The Rake Magazine

Author: rakemag

  • Sayulita, Mexico

    Paulette writes:

    Rake, Rake — whose got my Rake.

    Well, I have two men on vacation in Sayulita Mexico, vying for a Rake
    read. They had to take turns. Here are pix of both sitting on a palapa
    at the top of “gringo hill” — there’s no specific evidence of place,
    but you can see the Pacific in the background — which is far, far down
    the hill.

    Frankly — outside of the barking roosters and crowing dogs
    — pure paradise. Glad to have had you with us!

    The cute young guy is
    Steve Lauterbach presently of Salt Lake City, Utah. The cute gray beard
    is George Warren of Lino Lakes, MN (my hubby).

    Sayulita is a community
    about 30-40 miles north of Puerto Vallarta and many many worlds apart.
    Unfortunately, it is a boom-town in the making — development is
    everywhere and what might have been reasonable real estate just three
    years ago is now far beyond the reach of everyone except the
    Californians — who are convinced they have a new Carmel in the making.
    And — unfortunately — they are probably right. Oh well — there’s
    lots of coast in Mexico before Paradise is Lost.

    Send along your Rakish travel shots, if we publish yours in the
    magazine, we’ll send you a non-thermal, non-extreme Rake T-shirt and a
    $25 gift certificate from West Photo (21 University Ave. N.E.,
    Minneapolis).

    If we publish yours on our website, then we’ll send you nothing, but
    you will be considered Rakish and that alone is well worth it.

    Keep the submissions coming!

    Paulette Warren

  • Kristina Larsson

    Kristina Larsson always wanted to dance, but she was turned off by the phony smiles she saw fixed on the faces of most performers. “When I saw flamenco, I thought, ‘Wow! They’re not smiling!’” she says. It was that subtle epiphany that helped this Minnesotan fall in love with a dance associated with the sultry climes of Southern Spain. It happened on her thirty-eighth birthday: She had been wandering around Paris for six months, a painter/waitress on her first visit overseas, and three weeks before her return home, she decided to take a flamenco class. “That was the end of life as I formerly knew it.” Now Larsson’s own company and dance school, Anda Flamenco, is part of a surprisingly robust local flamenco scene. “It’s the climate,” says Larsson. “We’re attracted to opposites.” Kristina de Sacramento, as she’s known onstage at nightspots like Babalu and Nochee, travels to Spain every year to study dance. What if she should become stranded on a desert island en route? Here’s what she’d want to have on hand:


    1. I’d bring my cat. Cats fascinate me. Time stops, and I feel like a kid when I watch them. They are the most amazing physical creatures. When I’m teaching flamenco to non-dancers, I teach them to walk like a panther. That creeping weightlessness, that impending doom to the prey–that’s very much an idee of flamenco. You stalk the audience a lot.



    2. My dancing shoes and a board to dance on. I’d need a board because the shoes wouldn’t make sound on the sand, and that sound is essential to the dance. Flamenco shoes are like an instrument. The only good ones are made in Spain. They have steel arches. The heels and the points of the shoe have tiny nails in them, to give support and make sound. They are like castanets. Every maker’s shoes sound different. I have maybe twenty pairs.



    3. I’d need a singer to accompany my dancing. In the Twin Cities we have a great cantaora (a native flamenco singer), Mar”a Elena Òla Cordobesa,Ó which is why I’m still here. It’s a great honor to be able to work with her.



    4. A homing pigeon, so I can stay in communication with friends and family. That undulation of love and ideas is very sustaining for me. I can write the messages with ink and paper I make from things on the island.



    5. Some beautiful human-made thing to inspire me to remember hopes and dreams and the ability of the spirit to soar above the mundane. Maybe a stained-glass window from some cathedral. Didn’t Matisse make paper cutouts at the end of his life that were made into windows? He, for me, represented both the joy and delightful transcendence of life.



    For more on the Anda Flamenco Company and School, go to www.andaflamenco.com.

  • Crapping on the Koran, part 2

    Will wonders never cease? The conservative columnist of the NY Times, David Brooks, came to the defense of Newsweek today.

    Brooks takes note of the fact that radical Islamists hardly need a short item in an American magazine with an excellent reputation to incite them to senseless violence against almost everyone.

    He doesn’t actually put it in so many words, but, he suggests we ask Muslim clerics, “Where is the Koran, if not in the toilet, when you are encouraging children to blow themselves up to kill fellow Muslims in Afganistan?”

    Now I’ve never incited Muslims to violence by, for example, calling for a “crusade” or invading their country, unlike a certain President I know. And I’ve never pissed off Hindus by calling them devil worshipers, like a certain Christian leader.

    But, I have written some fairly inflammatory things about right wing Christians in this space, and so far no one has walked in here ringed with C4. Of course, I’m not an “activist” judge either. Maybe the Christian bombers are saving themselves for when it really counts.

  • Freedom of Information

    maonixon.jpg
    Can you give me some advice on how to deal with Woodward and Bernstein?

    I had the opportunity to have lunch with an editor of the Beijing English language daily newspaper China Daily on Sunday. He was in town as part of an exchange program for Asian journalists to see how we do it over here.

    In preparation for our meeting, he’d read the May issue of the Rake, and noticed an ad for the Friends of the Minneapolis Library which featured a little blurb about Mao Ze Dong, and compared him in unflattering terms to American librarians, who are guardians of our free access to information. I asked him what he thought of that, and he just smiled.

    In journalistic, if not terribly polite fashion, I pursued the theme a bit. “Does the government closely monitor what you publish in your newspaper?” I asked. “Yes,” he replied.

    “Is there someone in the government who assures what you write conforms with the story the government wants to tell?” I continued. Again, “Yes.”

    “Who does that for your newspaper?”

    “I do.”

    “Oh…How do you like your sandwich?”

    I thought back on this in the context of the blowup over the Newsweek flap over the report on whether some copies of the Koran were finding their way into Guantanamo toilets. The Bush version of the Maoist Censorship Society has certainly had its jollies being righteously indignant about the story that a Pentagon report contained the information about the crapped-on Korans. (Note please that the story has been reported before on several occasions and that the Pentagon was shown the story and didn’t deny it before it ran. It’s also worth mention that the reporter, Michael Isikoff, was a lot more popular with Republicans when he broke the Monica Lewinsky story.)

    But those troublesome facts have nothing to do with what’s going on here. What this flap is about is a concerted effort to discredit the press at every opportunity–with the hoped-for result of limiting the press’s desire to do the sort of investigative reporting that revealed the official sanction and practice of torture by Bush and his decorated Myrmidons.

    Mao didn’t have a troublesome First Amendment to deal with, so his methods of information control didn’t have to suffer any intermediate hurdles to get his message across. But given the obstacles Bushies face, don’t you agree they are doing a great job of making sure America gets the news they want?

  • The natural balance of power

    In the book Freakonomics that I mentioned the other day, there’s a chapter called “Where Have All the Criminals Gone?”. In it, author Steven Levitt examines various theories of why violent crime has decreased in the country. Many explanations are examined: more prisons, more police, better policing strategies, aging population, stronger economy, and gun laws.

    Since our legislature seems again determined to re-pass the idiotic conceal carry law, let’s talk about that. Oddly, Levitt has in his book an example that exactly fits the circumstances of the murder last week at Nye’s restaurant in Northeast Minneapolis.

    On page 131, here’s what Levitt says, “A gun scrambles the outcome of any dispute. Let’s say that a tough guy and a not-so-tough guy exchange words in a bar, which leads to a fight. It’s pretty obvious to the not-so-tough guy that he’ll be beaten, so why bother fighting? The pecking order remains intact. But if the not-so-tough guy happens to have a gun, he stands a good chance of winning. In this scenario, the introduction of a gun may well lead to more violence.”

    This is exactly what happened at Nye’s. The little jerk who was bounced from the bar had the legal right to carry a gun, thanks to the 2003 mandatory permit issue law. (The gun-bill-totin’ State Senator Pat Pariseau’s take was this, though: “I don’t think it proves problems with the law. I think it proves that someone got [a permit] who shouldn’t have gotten one.” Could Pat Pariseau be any stupider? I’ll give a free peronalized “We ban guns here” poster to the reader with the best answer to that one.)

    Levitt goes on to discuss the alternate scenario of a girl out for a nighttime stroll who is accosted by a mugger. Three possible scenarios, actually.

    One: the girl is not armed and the mugger is. The most likely–and there will be a bad outcome for the girl. She’ll be robbed, (or worse.)

    Two: the girl is armed and the mugger is not. Highly unlikely that a mugger who is robbing people won’t be armed, but, if the mugger is a complete idiot, the outcome is better for the girl.

    Three: they are both armed, but, it’s reasonable to believe the mugger has his gun drawn, while they girl does not. Still a bad outcome for the girl. Perhaps even a worse one if she goes for her gun and the mugger shoots her instead of just taking her purse.

    Levitt goes on to discuss other facets of gun laws, but comes to the conclusion that there are so many guns in the United States that neither the Brady Laws nor concealed carry will affect crime in a macro sense.

    So what is the cause of the drop in violent crime? I guarantee you, the right ain’t gonna like the answer. It’s fewer babies born to people who don’t want them. Looks like it took just about 20 years after Roe v. Wade for the effects to make themselves apparent.

    Discuss.

  • Monkeys in Montecello, Rats in Rome

    If we needed more evidence that the religious right’s nincompoops are profoundly dangerous, here you go.

    It seems they are right here in Minnesota, intimidating weak-kneed school administrators into preventing the introduction of the idea of evolution in Montecello.

    St. Paul author Lisa Westberg Peters has written a book for children called “Our Family Tree” which explains evolution in a juvenile, yet scientific, sort of way. Although she was scheduled to speak at a Montecello elementary school about writing, rather than evolution, the school administrators asked her to make sure she stuck just to writing and leave off mention of evolution. When she refused, Peters’ visit to the school was cancelled.

    Brad Sanderson, principal at the elementary school, was quoted in the Strib as saying, “It’s a cute book. There’s nothing wrong with it. We just don’t need that kind of debate.” Yup, the last thing we’d want in a school is a debate, especially when there’s religious clap trap to be crammed down the throats of our children.

    Now, in fairness to Principal Skinner–I mean Sanderson–he’s probably afraid of the pitchfork and torch crowd that could undoubtedly be whipped up in Montecello if a public school were to actually teach science instead of dogma and were actually to stand up for the American values of free speech and enlightened education instead of the censorious crap dished out in the name of God.

    In other religious news, as if the Catholics needed more problems, Pope Ratzinger has opened up a can of Inquisition whup-ass on the intellectual organ of the American church, the Jesuit magazine America. The editor of America, Father Thomas Reese, S.J. was fired on the orders of Ratzinger because the magazine provided a forum for discussion of church positions on controversial issues such as denying communion to John Kerry or use of condoms in AIDS-riddled Africa.

    I was told recently by a man who knows that Ratzinger’s election was greeted with less than wild enthusiasm by the Benedictine monks at St. Johns. It must have been particulary galling to them when the head of the Inquisition took the name of the founder of their order–the order which over the centuries has taken primary responsibility for the preservation of western intellectual history.

    Alongside this formidable Benedictine tradition stand the Jesuits, who are the church’s foremost educators and intellectuals today, and who run Boston College, Georgetown, Fordham, Creighton and many other first rate universities throughout America and the world. Both orders are steeped in their vows of obedience, but to the Benedictines and Jesuits I know (and I’ve known a lot of Jesuits in particular) that obedience usually takes the form of obedience to their own tradition of intellectual inquiry and open mindedness. It was a sad day for a lot of Catholics when Ratzinger was elected Pope. I’m afraid it will be even sadder for the many thoughful men of God whose intellectual lives will be proscribed by this maledictory Benedict.

  • Bagel thieves

    I’m reading the book Freakonomics by a University of Chicago economics professor Steven Levitt.

    In one chapter he talks about an entrepreneur who sets up a business of selling bagels on the honor system in the offices of several companies. By analysing who pays for the bagels and who takes them without paying, Levitt draws several interesting conclusions.

    One unsurprising conclusion is that most people are honest. The payment rate in most businesses was over 90 percent.

    However, in those businesses where more than one bagel station was set up–and the stations were set in the areas occupied by top management, middle management, and the worker bees–top management types seemed to be the least honest. In other words, those with the highest positions, and presumably those making the most money, were less likely to pay for their bagels than their employees a couple of floors down.

    Surprised? If you are, I guess you haven’t been paying attention much lately. Let me give you some hints: Enron, Tyco, Adelphia, Merrill Lynch, United Air Lines, Global Crossing, Worldcom…

    Watch your bagels.

  • Brooks and Dumb

    Goebbels.jpg
    Don’t worry about National Socialist Security

    It’s getting more difficult to sort out the NY Times’ David Brooks’ columns when you try to rank them in order of how much they are beginning to remind me of the old Nazi adage “Just repeat the lie; it will become the truth.”

    Yesterday’s column, in which he excoriated the Democrats for failing to embrace Bush’s latest crock re Social Security takes the cake, though.

    Brooks takes the Democrats to task for not supporting Bush’s call for indexing Social Security benefits to income. He sanctifies Bush for putting forth a plan to save Social Security (by cutting benefits to “wealthier” retirees) and damns the Dems for not leaping into what is clearly a political trap. With astonishing intellectual dishonesty (even for Brooks,) he says “He [Bush] has asked us to redistribute money down the income scale. Why should programs for children and families be strangled so Donald Trump can get bigger benefit checks?”

    Try substituting “up” for “down”, and “tax cuts” for “benefit checks” in the previous sentence and see if you don’t get a much clearer picture of what Brooks is actually defending. After all, if the top of the income pile is getting a tax cut far in excess of its Social Security benefit reductions, we can all live with that, right?

  • Monkeys in suits

    monkey.03.jpg
    In God We Trust

    If you haven’t read the book “What’s the Matter with Kansas” by Thomas Frank yet, you can get a preview in today’s NY Times story on the Kansas Board of Education’s impending mandate that evolution be taught side by side with “intelligent design” in Kansas science classes.

    The irony hasn’t been lost on anyone that this year is the 80th anniversary of the Scopes Monkey Trial in Tennessee. My friend from Kansas has already called to make chimp noises into the phone. Not, as she says, because Kansans are descended from apes, but because the Kansas Board of Education clearly hasn’t evolved yet.

    I’ve pissed off a few Christian conservatives here before when I suggested that the real problem with fundamentalists is that they are allowed to vote. My thinking on this is evolving, though. Keep reading.

    The first amendment clearly states that the government “shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” Now, the majority of the members of what shall now by known as the Kansas Ministry of Ministry Propaganda all unabashedly admit that they believe in creationism, and, yes, these hearings they are holding have a purpose. Here’s how one board member put it, according to the Times, “I was hoping these hearings would help me have some good hard evidence that I could repeat.” That is, I was hoping someone could come up with a logical explanation to refute the actual logical explanation of evolution. Her problem is that everyone who knows what the word logic or evidence means accepts the abundantly clear case for evolution.

    I started thinking about this all again last week when I was reading a report on the problems with production of flu vaccines. The basic problem is that flu vaccines have to be made fresh and fast every year, after the current strain of flu virus makes itself apparent. As the immunologist said, “Our problem is the virus evolves all the time. It changes. So, we have to make a different vaccine every year.”

    So here’s my solution to the Kansas problem. Let’s let them vote. This will, I hope, appease my earlier critics.

    But, I say anyone who doesn’t believe in evolution doesn’t get to have the flu vaccine. They don’t believe in its underlying premise after all. Then when the epidemic hits, we’ll all get a lesson in what Darwin meant by “survival of the fittest.” The simians running Kansas are going to be in big trouble.

  • The lasting monument for the last day of Poetry Month

    The Latin poet Horace wrote this as the final poem of the third book of his Odes. (He later published a fourth book. We had one of those poems earlier.)

    Horace’s poetry has been the inspiration for poets through the ages. Dante, Dryden, Housman, Yeats and Auden all cribbed from him. He was the one who said “carpe diem”–“Seize the day,” and many other lines which have become a part of our language.

    The third book of Odes contains the “Roman Odes” in which Horace set out the characteristics that made Romans, and Rome, what it was–the ruler of the world. Duty, honor, self sacrifice, industry, love are all treated in that book. It ends with this poem, his succinct, and prideful, homage to his own contribution to Roman greatness–and to the place of poetry in his, and our, lives.

    I have built a monument more lasting than bronze
    And higher than the pyramids’ pile,
    Which no corrupting rain, nor impotent north wind–
    Nor even the innumerable years’ flight through time
    Can possibly pull down.

    I can never completely die. A great part of me
    Escapes the funeral rites. I’ll always increase,
    Fresh with new praise.

    As long as the tacit Vestal follows the priest
    Up the Capitoline hill,
    I will be known as he who brought this skill
    Out of the dry land where rapid Aufidus roars,
    And Daunus rules the rustic folk,
    And first led Greek song to march in Latin measure.

    So, Delphic Melpomene, lift up my deserved pride,
    Duly won through my merit,
    And gladly, with the laurel, wreathe my brow.

    Here’s the Latin.

    Exegi monumentum aere perennius
    regalique situ pyramidum altius,
    quod non imber edax, non aquilo impotens
    possit diruere aut innumerabilis
    annorum series et fuga temporum.
    non omnis moriar multaque pars mei
    vitabit Libitinam; usque ego postera
    crescam laude recens. Dum Capitolium
    scandet cum tacita virgine pontifex,
    dicar, qua violens obstrepit Aufidus
    et qua pauper aquae Daunus agrestium
    regnavit populorum, ex humili potens,
    princeps Aeolium carmen ad Italos
    deduxisse modos. Sume superbiam
    quaesitam meritis et mihi Delphica
    lauro cinge volens, Melpomene, comam.