The Rake Magazine

Category: Article

  • Rake Appeal { Show and Tell

    With its lion’s head door knocker and elegant front walk, Robyn Waters’ home in Deephaven is a world away from rural Minnesota, where she grew up attending one of the state’s last one-room schoolhouses. Waters herself has come quite a long way from the little girl who used to tie Lord Hathaway, her tri-color Paint horse, to the merry-go-round every morning after riding him to school. Armed with thirty years of service at Target Corporation, culminating in her appointment to vice president of trend, design, and product development, Waters embarked on the consulting phase of her career in 2002, not just as a run-of-the-mill “trendspotter,” but rather a full-fledged “trendmaster.”

    “It’s not about predicting the next trend,” Waters explained. “A trendmaster gives you the thirty-thousand-foot view from above—she tells you what the trend means.” And right now, the trend Waters is busy defining is paradox—the subject of her forthcoming book. “Look at the Hummer and the Mini,” she said, referring to the models she named in the title of her book. “Cars are getting bigger and smaller. It’s yin and yang.” Waters gestured toward a carving of the black-and-white symbol on her coffee table. Waters’ home is a trove of rare and eclectic objects from her travels around the world. She embraces paradox—devoting her life to analyzing the future while surrounding herself with relics from the past. “It all ties to my fascination with symbols, discovering the story behind the story.”

    A tour through the trendmaster’s house revealed other ways in which Waters lives out her trend theories. A sandstone bust from Cambodia was carved by young landmine victims—an example, she said, of “social capitalism.” The antique apothecary chest on which it sat demonstrated how “everything old is new again.”

    A stunning pair of hand-painted waist-high statues represented Waters’ interpretation of Maslow’s hierarchy of need, and her place in that order. “When you get to the top, you ask yourself what really matters. All of my things have meaning. They’re more than decorations … I bought these statues in Udaipur, India, and they represent a Hindu feast day, when the wealthy would bring offerings to the Rajistani—the lower castes—and wash their feet. That resonated with me.”

    Bright red tassels are attached to the knob of every door in Waters’ home. When asked for their story, the trendmaster paused. “Actually,” she said, cracking a smile, “I found those at Target.”

  • Rake Appeal { Sweet Spot

    There’s enough history in Minnehaha Park’s 193 acres that it feels worthy of a Ken Burns documentary film. There’s the home of the first permanent settler west of the Mississippi—the transplanted John H. Stevens house. Originally built around 1850, it was in this house that the word “Minneapolis” was first tossed around. The Pergola Garden drips with flora native to the area, and there’s even a replica of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s home in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

    Those wanting to skip the history lesson can slip into the Sea Salt restaurant, a slick place that’s open seasonally, to load up on shrimp tacos or Sebastian Joe’s ice cream—and then head over to the band shell for an evening bluegrass concert.

    But the real magic remains at the falls.

    A stairway winds down into a tangle of greenery. You lose the sounds of the city even before losing sight of the banking planes and the brick towers of the Ford Plant to the east. More important, as you descend among the silver maples, you begin to see the waters “laugh and leap into the valley,” as Longfellow put it in his 1855 Song of Hiawatha. It was that poem that first lured pilgrims, including the likes of Mark Twain and Henry David Thoreau, to this place, and actually gave the falls its name. By 1894, a zoo was built on the park grounds. By 1922, tourist cabins were erected and the park’s Princess Station welcomed dozens of streetcars a day.

    Watching the water foam up, tasting the mist in the breeze, you’ve moved back in time—to a Minnesota devoid of mills, dams, or the Mall of America. Daily life in the Twin Cities offers few such opportunities to mingle with the ancient. Standing in the rush of water, hidden from the world above, it seems entirely plausible, as the creation story goes, that this is the spot where the mother of the earth gave birth to the Dakota people and that all the trees and surrounding grounds are indeed sacred.

    The park has many moods. There are sunny afternoons with crowds of picnickers; Hmong girls splashing in the creek; bevies of high-end bicycles locked to the wrought iron fences along the gorge; and cool, cloudy mornings when walking along the creek is a solitary pursuit, met only by the occasional heron, clutch of bachelor ducks, or jogger.

    Several years ago, the parks department put up fences to discourage intrepid trailblazers from clambering up to and even behind the waterfall. This spring, the stairway, which dates back to the New Deal WPA era, got a fresh coat of concrete. But even if you can no longer stick your hand in the froth, there’s still something a little illicit about disappearing in the woods, about the rush of all that water around you. The falls remain an icon, a vision of what the world was before us—and a sense that, should it come to pass, the world would do just fine without us.

  • Hard Look, Tender Touch

    “One thing I would never photograph,” Diane Arbus once wrote, “is dogs lying in the mud.” 

    That’s an odd statement coming from a woman who looked so unflinchingly at the weird world around her. Technically there may not be any photographs of dogs lying in the mud in Revelations, the vast retrospective of the photographer’s work that is currently on display at Walker Art Center, but there are certainly scads of the portraits that many have long viewed as degraded human variants of Arbus’ one supposedly forbidden image.

    Celebrated and influential as her work has been, those critics contend that Arbus was a cold and exploitive stalker of human freaks and garden-variety ugliness, a photographer who prowled human peripheries in search of the sordid and the sensational, and kept probing until she exposed the vulnerabilities and flaws in her subjects.

    While Arbus was a master at exploring human fault lines, she also succeeded in demonstrating that the family of man is weirder, more wondrous, and multifarious than most of us can begin to imagine. Looking at her photographs, you often have the feeling that what we have all agreed to call human beings can’t possibly be a single species. Like so many other great artists, Arbus understood that we live both bundled in and surrounded by mysteries.

    Much of the blame for the misinterpretations and misapprehensions that have dogged Arbus’ work lies in the psychoanalytic evaluations that flourished in the wake of her 1971 suicide. The criticisms tend to focus on her portraits of sideshow performers, transvestites, and denizens of rundown nudist camps or mental institutions, as well as ordinary people at moments that always, as Arbus captures them, appear to convey unattractive discomfort or utter cluelessness. Her own term for many of her subjects—“singular people”—is both revealing and useful. Although these photos still cast a powerful spell, they have mostly lost their ability to truly shock, eclipsed as they have been by all manner of art (much of it influenced by Arbus) that has gone much further that Arbus ever did. Artists like Nan Goldin, Joel Peter Witkin, Stephen Shore, William Eggleston, and Alec Soth have carried on the quest for the ugliest American fringes of the strange and the purely mundane.

    What is not often explored is how Arbus’ working methods relied a great deal on trust and tenderness. Ample evidence of this is provided by the biographical and documentary thoroughness of the Revelations exhibition and its accompanying catalog. She cultivated relationships with the subjects of her photographs, and her fascination was virtually always balanced by real curiosity and compassion. Images like Santas at the Santa Claus School, Albion, N.Y. 1964, or A Jewish couple dancing, N.Y.C. 1963 show that Arbus also had a marvelous eye for quintessential American tableaus and moments. Some of the most striking and lovely works in the retrospective have little in common with Arbus’ well-publicized taxonomy of American freaks—other than an unerring feel for the archetypically forlorn. Check out, for instance, Xmas Tree in a Living Room, Levittown, L.I. 1963, A Castle in Disneyland, Cal. 1962, Clouds on a Screen at a Drive-in, N.J. 1960, or A House on a Hill, Hollywood, Cal. 1963.

    For a photographer who produced so many widely recognized images, Arbus’ huge body of work has been almost shamefully underexposed. Before Revelations, and the sprawling catalog that accompanies the exhibition, monographs and museum shows were few and far between. Revelations, whose Walker appearance is the last stop on a tour that began more than two years ago in San Francisco, is only Arbus’ second solo museum retrospective; the first, also posthumous, took place almost thirty-five years ago at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. During the photographer’s lifetime she had just one museum exhibition, New Documents, in 1967 (also at MoMA), which she shared with Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander. In the years since her death, there have been only three major published monographs of her work—1972’s Diane Arbus, the book that established the relatively small number of images for which she is most widely known; 1984’s Magazine Work; and 1995’s Untitled, her series of photographs taken at institutions for the mentally disabled.

    Similary, exhaustive biographical information has been even harder to come by. The only full-scale look at Arbus’ life was Patricia Bosworth’s sketchy and mostly unsatisfying Diane Arbus, the 1984 biography that was written without access to the photographer’s archives and without cooperation from her estate or many of her closest friends and family members.

    Revelations—both the show and the book—fills in the blanks, and then some. Featuring nearly two hundred photos (many of which have not been previously exhibited), contact sheets, notes, letters, source materials, an exhaustive chronology, and even some of the contents of the photographer’s library and studio, Revelations offers a sprawling look at the life and career of a woman who apparently knew from a very early age what she was looking for and, more importantly, what she was looking at. Reading her notes, diaries, and letters also leaves little doubt that Arbus understood exactly what she had gotten herself into.

    “There are and have been and will be an infinite number of things on earth,” she wrote in a high school paper on Plato. “Individuals all different, all wanting different things, all loving different things, all looking different. Everything that has been on earth has been different from any other thing. That is what I love: the differentness, the uniqueness of all things and the importance of life … I see something that seems wonderful; I see the divineness in ordinary things.”

    There, in the awkward, exuberant prose of a weird teenager, is the essential, unwavering mission statement that would guide Arbus’ career. She would also later claim, “I really believe there are things which nobody would see unless I photographed them.”

    She was absolutely right about that; most of us go through life looking through or around the sorts of things Arbus routinely sought out and scrutinized through the lens of her camera. She was a fearless gawker, a master of the hard stare, and there’s never anything furtive in her approach—no evasion, no flinching or turning away. It’s one thing, of course, to look unflinchingly at someone strange, but Arbus had a gift for getting her subjects to look back at her. In many of her photographs, in fact, you have the sense that these people saw right through her and knew exactly what she was looking for. “I don’t press the shutter,” Arbus once said. “The image does. And it’s like getting gently clobbered.” The photographs that make up Revelations are the afterlife and aftershocks of that clobbering. Everything about most of her photographs, you have to imagine, was difficult—the search, the logistics, the process and meticulous printing, and, most particularly, the moments themselves, which are never quite Cartier-Bresson’s Decisive Moment. They are something more slippery and incidental and subject to metamorphosis at shutter speed: brief encounters in that gray, expansive territory between fateful decisions and fate itself.

  • Holiday in Albania

    Last summer, Ismail Kadare was awarded the first-ever Man Booker International Prize, beating out Muriel Spark, Doris Lessing, and Ian McEwan. I felt a bit smug about having discovered the Albanian author many years before, in the late 1980s. At Hungry Mind Bookstore in St. Paul, where I was working at the time, no one bought books by this little-known writer, from a country I could barely find on a map. But then my brother loaned me a copy of Kadare’s Chronicle in Stone, a semi-autobiographical novel about growing up in the remote villages of the forgotten country of the Balkans. In it, Kadare showed how bizarre tribal laws kept religion in check among a fiercely proud population made up mostly of Muslims, as well as Orthodox Christians and Catholics—while also fomenting vendettas that endured for generations. The rigid rule of monarchists, Stalinists, or fascists pales in comparison with these Albanian blood feuds.

    I was hooked and have since devoured Kadare’s other hard-to-find novels. Broken April, published in 1998, used as a backdrop those generations of familial battles that, in a country cut off from the rest of Europe, continued well into the twentieth century and the reign of King Zog I, the tribal king with the space-alien name, from 1928 to 1939. In 1938, Zog had Mussolini’s son-in-law as the best man at his wedding to Princess Geraldine, the “White Rose of Hungary.” As a wedding gift, Mussolini gave the king and his bride a yacht with an Italian crew that tried but failed to kidnap Zog on his honeymoon.

    Italy eventually annexed Albania in April of 1939, and while Italian troops were greeted with cheers from the Albanians, Mussolini had the Italian press publicize the event as a fantastic military victory for the Fascist forces. The Italian public went wild over Il Duce’s triumph, and Zog looted the treasury on his way out. When he checked into the London Ritz Hotel, a porter asked him what was in his bags that made them so heavy. “Gold,” Zog famously replied.

    But even after Zog’s abdication, little Albania couldn’t oust its homegrown communist tyrants, as most other Eastern European countries had by 1989. Many of Kadare’s books, such as The Concert, give a glimpse into this complete communist state and how its dictator of forty years, Enver Hoxha, who followed Zog in power after the war, played Mao and Stalin off each other and maintained the most repressive government in Europe, comparable only to North Korea.

    Spurred by the tales Kadare told of his lost country, I decided to travel to the darkest Albania to meet the author. Like awkward subtitles of foreign films, the sometimes simplistic translations of Kadare’s books only piqued my interest in what seemed like an undiscovered and closed world. I wanted to see for myself the towns made of stone where generations of vendettas and clan loyalty made Sicily’s Cosa Nostra look modern and welcoming, like a group of Rotarians. Americans were unwelcome and the only way into the country, I found out, was through an obscure Greek bus-tour company.

    Our bus left Thessaloniki, winding through desolate dirt roads over empty mountains. Guard houses sat atop every hill in the distance. At that time, an average of five Albanians a day were shot trying to flee the country, and their corpses flung into town squares as a warning. I soon realized that the inspiration for many of Kadare’s stories—vicious but often faceless government oppression—was alive and well in his homeland.

    At the remote border post into eastern Albania, officials rifled through suitcases and confiscated magazines and picture books. A Greek man whispered that photos from the outside world were illegal as one guard paged through a Bible and another studied glossy centerfolds of Greek starlets in search of propaganda. Religion was outlawed, too, making Albania the only officially atheistic country in the world. Also verboten: kissing in public, dogs, foreign music, beards (border guards had orders to shave any visitors with facial hair), candy and gum, and cars (except those for government business). As we drove onward, people who were hunched over in the fields stood up and waved, as if they’d never seen a bus before.

    All the roadside trees had been chopped down, as Hoxha, like Zog before him, had a particular fear of snipers. Among the stumps, cement bunkers lined the roads about every hundred feet—the dictator’s investment to protect the country from some imminent attack and evidence of his paranoia.

    The Successor, from 2003, shines light on Hoxha and his possible motives in the unsolved assassination of his Number Two, known throughout Albania as the “successor.” High-ranking members of Albania’s communist party, who apparently shared Hoxha’s paranoia of insurrection, dug secret escape tunnels from their houses in the capital of Tirana. Theories abound in this real-life mystery and probable cover-up, with the shadows of Mao and other tyrants eclipsing the truth. Kadare’s Cold War whodunit opens the curtain to reveal Eastern European intrigue and the subsequent official government version of events, whitewashed for consumption by the masses.

    When we reached Korçë, five hundred people surrounded our bus; we were the first foreigners in that town since the 1940s. I handed out ballpoint pens and a fellow tourist gave some teenagers a Bic lighter after demonstrating how to use it. A boy flicked a flame to life and held it aloft as his friends clapped in awe.

    The stores were empty. A line formed around the block outside a boarded-up, padlocked shop; rumor was that milk would be delivered at midnight. I asked our guide how I could meet Ismail Kadare. Impossible! He replied. Our tour only had permission to visit two towns on the Greek border. Perhaps as consolation, he led me to the town bookshop. Its window displayed the dust jackets for a French-Albanian dictionary and a remedial physics book; no one had seen the actual books in years.

    The bookstore clerk, too, was aghast when I asked for Ismail Kadare’s books. He caught the eye of the guide waiting outside and stood up straight. A shipment of Kadare’s books was expected any day—but not today. Instead, he suggested I purchase the twenty-plus volumes of speeches of Comrade Enver Hoxha, which was on special; apparently, the forward-looking autocrat’s memoirs made a decent substitute for firewood, since most of the trees were gone.

    The clerk seemed to convey that Kadare’s novels were off-limits under the repressive regime, though of course everyone knew them. The people were starved for information and stories that weren’t burdened with purveying government propaganda, and Kadare provided page-turners without glossy fairy-tale endings. Even though the prolific author’s works are relegated to the fiction aisle in American bookstores, these are the only true and readable windows into this land of secrets.

    The next year, images of Albanians toppling statues of Enver Hoxha were transmitted across the globe. I made another attempt to visit Kadare in Gjirokastër, the mountain town where he was born and grew up. Thanks to a faxed letter from the prosecutor general of Albania (who had visited Minnesota to learn about our legal system through the Minnesota Lawyers International Human Rights Committee), I acquired a visa at the Albanian embassy in Athens, a dingy, smoke-filled efficiency apartment in a rundown suburb. From Tirana, I hopped a bus south to Berat and then on to Gjirokastër. In the highest point of the walled city stood stone houses, headless minarets, and once-outlawed church ruins that now served as playgrounds. On a distant mountainside, “ENVER” was spelled out in three-hundred-foot letters formed by painted stones; the deceased leader had hailed from the same town as the country’s most famous writer.

    I poked my head inside a beautiful stone three-story villa where royalty, perhaps even King Zog’s relatives, had probably stayed. Grizzled men chain-smoked and took shots of raki. I asked if anyone knew where Ismail Kadare lived. They didn’t understand, but tried to sell me the villa for three thousand dollars.

    A fifteen-year-old boy chimed in that Kadare left as soon as he could, probably for Paris. “Anyone that can leave Albania, does.” In fact, this boy had already walked to Athens twice—eight days and eight nights with only three hours of sleep per night—and had been returned both times.

    I was crushed to find out that Kadare had left this country—his muse—for greener pastures, and I cut short my trip (but not before succumbing to a vicious bout of food poisoning).

    I eventually did meet the author, but not until 1997, by which time the already-feeble Albanian economy had collapsed and the influx of guns during the Balkan War had made the country Europe’s center for weapons—and white slave trade. That year, I traveled to Frankfurt for the annual Frankfurter Buchmesse book show, the world’s largest trade show, filling eight convention halls. The Albanian booths were easily identified by the pall of cigarette smoke, in flagrant violation of the “Rauchen Verboten!” signs everywhere. A ring of men hovered around a table littered with shot glasses and a large bottle of Jack Daniels. When I asked about Ismail Kadare, they looked me over suspiciously.

    One stubbed out his cigarette and said, “I’m his agent. What do you want with him?” I explained that I was a fan and had even traveled to Albania to interview him. “You went to Albania? No foreigners go to Albania.” He squinted at me almost menacingly and scribbled something on a scrap of paper. He handed it to me and commanded, “Meet us at our hotel at 11 p.m. tonight. Don’t be late.”

    I went to a cafeteria in the building next door to get a cup of coffee and ponder how this guy planned to swindle me. There, just a few tables away from me, sitting alone and eating a würstel and sauerkraut, was Ismail Kadare; he was surprised that I recognized him from his dust-jacket photo. I told him I had visited his hometown, and he wanted to hear about the situation there. I ended up relating the story of my two unforgettable trips. He shook his head. “There is much to tell about Albania. The problem is, who wants to listen?”

  • A Lesson in Lifesaving

    As the babysitter gathers up her schoolbooks and coat, William’s wife whispers—he catches the faint musk of bourbon still on her breath—that she will wait up for him while he drives the girl home. Then she winks, sort of. Gina has never been able to close just one eye without contorting her entire face. Tonight, the man finds it exhilaratingly lewd.

    “All set,” Cindy announces, waiting by the front door. “Oh, Mrs. Stevenson, I washed the dishes you left in the sink.”

    Gina smiles sweetly at the sixteen-year-old. “You didn’t have to do that.”

    “It’s OK,” the teenager assures her, “I thought you wouldn’t want Mr. Stevenson coming home to a dirty kitchen.”

    Gina’s smile curdles. “It was just the dishes from the kids’ dinner.”

    “Yes, ma’am, it wasn’t any trouble.”

    As they back out of the driveway, the man tells the girl, “That was very nice of you, Cindy, doing the dishes.” He has trouble with the string of d’s at the end of the sentence, his tongue still sticky from all the liquor he has drunk tonight.

    “It’s the least I can do,” she says firmly, nodding her head.

    “Watching those kids is job enough.”

    “Billy and Eileen? They’re angels.” Then she adds, “They look just like you, you know.”

    “And I thought you liked the way they look,” he jokes.

    “Oh, I do.” The girl sighs. “They’re lucky to have a father like you.”

    There’s something about the way she says it that makes him ask, “But you’re lucky, too, aren’t you?”

    “You mean, to have my father?” She turns to the window, where dark houses whisk past, one after another.

    “He seems very nice—at least at the bank when I see him.”

    The girl is still looking out the window. “Do you ever wonder what’s going on inside other people’s houses?”

    He thinks she is changing the subject. “Sure, sometimes. Especially at night if there’s just one light on.”

    “It would surprise you,” she says weakly.

    The man smiles to himself. “How would you know?”

    Her voice is almost a whisper. “What goes on in our house would surprise you.”

    He stops smiling. He looks at the girl and sees the streak of a tear glistening in the light of a passing streetlamp.

    He doesn’t really want to hear what he guesses his babysitter is going to tell him about what goes on in her house. But she is crying now, and so he eases the car to a stop along the curb of the deserted street and turns off the motor.

    He stares straight ahead. “Look,” he tells her, slurring his words, “if you need a man to talk to your father about whatever … ”

    The girl is wiping her eyes. “I’ll get in trouble if I say anything.”

    “Well, you haven’t said anything. I’m just offering, that’s all.”

    “You’re a real lifesaver, Mr. Stevenson.”

    The gratitude in her voice is obvious. He feels good about himself, about being a man who can protect the weak. “Actually, I used to teach lifesaving. For the Red Cross. I trained lifeguards when I was young.”

    “Did you teach mouth-to-mouth?”

    “Sure. Mouth-to-mouth, inverted scissors kick, fireman’s carry—we taught everything. Everything you’d need to save a person.”

    “But it must have been yucky, mouth-to-mouth with all those boys.”

    “I’ll tell you a secret: I only practiced resuscitation with the girls.” He smiles sheepishly and adds, “The pretty girls.”

    “I bet they must have waited in line to practice with you.”

    “Well, maybe. It was a long time ago.”

    “Teach me,” the girl insists.

    “Now?”

    “Yeah. What if I’m babysitting someplace with a pool and one of the children falls in and drowns? I’ve got to be able to revive the kid before the parents come home.”

    He is thinking like a man who is a great deal drunker than he actually is. “That’s true,” he agrees, nodding. “Babysitters ought to know artificial respiration—and CPR, too.”

    The teenager unbuckles her seatbelt and sprawls across the leather bench of the Crown Victoria, her body limp as a suicide dragged from the sea, her head lolling in his lap, her mouth jutting open, her eyes closed.

    “What are you doing?” She has startled him.

    Cindy opens her eyes. “Come on, show me how to do it.” She closes her eyes again and lets her mouth fall open.

    The man doesn’t allow himself to think about what he is doing, what it would look like if someone found them parked on this dark street. Instead, he concentrates on the mechanics of saving the drowned. Though he is, in fact, close to panic, he bends stiffly, adjusting her head beside the steering wheel, lifting her chin. “In goes the good air,” he whispers just above her face. Clamping her nostrils shut with finger and thumb, he covers her mouth with his own and exhales. Even after all these years, he has remembered to put his hand on her chest to check whether her lungs are expanding with his breath. Yes, there’s no blockage, he thinks with unnecessary relief. It still thrills him when it works. Barely above her lips, he whispers, “Out goes the bad air,” as she exhales his breath, stale with liquor, back into his face.

    “That’s cool,” she squeals, her eyes springing open. “Let me try.”

    “Oh, you don’t want to do that,” he demurs.

    She is on her knees now on the front seat, her back to the windshield. “Lean your head,” she insists.

    He tries to keep thinking about this as a lifesaving lesson, so he does as she instructs. Her delicate finger and thumb close around his nostrils beneath his unblinking eyes. Involuntarily, his mouth gapes open to breathe. That quickly, she clamps her lips over his. Her mouth is so small, he has to help her, pursing his lips so she can cover him. He tastes her hot, fresh breath as she empties herself into him. He takes her hand and places it on his chest.

    Suddenly, he feels her tongue flickering between his lips. Her slender hand has slipped between the buttons of his shirt and rubs the thick hair on his chest.

    He bats away the hand holding the nostrils so he can get a breath. A deep, serrated purr vibrates through him; he realizes it is coming from the girl. Grabbing her by the shoulders, he pulls her away and back toward her own seat. As her hand jerks free of his shirt, one of the buttons pops loose, but he does not notice. He is too busy struggling to keep Cindy from embracing him.

    “Oh, Mr. Stevenson, let me make you happy.” She sounds a dozen years older.

    “Cindy, stop it.”

    “But—”

    “No buts.”

    The girl pouts, “You kissed me first.”

    “No, I didn’t.” He stops himself from adding, “You’re the one who kissed me first.” Instead, now achingly sober, he explains that he was not kissing her; he was teaching her artificial respiration.

    It sounds so ludicrous, Cindy looks at him and they both start to laugh.

    “Maybe you’d better take me home,” she says.

    He starts the car. “Yeah, everyone will be worried.”

    Neither says anything else, but then when they pull up, a few blocks away, in front of her house, the girl turns to the man and asks, shyly, “Did you mean what you said about talking to my father?”

    “Of course,” he assures her. He had forgotten all about that. “Whenever you want.”

    Cindy gets out of the car, but before she closes the door, she leans back in. “You’re sweet,” she tells him, smiling.

    It’s going to be all right, he thinks as he watches the teenager climb the steps onto her porch.

    “You’re missing a button,” Gina remarks when William walks into the bedroom. It’s the first thing out of her mouth.

    He looks down at the rumpled cloth.

    “Come here,” she tells him. “You didn’t go out like that tonight, did you?”

    “I don’t know. Maybe.”

    She lifts the shirt just above the missing button. “I don’t think so,” she says pensively. “I would have noticed.”

    He shrugs, grateful that she hasn’t noticed how long it has taken him to drive the babysitter home.

    “And where have you been? Cindy’s house is just on the other side of the highway, isn’t it?”

    “You know, now I remember. The button came off during dinner.”

    “So where is it?”

    He smiles, waiting for the answer to occur to him. “I couldn’t exactly go crawling around under the table looking for it.” Gina seems about to ask another question, so he adds, “Now, how about if I pop a few of your buttons?”

    The woman giggles.

    He is relieved. His wife is still drunk.

    The next morning, as she does every Saturday morning, Gina drives the kids to their Suzuki lesson at Mrs. O’Neil’s house. Each child carries a miniature violin in a small black case; their mother, too, carries a violin. All week, the trio has practiced, over and over again, the Suzuki repertoire: “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” “Go Tell Aunt Rhody,” and “Long, Long Ago.” Today they will try Dr. Suzuki’s “Perpetual Motion” for the first time.

    When the bell rings, William thinks somebody has forgotten something. He runs downstairs shouting, “Use your key.” But when he twists the dead bolt with one hand and the doorknob with the other, he finds Cindy standing on the steps. Behind the teenager, her bicycle lies sprawled on the lawn.

    “Hi, it’s me.”

    “What are you doing here? Did you forget something last night?” He still imagines this has got to do with forgetting something.

    “I wanted to talk to you.” The girl shifts from one foot to the other. “About what we talked about.”

    At first he thinks she means the lifesaving lesson. Then he remembers the other thing. “Oh, yeah,” he says, nodding, “sure.” He scans the street. Nobody is outside. “Come in, come in.”

    The girl knows the house; she heads straight for the kitchen. The man, wearing only a robe, follows her. He had been padding around the bedroom after his shower when the bell rang.

    The breakfast dishes are still on the table. “Mrs. Stevenson must have been running late,” he apologizes.

    “It’s OK,” Cindy assures him. “The kids told me they had a music lesson this morning.” She begins to clear the table, carrying the dishes to the sink. When he objects, the girl shakes her head. “I don’t mind.”

    He pulls out a chair and watches her rinse the plates. “You said you would talk with Daddy,” she reminds him. “I don’t know who else to go to.”

    He wishes he had already had his coffee. “But what is it I’m supposed to talk to him about?” He doesn’t want to sound like he is chickening out. “I mean, what is it exactly you want me to say?”

    The girl wipes her hands on a dishcloth and turns to him. Behind her, the water is still running. “Tell him you know what’s going on—and it’s got to stop.”

    “But what’s got to stop?”

    Her clothes are too small for her; her tight little T-shirt doesn’t even reach the top of her shorts. She wraps one leg around the other and looks away. “You know what,” she whispers.

    “But, Cindy—”

    She bursts into tears, her body wracked with wailing. He has never seen anyone cry like this before. Choking on hoarse sobs, she sinks down until her arms clutch her knees to her face.

    It breaks his heart to see her weep so wretchedly, but after last night, he knows he has to be cautious. He crouches next to her, holding his robe closed with one hand, and gingerly pats her on the shoulder, repeating over and over again, “It’s OK, it’s OK.”

    The girl rocks herself from side to side. “What am I going to do?” she manages between sobs. “What am I going to do?”

    The poor kid, he thinks. He lets his arm squeeze her a little tighter. “We’ll think of something,” he promises.

    She leans her head against his chest. “I don’t know what I’d do without you, Mr. Stevenson,” she stammers, calming down.

    “I’ll talk to him. We’ll straighten this out.”

    Helping her to her feet, he shuts off the water that has been gurgling down the drain the whole time.

    Cindy wipes the tears from her eyes, like a child, with the heels of her hands. “I’ll finish the dishes,” she says, taking a deep breath.

    “No, don’t be silly,” he tells her. “I’ll finish them.”

    She gives him a shy smile. “And you’ll talk to Daddy.”

    “Sure, on Monday. I’ll stop by the bank.”

    “Good,” she says. “Tell him, ‘No more.’ ”

    “I will. I promise. Now you go on and let me clean this house.”

    The girl laughs. “That’s not a man’s job.” By the time she finally leaves, the sink is empty, and the table has been sponged.

    Half an hour later, when Billy and Eileen come bursting in, banging their violin cases against the chairs as they run to their father, he is finishing his coffee and reading the paper.

    “Oh, you sweetheart,” his wife calls from the door, her violin case and two grocery bags bundled in her arms, “you cleaned the kitchen.”

  • The Dog's Lover

    I log onto the Target website, type the keywords “Target stuffed dog” and wait for the page to load. She’s not there. The white bull terrier with the red bull’s-eye around her eye, the one in the jaunty, red-and-white knit cap, is no longer available.

    “Great,” I mutter. Now I’ll have to stalk toy stores until I find a suitable stuffed dog. It’s hell being Hank’s pimp. Hank is my undersized, oversexed Jack Russell terrier, and I have learned in the eight years we’ve been together that we’re all better off if Hank has a girlfriend. Through the years, I’ve supplied him with an array of stuffed lovers, including a mother and her two pups and a pillow-style hound dog, before hitting upon the Target dog, whose most alluring charm is her stiff back. Hank doesn’t like a girl who just lies there like a pillow.

    I know Hank is not unique in his fetish for stuffed animals, but he’s elevated it to an art form. The first time Hank dragged a toy dog from our daughter’s bed and performed a lewd sexual act in front of the television, my husband, Ed, and I watched in stunned silence. When he was finished, he stood there panting with a goofy, but satisfied, look on his face. “I could use a cigarette,” my husband deadpanned.

    When the kids lived at home, Hank used to wait until they had friends over before dragging the current girlfriend in front of the television for his love fest. “Mom, he’s doing it again,” our sophisticated teen would wail. Hank, who was neutered at six months, humps his girlfriend two or three times a day. She’s called into service when he’s stressed, bored, and whenever his owners commingle. Which, I must admit, is less creepy than when he decided to join us for a threesome. “I don’t know how you’re able to lick my knee at the same time you’re doing all that other stuff, but it really turns me on,” I’d purr to my husband. Neither he, nor Hank, was amused.

    For two years in a row, when they were plentiful, I bought Hank a Target dog: one in the jaunty ski hat, the other in red long johns. We refer to them as the twins—one for the upstairs and one for downstairs. Both were immediately blinded, their ears half chewed off, and the fur on the back of their necks tramped down from the death grip Hank’s strong jaws have on them in case they try to escape.

    Surprisingly, Hank can be a considerate date, too. Occasionally, he tries to take his girlfriend out. When we lived in Denver and he had twenty-four-hour access to a doggie door, this posed a problem because his then-girlfriend was too large to fit through the door. I once watched for twenty minutes as he tried to help her out. He’d push her for a while and then squeeze around and try to pull her out. Finally he popped her through, and they spent a couple of hours basking in the sun. He alerted me, in that bossy way of his, when it was time to bring her back in, so I’d open the door.

    My other responsibility is to hide the twins in the hall closet every two weeks so the cleaning service doesn’t discover our dirty little secret. After we settle down for the evening in our clean house, Hank will remember the girls and demand I get up to let them out of the closet. And then we’re privy to a reunion worthy of a war hero returning from battle.

    I did try once to keep Hank on the straight and narrow, but he became so tense, so nervous, that I finally gave in and bought him another stuffed dog. The gratitude in his eyes was enough to make me his pimp for life. It could be worse, I suppose—he could have a thing for real-life bitches, and we’d go broke paying puppy support or be overrun with the pick of the litter. Plus, Hank’s live shows have curbed any desire to view adult entertainment on video or pay-per-view. The money we save keeps his harem well stocked.

  • Dave Alvin

    It only seems like the Turf Club is too small for the sound—and audience—Dave Alvin can generate. Actually, this scruffy and resilient little bar is a great place for a songwriter who has never asked for much in the way of attention, yet who also remains a dependable source of solace or entertainment (whichever you require at the time). Alvin’s natural gift for penning tuneful and expressive songs has taken him far and wide, from his rootsy early days with the Blasters, to his stint as the guitarist for X (and his ongoing role with the Knitters, X members’ country-rock side project), to a solo career that has merged his ear for blues, folk, country, and rock with the energy, anger, and hilarity of punk. Given his gig’s proximity to Independence Day, we’re crossing our fingers for the classic X number, “4th of July.” 1601 University Ave., St. Paul; 651-647-0486; www.turfclub.com

  • The Plastic Constellations with Tapes ’n Tapes

    Here’s a lineup showcasing the new sound of the Twin Cities rock scene that will have legions of fans and new converts scurrying home to write on their blogs, blissfully if also slightly hearing-impaired. The Plastic Constellations have been together since their days at Hopkins High School more than a decade ago, but the rock and roll is finally coming together for the guys on their third album, Crusades, which puts a polish on their anthemic howl while bearing the imprimatur of a hip indie label, Frenchkiss Records. Their upstart pals in Tapes ’n Tapes are harder to characterize. Their songs echo a profusion of indie heroes, but with such a short attention span for any and all of them, there’s little point in accusing them of being derivative—music-obsessed is more like it. 612-332-1775; www.first-avenue.com

  • The Illusion of Cooperation

    Diane Arbus, whose retrospective is now on view at Walker Art Center, used her exceptional technical skill as a fashion photographer to create a world inhabited by circus freaks, the mentally handicapped, nudists, giants and midgets, and, even more disturbing, “regular” people made up to go out on the town. Taken as a whole, this work creates a community without typical boundaries of race, social status, or physicality. With the unflinching, semi-nude self-portrait taken early in her career and included in the exhibit, Arbus planted herself firmly in this community. It’s shot into a mirror, and this mirror serves as a metaphor for the whole of her work. Her empathy is apparent as she holds the mirror of her camera up to all her subjects, and sees herself.

     Community is an elusive—and illusive—concept. The reality is tougher yet. It’s become an industry in this country to destroy any illusion of cooperation. Ann Coulter trashes the 9/11 housewives as political opportunists and then gloats on television that she did it to sell books. Al Franken calls conservatives lying liars, and sells lots of books to the other side. Instead of using his convention speech to embrace a common future for Minnesotans, Governor Tim Pawlenty takes the opportunity to demonize gays and people on welfare.

    Politics is now being played as a zero-sum game. There can only be winners and losers. Politicians like Jim Ramstad, who would reach across an aisle to fellow addict Patrick Kennedy, are the ones who are marginalized. Ramstad will always win his sensible political district, but he’ll never wield the big stick in Washington because he’s unwilling to use it to punish.

    This corrosive behavior is particularly evident in “virtual” communities. Think of fiction, where someone like Vince Flynn or Cormac McCarthy can act out violent fantasies (and, we hope, exorcize them) within the safety of the printed page. As readers, we can participate to a degree, either in killing the bad guys with Flynn, or being a bad guy with McCarthy. The only rules are in our head. Online, anything goes as well.

    Online, anyone can create fiction without the hard work and discipline displayed by real writers or artists. The lines between creator and consumer aren’t defined; anyone can be an idea killer. Any discussion that starts in a civil fashion can career off in any direction, and often does. A perfect example of this occurred on the online forum Mnspeak.com the other day (disclosure: my son owns Mnspeak) when, believe it or not, a discussion of Minneapolis’ crackdown on housing violations morphed almost immediately into a discussion of German prepositions. That digression was characterized by its benign nature. Others can degenerate into ad hominem attacks fueled by commenters who intentionally try to derail any civil discourse for the purpose of calling attention to themselves, or even to intentionally destroy a community. When it happens, serious people get fed up and leave. When there are no rules, people who like to play by them simply refuse to play. It’s a game of a different nature and it’s as good an explanation as any as to why online communities tend to burn out.

    Conversation between people who actually have to face each other is less likely, one would hope, to end up in the ditch. When one actually listens to a correspondent, a conversation is more likely to ensue. Are you actually interested in what the person has to say, and are you willing to consider his view? Or are you debating rather than conversing? Are you trying to reach a solution to a common problem, or are you trying to score points? Is civility more likely because there can be consequences in a face-to-face encounter? When you can’t stand off from your targets like pundits or politicians do, or can’t hide behind anonymity online, the possibility of a smack in the face is always there.

    As repugnant as Ann Coulter already is, imagine her standing in front of a woman who watched on television as her husband or son burned alive in the World Trade Center. Would she be able to look into tear-filled eyes and deliver the same vitriol? Imagine Tim Pawlenty’s anti-gay tirade from the state Republican convention podium delivered right to the face of one of Diane Arbus’ transvestites. Would he have the audacity to do that?

    In one of her journals, Arbus wrote, “There is so much to learn, mainly it is never as good as you hope or as bad as you dread.” The majority of her photographs were made with a wide-angle lens that forced her to get very close to her subjects. These images prove that she was willing to get close enough to listen to and learn from people very unlike herself. It is that sort of communication that we should seek, even if that communication doesn’t necessarily lead to agreement.

     

  • Lizz Winstead

    Jon Stewart’s smart satire makes watching The Daily Show one of our favorite things to do in bed. But it’s a little-known fact that the show owes much of its sassy vibe to Minnesota-born humorist Lizz Winstead, who, with Madeleine Smithberg, co-created the show. Winstead still works the comedy circuit, performing one-woman shows such as Don’t Get Me Started and Stream of Consciousness that get personal on touchy topics, and she’s also appeared on programs like Politically Incorrect and Air America’s Unfiltered. She’s at home anywhere she has an opportunity to lampoon and dissect the news of the day, which is why we permitted her to bring item #1 to The Rake’s deserted island; her powers of creativity are fueled by current events, and it just wouldn’t be fair to cut her off.

    1. I would have to bring a computer that would give me Internet access. I need to read Slate and listen to NPR every day. I’m a total news junkie, and I have to keep up with what’s going on in the world.

    2. Would a Scrabble board be a ridiculous thing to bring if I was by myself? But I love Scrabble. I play a lot of Scrabble, and I always have. I like the strategy of it. Even if you lose, you achieve your personal best just by being strategic and paying attention. I’m competing with myself, not with the other person. But hey, with my computer, I can play Scrabble on the Internet.

    3. My dog, Edie. She’s a rescued collie-shepherd mix. She would provide the most joy I could possibly have on the island. She and I could go swimming, and she’d tell me all her secrets. She’s named after Edie from the documentary Grey Gardens [about the deteriorating cousins of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy]. In the movie, there’s a little Edie and a big Edie; my dog is little Edie and I’m big Edie.

    4. A family photograph of my siblings—I’m the youngest of five—singing to my parents on their fiftieth anniversary.

    5. I like crappy coffee. It keeps me not broke. In New York I buy coffee from the men who have coffee carts on the streets for a dollar, and I think it’s delicious. Other people think it’s not so great. And I’d bring a bottle of Oban Scotch.