The Rake Magazine

Category: Blog Post

  • A Brand Is Worth 10,000 Words

    There’s an interesting article on product placement in this week’s Business Week (via Romenesko, naturally). But not product placement like you know and love it–we’re talking product placement in the edit space of magazines. Toyota Corporation apparently approached Hearst, Conde Nast, and Meredith and asked executives to consider “product integration” in their pages.

    The thing is, it’s not the most terrible idea. Well, maybe it is, but there are more interesting things to say about this than merely “never!” The written language has evolved to the point where certain brands are so well marketed and branded that they often communicate an entire lifestyle, attitude, world-view in a single word. Writers, without any extra compensation at all, are beginning to rely on brand names as useful tools of brevity and concision. Rather than using words like “She drives a dependable, mechanically sound, well designed car, kinda cheap sheet metal, corners cut for unecesssary cost, but integrated amenities and options as standard, so-so gas mileage, depending on the model, great 4X4 legacy, a yuppie mobile that appeals across age and gender demographics, a smart little crossover utility vehicle that circumvents the bad reputation of behomoth SUVs, lots of useless but somehow strangely comforting headspace” you can simply say “She drives a Toyota RAV-4.”

    Now of course writers should never be paid, by anyone, for using the WRONG word, if in fact “She drives a Buick Le Baron,” which would surely be a completely different person.

    Aside from using brands as short-cuts in description, which seems like a venal sin at worst, there are several problems with a business model that tries to incorporate product placement into print. FIrst, the comparison to placement in other media is misleading and wrong. Product placement has never been attempted, that we know of, in a non-fiction context. It’s easy enough to insert a can of coke into the latest Tom Cruise vehicle, quite another to insert it into the latest Vanity Fair interview of TOm Cruise–if it wasn’t in fact there. We suppose Toyota could suggest that Vanity Fair interview Tom Cruise in the cabin of his brand-new Toyota Tacoma, but you know, there’s probably a limit to everyone’s patience on this sort of scene manipulation. Lord knows it’s hard enough to get to Tom Cruise anywhere or anytime, and trying to bring in a partner, no matter how much money they’re willing to throw at the problem, seems a lost cause on the face of it.

    All that said, there is this: Google smart ads. We’ve commented on this before, and it’s interesting. It works like this. Google crawls the editorial content of an online magazine, and places ads on the page that correspond to keywords in the edit. This is widely seen as acceptable because editors and writers have no control over the ads that get placed adjacent to the copy. In fact, neither do the advertisers. Thus, on any editorial page that, say, excoriates George Bush for lying, warmongering, and fomenting class hatred, there might be a dozen ads for the GOP or Powerline or whoever has paid google to place their ads next to any “Bush” high-hit edit content. So they run the risk of advertising next to the opposite kind of copy they would choose to advertise next to.

    We thought briefly about how this might actually crossover to print–that is, during the production process, allow some kind of keyword search on magazine edit that also placed keyed ads on the printed page, and we realized that would and could never work. Why? A couple of reasons. Readers, editors, publishers, and even writers are trained to smell this is a big, fat, stinking rat in print. There is the assumption made in print that the people who put the magazine together have full control of the content, and that this sort of bait-and-switch is being done on purporse in order to extract money from the reader and deliver it to the advertisier and to the publisher. Why is that assumption not made with Google smart ads? Because of the technological interface–you’re reading on your computer, dude–you are automatically reassured that it is merely some logorythm (to coin a cool new homonym) at work. Even though humans wrote that code, they were apparently motivated by a more general, universal desire for you to spend your money in a way that would benefit advertisers and publishers

    As the Businessweek story points out, there has been a great hue and cry even online, when this sort of thing happens with any human involvement or agency, or the appearance of it. When people got in a lather earlier this year about the New York Post’s version of keyword ads, courtesy of a Vibrant Media search spider, it was the fact that the technology actually highlighted the keywords in the editorial text itself. That was crossing the line.

    What does all of this have to do with Lucky, Cargo, and their hundreds of city-mag copycats? Uh… we think product placement in editorial is alive and well, and pretty damn lucrative. It’s just that the placement isn’t really happening in a magazine, in that case. It’s happening in a catalog, the print equivalent of QVC.

  • Amen

    I think a lot of people have been saying this lately: the moderates among us Christians have to step up and make our views preeminent over those radically conservative Christians who would take over, and in some cases have tken over, our government.

    We’ve received some unexpected praise here for our cover story this month–primarily because we wrote about Dean Johnson, a minister, for God’s sake, who doesn’t believe he has the exclusive insight into God’s will, and doesn’t try to wield government power as if it were God’s hammer.

    Thank God for Christians like him in our government, and for John Danforth, former senator from Missouri and Episcopal minister. His op-ed piece in the NY Times today is the most eloquent call to moderate Christians we’ve seen in a long time.

    Read it. And when you’re done, say “Amen.” The Revs Johnson and Danforth represent just the sort of Christians we need more of in our capitols–and in our churches, for that matter.

  • Yes, it's another Irish holiday

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    The devilish man himself

    Damn, until reminded a little while ago, I forgot today was Bloom’s Day. Have a fried kidney, walk around town, try to sell some ads, wander into an Irish pub, and think of Leopold Bloom, Stephen Daedalus and James Joyce and all the good books you could have read if you didn’t have a television.

    Stuff like this:
    I know them well who was the first person in the universe before there was anybody that made it all who ah that they dont know neither do I so there you are they might as well try to stop the sun from rising tomorrow the sun shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to propose to me yes first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth and it was leapyear like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all a womans body yes that was one true thing he said in his life and the sun shines for you today yes that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could always get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldnt answer first only looked out over the sea and the sky I was thinking of so many things he didnt know of Mulvey and Mr Stanhope and Hester and father and old captain Groves and the sailors playing all birds fly and I say stoop and washing up dishes they called it on the pier and the sentry in front of the governors house with the thing round his white helmet poor devil half roasted and the Spanish girls laughing in their shawls and their tall combs and the auctions in the morning the Greeks and the jews and the Arabs and the devil knows who else from all the ends of Europe and Duke street and the fowl market all clucking outside Larby Sharans and the poor donkeys slipping half asleep and the vague fellows in the cloaks asleep in the shade on the steps and the big wheels of the carts of the bulls and the old castle thousands of years old yes and those handsome Moors all in white and turbans like kings asking you to sit down in their little bit of a shop and Ronda with the old windows of the posadas glancing eyes a lattice hid for her lover to kiss the iron and the wineshops half open at night and the castanets and the night we missed the boat at Algeciras the watchman going about serene with his lamp and O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down Jo me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

    Kind of gets your heart going, yes?

  • Oh no, now the police have joined the judges arrayed against us

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    To serve and protect

    Not that anyone who has an ounce of time or a brain cell to spare is reading Katherine Kersten’s column, but in case you’ve already been to the dentist as much as you can afford because listening to the high pitched squeal of your dentist’s drill is more pleasurable than reading her whine, I’m gonna give you a little more root canal. I promise to stop soon.

    Today, she scratches the Terri Schiavo scab again. If Kersten had any thought behind her compulsion to lecture us, she’d know that raising this issue, both to genuine conservatives and to liberals, ain’t doing the cause of the attempted Christian takeover of the American government any good.

    She’s trying hard though. How about the image of the “armed policeman”, (presumably in the pay of the gay-marrying, abortion-legalizing, Patriot Act-skeptical, activist judges) keeping the forces of good at bay? Then there’s the inevitable invocation of Nazi Germany at the end. Yup, if we let the Nazis take over, pretty soon our government might be lying to put the country into a war, spying on the reading habits of its citizens, and trying to pass laws discriminating against a class of citizens whom we don’t like.

    Yup, we wouldn’t want a government like that, would we?

  • James Bond, Only A Girl

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    –Senior Citizen Center. Livingston, Montana

    Ella was on the front porch, blowing into an empty bottle with a straw, shivering a fly that was trapped there at the bottom. The fly was woozy and slick with cola, and was rolling and tumbling in the little bottle hurricane that Ella was producing with her straw. The fly was done for, Ella knew that much. It had gotten itself into a pickle, and would spend its last moments at the bottom of the bottle, drunk on cola and flopping itself unconscious.

    Roland Schramm came around the side of the house with a globe in his arms and crawled down under the porch. Ella’s grandmother had thrown out the globe because it had a dent in Asia, and Roland had fished it out of the trashcan out back. Roland’s dog, Perry, followed him everywhere and was under the porch with him. Perry was a first-class leaper, and a shy dog.

    Roland lived across the back alley and went under Ella’s grandmother’s porch all the time to smoke. Ella could see him now through the slats of the porch, hunched beneath her with his head down and his dog curled up in the dirt. The smoke from his cigarette came up through the floorboards of the porch. Ella didn’t mind the smell; it smelled just like Roland under the porch. Her grandmother no longer made a stink about Roland smoking under the porch, because if you hollered at Roland he would spray paint on your garage or break things. It was easier to just let him go under the porch, where he kept a stash of motorcycle magazines with pictures of men with tattoos.

    Ella was bored. It was no good, being a girl in the world. The yards and bushes and woods all around her were full of dirty boys, chasing each other with sticks and throwing things and still hollering into the darkness when she was already in her bed. That’s unfortunate, her grandmother would say whenever Ella complained about her life.

    Have a heart. That was another of Ella’s grandmother’s sayings. If her grandmother were to come out to the porch and see Ella torturing the fly in the bottle, that was exactly what she would say: Have a heart, Ella. That poor fly is one of God’s creatures.

    Ella had never seen her grandfather, but he was in the world somewhere, and her grandmother was sour about it. There was a card on her grandmother’s bed stand, which had been there all the years that Ella could remember. The card featured a funny drawing of a man in a tuxedo. The man was holding a tray on which was a sparkling diamond ring. Inside the card someone had written “If you’re loving me like I’m loving you, baby, we’re really in love.” Those words, her grandmother said, were written by Hank Williams, but the handwriting was Ella’s grandfather’s. They weren’t, her grandmother said, worth the paper they were written on.

    At least once a day Ella’s grandmother would drag her in under her chin, wheeze what sounded like tears into her hair, and murmur, “Bless your little pea-picking heart. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

    Ella could not begin to formulate an answer to her grandmother’s question. All day the old woman sat at the kitchen table, scribbling away at her word search puzzles and watching a television that was on top of the refrigerator. Every afternoon in the summer Ella’s grandmother would send her up the street to the Gas-and-Go to fetch a bag of potato chips and a can of diet Cola. Her grandma would give Ella a five dollar bill and instruct her to get something to eat for herself as well. Ella would ride her bicycle to the library downtown and spend the remaining three dollars and twenty five cents making photo copies of beautiful women and beautiful clothing from fashion books and magazines. Shoved in the drawer of her nightstand and tucked in her school books Ella had hundreds of photo copies of exotic clothing –and shoes; Ella loved shoes– the likes of which she had never seen in Prentice. She also liked to make copies of photographs of sports cars. Ella wanted to be a secret agent like James Bond, only a girl. In her dreams she was often driving a stolen Jaguar through the streets of Prentice.

    Ella’s grandmother was her father’s mother, and she would seldom give Ella information that was helpful in forming an impression of a man she could no longer remember. “He liked to put rocks in his pockets when he was a boy,” her grandmother would tell Ella. “I used to have a basket full of them down in the laundry room. Eddie’s rocks.” When pressed for more information, Ella’s grandmother would say things like, “He used to listen to a radio that was the shape of a motor oil can,” or, “He loved tomatoes.” One time she told Ella that her father had been a crackerjack jumper, the best in his class. “He got a ribbon for it,” she said. All of these details didn’t add up to much in Ella’s mind, and her conversations with her grandmother regarding her father always boiled down in the end to the fact that Ella’s father “hadn’t amounted to a hill of beans.” Men, she was told, were good for three things: running off, killing each other, and making babies they wanted no part of. Ella’s father, it turned out, was good for all three.

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  • Seriously, That Should Have Never Happened Either

    A few things:

    That ugly business in the first inning has happened way too many times now to be dismissed as a mere fluke, but how the hell do you explain it? Beats the shit out of me.

    You know how many times the Twins have scored four or fewer runs now this year? I do, I think. Thirty. That’s ridiculous, and isn’t going to get them deep in the playoffs any time soon. I’m not quite sure how moving Justin Morneau down to sixth in the order is going to help the team score more runs. Seems to me that with Torii Hunter riding out one of his hot streaks you’d want to take advantage of that by letting Morneau hit either in front of or behind him.

    Also, the more I see of J.C. Romero the more I’m starting to understand why Ron Gardenhire has been turning to Terry Mulholland as his bullpen lefty in close ball games. That’s not saying much, of course.

    Finally, check out John Bonnes’ Twins Territory for a great event for a great cause. The date is Tuesday, June 21 (Twins vs. Tigers at the Dome), and the proceeds go to Admission Possible, an organization that helps low-income kids gain admittance to college. A recent update is here. And you can buy your tickets directly here. I’ll be there, and it sounds like lots of other people much more interesting than me will be there as well.

  • The Seventh Column

    We are tearing through the cabbage patch today, putting together the next issue,but we thought you might be interested in this over at MnSpeak, where we appreciate the frank talk about our humble little magazine, and we’d join in the fun, but too much too much too much.

    Let me just say that the thread on columnists is one that’s been going on inner-office since we launched this thing three years ago, and probably goes on at every publication under the sun–at least the ones with regular columnists.

    Twas ever thus. Suffice to say that people love them or hate them, and they certainly don’t mind speaking up about it. People feel the same way about Jim Walsh, Nick Coleman, Katherine Kersten, David Brooks, whomever. It’s the upside AND the downside of publishing columns. (You might have heard that the Times will soon require subscriptions to gain access to their columnists, which tells you something about how people congregate around columns.) It is also worth noting that a columnist that makes readers mad is frequently just as valuable as a columnist that makes readers glad; that means lots of people are reading and responding. Now the trick, from an editor’s point of view, is gauging whether MOST readers, whose feelings are not strong enough to disturb The Force one way or another, give a shit.

    The worst thing is to have any space dedicated on a regular basis to something no one cares about, a place-holder, a contract being executed, whether that’s a column, a news department, a photo, or a standing head. If I had to defend The Rake in sixteen words or less, I would say every word in it is there for a reason, and that reason is to entertain readers. It’s not any more complicated than that. We do not always succeed, hell, we may never succeed, but we certainly don’t plan to stop trying. I frequently am asked by interested readers (and publishers and ad-sales folk) why any particular thing is in the magazine, and my capacity to astonish people with real, reasonable-sounding answers is endless. Want to know why it’s in the magazine? I have the answer!

  • Seriously, That Should Never Have Happened

    It’s really that simple. One guy should not ever have the opportunity to hit three home runs off one pitcher in the same game. It’s just wrong, and stupid, particularly in a close game. I don’t care who the hitter is, or who’s on the mound. And never mind that Radke was allowed to hit and go out for one more inning.

    You would think, though, that when a guy already has five homers off your pitching staff in the series, not to mention two in the game in question, that you’d at the very least alter your approach. You might even think about radically altering your approach. I might, anyway, but of course I’m not a Major League pitcher or manager, so what the hell do I really know?

    I don’t doubt that players have hit three home runs in a game off one pitcher on many other occasions –actually, I do doubt that, but I’m sure its happened. I’m pretty sure, though, that it doesn’t happen with any frequency in close ball games, and I certainly can’t find a way to justify its occurrence under any circumstances.

    The weird thing to me is how inevitable it seemed at the time. I don’t know about you, but I knew –I’m not shitting you, I knew— Choi was going to hit that third home run against Radke yesterday. Even Radke seemed resigned to the fact; I can’t see any other explanation for why he threw the pitch he threw in that situation.

    Baseball really is a damn strange game, that’s all there is to it.

  • Balderdash

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    I’m not kidding you, for about twenty seconds I thought I was looking at a giant snail, and I mean a really giant snail, just the soft, slimy part without the shell, maybe six feet tall and walking upright –or creeping– like a man.

    I saw the thing come slowly through the hedgerow at the back of the lawn. I was in my workshop in the garage, monkeying around with one thing or another. It was just after midnight and I was about ready to call it a night.

    I had a big window right above my work bench that looked down the long slope of my backyard to the flower beds, the hedgerows, and the garden plots beyond. I saw a brief flash of reflected light when the giant snail first slipped through the bushes and out of the complete darkness.

    I think there was a little bit of a moon that night, and I watched as the thing moved slowly along the edge of my yard in the dark shadows. I might have shook my head. I must have. The whole idea seemed alternately crazy and terrifying, but I would have sworn there was a giant snail sneaking towards my house.

    I was so transfixed by this spectacle that I was taken completely by surprise when the motion light above the kitchen window popped on and revealed a stark naked Ted Hickock –pink, heaving, and glistening with sweat– standing in the middle of my backyard.

    At one time Hickock had been my insurance agent. He was paralyzed for an instant when the backyard was flooded with light, and then he clumsily straddled my fence, plunged over, and trundled off into the darkness.

    To this day I can’t explain why I never mentioned this disturbing incident to another soul, let alone called Hickock on it. I guess it seemed like such an awkward situation all around, and, frankly, I felt embarrassed for the man. Hell, this is a small town, and something like that could ruin a fellow’s reputation.

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  • Time Wounds All Heels

    We didn’t want to like Michael Kinsley’s little dismissal of the Downing Street Memo, but in the end you just can’t argue with reason, even if it’s coming from Wax Museum Mike. (We like Kinsley fine, we just think he should stay off TV if he can help it. With Crossfire officially gone, there is little reason to worry.)

    When we read the memo and the initial coverage, we had the sinking feeling ourselves that it was never a secret how much the neo-con hawks wanted to march into Iraq, and how little it mattered what the revolving carousel of reasons would be. Americans have proven time and again that we (that is, a slim majority of us) can’t be bothered with all the niggling little details that may or may not politically justify Iraq. In this respect, it really is a lot like Vietnam. The Gulf of Tonkin, for example, was merely the expedient that made it possible for many Americans to endorse Vietnam on the larger spiritual quest to stand up to communism–just as we wish today to stand up to terrorism, whatever that’s supposed to mean. It may also be instructive to consider that communism, from Marx to Mao, eventually burnt itself out independent of our failure in Southeast Asia. If we’re really, really lucky, our failures in Iraq will be complemented by a similar, historic petering-out of terrorism independent of our efforts. In other words, Islamic terrorism may fail due to its own inherent contradictions and inward rotteness, rather than from any sabre-rattling on our part.

    But what we really wanted to say was that Kinsley certainly made a monkey out of Time magazine–normally a source of deep inner conflict for us, seeing as how that magazine manages to be so smart and so stupid at the same time.