Several artists who shall remain nameless wrote to complain that they had not been included in last month’s cover story about hot Minnesota art stars [“Making It”]. We normally love to namedrop and logroll terrific overlooked artists, but we’re looking after you here, folks. Take our word for it: There is no elegant way to press these sour grapes into the sweet wine of publicity. But we’ll mention you the next chance we get!
Send along your own rakish reflections to: letters@rakemag.com. But please remember: We assume submissions are intended for publication, and we cannot return materials sent by mail. (Don’t send valuable originals!) Letters may also be edited for length and clarity.
CJ Kurth writes: This picture was taken on the campus of Peking University in Beijing, China. My coworker who was showing me around said I should take a picture here as it is a very famous lake in China and that most Chinese would recognize the location. The tower seemed like a perfect backdrop. I asked him what the name of the lake was, he said “the lake has no name”. After taking the picture I asked what the tower was used for, he said “it was made to hold water”. A water tower in front of an unamed pond… maybe we should have seen the great wall instead.
Twin Citizens Desi Fernandez and Laine Bergeson traveled eight thousand miles (a twenty-eight hour flight; good thing they brought a copy of The Rake!) to visit former Twin Citizens Jennifer, Grady, and Linda Jean Kenix in New Zealand. Here they are in Kaiteriteri enjoying springtime in December. How come they’re not upside down?
Marcia Gardner (Minnetonka) and Colin Fenwick (Shorewood) write: Hello! The Rake was with us as we traveled and worked as part of a Global Volunteers team in Mexico about a year ago. Here we are in a park in the town of Victoria, in the state of Guanajuato, Mexico.
Cheryl writes: Smugglers Cove is the perfect place to surf. So we read an article from The Rake to local and visiting surfers on the beach. We wanted to show them our creativity even though we were frozen for almost six months a year. Of course, that’s probably why we stay young looking too!
From L to R: Julia Buky, expat. teaching at Learetty-Stout College, Tortola B.V.I., Becky Aligata from Newington, CT, Cheryl Ouellette (Julia’s mom) from Edina, MN.
Tortola is a fabulous island in the British Virgin Islands. Great food, fantastic social life and breathtaking beauty from every spot on the island.
Smugglers Cove and Cane Garden Bay offer world-class surfing. Rebecca just learned to surf like a pro on her first try!
(We apologize if there are any names spelled incorrectly, the handwriting was hard to read.)
Game Night at the American Language Center in Damascus is an eagerly anticipated annual event. Each classroom offers a different game, with a volunteer to explain the rules, supervise play, and arbitrate potential disputes. A day before the event, my co-worker Tanisha informed me that I’d be presiding over the board games Risk and Monopoly. The choices were purely coincidental. But the juxtaposition of games offered an unintended comment on American culture. “Have fun,” the language center seemed to be suggesting to its students, “and gain first-hand knowledge of two things Americans have excelled at over the years: accumulating wealth and invading other countries.”
As the students poured into tiny classroom seven, I discovered that both Monopoly boxes were missing dice and game pieces. The Risk game sets were also incomplete and required about five minutes to assemble. But I enlisted two students, Tarek and Amer, to separate and stack the perforated sheet of game cards while Nawras and I made the dice by placing tiny stickers onto the uneven surfaces of three black plastic cubes. Amer’s brother Alaa and a reticent female student named Noor sorted the plastic armies according to color. As we set up the game, I explained the rules. Game cards are distributed among five players, with each card representing a particular territory on the board. The students must distribute their armies according to whatever cards they receive. The purpose of the game is to occupy territories and attack adjacent countries, while the ultimate goal is to eventually conquer the entire world. Armies are lost by low rolls of the dice. The reward for conquering a territory is a game card, and these cards can eventually be exchanged for additional armies.
Ten minutes into the game, his position on the board already virtually indefensible, Nawras’ cell phone erupted with a popular Arabic tune. “Joel, I have to go,” he informed me moments later, and headed for the door. In the absence of newcomers, I decided to sit in. My presence seemed to spur an instant, politically motivated enthusiasm in the other players. This newfound interest was confirmed by Amer and Alaa’s two brothers who entered the room minutes later. “Where are you from?” one asked me. I pointed to the west coast of North America on the game board. “We are four Iraqis,” he laughed, and the rest of the room laughed with him.
Veterans of Risk understand that the game is won and lost by ephemeral alliances that form between players. Essentially, you can’t win without the help of other players, so you try to persuade them it’s in their interest to attack someone else instead of you. Tarek and I were friends outside of class, so we formed a non-aggression pact out of mutual self-preservation: I wouldn’t attack him in Europe if he left me alone in Africa. But the common enemy of the four brothers from Baghdad is obvious, so I decided to find out if Noor could be persuaded to do my military bidding. I gestured for her to overwhelm Alaa in Asia from North America. “Come on, Noor,” I said. “If he holds onto Asia until next turn, he gets an additional seven armies. You can’t allow that.” But Noor, who is Syrian, required no convincing from the Iraqi brothers to join their anti-American alliance.
I plotted my next move. Apparently inspired by the sight of my unintentionally serious countenance bent over the board, Noor lobbed an insult in my direction: “You look like George Bush!” My mouth dropped open. “I was joking,” she assured me a moment later, and all was forgotten except for the job at hand: to gang up and attack me in successive turns. Amer in particular was clearly delighting in watching his American teacher erased from the board. As we fought over South America and Africa, denying each other armies by pushing into each other’s territory, his brothers plotted my eventual destruction from behind the scenes. Whenever Amer won a roll against me, he gleefully exclaimed, “See you!” before removing my plastic pieces from the board.
Tarek, languishing in Europe, was the first to be eliminated. Just before he was attacked by Amer’s brother Alaa sweeping in from the territory labeled “le Moyen-Orient” (the Middle East), I intervened ineffectually on his behalf. When Alaa eventually decided to attack me in Egypt, I responded with mock incredulity: “Come on! Mubarek wants peace! Can’t we all just get along?”
Other students came in and gathered around to watch. Amer’s brothers continued to whisper strategy to Noor, making sweeping motions with their hands—like a conductor motioning for a crescendo from the tympani section—over my weakly held territories in Africa. It was Amer who was rewarded with the task of finally finishing me off—a moment of sweet justice denied his country in the real world. I began to wonder how the game would end. Noor would be the next to go, I reasoned. But would Alaa and Amer eventually have the fortitude to attack each other? Amer, however, had a more benevolent plan up his sleeve—a harmonious alliance of Christian and Muslim brothers controlling the world with no unilaterally aggressive American army in sight to foul it up. As soon as I was off the board, he proclaimed triumphantly, “Now we can have peace!”—Joel Hanson
Hugh Bennewitz’s Vulcans feature was hilarious [Back Page, February]. I do feel, though, that the piece left some questions unanswered. First, are there twelve-step groups for survivors of Vulcan assaults? It seems to me there would have to be, and that their intergalactic numbers would be huge. Second, is there a twelve-step group for recovering Vulcans, those who discovered the wrongness of their affiliation and who sought to find relief from their sickness? (“We admitted we were powerless over Vulcanism, and that our lives had become Vulcanized” etc.). Just wondering.
Thanks so much for your recent tribute to Richard Pryor, “In Memory of Richard Pryor” [Free the Jackson Five, January]. From the moment I first heard Richard in the early seventies, I knew I was listening to comic genius. I had never laughed so long or so hard before I listened to Richard. He could be funny reading a phone book. My brothers and I would sit and listen for hours to the routines and memorize the lines and even when we had heard them fifty times and committed them to memory, we still laughed every time. Richard also taught me to “use humor as a sword and shield as we make our way through a world riddled with pain.” I cannot ever know the deep pain of racial prejudice but Richard taught me, a fifty-two-year-old white guy, about the pain and humor of many African-Americans and I am a better person for it. His death was a blow to me too.
Jennifer Vogel reportedly drove across North Dakota in writing her article, “No. 1 Hard: Notes on the emptying of North Dakota” [February]. Was she just looking for images and people to interview who would capture her predetermined story about North Dakota? Or was she looking to write about the economics that are actually at play here? I have to wonder, because as someone who recently moved back to North Dakota from Washington, D.C., my view about what’s happening here is much different. Many communities throughout the state are growing, not just Fargo and Grand Forks, as she suggests. North Dakota was one of only three states in the nation to show real growth in manufacturing. Minnesota was not one of the other two. In the most recent reporting period, the U.S. Census Bureau shows that North Dakota was one of only five states with a positive change in household income. In fact, ours was the largest change. Unemployment is at historical lows in many communities and job opportunities surpass people to hold them.
Yes, you can find ghost towns here–just as you can in Minnesota or any state where the railroads created towns every ten miles. But from the headline, to the photos, to most of the text within, “No. 1 Hard” uses a ghost town to illustrate life as a whole in North Dakota. This is no more accurate than a story focusing on inner-city Minneapolis to depict the state of affairs in all of Minnesota.
Shane Goettle,
commissioner North Dakota Department of Commerce
As somebody who endured five years in North Dakota, which felt more like twenty-five, I relished your article about the state’s ongoing economic desperation and youth outmigration issues. Well, “youth outmigration” is a polite term for anybody young and smart leaving the state in any kind of vehicle that will run just as quick as they can get together enough jack for gas and enough courage to go someplace with decent career opportunities. The article was, if anything, too damned kind to North Dakota, a place best described as a “rural ghetto” and the “economic hurt bag of the nation.”