The Rake Magazine

Category: Blog Post

  • Chicks Live on Farms

    It occured to me this morning that I must update my post "Bimbos,
    Himbos and Harleys" with new content and here is why:

    While
    it is true that the DelSol, the VW rabbit convertible and the Corvette
    are charter members of the Bimbo & Himbo Hall of Fame, not many of
    you drive these things.

    Unlike the Mini-Cooper.

    Which raises the question: is this a car for bimbos and/or himbos? My answer is emphatically, unfortunately, yes. But only for the second-gen "new mini" model, not the first.

    BMW has detuned the second generation Cooper to fit a
    demographic that is overwhelmignly female. These German Dunderheads
    equate this with the "more forgiving" characteristics of a "chick car."

    I for one, have always believed that chicks live on farms and
    not the front seat of a Mini Cooper. That is why the women I know have
    shunned the second generation model.

    Come to think of it, the
    only person I know who has purchased one is my Dad’s loudmouth,
    Crocs-wearing and frequently swearing neighbor who seems to be going
    through some kind of mid-life crisis.

    In other words, a himbo.

    Of the very highest order.

  • Who, Me? Ugly?

    How utterly devastating it must be to go through life as "unfortunate
    looking." I could live with plain, ordinary, even homely — but unfortunate? This is no way to live. It’s shear impetus to go under the knife: just get surgery and look like everyone
    else.

    Certainly, many people
    bank on their good looks to get them through life; but there are indeed others who
    actually have to earn respect through hard work. Which would you prefer? The first is easier, no doubt. I’m guessing most of us would love to avoid the latter of the two if we could.

    The Ugly One, now showing at the Guthrie’s Dowling Studio, uses
    an "exploratory" (apparently, the director,
    Benjamin McGovern, doesn’t like to describe theater as experimental,
    so in an effort to avoid offending him, I’ll use the word exploratory)
    avant-garde style, typical of black box theater. Simple scene designs and costumes, and exploratory direction, drive through a message about the importance of succeeding
    by hard work, regardless of physical shortcomings.

    The Ugly One follows the story
    of, as you may expect, a very ugly man named Lette (played by Kris
    L. Nelson). While Lette is initially (the only one) unaware of his unfortunate stature, his shallow, smug boss (played by Luverne
    Seifert) finally sets him straight by cruelly informing him that he is in fact very ugly. It is at this
    point that Lette decides to reconstruct his face. After a successful
    surgery, people are enthralled by his good looks, and he is quickly promoted to head of sales. As his ego seeks long-awaited gratification, however, Lette is overcome by the astonishing amount of women who want to sleep with him. Yes, he’s just as human as the next frog-turned-prince; and with so many choices as hand, he cheats on his beautiful wife, who, captivated by her husband’s
    new face, refuses to leave him.

    News travels fast of the seemingly
    impossible (and ludicrously lucrative) surgery, and envious, greedy hoards swarm to the surgeon to recreate his masterpiece upon their faces. Before long, Lette’s face is everywhere — even among his coworkers. (Can you imagine seeing your face in every cubicle down the hall?) The novelty long gone, the original incumbent prince reevaluates his decision.

    The 55-minute play has only
    four actors, each playing multiple characters. The only woman
    in the play, actress Kate Eifrig, smoothly transitions from Lette’s
    wife to an old woman with enough plastic surgery to make Dolly Parton
    jealous. It’s safe to say her characters are the easiest to
    distinguish, as she utilizes her whole body to interpret them. This is no surprise considering all the roles she played in her last Guthrie performance, 9 Parts of Desire — a stellar one-woman production.

    Kris L. Nelson’s did a great job flipping from an ugly man with a
    beautiful heart to an attractive man with an ugly heart, realizing that he lost himself in the midst of his transformation.

    What’s particularly interesting about this production, however, is the way it plays off of the audience’s imagination. Rather than simply presenting beauty and ugliness for us to react to, most of what we know is not seen, but derived from reactions and dialog. The audience reacts to the reactions, rather than to the physical aspects themselves. This brings out
    an interesting irony in the play, since the theme revolves around identity
    in terms of physical beauty. Does the play strengthen its point by refusing to present beauty in physical form? Or is it simply cowardice — avoiding any statement or distraction of what is beautiful or ugly?

    A farcical comedy with wit and intrigue, The
    Ugly One     is an enjoyable exploratory play that will leave
    you with an understanding that maybe you ought to take another look in
    the mirror.

    7:30 p.m., May 28-June 1st,
    Guthrie Theatre, 818 South
    2nd St., Minneapolis; $18-$34.

  • Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Starchitecture

    Art museums are host to two species of rats, those that skulk in the basements, gnawing on the art in storage, and, lower on the food chain, the people who handle the art. “Museum rat” is trade slang for the stagehands, the workers who hump crates of art off trucks at the loading dock, maneuver sculpture into position, hang paintings, set up lights, build pedestals, perpetually paint and repaint the walls of the galleries, and generally do the bidding of the museum’s commandants. Museum rats are the movers, but not the shakers, of the art world. Most of them are artists of one sort or another themselves, which is to say, bust-outs and delinquents in t-shirts printed with the names of bands and film festivals you never heard of.

    During the nineties, I was one of that floating pool of feckless souls in the Twin Cities who get hired when a museum has two weeks to go before the opening of a show and too few hands to get the work done (the custom is to hire you for a stretch but then lay you off before you qualify for benefits or pensions). Most of my employment was at the University of Minnesota Art Museum, which before it transmogrified into the Frederick Weisman Art Museum consisted of a series of grubby galleries and offices strung along the fourth floor corridors of the moldering Northrup Auditorium. When the museum moved to its new quarters in Frank Gehry’s destroyer-class WAM–the crumpled sketch that served as the tuneup for the Guggenheim’s aircraft carrier in Bilbao–I was one of the deckhands, one of the crew who installed the billboard-size works by Roy Lichtenstein and James Rosenquist that hang in the front lobby and gallery of the museum. And it was I who with clammy male hands in white cotton gloves hung Georgia O’Keefe’s Oriental Poppies, said at the time to be worth two million bucks.

    One of Gehry’s early sketches for the Weisman, scribbled on a cocktail napkin and since preserved with the reverence accorded a holy relic, was seized upon by the museum for a logo, hoping with this to create a perception of the place as a hotbed of spontaneously combusting creativity. The with-it acronym, WAM, strives desperately for the same effect—POW! For all that, the place is basically just a gift shop (the first thing you encounter on entering the building) with a small teaching museum attached. Besides teaching students how to make purchases of tasteful gifts and stand frowning thoughtfully before works of art, the Weisman also makes money by hiring itself out as a catering hall for conferences, receptions, yuppie nuptials, etc. Often when I came in to work on mornings after one of these events, the floors of the galleries would be garnished with wet bits of wilted lettuce and little gobs of buttercream from pieces of sheet cake accidentally flipped off paper plates the night before.

    Gehry’s buildings, in my book, are architecture’s version of torn designer jeans. They imply radical experience without actually having to go through it. They gesticulate without it meaning anything. Inside the Weisman, the yawing walls reflect the gratuitously skewed planes and pointless curves of all the tin-snipped bling hung off the outside. In the museum’s carpentry shop, where I worked, the wall is canted uselessly inward; anything as sensible as a plumb wall would have been too mundane. I never measured to be sure, but it always felt like the shop’s longest dimension is the height of its absurdly unusable vertical space. The shop has no windows either—no eyes. . . it was like working inside a dumpster with the lid closed.

    Rhapsodizing over the Weisman when the building opened fourteen years ago, however, critic Herbert Muschamp of The New York Times pronounced the new museum’s galleries “the five most beautiful rooms in the world.” I rubbed my eyes to be sure I’d read this right, but this was before I understood anything about criticism’s contributions to the science of buzz. The process by which a work is pronounced great is compounded of many sidewise glances at what other people think. Gathering mass, the consensus keeps snowballing, burying us in an avalanche of conviction that such and such a thing is so -– it must be. . . someone more important than us said it is.

    It fell, then, to a couple of obscure museum rats, two anonymous art schleppers, to do something to subvert some part of the world’s received wisdom. One lunchtime a few weeks before the museum’s grand opening, they decided to circumvent the curators and put up a favorite work of their own as the very first picture ever to hang in the new galleries. The work was a portrait they’d found —actually a jigsaw puzzle, still wrapped in cellophane–of Barney the Dinosaur, sporting the beret of an artiste, a pallet and brush in his purple mitts. Following Barney’s installation as the museum’s maiden work of art, one of the perps set up a music stand in the middle of the echoing gallery and with great verve proceeded to play a rousing march on his dented old farting tuba. It was the high point of my life at the WAM.

    Now, whenever I bike along the opposite bank of the river, I look across to the Weisman and think of that dinged-up tuba and the wags I used to work with in the building’s lower depths. As it happens, a fenced-off stretch of the riverbank opposite the museum has this past year been serving as a storage lot for some of the violently twisted steel recovered from the collapse of the I-35 W bridge. From its vantage point across the river, the Weisman, a building that itself appears to have been cobbled together from gum wrappers, looks out upon all that contorted steel rusting in the weeds across the river. Last year, Gehry was sued for dereliction after a $300 million research building he did for M.I.T. in 2004 started falling apart a few months after it opened. Before time stole his thunder, the great and terrible Ozymandias declared, “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair,” but maybe what he meant to say was “repair.”

  • Please Welcome Kate Iverson to The Rake

    As you may have noticed, our Secrets of the Day header has changed. From here on out, Kate Iverson will take the lead on compiling the Secrets and letting you know what great things are happening in the Twin Cities. We are very excited to have her with us, as I’m sure you will be once you experience her awesomeness.

    Please see below for her first Secrets of the Day recommendations. I have but one thing to add to the mix. Tonight, the Edina Cinema is serving up a stellar double feature — too good to pass up: Woody Allen & Diane Keaton in Annie Hall (1977), and Jack Lemmon & Shirley MacLaine in Billy Wilder’s The Apartment (1960). You just can’t go wrong with these two!

    Have a great one, and be sure to check out some of our new articles: J.A. del Rosario’s review of Mike Edison’s pop novel, I Have Fun Everywhere I Go; author Stephan Evans’s explanation as to why his novel is set in Minneapolis; Gwen E. Kirby’s "Cherry on a Spoon"; Denis Joeng’s Martin Olav Sabo Bridge-Naming Ceremony slideshow; and Brian Voerding’s piece on Mikenastics.

    —Cristina Córdova

    And now, more from Kate…

    THEATER & PERFORMANCE
    Bedlam 10 Minute Play Festival

    The forum for independently produced theater is always in high-demand, and since 2002 the Bedlam Theatre has been catering to that demand through its 10 Minute Play Festival. Each year, for the past seven years, the company has painstakingly selected the most visionary directors and playwrights for this annual production. Twenty-three ten-minute or less works showcase experimental and cutting edge ideas of local and national talent — which culminate on the Bedlam stage this very evening. The plays are parceled out into three sections that rotate throughout the festival for easy and non-overwhelming theatrical enjoyment.

    7 & 9 p.m. (through June 1st), Bedlam Theater, 1501 S. 6th St., Minneapolis; $10-$20.

    SPECIAL EVENT
    Bush-McCain Challenge

    A funny yet informative twist on the old Pepsi-Coke Challenge, the Bush-McCain challenge is an enlightening quiz which shows George Bush and John McCain in a very similar light. A phenomenon that is sweeping the internet, actual Bush-McCain Challenge events have been popping up all over the country — in-your-face man-on-the-street events. Today, three such events will occur throughout the afternoon all over the city. So, come on down, take the challenge, and talk politics with like-minded (and perhaps some not-like-minded) folks.

    Noon; 11th & Nicollet Mall, downtown Minneapolis; Wedge Coop, Franklin & Lyndale, Minneapolis; Hub Shopping Center, 66th & Nicollet, Minneapolis; free.

    ART

    Art Revolution for Twin Cities Students: Ask Me

    The Center for Independent Artists has been churning out an impressive season of community-friendly art events aimed at drawing in and educating people of all ethnicities, ages, and skill levels about the arts. Tonight’s event, presented by Yo! The Movement and Art Revolution for Twin Cities Students, brings together arts professionals with Twin Cities students for a fun meet-and-greet and general information session about art as a profession and as a creative outlet. A great activitity for the fam that includes cool music, art, food, and creative encouragement.

    6-10 p.m., Center for Independent Arts, 4137 Bloomington Ave. S, Minneapolis; free.

    MUSIC
    Los Campesinos!

    Los Campesinos translates to "The Farmers," and what they seem to be cultivating is some seriously charming indie art-pop, topped off with a nice, messy dollop of punk rock sensibility. Tonight’s show at the Varsity supports their fittingly titled debut CD, Hold on Now, Youngster, and will most likely be a high-energy phantasm filled with musically elite college students who probably think they’re cooler than you. If you can get past that, however, I definitely think this show merits consideration on your hump-day itinerary.

    8 p.m., Varsity Theater, 1308 4th St. SE, Dinkytown, Minneapolis; $13.

  • Sign Your Life away on the Dotted Line

    Personally, I’m a little tired of insider media gossip, but I find myself compelled to contribute to the cause. What the hell is up with these ridiculous non-competes!?

    The Pioneer Press has one. The Star Tribune has one. According to Brian Lambert, John Hines even had a non-compete agreement with KTLK. Work for any media in town, in fact, and you’ll likely be
    asked to sign one. Six months. One year. Minneapolis/St. Paul Magazine has the gall to ask for two whole years!

    No, you’re not misunderstanding. It’s not enough that they have you exclusively while you’re there. That I can live with. But you can’t work for a "competing" (so loosely defined) organization for two years after you leave.

    A two-year non-compete?! Can you imagine? You
    leave that job — maybe you just get a little tired doing the same thing
    day in and day out — and you have to leave town to find work (unless you
    want to work at the local Arby’s). It’s absurd.

    I say we all take the Par Ridder approach and tear the fuckers up! (Pardon
    me, but outrage overrides the auto censors.)

    Why would anybody ever sign anything like this in the first place? Why would anyone sign away all their rights? To get a job? You’ve got to be kidding!

    Hello. Sign here. Welcome to indentured servitude.

    By signing a non-compete agreement, we are ceding our rights as employees, voluntarily surrendering our power of negotiation, our only leverage in a lion’s world. Ridiculous!

    As an employee you have the right to explore your options, to determine your value in the job market. You have the right to use said value to make demands on your employer. And you have the right to leave said employer if said employer does not match said value.

    On a much more personal note, you have the right to bore with your employer, to explore new options, to ty something new just because you damn well fell like it. You have a right to explore every whim. And, of course, you have the right to suffer the consequences.

    Why would anyone sign this away? Are we so desperate for employment that we’re willing to cut our legs off at the knees just because someone put a saw in front of us? Is this the contemporary scab—too desperate to make demands?

    Say "No!"

    For crying out loud, at least ask for a three-month probation period before you put on the cuffs (and then think twice about how long your hands will remain fused together after the cuffs are off). Would you marry someone who proposed to you after only one interview? Hell, I won’t even marry the man I’ve loved for eight years. And that divorce wouldn’t even require an extended celibacy period.

    We seem to have gotten far too comfortable with signing our rights away. Every day we set our signature to something new: a credit card, a mortgage, a lease, a loan, a job order, a purchase, an invoice, a job contract. How much do we really know about what we’re signing? How often do we question the agreement? Don’t even get me going on our lack of consumer rights… But we do have rights, people. And we need to start making demands. As long as we continue to submit to inanities, the lions will continue to feast on our bones.

  • Mr. Smith Goes to Kenwood

    Dane Smith is back, and he’s back with
    the panache that only serious money can sustain. Is this a good thing?
    As per Rupert Murdoch’s Pravda West, you decide!

    When last we saw our hometown hero, March of 2007, Dane Smith was walking the plank at the Newsreel of the Twin Cities,
    where the new spew of hard-edged gossiping, gay-bashing,
    Muslim-bashing, Kersten-style investigative journalism has dragged
    Strib reader’s average IQ down yet another 20 or 30 points. (When IQ
    approaches zero it’s a basic math problem; check out renormalization. If you find this stuff difficult, you’re reading too much Strib).

    Back
    to our story, shouldn’t we feel sorry for Smith, who coughed up a
    20-plus-year career of determinedly non-partisan political reporting in
    favor of getting out "while a good buyout offer was available"?

    No, we shouldn’t. Smith quickly re-invented himself, jumping the shark
    onto the career path of a politician who’s been around long enough to
    know what principles to sacrifice, and when. He followed the money.

    A
    mere month from his Strib swanbyline, Smith was "found" for the
    self-identified "progressive economic think tank" Growth and Justice in a "search" conducted by DFL mover and perennial candidate Rebecca Yanisch. This hookup paired Smith with ex-Strib crony and DFL candidate (do I sense a trend?) Joel Kramer, in a deal which looks chummier than a Wild night in the penalty box.

    Politicians
    leaving office are inclined to tap their Rolodexes, those arteries
    through which political influence and big money run fastest, for
    whatever purposes motivate them. Smith is now the poster boy for an epidemic of similar vascular incursions by exiting political journalists.

    What
    brings this all to mind is that, on Wednesday past, Smith and his pals,
    self-appointed keepers of Minnesota’s moral and electoral rectitude,
    treated us to a gloriously righteous fit of profitable indignation, the
    Worst Political Advertising in America Awards Ceremony. The event was, more or less, the political set’s version of the Bad Sex in Fiction Awards. Or something.

    Smith’s pre-event spiel
    touted an "Academy Awards style event," but admitted the content was
    just the baddest stuff of a few intern-hours’ search on YouTube. He
    proposed "marketing it as a way for people to blow off steam" in a
    "non-partisan, multi-partisan setting," but that’s where it gets even
    harder to believe.

    What it is, really is, is a feel good dollar hook for Growth and Justice, Smith’s we’re-not-very-partisan lobby. Smith’s real message is "send me money!"

    Growth and Justice has only one identifiable BOD Republican (Arlen Erdahl). The case makes itself that G&J is "nothing more than a front group for the DFL."
    Nevertheless, Smith, like most partisan Democrats, has handed over to
    the right the right to be openly partisan about anything. Like Dems in
    general, he’s scared to death of the word.

    Wednesday,
    in exchange for the paper-thin political cover of having kicked-out
    (Ron Erhardt) and forgotten (Charlie Weaver) Republicans,
    self-promoters (Mitch Pearlstein) desperate for their thoughts to be
    remembered, and US Senators (some guy named Coleman) desperate for
    their acts to be forgot, all act as award co-presenters, along with a
    bevy of the DFL’s Kenwood elite, Smith and G&J happily conceded Democratic ads to be just as stupid, dishonest, and downright evil as Republicans’.

    Irony
    the First is that Smith’s methods, indeed his very position, are those
    he so recently decried. His portentously perverse parting proposition
    for a Strib successor: "Always pay attention to who’s getting what and
    why    . I’ve always liked the old saw about comforting the afflicted and
    afflicting the comfortable." Today no powerful or desirous Minnesota politician is too comfortable to sit in the shade of the G&J umbrella.

    And let’s not mention that, as an entrenched media elitist, Smith has no trouble convincing MSM (see here, and here) to spring for free space ("earned media," in political parlance) to promote his fund raising activities.

    To
    be fair (must I?), Smith and his cronies are emulating a right wing
    strategy of years’ proven effectiveness. For as long as memory, the
    Heritage Foundation, American Enterprise Institute, Cato Institute and
    other unabashed cash laundries have ecstatically catapulted Republican
    candidates and causes upon us from behind the invisible shield of non-profit tax deductions. Left-wingers are finally catching on, and G&J is but one of a rapidly flocking coterie of port side dollar decoys.

    But the impartiality illusion must be maintained.

    G&J’s
    complaints about Dem ads are fatuous at best. Growth and Justice
    cheerily Swift-boats national Democrats, declaring the DNC’s smooth,
    smart Valentine’s Day 2008 "Sweetheart Deal" to be the bad ad equal to North Carolina lunatic fringer Vernon Robinson’s 2004 "Twilight Zone v. Leave It To Beaver." "Sweetheart Deal," tapped as a "guilt by association" ad, wins G&J’s Daisy Award for Dems bashing Republicans, while "Twilight Zone" wins the Willie Award for the reverse. But there’s a qualitative difference between the two.

    Robinson,
    who has lost Republican primaries in multiple NC Congressional districts,
    takes on Islamic extremists, homosexuals, lesbians, feminists, liberal
    judges, burning American flags, killing a million babies, the ten
    commandments, God, black children born out of wedlock, Jesse Jackson,
    Al Sharpton, racial quotas, aliens (with and without spaceships) and
    the unguarded Mexican border, in 59 seconds flat. He’s an avenging
    angel, and there are a lot of us on his hit list. McCain and Bush may
    not be peas in every issue’s pod, as "Sweetheart Deal" hints, but
    they’re from adjacent rows of the same vegetable garden, and the ad
    uses McCain’s own audio to make that point. The DNC MO isn’t guilt by
    association; it’s association by guilt. Don’t bother trying to decode
    this one. It’s tautological.

    Smith’s
    supreme intellectual insult, though, for those whose IQ numbers still
    require sock removal (see paragraph 2), doesn’t even have a
    (non-)partisan point. It’s a shame shame about using sex to sell
    politics. Smith/G&J cite a clever tongue and cheek (sic) show by porn actress and political opportunist Mary Carey,
    demonstrating her qualifications to command the office of Governor of
    California, and whatever else might arise. How opportune! Mr. Smith, to
    lure us to your very own fund raiser by flashing a hint of porn. C’mon,
    Dane, who’s zoomin’ who?

    To
    entertain a rumsfeldian dialogue, is the growth of Growth and Justice
    justifiable? No. Is it necessary to balance the political equation?
    Yes. Will American politics improve, as Democrats catch up with
    Republicans in the Think Tank Wars? I doubt it. Is there a better
    way? You tell me!

     

  • Our Dear Friend "Utah" Phillips

    We just received this email from Red House Records, and thought you all should know:

    It is with great regret that Red House Records mourns the loss of our friend Bruce "Utah" Phillips who passed away Friday the 23rd at his home in Nevada City, California. In a time when words like "icon" and "legend" are bandied about
    too freely, Utah was the real deal: a consummate songwriter, labor
    historian, humorist and towering figure in American Folk Music. A true
    original, we will not see his like again and it was our great privilege
    to have been able to partner with him on a number of record releases.
    Our deepest condolences go out to Utah’s family and many friends and the countless fans who will profoundly feel his absence. His family requests memorial donations to Hospitality House, P.O. Box 3223, Grass Valley, California 95945 (530) 271-7144.

    Born
    Bruce Duncan Phillips on May 15, 1935 in Cleveland, Ohio, he was the
    son of labor organizers. Whether through this early influence or an
    early life that was not always tranquil or easy, by his twenties
    Phillips demonstrated a lifelong concern with the living conditions of
    working people. He was a proud member of the Industrial Workers of the World,
    popularly known as "the Wobblies," an organizational artifact of early
    twentieth-century labor struggles that has seen renewed interest and
    growth in membership in the last decade, not in small part due to his
    efforts to popularize it. Phillips served as an Army private during the
    Korean War, an experience he would later refer to as the turning point
    of his life. Deeply affected by the devastation and human misery he had
    witnessed, upon his return to the United States he began drifting,
    riding freight trains around the country.

    His struggle would
    be familiar today, when the difficulties of returning combat veterans
    are more widely understood, but in the late fifties Phillips was left
    to work them out for himself. Destitute and drinking, Phillips got off
    a freight train in Salt Lake City and wound up at the Joe Hill House, a
    homeless shelter operated by the anarchist Ammon Hennacy, a
    member of the Catholic Worker movement and associate of Dorothy Day.
    Phillips credited Hennacy and other social reformers he referred to as
    his "elders" with having provided a philosophical framework around
    which he later constructed songs and stories he intended as a template
    his audiences could employ to understand their own political and
    working lives. They were often hilarious, sometimes sad, but never
    shallow. "He made me understand that music must be more than cotton
    candy for the ears," said John McCutcheon, a nationally-known
    folksinger and close friend.

    In the creation of his performing persona and work, Phillips drew from influences as diverse as Borscht Belt comedian Myron Cohen, folksingers Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, and country stars Hank Williams and T. Texas Tyler. A
    stint as an archivist for the State of Utah in the 1960s taught
    Phillips the discipline of historical research; beneath the simplest
    and most folksy of his songs was a rigorous attention to detail and a
    strong and carefully-crafted narrative structure. He was a voracious
    reader in a surprising variety of fields. Meanwhile, Phillips was
    working at Hennacy’s Joe Hill house. In 1968 he ran for a seat in the U.S. Senate on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket.
    The race was won by a Republican candidate, and Phillips was seen by
    some Democrats as having split the vote. He subsequently lost his job
    with the State of Utah, a process he described as "blacklisting."
    Phillips left Utah for Saratoga Springs, New York, where he was
    welcomed into a lively community of folk performers centered at the Caffé Lena. Over
    the span of the nearly four decades that followed, Phillips worked in
    what he referred to as "the Trade," developing an audience of hundreds
    of thousands and performing in large and small cities throughout the
    United States, Canada, and Europe. His performing partners included Rosalie Sorrels, Kate Wolf, John McCutcheon and Ani DiFranco.
    "He was like an alchemist," said Sorrels, "He took the stories of
    working people and railroad bums and he built them into work that was
    influenced by writers like Thomas Wolfe, but then he gave it back, he
    put it in language so the people whom the songs and stories were about
    still had them, still owned them. He didn’t believe in stealing culture
    from the people it was about." A single from Phillips’s first record, "Moose Turd Pie,"
    a rollicking story about working on a railroad track gang, saw
    extensive airplay in 1973. From then on, Phillips had work on the road.

    His extensive writing and recording career included two albums with Ani DiFranco which earned a Grammy nomination. Phillips’s songs were performed and recorded by Emmylou Harris, Waylon Jennings, Joan Baez, Tom Waits, Joe Ely and others. He was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Folk Alliance in 1997.
    Phillips, something of a perfectionist, claimed that he never lost his
    stage fright before performances. He didn’t want to lose it, he said;
    it kept him improving. Phillips began suffering from the effects of
    chronic heart disease in 2004, and as his illness kept him off the road
    at times, he started a nationally syndicated folk-music radio show, "Loafer’s Glory,"
    produced at KVMR-FM and started a homeless shelter in his rural home
    county, where down-on-their-luck men and women were sleeping under the
    manzanita brush at the edge of town. Hospitality House opened
    in 2005 and continues to house 25 to 30 guests a night. In this way,
    Phillips returned to the work of his mentor Hennacy in the last four
    years of his life.

    Phillips died at home, in bed, in his
    sleep, next to his wife. He is survived by his son Duncan and
    daughter-in-law Bobette of Salt Lake City, son Brendan of Olympia,
    Washington; daughter Morrigan Belle of Washington, D.C.; stepson
    Nicholas Tomb of Monterrey, California; stepson and daughter-in-law Ian
    Durfee and Mary Creasey of Davis, California; brothers David Phillips
    of Fairfield, California, Ed Phillips of Cleveland, Ohio and Stuart
    Cohen of Los Angeles; sister Deborah Cohen of Lisbon, Portugal; and a
    grandchild, Brendan. He was preceded in death by his father Edwin
    Phillips and mother Kathleen, and his stepfather, Syd Cohen.

     

  • The Three Pointer: The Pistons Square the Series

    Photo by Nathaniel S. Butler/NBAE via Getty Images

    Eastern Conference Finals, Game #4: Boston 75, Detroit 94

    Series record: Tied 2-2

    1. The "Little 3"

    I’m not the first one to unimaginatively pervert the "Big 3" sobriquet for tonight’s no-show troika of Celtic stars, and the way they are playing, I certainly won’t be the last. Among Boston’s starting five, the two role players stepped up fine, especially Kendrick Perkins. But the stars were all dim bulbs, collectively shooting 11-38 FG and refusing to take control of what remarkably, all things considered, was a winnable game until about 3 minutes left to play.

    Begin with Paul Pierce, the man whose guidance of the offense in the half-court is what ultimately swung the Celtic series versus Cleveland. Tonight Pierce had his shot blocked as many times as it went in the hoop, making just 3-14 FG while getting housed three time. Worse than that, though, was that he doled one measly assist compared to four turnovers. Yes, his defense on Tayshaun Prince was stout, and yes he got to the line 11 times and sank ten of them. But in the half-court sets, Pierce, who has become the floor general and go-to creator, never really made anything happen via either the pass or the jumper.

    On to Kevin Garnett, who had an embarrassing night first getting his shot blocked from behind by Jason Maxiell on a breakaway, then getting shown up on two straight defensive sets, the first on a spin move and layup for ‘Sheed Wallace, quickly followed by a Stuckey alley oop lob to Maxiell over KG’s leaping fingers. Now with the exception of the ‘Sheed spin, a charitably inclined individual could say Garnett was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. But there is no excuse or justification for Garnett’s disappearance in the first quarter. During the regular season and the first three games of these finals, KG has owned ‘Sheed and the Pistons from about 16 feet on in, averaging 24 points and converting well over half his shots. So tonight the Pistons come roaring out with a 10-0 run and Detroit’s matchup nightmare is MIA. The other nine starters on the floor had all attempted at least one field goal before Garnett deigned to clank a jumper with the score already 16-4 Detroit and the first quarter more than half over with 5:19 to play. His second shot was the breakaway dunk attempt swatted away by Maxiell with 2:22 to play. He sat about a minute later with his team down 20-12.

    During that entire first quarter, in other words, Garnett followed through on a post-up move exactly once. That is ridiculous and typical of the self-effacement that crops up enough to stain his reputation. He finished with decent numbers, given the context of the Celtics offense: 6-16 FG, 16 pts, 10 rebounds, 3 assists (vs. 3 turnovers) and two steals. But when your team is up 2-1 on the road with a chance to essentially make your winning inevitable and your desperate, talented opponent races to a lead, and you are the best mismatch for your ballclub, you make yourself available and then you succeed or fail on that availability. You don’t shoot 0-2 FG with one of the shots being a breakout in transition.

    Which leaves us with Ray Allen. I am sick and tired of color commentator Mark Jackson (and to a lesser extent his colleagues Breen and Van Gundy) detailing every imagined flaw in Rajon Rondo’s game, especially on offense, while Allen gets a free ride for a stretch of abysmally cold outside shooting that has gone beyond a slump and is entering Nick Anderson or John Starks territory for historic, career-footnoting ineptitude. Less than 6 weeks ago, Allen ranked with Peja Stokjaovic and Steve Nash as one of the NBA’s best outside shooters. Tonight he once again failed to hit a single jumper, going 2-8 FG in four seconds less than 35 minutes, with both buckets being layups. He missed three treys and turned down about 15 other open looks. Compared to the way Allen is shooting, Rondo is Pete Maravich.

    I know that none of this is Allen’s "fault," in that he’s been lax or malicious or brought this on by any karmic retribution that would make sense. He’s been forthright and classy about his woes. He’s moved the ball relatively well and has been mostly automatic from the free throw line. But it is getting to the point where patience is appearing to be less and less of a virtue. Allen has already had his breakthrough game to end the doldrums when he shot 9-16 FG in the Celts’ Game Two loss–then promptly went back to abject clanking in the next two games. Tonight’s fourth quarter had to be a bad dream for him: Not only couldn’t he buy a basket, he missed two crunchtime free throws (!) and had Rip Hamilton toy with him on two crucial crunchtime buckets en route to Rip’s 10 4th quarter points and game line of 8-10 FGs. It might be time to experiment with Rondo on Hamilton and either Cassell or Eddie House guarding Billups at the point, at least for brief stretches. That’s two tough matchups on the defensive end, but maybe a little more offense–some shots that go in, in part because they are attempted by someone not worrying about being an albatross every time they pull the trigger. The Celtics as a team shot 31% tonight, and Allen’s 2-8 didn’t elevate that putrid accuracy. I understand that the Celtics don’t win the NBA Finals against the likes of LA or SA without Allen being on his marksman-like game. But that doesn’t mean you can’t rattle the mix–Tony Allen, even?–for four or five minutes stretches, just to see if you can stir a change.

    2. A Night For Large Role Players

    As in large guys who are role players, but also guys who play large roles. The consensus among those who saw tonight’s tilt would be that Antonio McDyess was the player of the game, and not just because he scored more points (21) and grabbed more rebounds (16) than anybody else. Although he continues to be deadly from midrange, McDyess was perhaps most valuable as the team’s emotional leader. With Rip and ‘Sheed bedeviled by fouls, Billups obviously not right in his hamstring, and Prince experiencing shooting woes, McDyess became the regulator, the one to keep things on a consistent keel that blended both passion and self-control. He came up huge. Ditto Maxiell, who in additon to his signature block and nifty alley oop played staunch half-court D and was a perfect 6-6 FG in 20:28 off the bench. And over on the other sideline, Kendrick Perkins was probably Boston’s best player tonight, ensuring that nobody got anything easily in the paint and warring for defensive boards and putbacks while stoking the desire in what seemed a curiously blase, or perhaps just disspirited, Celtics ballclub. After a horrible series against the Cavs, it has been enjoyable to watch Perkins’s series-long revival vs. Detroit.

    3. Quick Observations

    If I’ve got a rooting interest in either team, it is Boston, who I picked to win in 7 and who stars one of my favorite players in Garnett. But without the refs blowing their whistles, the Celts lose by 30 tonight, as Hamilton (8-10 FG) and ‘Sheed (6-9 FG) were both limited by foul trouble while the Celts lived at the line, registering more than half of their first 53 points via free throws. That said, the refs are getting wise to Hamilton’s arm-locking manuvers and push-offs to get open, and ‘Sheed still commits some really obvious and circumstantially dunderheaded infractions, like 4th foul showing hard on the pick and roll with more than 7 minutes to play in the third.

    Flip Saunders and Mark Jackson seem to want to agree that Chauncey is more rusty than dinged up, but the rest of us don’t have to buy that bullshit. Billups has always moved like a cat, he a bunched-up and spring player with a great first step. That stuff is nowhere to be seen in this series. Instead
    we see Billups missing badly on his jumper (3-12 tonight) and walking with a hitch during breaks in the action.

    I understand that Lindsay Hunter’s on-ball defense is preventing Eddie House from getting much burn, but have the Celts forgotten that Pierce was frequently bringing the ball up in Game Seven of the Cleveland series? For that matter, KG and Ray Allen also have pretty good handles. It sure would have been interesting to see if House’s microwave act from way outside could have made up that perpetual 5-10 point margin that existed from midway through the first until about 4-5 minutes left in the game. Boston was 1-9 from trey territory tonight, and that was Posey in the corner off a KG double team. I mean, if Sam Cassell is going to chuck a trey with 16 seconds on the shot clock in the fourth quarter and the Celts down 6 without nobody under the hoop for a rebound, is there any justification for keeping House under wraps?

     

  • Wild Bill's Birthday

    One hundred and seventy-one years ago, James Butler "Wild Bill" Hickok was born in Troy Grove, Illinois. Perhaps this is a good day to rent the full first season of Deadwood and veg out in front of a screen. It’s hardly the most sociable way to spend your time (unless you make a party out of it), but damn… it’s good!

    Of course, you could always just go to Bill’s Gun Shop & Range and fire a few rounds from a Colt revolver (or two).

    BOOKS & AUTHORS
    Michael Ondaatje

    OK, I confess: I’ve never actually read The English Patient; I only saw the movie — and even then only after months of resistance. (I didn’t like it, of course. How can anyone like something that’s supposed to be that good?) The truth is, I never gave Michael Ondaatje a fair shake until a random (and terribly good looking) man wondered into a bar in Puerto Rico and handed me a copy of Coming Through Slaughter. I read that one, of course. (Don’t you have to read a book given to you a random man in a bar?) And, bingbamboom, what a read! Methodically splattering his tales in a realm between prose and poetry, Ondaatje speaks in a language that’s all his own, but that inevitably reverberates with all that is not — and all that is great: the heat-soaked world of Tennessee Williams, the non-linear poetry of James Joyce, the romantic exoticism of Lord Byron. The man is brilliant. And tonight he’s here to share his brilliance with us as part of the Talking Volumes series at the Fitz. Ondaatje, who was born in Sri Lanka and now lives outside Toronto, will discuss his latest novel, Divisadero, in which an act of violence sends us spinning from the past to the present, and from the casinos of Nevada to the French countryside. Sounds like quintessential Ondaatje to me.

    7 p.m., Fitzgerald Theater, 10 E. Exchange St., St. Paul; 651-290-1221; $15.

    MUSIC
    George Clinton & Parliament Funkadelic

    "Funk is fun," says grandmaster of funk George Clinton. "It’s a state of mind; but it’s also all the ramifications of that state of mind." Let the rainbow-dreaded
    ringleader of Parliament-Funkadelic guide your state of mind tonight at First Avenue. You’ll have to deal with the ramifications on your own.

    8 p.m., First Avenue, 701 First Avenue North, Minneapolis; 612-338-8388; $25.

    And if you happen to be at First Avenue (or even if you’re not), be sure to poke your head into the 7th Street Entry to catch Jason Trachtenburg. I’m not sure what he’s up to these days, but if he’s still reaching out (even just a little) into the realms of the Trachtenburg Family Sideshow Players, then he’ll definitely be worth a gander.

    Also tonight, Motion City Soundtrack returns home for a gig at Myth.

    THEATER & PERFORMANCE
    Spamalot Is Back

    Hands down, this retelling of the ’75 flick Monty Python and the Holy Grail
    is the Broadway hit of the decade. Its success owes to the Pythons’
    pioneering formula—sketch comedy bits on flatulence, effeminate
    Frenchmen, and such—which, in turn, has attracted the loyal patronage
    of a most atypical theatergoer: the heterosexual white man aged
    thirty-five or thereabouts. But this production is an unapologetically
    slapstick, frisky, and therefore supremely escapist entertainment for
    all demographics. This touring production features an all-new cast of
    King Arthur and his knights in tights, as the original blockbuster is
    still going strong on Broadway. Nevertheless, the ersatz proves as popular as the first: Last summer’s St. Paul production sold out completely. —Christy DeSmith

    7:30 p.m., Orpheum Theater, 910 Hennepin Ave; 651-989-5151; $29-$79.

  • A Hit and a Miss for Ellis Marsalis

    Irvin Mayfield and Ellis
    Marsalis
    Love Songs, Ballads and Standards
    Basin Street Records

    Trumpeter Irvin Mayfield has
    often been an artist who wears his heart on his sleeve. This sentimental
    exuberance has helped put the panache in Los Hombres Calientes, made
    his breakup concept CD, How Passion Falls, especially vivid, and
    has fueled his tireless efforts (as musician, cultural ambassador, library
    board member, you name it) to resurrect New Orleans after the hurricane
    and flood that took the life of his father. But the combination of overripe
    ballads and the chance to record with his mentor, the pianist and patriarch
    Ellis Marsalis, makes Mayfield’s most every bleat bathetic, and the
    sum of Love Songs corny and starchy. I wouldn’t quite call
    it elevator music. But if I heard it on an escalator, I’d want to
    get off.

    The disc’s problems are symbolized
    by the fact that there are not one, but two versions of the hoary, somnambulant
    Beatles standard, "Yesterday," bookending the record with a studio
    opener and concert closer that aren’t different enough to justify
    the redundancy even if the improvisational acumen were more apparent.
    The song selection sets a high bar—"Superstar" and "A House
    Is Not A Home" have plenty of stirring versions even without Luther
    Vandross’s definitive takes, and material like "Round Midnight"
    and "In A Sentimental Mood" require more than lush atmosphere and
    a few swoons to become distinguished.

    The best things here are a
    solid version of "Mo’ Betta Blues," a "Don’t Know Why" that
    provides much needed whimsy, and Marsalis’s elegant piano on Corinne
    Bailey Rae’s "Like A Star." Not coincidentally, they are three
    of the four tunes recorded last June, post-Katrina; whereas the other
    ten numbers are from 2004. Most of these arrangements were sufficiently
    dewy just with a quartet (drummer Jaz Sawyer and bassist Neal Caine
    abet the leaders), but the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra is brought
    in for further sweetening, another sign of overreach. In the liner notes,
    Mayfield says he "didn’t intellectualize" his song choices. Next
    time, a few more brain cells might be a better investment.

    Love Songs, Ballads and
    Standards     * (one out of five stars)

     

     


    Ellis Marsalis Quartet
    An Open Letter to Thelonious
    ELM

    An Open Letter To Thelonious,
    likewise, had the potential to be stodgy and hackneyed. Monk tributes
    come a dime a dozen, and Ellis Marsalis—the father of Wynton Marsalis,
    after all—is a thorough but resolutely orthodox jazz scholar and musician.
    He remains that way on Letter, and proves you don’t have to
    take liberties with classic material to keep it refreshing.

    Marsalis admits in the liner
    notes that he didn’t initially "get" Monk, and there is the diligence
    of atonement in the way he burrows into the crevices of Monk’s fractured
    rhythms and invests himself in both the earnest and wry aspects of the
    great composer’s work. Ellis himself takes the lead on songs involving
    the ladies in Monk’s life, unveiling the languid contentment of "Crespuscule
    With Nellie" and the sweetness of "Ruby, My Dear." He delivers
    a brief but memorable two-handed solo on "Light Blue" (misspelled
    "Light Bue" on the disc) that helps portray an essential Monk contradiction,
    relaxed complexity. And his dappled notes showcase the beauty of "Monk’s
    Mood," including a solo that captures Monk’s ability to be elliptical
    and allusive yet never lax or otherwise inattentive.

    The other star of the quartet
    is Ellis’s youngest son, drummer Jason Marsalis, who among other things
    was Irvin Mayfield’s cohort in Los Hombres Calientes. His drum solos
    on Letter are plentiful and thus inevitably garrulous on occasion,
    but his turn on "Jackie-ing" is pure delight, an adventurous mixture
    of crisp Monk and New Orleans march time, and his hard-bop propulsion
    on "Straight, No Chaser" gives the tune the feel of Blakey’s Jazz
    Messengers    . Saxophonist Derek Douget and bassist Jason Stewart round
    out the ensemble, with Douget’s soprano horn leading the dialogue
    on "Epistrophy" and the whole band exuding a light-hearted vibe
    on "Teo" (Monk’s paean to his longtime producer, Teo Macero) and
    the irrepressible "Rhythm-A-Ning." After a nifty solo that drops
    in a "Sweet Georgia Brown" quote on the latter tune, Marsalis closes
    out the disc with a solo rendition of "Round Midnight" that is luscious
    with sentiment yet never cloys. Compare its acuity to the pro forma
    romance contained in the "Round Midnight" on Love Songs, and
    hear why good intentions don’t suffice without an artistic follow-through.

    An Open Letter to Thelonious
    **** (four stars)