The Rake Magazine

Category: Blog Post

  • Can't we all just get along?

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    Please can I have some health insurance?

    Representative Jim Ramstad gave us a good chuckle this morning in his Strib op-ed piece, “Too much at stake for continued partisan warfare.”

    He rattles off a litany of the nation’s problems: social security, hungry children, crisis in public schools, out of control health care costs, national security, dependence on foreign oil, etc, and calls for a bipartisan effort to solve them. He goes on to say, “I’m not talking about singing “Kumbaya,” holding hands on the Capitol steps.”

    Well, Jim, that’s exactly what you are talking about. In case you haven’t noticed, your party now controls both houses of congress and the White House. If your party were really in power for the good of the people as you see it, they could do all these things.

    For example, they could raise the retirement age a squeak and eliminate the limit on the amount of income that is taxed for Social Security benefits. They could add to, rather than cut, poverty programs, especially for children. The party of Lincoln could establish a reasonable basic health care system for all Americans that would make our businesses more, not less, competitive internationally. You could put a tax on gasoline that would raise the price to somewhere near what the rest of the world pays, and use the income from that tax to repair roads and bridges and build a mass transit system that would use less gas. While you are at it, you could put a huge tax on gas guzzlers and require car manufacturers to increase their fleet mileage. You could pay for increased security measures where we really need it–around our ports and chemical plants–instead of sending seven times as much money per capita for increased security measures to Wyoming (home of Dick Cheney) than you do to New York.

    I could go on, but you get the point, Jim. It’s your party, firmly in the control of the DeLay wing, which is against all those things you say the country needs. They are the ones who want to cut taxes at the same time we’re at war in order to starve the government enough to effectively repeal the New Deal.

    Jim, if you really think these things need doing, you need to round up the few remaining moderates in your party and get together with some of the same from the Democratic side and get to work to wrest the power from those who simply want to destroy government.

    Writing a polyannaish letter to the Strib ain’t gonna cut it.

  • The Basic Drill

    Welcome to this thing, yet another old thing reconfigured as a new thing. It’ll be mostly about baseball, but I have a wandering mind, so it’ll likely occasionally stray pretty far afield –at some point, I suppose, I’ll feel compelled to talk about other random nonsense as well. Sometimes the random nonsense and the baseball will intersect in strange ways. I might, for instance, tell you about the time I saw Boxcar Willie throw out the first pitch in a Southern League game.

    Willie was wearing overalls, of course, and uncorked a wild pitch to the screen. I could then seque into the story about being present on another occasion when Boxcar Willie had a street named after him in Branson, Missouri (he was wearing overalls). Every time I see a celebrity of even the most forgotten, nearly-dead sort at a baseball game I’m for damn sure going to tell you about it. Like this: I once saw Don Knotts and Norman Fell at Kauffman Stadium in Kansas City on the night Paul Molitor got his 3000th hit.

    I might ask you to tell me the strangest person you’ve ever seen throw out the first pitch or sing the National Anthem at a baseball game. What the hell, as long as I’ve already mentioned it we may as well get that out of the way right now.

    Mostly, though, as I said, I’ll write about baseball, because baseball is one of the few things I’m passionate about in a world where the things I’m passionate about are diminishing by the day.
    I say this even though baseball has nearly destroyed my life, and may yet manage to finish me off. I think it was F. Scott Fitzgerald, talking about Ring Lardner, who once observed that baseball had ruined more good writers than alcohol. I’m not going to pretend to be a good writer, but I can tell you that I’ve done more than a little dabbling –dabbling is almost certainly not the right word– in both baseball and alcohol, and I’m pretty sure baseball has taken more years off my life.

    Perhaps not all truly obsessive baseball fans are stunted oafs, but a great number of them are, and I don’t suppose I’m any exception.
    I once ran away from home to work at a spring training ballpark (sure, I was 25 years old, but like I said, I was a stunted oaf). I’ve been to more baseball games than I could count, although I’ve scored every one of them, and the scorebooks are heaped in my basement along with several thousand baseball books, a couple hundred mitts, and scads of other baseball-related nonsense.

    I’ve tried to wean myself over the years, but to no avail. The overpaid, cheat-at-any-cost bastards and their cretinous overlords have got their hooks in me for good. If I were to wake up one morning in April and read in the newspaper that Derek Jeter had been arrested for having a freezer full of human body parts, dead cats, and growth hormones in his basement I’d immediately skip happily along to the boxscores and by six-thirty I’d be in my seat at the Metrodome with a scorebook in my lap.

    I have nothing whatsoever against complete monsters as long as they can swing the bat and make the necessary plays in the field. As soon as their production starts to slip, you’re welcome to lock them up for the rest of their lives as far as I’m concerned.

    I could tell you about all the reasons why I love baseball despite its many serious flaws and blemishes (unsightly steroid rash, most prominently, and Bud Selig), but people do that all that time, and you’ll surely have noticed by now that they’re always essentially the same reasons: the perfect accounting of the game, the absence of a clock, the rich history and repository of statistics, the easy and expert comparisons those statistics make possible for even the most casual fan, the lulls that allow time for plenty of idle conversation, the quirks and characters and long season.

    That’s all absolutely true, but Roger Angell and George Will and a host of others have been going on about that sort of thing forever, and sometimes it can almost make me resent the sheer perfection of the game. If it were a little less tidy and entrenched maybe most of the highbrows would go back to their chess boards and fat volumes of political philosophy and Civil War history.

    Mostly, I have to admit, I love baseball because it takes up so much time that would otherwise have to be taken up with something else, and I don’t have much in the way of something elses in my life. Spring training, 162 games, the postseason –that’s essentially eight months steeped in obsession, and over a lifetime that adds up to an awful lot of the most basic sort of prison subtraction.

    I like the way we’ve all come to take for granted the ridiculous uniforms of the sport. I love the fact that there are no cheerleaders. I love the suicide squeeze (and despise the sacrifice bunt) and the grand slam –or, as my wife calls it, the four-run thing. I love the various plot lines and dramas large and small that play out over the course of a season, the countless opportunities for pure joy and abject misery.

    I’m not sure baseball builds character, but I do know that it creates characters, and I adore characters. The game also doesn’t necessarily reward devotion, but it does reward attention, and for the attention deficient it’s like a daily Ritalin injection directly into the heart of the cerebrum. I can’t think of any other thing that can make me sit still for four hours at a time.

    And after four months of bouncing off the walls I can’t tell you how good it’s going to feel to be able to sit still again, even if I once more end up with my heart yanked out of my chest and kicked into the gutter with the last leaves of autumn.

    This, though, will be about those months when my heart will still be beating, hopefully like a man’s with a gun in his mouth. Seriously, that would be a good thing. That would be a seriously good thing.
    I’ll be here –and elsewhere– all year. Feel free to drop me a line any time. I’d be happy to hear from you.

  • Because We Care

    I’d still prefer to be riding the bike, of course, even in this beautful and deadly snow, but it’s a crazy week. We are shipping the new issue of the magazine today, uploading it to the website, there are school conferences for the kids (one of whom is having a cavity filled today), there is a birthday Thursday, and the week-long wind-up to the Birkebeiner is in full swing. So today I was on the Interstate behind a school bus. It had just come on the entry ramp. I drove in its wake, which was a dazzling wind-blown banner of snow flakes, a sort of glittery con-trail. I kept pace with the bus, trying to stay in its magical sphere. My daughters would have recognized it as a cloud of fairy dust. On the seat next to me, there was a print-out of David Carr’s thoughtful appreciation of Hunter S. Thompson in today’s Times.

    I read something yesterday that was striking, and I thought about it now: great writers–in fact, great artists of all kinds–are usually marked by their curiosity, their unquenchable desire to see new things, meet new people, go new places, find new ways to use the language and new facets of truth. I think of this as having “hungry eyes.”

    How do you know if a writer has “hungry eyes”? I think it shows in their work by a certain comfort level with leaving things unfinished, or at least unresolved, being OK with a sustained mystery, leaving questions unanswered intentionally (rather than accidentally, which just looks sloppy)–that, after all, is the human condition. Writing that I am not very interested in is usually stained by a kind of blind, self-assured arrogance that has no sympathy for the undecided, only pity and disgust. (Like, say, the me-first neo-cons over at Powerline.) Most people are undecided about most things, and to belittle them is to insure that your work will be instantly forgotten except by pedants and thugs.

    I am not sure whether Hunter S. Thompson was part of the problem, or part of the solution. I do know that he had deep reservoirs of courage and enterprise as a reporter, and these are rare enough nowadays. On the other hand, there is certainly no shortage today of righteous indignation across the political spectrum, nor the narcissistic compulsion to make every story revolve around its writer.

    By far the majority of editors I’ve ever dealt with are liars about this. In private moments, talking amongst themselves, they gripe bitterly about how Hunter Thompson and Lester Bangs ruined journalism and criticism (respectively) because they inspired legions of bad imitators. This is a little like blaming the Beatles for ruining pop music. What’s worse: in public, these same editors lament the passing Golden Age–where are the Thompsons and Bangs of today? Well, they are out there, but no one is willing to take the risk of cultivating them. They complain about the weather, but do nothing about it.

  • These Fragments I Have Shored Against My Ruin: A Collection Of Scraps From One More Sleepless Night

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    How ashamed must be the loathsome models who wake up in the morning in bed with ZZ Top?

    In the old bar of my early days as an inebriate there was a mural there on the wall, a tableau of drunken trolls, a forest scene, I seem to remember, a vertitable sprawl of blasted trolls, collapsed among the trees. A dark woods, more darkness creeping through the trees. They’d come through there any day now with the heavy machinery, the chain saws and earth movers. They’d lay waste to everything the fucking trolls held dear. They’d plow their world right under, drive the plump little bastards into exile. No wonder the trolls did nothing but drink, no wonder all they ever did was lay around eating and drinking and gaining weight. There weren’t even any women trolls, so when they danced it was a sad spectacle, bachelor trolls self-consciously dancing with each other and doing their pathetic best to make merry. Still, they did dance, once upon a time. They used to. They used to be furtive and quick on their feet, used to cover all sorts of ground just for the hell of it. No more, though. They knew what was coming, and there was nothing left for them to do but wait.

    If you want to speak directly with a disc jockey, your best bet is to call in the middle of the night. It works for me every time.

    So many white men, taking turns pushing their tired white brains down a moonlit dirt road in a wheelbarrow.

    Please present a word with two w’s. Wheelbarrow. Willow. Wallflower. Window. It’s difficult to find such words that don’t start with w. Awkward.

    Dear Giant: Please put your lips to that little chimney and blow this frozen man out of his chair.

    The Giant’s prerogative: He can do whatever the hell He pleases.

    The backs of my eyeballs feel like a chalkboard on which some invisible hand is quietly scratching a descending series of numbers.

    We got a word for fellas like Clayton Eshelman where I come from, mister: pussy.

    I can’t seem to shake the memory of a little cross-eyed mudpuppy, crammed in a jar of formaldehyde in a high school science lab. When I was younger the eggs in the refrigerator would talk to me, telling me stories of long dead hens, nights in the country, the distant sawing of fiddles, crickets who giggled all night long, the gravel percussion of truck wheels coming up the driveway, the soft crooning of the old woman who came each morning to carry them away. I’m extremely grateful for this opportunity to present my side of the story. Thank you for your time.

    Now: Bushed. Shagged. Tuckered. Fagged. Fried. Beat. Shot. Sacked. Whooped. Whipped. Saddled. Socked. Weary. Worn out. Crapped. Crying Uncle. Exhausted. Tired as shit. Lights out. Now I lay me down to sleep. To sleep, perchance to dream. Nighty-night. Sayonara. Get a good night’s sleep. Don’t take any wooden nickels. Don’t let the bedbugs bite. I’ll see you in the morning. Good night. Sweet dreams.

  • Snow Emergency

    Due to some strange, unforeseen circumstances, I found myself driving several different cars in the last twenty-four hours. Yesterday, I finally got around to some domestic responsibilities that included tightening a hand rail that had loosened under the constant attack of children. These same children were being scalded by a leaky hot-water tap in the bathtub. I keep a small box of washers and springs and valve seats on a shelf in the basement. Each time there is some sort of plumbing job, I retrieve this, and within about twenty minutes of fiddling, I discover that I do not have any of the parts I need, so it’s off to the hardware store.

    I drove the wife’s car, and I happened to catch “On the Media,” NPR’s meta-media radio program that is often quite good, but not good enough to compel me to turn on the radio of a Sunday afternoon. Yesterday made me reconsider my weekend blackout on media. Though they had not yet heard of Hunter Thompson’s passing, Brooke Gladstone and Bob Garfield had a brilliant triangulation between Deep Throat, Woodward and Bernstein’s key anonymous source in their Watergate reporting, and “Inside Deep Throat,” the new behind-the-scenes movie about the first hardcore porno flick. I had not realized that the movie opened and the Watergate break-in happened in the same week, in 1972. To my slightly touched mind, these coincidences tend not to be coincidences at all, but representative moments. Now, thirty-three years later, we find ourselves at a similar moment. Who could have guessed, three decades ago, that we would find ourselves fighting the same battles as if they’d never happened—arguing, as those nitwits over at Powerline are wont to do, about whether Watergate was “no big deal, afterall” and giving the FCC wide-ranging power to put media companies out of business for perceived obscenity violations.

    We’ve been urging anyone who will listen to go back and either read “All the President’s Men” or see the film. It is an edifying thing to do for a number of reasons. First, as a palliative against the widespread suspicion that newspapers and reporters are “on the make” at all times, either literally or figuratively. As Gladstone and Garfield pointed out, the last thirty years have been hell for politics, government, and the social fabric in general—but they have been very good to the press, because it has been the press that has revealed the unpleasant truth about so much ugliness from Vietnam to Iraq. That process has now reversed; politicians and corporate marauders grow more comfortable and more arrogant as they “discredit” the press, or at least convince the general public that there can be no news without a liberal slant (unless it is owned by Rupert Murdoch). Nicholas Lehmann, in last week’s New Yorker, seems to have picked up on this irony—that neo-cons are, interestlingly enough, hardcore relativists when it comes to the news. It’s all a snow-job, unless its in the Bible.

    Today, we have snow emergencies around town. The deputy editor, who is on vacation in New York this week, put her car in my charge for just such an eventuality. It was safely parked in my driveway, but I got a call early this morning from my old friend DK, who happens to be in New York this week, too. He had two cars parked in the tow zone—so off I went, on an errand that would involve three different cars across two counties. And plenty of radio. So I learned that Hunter Thompson had died, and he too reminded me of how times have changed—but also stayed the same.

    While today there is plenty of raw material for a fearless writer like Thompson, I worry that our culture and our institutions have been stung too many times by great, insightful, truthful journalism, and that the reading public has grown innured to it. Great journalism is, in one of its modes anyway, supposed to “speak truth to power,” but power is presently winning the contest. It is doing this by cultivating a very sophisticated and cynical understanding of media, and manipulating it. By contrast, Hunter Thompson was a hero to all earnest and poetic truth-seekers who could tolerate his selfishness long enough to see the inner workings of whatever subject he trained his sights on, no matter how irreverent or unorthodox he wished to be in telling the story. I have no idea why he might have decided to commit suicide, but I do know that it comports with both his personality and the times he was now forced to live in. (It is telling, I think, that my favorite Thompson composition was this memorable obituary of Richard M. Nixon; it is a highly useful adjustment of focus for those of us whose view of those dark times has grown fuzzy or sepia-toned.)

    Anyway, there will be plenty of obituaries that are far more telling and eloquent than anything I could say about Thompson, but I did want to take this thing a little further in a different direction. “On the Media” had a long segment on the Watergate Deep Throat and efforts over the years to identify who that source may have been. A journalism professor named Bill Gaines conducted a class that asked its students to pore over all available information—primarily the books and articles of Woodward and Bernstein— from Watergate to determine, as scientifically as possible, who Deep Throat was. Gaines and his class believe that they have, beyond a doubt, identified who that anonymous source was. Bob Garfield pressed Gaines on the ethics of this exercise. As a journalism proferssor, shouldn’t he be teaching his students the sanctity of keeping a source anonymous? Gaines, in a most disngenuous way, said that Woodward and Bernstein had already identified the source by leaving all sorts of hints along the way. If they had been serious about protecting Deep Throat, they would have let him remain strictly on “deep background”—that is, not only anonymous, but entirely unsourced in print. But this is unfair and insincere. Watergate was the single biggest most celebrated triumph of investigative journalism of the last fifty years, and it would not have broken without Deep Throat. Woodward and Bernstein have been harrassed about the identity of their source from the day they begain investigating that “trivial little break-in.” The fact that they have managed to keep Deep Throat’s identity secret from everyone except the redoubtable Bill Gaines and his class is the only defense they need.

    And so, in honor of Hunter S. Thompson, we have to ask—is this what journalism is about today? Has it devolved so far that it must eat its own, to keep itself occupied? To speak truth only to the truth-seekers, even when it is an irrelevant and a counterproductive exercise in navel-gazing? How depressing. We hear there’s been a lot of snow in Aspen this year—or was that merely the ashes of Harold Ross floating lightly on the air?

  • Dopes on Journalism

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    Image courtesy Nathan Walsh

    Now that we know that President Bush smoked dope, I guess we can finally admit that we were in the room when some of that went on at our college, too. And, also because we now know the President has finally admitted to what we all knew anyway, I don’t feel bad pointing you to High Times for this interview with Hunter S. Thompson, Mr. Gonzo himself, who is at least a bastard godfather to all journalists of my age. Thompson killed himself yesterday.

    From the passage he wrote about looking down into the trunk of his Cadillac which was stuffed full of marijuana, LSD, mushrooms, uppers, downers, and a tank of ether, and figured “with careful rationing, I could make it through the weekend,” to last week’s report of him and Bill Murray driving golf balls then shooting them like skeet, Thompson was bigger than the rest of us who merely wrote about stuff other people did. “Living large” was a phrase invented for him.

    He wrote a lot of great stuff, and a lot of crap, too. We certainly remember Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas from college…it’s maybe the only thing we remember from college. But, while that was all in good fun, what we really remember was his essay, which amounted to an endorsement, of then Georgia governor Jimmy Carter, after he heard Carter give a speech at the U of Georgia on Law Day 1974.

    Thompson was drinking Wild Turkey at the luncheon, while everyone else was sipping that overly sweet Southern ice tea. I can’t find the piece he wrote on the internet, but it’s in his book The Great Shark Hunt. That piece, as much as any, except maybe All The President’s Men, made me pick up the typewriter. I had to do a lot of typing one handed because it took me a while longer to remember to put down the Wild Turkey.

    Drug addled though he may have been, Thompson set a standard for truth telling in his journalism that is rarely matched today. (My favorite example: “There is no way to grasp what a shallow, contemptible and hopelessly dishonest old hack Hubert Humphrey is until you’ve followed him around for a while.”)

    Maybe his epic battles with the likes of Richard Nixon left him with less to fear than journalists have today. As far as I know, he didn’t face jail when he crossed some lines, unlike Judith Miller and Matthew Cooper do today. But then, Nixon was a complete amateur at dealing with the press, when compared to that old dope smoker George W. Bush. If only Nixon had thought of populating the White House press corps with gay prostitutes, maybe things would have gone easier for him.

    I wish Thompson could have held off his own demons long enough to write about hot military studs in the White House. I would have paid to read his thoughts on something so weird even he couldn’t have made it up.

  • When Music Came To The Mountain

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    All right, everybody get in line and listen up. I want you gentlemen to get some shut-eye tonight so you can get up and be ready to hump it first thing in the morning. We’ll be traveling seven miles to the east over rugged terrain. Word has it we might be in for some heavy weather as well, so pack accordingly. We’ll have six men to a piano, and each of these pianos is worth more than $50,000, so I want to make good and damn sure that everyone in this room understands the importance of taking all the care and precaution necessary to insure the safe delivery of every single piano in our possession. I don’t need to tell you fellas that nobody has ever carried a piano over this mountain, let alone nine pianos, and I’m not about to stand here and try to sugarcoat the serious dangers and risks involved in this operation. Every one of you has endured months of grueling training, and I wouldn’t send you out there if I didn’t have absolute confidence in your ability to bring this difficult mission to a successful conclusion.

    Our most recent intelligence suggests that we can expect fierce if sporadic resistance from the local guerrillas. These people resent the incursion of very expensive pianos into their territory; most of them have never seen a piano in their lives, and the value of these instruments is more than most of these folks will make in their lifetimes. We can expect them to give us everything they have, and I don’t want anybody going into this with a false sense of security just because these local characters don’t have much more than rocks and sticks and old surplus Daisy rifles to defend themselves with. When the British tried to bring a piano over this mountain back in the 1950s –and this was one piano, mind you– they were badly routed and the piano was destroyed and burned by the natives.
    I expect nothing less than 100% success from this mission, so I want you to defend these pianos with everything at your disposal; and, well, boys, you know what they say about making an omelet. What I’m saying is, be vigilant, and expect a tough battle. And let’s all keep in mind what we’re up to here: these are poor, backwards people, and they’ve been drumming on rocks since the stone ages. They can’t even yet begin to imagine the gift we’re bringing them. We’re gonna bring these miserable savages music, and we all know in our hearts that even if we have to shove it down their throats they’re for damn sure going to thank us for it one day.

    Lights out, boys. Tomorrow let’s make the folks back home proud.

  • THE TRUTH, AS ALWAYS, WAS CHRONIC

    Lion, lout, rough beast, sick dog, oracle, and oaf: Hunter S. Thompson, 67

    Myths and legends die hard in America. We love them for the extra dimension they provide, the illusion of near-infinite possibility to erase the narrow confines of most men’s reality. Weird heroes and mold-breaking champions exist as living proof to those who need it that the tyranny of “the rat race” is not yet final.

    —Hunter S. Thompson, “Those Daring Young Men in Their Flying Machines…Ain’t What They Used to Be,” Pageant, September 1969

  • Why my cable bill is so high

    Every time I look at my Time Warner bill and wonder why I’m paying so much for so little I think of Groucho’s advice: “I find TV very educational. When someone turns it on, I go into the other room and read a good book.” It’s not that easy though. I’m as dumb as the next guy, and when the damn thing turns itself on (I’ve got to quit sitting on the remote) I tend to just sit there and take it in.

    It’s not really that bad. I used to like West Wing, and I do like the Sopranos and the movies on Turner Classics, but every time I really think of pitching the box out the window I begin to worry that I’m going to miss an episode of Real Time with Bill Maher.

    If you haven’t seen Real Time, or you don’t remember when Bill used to have a show on ABC before he said something Ari Fleischer didn’t approve of, here’s a sample of why it’s so good from today’s LA Times.

    The new season of Real Time starts tonight at 10 on HBO. If you call right now, I’m sure they can add HBO to your package. While you’re on the phone, ask them if it’s any cheaper if you can drop the Fox News Channel.

  • The Mess

    We are still enjoying our unique new radio station quite a lot, but we are disturbed that the signal is not nearly as powerful as we’d like. Which explains all the contraptions and random wires strung across stacked boxes around the office—watch your head. Oops, look out for the beer bottles there. We removed a long piece of lamp wire from the antenna of the TV, and wound its frayed end around a bit of wire hanger that serves as the antenna for our small transistor radio, which until now has been the radio with the best reception in the entire office, despite being tabled next to our humidor, our furry black shako, and our Apple II in this little lead-lined, roofless echo chamber we call the office.

    The TV is a small black and white job that literally receives one station, which is Fox—not the Fox News Channel, thank god—and this is hugely gratifying, since Fox now owns the contract to televise the State High School Hockey Tournament, the sole reason and justification and explanantion for the existence of this television. (We think they still own this contract. We hope they do. Otherwise, we may have to listen to the tourney on AM radio. If this proves to be impossible, our exit strategy will be set in motion—which involves buying a toga and running away to join the Polyphonic Spree.)

    So anyway, we ran the other end of that lamp wire into the keyhole on one of our filing cabinets, with the probably mistaken idea that reception is a function of how much ferric metal one can marshall to the cause. If there were any exposed plumbing in the place, we’d wire that into the bargain too, and then we’d consititute a pretty good fire hazard in case of a lightning strike. All this effort has so far resulted in the persistence of very bad reception.

    Now some of us have been reduced to streaming our new radio station on our computers, but this aggravates the Big Boss as he meters company bandwidth, and it is also a useful procedure for making the staff insane, because these streams of audio are not synchronized, and unsynchronized streams of the same music are twice as disturbing as having two entirely different stations tuned in. With five or six computers tuned to the stream, it is a little like being stuck in the creepy time-travel sequence of “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory,” without the consolation of Gene WIlder’s bug eyes and the river of molten chocolate, and the Oompah Loompahs paddling doubletime, hell bent for leather.