The Rake Magazine

Month: March 2008

  • Another One from the Mothballs: The Art of Indexing

    I always thought it would be interesting to attempt to tell the story of
    your life purely in index form. I tried it once, without a whole lot of
    success. I’m sure there are others out there like me, though, people for whom
    the indexes of thick biographies are often better and more fascinating reading than
    the books themselves.

    I was obsessed with indexing for a time. I acquired and pored over
    scores of books on the subject (H.B. Wheatley’s How to Make an Index from
    1902, A.L. Clarke’s Manual of Practical Indexing from 1905, Robert L.
    Collison’s Indexes and Indexing from 1959, among others). I even paid way too much money to acquire a copy of Der Index der Verbotenen Bucher (1899),
    which was in a language I do not read, and appears to have no practical bearing
    on my own interest in the subject. The great indexers are legendary obsessives.
    In 1848 a man named William F. Poole published a book called An
    Alphabetical Index to Subjects Treated in Reviews and Other Periodicals to
    Which No Indexes Have Been Published.

    In his more recent Explorations in Indexing and Abstracting, Brian
    C. O’Connor poses the single most relevant question regarding the indexer’s
    art: "Can we design systems that detect the treasure for each
    user?" Perusing indexes it’s clear that every indexer worth his or
    her salt brings to this question a deeply personal set of priorities and
    proclivities. Check it out some time; it’s fascinating to see what sorts
    of bizarre minutiae an indexer will choose to extract from a book’s tangle
    of detail and incident.

    I’ve been collecting these minutiae for years. Here’s just a small sampling
    (and I would, of course, welcome any interesting contributions you might have
    stumbled across):

    From Margaret Drabble’s Angus Wilson: A Biography:

    Fear of falling, 556, 592;
    tendency to fall, 599,
    601;     lack of sense of balance,
    603, 604;     serious fall,
    623-4;     in nursing home,
    642-3.

     

    From Gerald Clarke’s Capote: A Biography:

    Dancing of, 58, 101, 102; eavesdropping and snooping of, 180-81,
    206-7, 294;     as love life advisor,
    166, 168;     sleepwalking of,
    44;     Montalban, Ricardo,
    298.

     

    From Donald Spoto’s The Dark Side of Genius: The
    Life Of Alfred Hitchcock:

    Gastronomic Life: potatoes,
    14;     three-steak meal, 187; gulping, 412; Personal Life, Habits,
    Attitudes, and Traits:     mustache,
    95;     woman in the back of a taxi,
    162, 374, 432, 433, 531;     destruction
    of crockery, 187, 192;     interest
    in strangling, 353, 527;     spiritual
    transvestism, 432-33.

     

    From William Manchester’s Winston Churchill biography, The
    Last Lion    :

    Silk underwear for skin sensitivity, 399; national crisis while bathing, 418-19; attitude while playing polo, 241-42; skin donation to wounded soldier with Kitchener,
    283;     bricklaying, 776,
    883.

     

    From John Baxter’s Bunuel:

    Death, fascination with,
    15, 24;     menagerie, 14; obsessive punctuality, 183; orgies, participation in, 116-17; phone, hating, 295; pistols, fascination with, 202-3.

     

    From David Sweetman’s Van Gogh: His Life and His Art:

    Tooth trouble, 203, 262; wears candles in hat, 278; throws glass at Gauguin, 289; razor attack on Gauguin, 290, 306; kicks attendant, 307.

     

    From Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith’s Jackson
    Pollock: An American Saga    :

    Beguiling smile of,
    2, 4, 94, 808;     dimples of,
    2-3, 44, 161, 808;     drunken binges
    of    , 2-3, 6, 7, 117, 120, 168, 170, 197, 212-14, 247-48, 249-50, 255,
    266-67, 294-95, 296-98, 302, 306, 310-11, 314, 335-36, 359-60, 448, 449, 491,
    572, 669-71, 686, 844;     fights
    provoked by    , 6, 140-41, 145, 204, 212, 228, 247-48, 265, 267, 297,
    302, 310, 350, 481, 488-89, 498, 570, 572, 715, 755, 900;     mouth harp played by, 208, 220, 247, 833,
    834;     urinary habits of,
    50-51, 469, 478, 489, 541, 612, 671, 753, 760, 762, 770, 788, 813, 818, 867,
    876, 904;     weeping of,
    249, 297, 581, 740, 763, 770, 778, 782, 787, 901, 904;     Ives, Burl, 170, 828.

     

    From Mary Tyler Moore’s After All:

    Richie’s rescued pigeon,
    208-210;     assassination threats,
    269-71;     Blue Chip stamp collecting,
    382-83;     crossword puzzles,
    383;     Gomer Pyle, 113; hitting bottom, 349-50; mother’s addiction to pinball machines,
    12-13;     as inept liar,
    279-82;     O’Neill, Tip,
    280, 281;     Kershaw, Doug,
    236;     Busey, Gary, 207.

  • Married Life: Frustrating, Sort of Like Marriage

    Anachronistic is the best word to describe Married Life, which will be arriving at Landmark’s Edina Cinema on March 21st. The film’s frustratingly whimsical tone washes out its better, darker moments, leaving little to say about marriage.

    Based on the 1953 pulp mystery novel Five Roundabouts to Heaven,
    the film follows the relationships and ethical dilemmas presented by a
    man and his wife, a man and his mistress, a wife and her lover, and the
    rakish friend that likes the mistress. The sum of those four parts is
    supposed to be some sort of conversation about marriage, but it never
    really emerges from its pulp mystery origins. What does emerge is a
    story you’ve seen before: Man decides to kill wife to be with
    mistress. I kept waiting for the movie to offer up something new, a new
    breath of life into a tired story, but ultimately it falls short.

    The problem is rooted in the source material. Commenting on the
    reason he chose the story, writer/ producer/ director Ira Sachs
    explains, “I wanted to make a film that spoke gently and honestly about
    the complexities and intricacies of marriage and intimate life, and
    here was a plot—however outrageous it might seem—that in the end could
    do so in a way both direct and metaphoric.” Unfortunately the direction
    Mr. Sachs takes with the story, a split between whimsical and serious,
    is neither complex nor intricate, making it difficult to take the film
    seriously.

    Mr. Sacks also thinks you’re an idiot. There is a constant, droning
    voice-over during the entire movie, and the characters are shallow and
    poorly developed. With only the slightest provocation they spout off
    their entire life stories, discussing relationships and feelings with
    the clumsy hands of the screen writer pulling the strings in abrupt,
    jerky motions.

    The uncommonly talented cast does a lot to calm the uneven
    writing. Chris Cooper, the pain and disillusionment fused into every
    pore, delivers the sort of nuanced performance that we’ve come to
    expect from him. Rachel McAdams is similarly able to shock a semblance
    of life into Kay, the thinly written object of affection for both
    leading men.

    The acting makes the darker moments of the film resonate, but it
    hits so many bad notes with its thin plot and whimsical execution that
    it’s difficult to take seriously. Ultimately the film neither chills,
    nor comments on marriage at all, but simply wilts away in mediocrity.

  • The Tao of Puerh

    I’ve been hanging out lately at a great little place called Fireroast Mountain Cafe, which besides having wonderful soups, sandwiches, and pastries, serves a perfectly brewed cup of Puerh, which is a rare and wonderful thing.

    A fermented tea that contains microbes — like yogurt of kefir —Puerh has an earthy, amber, slightly caramel flavor. Perfect with a touch of honey. And according to experts going back to the Eastern Han Dynasty, it offers a myriad of health benefits, too. Puerh is said to cleanse the blood and aid in digestion, lowering LDL cholesterol, canceling out the effects of alcohol, and boosting the metabolism. Some people even claim it helps them feel better immediately after a heavy, greasy meal, acting as both fat blocker and antacid.

    I have no idea if any of this is true. What I do know is that Puerh makes me feel good, and it’s rich enough to be a decent substitute for that cup of espresso I crave around 2 o’clock every afternoon.

    The key to making this and other varieties of tea, however, is to get the water temperature and ratio of leaves just right. Black tea, for instance, should be made with water that’s just off the boil and steeped for five minutes; green with water that’s about 10 degrees cooler — e.g. the stuff that comes out of those red-spigoted hot water taps — and steeped for no more than three.

    Puerh, on the other hand, cannot be overcooked. You make it with water that’s at a roiling boil and let it steep forever. . . .10 minutes or so. The key is to use only a teaspoon of leaves, or it can become overpoweringly thick.

    I’ve looked for this tea on the shelves of every grocery store I’ve visited for the past month, but it’s simply not available. Lunds carries everything from infused green to Indian chai to maté, but there is, apparently, only a very small retail market for Puerh. The only place in town I’ve found to buy it in bulk is Tea Source.

    I’m generally unimpressed by the studies touting the health benefits of various foods. But evidence that goes back 2,200 years will tend to sway me. And just to test the veracity of the claims, I recently consumed a large and meaty meal, then drank a cup of carefully prepared Puerh. And while I doubt it completely eliminated the roasted pork, brie, dark chocolate, and heavy cream from my system, I must say, I went to bed feeling amazingly good.

    Those ancient Chinese emperors? I think they were onto something.

  • Born From Jets. A Saab Story.

    (Pictured: The tiny "Ursaab" 92001 which reminds me of a small plane stepped on by an elephant.)

    I give to you, again, a post from Kurt Nelson, skier, writer, road pilot, with a few thoughts on automotive flight:

    Born from Jets: You have all seen the advertising for Saab,
    touting their long heritage in aeronautics and airplane history. Well, this is not really a jet story, but it
    does involve a Saab leaving the ground, so I guess Born from Jets is accurate. Saab was started as an aeronautics company,
    and in the mid 1940s a group of their engineers decided to build a car, which
    resulted in the Saab 92001 or “Ursaab” and the rest is history.

     

    (Pictured: A jet fighter plane in the SAAB Museum, and we all thought Swedes were pacifists.)

    I have had the happy occasion of getting my Saab off the
    ground a number of times over the years, but it was the first time that evokes
    such good memories and makes me continue to look for places to launch.

    A few years ago, my wife and I bought some property in
    Northwest Wisconsin, a very rural area, with great roads, ribbons of blacktop
    that stretch for miles and undulate with the local terrain, over peat bogs and
    thru white pine forests. Where most people just see a road to their cabin, I
    see roads that beckon for me to put my car to the test. It is in that spirit that this story comes.

    Driving alone one morning to go for a mountain bike ride, I
    went past our normal access road, looking for another entry into the
    forest. The road had a large dip, one
    with a steep upside and a flat entry or landing depending on your point of
    view. My immediate thought was, hey, I
    could probably get my car off the ground if I try; and being one who likes to
    try, I gave it a shot.

    I turned around and started into the approach again, but
    with a little more urgency, in fact I
    was giving it thru 3 gears, up to about
    80mph, I rode up the steep side, and launched at the apex, now this was not 3
    feet off the ground, more like all 4 wheels left the pavement for a time, I
    landed softly, but In my usual doubting way I thought, did I really leave terra
    firma, or was this just hopeful thinking.
    I turned around and tried it again.
    This time I hit the steep side at 90, and this time I heard the wheels
    spinning and engine revving as I left the pavement, so I knew that I had
    succeeded in getting weightless albeit for a brief instant.

    A couple of weeks later my wife and I were going to spend
    the day at the property hiking and maybe a mountain bike ride, with a
    picnic. Knowing full well that I was going to let her in on the fun. I approached the dip, and rather than tell
    her what was going to happen I just got on the go peddle, getting the tires to
    chirp in 3 gears. We hit the dip at 90,
    and launched, all the while she was
    laughing with child like joy, and enthusiasm.

    Not only did we get off the ground, we did it twice so I could hear that
    laughter again. how you approach it, and for me and my car born from
    jets, getting in the air is an appropriate nod to heritage.

  • The Three Pointer: Power Outage

    Copyright 2007 NBAE (Photo by David Liam Kyle/NBAE via Getty Images)


    Game #57, Road Game #27: Minnesota 84, Cleveland 92

    Season Record: 12-45

    1. The Price of Youth

    What a discouraging game.

    Wanna bet that the Cavaliers had a scout at Target Center for the Wolves win over Utah last Tuesday? Coach Mike Brown seemed to set his stellar defense for a team that would deftly move the ball and present probing, multifaceted threats. In particular, Brown, thinking he had 20-point scorers like Foye, McCants and Gomes to worry about, decided to single-cover Al Jefferson with the Luthuanian leviathan known as Z, and let tall, panther-quick cohorts like Ben Wallace and LeBron James scout the horizon beyond the paint.

    That was fine with Jefferson, who was enjoying the elbow room even before Z (surname Ilgauskas) committed one stupid foul by going over the back on a free throw miss, and then another one showing too hard on a perimeter pick and roll in the first six minutes of play. That sent him to the pine, to be replaced by Anderson Varejao, a Raggedy Andy-headed string-bean quite the opposite of the bald Z. He promptly got flattened (half shoulder, half patented Varejao fffflop) for a Jefferson slam. Brown understandably flipped Varejao over to Gomes and so it was Ben Wallace’s turn to guard Jefferson. By the half, Jefferson had hit half of his 16 field goal attempts for 18 points and 5 offensive rebounds (out of 7 total) at intermission.

    Alas, the rest of the team also had 18 points, on horrendous 7-30 FG. The ball movement and constant stabs at penetration–not to mention the silky, visually pleasant teamwork–so much in evidence against Utah was kaput, with a capital dipthong. Just a few quarters beyond his breakout game against the Jazz, Randy Foye broke back in, displaying all the bad habits that caused me to sour on him earlier this season– the ill-chosen, off-balance jumpers early in the shot clock, the running alongside of his opponent’s dribble so he can he can get a better profile on the man’s successful jumper, and the lazy entry passes that, while not usually stolen, certainly give defenses the time to cogitate and react.

    Hopefully the offensive gameplan was for Ryan Gomes to exploit the smallball matchup and take Ben Wallace out on the perimeter, the only justification I can come up with for the normally prudent Gomes chucking it up like the second coming of Rashad McCants, at 2-7 FG in 11:04. Speak of the devil, Shaddy checked in with 2:41 to play in the first quarter and managed to squeeze off three before the buzzer, then added three more in 8:41 of the second quarter. Three and three make six shot attempts and six misses for zero points in 11:22 first half minutes. Foye? Zip for three but a literal bonus point for being allowed to shoot the technical on a defensive three-second call against Cleveland, and thus transform his halftime goose egg into a straight line. After his first quarter delirium, Gomes came back to earth with but one clank in the second, and thus finished the half with 4 points on 2-8. For those of you slow with the abaci (abacuses?), that’s a collective 2-17 FG and a whopping 5 points from the squad’s second, third, and fouth leading scorers in the first half–and because of shot selection and general disdain for the first pass, let alone the extra pass, they collectively deserved almost every miss.

    This is what happens with a young ballclub. They play well and then they don’t, learning painful lessons on the job. Coach Randy Wittman addressed this after the Toronto loss Wednesday, but it is typical young club behavior, the habit of relaxing after a grand victory. The vexing aspect of it was not so much Toronto, however, but this game, after their Canadian clubbing theoretically taught them the error of instant self-regard. They had the contrast–fun and bloody games a la Utah, or belittling suffocation a la Toronto. The irksome thing is that they mentally opted for another bout of belittling suffocation, this time in Cleveland.

    At the half, Hanny and Pete were marvelling about how nice it was to shoot only 32.6% and yet be down a mere four points at 36-40. But from the time the Cavs’ Devin Brown opened the game by waltzing down for an easy jumper and Randy Foye followed that matador D with a travel, until the time McCants rang the garbage time dinner bell by nailing his 4th quarter treys, there was not a single moment when I seriously thought the Wolves were going to win this game.

    In the second half, Mike Brown took a gander at the stat sheet and decided Big Al needed a double team after all. With Z and Big Ben–and isn’t it ironic that Z is much bigger than both Big Al and Big Ben?–taking turns as the primary matchup and sometimes tag-teaming, with a little guy flashing over to boot, Jefferson had 4 points and 3 boards in 20:36 of the second half after going 18-7 in 20:39 of the first half. With all this attention focused on the undersized center, the undersized power forward, Gomes, managed to sneak outside for a 7-point flurry in 71 seconds to knot the game up at 51-51 midway through the third quarter. But by the end of the third Foye and McCants were a combined 1-14 FG and the Wolves were back down by 7.

    When it was mercifully over, Foye was 1-9 FG for 4 points, two assists, and three turnovers in 33:32, not a good line for a point guard or off guard, even one given a fistful of free passes for making a ginger transition from one-and-a-half to two good knees. McCants had a totally deceptive double-digit night–six of his ten points came on meaningless three-pointers in the final minute of play–but to his (small) credit he did register a team-high 3 assists while finishing sixth in minutes-played at 27:37.

    With just 1:22 to go in the game, the Wolves had amassed but 75 points and visited the free throw line 10 times. For the game they shot 39.1%. Young players or not, it is worrisome that the ballclub, which ranks 29th among 30 NBA teams in points scored per game, can be so inept offensively despite the fact that three players perceived to be cornerstones–Jefferson, Foye, and to a slightly lesser extent McCants–are all much better offensively than they are on defense.

    2. Management Follies

    About the only good thing about owner Glen Taylor’s halftime "interview" with Tom Hanneman tonight was that it spared us the cheerleader report and Sweetwater Jones. As infomerical entertainments go, it was somewhere between the Victoria Principal/Susan Lucci testimonials and the somewhat clownish guy walking around with all those question marks on his suitjacket. Actually the latter wouldn’t be a bad analogy for the current state of the Wolves.

    Taylor let it be known that he is really enjoying this team, especially compared to the underachieving teams of the previous two years. He knows, in other words, that this 12-45 team is not underachieving, but likes the job coach Randy Wittman is doing–Kevin McHale and the rest of the front office are not discussed. He says he has many people telling him and writing him that they like this team better than other recent editions too, and would like to invite still other folks to come out and decide for themselves. And, oh yeah, the new Timberwolves season ticket packages for next year are about to go on sale soon. If Taylor was this subtle in his wedding invitation business, the fancy, script-flowing marital announcements would go out complete with a picture of a the father of the bride holding a shotgun between the groom’s shoulder blades.

    In very much related news, the Wolves have bought out the contract of Theo Ratliff and would very much like to do the same with Antoine Walker. The spin that dumping Ratliff will open up more playing time for rookie Chris Richard is about as disingenuous as the earlier spin that Ratliff’s
    return would enable the Wolves to see how well Al Jefferson plays with a shot-blocking center. Richard got a whole 3:21 worth of burn tonight (his plus +1 led the team, of course), which is approximately how much Ratliff and Jefferson played together after Theo’s return.

    For quite some time now, it has been apparent that Wittman prefers Jefferson at center and Gomes at power forward. Smallball. Game by game, it has worked out much better than I would have imagined. Tonight, for example, the shrunken banshee lineup battled to a 40-40 draw on the boards with the top rebounding team in the NBA. Wittman likes to spread the floor with his small unit and give Jefferson room to operate down low. He also likes the other players utilizing this spacing and their quickness to crash the boards and outhustle as much as outmuscle opponents for position under the hoop. Perhaps this lineup is giving Jefferson experience getting his shot off against the tall timber, and hopefully learning how to survey the floor and dish back out when teams pack the paint to defend him.

    But I can’t embrace it. Anyone who watches Jefferson knows he’s a classic power forward that, even by the standards of the "new" NBA, with its paucity of dominant big men and anti-hand checking rules, is best suited to operate beside a center precisely like Ratliff, who can help out on defense, is laterally quick around the hoop, sets a good example by showing hard on peimeter pick and rolls and doesn’t need the ball. Even if we all know Ratliff wasn’t part of the future here, isn’t that kind of pivot man something this franchise should be manuevering towards? Shouldn’t we get Jefferson and Gomes ingrained in those habits now, in their formative stages? Do we really need Jefferson playing 69% of the center minutes for this ballclub and just 5% of the power forward’s minutes? (According to the 82games.com web data.) And do we really need the Wolves’ 8 most popular 5-man lineups to feature Jefferson as the center–especially when the most popular 5-man lineup that doesn’t feature Jefferson as a cetner puts Mark Madsen in the pivot instead?

    Perhaps there is guerrilla tanking going on here. A Timberwolves team with Jefferson and Ratliff playing beside each other for most of the season would be very close to 20 wins by now, in my opinion, which would vault them ahead of another five teams in addition to Miami. Perhaps that’s a little too close for comfort on losing that Clips’ pick this year for the Jaric deal.

    Then there is the money angle. Taylor himself acknowledged (in the newspaper, of course, not the infomercial) that the buyout would save him a chunk of the remainder of Theo’s $11 million contract this year–on the order of the $3 million or so that he had remaining. Meanwhile, consider that Ratliff has missed 45 games–officially more than half of an 82-game regular season. Consider that with his injury history there is a possibility that he is insured against loss of play due to injury. When I tentatively asked around, through a member of the communications staff, about whether the Wolves were getting any insurance money due to Ratliff’s injury, the staffer reported back that he couldn’t find out. Now that Ratliff is gone, I’ll be a little more aggressive and ask the question myself to Taylor or GM Jim Stack or some other team representative. And I wouldn’t mind if a daily beat writer traveling with the team beat me to it.

    3. Silver Linings

    Not all is amiss and awry in Wolves land tonight, and amid all the dolor, I thought I’d save the best for last. First off, Sebastian Telfair has begun to improve his shot much as he hiked up his court vision and sense of command in prior months. For the past 8 games, Bassy has shot 48%, (12-25) from beyond the arc. He has scored in double figures in 6 of those 8 games, along with running the offense far better than Foye or Jaric or McCants in terms of pace and proactive passing. Let’s face it, he’s the only point guard on the roster. That said, I wouldn’t go so far as to label Telfair a reliable shooter. Tonight, after hitting some big shots in the 3rd quarter and clearly establishing himself as the second-best Timberwolf behind Jefferson, he got a little too happy with himself and clanged a pair of stupid shots that were crucial to helping the Cavs pull away. On the second of these, McCants was literally pointing down toward Jefferson in the paint as Telfair drew iron with a trey. I understand Bassy is feeling–and sort of thriving on–the heat of competition for playing time with Foye, McCants and Jaric (the current short straw man, logging just 6:26 tonight). But excitability is his enemy.

    By contrast, Corey Brewer seems forever excited and unruffled at the same time. The rook’s work on LeBron James tonight was as staunch as one could hope for against a player who wound up with 30 points and 13 assists.(And if we’re talking about real silver linings, that would go to everyone lucky enough to see James’s monster dunk midway through the fourth quarter, when he tried to thread his way through two or three Wolves and stumbled around the foul line, losing the ball a little out in front of him, only to grab it as he stumbled a bit and rise up with literally incredible speed and elevation to slam it home. "That is a different look than anything I have ever seen in my life!" Petersen claimed, rightly going batshit. "TV doesn’t do it justice." Perhaps, but even on TV it looked like somebody hitting the fast forward button on a dude who disappares behind players for a second only to emerge as if jumping on a trampoline to slam it home.)

    Whatever is said about Brewer, and I’ve been pro and con, the guy is dogged and he plays the game like he’s memorized the handbook. Tonight he racked up 15 points (5-10 FG) and 4 steals, but it was his simple foot movement and determination to stay in front of LeBron that was most impressive. Meanwhile, if you want a half full/empty glass, think about how shrewd Brewer’s shot selection is–the ex-Gator almost never shoots outside the flow and rhythm of the offense and hustles hard enough to put himself in many great positions to score. Now consider that despite taking such an inordinately high percentage of good shots, Brewer is still making less than 35% of them. Blame it on his youth, and cross your fingers.