The Rake Magazine

Category: Article

  • Rites of Passage

    There’s an arbor in my neighborhood that I drive past every day. Sturdy pre-fab construction, what looks to be bare, untreated wood. It catches my eye not because it’s beautiful, but because it is goofy. It’s the placement of the thing that gets me. It’s plopped a third of the way into the front yard of the house.

    It is not arching gracefully over a walkway or path. Nor does it draw the eye through to focus on a lush planting. Furthermore, it’s not an accidental placement of the thing. It’s been sitting on that front-yard grass, bare as a bone for its second summer now, and it looks as though it’s going to stay there. It looks as though someone had a Jack Daniels break on chore day, went to Bachman’s, dumped two hundred dollars on a three-sided pine box, hauled it home, stood it up in the yard, passed out, and then woke up the next day and decided to leave it where it stands as a physical reminder to remain sober while landscaping.

    I’m not saying that as a judgment, merely as an observation.

    I live a couple of blocks away from the house that boasts this oddity, and I don’t know the people who live there. The rest of the house seems well-kept and ordered, at least from the outside, which only makes the Doorway to Nowhere that much more puzzling.

    So, I’m out having coffee with my groovy artist pal, an old friend I haven’t seen in a while. He travels around a lot, and because I pretty much stay in the same place, I know we’ll always catch up sooner or later. He knows where to find me. It’s been more than a year since we’ve spoken, and when he asks me how I’ve been lately, the floodgates release. “My dad is sick! My kids are growing up fast! We have no kitchen countertops! The family dog had to be put to sleep!” Life is hardly falling in around my feet, but suffice it to say, there’s been a fair amount of nuttiness in the last twelve months. The next thing I know, I’ve been talking his ear off for thirty minutes straight and for the last ten I’ve been ranting about the arbitrary arbor. Of all things.

    My old pal, he laughed in all the right places and didn’t question my hopscotching brain patterns. I finally ran out of gas, and he took a pull off his hand-rolled cigarette, and a slurpy sip from his sugary coffee treat. And when he spoke, it wasn’t, “Aw, hell, baby, I’m so sorry about your dad.” Or even “The dog too, huh? Well that’s the pits, man.” Nope. It was “Colleen, how do you know that the archway doesn’t lead anywhere?”

    I stifled a wild urge to sink my teeth into his gentle hippie windpipe. Instead, I calmly said, “Well, that’s because I can see through it. That, and the last time I checked, I wasn’t living inside a Doctor Who episode. Just in case you’re wondering, I’m certain it’s not haunted either. No unexplained deaths in the neighborhood, no smell of sulfur.”

    “Sure seems to be haunting you.” He laughed.

    “Say that again but next time, cue the sitar music.”

    “Seriously, think about all the things in life that you feel you know are real, but you can’t see. Your idea of God and the hereafter. Divine reprisal for unrepentant souls. Maybe you don’t see anything on the other side of that arbor, and what bugs you is that you feel you’re supposed to. By all the rules of gardening, an archway is supposed to lead somewhere. To your eye, this one doesn’t, and that sticks in your craw so much that you’ve become obsessed by it.”

    “Obsessed is a pretty strong word.”

    “Is it? I don’t see you for a year and a half, all this stuff is going on in your life, and you ramble on about a stupid garden feature that’s not even in your own yard?”

    My morning commute takes me past the arbor and every day I still look up at it. I’ve become accustomed to the weird, bare wood arch standing stark on a plain green patch of grass. Now I’ve begun thinking of it as a pass-through that leads to everywhere, instead of a doorway that connects to only one room. A conceptual thoroughfare leading past illness, strife, and financial crunches, with wayside rests for joy and contentment and ridiculous old friends who smoke fragrant curls of tobacco and untangle thought snarls.

    It’s like a little South Minneapolis Stonehenge. A primitive calendar that reminds me each day that passes is an occasion to believe.

  • Road Trip to Myself

    It won’t be long now. September’s weight presses in on my teacher bones, and there’s only one way to stave it off and prepare for the shock of going back to school: Take a road trip of several thousand miles with five kids. So here we are in Mackinaw City, Michigan, where sturdy-looking Midwestern families gather to enjoy the azure waters and soft sand beaches of Lake Michigan.

    The sky above the straits of Mackinac spans clear and stunning, the same as it’s been since I first started traversing the Upper Peninsula with my sister and our Nana eighteen years ago. Back then, after we’d dropped off Nana at our aunt’s house in Detroit, we’d turn around and head back north on I-75 for a long car party of Doritos and cigs and Tab and music so loud that one state trooper had to use the bullhorn to catch our attention. Finally we noticed him and pulled over. A cloud of air-conditioned smoke emerged as my sister rolled down the car window. “Ladies,” the trooper said through tight but upturned lips, “I’ve been following you with the lights and siren for the last three miles. It’s time to fasten your seatbelts.”

    This morning, a rainbow kite with six tails flies impossibly high, and another exactly like it lags at least a hundred feet below, trying hopelessly to catch up. On the ground, the thick smell of fudge coats my nostrils. I’m sitting alone in a coffee shop in the bustling town square—which is actually an outdoor mall — and I’m pretending to be a serious novelist at work on a great manuscript instead of a harried columnist trying to work on vacation. Tomorrow, we head for a friend’s private island in the Georgian Bay, a place so remote that there is neither phone service nor electricity nor flushing toilets. At the nearby arcade, Jon and the kids entertain themselves watching the teen locals show off on the Dance Dance Revolution Extreme machine. It’s so entrancing that I blurt out a promise to get the home version for our basement.

    Later, I find myself wondering if promises made in the heat of vacation are binding. After all, do we really know what we’re saying or doing or even who we actually are when we’re on the road?

    Think how many couples tie the knot while vacationing, only to come to their senses with a sickening shock once the trip is over. Of course, for Jon and me, such a jolly and spontaneous act would be different. Since we’ve been living together for so long, we are already balancing all of the responsibilities of marriage and family life, just without the paperwork. Plus, we’ve been planning to marry for quite a while. By now, the most frustrating aspect of being unwed is the inability to use the simple terms “husband” and “wife.” Can a “boyfriend” have a touch of gray? Does anyone especially care to be a fiancée more than once? Can a heterosexual have a “partner”? And no offense, but I’d rather lock myself in the bathroom than have a “significant other.”

    Traveling as a blended family brings all this up, since we’re meeting people and introducing ourselves over and over again. We get a little loopy. This morning at the cabin, while Jon and I were still in bed, I heard my daughter Sophie say something to her stepbrother about “when my dad and your mom get up.” Silence. Laughter. Who’s who around here, anyway? Isn’t that part of why we travel — to get enough perspective on ourselves and our lives to figure it out?

    These questions must have been nagging me the other day, when I surprised the Mackinac ferry driver (who looked about fifteen) by asking him if he was licensed to perform weddings “at sea.” Alas, he wasn’t. But no matter, because after the Georgian Bay we’re headed south, to Manhattan, where we will dodge terrorists before heading to the Jersey shore near Cape May, which is awfully close to Atlantic City, if you get my drift.

    At the table next to me a grandmother is sharing a sandwich and orange juice with a little girl about eight. The child is wearing a red T-shirt with a white cat on it. She reminds me of my younger daughter, and of the wistfulness of teenage girls before they grow up, and of myself years ago.

    All these young families walking by the window, and the childless couples, bronzed and urgent, they remind me of time passing. Revisiting these places I’ve been so many times before, it’s oddly disorienting and comforting at the same time. I see my past and my future, but it’s my world right now that comes into focus. These kids we adore, the chaos and the effort and the comedy, honestly, it aches in that way I love to feel, because I know it will never be like this again.

  • Ross Taylor

    “Zookeeper” is surely one of the top twenty coolest jobs in the world, and for Ross Taylor, a South Minneapolis native and University of Minnesota graduate, the path to this career started, oddly enough, in clown college. Studying to be a circus clown led to a job as big-top animal caretaker and then, for the past twenty-five years, keeper at the Minnesota Zoo. Taylor is one of the folks responsible for the animals on the Northern Trail—that’d be buffalo, Przewalski’s horses, moose, and of course the endangered Amur (Siberian) tigers. Lately he’s been especially busy with some new arrivals—a pair of female tiger cubs born in May. Visitors have been able to watch the cubs in their den via closed-circuit TV, but starting September 18, the youngsters will be on view romping around the main tiger enclosure. When we enlisted Taylor for our desert-island game, we were pleasantly surprised to discover that, unique among all our previous interviewees, he’s actually been stranded on a real desert island: specifically, Mili Atoll in the Marshall Islands, during his two years with the Peace Corps in the 1960s. “The minimum temperature the whole time was seventy-one degrees,” he says. Here’s what Taylor would take along for another stint in the South Pacific:

    1) “A machete, because you can’t drink one of those big coconuts without them. You can use it for building huts, or just about anything you can think of.”

    2) “A refrigerator. Boy, do you miss ice when you don’t have it for two years. Solar-powered, and stocked with supplies to make the perfect Hawaiian Sunset—rum, a
    little pineapple juice.”

    3) “Several blank canvases and painting supplies for capturing the island sunsets. I mostly paint with acrylics, because they’re so easy to handle. Recently, I’ve been painting animal-related portraits—tigers, actually.”

    4) “A jar of mayonnaise, for when a palm tree falls down and you cut out the heart for a heart-of-palm salad. If you haven’t had salad for a year, it’s pretty much beyond description.”

    5) “Two cats, to keep the rodent population down, which is a problem on a desert isle. Two cats because you can amuse yourself watching their interactions.” But Taylor would probably leave the tiger cubs at home—referring to the book The Life of Pi, he notes that on a desert island it’s probably best not to live next to a predator that weighs three times as much as you do. “I’d stick with domestic cats,” he says.

  • The Upper Crust

    Just about everyone can name someone they know who hates meatloaf. Or yogurt, I bet you can find someone in your circle who categorically hates yogurt. But I dare you to locate someone who hates pizza. Sure, you can find a friend with tomato issues or one of those poor, lactose-intolerant freaks who cries if cheese is even in the room with them, but that’s not the same, is it? When you’re a kid and you get all A’s: pizza party! When you’re sheet-rocking your buddy’s cabin: pizza break! When you’re an agoraphobic, what keeps you alive: pizza delivery! Is it the delectable complexity of combinations or is it the mind-blowing simplicity of bread with toppings? Whatever it is, pizza is the 24/7 chow that has conquered the world.

    Even though you can find pizzerias from Bangkok to Biloxi, pizzas are generally thought to be Italian in origin, which is generally true. Throughout antiquity, especially in the Mediterranean region, people used flat bread as a plate, and the Egyptians were believed to celebrate the birthdays of their pharaohs with flat breads seasoned with herbs and spices. The pita, an obvious relation, had been eaten for thousands of years all over the world before it was brought to Italy by soldiers from abroad.

    Though there’s no Big Bang theory that applies to the invention of pizza, the style we know today came together in Naples, which is commonly acknowledged to be the pizza capital of the planet.

    In the 18th century, it was known in tradesmen’s circles that the poorest sections of Napoli had the best food (a tradition that endures in many large cities). The flat pies were sold as street food by young boys who ran around with tin stoves on their heads. In 1830, Antica Pizzeria Port’Alba became the first pizzeria. They used a large round brick oven to fire their instantly famous pies—which they are still churning out today. Some people believe that it is this wood-fired cooking method that make Neapolitan pizzas the world standard. Others attribute the San Marzano tomatoes that grow in the volcanic soil of nearby Mt. Vesuvius, lending them a soft lusciousness. Still more swear by the pure buffalo mozzarella and its tanginess that makes any cow’s-milk imitation taste like wallpaper paste.

    Here in the Land of Opportunity, Lombardi’s opened on Spring Street in New York City in 1905 with its very own brick oven. Of course, New Yorkers like to claim they’re responsible for giving pizza to America, but credit should again be given to the Italians. Stationed in Italy, World War II GI’s took advantage of the local fare and brought back a hunger for the easy meal. It wasn’t long after the war (1958, to be precise) before two young brothers, still enrolled at Wichita State University, came up with a winner of an idea we’ll call Pizza Hut. Two years later, two Wisconsin brothers came up with a little brand we’ll call Tombstone.

    Pizza innovations have since proliferated, with deep-dish, stuffed crusts, dessert versions, BBQ style, “gourmet” white pizza, and all manner of other gussied-up folderol. Truth be told, the version that you can get delivered to your door in thirty minutes or less has almost nothing to do with the original idea of pizza, and I’m not just talking about the aberration that is Canadian Bacon and Pineapple. What was once a healthy, fresh repast is now helping to pad your ass. The gang at the Center for Science in the Public Interest (they were the ones who made you scared of movie popcorn) notes that just one slice of the Pizza Hut Stuffed Crust Meat Lover’s pie packs the fat of an entire McDonald’s Quarter Pounder. And I bet you don’t pick up a second QP like you pick up a second slice. Not one to mince words, Jayne Hurley, who headed the pizza study at CSPI, says, “You need cheese stuffed into a pizza crust like you need reverse liposuction to force more fat under your skin.”

    Provoked by this obscene permutation of their national treasure, the Italians formed the Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana. A governmental DOC (denominazione d’origine controllata) organization like the ones that protect the names “Chianti” and “Parmigianno Reggiano,” the VPN sees its mission as one of preserving simplicity and authenticity. The dough must be shaped by hand, without a rolling pin. The pizza must be baked in a wood-fired oven, without a pan and should be “soft, well cooked, fragrant and enclosed in a high, soft edge of crust.” Graciously, they allow that “all types of pizza are agreeable to basil leaves.” To be able to call yourself a true Neapolitan pizza joint, you must become a certified member of the VPN with a trained pizzaioli (pizza maker) on staff.

    Count yourself among the lucky, because Punch is a local outfit that is one of a handful of American members of the VPN. Not only do they turn out a dough that is soft and well cooked, but they proudly import the San Marzano tomatoes and authentic mozzarella di bufala which make their pies undeniably the best in the city. Pizza Nea is also turning out great wood-fired pies with astonishing toppings and innovative combinations. If you love a pizza not for the crust but for the sauce, then the Savoy Inn in St. Paul has the fresh, spice-laden stuff of dreams. Fat Lorenzo’s in Minneapolis comes in a close second. All these places will give you something the big chains can’t: texture and flavor that aren’t suffocated by heavy swaths of bland cheese.

    If you’re under house arrest, you too can have flavorful pizza without delivery or DiGiorno. Pizza dough is the essence of simplicity: flour, water, yeast. If you have the cash, you could invest in a miraculous, top-of-the-line Mugnaini oven direct from Italy (their national distributor happens to be right here in town). Otherwise, you should definitely pop for a pizza stone. These flat round stones heat up in your oven before you place the pizza on top, simulating the bottom of a brick oven. While it can’t cook your pizza in ninety seconds like the Mugnaini, it will help to elevate the crust to near-VPN standards, bringing you that much closer to true pizza perfection.

    ~Neapolitan Pizza Dough~

    Makes four nine- to ten-inch pizzas

    It’s best to use a blend of cake flour and all-purpose flour to achieve a Neapolitan-style crust. This tender dough stretches more easily and has less of a tendency to spring back onto itself, making it easier to wield and shape.

    1 teaspoon active dry yeast
    1-1?4 cups warm water (105ºF)
    1 cup cake flour (not self-rising)
    2-1?2 to 3 cups all-purpose flour
    2 teaspoons salt
    Olive oil, to grease the bowl

    Sprinkle the yeast over the warm water in a measuring cup. Let stand one minute or until the yeast is creamy. Stir until the yeast dissolves.
    In a large bowl, combine the cake flour, 2-1?2 cups of the all-purpose flour, and the salt.

    Add the yeast mixture and stir until a soft dough forms. Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured surface and knead, adding
    more flour if necessary. Work until smooth and elastic, about ten minutes.

    Lightly coat a large bowl with olive oil. Place the dough in the bowl, turning it to oil the top. Cover with plastic wrap and set in a warm, draft-free spot and let rise until doubled in bulk, about 1-1?2 hours.

    Punch down the dough with your fists (quite gratifying). Cut it into two to four pieces and shape into balls. Dust the tops with flour.
    Place the balls on a floured work surface and cover each with plastic wrap allowing room for expansion. Let rise sixty to ninety minutes, or until doubled.

    While patiently waiting for dough to rise, place a pizza stone with dusting of cornmeal in oven on the lowest rack. Heat the oven to its maximum temperature.
    Shape dough on pizza paddle (officially called a “peel”) dusted with cornmeal, and add toppings. Gently slide pizza onto stone in oven. Bake each for six to seven minutes.

  • Soundtrack to Mary

    Mary’s watching: “Live Forever: The Rise And Fall Of British Pop”

    I settled into my comfy chair and with every good bed-wetting liberal intention tried to watch the Democratic National Convention on TV. I felt like a big dumb demographic cliché. With one eye on John Edwards’ shiny hopeful face, my hopelessly Gen-X other eye drifted to the Vanity Fair in my lap. Mr. Sincere and Shiny, try as he might, could not compete with the pretty magazine and its photos of people who party with Paris Hilton.

    I’m sure you’re thinking, “Here’s where Mary begins berating herself for her shallowness and political apathy.” Oh, how little you know me…

    First, if most of my friends were honest, they would reveal that their true interest in Kerry amounts to little more than good hair, time spent in a garage band, and kite surfing.

    So what? People say, “Vote for the candidate you can most relate to.” I’m happy to say I can’t “relate” to any of them. Can you?

    I wasn’t born into money. I’ve never taken advice from my father. I’ve never been drawn to people who desperately seek the approval of strangers. I hate being told what to do. I think it would be creepy to know that there’s a good chance that I’m sleeping in a room that Ronald Reagan has had sex in (although Reagan was a SAG member and he regularly colored his hair, so I have more in common with him than any other president).

    Sometimes the trifling, immoral details of a candidate’s life, the very things the spin doctors want to keep hidden, are the things most of us could relate to. Between blowing the sax on late-night TV and blowing the chronic, Clinton sealed the deal with a huge demo of voters. Bottom line, vote from your heart, vote from your ass. Just vote.

    Now if only Nader smoked crack.

    E-mail Mary at popularcreeps@yahoo.com.

  • Stick ’Em Up!

    Phoenix Rising, a sculpture fashioned from roughly five thousand melted guns, now lies in two pieces in a storage facility. Hennepin County officials are reluctant to say exactly where, because its current condition “is not the presentation the artist had in mind.”

    The mawkish symbolism of the mythic bird reborn from ashes certainly makes it easy to guess what the artist did have in mind. But since 1992, when Hennepin County melted the weapons from its “Drop Your Guns” buyback program, the birth of a firearms-free utopia appears to have been aborted. Instead, Hennepin County has issued just about four thousand new permits to carry guns, as a result of the Personal Protection Act. This has led some to wonder if the sculpture should be melted again and recast as Don Quixote.

    In America, there are approximately two hundred and fifty million firearms. Despite this penchant for personal protection, the U.S. is a world leader in homicides. So municipalities across the land have made sporadic attempts to mop up some of the excess with buyback programs and amnesties. Though Hennepin County will be smoke-free long before it becomes gun-free, the 1992 buyback, costing about two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, ranks as one of the most successful programs of its kind. But across the river, Ramsey County lived up to its quaint reputation with a program that entered people in a raffle in exchange for turning in weapons. Seventy-one capital citizens dropped off guns for a chance at Twins tickets and hotel coupons.

    A similar tale has been playing out over in Iraq. The U.S. Army reported grand success with a program in Basra earlier this year that bagged four thousand AK-47s. And in June, a program in Karbala yielded “dozens” of weapons. But U.S. Army press releases have yet to boast of similar results in Najaf. There, Marines had surrounded the city and were in running firefights with the Sadr militia. Early estimates put the turned-in weapons total in Najaf at two.

    Possibly the largest turn-in ever took place Down Under. After the 1996 massacre of thirty-five people in Port Arthur, Australia, citizens responded by relinquishing more than six hundred thousand weapons. The Australian government continues to fund buyback programs to this day. Violence perpetrated by humans is down, but, according to a recent report in the Guardian, crocodile attacks are up.

    If there’s final proof that every gun turn-in program begets unintended consequences, Cynthia Gerdes has it. Since 1994, Gerdes has sponsored several toy gun turn-ins at her Creative Kidstuff toy store locations in the Twin Cities. When we spoke recently, she was unable to guess how many guns she took in. “We would fill boxes the size of thirty-three-gallon trash cans many times over. Thousands,” she said. Many of the toys are so realistic, she added, “they make the hair stand up on the back of my neck.” Gerdes always carts the weapons home for disposal to prevent them from being “recycled” out of the commercial dumpsters. Sadly, one was recovered there by a visiting nephew who took it to school and was promptly suspended.

    Back at the Hennepin County Government Center, plans are underway to re-install Phoenix Rising on a lonely-looking footing poured on the plaza facing Fifth Street. The pylons surrounding the footing are there because the slab is not level with the plaza pavers, explained senior project manager Shirajoy Abry. It would not do for a citizen to trip and fall so close to the seat of litigation for the county. Nor would that be the first trip to court for the bird. The melting of the guns in 1992 was temporarily halted due to litigation by gun owners who wanted the inventory checked for their own lost or stolen weapons.

    Later in the decade, the sculpture was mothballed during government center renovations and left in storage. Last April, just before the most recent attempt at installation, the five-hundred-pound aluminum base for the sculpture was stolen from the St. Paul shop where it was fabricated. A new one is being manufactured now, said Abry. How the fates may intervene this time is anyone’s guess. “I don’t even want to think about that,” said Abry. —Joe Pastoor

  • Silver City

    In film after film, John Sayles is one of the only directors out there unafraid to take a hard look at the negative influence of money and power on American society. At times that leads to heavy-handed didacticism, as with the disappointing Sunshine State, but we’ve got a good feeling about Silver City, which reunites Sayles with Chris Cooper and Kris Kristofferson, both of whom teamed with Sayles in his best film, the terrific thinking-man’s cop thriller Lone Star. Here, Cooper plays Dicky Pilager, a deeply conservative, tumble-tongued candidate for Colorado governor, who dredges up a mess of trouble when he reels in a corpse during a routine fly-fishing photo-op. 651-649-4416; www.landmarktheaters.com

  • The Onion Arrives

  • Shaun of the Dead

    If moviespeak shorthand abbreviates “romantic comedy” as “romcom,” then this is a “romzom”—a romantic comedy set amid the zombie plague of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. Director Edgar Wright and star Simon Pegg, who also wrote the movie, first worked together on a British sitcom called Spaced, and it’s obvious they have great creative chemistry. They’ve created an instant cult classic in the vein (and we use that word advisedly) of Peter Jackson’s Dead/Alive, and provided the biggest laughs we’ve had in a theater all year. It’s not merely parody à la Scream, though these guys really know and love their zombie movies, but smart, character-driven humor that American audiences will find most familiar from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. If you like the genre, Shaun comes highly recommended.

  • Gozu

    Director Takashi Miike’s reputation rests on his bizarre visual imagery and his mindbogglingly prolific career—though Gozu only came out in Japan last year, the Japanese gonzo has already finished seven other films. So it might be too much to ask that everything that happens in this movie makes logical sense. Nominally a cross between an atmospheric horror film like The Ring and a gangster thriller, Gozu follows Minami, a hapless, low-level yakuza who’s been assigned to kill his insane mentor and manages to lose the corpse in the very weird criminal underground of the city of Nagoya. Further plot explanation would be fruitless, but we’ll tell you that it does involve a minotaur-like demon named Gozu (Japanese for “cow head”). Like the work of Eugène Ionesco, Matthew Barney, and David Lynch—like dreams, in other words—there is a strange and disturbing art here that can’t be denied even if it can’t be understood. 612-331-3134; www.mnfilmarts.org