Author: The Rake

  • Man Versus Beast

    Fifty years ago I was a young bride planning to rent an old Iowa farmhouse. My rural mother-in-law shared her successful bedbug remedy [“A Bedtime Preyer,” April]. She said: “Wash and air-dry all bedclothes. Center the bed in the middle of the room. Put each leg (bed leg) in a pail of turpentine. Don’t smoke.…

  • Epistle Packin’

    “Mom and I are standing in front of the Church on Spilled Blood in St. Petersburg, Russia,” wrote Ann Bernstein of Minneapolis. “The church was built on the very spot where Emperor Alexander II was assassinated on March 1, 1881. The Literary issue was a perfect travel companion in this country, where things seem familiar…

  • Heather McElhatton’s Playlist

    Child of the ’80s that she is, when local writer and independent public-radio producer Heather McElhatton decided to write a book, she chose to resurrect the literary model made famous by Bantom Books’ classic Choose Your Own Adventure series. The result, Pretty Little Mistakes, is a novel with 150 endings to choose from, where adults…

  • Joe Boyd

    Hallelujah; it’s Monday and there’s actually something of interest going on, I mean, aside from the 70-degree weather. Straight outta our March So Little Time section (I wrote this little ditty–it was a while back now–and don’t want to reinvent the wheel): Joe Boyd had his fingers in all sorts of music-history pies. While still…

  • The Books

    Using samples from obscure movies, as well as their own singing, mixing, and instrumentation, Paul de Jong and Nick Zammuto construct melodic sound collages and electronic songs so catchy as to be genre defying. On the Massachusetts duo’s 2003 release, The Lemon of Pink, for example, the title track alone contains seamless movements between folk…

  • Blood Wedding

    Of all the theater companies in town, none has better taste in classic literature than Ten Thousand Things. Now, the troupe takes on Federico Garcia Lorca’s saucy Blood Wedding. Deeply poetic yet also accessible, this play sets up a gut-punching war between the heart’s passion and the human brain’s limited capacity for reason. Armed with…