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  • Big E is Back!

    Eric Austin, the talented chef behind the late, lamented Big
    E’s Soulfood on Eat Street, has resurfaced in South Saint Paul with a new
    upscale restaurant, the Bourbon Street Steakhouse, in the dining space formerly
    occupied by TreVina Italian Steak House. It’s a more suitable venue for fine
    dining than the little storefront on Eat Street, and Austin is now able to offer cocktails and a wine and beer
    selection to go with his cuisine.

    chef Eric AustinAustin, who trained at Commander’s Palace in New Orleans,
    offers a nice selection of Creole specialties, many of them upscale
    presentations of the classic Creole fare that he served at Big E’s. But the
    menu has a wider range, from beer can chicken with whisky baked beans ($16) to
    lamb chops with rosemary and parmesan cornbread stuffing, and a 20 ounce ribeye
    cowboy steak served with baked beans, chorizo and sauteed asparagus ($32). (The
    south Saint Paul stockyards are right across the street.)

    shrimp and crawfish etouffee

    shrimp and crawfish etoufee

    I was very impressed with the Louisiana gumbo, made with a
    proper brown butter and flour roux, and brimming with shrimp, crawfish,
    andouille sausage and chicken, and the entrée of shrimp and crawfish etouffee,
    smothered in a rich brown gravy. The
    blackened catfish, a nightly special, was also first-rate – moist and flaky and
    accompanied by a roasted sweet corn succotash. My smothered pork chop wasn’t
    quite as exciting as the Creole dishes, but it was enormous and quite tasty.

    With a day’s notice, Austin also offers a special Chef’s Table menu, made up to order, for $65 per person, including two glasses of wine per person. Austin says he asks diners three questions – whether they have any food allergies, whether there are any foods they absolutely won’t eat, and whether they prefer land, sea or air – and then he invents a menu.

    Bourbon Street Steak House, 200 N. Concord Exchange, South Saint Paul, 651-209-6854. Lunch – Tuesday through Friday; Dinner – Tuesday through Saturday.

  • God and Man in Edina.

    ABOVE: This is how I prefer to see a Land Rover. Don’t believe that stuff about their ladder frames. Even the bodies break.

    NOTE: I have been receiving personal e-mails related to my recent Edina Mom post. What I find most enlightening about this gentleman’s well-crafted commentary is that God in Edina, it appears, remains in the automotive details. 

    "As both a proud Edina resident and Land Rover owner I am fuming – FUMING – at your recent blog entry. In fact, I’m cancelling my subscription to The Rake today.

    How dare you besmirch my fine city, and my fine vehicle of choice?

    And let me just be bold and speak for Signe (herself an Edina native) and ask yet another question: what better language for an immersion school than French?

    Hey, someday – someday – if Edina keeps educating its children, and if France keeps supporting wars in Africa to bolster former French colonies and wreak genocide on former British colonies in an attempt to keep more French-speakers alive, I have no doubt that more than 50,000 people worldwide will still be speaking French.

    And everyone in Edina will be able to tip his or her beret proudly and say that we were a part of making that happen.

    And, good sir, what better vehicle for an Edina church to model its camps after?

    In many ways, Land Rover is just like many Edina residents – expensive, beautiful to look at, and amazing (on the rare occasions) when they are functional.

    And when they break down? Well, who doesn’t need something else to complain about?

    Look, if you drove a Toyota*, you’d never get to sit in the posh Land Rover service waiting area on beautiful but uncomfortable square leather couches while talking on your Bluetooth headset connected to your Blackberry while watching Fox News on the hi-def flatscreen, drinking Caribou and eating fresh pastries, while looking at (but never make conversation with) your fellow Edina residents, who are also there doing the exact same thing."

    *ed: Doesn’t Toyota manufacture the Prius?


  • Helter Skelter Advertising

    So I have a friend who’s kind of a conspiracy theorist. Which is fine, because conspiracy theorists can sometimes help one see the broader picture. Global warming is a scam put on by Ben and Jerry’s to sell more ice cream, which in turn helps the Canadian GDP because – unbeknownst to anyone who isn’t paying attention – that’s where B & J get their milk? Okay. In short, hanging around with a conspiracy theorist is a pretty good substitute for smoking pot.

    A few nights ago, said friend was over at my place. We weren’t watching the Olympics, because of course they’re rigged, anyway, so why bother? And he was talking about this book, called The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder. It’s written by Vincent Bugliosi, a lawyer-turned-best-selling-author, most famous for Helter Skelter, which chronicles the legal proceedings of the Manson family. In his new book, Bugliosi states that he has a watertight case against Bush on grounds of homicide, and given the chance, could nail our President with a ‘guilty’ verdict.

    It came out in May, and received minimal press. Like, actually, no press whatsoever, according to my friend. This was suspicious, because Bugliosi is a world-renowned writer, who has topped the New York Times best-seller list. My friend attributed the lack of coverage to the fact that the government controls the media, including the liberal-seeming Times, and simply wanted to suppress this title.

    And he has some corroboration. "The author is receiving the silent treatment from many media outlets," reported Cara McDonough in an article for Finding Dulcinea. "Bugliosi…thought that at least MSNBC and Comedy Central’s ‘The Daily Show’ [where he’d made previous appearances] would show interest in interviewing him about his new book, but neither responded to requests for appearances."

    Did someone say Kafkaesque?

    Nevertheless, the book became a bestseller. Now The Prosecution is being hailed as a working prototype for how the Internet can sell literature, perhaps more effectively than mainstream media outlets.

    "The latest title by former Los Angeles attorney Vincent Bugliosi has become publishing’s favorite example of how the web can move books," writes Mark Flamm in Crain’s New York Business. "A campaign that blanketed blogs with excerpts, podcasts, author videos and advertising has led to sales of more than 60,000 copies of The Prosecution, according to publisher Vanguard Press, part of the Perseus Books Group. A total of 140,000 copies are in print."

    Ahh…so it would seem that, in the book world, conventional marketing is losing out to newer forms. This of course is a somewhat predictable progression – it’s easy to see that history is marching blogward. I guess I’m just dumb enough to be surprised that the industry hasn’t yet completely shifted its paradigm. Especially because it’s cheaper to do targeted online ads.

    "While a half-page black-and-white ad in USA Today costs $53,000, a two-week online campaign on a network of small Web sites can go for as little as $3,000 to $5,000 and reach 2 million to 3 million people," Flamm reports.

    I don’t think it’s too much of a reach to say that this same approach could work for fiction, and maybe even poetry, so long as marketers don’t just tap insulated lit blogs the way they do insulated lit mags.

    Back to Bugliosi, I guess I still can’t explain why the media didn’t give him coverage, in terms of reviews and interviews. While the success of The Prosecution is impressive, no one has yet dealt with the book’s actual content. Pundits are surmising that people are just sick of hearing about how much Bush sucks, but still, given Bugliosi’s stature, it is surprising that no one picked him up (and way too post-Modern that EVERYONE, including me, covered his lack of coverage). I guess the conspiracy theorists can keep their suppositions in tact on that count.

  • Securing the Sewers of Saint Paul Against the Crappiest of Villains

    Hordes of Jihadists, radical liberals and ancient clown-shaped abominations with fantasies of disrupting the Republican National Convention by rising from beneath the streets of Saint Paul like so many crap-coated Lovecraftian elder-beings wept bitterly as public works employees welded downtown manhole covers shut during the last week. Thanks to the astute foresight and planning of the combined brain trust of the Department of Homeland Security and local law enforcement, the dire public safety threat posed by Shitman – the sewer dwelling creature immortalized in 90s hard rock band Green Jelly’s song of the same name – has been neutralized.

    Demonstrating the serious nature of the sewer-borne terrorist threat, sealing the city’s manholes was but the first step in a multi-layer defensive plan. In addition to placing mutant amphibians and rodents trained in the lost secrets of nijutsu in the tunnel beneath St. Paul prior to welding all access points shut, Kevin Bacon has been retained for the duration of the convention. Bacon’s demonstrated skill and ingenuity at defending against underground threats will serve the city well and ensure the safety of delegates, convention attendees, and the assembled masses in the event of worm-like creatures from the deep.

    This, in addition to the recently announced "no-fly zone," super secret security expenditures redacted in the publicly available budget and the protest corral that is located in "unprecedented proximity" to the convention, is sure to make the attending delegates, candidates, elected officials and assorted panderers and hangers-on feel cozily safe in the confines of downtown Saint Paul.

    Safe, that is, until they venture west to Minneapolis in search of the fabled land of Déjà Vu and Scheik’s. While Saint Paul may have locked down the shit-related security threat, its metrosexual twin across the river is still coping with roving groups of crap-flinging chimpanzees that take over the city streets at bar close and make the city unsafe for freshly laundered and crisply pressed Brooks Brothers shirts.

  • August 13, 2008: 天氣

  • Bearded Child Film Fest Creates Bedlam (at the Bedlam)

    FILM
    Bearded Child Film Fest

    I can hardly imagine a more fitting venue for the Bearded Child Film Fest
    than the Bedlam Theater, with its carnie-friendly vibe and its rep for,
    well, bedlam. After an 8-year warm up in its founding city of Grand
    Rapids, MN, the Minneapolis debut of the Bearded Child Film Festival
    will combine film, installation, music and live performance into "one
    major multimedia explosion" that’s sure to impress anyone with eyes and
    ears. I’ll attempt to recite some festival highlights for you, but the
    schedule is almost too awesome to narrow down so make sure to check it out
    for yourself. Check out the Light Speed Installation
    by Chicago’s Karen Johannsen, or perhaps Peep Show, a collection of risque and randy
    shorts for a curious culture. Be sure to pop in for the artists talk with Minneapolis’ own
    Candy Eye Factory, or for any of the midnight electronic music
    and circuit bending phantasms throughout the fest, which are bound to be weirdly fantastic! Runs today through Saturday.

    13th-16th, 6pm-2am Nightly, Bedlam Theater, 1501 S. 6th Street, West Bank Minneapolis



    LECTURES
    MN Politics: 150 Years of Characters, Oddballs and Loons

    There have been plenty of nutty, crazy, half-baked,
    goofy, wacked and cracked Minnesota political leaders and instigators
    in our fair state’s history, that’s for certain. This afternoon, join
    in on a good-humored lunchtime discussion led by in-the-know Minnesota History Center
    experts; learn a thing or two about our local politicos (some
    lovable, some not) and the ins, outs and oddities of times past that
    will surely entertain, if not enlighten. This noon-ish chat takes place
    in the Courtyard of the St. Paul Central Library so pack a light picnic, or, for a more hearty option, make a post-discussion lunch date at nearby McGovern’s Pub, where the turkey dinner (served all day) will leave you snoozy and satisfied.

    Noon-2pm, St. Paul Central Library Courtyard, 90 W. 4th Street, Downtown St. Paul, Free


    THEATER
    The Government Inspector

    Reminder! If you haven’t seen this play yet, hurry up! It closes on August 24th.

    The heads of a small Russian village are horrified to learn that a
    government inspector is coming to make a thorough visit to the town.
    Even worse, he may be in disguise. Mayor Anton Antonovich (Peter
    Michael Goetz) knows his town isn’t an exemplary place – the hospital
    was built the same size as its model, the school principal is
    frightened of his teachers and geese are being raised in the courtroom
    jury box – so he proclaims that the government inspector must be found
    and dealt with. A case of mistaken identity leads them to Ivan
    Alexandreyevich Hlestakov (Broadway vet Hunter Foster),
    a down-on-his-luck-and-finances card player on his way to visit his
    father. He unexpectedly finds himself the object of everyone’s
    affections, getting bribes thrown at him from the men of the town and
    much, much more from the women. -Andrew Newman

    Click HERE to read the full review.

    7:30pm, The Guthrie, 818 2nd Ave S., Downtown Minneapolis, $29-$59

  • Reefer Madness

    I was patiently standing in the ticket line at the Fringe Festival. Then the middle aged man right in front of me abruptly took off his pants. When he began to twist and turn and fidget with his belt, I nervously stepped back. Personally, I didn’t think that when I signed up to cover the Fringe Fest it meant I would be within tickling distance of another man’s ball sack. The throng of theatre goers at the Bryant Lake Bowl hardly even noticed the disrobing right in front of them. I guess this was just normal Fringey behavior. I took a long hearty gulp off my beer. Then I realized that the man was only taking the lower half of his pants off. He was wearing those camping pants that can convert into shorts with a quick flick of a zipper.

    "Oh, that’s much better," the man said, refreshed. He folded the calf parts of his pants and tucked them into a large backpack that was slung over his shoulder. The man was a theater nomad. He purchased an Ultimate Pass Ticket and was travelling across the Twin Cities attending as many shows as possible.

    "I’ve been to forty shows this week," he boasted to me. "I’ve attended three today!" I took another pull of my beer because I had nothing to say to the guy about the Fringe Festival. The brain trust at The Rake chose me to review some shows during the city-wide acting festival. I think they like me because I’m a bit rough around the edges. I’m the kind of guy who enjoys hockey fights. It’s not exactly Shakespeare.

    As we waited in line, the man lectured me extensively on the nuances of the different venues in the Festival. He gushed about this Fringe superstar named Alexis and how she has once again taken the Festival by storm. Then the man killed our pleasant conversation by asking me what my interests were in the highly regarded performing arts festival.

    "Ugh, I chose the Bryant Lake Bowl Theater because it sold beer," I said rather bluntly. "The BBQ pork sandwiches are awesome, too."

    His face turned bitter. He ruffled his limbs like a pissed off peacock. When theater patrons talk about their appreciation for stage acting, pork sandwiches usually aren’t a factor. By the time we got to the box office, the show had sold out. Without a single hesitation, the Fringe Fest Freak whipped out a map and a showtime schedule. He moved quickly through the bustling restaurant/bar/bowling alley/theatre and was out the door towards the next gig. I had no idea what to do. So in the sake of good journalism, I put down my pen and notebook and went bowling.

    The next night, I attended Reefer Madness: The Musical. The pretentious theatre crowd from the night before was gone. The bar was now filled with an alternative class of theater folks: stoners, rockers, and dipshits. Needless to say, I fit right in.

    As I waited at the bar for my sister Becky, this Genghis Khan looking mofo thumbed through a well worn novel next to me. Then a dude with a spiky pink mohawk and a "Punisher" T-shirt saddled up next to him. They fist bumped, got their tickets, and went into the theatre. In a nutshell, that was the true beauty of the Fringe Festival. It was an awesome collection of local and national talent that had been brought down to the street level for everyone to enjoy.

    When a rolly polly man with a giant white beard waltzed in to the Bryant Lake Bowl, I knew it would be a good night. With his rosy red cheeks and Hawaiian shirt, he looked like Santa on vacation. He heartily back slapped several patrons and they all moved into the theater. My sister and I took our seats in the back.

    The musical remake of the infamous anti-marijuana movie was being put on by a local Twin Cities youth acting company. There was a funky house band kicking out jams on the wing of the stage. Although the play was about the evils of smoking weed, the majority of the patrons were thoroughly stoned. Everywhere I looked people was munching on heaping plates of nachos. Midway through the play, people started letting out cat calls. They playfully hooted and hollered at all the righteous anti-drug rhetoric in the script. When an actor sang the line, "We will bring down jazz musicians and immigrants!" the place bristled with good humored outrage.

    The play ended with classic Fringe flair: President Roosevelt performed a death row pardon on a young dope fiend and girls danced in bikinis.We left the quaint theater and headed back to the bar. A long line had formed for the next dramatic performance. Obscure hip hop music bumped out of the Bryant Lake Bowl sound system and washed over the patrons anxiously waiting for the box office to open. My sister and I had no idea what was showing next, but that didn’t matter at all. We ordered two more beers and got right back in line. Who knew theater could be so much fun?

  • Doomtree by Doomtree

    It seems sometimes like every debut rap album is long-awaited, highly anticipated. We heard the usual phrases a couple weeks ago on Muja Messiah‘s premier release ("They said this would never get done…I made it happen. I was part-time hustlin’, now I’m full-time rappin’ "). Likewise, in the liner notes to their new CD, the Doomtree crew informs us this project has ‘been a long time coming.’ That phrase is repeated verbatim on the hook of "Let Me Tell You, Baby," and echoes throughout various songs on the album. "So coming soon to a college town near you/here we are DTR/holla atcha rap group," Mictlan, one of the collective’s five emcees, intones on the lead-off track.

    And indeed, there has been hype. After P.O.S.’s second solo album made waves in 2006 as The Next Big Thing in Minneapolis hip-hop, a palpable bit of excitement presaged this crew’s collective release. As a group they’ve been gaining steam around town, playing to packed crowds, and even scoring a slot this last spring to open for the Wu-Tang Clan.

    So here it is! The first collaborative album featuring all the members of Doomtree.

    Maybe we should have waited a little longer.

    It’s a bad sign that the five solo tracks (each MC is given one showcase piece) are five of the best six songs on the album. ("Kid Gloves," with Mictlan and Dessa, is the only tandem track to crack the shortlist.) When it comes to collaboration, the group fails to find any real cohesion. Three or four or five rappers might all appear over a single beat, but they are unable to transcend their personal styles to become a unit. There isn’t much interplay between the rappers; rather it typically goes verse-hook-verse-hook-verse-hook. Listening to them is kind of like watching the 2004 USA men’s basketball team at the Olympics – a bunch of obviously talented individuals that are unable to work together. (Hey, guess what’s on TV…)

    Certainly there are moments of virtuosity on Doomtree.

    Cecil Otter is able to devise rhyme schemes more twisted and intricate than anything he’s previously created, and he sounds natural spitting them out – one doesn’t get a sense that he’s impressed with how clever he is. And the production is consistent; never exactly innovative, but never sinking a track down, either. Which is exactly what you want, because the beats should never outshine the rhymes on a rap album. MK Larada, Turbo Nemesis, Paper Tiger, and Maker display a variety of styles, ranging from jazzy-cool to hard-rock-hard.

    The most consistently outstanding member is Dessa, the collective’s lone female member. Her solo piece, "Sadie Hawkins," is by far the most successful part of the album. She’s the only one who’s able to morph her style to a given beat, to curve her talent to a track. In most cases, too, her lyrics are the most on point, the cleverest, and spoken with the most original delivery. Her solo album is highly anticipated.

    But these strengths are overwhelmed by the fact that, by and large, no one is really saying anything. The words rhyme, but only sometimes match; many songs are more akin to polished freestyle sessions than to finished written songs. The first verse to open up the album features an impressively complex rhyme scheme:

    "We work the mics and rehearse the lines that life furthers/
    and curse the vines that you might have heard your rumors from/
    like it’s me verse a vice or vice versa/
    then I returned to the life that Christ nurtured"

    Say it aloud and it sounds cool, but if you try to actually understand what it means, you may run into some issues. It may be a debut album, but it’s not a rookie album – these guys have all been around for years, playing shows and releasing EPs. So it’s a little disconcerting to hear Doomtree repeatedly rhyme their way into oblivion. Ultimately, the album is defined by lyrics so disconnected that they become abstract, so abstract that they deteriorate and become indecipherable.

  • Sawatdee and Hare Krishna

    Sharon Mollerus/Creative Commons

    Sawtdee

    To commemorate the lives lost in
    last year’s bridge collapse, Supenn Harrison, owner of the Sawatdee
    restaurants, has invited all of Minnesota’s Buddhist monks to participate in a
    commemorative service and alms
    offering in the parking lot of
    Sawatdee Bar & Café, 118 N. 4th St., Minneapolis next Saturday,
    August 16. The ceremony will be followed by a food offering and lunch, and the public is invited to attend.

    No donation is required, but Supenn says people are encouraged to bring gifts of dry foods, fresh
    fruit, or cash for the monks – you can give individual gifts to each
    monk, or make a donation to one or more of the temples that will be
    represented. Supenn expects 30-50 monks to participate, representing as many as
    four Laotian Buddhist temples, three Thai temples, and one each serving
    communities from Cambodia, Sri Lanka and possibly Vietnam.

    Lunch is at 11 a.m. – people are welcome to bring food to
    share, but Supenn says she will also provide plenty of food from the Café. The
    press release notes that the one can gain the "fruits
    of merit by offering meals to monks: one will have the five ennobling virtues; longevity, good
    complexion, happiness, strength and sagacity."

    Here’s the schedule of events:

    10:00 am: Requesting the Five Precepts and Sangkadana Offering
    Ceremony

    10:15 am: Buddhajayamangala chanting (The Buddha’s
    Auspicious Victories) by the monks

    10:30 am: Alms offering to the Monks

    11:00 am: Food offering & Lunch for all

    12:15 pm: Blessing by the Monks

    Dharma

    The young woman fronting the little band of Hare Krishna
    chanters outside the Wedge Co-op handed me a flyer for "Dharma," a show on
    Wednesday, August 20, 7 pm at the
    University of Minnesota’s Coffman Memorial Theater. The show, presented by
    Krishna Culture Tour, is billed as "blissful entertainment from the Krishna
    culture of India, performed by an international cast." But it was the food
    angle that caught my eye – the website for the event says that "at the end of the show, guests are served delicious vegetarian
    refreshments of savories, sweets and nectar drink in the lobby, created by
    gourmet Hare Krishna chefs. The food is prepared with love and is served as a
    complimentary gift to all who attend." Tickets are $15 for adults, $10 for
    seniors, students and children. For more details, go to http://dharma.eventbrite.com

  • August 12, 2008: Rain/Bush On The Beach