The Rake Magazine

Year: 2007

  • Stranger in a Strange Land

    UrbanEye, a New York Times email newsletter, is meant to be a daily
    aid in deciding “what to see, eat, do and wear in New York City.” It is
    useful for the infrequent visitor to New York to know what he is
    missing when he isn’t there. Since discovering the newsletter, I’ve
    devoured the theater and art suggestions in particular, and made notes
    in my Moleskine of what to see when I make my semi-annual sojourns.

    I pay no attention, however, to the “what-to-wear” pretensions of
    UrbanEye. Those sartorial suggestions are infrequent—and only implied
    within the gallery, theater, and music listings. I should have perhaps
    taken the hint, though, by the very fact that fashion is mentioned in
    the “sell line” for the email sign up, that how you present yourself,
    even when at leisure, is more important in New York than here. (I could
    have also picked up that idea from my daughter, who was home from New
    York for a few days during a school break recently and brushed off her
    mother’s offer to pay for a haircut with, “Mom, I get my hair cut in
    Manhattan.”)

    This insensitivity to fashion is how I ended up at the Armory Show in
    ill-fitting Nautica jeans from Costco and a faded hemp shirt I once
    bought in Duluth because I was cold and had forgotten my jacket.

    The Armory Show is an annual assemblage of art galleries from around
    the world. Art is flown in from Tokyo, Vienna, Berlin, Paris, London,
    Milan, Madrid, Tel Aviv, and San Francisco and displayed in one place
    for New York collectors to be led around by experts and told what to
    buy. (At least that’s what happens according to the Times, which ran a
    recent front-page story about an arriviste collector from Florida who
    required “introductions” to the galleries in order for them to allow
    her to spend a quarter-million dollars of her money.)

    As I walked around the show, I realized that I was indeed dressed as if
    I had originally set off for a day in the swine barn at the Minnesota
    State Fair and had somehow gotten off at LaGuardia Airport instead of
    Larpenteur Avenue. As I browsed among stylish New York men in their
    draped Italian suits or five-hundred-dollar jeans, and the
    coiffed-and-coutured women on their arms, I unintentionally began to
    focus my gaze more on the attendees in the halls than the art on the
    walls. I pulled out my notebook and scrawled a reminder about my next
    visit: “In NY, wear BLACK jeans.” As I closed the book, I looked up and
    saw coming toward me an attenuated young man in pegged black jeans and
    a skin-tight black silk turtleneck. Setting off his wardrobe were his
    goatee and fringed hair—both of which had been bleached to a degree of
    whiteness only dreamt of by Gwen Stefani—and a set of platinum dog tags
    which seemed to mark him as a brand-new second lieutenant in some fey
    ninja army.

    I opened the notebook again and added, “Put The Devil Wears Prada on Netflix list.”

  • Jade Townsend: Born Between Piss and Shit; Kristina Estell: Cover

    Despite limited hours, Art of This is becoming an important place to visit; these two very different installations show the range of the gallery. Jade Townsendis an Iowan who passed through Minneapolis at one point and now worksin New York, where his crisp and often funny-though-harrowing buildinginstallations have gotten good reviews. Razor wire, all-whiteinteriors, holes in the wall, some contradictory emotional play betweenhumor and horror: familiar stuff but interesting in person. Kristina Estell,by contrast, produces emotionally distant but evocative and sensualinstallations based on the overwhelming presence of water and rock inher current home, Duluth.

    Art of This, 3506 Nicollet Ave., Minneapolis, 612-721-4105.

  • Naked Wonder: Mark Dion, Christine Baeumler, and Eleanor McGough

    Colleen Sheehy, curator at the Weisman, put together a nature-themedshow with this Bob Dylan epigraph: “The sky cracked its poems in nakedwonder.” She chose Mark Dion’s candid deer portraits, Eleanor McGough’spaintings of natural subjects subsumed into lushly decorative patterns,and Christine Baeumler’s paintings from her recent trip to theGalapagos and the Great Barrier Reef. Sheehy chose “curator artists”:Dion has always been interested in what museums do to their subjects,the animals or art that end up in them; McGough seizes flowers,branches, cells, and proliferates their patterns, creating a decorativecontext that acts much like a museum in deracinating the subjects.Baeumler seems better able to stand back—in the past, her paintingsoften contained such patterns and grids, but these new ones seem tofind rather than seek.

    Gallery Co., 400 First Ave. N., Suite 210, Minneapolis; 612-332-5252.

  • Frida Kahlo

    On the centenary of Frida Kahlo’s birth, a comprehensiveretrospective can go a long way to rescue this tough, rich artist from her ArtHeroine Poster Grrrl status. She deserves more. Kahlo was full ofcontradictions and had moments of heroism and weakness; she had blindness,insight, and a gift for telling a story with pictures. She also hadtalent-maybe not quite enough for her desire, but that’s true of manydeservedly beloved artists: Edward Hopper and Paul Cézanne, for instance, weregiven deeper insight into the nature of the world by their own clumsiness atlevering it into paint. Kahlo shares this divine thumbiness; it helps hercreate the new and make it accessible to her fellow mortals.

    Walker Art Center, 612-375-7600.

  • RADIO (Magazine) Dials Down

    RYBAK: Word trickling out of Kenan Aksoz’s Metropolitan Media Group in Bloomington is that its newly launched RADIO magazine has encountered some static after just two issues. Kenan told me Tuesday that RADIO, which is jointly owned by Metropolitan and the radio marketing group Marketing Architects, “will be put on hold while we assess the model.”

    Kenan acknowledged that, at 100,000 copies per issue, RADIO was an ambitious launch. “The initial feedback from readers and distributors was better than expected.” However, “the advertising was a little slower to come by.” He said it wasn’t unusual to “have an initial launch, then put it on hold for a few months to re-evaluate it and then come out with a regular schedule.”

    LAMBERT: Metropolitan Media is the outfit that turns out Escape [Sun Country’s inflight magazine], Saint Paul, City South, and all those shiny suburban city magazines that come free in the mail, Edina, Woodbury, Eden Prairie, etc.. They’re all based on the notion that you and me and the celebrity-crazed housewife next door are eager for a peek at the lifestyles of famous media folk like, uh, Dan “The Common Man” Cole and — more specifically — any woman. preferably blonde, who has ever read off a TelePrompter in front of a live camera.

    While I accept the apparently inexhaustible advertiser faith in the appeal of the lifestyle magazine format, when MMG announced a monthly built exclusively on Twin Cities radio personalities, our reaction I dare say was, “WTF?” It would be an understatement to say we had doubts about market enthusiasm for a magazine focused on such a narrow media niche.

    RYBAK: I asked Kenan about that during our conversation and he readily agreed that the concept was unusual: “It’s the first of its kind.” He said the rationale was that there were only a handful of TV stations here and that they were already covered by local media. “But radio is barely covered by anybody.” Given that big TV dogs like Don Shelby have their own radio shows and that other big dogs like Jeff Passolt regularly appear on other radio shows, “they would show up in our magazine anyway.”

    LAMBERT: Still, everyone knows that once you get past Tom Barnard, Jason Lewis, Dan Barreiro and a small handful of recognizable names, the celebrity impact quotient of local radio starts to slide pretty drastically. I mean, if you’re a life-style magazine the assumption you’re selling is that the celebrities featured in your magazine have lifestyles worth envying. But the reality is that most radio jocks are working for little more than your average SuperAmerica manager. No one is going to envy their Ikea kitchenette and classic ’97 Nissan.

    That said, damn but I’d love to see the outtakes from a foo-foo lifestyle shoot at the homes of the Barreiros, or the Lewises or — my personal fantasy favorite — Joe and The Long Suffering Mrs. Soucheray. (“Joe! Joe! Joe, come up and say hello to the nice reporter!”) I’d pay for pics of the boys posing proudly in front of their new chintz drapes and overstuffed love seats.

    RYBAK: Although Kenan said that a couple salespeople were let go, the fact that RADIO editor and former WCCO-TV reporter Bridgette Bornstein still has a job would indicate that there may be some broadcast life yet left in the mag. He said a final decision could come in a week, or take a month.

    Certainly things aren’t hurting at Metropolitan, which currently publishes 20 magazines. Kenan told me that City South, which covers Southwest Minneapolis, has been so well-received that he’s bumping it from a quarterly to a monthly publication. Three other quarterlies–Burnsville, Chanhassen and St. Croix Valley–will also increase pub dates from quarterly to bi-monthly.

    So, you can smirk all you want, Brian, but damn does that lifestyle concept sell. Just think, someday Kenan might even launch a mag called BLOG and feature glossy pics of all of us at home working in our pajamas….

    LAMBERT: Hey, give ’em my number. If they’re nice I’ll strike a series of erotic poses in front of my Coleman grill and show off the couch with the dog drool down the arms.

    But my point, and I had a conversation earlier this year with the Met Media bosses, is that I don’t get their active disinterest in anything newsworthy. As is, they have a magazine consciously avoiding information. My argument was that if they spread the concept out to all Twin Cities media, rolling in the hot-shot cool kids in advertising, publishing, TV and radio, plus their well-fed bosses and balanced out the dingbat “Ooo, look at the beautiful teak crown moldings” stuff with a little news about how these people operate their magazine might make a little bigger impact.

    RYBAK: I acknowledge your point, but think the “non-newsworthy” label can be affixed to a lot more media outlets than Metropolitan. One local publisher was complaining recently that all it takes is one scintilla of un-Pollyanna like writing/reporting to scatter advertisers to competitors offering no newsworthy whatsoever, just print infotainment–interesting little nuggets that don’t hurt anybody. So, in the pursuit of the almighty advertising dollars, nobody’s doing newsworthy–let alone controversy–anymore.

    That said, I absolutely agree that a magazine that covered a variety of local media, rather than just radio, would have seemed a smarter choice.

  • Alec Soth: Dog Days, Bogotá

    One of these photos—a scruffy dog isolated in the center of theframe—appeared in passing on a web page and immediately snagged my eye.There was no attribution provided but I thought, that’s got to be Soth.And it was. Why was this goofy, tragic dog as good as a signature? Fora young guy, Soth seems to have an old guy’s emotional chops—and notjust any old guy. If you want to see Lear as a dog, or Cordelia as aghetto kid, then go see this show. You’ll be so happy you’ll cry youreyes out and go home confused—the best possible outcome for an artshow.

    Weinstein Gallery, 908 W. 46th St., Minneapolis; 612-822-1722.

  • The Staff of Life. . . .Shouldn't it be free?

    bread.jpeg

    A reader e-mailed this morning to tell us about a South Minneapolis bistro (I won’t say which one. . . .because this is a common practice) where she and a friend enjoyed their entrées but were completely put off after being charged separately for the bread — a couple paltry, obviously store-bought slices of baguette served with two foil packs of butter.

    “Our meal, with wine but no desserts, came to more than $60 for two,” she wrote. “I can understand a restaurant trying to save money by not automatically setting out a bread basket. But once you’ve ordered — at that price — shouldn’t bread be part of the deal?”

    As one of those people who rarely eats bread, I’m sometimes surprised by the number of restaurants that still do set down a bulging basket at the outset of every meal. My husband might take a slice or two, but we’ll typically send back half a loaf to be discarded (I hope!) in the kitchen.

    Personally, I agree with our reader: the best solution is for patrons who want bread to request it, so entire baskets don’t go to waste; but at a certain price point — say, $20 a head — it really should come gratis. Manna from. . . .well, you get the idea.

    Dissenters?

  • Judy Collins

    Of the two folk-pop female vocalists who broke through to massiveappeal beginning in the late ’60s, Joni Mitchell was the hippieartiste, Judy Collins the classically trained songbird. Now, atsixty-eight, Collins has taken care of her clarion soprano, deliveringup lush, conservative material ranging from children’s and Christmasfare to interpretations of Dylan and, most recently, Lennon andMcCartney. Don’t be surprised if these supper club concerts mix goldenoldies (“Someday Soon,” “Both Sides Now,” “Suzanne,” “Send in theClowns”) with more overtly political songs, plus a poignant dollop ofpersonal revelation. Collins’s own “My Father” is a career highlight,and her book about her son’s suicide, Sanity and Grace, is an honestand elegant chronicle of a harrowing episode in her life.

    Rossi’s Blue Star, 80 S. Ninth St., Minneapolis; 612-312-2828.

  • Ghostface Killah/Rakim/Brother Ali

    This is the most informative seminar on hip-hop microphone skills the Twin Cities will likely ever experience. While Biggie Smalls, Jay-Z, and KRS-One would all get some votes, Rakimis rightfully regarded as the greatest MC who ever drew breath, duemostly to his quicksilver-smooth flow and pioneering, now pervasivelyinfluential, rhyme schemes. The Wu-Tanger Ghostface Killahis a gloriously idiosyncratic word-slinger who has dropped as manyfive-star discs as Jay-Z over the past decade, without Jigga’s boorishmaterialism. And Brother Ali has pulled slightly ahead of Atmosphere’sSlug in their thrilling competition for best local rhyme slayer.Speaking of competition, we suspect that none of these three will beslacking when the potential for embarrassment by comparison is so highand nigh.

    First Avenue, 701 First Ave. N., Minneapolis, 612-338-8388.

  • Meat Puppets

    The supposedly big news is that Cris Kirkwood is back from drugaddiction and a stint in jail. But the exciting part is that older broCurt Kirkwood—the alpha talent responsible for both the blistering,psychedelic guitar explosions and the sardonic, semi-sage lyrics thatare the Pups’ signature one-two punch—has responded to the siblingreunion by spooling forth Rise to Your Knees. While perhaps not as crystalline or cow-punked as vintage classics like Meat Puppets IIfrom the ’80s, it’s a strong Meat Puppets collection from the samelineage, which augurs well for the trio (a new drummer is on board) asthey prove that contemporaries of The Replacements and The Minutemencan still raise and daze a ruckus in 2007.

    8 p.m., Varsity Theater, 1308 Fourth St. SE, Minneapolis; 612-604-0222; $15.