If you were born after, say, 1955, chances are you think clowns are scary. Whether your fear is rooted in pedophilic scandal, horror flicks, or a bad audience-participation experience, for you a bulbous red nose and size-100 shoes can turn a perfectly pleasant parade into a cavalcade of unease. “They don’t look all that friendly,” … Read more
Fear is Elias Merhige’s business, as you’ll know from his earlier films like the avant-garde creeper Begotten and the 2000 arthouse hit Shadow of the Vampire, with its witty premise that the villain in the great 1922 silent film Nosferatu had been played by a real vampire. His new film Suspect Zero stars Aaron Eckhart … Read more
In the seconds between shoving my third and fourth White Castle-sized pork sandwich down my throat, I yelled across the lavishly appointed basement toward my host. He and his wife had invited fifty Twin Cities WASPs, and me, to watch Mike Tyson’s pay-per-view, main-event boxing match in Las Vegas against heavyweight Frans Botha on their … Read more
It’s Saturday night at Lili’s Burlesque Revue, and Sweetpea is center stage, vibrating her derriere like a paint shaker at Home Depot. The diminutive brunette’s dance routine is a combination of kooky showmanship and gymnastic prowess. Arriving onstage in a frumpy 1950s housecoat, bath cap, and cat’s-eye specs, she peels off the Grandma outfit layer … Read more
A couple weeks ago, Don and I went out for breakfast on a Sunday morning. We were chatting amiably over our eggs and sausage, and we overheard a married couple having one of those painful heart-to-hearts. It turned out, he was getting his ass chewed for “looking at” our waitress. She was attractive, and Don … Read more
The other day about eighty thousand Christians gathered at the State Capitol for Luis Palau’s Twin Cities Festival. Just a mile away, at St. Paul’s RiverCentre, a smaller but no less devoted crowd convened at the Midwest Scrapbook Association Convention, the better to observe the objects of its own faith—designer paper and vellum and bottle … Read more
With the State Fair’s feeble lineup sounding the traditional power chord that marks the close of the summer concert season,Twin Citizens can crawl back under the rock of pre-recorded music for the cold winter months. Even in Minnesota, the Internet has not killed the used record store, nor the people who insist on taking their … Read more
Last spring, while driving down an Arizona highway searching for an alt-rock radio station, I heard a woman’s voice cry out across the airwaves, as if in primeval prayer. A guitar answered, then dropped into a thick growl of minor chords while the melody swelled with the lyrics, before the whole thing sank into the … Read more
Thirty columns ago, in the very first issue of The Rake — March 2002 — I wrote that “being a real brother is not as important as being a real man. Real men think for themselves and live with the consequences of their decisions.” I admit that I took some defiant pride in the not-so-veiled … Read more
When Fort Knox couldn’t hold enough gold to back all the paper money in circulation, the U.S. government in about 1913 began weaning the greenback from being a promissory note for precious metals. Instead, the mighty dollar became “fiat currency.” In other words, it became a slippery theoretical thing that depended on the Federal Reserve … Read more