The Rake Magazine

Category: Article

  • The Love Apple

    We are a deserving people. We bear down under the barrage of cold and wetness for some eight months, to emerge into the light for the remaining four. We understand our lot in life, we choose it. We have stronger character for the winters we suffer, and we have a deeper love and appreciation for the summers that thaw us. Looking forward to the gifts of the sun, we revel on our bike paths, enjoy our many outdoor dining options, and throw fests at every turn for every reason. If there is one icon to give form to our passions about summer, to illustrate the brief hedonistic streak in an otherwise puritan life, it is the food that is all about joy—the tomato.

    Round, red, and luscious, the tomato is the picture of pleasure. It has no rough outer shell to peel, no artichoke-like defenses. It is soft and fleshy to the touch. You need not worry about stems, cores, or nasty pits; the seeds simply slide down your chin with the first ravenous bite.

    Indigenous to Central and South America, the tomato was cultivated by the Incas and Aztecs as early as 700 C.E. The conquistadors took the Nahuatl name tamatl along with the fruit and introduced it to Europe in the 1500s. At first the tomato found its most loyal following among the hot-blooded Mediterranean countries of Spain, Portugal, and Italy. The Italians, so enamored of this succulent fruit dubbed it pomo d’oro or apple of gold. You have to wonder—Who were the Italians before the tomato?

    As the tomato moved north, its legend grew. The French renamed it pomo d’amore, or the love apple. The Germans called it the apple of paradise, believing it to be the actual “apple” offered to Adam by Eve. But many, like the British, shunned the red beauty as a poisonous berry. Perhaps because it’s in the nightshade family, they had a right to be nervous. In fact the foliage of a tomato plant is poisonous. During the 18th century the Linnaean name of the plant was coferred—Lycopersicon esculentum, but it was known as “wolf’s peach.”

    Unfortunately the fear of tomatoes traveled with the colonists as they set out for the New World. It wasn’t until the 1800s when the Creoles in New Orleans unleashed the tomato in this country with their fiery gumbos and jambalayas. By the 1850s the tomato was in produce carts and home gardens in every city in America. In fact some of the varieties begun in gardens at that time are considered priceless gems today.

    The “heirloom” tomato has been bandied about on chic menus for a few summers already. With names like Green Zebra, Blondkopfchen, Mr. Stripey, and Eva Purple Ball, these are definitely the showgirls of your vegetable garden. Some of these varieties have been around since the 200 years passing from family to family, and some have been created in the past decade through cross pollination. Regardless of their lineage, the heirloom market has boomed and thereby created more colorful, complex, tasty fruits.

    And yes, the tomato is a fruit. If you want to get into a heated, passionate discussion, gather a botanist and a chef to discuss the intractable fruit-or-vegetable controversy. The botanist will have logic and science on his side. He will point out that generally, a fruit is the edible part of the plant that contains the seeds, while a vegetable is the edible stems, leaves, and roots of the plant. Fruits are apples, oranges, papayas. Vegetables are cauliflower, carrots, and rhubarb. At this point the chef will throw down her tongs and scoff. Papayas and tomatoes in the same camp?! If not by science, then by common law, she will say, the tomato lives with vegetables, making a much more palatable existence among the garlic, onions, and savory foods of the world. Leave the syrupy sweet stuff to the trees. The tomato will dwell with the ground vegetables.

    It hardly matters, when you contemplate that first beautiful vine-ripened tomato from your garden. One that in the throes of spring planting was only a vision in your head as you patiently waited for the sun to work its mojo. The rubbery tomatoes in the grocery aisle that are hydroponically grown are meant to give you a December fix, to reawaken the frozen part of the tongue where summer lives; that’s all. Beware any restaurant that offers a tomato bruschetta or caprese in November or March. They should be held accountable for their light pink/whitish affront to the senses.

    The true and pure way to enjoy summer is to take pleasure in a tomato straight from the plant. Carry a small dish of kosher salt out to the garden, pluck and sprinkle. Stand there with the warm August sun beating on your neck, the juice running down your arm. Heady from the buzz of the garden around you, savor that moment—like only a sunburned Minnesotan can.

    The Second Best Way to Eat Your Garden Tomatoes

    A Mess of Caprese

    Traditional mozzarella caprese is usually sliced and laid out in layers. I think this way is more fun and gives a bigger bang in each mouthful.

    Coarsely chop three or four big fat tomatoes. Throw them in a big bowl. Tear a ball of fresh mozzarella into little chunks. Throw them in the bowl. Grab a handful of fresh basil, chop it how you like, throw it in the bowl. Roughly chop or mince three cloves of garlic, in it goes. Get some good extra virgin olive oil and douse the mess in the bowl. Don’t be afraid to jump in with your hands and toss it around a bit. Try not to make it too soupy.

    Cracked pepper and salt it to your liking. Maybe some red pepper flakes?

    All you need now is a big crusty loaf of bread as your fork. And a hammock.

    Stephanie March is a Minneapolis writer.

  • The Philosopher and the Wine List

    Bertrand Russell may have looked like God—piercing eyes, white hair, son of the Duke of Bedford, that sort of thing. But he was a philosopher not noted for an enthusiastic belief in the Divine. When asked what he would say when he got to Heaven, he replied in clipped tones, “‘God’, I will say, ‘you are a very mean fellow. You did not give us enough evidence to go on.’” Many restaurant wine lists seem to operate on the same divine principle. I know someone who was driven to ordering “vin rouge” from one particularly pretentious list—not red wine, you understand, but vin rouge.

    More often you look down the list under the appraising eye of someone who thinks you ought to be able to make wise decisions about wine (if about nothing else in life) and you see no more than the name of a grape variety, “Syrah,” and the maker’s name, “Joe.” You shut your eyes, hope for the best and state your choice, humming the while, “Che Syrah Syrah, whatever will be will be.” Which is of course not just the first line of a cheesy pop song. “Che Sara Sara” is the motto of the Duke of Bedford, which is why you see it all over the place in London—especially near the British Museum, long owned by the Duke of Bedford (Bertrand Russell, again).

    Sometimes you’re lucky. A pithy line on a wine list the other evening, “Pinot Noir, Kenwood” introduced a really pleasing bottle and prompted a spot of reflection. It would be a pity to have had the experience and missed the meaning. What was there to know about this wine? Let’s try induction.

    Kenwood is more likely to be named for a Californian town than the homonymous manufacturer of kitchen appliances or the upmarket mosquito breeding-ground of Minneapolis. Pinot Noir is the grape the French use to make the nectar known as Burgundy. (Did B. Russell feel that nectar was wasted on the Gods?) So this was going to be red and probably stronger, fruitier, and more voluptuous (I nearly said full-bodied, but you know what I mean) than many table wines. The bottle itself provided more information. It announced its year (2000) and the area it came from—the Russian River Valley, a misty wooded cleft in the California coast first settled by Russian fur-trappers in the early 19th century, as they spread south from Alaska (at that time Russian territory). It said that it contained 13.8 percent alcohol by volume, which was cheering but not of course the most important point. And on the back it said it had been aged in French oak barrels for a year (oak imparts its own taste), had a smooth finish, and should not be drunk when I was pregnant (pretty safe there; B. Russell too) or about to drive. Helpful, all of that, but only pointers to the empirical pleasure of pouring a glass and examining it with as many senses as are decent and legal. The eye saw a good deep red, the nose detected the sort of smell you might get if you cross-pollinated a garden rose with a bottle of brandy, the good round taste suggested that after the first glass a second might be an enormously good idea. It was the mind, though, which suggested that this was a drink less analogous to Burgundy than to Port, an Old World wine with few Californian equivalents (though there is an intriguing wine wittily named Starboard).

    Only experience will enable you to verify my observations. I thought this a wine delightful in itself, a Ding an Sich. At significantly more than $15 a bottle, this is a bit more expensive than most of the wines which make their way into this column, but I certainly thought it was worth it. Would Bertrand Russell? Can we know what is in Other Minds? It is easier to sample the evidence and make up our own.

    Oliver Nicholson is a classicist at the University of Minnesota, and former Secretary of the Wine Committee at Wolfson College, Oxford.

  • Is that a promise or a threat?

    As we speak, the conservative men’s religious/political organization, the Promise Keepers, are right smack in the middle of their 2002 National Conference Season, and on September 6 and 7, they’ll be rallying at the Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul. “In 12 years, we have held 140 stadiums and arena events, reaching 4.8 million men. And yet our focus has never changed,” says PK founder Bill “Coach” McCartney, a former University of Colorado football coach. “We’re still keeping promises, one man at a time.”

    Which isn’t as heady as one million men at a time. A mere five years ago, on October 4, 1997, between 600,000 and one million men descended on Washington D.C. for the PK gathering “Stand in the Gap: A Sacred Assembly of Men.” It was the largest religious get-together in U.S. history. After that last stand, PK attendance bottomed out and the organization suffered massive cutbacks. That nose-dive, however, was mostly the result of dropping the entrance fee. Promise Keepers thought if events were free, they’d raise attendance and get by on passing the hat. Instead stadiums sat empty, and, adding insult to injury, the average donation at events was a measly $4. Since the ticket price was reinstated ($69 for the St. Paul event), attendance has been on the climb for two years running, and financially speaking the PKs are “doing fine.”

    The St. Paul event has a capacity of 10,000 men and boys. According to Fred Ramirez, event organizer and director of U.S. Ministries at the PK headquarters in Denver, more than 4,000 seats are already booked. Ramirez says the “Storm the Gates” theme for this year’s conference is a metaphor for storming the gates of Hell, and has nothing to do with storming anyone else per se. “It’s a battle that men must fight against our own worst nature,” he explains.

    This sets my teeth on edge. But why? Who am I to judge a bunch of guys hanging out and staging mock crucifixions to praise God, expressing their feelings, and committing to keep their promises to their wives and children? After all, do I want my son to be a Promise Breaker? Maybe I do, if the alternative is for him to embrace the misogynistic, homophobic, racist underpinnings revealed in the rhetoric of some prominent Promise Keepers (despite the organization’s fervent denial of all that leftist whining).

    As McCartney puts it, all you men out there need to “Sit down with your wife and say something like this: ‘Honey, I’ve made a terrible mistake… I gave up leading this family, and I forced you to take my place. Now I must reclaim that role…’ I’m not suggesting you ask for your role back, I’m urging you to take it back… There can be no compromise here.” This is the brand of infamous and widely reproduced quote that gives the Promise Keepers a bad name with arm-chair feminists like me. That, and the fact that although women do most of the grunt work to pull off these glitzy events, tickets are for men only. “But women can buy tickets and go to any event,” protests Ramirez. “Women are never barred from attending. Women are just discouraged from being at the events because they are really geared toward men. Men are the guys who don’t understand in terms of emotions and all that. Women are far ahead of us, so we have to work harder with the men, because they don’t get it.”

    This, according to Ramirez, explains why up to two-thirds of the 300 to 600 volunteers scrambling behind the PK scenes are female. “The reason we get such a large number of women volunteers in because they want to free their men up to attend the event. The women support us 100 percent.”

    If my instincts are right, the time is ripe for a PK resurgence. The outrageous popularity of the fire-and-brimstone Left Behind novels reveals a mass-culture inclination toward just the sort of highly moralistic message that PKs deliver with unparalleled panache. Noteworthy, as well, is the position of one of the most fiery and controversial PK leaders, Tony Evans, as one of George W. Bush’s closest spiritual advisors. During the presidential election Evans told the New York Times that Bush “believes that God has a place in government, that religion has a place in society, and it is not to be marginalized and put on the periphery as though it is some sort of extra. There is no America without a theistic world view.” And that, I predict, is a promise the PKs will surely cash in on.

    Jeannine Ouellette is associate editor of The Rake.

  • Enlightened Self-Interest

    In life, where you stand very often depends on where you sit. And when it comes to the police, I have usually taken the stand that they have to be monitored very closely, especially when it come to relationships with black and brown people. I have a lot of personal and collective history that bred this well-founded distrust. During Mississippi’s hot summers of the early 60s, white cops brutalized my parents and many other civil rights workers. I saw Rodney King getting the stuffing beat out of him on videotape. I have been stopped in my car just for being black. In fact, I have sued police on behalf of people claiming racially motivated abuse. That was all before I changed where I sit. Nine months ago, I remarried and moved from Richfield to North Minneapolis. Now that I live less than six blocks from the Jordan neighborhood, Minneapolis’ gangbanger central, I can no longer afford the luxury of automatically distrusting the police.

    I live in what is euphemistically called a neighborhood in “recovery.” Malcolm X once remarked that if you wanted to find the “so-called Negro” in any large American city, you just had to find the neighborhood with a school named after Abe Lincoln and with homes abandoned by Jews. This is certainly true of my stretch of the North Side, where prosperous Jewish families built handsome homes 80 to 100 years ago. Then in the 60s and 70s, just as Malcolm predicted, the soul brothers moved in (and to be fair, did a little rioting on Plymouth Avenue) and the kosher brothers moved out. In the 80s home values plummeted to fire-sale prices across most of the once glorious North Side. In the last 10 years, rising home prices in nicer parts of town and decreasing crime in the area has given these homes a well-deserved second wind. And the Minneapolis police deserve much of the credit for the turnaround.

    The key to their success? The “Computer Optimized Deployment Focused on Results” program, also known as CODEFOR. According to Minneapolis police Lt. Troy Schmitz, the program uses computer data to figure out “where the action is,” thereby allowing the police to concentrate their efforts where “bad things are happening.” Now, as I suggested before, given my strong civil-libertarian/free-the-Jackson-Five bent and with images of Birmingham and Rodney King dancing in my head, I believed CODEFOR could easily give rogue cops cover for jacking up anyone, particularly African American males, who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

    I must admit that these very legitimate worries take on a different view when one sits, eats, and sleeps within a 20-minute walk of the city’s greatest concentration of gangbangers. According to recent statistics, the Jordan neighborhood is seeing increasing turf wars between the Vice Lords, the Gangsta Disciples, and other gangs. Minneapolis police chief Robert Olson, who recently bested Mayor R.T. Rybak in a turf battle of his own, decided the best defense is a good offense and, using CODEFOR, is turning up the heat in Jordan and adjacent neighborhoods like mine.

    According to Capt. Stacy Altonen, commander of special investigations, the police really do know who most of the bad guys are. Lt. Schmitz confirms that Minneapolis police keep lists and pictures of known “gangstas” and that the police watch them more closely. The civil rights lawyer side of me is a tad bit nervous about that. The “I-live-just-six-blocks-away” side is very comfortable with this, thank you very much.

    This year, Minneapolis has had 19 homicides as of July 19. All but one were either gang-or drug-related. Seventeen of the 19 murder victims were African American males ages 18-39. Half of them lived in Jordan. The true underlying causes are the usual suspects—unemployment, dysfunctional families, lousy educations, and institutional racism. I do not want to let anyone off the hook who has contributed to or can help alleviate these systemic incubators for gang violence. However, cop bashing does not change the cold hard fact that nearly all Minneapolis’ murders this year stem from African American gang members killing each other, or worse yet, other African Americans unlucky enough to get caught in the crossfire. So, MPD please, please use CODEFOR with my blessing if it helps keep this mayhem far away from my family and me.

    Clinton Collins, Jr. is a Minneapolis attorney and commentator.

  • The Bod Mod Squad

    I went out for coffee with my daughter the other day and the guy behind the counter sported a spike through the bridge of his nose. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. Get this—later, my kid said I was rude for staring. Well, isn’t that the point? Tattoos, scarification, piercing. You can’t tell me this stuff is for introverts.

    I’ve seen nose rings and cartilage grommets, but the spike guy hit a new mark. This wasn’t piercing, this was a puncture wound. It seems to me that the trend in post-punk street-wear is to appear as if you have been through a horrible metal shop accident, or perhaps some kind of ritualistic torture. That’s probably the Hellraiser symbolism of all the needles and nails and chains. Young adulthood is torture. I certainly wouldn’t do it again. But if I had to, you can bet I wouldn’t drive a railroad spike through my face. The braces were bad enough.

    Self-mutilation is not just for ne’er-do-wells any more. Good girls are getting into the act now. They’re into what they call “cutting.” Imagine feeling so pent-up full of rage and fear that you just had to… make a little mark. It’s still creepy, but sanitary and precise in an upper middle-class sort of way. When I was 15, you couldn’t get me near a razor. That was my counter-cultural message.

    When nose rings became common, not so very long ago, people wondered what might be next. Scarring? Branding? Amputation? No one would have predicted the popularity of thorny, armadillo-scale-like subcutaneous implants. The other week in a St. Paul record store I saw a guy who has artificial devil horns implanted on his forehead. He told me he didn’t know who Joni Mitchell was. He recommended Enya, and then I knew for sure he was Satan’s helper.

    How do people without health insurance manage to afford this kind of elective surgery? Can you sneak Grandpa’s tackle box over to the Piercing Pagoda and say, “Gimme the Full Metal Jacket?” I once worked with a guy who had bolts installed on either side of his neck. He said he could identify with Frankenstein’s monster. I guess the idea is that by handicapping yourself socially and physically in this way, you become somewhat like Mary Shelley’s sensitive tragic outcast, who was misunderstood and scary and able to withstand pain. Who did not have a place in this world. Except the guy I worked with did have a place. Even a title. He was my supervisor.

    Then there are tongue rings, nipple rings, and rings in even more sensitive places. I’m used to seeing them now, like cell phones and hip huggers, but I still don’t understand it. Even back in my experimental days, when I took a fascinating stranger to bed, I didn’t want it to be a Jim Rose Circus matinee. (Though I might have made an exception for the cannonball guy, who probably knows a lot about thrust.) No, in my day all I needed to make a daring statement of personal rebellion was a box of hair dye and a pair of scissors. Or a baby.

    I guess I know what bothers me about industrial bodywork, though I hate to admit it. I’m not supposed to get it. I’m not cool. My 14-year-old daughter tells me she can’t wait until her 18th birthday. She’ll get an eyebrow ring and a fire-breathing Chinese dragon emblazoned on her shoulder blade. At least it’s not her boyfriend’s name tattooed on her rear-end and antlers implanted on her forehead.

    I’m counting on this whole craze being played out by then. My guess for what’s next on the bod-mod horizon is total body deconstruction. Flaying. Removing decorative patches of skin, possibly to give to one another as prom gifts or to be grafted onto one another, bringing pinkie-spit swears to a whole new level. Or perhaps the removal of the body altogether. If you’re just a pale gray brain floating in a jar, that way you know you’ll truly be appreciated for who you are, your soul, the sum total of your ideas and deeds rather than what you look like, or where you live and how you dress. Fashion Rule No. 1 has always been “Less is more.”

    Writer, performer, and femme fatale Colleen Kruse is at mscolleenkruse@ hotmail.com.

  • The Running of the Bears

    The Funniest President traveled to Wall Street recently, on a mission to kick shins and take names. Since entering public life W has scattered behind him a string of linguistic pearls the likes of which many older Americans still recall fondly from the TV show Kids Say the Darnedest Things. “I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family.” “I am mindful not only of preserving executive powers for myself, but for predecessors as well.” “Teaching children to read… will make America what we want it to be—a literate country and a hopefuller country.” “For a century and a half now, America and Japan have formed one of the great and enduring alliances of modern times.”

    But he was at his deadpan best in the financial district speech: “In the long run, there is no capitalism without conscience, there is no wealth without character.” Ah, but seriously, folks—seriously! Telling one of these CEOs not to cook the books is like telling a crack whore to dress better and keep off the pipe until the cocktail hour! Ba-dum-PAH.

    Enron begins to seem like the good old days. That was only a billion dollars or so in flim-flammery, and onlookers could pretend it was an isolated instance of malfeasance rooted in the looking-glass world of energy derivatives. Then came Worldcom at $4 billion and Merck at $14 billion. And sandwiched between them, to less fanfare, a series of brewing scandals involving Xerox, ImClone, Tyco, Kmart, Adelphia, Qwest, Global Crossing, and Halliburton—the last concerning alleged improprieties that took place in the late 90s when Dick Cheney headed the company. The business press is taking all this much more seriously than mainstream media. As Joseph Nocera wrote in Fortune, “Phony earnings, inflated revenues, conflicted Wall Street analysts, directors asleep at the switch—this isn’t just a few bad apples we’re talking about here. This, my friends, is a systemic breakdown…We have reached the tipping point.” Nocera and his colleagues correctly call the present ferment the worst U.S. financial crisis since 1929.

    The saner heads on Wall Street, endangered species that they are, want some regulatory reform to ensure that such scandals don’t flare again anytime soon to disrupt their affairs. But talk like this is bound to seem not only reckless but silly to the president, who has never known any other way of doing business. W is a man who never registered a single success in his chosen trade, the oil business, but nonetheless managed to parlay the family name into a handsome stake in Harken Energy, which he cashed in just before his father’s war on Iraq sent Harken stock tumbling. Stock sales by insiders are supposed to be registered at the SEC within two months’ time; W waited over half a year without adverse consequence. He likewise turned a $600,000 investment in the Texas Rangers, and a role as greeter at The Ballpark in Arlington, into a $15 million payday when the team was sold. Double-dealing, something-for-nothing cronyism, and the absolute entitlement of the powerful to grab as much as they can are no more than Bush’s birthright. Privately he must be mystified by all the fuss.

    Small wonder his get-tough talk to Wall Streeters was a piece of puffery. If Bush gets his way there will be a few show trials, a hundred additional bodies at the SEC—which, under GWB, is headed by a former attorney for the very accounting firms that have played such a vital role in the crimes at hand—and a shiny new executive commission to study the problem. Bush uttered nary a word concerning any of the grosser forms of institutionalized lying, cheating, and stealing that allowed the stock market bubble to assume such epic proportions—the rules that allow accountants both to audit corporate books and to consult with those same clients on how best to cover up problems, for instance, or the ones that let brokerage analysts participate in deals they are “analyzing” “dispassionately” for the suckers who comprise the investing public.
    The Democrats are licking their chops over the likely electoral dividends of all this come November, but it doesn’t mean Democratic pols as a class are any likelier to push substantive action than the Republicans. At the national level the party is more thoroughly dominated than ever by the Democratic Leadership Council and its clones, whose entire enterprise over the past decade and a half has consisted of making the party a more attractive vehicle for the same corporate dollars that flow so unstintingly to Republicans. It’s foolish to suppose the complicity of the Democrats is any less monumental than that of the Republicans, and one of the worst offenders is the man many consider prime presidential timber for 2004, Tailgunner Joe Lieberman. (As I write, Lieberman is being quoted exhorting Democrats not to lose their heads and turn “too populist” on big business’s perfidy.)

    If ever the time was ripe for mavericks from both parties to step forward in the interest of doing a little good—and, not incidentally, making names and power bases for themselves—that time is now. And once again we must ask, where the hell is Paul Wellstone? (Or, for that matter, his protégé in public obscurity, Mark Dayton?) You can pore through Wellstone’s web sites or any news archive and find only a scant few discouraging words on the corporate crime wave. Maybe he is afraid of drawing more wrath and more Republican dollars in his race against Norm Coleman; maybe he is being Senatorial, nattering privately and uselessly to his party superiors about the issue; maybe he is just too busy fighting mostly losing battles in the Agriculture committee and rescuing kittens from trees in Willmar. Or perhaps he is awaiting word that one of the CEOs under investigation has snapped and struck his wife—Paul and Sheila are adamantly opposed to domestic violence, you know.

    One thing’s for damn sure: In this most pungent domestic scandal of the past few decades, the man The Nation once called “the senator from the Left” is scarcely on radar. By staying on the sidelines this way, Wellstone is both shirking a duty incumbent to his populist pretensions and missing a golden political opportunity. About a year and a half ago, in the pages of Mother Jones, I went on record with the observation that if Wellstone broke his two-terms-and-out pledge to run again, he would probably lose. But with fresh financial scandals breaking every week, the ground under our feet has moved considerably since then in ways that should only benefit Wellstone. Is there a politial candidate anywhere this year who, as a matter of style and presence, embodies the toothsome, glad-handing, reptilian ethos of corporate America any better than Norm Coleman? Yet Wellstone manages to continue running neck-and-neck with him. Quite a feat when you think about it.

    Steve Perry is a contributing editor to The Rake. He can be reached at steve@rakemag.com.

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  • Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring

    Sword-and-sorcery tales are not easy to pull off. Perched over the twin chasms of Ludicrousness and Pomposity, it’s all too easy for a ham-handed filmmaker to fall prey to that terrible Dark Knight known as Dorkiness. And so Peter Jackson’s first installment in the three-part film version of J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1,000-page Middle-Earth trilogy is a genuine treat. It’s a lovingly faithful, action-packed distillation true to the spirit of the book in every important respect, if necessarily breezier and more popcorn-friendly. Jackson previously created a believable fantasy realm with Heavenly Creatures , and here again takes the right approach—childlike wonder and an unapologetic sense of grandeur. He’s helped enormously by lavish CGI effects and the natural beauty of his native New Zealand, which stands in nicely for Tolkien’s craggy mountains and valleys. But the movie wouldn’t work if the characters were twee or wooden. As in any great film, script and acting are the saving graces. Ian McKellen’s nuanced portrayal of Gandalf holds the film together, but special mention goes to Viggo Mortenson’s heart-throb hero Aragorn and longtime horror villain Christopher Lee, icily evil as the corrupt wizard Saruman.

  • Schoolhouse Rock 30th Anniversary Edition

    Saturday morning, curled up on the braided rug, parents still sleeping or having coffee. From the scratchy little speaker of the “wood-look” television comes the melancholy ode to the journey of legislation, “I’m Just a Bill.” We knew they were really singing about what it’s like to be a kid, trying to advance various agendas, lobby for support, and face the ultimate possibility of final parental veto. This is why we identified so strongly with Schoolhouse Rock, the zany animated series that aired through the 70s and 80s, and it’s why we were willing to sit glued to the tube for blatantly educational programming. We don’t know if it also explains why millions of us bought tickets to see the jingly grammar and math tunes brought to life on the stage in the 90s when Schoolhouse Rock: The Musical toured the country, but who said everything can be explained? This month Disney releases the TV series on DVD, a two-disc set that includes more than 50 episodes. All the favorites are here: “Conjunction Junction,” “Three is a Magic Number,” “I’m Just a Bill” (of course), and “Electricity, Electricity.” New generations of kids have already proven the timeless appeal of the Schoolhouse Rockers (or, perhaps, demonstrated loyalty to their parents’ nostalgia) by embracing the Schoolhouse Rock video series. The DVD ups the fun with behind-the-scenes footage, “play-all” and “shuffle-all” features, and games. The show’s original creators have also written a new song, “I’m Gonna Send Your Vote To College” (about the electoral college, and rumored to explain just exactly what did take place in Florida in 2000).

  • Jim Heynen

    As a tongue-in-cheek chronicler of Upper Midwest farm life, it’s impossible to avoid comparing Jim Heynen to that popular juggernaut over at Minnesota Public Radio. And indeed, fans of Garrison Keillor will find much to enjoy in the work of this Iowa-born storyteller, who chronicles rural life and boyhood in a voice wistful, spare, and wry. The Boys’ House , which came out in paperback from Minnesota Historical Society Press in July, collects new stories and tales from two out-of-print collections about a loose, rambunctious band of farm kids known simply as “the boys,” whose exploits Tom Sawyer would recognize with a grin. They spend their lives playing in corn cribs and on threshers that might suffocate or mangle them in an instant. They innocently plot mayhem against stray cats and ducks, and learn unpretentious wisdom from sparrows and their not-quite-grownup Uncle Jack. All the while, they slowly awaken to the strange, contradictory adult world looming around the corner. Heynen’s simple, plainspoken prose is rich in observed human nature and a bittersweet awareness of the certainty of change. These short vignettes—all clocking in at around three pages—capture life under the shadow of grain silos as a series of snapshots rather than a single continuous narrative. Heynen’s spare, Zen-like lack of specificity is worlds apart from Keillor’s highly detailed Lake Wobegon. His small town is never named and exists in no particular state or decade, and his farm folk have the anonymous resonance of characters in a fable. They could live anywhere, and so live everywhere in those small towns and states of mind that the Wal-Marts and the malls haven’t yet plowed under. Ruminator Books, (651) 699-0587, www.ruminator.com, www.jimheynen.com

  • National Poetry Slam

    What a strange animal is “performance poetry” or “spoken word” or the ubiquitous “poetry slam.” There was a time when, if you got up on a stage and took the mike and told a story, you were a standup comedian. If there was a podium in front of you, and you’d taken a few learned degrees, then you were a poet giving a reading. Well, the eternal frustration of youth (exacerbated by public indifference and institutional favoritism) resulted in the 80s in a real bumrush: Self-styled poets who were wiping themselves with the reams of rejections they were getting from The New Yorker and The Paris Review decided to inject the punk-rock ethos into the dying art of poetry. They stormed the stage with an egg-timer, and the poetry slam was born. Say what you will about the phenomenon—there’s no way around it, you have to take the good with the bad—there is no denying that it’s here to stay. For the first time ever, the National Poetry Slam comes to Minneapolis. Check out the schedule, including slams at Kieran’s, Seventh Street Entry, the Orpheum, Sursumcorda, and several other venues. National Poetry Slam 2002, (612) 822-2500, www.nps2002.com