The Rake Magazine

Year: 2007

  • Niggling with "The War"

    Proving once again that if God himself arrived on Earth X% of the chattering classes would complain that his luminous vestments were not luminous enough, his beard had split ends, his diction was stilted and (for balance) Satan thought him intellectually lacking, the niggling over Ken Burns’ “The War” has begun.

    OK, so we’re off to a shaky start comparing Burns to God, (some of his recent interviewers have come close), but come on, is anyone out there doing better stuff on this scale anywhere in this country? The answer to that is, “No”. Personally, I locked in from the first frame last night and see no purpose in niggling, other than to bait/engender an argument. I’m a fan of Burns’ “style”, the pace, the panning, the narration, the “fiddles”. Not only doesn’t it bother me, I regard the time in frame and hours spent overall as a valuable antidote to the ADHD-pacing and “money shot” structure of way too many feature films and network documentaries. (In my opinion, Burns’ “Lewis & Clark”, which he described as a “visual valentine to the American West” is the apex of this style. Gorgeous. Hypnotic. Plug it into a plasma set.)

    I have not seen all of “The War”. (I am still trying to convince PBS that I am worthy of press screeners, even though my last name is no longer the prestigious “St. Paul Pioneer Press”). Burns has said that last night’s opener was essentially a full-length scene-setter, designed to establish the characters from the four towns he chose to build his story upon. But the nigglers are already complaining that Burns’ is treading on overly-familiar ground, hasn’t revealed anything new about WWII, or why humans fight, and is already resorting to visual cliches of repeated stock footage.

    Among the less-than-thrilled … my new co-blogger, Ms. Rybak. She of course is so much younger than me she can be forgiven for not remembering WWII. Hell, she’s such a pup she barely remembers Duran Duran.

    Since I haven’t seen the next 12 hours I’ll reserve judgment on whether Burns goes anywhere new, anywhere no filmmaker before him has ever gone, and whether he creates an epiphanic moment whereby the human affinity for war is laid bare, Dick Cheney is dragged out behind the barn and peace petals blanket the planet.

    But the Burns’ “style”, even the 14 and a half hours, he commits to these epics has the effect of a deep immersion class from the best professor on campus. You absorb his films. You LIVE in them, and the hours you spend with the rhythms and characters, especially the ground level characters he’s chosen here instead of generals and historians, provide insights and qualities “ordinary” documentarians struggle to capture, condense, condense again and and contextualize in an hour, or even more laughably, a 12-minute, “20/20” piece.

    What amuses me first is the insistence on … speed … even from middle-aged book readers, who you’d think would know better and appreciate comprehensiveness. The vibe is: WE already know about Guadalcanal, the battle of Midway and MacArthur’s screw-ups. So come on! Chop chop. Let’s get to something new or at least get to the end … faster.

    Burns has told every interviewer that he was inspired to make “The War” after reading a poll that showed a shockingly high percentage of American school children so ignorant of who fought who and why in WWII they believed the United States and Germany were allies against the Russians. (Holy shit.)

    Knowing that those people soon become voting age adults capable of being swayed by cheap demagoguery, you may, if you’re Ken Burns, decide to devote a year and a half to re-telling an oft-told tale in a different way, (going light on the politicians and admirals). But the nigglers are arguing that this is exactly what the Burns “style” is failing to engage — the imagination and attention of teenagers and twenty-somethings who have no interest in the background noise about wars of their own generation, much less their grandparents’.

    Burns has hinted he may take on the Vietnam War somewhere down the line. If the nigglers are upset that “The War” isn’t ideologically-driven enough, THAT adventure may be more provocative.

    Alessandra Stanley’s review in The New York Times hits on the notion that the film is too tightly focused on America. Really? I mean, I understand the need to find something to niggle about under deadline pressure, but this is clearly a film about the American experience of WWII. (I’d love to see a similar film from a Russian or Japanese filmmaker with access to their archives.)

    Even in the scene-setter opening I sense that Burns’ decision to speak from the perspective of GIs, flyers, sailors, nurses and relatives at home offers valuable illumination about how little the average soldier then (and probably now) cared about or followed (or even had access to) world events that drew him into the maw of war. Only the Jewish guy from Waterbury, CT. recalled having followed the ravings and fascism of Hitler with any particular interest before enlisting. Most other young men, as Minnesotan (and soon to be folk hero) Sam Hynes, says, were simply swept up into the current, often with a cartoonish notion of war and the promise of instant adulthood and an adventure far more interesting than anything they’d find at home.

    If all the “war” nigglers are really complaining about the lack of direct relation to the disaster in Iraq, I think they might be guilty of being too short-sighted and literal-minded. I’m guessing that by the time “The War” wraps next weekend, viewers who don’t demand some kind of Michael Bay-meets-Michael Moore hybrid, will have had a remarkably fulfilling experience, even without learning anything new about naval strategies at Midway.

  • Fortress Wine: Talk about focus!

    Here’s a winery on Mt. Konocti in Napa Valley’s Lake County that produces exactly ONE wine: a Sauvignon Blanc made of 100% Musque clone grapes.

    04FortessSavBlanc.jpg

    “My husband believes in doing one thing well before he moves on to something else,” said Barbara Snider, co-owner of Fortress Vineyards and — by the way — mother to Tim Snider, who happens to be vice president of the much larger Fess Parker Winery as well as the son-in-law of Fess himself. “We decided to focus on the Sauvignon Blanc until we got it just right.”

    I’d say the Sniders (senior) can start experimenting with Pinot Noir.

    Their Sauvignon Blanc 2004 is almost startlingly clean, with a nose of cucumber, citrus, and minerals, and a full flavor like a lime that’s been cut with a steel knife. The finish is bigger than you might expect; there’s even a tiny hint of vanilla in the wine’s wake. But the overall experience is one of clear, sparkling water, tart fruit, and flinty soil.

    My husband and I split a bottle last night while sitting outside on what probably was the last sultry night of the year. A perfect way to punctuate the end of summer.

  • First Thoughts on The War

    Ken Burns’ The War launched last evening. It was virtually impossible not to know this, as it had been advertised almost literally everywhere, and if you have any interest in anything that public radio or television broadcasts, you’ll have heard or seen tons of ads already. As usual, Burns is exceedingly earnest, and, as usual, The War–like The Civil War, Baseball, and Jazz before it–is being not-so-subtly billed as the definitive account of that incredible event. Unfortunately, the first episode is an unholy mess, weighed down with cliched narration and an irritating soundtrack, a confused narrative that lurches forward and stumbles back in time, and interviews that are both startling for their candor and startling for their tedium.

    I had the very great pleasure to interview dozens of World War II vets for an unpublished (and unpublishable) first novel that I wrote many years ago. As in The War, the men I spoke with were gentlemanly and brave–it is no small feat to recount such horrors, not to mention to pause mid-sentence to try to keep oneself from weeping in front of a perfect stranger. But these were the fascinating interviews: in every conflict are the men and women whose lives only marginally touched the grinding machine of war. Some of the men I spoke with (they were all Navy combatants) had enlisted at the tail end of the war and the whole of their experience was tooling around the coast of America.

    There’s nothing wrong with that–my own Grandfather Derr was drafted into the occupying Army that wandered the ruins of the far East in the wake of World War II. He had no horrors to recount, and I’m damn glad for that. My other Grandfather, Grandpa Schilling, was a medic who landed in Normandy two hours after the first soldier hit the beach on D-Day. He was haunted by that experience his whole life, and never spoke of it except to my Aunt Mary. I wish that he had seen only peace. But there were also countless people who remained at home, and many have great stories to tell about the trials of living at home during the war.

    But Burns doesn’t seem to get that there’s also a lion’s share of people whose experiences were, well… they were boring. Perhaps because he limited himself and the scope of his film to the tribulations of the citizens of four small to smallish towns in America. (Those towns are Sacramento, California; Mobile, Alabama; Waterbury, Connecticut; and Luverne, Minnesota.) For instance, Burns gives us the testimony of the man who befriended a young English kid, and we’re told that this British boy lost his dad to a German submarine, and he (the narrator) felt just awful hearing about that. Well, Mr. Burns, it is probably much more potent to have interviewed someone who actually lost their father, rather than a second hand account. There are many such discussions, usually with the same people.

    Even worse, Burns got into some trouble for initially excluding Hispanics and Native Americans from this story, which is a grievous error. So Burns tacks on a few interviews with Hispanic soldiers (after a heinous Norah Jones song that was obviously meant to close out part one.) This section is suddenly riveting, and makes it appear as if the protest were less about including Hispanics and more about making this thing actually entertaining.

    Would it have been so awful to have included a major city in The War? Why only small towns? Including, say, either Los Angeles or Detroit would have given Burns myriad sources from various cultures and first hand accounts of two of the most famous riots in history: the Zoot Suit riots of ’42 or the Detroit race riots of ’43, both of speak volumes about race and the war at home.

    The War is a diffuse effort, a film that juts and sways all over the historical map and can’t seem to find its footing. One minute you’re in Hawaii during Pearl Harbor, then you’re in Europe in 1939, then you’re back listening to an elderly woman recount how they really didn’t like Hitler in Mobile, Alabama, and you go “what?” Tom Hanks makes his appearance, narrating–they can’t make a movie about the Second World War without his participation. Too often, we get lofty speeches about what the war meant, in lieu of first hand accounts of the suffering. The old soldiers descriptions of Bataan and Pearl Harbor say so much more than you ever could, Mr. Burns.

    What The War made me yearn for was some Studs Terkel and specifically his World War II masterpiece, The Good War. The Good War is a surprising work, and its people never boring, but often shocking to the extreme. Studs knew enough to find folks from every walk of life, in the small towns and the great cities, in the halls of Washington and the ghetto. He spoke to the men and women who felt the war was justified, the downtrodden who fought despite knowing that they had their own fight for freedom back home, and the few brave souls who objected to this war and sat out. It is a crazy book, and Burns could stand to have some of the real madness that accompanies war in his epic.

  • Roll out the Red Carpet

    THEATER AWARDS
    Local Theater Awards

    907iveys.jpgThe third annual Ivey Awards — which aspires to be, roughly, something like a mini Minneapolis Tony Awards — gets underway this evening. If you’re a fan of local theater, you’ll relish the chance to see your favorite performers dressed to the nines. (Mondays are the bohemian Sundays, you know.) You’ll also get a glimpse of snippets from upcoming shows, one-minute plays, and, of course, a host of awards that recognize performers, as well as directors and designers of lighting, sets, and costumes. The theater community has regarded these young Ivey Awards with some skepticism, for certain. But now, three years later, very many theater-makers have been honored by the Iveys, and they’ve gotten the chance to bask in the limelight at this glamorous, high-production ceremony. Some have even gone so far as to give tearful speeches. And so, it seems, the actors are coming around. –Christy DeSmith

    7:30 p.m., Historic State Theater, 805 Hennepin Ave., Minneapolis; 612-673-0404; $30-$125.

    THEATER & PERFORMANCE
    Strange Love

    907strangelove.jpgThis evening Skewed Visions presents its only Monday performance of Strange Love, a two-part exploration of contemporary and historical cultures of fear. Based on Stanley Kubrick’s Cold War satire, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, this Theater All Year production features an an installation and multidisciplinary show by artists Charles Campbell and Sean Kelley-Pegg. Tonight’s guest artists will be The Body Cartography Project.

    8 p.m., Casket Arts, 681 17th Ave. N.E. (1700 Madison St.), Minneapolis; 612-201-5727.

    MUSIC
    Peter Bjorn and John

    907jpp2.jpgIn an age of drum beats looped ad nauseam, of recycled and often misused samples, of really shameful overproduction, the modest melodies laid out by this Swedish trio feel almost revolutionary. Peter Bjorn and John have been together since 1999, but were little-known stateside until their 2005 release Falling Out, which won them substantial critical acclaim and a devoted indie following. With their latest album, Writer’s Block, they have landed a mainstream audience, propelled by two songs, “Amsterdam” and “Young Folks.” These tunes are catchy but not infectious — they strike that rare balance of introspection and optimism that compels any casual listener to hum along. Lyrically intricate, musically simple, their style is at once retro and progressive — a ’60s pop feeling, underscored by contemporary crises. –Max Ross

    8 p.m., First Avenue, 701 First Ave. N., Minneapolis; 612-332-1775; $20.

    Also playing tonight are Sinead O’Connor at the Pantages Theatre and
    Loudon Wainwright III at the Cedar Cultural Center.

    FILM
    Once, Full of Light

    907once2.jpgGranted, this is a fairytale of a movie. There’s actually a scene in which the street busker and his rag-tag band are cutting a demo album while a two-year-old runs gleefully around the sound studio. I’ve had two-year-olds [three of them] and you can barely make toast when they’re around and upright. Nevertheless, this film is wonderful. It’s quirky and sad and nearly prayerful: everyone in it is visibly lifted, exalted, made more whole by the music. And, yes, the music is that good. On a strictly emotional level, Once is real. Its stars, playing simply “the guy” and “the girl” according to a script by director John Carney, are an Irish and a Czech musician (Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, respectively) whose voices simply light up our world. In the story, they sing together for the first time in an empty music shop and everyone — from the clerk, who is leaning on the counter eating a sandwich, to members of the theater audience — goes still. Listening. —Ann Bauer

    5 and 7:10 p.m., Heights Theater, 3951 Central Ave. N.E., Minneapolis; 763-788-9079; $8 (matinees $6).

  • When the rich get bored … then hungry.

    pig.JPG
    pork your pork and eat it too….

    Yuck.

    And that’s all I really have to say about that.

  • Consider the Egg


    Click here for Consider the Egg, Stephanie March’s FOOD blog.

  • Beyond the Cask


    Click here for Beyond the Cask, Ann Bauer’s WINE blog.

  • NEWS: Breaking Bread


    Click here for Breaking Bread, the FOOD NEWS blog by Jeremy Iggers and Ann Bauer.

  • Storage

    Last week we played out the deathbed scene and it wasn’t a life-changing experience, but with Dad dead my tool collection tripled. I have enough power drills to arm a framing crew, which I do in fact arm, since I run a framing crew. We’re the guys who put up the outlines of houses—braces, trusses, etc.—and then other crews come in for the interior and surface work.

    Today’s my last day off work. I took the week off for arrangements—ordering the box, funeral logistics, church reception, nodding at lawyers. Today’s my last day to get shit done around the house before going back to work, so I open the kitchen cabinet next to the dishwasher and extract all the food storage containers and pile them on the counter. I open another drawer and pull out all of the lids and pile them next to containers of various sizes from small transparent cubes to large oblong orange ones with vacuum-sealable lids for foods like brownies and nachos. Some of the containers seal in moisture while others preserve crispness.

    “Where are all the goddamn lids?” my wife always yells. “I can’t find a lid to match a container.” That’s why I’m taking care of this problem.

    I match lids to containers, and of 37 lids and 43 containers, I find only twelve matches of containers to lids, which makes my armpits suddenly burn like a gas grill and itch like mad. Just before I’m about to crash my fist into the refrigerator, my son Danny screams and I hear falling objects pound his closet floor upstairs.

    “Hey, Dad,” says my other son Alan, walking into the kitchen. “I’m going over to Kimmy’s to play XBox.”

    “Who’s Kimmy?” I say.

    “Jimmy,” he says.

    “I swear to God you said Kimmy.”

     

    Last Friday when I got to the hospital after work, I knew Dad was dying because he had scared little-child eyes, except they weren’t white and clear like kids’ eyes. They were yellowed, almost brown, because his kidney was shutting down and shit was filling his blood, and I said, “You want the baseball game on? Santana’s pitching tonight.”

    Dad mumbled through the mask that cupped his mouth and nose and pushed in and pulled out air. I couldn’t find the right TV station. Even the ICU, where terminal people went to die, had the deluxe cable package. The biggest lesson I learned from the deathbed scene: people about to die still care about what’s on TV.

    “Norty tree,” Dad said, voice limp like a wrist through the incoming and outgoing air. At his house on the lake, he got the games on channel 43. The nurse came in and said, “Lift the back of his head. I’ll take this thing off so you two can talk. You’re his son?”

    “Norty tree,” Dad said again, this time closing his eyes because of the effort.

    I reached behind his head and lifted. The back of his neck felt like fish skin hardened by sun. Dad was a roofing contractor who had half the sun’s energy stored in his neck flesh. His skin still released heat. The nurse pulled off the mask. I let his head fall back. He panted for air.

    “Santana’s pitching tonight,” I said.

    “Get ice cream,” he said. “I got chocolate and vanilla. Where’s the kids?”

    “They have chores tonight,” I said, lying. Bringing them to a deathbed scene was just too much work. I’d have to pay attention to Dad and watch the kids at the same time, make sure they didn’t start screwing with sensitive medical equipment. Also, my wife promised to watch some neighborhood kids because the parents were going to a church function and I’d worked sixty hours through Friday and was lucky to get off by five so I could see Dad, who’d been in the hospital since Wednesday. Long story short, I was tired and couldn’t deal with the kids.

    I sat on a little metal chair in the corner off the foot of Dad’s bed. He was way up high and I could just barely see his head angling down at me, his cheek flesh scrunched up as he tried to make out my shape, and I laughed at a quick thought about the Hallmark Hall of Fame ending where a sensitive son would hold his dad’s hand and whisper, “What’s it like, Dad?” And then pause. “Dying, I mean? What it’s like?” And the dad would look his son in the eyes and say, “It just feels right, son. No more pain.”

    But instead I said, as I fiddled with the remote for the TV, “You can’t get sick on me now. I have to finish that tile work behind the stove.”

    “I got the glue and grout over there,” Dad said. He pointed limply at a wall of white cabinets full of medical supplies. He thought he was at home.

    I didn’t hold his hand the way my sisters did when they came into the room later, one standing on each side of the bed and squeezing his leathery mitts over the bedrails. If I held his hand, he’d know he was dead.

    I figured out the remote control and got the game, the Twins against Tampa Bay. I wanted a more historic rival like the White Sox or the Tigers for Dad’s last game, but we got the fucking Devil Rays. Life is bullshit, and so is death. That’s also a thing I learned.

     

    Now that things have slowed—we’re done with the paperwork—I can get to projects. Before I organized the food storage containers, I’d been on the toilet reading an article in Better Homes and Gardens on how to build a backyard Japanese garden. I always read BHG, which my wife subscribes to, when I’m taking a dump. Though my next project is to wrap our two-tiered deck around the side of the house and install a recessed hot tub, I’m vacillating on putting a meditation garden there instead.

  • Taming the Lunch Line

    Decreasing student enrollment in Minneapolis, and the subsequent shuttering of some nine of its public schools, has been big news in the last couple of years. Less known, perhaps, are the pressures that have resulted at remaining schools—especially in the cafeteria. 

    For example, Whittier International Elementary in South Minneapolis is a popular selection in the state’s school-choice lottery system and thus has seen enrollment go from 350 students in 2005 to nearly 500 in 2007. With this population surge, about a hundred kids are shuffling through the cafeteria every thirty minutes—for five consecutive lunch periods. Needless to say, things can get a little wild in what is already, by tradition, one of the more lawless realms at any K-12 institution. Seeking to impose some order, Whittier officials did a very au courant thing: They outsourced the problem to a consultant.


    Nancy Burns     is a certified classroom management trainer who has coached over ten-thousand teachers in her nine-year career. But in 2001, she began scrutinizing school lunchrooms. “I would do a classroom management conference and so many questions would come up about improving the cafeteria. Obviously, there was a need to make lunchtime work better,” she said. Since developing a training curriculum called “Cafeteria 101: Setting up for Success,” Burns has fully made over three school lunchrooms and consulted on several others. As far as she knows, this petite forty-year-old is the only person in Minnesota who specializes in this area.

    “Truly, I’m passionate about cafeterias,” said Burns, even as she admits how goofy that sounds. Her zeal stems from the idea that a relatively calm, well-run lunch period has benefits that reach beyond the cafeteria. “It affects the atmosphere of an entire school,” she pointed out. “Teachers can pick up kids and dive right into learning without wasting time recovering from a madhouse feeding frenzy.”

    How does Burns keep a busy cafeteria from devolving into a scene worthy of Animal House? She takes her cues from the biggest people-moving industry on earth. “A successful lunch program is like a well-run airport,” she said. “It has clear momentum and destinations, which are provided by signage, traffic flow, and zones.” She uses the typical flight experience as an example. “A plane is a place where you expect people—the flight attendant, maybe even the pilot—to be standing in a certain place wearing a uniform. Now the cafeteria staff and student helpers wear colorful aprons with handy pockets. They know exactly where to stand within their zones and children will always know where to find them.”

    Another strategy involves colored tape. “We literally marked out the line on the floor to help children and adults know where to queue up. It’s an enormous stress reducer when there are clear guideposts to the next transition,” said Burns. “Transitions, even small ones, are difficult for young children.”

    To adults, these “transitions” are merely a list of things one does in a cafeteria—get in line, pay for your food, grab some napkins, find a table, and so on. But to young children they can be sizable hurdles, especially when you factor in the stresses from hunger (the last lunch period at Whittier is at 1:40 p.m.) and the decibel levels in a typical elementary school lunchroom. According to Burns, the trickiest of these transitions involves condiments. Just try watching a hungry third-grader as she struggles to open a mustard packet—tears might not be common but frustration will be plentiful. Or worse: “Picture the kindergarten student who navigates the line and gets her hamburger,” Burns said. “But she doesn’t realize that it doesn’t have ketchup until she sits down. Now how do your procedures accommodate her?”

    To avoid students swimming upstream against the prevailing cafeteria current like ketchup-seeking salmon, Burns emphasizes prevention—a kind of “leave no condiment behind” approach. “The system that the lunch staff liked best involved foam-board signs,” said Burns. Emphasizing that the staff, who are there every day, have the last word, she made vertical signs that each pictured one of the day’s meals at the top, along with examples of recommended condiments. “I literally Velcroed ketchup and relish packets to the signs as a visual cue,” she says. And when that plan fails? “That’s when the colored aprons with their fabulous pockets come in.” All lunch room staff and helpers carry condiments with them.

    Establishing procedures is just one part of Burns’s job; she also trains lunchroom monitors on addressing throngs of young diners and managing the various tables: a peanut-free table for those with nut allergies and a “loss of privilege” table where students are consigned for poor behavior. And finally there is a “food sharing” table for unwanted items; if a kid wants something from this table, a helper brings it to her. It sounds odd, but this set-up was established to prevent bullying. “Food cannot travel from child to child because it can lead to intimidation,” explains Burns. “We don’t want ‘gimme your cookie or else’ to ever be confused with sharing; this is just another safeguard we’ve put in to make lunch better.”