Author: rakemag

When it comes to material possessions, I’m closer to Fred Sanford than Gandhi. I’m moving later this summer and already I’m so tired of hearing everyone say, “Oh, you’re moving—that’s a great time to get rid of all of your stuff.”

Ummmm, did I say that’s what I wanted to do? I understand the general purge of useless crap that occurs when moving, i.e. old take-out menus in the kitchen junk drawer, dust-covered cat toys that got kicked under the couch during the Clinton administration, or 1999’s tax returns. But I have no intention of parting with everything else and I’m starting to resent the implication that I’m one of those crazy-but-doesn’t-know-it people featured on a Fox 9 Investigates segment about garbage houses—you know, the wingnuts who see nothing wrong with sleeping on an artificial Christmas tree and a pile of used pull tabs. I promise you that in order to answer the phone in my apartment, you won’t need to step over any food product, empty Huggies boxes, or hamster feces.

The reality is that I will be losing square footage and therefore will have to be more creative and selective about what is on display in living areas and what remains boxed in the basement. Therein lays my problem. I like to know that I can look at my stuff on a moment’s notice. If I want to refer back to an old Q magazine article on the Verve, I don’t want to run the risk of seeing water bugs to do it.

I like stuff. Stuff makes me comfortable. To know me is to know my stuff. I’ve never understood people who don’t have stuff. I don’t trust people who fill the voids in their lives with family and meaningful careers. It’s important for me to point out that when I talk about my love of stuff, I can safely separate myself from the “bad people who like bad stuff.” You know, there’s a big difference between measuring your self-worth based on the ownership of new cars, bling, and children—and, say, vintage lampshades, Dean Martin biographies, and thirty-eight pairs of clunky black boots.

Dig if you will this picture: My ultimate fantasy house would be the Addams Family’s altogether ooky crib. My perfect bedroom resembles the inside of I Dream of Jeannie’s bottle. Blank walls and tasteful open spaces break my heart. If you have extra space in your closet, you obviously don’t own enough 1930s dress mannequins.

Though he has written in many genres including science fiction, political essays, and literary fiction like the recent The Man in My Basement, Walter Mosley’s widest acclaim comes from crime novels, especially his Easy Rawlins series, which earned him praise as Bill Clinton’s favorite novelist. The first Easy book, Devil in a Blue Dress, was made into a film with Denzel Washington in 1995. The latest, Little Scarlet, finds Rawlins tracking down a killer during the tumultuous Watts Riots of 1965.

How did Little Scarlet come about?

I was writing my nonfiction book What Next, which is partially a memoir of my father. I was writing about my father’s response to the riots, and it caused me to start thinking about them, not exactly in the way I remember my father reacting to them. And I thought, wow, I should write from this point of view. And the other thing is that [in the series] I’m working on a timeline, working through the contemporary history of Los Angeles from a black point of view, and Watts was the next thing up after the [Kennedy] assassination.

Race and class issues are at the heart of your writing, more than for most mystery writers. Were you drawn to mysteries as a vehicle for discussing these issues?

I made this discovery that if you write a crime novel about an important political issue, you’re going to have a much broader audience. People read it because of the genre, and not necessarily what they might learn from it. But you can attract anybody from a housewife in Texas to the president of the United States.

In Scarlet, Easy claims that the Watts riots gave rise to a completely new relationship between black and white culture, that after the riots everything had changed. “If it’s not broke, you don’t fix it” is a general notion in human life and maybe all animal life. People don’t go around trying to change things if they work. Black people were kind of invisible. They were held back by a certain set of rules and norms of society that most people didn’t have to pay attention to. And they seemed to be all right. You could go to black neighborhoods, they could be around but you didn’t have to know their name or know anything about them. They couldn’t insinuate themselves into your life. And it was OK. And all of a sudden there was this incredible riot, and all these people you never knew and never had to think about, you have to know and think about, even though you still don’t know anything about them. It really is like a second movement in the Civil Rights movement.

In What Next, you draw a parallel between the rage that fueled the Watts riots and the rage in the Middle East against America today, and suggest that black America is in a unique position to help bring about peace in the world.

My apartment looked out on the World Trade Center, and I watched the airplanes crash into it. I was deeply moved by it, but at some point I realized that everybody I knew who was black wasn’t surprised. They were outraged, angered, afraid—but not surprised. Many people said, “You knew this had to happen, bad as we’ve been treating them.” And I began to understand this knowledge in the African-American community about how America is seen around the world that many other Americans don’t have, because they aren’t that close to a history of oppression from the United States. Whereas black Americans are. So what you have is a people who are in a very good position to start to talk about how we might pursue an international peace. Most Americans have no notion why so many people in other parts of the world hate America. And that’s something we really need to talk about.

Little Scarlet will be released July 5; Mosley appears at Once Upon a Crime bookstore in Minneapolis July 29.

In the past two years the Minnesota Orchestra’s once-moribund Sommerfest series has surged back to life, thanks in part to the guidance of artistic director Andrew Litton (who also wields a baton as the Dallas Symphony’s music director). This year’s program is satisfyingly broadminded, anchored by traditional classical works by composers like Brahms and Dvorak, but also includes a crowd-pleasing night of movie music from films like Lord of the Rings. Jazz is covered by the Duke Ellington Orchestra and the great hard-bop ivory man Oscar Peterson, and there’s even a nod to experimental rock with pianist Christopher O’Riley’s Radiohead reinterpretations. Litton will lead the orchestra in a selection of Gershwin tunes (one of his specialties) and Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, and close out this year’s fest with Beethoven’s only opera, Fidelio. When we asked Litton what he’d bring to entertain him if stranded on a deserted isle, his list was appropriately heavy on aural delights—but he also knows there’s more to life than just music.

1) “First would be my piano, with the complete Beethoven piano sonatas, and the score to Rachmaninoff’s third piano concerto because I’ve always wanted to learn that and I’ve never had the time. Those thirty-two sonatas have everything. It would never be boring to have that treasure trove of music to look through.

2) “My complete Oscar Peterson collection, which is about 114 CDs. He’s my hero. I’m so excited that he’s coming to Sommerfest this year that I can hardly stand it. He represents all that I think is great about music. Maybe I’m being selfish by asking for all 114, but even a selection of ten would do! For me, his approach to the piano is as educational as listening to any of the great classical pianists—plus the fact that he can just sit down and play, and make up stuff on the spot.

3) “Richard Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier. It would be wonderful to have that, and I’d dream that if I ever get off the island I’ll get to conduct it. It would always give me hope.

4) “I’d like to cheat a little bit and take my kids along. They’re the most entertaining thing I know. They’re five and eight, so they’re at a very funny, very entertaining age.

5) “A case of 1982 Bourdeaux that’s kept in the shade. That is one of my passions, I confess, so why not put it here on my list for the world to judge? (laughs) That sounds like a pretty nice island now. I’m very happy. When do I leave?”
Sommerfest runs July 9-31. For a complete schedule, visit www.minnesotaorchestra.org.

Even at her worst, Louise Erdrich still produces some of the best stuff in print. The rambling, poorly edited The Master Butcher’s Singing Club was a great read despite its flaws. And now one of our favorite locals is back and playing to her strengths with another short, near-perfect book the likes of which put her on the map nearly twenty years ago. The thread of her lead character, Fleur Pillager, can be traced to the 1986 Love Medicine sequel The Beet Queen, where she appears from nowhere to salvage the wayward Karl Adare. Erdrich follows her thread backward now, with her usual set of startlingly different narrative voices. (Available July 1)

Although the wildly prolific P.G. Wodehouse turned out almost a hundred novels in his lifetime, the world can always make room for another story in his marvelously droll, light-as-a-feather comic voice. Ames’ latest novel is a loving parody of Wodehouse’s most famous creations, Jeeves and Wooster, seen through the eyes of Alan Blair, a would-be writer and heavy drinker who has somehow acquired an imaginary valet named (of course) Jeeves. Their relationship is like a benign version of Jack Nicholson and his butler in The Shining—no murders, but lots of witty repartee. Blair’s Jewish self-identity and deep-set neuroses make him as akin to Woody Allen as Bertie Wooster, and his hapless distension from reality gives Wake Up a vibe that’s akin to A Confederacy of Dunces, as well as any of Wodehouse’s artfully constructed farces. Ask your valet to pick up a copy for you. (Available July 13)

We’re pleased as punch that local mystery novelist and poet Mary Logue is back between boards with a bona-fide Claire Watkins mystery. This one is an ambitious suspense tale set in the familiar area around Pepin, Wisconsin. A fifty-year-old murder mystery and a modern terrorist are somehow linked, and Logue’s most beloved detective takes the case. What we love about Logue is the importance of place, and how her
real-life summer home in the Wisconsin bluff country is the secret muse of this particular work. There may be local novelists who score higher on the New York Times bestseller lists, but we consider Logue and her partner Pete Hautman the reigning royalty of Minnesota murder mysteries. (Available now)

Sex. Drugs. Corruption. Misunderstanding. In her debut novel, Lindsay Ahl explores these themes through the eyes of 35-year-old Elena Monroe, a confused individual who has occasional cravings for grape juice. Elena stumbles through a web of the past and present, trying to work out her relationship with her mother. Ahl’s vague and ethereal writing style helps tremendously in creating Elena, who is so unreliable as a narrator that we don’t even trust the story to be over just because when we’ve run out of pages to read. Local imprint Coffee House Press published Desire, but that’s not the only Minnesotan connection. At one point, Elena drives through Minneapolis just in time to catch a Bob Dylan concert. (Available now)

Meticulous detail, natural poses, and—most startling—life-sized renderings made John James Audubon’s Birds of America a groundbreaking work in the formerly staid world of nineteenth-century ornithology. Today, William Souder’s biography of Audubon, Under a Wild Sky, paints the larger-than-life portrait of the man behind the famous illustrations, who was far more interesting than his role as the über-birdwatcher implies. Souder follows his subject, a “self-taught painter and self-anointed aristocrat,” as he travels from an illegitimate childhood in Haiti to the wilderness of Kentucky and elite scientific circles on the East Coast and in Europe. Souder peppers his rich prose with tangents on American history, natural history, and environmentalism, which should be no surprise coming from an author whose last book, A Plague of Frogs, chronicled Minnesota’s outbreak of frog deformities in the late nineties. Bound To Be Read, 870 Grand Ave., St. Paul; (651) 646-2665; www.boundtoberead.com. Valley Bookseller, 217 N. Main St., Stillwater; (651) 430-3385

Rock criticism has never mattered less, probably because it has never really evolved beyond the canon of its best, exhausted practitioners—Christgau, Marcus, and Meltzer. Whereas those old duffers should have grown up a long time ago, into broader social, political, even pop-cultural criticism—hell, how about a novel, guys?—they keep churning out increasingly remote ruminations and mostly just come off like cranks who have spent too much time in smoky bars with loud music and loose women and oversized mirrors. Which brings us to Klosterman, who deserves the attention he’s gotten for writing pop criticism that’s actually fun to read. His last book, just out in paperback, is Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs. It’s a wild romp from Pam Anderson’s sex tapes to the decline of American newspapers, and shows just how free-wheeling and funny the male mind can be. Mary Lucia loves this guy, and so do we. (651) 699-0587; www.ruminator.com