Author: rakemag

Tucked away in cardboard boxes in hundreds of basements and attics lie the forgotten, dusty remnants of “artistic phases” from our younger days, often remembered, if at all, with mortification. A couple of years ago, D.R. Martin found his cardboard box, and what he thought was, “Hey, these aren’t bad.” He had 200 sheets of negatives from his days as a photographer, pictures he’d taken in Duluth, Minneapolis, and Europe in the late 1960s, when he was 18 and smitten by the methods of Henri Cartier-Bresson. That French photographer specialized in the spontaneous shot—what he called “the decisive moment” when the lighting, setting, and subject was suddenly just right. Life organized the composition; the photographer’s art was to recognize those moments and even hunt them down. Martin’s compositions are striking, now with an added sense of being removed from time. An old man peers into an Italian newspaper, oblivious to the frenzied activity of birds around him. A young girl leans against a wall, staring into the distance. Four protesters rest after an event, each lost in their own thoughts. Photography is an instantaneous art, all about being in the right place at the right time. It’s good that these found a new place and time as well. Icebox, 2401 Central Ave. N.E., (612) 788-1790

You were a world-class hairdresser from Austria. You settled in Minneapolis and became a world-class party animal. You got deathly ill, and decided to heal not only yourself but the world. You sold Aveda for $300 million. Meet your Rakish readers, HORST.

Horst Rechelbacher is filthy rich. He’s also a pure soul, spending as much as seven hours a day in serious meditation and yogic practice. The 61-year-old stylist, photographer, entrepreneur, and activist has long made his home in the Twin Cities.

Horst arrived in Minneapolis when he was still a young man with a rich Austrian accent. Having become a world-class hairdresser at the tender age of 14, he had already toured most of the world before he was an adult. In 1965, he was passing through the area when he was involved in a nearly fatal automobile accident. He spent several months in the hospital, and by the time he got out, he was saddled with what seemed like a lifetime of medical bills. He decided to set up his own hair salon here, and the rest is history.

But what a history! Through the 60s and 70s, he maintained his platinum reputation as a stylist, while experimenting with his own cosmetics and hair-care supplies. At the same time, he’d become interested in Eastern philosophy and religion. It was a fast-paced, jet-setting lifestyle. Ultimately, in the mid-70s, it all caught up to him and he had a physical breakdown he describes as being “completely zapped.” His mother, an Austrian apothecary, came to Minnesota and helped nurse her son back to health. At about this time, a light went on. He saw with clarity new connections between his spiritual interests, his business ventures, and his personal history. He suddenly became interested in his mother’s traditional herbal infusions and preparations, and sensed a connection to some of the Eastern philosophies he’d been exposed to in India, Nepal, and Tibet.

Horst began to see that “the human body and the planetary body are totally symbiotic.” He studied and received a degree in Ayurvedic medicine, the traditional Indian approach to healing that uses 175 essential oils prepared from plants and flowers. He started meditating on a regular basis. He began to sense that his industry was ripe for a revolution—and he was right. In 1978, he launched Aveda—a Sanskrit word meaning “all knowledge”—to engender his new principles about personal and global renewal, while trying to eliminate the use of toxins and petrochemicals in personal care products.

In 1997, he sold Aveda to Estee Lauder for $300 million. Frustrated by the constant pressure of running a business that had outgrown him, he decided to focus on the things that mattered most to him: meditation and activism. And yet, before long he’d had another idea for a new enterprise: Intelligent Nutrients, a progressive food and supplement retailer. It seems that no matter how retired or wealthy the man becomes, he grows restless to be involved with either a noble cause, a global business, or (ideally) both.

In October, Horst launched a new personal adventure: an art gallery in Northeast Minneapolis, just down the road from the Aveda Institute. Horst Galleries will feature Eastern and emerging artists, and profits from the gallery will benefit charitable causes like preserving traditional medicine and promoting awareness about cancer. His first show featured the work of Romio Shristha, a Tibetan who paints thankgas. These are beautiful, highly detailed, traditional medical illustrations. It was the perfect debut for Horst, combining his love of fine art, his personal interest in Eastern spirituality, and his professional involvement with the traditional, indigenous medicine of Asia.

We met with Horst while the paint was still drying on his new office walls, and Shristha’s show was being hung. Horst is a centered man, he laughs easily and uproariously, and he is genuine about his passions. Like anyone who has cashed out the way he’s cashed out, he knows what he likes, and has no problem demanding it from those around him.

Coffee House Press has certainly been double-dosed on caffeine—or something—in the past year. One of our favorite local publishing houses just seems to go from strength to strength. Norah Labiner’s Miniatures got widespread acclaim (and even got thrown up on by the office cat, a special distinction we won’t go into here) and the world seems poised to go nuts over Laurie Foos’ Bingo Under the Crucifix. The latter, together with Ellen Cooney’s The White Palazzo seem to suggest that someone over at Coffee House found the box of hand-buzzers, squirting flowers, and rubber chickens. These books are subtle and hilarious, without being cynical or cruel. Cooney’s novel takes her young heroine on a wild ride from the altar, where she abandons her betrothed, to the backroads of Massachusetts, where she eventually hooks up with a psychic who has been hired to find her. Think of it as a goofball, 21st-century update of Thelma & Louise and an inversion of The Graduate. Is the nation on the verge of a New Sense of Humor? We think it may be one of the few benefits that accrue from single-party rule, and we plan to laugh hard and long, whenever the opportunity presents itself. Amazon Books, (612) 821-9630, amazonbookstorecoop.com

Though he’s scored with things like Disclosure and TV’s ER, Michael Crichton inevitably returns to the theme that’s served him so well so often before, Science Run Amok. The dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, the robot gunslingers in Westworld, the virus in Andromeda Strain (We could go on; he certainly did) are joined by the villain of his latest book, Prey: a killer swarm of nanotechnology. Out in the remote Nevada desert, a team of scientists has built a cloud of intelligent microparticles—very small robots, basically—intended as military spyware. But, as always in Crichton’s books, the scientists don’t fully comprehend the complexity of their creation until it’s too late, and soon the cloud escapes, growing larger and smarter by the hour and developing a taste for human flesh. Crichton’s determination to base even the wildest aspects of his thrillers on real science is admirable, but we find it hard to imagine that Prey will find as large an audience as Jurassic Park did—nanobots seem awfully abstruse compared with the in-your-face threat of a T. rex attack. Still, even a weak Crichton book is a smart mix of tense plotting and cutting-edge pop science, equally suitable for the beach and the physics lecture. (Note: To attend, you must buy a copy of Prey at the store.) Ruminator Books, (612) 215-2600, ruminator.com

Appropriately enough, Sam Fuller’s life sounds like something out of the movies. The director of such great cult noir films as Shock Corridor and The Naked Kiss penned this autobiography in the months before his death in 1997. Fuller grew up a poor Jewish kid in New York, raised by his strong-willed, widowed mother, and was kicked out of high school for moonlighting as a crime reporter. He never looked back. His newspapering days marked him for life. Third Face is written in a voice that could be a tabloid reporter straight out of central casting: cantankerous and hardboiled, yet passionate in his beliefs and peppered with both no-nonsense profanities and quaint slang like “Holy cow!” His later career as a screenwriter was interrupted by Pearl Harbor, and Fuller the infantryman fought through some of World War Two’s most harrowing moments—D-Day, the Battle of the Bulge, the liberation of the concentration camps—which he’d later draw on for his autobiographical war film The Big Red One. As a postwar director, Fuller was an iconoclast during the height of anti-Red blacklisting, leading his terrific seedy noir Pickup on South Street to be blasted as pro-communist by J. Edgar Hoover and anti-communist by French intellectuals. It was neither; Fuller’s films (or “yarns,” as he insisted on calling them) were too smart to be reducible to anything other than straight humanism. Like him, they were tough and unsentimental, but never cruel. You can open up Third Face to almost any page and find some fascinating anecdote, like the time Fuller set up his brother on a blind date with Marilyn Monroe, or when, during the war he unknowingly took shelter overnight in the boyhood home of his hero, Beethoven. Highly recommended, and a must-read for anyone interested in filmmaking.

It’s difficult not to connect the dots from Robert Crumb to Daniel Clowes. Crumb’s raw, realistic figures, oozing desperate human emotion (unrequited lust, mostly) spawned numer-ous other writer/illustrators like Clowes, Chris Ware, Johnny Ryan, Dave Cooper and Charles Burns that have have expanded comics beyond the green tights and trusty sidekicks that came before. Caricature features nine stories, many from Clowes’ Eightball periodical as well as the melodrama “Eyeliner,” the first comic work to appear in Esquire’s fiction issue. Clowes’s stories are rich with buck-toothed, horn-rimmed, hat-haired eccentrics, each living their lives in quiet and not-so-quiet desperation: a gynecologist/karaoke singer, a 14-year-old trick-or-treater, a traveling carnival caricaturist, all traveling down a road they seem unable or unwilling to change. It’s the journey, not the destination, and these nine by the writer of Ghost World are definitely worth the ride.

Famous for her Pulitzer-winning novel The Shipping News, Proulx’s carved out a literary niche chronicling the lives of down-and-out communities all across North America—Newfoundland in Shipping, New England in Postcards, and now the Texas Panhandle in Ace. The story is something like the film Local Hero as it might have been told by Flannery O’Connor or T.C. Boyle. (Kirkus Reviews called it a kind of Rake’s Progress, which is too bad because we’d really like to have been the ones to make that reference.) Bob Dollar, a young and ambitious employee of a multinational hog farming corporation called Global Pork Rind, is sent to Texas to find a suitable spot for a new plant, and then buy the nearby land on the cheap. He finds his target in the little town of Woolybucket, but finds strong resistance, and begins to have serious doubts when he learns about the drastic effect giant hog farms have on the land around them. Proulx’s affinity for oddball character names is in full force, and adds to the sense of comic grotesquery: among others, we meet Ribeye Cluke, Jerky Baum, Habakuk van Melkebeek, LaVon Fronk, and the title character, a crusty old windmill repairman named Ace Couch.

Pinocchio apparently isn’t the only one who wants to be a real boy. At age 50, Roberto Benigni is perhaps more suited to play the grandfatherly Gepetto than the marionette whose nose grows when he lies. But to give him his due, Benigni’s best performances have always been touched with childlike wonder, and if anyone his age can pull this off, he can. This live-action version, also directed by Benigni, hews closer to Carlo Collodi’s original book than the Disney version more of us are familiar with. Kids might find it hard to get past the subtitles, but Benigni’s forte is physical comedy, and we’re guessing that most of Pinocchio’s action will transcend any language barrier. The film might be a harder sell with grownups. Judging by Benigni’s flower-patterned white clown outfit, anyone who found him insufferably cloying in Life Is Beautiful should make other plans.

In recent years, wags of varying levels of hostility have suggested, with some drama, that Uncle Sam should require licenses of all parents and would-be parents. Well, we don’t know about that, but we do know that there are a handful of charitable organizations that work with sincerity and sympathy to improve the lot of ordinary families in extraordinary circumstances. The Jewish Family and Children’s Service of Minneapolis has been offering classes and support to families of all faith traditions—and they’ve been doing it for 90 years. (Upcoming programs include classes on parenting children with special needs, living with chronic illness, and Jewish grief support.) In recent years, the JFCS has refilled the coffers with this highly popular comedy revue. Here’s a chance to see whether Martin Short still has the comedic goods, and a rare opportunity to see Second City set their tent up in the Twin Cities. Tickets range from $50 to $25,000(!). We’re told you have to drop at least two Benjamins and four Franklins to get the dinner plate. JFCS of Minneapolis, (952) 546-0616, jfcsmpls.org

This is the best kind of pyramid scheme. Spanning 35 centuries, this massive traveling exhibition showcases nearly 150 items from the English national museum’s collection of Egyptiana, many of which haven’t left England since, well, arriving from Cairo. Although the MIA is complementing the show with a display of locally owned mummies, the exhibit proper focuses more on the history of Egyptian art. Among the treasures are the Soleb Lion—a massive granite statue inscribed by King Tut himself—and the beautiful golden funerary mask of a mummified noblewoman known as Satdjehuty. (Just the mask, unfortunately, since poor Satdjehuty’s body was, according to British Museum records, bought by “an enterprising beerhouse keeper in Uxbridge.”) Not one to let a good theme go to waste, the MIA is putting on several Egypt-themed shows of its own, including an exhibit of 19th-century Nile photography and another of Scottish painter David Roberts’ Middle Eastern landscapes. MIA, (612) 870-3131, artsmia.org