Author: rakemag

Happy Birthday to Me!

The Rake is the oldest continuously published periodical in the English language, but it didn’t get to this venerable and celebrated position without sacrifices! You remember the Cedars of Lebanon? They provided the reams of paper that became our massive “Top Priests” issue of May, 501 AD. Atlantis? The island defaulted on payment for its legendary “Get to the Bottom of It All” tourism campaign that ran in our pages, which at the time were printed on clay tablets. (Our tough-love comptroller sank the island, along with its economy, sometime during the tenth century BC.) Throughout it all, we’ve managed to keep sex, violence, and moral turpitude out of our glossy pages. The cost for such constancy and righteousness? Well, let’s just say you’d be surprised at the improvements in staff morale that accrue from our semi-annual pig-roast, bake sale, and office orgy—a relatively new tradition, established by our legendary 19th century publisher, Lord Thomas Aquinas Bartel. A “safe room” with duct-tape and plastic sheeting? We’ve been into that since the Gilded Age.

At the heart of this new-in-paperback novel by the author of The Joy Luck Club lies the terrible fragility of memory-and how time robs us piece by piece of our own past. Her main characters are instantly recognizable Tan types. American-born writer Ruth Young realizes it’s time to mend fences with Alzheimer’s-beset mother, LuLing, before she loses her chance. She discovers two secret memoirs, and through them learns the family past mom never told her about. Bonesetter becomes LuLing’s story, jumping from present-day California to her 1920s childhood in the Chinese region where Peking Man was first dug up by anthropologists. She and her sister plot to escape their tradition-bound mountain village, and along the way she has secrets of her own to learn. All of which reminds us that next time we visit the grandparents, we ought to bring a tape recorder and an afternoon’s worth of questions about our own family archaeology.

When Michael Gordon uses the word “hero” to describe the 12 stylists he profiles, he’s not kidding. And although he’s not trying to place his subjects on the same level as, say, the firefighters of 9/11, they’re certainly at the top of the heap when it comes to the top of your head. There’s Kenneth Battelle, who invented the Jackie Kennedy bouffant, and Sydney Guilaroff, head stylist on 1,500 films during Hollywood’s golden age. And of course Vidal Sassoon, who Gordon calls the Frank Lloyd Wright of the tonsorial world. But even for those of us who know these names only as brands of shampoo, there’s interesting history within—for one thing, Sassoon tells us how he invented blow-drying. (“That weekend I couldn’t think of anything else,” he says of his Edisonian flash of insight.) Now if only we knew who came up with the mullet.

Right out of the gate, with her early novels The Bluest Eye and Sula, it was clear that Toni Morrison was a writer to be reckoned with, capable of powerfully articulating the rage and despair of black women trying to get by in a society permeated with both racism and sexism. Her big-league status was cemented with the Pulitzer she won for her fifth book, 1988’s Beloved, a horrifying ghost story about a former slave haunted by the daughter she murdered. (Ten years later, it was made into a movie by Oprah Winfrey, which in some quarters beats a Pulitzer any day of the week.) In 1993, she became the first black woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and in her acceptance speech talked movingly about her mission to document “what moves at the margin. …What it is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear your company.” Now 72 and a humanities professor at Princeton, she visits St. Kate’s as part of the Women With Substance lecture series. O’Shaughnessy, 2004 Randolph Ave., St Paul, (651) 690-6700, www.stkate.edu/oshaughnessy

If he were the protagonist in one of his own crime novels, Andrew Vachss might be unbelievable: A hard-as-nails lawyer, grizzled and sporting an eyepatch, who’ll only take cases defending child victims of sexual abuse. But his singleminded, furious crusade is for real, and it informs not just his writing but his whole life. Vachss works tirelessly for his cause, and has a string of achievements to show for it, such as the law mandating national background checks for sex offenders (which was his idea). Vachss’ stories are an outgrowth of his activism, and they burn with the same fiery rage he shows in court. He’s best known for his Burke novels, a remarkably brutal and angry series in which the villains are usually child pornographers, intended not so much to entertain readers as to build them up to Vachss’ level of moral outrage. These books are often powerful, and not exactly light reading. If this all sounds too extreme to start with, try his new The Getaway Man. A Thompsonesque tale of a bank-job driver hard on his luck, Getaway harks back to 1950s pulp-fiction—especially the Gold Medal series of dime novels. That means lean prose and slam-bang action—sunnier than Vachss’ usual territory, but with streets that are still plenty mean. Ruminator Books, 1648 Grand Ave., St. Paul, (651) 699-0587, www.ruminator.com

Northfield native Siri Hustvedt first caught our attention with her 1996 novel The Enchantment of Lily Dahl, a self-consciously quirky noir set in a small Minnesota town populated by a ditzy femme-fatale heroine and a cast of flaky eccentrics.What I Loved, her third book, chronicles the quarter-century friendship between a painter and an art historian secretly in love with the painter’s wife. It’s something of a cross between a John Irving family drama and an erotic thriller, and it’s creating quite a bit of critical buzz.

Sophomore slump is often nothing more than the indifference of critics and fans who are still digging the first record. Macy Gray got about as big as anyone can get with her 1999 debut, On How Life Is. The freak queen of rock ’n’ soul combined a Jimi Hendrix sense of style with a vocal sound that reminded most of James Brown on helium. Top-40 stations around here are still spinning that breakthrough single, “I Try.” Gray’s 2001 followup, The Id, built further on both her strengths and her weaknesses. What she lacks in real range as a vocalist, she makes up for in straight funk, no chaser. Perhaps most important of all, Macy’s a good CEO: She has a special talent for working with great co-writers and a backup band that knows how to groove in the great soul tradition of “Cantaloupe Island” and “The House that Jack Built.”

This is the Bristol duo that almost singlehandedly invented the late-90s genre du jour, “trip-hop”—meaning atmospheric, heavily remixed club music that brought together elements of electronica, turntablism, rock ’n’ roll, film soundtrack, and torch song. You probably remember Geoff Barrow and Beth Gibbons best for “Sour Times,” a wonderful, sepia-toned single that hit the airwaves right around the time REV-105 went off the air forever. Their second, self-titled album was a mostly inaccessible mash of aural dementia, but the concert album PNYC was among the very best records of the 1990s. The five-year hiatus bodes well for this particular group: Either the world is ready for a trip-hop revival, or Portishead will again rewrite the rules of prerecorded pop music, or possibly both. Like a dog and a tin whistle, the ears of every critic in the country will be tuned to this one. Whether you should care about that, of course, remains an open question.

He was the Hendrix of jazz, was Charlie Parker. The living genius who flamed out young, so consumed by his music that he could practice 15 hours a day if he wasn’t strung out on junk. He helped forge a new form of jazz—bebop, in this case—and improvised riffs on his saxophone that fellow musicians sometimes could barely comprehend, let alone copy. His skills were elevated to an almost ludicrous level of worship by journeymen sax players, and even now, Bird is the word. This three-disc collection captures him during his last four years—not generally pleasant ones for him. The combination of heroin abuse, exhaustion and hounding by the authorities was ravaging him to such an extent that when he died in 1955, the coroner thought he was 60 when he was only 34. But he could still play like wildfire when the mood took him, and some think his best work lands square in the middle of these years.

Terry Gilliam’s work had always had anarchy deep in its heart, and more than once anarchy has overwhelmed the project entirely. Certainly, our favorite hometown Python can say with some justification that his failures are more interesting than a lot of director’s successes. There is, in fact, a whole cottage industry devoted to chronicling his fights to keep his artistic vision and his films alive: The Battle For Brazil, Losing the Light and The Hamster Factor and Other Tales of 12 Monkeys. And now this wry documentary, a blow-by-blow account of Gilliam’s catastrophic attempt at Don Quixote. Gilliam’s the first to admit he thrives on disorder and brings much trouble on himself. But the windmill giants he contends with to make The Man Who Killed Quixote are too numerous even for a director nicknamed Captain Chaos: An infirm and incomprehensible lead actor, budget-smashing monsoons, and a shooting location a stone’s throw from a practice site for NATO bombers. And though it’s sad to see Gilliam’s inevitable abandonment of the project, at least this documentary means that somebody got a decent film out of the experience.