The Rake Magazine

Category: Blog Post

  • Wishing in One Hand

    There is nothing easier than complaining about TV news, except maybe complaining about the weather or commercial radio. Some like to blame the “broadcast journalists,” but we stopped calling them that years ago. Honestly, why continue to expect wisdom from the mouths of babes? Besides, it is not the newsreaders’ fault, and it is not even their editors’ fault, nor the news director’s, nor the general manager’s. It is the public itself that wants what it gets, and in a competitive markeplace, pandering is an indispensible tool. Some people really ought to know this better than others.

    The gold standard for this war of the higher and lower selves was the death of Diana years ago—remember the self-loathing press that, on the one hand, camped at the doors of the morgue, while at the same time publishing reems of complaint and apology for doing it? When we blamed the paparazzi for killing Lady Di, we were actually blaming ourselves. When we retched at the tabloid coverage, we wretched into the newspaper we had just bought. The press wanted a look because the public wanted a look, and all the moralizing was simply folded right into the overnight coverage. Likewise, if half the people who loudly complain about pornography actually stopped using it privately, the business would slow to a trickle.

    From a media consumer’s point of view, the real problem with “over studied,” focus-grouped, service-oriented magazines, newspapers, TV, and radio programming, is the slow leeching away of surpise and revelation. It’s not that big a deal, but if you give the people what they want one hundered percent of the time, they’ll never get anything fresh, offbeat, informative, inspiring, delightful. It’s rather like a political leader who does nothing until he has consulted the latest poll; that’s not leading, it’s following. (Which is one of the reasons we get so incensed about the relentless polling of Americans regarding their feelings about gay marriage. How many ante-bellum Southerners supported abolition? Real progress often requires leaders to lead without the affirmation of overwhelming public support. Real regression, by the way, can happen WITH a slight popular consensus.)

    Some media companies want to make boatloads of money; other media companies want to do good and substantive and memorable work. Let’s not be silly about confusing the two.

  • Going Back, Going Down

    livingston-yellowstone.jpg

    to be a discoverer you hold close whatever

    you find, and after a while you decide

    what it is. Then, secure in where you have been,

    you turn to the open sea and let go.

    –William Stafford, from “Security”

    Is the path to the waterfall an ascent or a descent?

    Descents have a bad reputation that is mostly unjust. The metaphoric and melodramatic abuse of the whole idea obscures the fact that a descent can be an exhilarating, breathtaking thing, and far less arduous and fraught with competition and peril than the ascent.

    On the way down, just so long as you’re not falling, you have a chance to catch your breath and take a good look around, to access whether all that climbing was worth it, and to see what you were climbing towards and from.

    You have to turn your back to see what’s behind you, and it’s always a good idea to take the occasional long, hard look at what’s behind you. How else are you ever going to learn how far you’ve strayed, if in fact you’ve strayed.

    I’m sure you’ve strayed. You must have.

    But the human instinct is to keep going, and to associate this notion exclusively with forward motion. Implicit in this assumption are the ideas of both survival and progress, which strikes me as severely wrong-headed at the moment.

    When you’re returning from some journey in the mountains aren’t you still moving? Isn’t retreat sometimes necessary for survival? And when you retrace your steps to retrieve something you’ve lost or left behind, aren’t you making the most important progress of all?

    Easy world, you gave it once–

    please quietly welcome it back,

    that hand.

    –William Stafford, from “Going On”

    montana-ruins.jpg

  • KKK

    We’ve been holding our tongue on the whole Katherine Kersten Kolumnist thing, but after her tawdry little appearance here, we can no longer keep ourselves from mumbling out loud on several points.

    First, she definitely should have held pat with the original column photo. Every picture we’ve seen of this woman makes it clear to us that time has made her ever more pinched and shrewish. It is also a warning to the kids: Your hateful, me-first attitude will eventually write itself on your outward person. Sure, relief from taxes and the homosexual-lifestyle agenda sound good of a day’s selfish hate-mongering, but your face may actually stay that way. (Ad hominem, yeah, whatever.)

    Second, we’re pretty tired of the neo-conservative-Christian-Republican-movement-as-the-real-victims-here meme. If the so-called liberal media were as all-powerful as people like Kersten want you to beleive, then why have a very slight majority of victimized, disenfranchised rural nut-jobs managed to put a conservative christian monopoly into almost every legislature in the land? More to the point, why would she waste her time lending her considerable, erm, reporting skills (which we understand to be the equivalent, in her case, of a bloated Rolodex) to the advancement of the “Red Star”–a business enterprise everyone seems to agree is outdated, irrelevant, and quite possibly bypassing readers on the way to the landfill?

    Third, what does this even mean?

    Several reputable parties have already commented on this, without explaining First Principles…. i.e., what the hell is she talking about? Is she seriously complaining about happy children? And what does that have to do with homosexuality? Is she saying that homosexual parents can’t possibly raise children that are capable of happiness, without the help of Photoshop? Do children of homosexual parents have some sort of congenital condition that prevents them from understanding the phrase, “Say cheese”?

    We guess we’re just missing something here.

  • Yes, That's My Handwriting On The Paper Plate, Officer, But There Must Be Some Mistake

    dancers.jpg

    Gogi? I remember saying. Is that your real name?

    She said something to me, something impertinent I’m sure, that was lost in the whirring of the blender.

    Grasshopper? she said a moment later, offering me a thick green drink in a jelly jar.

    I swear, I said, I could drink these all night.

    I do, she said.

    Later, she put a record on her turntable and said, My mother used to sleep with this guy who’s playing tenor. She used to follow Shelly Manne around, and I’m sure she slept with pretty much everybody in his band. She spent half of her life chasing after musicians, until she got too old and worn out. Then she started tending bar in this law-and-order dive, and all she ever dated were old cops. The last twenty years of her life she dated one cop after another. The same guys who used to make life so miserable for her old musician friends. They treated her like shit, the fat bastards. Funny, isn’t it?

    She went back to the kitchen and fired up the blender again, and when she returned she settled back in on the couch and said, My mother had this big, fat scrapbook full of signed photos and I.O.U.s from jazz musicians, most of them written on cocktail napkins or scraps of placemats. It was like a who’s who of jazz musicians, seriously. Those sponges fucked her and drank up all her money and then dumped what was left of her for the old cops to pick over. I wish I still had that scrapbook. I wonder what happened to it? I’ll bet something like that would be worth a lot of money.

    She got up and put another record on the stereo. I’m sure my mother screwed this guy too, she said. I remember him coming around and crashing on our couch in his underwear. He was an A-number-one creep. Creep central. Bad complexion, bad teeth, nothing really to recommend him other than a decent wardrobe and the fact that he could play music. I guess that was enough for my mother. Me, I’ve always hated musicians. Every one I’ve ever met was a bum who never even pretended to be a decent human being unless he was on a stage somewhere, and that was just so they could get some woman like my mother to sleep with them and buy them drinks. Don’t get the wrong idea, I love music; I just hate musicians, and don’t even try to tell me that’s not possible or I’ll claw your eyes out.

    I’m sure it’s possible, I said. I don’t have a doubt in the world it’s possible.

    Oh, Jesus, she said. Don’t kiss my ass like that. It’s so unbecoming.

    I had some fine times with Gogi. We laughed a lot. She really did drink grasshoppers every night, and she had one hell of a record collection. She also had a lot of nice clothes. She hated crowds, I also remember that. I lost track of her when I moved in the early eighties, which wasn’t unexpected; I should warn you, she’d told me when I stopped by her place to say goodbye, I don’t keep in touch, so this really is adieu.

    I found her obituary online a few weeks back, in a Phoenix newspaper. She died in 2002, at the age of 52, which meant that she was older than I thought, but still not nearly old enough. The obituary didn’t say how she died, or, rather, of what. She wasn’t survived by a husband or any children, which didn’t surprise me, of course. Just a brother in Boston, I think. No flowers, please, the obit said, and suggested memorials to the Humane Society. I keep telling myself that one of these days I’ll get around to sending a check.

    drummajor2.jpg

  • Ain't Nobody Watchin'…

    Hard to believe, but reports say that Minneapolis’s new camera cops have snapped photos of nearly 2,000 runners of red lights. This fact reminds us that our favorite tune Paul Westerberg ever screamed is “Run It,” but it also reminds us that maybe we’re not quite the “nation of laws” we thought we were… or punk rock has gone way too mainstream.

    We were just saying yesterday that we noticed one of these new cameras installed somewheres between the old Honeywell campus and the Swedish Institute, probably on 26th round about Park Avenue, and the first idea that popped into our head was what a great target that would make for a paintball gun.

    It also reminds us of one of the Ethicist’s more memorable pronuncements in recent months—that there is something deeply depressing about the thought of a man in his car at an abandoned intersection deep in the quiet hours, waiting for the affirmation of a single lightbulb.

    Has anyone else noticed an upswing in the public nuisance of revenue-generating tickets as the fiscal year apparently draws to an end for the MPD?

  • A Couple Small Steps In The Right Direction

    It’s always nice when you’re scuffling to get some wins from the back end of your rotation. It would be even nicer at this point to see the Twins start putting together some big innings and throwing some crooked numbers on the board to give the pitching staff a little breather, but I’m not about to complain.

    Already people are starting to trot out the usual discouraging math that purportedly demonstrates how seemingly impossible it is for the Twins to catch the White Sox. You know what I’m talking about; you see this sort of thing every year about this time, particularly when one team is maintaining a blistering pace. It always involves daunting long-range projections –if the White Sox fall off to a .500 pace the rest of the way, for instance, the Twins would have to play at some unreal clip to catch them.

    We’ve been on both ends of this sort of speculation in recent years, and should know by now that baseball is more than anything else a game of one- and two-week stretches. Even in late June a big lead can evaporate in a hurry. How long, for instance, did it take for the White Sox to stretch their lead from three-and-a-half games to nine games? Not very long. And why was that? Because while the Twins were going 2-8 during that period, the Sox were going 8-2.

    I’m certainly not overly optimistic, but I do think Chicago is long overdue for a couple bad stretches, and if the Twins are going to capitalize they’re going to have to put together some 8-2 runs of their own. Wins from Kyle Lohse and Joe Mays are a good way to get one of those going, as are ten games against the Royals and the Devil Rays between now and the All Star break.

    I think the stretch leading up to the break is crucial. The Twins are going to have to whittle Chicago’s lead in half –at least– because the rest of July after the All Star game looks pretty brutal, at least on paper. Minnesota will close out July with series against Anaheim, Baltimore, Detroit, New York, and Boston, and the last eleven of those games are on the road. Chicago, meanwhile, will have four games with Cleveland, three with Detroit, and three with Kansas City.

    Perhaps this is nothing but a coincidence, but does anyone else find it strange that seven of Torii Hunter’s team-leading fourteen homers have come in seventeen games against National League teams, while it’s taken him 55 games against AL opponents to hit his other seven? You’d certainly think the NL teams would have the same scouting reports, but I sure as hell can’t remember seeing very many AL pitchers throw Hunter so many fastballs right down the middle of the plate. Does this say something about some difference in pitching philosophy between the two leagues? I have absolutely no idea, of course. Maybe Torii’s just hitting his stride and it’s all been a fluke matter of timing.

    It looks like the problem with the comments, by the way, has been ironed out. Apologies for the snafu.

  • What Would Hank Hill Do?

    In yesterday’s New York Times magazine, Matt Bai proposes that “South Park Conservatives” have nothing on “King of the Hill Democrats.” Bai maintains that Hank Hill is the living, breathing animation of the nation’s much-desired Nascar dad, and that Democrats like North Carolina governor Mike Easley are wise to poll their constituencies based on whether they watch “King of the Hill” or not. The idea seems to be that if Democrats seriously wish to regain relevancy to average Americans, they need to think like Hank Hill.

    Like a great David Brooks column, it all sounds pretty good until you begin to pick at the rhetorical lint and the whole garment kind of unravels at your fingertips. Bai assumes that most of Hank Hills fans are a lot like Hank Hill, and to support this merengue of speculation, he offers some Nielsen demographics. These numbers say that “the largest group” of the show’s viewers are “men between the ages of 18 and 49” (that, of course, leaves out men ages 0-17, and 50-100) and that “almost a quarter of those men own pickup trucks.” Leaving aside that that is a particulary egregious sort of Brooksian leap (more women than men drive pickup trucks today, for example; there is no established precedent for rural/urban, democrat/republican ownership of pickup trucks; pickup trucks are the single best-selling model of autombile in the country–but, yeah, we all know the stereotypes, thanks very much), we hate this sort of overstatement. One quarter of the show’s male, 18-49 viewers own pickup trucks? Uh, we’re terrible at math, but the way we pencil it here on this Panera napkin, just between the soup stain and the booger of asiago, that’s… oh, roughly THE VAST MAJORITY don’t drive pickup trucks.

    But OK. So let’s not get stuck on silly details. The more serious problem here is that Bai assumes people only like to watch television shows that reflect their world, their personality, their interests, and politics. Let’s just say we’re glad that huge, looming Soprano’s demographic doesn’t feel particulary disenfranchised at the moment. As a sort of innoculation against this narcissistic assumption, Bai claims that this is precisely the point–that many Americans, like Hank Hill, simply do not define their world according to the lockstep politics of Democrats or Republicans.

    Bai: “Like a lot of the basically conservative voters you meet in rural America — and here’s where Democrats should pay close attention — Hank never professes an explicit party loyalty.” Uh, right. That’s sometimes referred to as the vast, uncommitted, middle-of-the-road electorate. Last time we checked, that would cover almost every sit-com charcter that ever sprang to life in the dummy box other than Alex P. Keaton.

    Bai: “If Hank votes Republican, it’s because, as a voter who cares about religious and rural values, he probably doesn’t see much choice.” We don’t know what that means, other than the fact that it’s a good bet Hank eats pork.

    As Bai himself admits, Fox actually seems to be phasing out “King of the Hill,” possibly ending the series after its tenth season next year. This hardly strikes us as the thing to do with such a massive, lucrative, and politically attractive demographic. TV networks, particularly cable TV networks, and even cable TV networks owned by Rupert Murdoch don’t normally discontinue popular primetime shows for frivolous reasons. If Bai really wants to keep the lost demographic in his crosshairs, why not stick with the original gold standard–Nascar (or its many automotive stand-ins)? We happened to hear this weekend that Target Corporation pays close to $30 million just to have its sticker on the hood of its Indy 500 car, and that they’re very happy with the return on this investment. That says at least as much as a season of “King of the Hill,” and the entire Nascar schedule is now covered in primetime by network TV.

  • I can't make this stuff up

    MOSES2.jpg
    If you Christians don’t quit worshipping golden calf statues, I’m gonna smash your laws.

    I was just listening to MPR’s Talk of the Nation, and they were discussing the Supreme Court’s recent rulings on the display of the Ten Commandments in public space.

    It was going along about as these things usually do (everyone treated with courtesy and respect–even the most preposterous–and everyone quite sonorous and boring) until we got to the inevitable Christian boob-of-a-caller. This guy, in a spirit of American tolerance and ecumenism, suggested that, since we, (the Christians,) get to place the Ten Commandments monuments, it would be okay with him if the “Jewish people” could put a symbol of their religion in our courthouses, too.

    Now that’s entertainment I’m willing to pay a membership fee for.

  • Damn Right, I'll Rise Again

    miles city-wall.jpg

    Maybe you’ve seen my tongue limping in circles, yoked to the whip hand of my brain, sinking further and further into the muck. The words don’t come out the way they’re supposed to, or the way they used to. Something happens. Happened. It’s like when you take a picture and the print looks nothing like what you saw when you looked through the view finder. I think you could define that feeling as disappointment.

    This world astonishes and appalls me in equal measure. It keeps taking things from me and trying to hoodwink me into believing I’ve given them away.

    This from my horoscope yesterday (Scorpio): “Don’t trust little ones with potentially dangerous tools.”

    Okey-dokey.

    Was Job cursed with sleeplessness? Do the damned sleep in hell? Not likely, I realize, but is it official anywhere?

    It’s almost funny how long ago long ago was. It’s not funny, though, how much my hand and wrist have been cramping lately. Eventually, I realize, I’m going to have to learn how to write left-handed.

    You there, little man, little speck, when did you forget how to leap? Leapless, you’re helpless. Go back to leap school, dammit, and relearn your old gift. How else are you ever going to leave this planet behind, even if only for an ecstatic instant?

    One last observation, or whatever this is: My eighth grade shop teacher was the creepiest character I ever met, the way he’d sit there on his stool whittling the calluses on his hands with a pocket knife. I remember one time he said, “I could teach any one of you morons how to get out of a pair of handcuffs in five minutes.” He had a tattoo of Jesus wearing his crown of thorns. It was on his chest, and every day when the bell rang at the end of class he’d pull down the top of his tee-shirt to reveal the tattoo and say, “Believe in this man.” People around town said in his younger days he was a motorcycle racer who’d fathered children in damn near every state of the union. Once upon a time he’d allegedly bragged about having received more than fifty citations for urinating in public. He said it was a hard habit to break, and I’ve no doubt it is.

    That’s all for this morning.

    Thank you.

    feel.jpg

  • Uncle Jumbo's Playground

    uncle jumbo-7.jpg

    –Illustration by James Dankert

    Last night was a train wreck all around. I drove down to my old home town, Blooming Void, to attend my 25th high school reunion. To be perfectly honest with you, I’m not quite sure what I was thinking.

    When I got home from work I tried without much success to prime myself for the experience by taking a shower, blasting REO Speedwagon’s “Riding the Storm Out,” and running an electric shaver over my face while eating Captain Crunch out of a one gallon plastic ice cream bucket.

    I have no business going to a high school reunion. The whole notion of a reunion implies that the reunited were, in fact, once united, that there was some sort of a union to begin with. I have known no unions. I was one of those bulky specters that haunt every high school hallway, I suppose. I did play baseball, but baseball at Blooming Void was right up there with the ham radio club (of which I was also a member) in terms of status or attention.

    Blooming Void is a small town, despite which I would have a hard time identifying more than a handful of people from my senior class in the high school yearbook. Being naturally awkward and anti-social, I had few friends, and none of us were big on doing things. We mostly sat in our bedrooms or drove around in our cars making inane small talk on our CB radios (Jumbo’s handle: Hair of the Dog).

    South of Lakeville I pretty much lost my resolve, and more or less made up my mind to avoid the reunion altogether. I’ve had quite enough disappointment and trauma in my life of late (thank you, Twins, thank you so very much).

    When I got to Blooming Void I drove around town aimlessly for awhile (there is, really, no other way to drive around Blooming Void). I drove past the Elks Club, site of the reunion, perhaps a dozen times, listening to the Twins game on the radio. I told myself that if the Twins managed to take a three-run lead I would go to the reunion and celebrate in a desultory fashion.

    By the sixth inning I was sitting at the bar in Glum’s, my favorite local watering hole, watching the game on the TV. The bartender was some vaguely familiar character, and he kept trying to make small talk with me. At one point he observed, “I think you were the first guy I ever heard make an armpit fart.” I guess, if nothing else, that’s a little something I can hang my hat on.

    You probably saw the game, or listened to it. There was nothing to celebrate, nothing at all. Still, I sat there at the bar until the bitter end, drinking beer and eating Slim Jim after Slim Jim. I must have spent $20 on Slim Jims.

    I ended up heaped on my mother’s living room couch at 1:30, nursing a sour headache. If you spend more than an hour in my mother’s house there is one phrase you are virtually guaranteed to hear, and that phrase is “What’s that smell?” I was awakened by those words at 6:30 this morning, squawked repeatededly from, first, the top of the stairs, then the kitchen, and, finally, inches in front of my face.

    As my eyes slowly focused I saw my mother looming there above me. From the look on her face she could have been scrutinizing a mysterious and particularly disgusting species of insect.

    “Good Lord, look at you,” she said. “Remind me: have you always been such a mess?”