read it in 2004 and I had left Vienna in 1988. That was sixteen years. And my mother was having a heart attack and my father was crying from this! I said to myself “Thank God I didn’t tell them sixteen years ago, they would have died!”

    This story is not just a story of your reaction to political events but a personal story of depression and heartbreak. Is this something addressed in Iran?

    Yes, absolutely. I get letters from around the world and in Iran from people telling me that I gave them hope. Adolescents especially. Of course I get notes from people telling me that this never happened, that never happened, but of course it did.

    What do you think about Iranian President Ahmadinejad claiming that there are no gays in Iran?

    If homosexuals are a symbol of a weak society then we have no strong society, because gays are everywhere. The only thing is that in some countries they are persecuted and killed and in others they’re left alone. For me, the reason some people don’t like gays is because of religion. Religion doesn’t like sex. Between a man and a woman sex is OK because you can create babies. Between gays sex is only for pleasure. That’s the same reason why we don’t show the sexuality of women that are in menopause. It is not because they are not desirable. Today many women of fifty are very desirable. The thing is, after fifty you cannot get pregnant, so if you fuck only for pleasure that is a big “No, No, No, No!” Besides, how can you not like gays?

    As a smoker, what will you do if the threatened ban in France on smoking in cafés comes through?

    I agree not every place should be a smoking place, but I’m a grown-up, leave me alone. For me, smoking is the symbol for what is going on in the world. We are focusing on the small details and hiding the misery in the world. Look at the smoker and we miss global warming, war, and the shit we eat—not the bad guys but smoking. I smoke and they talk about cancer, I eat and they talk about cholesterol, I make love, it’s AIDS. Jesus Christ, before AIDS and cholesterol and cancer there’s the pleasure of making love and eating and smoking. I have to die someday, so if the thing that gave me pleasure all of my life kills me instead of [me] going under a truck, that’s fine. Besides, why should I live so that when I die I give fresh meat to the worms? I hope that I am rotted and they don’t want to eat me. Fuck the worms.

    Speaking of gore, there’s a crazy sense of humor in your work. In the Persepolis book there’s a young man in a wheelchair who’s lost his arm and seen his friends blown to pieces, and yet he can tell a raunchy joke about a kid who was blown apart. Is this a cultural thing or just something that affects your friends and family?

    People that complain—and you see this a lot in Western society, they go to the shrink and complain—do so to the level of your sadness. It becomes unbearable. Eventually you have to laugh or become consumed by it. You have to spit it out with laughter. That was our way of doing it. I am a serious person but I don’t take life seriously. How serious can it get? I was born stupid, and the day I have enough experience to live is the day I have to die. This is crap! So you see, life is a big joke!


    Persepolis opens in the Twin Cities at the Uptown Theatre on January 18.

  • This Magazine, Martyred

    The Hart family (Brooke and Sean, along with sons Rio and Kai) of Minneapolis stumbled into an unusual situation while visiting Tanzania: A meeting with members of the Hadzabe, a nomadic hunter-gatherer tribe situated in the Yaeda Valley, was followed by a barbed exchange of sorts. The Hadzabes’s arrows won out against The Rake, Brooke Hart reported. “They aren’t literate, and so didn’t show much interest in our magazine,” she wrote. “But the Hadzabe were kind enough to take us hunting … They showed us how they made their arrows, and then taught us how to shoot. We set up a target and thought, What better way to show off The Rake than to use it for target practice!”

    The Hart family, in Tanzania
    Red Handed

  • What word do you think should be added to the dictionary?

    Editor Julie Caniglia Hingie
    Senior Editor Brad Zellar Garfong
    Assistant Editor Christy DeSmith Noneya
    Online Editor Cristina Córdova The Gooch (see Jackass the Movie)
    Art Director Evangeline Johnson Ickers
    Production Manager Lisa Pahl Obsane
    Interim Production Savior Ryan Tungseth Booch

    Contributors
    Ann Bauer Spinky
    Jeremy Iggers Freating
    Colleen Kruse Chill-axing
    Stephanie March Shyah (as in “shyah right!”)
    Oliver Nicholson A tisser (one of those annoying folk whose headphones leak nasty music on public transport)
    Britt Robson Tangtussle
    Peter Schilling, Jr. Potrzebie

    Copy Editor Katherine Lewis Gullible
    Proofreader Judy Arginteanu Elwyn Tinklenberg (to lightly dance around on your tippy-tippy-toes)

    Interns
    Danielle Cabot I’ve had enough of this car-a-mel b.s.
    Christopher Hontos Totes (abbrev. for totally)
    Kate McDonald Twerking (an intimate form of dancing)
    Tricia Towey Trill (true and real, down to earth, cool)

    Publisher Tom Bartel Schlumpfpop (which is the sound the last bit of Florida will make when it sinks under the sea)
    Associate Publisher Kristin Henning Fashionée
    Controller Cindi Barthel Yathink?
    Circulation Manager Joe Kvam Woot!

    Sales and Marketing Group
    Kela Caldwell Fantabulous
    A.J. Kiefer Ridonkulous
    Elton Langland Liberalollapalooza (an election landslide for progressives)
    Valerie Rigsbee Oi!
    Lisa Van Asten @%*#!!

    Sales Coordinator Mary Olson Weaksauce
    Online Coordinator Jennifer Havrish Tall-double-nonfat-nofoam-hazelnut-latte
    Systems Admin/Network Guru Kristopher Wilson Craptastic

  • I Like Candy

  • Jet Trash

    Every day, a hundred thousand people travel through the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport, lugging an astonishing quantity of stuff. They leave for vacations, board connecting flights, and come home from business trips. About 5,000 times a year, they leave things behind. They leave cell phones and carry-ons. They leave prayer rugs and acupuncture instruments and snow shovels. They leave rings on the edge of sinks.

    Airlines are responsible for things left in boarding areas; items left at security checkpoints are the problem of the U.S. Transportation Safety Administration. But the vast majority of lost and forgotten items, the things left in food courts and taxis and on concourses, become the responsibility of the Metropolitan Airports Commission.

    The airport lost-and-found’s one full-time employee and one part-timer have a laudable record of returning things—a one-hundred percent success rate on cell phones and nearly as high on other items that contain clues to owners’ identities. But even after a legally mandated wait of ninety days, about ten percent of the airport’s material orphans aren’t claimed.

    That stuff—fishing tackle, sleeping bags, tripods, iPods, Mason Jennings CDs, and, not long ago, a freezer of elk meat bagged in Montana—finds its way to JoAnn Brown, who has a quintessentially bureaucratic title: Purchasing Department Buyer/Seller. Armed with a digital camera and marketing expertise acquired from decades of haunting garage sales, Brown auctions it off.

    An animated, chatty woman, Brown grew up on a farm in Canby, in southwest Minnesota. She got hauled to a lot of farm auctions as a child, and it’s her opinion that surplus property disposal should be fun. That’s why she hangs onto the unclaimed goods until she can organize them into themed lots.

    “I thought about how to get people’s attention,” she explains. “I used to go to Dayton’s Jubilee Sale and the Daisy Sale and I thought, ‘These [auctions] should have names.’”

    When Brown has accumulated, say, five pieces of baseball equipment, she bundles them in a suitable piece of luggage—there are so many suitcases and duffels, the only way she can get rid of them is to use them as free packaging—and thinks up a cheerful name, like “Grand Slam,” or “Batter Up!” Her favorites are lots organized around a holiday, such as a collection of jewelry for Valentine’s Day.

    When she’s composed a lot, she noodles around on the Internet to establish minimum bids, then posts pictures on the MAC’s website, with a deadline for bidding.

    Lot Six of “Just for Fun” (minimum bid $11.10) was made up of things lost by little girls: a Bijoux Terner black purse, a Hello Kitty calculator “with auto clock,” a Hello Kitty notebook, a My Little Pony tablet, a Happy Aviator date/address book, a tube containing twelve colored pencils, a Minnesota key chain, a Bratz metal lunch box, two Swirly Girl ponytail holders, a package of Tara hair accessories, and a three-inch flying pig.

    “Playing Through” was composed mostly of golf equipment, including ten Warrior irons in a Bag Boy Ultra Light blue bag ($59.25), a burgundy bag containing right-handed clubs ($79.45) and, inexplicably, a poster with a depressing painting of a Teamsters meeting ($6.95).

    Half-finished lots wait in the purchasing department’s conference room. On a recent day, there were two stuffed penguins, a shark, and a turtle, all packed in a purple duffel and waiting for an aquatic theme to present itself. Brown had already decided on “Stress Relief” for a nylon hanging chair and an aluminum racquet—“After they exercise then they can sit and relax”—but she needed some more stuff to round out the lot.

    She’s always amazed to end up with canes and crutches: “You wonder how people get out of the airport without those.” Brown is equally astonished at the things people don’t try to reclaim—a German GPS system, for instance—and the fact that folks are still, by and large, good-hearted enough to turn in jewelry and electronics and other things they could just as easily pocket. “We get wallets belonging to elderly people, with thousands in cash sometimes, turned in intact,” she says.

    Besides the auctions, Brown also gives a lot of airport booty to charities. Books go to libraries, and there are several places she sends children’s clothes. Last fall, a bunch of kids’ coats went to flood relief organizations in southern Minnesota.

    The lost-and-found auctions bring in $30,000 to $40,000 a year, according to her supervisor, purchasing manager Don Olson, a voluble man with an office full of Thomas Kinkade paintings. That’s on top of revenue raised by selling goods the MAC no longer uses—a double-wide office trailer, a snowplow, outdated security cameras—and items seized by the airport police.

    Brown’s been holding sales for twenty years, but things have really taken off since the advent of eBay; she has developed a list of 100,000 bidders who get notices by email. Winners have to drive out to the MAC’s offices to get their loot, so she’s gotten to know some of the regulars.

    “It’s fair,” she says. “People pay what they want, and it’s local. The money stays right here.”

  • An Ocean Away

    Darfur, Minnesota, population 137, doesn’t have a newspaper or a café, but news still gets around. Ask at the bank, and they’ll show you the town’s hundred-year anniversary publication, which lists the history and members of every club, business, and family who’s been here since 1903. And if there’s important news for everyone in town, they just print it on the water bill. Still, before 2003, it’s doubtful that many people here knew that their town shared a name with a region in western Sudan. “It’s strange seeing our name on the news,” said Ione Elg, who, at eighty, has lived all her life in Darfur, about 45 miles west of Mankato. Her sentiment generally reflected that of some twenty other Darfuris who were sharing morning coffee recently at City Hall.

    Since the café closed four years ago, this daily get-together has been taking place in the large room next to the mayor’s office; someone volunteers to start the coffee, others bring treats, and there’s a basket for donations to help cover costs. Some people drive five miles just to share coffee and news. The men and women sit at different tables, each caught up in their own conversations—a separation of the sexes being at least one commonality between the two Darfurs. Elg continued: “I was surprised I’d never heard about the other Darfur before.” There were more nods. It was a little strange to refer to a place the size of Texas as “the other Darfur,” but what else would you call it?

    In the Twin Cities, where the main connection with Sudan is via the internet, the Genocide Intervention Network has raised thousands of dollars for peacekeeping efforts; last fall, that group and another nonprofit, Doctors Without Borders, each set up mock refugee camps in public parks. No such fundraisers or demonstrations were taking place in Darfur, where, as Elg pointed out, the weekly attendance at Bethlehem Lutheran is only thirty people, including three kids in Sunday school. Most residents are farmers or retired farmers. There was a drought on. They were not disconnected from news of other international conflicts—“We Support Our Troops” signs welcomed four local National Guard members, two from Darfur, recently returned from Iraq—but many people here were far more knowledgeable about the issues of their community (the new town septic tank to be installed, for example) and devoted to making it run better. Sitting in the city hall, eating homemade lemon cake, the Sudanese Darfur and its government-backed genocide felt far away indeed.

    Darfur, Minnesota reportedly got its name for that reason: “We have to go da fur?” a Swede is said to have scoffed before boarding the train. Or perhaps a railroad worker complained, “What’re we stoppin’ dere fur?”

    For those who weren’t born in Darfur, that was the general first impression. Bernie Mogler, one of the generally recognized keepers of oral history, arrived with her new husband in 1945; she recalled that if she’d had the money for a return ticket, she would have gone straight back to Connecticut. But Darfur has a way of getting inside you. The former town constable recently turned ninety, and there was a big celebration. Mogler, in her eighties, can walk nearly everywhere she needs to go. She’s never been back east.

    In Sudan, Darfur means “land of the Fur,” the largest ethnic group in the region and one of three that has been systematically terrorized. Sitting by the grain elevator in the Minnesotan Darfur, it’s hard to imagine this village being attacked by rebels on horseback or by truckloads of men armed by the government. It feels a little twisted to try to picture people walking, exhausted and starving, to Comfrey, Butterfield, Mountain Lake, or fleeing to overburdened refugee camps in South Dakota or Iowa. Meanwhile, in Sudan, the continuing devastation is visible via Amnesty International’s “Eyes on Darfur” campaign, which allows internet users to watch over at-risk villages via satellite cameras. Look up “Darfur” on Google Earth and you can click on individual villages for updated body counts and photographs of a scorched-earth policy in action.

    In a more peaceful time, it would be easy to imagine villagers in the overseas Darfur discussing topics similar to the ones bandied about over coffee here in City Hall: whether there would be enough water for crops, plans to check in on So-and-So that day, recipes, episodes of remember-when—the sort of casual, even idle conversation, in other words, that people are free to indulge in when no one is threatening their lives.