The opening of Heartland could not have been timed better. With winter approaching, our primitive souls yearn for the comfort food that will sustain us through the next six months. Lenny Russo, the former executive chef at W.A. Frost, has crafted a North American Midwest cuisine (who knew?) consisting of all locally grown produce, nuts and berries, fish, beef and game, with a menu that changes on a nightly basis. Meat, fish, and veggie tasting menus for the hearty appetite, and a stream-lined a la carte selection for those with a smaller appetite. Heartland, however, goes international with their libations: 138 selections of wine (American, French, some Italian), regional and foreign beer as well. Dinner only. Reservations are strongly encouraged, as the restaurant only seats around fifty. Heartland, (651) 699-3536.
Author: rakemag
-
Jem Casey Explained
Many readers write to ask about Rake contributor Jem Casey. He is modest, and unlikely to speak up for himself, so we thought we’d take this opportunity to answer a few questions that frequently come up.
Under several different pen names, Jem Casey has written stories for magazines like the Oxford American, Ploughshares, the Prairie Schooner, and Harper’s. He also publishes a quarterly newsletter called JUPPER. He has received numerous awards for his short fiction.
Jem Casey is in charge of newspaper clippings at The Rake. As his fans already know, he is frequently the author of the anonymous “newsbreaks” which appear at the bottom of the columns in the print version of The Rake.
Jem Casey is not “the Poet of the Pick” made famous by Irish writer Flann O’Brien. He did not write “the pome that’ll be heard wherever the Irish race is wont to gather.” He is that Jem Casey’s great-grandson, and he too believes that “The Workingman’s Friend” will “live as long as there’s a hard root of an Irishman left by the Almighty on this planet.”
Jem Casey can be reached directly at press@rakemag.com.
-
Citizen Kane
The persistent claim that it’s the “Greatest Movie Ever” leaves us a little cold—it seems a little too easy to put this at the top of the list, a safe choice nobody can really argue with. And the Rosebud mystery that bookends the drama seems more heavyhanded and gimmicky every time we watch it. Those quibbles aside, Orson Welles’ film debut is a true milestone, with fine acting and writing, direction and cinematography that from a technical standpoint were light-years ahead of their time. The most impressive achievement is that it was made at all, given that the motivating force was Welles’ ferocious loathing of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. It was no mean feat to get away with such a stealthy character assassination, deserved or not, on one of the most powerful multimillionaires of the time. And of course Welles didn’t escape unscathed—Hearst’s counterattacks poisoned the rest of his career. But even if he’d never made anything else, Kane assured his place in cinema Valhalla. This new three-disc special edition has all the behind-the-scenes story you could want: It is essentially last year’s two-disc set that included the terrific documentary The Battle Over Citizen Kane plus HBO’s RKO 281 , a dramatic retelling of the same events featuring a perfectly cast Liev Schreiber as Welles.
-
Lucy Jago
The Vikings thought the northern lights were the unearthly spirits of Valkyries pointing the way to the warrior’s afterlife in Valhalla. Eskimos thought they were evil spirits who decapitated the heads of children for sport. A former BBC documentarian tells a true story no less strange and tragic in The Northern Lights . Turn of the century Norwegian scientist Kristian Birkeland was obsessed with unlocking the mystery of what causes the aurora borealis, believing (correctly, as it turned out) that it was the interaction of solar wind with the Earth’s magnetic field. It was a gifted deduction, but after that his career was guided by an unlucky star. Other scientists refused to accept his unorthodox theories, forcing him to scrounge for money as an inventor. Despite some spectacular successes, that backfired when his business partner attempted to cheat him out of his profits, and even scuttled Birkeland’s Nobel Prize nomination out of jealousy. Meanwhile, Birkeland became so fixated on scientific pursuits that he absentmindedly double-booked his own wedding, and began to spiral into drug abuse. Strung out and paranoid, he died alone in a Japanese hotel room, armed with a pistol to protect himself from the British spies he thought were out to steal his ideas. (A fear that may not have been entirely unfounded.) As is so often the case, his ideas were accepted only years later, long after it was too late to halt his downward spiral. Jago’s clear prose, quoting extensively from the letters of Birkeland and contemporaries, is a worthy attempt at posthumous vindication. It’s also a compelling portrait of an archetypal unheralded genius, destroyed by forces both external and internal. Ruminator Books, (651) 699-0587, www.ruminator.com
-
Letter from China: A Picture is Worth a Hundred Characters
I’m sitting on the dusty steps of a Kodak camera shop on Bai Se Road, just down the street from my apartment, looking through some black and white photographs. They’re the first pictures I’ve taken in China and I’m so excited to see them that I can’t be bothered with getting on my bike and making the five-minute trip back home.
After a couple minutes, a shadow passes over me. I look up and I’m face to face with a woman in her mid-30s, barefoot, dressed in a short yellow skirt. She mutters something in Mandarin and positions herself behind me to look over my shoulder at the photographs. Her eyes are glowing with fascination—a look I’ve seen many times before, mostly from disbelief that blue-eyed Americans exist and are walking around suburban Shanghai.
In a gesture of modesty, I shuffle through the rest of the photographs and put them in my backpack. The woman steps down to the street and leans even closer, like she wants to kiss me. I can taste her breath and her short hair brushes my face. A barrage of Mandarin emanates from her mouth, like she’s trying to feed the words to me, and I can’t seem to slow them down, no matter how many times I fill the spaces in between her sentences with “Wo bu dong” (I don’t understand). For the moment, I can’t say anything to her that she’ll understand, and I can’t look her in the eye because she’s only a few inches from my face.
Once she determines her one-sided conversation is leading nowhere, she takes a pen out of my hand and begins writing Chinese characters all over my hands. Once she’s filled up the space on my skin, she tears a few scraps from a newspaper and continues to write. I gather as many of these scribbles as I can carry, stuff them into my backpack, silently excuse myself, and make my escape down Bai Se Road in the direction of my apartment.
Half an hour later, I walk into the office of my friend Arnold and show him my hands. At first, he can’t read the sloppy characters, but slowly a smile of recognition crosses his face and a story emerges. The sentences on my hands are mostly questions: “Do you speak Chinese?” “Are you married?” And then, the most mysterious, an invitation: “When you’re happy, come over to my house.” Finally, an address—not enough information for me to determine whether or not I was just propositioned for sex.
Most Chinese women tend to be much more modest with their body language, because they live in a predominantly non-touching culture, where couples are the only people permitted to hug each other in public. (Try to hug a casual female friend in China and you’ll get a cold, stiff-bodied response as though you’re an incestuous uncle instead of a friend.) Moreover, prostitution, while considered a perfectly acceptable profession in China, is nevertheless officially illegal. Consequently, brothels must thinly disguise their true purpose by fronting as “hair salons,” to avoid occasional visits from police arbitrarily enforcing the law.
-
Uncle Clinton?
Though I agree with Clinton Collins’ main point, that often blacks use the “Uncle Tom” accusation too broadly [Free the Jackson Five!, September], I think his analysis of why it occurs is too crude. Mr. Collins errs greatly by using Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas as an example of someone who was called out by blacks, unfairly, only for thinking differently than us. Our determined shunning of Thomas is more reasonable than that. Though he opposes affirmative action, he accepted the top position held by an African American solely on the basis of his race. Unlike Colin Powell, who is a Republican and supports affirmative action, Thomas is a hypocrite. No intelligent person ever argued that he was the best candidate for that job. He was too young, he had left the EEOC with warehouses of backlogged cases, and his tenure as a judge was unremarkable. Yet, he was black and right-minded, and just what the white right needed to fill the shoes of a black justice. If that isn’t selling out then nothing is. What should concern us most as African Americans is what our people do with the power bestowed upon them. Unfortunately, it’s all too common for some of us to find a source of “enlightenment” that pays us to denounce our own. There is a literary anti-nigger machine that employs countless pundits to detail why black people are wrong about everything. Former liberal David Horowitz is making a killing being a venomous one-trick pony exposing in detail our political ignorance. It’s too bad many of us are following suit: Larry Elder is paid handsomely to constantly chastise us from his vantage point, as is Denver radio host Ken Hamblin, Armstrong Williams, Alan Keyes, and the list could go on. It’s important for blacks to keep tabs on those who constantly detract from our conventional wisdom. People like Justice Thomas are black as a euphemism, but they are paid by our moneyed white opposition for their work detracting and dividing us. Is it a coincidence that most of them find greater comfort in white neighborhoods, white churches, white think tanks, and white work places? Further, what should we make of the weird universal that they all have white wives? Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but… I appreciate Mr. Collins point that we shouldn’t hate on each other as much as we do, that we shouldn’t be so quick to stifle free speech, and that it could be dangerous to carelessly participate in our character assassination. I would just ask that he explain at what point should we call a spade a spade?
Rev. Christopher Rahelio Soleil
Minneapolis -
Like the Lady Said
I found Jon Zurn’s recent article on the state of the arts and opportunities for artists in this area very much on-the-mark. There are so many talented persons in the Cities that are not being shown or collected and might be if more of the public would take time for a closer look at what local artists have to offer before going off to buy art in other cities or states (or countries). I salute the efforts of those artists and galleries that have been able to keep their resolve in the face of what can often seem to be a disinterested general public. One venue that comes to mind when thinking about galleries that are dedicated to the promotion and exhibition of local artists—one that takes great risks at times by showing artists working from a wide range of stylistic idioms as well as mediums—is Flatland Gallery. Robyne Robinson has proven, during the two years Flatland has been in existence, her rock-solid commitment to both local artists and local art. The bottom line at Flatland (as with many other small galleries in the Twin Cities) has always been to bring artists to the public’s attention that might not get the opportunity otherwise. The fact that so many local galleries/owners are willing to keep going and stay open in spite of more and more collectors turning to large venues while collecting art should be loudly applauded!
James Michael Lawrence
Minneapolis -
Looking California, Feeling Minnesota
When reading your article on Ken Pentel, the Green Party candidate for governor [“It Ain’t Easy Being Green,” September], I felt a deep sense of envy and awe for Minnesotans. Out here in California, we don’t have public policies which encourage desperately needed third parties to participate in government. Third-party candidates in California don’t have the blessing of public financing or candidate forums. Our current governor, a corrupt, corporate yes-man known as Gray “Rolling Blackouts” Davis, refuses to acknowledge that our third-party candidates even exist. Davis is so unpopular that he has agreed to only two debates with his equally repulsive Republican challenger, Bill Simon. One of these debates will be on Spanish language television at 12 in the afternoon on a weekday. Both major party candidates are so despised that their disapproval ratings are significantly higher than their approval ratings. Minnesotans should be proud that they live in a state that believes in democracy and allows people like Ken Pentel to exist.
Matthew Stewart
Palo Alto, CA -
Ignorance, By Milan Kundera
It’s been 20 years since Milan Kundera first published The Unbearable Lightness of Being and became literature’s equivalent of a rock star. It was the kind of book that American college students thrive on—Eurotrash romanticism, haphazard pop-philosophizing, and lots of adulterous affairs with mysterious Women of the Warsaw Pact. If you wore black back then, and fantasized about booking a flight to Prague—oh romantic city!—you read Kundera. Well, we’ve all grown up since then, and the Czech writer has too, but maybe not quite as much. He still lectures his readers every other chapter, on the etymology of the word “nostalgia,” on the Odyssey , on Icelandic myths—on anything he damn well pleases. He’s not the world’s most complex thinker, nor its most poetic novelist. But this novel, about two Czech expatriates making their way back to Prague to rediscover their past—typical fare, really—is another light-handed page turner. If nothing else, Kundera will get you in touch with your own past—as a college student in black jeans, excited for the first time in your life about the passions that can be cultivated by something as simple as an earnest European hardcover.
-
Baudolino, By Umberto Eco
It’s fittingly ironic that Umberto Eco finds such rich soil in which to plant his postmodern mysteries back in the Middle Ages. In his fourth novel, 12th-century Italy is a backdrop for the tale of Baudolino, an Italian peasant who becomes the adopted son of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I, known as Barbarossa. Mixing fiction with meticulously researched history, Eco inserts his imaginary rogue deeply into some of the 12th century’s most momentous events. Unlike Forrest Gump, Baudolino’s no passive fool, but a clever, spontaneous liar who uncorks a scheme that could change the course of European history. The plan: to perpetrate a massive hoax on Frederick’s enemies by forging a letter involving the Holy Grail and the mythical utopian kingdom of Prester John. It may not be as compelling as The Name of the Rose or Foucault’s Pendulum , but if you’re looking for more of Eco’s mix of political conspiracy, abstruse theology, and murder mystery you won’t be disappointed here. Eco makes the 12th century spring to life, setting his story in the fascinating larger framework of how the Renaissance grew out of the Dark Ages.