Life at the Grande Chartreuse monastery, nestled deep within the French Alps, has remained virtually unchanged for almost a thousand years. Following their motto, “The Cross is steady while the world is turning,” these Carthusian monks live entirely in silence and are even cloistered from one another. In 1984, German filmmaker Philip Gröning sought permission to document their solitary life. “It is not time,” came the terse reply. Sixteen years later, however, the doors were opened. Gröning wandered unfettered through the monastery, recording the lives of these devout men using natural light and pretty much nothing else: no score, no voice-over, no archival footage. The result is a film of almost shocking gravity, and, at nearly three hours, it is perhaps a tonic for our fast, information-clogged life.
Category: Article
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Rollin Marquette: New Sculpture
Like all good minimalists, Rollin Marquette trains his focus on the materials he works with: individual servings of pasteurized cheese-food product poked through chicken wire, or plastic tubes filled with electric-green antifreeze, or, in his latest installation, balsa wood and steel. Wedged into two galleries at the MIA (and piercing the wall between them), this untitled work offers up a series of contrasts: Dark industrial steel beams play off the bright, clean elegance of the gallery space; the sheer heft of those beams ironically holds aloft a ring of balsa wood—which is itself given weightiness and depth by being charred and waxed. (Or do those beams keep the ring from floating away?) On the whole, this assemblage comes off as some oddball feat of engineering, or a mysterious monument from a long-gone militaristic society. 612-870-3131; www.artsmia.org
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Bob Dylan’s American Journey, 1956–1966
Sure, you know Dylan’s from these parts, but do you really know Dylan? This retrospective of his early years, curated by Seattle’s Experience Music Project, should appeal to casual fans and obsessives alike, tracing his evolution from Hibbing rock ’n’ roller to Dinkytown folk-scenester, then on to New York, where he was destined to achieve almost-mythic status. The Weisman has expanded the exhibit to emphasize the legend’s Minnesota roots, including additional relics from his Hibbing and Dinkytown days. Bonuses include artifacts from Dylan’s contemporaries: a handwritten note from Joan Baez, the spur-adorned boots of Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, and Woody Guthrie’s acoustic guitar, with his name scratched, childlike, onto the back. 333 East River Rd., Minneapolis; 612-625-9494; www.weisman.umn.edu
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Ghada Amer and Wangechi Mutu
Here’s an intriguing pairing. Amer and Mutu, both widely exhibited internationally, came to New York via Cairo and Nairobi, respectively, and focus on intersections between the woman and race, sex, power, and religion. Amer’s huge canvases are embellished with chaotic embroidery that, upon close inspection, reveals images of women from porn mags. The new works here add, in a couple of instances, stitched renderings of Disney princesses and Alice in Wonderland. Mutu, known for collages combining clippings from fashion magazines and African art books, presents Thrones: three rickety wooden chairs elevated with wobbly, unstable leg extensions that, she says, represent Western power structures. Hanging among them, upended bottles slowly drip red wine, creating spatters on the concrete floor—a reference to government-perpetrated violence, especially against women. 1021 Franklin Ave. E., Minneapolis; 612-872-7494; www.franklinartworks.org
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Contemporary Prints from Tokyo
What’s going on with printmaking in the world’s largest metropolis? This modest but wide-ranging show offers a glimpse—some thirty works from nine artists—of the current scene where populist ukiyo-e prints first blossomed in the sixteenth century. On the prominent end are works by Tesuya Noda, one of Japan’s best-known printmakers, including a selection from his “Diary” series (a still life from Israel casually pictures a string of bullets alongside a robe, mattress, and pair of shoes), while Miki Kato’s color intaglio prints, incorporating animals and old-fashioned wallpaper and doily patterns, have a more of-the-moment hipster appeal. Kato curated the exhibit with Tyler Starr, an American expat in Tokyo, whose color woodcuts are included, alongside images of tourist sites obliterated by imagined disasters, as rendered by lithographer Hisaharu Motoda. 2638 Lyndale Ave. S., Minneapolis; 612-871-1326; www.highpointprintmaking.org
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Happy Birthday to Us
A little more than five years ago a few of us sat down around my dining room table with some legal pads, a laptop computer, and a long list of ideas. Our starting point was an executive summary of an idea for a magazine that I’d written up three years earlier. The magazine had the working title The Village Idiot.
Among the files in the computer’s “Idiot” folder were cash flow projections, printing cost estimates, rate cards, positioning statements, bios of prospective members of the founding team, lists of feature and department ideas, and a list of possible names. That last list was several pages long, and over the next few days, we added even more pages.
Among the prospective names were The Natural, The Local, and The Regular. We spent a good deal of time thinking of all the reasons we couldn’t call it The Regular. We wanted to make a magazine that would be as personable as your buddies at the bar, and although we were certain that concept would eventually get across to the readers, we weren’t so sure we could weather the inevitable storm of potty jokes. I had also once participated in the founding of a newspaper called Sweet Potato, and that was enough to convince me that we should spend as much time as it took to get the right name.
I had read an article about naming companies, which mentioned how George Eastman came up with the name Kodak. There was more to the story, of course, but the basic idea was that the name had the letter K in it, and the letter K made a strong, memorable sound, especially at the end of the word. We pored over the dictionary, the thesaurus, a book called Choose the Right Word, and eventually, after several more days of rejecting words like Crack, Smack, Clock, and Crock, we ended up with Rake, which doesn’t exactly end in a K, but is close enough for English majors.
Now all we had to do was explain our choice. There are lots of definitions and connotations. Rake as in muckraking; rake as in the slant of a theater floor which allows everyone to get a better view; the eighteenth-century Rake’s Progress engravings by Hogarth; and, our favorite meaning: a person who likes to, shall we say, have amorous encounters with other peoples’ spouses. (We don’t do that, of course. We prefer to alter the meaning to “sticking our noses into other peoples’ affairs.”)
So we got all that preliminary stuff out of the way, and, since our spreadsheets told us that it would be easy to make a profit, we made the financial commitment to start the magazine. By early in September, we had hired our first two employees, bought some furniture and computers, and signed an agreement with a web site developer. On September 10, 2001 we signed a five year lease on office space.
The next day, of course, changed the nation’s business climate. But since it hadn’t directly changed the numbers on the budget spreadsheets, we decided to go ahead and publish the first issue of The Rake in March 2002. It turned out that our Rake’s progress wasn’t as easily predicable as Hogarth’s, and there have been some hiccups on the way.For instance, we still have trouble explaining the name, and what it says about what we do—and more to the point, how we fit into the local media scene. Since we started, we’ve received semi-regular encouragement in the trade press; they’ve recognized how The Rake is a groundbreaking addition to the magazine world. We’re one of very few glossy mags that are distributed free. We’re one of the only regional magazines that doesn’t compile incessant lists of best doctors, lawyers, colleges, restaurants and babysitters. We don’t produce “special sections” that are designed exclusively to sell advertising. (Though we like to sell advertising as much as the next guy, and we wish all of you readers would visit one of our advertisers today and say, “I want to buy that thing you advertised in The Rake, and by the way, thank you for supporting my favorite magazine.” Go ahead, you can do it.)
First and foremost, as I wrote in this space five years ago, we are story tellers. The fun for us in The Rake is to share all sorts of tales that are fascinating in the telling, and rewarding in the response. There’s a simple logic to how this works. Because you readers connect with us on an emotional level, you provide value to our advertisers. It’s gratifying to be told, again and again, that someone loved some story we published, admires our art direction, enjoys our ads, and, as one reader mentioned last week, because of our Rakish coverage, appreciates all the Twin Cities has to offer. Those are the best birthday greetings we could receive.
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As It Was Meant to Be Played
I sat in a lawn chair in the middle of frozen Lake Nokomis, nibbling on chicken kabobs and sipping a tequila slushy, thinking, How serious can this pond-hockey thing be?
A minute after the puck dropped in my first game, I immediately regretted my warm-up smorgasbord. This pond-hockey thing was apparently very serious. We were playing a team named the Whiskey Bandits, an ass-kicking juggernaut of players in handsome red jerseys who were definitely in it to win. My crew, the Arden 6, was there to play and to party. While the Whiskey Bandits were a team of sculpted Adonises in their mid-twenties, the Arden 6—made up of a forklift driver, two office maxes, a stay-at-home dad, and a couple of slackers—looked like a bunch of Chris Farleys on skates.
The Whiskey Bandits skated with crisp, robotic efficiency. We chased them like slobbering dogs, somehow managing to score a lucky goal before the onslaught began. Within moments of the opening face-off, we were losing 10-3. A Whiskey Bandit made a wicked tic-tac move on me, twisting me right, then left, then right. I almost pooped my pants. The referee called out the score. “27-5.” Slight pause. “28-5.” They scored more than a goal a minute. The final tally, 37-5, represented one of the worst defeats in the two-year history of the U.S. Pond Hockey Championships.The beleaguered Arden 6 headed into the massive party tent to regroup over a few beers. We were baffled by the extreme drubbing we had suffered because we thought we had a pretty good squad. All of the players on my team played high school hockey in the Twin Cities. Nick Brown, our ringer, even played at Dartmouth and has fantastic speed and silky moves. As we sat and sulked, the Whiskey Bandits strolled in without a hint of arrogance; they came over to apologize for the slaughter.
“Sorry ’bout all that,” a fresh-faced Bandit said sheepishly. “I had to get a waiver to come play here this weekend.”
“A waiver from what?” I asked.“I play pro hockey in Oklahoma,” the guy said. He took a giant chug from his plastic keg cup. “Most of my teammates played in the minors, too.”
My posse spit up their beers.
“You guys are pros? Big deal,” I said facetiously. “Our right-winger is a thirty-eight-year-old stay-at-home dad who calls himself The House Admiral.”
I walked outside to the patio that overlooked the entire tournament. Bright sun filled the blueberry sky with blinding light. A horn blew across the frozen lake, signaling the start of another round of play. All at once, on twenty-four rinks, forty-eight teams accounting for 288 players started playing hockey the way it was meant to be played: wide open, four-on-four, with no offsides, no goalies, and no hitting.
Before our next game, I made my way to a giant board containing the tournament schedule and scores from all of the games. It gave me hope to see that many of the other teams had pathetic names like A Lot Better than Last Year, Fattys, and Footlong Meatball Sub on White with Double Pepperjack Cheese!—indicating they probably wouldn’t be as awesome as the Whiskey Bandits.We held a team meeting over doughnuts, hotdogs, and more beers while The Admiral talked to his babysitter on a cell phone. Back on the ice, the junk food in our systems worked like magic. We spanked our opponents, the Campbell Avenue Crawlers, a team that traveled from Connecticut just to get whupped, 20-3, by our sorry asses.
The day ended with more hockey, more beer swilling, and a funk band named the Prophets of Soul jamming tunes like “Ain’t That a Bitch!” and “Skin Tite!”The next morning, cold air burned my lungs like shots of vodka; an orange sunrise painted a few white clouds the color of a dreamsicle. Our game against the Flying Saucer Attack was hard fought with lots of slashing and chipping, but we eventually lost 14-8.
That afternoon, the beer garden bristled like a busy trading session on the New York Stock Exchange. Hordes of sweaty bastards, grown men still wearing breezers and shin pads long after their games were over, waved dollar bills to pay for beer. I asked an old-school guy in a vintage helmet how his team was doing. “I ain’t playing,” he mumbled. He pointed to the helmet and said, “I just fall down a lot.”
Later my team stood rink-side and watched the Whiskey Bandits dismantle Kari Takko (a team named after a Minnesota North Stars backup goaltender) to win the championship game 10-2.
“Next year, I think we should use steroids,” I suggested to my teammates. They chuckled and ambled on sore legs back to the beer garden. -
Project with a Capital “P”
Andy Sturdevant—bon vivant, raconteur, interlocutor, chairman-elect of the Medicine Lake Gentlemen’s Research Society—sat down one wintry Wednesday evening to talk about history. I had last seen him perched atop a handmade shack on the frozen shores of Medicine Lake, horn-rims steaming, cheeks aflame, hollering into the wind like Buddy Holly in a one-piece snowsuit, one whose embroidered label read “The Aristocrat.”
Sturdevant had planned to offer a walking tour coupled with a rambling, discursive history of Medicine (née Mdewakan) Lake—part of the festivities surrounding the Art Shanty Projects, the annual undertaking whereby dozens of artists invite the public to visit their creative takes on ice fishing shanties. But the temperature of the air and the fortitude of the tour group were plunging fast. So he took pity on the crowd and shaved several hundred years off the history; as we huddled around him in a loose horseshoe, he let loose a volley of historical grapeshot: “You are standing on the site of a mid-century Methodist mission camp! ‘Mdewakan’ is Dakota for Lake of the Spirit! This lake was the childhood home of director Terry Gilliam!” [Editor’s Note: Mdewakan is literally translated as “sacred” or “mysterious” Lake.] With a flourish, Sturdevant corralled the crowd out of the wind for a “Battle Hymn of the Republic” sing-a-long. We sang hallelujah, said hallelujah, and with that, the tour was over.
By the time we met at the Clicquot Club in south Minneapolis, Sturdevant had swapped his lambskin for a long, red-and-white striped Dr. Who-style scarf. He grasped a grilled panino imperiale with one hand and flipped through some of his historical research, a series of nineteenth-century advertisements, with the other. The ads were designed to persuade Minneapolitans of the 1890s to settle near “Medicine Lake Park,” and Sturdevant read them aloud with glee. “Do not suppose that THE PARK IS A WILDERNESS,” he intoned. “The shrewd investor will be quick to GRASP THE OPPORTUNITY and purchase now, while prices are low and terms easy.” Wiping a few crumbs from his chin, he moved on to describe his next curatorial endeavors, including a sprawling twentieth-anniversary exhibit on the history of No Name Exhibitions and the Soap Factory, the art space near St. Anthony Main that occupies a special place in Sturdevant’s heart. “It’s dank and weird,” he says. “Everything a gallery should be.” It’s also where he once exhibited a project titled Dead Flying Minnesota Liberals: images of Hubert Humphrey and Gov. Orville Freeman strung up between the gallery rafters and spotlit from below like the ghosts of politics past.
Indeed, a deep appreciation for local history permeates Sturdevant’s work—all the more impressive as he only recently set foot on local soil. An artist by training, curiosity-seeker by nature, and gentleman historian by night, he moved to Minneapolis two years ago on a wing and a beer. He’d spent a cool quarter-century on much-loved home turf in Louisville, Kentucky, where “You pay $180 in rent,” he says. “You make $600 a month and live like a king.” But the city’s elixir of torpor and plenitude threatened to choke his chi, so he sat down one night with a Sharpie and a Sterling and made a list of possible new hometowns—Philly! San Francisco! New York! Milwaukee!(?) Chicago is where most Louisvillians go for a swig of big-city life, but Minneapolis became the frontrunner by dint of its mystery. Sturdevant arrived in February of 2005 bearing copies of a home-made book called Everything I Knew About Minneapolis Before I Moved Here, all his worldly knowledge occupying a dainty twelve pages.
Any newcomer will tell you that the social fabric of the Upper Midwest is as impermeable as lefse left in the snow, but Sturdevant approached Minneapolis as a Project with a capital “P”: He scoured the local papers for arty happenings, scribbled notes, and attended precisely one zillion gallery openings. He said hello. And hello. And hello. He switched from Sterling to Grain Belt. Being from the South gave him a lot of social leverage, he discovered. “Ah just moved here from Kintuckee two weeks ago”: like a hot knife through butter.
He quickly found a number of conspirators and cohorts among other Twin Cities artists, began volunteering at the Soap Factory, and exhibited Everything I Knew at Creative Electric Studios in Northeast. He made artwork for (full disclosure) this magazine and designed programs for The Electric Arc Radio Show. At the moment, Sturdevant’s gig as a secretary at the University of Minnesota Medical School pays the rent while his multifarious projects feed the head. Not to mention the vocal cords of anyone who comes within singing distance. Speaking of which, any sing-a-longs in the foreseeable future? The gentleman makes no promises—except that he’ll personally serenade any interested party with the 1961 hit single “A Little Bit of Soap” by the Jarmels. The shrewd investor will be quick to grasp the opportunity. -
The Temple is Melting
If Minnesota hockey were a religion (and many, of course, would contend it is), Steve Mars would be a hellfire-and-brimstone preacher whose sermons carry an apocalyptic message: Something must be done to save the faith, because the temple is melting.
Warm winters of late have cut the outdoor-skating season nearly in half, and as outdoor ice goes, Mars says, so goes the status of our state as a puck mecca.
“For years our municipal parks were to hockey what Chicago’s are to inner-city basketball,” says Mars, a red-headed, boy-faced forty-nine-year-old who was a star winger on the Duluth East and Hamilton College hockey teams. “Imagine Michael Jordan without playground basketball. We’re losing our playground hockey,” Mars says. “All of those kids who just want to go out with their skates and stick now have almost no opportunity.”
Mars recently came up on the losing side of a contentious battle with the Eden Prairie Hockey Association over the use of $3.4 million raised to build an indoor arena (the third for this southwest suburb). He proposed instead spending the money to install up to six refrigerated outdoor rinks in city parks. Among other benefits, he says, that would have opened the sport to hundreds of kids who cannot afford the $1,400 to $1,900 to join a team and purchase equipment.
The cost of playing hockey has been rising in direct correlation with rising temperatures; as free outdoor ice disappears, teams are forced to shell out the $150 to $200 it takes to rent an hour of indoor ice. Multiply that by twenty or so—the number of practices each team once counted on conducting outdoors—and the outlays grow prohibitive.“Minnesota is the state of hockey and we’re telling eighty percent of the kids they aren’t allowed in the club,” Mars says.
Like many religions, Minnesota hockey is political. According to Eden Prairie hockey parents who insisted on remaining anonymous, the clash between the indoor vs. outdoor ice advocates was often “nasty” and led to several of the children of those involved being cut from teams they deserved to make. Many individuals contacted for this article on both sides of the issue refused to comment, saying only that they wanted to put the ugliness behind them. Jerry Fagerhaug, the Eden Prairie Hockey Association president who backed the indoor arena, did not return multiple phone calls.
The issues in Eden Prairie are by no means limited to that community. According to Paul Douglas, the WCCO Television weather guru, Minnesotans have no choice but to “adapt to this new, Chicago-like climate.” Douglas says there will still be ice in Minnesota, but it won’t be nearly as reliable as it was a few decades ago. “Skating by mid-November was the norm for much of the twentieth century, but that date is being pushed back into mid- or late December. The skating season will, on average, be shorter by as many as ten to thirty days per winter than it was during the 1970s and early 1980s.”
That means fewer kids may experience what the late Herb Brooks called “the joy of going to the local park rink and playing pick-up games.” Brooks, who coached the 1980 “Miracle on Ice” team to Olympic gold at Lake Placid, proposed the way forward for Minnesota Hockey shortly before his death. The state doesn’t need any more “million-dollar Taj Mahals,” Brooks said in the January 2003 issue of Let’s Play Hockey. “Why do we have all these arenas around town? To give kids the chance to play, right? But they’re expensive! What if we could find a more cost-effective way to get more ice and allow more kids to play? We need to supplement the indoor arenas—artificial outdoor ice is the missing link.”
“The people who advocate for more indoor ice tend to be people who never experienced the joy of outdoor ice,” Mars says. “They also feel that refrigerated outdoor ice is unreliable. But all they have to do is drive over to the Roseville Oval to see that’s not true.”
The John Rose Minnesota Oval, the largest refrigerated ice surface in the world, offers four outdoor rinks. The enormous facility is open from the first week in November until the first week in March and remains operational at temperatures up to fifty degrees. Since its establishment in 1993 the skating center has rarely been forced to cancel a session because of weather.
Steve Mars, who failed in his campaign to convince the Eden Prairie Hockey Association that outdoor refrigerated ice is the only way to preserve the sport in the era of global warming, says he’s glad the conflict has, for the moment, been resolved. But he laments the missed opportunity. “This was our chance to bring hockey back to any child who wanted to play. That’s what makes me lose sleep and lose friends over this. I mean, jeez, come on guys.”
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Nice Folks and Nitwits
People will tell me anything. I have that kind of face. I got it from years of practice. When I was a waitress, I’d listen to people all day long and smile at nice folks and nitwits alike. My livelihood depended on my genial expression. In time, it bled over into my daily life. My bland, Mona Lisa smile would win people’s confidence even if they hardly knew me. Maybe they were picking up that I’m interested in people. You know—I am you and you are me and we are all together. We’ve all got stories we’re dying to tell, even if it’s the kind of thing you pray won’t show up in your obituary.
At the greasy spoon where I used to work, one of the regulars was an old veteran with a face like five miles of gravel road. Late one night when it was just the two of us, he looked up from his drink and blurted out, “I’m a cross-dresser.” He would have been a better Charles Bukowski impersonator, but I just refilled his cup and commiserated about finding the correct undergarments for trapeze dresses.
After my standup comedy performances, people would often tell me stories that were funny tinged with awful, like they were looking for permission to laugh off the painful part. I remember one regular-looking guy, maybe fifty, thick-set, plaid wool jacket, and brown thinning hair. His blue eyes were dancing and he made a beeline to me and said, “I got to tell you a story.
“I got a dog, a golden retriever name of Gracie. She’s my girl, and she’s a good one. We go everywhere together, best pals. She’s a long hair, and every summer we got to get ’er a haircut. It’s better for when she swims, my wife says, ’cause that way Gracie can’t shake water all over the kitchen floor and then it’s also better in case of ticks.”
The guy was gearing up to tell me the next part.
“I can’t have money.” I let my eyes run a quick scan of the man. He was holding car keys. He could pilot a car, but he could not be trusted with money. Where was this story going? I held my smile. “It just runs through my fingers, and it’s better if my wife takes care of that side of things. She keeps us out of the poorhouse.”
He leaned in conspiratorially, looking from left to right to make sure no one else was listening in and then he continued.
“One Saturday last summer, she gives me a twenty-dollar bill and says for me to go get Gracie her haircut. Then she takes off for the day with her girlfriends. Well, I’m thinking I’d rather have the twenty, and I could just get out my beard clipper and cut Gracie’s hair myself.”
After he said that, I figured you could practically cue the disaster music, but the guy had to get it out. “So, I’m doing it in the kitchen, that way it’s easier clean up. The top half is no problem at all, even the tail. I’m talking to her the whole time and I’m thinking that this’ll be easy.
“Then, we get to the underside, a little trickier, because of the longer strands. I lean over her, kind of spooning her backside to keep her comforted and still. I’m doing all right, Gracie’s doing all right, and then the doorbell rings.
“Gracie jumps in my hands, and then … zoop! I just shaved one of her teats clear off. It’s an accident you know.
“And everything happened real fast after that.
“The doorbell rings again and I let go of Gracie to run and go get rid of whoever it is. It’s someone looking for a different address. Some lady, she’s going to a baby shower and she’s got a stack of presents in her hands.
“I open the door and say wrong house, but not before the gal hears Gracie howling to beat the band and zooming all over the house, trailing blood like a Friday the Thirteenth movie. All over my wife’s beige couch, the carpet.
“I slam the door on the lady, and I coax Gracie back into the kitchen with some raw bacon. She’s still bleeding, I’m nuts, still thinking that somehow I can get out of this. So, I get behind her and double up and hold her tight. I got a fistful of paper towels on the wound, pressing down to try to stop the bleeding.
“Old Gracie quiets down ’cause she’s got the open bacon package in front of her, and we just sit there for a while. Every time I took the paper towels off, the bleeding would start again. I couldn’t figure out how to Band-Aid it, so we just sat there. And, that was how my wife found us.
“You know,” he said, “Gracie forgave me a long time before my wife did.”
“I know,” I said. “I know how it is.”