The Rake Magazine

Category: Article

  • Bird is the Word

    When I first came to Minnesota twenty years ago, I had never taught a class larger than ten students—mostly I had conducted the one-to-one tutorials that are at the heart of the Oxford system. My first term here I was given a class on the Roman Republic that numbered some seventy souls. The learning curve for me was as steep as it was for them.

    After a few weeks I said to my teaching assistant, a clever young lady who had recently graduated from a cut-glass establishment on the East Coast, that I had really no idea whether I was making an impression. After all, though we speak a similar language, I am a foreigner. A few students kindly asked questions in class, but it was all quite different from the va-et-vien of individual tutorials. “What,” I asked, “do I do?” “That’s easy,” she replied. “You set a pop quiz.”

    The following Friday she and I marched into class with seventy sheets of paper, each roneoed with a dozen quick questions, and announced the pop quiz. Roneo, Roneo, wherefore art thou Roneo? I have never felt the temperature in a room drop so quickly—I might as well have walked into a convention of Southern Baptists wearing a false beard and announced that I was the Ayatollah Khomeini.

    One of the questions was concerned with divination, the Roman practice, learnt from their sophisticated neighbors the Etruscans, of examining the innards of the animals they had sacrificed to discover from their shape and size and knobbly bits what combination of divine forces was floating around in the atmosphere at the moment of the animal’s sacred demise. There is even a bronze model of a sheep’s liver dug up at Piacenza in northern Italy in 1877, which has mapped onto it the different divine forces associated with each area of the organ. This should explain that “the Etruscans” was the answer I expected when I asked my class: “Who taught the Romans to foretell the future from the entrails of birds?” The best answer I got was “Colonel Sanders.” Minnesotans are good souls, and I think they forgave me—I have certainly never repeated the experiment. And three years later, the teaching assistant and one of the men from the class kindly invited me to their wedding.

    Romans thought that birds furnished information about the world not immediately apparent to mankind. The trajectory of events and the pattern of ambient forces could be made out not only from the entrails of the dead but also from the flight of the living. No city could be founded ’til the woodpeckers were wheeling in a favorable configuration. A Roman admiral, told he could not go into battle because the sacred chickens were off their feed, exclaimed, “Let’s see if they will drink,” kicked the peccant poultry over the side of his ship and gave the signal for hostilities to begin. Naturally he was defeated.

    It is not only Romans who found birds made them think. A wild duck passes through the halls of memory, a duck roasted by my cousin, a talented cook fortunate in having friends who shoot more game than they can consume themselves. It came from the kitchen, warm, reeking, rich; from its crisp skin rose a fragrance that would have satisfied the most exacting classical god. The charger came to rest in front of my cousin’s husband, a noted wild-animal veterinarian. He raised the carving knife: “These mate for life,” he said. “Anybody want some?”

    Well, why not? At least it died flying, not flapping in panic on the conveyor belt of a crowded slaughterhouse. Honest men, says the poet Peter Levi, “dive after truth, know nature, fight pretence / admit we live at one another’s expense.”

    This was a memorable bird. And now, years later, I have found just the wine to go with it, a plummy 2004 Pinot Noir from the Hahn Estates in the Santa Lucia highlands of Monterey, south of San Francisco. This wine may be had hereabouts for around thirteen dollars. It has that clear red color characteristic of Pinot Noir, a fine, ripe, fruity taste with soft tannins at the center, only a little acidity, and plenty of alcohol—14.7 percent, according to the bottle, but you do not need to be told—you can taste it. This wine would go with grilled chicken (Hahn is German for cockerel) or summer barbeque, as well as with duck or grouse. Just be sure someone else drives home afterward, unless you wish to face a pop quiz beginning, “Would you mind blowing into this little bag?”

  • Restaurant Rage

    Last winter, over the holidays, a restaurant manager I know clocked what she wryly calls the “Best Five Minutes Ever” of her career. Just seconds after punching in, she was called to the bar to break up a couple of brawlers. While showing one-half of the drunken duo to the door, she came across a couple of baddies dealing drugs in the entryway. Upon throwing all criminals out on the street, she was headed to the phone to call the cops, only to be sidetracked by a page instructing her to check out the men’s bathroom. Standing there in the middle of the restroom she found a guy, pants around his ankles, playing his own instrument, if you know what I mean. She had to literally pull up his pants so that she could usher him out without freaking out the diners.

    Now, humility is a crucial quality for people who work in the hospitality industry; the notion that the guest is always right has been deeply ingrained within them. And as guests, most of us appreciate the service we are provided, and we express that gratitude with generous tips. Usually, this arrangement works out just fine, but there are exceptions to both sides of the deal. In recent years, in fact, it seems that I’ve been privy to more and more horror stories about diners. Maybe it’s because finishing schools and etiquette manuals are largely obsolete. Perhaps it’s due to “fine dining” being touted as a form of entertainment unto itself, thus raising the expectations of both staff and guests. Regardless, the upswing in ugly behavior has many restaurant workers questioning whether the guest is always right—and also wondering what the hell has gone wrong.

    More from the local restaurant-worker pipeline: An older, affluent couple frequented a top steakhouse on a weekly basis, and they never failed to find something to complain about. The steak wasn’t cooked right, the wine smelled funny, the forks were poorly polished—whatever the problem was, they voiced their feelings, very loudly, to whichever server had been stuck with them. For a while, management went out of its way to appease the couple—moving their table, switching their server, pampering them with extra attention, and on occasion, a complimentary meal. Eventually it became clear that nothing would ever make this couple happy. A manager sincerely apologized for being unable to meet their high standards and politely suggested they find another restaurant. To everyone’s surprise, the pair kept coming. But from then on, they found everything to be fantastic.

    Bad service should never be tolerated. If your food is cold, send it back. If your server was rude or inattentive, seek out a manager. No restaurant worth its salt wants you to suffer through a meal. Their goal is to have you leave happy and return later, credit card in hand. But a certain set of people seem determined to publicly humiliate or otherwise punish restaurant workers for service snafus. I theorize that these types are often asserting their version of a pecking order. People who spend days cowering in a cubicle to avoid an impossibly demanding boss—or, conversely, clawing their way to the top and stepping on many others in the process—are often all too delighted to blast anyone they perceive to be below them on the socioeconomic ladder.

    Worse still, their chosen scapegoats are charged with the task of trying to please them. The worst offenders, outraged at the slightest mistake (say their Caesar salad arrived without chicken), demand justice. They declare their dining experience ruined, and expect their entire meal to be paid for. How would these people respond should a similar principle be applied to them in their work? Imagine a boss finding a typo in a certain status report and demanding that the offender forfeit a day’s pay as punishment. If this became the norm, employment litigation would sprout all over the place. Yet it seems to have become socially acceptable to belittle servers and bartenders, perhaps because they are mostly younger people whose work is not considered by some to be a “real job.” Never mind that restaurants in this country are a $1.3 trillion business that employs twelve-and-a-half million people—an employment force second only to the government.

    Not surprisingly, booze plays no small role in this rash of bad behavior. Servers can be held liable if a drunk goes off and hurts someone, but the law that decreed this does not acknowledge how delicate a task it is to cut off inebriated people. Drunk people do not like being refused service; rich drunk people seem to like it even less so. Another recent story from the frontlines: A clean-cut man who’d been drinking was cut off and asked to leave an Uptown restaurant. After a short while he returned, claiming his sunglasses had been stolen. The manager threatened to call the cops and asked him to leave, but before he did so, the man responded by kicking her in the gut, leaving a boot-print.

    Some restaurants are taking steps to ban anyone who behaves outrageously. But some good servers are also leaving the industry, tired of suffering the abuse. If this becomes a trend, owners will have to pay higher wages to less-experienced workers, which will only drive prices up and satisfaction down. It’s a bit of a conundrum. Owners and managers must make their guests happy, attempting to turn every complaint into an opportunity to create a guest for life; at the same time, they have to provide their employees with a safe and hospitable workplace.

    But there’s reason for hope. Four out of every ten people have worked in a restaurant at some point in their lives. They can appreciate good service and sympathize with a mistake here and there. If they team up with current restaurant workers, maybe those diners with rage issues will eventually find themselves eating alone, at home.

  • Goddess Revealed

    I was beginning to suspect that I was the last person on the planet who hadn’t read The DaVinci Code, and so I remedied that situation last weekend. I like a good page turner as much as the next guy, and this was a good one. But man, I can sure see why this is riling up the orthodox Christians, especially the Catholics. Because if Jesus had a wife, and Constantine chose to unite the Roman Empire under Christianity for political rather than religious convictions, then myths are shattered, the center cannot hold, and some rough beast is certainly starting to slouch.

    The idea of the "Sacred Feminine" is a new one for most Christians. There are no sacred females in Christianity, unless you count Mary, who was a mother, yes, but not the sort of woman that most women, or men, can relate to—notwithstanding the images of the BVM painted on abandoned bathtubs in Stearns County. There was no sex, after all.

    Contrast this with the various other religions of the early Christian era. For example, here’s a description from the Aeneid of Venus, the goddess of love, and the mother of Aeneas, the Trojan hero and founder of Rome. He’s just been talking to her in the woods:

    She spoke, and as she turned away, her rosy neck brightened,
    And from her head breathed the aroma of divine ambrosia;
    Down to her feet flowed her garment,
    And by her step, she was revealed a goddess.

    Jesus certainly never talked about his mother that way, at least according to what we know from the Bible as it’s been transmitted. Venus is, well, hot. And Mother Mary—she’s pretty much the good old androgynous, handmaid-of-the-lord, giving-up-everything-for-the-kid kind of mom.

    People who have actually done their homework on the history of the early church don’t give a lot of credence to The DaVinci Code’s tale of Mary Magdalene as Mrs. Jesus Christ. (According to esteemed medieval historian and oenophile Oliver Nicholson, the Magdalene tale arose in the Middle Ages.) I am old enough to remember when Nikos Kazantzakis’ book, The Last Temptation of Christ, caused an uproar at my high school, years before Martin Scorsese scratched the scab again with his film version. (God bless the Jesuits for disregarding Rome and assigning it to high school juniors.) Jesus and Magdalene were married in that book, too, but since there wasn’t a hot Parisian cryptologist and a murder mystery involved, it sold about twenty-seven million fewer copies than The DaVinci Code.

    Silly history aside, The DaVinci Code does have a symbolic purpose. Dare I say a book about symbols is a symbol? Dare I opine that part of its appeal is its fictional struggle against the patriarchal nature of Christianity and the established church’s hold on the flock? Why not? This is just an essay in a magazine and probably won’t be reprinted in enough languages to tick off the Vatican to the point of excommunicating me. Also, if I do get in trouble, I can always blame it on the Jesuits, and whoever is currently filling Tomas de Torquemada’s shoes will just nod knowingly.

    So why does this all remind me of Michele Bachmann? Beats the hell out of me, but it did. OK, I admit it—it was the sexless obedient servant thing. And maybe we’ll throw in the omniscient overbearing church thing. While we’re at it, the hiding behind the trees at the gay rally at the Capitol and the cowering in the bathroom when confronted by some disagreeable lesbians recall some aspects of the thrilling DaVinci chase scenes, as well.

    Speaking of chase scenes, in the upcoming mad dash across the sixth congressional district, Michele, you can bet, will be playing the part of the Opus Dei-trained and Church-sanctioned albino assassin. She’ll be using the weapons provided by her church, and its armorer, Karl Rove, to try to squelch the story of Patty Wetterling, who actually does symbolize family values. Except, unfortunately for Wetterling, protecting children just isn’t as visually eloquent as the images of the yucky kissing gays that we’re going to be treated to, courtesy of Bachmann.

    In the last congressional campaign, Bishop Mark Kennedy put Wetterling’s pictures in ads right next to Osama bin Laden’s. How’s that for a powerful symbol? (And you thought the Church calling Magdalene a whore was bad.) I can hardly wait to see what Rove and Bachmann come up with this time. We don’t yet know any specifics of the Rovian symbology, but I’m willing to bet it’s going to involve Wetterling officiating at a gay marriage ceremony.

    But, like The DaVinci Code, politics is all about the supremacy of symbols over actual fact. That’s what makes a good story, after all.

  • Five and Dimed in America

    A few miles from the McStop off 35W, down a road that winds along black-dirt fields and stretches into downtown Lakeville, you’ll find the last Twin Cities-area Ben Franklin five-and-dime store. Once a staple of small-town Minnesota, and the anchor in any tiny downtown, Ben Franklin was the place we all biked to on our beat-up Schwinns, the ones with the banana seats and girly bars. It always had that Ben Franklin-y smell—worn industrial carpeting, mothballs, yarn, and potpourri. Our Ben Franklin had Tupperware containers filled with penny candy, latch hook rug kits, and costume jewelry that you’d buy for your mom on her birthday. It was your destination for Pop Rocks and Wacky Paks bubblegum cards, Charleston Chews and Slopoke suckers, Laffy Taffy, and Lik-m-Aid Fun Dip.

    When I arrive at the Lakeville store during a spring downpour, owner Scott Erickson is on a ladder, holding a flashlight, and visible only from the chest down. He’s moved one of the ceiling aside to locate the source of a new drip. A bucket is balanced on top of the ladder, and the tell-tale rusty rings of water spots dot the ceiling all over the store. “It’s been a really bad day,” the young woman who’s helping him says, apologizing for his gruff greeting. “He’s usually really nice.”

    How often does anyone walk into a business these days and actually meet the owner? How often does anyone receive a needless apology from the owner—who is holding a big bucket of rainwater—for being gruff? A red-haired guy of medium build, Erickson is soon to be fifty, but doesn’t look it, and has owned the store for half of his life. While enterprises like SuperTarget, Fleet Farm, and Gander Mountain are thriving just off the freeway, little Ben Franklin hangs on in a quiet downtown that depends on the loyalty of a citizenry that is increasingly composed of commuters. Enggren’s grocery store across the street, which celebrated its one-hundredth birthday in March, was forced to close its doors only a month later, another victim of tight profit margins. “A grocery store is your anchor,” says Erickson, who is worried about the decrease in traffic that the absence of Enggren’s will bring. “To tell the truth, the last six months, it’s been a struggle. You need the community to support you.” And in turn, Erickson tries to supply what the community needs, and to keep prices low.

    I should come back on a drier day in the fall, Erickson tells me, when more than seventy pairs of pants will be hanging from the ceiling, part of Lakeville’s homecoming celebration, a sort of commercial display of fall colors. It’s become tradition that the kids, elementary through high school (and there are now twelve elementary schools, four middle schools, and two Lakeville high schools) decorate their pants, spending anywhere from fifty to one hundred dollars to add flair—rhinestones and paint and anything else that screams school spirit. To give kids ideas, Erickson and his perky staff of local teenagers will hang pants from past years all over the store. “The kids really go wild on Homecoming,” says Erickson. It’s the kind of mom ’n’ pop touch that you won’t find at Target. Nor will you find at Target Harry the Quaker Parrot, who lives next to the counter and says “Hello” and “Pretty bird,” and busily gnaws on cardboard. Nor Marley the Golden Retriever, who watches over the store during the week.

    Nor will you find at the corporate stores small, homemade pricing signs and craft suggestions, written in the cheerful bubble script of the young women who work there, and who know exactly where every little thing in the store can be found. These things include candles, raffia, Lakeville Panthers spirit wear, water pistols, greeting cards, Elmer’s glue and paperboard, bacon bits and paprika, feather boas and backpacks, beading kits and needlepoint supplies, and tables of fabric. Aluminum roasting pans and laundry detergent. White Rain shampoo and extension cords. A God Bless America shot glass. All of the things you remember, in other words, as well as the sorts of things you might need in a hurry. Not to mention such modern additions as a universal, hands-free mobile-phone adaptor.

    “It’s tough,” says Erickson, “but we’re going to stick it out as long as we can. People don’t realize what they have, until it’s gone.”

  • Intro to Cubism

    The other day, the McNally Smith College of Music held a press conference to note the creation of a special scholarship in the name of producer, actor, and rapper Ice Cube. The school is housed in St. Paul’s old Science Museum building, and the feeling one has in its familiar corridors and public spaces is, Shouldn’t there be a river ecology diorama in that corner? Since Mr. Cube himself would be attending the event, the school’s intimate auditorium was filled with a range of young people, from those merely interested in seeing a celebrity to long-standing N.W.A. fans in a state of high excitement. The students were just finishing final exams, and the commencement ceremony for the graduating class of 2006 was only hours away. Teenagers from a local hip-hop academy slid into the last untaken seats, bringing a hyper, field-trip energy with them. In the sonorous voice of a movie-trailer narrator, school cofounder Jack McNally formally announced the new Ice Cube Scholarship and welcomed the guest of honor onto the stage. (The rock band Queen, and bassist Mike Watt from the Minutemen have also been recognized with McNally scholarships.)

    The man of the hour wore a gold necklace with a pendant that spelled out “Ice Cube” in diamonds, but otherwise his outfit—black shirt, blue jeans, dark brown leather parka, light brown leather sneakers—was so subdued that only the crisp, impeccable brand-newness of every item hinted “self-made multi-millionaire.” He expressed how honored he was by the school’s recognition, and admired the advantage McNally Smith gave aspiring music producers: Musing that some of his contemporaries—Dr. Dre, for example—“can’t play instruments,” and have to hire musicians, he pointed out that a McNally Smith education gave the next generation of hip-hop producers the chance to be more like multi-skilled performer/ producer “Lil Jon, who’s keeping all that money.” Then he answered questions from the crowd, offering back-in-the-day anecdotes and dispensing advice with goodwill and authority. “Don’t keep equipment at your house,” he cautioned a music production student, explaining that while “musicians are cool … they ain’t cool in your den.” When asked about his dream collaborator, he answered, “Prince, no doubt!” and the home team responded with victorious applause. It was time for souvenir photos and informal meetings.

    An entourage of hungry entrepreneurs moved toward the stage, wearing matching T-shirts with “Page Music” in gigantic lettering. Richard Schultz, a recording engineering student affiliated with the group, later confirmed that they had made the most of this opportunity: “We gave him the demo.”

    Bass performance student Lee Carter had crafted himself a special T-shirt for the occasion. The words “Ice Cube” were written a few inches above a crude line drawing of what was apparently an ice cube. Underneath, Carter, who passed one of his homemade tees on to Ice Cube, had scrawled the question, “Why you gotta be so cold?” Did interest in N.W.A. motivate Carter to go to such great lengths? “More of just a seeing-famous-people interest,” admitted Carter. In that case, had he gone to the Prairie Home Companion parade the previous day, to see starlet Lindsay Lohan? “No, but she came to see me—that was later, though. At my apartment.”

    As Ice Cube left the school, the teenagers swarmed around him. Donley McIntosh, one of the hip-hop academy kids, had brought a VHS tape of Ice Cube’s movie Friday, which Cube graciously autographed. McIntosh’s classmate Adrienne Duncan, zipping through the crowd, also got a last-minute autograph. Overwhelmed with the intensity of the moment, she used the autograph to fan herself furiously, and the superstar rode away in a black SUV.

  • Hollywood Hit ’n’ Run

    Though it now seems long ago, it’s only been a few weeks since a brace of bona fide Hollywood stars descended on downtown St. Paul. The city was abuzz with famous people and the regular folks who admire them, but nothing rivaled the enthusiasm of the international, domestic, and local press. Since this was, after all, the national premiere of a major motion picture, a full-scale, Hollywood-style press conference was set up inside the Saint Paul Hotel. There were dozens of lensmen, talking heads, beat reporters, stringers, and hacks in attendance. There were big-timers from organs like People magazine and the Associated Press.

    Lori Barghini and Julia Cobbs, the “Drive Time Divas” from FM-107, immersed themselves in the press pool. Comporting themselves as unofficial ambassadors of the Twin Cities, they flitted around the ballroom, welcoming newcomers and sizing them up for gossip. There was a hunky, bed-headed guy from Le Journal de Montréal, and a sharp cross-dresser in a pinstripe suit and black beret—Daisy D, a personality from the Deco Drive show on a South Florida Fox TV affiliate, who was once scheduled to wrestle Tonya Harding. While Julia chatted up Mr. Montreal, Lori offered an enthusiastic early report. “Over there,” she said, gesturing to a section of apparently special attendees who were not obligated to wear press badges, “that’s Mark Singer from the New Yorker. He was really reluctant to tell me who he was.”

    She pointed out a number of bewildered Canadians, some looking bored and others looking like they were ready for a drink. “Minnesota Daily,” she said, gesturing toward a shy, bespectacled redhead with a messenger bag, sent by the University’s student newspaper.

    At last the stars sidled in, to much applause. “It was wonderful … enjoyed it … learned a lot,” said Lindsay Lohan of her experience working with so many esteemed and much-older actors. “ … fun … tremendous fun,” said Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin. “… hard to keep a straight face … we were all having so much fun,” said Kevin Kline. “ … I don’t expect to have that much fun anytime soon,” said Garrison Keillor.

    That hint of merriment from the notoriously stoic host emboldened Diana Pierce. “What are you feeling today? You must have quite a lot of emotions right now!” Keillor shrugged. A friendly cajoling ensued and the KARE-11 anchor pressed her advantage. “It’s a historic day for you—and for Minnesota.”

    “Minnesota was admitted to the Union?” Keillor asked. Pierce tried a different tack. At least it was a “big” day, right? The stars, the red carpet, the horse-drawn carriages. “It’s a big day for the horses,” he allowed. Pierce was not backing down. But what about him? “Today is a big day in downtown St. Paul,” Keillor said with a gravity that indicated her time was up.

    Bill Carlson, the elder statesman of WCCO, had the honor of asking the last question. In stentorian tones, he gave a preamble in which he mentioned “motion pictures” several times. Ultimately, he demanded to know, “Was this not one of the most enjoyable experiences you’ve ever had making motion pictures?” No one dared disagree.

    Later that afternoon, Wabasha Street was lined with folks waiting to see the stars in their carriages. The crowds were thickest in front of the red carpet at the Fitzgerald. Children, old men and women, Mohawked punks, harried security, hustling PR attendants, and a gaggle of young girls carrying Lindsay Lohan DVDs and CDs. One girl with a determined gaze, toting a bouquet of flowers and a letter, stood out in the crowd. She scoffed when a reporter asked if she was waiting for Lindsay Lohan. “I am Meryl Streep’s number-one fan,” announced Cara Pennington, who is fourteen. She has been pursuing Ms. Streep for five years—not in the stalking manner, but as a young girl who’s watched every last Streep vehicle, written letters, and daydreamed. “I love her values. I’m trying to do well in school so I can go to Yale, just like Meryl,” she said. “I used to want to look like her, but then I read that Meryl wants us to love ourselves, and so I thought she’d want me to be myself.”

    Suddenly there was a scream, and a dozen other girls chimed in—but it was just the marching band, not the movie stars, who did, however, arrive soon after. Eventually Meryl was spotted holding Cara’s bouquet, while a guy accompanying her held the letter. Streep and Lily Tomlin were the last stars inside the Fitzgerald. The reporters followed, security muscled everyone else away, and the doors closed for good.

    The crowds evaporated quickly, but girls lingered to pose with their friends. One reposed on the red carpet and sighed. Out back, in the alley, a young man leaned against the stage doors of the Fitzgerald, listening for whatever whispers of fame were coming from within.

  • Aimee Mann

    Aimee Mann has a knack for imbuing her songs with emotional intelligence as well as pop hooks, but her idea of what constitutes a hook continues to move further away from the radio-friendly songs she sang with her old band, ’Til Tuesday. Her recent music is a new animal entirely. She seems to be writing for her own quiet pleasure rather than for any audience, and her songs take time to breathe and follow the arc of their melodies to places of melancholy and euphoria. For instance, the songs on last year’s The Forgotten Arm seem unremarkable at first, but considered listening reveals a masterful, high-concept, almost literary album that chronicles the love affair of a boxer and his honey. 13000 Zoo Blvd., Apple Valley; 952-431-9303; www.mnzoo.org

  • Frank Black

    Now that the reanimated Pixies have proved to be an arena-sized success, Black is back to focusing on his solo career, and this double album shows he hasn’t been just counting his cash. He called back several Nashville session players from his last album, Honeycomb, and brought in other guests as disparate as The Band’s Levon Helm and Cheap Trick’s Tom Petersson. The sound, accordingly, is all over the place, burnishing Black’s hard-won rock ’n’ roll credentials with deft folk, country, and soul stylings. His lyrics remain as intriguingly inscrutable as ever, while his voice, though surely seared by screams, is often more warm, relaxed, and inviting than expected.

  • Tim O'Reagan

    The Jayhawks seem to split up and get back together about as frequently as Eminem and his wife/ex-wife/wife/ex-wife Kim Mathers. Meanwhile, the individual members of the band have been working on some very cool side projects. There’s a new Golden Smog album, Gary Louris plays on both the new Rhett Miller and the Dixie Chicks’ latest, and now drummer Tim O’Reagan has come out from behind the kit for a solo debut. He proves his formidable skill as a songwriter, arranger, and player of guitar and bass (as well as drums) on this album. It’s a surprisingly polished affair ornamented with accordion, skillful whistling from his dad, and a few predictable guest spots by his Minneapolis pals. Overall, O’Reagan achieves an easygoing lightheartedness that mostly proved elusive for the Jayhawks, what with all their heartaches.

  • Jim Cullum Jazz Band

    KBEM continues to surprise us—and not just by staying on the air. Amid continued funding threats, this tiny, low-budget, low-profile radio station keeps its programming fresh and relevant. Thursday nights, for instance, there’s “Riverwalk Jazz,” a Texas-produced show that explores the history of jazz through archival recordings, interviews, and performances of classics by the Jim Cullum Jazz Band. In touring and recording, this accomplished seven-piece outfit focuses on New Orleans and Chicago-style jazz, paying homage through a meticulous attention to historical detail. 612-371-5656; www.minnesotaorchestra.org