The Rake Magazine

Category: Blog Post

  • Art Or Not at the State Fair

    My favorite thing about the fair is NOT machinery hill. Nor is it the exotic animals (i.e., the sad looking giraffe whose head doesn’t quite fit under the big top). It’s not the stunt skateboarders and BMX bikers, not the corndogs and cheese curds, nor is it the ejection seat. And don’t get me wrong; I rather like each of these things. It’s just that I realllllllly love, for whatever reason, the state fair fine art show. Perhaps it’s because my friend Adam made it in a few years back, and I can still remember his self-portrait as being the most starkly beautiful thing in a room full of mediocrity. There’s always a gem or two in that show. Last year it was a photographer’s sideways glance at a golden retriever. A while back, it was the half-finished painting/drawing of a cow, as done by an artist who passed away earlier that summer. (Drat! I don’t remember his name!)

    There is plenty of sentimental work to be had at the fair–which I find to be a nice respite from all the emotionally detached work I see at the galleries I normally visit. Perhaps this is because out state is hugely represented in the show, and folks out there aren’t bound by the same aesthetic fashions as we city-dwellers. I always suspected that Adam got in because his painting represented a purely visceral, and highly emotional scavenge for beauty–for love, even. He painted it after having an incredibly invasive craniotomy; and the painting, I suppose, was a lament for the person lost. But ultimately what he found was a thing of beauty and worth. Or at least that’s what I saw when I looked at the painting.

    There are plenty-o-artists hanging around the fine arts building. If you listen closely, you can hear some of ’em grumbling about the jury process and all its out-state favoritism. On the other hand, another great thing to listen for is the reaction being had to the art. (Adam’s “Self Portrait after Surgery” won an inspired “harrumph” or two!) Surely this place is worthy of some Overheardinminneapolis.com lurkers!

    Also of note: Hopkins Center for the Arts is hosting a state fair overflow exhibition. You won’t get to browse alongside the corndog-fed outlanders. But perhaps you see this as good thing.

  • Back To School

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    Even if you’re not matriculating this September, the month always seems to inspire further education. It’s hard to break a habit most of us lived with for 17-odd years, so off to school with you.

    Why not learn to become a Master of Cuisine? Iron Chef Training Camp may reveal your true calling.

    Once you’ve put the kids on the bus, plan your Thursday lunch dates with a Chef’s Lunch.

    What’s beyond peanut butter and jelly sandwiches? Try chicken with brie and figs or a brick grilled ham sandwich for starters.

    Learn the art of dim sum and banish eggs benedict from Sunday brunch FOREVER!!!

    There’s nothing like kicking off chilly-weather-baking season with a class about baking rustic breads.

    A seat at one of these two classes at the Chef’s Gallery will be highly prized, I’d call today to reserve: Jim Kyndberg of Bayport Cookery will teach An Autumn Harvest Menu on September 14th and Jack Reibel of The Dakota will teach A Harvest Menu on September 15th.

  • Knocked out in the park…

    All right, it’s the season finale of the Walker Art Center’s music and movies in the park series… and because Low will be playing, you can be sure there’ll be a, uh, party. Or at least something resembling a party… I mean, there’ll certainly be a lot of folks out in the park to see this band tonight, including myself, probably, but I’ll have to stop over during my evening run, as I’ve been slacking on my marathon training and can no longer afford to skip a day of running. Once the sun sets, on the big screen: Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn star in The Philadelphia Story. See Peter Schilling’s page to school up on the associated trivia.

  • Box Office Poison

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    The Philadelphia Story, showing tonight at the Walker’s Summer Music and Movies in Loring Park.

    According to an History of the Movies class I took at Michigan State University–taught by one of the screenwriters of Top Gun, for God’s sake–when The Philadelphia Story was released, Katherine Hepburn was considered “box office poison”. Kate being Kate, she decided to expand her horizons, extended Hollywood her middle finger, and headed east to act on Broadway. They didn’t like that, naturally, so they said she was poison. Well, Kate being Kate, she was wise enough to buy the rights to the thing she was wowing them with in New York, namely “The Philadelphia Story”. Since it was a huge hit on Broadway, suddenly the moguls desperately wanted it, and discovered they had to go through Kate. So they gave her scads of dough for the rights to the story, and the lead role. Thus, the legend continued.

    Frankly, I think The Philadelphia Story is the weakest of this lot, but I still enjoy the thing. Why they gave Jimmy Stewart his Oscar for this vehicle remains a mystery (he wasn’t even nominated for Vertigo), but you can do no better than spend a balmy evening watching this classic on the big screen. And take note: Stewart works for Spy Magazine, for which a short lived humor mag was named, and Hepburn’s character is named Tracy Lord, for which young porn star and John Waters ingenue Traci Lords named herself.

  • What Magic Is; What Magic Isn't

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    The Illusionist, 2006. Written and directed by Neil Burger. Starring Edward Norton, Paul Giamatti, Jessica Biel, Rufus Sewell, Eddie Marson, and Jake Wood.

    Nightmare Alley, 1947. Directed by Edmund Golding, written by Jules Furthman. Starring Tyrone Power, Joan Blondell, Coleen Gray (rrowr), Helen Walker, Ian Keith, George Beranger, Taylor Holmes and Mike Mazursky.

    The Illusionist is playing exclusively at the Uptown Theater; Nightmare Alley is available on DVD at Cinema Revolution.

    My father is–was–a magician, having set aside his practice for the time being to focus on teaching grade school. I tell you that in advance because watching him perform his slight of hand was always a source of deep wonderment for me as a child, and every time I hear there’s a film about a magician I’m ready to be awed again. For the longest time, I refused to listen to his explanations of how he was able to perform his tricks, like the fabulous sword through the card trick. With his back turned, my pop would ask his young assistant to pick a card, any card, and show it to the audience and don’t be shy. That’s good, now shove it back in the deck. And then, he would explain, the idea was to go presto! and find the card by impaling it on a sword. Only, he would say sheepishly, that was how it was supposed to go–he couldn’t afford a nice sword so he chose the next most dangerous thing you could get in Saginaw, Michigan: a model M150 Victor Model Rat Snap Trap, a nearly foot long instrument of death. So now the subject would take the deck, hold it up high and let the whole thing fall like leaves into a basket below. And then bang! there would be the card caught dead-to-rights like a rodent with its neck snapped. That was pretty damn cool.

    Thing is, over the years I came to understand that the magic isn’t in his being able to seemingly read your mind and make cards appear out of nowhere, but in the care he took to perfect the craft, the way that my dad would take old tricks (and any magician will tell you they’re all old) and make them new again, with a simple twist and turn in the story or a touch of personality. For great magicians are storytellers and comedians, singers and actors. They make you look at one hand while they’re doing what they need to do with the other. When they get it right, it’s magic.

    The Illusionist doesn’t get magic at all. It doesn’t get the craft, doesn’t get romance, simple storytelling, or acting, even. Like most films about conjurors, the filmmakers are so caught up in the wow! of a trick that they miss the performer and what he does. The Illusionist is a perfect example of a film that so deadens the art of legerdemain by turning it into a collection of CGI effects and giving us one of those surprise endings that have, as of late, become the bane of decent storytelling.

    On the other hand, there’s Nightmare Alley. I stumbled on this little gem once again at the local DVD store (I saw it originally at the beloved Oak Street). It is a movie that, despite its handicaps, understands what magic can be. And how a man who can master the art of slight of hand and mind-reading can get warped by it.

    To wit: Nightmare Alley is a beautiful and exciting picture, well told and decently acted; The Illusionist is garbage, and will be forgotten in a matter of months.

    The facts: The Illusionist is about a young man named Eisenheim (I’ll give them that that’s a great name) who tries to learn the ‘ancient arts’ of magic at a young age. He is a poor boy who falls in love with a beautiful and wealthy young girl named Sophie (Jessica Biel) of tremendous privilege. Because of the class difference, Eisenstein and Sophie are forcibly separated as teen-agers, with passionate vows between the two of them that they will reunite. And reunite they do, much later, when he has become a magician extraordinaire, able to make orange trees grow three feet in seconds.

    Well, the Illusionist isn’t too happy to see that now his love has hooked up with mad Crown Prince Leopold (Rufus Sewell), who is known to have beaten past lovers senseless and wants a quick path to the throne. Apparently, marrying the well-connected, pretty, but dull Sophie is the right way to become king. But Eisenstein gets in his way, thwarting the prince, stealing the girl, and in the end hoodwinking the respectable Chief Inspector Uhl (Paul Giamatti), who has been following Eisenstein around the whole picture, apparently because there are no other crimes in the kingdom.

    Edward Norton and Paul Giamatti are awful. Simply horrible. I have a suggestion to make, for anyone who cares to listen, but especially the director of this fraudulent film: you don’t have to set the movie in Russia just because the story takes place there. Especially when your actors cannot carry their accents without sounding like something from Monty Python. Even then, the Pythons were better.

    Aside from the silly accents, the acting is atrocious and the story is as boring as a children’s party clown who shows up forlorn from an impending divorce. Implausibility is piled atop implausibility, and Edward Norton and Jessica Biel have no chemistry whatsoever. The evil prince, played by Rufus Sewell (who is gaining prominence, God knows why), is wonderful because he gives you moments of much needed laughter in between the long stretches of boredom. That he does this unintentionally doesn’t matter much if you’re stuck looking for something to enjoy in a long, tedious movie.

    For a film that is ostensibly about a magician, there is no magic. True, there’s Ed Norton squinching his face at his hands while a ghost appears, although you could visit Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion and get better effects. You could also check out Woody Allen’s much-maligned Scoop and get better slight of hand. But even the scenes that bubble-over into full stage illusion, such as the orange tree bit and the ghost bit, have no personality from Eisenstein. He’s dead up there. And in magic, dead you just can’t be.

    Nightmare Alley, on the other hand, is a hoot. Stanton Carlisle (played by Tyrone Power, and barely credible) is a flunky who’s working the carnival circuit to make ends meet. He’s nothing more than a roustabout who wanders the grounds doing the dirty work, admiring the fetching Molly (the sexy Coleen Gray), and working on the sly with aging Zeena Krumbein (played by Joan Blondell, with great sympathy). Zeena’s married to the alcoholic Pete, and between them they have a dynamite mind-reading act. Zeena’s keen on Stanton; Stanton’s keen on Molly, but even more keen on the sawbucks he could rake in if he got hold of Zeena’s formula for mind-reading. Naturally, he sleeps with Zeena and then double-crosses her, and accidentally murders Pete along the way. He also steals good-hearted Molly from her lunkheaded strongman (Mike Mazurski, bless his soul). From there, he leaves the carnival behind and hits New York, where he begins to con the wealthy with his act, until his ambitions undermine his rise to the top, he is himself double-crossed by a bitch female-psychiatrist (!), and spirals to the bottom in one of the most harrowing finales ever.

    Nightmare Alley understands magic. That is, it doesn’t seek to make your eyes grow wide with wonder at the fabrications you’re seeing. Based on the incredible novel by nutty William Lindsay Gresham (who was at one time married to the doomed woman who would go on to wed C. S. Lewis, their story becoming Shadowlands), Nightmare Alley is concerned with the people who practice magic, who live to hone their art so well that they can fool anyone, even the authorities if need be. Eventually, they get so good at it they fool themselves into thinking they’re invincible. In the end, by avoiding soulless special effects, Nightmare Alley becomes a magical picture, in the sense that is awes you with its characters, and may make you even more intrigued by the art of these charlatans.

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  • King of the Country, revisited

    Last Friday I was walking down the avenue–Riverside Avenue, to be exact. I was, at the time, admiring the marquee at the old Viking Bar, which read “Gone Fishing”; and I’d remarked to the boyfriend about that. But, because he’d never been to the place, I started going on about how much I’d always liked it there, and how sad I was to see the place go. Mike, the guy who owns the Viking, and who’d taken it over from his father years before, was walking by just then and he must’ve overheard me saying something nice. He invited us in.

    The boyfriend was given a beer. I was kindly given a root beer for being a teetotaler. We were then told stories about how the smoking ban had hurt the place, ultimately driving it out of business… And how angrily Mike had responded when he heard a couple of KARE 11 announcers bantering about the Viking Bar’s closure during the next morning’s news. (Mike was still there, with the TV on, cleaning up during the broadcast.) Mike said the newscasters were speculating about crime having driven the bar out of business, something he insisted wasn’t true… Nevertheless, he said, he has since received an outpouring of love from friends and old regulars. He’d been cleaning the place up. He hoped to reopen.

    But, for now, Jackson’s Juke Joint, a regular Viking Bar happening, has skipped over to the Eagle Bar. In fact, Randy Weeks and The Front Porch Swingin’ Liquore Pigs will play a concert, celebrating the new Weeks CD release, there tonight.

    On Saturday, I plan to stop by the Hexagon Bar to catch High On Stress. I’ve never seen or heard these guys play before. But I went to college with the guitar/keys/harps/vocal player, Ben “Country” Baker. He was a Chinese Language and Literature student back then. (He helped spawn a hunger strike over the program’s under-funding, remember?) He was also a guy with a passion for truck driving songs–and it wasn’t at all ironic. He left a permanent mark on my musical preferences by playing Red Sovine’s “Teddy Bear” track (something I remembered my dad playing) just before switching to The Dead Milkmen. I used to go down to Jitter’s, back when it was downtown, to catch Ben’s band, Martin Melville, twang away. My favorite song, I can still remember, was a catchy one called “King Of The Country”–an homage to the tradition of truck driving songs.

    Ben was a very close friend back in those days, and I’m very sorry to have lost touch with him. So, I guess I’ll see him on Saturday!

  • Only Once

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    Only once it happened, only the one time, that once upon a time, the only memory I have left that inspires anything for the man but disgust.

    And even so, it wasn’t love I was feeling that day, but a sort of plain pity and cruel fascination, but, Jesus, it was a great moment, almost like something from Shakespeare, if Shakespeare is as great as everyone says he is.

    And that day is one thing that can make me look back, into that sad, lost territory of forever gone, where the only family I ever had still lives.

    We were never a clan that had a very generous interpretation of the whole concept of a family.

    My dad had a brother (this also I guess I remember), and one night the two of them stood in the shadows of the entryway to our house, arguing as they often did, and I heard the brother say something about blood, maybe “blood is thicker than water,” and the old man hissed, “That doesn’t mean shit to me,” and that was the last time I ever saw that particular uncle.

    Yet whatever else you can find to say about my father, he loved my mother in apparently the only way he knew how. She was a nervous, harried woman, a dramatic smoker who could get loud in a hurry and make spectacular messes, and I suppose I can say this now: I don’t believe I was ever inspired to really love either of them.

    This one time, though, I was young, but already at an age where I could see my way out, or imagine it, and was thinking pretty obsessively of someplace beyond all that then.

    My mother had left us, gone a few towns over to live with her sister, and I can tell you now that it was permanent and had, I think, something to do with poverty.

    This was after the war, and my father had not gone (asthma), but had stayed home and did what I cannot honestly tell you, but we had never owned anything. After my mother left, my father went through this long stretch where he saved every penny he could get his hands on, and after moving down a long post-war waiting list he had finally taken possession of a gleaming black Impala –or something that looked kind of like an Impala– and that day, I remember, he came home actually trembling with excitement and laughing in a strange and almost nervous way, and he said, “C’mon, kid, let’s go say hello to your ma and just see what she says now.”

    So off we went and it was rough country and the old man was taking the long way so as to avoid gravel.

    I can still see it all clearly even now: the black clouds boiling and moving fast, almost like time-lapse photography, this swift, spectacular production of weather, what weather can do when it’s in a hurry and it’s July and humid in the middle of the country.

    The windows were open and you could smell the wind, the way it is before a big storm moves in, wet, suddenly cool, and sweeping along with it all the smells of the country.

    The old man was really rocketing along in that Impala, leaning and squinting over the steering wheel, muttering something not yet angry, but more pleading: Go, go, go, you sonofabitch, go.

    The rain came hard when it came, chopping rain, and the wind rose up and drove the rain across the road in rippling sheets, and there was hail right behind it, hail growing right before our eyes until it was the biggest hail I’d ever seen. Hail that was loud, deafening, banging off the roof of the Impala and richocheting off the hood and careening at wicked angles into the ditches.

    The place he finally found was closed, a truckstop long since vacant, with a big, empty parking lot. The old man beached the Impala there, beneath a pump shelter that was cluttered with trash.

    And there we stood, the old man hunched and incredulous, his face gray and screwed into a squint of absolute disbelief, his bottom lip clamped in his front teeth, a cigarette burning in his trembling and stained fingers.

    That one time I think I saw tears.

    I’m sure I did.

    He tossed his cigarette out into the rain and clenched his fists and he cried. Then he seemed to be leaning, almost like he was going to pitch over, and rocking on his heels, and cursing under his breath as he stared at his new car, which was gleaming even then, even as hailstones were still puddled and melting in the rooftop dents.

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  • It's Not Like I've Fallen And I Can't Get Up

    I still love baseball. I still make an attempt to at least keep tabs on every game, and religiously scroll through the boxscores every morning. I don’t know, quite honestly, why it’s been so hard to write about the Twins this year (and, truth be told, through the second half of last season).

    Actually, I do know. I’m lazy and I’m busy, a brutal, impossible combination. Life keeps changing speeds on me. Baseball used to be the perfect antidote for almost any funk or malaise –if, in fact, funk and malaise are two different things. And baseball still is the perfect antidote. Donald Hall once wrote, “The diamonds and rituals of baseball create an elegant, trivial, enchanted grid on which our suffering, shapeless, sinful day leans for the momentary grace of order.” I love that quote, even if it’s exactly the sort of overwrought thing that highbrows have been writing about baseball forever.

    It’s true, though. And I yearn for that “momentary grace of order,” and yearn even more for those increasingly rare shapeless days.

    I’ve felt swamped all summer, and even though I haven’t found much time or energy at the end of the day to write about baseball, the game has continued to be a refuge. And, God knows, there’s been plenty to write about this year.

    There are freak storms, freak accidents and freak injuries. This has been a freak season.

    The Twins have been both confounding and astonishing, although astonishing has been winning out more often than not in the last several months. The season sure as hell hasn’t played out like anyone could have imagined back in April, and the team’s brutal start, coupled with the breakaway surge of the Tigers and White Sox, sapped a good deal of my early optimism.

    That wretched start still pisses me off, but it’s amazing nonetheless to check out the standings every day and recognize how far the Twins have come. It seems truly impossible that they’re actually in the post-season hunt.

    They’re a damn good team, though, and while hindsight is whatever it is, they had the makings –at least on paper– of the damn good team they’ve become way back in January. For a front office that’s displayed some awfully canny (and uncanny) instincts over the years, the Twins’ brain trust made some pretty poor choices over the winter.

    The signings of Tony Batista and Rondell White were bad decisions, but the real blunders were the April choice of Juan Castro over Jason Bartlett and the early mishandling of Michael Cuddyer.

    Cuddyer has been jerked around since his first call-up, moved from position to position, yanked in and out of the line-up, and shuttled back and forth between Triple A and the Majors. What he’s done since he’s been permanently installed as a starter has been pretty much exactly what his minor league numbers suggested he would do. Consider this, from last night’s postgame notes: Cuddyer now has thirty-two RBI with runners in scoring position and two outs. Of his 104 hits, fifty-two have been for extra bases. He also has nine outfield assists, which is third in the AL.

    Castro over Bartlett looks more preposterous and indefensible by the day. Castro was a 34-year-old career .233 hitter with a reputation as an excellent fielder. Unfortunately, we didn’t even see much to justify that last business in his 2006 stint with the Twins.

    Given what Bartlett went through when the team broke camp in Florida, it would have been easy for him to go out to Rochester with a head full of doubts and questions. Perhaps knowing that Castro was holding down the starting shortstop job in Minnesota gave him motivation and, even more likely, confidence. Regardless, he did what he had to do, Castro didn’t do anything, and Bartlett finally received his pardon in mid-June.

    In fifty-six games since his call-up, Bartlett has hit .369 with a .435 on base percentage. In that same span the Twins have gone 41-15, and have crept back into contention. During Castro’s 2006 stint, the team was 29-34.

    You can’t blame Minnesota’s poor start entirely on Castro, of course. He’s just not that significant. He was a blip to begin with. Batista and White were wretched, the starting pitching was a mess, and Justin Morneau, batting sixth, was scuffling. Francisco Liriano was in the bullpen, Dennys Reyes and Pat Neshek weren’t even on the radar, and there was no reason in the world to expect that we’d see Jason Tyner –let alone Josh Rabe– in a Twins jersey in the middle of a pennant race.

    Four of the Twins’ opening day starters –White, Bastista, Castro, and Shannon Stewart– are either gone or have been insignificant factor’s in the team’s remarkable surge.

    That the club has been able to reinvent itself on the fly, and not only climb its way out of such a huge hole but actually put itself in a position to be a factor down the stretch and into the playoffs, is one of the great baseball stories of the year.

  • Open space and plenty to drink

    Two outdoor concerts happening today, which I’ll recommend, with feeling, since the window of opportunity is closing on these things: On my side of the river, out in the courtyard at the Mill City Musuem, there’s Desdamona (gee, I remember when she was just a wee thing at the Artist Quarter’s open mic) and The New Congress–a “neo-soul” band whose praises I can sing (even if not any of their songs) since the bass player’s girlfriend works here at The Rake. Just yesterday she was bragging about the band winning a “Single of the Year” honor at the L.A. Music Awards.

    Across the river, the Minnesota Museum of American Art’s Patio Nights party doubles as Gallery Grooves. (This means there’ll be plenty of gratis wine ‘n cheese, in case you didn’t immediately catch my drift.) Starting at 8, there’ll be live performances by Kill The Vultures and Chill 7, as well as some fire dancing (gasp!). But the thing I love most about these parties is how, at least in spirit, they celebrate the best of the AMPERS radio network. These under-funded community stations are in a struggle, you know… But every Saturday morning, in particular, I thank heavens Phil Nusbaum and the Bluegrass Review are still around! Another one of AMPERS’ finest–Kevin Barnes, also from Jazz 88/KBEM–will be there tonight spinning some tunes.

  • Puff Pastry?

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    This isn’t your average bake sale. You probably won’t find suburban moms in their J.Jill capris sweetly smiling over bundt cake. That’s because it’s …

    The Big Gay Bake Sale!

    This Saturday from 6-10pm, Patrick’s Cabaret is hosting The Big Gay Bake Sale as a fundraiser for the Flaming Film Festival. Beyond bakery items, they promise a live date auction, queer kissing booth, drag show, raffle, music by Central Standard, plus a kicky apron contest!

    Do you think there will be bread baked into naughty shapes? I can’t wait to see the fabulous cupcakes…

    Patrick’s Cabaret
    3010 Minehaha Ave S
    Mpls.MN 55406