The Rake Magazine

Category: Columns

  • Walking the Line

    After winning the DFL endorsement at the Fifth Congressional District Convention in May, Keith Ellison has come closer than any black person (or Native American, Latino, Hmong, or Somali, for that matter), to representing Minnesota in Congress. If he wins the September 12 primary in the overwhelmingly Democratic Minneapolis, about the only thing that could keep him from taking Martin Sabo’s seat come January 2007 would be, in the words of the old saw, getting caught in bed with a live boy or a dead girl. The primary is his to lose—and opponents Mike Erlandson (current Congressman Martin Sabo’s chief of staff), former State Senator Ember Reichgott Junge, and Minneapolis City Councilmember Paul Ostrow all know that.

    And yet, that is not such a far-fetched possibility. His past ties to Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam, the unpaid parking tickets, and the public hand slaps for failing to follow campaign financial-disclosure rules have certainly given his detractors something to work with.

    Ellison was born in Detroit in 1963. The middle child in a family of five boys, he was raised in what he calls a “very Catholic family” by parents who expected their sons to achieve. Ellison’s mother, Clida Cora Martinez Ellison, who was born and raised in Jim Crow Louisiana, was a social worker who encouraged her boys to also be politically active. After graduating from Wayne State University, where he converted to Islam, Ellison went to the University of Minnesota Law School. He candidly admits he took pleasure there in “shaking people out of their zone of comfort” and sometimes said and did things for their “shock value,” such as writing what some considered racially inflammatory columns for the Minnesota Daily under the pseudonym of “Keith Hakim.”

    Ellison has a number of things going for him, starting with the most obvious—he is the endorsed candidate in a primary election. He sits very comfortably at the same spot on the political spectrum as most of the DFL party faithful who are most likely to turn out and vote in a primary. And, by virtually all accounts, he was a conscientious state legislator. Beyond that, he is the only non-white candidate facing three other Democrats who are political and demographic clones of one another. In essence, they are fighting over the same pool of chardonnay-and-Brie white liberals. This is a state that loves “firsts” and “onlys”—therefore, the chance to send Minnesota’s first African-American to Congress, where he will be the only Muslim, is something to die for in this recognition-starved state. Face it—since Paul Wellstone’s death, has any Minnesota politician really made a national splash for anything other than bad-mouthing Kofi Annan or shutting down his office in reaction to an anthrax scare?

    And yet, if I were Ellison, I would be a tad concerned about the underwhelming response from the African-American political community. I spoke with a number of well-connected black politicians who said that Ellison has to do some fence mending “right quick” to ensure a strong black turnout. Former Fifth Ward City Council Member Natalie Johnson-Lee had this to say about Ellison. “Keith is a smart, driven, very ambitious, bordering-on-arrogant kind of guy. Many in the African-American community who actually turn up to vote will likely vote for him. But—and this is key—how hard those same individuals are willing to campaign for him and how deep they are willing to dig into their pockets to support him financially … that’s another question. I wish him the best.”

    Between now and primary day, Ellison must do these three things: convince the Lake of the Isles-Lake Calhoun-Linden Hills crowd that he is a person of integrity who does not see himself above the law; re-energize black people about his candidacy; and make sure that the delegates who showed him the love in May do not get a case of buyer’s remorse in September. If he does, he should win by a comfortable margin. However, those three factors will not mean squat if there are any more credible allegations about Ellison. Should any more bad news about Ellison surface—particularly if it comes from anybody but Ellison himself—then stick a fork in him, because he will be done, and rightfully so.

    Clinton Collins, Jr. is a Minneapolis lawyer and ABC Radio commentator. You can reach him at ccollins at collinslawfirm dot com.

  • Red-Blooded Australian

    It is a drear thought that if you can remember the Pudding Shop on the north side of Divan Yolu in Istanbul you must be well into middle age. “Those were the days, my friend,” the Seekers sang, “We thought they’d never end, we would be young for ever and a day.” As the Roman poet Horace said, eheu fugaces, alas, the fleeting years.

    Divan Yolu had been one of the grand-processional avenues of Byzantine and Ottoman Constantinople. Between its marble colonnades, purple-robed emperors and their retinues passed ceremoniously from the circular Forum of Constantine to the great Church of the Holy Wisdom.

    By the 1970s, it was distinctly dingy. A small Ottoman mosque still broadcast the call to prayer over a crackly public address system, just about audible above the geriatric gearboxes of nose-to-tail Turkish taxicabs. Across the road there were inexpensive kebab shops, the sort of places where you might spot the management replenishing the mineral water bottles from the tap. The upper stories of these eateries were crumbling hotels whose small-bore plumbing pipes had not been designed with western lavatory paper in mind—the blockages and bursts caused by inconsiderate guests smelt awful. So much for the Romantic East.

    The Pudding Shop stood in the center of this heterogeneous parade. The puddings were puddings in the American sense, little bowls of dairy glup, with or without rice. The clientele was long-haired youth from all over the western world—what the Turks called hipi (Turkish spelling is relentlessly rational). On one wall there was a notice board on which people advertised for traveling companions to go with them eastward: Persia-Afghanistan-India-Kathmandu.

    The Hipi Route to the Mystic East (farther east than the Romantic East) would be impassable today. It finally died at Christmas 1978 with the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. But thirty years ago, it was a long, thin line stretching across Asia, drawn by folk inspired by a lust to know what cannot be known. You saw them, always in groups, hanging around the bus stations at Erzurum and Tabriz, wild-eyed, thin from inanition, sometimes begging, often clutching paperback selections from the Buddhist Scriptures.

    For all their preoccupation with spiritual traditions, the hipi seemed quite uninterested in the Christian and Islamic heritage of Turkey and Persia as they passed through. The poet Peter Levi, who recounted his own adventures in Afghanistan in The Light Garden of the Angel King, found them remarkably unenterprising people. You seldom saw the hipi anywhere except in the places where they all congregated—the Pudding Shop in Istanbul, Nasr-i Khosrow in Teheran.

    It is odd too that a movement of free spirits with lofty spiritual aims has left so little in the way of literature. I can think of no bahnbrechend, or groundbreaking, spiritual odyssey recording the hipi Drang nach Osten. That is not to say that their travels had no consequences. Many decent people in the Near East had never seen westerners in the flesh before the hipi passed through. Heaven knows what effect they had on the lands they traversed.

    True, they were not guilty of building vulgar concrete tourist hotels, but their practices and appearance were scarcely such as to commend the West to those who in the next decade were to animate the Muslim moral re-armament of Persia and Afghanistan.

    There were other folk who frequented the Pudding Shop. They were going in the opposite direction. These were not etiolated seekers after truth; they were beefy blond Australians, big men for whom the shish kebabs of Divan Yolu, one felt, were slim pickings. The destination to which they were working westward was the area of London around the Earls Court tube station, then known as Kangaroo Gulch. Their idea was to see the world before they went home to settle down. They were no better informed than the hipi (“Who were these Byzantine guys?”), but their bluffness was refreshing.

    You might find similar genial refreshment in a bottle of Lindemann’s Reserve Merlot, a warm-hearted red wine from the southeast of Australia, available around here for less than twelve dollars a go. This is a rich round wine, compounded of equal parts of Merlot and sunshine, with spicy touches derived from the oak barrels it matured in and fine plummy flavors that will, if you are not careful, have you uttering the broad, relaxed vowels of the Antipodes. It would go well with kebabs. And you do not need to traverse all Asia to get it.

  • The Upside of Knocked Up

    My husband and I recently went over our wills. This was pretty easy for me, since I don’t actually own anything of value. In fact, the only thing I am leaving my husband is a postmortem “honey do” list.

    The first thing on that list is to throw away all of my notebooks and journals. These are the things I worry most about falling into the wrong hands. I’d hate to be remembered for grocery lists interspersed with late-night rum-fueled “comedy” inspirations. Sample page, New Year’s Eve 1998: paper towels; Windex; lime LaCroix; (then suddenly, in capital letters) DON’T FORGET COLLEEN—CAT POOP DOG OMELETTE—FUNNY!!!!; (then the Target shopping list resumes) spray starch; tweezers. Apparently my pen ran out of ink at the last, so the word “tweezers” is scratched deeply into the paper. As if it were actually written with a pair of tweezers.

    I’d like to spare my kids from handling actual documentation of the nuts-and-bolts machinery of their Mama’s particular brand of goofy.

    “Maybe I should’ve thought about that before I had kids,” you say? How many parents out there have ever been on the receiving end of that one? What I love most is when the mighty “should-a” sword is wielded by Those Who Are Childless. Particularly those who are Childless By Choice. Because, when a CBC nails you with a “should-a,” the implicit suggestion is that not only should you feel extra crispy crappy about whatever current conundrum that you’re in—but furthermore, you should also pat the CBC on the back for having the presence of mind not to get knocked up.

    This has been on my mind lately because my daughter is now roughly the same age that I was when I was pregnant with her. She’s also got a pal who is pregnant and facing some tough decisions. This isn’t the first pal of hers to become a young mother. I thought my heart would stop a few years ago when Amanda came home from a slumber party with the news that one of the young party guests was expecting. I’d met the girl in passing. She was easy to remember because she was so pretty and outgoing. She was also fourteen. I’ll admit that my first instinct was to tug the reins hard and never let my daughter see this girl again. Like it or not, our peer groups help define our belief systems and our societal dance steps. This is true whether you’re forty or fourteen. This stance was more than a bit hypocritical on my part, because I remember all too well the isolation of what it was like to be young and pregnant.

    In the hot summer of ’88, I was ready to drop. I’d moved back in with my parents so I could be close to help when the time came. I ran into an old classmate and her mother at the corner convenience store. My old pal talked to me animatedly about what was going on in her life, and didn’t really ask about mine. That was pretty weird, right? I mean, talk about the elephant in the room. We said our goodbyes and I walked next door to the Video Update. I was obscured by one of those giant cardboard cutouts so when my pal and her mother walked in—talking animatedly about running into me—they didn’t realize I could hear them. What stands out for me to this day is the breezy statement: “Well, she’s ruined her life, and now she’s probably going to ruin that poor kid’s life, too.” So good to know those stand-up folks are out there, ready to exercise their index finger muscles and point.

    I’ve got a friend, Terry, who once told me that she thought all people should have to obtain a license to procreate. I asked her whether she thought this license should be a four-year kind of a deal that expires on your birthday, or could you apply for and secure a seasonal pass?

    Under Terry’s rules, my kids wouldn’t exist—at least, not as they are now. And that would be a damn shame, because they are terrific. There’s no fill-in-the-blank space for this in my will, but, if there were, it would be: My greatest earthly treasure is that my kids love me. May you all be so rich.

    Writer, performer, and femme fatale Colleen Kruse can be reached at colleen at rakemag dot com.

  • Who is “We the People”?

    A few weeks ago, Joseph C. Phillips, one of my childhood “ace boon coons” (black Southern speak for best friends), rolled through the Twin Cities. He’s mainly an actor (The Cosby Show, General Hospital, and the upcoming Vanished), but on this trip he was promoting his book, He Talk Like A White Boy—Reflections on Faith, Family, Politics and Authenticity. In it, Joseph proudly riffs on why he is so “old school,” which he defines as embracing traditional values: love of God, devotion to family, patriotism, and Smokey Robinson crooning about love and marriage. In other words, he is what our label-happy culture calls a conservative. For him, affirmative action is demeaning, hip-hop music is nihilistic and same-sex marriage an abomination.

    While in Minneapolis, he appeared at Raking Through Books, this magazine’s monthly showcase for authors. After his reading, Joseph and I volleyed on the state of racial politics in America, and on affirmative action and reparations, each saying the things that you would expect people with our political viewpoints to say. We have had this conversation so many times and are both so hammy that for us eating pork is akin to cannibalism; the audience loved it.

    However, the warm fuzzies floating around the room grew frosty after an earnest young African-American law student asked Phillips if he agreed that diversity fostered by affirmative action enhanced the value of education for all students. Phillips responded with a passionate denunciation of Gratz v. Bollinger, the 2003 Supreme Court decision that upheld the University of Michigan’s affirmative action program but rejected the school’s policy of giving undergraduate minority candidates an automatic extra twenty points on their admissions scores.

    Phillips’ voice lost the relaxed cadence of our friendly banter. Pointing to the corner of the room where most of the African-Americans were sitting, he shouted, “I reject the notion that African-Americans need extra points to get into an elite school! We have just as much brain power as anyone else!” A few minutes later, the same law student, not so subtly referring to George W. Bush, asked how Phillips felt about people who secured spots at fancy schools like Harvard and Yale due to their money, family name, and connections. Is it OK, he asked, to give these “legacies” a leg up in college admissions but not to do so for members of historically oppressed minority groups? Joseph never really did answer the young man’s question.

    After the event, Joseph and I reconnected with old classmates from George Washington High School in Denver over dinner. He was frustrated that so much of the discussion had centered on affirmative action. “Our country needs to get back focusing on our shared values—the things that unite us as Americans,” he said. Meanwhile, I thought about those long-ago days in Denver, when we both knew that being African-American enhanced our chance of getting into an elite school. We did not doubt for a minute that we had just as much “brain power” as anyone else. However, affirmative action was not about who had the bigger cranium. We saw it as deferred compensation for the brutally dashed dreams of our forefathers and mothers. From that perspective, we felt no remorse for being “affirmative-action babies.”

    There is a scene in the movie Ragtime in which a black man named Coalhouse Walker Jr. barricades himself in an art museum after being disrespected by some white firemen. Booker T. Washington tries to convince him to give himself up, and makes a moving speech encouraging Walker to trust the system. Walker replies that Washington “spoke like an angel,” but that he and the people he cared about most lived “on earth,” with its cold and bitter realities.

    As we finished our meal, I remembered that scene. It so neatly captured why Joseph and I, despite growing up with the same political signs on our lawns, competing on the same high school speech team, and enduring the same racial pressures in our white middle-class Denver neighborhood, have differing views on certain issues.

    Like Booker T., Joseph still trusts that “the system” can work without enforcement tools like affirmative action. I am more like Coalhouse. I want to believe in the lofty rhetoric Joseph espouses in his book. However, just when I am about to take that leap of faith and believe I am truly part of the “we,” something happens to me or my family, like getting stopped for driving at night in the wrong neighborhood, which brings me back to reality of living in a still-unequal America.

    Therefore, I am not ready to give up affirmative action and other institutional safeguards that help to protect “us,” until my country gives me consistent and sustained reasons to believe that the “we” are prepared to actually do—and not just talk about doing—the right thing for all Americans.

  • Magic Potion

    No one ever added more acreage to the Roman Empire than Julius Caesar (the Roman geezer). Until his time, Roman territory in what is now France was the relatively narrow sliver along the Mediterranean coast that is still called Provence, precisely because it was the original Roman province. In ten years Caesar took over all Gaul, and had even paid a couple of visits to the closest of the islands in Ocean, where he found a lot of hairy warriors wearing nothing but woad (blue dye made from a plant like the indigo): “Woad’s the stuff to show men / Woad to scare your foemen / Boil it to a brilliant hue/ Then rub it on your back and your abdomen.”

    Of course there was one village in Brittany which even Caesar could not subdue, the one inhabited by the tough little cartoon warrior Astérix and his oversized friend Obélix, who can eat a whole wild boar at a sitting and makes his living (when he is not beating up Romans) delivering the massive stone obelisks used in Gallic religion. The secret weapon of mass destruction the villagers use against the Roman invader is a magic potion brewed by the local druid Panoramix (yes, they all have silly names). Drinking it makes Astérix mightier than Popeye; Obélix was dropped in a vat of it when he was a baby. Apparently there is to be an Astérix film in time for the next Olympics, in which nos héros will compete against a legionary called Gluteus Maximus (very humerus) and there will be a lot of earnest stuff about the morality of magic potions. Odd how morality can spoil a joke.

    Perhaps one can forgive Caesar for not referring to this determined center of resistance in the rather po-faced narrative he composed concerning his conquests. What is harder to credit is the account he provides of Gallic wildlife. There are, he says, three sorts of deer in Gaul. One sounds like the unicorn, except that its horn has a branchy tip, like an antler (all right, maybe he had seen a stag in summer after only one of its antlers had fallen off). One is the auroch, a mighty ox which the Gauls were accustomed to catch by the same unsporting method Winnie ille Pu used to capture heffalumps—the auroch is extinct but is known from archaeology. But it is the elks which make one wonder. Elks, according to Caesar, have no knees, so they sleep standing up and leaning against trees, and when they fall over they land on their backs with their little legs wiggling in the air. If you want to catch one, you find a tree that an elk is likely to lean against and you cut halfway through it; you then lie in wait ’til an elk sidles up and goes to sleep, at which point Pif, Paf, Boom (as Astérix says when he biffs a Roman legionary). If you believe this, I have a magic potion that might interest you.

    Well, actually I have. It is white and comes from the broad land south of Bordeaux called Entre-deux-Mers. The name is Verdillac—all those French names ending in -ac (Cognac, Cadillac, Carnac) are pre-Roman—and the 2004 vintage, made by the old established firm of Armand Roux, may be had locally for around ten dollars.

    A skillful blend of (mostly) Semillon with Sauvignon Blanc, this is very easy to drink. Semillon is the grape variety used to make the great golden dessert wines of Sauternes (I think of dreamy glasses of Chateau Rieussec 1976 sipped in my misspent youth). What the Semillon imparts here is not sweetness, but a pleasing douceur, an almost oily mildness which kicks in just before the aftertaste; some people would call this the taste of melon, but it is more interesting than that. The Sauvignon gives the wine its central grit—the taste you get from the red frilly bits next to a peach stone—and there is an aftertaste which recalls the scent of elderflowers in high summer.

    Chilling this wine too much would kill some of the cleverly constructed taste. Roast elk or braised auroch would overpower it. But drinking it with grilled chicken should make you grateful that the Romans brought to Gaul the cultivation of the grape. Astérix and his friends did not know what they were missing; “Ô vive lui, chaque fois / Que chante son coq gaulois.”

  • The Monster Mash

    It was the Paris Hilton-Stavros Niarchos breakup that did it. I’ve decided that since the average celebrity liaison lasts less time than it takes Britney Spears to endanger a baby, I’m in favor of assigning these jet-set hook-ups shorter, more easily memorable names.

    The TomKats, Brangelinas, and Bennifers of the entertainment world become shorthand for even shorter commitments. David Spade and Heather Locklear came and went as an item before we could even agree what to call their unholy babe-elf union. I would have voted for Spocklear, but I didn’t know whom to contact.

    Assigning concise monikers to celebrity couples would free up hours for me each day by cutting my bathroom reading in half. In the 60s, adulterous Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton were the reigning queen and king of showbiz tittle-tattle, known to all as “Liz and Dick.” But that was a more leisurely era. If they were scandalizing today’s go-go, short-attention-span world, I’d abbreviate them as Lick. A single, recognizable syllable radiating spicy overtones, perfect for efficient cocktail-party chatter. Plus, it would move more copies of supermarket magazines. I imagine some lucky staffer at Cosmo or the National Enquirer has the task of dubbing showbiz couples with kicky pet names. I would love that job: Appellation editor has got to be the most desirable post in the whole gossip industry. It would be like naming perfumes or hurricanes or heartburn medications. Doesn’t Prilosec sound like a ménage between Prince, Lindsay Lohan, and Ryan Seacrest?

    What makes an A-list celebrity couple (other than blinding good looks and oodles of dough) is that everybody knows their name. The easier it is to remember, the more powerful their superstardom becomes. Conversely, lack of an instantly recognizable name is an embarrassing disadvantage. Imagine George Wendt expectantly strolling onto the Cheers set, all ready for a big welcome, and the cast saying, “Oh, hi, you.”

    Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt never had a shared tabloid name during their marriage, and that lack of marketable brand identity probably contributed to their breakup. Ben Affleck and J-Lo had already staked their claim to Bennifer, so Brannifer would have been too close and confusing. By the time Affleck hitched up with Jennifer Garner, becoming Ben-Gar (which sounds like a Tokyo-stomping dinosaur played by a man in a green rubber suit), the damage was done. Beautiful lives were tragically torn asunder, entourages were disbanded, forests of newsprint were leveled—all for lack of a cool, fame-enhancing nickname.

    Now the publicity-challenged Jen—Aniston, that is—is with Vince Vaughn, and the tabs have saddled them with the klunky tag Vaughniston. If she and Vince want to stay in the game, they need a name makeover—something with some zing and pep. A confident, assured new handle that dumps her old marital baggage and proclaims, “Forget those losers Brad and Angelina! I’m having a great time with my hot giant boyfriend whose eyebags totally give his face character and make him more desirable! I am not looking for household cleaning products to swallow!” A super with-it name that tells the world, “Vaughn and Jennifer got it goin’ on!”

    I propose Va-Jenna. Clear. Self-explanatory. Salacious. I can feel the Pulitzer in my hands right now.

    Once Va-Jenna makes its mark, Brad and Angelina will have to respond with a re-branding of their own. Brad faces a challenge here. You can’t use his last name because “Pitt” sounds like something dank that you fall into—or worse, deodorize. So it’s good that he’s with the melodious Angelina Jolie. With Va-Jenna shoved in their faces, their retaliation must be bold and direct. Something that decisively tops their rivals and re-establishes their cred as Sexiest Couple in All of Human History.

    After careful consideration and hours of tricky word games worthy of The Da Vinci Code, I hit the pot of gold: Bagina. I need to get this trademarked right away. Can’t you see the headlines? “Bagina Desperate for Another Baby!” “Bagina Opens Up in Exclusive Barbara Walters Interview!” “Bagina Clamps Down on Pushy Paparazzi!” “Globetrotting Bagina Snubs Tinseltown!” “Bagina Gains Weight in Bid for Oscar Nomination!” “Bagina Discharged from Hospital!” “Bagina Heats Up the Screen in Mr. & Mrs. Smith 2!”

    OK. I’ll stop.

  • Constant Commenter

    When Kate Parry became the Star Tribune’s “reader’s representative” in December 2004, she told readers she was their “advocate in the room. My job … is to take [your] concerns and make sure the newsroom understands them … It’s a good thing when someone wants to call, even if they’re angry. It’s a good connection.” Unless the reader in question is a very frequent complainer like Dan Cohen, and the issue is making Star Tribune staffers pay for something that they used to get for free—their own newspaper. Then you may find that the “good connection” gets disconnected.

    Cohen, who successfully took the Star Tribune all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court for outing him as an anonymous source, takes great glee in continuing to torment the paper. After Parry got her gig, Cohen, according to Parry, began emailing her almost daily. Cohen, who admits as much, says that he was simply exercising his rights as a reader to complain. Parry, however, counters that she did not sign up to be a “punching bag” for Cohen’s “abusive emails.”

    So, when the newspaper got egg on its face for first requiring its staffers to pay for newspapers and then threatening to hunt down the ones who stiffed the company newspaper rack (former Twin Citian David Carr wrote a hilarious New York Times story about it), Cohen got really busy. He wrote several emails chiding the paper for failing to respond to the Times story, while at the same time taunting Parry with her own promise to provide “a window … on how the newspaper makes decisions.”

    On April 24, Cohen received the following email from Managing Editor Scott Gillespie. “I don’t want you communicating with Kate Parry again. That means writing her messages directly or copying her on messages.” Then Gillespie went one step further and said, “you should message me directly: not Kate, not Anders [Gyllenhaal, Star Tribune editor in chief] … if you’ve got a legitimate question about the content of the paper … send it my way.”

    Cohen gave me the emails regarding the paying-for-papers brouhaha. (Kate Parry would not give me the copies of his other emails and Cohen said he would only “if pushed.”) The emails I did see simply questioned why the paper failed to report on a story covered in the New York Times, Politics in Minnesota, and even City Pages. The paper’s responses that I saw sidestepped this question and did not make any comments about Cohen harassing Parry or being abusive.

    Even Stevie Wonder can see that Cohen has a thinly veiled agenda of wreaking havoc with the paper whenever possible; still I think he correctly calls out the Star Tribune on its own hypocrisy here. Having gone a round or two with the paper myself—I used to write a column for them and we parted on less-than-pleasant terms—I personally know that this paper does not always practice what is preaches. Complaining to the Star Tribune is OK—if it is the right complaint, on the right issue and one does not complain too often.

    Fortunately, Gyllenhaal wisely saw the dangers of Gillespie’s attempt to bully Cohen. After hearing from Cohen directly, Gyllenhaal wrote that another frequent Cohen target, Katherine Kersten, was “very much up for the criticism as well as compliments.” Cohen told me he took Gyllenhaal’s response as a “pass” to write as often as he chooses to anyone at the paper without being admonished like a bad little boy. Parry, however, responded that Cohen’s interpretation was all wrong and that he remained no longer “welcome to write to her.”

    Gillespie has since told me that Cohen simply needs to take a “time out” and that no one is banned from writing “substantive emails” to the paper “four times a day every day” if he wants to, as long as he does not make “personal attacks on the character of the person [he is] writing to.” Gillespie further concedes that deciding when an obnoxious reader needs a “time out” is currently a subjective “judgment call” and that maybe the paper should “kick around” establishing clear guidelines.

    I think Gillespie is starting to understand what this whole ruckus is really all about. If the Star Tribune is going to have a true “reader’s representative,” then she and her newspaper must have the cojones to take on all comers—from the meek and mild to the Dan Cohens—or clearly state that some complainers can wear out their welcome of certain editors and columnists of the Star Tribune.

  • Bird is the Word

    When I first came to Minnesota twenty years ago, I had never taught a class larger than ten students—mostly I had conducted the one-to-one tutorials that are at the heart of the Oxford system. My first term here I was given a class on the Roman Republic that numbered some seventy souls. The learning curve for me was as steep as it was for them.

    After a few weeks I said to my teaching assistant, a clever young lady who had recently graduated from a cut-glass establishment on the East Coast, that I had really no idea whether I was making an impression. After all, though we speak a similar language, I am a foreigner. A few students kindly asked questions in class, but it was all quite different from the va-et-vien of individual tutorials. “What,” I asked, “do I do?” “That’s easy,” she replied. “You set a pop quiz.”

    The following Friday she and I marched into class with seventy sheets of paper, each roneoed with a dozen quick questions, and announced the pop quiz. Roneo, Roneo, wherefore art thou Roneo? I have never felt the temperature in a room drop so quickly—I might as well have walked into a convention of Southern Baptists wearing a false beard and announced that I was the Ayatollah Khomeini.

    One of the questions was concerned with divination, the Roman practice, learnt from their sophisticated neighbors the Etruscans, of examining the innards of the animals they had sacrificed to discover from their shape and size and knobbly bits what combination of divine forces was floating around in the atmosphere at the moment of the animal’s sacred demise. There is even a bronze model of a sheep’s liver dug up at Piacenza in northern Italy in 1877, which has mapped onto it the different divine forces associated with each area of the organ. This should explain that “the Etruscans” was the answer I expected when I asked my class: “Who taught the Romans to foretell the future from the entrails of birds?” The best answer I got was “Colonel Sanders.” Minnesotans are good souls, and I think they forgave me—I have certainly never repeated the experiment. And three years later, the teaching assistant and one of the men from the class kindly invited me to their wedding.

    Romans thought that birds furnished information about the world not immediately apparent to mankind. The trajectory of events and the pattern of ambient forces could be made out not only from the entrails of the dead but also from the flight of the living. No city could be founded ’til the woodpeckers were wheeling in a favorable configuration. A Roman admiral, told he could not go into battle because the sacred chickens were off their feed, exclaimed, “Let’s see if they will drink,” kicked the peccant poultry over the side of his ship and gave the signal for hostilities to begin. Naturally he was defeated.

    It is not only Romans who found birds made them think. A wild duck passes through the halls of memory, a duck roasted by my cousin, a talented cook fortunate in having friends who shoot more game than they can consume themselves. It came from the kitchen, warm, reeking, rich; from its crisp skin rose a fragrance that would have satisfied the most exacting classical god. The charger came to rest in front of my cousin’s husband, a noted wild-animal veterinarian. He raised the carving knife: “These mate for life,” he said. “Anybody want some?”

    Well, why not? At least it died flying, not flapping in panic on the conveyor belt of a crowded slaughterhouse. Honest men, says the poet Peter Levi, “dive after truth, know nature, fight pretence / admit we live at one another’s expense.”

    This was a memorable bird. And now, years later, I have found just the wine to go with it, a plummy 2004 Pinot Noir from the Hahn Estates in the Santa Lucia highlands of Monterey, south of San Francisco. This wine may be had hereabouts for around thirteen dollars. It has that clear red color characteristic of Pinot Noir, a fine, ripe, fruity taste with soft tannins at the center, only a little acidity, and plenty of alcohol—14.7 percent, according to the bottle, but you do not need to be told—you can taste it. This wine would go with grilled chicken (Hahn is German for cockerel) or summer barbeque, as well as with duck or grouse. Just be sure someone else drives home afterward, unless you wish to face a pop quiz beginning, “Would you mind blowing into this little bag?”

  • “Bitch-Slapped by Mother Nature”

    told my girlfriend Liza that I was going camping for a week with some friends at a remote nature preserve in the mountains of Tennessee, where there would be no modern conveniences. She peered at me over the rims of her geek-chic glasses. “Now, why the hell would you want to do that?” she said.

    Liza is from New York City, and I take great pleasure in slathering her with folksiness whenever I can. I do this because when she talks to me about “last season,” I know that she’s probably not referring to the Farmer’s Almanac. By shoving my Midwestern-native status in her face from time to time, letting a little Fargo creep into my voice after a glass of chardonnay, I figure I’m doing her a favor. It makes her feel like more of an outsider, which is secretly what all transplanted Manhattanites love to feel like.

    “Liza!” I said. “It’s a vacation! It’s an adventure! Hiking! S’mores around the campfire! Doesn’t it sound like fun?”

    “No,” she replied. “But you tell me all about it when you get back.”

    So OK, Liza. Here it is in black and white. It was one of the most trying, difficult weeks I ever had. I was bitch-slapped by Mother Nature. I thought that because I’d watched six seasons of Survivor, I had learned how to survive. All it really meant was that I could operate a television set.

    The thing was, I may not be a hardened urbanite, but I’m not what most people would call “outdoorsy,” either. My nifty new hiking boots had never ventured beyond the rough-and-tumble terrain of the Lake Calhoun footpath. I borrowed a tent and lantern from my pal Jim, who gave a low whistle when I admitted I’d never gone camping before. “Well,” he said, loading the gear into my station wagon, “you should be fine. The tent is orange, so rescuers can find you.” But if the bears found me first in my DayGlo dome, they might just think, “Yummy candy shell.”

    “At least you’re not going in the winter,” Jim said, slamming the hatch door. “I won’t go winter camping anymore. I only went once. Here’s the thing about winter camping. You pretty much just add the words ‘OR ELSE I’LL DIE!’ to the end of every sentence. As in, ‘Oh! I’d better get that fire started.’ Or, ‘I’ve got to get my tent set up.’ ”

    Jim saw my eyes widen and hurried on. “You should be fine, though. If the weather holds out.”

    The first day, it drizzled for ten hours straight. When my companions and I got sick of hiding in our tents, we huddled by the fire in our ponchos, with gray skies spitting all over us, and tried to make merry by opening a bottle of wine. I found that if I am drinking outside, and it is raining, and there is no live band playing, I don’t feel festive. I feel like Boxcar Willie.

    I was starting to smell like him, too. The park ranger had told us to refrain from using perfumed soaps because it said to the bears, “I am here.” I quickly developed a ripe musk that a male Sasquatch might mistake for a female in heat. I imagined trying to let him down easy. “I’m sorry, Bigfoot, it’s totally not you. You’re great; it’s just that I’m married.”

    Once the rain stopped, we had to go into town for dry matches. Only two days into my back-to-nature adventure, and I was itching to buy something. Anything. Because buying things makes me feel like a civilized person, a part of a larger whole, a world where printing presses exist, and frappuccinos. But the pickins were slim. The gift section of the convenience store offered jars of jelly with little pillows of gingham cloth covering the lids, pickled okra, and brown suede knee-high moccasins (the sort favored by Fleetwood Mac fans worldwide). There was also a broad selection of knobby, wooden walking sticks, for that stylin’ “woodland pimp” look. The cashier was wearing an angler’s vest with more pockets and flaps on it than an Advent calendar. He sure didn’t smell like he had any chocolate on him, though.

    I didn’t go away empty-handed; at least I picked up some toilet paper. But when there is no toilet I guess you just call it “rump paper.” If you had told me a year earlier that I would be digging a hole in the ground to crap in, I would have wondered what apocalyptic sect you belonged to.

    So, Liza, because I know these words will ring sweetly in your ears, and because I believe in admitting it when it’s true:

    You were right.

  • Move Along

    If you really want to get Minneapolitans edgy about crime, kill some white people. Since the random murders of two middle-class whites in Uptown and downtown, near Block E, both places where affluent people live, work, and spend big entertainment dollars, Minneapolis has dramatically raised its police profile at those locations. Block E, with its proximity to the city’s most populous African-American neighborhoods, has drawn large numbers of black teens and twentysomethings since the $170 million entertainment complex opened in 2002. Even before the March 30 murder of thirty-one-year-old Alan Reitter, black kids frequenting Block E, who often wear hip-hop clothes and enthusiastically embrace the swagger that goes along with it, were sometimes perceived as a menace by white patrons.

    On a Friday night in mid-April, I decided to catch a movie at Block E with my sixteen-year-old son Alexander. I wanted to see for myself whether young, African-American males were targeted by security more frequently than other patrons, and, if they were, whether their behavior warranted the extra scrutiny. Beyond that, I wanted to get the African-American males’ perception of how they were regularly treated.

    I found that groups of African-American males were scrutinized more closely than groups of white young people by security guards and also were more frequently asked to move along. Admittedly, this was just one evening’s worth of observations, but that was all it took to witness the disparity. Shortly after Alexander and I arrived, we saw a guard order a group of African-American males, who were chatting amiably, to leave the building. Within about twenty feet of them were groups of white teenagers that the guard left alone.

    When I asked the guard why he had rousted the black kids, he curtly replied that I was “interfering with his duties.” When I told him that I intended to continue watching his interactions with Block E patrons, he ordered me to leave the building. When I protested, he called the Minneapolis police and asked them to toss me out. After the police arrived, I explained who I was and what I was doing. They told me that I was free to observe whatever I wanted so long as I did not speak to the security guards. A few minutes later, I saw the guard who had tried to expel me engaged in a friendly chat with some white patrons.

    I then spoke with the rousted African-American kids, who were dressed in what they called their “hangin’ out with their boys clothes.” One told me that he was tired of security people and cops “mean mugging” him. “The brothas always get singled out down here,” he said. “The cops think we’re up to something and these young white wannabes hit on us for weed.” When I pointed out that some African-American males do hassle white passersby, as attested to by some of my white friends, nineteen-year-old Derrick R., who did not offer his last name, conceded the point. “Yeah, some of the brothas are acting like fools sometimes,” he said, “But hey, we all gotta hang out someplace.” Twenty-year-old Isaiah Thomas added that black guys have to dress more conservatively than whites to get respect. “If a nigga has got a good fit [i.e. nice clothes], and acts like he’s about something, then he ain’t as likely to get hassled.” His friends nodded in agreement, with one adding, “Yeah, that’s true brother, but it ain’t right.”

    The following Monday, I spoke with a senior official with Securitas, the company that employs the overly zealous security guard. The official predictably said that Securitas did not train its security guards to profile African-Americans or to hassle anyone engaged in lawful conduct. You know what? I believe him. Securitas is not the problem—it is much deeper and more systemic than that. Ever since the earliest days of slavery, the mere presence of a group of black males has been interpreted as threatening by many whites. That is, unless they are wearing a business suit or a uniform of some kind—say, for a sports team—which signals that they are properly domesticated and under control. One black man can be easily cowed if he gets out of line. A group of black men is more likely to fight back. At some deep subconscious level, white America knows that black men have plenty of valid reasons for wanting to avenge centuries of abuse. And, as we all know, payback is a bitch.

    I will candidly admit that some groups of African-Americans males do, to borrow Derrick R.’s phrase, “act a fool sometimes” and exploit this historic white fear. However, as a society we have got to come to grips with the legacy of this fear if we are to peacefully co-exist, as individuals and groups, at places like Block E.