The Rake Magazine

Author: rakemag

  • Pat’s Baby

    I found it very interesting that your July article was promoting Pat Awada for sainthood [“Is This Woman Ruining Our State?,” July], not mentioning any lasting effects about what her plan on reducing aid to the cities would do to the Metropolitan area. Your August article on the cuts to the Minneapolis fire department did not mention that they were a legacy of our illustrious auditor and her pet governor. Funny how you didn’t mention who was responsible for the cuts. If I recall, this was Pat Awada’s baby from the word go.

    Pat Vauk
    Minneapolis

  • Blame the Republicans, Part II

    Minneapolis city officials certainly have a duty to provide adequate and effective fire protection service to their city, but it’s unfair to single out that one city and one department for criticism as The Rake does, when the true fault lies with the decisions imposed by Gov. Tim Pawlenty and Republican legislators. The governor and Republican lawmakers who backed him in his “no tax hike” pledge utterly failed to recognize that this policy would have real-world effects—and the reduction of firefighters, police, and other essential city services is one of the biggest. They talk about “the budget” as if it were some mathematical abstraction, but as mayors, council members, and fire and police chiefs can testify, there are real people, real communities, and real challenges attached to every digit in the document. That’s why House Democrats proposed a budget that avoided these devastating cuts in aid to cities. Every citizen ought to be concerned about the ability of our city governments to protect them. But blame ought to be laid where it truly belongs: with the governor and the Republican legislators who put their own narrow ideological and partisan interest above the public interest.

    State Representative Len Biernat, District 59A, Northeast Minneapolis

  • St. Paul Is Not the Hero of This Story

    As I read Craig Cox’s article, I couldn’t help but be impressed with his knowledge of the sometimes tough and always dangerous job firefighters perform twenty-four hours a day and 365 days a year. Still, the article does unfortunately gloss over the ax–wielding occurring across the river in St. Paul. Cox wonders how it is possible that St. Paul, with a population of 100,000 less than Minneapolis, can afford to have a fire department approximately the same size as Minneapolis’s department. Both fire departments respond to fire alarms and are EMS first responders. However, in St. Paul, firefighters also provide the emergency ambulance service for the city, to the tune of more than 25,000 medic runs per year. Although St. Paul is smaller in population than Minneapolis, the SPFD does have more runs, and therefore the need for added personnel. Cox also mentions St. Paul’s plan to hire laid-off firefighters from other departments. St. Paul’s fire administration is doing this out of desperation. Mayor Randy Kelly eliminated fourteen already-vacant firefighter positions. Although nobody was laid off, this move had the same effect. Staffing levels in St. Paul are so poor that on many occasions rigs have had to be placed out of service and entire fire stations have had to be shut down because there were not enough personnel to man them. Randy Kelly won St. Paul’s fire union’s endorsement in 2001 because he promised to make public safety his number-one priority. Since his election, Kelly hasn’t done one single thing to increase the public’s safety. If anything, he has continually sought to compromise safety through misguided policies—for example, his plans to cut three fire rigs and then build two new fire stations. Any firefighter can tell Mayor Kelly that fire stations don’t put out fires, firefighters and fire rigs do. Often I wonder if I will have the resources to put out the fires in the city where I work, and if the Minneapolis Fire Department will be able to protect my family’s home in the city where I live.

    Chris Parsons, Minneapolis
    St. Paul firefighter,
    member, IAFF Local 21

  • Handsome Family

    It was cosmically appropriate that our review copy of The Handsome Family’s sixth disc, Singing Bones, arrived the day that Johnny Cash died. The New Mexico husband-and-wife duo of Brett and Rennie Sparks are true artistic children of the Man in Black, mixing traditional roots music with postmodern macabre about haunted all-night chain stores and doomed expeditions down bottomless pits. Brett’s deep bass is a perfect complement to Rennie’s lyrics, which aren’t so much standard verse-chorus-verse as melancholy story-poems with a dark, dry humor Flannery O’Connor would have appreciated. Bones is rich with somber alt-country, recorded and mixed entirely in the Sparks’s living room. Turn down the lights, knock back a whiskey and sing along.
    400 Bar, 400 Cedar Ave., (612) 332-2903, www.400bar.com

  • Dard Hunter: Master of Graphic and Book Arts

    DIY? As a graphic designer for New York’s Roycroft Colony, Dard Hunter invented the concept. Hunter’s participation in the Arts and Crafts movement (which embraced an ideal of human craftsmanship over the machine-made) yielded impressive results. Hunter dabbled in a variety of media, including stained glass and metal, but his true legacy lies in his accomplishments in papermaking and typographical design. This exhibit reveals a diligent American artist whose designs are cleverly handsome, making even the decapitated head of John the Baptist, a cover design for Oscar Wilde’s Salome, into an elegant work of art.
    MMAA, 505 Landmark Center, St. Paul, (651) 292-4380, www.mmaa.org

  • Werner Bischof Photographs: 1932-1954; Sid Kaplan; The Last Picture Show: Artists Using Photography, 1960-1982

    Shutterbug buffs have a busy month ahead of them, with three diverse exhibits sure to help build a sense of camera-derie. Two are, more or less, single-artist retrospectives. At the MIA, it’s a look at the 22-year career of Swiss photojournalist Bischof, one of the leading lights of the Magnum agency. Best known for documenting shattered postwar Europe and famine-struck India, he was in the midst of a massive South American tour when his car fell off a mountain road in the Andes. Over at Icebox, a loosely organized show of several decades of Sid Kaplan’s work provides an excellent excuse to check out the new gallery space in the Northrup King complex. Kaplan will be in town to introduce the show October 9; he’s got 50 years’ worth of stories about working with the greats of the New York scene, so mark your calendar. But the big development is the Walker’s aptly titled Last Picture Show, running until the building closes for a year in February. With nearly five dozen artists on display, this ambitious exhibit takes as its subject nothing less than the changing meaning of photography itself as an art form. It looks like a superb show; a year without the Walker sounds very long indeed.
    MIA, 2400 Third Ave. S., (612) 870-3131, www.artsmia.org
    Icebox, 1500 Jackson St. N.E. #443, (612) 788-1790, www.iceboxminnesota.com
    Walker, 725 Vineland Pl., (612) 375-7622, www.walkerart.org

  • The Poets Know It

    As a poet and host of a poetry reading series, I found William Waltz’s article “Does Poetry Matter?” [August] an outstanding insight into what is right and wrong with poetry today. Waltz does highlight the prominence and reach of Billy Collins who (like Mark Doty, Lucille Clifton, and others) understands both how to write excellent poetry and how to engage an audience that isn’t likely to read that poetry without some assurance it won’t bore, berate, or bite them. On the flip side, Waltz calls attention to those poets who are too impressed with their own ideas, satisfied with their own politics, or comfortable with their own crowd to notice that they are using bad poetry to preach a poor message to a smug choir. Thanks for driving home the point that there’s a difference between writing quality poetry and thinking you’re a poet. Writers who write things no one can read do nothing for anyone—least of all themselves.

    David Vincenti
    West Caldwell, NJ

  • The Sound of One Minnesotan Clapping

    We’ve known for a long time that Minnesotans practice a kind of karmically correct stoicism. But who knew that Minnesota Nice was just a variation on one of the world’s most ancient spiritual practices—Zen Buddhism? You’re really going to send that medium-rare steak back to the kitchen? You’ll carry the black cloud of unnecessary confrontation for months—possibly into your next lifetime, when you’ll come back as a pushy New Yorker.

    The five ethical precepts of Zen & the five pillars of Minnesota Nice

    Buddha nature is mindful and reverential
    of all life. Do not be violent. Do not kill.

    Avoid confrontation at all costs.

    ***

    There is no self. Respect the property
    of others. Do not steal.

    Checks still gladly accepted!

    ***

    Desire is an illusion. Be conscious and
    loving in your relationships. Do not
    give way to lust.

    Do not stare. If you must look,
    keep it above the shoulders, please.
    Below the knees is also OK.

    ***

    All is one beyond the cloud of unknowing.
    Honor honesty and truth. Do not deceive.

    If you can’t say something nice,
    don’t say anything at all.

    ***

    Transcend the pain of unreality. Exercise proper care of the body and mind. Do not
    be gluttonous. Do not abuse intoxicants.

    No liquor sales after 10 p.m.
    Great walking paths! (Don’t stare!)

  • Chris Ware, Quimby the Mouse

    It didn’t quite rival the fever-pitch anticipation of Order of the Phoenix, but fans of Chris Ware’s work (Jimmy Corrigan, Acme Novelty Library) have been waiting since the original release date of November 2002 for Quimby the Mouse. Quimby chronicles the life of a long-suffering mouse, drawn in the style of 1920s and 1930s comic strips, like George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, which Ware recently helped bring back to life by redesigning bound reprints. Quimby, like Jimmy Corrigan, is packed full of amazingly complicated graphics, cut-and-paste paper projects, and nostalgic-looking fake advertisements and newspaper columns that should take you the rest of the year to read. And you’ll enjoy every single minute of it.

  • Lauren Kessler, Clever Girl

    Kessler has a talent for finding singularly larger-than-life women to write about. She previously told the life story of fast-living lady stunt-pilot Pancho Barnes in the memorably titled Happy Bottom Riding Club. Clever Girl has an equally juicy story behind it: the tale of Elizabeth Bentley, a seemingly straitlaced Vassar grad who wound up converting to communism and became the KGB’s most important spy in America during World War II, running rings of agents that infiltrated dozens of agencies in Washington. When her lover and KGB contact died, the spy whom the Russians code-named “Clever Girl” came in from the cold and found herself under some very hot public scrutiny. What she knew, or claimed to know under oath, was political dynamite; she was instrumental in the infamous Rosenberg trial, and lived for a time as the darling of the anticommunist right wing. Kessler makes the most of her fascinating subject, though her efforts are weakened by a lack of solid evidence to draw on. Speculation and conjecture are unfortunate but necessary given Bentley’s shadowy early career and her later isolation, dying practically alone and friendless.