Author: rakemag

The Funniest President traveled to Wall Street recently, on a mission to kick shins and take names. Since entering public life W has scattered behind him a string of linguistic pearls the likes of which many older Americans still recall fondly from the TV show Kids Say the Darnedest Things. “I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family.” “I am mindful not only of preserving executive powers for myself, but for predecessors as well.” “Teaching children to read… will make America what we want it to be—a literate country and a hopefuller country.” “For a century and a half now, America and Japan have formed one of the great and enduring alliances of modern times.”

But he was at his deadpan best in the financial district speech: “In the long run, there is no capitalism without conscience, there is no wealth without character.” Ah, but seriously, folks—seriously! Telling one of these CEOs not to cook the books is like telling a crack whore to dress better and keep off the pipe until the cocktail hour! Ba-dum-PAH.

Enron begins to seem like the good old days. That was only a billion dollars or so in flim-flammery, and onlookers could pretend it was an isolated instance of malfeasance rooted in the looking-glass world of energy derivatives. Then came Worldcom at $4 billion and Merck at $14 billion. And sandwiched between them, to less fanfare, a series of brewing scandals involving Xerox, ImClone, Tyco, Kmart, Adelphia, Qwest, Global Crossing, and Halliburton—the last concerning alleged improprieties that took place in the late 90s when Dick Cheney headed the company. The business press is taking all this much more seriously than mainstream media. As Joseph Nocera wrote in Fortune, “Phony earnings, inflated revenues, conflicted Wall Street analysts, directors asleep at the switch—this isn’t just a few bad apples we’re talking about here. This, my friends, is a systemic breakdown…We have reached the tipping point.” Nocera and his colleagues correctly call the present ferment the worst U.S. financial crisis since 1929.

The saner heads on Wall Street, endangered species that they are, want some regulatory reform to ensure that such scandals don’t flare again anytime soon to disrupt their affairs. But talk like this is bound to seem not only reckless but silly to the president, who has never known any other way of doing business. W is a man who never registered a single success in his chosen trade, the oil business, but nonetheless managed to parlay the family name into a handsome stake in Harken Energy, which he cashed in just before his father’s war on Iraq sent Harken stock tumbling. Stock sales by insiders are supposed to be registered at the SEC within two months’ time; W waited over half a year without adverse consequence. He likewise turned a $600,000 investment in the Texas Rangers, and a role as greeter at The Ballpark in Arlington, into a $15 million payday when the team was sold. Double-dealing, something-for-nothing cronyism, and the absolute entitlement of the powerful to grab as much as they can are no more than Bush’s birthright. Privately he must be mystified by all the fuss.

Small wonder his get-tough talk to Wall Streeters was a piece of puffery. If Bush gets his way there will be a few show trials, a hundred additional bodies at the SEC—which, under GWB, is headed by a former attorney for the very accounting firms that have played such a vital role in the crimes at hand—and a shiny new executive commission to study the problem. Bush uttered nary a word concerning any of the grosser forms of institutionalized lying, cheating, and stealing that allowed the stock market bubble to assume such epic proportions—the rules that allow accountants both to audit corporate books and to consult with those same clients on how best to cover up problems, for instance, or the ones that let brokerage analysts participate in deals they are “analyzing” “dispassionately” for the suckers who comprise the investing public.
The Democrats are licking their chops over the likely electoral dividends of all this come November, but it doesn’t mean Democratic pols as a class are any likelier to push substantive action than the Republicans. At the national level the party is more thoroughly dominated than ever by the Democratic Leadership Council and its clones, whose entire enterprise over the past decade and a half has consisted of making the party a more attractive vehicle for the same corporate dollars that flow so unstintingly to Republicans. It’s foolish to suppose the complicity of the Democrats is any less monumental than that of the Republicans, and one of the worst offenders is the man many consider prime presidential timber for 2004, Tailgunner Joe Lieberman. (As I write, Lieberman is being quoted exhorting Democrats not to lose their heads and turn “too populist” on big business’s perfidy.)

If ever the time was ripe for mavericks from both parties to step forward in the interest of doing a little good—and, not incidentally, making names and power bases for themselves—that time is now. And once again we must ask, where the hell is Paul Wellstone? (Or, for that matter, his protégé in public obscurity, Mark Dayton?) You can pore through Wellstone’s web sites or any news archive and find only a scant few discouraging words on the corporate crime wave. Maybe he is afraid of drawing more wrath and more Republican dollars in his race against Norm Coleman; maybe he is being Senatorial, nattering privately and uselessly to his party superiors about the issue; maybe he is just too busy fighting mostly losing battles in the Agriculture committee and rescuing kittens from trees in Willmar. Or perhaps he is awaiting word that one of the CEOs under investigation has snapped and struck his wife—Paul and Sheila are adamantly opposed to domestic violence, you know.

One thing’s for damn sure: In this most pungent domestic scandal of the past few decades, the man The Nation once called “the senator from the Left” is scarcely on radar. By staying on the sidelines this way, Wellstone is both shirking a duty incumbent to his populist pretensions and missing a golden political opportunity. About a year and a half ago, in the pages of Mother Jones, I went on record with the observation that if Wellstone broke his two-terms-and-out pledge to run again, he would probably lose. But with fresh financial scandals breaking every week, the ground under our feet has moved considerably since then in ways that should only benefit Wellstone. Is there a politial candidate anywhere this year who, as a matter of style and presence, embodies the toothsome, glad-handing, reptilian ethos of corporate America any better than Norm Coleman? Yet Wellstone manages to continue running neck-and-neck with him. Quite a feat when you think about it.

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

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Sword-and-sorcery tales are not easy to pull off. Perched over the twin chasms of Ludicrousness and Pomposity, it’s all too easy for a ham-handed filmmaker to fall prey to that terrible Dark Knight known as Dorkiness. And so Peter Jackson’s first installment in the three-part film version of J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1,000-page Middle-Earth trilogy is a genuine treat. It’s a lovingly faithful, action-packed distillation true to the spirit of the book in every important respect, if necessarily breezier and more popcorn-friendly. Jackson previously created a believable fantasy realm with Heavenly Creatures , and here again takes the right approach—childlike wonder and an unapologetic sense of grandeur. He’s helped enormously by lavish CGI effects and the natural beauty of his native New Zealand, which stands in nicely for Tolkien’s craggy mountains and valleys. But the movie wouldn’t work if the characters were twee or wooden. As in any great film, script and acting are the saving graces. Ian McKellen’s nuanced portrayal of Gandalf holds the film together, but special mention goes to Viggo Mortenson’s heart-throb hero Aragorn and longtime horror villain Christopher Lee, icily evil as the corrupt wizard Saruman.

Saturday morning, curled up on the braided rug, parents still sleeping or having coffee. From the scratchy little speaker of the “wood-look” television comes the melancholy ode to the journey of legislation, “I’m Just a Bill.” We knew they were really singing about what it’s like to be a kid, trying to advance various agendas, lobby for support, and face the ultimate possibility of final parental veto. This is why we identified so strongly with Schoolhouse Rock, the zany animated series that aired through the 70s and 80s, and it’s why we were willing to sit glued to the tube for blatantly educational programming. We don’t know if it also explains why millions of us bought tickets to see the jingly grammar and math tunes brought to life on the stage in the 90s when Schoolhouse Rock: The Musical toured the country, but who said everything can be explained? This month Disney releases the TV series on DVD, a two-disc set that includes more than 50 episodes. All the favorites are here: “Conjunction Junction,” “Three is a Magic Number,” “I’m Just a Bill” (of course), and “Electricity, Electricity.” New generations of kids have already proven the timeless appeal of the Schoolhouse Rockers (or, perhaps, demonstrated loyalty to their parents’ nostalgia) by embracing the Schoolhouse Rock video series. The DVD ups the fun with behind-the-scenes footage, “play-all” and “shuffle-all” features, and games. The show’s original creators have also written a new song, “I’m Gonna Send Your Vote To College” (about the electoral college, and rumored to explain just exactly what did take place in Florida in 2000).

As a tongue-in-cheek chronicler of Upper Midwest farm life, it’s impossible to avoid comparing Jim Heynen to that popular juggernaut over at Minnesota Public Radio. And indeed, fans of Garrison Keillor will find much to enjoy in the work of this Iowa-born storyteller, who chronicles rural life and boyhood in a voice wistful, spare, and wry. The Boys’ House , which came out in paperback from Minnesota Historical Society Press in July, collects new stories and tales from two out-of-print collections about a loose, rambunctious band of farm kids known simply as “the boys,” whose exploits Tom Sawyer would recognize with a grin. They spend their lives playing in corn cribs and on threshers that might suffocate or mangle them in an instant. They innocently plot mayhem against stray cats and ducks, and learn unpretentious wisdom from sparrows and their not-quite-grownup Uncle Jack. All the while, they slowly awaken to the strange, contradictory adult world looming around the corner. Heynen’s simple, plainspoken prose is rich in observed human nature and a bittersweet awareness of the certainty of change. These short vignettes—all clocking in at around three pages—capture life under the shadow of grain silos as a series of snapshots rather than a single continuous narrative. Heynen’s spare, Zen-like lack of specificity is worlds apart from Keillor’s highly detailed Lake Wobegon. His small town is never named and exists in no particular state or decade, and his farm folk have the anonymous resonance of characters in a fable. They could live anywhere, and so live everywhere in those small towns and states of mind that the Wal-Marts and the malls haven’t yet plowed under. Ruminator Books, (651) 699-0587, www.ruminator.com, www.jimheynen.com

What a strange animal is “performance poetry” or “spoken word” or the ubiquitous “poetry slam.” There was a time when, if you got up on a stage and took the mike and told a story, you were a standup comedian. If there was a podium in front of you, and you’d taken a few learned degrees, then you were a poet giving a reading. Well, the eternal frustration of youth (exacerbated by public indifference and institutional favoritism) resulted in the 80s in a real bumrush: Self-styled poets who were wiping themselves with the reams of rejections they were getting from The New Yorker and The Paris Review decided to inject the punk-rock ethos into the dying art of poetry. They stormed the stage with an egg-timer, and the poetry slam was born. Say what you will about the phenomenon—there’s no way around it, you have to take the good with the bad—there is no denying that it’s here to stay. For the first time ever, the National Poetry Slam comes to Minneapolis. Check out the schedule, including slams at Kieran’s, Seventh Street Entry, the Orpheum, Sursumcorda, and several other venues. National Poetry Slam 2002, (612) 822-2500, www.nps2002.com

Alice Sebold’s first novel is the great Oprah’s Book Club selection that never was—an accessible, generous, finely observed essay on the question of what the dead want from the living. A 14-year-old girl, Susie Salmon, is raped and murdered at the outset; then commences many years of wandering, grieving, and yearning on both sides of the great divide. It was daring of Sebold to risk the potentially disastrous device of telling the story in the dead girl’s voice, from beyond, but it pays off. By dwelling ostensibly on the dead’s sense of responsibility toward the living, Sebold captures in moving fashion exactly what it is the living owe to the dead: to bear their grief—wait it out, really—and go on living while they can. The book was no doubt written before 9/11, but the vagaries of the publishing cycle have conspired to make it, for the moment anyway, the most potently evocative writing on the subject that we’ve seen.

If this isn’t enough rope for you, you need to seriously rethink what you’re planning to tie up. This 900-page expanded version of 1999’s Collected Mystery Stories gathers 83 short stories spanning the career of mystery master Block. He’s also a prolific novelist, but this tome is the best showcase for Block’s command of style; he does breezy romantic comedy, cold vindictiveness, Hitchcockian irony, and Chandleresque world-weariness and he does them all damn well. As a mystery author, Block gives the lion’s share of his work over to recurring series characters, all of whom make appearances here. Seeing them together shows what a motley crew he’s created. There’s Mephistophelian lawyer Martin Ehrengraf, who goes to any extreme necessary to prove a client’s innocence, especially if they’re guilty. And there’s the far breezier Bernie Rhodenbarr, dashing gentleman thief who steals cash and hearts with a Cary Grant smile. Block’s lasting legacy as a noir author will surely be his rich and melancholy books about alcoholic detective Matt Scudder. But his stories in Rope are inessential curiosities, like deleted scenes in a DVD. (Also see 1986’s When the Sacred Ginmill Closes , still Block’s best novel, or wait for Harrison Ford’s upcoming film of A Walk Among the Tombstones .)

Do you know there are prophets in your midst? Steve Tibbetts is one of the planet’s most inventive electric guitarists, drummers, and tape manipulators—has been for more than 20 years and he makes his home right here in the Twin Cities. We’ve been fans in the wilderness ever since hearing a snippet of Exploded View on Radio K back in the day (1994). That was a stunning collection of overdriven electric guitars woven tightly into a tapestry of traditional tabla and congo drumming. If Hendrix hung out with TVBC, and they did Earl Grey and Ginkgo Biloba all day instead of… well, other drugs that come to mind, this is what might go in your earholes. As the story goes, Tibbetts had a brush with mortality a few years ago when he fell off a ladder and had to have one of his hands rebuilt. Pre-op, he took the opportunity to lay down this new record, full of urgency, big beats, wailing guitars, but also moments of shining ambient serenity. Don’t expect lyrics or anything else remotely linear. These are sound paintings—but emphatically not experiments, which would imply there was something accidental or uncontrolled going on. Tempting to call it New Age Prog Rock—what with his long tenure on the arty German label ECM—but let’s lay off the cheap labels. Just turn off the lights and turn up that stereo you were bragging about 10 years ago. Don’t be afraid to fire up a stick of incense, no one is watching.

If you’re like us, you browse Amazon or Roadrunner, find great CDs to replace your classic vinyl, and suddenly get buyer’s remorse, right before the deed is done. But this is one of those collections that should break our longstanding habit of procrastination. It’s a piece of the secret history of rock ’n’ roll, the smoking gun that connects David Bowie with the Replacements, Led Zep with Spacehog. Forget “Bang A Gong,” that cheap Power Station cover from the mid-80s. This is creepy slick-rock, proto-punk from the humid threshold of the 70s. The fact of the matter is that you really only need Electric Warrior in your collection—the acknowledged T. Rex classic first released in 1971—but since you’ve already got that, and you feel the need to completely immerse yourself in the sick grandeur that is T. Rex, go ahead and tune in, log on, and drop dime.