Author: Joe Pastoor

You’ve seen them: the new passenger vehicles with pickup truck beds sprouting from their behinds. The Subaru Baja, the Chevrolet Avalanche, the Cadillac Escalade EXT. An automotive slice of the 70s slid into this century, along with the bell-bottoms and halter-tops. Avacado-colored refrigerators can’t be far off. But can any of these freshly minted sleds accept the mantle of the defunct, classic, koan-like El Camino?

Actually, the laughable-yet-venerable Chevrolet El Camino was itself a knockoff. Ford was first with the Ranchero, a short, boxy coupe in the front with a pickup bed on the back, launched in the 1957 model year. With the cat-like agility for which Detroit was then known, General Motors had a copy in showrooms by 1959. Ranchero production ended in 1979 around a half-million cars (or are they trucks?), but El Camino the imitator kept going for nearly a decade more, delivering more than a million vehicles to customers bewitched by the car/truck enigma.

Now, more than 15 years after the last El Camino rolled off the line, General Motors has treated the public to the spectacle of the Cadillac Escalade EXT waddling down the street, wagging its stubby little tail of a pickup bed. I called General Motors to see if they could tell me how this self-inflicted caricature of a truck came to pass. But first, I wanted to find out if there was any truth to the rumor that Chevy was bringing back the real El Camino.

“To be honest with you, I’ve not heard anything like that,” said GM spokesman Tom Beaman from the bucket seat of his Pontiac, Michigan, office. “I’ve not heard that rumor.”

In the interest of full disclosure, readers should know that I started this rumor myself. But what’s going on with all these SUVs with truck boxes stuck on the end, I asked Beaman? It turned out to be about mulch. “We call it the ‘family tree,’” he explained, “and it all springs from the basic full-sized truck architecture.” He went on to elaborate about the many lifestyles that can be accommodated by mating different configurations with one basic truck frame. “You want to be able to take five people across the country on a family vacation, but when you get back you want to be able to get mulch and peat moss and stuff like that in the back. An Escalade buyer often times, honestly, they may not put anything in the back. But it’s good to know that it’s there if they want to use it.

Subaru spokesman Rob Moran was much more definite about who’s supposed to be driving their little mutant Baja. “What’s different about our customers is that they are more inclined to outdoor activities. Things like mountain biking, kayaking, outdoor sports, climbing, that kind of thing.” In other words, GenXers are supposed to be walking out of Mountain Dew commercials in droves to shell out more than $20K for this little buggy. Might it also be the spiritual heir of the El Camino, I asked?

“I don’t think so.” Moran pointed out the four seats and some distant Subaru ancestry in the Brat, a truckish little unibody that Subaru smuggled under the chicken tax into the American market in the 70s.

But the lower, cuter, car-like profile of the Baja left a persistent afterimage in my head of the original ugly ducklings of those bygone days. I found a guy with a lovingly restored 1972 Ford Ranchero. Joe Anton, an amiable General Mills machinist, kindly agreed to drive with me to a Subaru lot and park it next to a Baja to see if they would resonate on the same frequency. Side by side, they looked like an unlikely pair. But whatever hooked this guy on the Ranchero was, in some form, present in the Baja. “This thing is so cute,” he said to Morrie’s Subaru General Manager Charlie Rassouli, who had generously provided the Baja for this experiment. “When I see one of these, the first thing I think, is ‘I want one!’” This, of course, makes perfect ad copy and could not have been planned better. Joe did not, however, offer his coveted Ranchero for trade.

I asked Charlie who is actually buying the Baja from him. Is it a Gen-X car for extreme sportster dudes? “I would say the demographic right now is older than that. We’re finding a lot of part-time gardeners and things like that,” said Charlie. Mulch again.—Joe Pastoor

It’s not often that someone reads the Gastronomer’s mind; it’s more likely that someone will read The Rake, if that tells you anything. But a fit of Weltschmerz left me unable to decide what to eat one recent evening, and lucky for me it was a Tuesday, and the psychic Ruth Jordan was at Santorini, a Greek restaurant in St. Louis Park. I drove on over, explained my situation, and she kindly offered to help. At 55, she’s dashing, slim, and disarmingly candid.

“I see you are obese,” she observed right away, before she even read my palm. When I sat down at her table, she went into more detail. Ruth explored a miniscule bump in the palm of my right hand with her thumb and discovered self-esteem issues in my past, and a current need for my wife and I to have another baby. “Actually, that’s a piece of glass that’s been lodged under the skin right there for years,” I told her.

“I wish it was, but it’s a little girl that your wife wants. She’s ready to raise another baby.” Well, maybe she is. But I was ready for something to eat. Could Ruth forecast what I would order? “No,” she said. “I’m not going to forecast what you would choose. I’m going to forecast what you would like.” So I decided to have Ruth order for me.

Having divined that I had snacked recently, Ruth went with an appetizer plate. At a glance, it looked like two strikes against her; there are few things in the world I dislike more than eggplant and red caviar, and this plate featured both. A third strike came when she had the waitress fetch a glass of Nema, a red wine from Corinth. Apparently, she had not received the Retsina-seeking wavelength I had been transmitting since I walked in. But when the plate arrived, I found that the caviar had been whipped with a smooth cheese-spread topped with capers. It was salty and smooth and went nicely on the cucumber and pita wedges served with it. Next to this, I found a generous scoop of feta spread, a favorite of mine wherever it can be found. The Nema turned out to be another pleasant surprise. Light bodied, a little fruity on top with a tannic finish, it washed the cheeses down perfectly.

The next thing that happened made me suspect that not only had Ruth chosen well, but that she was also exerting some sort of occult influence on me. I kept involuntarily snagging my little wedges of pita in the repulsive-looking eggplant spread. I liked it. It balanced the richness of the cheese and gave the wine another nice counterpoint. Ruth’s psychic power was the only explanation, and with a second glass of Nema I became a believer, at least regarding affairs of the stomach. Another daughter, though? Not telling. Just keep your eyes peeled for Mpls.St.Paul’s cover story on food critics’ babies.—Joe Pastoor

At the 2002 State Fair, the Minnesota Pork Producers Association unveiled a catchy new slogan: “Today’s Pork: Created With Enduring Values.” Ever curious, the Gastronomer asked a representative if these might be, specifically, Christian values. According to Muslim values, of course, pork is “haram”—not allowed. To Jews, pork is “treyf,” or not kosher.

“Rural values,” was the artful reply to my query. Of course, this could amount to the same thing. The vast majority of the 2.2 million Muslims and 5.8 million Jews in America are city slickers. Issues of social tolerance doubtless play a role in this, but the proliferation of five-million-gallon hog manure lagoons across the Minnesota countryside might also be a contributing factor.

So when a rabbi was spotted in February near Thief River Falls, it made the news in a big way. A tanker of kosher canola oil had overturned, and the press, as usual, found it very much fer cute that a little guy with earlocks showed up to wave a blessing over the process of transferring the oil to another kosher tanker. The rabbi was really just verifying that the transfer equipment wasn’t contaminated with non-kosher products.

The dietary rules for Muslims don’t make the news as often, despite a large local market for halal products. The Holy Land market and deli on Central Avenue in northeast Minneapolis does a bustling trade in halal goat, lamb, beef, and poultry, as do the Cedar Bakery and Deli and several other metro outfits serving the local Muslim community. While there are significant differences in practice, halal regulations and kosher laws share the same basic foundation, says Iman Ghazalla of the Arab-American Cultural Institute in Edina. Each custom forbids consumption of insects, amphibians, reptiles, birds of prey, pigs, dogs, donkeys, or any carnivorous animal.

Also similar to kosher custom, halal products are subject to certification. Al Safa Halal in El Paso, Texas, certifies most halal products in the Midwest. While their tagline “Hand Slaughtered by a Muslim” may give pause to some, their mission of “Extending the benefits of Islamic dietary laws to Muslims and non-Muslims alike” is a worthy goal, according to Holy Land market staffer Amber Essaid. Both halal and kosher slaughter are more sanitary, more humane, and involve more thorough bleeding of meat than the average factory practices. Essaid says this satisfies more than a spiritual necessity; it’s simply better quality. “You have to taste it,” she commanded. “There’s no comparison.” Whether a halal chicken might taste different than a kosher one, we’ll keep you posted.—Joe Pastoor

Alan Ralston started collecting De Sotos in the mid-80s, including the white wagon with a 361 parked in the front of his shop, one of two street-worthy sleds he has so far restored from his fleet of nine or ten. In back, one of the Fireflites holds an intact Torsion-Aire suspension.

“I would have been eight years old in 1959, and when you’re a boy you’re always dreaming about driving a car. One of the most appealing things about a De Soto is that it has a push-button transmission. An eight-year-old doesn’t know how to shift gears, so we dreamed about driving cars like this and shifting the gears by pushing the push-buttons.”

Ralston’s collection is stored in a downtown Mendota building that once held a U.S. post office, Ernie’s Liquors, and finally a thriving indoor marijuana farm. After the farm was shut down, Ralston bought it from the feds in 1992. “I’ve put a home in the upstairs for my wife and me. I live here,” he said, when I found him at work in the shop the other day. The south end of the building is in various stages of restoration as the energetic man gradually builds a garage for his push-button 59s. He plans to restore all those cars after he retires from his job as a flight operations programmer at Northwest Airlines.

About a year and a half ago, someone started pushing Ralston’s buttons. It started on September 11, 2001. “I was so upset that I came home. What I was doing is, I had my American flag out and I was waving it on the sidewalk and saluting people and just trying to get support for the United States ’cause I was very saddened by what happened to us. And then I made a little poster that said ‘revenge,’ and I taped that up to the side of the wall in the front.”

The next day, a passerby was upset by this message. A woman driving a maroon Buick stopped her car. “She actually came in, and I was up on the scaffolding, and she said, ‘Did you put that sign up on the side of the building?’ and I said, ‘Yes, I did,’ and she said, ‘You really shouldn’t feel that way. You shouldn’t think that way.’ And I said, ‘The last time I checked, it’s a free country and we can think and we can say what we want, including you.’

“I got up the next morning, and my flag had been stolen off the side of the building, along with my poster.” Admitting he has “nothing to prove it,” he nonetheless feels certain that the woman in the maroon Buick was behind this and other acts of vandalism that followed.

When the first flag was stolen, he put a reinforced flagpole bracket higher up on the building. A motivated vandal threw a rope over it to pull it down. Ralston responded with guy wires anchored into the masonry to support the pole. And, of course, he has famously exercised his First Amendment rights in paint on the front of the building:

To those who stole my flag and poster: You cannot silence my speech or diminish my love for the United States. With resolve and might we will defeat our enemies. Alan L. Ralston, citizen soldier 9/17/2001.

GOD BLESS AMERICA

This bracket was not bent by the wind! Those who continue to be intolerant of my First Amendment rights, please be advised that I exercise my Second Amendment rights with equal fervor. Alan L. Ralston 9/9/2002.

Since adding that second warning, the vandalism has stopped. But he thinks he knows why his messages disturb some people.

“I think there’s a lot of people who don’t support the United States. They feel America is always wrong no matter what we do. And they can’t stand anyone who loves the country and supports the country and demonstrates patriotism.

“I find it interesting that even a year and a half later, people drive by and they stop across the street and they read it. And you see people come out and take pictures of it. I think that’s nice.” Eventually, the messages will be painted over as Ralston restores the rest of the building. He thinks he might have a public ceremony when the time comes.—Joe Pastoor

When Joel and Ethan Coen made Fargo and gave the world a generous serving of the rounded, marbles-in-the-mouth outstate Minnesota accent, it seemed a little over the top. But we all knew it was out there. Just 20 minutes of any WCCO-AM call-in show will prove it. Even those of us in the metro have the long O and the hard R, though we think we talk like newscasters.

Of course, we’re always adding to the mix. Norm Coleman, a New Jersey native, brought us vowels that sounded, oddly, sort of South Boston. First he told us, “I wanna be yah Mayah,” then “I wanna be yah Govenah,” and finally, “I wanna be yah Senatah.” With his thumb ever poised for action, there will doubtless be more of these announcements, but that’s a different story. More recently, Coleman has turned his Southie accent against one of his own party, scolding State Representative Arlon Lindner. He is the Corcoran legislator who has lately brought shame on the state with language that sounds more like Deliverance than Grumpy Old Men.

Coming from a guy who represents a district just outside the 494/694 beltway, Lindner’s twangy drawl has been just as startling as the content of his speech. To find out how this dialect might have emerged on the edge of the prairie, we turned to the late Harold Allen, who painstakingly mapped Minnesota speech patterns for a masterpiece of research titled The Linguistic Atlas of the Upper Midwest. Samples taken near Lindner’s congressional district (32A) found farmers with “speech of moderate tempo, with unusually distinct articulation of emphasized words. Deliberate, even-tempered, carefully articulated speech. No special peculiarities.” Hard to see where Arlon Wayne Lindner fits in there.

But maybe things have changed since 1973, when the atlas was published. So The Rake loaded up the wagon and headed northwest to Corcoran, almost smack in the center of district 32A, and Lindner’s current hometown.

The Stanchion and its ornamental fiberglass cow sit at the intersection of County Roads 10 and 50. The morning crowd on a weekday is a mix of retired locals in seed caps and somewhat younger guys who have just finished with the morning’s snow removal. They work for a lawn service company with contracts in the new developments that are now paving over the few remaining farms in Hennepin County.

Some of the crowd warmed to the topic of Arlon Lindner with racial jokes. A few seemed embarrassed by this, but one guy with a big white beard and a long thin ponytail couldn’t be stopped. He loves Lindner, and it turns out, he’s pretty unhappy about African Americans.

“I’ve worked hard my whole life to support myself. Why should I have to pay for a bunch of niggers who don’t want to work?” What part of Lindner’s legislative agenda remedies this problem he didn’t say. But he wanted me to know he’s not a racist, offering this proof: “Go out in the parking lot and look at my truck. I’ve got one white mud flap and one black one.”

Francis Pomeroy, a World War II vet who says he votes both DFL and GOP, hopes Lindner will do something about illegal immigrants.

“These citizens [sic] that come over have more rights than you and I and they’ve only been here ninety days,” said Pomeroy. “There was a picture in the paper the other day of an illegal alien protesting. What have they got to protest about?”

Others at the bar seemed a bit more acquainted with the current crap-storm involving Lindner, and they seem to think he’s on the right track, too. Doug Theis, a former truck driver, is no fan of gay rights.

“I don’t want to see AIDS become an epidemic like it is over there in Africa. Those diseases are coming from people living, let’s just say, a tasteless lifestyle,” said Theis gravely.

Vernon Peterson, a stocky Korean War veteran, got his coffee refilled and echoed this view. “There’s no racism in it. He tells it like it is,” said Peterson. “If we want to turn into the greatest AIDS nation in the world, we can compete with Africa. It’s a proven fact that Africa is rampant with AIDS and HIV and all that stuff. And that’s all he said. If we want to be equal with them, keep it up.”

Lindner is currently serving his sixth term in the House and has been gay-bashing pretty much from the start, informing the public as early as 1997 that same-sex marriage is like “a man marrying a dog.” When State Rep. Karen Clark took umbrage at this, Lindner replied, “I don’t know why you felt that was insulting.” He apparently did not have a set of mud flaps coordinated to demonstrate his benign intentions, but eventually acknowledged that Clark, a lesbian, was “one of God’s creations.”

While it was quaint to discover that these and other of Lindner’s views are in step with his constituency, the feeling persists that he’s a good ol’ boy in the geographic, as well as the cultural sense. His middle name is Wayne. His wife’s name is Shirlee. He’s got three German Shepherds. And as “down home” as the fellas at The Stanchion sounded, none spoke in anything remotely like Lindner’s drawl. They all spoke pretty much with the diction and style described in Allen’s samples from Wright County, if not in the way encouraged by Rosalie Maggio’s Dictionary of Bias-Free Usage.

Well, it turns out Arlon Wayne Lindner is from Texas, born there with a rawhide spoon in his mouth in 1935. He got his B.A. from North Texas University, and went north. After receiving his Master of Divinity from Central Baptist Theological Seminary in Minneapolis, he decided to stick around and help the State of Minnesota make up for its alarming shortage of concealed weapons. Sure, Lindner might not be able to help out right away with the African-American problem in Corcoran. And his efforts to save Minnesota from becoming “another African continent” might not get traction this year; his proposed repeal of civil rights protections for gays and lesbians has not got the Governor’s nod. But the conceal-carry bill, also popular with the guys at The Stanchion, has good prospects in both houses. If it becomes law, perhaps the good people of Corcoran can take care of their other problems on their own.—Joe Pastoor

Last fall, when I signed my daughter up for a season in St. Louis Park’s Mite league, one of the many expenses was a $200 check, above and beyond the association fees and equipment rental. It was a security deposit against the volunteer hours required of every parent with a child in the hockey program. Some lucky parent might get to run the association website. Some might coach or manage a team. Most will do their time in the venerable concession stand.

Hockey is expensive. Year-round indoor ice costs a pretty penny. Decent helmets can run a C-note, good skates even more. Pneumatic goalie pads go for $600 plus. A magistrate who works several counties in southern Minnesota recently noted that hockey fees have become a hotly contested line item in many divorce settlements.

To keep a lid on costs and preserve access for families left out of the Bush tax cut, most youth hockey associations depend on cash flow from the concession stand. So when the Gastronomer returned to work in food service, a field in which he had not been employed since the late 80s, it was with charitable motives.

In fact, youth hockey is a charity. Most hockey associations are organized as non-profits. Might a shift behind the counter be approached with the Christian humility of, say, serving Thanksgiving dinner at the homeless shelter? No comparison. The average hockey player smells far worse and demands much more than the average panhandler. And parent volunteers have been known to combine the roles of benefactor and beneficiary. The concession stand at Columbia Arena in Fridley (of Mighty Ducks fame) took $11,000 in shrink last year, according to a worker there. Arena staff have now taken over most operations.

Even so, concession workers in St. Louis Park have it pretty good. The rinks are in a separate part of the Rec Center, and the stand is in the heated section of the building. What little breezer skank does waft in can be easily overpowered by running a few orders of chicken strips through the deep fryer. Kids as young as 15 are allowed to work the stand, so St. Louis Park has invested in a low-liability deep fryer minus the wire baskets in open pools of boiling oil. It faintly resembles a small front-loading washer, with a little hinged drawer on the front to deposit frozen food. Set the timer and hot, crispy stuff comes down a chute on the side, ready to serve. Low prices bring a steady demand to the counter during games and practices: hot dog $1.50, chips $.75, slapshot special (hot dog, chips, and soda) $2.50. And it’s easy to work the till, with the 501(c)3 status ending every transaction in round, tax-free numbers.

The other night, the fryer stopped working. It accepted deposits of new food, but released only partial orders, and then none at all. I turned the heater off and gave it some time to cool down. When I opened the access door to take a look . . . well, this is a family magazine, so I just can’t tell you what I found.

“We’re out of fried food,” I informed the cashier. “The morning shift is gonna have to clean this thing.”—Joe Pastoor

Back in Moscow, they have haphazardly declared the 500th anniversary of vodka. The native Russians at the St. Petersburg, a new restaurant in Robbinsdale, greet this news with skepticism. After all, they put 8,000 miles between themselves and the motherland for a reason. Besides, it’s not like Russians have lacked for excuses to knock a few back, through each of the previous 499 anniversaries.

“We have two basic place settings for receptions,” explained Andrey Shmykov, showing off the banquet facilities at the St. Petersburg. “One is a 750 of Absolut. The other is a liter.” At each setting, as in per person? “That’s the Russian way,” shrugged Shmykov.

The St. Petersburg has more than 100 varieties of vodka. The menu is vast as well, but it’s all a part of a pattern. In creating his little Russian satellite, Shmykov tried to get everything in the house. The cinderblock building, which harbors an American Legion downstairs, is decorated in the maudlin style of a mid-70s Eastern bloc club: rococo chandeliers, blue-on-white velour wallpaper, black velvet drapes tied back with golden braids, a stage-lit dance floor, and a house band that puts out Russian pop, James Brown standards, and Earth Wind and Fire covers—all with spectacular aplomb.

Non-Russians seem to be catching on, too. The other night, a metro dating club monopolized the bar, and made advances on the dance floor. The regulars welcomed them with open arms and decanters. Though braced as bitter rivals for a half-century, America and Russia are essentially about the same things: too much space, too much power, too much appetite. No matter what their politics, all humans instinctively know that such psychological tyrannies can easily be medicated with an excess of food and drink.

To that end, we ordered liberally from both the beverage and the dinner menus. Nalivka, a deep red cranberry version of the house vodka, arrived like a ruby in a glass. It was smooth and sweet, and good for sipping with an appetizer. A strong, clear Polish vodka cut the salty tang of red salmon caviar nicely. We also tried the mythic pelmeni, with sour cream and vinegar. The borscht was above reproach (with vodka), and the chicken Kiev was a competent nod to American tastes (with vodka). For its symbolic value and its gem-like appearance, there are also several types of caviar, including Caspian beluga (with vodka).

A spicy lamb soup of south Russian provenance was especially good. It might have been the vodka, but shortly thereafter, I loudly challenged to a duel any wretched serf who dared to call any other soup better than this one. Pavel, who wields a lemon-yellow Telecaster, was nominated as second. The house band’s guitar player says Americans are more comfortable calling him Paul, but from my vantage point, I’d say they’re already about as comfortable as they ever will be. —Joe Pastoor

“We are looking for the person on house arrest. Please press the BAT button.” Daniel Lemke hears this on his phone three times a day. It’s called the Alco-sensor. Developed by Mitsubishi, it is one of the few devices that can be called Orwellian without exaggerating. The Alco-sensor is essentially a home breathalyzer with a modem. A central computer at Minnesota Monitoring generates a call to the Alco-sensor client at home. The client sets the device for a fresh test, gets in front of the built-in camera, and blows through a straw into the machine. Minnesota Monitoring gets a printout of the client’s face and the results of a pass/fail sobriety check.

“If you fail, it’s pretty much like you’ve skipped bail,” said Lemke, who allowed The Rake to see the device he took home from a D.W.I. arrest in November. “It’s a condition of release. So if you fail, they’ll come and get you,” said the 40-year-old handyman.

Karen Burkey is a manager at Minnesota Monitoring. I asked her if she is Big Brother, and she laughed. “I guess, kind of.” Her company specializes in what has grown to be a staggering array of products that keep tabs on substance-abuse suspects; drug testing for schools, home kits for parents, urine testing for employers, ankle bracelets, and counseling. Burkey said she’s got about 250 Alco-sensors in service at any given time, and is pleased with the “customer service” record with the machine. The “customer service” concept isn’t as ironic as it seems. Inferior products, Burkey pointed out, often generate false positives from non-alcohol products like cigarettes. This makes an obvious difference to the people who have to blow into the thing three times a day.

Some D.W.I. defense attorneys are incensed by the Alco-sensor. State law now requires $12,000 bail to release any D.W.I. suspect who tests at twice the legal limit (.20 percent or higher blood alcohol) or has a previous conviction. Those who can’t cough up the 12 large (or the $1,200 bond toward it) are allowed to go home with an Alco-sensor.

“The Alco-sensor is punishment before guilt and violates the basic tenets of our rights and freedoms, most importantly the presumption of innocence,” said Lemke’s attorney, Chris Ritts. Adding that it leaves wealthy violators free to post bail and tipple as much as they please pre-trial, he also points out that it amounts to confinement; failure to be home for any of the three scheduled daily calls is an automatic violation. Burkey estimates that her monitoring site gets about five violations a week.

Other attorneys say Alco-sensor benefits less-affluent clients who would otherwise sit in the clink awaiting settlement or trial. But given the house-arrest quality of the program, they’d like it more if suspects could get credit for time served at sentencing. Lemke is hoping to make such a case if he’s found guilty. By his next court date, he will have been married to the machine for more than five weeks.—Joe Pastoor

Few artists who paint dogs have found the vision to deviate from the time-honored themes of poker games and doe-eyed poodles on velvet. Armed with acrylics, canvas, and lots of costume jewelry, newcomer Amy Brazil has finally broken the mold. “Best of Show,” a recent hanging at Hopkins Center for the Arts, has people stopping in their tracks. There’s a lot to get their heads around. “La Chasse Auz Papillion” is a profile of a Great Dane giving thoughtful consideration to a crystal-encrusted butterfly mounted on the canvas over a lime-colored background. Others in the show feature more of these unusual jewelry applications. “Hairy Winston” depicts a Boston Terrier on a harlequin-patterned satin background bordered with rhinestones. “Lady Godiva,” a chocolate colored retriever, poses against a background of gold foil embossed to resemble a chocolate wrapper. “Lady Abigail,” an Afghan Hound draped in faux pearls, is painted on black velvet. An initial stroll past these 17 pieces, while enchanting, was also provoking. Why would someone so talented paint nothing but dogs? Why the jewelry? Why aren’t they ironic? Why do I like them so much? I wanted answers, so I called Amy Brazil.

It turns out that Brazil just really, really likes dogs. She started about two years ago with portraits of her own dogs, Jade and Jackson, a Lhasa apso and springer spaniel. She liked the paintings so much that she went to a dog show in search of more subjects. What happened then can only be described as an epiphany. “I went down to the convention center equipped with a sketch pad and a couple of cameras,” said Brazil. “I was just blown away. I was so overwhelmed that day. After that, everything just started clicking.” Since then, she’s wanted to do nothing but paint, and paint nothing but dogs. “I’m doing what makes me happy, and I’m having a great time doing it. If I’m not up by 5:30 or 6 painting, it’s a bad day.”

Yet somehow the resulting work is not precious or sentimental dreck. Brazil said she tries to reveal human equivalents in the variety of character found in canine breeds. Reminded of Sid Vicious by the legendarily ugly Chinese Crested breed, Brazil created a double portrait (“Sid and Nancy”) on a Sex Pistols-themed background. An “obnoxious” (Brazil’s word) Bob Mackey design favored by Cher in the 70s will supply the background for a work in progress of a doberman depicted as Cher. She will be posed with an Italian greyhound. Naturally, Brazil will call him Sonny. There seems to be no limit to the potential combinations Brazil might conceive and paint in the future. She has nonetheless paid the devil his due. With “Lady Abigail” on black velvet, she gave her nod to the kernel of kitsch that will forever be at the heart of this form. Is she also tempted to update the poker-playing bulldogs? “No,” she said. “It’s already been done, and it was done beautifully.”