Category: Article

Scotty could kick Dave’s ass. We got your ribfest right here, in Southwest Minneapolis. Scott Ja Mama’s is a screen-door two-seater joint that does a sweltering ribs business every week. It’s a call-ahead-and-order place, and we think the two seats are for the few who can’t escape the saucy aromas and make it to the car with their purchases. Scotty’s ribs are tender and meaty and swathed in his Mama’s secret sauce, which rings that perfect balance between spicy and sweet. You can order a full, half, or quarter rack of ribs or go for the pork sandwich, which has a cult following. Don’t forget the twice-baked potato the size of a small country, and don’t miss the door, which is marked by a glowing rendition of Scotty’s head. 3 W. Diamond Lake Rd., Minneapolis; 612-823-4450

We’d wager there are a few families left who prefer slide shows or Super-8 screenings to home videos. But how many do you know who create art exhibitions celebrating their life together? Melba Price, Bruce Tapola, and their daughter Oakley did so in 1993 at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts; eleven years later, it’s time for another installment, this time at the south side hotspot known as SooVAC. How to draw the familial connections between Bruce’s playful and sometimes acerbic takes on pop culture and pop art, Melba’s portraits with a gravitas harking back to early Renaissance painters, and Oakley’s saucy indie-kid cartoons? We’ll leave that up to them. We weren’t able to see their exhibit before press time, but it’s bound to be fun. Bring the whole fam damily! 2640 Lyndale Ave. S.,
Minneapolis; 612-871-2263; www.soovac.org

If it makes us sound shallow, so be it: We love supporting the arts because we love parties. Is there a finer way to show your support than to enjoy cocktails, hors d’oeuvres, and dancing with intriguing, passionate, and creative people (many of whom inevitably have amazing footwear)? And when you can buy art and support art at the same time, so much the better. The benefit for Midway, the gutsy gallery edging up on its fourth birthday, will include an auction of twenty works by emerging artists both local and national. Names weren’t available at press time, but suffice it to say, if the roster’s anything like the artists Midway has shown the past few years, we’re sold. 3306 5th St. N.E., Minneapolis; 651-917-1851;
www.midwaycontemporaryart.org

Only in the snotty West have we developed this idea of “outsider art” for crafts and art forms that are “vernacular.” Look to the East to find traditions that not only predate modernity, but keep right on ignoring it. Like Russian lacquer boxes. These incredibly detailed and lush paintings on boxes, plates, miniature caskets, and other functional forms go back five hundred years, and they’re still made today in Palekh, in central Russia. That’s a lot of twenty-four karat gold leaf and microscopic cyrillic. If you haven’t checked out the Museum of Russian Art—which normally specializes in Soviet-era socialist realism—this is a rare opportunity to appreciate folk art at its finest. Outsider art? Count us in! 11300 Hampshire Ave. S.; Bloomington; 612-914-0200; www.tmora.org

Now in its ninth year, the Rain Taxi Review of Books remains a stalwart champion of “difficult” literature—stuff that challenges our assumptions about narrative, language, or even what makes a good story. It also celebrates the larger world of things bibliophilistic with the Twin Cities Book Festival, which it has sponsored since its inception in 2001. How did our bookish burg go sans book festival for so long? No matter—this free, all-day affair makes up for lost time with an impressive array of readings, exhibits, a literary magazine fair, used book sale, and even art activities for younger bookworms. This year’s readings include best-selling novelist Karen Jay Fowler (The Jane Austen Book Club), essayist and poet Wayne Koestenbaum, Eleni Sikelianos, whose The California Poem is a book-length work dedicated to the Golden State, and many more. Given Rain Taxi’s steadfast dedication, it only seemed fitting to limit its editor, Eric Lorberer, to naming which five titles he would cart along to his enchanted isle of literary solitude.

1. The fattest book I own that I haven’t read is The Gormenghast Trilogy by Mervyn Peake—so there.

2. The American Alpine Association puts out a yearly compendium of mountaineering accidents, so I’d take along the latest edition—I bet tales of high altitude and bad luck would make one feel better about being on a desert island!

3. A book of haiku, to keep me humble. Maybe, vis-à-vis the previous answer, Japanese Death Haiku, which collects poems by monks presumably composed just before they shuffle off this mortal coil. (Whoever has my copy, if you’re reading this, give it back!)

4. It’s a well-worn trick among book geeks when playing this game to name collected works as one item, such as the collected plays of Shakespeare, or the collected poems of Wallace Stevens—good choices, but I might prefer a complete run of The Legion of Super Heroes. The eponymous teens of this comic book series each have a unique ability. For example, “Matter-Eater Lad,” who can, um, eat anything. I think it might yield some good, Gilliganesque ideas.

5. Finally, I’d take along a copy of the dictionary—which, as comedian Steven Wright noted, is sort of a poem about everything. From this book one can invent virtually all others, given time.

The 2004 Twin Cities Book Festival takes place October 16, 10 a.m.–5 p.m., at the Minneapolis
Community & Technical College; 1415 Hennepin Ave. S., Minneapolis; www.raintaxi.com/bookfest

Straight talk
VINCENT GALLO

Since its infamous debut at the last Cannes Film Festival, director and actor Vincent Gallo’s The Brown Bunny has become the year’s most controversial movie, as much for its deliberately slow pacing as for the final scene, in which Gallo and Chloë Sevigny engage in an explicit, unsimulated sex act. Gallo chatted with us recently about the film, his philosophy of art, and getting hassled by Minnesota state troopers after making out with a 1970s-era supermodel at a roadside rest area.

THE RAKE: What would you say to skeptical filmgoers to convince them this is a film they should see?

GALLO: If someone is skeptical, this is a very difficult film. If you have a sense that my intentions are questionable, it’s going to be very hard to follow the multidimensional first half of the film, which on the skeptical surface is where nothing happens. I’d rather a skeptical person not go to see the film. It doesn’t play to win people over. It’s not Lost in Translation.

Your scene with Cheryl Tiegs was filmed here in Minnesota. Any interesting stories to relate about that?

We went out on I-35, no more than ten miles out of town, and shot that sequence at a roadside rest stop. The rest-stop employees called the police. The police came and I said, “I don’t understand. People walk around with their video cameras and you don’t arrest them. There’s three people here; this can’t qualify as a production. I know my rights, and good day, sir.” He asked us all for a license. They always seem to handcuff me. The cop said something extremely mean to Cheryl, and I was taken aback by it—he looked at Cheryl’s license and said “Oh, Cheryl Tiegs—you were a model, huh? Wow, you got old. Fifty-four!” She was so cool and polite. She just said “Yeah.” And then he left. I’ll never forget that. It was just so bizarre.

The Chloë Sevigny sex scene has become notorious. But how important is that scene to the film aesthetically?

There’s no film without that. Sexually graphic images are not an accessory or a selling feature or a luxury. The whole point of the film was to bring insight into pathological behavior in loss of love. To remove those graphic images would severely diminish the disturbing nature of that scene. It would be fraudulent. I am not an eroticist or a pornographer. I’ve been working for twenty-five years, and I’ve never used exhibitionism or voyeurism in any of my work. I’m not interested in those things. I’m interested in emotional hangups and how they translate into the behavior.

You have an offbeat approach to cinematography, especially when shooting yourself—often we see only the back of your head, or you’re only visible on the extreme edge of the frame.

I have a very specific aesthetic point of view and a sense of composition. When I was shooting this film, I was always looking at myself in a monitor. There’s never a scene, not even in the shower—certainly not the sex scene, where there’s ten monitors and I’m watching the whole thing—there’s never a moment where I’m not watching what I’m filming. So I can play to the camera in a way no one has ever been able to do before in cinema, because the photographer is in charge of capturing the performer but the performer is unaware of what’s going on compositionally. However, if the photographer is the performer, I can do very extreme things. Unfortunately, I hate to see myself, especially my face. I can’t bear being captured on film. That’s a problem, because I’m a filmmaker and I choose to include myself in the performance of the film. That’s why the accusations of narcissism were so painful to me. I don’t care if people say I’m a jerk, I don’t care if they say I’m ugly. I’m really controlling and bold when it comes to concepts and aesthetics, and incredibly un-self-protective when it comes to me. I’m comfortable being hated for what I am. I just don’t like being hated for what I’m not.

The Brown Bunny opens October 1 at the Uptown Theatre.

A friend recently pointed out the hypocrisy in how I love bloody, mobbed-out films where people get whacked with a ball point pen in the jugular—and yet nearly have a nervous breakdown when I see a squirrel smashed in the street.
I don’t know if this requires serious examination on my part but it is true. Even though I can watch Scar Face without flinching, I have to turn away when they feature animals on America’s Funniest Home Videos. Throw a dude in a wood chipper, fine. But don’t show me a cat with his head stuck in a drinking glass.

I imagine this is hereditary, as I’ve repeatedly heard the story of my mom, out for a stroll one summer day, finding a stray dog who she claimed was “dying of thirst.” She promptly went up to someone’s house, filled her shoe with water from their hose spigot, allowed the mutt to wet his whistle from her sensible navy pump, and was on her way without a second thought.

This is also the woman who toasts bread for the birds in winter. Kind-hearted or insane? Maybe both.

Whenever some grisly story hits the news about a psychopath who has bludgeoned his wife with a ball-peen hammer and run off with the babysitter, the first thing my oldest sister will say is, “Oh no, that’s terrible—I hope he made provisions for someone to look after their dog!” Somehow she believes that a man capable of cold-blooded murder surely also he had the good sense to find a responsible caretaker for “Winky.”
Same goes for the occasional circus-elephant-rampage story. My family will undoubtedly rationalize that “Jumbo,” in a moment of elephant clarity, looked down at the tutu and roller skates he was wearing and thought “The hell with this!” So what if he snapped and mauled a family of four? Did his sadistic trainer really have to swat him with a stick during the act?

I know to some this sounds rife with contradiction. How can a self-professed animal lover be so cold and indifferent to people? I don’t have an answer, but I’d bet my Sopranos DVD collection and a lifetime’s supply of Pounce that there are people who feel the same way I do.

E-mail Mary at popularcreeps@yahoo.com.

We were a little disturbed by the explosion. All around the city, there was a sudden, violent eruption of elegant apartments, lofts, row-houses, and condominiums. And it wasn’t just along the Mississippi or in the Warehouse District. It was where a gas station had stood at Fiftieth Street in Linden Hills. It was where something unremarkable had failed at Lake and Bryant. It was in a liquor-store parking lot at Nicollet and Franklin. It was even cropping up on lackluster strips in first-ring suburbs like St. Louis Park and Richfield. What were the developers smoking? When was the population of the Twin Cities overrun by turtlenecked young executives with seven-figure checking accounts and an aversion to mowing the lawn?

They say the real-estate industry is recession-proof, but this felt like a powerful case of denial. The economy had soured, employment figures took a dive, higher interest rates thundered on the horizon, coffins trickled out of Iraq, and the country threatened to come apart along the red-blue seam. Meanwhile, Twin Cities contractors built ten thousand new “units.”

Sometimes our best impulses and our worst converge, and the result is happy. This colonization of the cool may seem wasteful and excessive and unneeded and vainglorious. It may even be morally suspicious; certainly this is not the low-income, affordable housing we’ve been promised for years now? But we should count our blessings and try not to be so disagreeable.

We find that the same sour people (in other words, we ourselves) who are complaining about “urban sprawl” and the loss of “green space” are the ones who feel uneasy about the urban building boom. But when we do our exercises to eliminate our affliction with jerky knees, we realize this is precisely what is needed. If we are serious about putting a lid on the tract mansions of Farmington, and about bringing beautiful people back to the city, then we will have to find some sugar to take with this medicine. These developments are creating what city planners call “density.” That is, more people living in a smaller amount of space. It is what distinguishes a city from a town or a village or a suburb. It is not necessarily a bad thing.

It is probably true that native Minnesotans are constitutionally turned off by population density. We are essentially a rural people—many of whom have freshly left the farm for the city (but not too much city, if you please). It could be that we are basically misanthropes who prefer to be alone. After all, some have interpreted Minnesota Nice as an icy-smiled predisposition to hate the stranger and the strange.

Still, let’s not forget that we do have a grand tradition of communitarian spirit. Officially, we care about each other, and we do our best to respond to neighbors in need, and there are times when personal gain does take a rear seat to civic pride—whether it’s light rail or the St. Paul Saints or a web-link to Canadian pharmacies.

In the last census, the Twin Cities ranked twenty-second among large American cities in population density. Minneapolis contains about seven thousand people per square mile. St. Paul, our narcoleptic capital city, has a bit more elbow room, with around five and a half thousand people per square mile. But with high-density housing “units” springing up like mushrooms all over the Twin Cities, we can be sure that there are more of us fitting into the same space. Perhaps we’ll learn how to get along more earnestly and take care of each other better—and the land given over to Farmington McMansions can be plowed into green meadows once again. Living among irritatingly rich, chic, lawnless people is a small price to pay for the greater good.

That afternoon, I remember, I’d attempted to perform back surgery on a dwarf who had gotten so stooped and hump-shouldered that she could barely walk. Neighborhood children had been throwing rocks at her for years. She was brilliant and very funny, but struggled with a terrible speech impediment, and was also cursed with a disastrous fashion sense that would have been merely amusing if the overall effect had not been so tragic. She would shrug the burden that was her shoulders and say, it is like trying to find clothing for a box, do you see?

I had learned to converse with this woman, but only with great difficulty. Her original language was Portuguese, and she spoke the local tongue with a clipped, husky accent, embellished with a stutter. I’d been playing chess with her at the local café for years before I became her physician, and we had a shared passion for jazz and American rhythm and blues. She had, without a doubt, the best record collection in the entire town, and the only decent library of books in English.

I was in a dark mood that day, as I made my way home through the tight and crowded streets. It was insufferably hot, and the rain was already moving in. The fat sun was sinking through dark clouds building in the western sky. The surgery hadn’t gone well; my skills in that arena are poor, and truth be told I am no great shakes as a doctor. Pity is a dangerous and useless quality in a physician, and I was troubled by my foolish involvement in an unnecessary procedure.

Even with a capable young doctor from another city assisting, at my expense, the surgery had been a terrible failure. I had made arrangements to use a surgical theater in a local clinic, and these facilities were barely adequate. This is a bad case, the other surgeon, a Frenchman, had said. He kept repeating it, mumbling through his mask. Oh my, this is a very bad case. It is too risky.

It was a very bad case indeed. It became apparent that there was nothing we could do to help the poor little woman, and I felt terrible surveying the mess we had made. Even our relatively simple exploratory operation would result in a long and painful recovery and rehabilitation. Medical facilities in that part of the country were primitive, and I knew that the patient’s only hope would involve a long and arduous trip to another city in the south, where there would be a better hospital and more capable physicians, a trip that I knew full well she could not afford and would never undertake.

All that day I’d been looking forward to going home to my apartment and listening to jazz. A friend in the U.S. had recently sent me a couple of new Cecil Taylor reissues on CD, and I had planned to spend the evening sitting in my big green chair and drinking beer while I listened to them. I once spent a month alone in a friend’s cabin in upstate New York, and the entire time I did nothing but listen to six Lee Morgan records from his prime years on Blue Note. I played those records every day, over and over. It was all, really and honestly, I did. I sat on the couch and listened to Lee Morgan. I had made a careful study of the progression from Fats Navarro to Clifford Brown to Lee Morgan, and that month was the end of that particular road.

Now, suddenly, I no longer felt like listening to Cecil Taylor. I needed something that required less concentration. I had a vision—a memory, really—of the humpbacked woman dancing awkwardly in her cluttered little apartment to a Wilson Pickett record.

The next morning I had the unpleasant task of delivering the bad news to my little friend. Although saddened, she was expert in the art of resignation. I long ago accepted that I would never be beautiful, she said. I suppose I can accept that I will never walk upright.

She asked if I would bring to the clinic her portable phonograph player and some records. That day’s mail brought me a live Sam Cooke record from the States, and I took it with me when I paid her a visit in the afternoon. I set up her phonograph and instructed the young nurse attendant in its use. I cued up the Sam Cooke record and handed the jacket to the poor woman. She was lying on her side, huddled beneath the terrible eminence at the top of her spine. She held the record jacket in her right hand, which was dangling from the bed, and she had to peer over the edge of the mattress toward the floor to scrutinize it. There was a lengthy Peter Guralnick essay on the reverse side, and she had to pull the jacket close to her face to make out the tiny print. I watched as she did this, as Sam Cooke and his band launched into “Chain Gang.” She was engrossed in the words on the record jacket, and I could see her toes wiggling beneath the bed sheet.

I wish there were a way I could show you myself in that moment. I was standing there, helpless, a stranger even to myself. I no longer had any clear idea what it was that had brought me to that part of the world, the odd conflation of desperation and restlessness that had torn me—so long ago now—from all my old notions of what my life would be. I was stunned by the sad realization that this poor woman, lumped like a broken-down seal beneath the sheets, probably understood me better than anyone else on the planet. I felt as if my heart were breaking.

I announced that I would be going. With a great effort my friend turned her head to find me standing at the foot of the bed, and she stuttered her thanks through an immense smile that was both painful and wondrous to behold.

Brad Zellar lives in Minneapolis and writes the weblog Open All Night.