Author: rakemag

We rarely think twice about a visit to this Uptown Tex-Mex haven, though it gets awfully loud inside on a busy Friday. So we took advantage of one of September’s last warm nights and grabbed a sidewalk table for some pre-Lagoon noshing. The vegetarian in our party was pleased but not thrilled with her potato pizza, declaring that the sausage was lacking in flavor. (She’s not, apparently, all that strict a vegetarian.) We split on the fajita question: the steak variety was declared bland, but the hickory chicken fajitas made us consider putting in a second order so we could have them again for lunch. The best dish of the night was the grilled chicken and wild rice burrito, with a delectable glaze of mango sauce and candied pecans. The menu’s also been recently augmented with some new pasta dishes and wood-roasted portobello mushroom fajitas. The drinks menu is anchored by a massive (even, er, Texas-sized?) selection of tequilas and margaritas. If you’re looking for something a little different, try the tart Prickly Pear, made with cactus juice. Bar Abilene, (612) 825-2525

We add our “megadittoes” to the chorus of praise heaped on this Loring Park restaurant since it opened this summer. Although it’s located in a graveyard of failed dining ventures (the unfortunately named “Snoodles” restaurant being only the most recent doomed enterprise), this Indian eatery has culinary chops to spare, and a pleasing atmosphere of hand-painted murals and hanging silks. Several recent visits to the obligatory lunch buffet revealed some unusual choices, including a clove-tinged egg curry, a seasonally-appropriate zucchini curry, a goat curry, and a vegetable curry flavored with white raisins. Also in evidence was the crepe-like Dosai, which Twin Cities diners have recently been introduced to at southern Indian restaurants like Udupi in Columbia Heights. In addition to the usual suspects of local Indian dining, the dinner menu includes other intriguing dishes like lobster vindaloo, an okra masala. and a coconut soup, which will insure many happy returns this fall. New Delhi, (612) 813-0000

Alas: the pitter-pat of shuffling feet on the stair that Martha Stewart hears each day when she awakes is not the stirring of guests invited for a festive country weekend; it’s the SEC closing in. Last month ImClone boss and “family friend” Sam Waksal (her daughter’s boyfriend, later her own) took his perp walk for the cameras on insider trading charges. A few days later the Wall Street Journal reported that the Feds had turned one of Stewart’s own pals, a woman who flew to Mexico with Martha on Stewart’s private jet the day her ImClone sale was executed.

Delicious, isn’t it? Martha summed up better than anyone the consumption side of the long 90s boom. And despite economically polarized times she figured out how to play both ends of the street. To the masses who bought up her branded Kmart merchandise, she peddled a vain and costly domestic fantasy; to the moneyed would-be gentry she offered a practical primer on the good life. It proved so lucrative in part because it tapped a market-driven article of faith rigorously foisted on fortunates and unfortunates alike in the 80s and 90s: There really is nothing you can’t buy if you’ve got the money—style, grace, dignity, domestic tranquility, you name it. At bottom, like all timeless hucksters, she was selling a sense of personal completeness and substance.

Turns out it was all pretend, right down to the paper fortune Stewart amassed during her day in the sun. So far her stock in her own company has dropped over $300 million in value, and she may be facing time in one of those minimum-security facilities whose décor she could do so much to enliven. All this over a smarmy little insider transaction that saved her about $200,000 in stock losses. If you aren’t gratified by what’s become of Martha Stewart, you just aren’t paying attention.

Don’t bet she’ll scrape by on the strength of her money and clout. If the order of the day is a few show trials to quiet public outrage, what prosecution could possibly be showier than Martha’s? One can already imagine the indictment, the subsequent death-plunge of MSO stock, even the eventual plea agreement, filed on the finest linen stationery with inlaid flowers pressed by Martha herself.

AFTER LAST MONTH’S column on Paul Wellstone’s silence concerning the business scandals, I got a testy email from a Wellstone staffer, larded with press release attachments that demonstrated the senator’s fierce and fearless leadership. Wellstone has spoken against corporate abuses on the Senate floor, I was informed, not once but twice—and, more impressive still, he spoke forcefully each time.

Naturally I felt mortified at my own hubris. Who was I to criticize Wellstone’s leadership just because I hadn’t heard a peep about it myself? Had I scoured the full menu of his press releases? Had I pored over member comments on the Senate floor? No. But in my own paltry way I did try. I looked at various news archives and Wellstone’s own Senate website. Before its content was frozen by election rules round about early July, it contained no word about corporate accountability that I could find, not even one of the press releases—each surely more forceful than the last!—that are the sine qua non of his leadership. All I can say is that I’m sorry, Paul, and in the future I’ll bear in mind that the mere fact of being invisible doesn’t make you any less a leader.

Now, in mid-August, Wellstone’s campaign website is screaming boardroom larceny front and center. Lovely. Better late than never, and better a little than nothing at all: That’s the central refrain of Wellstone’s Senate career and the only credible slogan on behalf of his re-election campaign. I’ll still vote for him if I vote at all, but I won’t venture out just to pull the lever for Paul. And in that I doubt I’m alone.

The other day I spoke with Bill Hillsman, the political ad consultant who played a vital role in electing Wellstone the first time. “I was thinking about some of the ads we just murdered Boschwitz with in 1990,” Hillsman smiled ruefully, “the print ads where we talked about his being in the Senate for 12 years and never getting anything done. And I thought to myself, good Lord, what would happen if someone did that same ad now with respect to Wellstone’s record? It would probably be no better, maybe in some cases worse.”

Steve Perry is a contributing editor to The Rake. He can be reached at steve@rakemag.com.

Get an advance e-mail of Steve Perry’s column every month by registering here.

At the State Fair, conscientious mothers frequently warn against the Midway because “Dangerous people hang out there.” Who are they afraid of? In a word, carnies. Last year, Sheila brought her 10-year-old son Ivan, who couldn’t wait to hit the Midway. She begged him to go to the Poultry Barn first, to look at the funny chickens and rabbits. It was a transparent bid to help him stretch his allowance that much longer, but Sheila quickly realized how foolish and Mom-like she sounded. “OK, pal,” she said. “Let’s you and me head to Sin City.”

Ivan ran to the games and quickly converted $20 into energy, whipping baseballs at china plates, shooting darts at balloons. Pat Benatar wailed in the background. (KQRS truly is the soundtrack of desperation.) Fifteen minutes later, Ivan trudged up to the ticket booth with the last of his money. He saw a game he was sure he couldn’t lose: the Ring Toss.

Armed with a $5 bucket of rubber O-rings, Ivan stood as close as permitted, leaning over the edge of the booth, strategizing every toss. Would putting spin on this one hook it over the pop bottle? How about slamming the ring down in a sort of overhanded spike? Finally, it was over. Sheila wrapped her arm around him and led him away, remarking all the close calls and good tries. Just then, a black O-ring landed right in front of their feet. Ivan snatched it up and ran back to the game. He closed his eyes and tossed. Nothing. They walked away again, this time talking about how freaky it was to get a second chance like that. Three more rings fell at their feet. This time, as Ivan shouted and scooped up the rings, Sheila turned to see where their luck was coming from.

Black steel-toed motorcycle boots, used-to-be blue jeans, and a tobacco smile, leaning against the support post of the Ring Toss booth. The carnie’s expression was somewhere between a leer and a laugh. “Here, little buddy, compliments of the house.” He dispatched another full bucket of O-rings for Ivan. Ivan’s eyes bugged. “Thanks, dude!” He set to work. The carnie had hooked the little one. Now he set about reeling the big one in. “So, taking your little brother out to the fair on this nice day?” He lit a cigarette. “Oh, this isn’t my brother, it’s my son.” She giggled, knowing there was only so far she could take this mating dance. The carnie smiled and leaned in closer. “Never would have guessed. But then I’m not the age guesser, I’m the Ring Toss guy.” They laughed together, taking in the chorus of rubber rings bouncing off glass, like some kind of weird xylophone music. Sensing her relaxation, the carnie closed in for the kill. “That ring on your hand mean anything?” She said, “I’m married.” He’d heard that before. “How long you two been together? Maybe you’ve got the seven-year itch.”

“We only just got married this past year.”

“Damn, Baby. Tell me this, was it for love…” his eyes swept down to Ivan, still sweating over his bucket of rings “…or obligation?” They laughed again and he backed down saying, “I’m just kidding.” They settled into a companionable silence. Sheila was completely lost in the heat and the sugar smell of the place. The carnie wrapped his arm around the tent pole, so he was dangling about three inches away from her, breathing Miller High Life all over her Lancôme. It was so ridiculous that instead of jumping away, she smiled up into his crinkly maw. “Alright then. This here’s my last shot. You wouldn’t have one of them ‘Open Marriages,’ would you?” She told him there was no chance she was going to toss her ring over his Coke bottle. He laughed and said, “Aw, well, you hang around anyway. It looks good for me to be talking to a woman.”—Colleen Kruse

Last night my son Max got jolted awake by a nightmare. In his dream, our car got slammed from behind and Max catapulted out of his seat. His head got wedged in the crevice between the front passenger seat and the car door, and it knocked the wind out of him. “But the scariest part
wasn’t that, or being stuck,” Max told me. “The scariest part was that I was screaming and screaming but no one heard me.” A few days before the nightmare, Max turned 10. Develop-mentally speaking, he’s been driven out from the hazy garden of early childhood and he now sees the world in an irrevocably more realistic light. It’s not surprising that it sometimes terrifies him.

I’ve been thinking about death lately. I visited my grandmother’s grave for the first time in five years, and I watched with fascination as my 7-year-old daughter Lillie and her brother and sister and two cousins placed unwrapped Hershey Kisses gingerly around the edges of the marker, because Nana loved candy. Then, in search of a way to express something she could not name, Lillie busied herself scraping the mossy growth out from the carved letters of the gray marble headstone of a woman she never knew. She had no idea how to show reverence and yet she did so with aching tenderness.

I felt the same way recently when I looked after my friend’s two children whose grandfather had died that morning. Later on, my friend and her husband came over to share dinner. I set the table, choosing the better linen table cloth with small embroidered daisies and the pretty linen napkins I’d never used before. I told my friend that I felt helplessly unable to be graceful in the face of death. It seemed somehow surreal for us to be eating pad Thai and mock duck just as if life goes on unaltered. As slender yellow elm leaves begin to litter my sidewalk, I brace myself for the irresistible beauty and melancholy of September, now entangled with painful memories of terrorism, tragedy, and war.

Last month I traveled east for an intensive training program for third-grade Waldorf teachers. The presenter was Eugene Schwartz, master teacher at Green Meadow Waldorf School and New York native. He understood the unease we teachers felt about the best way to face a first week of school that will forever coincide with the commemoration of September 11. The collapse of the Twin Towers had a harrowing impact on Schwartz’s students and school community. At the moment the news of the attacks broke at Green Meadow, Schwartz was outside with his fifth-grade class for picture day. The school administrator was advised by local district officials to keep students indoors until they could be picked up by their parents, who trickled in over the course of the rest of the day. Except for the two fathers who died.

On that same morning in Minneapolis, I got a call at school from my sister just before the morning bell rang. I picked up the phone and my sister shouted that there had been this bizarre plane crash at the World Trade Center, and had I heard from our older sister, who lives in Brooklyn? Of course I hadn’t, and it was a grueling day before we were able to get through to her and piece together the story of how she’d boarded the last train out of Penn Station on her way to teach a class at Rutgers when the first tower collapsed. She ended up stranded in New Jersey overnight before she eventually wended her way back to a dust-covered apartment in Brooklyn.

From there I slogged along with the rest of middle America through the dirty waters of a distant horror on the one hand and the need to go through the usual daily routine on the other. The daily routine prevailed without a contest, and although I cried my eyes out when my son’s parakeet died last winter, it wasn’t until visiting the memorial wall at Ground Zero this summer that I cried about September 11. But even then my tears were clumsy.

Unlike Lillie, I don’t so easily know how to scrape moss from the cracks of what I can’t comprehend. I can only hold Max tight until his silent screams fade away and he breathes peacefully back to sleep, and I can only stand in uncertainty before the schoolchildren in September, drawing inspiration from their willingness to revere a world they will understand less before they understand it more.

Jeannine Ouellette is associate editor of The Rake.

Uncle Tom. Aunt Jemima. Clarence Thomas. For most white people, these names represent, respectively, a literary figure, a picture on a pancake box, and a conservative African-American Supreme Court justice. For those of us on the darker side, they represent something much more ominous. Being called one of these names is tantamount to being called a racial traitor.

Some years ago in Denver, two African Americans survived the mayoral primary to face each other in the November general election. Popular district attorney Norm Early appeared poised to beat career politician Wellington Webb, until a rumor swept through the black community that Early was an “Uncle Tom,” a “white man’s Negro.” Early’s crime? He lived in a white part of town and had an East Coast education. For many black Denverites, this was enough to prove that Early was not black enough.

In one of life’s supreme ironies, we African Americans often do to each other what we accuse white folks of doing to us: We measure each other through a racially distorted prism. We resent white people sizing up our ability to function and belong in the larger community because of our membership in a particular racial group. “How dare they,” we self-righteously proclaim. “Judge us as individuals,” we demand.

Yet, we often question the motives and choices of individual African Americans, especially if we suspect they are deviating from so-called mainstream African-American thought. For example, for many African Americans, marrying outside the “community” automatically places one’s “brother card” at risk. And, heaven forbid, if one should publicly air dirty laundry, as I have in previous columns discussing trashed neighborhoods or the increased gang activity in the predominantly black Jordan neighborhood, then some readers believe my brother card should be revoked altogether.

According to these self-appointed racial gatekeepers, those of us who address problems within the African-American community are suffering from the “Clarence Thomas Paradox,” an affliction that turns one into a racial Benedict Arnold. Unfortunately, most readers who are critical of me do not dispute the truth of what I’ve written. They simply resort to the same tactics that led to the demise of Norm Early—attacking my blackness. Since I’ve been compared to Clarence Thomas, I decided to read how he himself describes his views, something that I am reasonably certain the racial gatekeepers among us have never done.

In July 1998, Clarence Thomas addressed the National Bar Association, the nation’s oldest and largest group of African-American lawyers and judges. Showing up at all took a lot of guts. Many in the group had publicly called him an Uncle Tom and privately called him much worse. Some NBA members threatened to openly disrupt his remarks. Thomas quoted Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy, a liberal Democrat, who said, “If racial loyalty is deemed essentially and morally virtuous, then a black person’s adoption of positions that are deemed racially disloyal will be seen by racial loyalists as a supremely threatening sin, one warranting the harsh punishments that have historically been visited upon traitors.” Thomas goes on to make a very interesting point. “I, for one, have been singled out for particularly bilious and venomous assaults… I have no right to think the way I do because I’m black. Though the ideas and opinions themselves are not necessarily illegitimate if held by non-black individuals, they, and the person enunciating them, are illegitimate if that person happens to be black.”

Sadly, that is the very thing that readers who wish to revoke my “brother card” are doing. They are denying me (and other African Americans) the right to freely discuss issues confronting our world without first passing some sort of racial loyalty test. Such thinking is intellectually indefensible and morally bankrupt.

Now, I usually do not agree with Clarence Thomas the Supreme Court justice. I did not support his elevation to the High Court and believed Anita Hill. However, I wholeheartedly support Clarence Thomas the man. And if the African-American community is to fully reach its potential, we must stop shooting the messengers and allow ourselves to enjoy the same right as other Americans—to speak and write without fear of racial character assassination.

Clinton Collins Jr. is a Minneapolis lawyer and ABC Radio commentator. His email address is ccollins@collinslawfirm.com.

There’s a new father at the restaurant where I work. I asked about his daughter the other day. “She’s doing great,” Dave said, radiating paternal pride. “I took Maya to her six month appointment this afternoon. The doctor said that out of a hundred babies born that same day, she’s the biggest one. Heaviest and longest,” he added, grinning and holding his hands out in a measure that traditionally indicates a prize-winning Northern from Lake Mille Lacs.

Now I know it’s not about how big she is, or her capacity to eat because my pal Dave wouldn’t be bragging about his daughter being in the top of her weight class if, say, she were a high school sophomore. It’s about extremes.

We’re living in an extreme world. It’s a uvula-searing peppermint, whiplash roller-coaster, super-sized, double-D, Vin Diesel kind of a world and nothing is permitted to be ordinary anymore. Every last element of life must be fuel-injected with bungee-jumping excitement! Poured down your gullet Mountain Dew style, about a foot from your tipped back face, while the entire world screams its approval. Or disapproval. It doesn’t matter; it’s all good, as long as there is screaming.

I don’t have anything against screaming. Screaming is a pretty useful thing. We are designed to scream, in fact, when something exciting or noteworthy takes place. Winning the lottery? Yes. Winning the Green Party nomination? Maybe. Knocking back a soda pop? No.

We’re living in a world where peanut butter logs call themselves Power Bars, where brassieres promise miracles, where dull, plodding gelatin comes in X-Treme Jell-O Gel Tubes, where even pizza crust, the part that you throw away, is stuffed. Three-Alarm Chili is a Gerber’s flavor now. Where’s the Habanero Hell Fire Suicide Sauce? Hot damn! It’s a Spinal Tap world with the volume cranked up to 11. You can’t hear your car stereo anymore unless it makes the body panels vibrate and sets off nearby seismographs.

If you can’t be the biggest, you had better be the smallest, wearing Gap Size 0 jeans and gabbing on a cell phone no bigger than a Sea Monkey. What’s the hottest new car on the market today? The Mini Cooper, a four-passenger runabout roughly the size of a coffin. Given the size of the SUVs roaring around with their body panels vibrating, I can see how that would be useful.

It’s all about the spin, baby. I get it. With so much essentially useless stuff competing for my attention day in and day out, it’s all got to shout. A couple of dynamic adjectives here and there go a long way in making it seem like I’m taking in something of value. That’s how “money guru” Suze Orman can talk for 45 minutes about “creating wealth” and “channeling abundance” before I snap that fool radio off. I wonder how much she gets paid for “channeling” noise and “creating” gibberish? The whole concept of marketing is built on “buzz.” Anybody who’s ever written a resume knows what I’m talking about. Were you a file clerk for the last eight months on that temp job? A mere drone? Or were you in charge of streamlining and organizing mission-critical data for over 1,300 people? That’s what I thought! Way to be pro-active, chief! Shoot me a Mike’s Hard Lemonade! Wooooooo! Awright!

The passion for extremes takes some bizarre turns. The other night at the restaurant, a trendoid jock seriously asked me to get him a Red Bull and vodka. Uppers and downers blended so he could be an energetic drunk. Garnish with Ritalin and serve.

I’ve observed this insatiable urge for instant peak excitement before. Children are hard-wired that way. Kids oscillate between demanding to be entertained right away and needing to be appeased immediately. Now the whole world’s got colic. I don’t know if they need to be burped or spanked. When I told jocko we didn’t serve Red Bull, he had a Def-Con Five fit worthy of Celine Dion being poked by a pin at a costume fitting. He stormed out using X-Treme words like “never” and “no way.” Sorry, Dave. Maya no longer qualifies as the heaviest and longest baby.

Writer, performer, and femme fatale Colleen Kruse is at mscolleenkruse@ hotmail.com.