The Rake Magazine

Category: Blog Post

  • Enjoy a Primitive Chicago Happy Hour

    FILM
    Chicago Restored!

    Who better to tell ya about all that jazz then the people who were actually living it? At the end of the roaring ’20s, a little film was made that incorporated all the music, gin, and debauchery of the times. While the movie originally met with fear, the premise inspired the hit Bob Fosse musical and 2002 Academy Award-winning movie Chicago. Now the original 1927 version has been found and restored, and it’s playing tonight at the Heights as part of a special screening with Harvey Gustafson on the organ. —Kate McDonald

    7:30 p.m., Heights Theatre, 391 Central Ave. N.E., Columbia Heights; 763-788-9079; $8.

    THEATER & PERFORMANCE
    Happy Hours and Olives

    There are many reasons behind my desire to see Martini & Olive’s Holiday Happy Hour show at Illusion Theatre: the fact that they describe themselves as deliberately appalling; the fact that they are channeling the ’70s in their wardrobe and badattitude; and the fact that I have a weakness for all things involving happy hours and olives. Their two-man play is a celebration of all things festive — as long as festive involves crudeness, fruit basket head ornaments, and debauchery. —Kate McDonald

    7:30 p.m., Illusion Theater, 528 Hennepin Ave., Minneapolis; 612-339-4944; $25.


    MUSIC
    Primitive Appeal

    Minnesota in December might not resemble Winter in Kingston, Jamaica, but that doesn’t mean we can’t have our reggae and play it too. And who better to play it than The New Primitives, who have won the Minnesota Music Awards for best reggae in Minnesota for the last four years? The eight member band doesn’t stop at reggae either; they incorporate R&B, ska, and calypso into their energetic world dance music performance. —Kate McDonald

    9 p.m., The Cabooze, 917 Cedar Ave. S., Minneapolis; $5.

  • Swallowing the Wormwood

    It is a firmly established fact about human beings that we want what we cannot have. Once stores run out of Furbees or fetal Cabbage Patch babies or giggling Elmos, suddenly every mother’s child must have one. When exorbitantly-priced iPhones hit the market already in limited supply, people line up at 2 a.m. I’ve heard this is even a paradigm used by sex therapists: by telling even a couple they are not allowed to have sex for a week, experts say they can get even the most disinterested spouse to churn with desire.

    And so it is with absinthe, the drink preferred by Ernest Hemingway, Vincent Van Gogh, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, which supposedly drove each of them crazy and was outlawed in the United States in 1912.

    It is supposedly the wormwood in Absinthe that makes it so deliciously dangerous. An herb that’s poisonous in even moderate amounts, pure wormwood contains trace amounts of thujone, a ketone with hallucinogenic properties — and it’s possible, I suppose, that absinthe provokes delusions in very rare cases. Though the same can be said of sugar, sleep deprivation, over-the-counter cold medicines, and love.

    Laws restricting the sale of absinthe have been loosening for years, since 1972 when the Food, Drug and Cosmetics Act lifted the ban on the liquor itself and focused instead on concentrated thujone, which occurs naturally in sage, thyme, and rosemary. Once distillers realized that the absinthe they’d been drinking in Spain and Portugal (and believing had mystical properties) actually contained such a negligible amount of the hallucinogen it qualified for sale in the U.S., they were faced with a conundrum. The very thing that made this substance legal might lessen its appeal.

    In other words, without the naughty element of absinthe, what is it but a bright green syrup with a nearly lethal level of alcohol?

    I am a confirmed wine drinker AND I do not care for the taste of anise. Keep these two facts in mind. But my experience tasting absinthe for the first time left me truly puzzled as to what all the fuss is about.

    It smells herbal with a touch of sweetness, like bakery in the middle of a stand of fir trees. This I truly liked. . . .But the first sip was like dragon effluvium: livid, scorching, and green. It burns for a long time (a looonnnggg time) on the tongue and in the throat and later in the gut. The predominant taste is licorice and leaf and something vaguely scotch-like — if your scotch were subject to a nuclear flash.

    Most disturbing, for me at least, the flavor lingers for hours. Neither breath mints nor vigorous tooth (and tongue) brushing can expunge it. With an alcohol content of 62 percent — that’s 124 proof — it’s as if the imprint is soldered onto the inside of your mouth.

    I tried drinking it straight and as an absinthe drip, a process that reminded me of every heroin-cooking scene I’ve ever seen on TV. There is dramatic ceremony to this drink — no doubt one of the things that made it popular among the writers, artists, and actors of yore. Traditional preparation requires a slotted spoon and a sugar cube. You trickle ice water directly over the sugar, allowing it to melt into the liquor through the spoon’s vents. This creates a "louche," or pale white cloud, topped with a ring of iridescent chartreuse.

    It’s pretty. But the fact is, I liked the absinthe even less this way, preferring the pain and boldness of a flavor I found confounding to the watered-down and sugary slurry edged in green. The only way I could imagine liking this liquor, frankly, is in coffee with a heavy dollop of whipped cream — which would not only soften the flavor with mocha but might thankfully heat off some of the alcohol as well.

    Tomorrow morning at 8 a.m., Surdyk’s will begin selling Lucid Absinthe Supérieure, one of only two varieties currently available in the United States, for $70 a bottle. And Jim Surdyk, who has an exclusive on the introduction of absinthe to the Twin Cities, says he expects a line around the block by 7:45. "It’s interesting to people, the whole mystique of it," he said. I agree. I also think this is a rather dangerous drink, not only for the pocketbook but for public health. It is a fascination: a century-long withheld novelty that will make you very, very, very drunk very, very, very fast.

    And this, in addition to depression, schizophrenia, and syphilis (respectively), likely is what caused the madness of Hemingway, Van Gogh, and Toulouse-Lautrec.

  • freedom of expression

    This "freedom of expression booth" at the MSP airport most likely won’t be looked at in the same way after this year’s Senator Craig escapade.

    But one of the most important — and one of the most overlooked — aspects our visual culture is fonts, particularly in our instructional messages.

    Recognize the style in the picture? It’s Helvetica, the ubiquitous plain Jane font that has gained a wider recognition thanks to an interesting documentary released earlier this year of the same name which illustrates just how pervasive the font is. (And really, it’s everywhere.)

    For some more info on fonts, check out the blog for local font shop Chank. They’ve got a lot of examples of fonts they’ve designed in action, like the lettering for the front of Sam’s Wine Shop on Washington Avenue:

    That window just wouldn’t be as classy and the Freedom of Expression Booth wouldn’t have the same seriousness if the fonts were exchanged, would they?

    (pictures from el-as’s photostream and chank blog)

  • Rachel Bliss at Cliché

    Minneapolis-St.Paul is a Midwestern oasis for the visual arts. In fact, we here in the Twin Cities have visual arts all over the place, damn near everywhere you look… or where you aren’t looking, as is often the case.

    The visual arts don’t just hang at big name institutions like MIA or le Walker and hot small spots around town like Rogue Buddha or First Amendent. They’re at rock shows, in the corners of coffee shops, on the sidewalks, in people’s clothing, and on and on.

    This week, while I’m guest bloggin’ over here, we’ll hopefully take a look at this strong visual culture in the Twin Towns.

    First, let’s start with something conventionally unconventional, but still pretty great. These pictures from painter Rachel Bliss, whose exhibit from a few weeks ago wasn’t on some stardard white walls of a gallery, but rather hanging up in the Uptown clothing store Cliché.

    Pretty fantastic stuff for a small show at a boutique, and a perfect example of how high grade art can show up at spaces alternative to galleries.

     

     

    You can check out more of Bliss’s work at Cliche and Bliss’s mnartists page.

  • Top Ten Tastes of 2007

    Truth to tell, I’m not a big fan of these end-of-year Top Ten lists. They tend, I think, to be both subjective and showy: meaning listmakers record either what’s obscurely relevant to them or what will demonstrate their great intellect and breadth of knowledge, or both.

    Two years ago, for instance, every book reviewer in America was raving about the Zadie Smith novel On Beauty, which I bought (in hardcover) and tried to bull my way through but could not abide. Then I went back and looked over the articles I’d read; suddenly I realized they sounded remarkably similar to one another. Follow the leader, it seemed to me. Being a fan of the young, beautiful, biracial Smith was simply the style that year.

    Please take my list for what it is: a random recollection of my ten most memorable eating experiences of the year, touched by all the emotional, irrational, and regional variables that make one meal sing like a chorus of angels while another — equally well-prepared — falls flat.

    1. Pizza Lucé — The Ruby Rae, an upside-down pie with spinach, tomatoes, Italian sausage, and crushed hot peppers, covered in a thick red sauce and sprinkled with parmesan; our favorite takeout meal.
    2. The Sample Room — Roasted Vegetables on Wilted Spinach, a huge plate of greens, warm, hearty roasted vegetables (such as squash or beets), and a balsamic vinaigrette; great for a cold winter night.
    3. Kinhdo — Tofu with Spicy Peppers and Extra Cabbage, a stewlike vegetarian meal over white rice and hot, hot, hot (are you sensing a theme here?); best eaten at home on paper plates.
    4. Atlas Grill — Fire-Roasted Salmon over mixed greens, a simple, nearly untouched piece of fish flashed over fire and served with fresh leaves of arugula, maché, and the like.
    5. Restaurant Alma — Roasted Duck with Baby Brussels Sprouts, as simple and wholesome a meal as I had all year and so fresh, I could have been dining on the farm.
    6. W.A. Frost — Cauliflower and Goat Cheese Soup, a creamy, savory mixture as warm as the crackling fire in the dining room and topped with fresh tomato purée plus a dollop of nutty green pesto.
    7. Hell’s Kitchen — Huevos Rancheros, a crisp tortilla layered with hash browns, scrambled eggs, black beans, heaps of cheese, salsa and a big scoop of sour cream; breakfast enough to last you all day.
    8. Coffee News — Carrot Cake, five layers high and covered in cream cheese frosting; this is my occasional indulgence before teaching a night class at Macalester.
    9. Lake Avenue Cafe (Duluth) — Black Bean Burrito, a hot wrap stuffed with beans and feta cheese, served with homemade corn salsa; my standard after the motorcycle trip to the North Shore.
    10. Home — John’s Satay, a combination of peanut butter, serrano peppers, and lime juice; nothing tastes better to me on a night when I’m tired, hormonal, or coming down with a cold — I’ll even eat it on popcorn.

     

    And there you have it: a list reflecting my personal tastes (I think it’s pretty obvious, I’m partial to spicy food, black beans, and goat cheese) and highlighting a handful of really excellent restaurants, plus my husband’s best recipe.

    But as I said, "expert" Top Ten lists are by definition self-limiting and narrow. What’s important is not what I liked this year but what you did. So. . . what did you eat that you loved in 2007?

  • Local Boys Sing, While Heathens Turn Pages

    MUSIC
    Gear Daddies Add Boxing Day Show Just for You

    The English might have Boxing Day, but we have the Gear Daddies. And who needs another commonwealth holiday when we can have good old American country rockers. With their shows on the 28th and 29th already sold out, the band has shown some Austin, Minnesota flexibility by adding an extra show to their tour. Get ready to drive your Zamboni, peeps. "That right there is one expensive machine." —Kate McDonald

    8 p.m., The Fine Line Music Café, 318 1st Ave. N., Minneapolis; 612-338-8100; $31.

    MORE MUSIC
    Not So Bad at All, and Then Some

    A band called The Bad Plus — covering the likes of Black Sabbath and Nirvana — might not conger immediate thoughts of your typical jazz trio, but this is precisely the appeal of the Minneapolis-grown group. From their beginnings, playing weekend gigs in Minnesota in 2000, The Bad Plus has gotten national attention with their unique sound and style that fuses jazz with rock and roll. —Kate McDonald

    7 & 9:30 p.m., Dakota Jazz Club, 1010 Nicollet Ave., Minneapolis; 612-332-1010; $40 & $28.

    BOOKS & AUTHORS
    John Allen Paulus — Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don’t Add Up

    Hot on the heels of the birth of Christ comes yet another assault on
    religious belief. God knows, the godless have been on the pop culture
    offensive of late (see: Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Philip Pullman
    et al.), and if the other side of the barricades didn’t have such an
    overwhelming historical foothold, you could almost accuse the atheists
    of piling on. The irony of so many of the recent irreligious screeds is
    that they tend to be marked by the same brand of repellent intolerance
    that has been the appalling hallmark of God’s zealots through the ages.
    It seems sad that even the unbelievers are reduced to preaching to
    their choirs. As to whether John Allen Paulos
    has any truly fresh light to shed on the subject—hint: It says right
    there in the title that the man’s a mathematician, and his book
    undertakes all manner of logical refutations of God’s existence
    (yawn)—I’m afraid he’s ultimately just another dog barking at cars. —Brad Zellar

    Available today at bookstore nationwide.

  • My First Rake Mea Culpa

    More like a mea maxima culpa. 

    In my very first guest post here, I used the Rachel Bliss show at Cliché as an illustration of art works on display in places other than galleries, something that happens more and more here in Minneapolis.

    And then I posted the work of the wrong Bliss.

    The artwork I posted — and have removed from this blog — came from Rachel Bliss in Pennsylvania and did not appear at Cliché.  We were informed that the images on the site, like many pieces on artist sites, are copyrighted and require permission to use. 

    I meant to use some pictures from the Minneapolis Rachael Bliss, who did in fact have an opening at the clothing store in Uptown.   You can now see her images in the original post. 

    My apologies to Rachel and Rachael and to Cliché for the confusion.

     

  • A Cratchit Family Christmas

    I read this the morning of every Christmas Eve. It helps remind me of the essential importance of a humble, shared feast. I gift this to all cooks as they start their ovens.

    Such a bustle ensued that you might have thought a goose the rarest of all birds; a feathered phenomenon, to which a black swan was a matter of course — and in truth it was something very like it in that house. Mrs. Cratchit made the gravy (ready beforehand in a little saucepan) hissing hot; Master Peter mashed the potatoes with incredible vigour; Miss Belinda sweetened up the apple-sauce; Martha dusted the hot plates; Bob took Tiny Tim beside him in a tiny corner at the table; the two young Cratchits set chairs for everybody, not forgetting themselves, and mounting guard upon their posts, crammed spoons into their mouths, lest they should shriek for goose before their turn came to be helped. At last the dishes were set on, and grace was said. It was succeeded by a breathless pause, as Mrs. Cratchit, looking slowly all along the carving-knife, prepared to plunge it in the breast; but when she did, and when the long expected gush of stuffing issued forth, one murmur of delight arose all round the board, and even Tiny Tim, excited by the two young Cratchits, beat on the table with the handle of his knife, and feebly cried Hurrah.

    There never was such a goose. Bob said he didn’t believe there ever was such a goose cooked. Its tenderness and flavour, size and cheapness, were the themes of universal admiration. Eked out by apple-sauce and mashed potatoes, it was a sufficient dinner for the whole family; indeed, as Mrs. Cratchit said with great delight (surveying one small atom of a bone upon the dish), they hadn’t ate it all at last. Yet every one had had enough, and the youngest Cratchits in particular, were steeped in sage and onion to the eyebrows. But now, the plates being changed by Miss Belinda, Mrs. Cratchit left the room alone — too nervous to bear witnesses — to take the pudding up and bring it in.

    Suppose it should not be done enough. Suppose it should break in turning out. Suppose somebody should have got over the wall of the back-yard, and stolen it, while they were merry with the goose — a supposition at which the two young Cratchits became livid. All sorts of horrors were supposed.

    Hallo. A great deal of steam. The pudding was out of the copper. A smell like a washing-day. That was the cloth. A smell like an eating-house and a pastrycook’s next door to each other, with a laundress’s next door to that. That was the pudding. In half a minute Mrs Cratchit entered — flushed, but smiling proudly — with the pudding, like a speckled cannon-ball, so hard and firm, blazing in half of half-a-quartern of ignited brandy, and bedight with Christmas holly stuck into the top.

    Oh, a wonderful pudding. Bob Cratchit said, and calmly too, that he regarded it as the greatest success achieved by Mrs. Cratchit since their marriage. Mrs. Cratchit said that now the weight was off her mind, she would confess she had had her doubts about the quantity of flour. Everybody had something to say about it, but nobody said or thought it was at all a small pudding for a large family. It would have been flat heresy to do so. Any Cratchit would have blushed to hint at such a thing.

    At last the dinner was all done, the cloth was cleared, the hearth swept, and the fire made up. The compound in the jug being tasted, and considered perfect, apples and oranges were put upon the table, and a shovel-full of chestnuts on the fire. Then all the Cratchit family drew round the hearth, in what Bob Cratchit called a circle, meaning half a one; and at Bob Cratchit’s elbow stood the family display of glass. Two tumblers, and a custard-cup without a handle.

    These held the hot stuff from the jug, however, as well as golden goblets would have done; and Bob served it out with beaming looks, while the chestnuts on the fire sputtered and cracked noisily. Then Bob proposed:

    `A Merry Christmas to us all, my dears. God bless us.’

    Which all the family re-echoed.

    `God bless us every one.’ said Tiny Tim, the last of all.

    — A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens

  • Let Nothing You Dismay: Rock the Bells

    It’s strange to me that nobody seems to expect anything in the way of an explanation these days. Nothing in the world surprises anyone anymore, unless, you know, someone decides to go all Jerry Bruckheimer with their rage.

    I guess I’m not a person who can live without explanations or surprise.

    Does the ticking of that clock bother you?

    I’m waiting like everyone else. In the morning I’ll get in my car and drive and blast music and try to get my heart to open, and I’ll go through it all and it will smart a little bit and it will be bittersweet and it won’t be like it once was, because so many essential hearts are now absent, but it will be something I nonetheless look forward to because I can’t help myself.

    For a few hours, and maybe even longer, I might even be able to
    forget about the saddle on my back, and perhaps no one will notice that
    I’m now so stooped that I can’t even see who or what is riding me. It’s
    more likely, of course, that they will notice –how could they not?– but won’t say anything out of kindness and courtesy.

    The
    truth is they all probably know a whole lot more than I do, and can see
    me more clearly than I could ever hope to see myself. All I know
    anymore is that whatever’s in the saddle is reckless, heedless, and
    something of a mess maker. He’s steered me into all sorts of places I
    don’t belong, and left behind quite a trail of wreckage. Oh, shit yes,
    my rider and me, we’ve broken all sorts of stuff that’ll never be
    fixed.

    Still, I’ll do what I always do and try to feel whole while doing it. I’ll go to a little family market that has been downtown for more than a century, and I will buy oysters and cream, just as I did when I tagged along with my father as a child.

    And I’ll go at midnight and sit with my mother and what is left of my family and we will listen once again to the stories about that long, long ago night when a wondrous bright star appeared to shepherds tending their flocks in the fields and an angel spoke to them of great tidings and three wise men were drawn to a manger in a town in the Middle East where an outlaw was born. And whether you believe those stories or not, you cannot deny that they are stories that contain all the essential wonder and magic and mysteries and hope of most good stories, then just as now. And you cannot deny that they are stories that forever changed the world, for the better and for the worse, in what sometimes seems like equal measure.

    I know that I’ll lift up my voice and sing, because it’s what I’ve always done; it’s tradition, ritual, a habit yoked to memory, and it feels good. And I’ll see all sorts of people who were part of the tribe that raised and educated me and kicked my ass out into the world. And in the early hours of Christmas morning, I will walk with my dog through the quiet, snowy streets that as a child I raced through on my stingray bike in the settling dusk of a thousand summer nights. With any luck snow will be falling, or there will be a clear, deep sky crammed with stars, and up and down every street I will remember dozens of voices and faces and the sound of laugher in dark backyards and the smell of my father’s cologne and all those Christmas mornings so long ago now, when I laid awake almost breathless with anticipation in the darkness of my bedroom, listening for sleighbells and waiting for the first light of morning.

  • The Cure for Scrooginess: A Hot Martini at Oceanaire

    I’ve spent only one Christmas alone — and by "alone," I mean myself and three young kids.

    I was recently divorced. My parents were visiting my sister’s family in Philadelphia. And my ex-husband, a "recovering" Catholic and practicing alcoholic at the time, had slid into his annual holiday slump. This is how I found myself in a movie theater Christmas Eve, with my three all lined up and feeling — I’m sure — a lot less melancholy about the situation than I.

    In fact, they were very good sports. We went home and had frosted pumpkin bars around our kitchen table then separated and went to bed. The next day, we watched a video and stayed in our pajamas until well past noon. Everyone survived. And yet. . . .It was a little lonely. Even for the four of us clustered together in a tight little snow-covered house. Though we had movies and sugary treats to keep us occupied. Despite the fact that we’re Jewish, for God’s sake!

    It is a fact of this ceaselessly commercial and bedecked season that being alone — or even with others but not celebrating — feels odd and empty. Everything is too quiet. Houses are either unoccupied or bursting. All the stores that were jam-packed only 24 hours ago are closed. You can’t go to the gym or the library or the mall. Here in Minnesota, it’s often too cold even to take a walk.

    That’s why my family now throws a small party on December 25 for all the people we know who are far from home or sharing kids with an ex-spouse or non-Christians who would ignore the holiday and go to work only their offices are securely closed. (We never give gifts on this day: it’s an irrational but deeply-held principle of mine that the only way to buck the mercenary nature of Christmas is simply to opt out.) And in its more profit-conscious but equally merry way, I’m sure, Oceanaire is doing the same — holding a special dinner on Christmas Eve.

    They can’t announce their specials yet, because chef Rick Kimmes doesn’t decide what to feature until the daily fish shipment comes in. But the front of the house is promising a Bing Crosby’s White Christmas theme with vintage holiday songs and hot drinks including buttered rum, eggnog, peppermint patties, hot toddies, and a warm Café con Leche martini made of coffee liqueur, vodka, butterscotch schnapps, and heavy cream.

    Now granted, this won’t solve the problem of single mothers or orphans or elderly shut-ins, but if Charles Dickens taught us one thing with his timeless Ebenezer Scrooge it’s that all the money in the world doesn’t stop a man from contemplating his own mortaility in a cold bed alone on Christmas. I suggest our local Ebenezers drop off a donation at Sharing and Caring Hands or some other philanthropic organization before stopping in at Oceanaire for crooned carols, warm food, and a good stiff drink.

    And just in case you can’t make it on Christmas Eve, be assured, all these warm winter concoctions will be available at least throughout the holiday season, until the New Year.

    Oceanaire is taking reservations up to 11 p.m. on Christmas Eve, 612-333-2277.