Category: Columns

  • Anyone for Dominoes?

    Other countries’ politics are always a mystery. Of course, it helps to know some history. Then you can at least ask how they got here from there, rather than merely measure how different they are from us, how they fail to meet our highest standards of democracy, feminism, etc. But even disinterested interest is sometimes…

  • My Appearance

    I was sorting through an old box of videotapes the other night and came across an unmarked VHS cassette with no case. I popped it in the VCR, hit play, and for the next half hour, marveled at the human animal’s capacity for selective memory. 1993. I was a barista in an espresso bar downtown.…

  • Rising from the Ashes

    Remember Brian Herron? Just three summers ago, the former Minneapolis City Council member was the poster boy for political graft after the FBI videotaped him accepting a $10,000 bribe. This very public crash-and-burn earned him a year in prison and spawned an investigation of the entire Minneapolis City Council. Political wags claim that Sharon Sayles-Belton…

  • The Taste of Place

    There is a Gresham’s Law in music; bad tunes drive out good. On Sunday you hear a competent choir render a subtle and melodious anthem by Herbert Howells. You are then obliged to join in a repetitive praise chorus of the sort whose words and tune suggest that the righteous are those who have enjoyed…

  • Classic TV

    We’ve hit an interesting point in the arc of TV storytelling. It’s almost completely self-referential. Like monks from those earlier Dark Ages, copying illuminated manuscripts over and over again, today’s Hollywood hacks are feeding internally until there is no discernable output or input of ideas. Only yeasty, subdividing molecules of “Cop,” “Hot Chick”/“Dopey Chick”/“Brainy Chick,”…

  • One Man Does Not A Movement Make

    Thirty columns ago, in the very first issue of The Rake — March 2002 — I wrote that “being a real brother is not as important as being a real man. Real men think for themselves and live with the consequences of their decisions.” I admit that I took some defiant pride in the not-so-veiled…