The Rake Magazine

Category: Blog Post

  • Is Biking, Is Not Canoeing

    Maybe it’s because I spent the better part of my holiday weekend cooking on the Namekagen River–where I slept under the stars but also encountered various flotillas of holidaying drunks who hollered “Whooooo!,” seemingly out of nowhere. (At the sight of me?) Well, whatever this feeling is, what’s clear to me is that I don’t feel entirely ready to reenter the civilized world. Not just yet anyhow.

    Here’s something that teeters on the edge: Altered Aesthetics is hosting a bike-themed art show. On the AA homepage, there’s a beautiful image of what I think is the Midtown Greenway at dawn, taken just after the Dean Parkway exit but well before coming upon Lake Calhoun. Now, I’m not necessarily venturing a claim against cycling here. I’m an enthusiastic one m’self. All I’m saying is that there’s something about riding down that trail in the morning, and then turning north onto Cedar, that, however fleetingly, delivers me out of this city. In any case, the AA show features one hundred bike-themed works by forty-some artists. They should do the same thing for canoes sometime.

  • Picnic Love

    foodiePotatoSalad.jpg

    It’s all about the Potato Salad.

    This is sort of an anti-pasto potato salad.

    This one is herby and light.

    This one, made with french fries, won a Food Network contest.

    Martha’s All American version.

    Ach du lieber, wir essen Kartoffelsalat. Sehr gut, ja?

  • Uncle Jumbo's Playground

    uncle jumbo-7.jpg

    –Illustration by James Dankert

    The things a guy will do for a free burrito. It’s humiliating, but a deal’s a deal, even when it’s not much of a deal. A couple weeks ago I insisted I wouldn’t write a damn word until the Twins clawed their way to .500. When it became apparent that that wasn’t likely to happen anytime in the next, oh, four months, I said that I’d cough something up when they managed to sweep a series.

    So now, since Zeller seems to have entirely lost interest in the greatest game ever invented, a game that he can never forgive for being so difficult for him to master and so damn easy for a fat guy like me, I guess I’ll finally step into the breach.

    I’ll say this much for myself: I can fill a breach like nobody’s business. And at a time when my weight, thirst for cheap beer, penchant for public urination, and economic status (such as it is) should have driven me into the greasy and indiscriminate arms of NASCAR Nation, I’m still a baseball fan. And I’m still a Twins fan, even though there are increasingly days when I curse the team with every labored breath left in my lungs.

    I don’t understand how a team can play like a bunch of slow-pitch softball hogs one day, and like a World Cup soccer team with a sieve for a goaltender the next. It makes no sense to me, and it drives me into raging fits of bellowing public (and private) spectacle. If you want to really ruin your Memorial Day picnic, go ahead and try to imagine Jumbo alone in his sweltering attic apartment in his ample white Jockey shorts, stomping around and howling and looking sort of like a red, sweating sausage that’s spent too much time on the hot dog spinner at the SuperAmerica and is just about ready to explode.

    There you have it. Welcome to my sad little world. The people who live below me spend a good deal of time banging on the ceiling with what sounds like a broomstick.

    To make things even worse, my old friend Junie “Boneyard” Sandoval was crashing with me for a couple months after his battleaxe of a wife threw him out of their place in Fridley. He was in a bad way, but I was none too happy to have him in my private space, of which I occupy plenty all by my lonesome. It was hard to watch baseball games when my house guest insisted on listening to the Steve Miller Band’s Greatest Hits over and over at maximum volume. I also don’t like to watch anybody play air guitar, particularly another fat guy without a shirt on. I’ve known Junie since grade school, but I discovered that that’s unfortunately not a good enough excuse to still be friends with anybody more than thirty years down the road. I realized that we had absolutely nothing in common other than that we were both thrilled to see Dennys Reyes, a guy almost as fat as either of us, pitching in the Major Leagues, and we both shopped at the Big and Tall Men’s clothing store. Neither of us is what you would call tall, but I suppose we fit pretty much any reasonable definition of big.

    Things finally came to a head –or, rather, to blows– when I walked into my apartment the other night and found Junie wearing my clothes, eating my Captain Crunch with my spoon, out of my plastic ice cream pail. I also discovered that he’d apparently spent the day drinking his way through the last of my chocolate milk and beer. I always have plenty of beer on hand, which would explain Junie’s extreme state of inebriation.

    I kicked his drunk ass out of my apartment and sat down for the first time in weeks to watch a baseball game in peace. I was pretty uptight and regrettably stone-cold sober, but the Twins lit up Milwaukee for sixteen runs (and coughed up ten: the softball hogs and the sieve goaltender were in the house). It was a beautiful night, my apartment hadn’t yet been transformed into an inferno, and I was mercifully reminded that I’m still capable of experiencing something approaching serenity on an occasional basis.

    The Twins are 6-2 since I sent Junie packing, and though I’m sure as hell not stupid enough to get truly excited by that fact, I still have to admit that the basic math of the the last week would have me breathing a little bit easier if it wasn’t a hundred degrees in my apartment, if I wasn’t in such lousy shape, and if I was, in fact, actually capable of breathing a little bit easier. Which –tough luck for me, I suppose– I’m unfortunately not.

  • Messengers

    laughter.jpg

    There were three of them, crowded into the front seat of a Volvo station wagon that had 150,000 miles on the odometer. They were angels, and they liked to drive with the windows down and the music loud.

    They seldom had disagreements about the music; all of them shared a taste for early Elvis Costello, the Pogues, and Buddy Guy, among others. They covered a lot of miles in that Volvo, and had a huge collection of tapes.

    They’d been chosen for their stoic, no-nonsense demeanors. They weren’t happy to be dead, and they’d all been taken quickly, violently, and much too young. None of them were much for conversation, but they found things to say to each other as they drove to and from assignments.

    It never failed to irritate them that people seemed to think that angels were supposed to be comely. In truth, most angels of their acquaintance were unattractive and ungainly, and there was generally something downright terrifying about the very best and most effective ones. They certainly didn’t look anything like what the gift shop loonies and inspirational quacks liked to imagine.

    Angels –the real ones– were expected only to be efficient and to deliver their message loud and clear. That message tended to be relatively simple and blunt.

    They would get their human assignments trussed and blindfolded in the backseat of the Volvo, and then drive them into dark places, where they would release them into a patch of intense and paralyzing light.

    They were epiphanic messengers, the sternest of the angels, and were assigned the hard luck cases and squanderers. Their advice, such as it was, was pretty much boilerplate by this time:

    Straighten up and fly right.

    Wake up and smell the coffee.

    Get your shit together.

    Pull your head out of your ass.

    And: Live, you lucky bastards.

    anarchy.jpg

  • Cry Me a River

    The weekend planner: Not so easy this weekend, since I’m subjecting myself to an under-planned canoeing excursion, as not even half-baked by the rather impulsive boyfriend.

    But if I were to be sticking around town this weekend, here’s what I’d probably be up to:

    The Fusion Fashion Event, featuring work by many-a local clothing designers at the Varsity Theater.
    And speaking of local designers, The Design Collective is having a big Memorial Day Weekend Sale.

    HowWasTheShow.com‘s fourth anniversary show featuring Alva Star, The Alarmists, White Light Riot, and our dear friend, the ever-optimistic, photo-snapping David DeYoung–or, as the man himself likes to say, the “best-paid man in local music journalism,” since he makes his living doing something else.

    Flaming Film Festival–especially all that B-Boy shit, yo.
    Speaking of which, there’s also the Homocore Minneapolis Show, on Sunday, featuring an evening of “Homo-hop.” Ha! Actually, I’m expected to have had my fill of river water by this late date in the weekend, and so I might actually catch this one.

  • Guns and Flies

    proposition1.gif

    The Proposition, 2005. Directed by John Hillcoat, written by Nick Cave. Starring Guy Pierce, Ray Winstone, Emily Watson, Danny Huston, the foppish David Wenham, Richard Wilson, and the woefully underutilized John Hurt, and two of Australia’s greatest aboriginal actors: David Gulpilil (famous for Walkabout) and Tommy Lewis (from The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith).

    Now playing at the Lagoon, instead of the Uptown, where they’re screening The Celestine Prophecy. Apparently, the finest films in the world don’t have a home at this Landmark Theatre.

    For those of us who love westerns–and I count myself amongst that forlorn group–The Proposition is as welcome as, well, as welcome as a the ghost of Sam Peckinpah in a lonely Montana hotel on a cold evening. Like old Sam’s best movies, this one is dirty, has vile characters, bucketloads of extreme violence, a morally compromised society, and gorgeous photography. Not to mention a decent script that sometimes falters but nevertheless serves its masters well. Like the films of Sam Peckinpah, this one’s being criminally neglected, shuffled off to the shoeboxes at the Lagoon theater, waiting to vanish like a bad dream.

    Even better, The Proposition doesn’t soak itself in Peckinpah’s drunken machismo, has a sharp female character who is not simply a whore or a saint.

    The facts: Captain Stanley (played by Ray Winstone, whose tense performance almost gave me a headache) and his scurrilous crew blast apart a brothel in order to apprehend half of the infamous Burns gang. After killing scores of prostitutes, the captain gets his men, Charlie and Mike Burns (Guy Pearce and the angel-faced Richard Wilson). Stanley makes a deal with the intelligent Charlie: if you go into the outback and murder your brother Arthur, the maniacal leader of the wicked clan, then the baby, Mike, won’t die at the hangman’s noose. Charlie accepts, is given a gun and a horse, and makes his way into the unforgivable desert.

    Nothing, of course, can go right. The Proposition cuts between the two societies, that of the criminal in the desert and the face of law and order in the town. But the Captain has troubles: his men, as rotten as the criminals they pursue and nearly genocidal in their attempts to rid Australia of aborigines, don’t trust him; his wife (played by Emily Watson, a beacon of cleanliness and clear morality in this wasted land) seeks justice for the murder and rape of her best friend (at the hands of the Burns gang); his superior Eden Fletcher (played by David Wenham, whose lispy performance is ridiculous, the only weak spot in this fine film) is after him to get results, and eventually disrupts this proposition by having the feeble Mike Burns flogged to death.

    Nick Cave’s screenplay is nice, even as it threatens to slog into Cormac McCarthy’s He-Man Spiritual Territory. I might also add that Cave’s soundtrack is astounding, and should be required for future westerns. But I digress: the menacing Arthur burns, played with one of the great slow-burners in Danny Huston (John’s grandson) is simply fabulous–a philosophizing bastard who stares at sunsets and ruminates on love and family. John Hurt is along for the ride, acting with the subtlety of John Lovitz in his Subway ads, but it’s great to see the old coot brandishing a gun, snot dripping from the end of his nose. The film is relentlessly dirty, and insects are everywhere, crawling on men and women, biting and buzzing.

    One could argue that The Proposition is a study of the madness of society versus the madness of family. For the Burns’ clan is, indeed, a close-knit family who might even be said to love one another. Captain Stanley’s little town in the middle of nowhere is a civilized place, where no one trusts one another and deceit is the first order of business, as long as everything is in its place. But the Burns’ are vile creatures, rapists, murderers, and in the final analysis, no one emerges clean and clear and unwounded.

    The Proposition is a film you could analyze until the dingoes come home, and in doing so find scores of little contradictions, mistakes, and etc. It’s not a perfect film, but for the lover of the western, it is perfectly entertaining, provided you can stomach some its violence. I could, and would see it again.

    proposition2_.gif

  • Top Mayonnaise

    mmm.jpg

    Well, Tiffani lost. Harold has been named Top Chef.

    He’s going back to New York to open his own restaurant and I’m sure he will have investors and press knocking down his door. He’ll probably be successful, as long as he has a smart someone running his front-of-house.

    But did he deserve the win?

    In the final round, he took the safe route. His dishes were good, but they didn’t seem to WOW the guests while they were eating them. In fact they seemed to react to them more fondly during the panel discussion than they did during the actual tasting.

    Tiffani took a bold route. She put out twice the preparations saddled with a hungover/drunk crew. In any normal situation, Dave and Stephen would have been sent home or fired. Her dishes were good and interesting. In contrast, people seemed to really like her food during the tasting, then during panel gave it a “meh”.

    The choice had already been made. I knew that the show had chosen to villify Tiffani and make her out to be a baddie. I knew that meant that she was in danger of losing so that the show could “punish” her and let the popular kid win.

    I’m just surprised that the panel took the safe route and didn’t see risk-taking and perseverance through serious adversity as more winsome qualities than average consistency. If Colicchio were competeing instead of judging, which route do you think he would have taken? If it were Keller vs. Colicchio, do you think either would have taken the safe route? They would have attempted to dazzle, and if they were as young as Tiffani, they might also have fallen short on some dishes. But that wouldn’t change who they are.

    Shouldn’t the title of Top Chef speak more to whom they will become in the industry rather than how they failed or succeeded on a taste profile in one or two dishes? In Project Runway they always speak about the winner as the “next big designer”. The judges of Top Chef, it seems, were more concerned with their own abilities to judge food than they were about identifying a potentially serious player in the industry.

    I know Tiffani will land on her feet, and I know in the end she will be more successful than jealous Leeann, untalented Miguel, or the fool Dave (who, with all his on camera eye-rolling antics, will probably never be welcomed in a serious professional kitchen).

    I’m sure there will be another season. But if they choose to champion palatable mediocrity over spicy determination, I might as well make myself a mayonnaise sandwich and watch American Idol.

  • Walk 'er

    No matter what you think about all these new designer buildings in town, you can’t help but give props to the frontrunner, Walker Art Center, for programming some pretty neat stuff since re-opening with their expansion. I’m not sure what to make of tonight’s prom-themed fashion show, curated by local hat designer/Target employee Anna Lee. For grownups: there’s also the behind-the-scenes look at Matthew Barney in a documentary by Alison Chernick called Matthew Barney: No Restraint–screening tonight as part of Free First Thursdays. Check Peter Schilling’s take.

    Worth noting: The very excellent prefab housing exhibition closes Sunday. Last weekend’s New York Times Magazine shed some light on one of the houses featured in the exhibit though, the owners of “Turbulence House” being not entirely pleased with their architect’s results. The magazine also featured a piece on Herzog & de Meuron (the guys who designed the Walker expansion), chronicling the plight of designing and building their bird’s nest/national stadium for Beijing.

  • "This F'n Vaseline Thing"

    For those of you who are still reeling from Matt Barney’s Drawing Restraint 9, I have just the thing for you: tonight at the Walker Art Center they’re showing the documentary Matthew Barney: No Restraint at 8:00–and it’s free (provided you get there on time–tix available at 7).

    Quite frankly, this documentary is, in my mind, more entertaining than the film itself. Barney talks with his ‘aw-shucks’ Idahoan accent, and there are weird public access television shots of Barney the high school football player–who woulda thunk? Also, there’s some great commentary by the very earnest captains of the whaling company and their baffled crew. The director, Alison Chernick, made a similar feature on Jeff Koons, who I personally consider the worst artist ever walk the face of the earth, so you also get heaping platters of pretension from gallery owners in NYC (though no critics). Nonetheless, the film is a winning companion to the wacky film. My only complaint is that they weren’t showing it before I sat through DR9.

    The titular quote, by the way, is from Barney himself.

  • Harder To Be Down

    redrocket.jpg

    He had gone up in his rocket again and again and returned to earth each time with a renewed sense of wonder. Even so, with each return it was harder to come back down. Or, rather, it was harder to be down.

    He’d gradually grown accustomed to the feeling of being out of this world, up there where he had such a clear and dazzling view of the planet on which he was such a small and insignificant thing trapped in the strange habit called life; the planet where he was carried along through the days, surrounded on all sides by other moving and breathing things, things in a hurry to get to wherever it was they felt they had to be; harried by distractions and responsibilities and burdens, by the clutter of all the things they built and inhabited and owned and desired.

    He felt so free when he was floating above it all, and the perspective also gave him a feeling of joy and gratitude that was harder to come by in the midst of the often pathetic reduction that too often passed itself off as existence.

    His rocket was an old and relatively simple contraption, yet difficult to maintain all the same. It was built to carry two, and could not, in fact, fly with only a solitary passenger. Its operation was only possible through the work and cooperation of a duo of committed rocketeers.

    As a result there were long and unfortunate stretches in his life when his rocket was grounded, yet even then his dreams were filled with visions of the things he had seen and felt on his many journeys, and there was a kind of bittersweet solace in this.

    tin wi 2.JPG