Enjoying the most recent issue of the Rake at Cabo De Roca in Portugal, the western most point of continental Europe. “where the land ends and the sea begins” (and people read the Rake).
Author: rakemag
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Subderma: Paintings by Chris Mars
Did Chris Mars live through (or die from?) the Black Plague in a former life? His paintings of ghoulish, skeletal crowds and beseeching wraiths, set in gloomy environments that hark back to medieval villages, seem too vivid to have come purely from the imagination. Cruel and creepy, yet with a visceral beauty, Mars’ storytelling on canvas is almost classical in its precision, and feels strangely at home amid the memento mori and Biblical topics featured in works from the institute’s collection. As witness to his older brother’s sufferings from schizophrenia and the attempts at treating it, Mars allows the monsters who populated his brother’s mind to roam freely in his paintings. Walk out of this show on a fall day, and the dying leaves may seem to rattle a little more ominously. 612-870-3131; www.artsmia.org
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Louise Erdrich
Our lady who art in Kenwood seems to have an endless supply of spooky and captivating tales that read like campfire legends. Her Native American characters often have one foot in the modern world and the other in a misty, spirit-populated Indian landscape that is quickly disappearing. The heroines in her latest book are a thoroughly modern mother and daughter who run an estate sale business that specializes in Indian objects. When a traditional drum is uncovered in an attic, a chilling story unfolds that explains its creation, and its powers to save youngsters in trouble. Dead children haunt this story and the community it’s set in, but in Erdrich’s world, ghosts can both help and heal the living; the drum, ultimately, is a gift that reconnects a modern Indian community with its ancestors.
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Ferry from Vancouver to Nanaimo
Tony, Cathy, Emma and Lucy Grundhauser on the ferry from Vancouver to Nanaimo, BC in July.
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Mt. McKinley, Alaska
Cyd Gillett, Daniel Sadoff, Abe Sadoff (15), Lydia Sadoff (9). We just completed an Alaska family vacation and, of course, we took The Rake along.
We landed on Ruth, a glacier named after the daughter of a man, Frederick Cook, who falsely claimed to have both been the first person to scale Denali (Mt. McKinley) and to reach the north pole. Another Alaskan controversy, the official name of the highest mountain peak in North America, persists – it was named Denali “the tall (or great) one” for centuries by the natives until some Ohio newswriter in the late 1800’s decided to curry favor with a local politician who was running for president at the time and started calling it Mt McKinley in his reports. William F. McKinley never once set foot in Alaska. Alaskans current day attempts to get the mountain’s name of Denali federally recognized are perennially thwarted by congressional representatives from Ohio.
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Justin Kirk
We thinks the Ivey Awards made a peculiar choice in having Justin Kirk co-host its first annual awards party later this month. Although Kirk just wrapped up a summer run of Entertaining Mr. Sloane at the Jungle Theater, he appears more frequently on the large and small screens these days. (You can catch him on Weeds, Showtime’s new series about dope-dealing in the suburbs.) But he spent his formative years in Minneapolis, studying at the now-defunct Children’s Theatre Company School before heading east, which might explain why Twin Cities thespians have invited him back. (Apparently, despite our thriving theater scene, that old coastal inferiority complex persists.) We caught up with Kirk and asked him to envision life far, far away from both Minneapolis and L.A., where he now resides. Being a true actor, he had no trouble imagining himself as a castaway, although he expressed an extremely limited interest in any ventures that would take him away from his adoring mom–er, fans. Here’s what he wants to bring along:
1. One carton of Camel Lights. I’m really excited about this desert island deal, as it will greatly assist me in quitting. I will, however, have to wean myself off the cigs slowly, and I think 200 final cigarettes should do the trick.
2. One lighter. See above. Plus, unless there’s good takeout, I’ll probably have to learn to cook and do fire-lighting and the like.
3. One plasma flat-screen television. I mean, c’mon. I can tack it up on one of the wider palm trees and away we go. Hopefully this particular area has a good cable company with, like, MTV2 and all the movie channels. And I’m probably gonna need some adult videos, as I assume desert island means the dating pool is fairly limited.
4. One platform stage with decent lighting rig and sound board. This seems like a great time to finally do my one-man show with no pesky critics to ruin everything. (Though hopefully, there’ll be at least a little bit of press that I can clip and send to my mom. I wonder if my publicist has an office out here?)
5. One first-class plane ticket back to the U.S. I can’t stand desert islands and I’m only gonna be able to rock this trip for a few days. I like cities with newspapers and radio stations and people I don’t know walking around on the street. Also, I’m out of cigarettes.The Ivey Awards will be held September 26 at the Historic State Theater, 805 Hennepin Ave., Minneapolis; www.iveyawards.com
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Istanbul, Turkey
Annie, a student at Wheaton College, in front of the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, Turkey.
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Help for the Iraqi constitutional process
The right to bare arms…and moreI was sitting around with a few wags yesterday and we were talking about the problems the Iraqis (if there is such a thing–as opposed to Sunni, or Shiite or Kurd, that is) were having in getting some agreement on a constitution. Aside from the squabbles over oil revenues and autonomy of regions which make the differences in 1787 between Virginia and Massachusetts seem…dare I say…tame by comparison, there’s the sticky problem of Islam, and all the implications for dress codes, tonsorial customs and which way is east conundrums.
So we took a look at our own Bill of Rights and offered the following hints for articles they could adapt:
Article 1: Freedom of religion. It’s alright to kill anyone who doesn’t like my brand of Islam. Christians and Jews, you better take off now.
Article 2: The Right to Bare Arms: Women north of Baghdad get to wear sleeveless dresses. Women south of Baghdad get to wear sleeveless dresses only if they have no arms, which we can arrange.
Article 3: No soldiers in your house. Soldiers destroying your house, that’s ok.
Article 4: No unreasonable search and seizure, unless it’s a world power looking for weapons we don’t have.
Article 5: No one shall be forced to testify against himself after we rip out his tongue for blasphemy.
Article 6: You have the right to a speedy trial, after we hold you in Guantanamo for as long as we damn well please.
Article 7: You can sue anyone you like for any amount over 20 dollars, or blow him up with a car bomb, whichever is more convenient.
Article 8: No cruel or unusual punishment, unless we think the pictures are funny.
Article 9 and 10: Anything else you can think of, but if it ain’t in the Koran, forget about it.
Since this is sort of the way things are running over there now, we figured they should have no trouble agreeing. And, once this constitution is in force, Bush will have his exit strategy. I say we give them all the encouragement we can to adopt our suggestions so we can get the hell out of there.
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The view from here
The news that countsBarcelona, Spain
One of the things about being out of the country for a week is you see how the other half lives without the constant bombardment of propaganda from our government. (They have their own to BS them, of course.)
There has been the news of Britain’s crack down on Muslim extremists, and the Iranians saying “You must be on crack” when the nuclear powers threaten them over their nuclear program. But so far, a glorious absence from the Spanish papers of George Bush.
Imagine the bliss of living over here and not having your papers full of his crap every day.
I did make the mistake of picking up the International Herald Tribune yesterday, though. (I just wanted some baseball scores, which I could have had on the internet, but there is some tactile pleasure of seeing box scores in print.) But there to spoil my day, was Bush on the front page (no picture, thank God) but just a quote about Iran.
The one paragraph story was about his comments, evidently delivered after he’d leveled some more brush at the ranch, that “all options were on the table” regarding Iran, “including force.”
He continued, “But force is always a president’s last option.”
Is this guy so stupid? Ok, don’t answer that. First, does he think anyone believes that he isn’t willing to use force at the drop of a falsified intelligence briefing? And second, does he not know why Iran wants nuclear weapons? Maybe the same reason why Saddam wishes he’d had them–so they can protect themselves from Bush?
If there’s anything that should be clear, it’s that Bush’s attack of Iraq has made every other country in the world eager to join the nuclear club. In the opinion of every other country in the world, it’s Bush who’s brought the world to this, not Iran.
Now, back to the soccer scores. Barcelona 3, Betis 0.
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A flat world for flat heads
I was just thinking we haven’t had a good excommunication since GalileoThe only reliable bit about the Star Tribune, other than Katherine Kersten will provide some laughs to anyone who can think, is the cartoons of editorial cartoonist Steve Sack. This guy has gone too long without a Pulitzer prize.
Today’s cartoon does the best job of sending up the “intelligent design” idiots I’ve seen in a long time.
My favorite columnist Paul Krugman follows on in today’s NY Times. Krugman makes some great points: that the purveyers of the pseudo science of “intelligent design” are motivated by the same goals as the “economists” who have given us Supply Side Economics. Those guys, along with the conservative-funded think tanks who claim that global warming is a myth, are just two sides of the same coin.
And what’s on the faces of that coin? Greed and political gain, baby. Heads they win, tails we lose.
Intellectual honesty is under constant attack, and the bad guys are winning. Pretty soon, we won’t even have to have peer reviewed science experiments or economists with actual data to tell us what’s what in the world.
Never mind the university libraries full of all those stuffy academic journals, all we’ll need is a subsciption to the Wall Street Journal.
It will be the the repository for the best science all those coins can buy.