The Rake Magazine

Category: Article

  • “We Was Right All Along”

    On a perfectly sunny day for a baseball game, as thousands of fans swarmed to the dust heap that is to be the future home of the new Twins Stadium, a good half-mile away a small but dedicated group of curmudgeons gathered outside Cuzzy’s Bar on Washington Avenue. They were preparing for their own little celebration. “We’re geniuses, you know,” boasted Julian Loscalzo, chewing on a fat cigar and quaffing the first of many beers. “My good, personal friend Sid Hartman used to call us geniuses, back when he was all for the Dome,” he explained, his words punctuated by hoarse laughter. “We’ve proven him wrong by actually being geniuses.”

    Loscalzo used to be a beer vendor at ballgames and other sports events around town; now he works as a tour guide, hauling paying guests around the country to see outdoor baseball, and counts selling parking spaces at the State Fair among his many other occupations. He is also the de facto leader of the Save the Met organization. This is the same ragtag collection of baseball cranks that tilted at windmills in the mid-1970s, hoping to persuade the Twins to remain at the scenic Metropolitan Stadium rather than move to the Metrodome. All these years later, Loscalzo and Co. are feeling a tad vindicated by the Dome’s impending obsolescence. Thus, a “We Was Right All Along” march down to the new stadium site was in order, replete with an old “Save the Met” banner from someone’s attic and well-preserved T-shirts bearing the same slogan, along with the likeness of the Twins’ old haunt.

    Michael Samuelson (“Sammy” to friend and foe alike), was part of the original sturm und drang, going so far at one point as to vow publicly never to set foot in the Dome. “And I didn’t go for two years,” he claimed. But, he noted, his love of the game overwhelmed his principles—and besides, “if it weren’t for the Dome, I would never have met my wife.” Loscalzo shook his head. “I never made the promise that I wouldn’t go. I knew better. I’m a big fan.”

    The “We Was Right” march didn’t amount to anything resembling, say, the recent Critical Mass bicycle gathering that sent not a few people to the clink for a long weekend. In fact, the Save the Met group kept to the sidewalks and their banner remained under wraps until they reached the construction site. Probably their only transgression involved chugging cans of Gluek beer in public.

    Once at the site, the clan gave some weak cheers to other protesters who were unable to enter the ceremony, whose handmade placards read “Foul!” and “Corporate Welfare,” among other admonishments. Although the Twins security granted access to the Save-the-Metters, Loscalzo paused and considered, instead hanging the sign on a fence. “I don’t know if I have the stomach to go in there.”

    Inside, there was little strife. In front of a large stage, a temporary diamond was set up, with actual Major League bases and thick swaths of deep green sod, all of which was surrounded by bleachers. Fans of every stripe were on hand, taking photos of dirt, eating dollar dogs and brats, and watching videos touting the new arena. Most of the crowd was suited up from a day of work, but there were also families in from the ’burbs and bicyclists galore—lines of bikes were chained to the fences. A few protesters stood on the Seventh Street overpass, trying desperately to get their message across; one sign read “Make necessary bridge repairs, not war.” But the amplified speeches by Twins alumni—not to mention the steady din of the garbage incinerator next door—kept their shouts from being heard below.

    One fan, Willie Rauen, an elderly gentleman from Pine Island, was holding aloft an old seatback from Met Stadium. He’d yanked it out during the last game ever played at the Met, which happened to be a Vikings and Kansas City Chiefs game. “Some guy had a wrench, and I took my seat,” Rauen crowed. “Others went crazy. They took toilets!” The front of Rauen’s seat—Number 8, “by the first base side”—was autographed by various Twins from that era, including Harmon Killebrew, Tony Oliva, and Rod Carew; Rauen was determined to get the front autographed by current Twins when the new stadium opens. “This is a pretty good piece of history here.”

    As Commissioner of Baseball Bud Selig began to speak—among other comments, he inexplicably suggested that the best thing about the groundbreaking was that it made Carl Pohlad smile—a chant emanated from the back of the crowd. “Con-trac-tion!” bellowed the Save the Met group, and this time they were joined by a larger crowd with still more beers. Loscalzo received hugs from a number of women. Someone blew a raspberry. A man who looked very Wall Street shouted, “Give me a tomato and I’ll hurl it at ’im!” Finally, Loscalzo beamed at the small crowd that had gathered around him to admire the banner, which, he claimed, had been to the Baseball Hall of Fame. He toasted it with his Budweiser. “We made it,” he said, wearily. “Thirty fucking years.”

     

  • What do you do?

    We are children, and then we work. If we’re fortunate, at any rate, we’re allowed to experience our childhood as children, and able, when the time comes to make our way in the world, to find work. Meaningful work, if we’re truly fortunate.

    The truth, though, is that the introductory icebreaker for youngsters—“How old are you?”—is too quickly replaced by “What do you do?”

    Work occupies a huge territory in both the conscious and unconscious minds of twenty-first-century Americans. We do it, talk about it, take it home with us, dream about it, get obsessed with TV shows about it; many of us allow it to dictate the parameters of our identities and the orbit of our social lives and what we do when we’re not working. The question of meaningful work looms larger all the time.

    Yet chances are that “meaningful work” means radically different things to people, depending on their economic circumstances, ethnic backgrounds, and ambitions. Also built into the notion are such questions as who or what we are when we’re not working. How much of an alternate identity does our work allow us?

    Our first notions of work, of course, take root in childhood, and in our childhood dreams and fantasies, which probably explains the wealth of evidence—first-hand, anecdotal, and statistical—suggesting that kids have largely unrealistic notions of work. Precious few have any real understanding of what their parents do for a living; thus the move, in the past decade or so, toward bring-your-kids-to-work programs. So it’s not particularly surprising that for generations, children, when presented with the inevitable question about what they want “to be” when they grow up, tend to choose highly visible occupations that involve art, public service, spectacle, and the archetypically heroic: ballerinas and painters, doctors and nurses, police officers and firemen, astronauts and professional athletes. In other words, they latch on to dream jobs—clear, simple concepts, really—that can be easily grasped at a time in their lives when they are more purely imaginative and idealistic.

    The real world, such as it is, usually crowds out these early dreams, whether through economic considerations (on both ends of the spectrum: a need to simply make a living or a desire for greater affluence), or the usual, practical process of gradual disillusionment that comes with growing up. For many of us, ambition and dreams inevitably take a backseat at some point, and work becomes a series of contracts and compromises with blunt reality.

    At the same time, we’re constantly bombarded with portraits of affluent achievers and annual reports featuring “executive compensation packages”; but what about all those other people who are still pursuing their dreams, or doing the sort of jobs most of us (with the possible exception of sociologists and economists) take for granted? There’s really no such thing as an “average Joe,” but what about those people who are routinely characterized as such? We went in search of random people doing random, interesting things for a living, most of whom are situated far outside the world of corporate America—a barber, a bartender, and a ballerina, for instance—and asked them not just what they do, but why and how they came to do it, and what sort of pleasures and perils their work offers. And as conscientious job interviewers have done since the beginning of time, we wondered: Where did they see themselves in five years?

    There are always a number of challenges involved in any discussion of work, many of them questions of perception and definition; for instance, how do we view the work we do, especially in relation to the work of our peers? What kind of attitudes and expectations do we bring to our jobs and careers? How does the reality of our work life measure up against those childhood dreams? And what, really, is work, beyond the purely personal nature of what each of us does to make ends meet?

    It’s huge, for one thing. The world is work. It’s everywhere, even if so much of it remains invisible, taken for granted, or situated outside the blinders many of us wear in our day-to-day lives. Work is a chain of connections and interconnections, the endless series of transactions and compacts that make the world run. Break down any fifteen-minute increment of your day and try to recognize all the points at which you are a participant in the ceaseless relay of work. You go to a restaurant, for instance; somebody seats you and takes your order; somebody mixes your drink, numerous other somebodies prepare your meal, somebody clears your table, somebody washes your dishes. Somebody else runs the whole shebang. Somebody owns the place. Another constellation of bodies supplies the restaurant with its meat, its produce, its liquor, its tableware; somebody hauls away its trash. Somebody built the restaurant, and somebody designed the layout and décor; somebody else cleans and maintains it. The signs and awnings are somebody’s livelihood. Somebody sells the proprietor insurance.

    Look at your life. Look at yourself in the mirror. Your shoes, the clothes you’re wearing and the clothing in your closets, the food in your cupboards and refrigerator, the stuff arrayed around your kitchen sink and in your medicine cabinet. All your gadgets and gizmos. Your car. The shit in your garage. Your haircut. All that stuff is the end result of somebody’s labor, and somewhere along the line it has passed through human hands. Trace any of it to its origins and you’d encounter a human being—or several, or dozens, even hundreds—just trying to earn a paycheck, support a family, and make ends meet.

    Again, how you perceive work, and how likely you are to see it all around you, probably depends largely on where and how you were raised. Certainly a kid raised on a farm, or in a family that has spent generations plying one trade or laboring in a particular industry, has a different conception of work than a kid raised in a white-collar bastion of suburbia. Such early ideas about work form the foundation for perceptions of class, and have for centuries.

    The future of work is another question that gets more complex and contentious all the time. Ever since a generation of post-war blue-collar parents sent its children off to college to learn their way out from under their upbringing, there has been an explosion of well-educated, well-trained white-collar professionals. The last few decades have been unprecedented boom times for the upwardly mobile.

    At what cost, though? Somebody still has to do the dirty work, the grunt work, the nuts-and-bolts stuff that keeps our cities (and our economy) afloat. Increasingly, of course, many of these sorts of jobs are filled by immigrant labor—another fact that raises complex and contentious questions. In this sense, it sometimes seems as if we’ve turned back the clock a century or more, to when America’s major cities were teeming with newly arrived workers from all over the globe. Those workers offered insane levels of productivity in return for paltry wages, and the often squalid conditions they worked under, once sufficiently publicized, helped to bring about government protections, as well as the formation of trade unions. They also inspired a wave of realist art and literature that both called attention to their plight and ennobled them and the work they did.

    These days blue-collar work—and work in general—has all but disappeared from popular culture. We’re not likely any time soon to see public art on the scale of Diego Rivera’s Detroit Industry frescos, commissioned in 1932 by Edsel Ford and the subject of almost immediate controversy. White-collar labor, on the other hand, particularly of the drone variety, has become a ripe target for satire, whether in the form of television’s The Office or Joshua Ferris’s alternately hilarious and grim recent novel, Then We Came to the End. There have also been best-selling books along the lines of Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America, in which the white-collar writer introduced millions of Barnes and Noble customers and frequent fliers to the travails of workers at the lower end of the economic food chain. But what we mostly get today from culture is gauzy, fictionalized treatments of upper-crust lifestyles and careers, most of which are so unrecognizable as to qualify as purely escapist entertainments. Or we’re treated, generally through advertisements, to corporate America’s fantasies of working men and women: labor as soft-focus patriotic propaganda, complete with a soundtrack from Bob Seger or John Mellencamp.

    All of this comes at a time when, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2006 report on income and poverty, the number of uninsured Americans rose to an all-time high of forty-seven million. And when, despite reported economic expansion, the poverty rate among children and working adults is still stalled at recession levels. Americans work longer hours than the Japanese and enjoy less vacation time than Europeans, even as average CEO pay over the past decade has increased by forty-five percent and the CEOs of the largest U.S. companies make more money in a day than the average worker makes in an entire year.

    According to recent data there are roughly 383,000 Minnesotans without insurance, nearly seventy percent of whom are employed. Fifty-six percent of those are self-employed or work for small businesses.

    Those are all just numbers, though, even to the people who are most affected by them. People still go to work, and as we discovered in our interviews, they do what they do for all sorts of reasons. Somewhat to our surprise, many of these folks are doing exactly what they want to. These are people who’ve somehow realized their dreams, or made sacrifices for the sort of freedom and flexibility made possible by what they’ve chosen to do with their lives. Some of them, certainly, have made a kind of peace with what they’re doing. These are people who have come to the crossroads, and chosen.

    All of them have presumably wrestled with the questions familiar to anyone who works for a living. How much insecurity are we willing to accommodate to square the work we do with the lives we want? How much, in a very literal sense, is our work worth? And how much are we willing to pay?

    BAIL AGENT: Janet Radloff

    BALLET DANCER: Penelope Freeh

    BARTENDER: James Flemming

    BOOKSTORE CLERK: Clarence Thrun

    BARBER: Jayson Dallmann

    DOG GROOMER: Bonnie Kane

    FARMER: David Van Eeckhout

    TAILOR: John P. Meegan

    MASSAGE THERAPIST/FLIGHT ATTENDANT: Mary Thomes

    AUTO MECHANIC: Steve Skibbe

    CONSTRUCTION/HOME REMODELING: Aria Williams and Moe Dominguez

    HOUSE CLEANER: Heather Joyner

  • Men with Baggage

    In the past hundred years, women have successfully appropriated menswear, from slacks and dungarees to business suits—but the exchange hasn’t exactly gone in the other direction. But lookit! Finally it has at least become socially permissible for men of all stripes to carry purses—or satchels, if you will, or just plain old bags. It’s only fair, after all: What guy doesn’t have a BlackBerry to pack, or a bottle of prescription drugs to tuck away until lunchtime? Trailblazing toters may have endured teasing, their attachés being branded with insulting names (“murse”? “man bag”? ugh!), even as their cohorts made do with slovenly JanSports.

    Now, thanks to an assortment of over-the-shoulder carryalls in leather and distressed canvas, the man-with-bag look is as fashionable as it is practical. And not just for lawyerly or Wall Street types. In fact, we wonder whether the proliferation of technological gadgetry didn’t seed this trend among our nation’s youth. In any case, Prince Charming ferries his own car keys these days; he feels naked without that rugged Jack Spade file case (above)—the one with heavy-metal hardware, a pinstriped interior, and enough room for everything he used to shove inside his companion’s purse. Our roaming photographer also met up with handsome heirloom leather bags outfitted with elaborate enclosures and a seductively sleek, bowling bag-inspired duffel by Ben Sherman. To these handy accessories we say: Carry on, fellows.

     

     

  • The Original All-American

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    There is nothing wrong with talented chefs like J.P. Samuelson at jP American Bistro turning out dishes like roast chicken breast with fermented black bean sauce and mango salad and calling it American cuisine. And Doug Flicker has every right to offer duck breast with prune ravioli, asparagus, and portobello mushrooms at Mission American Kitchen. But if you want to taste American cooking the way it was B.C., you have to go to a diner.

    B.C. means Before Child, as in Julia. She swept across the American landscape like a gastronomic tornado, starting in the early ’60s, and almost completely wiped out a venerable dining tradition. Nowadays it’s hard to find a menu that doesn’t offer deep-fried calamari or seared ahi tuna with ginger wasabi dipping sauce, but you’ll have to search far and wide to find a good old-fashioned chicken salad sandwich or Midwestern hotdish.

    Though there are some things that good diners have always done well, like hash browns and pancakes, there is no need to get too nostalgic about this bygone era—the truth is, most American food B.C. wasn’t very good. We were at the height of a convenience-foods craze when Julia burst on the scene, and the signature dish of the American diner in those days was a can of Campbell’s chicken noodle soup. Now the best of the new generation of diners offers an expanded repertoire, often using local ingredients, as well as more imaginative preparations—all without losing sight of the core value of traditional diners: unfussy fare at reasonable prices.

    You can break the contemporary American diner scene down into three basic categories: the true classics, like Mickey’s Diner, the Band Box, Our Kitchen, and the Ideal Diner, which continue to serve exactly the same grub they did two generations ago; the updated diners, like the Modern Café, the Colossal Café, and the Town Talk Diner, where new owners have preserved the historic décor, but offer updated menus (as well as wine and beer, or even a full bar); and, finally, the new retro diners, like the Edina/Longfellow/Highland Grills, which pay homage to the diner tradition with menus that combine old and new.

    The original diners were inspired by railroad dining cars, with a long counter and booth seating, but the concept, and the design, have evolved over the years. The early diners were America’s first fast food restaurants, decades before the Golden Arches arrived on the scene in 1955. With limited seating and tiny kitchens, the short-order cook had to get the food out, well, in short order—and the customers, too. In the ’80s, the Frogtown Diner in St. Paul captured the hurry-up attitude with the motto “Eat It, Then Beat It!”

    If you stretch the definition of a diner a bit, you can include landmarks like Peter’s Grill, which opened in 1914 and is the oldest restaurant still operating in Minneapolis. It has a long curved counter and plenty of booths, but a more extensive menu than the typical diner. Among its specialties are American classics that have largely disappeared, such as the Tuesday specials: a chicken patty with cream sauce and fresh peas, or grilled beef liver with bacon.

    The ultimate classic diner is Mickey’s in downtown St. Paul, built in a factory in New Jersey and shipped by rail to Minnesota. The first Mickey’s Diner opened in 1939 and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. (There are two other locations in St. Paul, although they have different owners.) You’ll walk out of Mickey’s smelling like a hamburger and French fries, but it’s worth it—this is traditional diner cooking at its best. Their basic cheese omelet is almost as light and airy as a soufflé—maybe because they whip the eggs in a malt blender, and fry them up in what looks like about half a cup of butter. And the hash browns, fried on the griddle, combine crisp and tender in savory perfection.

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    The Band Box opened that same year just outside downtown Minneapolis, and is enough of a neighborhood institution—and landmark—that its 2003 renovation was supported by Elliot Park neighborhood revitalization funds. It’s got a classic red-and-white color scheme, a standard eggs-pancakes-and-sandwiches menu, and a friendly neighborhood vibe. Although the Band Box Diner’s motto is “Turning Grease Into a Feast For Over 60 Years!” neither my juicy mushroom Swiss burger nor my side of fries was actually very greasy.

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    Something about the Ideal Diner brings Lake Wobegon to mind. It’s a place that, to paraphrase Garrison Keillor, “time forgot and the decades cannot improve.” That could almost be its motto, except it already has a better one: “Where Regular People Feel Special, and Special People Feel Regular.” My deep-fried pork tenderloin sandwich was more regular than special, but the accompanying hash browns were terrific. And the daily special, billed as goulash, turned out to be classic Minnesota hotdish: elbow macaroni, ground beef, and tomato sauce, untainted by any detectable spice or seasoning.

  • The Sweet (and Saucy) Transvestite

    In the early 1980s, when I was 16, my friend, Martha, picked me up at 11 p.m. in her father’s enormous Buick, and we drove from our neighborhood in Minnetonka to the Uptown Theater for the midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

    I was brought up on an entertainment diet of The Carpenters, The Waltons, and films like The Goodbye Girl. And Rocky Horror was like nothing I’d ever seen: its black-lipsticked hero, wearing dominatrix garb and wielding an ax; colorfully-dressed Munchkin-like people doing the “Time Warp”; a bizarrely compelling hook-nosed butler who had an unorthodox relationship with his sister, the wild-haired maid.

    Then there was the audience: kids chanting lines along with the characters and throwing things at the screen. Rice, toilet paper, toast. I didn’t remember much about the storyline (in fact, when I saw the film again, recently, I was amazed by its sci-fi ending); what made an impression was the experience. Raucous and sexually-charged, yet strangely wholesome.

    That’s why, when my not-quite-13-year-old daughter came home from a sleepover last summer, proclaiming that she’d watched Rocky Horror twice and it was her new favorite film, I didn’t fret. Despite its themes of party sex, incest, murder, and cultishness, I believed it was pretty harmless. I’d known interesting people over the years who hadn’t fit in anywhere else but found a home in one Rocky troupe or another. I was all for it.

    As an English professor, I realized Rocky Horror was informed by a wide range of classics: it’s a sexually-charged homage to Frankenstein, with a healthy dose of The Fall of the House of Usher, and a little bit of Hansel and Gretel thrown in. This is the story of two naïve kids who fall in love, then travel out into the world and become both wise and jaded. The protagonist, Tim Curry’s Dr. Frank-N-Furter, is sympathetic but deeply flawed — a character that turns from sinister to childlike but appears, in his twisted little heart, simply to want everyone who visits his castle to disrobe, dance, and have a good time. What’s so wrong with that?

    Nothing, I decided. . . .even for my adolescent. And it struck me, too, how remarkable it was that Rocky Horror — which was made when I was seven — remains relevant today. The film has, indeed, time-warped.

    I thought it would be interesting to sit down with an expert to find out why.


    We meet at the Longfellow Grill at 9:30 on a rainy Saturday night. I’m in straight-leg jeans and a purple blouse. She’s wearing a leather corset, fishnet stockings, and four-inch heels. We start by talking about regular life.

    Five days a week, Diana McCleery drives a school bus in the mornings and afternoons, spending the hours in between with her three-and-a-half-year-old, Morgan. She loves being a mom, and she’s grateful for the job that allows her so much time to parent. It’s only on weekends that she leaves her husband home with Morgan and goes to the Riverview Theater in Southeast Minneapolis, where she simulates sex on stage.

    For the past couple years, McCleery has served as the director of Transvestite Soup, a troupe of fifteen local volunteers that puts on a live performance of The Rocky Horror Picture Show while the 1975 cult classic film screens behind them. And she’s well qualified for the job. In addition to holding a psychology degree from the University of Memphis, the forty-one-year-old witch (McCleery is a third-degree leader in the Blue Star tradition of Wicca) has been performing in live renditions of Rocky Horror—here and in Tennessee—since 1990.

    “I went to Rocky every so often in college,” she says. “Then one day my boyfriend and I were like, ‘Let’s dress up and get crazy.’ So I wore my sexiest underwear, and he put a leash on me. I found out I enjoy performing, and I love this movie. In fact, the more I see Rocky, the more I want to get up on stage and show it to people.”

    McCleery points out that there are subtle, heartfelt relationships between the characters, such as Riff-Raff and Dr. Frank-N-Furter, which casual viewers often miss.

    “Frank is beautiful, and Riff-Raff is ugly; Riff-Raff has no one but Magenta, while everyone adores Frank.” She ticks these things off on her long fingers. “And there’s a hint that Riff is in love with Frank-N-Furter. At the end, when he kills Frank, Magenta says, ‘I thought you liked him,’ and Riff answers, ‘But he never liked me.’ If you look closely, he has a little tear in his eye.”

    Her college boyfriend didn’t enjoy their Rocky experience, she admits. As McCleery grew increasingly uninhibited, wearing less clothing for performances and experimenting with different roles, he became uncomfortable. She soon broke up with him and immersed herself fully in the show.

    Luckily, her husband, Rob, an administrative assistant at Wells Fargo whom she met long after starting with Rocky, is a big fan. Before their daughter was born, he attended nearly all her shows.

  • Dee Dee Bridgewater

    Bridgewater won a Tony for her role in The Wiz, won a Grammy for an Ella Fitzgerald tribute, had early-career dabbles in fusion jazz and R & B; more recently, she recorded a disk dedicated to Kurt Weill, and another of Parisian café music sung completely in French. But her latest, Red Earth, ranks with Dear Ella as her best yet, featuring a seamlessly buoyant mélange of American jazz and African pop from Mali. She’s bringing over seven African musicians for a mere two weeks to supplement her marvelous trio (which includes ace Nuyorican pianist Edsel Gomez) and the Dakota has bagged two of those precious nights.

    Dakota Jazz Club & Restaurant, 1010 Nicollet Ave., Minneapolis; 612-332-1010.

  • Mastering the Art of Service

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    He looks like a waiter out of a New Yorker cartoon. Crisp shirt, ramrod straight back, tray held aloft on his fingertips. He wears reading glasses on a chain around his neck, makes the best wine recommendations, calls all the ladies “dear” no matter what their age, and sports a wild, white mane of hair. No wonder he’s the most popular server at La Belle Vie.

    In fact, Mark Roberts may be one of the most popular, oft-requested servers in town. He is that quintessential pro. And very few of his regular customers know he’s also a nationally-known photographer and protégé of Ansel Adams; a former concert pianist; and the 1970s-era art gallery owner who helped Hollywood’s Steve Martin acquire his personal collection and gave Annie Leibowitz her first Twin Cities show.

    They likely wouldn’t guess that he didn’t start waiting tables until he was well into his 40s, after he went broke because his string of one-hour photo labs in the Caribbean was wiped out by a freak hurricane. Or that he was fired from his first restaurant job for knowing absolutely nothing about food service.

    Most of the people sitting in the dining room at La Belle Vie don’t even know that’s his art hanging on the wall.

    I first met Roberts in the St. Anthony Village home of Jack Hunt, owner of Billman-Hunt, our region’s only remaining independent funeral home.

    I was there to interview Hunt about his religious paintings and his audience in Rome with Pope John Paul II. We were standing in the living room, looking at a set of ancient triptychs, when Roberts sauntered through, shirtless and barefoot, still rumpled from bed, walking across a room crowded with statuary to the bathroom where he kept his favorite set of drums.

    Hunt rolled his eyes. “It’s only Mark,” he said, as if that explained everything. Later, Roberts came out, midway through pulling a shirt over his head and sat down with us. The men explained to me that they were former business partners and friends, that Roberts had only just arrived back in town after a surfing hiatus in Miami, and that he was staying with Hunt while he started a job at the newly relocated La Belle Vie.

    “So you used to be a mortician, too?” I asked. And they both laughed.

    Roberts was born in Carmel some time during the World War II era — he won’t say how old he is now, only that he’s in his mid-60s, “leaning” toward 70. As a child, he was a gifted piano player, and by the age of 14, he was on the road, giving concerts all over the United States. Often, he would stop in Minneapolis on his way cross-country to visit his godparents. He loved music but hated performing.

    “I would be sick for three or four days before every concert,” he says. “Even after I played, I’d still be throwing up.”

    Around the same time, his next-door neighbor, a photographer named Ansel Adams, asked if Roberts would like to work with him. Thinking it might help their son become more adventuresome and get over his stage fright, Roberts’ parents agreed. So in what Roberts calls “the pivotal moment” of his life, he went to Yosemite as Adams’ assistant. And there, he fell in love with photography.

    He was accepted to Stanford on a music scholarship, but he took a job there as a teaching assistant for Imogen Cunningham, and — despite earning his master’s in musical performance — went on to become a photographer. Also a surfer and a real party boy. . .

    He lived high: traveling, driving sports cars, buying exotic hallucinogenic drugs. But despite his love for big cities and oceans, Roberts kept coming back to Minneapolis — the place where his godparents had lived and he’d always felt safe. On one trip through in 1972, a local art dealer called Roberts to ask if he’d be willing to photograph a funeral: some family members of the deceased couldn’t make it from the East coast to see their loved one buried, so they wanted pictures.

    Roberts agreed, on the condition that he could take some portfolio shots for himself — stylized profiles of the dead. He thought it might help him make his mark. A couple hours later, Hunt picked him up in a long, dark hearse.

    They talked on the way to the funeral, determining quickly that they were both into art. Before the evening was over, the men had decided to open a gallery called J Hunt.

    They opened with a show devoted to the work of a prison guard and painter from Duluth.

  • Suzanne Vega

    Vega is deservedly getting the best reviews of her career for Beauty & Crime, her tip of the beret to New York City, her home since childhood and also the site of September 11th, her dead brother’s apartment, and sidewalks full of poets and fashion models. Vega gathers it all up—Frank Sinatra, Ava Gardner, and Edith Wharton are in there, too—and winnows it down to eleven songs that come in under forty minutes. She exacts such a detailed mixture of art (the naked sentiments in her cool, lofty lyrics, the seamless physical and emotional backdrop of NYC) and craft (the immaculate production, sophisticated arrangements, prim intonation) that the entire disc feels as much like scrimshaw as music: a small but potent treasure.

    Varsity Theater, 1308 Fourth St. S.E., Minneapolis; 612-604-0222.

  • Minnesota Orchestra

    This weekend’s program is emblematic of conductor Osmo Vänskä’s five-year tenure to date with the orchestra. It begins with “Rakastava,” the romantic, melancholic choral work from Vänskä’s famous fellow Finn, Sibelius. It ends with Beethoven’s “Second Symphony,” a secondary but not second-rate composition among the nine Beethoven symphonies that Vänskä is recording with the Minnesota Orchestra to generally positive reviews. In between is
    Shostakovich’s “First Violin Concerto,” a feature for guest star Lisa Batiashvili, who is fresh off her April performance of the same work for the New York Philharmonic.

    Orchestra Hall, 1111 Nicolett Mall, Minneapolis; 612-371-5656.

  • Eric Peltoniemi’s Playlist

    Red House Records is a tiny label headquartered in a modest office in the St. Paul Midway, yet one that is internationally celebrated among roots-music devotees. Founder Bob Feldman spent more than twenty years signing a roster of folk musicians like Greg Brown, Peter Ostroushko, and Ann Reed. But when Feldman died unexpectedly last year, it was up to Eric Peltoniemi to take the reins. Peltoniemi was the first employee Feldman ever hired, and was working as vice president of production when his boss and friend died; he has not only cultivated the careers of many artists in his role as an exec, he’s also written songs for dozens of Red House artists like Robin & Linda Williams and Claudia Schmidt, played folk music himself in ensembles across the globe, and even dabbled in musical theater. So oddly, or perhaps not, he doesn’t listen to a lot of music outside of work. “I spend a lot of time listening to artist demos,” he explained. “And as a songwriter, that crazy orchestra is always running in my head as well. As a result, when I get home I need the silence. My main recreational listening takes place in the cocoon of my car.” Here’s a sampling of what’s impressed him during his commute in the past few weeks:

    1. “Smile,” Tony Bennett
    This is the classic performance of Charlie Chaplin’s great song and it was the Little Tramp’s favorite, too. With Tommy Flanagan’s piano and the exquisitely subtle orchestrations, it doesn’t get any better than this.

    2. “Always Late (With Your Kisses),” Lefty Frizzell
    I love most genres, but in my heart I am and ever will be a country cat. Lefty influenced everyone from George to Merle … and all points beyond. His unique and fluid phrasing turned single vowels into multi-syllable diphthongs and I can rarely get this song out of my head once it appears (which happens a lot).

    3. “You’re a Wolf,” Sea Wolf
    I listen a lot to The Current and XM Radio these days while ferrying my teenage son Alejandro around town. He is pretty tolerant of my tastes, so I am trying to be open to his. I like a lot of what I’ve heard from this L.A. band. Alex Brown Church is an interesting singer and quite poetic and smart as a lyricist.

    4. “Little Laura Blues,” Sleepy John Estes
    John Adam Estes has always been one of my favorite deep blues artists, with his plaintive voice and memorable observations about love and life in western Tennessee back in the mid-twentieth century. I recently got reacquainted with this slyly erotic and light-hearted tune about a girl and her sensual dreaming.

    5. “Requiem,” Eliza Gilkyson/Conspirare
    Eliza wrote this stunning masterpiece in response to the tsunami tragedy a few years ago and there are now three great recorded versions of it: the original duet with her daughter, Delia, on Paradise Hotel; a new live version on her latest CD Your Town Tonight; and finally, the Grammy-nominated choral version by the vocal ensemble Conspirare. Whichever you hear, it’ll get you down deep.

    Listen to a Peltoniemi-ish selection right here,
    on The Rake Media Taster.

    6. “Papa Was a Rolling Stone,” The Temptations
    I recently bought Motown’s Ultimate Collection of the Tempts and have really enjoyed revisiting songs from the various personnel lineups of this legendary group. I could have picked several other tracks from this CD, but you can’t top this epic montage of funk.

    7. “The Restless One,” Robin & Linda Williams
    Ideally the music I listen to at work is so compelling I have to keep playing it after I leave the office. This track, written years ago by Jerry Clark and Dakota Dave Hull, is such a song. It’ll be on Radio Songs, Robin’s and Linda’s Red House Records release next month, featuring highlights from thirty-plus years of performances on A Prairie Home Companion.

    8. “Hang Me Up To Dry,” Cold War Kids
    Nathan Willett’s vocals are almost operatic and over the top, but I enjoy this band whenever my son puts them on. There are probably other bands that I am unaware of doing this kind of stuff, but to my ears it sounds pretty fresh and original.

    9. “Django,” The Modern Jazz Quartet
    One of the undisputed masterpieces from the classic years of the Prestige record label—no self-respecting music listener should be without this title track.

    10. “The Right Words,” Cliff Eberhardt
    When they’re completed, I usually avoid listening to projects I’ve been real close to, either as a performer or producer. I only end up hearing the things I wish I had done differently! But producing this track and the others from Cliff’s new CD, The High Above and the Down Below, was one of the most satisfying experiences of my career. Cliff is a classic American songwriter cut from the true vine of Tin Pan Alley. The bass solo by Gordy Johnson on “Right Words” is worth the price of admission