The Rake Magazine

Category: Article

  • The Valet

    François Pignon (the Moroccan-born Jewish actor Gad Elmaleh) has it pretty rough. He’s a good-natured but horse-faced valet who can’t convince the love of his life to marry him. Out moping one afternoon, he is caught on film while standing on a street corner, by chance next to a supermodel who’s out on a romantic interlude with a very-married perfume magnate. When paparazzi break news of this illicit affair, the cheating hubby (played by a very funny Daniel Auteuil) cooks up a plan to have the supermodel move in with the poor bloke, so that his wife (Kristin Scott Thomas, speaking fluent French) will be convinced of his innocence. Director Francis Veber’s broad comedy is sweet and charming, much like his earlier films The Dinner Game and The Closet. The Valet is a swell springtime diversion, a movie to enjoy with your date before strolling around the lakes. Edina Cinema, 651-649-4416.

  • Yippee: A Journey to Jewish Joy

    “When you wake up in the morning, don’t kvetch! Say ‘Yippee’!” So suggests the wisdom of this happy collective of Hasidic Jews in this delightful, if somewhat workmanlike, documentary from Paul Mazursky. Mazursky, once a presence in Hollywood (he created the outstanding Enemies: A Love Story before flushing his career down the toilet with some of the worst straight-to-video fare a great director has ever made), leads us by the arm to Uman, a Ukrainian city that just so happens to be the burial place of nineteenth-century Rabbi Nachman. Each Rosh Hashanah, Hasidic Jews from around the globe flock to this town for a rollicking celebration of faith. Funny thing is the event looks more like a Grateful Dead concert than a pilgrimage. The rumpled Mazursky is a wonderful guide—arm in a sling, unshaven, telling the same damn jokes over and over and insisting to anyone who will listen that he is a “famous American director.” But he doesn’t hog the lens, choosing instead to provoke stories and humor from the people who are only too eager to lean into the camera, eyes glistening, and tell why they’ve come to this corner of the world to dance and sing and laugh. This screening is part of the fourteenth Annual Jewish Film Festival. Hopkins Cinema 6, 1118 Mainstreet W., Hopkins; 952-931-7992.

  • Echoes of the Empire

    I shall spend a lot of this summer reading Polybius. The rise and fall of empires is in the air, and Polybius is the most coherent historian of the rise of Rome—not least because he was a Greek and smart. When Polybius describes how the Roman general Titus Flaminius accomplished his mission in the Second Macedonian War of 200-196 B.C. and then promptly promised that the Roman army would withdraw so that Greece might now be free, one cannot avoid a sense of déjà vu all over again.

    Such Roman blandishments did not on the whole fool Polybius, but, in general, the old Greek admired Rome; he saw it as the new world called into existence to redress the balance of the old. What other people considered Roman aggressiveness he extolled as efficiency; what others deemed their unthinking arrogance, he thought of as honest confidence. For all Polybius’ praise of Roman discipline, I admire more the Romans’ fierce adversaries, the bright-eyed Celts who threw themselves in waves against the solid wall of Roman shields at the Battle of Telamon in 224 B.C., ululating their wild war cries, wearing nothing but their weapons, their long hair, and the gold collars round their necks.

    Of course not all empires are the same, either in the trajectory of their rise and decline, or in the spirit animating them. It would be hard to find in Roman imperial verse such a sense of the fragility of human aspiration as that expressed in the High Victorian ode that Sir Edward Elgar turned into his cantata “The Music Makers.”

    One man with a dream, at pleasure,
    Shall go forth and conquer a crown;
    And three with a new song’s measure
    Can trample an empire down.

    More remarkable still for its humility is “Recessional,” the ode written to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria in 1897 by Rudyard Kipling, the archpoet of Empire:

    Far-called, our navies melt away—
    On dune and headland sinks the fire—
    Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
    Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!

    Try getting a Roman emperor (or American president) to utter the final couplet of “Recessional”:

    For frantic boast and foolish word,
    Thy Mercy on Thy People, Lord!

    Of course no empire ever entirely dies. The Romans brought the cherry to Italy and the grape to France, and they seem to have survived. Go to Nîmes in Provence and admire the Roman temple known as the Maison Carée, which still has its Roman roof. Then head out on the old pilgrim road to Compostela ’til you come to pebbled slopes facing south across the marshes of the Camargue, famous for its wild gray horses and pink flamingoes (naturally pink, not kept that way by being fed carrots or shrimp shells like the ones in zoos). Here are the vines of Château L’Ermitage, makers of a wonderful white wine that can be had for around eleven dollars hereabouts.

    The 2005 vintage of Chateau l’Ermitage has a trajectory like that of an empire. In the beginning, the color is clear and cloudless, the immediate aroma redolent of flowers from the south. I was reminded of a snuff I used to take that was scented with North African carnations. The initial taste is fresh and light, like melons, almost like watery Chenin Blanc, followed by no sharpness but lots of low and dirty tannins, like Melba toast. Wait, though. The wine grows upon your very tongue. Roussanne grapes, a rather rare variety grown mostly along the Rhône, contribute half of the juice in this vintage (the rest is Grenache and a little Viognier) and in a warm year they produce wine of great richness. The flowery first impression and the forceful tannins fuse into a flavor that is full bodied, powerful, and pungent like gunflint. Enjoy it with old-home chicken—potatoes, garlic, onions, and boneless breasts of chicken (never understood that—I thought most breasts were boneless), fried together and mixed with yogurt just before dishing up. (Make sure you use the plain yogurt, not the strawberry flavor.) Eventually, a day or two after the wine has been exposed to the open air, acid will creep in round the edges. Sic transit gloria mundi. Time to open another bottle.

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

    Read more of Oliver Nicholson’s wine selects.

  • A Fatal Lack of Judgment

    There are two things I’ve learned from reading and talking about the decline of modern newspapers: The average consumer doesn’t give a damn, and a key survival strategy of those who remain in mainstream newspapers is denying the self-inflicted wounds of compromised news judgment.

    To the first, there isn’t much I or any other ex-newspaper drone can do to whip up a frenzy of public pity. Too many other industries have been gutted in recent years, and to your typical forty-hour-week wage slave, newspapering always seemed like light lifting and comparative fun.

    On the second point, though—despite the blame placed on greedy investors milking papers for ridiculously unsustainable profits, and indifferent twenty-year-olds getting their faux news from the Internet—there’s the question of how well newspapers are performing their fundamental function of being the primary driver of news.

    A case in point is the Star Tribune’s curious handling of whether former U.S. Attorney Tom Heffelfinger was in any way part of the now well-documented purge of attorneys around the country, and whether his replacement, Rachel Paulose, was in any way linked to the White House or Justice Department officials who were coordinating the process.

    By the time you read this, all questions may have been resolved. Ms. Paulose may have demonstrated newfound competence in her job, and it may have been confirmed that there was never any connection of any kind between her and Justice Department officers like Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty and the Justice Department White House liaison Monica Goodling, people she once worked closely with and who are believed to be central to the firings. But I doubt it. The story appears to have both legs and unusual depth, which is why the Star Tribune’s laissez-faire, punch-pulling approach through the winter and into early April is so striking.

    What is knowable is that the Star Tribune’s former Washington, D.C., correspondents, primarily Greg Gordon, filed at least two provocative reports—the first on January 26—detailing the unusual political nature of replacement U.S. attorneys around the country, with specific mention of Paulose. And yet the Star Tribune declined to run not just those pieces, but anything at all on what clearly was a relevant, tantalizing story until columnist Nick Coleman weighed in on March 31. Coleman’s column came after several weeks of badgering his editors to first get someone to do a straight news piece, at least on whether Heffelfinger might have been on a 2006 list of prosecutors to be moved out for more “loyal” replacements.

    The fact that the Star Tribune was not alone in showing insufficient urgency for this story is central to my point. Besieged by new competition and gutted by their parent companies, big metro daily newspapers are still, for better and worse, the primary legitimizer of what is news in their home cities. They continue to set the news agenda—particularly on slow-evolving stories with complex bureaucratic twists.

    TV reporters and news directors who say they don’t generate assignments off the morning papers are flat-out lying. The Twin Cities have the unique advantage of Minnesota Public Radio’s presence, with its comparatively large reporting staff. But MPR’s game is depth, not breadth. More to the point, MPR lacks the nerve to lead on a story like this, what with the first-ever female U.S. attorney in Minnesota—and a minority at that—as the central figure.

    Two Star Tribune reporters, who asked not to be identified for fear of reprisals, tell of being lectured once by McClatchy corporate types on the need to avoid the appearance of liberal bias. There probably isn’t a reporter alive who’d listen to something like that without taking offense. But the two Stribbers took even greater umbrage because the McClatchy-ite didn’t bother to offer examples of any of them engaging in bias, liberal or otherwise. What the two took away from the episode was the suspicion that “liberal bias” was really a marketing problem, and it’d be better for marketing if “we pulled punches on Republicans,” as one of them described it.

    The appearance in the Paulose story is one of news judgment compromised by political and marketing concerns. For those who would hope that news judgment was above such considerations, this is just another bit of evidence that self-censorship and editorial timidity are compounding the effects of investor greed and the Internet. At the very least, newspapers could stop accelerating their own demise by killing off their lone remaining competitive advantage.

    Read more Brian Lambert online.

  • Plains Tasty

    It’s dusk, and there’s an unmistakable whiff of charcoal in the air. It’s the sign of the outdoor cooking season, and is as eagerly awaited as the return of the red-winged blackbirds to the tree by my driveway. I look at my own shining, gray monster on the deck and I start thinking of the burgers and the steaks to come. Ah, the possibilities of a burger: the pile of avocado, the hint of blue cheese, the accent of arugula. Recently, though, I’ve been thinking less about what’s going on my burger than what’s going in it.

    Of late, there’s been much talk about what your meat eats. Has it spent its life roaming hills of grassy green, or has it been crowded into a pen munching on corn? How does that simple distinction affect nutritive value; how does it affect the world at large? And, most important, how does it affect the taste? After all, soybeans may be healthy, but you won’t see any McSoy Huts popping up anytime soon.

    Used to be, most cattle were raised and fed on the pasture grasses that covered the better part of the United States. As the population grew, so did the demand for beef. Certain efficiencies became necessary. Beef cattle were taken off the grassy hills and relegated to feedlots, where they were penned and fed a diet of corn and other grains. This allowed them to gain weight rapidly and be ready for slaughter sooner. Today, the majority of beef comes from these lots.

    But because of increasing interest in organic and traditional agriculture, grass-fed beef is making a comeback. The guiding principle behind the grass-fed movement is rather simple: Cattle are designed to eat grass. Cows, like sheep and other cloven-hoofed herbivores, are called “ruminants” because their bodies possess a rumen, a tank in which grasses are converted to proteins and fats. When the animals are fed corn and other grains, their bodies react with rapid growth and increased fat production, but only with the aid of supplements, antibiotics, and growth hormones. Without the supplements, it’s likely that the cattle wouldn’t be able to live on corn. Moreover, grain-fed cattle have a higher intestinal acidity, which provides a great breeding environment for the pathogenic E. coli bacteria. And that’s not good for people who love rare burgers.

    Grass-fed fans will quickly point out that their beef is not only less likely to make you ill, but it might just make you feel better. Many a doctor has extolled the virtues of grass-fed beef. It is lower in cholesterol and that nasty saturated fat. Meat from grass-fed beef is higher in omega-3 fats, the necessary fats that are also found in nuts, fish, and soybeans. Then there’s the fact that it’s four times higher in vitamin E than grain-fed beef, and considerably higher in conjugated linoleic acid (CLA), which is associated with lower cancer risk. And of course, grass-fed cattle, which never eat genetically produced or flesh-based feed, are far less likely to become “mad cows.”
    There are many environmental arguments that can be made for pasture-raised beef. The energy it takes to feed corn to a cow is considerable, especially when compared with an animal that forages off natural growth. While a wandering animal drops waste as it goes, providing natural fertilizer for the next season’s grasses, a feedlot cow’s waste heaps about her, creating polluted air and water.

    Locally, the standard for grass-fed beef has become the farmers who make up Thousand Hills Cattle Company out of Cannon Falls. Inspired by Michael Pollan’s New York Times account of the horrific life of feedlot animals, Todd Churchill decided to do what he could to bring pasture-raised beef to everyone’s attention. Their pastures are all-natural, never sprayed with synthetic pesticides or herbicides, and their livestock are never fed any corn, grain, or animal byproducts. Currently the chef’s favorite, you can find Thousand Hills products at many city co-ops, Kowalski’s, and Simon Delivers.

    Finally, to the meat of the issue: Grass-fed beef does have a different taste than the meat you may be used to. Because of many factors, such as the higher concentration of omega-3 fats, the natural variability of grasses ingested, and the different breeds of cows being raised, the beef tends to have a stronger flavor that some may not recognize. What’s remarkable is that, even without the usually high-fat marbling seen in other beef, properly cooked pasture-raised beef remains tender, juicy, and flavorful.

    Some chefs believe that the best way to treat the beef is to cook it slowly. Cafe Brenda, which has been the natural-food standard of the Twin Cities for twenty years, recently added grass-fed beef to the menu. On the night I was there, it arrived in the form of a richly turned pot roast. The flavor of the beef was softened by the long cooking process but was teased out beautifully with the red wine sauce.

    Scott Pampuch of Corner Table prefers braising. You’d agree if you ate his braised short ribs with earthy barley in a porcini broth.

    Grass-fed beef can be treated simply or elegantly. At Café Minnesota at the Minnesota History Center, a roast beef sandwich with local blue cheese has the perfect salty bite that rings with tanginess. Chef Alexander Roberts of Restaurant Alma prefers to treat it a little more delicately. His grass-fed beef carpaccio is a graceful dish with a creamy celery root aioli, grated horseradish, and spicy arugula. A sprinkling of fleur de sel brings it together. Finally, a classic grass-fed filet at Cue is complemented with oyster butter to balance the flavor, and set with braised escarole and lentils.

    There’s some doubt that I will be able to turn this season wholly over to grass-fed beef, if last year’s attempt at a total whole-grain conversion is any indication. But if I start with a burger—maybe the season’s first burger—I might be able to convince my family that the almost-forgotten flavor of traditional beef is well worth recalling at every opportunity.

    Tips For Cooking Grass-fed Beef
    From Rachel Rubin, executive chef of Thousand Hills Cattle Co.
    Grass-fed beef shouldn’t be cooked beyond medium. Internal temp for grilling should be between 120° (rare) and 145° (med). To check doneness, press steak with your finger. Medium-cooked will be slightly firm, but still springy to the touch. Or simply cut into the steak to gauge whether you’ve achieved the desired pinkness.

    Marinade
    1/2 cup olive oil
    1/2 cup lemon juice
    4 cloves chopped garlic
    1/2 tsp kosher salt
    1/2 tsp cracked black pepper
    Yields one cup. Increase as needed for size of cut. Combine all ingredients and mix well. Pour over beef, cover, and refrigerate. Small cuts can marinate for up to three hours, large roasts for up to three days.

    SHOP TALK

    When you think of May, think fresh fish in the park. Minnehaha Park’s Sea Salt Eatery is open for another season, offering killer oyster po’ boys and clam fries, y’all … St. Paul’s District del Sol will host it’s twenty-fifth Cinco de Mayo celebration May 4-5. If your mouth can’t find a big enough boost during the annual salsa competition, head over to the seventy-fifth Festival of Nations at RiverCentre, which is held the very same weekend as Cinco de Mayo. There, you’ll find at least thirty-five global cafés, ready to feed your cravings in any language … Think your Mom’s crumb cake was the ultimate? Prove it! Submit a recipe and brief essay on dear old mom to the Mother’s Day Recipe Contest sponsored by Let’s Cook. Dishes will be judged on May 10 during a benefit for the Domestic Abuse Project … For fans of the morel mushroom, May means two things: early morning forages through state parks and a visit to the Bayport Cookery for an ever-magical morel dinner, offered only in the springtime.

    CUISINE SUPREME

    Osaka
    Sometimes faded strip malls hide the best treasures. Osaka is one such gem, tucked as it is inside the old Time Square mall in Apple Valley. Walk into the bar for a drink or sushi; the blue lanterns cast a modern glow against the dark mahogany walls. The great room beyond holds a gathering of hibachi tables, expertly manned by smiling, knife-wielding pros. Working their blades, they turn a great meal. Sushi lovers will find their favorites, plus some interesting special rolls like the Black Dragon with lobster, eel, and avocado. The Love Boat is literally a boatload of raw fish, artfully arranged and, of course, freshly cut. 7537 148th St. W., Apple Valley; (952) 432-6155.

    Duplex
    Many brunches, especially in the Uptown area, are designed to help patrons refuel after wild nights on the town—a feat that is usually achieved with starchy or extra-sweet foods without a lot of character. Duplex hosts a brunch for the rest of us, those who wish to be awakened by the freshness and flavor of the day’s first meal. Eggs star on the menu, as with the poached eggs Florentine with a creamy and tangy bleu cheese hollandaise. The East Coast scramble gives us light and fluffy eggs with soft and salty smoked salmon, while the Argentine chorizo hash offers a more robust start to the day. Those craving a taste of something sweet will enjoy the hot, crunchy Belgian waffle doused with pure maple syrup. 2516 Hennepin Ave. S., Minneapolis; 612-381-0700.

    Ngon Vietnamese Bistro
    This rather meager space, formerly known as Pho Anh, has received something of a French kiss. The hanging sign hasn’t changed, but the new name on the University Avenue door reads “Ngon Vietnamese Bistro,” and the vibe reads French Colonial. Bright, welcoming walls, bamboo flooring and colonial chandeliers and ceiling fans add something the space was sorely lacking—ambience. But it’s the food that adds the spark. Traditional dishes like broken rice, pho, and lemongrass beef are made with fresh, quality ingredients. Don’t miss the non-traditional daily specials, such as fish with a spicy ginger glaze or pork tenderloin with tangy aioli. With any luck, these dishes will play more prominent roles as the menu evolves. 799 University Ave. W., St. Paul; 651-222-3301.

    Read Stephanie March’s blog; and find more restaurant reviews.

  • Heather McElhatton’s Playlist

    Child of the ’80s that she is, when local writer and independent public-radio producer Heather McElhatton decided to write a book, she chose to resurrect the literary model made famous by Bantom Books’ classic Choose Your Own Adventure series. The result, Pretty Little Mistakes, is a novel with 150 endings to choose from, where adults can refuse marriage proposals, experiment with substances, and indulge their bi-curiosity. This got us thinking: If this provocative book had a soundtrack, what might that sound like? We asked McElhatton to describe her top ten favorite albums and songs.

    1. “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots” by the Flaming Lips, off the album Live at KEXP
    When I listen to this song I feel like I’m eating a fluffy poof of pink cotton candy, while simultaneously getting a pedicure from a sexy robot. I love the Flaming Lips in general, and this album is going to be made into a Broadway musical. I hate Broadway musicals on principle, but I might make an exception in this case. I want to see robots fighting on stage.

    2. “Give a Little Bit” by Supertramp
    This is one of the songs I blast in the house while vacuuming, which I think has caused my pug, Walter, to hate it. When he hears it, even on the radio or whatever, he’ll start to bark, because he thinks it means the vacuum (his mortal enemy) is about to make an appearance.

    3. “Peach, Plum, Pear” by Joanna Newsom
    You either love Joanna Newsom or you hate her. She’s got this weird whiskey-soaked little-girl voice like Shirley Temple belting her heart out at the docks. Very hypnotic. Plus, there’s a harpsichord in this song, which is always a bonus.

    4. “Goody Two Shoes” by Adam Ant
    This song just seemed to change everything when I first heard it. I had formerly been my own brand of Edina Punk (plaid skirts, torn black tights, clompy black shoes) and after this song debuted I realized I wanted to be a New Waver and bought one of those huge economy tubs of Dippity-do. The result was … well, let’s just say that when a gangly, pale, teenaged, redheaded girl tries to look like Adam Ant, the result is tragic. Nevertheless, I loved the song then—and I love it now.

    5. “Love Is Like a Bottle of Gin”
    by Magnetic Fields
    I like the lyrics to this song. “It makes you blind, it does you in/ You just get out what they put in/ Love is like a bottle of gin/ But a bottle of gin is not like love. …” Of course I can’t listen to songs with good lyrics when I’m writing or I just start to absent-mindedly plagiarize.

    6. “A Smile and a Ribbon” by Prudence
    In the ’50s, the eight-year-old who sang this was part of a little-girl group called “Patience and Prudence.” Patience was Prudence’s sister, and considered the pretty one. Patience usually got more attention and more stage time. This album was Prudence’s moment in the sun, but it didn’t do very well and now it’s out of print. I like the song because it sounds like an eight-year-old on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

    7. Hi, My Name Is Jonny by Johnny Polansky
    I suspect this could be the theme for many wayward souls past or present: “I am unable to resist your evil scurvy love!”

    8. “Granny Do Your Dog Bite?” by Othar Turner
    This is a “drum and fife” blues song, a medium they say originated from African Americans serving in the Civil War. It’s blues, but there’s a heavy snare drum beat in it and a definite marching theme. At first I thought the name of this song was “Granny—do your dog bite.” Like, “Granny, go ahead and bite me like a dog!” But now I realize it’s a question, not a command, which makes it a little less interesting lyrically, but a great tune nonetheless.

    9. “Sugar Town” by Nancy Sinatra
    She’s sassy, she’s sexy, she’s Frank Sinatra’s daughter. Though she’s known for “These Boots are Made for Walkin’,” I actually like this song a little bit better because of its vague cocaine-party reference.

    10. “Glósóli” by Sigur Rós
    When I write I usually listen to music without lyrics, but the lovely and haunting Icelandic band Sigur Rós lets me listen to vocals without having any idea of what they’re saying.

    McElhatton reads from Pretty Little Mistakes at the May 15 Talk of the Stacks event at the Minneapolis Central Library, 300 Nicollet Mall, Minneapolis.

  • Cat Scratch Fever

    About a year ago, on an April afternoon, Al Wolter drove to his neighbor’s house in Sandstone to help with a controlled burn. The neighbor, Cynthia Gamble, a wild-animal trainer, was his best female friend and the two regularly shared cocktails and sang karaoke together on his home machine. “She had an earthy sense of humor,” he said, an affectionate way of indicating that Cyndi could tell a good dirty joke. Gamble seemed to be most comfortable with male friends and often phoned Wolter to let off steam about personal problems. Lately, the problems had been mounting. Her business partner, Craig Wagner, had just left the state with a majority of their holdings, and her fourteen-year-old son Garrett was floundering in school.

    Wolter unlocked Gamble’s front gate and, seeing that his friend wasn’t around, shot hoops for a while with Garrett. The two then walked through a pasture where a musk ox grazed and headed toward the modified pole barn Garrett shared with his mother. Inside the barn, the living quarters were separated by sliding glass doors from a row of twenty large cages. Three of the cages contained tigers, the B-grade animals Gamble had agreed to keep when her exotic-cat business, the Center for Endangered Cats, went bust. The animals were not trainable and Wolter knew that Gamble took care of them only because they had nowhere else to go. One in particular, a ten-year-old Bengal named Tango, was notably vicious. Said Wolter: “She knew this tiger was a killer.”

    Cyndi wasn’t afraid of the tigers, cougars, jaguars, servals, coyotes, and caracals she’d trained and worked with for more than twenty years. Nor did she kid herself by considering them pets. She followed meticulous feeding procedures, especially with the tigers, which could consume more than ten pounds of food per day. Feeding them wasn’t what you’d call fun. It meant opening a small, six-by-eighteen-inch window and throwing in large chunks of the meat she kept in a freezer. Once, when Wolter was helping out, he tossed a slab and missed the window. When he moved forward to retrieve it, Gamble hollered in a booming voice, “Get out of there!” Wolter leapt back in a heartbeat.

    Garrett entered the section of the barn where the cats were kept and walked toward Tango’s cage, which was partially covered by a sheet of plywood. Something made him yell and run for a .22 rifle, calling to Wolter to shoot the tiger. Unarmed, Wolter approached the cage, where Tango was roaring and leaping against the sides. A safety door—a remotely controlled guillotine contraption—had been left open, which was unusual, not to mention dangerous. It was then that he looked beyond the piece of plywood and saw a tableau that will remain with him always. His friend Cynthia Gamble’s nude and destroyed body lay limp on the floor of the tiger’s cage. Tango had stripped her of clothing before eating her breasts and both arms up to the elbows and then licking her clean of blood.

    The tiger had to be tranquilized in order to retrieve Gamble’s body. And then, of course, it was killed. The news cameras rolled and reporters tried to explain how such a situation had come to be. They concluded that Cyndi, who two years previously had filed for bankruptcy and taken a job at a local casino, had been struggling to scrounge up enough meat to keep the tigers adequately fed. In fact, she’d fallen back on donations of road-killed deer. The tiger, given the opportunity, had attacked because it was starving. Tango and the other two cats were at least one hundred pounds underweight.

    And so it was that Cyndi Gamble—passionate animal lover, professional wrangler in films and demonstrations, author, film editor, conservationist, amateur biologist, mother, wife, daughter, and ultimately victim to her life’s work—became the tragic public face of a very private and reticent network of exotic-wildlife owners. For that brief moment, the lights flashed on and the average person realized that some of their fellow Minnesotans kept tigers and lions and bears in their backyards next to swing sets and tomato plants. And then, just as suddenly, the lights flashed off again.

     

     


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    More videos of wild cat interactions:
    Lion hugs a woman.
    Lion hugs a man emphatically.
    Lion greets an old friend — a man he hasn’t seen for a year.
    Lion and ferret play.

  • Free Verse series: Kevin Young

    Young, a poet and contributor to the catalog for the ongoing Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love exhibition, is appearing as part of the Rain Taxi/Walker Art Center Free Verse series. You hear too much nonsense about poets whose work is steeped in jazz or the blues, but Young’s work is the real deal; it’s truly musical poetry, and as funny, conversational, and hard hitting as dinner with a seriously entertaining, intelligent, and challenging guest. Word has it that he’ll be reading from his own work and also discussing Walker’s use of language in her art. Walker Art Center, 612-375-7600.

  • Second Chance for Third Second

    Twin Cities native Tommy Nehls was talking on the phone from Ft. Lauderdale, where he has been living since 1986. Nehls sounded alternately incredulous and bemused that an obscure record he made with a bunch of high school pals had become a hot (and pricey) commodity among a small but international community of vinyl fetishists (as well as garnering playtime on such eclectic public-radio bastions as New York’s WFMU). “The music on that record is thirty-four years old,” Nehls said. “When people first started tracking me down to ask about it I always thought they were friends trying to pull something over on me.”

    In 1973, when Nehls’ self-released I Always Catch the Third Second of a Yellow Light, he was a junior at Southwest High School and had been working at a Southdale record store, absorbing the music of the period and squirreling away money to make his first record.

    “I was a very serious student and a jock early on,” Nehls said, “but from the time I saw the Beatles at Met Stadium I realized that making music was something I wanted to do, and I’d been playing in bands since I was in seventh grade.”

    Nehls’ debut is a dense and ambitious record, even by the trippy compositional and production standards of the time. And he either had incredible good fortune or a real knack for assembling prodigally talented musicians from among his school chums. Either way, the lineup he took into the studio to record Third Second (which was released under the name Tom Nehls) featured a cast of characters that would later make their mark on the Twin Cities music scene and beyond. The engineer for the project (and owner of the studio) was Paul Stark, who would later co-found Twin/Tone Records, the label that would help launch the careers of the Replacements, the Suburbs, Soul Asylum, Ween, and the Jayhawks. Among the credited players were future members of the Wolverines Classic Jazz Orchestra, and Skogie and the Flaming Pachucos. Dorothy Benham, a classmate of Nehls’ who was crowned Miss America in 1977, provided a spooky and ethereal vocal on the apocalyptic “Clean Air” (“The black ash rain that obstructs the sun/has eased those people’s pain/You know they’re relieved from their pressure, they could only think of work”).

    Other song titles on Third Second include “No People in the Forest,” “The Underwater Symphony Dream,” and “Your Death.” The instrumentation ranged from the standard guitars, bass, and drums to bells, synthesizer, organ, flute, saxophones, and banjo, augmented with all sorts of period-era studio effects like tape loops, loads of echo, and backwards piano. The insert included with the original album gave a pretty good idea of where Nehls’ head was at in 1973: Among the record’s dedicatees were the Beatles, Frank Zappa, and J.R.R. Tolkien.

    “We were just a bunch of kids bouncing off the walls,” Nehls said. “I think the music was a soup that resulted from a lot of good influences and the dynamics of that time and place. This was probably one of the first records Paul Stark worked on, and he turned out to be the perfect person; he was totally patient and supportive of what we were trying to do.”

    These sorts of rediscoveries are increasingly common in an era marked by obsessive completism and the fevered research of legions of Internet musicologists engaged in a sort of perpetual game of obscurity one-upmanship. Still, that Nehls’ record would find an appreciative (and covetous) audience decades after it originally appeared is particularly strange given that by his own reckoning very few copies of the original vinyl ever made it into circulation. “I didn’t sell very many of them, I can tell you that,” Nehls said. “I sold some to friends, and the record was played by Howard Viken on WCCO one morning. Most of them ended up in my sister’s basement in Chicago, and I lost a bunch of those to flooding. By the time we were finished recording the thing I knew I was going off to college and I was just happy to have done it. It was like a high school project, really, and I didn’t really think about it for probably thirty years, until I started getting these random calls.”

    One of those random calls was from Mark Trehus, longtime Minneapolis record collector and owner of Treehouse Records.

    “A number of years ago a copy of the record came into the store,” Trehus said. “I’d never heard of it, but it looked interesting, and after I listened to it a few times I was intrigued. I’m always looking for records that are kind of odd and are of a particular time and place, and this one definitely fit that bill. It had a sort of late-night psychedelic bedroom vibe to it. I did a little poking around and learned that it was something that a few other people in psychedelic-record-collecting circles had heard about, so I went about trying to track down Nehls and found him alive and well in Florida.”

    Nehls, it turned out, had been not only alive and well, but steadily making music since the day he left the Twin Cities. He’d gone off to River Falls for college, and then one night while he was home for the summer, he remembers, he played Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony with a pops orchestra at the Lake Harriet band shell. By the next day, he said, he had “driven back to River Falls, packed up my stuff, picked up a pedal-steel player who had gigged with Mel Tillis, and headed west.” A couple of nights later he was sitting in with a band in a Reno lounge, playing “acid Spike Jones-style Dixieland.” Nehls credits Don Stoyke, his old music teacher at Southwest, for instilling in him an appreciation for diversity and versatility. “He really drilled it into us that if we wanted to make a go of this we had to learn to play as many different styles as possible.”

    He turned thirty in Reno, after years of traveling and playing a little bit of everything in casinos and clubs on the Reno-Tahoe-Vegas circuit. The eventual move to Florida, Nehls said, was the result of a combination of burnout and opportunity. “I’d spent a long time on the road, and it was getting to be tiring,” he said. “I’ve been writing music every day since 1970—I have over two hundred songs in my BMI catalog—but I really wanted to be able to concentrate on doing my own stuff.”

    Fort Lauderdale has been good to Nehls; he stays busy gigging around the area, has written and recorded music for Disney and the Florida Marlins, and has also released a batch of discs featuring his own compositions. He now has ten CDs available on his website (tommynehls.com), including a reissue of I Always Catch the Third Second of a Yellow Light, which he remastered himself from the archived master tapes he recovered from Stark a few years ago. The record has also allegedly been remixed by indie/experimental/improv pooh-bah Jim O’Rourke (producer-in-demand and a former member of Gastr Del Sol, Red Krayola, and Sonic Youth), even though that rumored version has yet to surface.

    Nehls’ recent music is a serious departure from the lysergic flights of his debut—he is, after all, fifty-one now. The discs have titles like Beachy Keen and Palm Tree Way, and a Caribbean-inflected smooth-jazz feel with occasional forays into New Age; most of the recordings wouldn’t sound at all out of place on any urban lite-FM station. “I basically do everything myself,” Nehls said. “But I like to hire a very good soloist to add the icing to the cake. There’s a lot of amazing talent down here.”

    When Third Second popped up on the radar after all those years, he hadn’t listened to the record in decades. “There were these people finding me,” Nehls said. “People from Japan, a guy from England, another guy from Spain, Mark Trehus in Minneapolis. It was weird. I guess people were learning about it through word of mouth. I sold a couple batches of the records from my sister’s basement to Trehus, and then a couple years ago I typed the album title into Google and was surprised to see these hits from all over the vinyl-collecting community.”

    After Nehls got the master tapes back from Stark he finally pulled on some headphones and sat down to listen to his old creation with fresh ears. “Initially I had a hard time hearing it outside of the context of everything I’ve done since then,” he said. “I mean, I was pretty naïve at that time, and I was just trying to be sincere. But overall I’d have to say I was pleasantly surprised. There were all sorts of things on there I’d forgotten about, all these Sgt. Pepper and Hey Jude references. The notion that people can get excited about something I did is always such a pleasure, but I guess the only thing that really bothered me about the record thirty years later is that I had just gotten a wah-wah pedal at the time, and I definitely over-used it.”

  • The Books

    Using samples from obscure movies, as well as their own singing, mixing, and instrumentation, Paul de Jong and Nick Zammuto construct melodic sound collages and electronic songs so catchy as to be genre defying. On the Massachusetts duo’s 2003 release, The Lemon of Pink, for example, the title track alone contains seamless movements between folk song, art singing, and acoustic picking. In “Be Good To Them Always,” from their latest, Lost and Safe, a squall of reverb and electric guitar is paired with the intoned refrain: “You know, I simply cannot understand people.” However, the Books’ technique and repertoire, while rock solid, don’t always translate to the stage. And so their live concerts are a whole other beast—sometimes inconsistent, but worth checking out. 612-375-7600; www.walkerart.org