The Rake Magazine

Category: Article

  • The Hulk in the Kitchen

    Right beneath our noses, an underground clutch of vintage appliance enthusiasts is quietly buying up all of the redeemable old stoves and classic refrigerators. To the uninitiated, it looks like a hobby, not unlike repairing and collecting classic cars. But some of the new converts to the vintage appliance game aren’t buying them because they want to resuscitate an era, or because they want to embark on a tricky renovation project; most lack the kind of accompanying home décor that marks the “vintage enthusiast,” a designation they casually shrug off. Lots of people have been outfitting their kitchens with vintage pieces because, for the money, they are some of the best buys out there. With a quick tune-up and a polish, many of these octogenarian appliances continue to work with faithful precision. Of course, the retro curves and colorful porcelain surfaces don’t hurt, either.

    Every vintage appliance buff has a story about how a love affair with an old range caused their conversion, and to this I am no exception. Chambers, Wedgewood, O’Keefe & Merritt … there are websites devoted to fans of each that forsake the others. Mine’s a Roper, a brawny, sure-footed hulk of a stove, manufactured a few years before World War II.

    Some nights after dinner I take care to detail my stove, from the top of the clock all the way down to the footed legs. I deep-clean the burner plate weekly. This uncharacteristic fastidiousness is a testimony to my love for this old thing. If to scrub it is to know it, I’ve learned that mine is a more solid and more beautiful machine than any stove made today. The fine features are legion: the generous coat of white porcelain enamel, pouring over the corners thick and creamy like milk off the farm; the design dimples and ripples in the chrome; the pretty little clock; the flourish of the Roper brand name dashed across its front. Every small detail reveals that its makers had high hopes for this stove. While it would devote its life to a relentless cycle of work, it was meant to be a thing of beauty, too.

    The latest in a lineage that began with fireplaces and then wood-fired cook-stoves, mid-century gas and electric ranges assumed the place and prominence of a hearth in the center of the kitchen—but with a sleek, modern look. Examining the smooth, clean lines of the shiny chrome and glowing Bakelite features, you’re struck with the sense of bold optimism inherent in these appliances. Their makers were obviously smitten with modernism and had great hopes for the possibilities of the future. This was the era when new devices in home technology were so darn exciting that it seemed as if they had dropped into the home from outer space—and they looked like it, too.

    Flash forward to today, when weekend gourmets with expensive stoves cook a little and fantasize a lot about being professional chefs. Meanwhile, when the professionals cook on the home front, they want to feel comfortable, like they’re cooking at home. I say this as one of them. Having spent the last eight years cooking on professional suites—and the last thirty minutes of every twelve-hour day scrubbing the shine back into the range top—the last thing I want to see when I get home is a hunk of industrial stainless steel. I have nightmares about the dark crevices where stainless steel corners meet, about what kinds of desiccated (or horrors, living!) creatures hide in the greasy grime. So for me, perhaps the strongest attraction to my old stove lies in its lovely porcelain façade: It looks nothing at all like work.

    Visual appeal has in large part driven the demand for retro stoves. According to Floyd Harvala (that’s “the Wild Finlander” to me and you) of Harvala Appliances in Park Rapids, my hometown, vintage pieces, especially those manufactured from the 1930s to the late 1950s, have increased in desirability over the years. “You usually get two or three people in a summer asking about them,” he said. “Mostly people in their forties, or younger.” Note that in a town of three thousand, two or three fairly constitutes a trend. Burt, the son-in-law who recently took over the store (thenceforth assuming the moniker “the Mild Finlander”), stocks and sells a great many contemporary appliances, but shares Floyd’s understanding of the older pieces’ appeal, noting that they “have a lot more character, more little features, neat-looking legs, and stuff like that.” Both Finlanders admire the thicker gauge of the porcelain and the steel foundations on these stoves, as well as the durability of the old cast iron burners. New burners are constructed of aluminum and even Floyd admitted that in comparison, they are “not very good.”

    Detractors might say that the older appliances lack technological advances that have since become commonplace. In reference to refrigeration, I must concede that these claims have validity. Fridges like my 1930s Royal, a compact model by General Electric, look glamorous in the kitchen, but they are not without problems. Food placed in the back tends to freeze, and after a few weeks of operation, opening the little inset box freezer is like looking at a diorama of the Ice Age: Squinting, you can barely make out a box of peas in butter sauce back there, frozen in time. With advances in compressors and insulation, these fridges just can’t compete with new ones. It takes more energy (and money) to run them, as most of the cold air just leaks out the door. Burt surmises: “Old fridges take a dollar a day to run. For new ones, it’s ten cents a day.” Hard truths like these have turned many a vintage fridge into a vanity piece: They look cool, but are not, in fact, actually cool. They’re commonly found in garages, demoted to holding the summer stock of fish bait and soda pop.

    Vintage stoves, on the other hand, possess the cooking power to compete with today’s top-of-the-line models. Is it possible for my Roper to pump out more Btu’s (British thermal units, the measure of heat output) than the average contemporary range? “Well, it depends,” said Jack Santoro, founder of the Old Appliance Club and publisher of the Old Road Home, a quarterly for vintage appliance buffs and hack restorers. He has been restoring vintage American stoves for thirty-seven years, with enthusiasm to spare. “In these old stoves, the valves which control the size of the orifice are adjustable.” The Btu level depends on the amount of pressure, natural gas or propane, squeezed through the orifice. Now that he mentioned it, I remembered the propane service guy asking me if I wanted it hot. I must have said something like, “Hell yeah, hot as she goes!” which would explain the power I now enjoy. Water for pasta boils in about eight minutes. Flames shoot up the sides of a wok, giving stir-fried greens the authentic Chinese lick of fire. By this estimation, my four Roper burners sport Btu’s in the ten thousand to twelve thousand range—hotter than a new budget stove (averaging nine thousand Btu’s) and comparable to those strapping, faux-commercial ranges (whose burners range from two thousand for the simmer plate to eighteen for the power burner on the priciest model).

    But beyond Btu’s, it’s the physical scale of my range top that makes it conducive to the bouts of intensive cooking, pickling, and jam-making in which I sometimes indulge. Like most of the stoves from this era, mine was built to handle some serious production. Its burners were widely spaced to accommodate huge canning kettles and stockpots of simmering broth, hog’s heads slowly melting into head cheese, pots of spurting apple butter, and, of course, the ever-warm pot of coffee.

    Currently, the market for these stoves is at that middle point: They are popular enough to sell for six thousand dollars on the Internet (totally refurbished and gleaming clean), but you could just as easily find one lolling amongst the old sinks at the local dump. That is, not everybody knows they’re desirable—not yet. The use of the Internet by rural junk dealers has gone a long way toward ruining, perhaps forever, the prospect of the insanely good deal. Now little dusty storefronts on deserted main streets that once promised the bargain of a lifetime are run by clerks who sell most of their stuff on eBay. They know what a Chambers stove is and how much it’s worth.

    Luckily for me, my husband got our Roper from a relative, and we bought the fridge from Burt for thirty dollars and a case of beer. But that was last year.

  • Sun So Hot I Froze to Death

    There are few things as merciless as office air conditioning. When I graduated from college and started temping in giant office buildings I made the grave mistake of dressing as if it were summer. Armed with a vague sense of professional attire and deep conviction that I had a cute post-collegiate bod, I had purchased a series of ill-advised (OK, OK, I mean “skimpy”) outfits. I was so cold I felt nauseated. In short course I learned to bring a sweater to work, and in shorter course I tired of selecting a different sweater every day, as if it were winter. There was no putting together of a proper outfit—heavy patterned-snowflake and Fair Isle sweaters looked uniformly bad with summer dresses and skirts. It was then that I joined the legions of women who keep a huge wool sweater, fleece jacket, or wrap at the office to keep warm.

    Forget the thin, matching cardigans recommended by fashion magazines. If you are going to sit still in an office environment that’s cooled to the lower sixties, then you are going to need some serious warmth, with enough bulk to fit over whatever else you’re wearing. This will be your second-tier sweater. It’s about two years from being donated to the Salvation Army. In other words, in Yiddish words, your schmatta—literally the word meaning “rag,” it has also come to describe the shapeless article of clothing you throw on in a pinch.

    The office schmatta is a career killer. As has oft been writ in those how-women-can-get-ahead-at-the-office books, nothing screams “unimportant functionary” like a rug-type thing worn over business attire. Can Kleenex up the sleeve be far off? Add spectacles on a chain and you have completed the thought for your boss that “Peggy is great at contracts” rather than “Peggy should be at the table for major contract negotiations.” Note that I am not equating doom with being secretarial. Powerful executive assistants at the companies I worked for were impervious to the chill, wore short-sleeved dresses in the latest style (this was in the early 1990s when there were annual styles and hemlines), dispatched the requests quivering junior professional staff, and seemed steam powered. If there were sweaters anywhere near them, they matched the dress and nevertheless were usually flung beside their work bags. Senior professional women, on the other hand, could combat the chill by wearing high-necked blouses and business suits of summer-weight wool, never poplin or linen. You also got the feeling that they were thinking so hard in their offices that their metabolism must have been boosted, unlike me, left shivering in my cubicle over dull spreadsheets when not making personal calls or sneaking peeks at Vanity Fair.

    My years in the workforce have taught me that there are two solutions to prevent freezing in the office. One is menopause. Is it terrible that I feel envious of my colleagues in short-sleeved blouses with fans blowing on them as they sip ice water? I recently padded over to a retirement-aged coworker—“padded” because I had put on my gym socks after my toes, exposed by sandals, felt at risk for frostbite—and asked, like a piteous child out of Dickens, “What is it like to be warm?” “Oh honey, it’s something!” She laughed with furnace-like warmth.

    The other solution is shameful, yet incredibly effective: The personal space heater. On top of the heaps of electricity that are used to reduce hot air to frigid temperatures, I add even more kilowatts by heating it up again. It’s so wrong, and yet so right—I leave my house sweater-less, dressed in proper summertime clothes, and I show up to meetings and walk the halls of my office looking perky and professional. I can leave behind the bedraggled sweaters and fleecy smocks. It is bad to waste our planet’s resources, yet when I contemplate the ultimate punishment for this all I can think is, I know, I know, I’m going to hell. But it’s warm there.

  • Passing on Your Right

    The first ride I ever had in a Mercedes sedan was on the German autobahn in 1975. In case you aren’t familiar with the autobahn, it’s a speed freak’s dream: There is no speed limit, and the German autobahn cops drive Porsche Turbos so they can keep up.

    The right lane moves along at about 120 kilometers per hour—or seventy-five miles per hour. This is where you’ll find the Volkswagens. The left lane is where the fun is. There is where you find the sort of blitzkrieg spirit that inspired German automotive excellence and the manifestations thereof, such as BMWs, Audis, Porsches, and the venerable Mercedes Benz. There is where you get to experience the sheer terror that is 240 kilometers per hour in heavy traffic.

    Until a few years ago, it was my impression that the basic philosophy of Mercedes was to build the best (and most indulgent) car possible, and never mind the cost. The company was dominated by its engineers. The sales guys just had to sell a great car that would go 240 on the autobahn to people who knew the difference between left and right lanes, even in America.

    That all changed a few years back—about the time Toyota decided to make the Lexus. I understood what Mercedes’ problem was going to be perhaps before Mercedes did when my friend’s father, who got a new Mercedes every two years, came home one day with a Lexus. He wasn’t in a Mercedes for the rush. He was in it for the plush. And if he could get that for fifty thousand dollars in a Lexus instead of about twice that in a Mercedes … well, he didn’t get to be a business big shot by miscalculating the value of his investments.

    The upshot of this is that Mercedes began to build cars like the fifty-seven-thousand-dollar E-350 to compete directly with the Lexus. In doing so, they make some compromises. Are these compromises apparent to the pure left-laners. Yeah. But if you’re interested in keeping it real in the gridlocked Twin Cities, this car will do just fine.

    The first thing the Road Rake and I noticed was how eerily quiet it is. We were rolling down 494 at eighty-five miles per hour when RR said, “This car is really quiet.” And I replied, “Yeah, it doesn’t seem like we’re going eighty-five, does it.” “That’s eerie,” he replied.

    After taking pretty much the route the aforementioned friend’s father used to take from Edina to Minneapolis every day, mostly at a boring fifty-five miles per hour in traffic, the RR and I decided that this was about the perfect car for doing just that. It was the epitome of the smooth, compliant highway ride. The handling was responsive, but not as nimble as a smaller BMW-like sedan would be. You don’t have the feeling you can, or should, take a corner at ninety, but there’s no call for that on the Twin Cities freeway system anyway.

    The car, even with the six-cylinder engine in the E-350 (there’s an eight-cylinder model, the E-500), had more than ample power. At eighty-five miles per hour, there was still plenty of room for acceleration.

    The interior is huge, and as comfortable and well appointed as a wealthy man’s home office. There’s plenty of room in the back seat for double-dating, or whatever other endeavors you might find a back seat useful for. The overall look of the car is Mercedes classic. To my mind, one of the beauties of the Mercedes is that it doesn’t change much from year to year. It won’t be outdated any time soon.

    My only complaint about the car is the so-called “Command System,” which requires its own two-hundred-page manual. There’s the radio, the navigation system, the climate control, the mpg, the miles remaining in the gas tank, etc. ad nauseam, all contained in a less-than-intuitive dashboard control panel that rivals a 747 for complexity. I’m more of a purist who isn’t interested in information that isn’t relevant to the task at hand—driving—but if you are one of those people who hates being away from a computer, well, you shouldn’t be disappointed.

    Mercedes is still the benchmark for luxury, ride, and comfort. If you’re headed for the autobahn, even if it’s just the part between the burbs and downtown, you could do a hell of a lot worse. And if you ever do have an open left lane in front of you, this car will do what you ask it to. Just keep your eye out for the Highway Patrol in their Porsches.

  • Light of My Life, Fire of My Paddle

    Seliga, splitting the water, slipping over its surface. Se-li-ga. Three syllables sliding off the tongue: Se—sibilant and schwa; Lee—light-hearted, quick, cascading into the primitive finale of Ga. That would be Joe Seliga, specifically, a maker of canoes—of craft—for the water.

    A wood-canvas canoe, generically. The shape familiar: the sides rising from the water, seventeen feet long, tapering at the ends, a subtle arch from tip to tail. The inside surprises: With its glowing cedar planks and ribs, the wood-canvas canoe’s exposed skeleton distinguishes it from cheap variations. Fifty-four curved ribs set the form; then the planks, their grain running perpendicular to the ribs, solidify the hull. Outside of that, the taut canvas, painted smooth, makes it seaworthy. Perched above the hull are two seats of oak and cane, two mahogany thwarts, and a yoke, framed by gunwales of spruce and mahogany. Sleek and radiant, my Seliga.

    As a girl barely old enough to babysit I set out for YMCA Camp Widjiwagan near the Boundary Waters, into the woods for a weeklong canoe trip. The well-mannered middle child of Southern parents, I knew guilt and care-taking well, so I quickly absorbed the camp’s doctrine: Canoe before self. Widjiwagan has more than a hundred wood-canvas canoes, and bears the responsibility for them proudly. Paddling these beautiful wood-canvas artifacts was a privilege, and we took great care never to allow their bellies to touch (let alone scrape) the unhallowed ground. Hands, fine. Water, perfect! But if contact with anything harder was imminent, we used our life jackets and even our bodies to intervene. Years later, in a mishap, I would throw myself under a falling canoe as a buffer—the lessons inculcated early on bearing plump, bruised fruit.

    Despite the epiphany that my ribs might be more important than the canoe’s, my veneration for these vessels has gone far beyond the simple camp ethic. The wood-canvas canoe is so perfect because it is the blending of form and function, an embodiment of history and craftsmanship that is most beautiful when in use. Se—smooth on the water, a slender wake cascading from either side of the hull, straight in the wind, steadied by the keel. Lee—the wood gleaming, sunlight encapsulated, warm, rich, and earthy, sweeping me away from the busy world into serenity. Ga—merging with the environment, the happy juncture where sky settles into wood sitting on water, and myself, a part of it, embraced by its gentle rocking.

    Joe Seliga is but one maker of these masterpieces. He spent more than sixty-five years building them in Ely, Minnesota, until his death last December. Now collectors’ items, they sold even before he died for thousands of dollars—a price I could never afford. But as an heir of the Widjiwagan tradition, I have access to their Seligas; so for a slip of time each summer, one becomes my own.

    The wood-canvas canoe took shape in the 1700s when French fur traders used sailors’ materials to transform the Native Americans’ delicate birch bark vessels into sturdy war-horses of international trade. Until the 1960s, companies like Penobscot and Chestnut were manufacturing recreational wood-canvas canoes, but today they are always built by hand, primarily by individuals like Joe.

    Other paddlers, tossing about their Kevlar We-no-nahs and hauling their Royalex Mad Rivers on land, scoff at my antiquated Seliga. They ask derisively why I paddle such a beast, and more to the point, why I portage it. Old and waterlogged, it easily weighs 120 pounds. These travelers, I see, are too lazy and ignorant to appreciate the splendor of my Seliga. In fact, I like it old and heavy, just to keep out their kind of riff-raff. I am content to leave them prancing about with their garish boats, far away from my loyal companion.

    Because companionship is really what the wood-canvas canoe provides. Traveling with me, accompanying every paddle stroke, it supports me effortlessly and brings me joy. It tells its own stories: Here are the scratches from paddling the river in low water; these are the new gunwales, which had to be replaced after spending ten summers’ worth of nights on the wet ground. Unlike synthetic factory boats, wood-canvas canoes bear these scars proudly, a testament to the value of creating and tending equipment by hand. It may be heavy and out-of-date, but I know that before me and after me the wood-canvas canoe has and will endure, beautiful and familiar, a slim streak on the lake as it glides ever onward.

  • The Buck-Naked Truth

    A couple of years ago, Pacific Drift, a public radio show produced in Southern California, featured a segment on “three very successful writers who all got their start,” according to host Ben Adair, “in sort of a surprising place—Hustler magazine.” In particular, they all credited as their mentor Allan MacDonell, the former executive editorial director of Larry Flynt Publications, which publishes Hustler. For instance, Evan Wright, a contributing editor at Rolling Stone and the author of Generation Kill, recalled MacDonell telling him that he “might have been one of the top two or three writers for Barely Legal” (one of the many other porn titles published by LFP). “I was flooded with this sense of achievement,” gushed Wright. “I can tell you that it actually felt better than getting the National Magazine Award for my reporting on Iraq.” Pause. “Is there any irony in that,” the interviewer asked, “or are you being serious?”

    MacDonell was fired from —Hustler in 2003, after some twenty years on the job; not surprisingly, he has written a book about his experiences working there. Anyone who can put fingers to keyboard and has worked in the adult industry has likely been tempted to write about it; not only do such titles stand a better-than-usual chance of getting published, but they might actually sell well. Oftentimes those writing on the porn industry employ one of two methods in order to distance themselves from their subject. They might observe and record activities in an anthropological way, that is, without engaging in the described activities (e.g., Luke Ford’s History of X: 100 Years of Sex in Film; Legs McNeil’s The Other Hollywood: The Uncensored History of the Porn Film Industry); alternatively, they can go “behind the scenes” so as to offer a more accurate rendering and a greater understanding of the described activities (e.g., Lily Burana’s Strip City: A Stripper’s Farewell Journey Across America; J. McIver Weatherford’s Porn Row).

    MacDonell, however, is neither an anthropologist nor an interloper, but rather an industry veteran who wasn’t expecting to be fired. For that matter, he never really expected to be hired: “I’d come in as an assistant nobody and risen to the top, like scum on a cup of hot chocolate,” he writes in the introduction to Prisoner of X: 20 Years in the Hole at Hustler Magazine. “If this progression had occurred at Condé Nast, I’d be pushing my publicist for a five-page profile in Forbes. When we met during the filming of The People vs. Larry Flynt, actor Woody Harrelson, who portrayed Larry in the movie, said, ‘You’re the guy who’s got the best job in the world.’ If so, why did I start my car every morning, then sit behind the wheel for 10 minutes debating whether or not to open the garage door?”

    It’s hard to imagine that anyone with this kind of sensitivity would work nine-to-five, for twenty years, on a monthly product that most people secrete away and “use” for just minutes at a time, if at all. There is genuine humanity in this memoir, though, not that any of it is uplifting or inspirational. Chances are slim that anyone will finish Prisoner of X and think, “Here is the path for me!” Nor does MacDonell romanticize the porn industry; its denizens are not revealed to have hearts of gold.

    Instead, he writes about his career at Hustler with journalistic detachment and a novelist’s eye for telling detail; imagine Gore Vidal describing the psychological impact of being subjected to a video of, purportedly, a post-post-post Barbarella-era Jane Fonda wearing a strap-on and taking care of business with Ted Turner; imagine if the radical feminist Andrea Dworkin wrote pornographic criticism about government officials and other public figures instead of pornographers; imagine if Vanity Fair’s Christopher Hitchens wrote a feature-length article about fellatio as one of America’s great pastimes (oh wait, you don’t need to imagine that—Hitchens’ “As American as Apple Pie” appeared in the July 2006 issue of Vanity Fair).

    I worked for MacDonell shortly after arriving in Los Angeles from New York. It was December 1999 and I had a résumé and a pile of writing clips, but no job. My first stint at Larry Flynt Publications involved writing for Leg World, which catered to men with such fastidious fetishes that it was difficult to come up with content that would please any majority of them. Some threatened cancellation of their subscriptions unless more shots of models wearing sheer stockings, preferably black with opaque, reinforced toes, were provided, while others forcefully argued in favor of the un-garbed foot. Seven months later, I was promoted to editor of Chic, Hustler’s presumably less raunchy twin. At one time, the Chic masthead included an editorial director, managing editor, associate editor, and cartoon editor, along with a list of contributors like Nat Hentoff, Norman Mailer, and John Ehrlichman. By the time my name appeared there in slightly bastardized versions (Allison Jenks, A.J. Ferguson), the magazine had been put on a starvation diet. Editorial content was stripped to the bare essentials, which meant the pictorials were broken up by a few Cosmopolitan-style “non-fiction” features (“Carnal Corporate Challenge—Get Sexually Harassed”), confessionals (“ ‘Does One Time Make You A Lezzie?’—Tattooed Love Girl Slips on a Clam”), and expert advice (“What Her Lingerie Reveals: More Than You Think!”), all intended to help the reader better understand the female psyche in order to get laid.

    During my tenure at LFP, I was always treated respectfully by MacDonell—more than I deserved, seeing as I was frequently late and spent a lot of time reading back issues of the New Yorker, which I hid between the covers of Penthouse and Juggs (if anyone asked, I was analyzing the competition). Nor was I a special case. He rarely, if ever, reprimanded anyone for being late or for dressing like a bum, even though he himself dressed to the nines and his door was always swung wide open by 9:00 a.m. He also taught new skills to everyone on his staff, from the editorial assistant to his managing editor, and was quick to champion their promotions. It was from him that I gained an appreciation for the art of photo selection, creating paginations, and working with the graphic designer to create eye-catching covers and layouts.

    MacDonell insisted on excellent writing and attention to graphic detail. By word and example, he instilled in his staff the idea that writing was an act of service—no matter the topic, you put forth your best effort within the parameters of the assignment. That meant consulting the LFP style guide to, say, see if you’d used the word “ass” too many times; scouting out synonyms for “buttocks”; noting that “blowjob” was one word (not two, and no hyphen); and remembering to capitalize Lycra—and, in fashion text, include a registration mark: Lycra®. These things mattered.

    All Chic cover lines, every last punctuation mark, and each faux letter from the readership was scrutinized by MacDonell. (Real letters were generally too depressing to run; Chic’s editorial content, he explained, was supposed to infuse the reader with hope for a hot sex life, not remind him that he was in prison, or had never had a girlfriend, or was subject to other unpleasant but all-too-common realities.) He read your copy carefully while you sat across from him, waiting. His pen would hover over the page and then suddenly strike, slash, add, omit—it was always an instant improvement, and usually a lesson in correct usage. If you wrote something, anything, that he didn’t touch, you felt proud, even if it was only a caption for the table of contents.

    Unfortunately, sales never picked up at Chic, and I lost my job when it folded. A couple of years later, I was surprised to hear that MacDonell had been fired. Rumor had it that his command performance at Flynt’s celebrity roast had crossed the line of taste and decorum, which must have been a difficult line to discern. “From the very beginning of my employment at Larry Flynt Publications, I joked that any day could be the last,” he writes in Prisoner. “It happened just as I had predicted, although the ax took almost 20 years to fall.”

    Reading MacDonnell’s memoir, it’s clear that, all the more to his own discomfort, he is acutely and instinctively aware of the motivations and feelings of those around him. You might not think that someone who penned a column titled “Asshole of the Month,” chock-full of highly creative and even more highly obscene invective, would have a highly developed sense of others’ feelings, but there it is: empathy. In one section, MacDonnell describes a long elevator ride with Flynt’s first wife, Althea, who then was succumbing to the effects of AIDS and drug addiction. “Althea slouched to the back of the box and slithered down the wall. A pair of giant, mullet-headed bodyguards bookended her, but did nothing to prop up her slide … This harried vision was a far cry from the firebrand who had slammed her fists down on a long marble tabletop and menaced a conference room full of Judases. The elevator dropped down a floor, opened, and three suits stepped in. They checked Althea with the black contempt that they would toss at any bum. It was easy to feel for Ms. Flynt in this state. She faced the arrogant suits and responded to their dismissive sneers in a manner that justified you pulling for her: ‘I am you and you are me, and we are all together,’ she sang in an opiated drawl.”

    The scenario might serve well as an analogy for those unable to understand—or believe—that the literary line between “legitimate” publishing and porn is imaginary, mainly serving (self-serving) those who chose to draw it. MacDonell was an editor and writer on par with and perhaps superior to any in the “legitimate” publishing world. His tenure at LFP gave him a unique vantage on American celebrity, culture, politics, and sexuality, and because it was a view that many would prefer not to see, his perspective is all the more interesting.

    “There are some former Hustler editors who have overcome the anti-Hustler prejudice and done quite well in ‘mainstream’ journalism,” MacDonnell wrote in response to an emailed question about whether he’s been snubbed professionally because of his résumé. “Laziness, lack of focus and narcissistic, arrogant aspects of my personality are factors that have contributed to my failure to be embraced by the journalism industry at large, along with the anti-Hustler prejudice. That said, I do have one anecdote: a week or two after I’d been fired by Flynt, I was looking through the Media Bistro site at their job listings, and I saw a Q&A with longtime GQ editor Art Cooper. Cooper was being interviewed upon his induction to the Magazine Hall of Fame. He talked a bit about his short stint at the editorial helm of Penthouse magazine, back in the 1970s. Cooper said he realized that he had to quit Penthouse when the men’s sophisticate niche was irrevocably perverted by the arrival of ‘Hustler magazine, a disgusting magazine.’

    “That’s when I realized that my jump to Vanity Fair contributing editor would not be without obstacles.”

  • New Pleasure from Old Recipes

    I had a German grandmother who could cook, but she lived in Michigan. During our summer and holiday visits, this silly American girl didn’t know how to appreciate her cooking. I thought meat wrapped in pancake was weird and wondered why the potato salad was pink. When I finally realized what I could have learned, it was too late. I have a copy of the Baltisches Kochbuch from which many of her recipes came, but it isn’t her original copy, the one with her scrawlings in the margins. My grandfather didn’t think anyone was interested, so he gave it away.

    Not long after my grandmother’s death, I began to search antique stores and musty old bookshops for copies of the book. Part of me thinks I will find her copy someday. In the meantime, I have found a diversion: collecting vintage cookbooks.

    My first was The Modern Priscilla Cook Book: One Thousand Home Tested Recipes, published in 1928. The crackled cover and yellowing pages caught my eye. Inside were recipes for dishes I could barely imagine: Wild Rose Mousse, Shrimp Wiggle, Chicken Timbales, Grand-mother’s Piccalilli. I was hooked immediately. Although many recipes, such as Pork Cake, Hot Lettuce Sandwiches, and Fried Calves’ Brains will never come out of my kitchen, Ada’s Famous Gingerbread, Eggs Baked in Whole Tomatoes, Tosca Sauce, and Zephyr Potato Squares have inspired me to work through the terse, sometimes vague directions to bring forth an arcane taste of the past.

    I am not alone in this odd hobby. In 1999, the Wall Street Journal called the antique cookbook sector the hottest in the rare book field. Collectors range from food historians and book lovers to beginning cooks and professional chefs. Probably the most rare collectible would be American Cookery by Amelia Simmons, which was published in 1796, and is known to be the first American cookbook. Collectible cookbooks are hard to find in good condition. A first edition of The Sun Also Rises might have been read once and then stacked on a shelf for years, but you can bet The Modern Priscilla was consulted daily, splattered with buttermilk, and used as a coaster. For rare book dealers and hardcore collectors, this detracts from the value of the book. For me, it only adds to it.

    There was something else, besides the recipes, that enchanted me about my Modern Priscilla. It was Miss Myrtle Finden McIntosh, presumabley the original owner of the book. On the inside cover she inscribed her name, followed by “Should this book take a notion to wander, box its ears and send it home.” Her graceful handwriting can be found throughout the book, reminding herself to add one cup of sour milk to the sugar cookies, checking off and rating the good dishes (“yes sir!”), and re-naming the oatmeal cookies “rocks.” Once-blank pages are covered with hand-written recipes for versions of Overland Banana Pie, Scalloped Oysters, Honey Pumpkin Pie, even a “Hands-Off” recipe for soap. And then there’s the phone number for Dr. Chowning, the addresses of friends, and the small, seemingly quick notation that Marie died on the 6th of February in 1935. Miss Myrtle Finden McIntosh not only used this book, she loved this book. And now, so do I.

    I began hunting down the tattered and worn old cookbooks. I wanted only books that had lived in a kitchen. I came across a Text-Book of Cooking by Carlotta Greer, published in 1915, which instructs the reader not only in the preparation of food, but in its scientific composition. A discussion of starches and carbohydrates is followed by a number of practical experiments and a recipe for Cream of Wheat. Mary Tretter dutifully penciled notes throughout, checking off the questions she’d been assigned, working through a chart of one-hundred-calorie portions of food, and doodling a caricature of, I assume, her instructor. On October 25, 1921, she mastered French Toast.

    My copy of The Household Searchlight Recipe Book, published in 1935, has only one or two handwritten notations, including a name I can barely read as Mrs. A.J. Slemin. The recipes are interesting, but it was the four four-leaf clovers pressed in separate parts of the book that really attracted me. Did she think it was a safe hold for her good luck? Was it the singular site she could call entirely her own, where no one else would look?

    I started out searching for a grandmotherly figure in old cookbooks, the kind of figure many famous cooks claim as their inspiration. But I never found her. Instead I found a collection of women who were closer to my own age, doing what I am doing, cooking and learning. Without glossy photos or guidance from celebrity chefs, they invented, adapted, and grew confident. Their cookbooks were as significant to them as any diary, marking their successes and failures, giving them a place to record daily life. I feel tied to these women when I cook something that fails, and then turn to Priscilla for an easy molasses cookie recipe that I know will work and bolster my bruised ego. Most of my recipes are stored on my computer and I am guilty of countless glossy cookbook purchases, but, if I ever find a four-leaf clover, I’ll press it between the pages of Priscilla, right next to my favorite Miss Myrtle notation: “Abra-ca-dab-ra, one two three, magic magic, come to me.”

    Eggs Baked in Whole Tomatoes

    adapted from The Modern Priscilla

    3 medium-large tomatoes

    3 eggs

    salt and pepper

    3 T toasted bread crumbs

    1 t chopped rosemary

    1/2 t garlic salt

    3 slices prosciutto, diced

    Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Slice off top of tomatoes and carefully scoop out centers. Break one egg into each tomato, sprinkle with salt and pepper. Set in shallow baking dish. In separate bowl, mix bread crumbs with rosemary and garlic salt. Cover each tomato with some of the bread crumb mixture and top with pieces of prosciutto. Bake for 30 minutes. If prosciutto isn’t crisp enough, place under hot broiler for less than a minute.

  • Red-Blooded Australian

    It is a drear thought that if you can remember the Pudding Shop on the north side of Divan Yolu in Istanbul you must be well into middle age. “Those were the days, my friend,” the Seekers sang, “We thought they’d never end, we would be young for ever and a day.” As the Roman poet Horace said, eheu fugaces, alas, the fleeting years.

    Divan Yolu had been one of the grand-processional avenues of Byzantine and Ottoman Constantinople. Between its marble colonnades, purple-robed emperors and their retinues passed ceremoniously from the circular Forum of Constantine to the great Church of the Holy Wisdom.

    By the 1970s, it was distinctly dingy. A small Ottoman mosque still broadcast the call to prayer over a crackly public address system, just about audible above the geriatric gearboxes of nose-to-tail Turkish taxicabs. Across the road there were inexpensive kebab shops, the sort of places where you might spot the management replenishing the mineral water bottles from the tap. The upper stories of these eateries were crumbling hotels whose small-bore plumbing pipes had not been designed with western lavatory paper in mind—the blockages and bursts caused by inconsiderate guests smelt awful. So much for the Romantic East.

    The Pudding Shop stood in the center of this heterogeneous parade. The puddings were puddings in the American sense, little bowls of dairy glup, with or without rice. The clientele was long-haired youth from all over the western world—what the Turks called hipi (Turkish spelling is relentlessly rational). On one wall there was a notice board on which people advertised for traveling companions to go with them eastward: Persia-Afghanistan-India-Kathmandu.

    The Hipi Route to the Mystic East (farther east than the Romantic East) would be impassable today. It finally died at Christmas 1978 with the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. But thirty years ago, it was a long, thin line stretching across Asia, drawn by folk inspired by a lust to know what cannot be known. You saw them, always in groups, hanging around the bus stations at Erzurum and Tabriz, wild-eyed, thin from inanition, sometimes begging, often clutching paperback selections from the Buddhist Scriptures.

    For all their preoccupation with spiritual traditions, the hipi seemed quite uninterested in the Christian and Islamic heritage of Turkey and Persia as they passed through. The poet Peter Levi, who recounted his own adventures in Afghanistan in The Light Garden of the Angel King, found them remarkably unenterprising people. You seldom saw the hipi anywhere except in the places where they all congregated—the Pudding Shop in Istanbul, Nasr-i Khosrow in Teheran.

    It is odd too that a movement of free spirits with lofty spiritual aims has left so little in the way of literature. I can think of no bahnbrechend, or groundbreaking, spiritual odyssey recording the hipi Drang nach Osten. That is not to say that their travels had no consequences. Many decent people in the Near East had never seen westerners in the flesh before the hipi passed through. Heaven knows what effect they had on the lands they traversed.

    True, they were not guilty of building vulgar concrete tourist hotels, but their practices and appearance were scarcely such as to commend the West to those who in the next decade were to animate the Muslim moral re-armament of Persia and Afghanistan.

    There were other folk who frequented the Pudding Shop. They were going in the opposite direction. These were not etiolated seekers after truth; they were beefy blond Australians, big men for whom the shish kebabs of Divan Yolu, one felt, were slim pickings. The destination to which they were working westward was the area of London around the Earls Court tube station, then known as Kangaroo Gulch. Their idea was to see the world before they went home to settle down. They were no better informed than the hipi (“Who were these Byzantine guys?”), but their bluffness was refreshing.

    You might find similar genial refreshment in a bottle of Lindemann’s Reserve Merlot, a warm-hearted red wine from the southeast of Australia, available around here for less than twelve dollars a go. This is a rich round wine, compounded of equal parts of Merlot and sunshine, with spicy touches derived from the oak barrels it matured in and fine plummy flavors that will, if you are not careful, have you uttering the broad, relaxed vowels of the Antipodes. It would go well with kebabs. And you do not need to traverse all Asia to get it.

  • The Upside of Knocked Up

    My husband and I recently went over our wills. This was pretty easy for me, since I don’t actually own anything of value. In fact, the only thing I am leaving my husband is a postmortem “honey do” list.

    The first thing on that list is to throw away all of my notebooks and journals. These are the things I worry most about falling into the wrong hands. I’d hate to be remembered for grocery lists interspersed with late-night rum-fueled “comedy” inspirations. Sample page, New Year’s Eve 1998: paper towels; Windex; lime LaCroix; (then suddenly, in capital letters) DON’T FORGET COLLEEN—CAT POOP DOG OMELETTE—FUNNY!!!!; (then the Target shopping list resumes) spray starch; tweezers. Apparently my pen ran out of ink at the last, so the word “tweezers” is scratched deeply into the paper. As if it were actually written with a pair of tweezers.

    I’d like to spare my kids from handling actual documentation of the nuts-and-bolts machinery of their Mama’s particular brand of goofy.

    “Maybe I should’ve thought about that before I had kids,” you say? How many parents out there have ever been on the receiving end of that one? What I love most is when the mighty “should-a” sword is wielded by Those Who Are Childless. Particularly those who are Childless By Choice. Because, when a CBC nails you with a “should-a,” the implicit suggestion is that not only should you feel extra crispy crappy about whatever current conundrum that you’re in—but furthermore, you should also pat the CBC on the back for having the presence of mind not to get knocked up.

    This has been on my mind lately because my daughter is now roughly the same age that I was when I was pregnant with her. She’s also got a pal who is pregnant and facing some tough decisions. This isn’t the first pal of hers to become a young mother. I thought my heart would stop a few years ago when Amanda came home from a slumber party with the news that one of the young party guests was expecting. I’d met the girl in passing. She was easy to remember because she was so pretty and outgoing. She was also fourteen. I’ll admit that my first instinct was to tug the reins hard and never let my daughter see this girl again. Like it or not, our peer groups help define our belief systems and our societal dance steps. This is true whether you’re forty or fourteen. This stance was more than a bit hypocritical on my part, because I remember all too well the isolation of what it was like to be young and pregnant.

    In the hot summer of ’88, I was ready to drop. I’d moved back in with my parents so I could be close to help when the time came. I ran into an old classmate and her mother at the corner convenience store. My old pal talked to me animatedly about what was going on in her life, and didn’t really ask about mine. That was pretty weird, right? I mean, talk about the elephant in the room. We said our goodbyes and I walked next door to the Video Update. I was obscured by one of those giant cardboard cutouts so when my pal and her mother walked in—talking animatedly about running into me—they didn’t realize I could hear them. What stands out for me to this day is the breezy statement: “Well, she’s ruined her life, and now she’s probably going to ruin that poor kid’s life, too.” So good to know those stand-up folks are out there, ready to exercise their index finger muscles and point.

    I’ve got a friend, Terry, who once told me that she thought all people should have to obtain a license to procreate. I asked her whether she thought this license should be a four-year kind of a deal that expires on your birthday, or could you apply for and secure a seasonal pass?

    Under Terry’s rules, my kids wouldn’t exist—at least, not as they are now. And that would be a damn shame, because they are terrific. There’s no fill-in-the-blank space for this in my will, but, if there were, it would be: My greatest earthly treasure is that my kids love me. May you all be so rich.

    Writer, performer, and femme fatale Colleen Kruse can be reached at colleen at rakemag dot com.

  • Walking the Line

    After winning the DFL endorsement at the Fifth Congressional District Convention in May, Keith Ellison has come closer than any black person (or Native American, Latino, Hmong, or Somali, for that matter), to representing Minnesota in Congress. If he wins the September 12 primary in the overwhelmingly Democratic Minneapolis, about the only thing that could keep him from taking Martin Sabo’s seat come January 2007 would be, in the words of the old saw, getting caught in bed with a live boy or a dead girl. The primary is his to lose—and opponents Mike Erlandson (current Congressman Martin Sabo’s chief of staff), former State Senator Ember Reichgott Junge, and Minneapolis City Councilmember Paul Ostrow all know that.

    And yet, that is not such a far-fetched possibility. His past ties to Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam, the unpaid parking tickets, and the public hand slaps for failing to follow campaign financial-disclosure rules have certainly given his detractors something to work with.

    Ellison was born in Detroit in 1963. The middle child in a family of five boys, he was raised in what he calls a “very Catholic family” by parents who expected their sons to achieve. Ellison’s mother, Clida Cora Martinez Ellison, who was born and raised in Jim Crow Louisiana, was a social worker who encouraged her boys to also be politically active. After graduating from Wayne State University, where he converted to Islam, Ellison went to the University of Minnesota Law School. He candidly admits he took pleasure there in “shaking people out of their zone of comfort” and sometimes said and did things for their “shock value,” such as writing what some considered racially inflammatory columns for the Minnesota Daily under the pseudonym of “Keith Hakim.”

    Ellison has a number of things going for him, starting with the most obvious—he is the endorsed candidate in a primary election. He sits very comfortably at the same spot on the political spectrum as most of the DFL party faithful who are most likely to turn out and vote in a primary. And, by virtually all accounts, he was a conscientious state legislator. Beyond that, he is the only non-white candidate facing three other Democrats who are political and demographic clones of one another. In essence, they are fighting over the same pool of chardonnay-and-Brie white liberals. This is a state that loves “firsts” and “onlys”—therefore, the chance to send Minnesota’s first African-American to Congress, where he will be the only Muslim, is something to die for in this recognition-starved state. Face it—since Paul Wellstone’s death, has any Minnesota politician really made a national splash for anything other than bad-mouthing Kofi Annan or shutting down his office in reaction to an anthrax scare?

    And yet, if I were Ellison, I would be a tad concerned about the underwhelming response from the African-American political community. I spoke with a number of well-connected black politicians who said that Ellison has to do some fence mending “right quick” to ensure a strong black turnout. Former Fifth Ward City Council Member Natalie Johnson-Lee had this to say about Ellison. “Keith is a smart, driven, very ambitious, bordering-on-arrogant kind of guy. Many in the African-American community who actually turn up to vote will likely vote for him. But—and this is key—how hard those same individuals are willing to campaign for him and how deep they are willing to dig into their pockets to support him financially … that’s another question. I wish him the best.”

    Between now and primary day, Ellison must do these three things: convince the Lake of the Isles-Lake Calhoun-Linden Hills crowd that he is a person of integrity who does not see himself above the law; re-energize black people about his candidacy; and make sure that the delegates who showed him the love in May do not get a case of buyer’s remorse in September. If he does, he should win by a comfortable margin. However, those three factors will not mean squat if there are any more credible allegations about Ellison. Should any more bad news about Ellison surface—particularly if it comes from anybody but Ellison himself—then stick a fork in him, because he will be done, and rightfully so.

    Clinton Collins, Jr. is a Minneapolis lawyer and ABC Radio commentator. You can reach him at ccollins at collinslawfirm dot com.

  • Diamond in the Bluffs

    Wabasha is a mighty fine place to see an eagle. The city is a ninety-minute drive south of Minneapolis on U.S. Highway 61—yes, Dylan’s Highway 61—one of several old settlements wedged between the five-hundred-foot bluffs and the Mississippi River, built in deference to the commanding geography. Originally established as a fur-trading post in the 1820s, Wabasha was platted as a town in 1854, four years before Minnesota was incorporated, and named after Wapashaw, a Dakota Indian chief. The same scenery that drew early settlers—the montage of backwaters, the tall prairie grass and diverse wildlife, the steamboats docking along the river, and, of course, the eagle’s nests—is what keeps tourism and consequently the city’s economic base stable today.

    Not surprisingly, perhaps, the national bird also became Wabasha’s mascot, and it’s hard to imagine it featured more prominently around town. Eagles are painted on park benches, on storefront windows and shelves; they glower from the bumpers of trucks and are carved into tree trunks set by the river. The city’s annual festival is named Eagle Days. The local java hut is called Eagle’s Nest Coffee House.

    If you aren’t fortunate enough to spot live eagles against nature’s backdrop, three of them reside at the National Eagle Center downtown, which is staffed by tour guides who teem with facts and trivia related to the birds. On a recent Saturday afternoon, as a tattooed Eagle Center guide led a small group through the museum’s exhibits, one visitor asked about the best time to view eagles.

    “Winter is good,” replied the guide, standing next to a wall-sized photograph of nearly fifty eagles perched in a single area, among a few trees. “But you know, it seems like they’re always around.”

    Still, there’s more to Wabasha than eagles, as the locals like to say. At a kimono shop called Wind Whisper West, one can peruse more than two thousand kimonos for sale and tour a private collection of wedding kimonos. There’s Book Cliffs, a used bookstore with an extensive selection of local histories as well as an amiable live-in mutt named Greta, who relishes her role as browsing companion. There’s the Arrowhead Bluffs Museum, with thousands of relics on display from the period when the Dakota Indians lived on the land, cultivating wild rice and hunting buffalo.

    Food options include the upscale Nosh, with Mediterranean and French-influenced cuisine; a greasy spoon called the River Town Café; Chinese from the Fresh Wok; or sandwiches from the Little Jo Flour Mill and Bakery, which has back-porch seating on the river. If you’re planning an overnight visit, you can reserve one of five cats (Ginger and Arnold are popular choices) with your room at the Historic Anderson House, the oldest continually running hotel in the state. Or try the swanky, extended-stay lofts downtown—named, of course, Eagles on the River.