Category: Letter

“Espace Jean Villar” is an unassuming movie house and club in an outlying suburb of Paris. This twisty, drizzly township is called Arcueil, and it was (we’re told more than once) the home of minimalist composer Erik Satie. Happy Apple, a Twin Cities jazz trio, is making its European debut here. I’m along as the group’s personal manager, escort, and de facto travel agent. And while it’s been four days since we touched down, a particularly resilient strain of jet lag has infected our whole entourage. You know it’s a rough bout when not even the surgical analysis of Olympic curling on late-night TV can summon the sandman to our hotel rooms.

The Euro is also making its debut, and this actually levels the playing field a bit for non-French speakers like ourselves. Local merchants handle the unfamilar coins and cosmopolitan bank notes with a troubled reticence. They have to think about dispensing your correct change almost as hard as you have to think about how to ask for a pack of Galoises. Spoiled as I am by our mild winter back home, the cigs provide a measure of comfort against the frigid, rainy wind that whips down Arcueil’s tangle of steep hills and narrow streets.

From a band’s point of view, British audiences get beaucoup grief for their stoic demeanor. But listening to American jazz, the French could give them a run for their quid. No matter how hard the band is grooving tonight, I can’t make out a single tapping toe. They watch and listen with stony reserve from the first note to the last. A few nod their heads now and again, but with the cautious restraint of a Kiwanis Club treasurer at a hip-hop show. They’re appreciative, no question—if the persistent doting of local photographers isn’t proof enough, the demand for an encore is pretty revealing—but compared to the average 400 Bar crowd, it feels about as rowdy as a Lutheran church service.

The vibe is almost unnerving until you realize what it signifies: Respect. Open-mindedness. Attentiveness to original, sometimes challenging music—music like Satie wrote a century ago. The irony is that a band starts to get uncomfortable when fans listen this closely. As the gig lets out and Euros are gingerly inspected at the merch counter, I ask a local jazz writer about the steely calm of the crowd. Is this typical? He doesn’t seem to understand the question. Trying to explain myself, I mistakenly give him the impression that American jazz fans will whoop and holler like Arsenio Hall at the drop of a key change. He looks at the floor. I change the subject. “Got a light?”

I think Bob Mould [The Broken Clock, March] deserves to do whatever he wants, and I know that no matter what he does I am going to respect him as the talented songwriter he is. What he has produced on Modulate is interesting; there is that underlying Bob Mould attitude that he will never lose, and that I love. He is always honest with his fans, and those of us who have been following him for a while know this is what he has wanted to do. I, for one, am happy for him and I hope he never stops.

Paula Zepke
Wallingford, CT

Steve Perry’s story on Carl Pohlad and the effort to eliminate the Twins was interesting and well written, but Perry could scarcely hide his contempt. That’s fine, but I think he inadvertently gives these old men way too much credit. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that these people are simply bumbling dilettantes who want to play Monopoly with real money. They keep trying to apply real-world economics to a fantasy world, and somehow it just never quite translates. For example, I’ve heard their arcane rules allow them to depreciate the value of their assets, which in this case are their employees. Human beings. Who else gets to depreciate their workers? The irony, of course, is that no one is depreciating faster than these senile old duffers.

Sam Romberger
Boston, MA

As a native provincial, until recent years I’d always maintained the private notion that our city was smart rather than nice or mean (or nice and mean). But without a free non-monopoly press it hasn’t been possible to hear the voices of real individuals like I had been used to. The current formula of the weeklies is to print only insultingly poor writing and then complacently publish the complaints sent in by readers who don’t know any better. We desperately need a paper like The Rake that could reflect some true indigenous intelligence again, if only for the entertainment value.

Michael McKenzie
Minneapolis

To quote Maggie Smith in Gosford Park—“Yummy, yummy, yummy!!” What a splendid opening entre! Indie writers unite! Thanks especially for Billy Golfus’ memorial piece on Larry Kegan [“Last Song from the Big Chair,” March]. I didn’t know he’d left us and what a day to go! I’ll miss Larry around the planet. Looking forward to your next issue. And bless you!

Carol Olyphant
Minneapolis

In your review of the Xena DVD [The Broken Clock, March], your writer suggests that the Xena series paved the way for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon type films. I am writing to remind you that wirework fight scenes involving women and men have been utilized in Hong Kong cinema far before Xena existed. And while Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger may not be a direct product of the Hong Kong film industry, it and the other films like it (i.e. The Matrix) owe their influence more to the Hong Kong action genre than Xena. There has been relatively little attention to the fact that Xena’s creators ripped off Hong Kong action cinema.

Bao Phi
Minneapolis/St. Paul

You may recall a sampler CD that I sent to you last week containing 8 songs from Weezer’s forthcoming album, Maladroit. Please ignore that CD for the time being as I wasn’t supposed to have sent it yet. I was overeager for you all to hear it and I jumped the gun. Unfortunately, there is still no release date to announce for the album. If you are a radio station, it would probably be best if you wait to play any of these songs until you have been officially serviced by the record company. Thanks, and sorry for the confusion.

Rivers Cuomo, Weezer
Los Angeles

We’re not a radio station, but thanks, Mr. Cuomo. Don’t be sorry.

I want to describe where we are trying to go with The Rake, and to beg your patience while we inevitably stumble on our way. Basically, we want to be storytellers. All the other stuff we’ll do will be to make room for more stories.

I always envied my father’s ability to make up stories while he was driving the family from Iowa to Colorado on vacation. Our two favorites were “Art Bartel: The One-Man Division” about his exploits in World War II, and “El Diablo” about when he was a cowboy by day and righter-of-wrongs and wooer-of-senoritas at night. We didn’t know it then, but that story about how he held off an entire Panzer division with “nothing but a .45” wasn’t complete bullshit.

He was a member of the 5th Ranger Battalion. He was at Bastogne. He was at the Huertgen Forest. He won a Silver Star, a Bronze Star with a cluster, several unit citations, and three Purple Hearts. After he was shot the third time, he spent a year in a hospital. But he wouldn’t talk about that, so he spun out comic book stories. The truth, my brothers and I realized later, was that he couldn’t tell us what he really had done, because that would mean he’d have to tell us about how a ricochet from his gun hit his friend in the throat, or how his best friend from the high school class of 1941 had drowned when his ship was torpedoed in the English Channel, or how he had killed 23 Germans with their own machine gun because he was too scared to get up and run after seeing two other guys shot in the back.

So, we got the story of blowing up a tank with one bullet from the .45, instead of the one about how he lay wounded in a drainage ditch and shot morphine into his leg until the survivors of his squad could knock out the machine gun at the end of the street. Instead of talking about the life expectancy of replacements, he’d only tell us of the advice he lived by: “Try to look unimportant, the Germans may be low on ammo,” and “Never share a foxhole with someone braver than you.”

Based on that scant testimony, I didn’t understand why he tried so hard to keep me out of Vietnam, or why he never joined the VFW, or why he wouldn’t go back to France. All he would say is that anyone who glorified war had never seen one, or he’d make some crack about the guys in the “mess kit repair battalion.”

My father has still left all the details unspoken. I’ve got them from my mother, my aunts, some old letters, and a Silver Star citation I found in a box. This year, he wrote his memoirs, but mostly left out the war. We pry at family dinners, but when he starts to remember, he gets sad and makes up a story about something else-like when he was a cowboy. There’s no bullshit there. He can really ride a horse.

Until I can get him to tell the real El Diablo story, we hope to fill The Rake with stories as good. In the meantime, please write us and tell us how we’re doing. Next month, this space is yours.

Thanks for Steve Perry’s honest assessment of the post 9/11 prettification. If the experience is edited down to the fiery explosions, a few brave men raising a flag, and a sweetly stoic wife, you’ve got a Bruce Willis movie. The horror that is the reality is, I suppose, depressing and therefore un-American. I worked across the street from the WTC and after we evacuated our building I looked up from the street and saw people plunging from the towers, some of them flailing arms and legs wildly as if something, someone could stop their fall. My colleague looked away and asked, “How can you watch?” But how could I not? I think I said something like, “This is what is happening.” I was thinking, this is it. This is the truth, and it’s terrible. Of course, my colleague and I eventually did turn our backs, literally, to flee up the West Side Highway. But it sometimes seems to me that as a country we want to turn our backs to everything that doesn’t suit our group psyche.

Wendy Brandes
New York City

If you think Walter Mondale’s presidential campaign was the last time Minnesotans were considered a threat to their fellow Americans, guess again. According to fans of public radio here in California the Gopher State, and in particular Minnesota Public Radio President Bill Kling, are squandering one of our most precious intellectual resources. “The daily advertisement for the wonders of corporate socialism called ‘Marketplace’” is how Salon’s Lorenzo Milam described the Los Angeles-based program MPR purchased in 2000. “Minnesota belongs in Minnesota, not in Los Angeles,” the owner of a Santa Monica public radio station famously complained. “I view Bill Kling as a barracuda in the public-radio waters,” a Pasadena academic said in an article that labeled Kling “Public Radio’s Darth Vader.”

When elephants fight, the grass suffers. My own work history has played out entirely in the private sector, so I had barely an inkling that an innocent (if unnecessarily grueling) series of job interviews at “Marketplace” would be a window on an ugly clash of cultures.

Sure, the occupation in question-webmaster and official excitement-generator for the program’s deadly dull web site–didn’t look like anybody’s dream job. With a sense of design worthy of the DMV, Marketplace.org attracts about 2,500 page views per week. That’s fewer than any schoolboy can generate by posting a few dozen J.Lo scans on his home page. The radio show, by contrast, attracts four million listeners each week. MPR wanted my expertise in figuring out how to leverage those numbers.

For my part, I did my best to reflect what seemed to be a popular feeling around the office-that “Marketplace” host David Brancaccio is a colossal genius whose shoes I was unfit to carry. (But by God I’d try!)

All the nasty stereotypes about Minnesotans-the slow-talking, mind-numbing mannerisms, the blandly liberal, vitamin-enriched mindset-were on shocking display among these Angelenos, who seemed worried that North Star Corporate was encroaching on their wild and crazy party. Hired out of the Minnesota office, I would always be an alien presence. Worse still, job details from my Twin Cities-based supervisor hinted at a dark future as a Pacific-coast mole for my Midwestern overlords. No wonder the radio people viewed me with contempt and loathing (beyond the fact that I happen to be loathesome and contemptible, that is).

In the end, though, they went with some other candidate, one who already lived in L.A. Was it a victory for Brancaccio’s holdouts? An olive branch from Minnesota to the City of the Angels? I’ll never know. Around the “Marketplace” office, it’s hard enough to find a pulse, let alone a telling display of emotion. Perhaps this place really is an outpost of Lutheranism worthy of its Minnesota landlords.

I’ve kept tabs on Marketplace.org since getting rejected, however, which furnishes this story’s one bright spot: In the months since my rival was hired, the site hasn’t changed a pixel.