The Rake Magazine

Category: Blog Post

  • Are You Going To Finish That?

    I’ve been reading with interest Ann Bauer’s provoking story at Salon, “Food Slut.” More interesting than the piece, to me, has been the somewhat predictable but volumous flamewar that has erupted among readers who are arguing the finer points of food criticism as it appears in most modern glossy magazines, many of them sawing on their tiny violins for the dyspeptic Bauer.

    Bauer has a special talent for writing stories that polarize readers. She tends to take noxious positions that reflect somewhat poorly on her person, but she is such an elegant and intimate stylist that she usually edges out a win with the tie-breaking sympathy vote. Personally, I’d love to see her write about something other than herself, and I did enjoy many of her less narcissitic food and restaurant pieces in Minnesota Monthly.

    It’s telling, I think, that she seems to have a special taste for reductions. All writers, about food and not food, try to reduce the cacophony of their little corner of the world into a trickle valve of distilled meaning, but they must be careful not to let it be curdled by the acid of falsehood-by-simplification (or its herbal cousin, the composite character or event), and I worry that Bauer indulges sometimes in this kitchen shortcut, much as she doesn’t have time to thaw her hamburger before she pans it.

    True, when the cold-pressed virgin truth you are supposed to arrive at is “Write positive reviews about our advertisers, dammit!” “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all, dammit!” it leaves a bad taste in everyone’s mouth.

  • More Beers Less Gears

    I was surprised to see, by way of MNSpeak, that a new local beer brewery has arrived called “Surly.” That’s a brand already known to dirt-bag bicyclists and gas-huffing bike couriers here and everywhere. The original Surly is, of course, a homegrown steel-and-wool bike operation affiliated with Quality Bike Parts out in Bloomington. The original Surly makes a number of popular products, but the closest they get to brewing beer, as opposed to merely drinking it, is the Jethro Tool–a combination lug tightener, bottle opener, and prog-rock memento. The close association in some people’s minds of beer and bikes may cause some cognitive dissonance; or perhaps it will just help along in the process of reducing brain-load to match the naturally occuring reduction of brain-capacity seen in at least one dirtbag beer-chugging cyclist, namely me. If my beer and my bike share the same name, I suppose that frees up a few more brain cells scheduled for demolition in my enthusiasm for both.

  • The Collector Of Sound

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    He drifted out of the reach of common sense early and from then on he could barely be trusted to properly dress himself and was interested in nothing but what he called sonics.

    Some days he referred to it as sonus.

    He’d be down in the basement and from the top of the stairs you’d hear things, everything from the tinkling of one or two piano keys to what sounded like radio interference, pure bubbling static. There’d also be the occasional burst of some disembodied voice gargling words and belching. Electronic things, you know, squawks and blips and modulated droning.

    He would insist that he was not making music.

    He was discovering sound, or so he claimed.

    “You are making fucking noise, is what you are doing,” the old man would say. “Why don’t we just call a spade a spade?”

    Which of course only drove him right back down into the basement, back to his racket.

    I guess he became somewhat famous in certain circles where the dicking around of obsessive weirdos was embraced and celebrated in a vacuum of obscurity. A prominent magazine once wrote a profile of him in which he was quoted as saying that he was assembling “a living museum of all the sounds that ever were or ever will be. All sonic possibilities will eventually be explored and discovered, or rediscovered, as the case may be. Sound is still the great neglected frontier. There are sounds from the Middle Ages that have not been heard in centuries. Or consider the cries and murmurs of extinct creatures, or an unmistakable or inimitable voice that was dead, buried, and silenced before any of us were even born. All of these things –every last one– must be recreated.”

    Despite the fact that he regularly received increasingly unconscionable sums of money from foundations, we were all prepared to pronounce him a complete failure.

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  • Tough Timmy

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    I’d rather have a boa for governor than a snake

    When Jesse Ventura was governor, we cringed at his many postures, and often his costumes, which sometimes included a feather boa.

    Someone once said to me on a day on which I was sporting a pink shirt, “You must be sure of your sexuality to wear that shirt.” That’s the way I felt about Jesse. He was an ass, but he was a real man’s ass.

    Little Timmy Pawlenty, on the other hand, is going to spend the rest of his life trying to get back at the bullies that shoved him into his grade school locker–starting with undocumented immigrants.

    Here’s the telling quote from today’s Strib story: “Pawlenty suggested Tuesday that polling by his campaign had confirmed what he said is obvious to anyone in Minnesota who isn’t “living under a rock” — that illegal immigration is a serious issue for much of the public.” Yup, polling is what’s driving Timmy. What’s right or effective? Forget it.

    Just like Timmy was afraid to call a cigarette tax a tax instead of a fee for fear of how that would poll with his true constituency, he’s bravely stepped up and on the radio today equated the Mexicans who clean your restaurant dishes with Zacarias Moussaoui.

    I’m as against terrorists washing my dishes and picking my fruit as the next guy, but doesn’t Timmy know that a lot of big time Republican contributors count on immigrant labor to make their businesses obscenely profitable so they can donate more? They’re going to be mad if they have to start employing Americans again at wages they can live on.

    So, tread lightly Timmy. Your idiotic stance on an issue your polls tell you will solidify your nutball base could backfire and singe your tie.

    Why not pressure Washington to come up with a sensible immigration policy? Oops, there’s that old politics thing again. The Republicans don’t want a sensible immigration policy because that would harm their true base. And, they couldn’t whip up the xenophobes at the same time.

    Timmy, be a real man. Get a boa. While you are at it, get some real issues that actually affect Minnesotans, like education funding or mass transit.

  • Vulcanized Rubber: Between the Pipes

    Good to be back. Funny how a week away can recharge the batteries, and the fear and loathing of a return to the office–how many fires to put out? How many angry emails and phone calls? What unfortunate mistakes revealed? What oversights in the budget, and disappointments on the spreadsheets?–quickly dissipates in the good will of the New Year.

    That, and the continuing dominance of the Minnesota Wild. I’m not kidding. I was most disgusted to get home Monday, find that my TiVo had recorded the Wild’s Saturday game against the much-hated Canucks, only to learn that the silly device had recorded the pay-per-view channel, which I had not paid for and therefore would not be viewing. I need to work out this kink. Unfortunately, the Wild are bouncing around between at least four channels, and each channel lists the games differently. Since TiVo operates on a database according to channel listings, the only way to passively record the Wild wherever they might appear is to use a keyword search. Anyway, I won’t bore you with the technical details, other than to say that so far TiVo has found only one way to really annoy me, and that is relative to sports events. It is unforgiving of overtime and stops recording at the end of regulation no matter what the score (a real liability so far this season). What’s worse is that it appears to have no way to facilitate a “season pass” to every Wild game on whatever channel it might appear. It’s no good at all.

    So I’m really bitching and moaning about technology here to deflect my disaapointment at missing what must have been a whale of a game–the Wild beating the Canucks finally on their fourth try this season, and apparently really shaming Naslund, Bertouzzi, the especially cretinous Ruutu, and the rest of that thuggish Vancouver scrum. The Canucks are one of the only things I dislike about Canada. (The other would be Canucks fans: annoying in their knowledge of the game, but never using their powers for good. Two years ago, I got in a barefisted email brawl about the WIld’s “ugly” dump and chase style, which I correctly identified by its simpler and more noble name, forechecking. And anyway, the Wild handed the Canucks a glorious shit sandwich in that memorable playoff series. Touche!)

    Last night was an another amazing win, this time against the Red Wings (who have the nuts to call Detroit “hockey town,” a slap in the face to every little berg in the fine state of Minnesota–know who the US Women’s Olympic hockey team is playing tonight? The Warroad high school boy’s team!), and the Wild are surprised to find themselves suddenly at the helm of a rocket that’s blasting straight at the heart of playoff contention.

    Dwayne Roloson was especially impressive in the net last night–almost blasphemously so. You may have been as surprised as I was to see him take the second intermission interview on OLN. (Nevermind his protestations to Michael Russo at the Strib; you can count the number of times Roli has appeared in TV intermissions this year on one hand and still keep a firm grip on your beer stein.) Hockey is a game that is ruled by superstition–it makes baseball voodoo look like ninth-grade algebra, when it comes to crossing fingers, tying shoes the same way, wearing the same lucky socks, drinking at the same water fountain, carrying the same lint in the watch pocket, and so on. And no hockey player is more superstitious–i mean SCARY superstitious than a goaltender, who must carry the weight of the world on his shoulders. Even though the world will forgive him for both good goals and bad goals (you really have to blow it at the professional level, or be a Canuck tender, to catch the open wrath of hometown fans and teammates) you will not forgive yourself. For many years, goalie coaches taught their acolytes that no matter what the final score of the game was, you had lost it if you’d allowed four points or more. I’ll go into greater detail some other time about a particular subject that riles me–the proliferation of “flop” goaltending– but not here, not know. Suffice to say that the Wild last night clearly identified Detroit goalie Chris Osgood’s weakness–the two-hole, low on the glove-hand side–and they nailed it at every opportunity, which paid off twice and set up the win.

    The main thing going for the Wild right now is an astonishing ability to a) kill penalties in what OLN annoyingly keeps calling “the NEW NHL,” and b) really capitalize on very minor mistakes. The more I watch modern pro hockey, as compared to, say, the college or high school game, it is precisely this point that keeps standing in high relief. Pros find very tiny cracks and instantly turn them into bullseyes. Right now, the WIld are finding the breaks, taking them, getting the bounces, and winning games. And it’s a joy to watch ’em.

  • Dark Side Of The Moon

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    Dead, the slender bug astonished with its complexity of sprung parts and the volume of its viscosity, the evidence of a supreme and comically-mad engineer’s attention to detail.

    One of God’s little basement projects.

    The poor little dude.

    What did this skittering mystery hope to find on the other side of the room? Perhaps the bug was an adventurer or explorer from a moist, subterranean world, this thwarted expedition long planned and invested with ancient dreams.

    By now the creature’s community had likely surmised that the explorer was dead; who knows how such information might be conveyed among such mysterious beings. Those antennae –those quivering tendrils– likely served some highly sophisticated function for inter-species communication that humans could not even begin to surmise or understand.

    Surely the bug had some sense of the dangerousness of its mission and recognized its position as unwelcome interloper; how else to explain its mad, breakneck dash from the corner, the audacious and risky traverse of the bedroom rug, in the middle of which it found itself so hopelessly exposed and ultimately doomed?

    It surely imagined it was going somewhere, perhaps even to an unknown, undiscovered somewhere that had been the dream of generations of myriapods –chilopods and diplopods, centipedes and millipedes: who was to say arthropod didn’t dream of extraterritorial exploration and conquest?

    After the boy smashed the bug with a tennis shoe he went back to smoking marijuana out of an apple lined with tinfoil.

    He was super rushed out by the whole bug thing.

    And Pink Floyd, he had discovered to his maximum satisfaction, sounded most excellent through headphones.

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  • There Was Nothing Wrong With His Life, Really

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    He’d sit up in the darkness staring across the inlet at the lighthouse on its pile of rocks, tossing its feeble light out into the fog rolling in off the lake. It was a ridiculous and hokey metaphor for exactly where he was in his life, but, what the hell, it was oddly comforting.

    The Charley Patton, the Robert Johnson, the Skip James records, they sort of cancelled out the lighthouse, but that was the way he lived in the world; that was how he did things and tried to keep the darkness and light of the world in proper proportion.

    For at least twenty years, since the first from his ever shrinking circle of friends and acquaintances started dropping dead from cancer, he fretted his way to the butt-end of every cigarette. Something was growing in his lungs; there was some persistent corrosion in his throat, a tightness in his chest. That nonetheless didn’t stop him from working nervously through his pack a day.

    There was nothing wrong with his life, really. The things that had happened to him and the things that would happen to his body were things that happened to all sorts of people all the time. Plenty of people had it a whole lot worse, he knew that.

    Yet it was an American’s particular prerogative to be miserable when there was really not that much to be miserable about. There was no form of self-pity that could not be romanticized, justified, and otherwise celebrated. That was why he loved the blues; it was so thoroughly American. European music might be tragic, might be romantically tragic, but the blues were full of the vaguest, most saturated sorrow, full of fear and pure, plain, fucked-up self-pity. They made that lighthouse feel like nothing more than the sad, distant metaphor it was, and most nights he could imagine himself crawling through the darkness for days, for months, fumbling his way toward that light, or praying for that light to find him, but somehow never quite managing to get there.

    And there was no getting around it: he loved that warm, woozy feeling of drifting in the darkness, just as he loved knowing that the light was out there across the way, vigilant, there not as welcome but warning, a beacon whose job was to push him further out to sea.

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  • Bees, Chanting, Etc.

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    Ruckert lived across a pasture from an order of monks who were famous for their gingerbread, their honey, and their singing. They’d supposedly sung at the White House once upon a time, and had made a few records. The had an orchard out behind the monastery, where they kept their bees, and Ruckert often saw the monks over there wandering around in slow motion in their bee outfits.

    Summer evenings Ruckert would sit out on his porch drinking beer and watching fireflies drifting around out in his pasture. On many such evenings the monks would throw open their doors and windows and the sound of their singing would travel for great distances in the countryside.

    Tormented as he routinely was in those days, the singing of the monks experienced in this manner never failed to give Ruckert a warm burst of uncommon pleasure.

    The autumn changing of his storm windows was always a harbinger of Ruckert’s annual onslaught of severe melancholy. He knew that from that day forward, until traditionally the first warm day of spring, he would be locked away from the music of the monks and their languid dance with the bees.

    On very rare occasions in the dead of winter, however, Ruckert would hear the faint murmur of the singing monks as he dashed back and forth from his car in the driveway.

    In the almost ten years he had lived across the pasture from the monks, Ruckert had never exchanged so much as a word with a single one of them, even as he lived with the constant fear that one of them would someday escape from the monastery and show up at his door seeking asylum.

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  • Off-Season's Greetings

    I’m trying to crawl back into baseball, which essentially means crawling from the wreckage of last season, when various nagging injuries cut the year short for me and led to disappointment and then flat-out indifference.

    I’ve never in my years as a fan had a season like 2005, and I’m hoping that it was nothing but one of those inexplicable mid-career hiccups that you see so commonly in the statistical line on the back of so many baseball cards.

    The ruptured spleen that finally shut me down for good in August appears to be fully healed, and the doctors have given me the go-ahead to resume rehabilitation in earnest.

    Warning Track Power has long been the engine that drives Rake Media Worldwide, and I deeply regret the toll my absence has taken on my co-workers, many of whom have lost their jobs or been saddled with extra responsibilities as the advertising revenues generated by my labors have slowly evaporated. Back in late October, the company health club and juice bar was temporarily closed, and let’s just say that I wasn’t exactly unaware of all the fingers pointed squarely in my direction.

    I’m not making excuses, but, frankly, that’s created a lot of pressure on me during my long hiatus, and I’ve no doubt there’s been a great deal of grumbling behind my back about my work habits and desire. I certainly can’t blame anybody for thinking that I’m a malingerer on the level of a Juan Gonzalez.

    I’m not, though, I swear to you. I’ve just had a few bad breaks of late. I honestly feel like I’ve still got a few good years left in me, and if I have to go to Japan –or even the Northern League– to resurrect my career, so be it.

    For now, though, here I am, trying to climb back on a slow moving mule.

    I know that an awful lot has happened while I’ve been gone, and I regret to say that I have only the vaguest of ideas of what that “awful lot” might mean.

    Since I’ve emerged however tentatively from my hibernation, though, I did notice that the Yankees signed Johnny Damon, which was an unpleasant and disheartening bit of news. I don’t tend to like grown men whose names are Johnny, unless their last names are Carson or Cash, but Damon was a fun player to watch during his time in Boston. He’s also, though, always been something of an enigma to me. I have a hard time understanding how a guy with a career on base percentage of .353 scores so many freaking runs and has a reputation for being such a terrific leadoff hitter. Damon will be thirty-two this season, and his career numbers across the board (a BA of .290 and slugging average of .431) are nothing really special. I suspect that now that his hair is gone and he’s no longer playing half his games at Fenway Park –with Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz batting behind him– he’ll become the latest Yankee free agent bust.

    I also noticed that the Twins went on their traditional spending spree and added Luis Castillo, Tony Batista, and Rondell White. Each of those guys could fill some holes or, given their histories and the recent good fortune of the Twins, create some holes.

    I like Castillo quite a lot. He’s a terrific defensive player (with three Gold Gloves), but his primary offensive value is his OBP (.391 last year in 122 games; .370 for his career). He’d score a boatload of runs batting in front of Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz, I’d bet that much. The main problem with Castillo is that he was gimped up for a big chunk of last year and apparently no longer runs well. The guy has hit .300 four of the last six seasons, yet he hasn’t managed to leg out twenty doubles in any of those seasons, and he has almost no power. Given the Twins’ success in driving in base runners last year, I’d have to say that the value of a singles hitter who plays good defense is somewhat questionable, at least until the team develops some real run producers from the 3-5 spots in the batting order.

    Rondell White could be one of those run producers, I suppose. White’s a good hitter, but he’s been injury prone. The Twins will try to keep him on the field by using him as the DH, but he’s not a particularly fearsome designated hitter. In his thirteen seasons in the Major Leagues, White has never driven in or scored 100 runs. He’s never even driven in ninety runs, in fact, and he’s never hit thirty homeruns. He’s averaged something like 120 games a season over his career, and played in a total of 218 over his last two seasons in Detroit. They guy has played for six teams in the last five years, and I always assume there’s some good reason for that.

    Tony Batista might be the acquisition that’s led to the most rolling of eyes among fans, but I’m not entirely sure why that is. Batista played last year in Japan, but in the preceding seasons he was the closest thing to an offensive lock that the Twins have had in years. His track record says he’ll stay healthy (in the five years before heading to Japan he played in 157, 161, 161, 156, and 154 games and averaged over thirty homers a season). He’s still only 32 years old, and in his last season in the majors, with Montreal, he hit thirty-two homeruns and had 110 RBI. Batista isn’t going to hit for average (he’s a career .251 hitter) and he’ll get on base as infrequently as Luis Rivas, but he’s at the very least proved that he can hit the ball out of the park and drive in runs, and I’d think that would be plenty of cause for optimism among Twins fans.

    The moves that the White Sox have made should not, however, be cause for much optimism among Twins fans. I’ll admit that I don’t even know all the moves the White Sox have made, but I do know they signed Jim Thome (and re-signed Paul Konerko), and that is dispiriting news.

    The only silver lining there is that Rick Reed is no longer occupying a place in Minnesota’s rotation, so we will at the very least be spared the spectacle of watching Thome launching Reed’s pitches off the tarps in the upper deck.

  • On (Off) the Air

    I’m away from the desk this week. In all the sturm und drang of Christmas–I understand there’s a war on it–I failed to mention last week that I had a local radio appointment you might have been interested in. Anyway, I had a delightful time yesterday hanging out with the gifted and gorgeous Kerri Miller at MPR’s midmorning program. I was the local lightweight on an otherwise auspicious panel of commentators. The subject was the year in media–which of course is a huge subject that got boiled down to the Valerie Plame/Judy Miller story, the Times phone-tapping story (why’d they hold it for a year?), the Post’s “black sites” story (why’d they decline to locate any?), and Kurt Eichenwald’s putative Pulitzer for his Times story about online child pornography (why’d Jack Shafer have a problem with it, and why won’t anyone be his friend at this vulnerable time of the year?).

    So much to cover, so little time. Anyway, you can listen to us barely scratch the surface here. I’d direct you to pay special attention to the comments of Alex Jones, who has some eloquent old-school things to say in these complex times, especially about “competing values systems” (confidentiality versus truth; impartiality versus justice; personal interest versus national interest).

    Also, watch the Minnesota Wild. They are ripping up the ice, and finally getting the bounces they deserve. See you next week.

    Also, new issue out today in the real world. We hope you enjoy it.