The Rake Magazine

Category: Article

  • Fogo de Chão

    Yes, Brazilians really do eat this way. Fogo de Chão, the new Brazilian steak house at City Center in Minneapolis, is much more elegant—and more expensive—than the truck stop in northeast Brazil where I first experienced churrascaria (Brazilian spit-roasted barbecue), but the basic principle is the same: Waiters in black pleated gaucho pantaloons (at Fogo de Chão, not the truck stop) stroll through the dining room with a skewer of spit-roasted meat in one hand and a long-bladed carving knife in the other. If your little coaster is green-side-up, they’ll stop at your table and carve off a portion to order. Turn the coaster red side up and they’ll steer clear.

    The fifteen meats offered range from sirloin, rib eye and beef ribs to leg of lamb, lamb chops, pork loin and bacon-wrapped chicken breast. As a dining experience, it’s a carnivore’s dream; as a business model, it’s brilliant. Instead of the typical mammoth slab of high-priced beef served up by Morton’s, Ruth’s Chris, Manny’s, etc., which congeals on your plate for an hour or two and eventually goes home with you, half-eaten, in a doggy bag, the mixed grill at Fogo de Chão arrives hot and juicy, a few slices at a time. (The chicken and pork tend to be drier, but the beef is wonderful.)

    You can have as much meat as you like, but you’ll probably eat a lot less than you might at a steak house. Diners are encouraged to start their meal at the cold buffet, and by the time you work your way through the cornucopia of salads, cheeses, and salumeria ranging from prosciutto, smoked salmon, and mozzarella to sundried tomatoes, asparagus, and hearts of palm, you are likely to be half-full. Then an assortment of filling side dishes is brought to the table, including fried plantains, seasoned mashed potatoes, pão de queijo (little cheese popovers), and fried polenta.

    The white-tablecloth ambience compares well with the other high-end steak houses in town, but you are likely to spend a lot less. Lunch is $22.50 and dinner, $38.50. 645 Hennepin Ave., Minneapolis; 612-338-1344; www.fogodechao.com.

  • Dog Day

    72 Degrees
    You’re wide awake at six a.m. when the sun tips its hand. You barely slept at all last night in the hot box that is your cramped third-floor apartment. There’s no air-conditioning, the windows are all propped open. You spent most the night on top of the sheets, waiting for a breeze that never came, just listening to the sounds of the city; cars whirring by on the street, college kids passing by on the sidewalk below, talking excitedly about their night at the bar. It sounded too familiar. That’s why you moved, to get out of the rut you were in. So far, it isn’t working.

    You might have slept for an hour or two, long enough to have dreamt about the beach—which is odd. You’re not a beach person. You haven’t gone swimming in years. Still, the idea echoes in your head while the heat begins to build, while broad swaths of yellow light climb the cream-colored walls around you.

    It’s a Saturday. You don’t have to work today and it’s going to be viciously hot again. Your friends back home would rag you to no end for even considering going to a beach by yourself. “Pathetic,” they’d say. But they’re not here, and you’re not there. Besides, there’s no one you know well enough to ask to join you.

    It’s settled: You will go to the beach.

    There’s a nice one within walking distance. You’ve driven past it dozens of times and walked around it once or twice, watching everyone else have fun. Today you’ll see for yourself what it’s all about.

    Tell yourself it’s because you’re bored, because any more time spent in this broiling apartment might drive you mad. But deep down inside you know you’re going for the girls. Five months without a date is a long time. Four months in a new town with none of your old friends to fall back on has been a lifetime in itself. You moved, and that’s good, but now it’s time to get moving.

    You roll free of the damp sheets. Your feet hit the gritty wood floor. The dry boards feel warm, not cool like you were hoping.

    74 Degrees
    Your second cup of coffee goes down smooth. You’re just enjoying the morning, reading the newspaper, and taking it all in. You can feel the city waking up around you and it thrills you in some vague way knowing you’re a small part of it. The light morning traffic sounds like a symphony to you. People jog by and zoom past on bicycles. There’s energy in the air, everything seems alive, possible. You never had this sense back home. The shaded downtown streets always seemed empty, the people you did walk past hardly ever looked your way.

    The picnic table on the sidewalk outside the coffeehouse was empty when you got there and you have room to spread out your paper. You’re just getting to the sports page when a pretty girl steps outside with her coffee. From the corner of your eye you can see her thinking about joining you. She’s attractive, somewhere right around your age—twenty-five, you guess—give or take. She has long blonde hair and is wearing round, blue-tinted sunglasses. She looks to you like everything you’ve been missing out on your whole life.

    The words to invite her to sit down are on the tip of your tongue, where they’ve always been when it comes to being anywhere near forward, but they refuse to fly. Instead you get nervous and swallow self-consciously. You study your paper for a moment, feign a look of grim concentration, and then look up at her hopefully. She returns your gaze and even gives you a friendly smile before turning around and going back inside. You smile, too, wryly, before flipping the page.

    You promise yourself right then and there the next time a chance to meet a girl comes along you will go for it, because it’s better to die on the mountain than starve in the valley. Or something like that.

    It’s still early. You aren’t thinking clearly yet.

    76 Degrees
    Instead of walking home after leaving the coffeehouse, you decide to go the grocery store to get supplies for the day. Before the heat comes down, before you change your mind and all you feel like doing is hiding out at the mall, maybe seeing a matinee by yourself. But you know that’s a dead-end street, with no chance for any interaction. No, the beach is where you should be today. You need to be out among people.

    The morning air outside is already heavy, but not choking like it will be later in the day. You listen to the birds singing in the trees. Even they sound restrained. The sky above you is a stark blue and streaked with traces of high, silver clouds. It looks to you as though one more scorching day might bleach away what color remains.

    Thoughts of the beach have you feeling light for the first time in weeks, happy. Your light-brown sandals flop rhythmically on the sidewalk, the sound echoing down the block.

    The back streets are quiet, there’s barely any traffic at all. Nothing seems to move but you. You almost wish someone would walk past you just so you could smile at them, and perhaps even risk a “Good morning!” if they happened to make eye contact with you. Smiling, you look up at the sky. There’s no sense getting too carried away.

    65 Degrees
    It has to be at least ten degrees cooler inside the store. You grab a handbasket and walk over to the fruit and vegetable section. You’re in the heart of the trendy part of Minneapolis and the health-conscious hippies are out in force. You look at their tattoos and their piercings, and the way they intently study each piece of fruit, as though the fate of the world depended on them finding just the right bunch of bananas.

    A pale young woman with jet-black hair cropped in a bowl cut catches your eye. You freeze and then hazard a small smile. She rolls her eyes like she expected nothing less from you. You grab a pound bag of red grapes and move on.

    It amuses you to think that here you’re the strange one. You, with your scrawny build, dark tousled hair and nondescript, clean-shaven face. You and your white T-shirt, khaki shorts and sandals. It would have bothered you once, not so long ago, the way she looked at you. It would have made you feel small and insecure.

    Now it just makes you laugh.

  • Master of the Restaurant Riff

    Tim Alevizos is a man who lives his art.

    Show up at his posh Uptown condo on a Saturday morning around 10. He will open the front door and take your coat. Then, if you’re someone he likes (and believe me, if you weren’t, you wouldn’t be here) he’ll usher you into the “owner’s suite” of his 8-foot Italian couch and bring you a cup of coffee so strong it’ll make your nasal hairs sing.

    There are surgical photos lining the walls, all viscera and blue-veined hearts. A statue of a naked Roman, one hand cupping his genitals, in the corner. Raise your mug and you’ll see that it’s printed with an advertisement: a beautiful blonde gazing into middle distance, looking healthy and satisfied. And underneath the words, “For her, it’s Maximum Strength Pubicort.” Alevizos will chuckle and stroke his chin and show you his own cup, the one that features a photo of him, five years younger and beardless, with his arm around the same woman, and the words “Clitrosyn Vagitabs.”

    These were Alevizos’ Christmas gifts one year: he posed for the photo with his friend, Jennifer Roberts; dreamed up the names of the drugs; and had the cups screen printed for $35 each at a Kodak photo lab in New Hope.

    “The best part,” he’ll tell you, flopping back against the far end of the couch, “was when I went to pick them up and there was this big guy at the register, yelling into the back ‘Hey, George, do we got any more of the Clitrosyn mugs back there?’ And I was just delighted. I made the big man say my made-up dirty words!”

    After a cup of the tannic coffee, you’ll ask for a glass of water (sparkling, of course), and then you’ll need to urinate. Lucky you.

    “Use the toilet in back,” Alevizos will advise, his eyes sparkling behind thick glasses. “That’s the best one.”

    So you’ll go all the way back, through the man’s personal lair with its unmade bed and books strewn all over. Enter the bathroom, a cavernous cube of tile, and face the Toto Neorest, a porcelain fixture like a throne that will yawn open as you approach. Sit on the heated seat, settle in, do your business. Then pick up the remote that hangs to the left of you on the wall.

    Hit the button that says “Front,” and feel the warm spray, which you can adjust — farther forward, if you happen to be a small sort of person who perches toward the front of the rim; or back, if you are, unlike this reporter, a person who covers the entire area of the lid — then the one that says “Back,” even though there is no compelling hygiene reason for doing so. (Notice, ladies, that there is a ‘pulse’ feature, as well; you decide what to do with this particular bit of information.) Finally, press the button labeled “Dry,” and let the air move gently across your bottom while you imagine the horn-shaped blowers of a drive-through car wash, only smaller and down below.

    “I was in Japan in 2002 when I first encountered these toilets,” Alevizos will say when you return, a full 20 minutes after excusing yourself. “I was lusting after one. Then I got this really sweet freelance job that turned out to be really easy and incredibly lucrative. Out of nowhere, there was just enough money to order a Neorest, and I’m really glad I did. That purchase has been nothing but pleasure for me. The remote, the technology, and the pride of ownership. People are always begging me to let them come over and poop in my toilet.”

     

    So what does all this have to do with food? Only that Tim Alevizos is the author of roughly 90 percent of the edgiest, most scatological, profane, and impolitic restaurant advertisements in town.

    His billboards for Chino Latino were among the most famous, sparking, among other things protests from the parents at a local elementary school when “Aw, Phuket, Let’s get takeout” was posted directly across the street from their playground; and outrage from All in the Family fans from coast to coast when he penned the wickedly cruel “Third World Prices, Sally Struthers Portions.”

    All in all, the Chino campaign hit national news some half a dozen times. Not bad for a guy who started his career as an intern for the U.S. Senate.

    “My first restaurant writing job was back in 1988,” says Alevizos. “I’d just graduated from Northwestern and moved to Washington. I always thought I wanted to work on Capitol Hill, but when I got there, I discovered the only things I liked about it were the crazy letters from constituents and these fabulous corporate gift packs that would open up like a Louis Vuitton steamer trunk. When it came to having laws passed, I really didn’t care.”

    That’s when he got a call from Phil Roberts, co-founder (with Peter Mihajlov) of Parasole Restaurant Holdings, and the father of his childhood friends, Steve and Jennifer.

    Roberts had just opened Blue Point, a rustic little seafood restaurant in Wayzata, and he wanted to produce a faux-tabloid ad. Alevizos responded with about a dozen headlines, including: “After having 3 bouncing baby boys, Wayzata woman gives birth to 18-inch prawn; Dad loves the little shrimp.”

    Still in Washington, now working as an information officer for PBS, Alevizos continued writing restaurant jingles and ads on a freelance basis. When Parasole launched Buca di Beppo in 1993, he traded on the over-the-top kitschiness of the décor, scripting radio spots that promised an atmosphere perfect for anniversaries, birthdays, and bowling banquets, as well as “recorded music in every room, thermostatic heating and cooling, and sanitary bathrooms.”

  • David Fhima at A Rebours

    There’s something about talking over a meal that makes people loosen up. It’s the proximity of your knees under the table, the intimacy of sharing food, the lubrication of a little wine. This is not a set-up for drunken confessions. It is a method for coaxing the truth out of public figures used to communicating mostly in talking points. Ultimately, I want On The Table to show my guests the way they really are.

    But I may have set myself up by asking David Fhima — the smooth, accented restaurateur whose empire crumbled last year amid rumors he was roughly a million dollars in debt — to be my first.

    The truth is that I’ve known David for more than four years: I’ve interviewed him twice before and talked with him personally more than a dozen times. But even after sitting down to a meal with him recently, I still have no idea who he really is.

    Ask around town and you’ll hear that David is a master chef, a hack, a thrill seeker, and a dreamer. You’ll learn he grew up in Morocco, London, or maybe Provence. He had as many as 17 siblings and got kicked out of two or four or possibly seven different boarding schools. He was once a minority partner in L’Orangerie in Los Angeles, or, more likely, one of their top maitre d’s. He’s a good guy who got in over his head, or a con man who’s been running a shell game, transporting unpaid liquor from one restaurant to another in the back seat of his car.

    In "Without Reservations" — a terrific profile by Steve Marsh that appeared in the September 2004 edition of Minneapolis/St. Paul magazine — Fhima admitted to being a “bullshitter” and a control freak. He skewered local food critics for panning Louis XIII, talked about opening versions of his eponymous Fhima’s restaurant in Chicago and Wayzata, raved about the imminent opening of Lo-To, and claimed to be in negotiations to host a show on the Food Network.

    Two years later, there was neither a Food Network show, nor a Fhima’s in Chicago. Lo-To had launched but then closed its doors for a short time, due to unpaid utility bills. Louis XIII was shuttered so quietly, Edina socialites kept showing up for lunches and finding the doors locked. News of his financial troubles was far more widespread, however. In June 2006, the St. Paul Pioneer Press reported that Fhima owed more than $900,000, including $39,000 to his fish vendor, and at least $180,000 to the IRS.

    Over the intervening year, there have been rumblings of continuing problems, such as bounced paychecks at Fhima’s.

    But the people who’ve worked with him — even the ones who’ve been burned — tend to be forgiving. Scott Mayer, local public relations legend and the founder of the Ivey Awards, worked with Fhima until near the end.

    “The thing about David is, no matter what happens, you just can’t get mad,” Mayer says. “Because at the heart of things, he’s just a genuinely nice person.”

    And I have to admit that despite everything I know, I feel the same way. Having lunch with David Fhima is restorative in a strange way. However vain and quixotic he may be, he’s also authentically kind and interested in the people around him. He reminds me, in this way, of a very smart and naughty nine-year-old who dreams of being king.

    Perhaps this is why people keep throwing money at him.

     

    We meet in May at A Rebours, the bistro that shares a block with Fhima’s. David arrives precisely at noon, dressed all in black, wearing dark glasses and carrying nothing but a small European satchel.

    “This is the earliest lunch I’ve had in years,” he announces as he sits. “At my age [46], I’ve tried to change. But no way. I’m a night person, and I’ll always be a night person. I think my DNA is made up for the restaurant business.”

    He has just returned from three days in North Carolina, where he was doing business for Bahram Akradi, founder of Life Time Fitness and Fhima’s new employer-slash-savior.
    In the aftermath of his financial woes, Fhima tells me, Akradi — a longtime acquaintance — stepped in to propose a deal: He would take over LoTo and rebrand it LoTo Life Cafe, then turn around and use the concept in Life Time facilities throughout the country. Fhima would join Life Time as executive chef in charge of more than 50 cafés around the country, and develop a fine dining concept for the higher end clubs.

    Fhima is understandably grateful. “Life Time is a company that if you walk into any club, no matter how incredible they are, it doesn’t do justice to Rahm’s vision,” he raves.
    He’s landed on his feet, yes. But when we begin talking about Louis XIII, Fhima’s mood becomes more sober. And he is ardently philosophical when he describes the past year: “Whether or not it’s true, I’ll always believe that challenges are like magnets. I think they’re like these little animals that walk and pick a place where they can’t knock people down. There’s so much to be learned from a failed dish, a failed relationship, a failed financial experience. More than to be learned from success. If you keep getting up and getting up and getting up, challenges become fun.”

    Say what you will about David Fhima, he does keep getting up.

    After giving me many of the same quotes he’s given other reporters about the closure of Louis XIII — including that it was misunderstood; that it was too good for the Southdale mall; and that it suffered from his being split between kitchen and front of the house — he hunkers down abruptly and looks me straight in the eyes.

    “Looking back, I don’t have any regrets except for one. When I knew it wasn’t working, I should have cut my losses. And I knew within three to four months. I should have cut my losses and owed ten times less than I do now.” He shrugs then, and his face changes, becoming tough again.

    “But I was trying to stick by my concept and make it work, employing people, and staying true to what I believed. What sends me is that some people try to put my financial failure on the same level with my talent as a chef. I know a lot of very talented chefs who have not been able to make a go of it. But there are a lot of successful ones I wouldn’t trust to butter my bread.”

     


    Click to play audio clip.


    Wait for the long pause at the beginning.

  • Moving Water and Earth

    When Father Louis Hennepin first saw the great falls of the Mississippi in 1680, he was on furlough from a prolonged captivity at Mille Lacs Lake. The Flemish cleric and his Dakota escorts portaged downstream along the east bank on what is now Main Street in Minneapolis, then beheld the cataract he would later document to be forty or fifty feet high. This figure was exaggerated (though somewhat prescient), but empirical accuracy was never a missionary priority, and Hennepin ventured only to tally souls. The cataract was called Minirara by his guides in honor of the water’s playful descent, close phonetic kin to the nearby “laughing waters” memorialized by Longfellow. But unlike the classic bridal veil at Minnehaha Creek, here a great flood spilled over ledges across a half-mile of river, spouting and tumbling through fields of broken limestone, producing a thunder that drew the ear from miles away. The dutiful Hennepin divested the site of its evocative animism, and christened the falls for Anthony of Padua, the patron saint of lost things.

    Not until Zebulon Pike’s 1805 expedition was the only waterfall on the Mississippi technically surveyed at just over sixteen feet, about as high as an upended canoe. This natural wonder quickly became a scenic refuge for southern tourists escaping the summer heat. But money men were also scheming along the riverbanks, seeing only industrial power uncapitalized, and by 1870 the falls had been completely harnessed by the young city’s industrial pioneers. They had no notion that their seizure of the river’s power also halted a geologic process in its final moments.

    The St. Anthony Falls of the seventeenth century—splendid, romantic, and terrible as they were to Dakota and Franciscan alike—were the faint echo of their cataclysmic origins just downstream from St. Paul. A dozen millennia ago, a surge of ice-age runoff first flooded over and eroded the stubborn Platteville limestone to create a cataract just as impressive as today’s Niagara Falls (another natural wonder first documented by Father Hennepin). Absent the ambitions and interventions of Minneapolis millers, the river would by now have eroded to the last reach of the Platteville limestone twelve miles from its start, and our legendary falls would have dissolved into a series of rapids through the underlying sandstone.

    Even the newest residents of condominia overlooking this site should recognize St. Anthony Falls’ major components: the central spillway, or apron; the millpond fronting St. Anthony Main, which once powered a large share of the city’s industry but now generates a thread of the electricity we consume; and the boondoggle Upper St. Anthony Falls lock on the downtown side.

    There’s a fourth component, however, that has for decades gone virtually unnoticed: The St. Anthony Falls Laboratory, a bastion of water-power research embedded in the middle of the river on Hennepin Island. Rampant nature created these falls, but engineers have preserved them, and so it is most fitting that the last significant use of the Falls of St. Anthony is a playground for engineers.

     

  • Laurie Lindeen's Playlist

    Minneapolis’s music scene in the ’80s is a persistent source of nostalgia, pride, and perhaps even fairy tales. Laurie Lindeen was there; her role as guitarist and vocalist in Zuzu’s Petals, an all-girl Minneapolis rock band, put her front and center for plenty of storied music moments. She even went on to marry the crown prince of that era, Paul Westerberg. These days, Lindeen lives a much quieter life with Westerberg and their son; she recently earned an MFA in creative writing from the University of Minnesota, a course of study that helped her produce Petal Pusher, a brand-new memoir about her days (and mostly nights) in Zuzu’s Petals and the surrounding music scene. In honor of the book’s release, we asked Lindeen what songs she likes these days. Yes, we hoped for an aural blast from the past. And we got what we wanted. “I’m stuck on my old records,” said Lindeen. “My all-time favorite records are all I ever play.”

    1. X, Los Angeles (and most other X records)
    I went to the X show last summer at the Fine Line because they were my absolute all-time favorite back in the day. I made an over-forty-thinking-she’s-nineteen ass of myself, drinking, dancing, shouting the words to every song, giving Exene my favorite bracelet (which I miss horribly), winking back at Billy Zoom (who must be seventy), shamelessly flirting with John Doe (who’s aging with grace and rugged good looks) … it wasn’t pretty. After that night I re-ordered all of my X albums on CD and they’ve been in heavy rotation for almost a year (this includes The Knitters’ Poor Little Critter on the Road).

    2. Roxy Music, “Editions of You” from For Your Pleasure
    When my first “music boyfriend” in Madison, Wisconsin, introduced me to this song, it was already old. I’ve listened to it at least once a week for the past twenty-some years. Like other early Roxy stuff, this song is so foppish and glam and wild and jazzy and hard-rocking all at the same time, and it is filled with words to live by, like “stay cool is still the main rule” and “too much cheesecake too soon.” When I saw Roxy at Northrop a few summers ago, where I also made a foaming-at-the-mouth ass of myself, they closed with “Editions of You.” Even better, Poses-era Rufus Wainwright opened the show and I’ve listened to Poses at least once a month since.

    3. Robyn Hitchcock, I Often Dream of Trains
    I don’t know if it has to do with the time, place, or age you are when something grabs you hard, but for me this record is my Pet Sounds or Music from Big Pink or Sticky Fingers. Maybe it’s the sound—hollow and stripped down and driven by piano and acoustic guitar and harmonica. Or the first line of the first song: “This could be the day I’ve waited for all my life.” An inviting greeting like that will always keep me coming back for more. It’s a haunted, intimate, lonely record that is not depressed or depressing. Even though Robyn Hitchcock often hides behind cleverness and the absurd, try as he may have, he couldn’t keep his soul out of this record and for that I am forever grateful.

    4. The Jayhawks, Blue Earth
    Yesterday was a warm, sunny, spring day and as I drove to meet a friend for lunch at the Birchwood, I blasted this record in the car with the windows down. I can’t get over how strong the vocals, lyrics, and licks are on this record—it was such a fun, free time when it came out and the Jayhawks were so freaking great and untouched by the things that can wear a band down. It must be the equivalent of when my dad used to play a Buck Owens record on a Saturday afternoon, singing along with over-the-top jubilance (though I think Buck was born worn down).

    5. “Family-friendly” music
    My son is already Ramones-centric at the age of nine, but I’m having a hard time letting go of our favorite sing-along records. I’m not ready to give up Dan Zanes (especially Night Time), Burl Ives, Leadbelly, and Tom T. Hall—I still secretly listen to them alone in the car. (American folk songs should never be ignored for very long.)

    Joni Mitchell, For the Roses (followed by Court and Spark, Ladies of the Canyon, and Blue, in that order, at least one a week.)

    I’ve never been a Hejira girl, but you can’t touch Joni when it comes to originality, innovation, lyrics that should be called poems, snaky chords, brave vocals, and emotional intelligence. Amen.

    Petal Pusher: A Rock and Roll Cinderella Story is available now. As part of The Current Fakebook series, Lindeen reads from the book June 16 at the Fitzgerald Theater. Zuzu’s Petals is playing a reunion show for the occasion; joining them onstage will be music luminaries such as Paul Westerberg, Mark Olson, Steve Wynn, John Eller, Lori Barbero, Ed Ackerson, and Marc Perlman. 651-290-1221; www.mpr.org

  • Ian McEwan

    Ian McEwan is at a stage in his writing life where he could be coasting on his laurels or organizing his papers for the inevitable memoir(s). McEwan, though, is not that kind of writer—at least not yet. More than a dozen books into his career, he seems to be getting only better and more ambitious. His recent string of novels—most notably Atonement and Saturday—have displayed increasing thematic and structural complexity, as well as a warmth and compassion that was often missing from his early fiction. His latest novel is a slim piece of work, but manages to pack an epic’s worth of telling details into its examination of an often calamitous marriage.

  • Andrei Codrescu

    “For years now I have published my poems in funny magazines / So that nobody would notice / How sad they were,”
    Andrei Codrescu     wrote in his 1980 “Paper on Humor.” Despite his acutely ironic sense of humor and his archetypal Jewish wit, Codrescu nonetheless seems an odd proposition for the Minnesota Public Radio’s American Humorists Series. More than a humorist, Codrescu is one of our nation’s leading proponents of critical thought. From the time the then 20-year old Codrescu arrived in the United States in the 1960s, the Romanian-born writer and thinker has been exploring and examining American culture in myriad forms—poetry, essays, novels, screenplays, and even a National Public Radio column, all of which display his trademark sardonic wit, thirst for the unusual, and playful defiance of all categorization. 651-290-1221; www.fitzgeraldtheater.publicradio.org

  • Woody Allen

    It’s been twenty-five years since a new collection of Woody Allen’s short humor appeared in print. You’re welcome to argue this point until you’re blue in the face, but he hasn’t made a truly great—or at least consistently funny—film in almost as long. It’s easy, then, to forget how truly fresh and funny Allen once was. The material in his early collections (and in his best films) was marked by his trademark neuroses as well as by an ability to blend high and low culture with often inspired and hilarious results. Allen’s work occasionally pops up in The New Yorker (where many of the pieces in Mere Anarchy originally appeared), and while there’s a palpable strain in some of the more uneven selections, the man is still capable of being very funny, very smart, and hyper-literate, often within the same paragraph.

  • Barbarella

    This irreverent modern dance production is inspired by Jean-Claude Forest’s cheeky ’60s comic strip Barbarella. But it’s more closely related to the 1968 sci-fi movie Forest’s book inspired. Just as Jane Fonda did in that movie version, Dolls dancer Heather Cadigan gets things started with a zero-gravity striptease. In this instance, however, the achievement owes more to the performer’s limberness than to primitive, mid-century F/X. From there on out, the intergalactic mission finds Cadigan shimmying and wall-dancing in little more than her go-go boots. (Rumors that Cadigan would don something akin to Fonda’s famous see-through plastic breastplate couldn’t be confirmed.) Of course, the Dolls’ artistic director Myron Johnson couldn’t resist the temptation to inject Barbarella with some twenty-first-century-style modernity. He keeps his comments on media, women, and war on the slight side, but shamelessly mashes the film’s bubblegum score with P. Diddy and Christina Aguilera. 345 13th Ave. N., Minneapolis; 612-436-1129; www.balletofthedolls.org