Brad Zellar AP Photo, by Paul Battaglia I walk away happy as a clam from any baseball game that features a successfully executed suicide squeeze. It’s a great, gutsy, and increasingly rare play, and last night, with the Kansas City Royals in town (I actually heard some radio guy refer to them as the "red hot Royals"), … Read more
AP photo by Tom Olmscheid Representatives of the local sporting press —of which I am a decidedly derelict member— were packed cheek to jowl in the Herb Carneal Memorial Press Box at the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome Monday night. It was not, as you might imagine, a pretty picture. If somewhere there exists an International … Read more
Long, long ago, in the sweltering twilight of an August night roaring with cicadas and the vacuum hum of a lazy small town in retreat from the heat and the falling darkness, the yards and sidewalks abandoned for living rooms and television sets (the wobbling blue screens of which we could see through the dark, … Read more
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 … Read more
How it is that I…how is it…or, rather, why it is that I…that I seem to keep…or, really, that I do keep, that I keep ending up…that every single night I look at the clock, I look at the clock and it’s two o’clock in the morning, it’s three o’clock in the morning and I…I … Read more
I opened my electronic correspondence this morning to discover that, scattered among the many missives from such devoted readers as Floyd Whopping Cock, there were a number of notes from acquaintances calling my attention to the fact that in the pages of the Southwest Journal local media rascal David Brauer was weighing in on the … Read more
St. Paul filmmaker Ali Selim’s Sweet Land, a Minnesota-made indie labor of love that garnered critical acclaim and spawned a minor cult, was adapted from Bemidji writer Will Weaver’s 1989 short story “A Gravestone Made of Wheat.” The Rake’s Cristina Córdova will moderate the latest installment of The Talk of the Stacks series, as the … Read more
Bronx born and bred, Richard Price is arguably the country’s grittiest version of a zeitgeist Renaissance man. Following his first two novels The New York Times Book Review dubbed him “The Fonzi of Literature,” which may or may not have been intended as a compliment. But if early Price seemed like a flyweight greaseball with … Read more
Some mysterious combination of failing light, and the smell of an unrecognized plant bring back to some men the sense of childhood, and of future hope; and to others the sense of something which has been lost and nearly forgotten. –Graham Greene, The Honorary Counsul What we cannot think, we cannot think; we cannot therefore … Read more
This month marks the third anniversary of Yo Ivanhoe, and considering the similarly wasted years I spent shoveling words in a similar hole (Open All Night) at City Pages, I’m not much in the mood to celebrate five years of futility. When I first started doing this nonsense I was nothing but a clueless conscript … Read more