The Rake Magazine

Category: Columns

  • Dear God, Thank You

    Hallelujah and amen! You know what time it is. I can smell the cornmeal and sizzling fat in the air already. Set aside petty concerns of the pending apocalypse and don the raiment of joyous festival! Bring me my cutoff jeans, and my baseball jersey that depicts the beer swilling cartoon bear! Unearth my novelty cheese wedge hat! And hand me my sunglasses. Yes, the holographic American flag ones.

    The time has come to join the sweltering flock of humanity that bleats and lows while rounding that Mobius strip between Snelling and Dan Patch. Attendance is required. And the second I get there, what will my poison be? A half-gallon pail of Sweet Martha’s chocolate chippers? For breakfast? And gimme a Summit to wash it all down while I snag a foot long and a sack of minis on my way to the KARE 11 Health Hut to have my cholesterol checked, not because I truly want to know—only because it’s free.

    Then I’m off to find a DFL Party yardstick. I get one every year, even though I’ve never had use for one. Someday, I’ll side my tool shed with them. But for now, it’s just the thing for a mite of self-flagellation in front of the Pawlenty/GOP tent. The backhanded passivity of Minnesota Nice fades when the collective blood sugar of the crowd rises. It’s definitely a chemical reaction. Give a Swede a cake-dough-battered, deep-fried Snickers, and opinions are made known. I believe the official diagnostic term is Sudden-Onset Insulin Spike Attitude.

    Last August, a dreadlocked, blue-eyed Mac student angrily splashed her red raspberry Slurpee across my Uncle Jim’s back while howling, “Fur is murder!” only to realize seconds later that he’d been strolling Machinery Hill shirtless in the noonday sun.

    The Great Minnesota Get-Together is not only about junk food and trashy politics. There’s a little something for everybody. For swinging single folks, what could be more titillating than a promenade down the Mighty Midway? That half-block of diesel-fueled terrain holds more prospects than all the singles bars, personal ads, and blind dates you’ll ever see—I guarantee it! You know why? Everybody looks good under neon light.

    It evens out the skin tone. Plus, at least half of the hotties are lightheaded from the rides. Picking up a date in front of the Matterhorn coaster is about as tough as trolling for crappies on Lake Itasca. And the same rules apply. Don’t talk loud; it’ll scare the big ones away!

    For sensitive artistic types, there’s the Fine Arts Building. For non-sensitive artistic types, there’s the Dairy Building, with its astounding sculptural installations.

    For you out-of-towners, here’s how the story goes. Each year among the rural folk a princess is chosen. She is always beautiful, and of smiling temperament. The kindly town elders will select their royalty only from girls of common birth whose fathers own a cow. Once the crown is laid upon the shining head of the girl, she is whisked in covered chariot to Falcon Heights. Because she is from the sticks, we have to have a little fun before we let her go. A lush fur cape is draped over her satin shoulders, and she is handed over to the elves. She is made to enter a crystal-clear tomb of bitter cold. Rough hands cruelly sit her down on a hard-backed chair. A crowd gathers, mocking. A demonic mechanism is triggered and the frozen crypt of windows begins to rotate slowly on its axis so the frightened girl can fully marinate in the goggling eyes of the slothful townspeople.

    The top craftsperson of the village is called in to document this curious ritual in an even more curious fashion. A block of grade-A premium butter is carved in the exact likeness of the princess’s head. If she is truly pure and simple, she remains smiling politely and is released upon completion of the lactose-based effigy. The creamy trophy is kept on display for the duration of the fair, where young and old alike can stand, licking their cones, staring blankly into the hollow yellow eyes of the princess’s visage, wondering what it would be like to roll their corn in her hair. The End.

  • The Final Stage

    Josh Hartnett is cute, sure, but he’s a little green for us gals in the Been Around the Block Club. Plus he’s got a girlfriend anyway, duh! So, for those of us who like our hometown heartthrobs with a few rough edges and a checkered past, not to mention killer timing, may we present Minnesota’s newest star, Dave Mordal.

    Mordal is from Elk River and he’s 42, and he’s currently starring in Last Comic Standing, an NBC reality-TV program. Last winter, just for the hell of it, Dave drove down to Chicago to audition, and he got on. Here’s the premise: A group of stand-up comics from across the country are trapped in Heidi Fleiss’s rat-infested Los Angeles mansion. When they’re not fighting for the toilet, they are pitted against each other in stand-up showdowns. It’s sort of like Survivor, Fear Factor, and Star Search all rolled into one. The winner gets an NBC development deal for his or her own sitcom, along with a Comedy Central special. Mordal became one of the early favorites in a sequence that showed him trapping a rat and dumping it over a neighbor’s privacy wall.

    The Rake caught up with him recently at the Acme Comedy Club. Dave strikes you as a guy who’d help get your car out of the ditch on an icy morning. A guy you’d hang out with, but you’d be a little leery about letting your sister date him. The funniest guy at work.

    Which is precisely how he got started in comedy, nine years ago. “The whole thing was pretty straightforward. I just fell into it. At work, I was always more of a practical joker than anything else.” Examples? “A comic I know from Seattle was coming to play Acme a few summers ago. I told him he was arriving on the day of the Minneapolis Harvest Day Parade (which doesn’t exist). I said he’d have to ride on the Acme Comedy Club float, since he was that week’s headliner. I picked him up at the airport a couple of weeks later, towing the Acme Comedy Club float. Me and two of the waitresses from Acme made it in the pole barn at my dad’s farm. Took us 80 hours. It was a beaut! I took him all over the city, towing him behind my truck, out on the highway and everything, pretending that I couldn’t find the street that the parade was supposed to be on. Had him convinced we were lost. Rattled his nerves good. He left town early!”

    Though he’s sworn to secrecy about the show’s final outcome, Dave confesses that he enjoyed the experience—which in the world of comedy probably means he killed. “My favorite thing about being on the show right now is knowing what happens. My least favorite thing is the stupid questions people ask.” Like what? “Did you win? Are you still doing comedy? That sort of thing.”

    “But the kicker has to be when I was at my brother’s house watching the premiere with my family and friends, and at the first commercial break, I’m sitting right next to them, looking right at them, and someone says, ‘Is this live?’”—Colleen Kruse

  • Watch out, R.T.

    Pitching great Satchel Paige used to tell his teammates to never look back, “because something may be gaining on you.” This is great advice, especially if you are R.T. Rybak and Don Samuels is the guy gaining on you. Why? Because key Minneapolis political insiders increasingly view Mayor Rybak as a “sound bite” schmoozer and Don Samuels as a real leader.

    One City Hall wag told me that the mayor has never met a side of a political issue he doesn’t like. When Rybak ran against two-time incumbent Sharon Sayles-Belton, he portrayed himself as a grassroots leader diametrically opposed to subsidizing fat cats like Target and Carl Pohlad. During an MPR debate, Rybak unequivocally said no to any public stadium funding. Then, six months after using the stadium-funding issue to pummel incumbent Sayles-Belton, Rybak, tag-teaming with Hennepin County Commish Mike Opat, decided public money for a stadium was not so bad if it was popular with the right folks.

    According to one Minneapolis council member, Rybak’s greatest weakness is that he is deathly afraid of making people mad at him. “R.T. talks in sound bites. Why? Because he is a schmoozer who wants everyone to like him. Politics does not work that way. If you are going to lead, you’ve got to take strong positions, which means you are going to piss some people off.” Former mayoral candidate Lisa McDonald goes even further. “R.T. waits to see the lay of the land before he jumps into any political debate. He never takes a stand early on. Just look at how he approached whether Minneapolis should go ahead with the new library. He held off taking a position until the last possible minute.”

    At first blush, Samuels and Rybak appear to be cut from the same cloth. Both are attractive, polished men who started their political careers at the grassroots—Rybak battled jet noise; Samuels put his life on the line taking on the gangs who were terrorizing his Jordan neighborhood. Over time, Samuels gained the gangs’ grudging respect. That, however, is where the similarities end. Samuels is not afraid to call it as he sees it, and say things that will anger his supporters. Last summer, when a routine police arrest escalated into a riot, Samuels confronted Jordan residents spoiling for a fight and told them to act responsibly and go home. Samuels then became a key bridge between shell-shocked city officials and gangsters. In fact, some political observers said that Samuels’ virtuoso performance set the stage for his quick political rise a few months later.

    From the moment Don Samuels beat the once-mighty DFL machine and succeeded the disgraced Joe Biernat, he became the Next Great Thing. Remarkably, Samuels did so by carrying much of “Nordeast,” historically a part of Minneapolis that Archie Bunker would be proud to call home. Just like Sayles-Belton in her salad days, Samuels showed that he had “crossover” appeal. Samuels, however, has something that Sayles-Belton never had—genuine charisma. When he speaks, he sounds authoritative and articulate. Samuels uses words that, because they are unambiguous, are not going to please everyone. And he readily admits he doesn’t really care, “if that is what it takes to build a real community.”

    Samuels does not support public funding of sports stadiums and does not intend to change his position just because it suits the prevailing political winds. “I believe that all politicians have to have a moral foundation—one cannot lead without one.”

    However, one of his Minneapolis council colleagues says that “he gives excellent soliloquies in council chambers… but he can be mighty weak on the details.” Even Samuels’ supporters concede that he is more of a “big picture kind of guy.” He’s been known to make dramatic statements at meetings without the statistical firepower to back it up. His staff, a hodgepodge of Biernat holdovers and newcomers—do not always provide effective cover for their boss, making him ripe pickings for City Hall barracudas that do know the details.

    There is no question that Samuels must get his administrative groove on before he can effectively challenge the political juggernaut that propelled R.T. Rybak into City Hall. He needs to learn the minutiae of the budget process and Robert’s Rules of Order. But these are relatively minor adjustments. If Don Samuels does his homework, he will be ready for prime time.

  • Home and Abroad

    Imperialists come in all shapes and sizes. Some claim their god gave them the right to take away other people’s land and market the produce of their orange groves. Others never visit the places or people whose lives they dominate through the sale of brown sticky drinks and their cinematic equivalent.

    And then there are the unlikely ones, such as the poet Catullus. In the middle of the first century B.C. Rome was taking on territory at a greater rate than ever before. It was the custom for young men who aspired to a political career (or whose fathers aspired to one for them) to spend a year or more in a province as an honorary attaché on the governor’s staff, picking up tips, both informative and financial. Catullus did not find the wide plains of what is now northwestern Turkey at all to his liking. He was clearly happier in a sleazy pub off the Forum in Rome (“salax taberna,” as in “salacious tavern”), even if he did accuse its regulars of rogering his lady love Lesbia, “than whom no woman will ever be more greatly loved.” He was especially bitter about a Spaniard called Egnatius who favored as a dentifrice (so Catullus claimed) a fluid for the production of which he held, shall we say, an unassailable monopoly. [Uh, his own urine.—Editors]

    Perhaps Catullus could have learned to like living abroad for his country. One thinks of that remarkable generation of British Arabists who tried to put the Near East back on its feet after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War. Hamilton, who engineered the Hamilton Road through the Zagros Mountains, the first road to link Persia with northern Iraq, was perhaps a natural for strenuous service. Lawrence, too, of course. But less so Canon Wigram who spent years living in the remote mountain villages of the Assyrian Christians, not proselytizing but providing every kind of help—medical, liturgical, typographical, political.

    Still less, one might have thought, Gertrude Bell. When that formidable lady first came to the East it was to fall in love with a young diplomat under the plane trees of the British Legation in Teheran and to translate the wine-and-roses poems of Hafiz, the Persian national poet. Yet she learned to travel rough, to do astounding amounts of pioneer work in Byzantine and early Islamic archaeology (she was the power behind the Baghdad Museum, the one recently looted) and to become the trusted political counselor of the first King of independent Iraq (while remaining resolutely against Votes for Women at home).

    The memoirs written by this generation shine with love of the Levant, the land, its languages, its people. Try Sir Arnold Wilson’s S.W. Persia or Hamilton’s Road through Kurdistan (and if it’s you that has my copy of the latter, please could I have it back). Alas, it will have been papers precisely of this period that were lost in the holocaust of the Iraqi National Archives horrifyingly described by Robert Fisk in the last week of the recent war.

    Gertrude Bell died in Baghdad. Catullus sailed a yacht back from Asia Minor, down the Bosporus, past Byzantium, through the Greek islands, up the Adriatic. He made his homecoming not to Rome, but to northern Italy, where his family lived. The yacht was allowed a serene retirement on the limpid waters of Lake Garda. No serene retirement for young Catullus. He went on writing, riling other poets, especially Julius Caesar’s Chief Engineer, a multifutuent but incompetent versifier whom Catullus liked to call Mentula, (crudely translated by the late Professor Swanson as Mantool and by the witty James Michie as John Thomas). Catullus’s father invited Caesar to dinner when the great man was in northern Italy and made his son apologize.

    One does not know what they drank, but the enterprising firm of Bitari has invented a pleasant red wine grown in the hills near Verona, the poet’s home, and named it after him. Catullo is 60 percent Cabernet (not a grape one associates with this part of the world) and 40 percent Corvino (which one does—it is the main variety in Valpolicella). The blend is mighty successful; my friend the wine merchant, with whom I discussed a bottle of this one sunny evening, thought it tasted rather like Pinot Noir, which is to say that it slipped down all too quickly, promoting pleasure more than thought and pastime with good company. Order it at your salax taberna, or take it to the lake and listen to the water chuckling up against the dock sharing your pleasure at being home.

  • Viewer Indiscretion

    I’ll come clean. Though I produce my own small bit of pop culture, I am not a big fan of the stuff, particularly not movies. On average, I see about three movies a year. I watch about two hours of television a week. And most of that is accidental viewing. My channel surfing is akin to driving past a ghastly, five-car pile up on Interstate 494. It leaves me powerless to do anything but slow down and gape at the carcass of American entertainment. It’s enough to make you turn on the radio, listen to Garrison Keillor, and think “Guy Noir” is funny.

    If only I could lose a few more brain cells and get with it, perhaps, my life would be a lot more interesting. I would be more informed, part of the Matrix, with my finger on the pulse of humanity. It would be so easy to open my eyes and ears wide and take it all in. The snap and crackle of pop-culture references and imagery boiling down my consciousness until my inner monologue becomes a thick, greasy roux of prurient joy juice. A serotonin/Prozac cocktail party, nonstop diversion as colorless, and as easy to digest, as the Wonder-Bread goodness of a Jim Belushi sitcom one-liner. It’s tempting to join this uncomplicated world, where the most common exercise of free speech is a prime-time half hour of nubile Red Lobster waitresses in thong bikinis, cantering in front of Lorenzo Lamas on the prospect that he will decree them, by the power infested in him, as a bona fide, blow-dried son of Fernando, once and for all, HOT. (What happens after this? Do the girls get diplomas? Lifetime backstage passes to Whitesnake concerts? Is it like transferable life-experience credits that you can apply to your major? What they deserve is just a swift kick in the glutes, a souvenir wet T-shirt, and their name on the short list for fluff girls on the next Snoop Dogg video.)

    You’ve come this far, so gather ’round and I’ll tell you what put the quarter here in old Grandma. Last week, heading out to the Cineplex to indulge in a couple hours of air-conditioned distraction, I settled into the lazy back row with a magnum of Sprite in one paw, and a five-gallon refillable grocery bag of popcorn in the other. (I can never finish either, but I am incapable of buying the smaller size for a dollar less when you get so much more for your money the other way. That’s either the retail sucker in me, or the Lutheran—you decide.) The theater darkened, and after a half-hour of commercials, the Coming Attractions began. The trailers, in most cases, eliminate the desire to see the film at all, as they typically contain the movie’s best three jokes, the entire plot-line, including the surprise twist ending, and the best cut on the soundtrack, blasted at air-raid-warning-siren levels.

    After the commercials, I reached the zenith of the phenomenon of pre-ejaculate movie trailers. Freddy Versus Jason. My eyes bugged and glazed. I tried to lift myself out of the plush chair, but the popcorn had me pinned in place. Graceful arcs of blood spouted from sexy victims whose anguished, terrified screams rose in operatic unison to the techno back-beat. Beloved monsters wielding Sears Craftsman chainsaws and Flo-jo miracle-blade manicures guffawed in butchersome glee.

    Later, my ironic friends laughed at my stunned response to the gorefest. They explained that it’s simply a mass-media reaction to our brutal, insecure world. A safe, pleasurable, R-rated way of mirroring and digesting real violence, making it more palatable and, therefore, less nerve-racking. By combining that pair of consumer-tested mass-murderers, the studio is merely treading a profitable path of least resistance. Call it the regurgistory.

    Still, that last trip to the movie-house was enough for me for awhile. I probably won’t get lured back until after Thanksgiving, probably won’t turn the TV on until the new crop of network shows comes out. Maybe someone in development at ABC will decide to put real homeless people in the Big Brother house. Give ’em a wet bar and let America choose whom to vote back onto the streets each week. You know, kick it up a notch—Bam!

  • Son of the South

    On March 20, 2003, Quinn Keating Collins made his grand entrance on planet Earth. On April 29, 2003, his grandfather, Clinton Clarence Collins, Sr., took his final bow. My two oldest sons, Joseph and Alexander, knew their grandfather and heard, probably more times than they wanted to, the stories of Mississippi cross-burnings and ducking bullets on Omaha Beach, homemade bootleg brew and the “come to Jesus” meetings between me, my father, and his dancing leather belt. Those stories are now safely fermenting in their minds for all the family retellings yet to come.

    Alas, Quinn, the newest Collins, will not have his own personal memories of his grandfather. So it will be left to our family and particularly to me to conjure in Quinn’s mind his grandfather’s life and legacy. I’ll start right now with this column.

    Clinton Collins, Sr., was born in Wiggins, Mississippi, in either 1923 or 1924, depending on whether you believe the old, weather-beaten family Bible or the birth certificate that mysteriously emerged from the bowels of some bureaucratic computer about a decade ago. His mother was named Judia and his father was a “professor” (which is what any black male teacher with even a whiff of college was called in those days). My dad thought his last name was Johnson. “Professor” Johnson never married Judia, who died when my father was four or five years old. Judia’s brother, Isaac Collins, took him to Laurel, Mississippi, and raised him there.

    Clarence was his “Sunday-come-to-meeting” name, but his everyday name was “Boy.” No, not “boy” as in the white put-down. “Boy” as in “ain’t you one of them Collins boys?” In fact, the name stuck so hard that even when he made his last trip to Laurel a few years ago, he was still “Boy,” albeit “Mr. Boy” Collins. Boy Collins lived the life that black people lived in Mississippi in the 20s, 30s, and early 40s. He attended segregated, dilapidated schools, went to the Mississippi state fair on “Colored Day,” and tried to avoid the ire of “white folks.” Unfortunately, that was a very hard thing for a young black manchild coming of age in the “Solid South.”

    He dropped out of tenth grade, picked cotton for a hot minute, and was ultimately drafted into World War II. During the war, he landed on Omaha Beach and drove trucks for the famed Red Ball Express, a group of black soldiers that kept Patton juiced during his dash to Germany. After the war, he came back to Mississippi determined to make sure that his native land gave him his due as an American citizen and as a man.

    By 1949, he had finished high school and college, earned an officers’ commission in the newly integrated Army, and was applying to the University of Mississippi (“Ole Miss”) law school. Ole Miss rejected him because he was black. After a year at an all-black law school in Missouri, Mr. Boy went back to Mississippi and became one of the youngest public school superintendents ever. Now, because Mississippi was still caught up in the fallacy of “separate but equal,” he was only responsible for the “colored” students in his district. Outraged at the substandard equipment and poor treatment, Mr. Boy bought an hour on a Laurel radio station in the 1950s, a time when most Mississippi blacks were afraid to even look a white man in the eye, and told those crackers exactly what he thought of their racist world.

    In 1957, he married Carrie Beatrice Holloway, a kindred spirit who did not take any abuse from racists either. Together, they risked everything to take in young Freedom Riders who traveled Dixie’s bus lines to break segregation’s chokehold on the South. In 1962, Mr. Boy became the first black man to run for public office in Mississippi since Reconstruction. He told his terrified neighbors that if he was going to die, as his good friend Medgar Evers did in the awful, bloody summer of 1963, he was going to do so on his feet, not his knees. Even after the Klan burned a cross on our front lawn, Mr. Boy took no unanswered blows. He simply ran for public office again.

    Like most sons, I had my “issues” with my father. He was not perfect. Yet, not a day passes, when I do not gain a deeper appreciation for the many life lessons he taught me. The most crucial, one that I have taught Joseph and Alexander and will teach Quinn, is this: You gain nothing by blaming white people, the world, whoever, for giving you crap. And you have no one to blame but yourself if you take it.

  • No Tyrants’ Tipple

    Freud and Strauss offer contrasting impressions of the nightlife of old Vienna. Hitler painted a verbal picture of the same city as it was seen by those who could not afford Sacher Torte and waltzes, let alone dream therapy with the good doctor, those for whom the opera (the solemnities of Wagner, one gathers, rather than the gaiety of the Gipsy Baron) could be only a very occasional indulgence. Mein Kampf is a book more reviled than read. It certainly earns the revulsion. Like most emetics that really deliver, the effect is gradual. The reader is invited to pity the poor painter, scraping a living as a builder’s laborer, excluded from art school by the shortcomings of the education system. Slowly it emerges that it is all someone else’s fault, the Jews, the unions, the Hapsburg monarchy, parliamentary procedure, you name it. Cringing self-pity metamorphoses effortlessly into snarling resentment and contempt. This is as unhappy a study in the mental genesis of tyranny as you are likely to find. One doubts if Hitler could ever have painted bold bright landscapes like those of Churchill.

    Hitler, as is well known, was not keen on wine (though his ambassador to London, von Ribbentrop, had an earlier career as a champagne salesman). Other tyrants have been less teetotal. Saddam Hussein, despite being a Muslim, had a favorite wine. It is a liquid which many of us remember from those anxious years between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP, when bepimpled youth wished to do the right thing by the lady they were entertaining, but did not know if the right thing was red or white. Yes, Mateus Rosé, sweetish, pink, faintly fizzy, to look at not unlike the colored carbonated water some dentists give you to disguise the blood when you “wash out now please.” Maybe you still have one of the dumpy bottles, stoppered with a light bulb, caked in oodles of candle grease.

    One ought not to suggest guilt by association. Some of my best friends have moustaches. The taste of Mateus Rosé is at least consistent, even if I am not an admirer. But it is a pity that it is by far the best known table wine from Portugal, a land of many interesting grape varieties and vintages. There is Vinho Verde, a white wine which is indeed green and fresh in taste and color, as the name suggests. And recently I enjoyed a really heartening bottle of Portugese red, Quinta do Crasto 2000, named after the vineyard which clings to the vertiginous slopes of the valley of the River Douro in the north of the country and conveniently available in the valley of the upper Mississippi for substantially less than $20.

    The Douro valley is, of course, the area from which port comes, and this red table wine is made from some of the same grapes as port, Tinta Roriz, Tinta Barocca, Touriga Francesa, and Touriga Nacional (the names are as evocative as those of old English apple varieties—listen to Bramley Seedling and Worcester Pearmain, James Greave and Ribstone Pippin). Port, though, stays sweet because its fermentation is arrested. The yeasts get busy in the barrel turning the sugars into alcohol only to have their activities curtailed by the fortifying addition of substantial quantities of brandy. The sugars sit back and let the resulting blend mature into the noblest of all dessert wines.

    Quinta do Crasto table wine lacks the sweetness of port, but has much of its nobility. The wonderful dark color is matched by a magnificent dark taste, which not only fills the mouth but swells up into the soft palate and the sinus, making you puff out your moustache (if any) like a walrus. There is soft tannin, enough to give good road-holding qualities, and a slight tang of fresh apples, enough to induce salivation but no sharpness. This is well-balanced wine.

    Take it this summer if you are asked to the better sort of barbecue. With the help of a small steak, a baked potato and Savoy cabbage (you know, the crinkly kind) lightly steamed with a knob of butter, it lifted me out of the miry slough of Hitler’s prose. “Come then, your ways and airs and looks, locks, maiden gear, gallantry and gaiety and grace.” The answer to tyranny must, I suppose, be hope.

  • Hero or Dope?

    I first heard of Colorado mountain climber Aron Ralston’s daring self-rescue on the radio. I thought: “Wow! What an adventurer!” I stood daydreaming in the kitchen, up to my elbows in dishwater, and let my imagination fly. It was the fifth day… pinned to the north face of a brutal cliff… my water—gone. My hopes that someone might happen along, someone within earshot even—dashed. Listed among my assets: rope, the clothes on my back, and perhaps the most important ingredient of all—steely resolve.

    I never got to the part where I sawed off my arm with a jackknife and rappelled down the cliff only to walk five miles before finding help, because I know myself too well. I’d never have made it. Once pinned by the 800-pound boulder, I’d have faced a toss up—how to expel fluids fast enough to pass out from dehydration and welcome sweet death? Crying or wetting my pants? Could I do both at the same time? Probably, yes.

    As for the DIY surgery, forget it. I can’t even cut my own bangs. Even mall-walking is too risky for me. I’m smack dab in my mid-30s, and I’ll tell you—I’ve got my limitations pretty well categorized. What’s intriguing to me about this hike gone wrong are the other little bits of the story that get lost in the shuffle. Time magazine headlined their chronicle of his ordeal, “Survival of the Fittest.” I’d call it “Lucky Fool Cheats Death—Again!”

    Here’s the timeline. In the late 90s, Ralston saw the movie Everest, the one about the climb gone fatally wrong. It spurred him on to quit his day job and devote his life to exploration and following the jam bands Phish and String Cheese Incident. (After reading this, I could give Ralston the benefit of the doubt and assume he is not also a fan of illegal herb, but I won’t. I mean, come on.)

    So, for me, the next part makes total sense—the part where he forgets/neglects to leave an itinerary. (Do you think Ashton Kutcher will star in the movie version of Ralston’s hike? Dude! Where’s My Arm?) The more you know about it, the more the story degenerates into a Super Dave Osborne fiasco. Ralston’s made a habit of climbing with nothing more than water, candy bars, and an ice axe. No cell phone, no global positioning system, no rope. When I’m walking on the treadmill at the Y, I’ve got a 20-oz. Cherry Gatorade, the latest Jackie Collins potboiler on tape, and if I didn’t think people would look sideways at me, I’d bring caramel corn.

    I know I shouldn’t blame all of this guy’s irresponsible behavior on the demon weed. Scientists say there’s an internal chemical reason folks like Ralston skate the edge. They call it the thrill-seeking gene. Boy, when you hear it described that way, don’t you just get visions of handsome Chuck Yeager breaking the sound barrier? Plane disintegrating around him? His broad rugged shoulders seared by his flaming jumpsuit as he plummets to Earth? But the same gene must then include Houdini. And Evel Knievel. The guys on Jackass (who have, incidentally, elevated that word to an entirely new level of disrepute). And that goofy kid I knew in third grade who thought he’d be able to jump off his garage roof, Wile E. Coyote-style, and scare the skittles out of us girls. (Sure, we felt bad, but it didn’t stop us from laughing before we ran to get help.)

    So when thrill seekers are out for information or money, the rewards seem pretty well explained. But how about those rambunctious few who venture outside the fence of science or show business? Are they merely threats to themselves and others, or could they be valuable research subjects? Could we harness their brain chemistry to create an elite force of rodeo clowns? Should we have volunteers from the Raptor Center ear-tag them like other endangered species? Or should we do what we’ve always done—let these guys roam free to inflate our rates on life, health, and casualty insurance? I’m glad to hear that Ralston is on the mend, but I still worry about him. He doesn’t strike me as a quitter. And there’s a lot of mountains left out there.

  • Wanted: The Middle Class

    When I moved to north Minneapolis in October 2001, my “posse,” with perhaps one or two exceptions, was, shall we say, perplexed. Oh, everyone liked the house, a recently renovated five-bedroom house with Birdseye maple hardwood floors and leaded glass windows. The neighborhood—that was a different matter. My former wife warned my two oldest sons to never stray more than a block from my house, and then, only in broad daylight. My future father-in-law asked me, “Will my daughter be safe in this neighborhood?” And my sons nervously joked about borrowing my old military flak jacket when they came to visit.

    Someday, I vowed, y’all be kicking yourself in the backside for not joining me up here. Now, I must confess that sometimes I wonder if I should be kicking myself for moving up north; I still contend with trash in my yard, the “boom-boom” of mega-decibel car stereos, and the knowledge that some of Minneapolis’ worst mayhem occurs within a 20-minute walk from my front door. For some time, the prevailing mantra among those in the urban renewal business has been “affordable housing.” However—and I am sure I’ll be called an elitist or worse for saying so publicly—some of the people who most need affordable housing are not great neighbor material. Now, I am defining “great neighbor material” as those who are stable, law-abiding, and respectful of the rights and property of others, those who value education—in other words, those with values closely associated with the middle class. And, unfortunately, a disproportionate number of those who fall short in the “great neighbor department” live in north Minneapolis.

    Now, I am not alone in that view. Don Samuels, Minneapolis’ newest City Council member, represents the racially diverse Third Ward, which includes a very good chunk of north Minneapolis. Samuels recently told me that the Jordan neighborhood, where he lives, has too many thugs. He told me about drug dealers threatening him in front of his own home. Samuels believes that the gangsters felt bold enough to do this for one reason. “They had become the dominant culture on my block. Sure, we had a few middle-class families—three or four—on our block, but that is not enough to change the culture. Give me just two or three more families, then we really make a difference.”

    Samuels publicly exhorts the middle class, particularly the African-American middle class, to “come home” to north Minneapolis. Privately, he admits that living in north Minneapolis is harder than, say, Linden Hills or Uptown. He concedes that it is tough to encourage affluent, educated people into neighborhoods like Jordan, joking, “not everyone shares my sense of mission.” Samuels agrees that middle-class people, because they value hard work and planning for the future, can anchor a neighborhood in a way that those struggling to survive simply are unable to do.

    The truth is that many middle-class people are scared away from north Minneapolis because they fear what nationally known educator Ruby Payne calls the “culture of generational poverty.” According to Dr. Payne, those in generational poverty live “in the moment,” and do not consider the future ramifications of their actions. She adds, “being proactive, setting goals, and planning ahead are not a part of generational poverty.” The middle class by contrast usually embraces those very values that those in generational poverty resist.

    What if the Minneapolis City Council, in conjunction with various community groups, collaborated in creating a predominantly middle-class neighborhood in north Minneapolis? I would suggest redeveloping three or four city blocks with market-rate (i.e. no subsidized) housing, unlike Heritage Park, the new development rising where public housing projects once stood. I personally think Heritage Park developers will have a tough time selling market-rate housing alongside significant subsidized housing. Why? Because most people want to live around people that share their world view, even if they are not willing to admit so publicly.

    North Minneapolis is at a critical juncture. Middle-class folks and their values are crucial to providing the stability that creates a truly healthy community. The Minneapolis City Council needs to do everything in its power to ensure that middle class values are the rule, and not the exception, in this challenged part of town.

  • Shandy is Dandy

    Our first spring in Minnesota came late. It had not been much of a winter, in fact we felt fairly blasé about our capacity to survive Minnesota’s fabled frigidity. (But oh, how we have learned since!) The torrents pouring over St. Antony Falls inspired no particular shock nor awe, unlike the ceaseless roar of Spring 2001. There was road-grit, weak sunshine, and windblown tulips. Surprising then to hear accordion music outside, and the clash of small bells. But it was true—this music came by me on the waters. Rounding a corner we saw a white sleeve rhythmically waving a handkerchief, and were promptly transported from the shore of the Mississippi to the banks of the Thames at Oxford.

    England, God knows, is full of odd customs. The unwise think they are vestiges of primeval paganism, but most of them seem to have started in the High Middle Ages, the most Christian era of English history. If you don’t believe me, read a book called The Stations of the Sun by a learned bloke called Hutton. These calendar customs began not as gnarled substitutes for child sacrifice but as the secular entertainments of Christian civilization.

    Whatever the history, every May 1, thousands of Oxford people creep out of bed in the wee small hours of the morning. The crowds converge on Magdalen Bridge, where the main London road crosses the river. There they hear, generally in silence, the choir of Magdalen College, grouped on top of the college tower, sing a Latin hymn and a few madrigals, no louder at ground level than birdsong. Then the crowds head back into the city where the purveyors of greasy breakfasts do land-office business and “sides” of Morris dancers, dressed in white shirts and trousers, with colored cross-belts, bells strapped to their legs, and substantial boots perform with a vigor remarkable for the earliness of the hour.

    It was Morris dancers we ran into that evening in Minneapolis, one of four sides in the city (two men’s, one women’s, one—from the village of Uptown-on-Calhoun—mixed). They say they are often asked if their art is Irish, but no, it is firmly in the tradition of Thames Valley Morris dancing. This art form was “discovered” in 1899 just in time to prevent its disappearance by a remarkable musicologist named Cecil Sharp (did anyone dare to call him D Flat, one wonders), and it’s now more popular than ever before. Like their Oxford fellows, the Minneapolis dancers also take May Morning exercise early, clashing batons, fiddling, leaping, whirling hankies, but they also meet at a more sociable hour in the evening and come together from the four points of the compass to dance in front of the IDS Tower. (Isn’t there something a bit Freudian about that name?)

    So much leaping and clashing (even watching it) naturally works up a thirst, and it is indeed as much with Saturday evenings at Cotswold country pubs as with May Morning in the city that one associates the Morris. How good those white outfits look seen through a pint of Hook Norton Best Bitter, pulled by a shapely forearm from a proper draught-beer engine. Hook Norton promise an on-line shop for their bottled products, but who knows if they will be able to ship to the United States.

    Until they do, I recommend a refreshing summer beverage called “ginger beer shandy,” described as “new-fangled” in 1888. One simply adds one of the ordinary bitters (Bass, say, or McEwans Export) to an equal quantity of ginger beer. Not ginger ale, a clear brown cisatlantic drink, but ginger beer as my mother used to make it—with live yeast in the family’s heated linen cupboard (until it exploded), a sweet cloudy non-alcoholic drink now conveniently available from superior Minnesota grocers. The mixture brings out a healthy sweat. Let’s hope the summer is hot enough to warrant drinking plenty of it.