The Rake Magazine

Category: Article

  • More Equal Than Others

    “Equal justice under law.” These words, emblazoned over the entrance to the United States Supreme Court in Washington, really represent the “bottom line” of our court system. No matter who you are—Joe Blow or Joe Biernat—if you do the crime, you should get the same time.

    In unguarded moments, however, lawyers will tell you what they want is not equal justice but justice for their client. They want to win. And the good trial lawyers know that trials are won or lost during jury selection. If you don’t believe them, just ask O.J. Simpson. His “Dream Team” spent big money to figure out what the ideal jury would look like and did everything they possibly could to get it.

    The preemptory challenge or “strike” is the weapon lawyers use to terminate jurors they do not want. Lawyers can strike a juror for almost any reason—except race. According to the U.S. Supreme Court, racially based juror strikes are unconstitutional because they violate a defendant’s right to a bias-free jury and also violate a prospective juror’s right to participate in jury service. If a judge suspects that a lawyer is trying to get rid of a potential juror because of race, then the judge must give the lawyer a chance to produce a “race-neutral” reason for canning the juror. If the judge thinks the reason is bogus, the juror stays.

    This is precisely what Judge Harry Crump did in The State of Minnesota v. Reiners. Judge Crump, who quickly realized that the lawyers defending a white man accused of assaulting a Latino man were trying to keep a black woman off the jury simply because she was black, refused to be duped by their flimsy subterfuge. He kept her on the jury. Unfortunately, five of the seven Minnesota Supremes said Judge Crump was wrong, even though they tacitly conceded that the defendant’s “race-neutral” reason was bunk. Justice Alan Page, the court’s lone African-American, offered a well-reasoned dissent (in which he was courageously joined by Justice Russell Anderson), bitterly explaining why, for people of color, “equal justice under law” remains an elusive goal in our justice system.

    Cecil John Reiners was charged with first-degree assault after he fractured Jose Padilla’s skull with a two-by-four because he spoke Spanish to one of Reiners’s employees. Reiners’s defense counsel quickly struck an African-American woman whose dad was a former cop. The prosecutors argued that Reiners’s defense lawyers were simply trying to camouflage the real reason for removing her—the color of her skin. Judge Crump was not bamboozled and told the lawyers, “I am going to deny the strike. Keep her on.” Reiners was convicted and sentenced to 91 months in prison.

    Normally, appellate courts accept the trial judge’s decision (or in judgespeak, give them “great deference”) on matters such as jury selection, because, after all, he or she is the person who saw the show and knows where the bodies are buried. Instead, the Minnesota Supreme Court, sitting miles and months removed from the Reiners trial, and ignoring reams of judicial precedent, dissed Judge Crump. The court said that once Reiners’s lawyers gave a so-called race-neutral reason for striking the African-American juror, it did not matter if the reason was not “persuasive or even plausible.” In other words, as long as Reiners made up some excuse, even if everyone knew it was bull, that was good enough for Minnesota’s highest court. From there, it was easy for the court to throw out his conviction, because a “tainted” jury rendered it, and to grant Reiners a new trial.

    Justice Page’s blistering words cleanly exposed the racist hypocrisy of the supreme court’s decision. “Today’s decision highlights an extremely troublesome trend emerging from this court, one that evinces a hostility towards jurors of color.” Page noted that the Minnesota Supreme Court never second-guessed a trial judge’s call on racially tainted jury strikes until the defendant was white and the victim was not. “It is beyond ironic that, in this case with its Caucasian defendant…we decline to give the trial court any deference whatsoever.”

    Justice Page said from the bench what most black and brown folks in the streets have always known—that when it comes to justice, there are two flavors. White people are far more likely to get one and the rest of us get another. And, as long the our state’s highest court issues decisions like State v. Reiners, that ain’t gonna change anytime soon.

  • Casablanca (Special Edition)

    Do we really need to try to convince you on this one? If you’re building a DVD library and don’t plan on including Casablanca, there’s just plain something wrong with you. This double-disc edition includes 10 minutes of newly discovered deleted scenes, plus a couple of choice bits of nearly forgotten Casablanciana—a radiodrama adaptation, the premiere episode of the short-lived 1955 TV spinoff, and Bugs Bunny’s rascally remake, “Carrotblanca.” And, shifting subjects a bit, the bad rumors are apparently true that Ben Affleck and J.Lo are actively pursuing a remake. This just makes us feel sorry for them. Really, how dumb could they be to set themselves up against the original? If that film leaves the ground and they’re on it, they’ll regret it. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of their lives.

  • Dear God, Thank You

    Hallelujah and amen! You know what time it is. I can smell the cornmeal and sizzling fat in the air already. Set aside petty concerns of the pending apocalypse and don the raiment of joyous festival! Bring me my cutoff jeans, and my baseball jersey that depicts the beer swilling cartoon bear! Unearth my novelty cheese wedge hat! And hand me my sunglasses. Yes, the holographic American flag ones.

    The time has come to join the sweltering flock of humanity that bleats and lows while rounding that Mobius strip between Snelling and Dan Patch. Attendance is required. And the second I get there, what will my poison be? A half-gallon pail of Sweet Martha’s chocolate chippers? For breakfast? And gimme a Summit to wash it all down while I snag a foot long and a sack of minis on my way to the KARE 11 Health Hut to have my cholesterol checked, not because I truly want to know—only because it’s free.

    Then I’m off to find a DFL Party yardstick. I get one every year, even though I’ve never had use for one. Someday, I’ll side my tool shed with them. But for now, it’s just the thing for a mite of self-flagellation in front of the Pawlenty/GOP tent. The backhanded passivity of Minnesota Nice fades when the collective blood sugar of the crowd rises. It’s definitely a chemical reaction. Give a Swede a cake-dough-battered, deep-fried Snickers, and opinions are made known. I believe the official diagnostic term is Sudden-Onset Insulin Spike Attitude.

    Last August, a dreadlocked, blue-eyed Mac student angrily splashed her red raspberry Slurpee across my Uncle Jim’s back while howling, “Fur is murder!” only to realize seconds later that he’d been strolling Machinery Hill shirtless in the noonday sun.

    The Great Minnesota Get-Together is not only about junk food and trashy politics. There’s a little something for everybody. For swinging single folks, what could be more titillating than a promenade down the Mighty Midway? That half-block of diesel-fueled terrain holds more prospects than all the singles bars, personal ads, and blind dates you’ll ever see—I guarantee it! You know why? Everybody looks good under neon light.

    It evens out the skin tone. Plus, at least half of the hotties are lightheaded from the rides. Picking up a date in front of the Matterhorn coaster is about as tough as trolling for crappies on Lake Itasca. And the same rules apply. Don’t talk loud; it’ll scare the big ones away!

    For sensitive artistic types, there’s the Fine Arts Building. For non-sensitive artistic types, there’s the Dairy Building, with its astounding sculptural installations.

    For you out-of-towners, here’s how the story goes. Each year among the rural folk a princess is chosen. She is always beautiful, and of smiling temperament. The kindly town elders will select their royalty only from girls of common birth whose fathers own a cow. Once the crown is laid upon the shining head of the girl, she is whisked in covered chariot to Falcon Heights. Because she is from the sticks, we have to have a little fun before we let her go. A lush fur cape is draped over her satin shoulders, and she is handed over to the elves. She is made to enter a crystal-clear tomb of bitter cold. Rough hands cruelly sit her down on a hard-backed chair. A crowd gathers, mocking. A demonic mechanism is triggered and the frozen crypt of windows begins to rotate slowly on its axis so the frightened girl can fully marinate in the goggling eyes of the slothful townspeople.

    The top craftsperson of the village is called in to document this curious ritual in an even more curious fashion. A block of grade-A premium butter is carved in the exact likeness of the princess’s head. If she is truly pure and simple, she remains smiling politely and is released upon completion of the lactose-based effigy. The creamy trophy is kept on display for the duration of the fair, where young and old alike can stand, licking their cones, staring blankly into the hollow yellow eyes of the princess’s visage, wondering what it would be like to roll their corn in her hair. The End.

  • Various artists: Shout, Sister, Shout! A Tribute to Sister Rosetta Tharpe

    In her time a bigger gospel star than even Mahalia Jackson, Sister Rosetta Tharpe was possessed of a terrific voice and, most significant, a bluesified guitar style that helped her become the first major crossover from African-American church music to secular songs. A clear influence on the Chicago electric blues of the 1950s, she’s also sometimes cited as one of the earliest to incorporate a rock ‘n’ roll riff into her ax work—15 full years before Chuck Berry. Not too shabby. The tribute Shout, Sister, Shout! lets loose some of the current era’s most prominent female singers on the Rosetta songbook, resulting in a near-flawless blend of faithfulness and reinterpretation. High points include a superb version of “Nobody’s Fault but Mine” by Joan Osborne and Odetta’s slightly loopy take on the spiritual “Two Little Fishes and Five Loaves of Bread.” During Rosetta’s life, her gospel-blues blend infuriated her core audience and nearly wrecked her career—60 years later, her granddaughters have no problem singing out simultaneously to both heaven and earth.

  • A Fresh Coat Against Time

    I’m sorry to be morbid, but I’ve been thinking a lot about death again lately. This time, it’s the simple fact of mortality that’s got me flustered. It’s as if it never dawned on me that I won’t live forever, and neither will my family and friends. I keep overhearing people at stores and in restaurants talking about hospitals and radiation and surgery, and the loved ones of neighbors and friends are dropping like flies. How unfair! There’s so much to do! To distract myself, I jumped into a frenetic burst of hot-weather productivity.

    So far this summer, I’ve painted or helped paint about 32 walls, five doors, many yards of woodwork, a staircase, and two ceilings—one a mural of a summer sky with a veiling of translucent white clouds floating lazily along. This latter was a labor of love for my youngest daughter that took about six hours (thank God her room is the size of a closet), and my neck has almost straightened itself out now, six weeks later.

    This morning, I sit at rest in the study, birds chirping away furiously outside the window, clear sun and sky dappling brightly through a thick canopy of oak. I’m taking a moment to revel in the soothing cheer of the fresh rose chintz walls—which still need another edging from this view—and I’m taking stock of all this new color and its deeper meaning. Because there was more to the obsessive painting than just tidying up the place. I had a mission, based on some wise words from my hero, Anne Lamott, who says that “perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won’t have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren’t even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they’re doing it.”

    I wasn’t looking at my feet when I painted the living room brick red. I was terrified to do it, having been a white and off-white kind of gal all these years. Yeah, white is safe and tasteful and all, but it’s also as enticing as pabulum. Ever since painting one small wall in the foyer a dusky red last summer, I’ve been desperate to go for more. So, while Jon was busy on a ladder scraping the walls upstairs, I whipped out the color swatch I’d nabbed at Home Depot, waved it in his general direction, and called as I backed casually into the hall, “The foyer walls are drying and I’m going out for more sponges . . . and I’m going to grab some paint for the living room, as long as you don’t object to this color, bye!” I ran down the stairs and out the door before he could talk me out of it.

    The results? Shocking and then pleasing, especially after we ran out in a panic and bought four new lamps to brighten it up. According to belatedly consulted color experts (a cheesy page on the web), red paint suggests vitality and aggressiveness. It conveys amorous vibes, and deep subtle shades are perfect for living rooms, creating an intimate, cozy feel. What do you know! At worst, say the experts, red is too dramatic.

    With this small success buoying our confidence, Jon and I really got bold, and we blissfully and fearlessly imagined a burnt orange for the dining room. We spent an hour poring over the samples and finally settled on three cans of Flaming Glow, I think it was called. But we probably should have brought that little cardboard patch of Flaming Glow home before we paid for the paint, because when we taped it up to the dining room wall and stood back, it was unequivocal: If we painted our walls that color, the onset of violent insanity would be swift and merciless. I should have checked into the expert view of orange, a dominant color that combines the energy of red with the intellectual associations of yellow and is, at its worst, non-relaxing.

    So we veered for a soft, creamy yellow, and continued sanity (more or less). That’s life for you. You win some and you lose some, you get stuck with a few cans of crazy orange paint, and then you die. But at least nobody can say your walls were boring.

  • Ween, Quebec

    Dean and Gene Ween, aka Mickey Melchiondo and Aaron Freeman, operate in a zone bounded by stoner novelty songs, Frank Zappa, and Captain Beefheart—never taking themselves a bit seriously, but with genuine chops and the ability to project total sincerity whether they’re playing Prince-style funk, 70s soft rock, country, or some strange concoction best fit for the Dr. Demento radio show. 2000’s White Pepper was a step toward a mainstream rock sound—listenable but not really anything exceptional. If that was an attempt to broaden their audience it didn’t work; in fact, Elektra dropped them from the record label. Their ninth disc, Quebec, is edgier and more psychedelic, which is the way it should be. Like the title’s namesake province, the Ween boys speak a language different from everything that surrounds them.

  • Hardcore Corn

    Outside Minnesota, the month of August has nary a holiday. Many people just let the hot, humid month hang there, lazily dipping its toes off the dock. But here, we know August shimmers like the last few grains of sand falling through the hourglass, telling us our time in the sun is waning. So we celebrate life and our own holidays with “the fest,” not the Great Minnesota Get-Together parking extravaganza, but the local fair, the carnival in the church parking lot. The one where your softball team and the mayor dress as clowns and chuck candy at kids.

    For me, it was Corn Days in Long Lake, where our corner was prime squatting for the parade, my sister was a Corn Princess, and for two days you could eat all the corn you could handle for $1.50. The night before the fest, I would ride my bike to church and help shuck the corn, husks and silk flying through the warm evening air. The next day we’d sit in the grass with butter glossing our faces and kernels jammed in our braces as we watched the boys to see who got cuter over the summer. The taste of a hot, plump, buttery cob is inextricably tied to the feelings of those last heady days of summer—of contentment and divine satisfaction.

    If you believe as I do that corn is a heavenly gift that brings farm boys to roadside stands with heaping pickups, we’re not the first. Some ancient tribes believe that the Creator gave the People one last gift before placing them on Mother Earth—four kinds of corn. Yellow from the South for the advent of spring and new life; red from the West for long lives with the sun; white from the North for strength; and blue from the East for wisdom and understanding. The People were instructed to be corn’s caretakers and to use corn for food, medicine, and prayer. Judging by the fact that corn now grows on every continent except Antarctica, the People have done their job.

    Corn, or maize, as most of the planet knows it, is actually in the grass family, despite its omnipresence in veggie medleys. This grass is differentiated from its relatives by the large seed heads (cobs) and shorter growth rate, but it’s still considered a cereal crop. The origination of this crop is believed to be in the Americas, and archaeologists have found evidence that it predates humans in some regions.

    A smite of controversy surrounds the global dissemination of maize, whether it be pre- or post-Columbian, and no one can actually track how it came to exist all over the planet. For a Midwesterner, it can be a bit odd to see long waving cornfields outside of Bangkok, but where else would they get the baby corn they love so much? It took the Europeans awhile to warm up to the cob. Knowing it mainly as feed for the swine, the Parisian guests of Alice B. Toklas called her a savage for trying to feed it to them.

    Despite the kernel’s long history, its mysteries are still being unlocked. Did you ever notice that there are always an even number of rows on a cob? Or that there is one piece of silk for every kernel? So far, we’ve discovered more than 3,500 uses for corn or corn products, including chewing gum, icing, fireworks, ethanol, antibiotics, soap, paint, vitamins, and film. One bushel (56 pounds) of corn can produce enough sweetener for 325 cans of pop, oil for two pounds of margarine, enough starch for a ton of paper, or 15 pounds of carbon dioxide fizz in soft drinks. And consider the beautiful mysteries behind the liquid corn of Kentucky, where a good day is spent sippin’ mash and talkin’ trash.

    It’s possible that your personal summer corn fest comes without the cob. Maybe you enjoy your niblets freed and scooting around a plate. Maybe it’s hot-from-the-oven cornbread you crave, or huitlacoche, a corn-fungus delicacy in Mexico. You could be a polenta freak, or a corn-flake junkie who pours corn syrup on morning cereal. Whether it’s hush puppies or corn pone, tamales or tortillas, you are not alone.

    Chef Rachel Rubin of Bobino is really just a Peruvian girl with nothing but love for the ear o’ plenty. Her menu last month included grilled young corn to accompany the octopus ceviche. Pop in to see what she’s planning this month with the organic fresh corn she gets in weekly. If you want to try the cob with something different, eat it Elote style, like they do at the Burrito Mercado in St. Paul. A fresh hot ear of corn is smothered with queso fresco (fresh cheese) and a sprinkle of chipotle. But if you can, try to eat it Katharine Hepburn style: Walk up to a stalk, pluck and shuck, and dig right in. As the late great Kate believed, 10 minutes off the stalk and it’s a whole other ballgame.

    To make sure you understand the truly magical properties of corn, in some August of your life, make a pilgrimage to the maize mecca of Mitchell, South Dakota, and view the world’s only Corn Palace. It’s really a drive away from a cold winter with no corn memories.

  • Harry Connick Jr.

    It certainly seems as though the local jazz scene’s center of gravity is shifting west, what with the Dakota’s reported plan to relocate to Minneapolis in the fall, and this brand-new club on Ninth and Marquette. (St. Paul, never fear, will still have the AQ and its own new blood, Brilliant Corners.) The Blue Star Room makes its bid for major-player status by snaring Connick, who’s still cranking out high-quality music despite his Hollywood success. His new disc, Other Hours, consists of material he wrote originally for a flopped Broadway show, Thou Shalt Not. Be aware that both CD and live show are instrumental-only—which shouldn’t be too much of a deterrent given his skill on piano. Fans of his acting, you can wait for the new TV season, when he returns on Will & Grace. Rossi’s, 90 S. Ninth St., (612) 312-2828, http://www.bluestarjazz.com

  • Steely Dan

    Steely Dan fell out of favor in the 80s and 90s, especially at the peak of alt-rock’s conquest. Jazzy pop-rockers Donald Fagen and Walter Becker were seen for what they apparently were: Studio mercenaries who worked their magic in velour control rooms. Besides, they were effectively retired. Remember, there actually was a time when rock stars gracefully left the stage after a long run of success, desperately hoping not to be made fun of or resurrected for purposes of lucrative self-parody. But their core fans knew all along that this was one of the great, subversive pop duos of the 70s. Now, perhaps, is the biggest surprise of all: The Dan is back for all the right reasons—writing interesting new material, recording important new albums, and finally exploding the myth that they were bloodless studio hacks by simply taking the stage. 199 W. Kellogg Blvd., (651) 726-8240, http://www.xcelenergycenter.com

  • Does Poetry Matter?

    Being a poet in America makes as much sense as a butt full of pennies. That’s one of the pleasures of being a poet in America. There’s something wonderful, something perversely subversive about being disconnected from the world of goods and services and John Maynard Keynes, if only for an hour or two every now and again. It’s freedom. Poetry is an uncharted wilderness along whose margins capitalism wilts like arugula in the Wedge parking lot on the Fourth of July. Inside its borders, the mind blooms and the imagination yields a bumper crop, yet the marketplace rejects poetry. One given to daydreaming might wonder why, and the answer might be found in the dump of discarded possibilities. This is the predicament American Poetry finds itself in: stranded in the closeout bin of our cultural supermarket because of poor management—management that has chosen to make poetry an unwanted specialty item rather than a staple.

    There is an economics to poetry, of course, and even a poetry to economics, yet the numbers don’t add up. (The poetic colossus Wallace Stevens, the insurance executive of Hartford, wrote, “Money is a kind of poetry,” but it’s not a kind of poetry most poets are familiar with.) The nonsensicality of a career in poetry can be explained by the laws of economics. To paraphrase Adam Smith, the founder of classical economics, a livable wage shall be retained if a good or service is provided in a supply that does not exceed demand. Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve, might say the demand for poetry is soft, while the supply is robust. If home ownership, retirement, a cabin by the lake, prestige, and self-esteem mean anything to you, or if you’re practical, pragmatic, cautious, or otherwise uncourageous, please be advised to follow your muse elsewhere. Poetry and economics make a profoundly odd couple, sort of like Sylvia Plath and Milton Friedman.

    Poetry registers barely a blip on the national radar, and when it does make the news, there’s often a certain wackiness quotient factored in. During the past 18 months, poetry has experienced a relative media bonanza—which might indicate either a spark in interest or a surge in wackiness. Most recently, a new Robert Lowell collection sent pop-culture commentators scurrying to their keyboards, suddenly writing about poets and poetry. This lavishly praised collection anoints Robert Lowell the potentate of poetry, the latest in a long line—symptom of a perennial compulsion, unique to poetry, to name a figurehead.

    It’s not all Ivy Tower cogitation either. In recent months, news of the weird has emanated powerfully from the world of tweed and elbow patches, too: Amiri Baraka, poet laureate of New Jersey and subsidized revolutionary, wrote a god-awful poem that made itself worse by suggesting the Israelis had foreknowledge of the September 11 attacks. New Jersey officials tried to have him decommissioned. In Washington, D.C., the White House indefinitely postponed a literary symposium sponsored by First Lady Laura Bush for fear some poets might take advantage of the occasion and spout antiwar, anti-George rhetoric. Poets cried foul, claiming this was yet another example of the Bush administration’s hostility toward dissenting voices. (Ironically, many poets are intolerant of dissenting opinions among their own ranks.) And possibly strangest of all was the news that Ruth Lilly, the nutty heiress to the Eli Lilly pharmaceutical fortune, donated $100 million to Poetry magazine. Poetry is a well-respected journal but is neither the best nor the most important literary magazine in America. It certainly doesn’t know what to do with $100 million. Who would? To put Lilly’s donation into perspective: According to the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses, 261 magazines belong to the association and 175 of those have budgets under $10,000. As I say, money is a rare kind of poetry.