The Rake Magazine

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  • Develop a Conscience, Get Help, or Toss the Dice

    BOOKS & AUTHORS
    Paul Krugman

    New York Times columnist and Princeton economist Paul Krugman could have chosen a better title for his new book than The Conscience of a Liberal, which he cribbed from the late Senator Paul Wellstone. (Wellstone himself was riffing off Barry Goldwater’s 1964 book, The Conscience of a Conservative.)
    Krugman’s book is less a manifesto of liberal ethics than it is a
    discourse on practical economics. He takes for granted Wellstone’s
    moral arguments for socioeconomic equality and concentrates on an
    empirical defense of liberal policy. Like Wellstone’s book, Krugman’s
    is unlikely to change conservative minds. But Krugman’s shrewd and
    accessible arguments give liberal readers a tool set for arguing points
    themselves. If you agreed with Wellstone but didn’t quite know why,
    read Krugman and you will. —Matt Bartel

    7 p.m., Temple Israel, 2324 Emerson Ave. S., Minneapolis; 612-822-4611; free.

    Shampoo or Carcinogenic Slop?

    Stacy Malkan, author of Not Just a Pretty Face, will be reading
    from her book at the U of M tonight. The effect, probably,
    will be a chorus of indignant gasps from a congregation of
    eco-conscious consumers. Malkan’s book chronicles all the harmful
    chemicals found in everyday cosmetics, like lead in our lipstick, coal
    tar in our shampoo, and dioxane in baby soap. What
    the … ? So long as it resides in Minneapolis any such forum must also include Horst Rechelbacher. (Other panelists include Jeanne Rizzo, RN; Jane Houlihan, V.P., Environmental Working Group and architect of the Skin Deep Cosmetics Database; and Lindsay Dahl, coordinator for the Minnesota Healthy Legacy Coalition.) Rechelbacher, of course, is founder of both Aveda and Intelligent Nutrients. Read Hook & Eye. —Christy DeSmith

    7 p.m., Mayo Memorial Auditorium, 425 Delaware St. S.E., Minneapolis, 612-624-9459; free, but advanced registration required.

     

    DVD RELEASE
    Help!

    “So these are the famous Beatles,” says one of the many
    British stiff-upper-lip types in Help!, their second go-round with director Richard
    Lester    . This ’65 effort concerns the Fab Four on the run from pug-faced Leo
    McKern    , who is a kind of Indian spiritual leader with a Cockney accent, eager
    to get Ringo’s holy mood ring. Watching Help! makes one marvel at the
    complexity that was the Beatles—here they’re fresh-faced youngsters eager
    to tell an incomprehensible joke, race through the London streets, and sing a
    song. But in just four years they’d become bearded, justifiably frustrated and
    angry with themselves and the world, and still creating the incredible pop
    songs that would move the world. —Peter Schilling


    DVD Deluxe Edition, available
    Nov 06, 2007.

     

    FAMILY
    World’s Biggest Playgroup

    I don’t write about children-specific events too terribly often. Truth be told, I hold firmly to the notion that art transcends age — that we all interpret according to experience — young or old. Of course, what do I know. I don’t even have children. And as I spout my impractical drivel and decry Disneyland, those around me line up for the Worlds Biggest Playgroup. Moms, grab your children and join Babytalk magazine at the Mall of America today for a day of fun activities for you and your children: live children’s entertainment, free Kindermusik classes, and giveaways. Park your stroller (which is also free), and spend the day. Those of you who are particluarly ambitious can get there early (8:45 a.m.) for a one-hour StrollerFit class. Learn how to turn that stroller into a portable fitness machine.

    10 a.m. – 2 p.m., Mall of America, Rotunda–located on the east side of the Mall between Sears and Bloomingdale’s, 60 East Broadway (at the crossroads of Interstate 494 and Highway 77), Bloomington; free.

     

    MUSIC
    Toss of the Dice — I’ll bet they’ve never heard that before

    Brooklyn band Black Dice is in town this evening, promoting their latest album, Load Blown. "The beats drip and roll, tar-pit voices sing into an oilcan, and the guitars crank like a calliope. Some tunes crackle and burble like submerged television; others bump and click along like a summer jam concert series from another dimension." Well, if it’s anything like this fabulous description, I’m there. Whew! Shoal Kodiak will be opening.

    7 p.m., SooVAC, 2640 Lyndale Ave. S., Minneapolis; 612-871-2263; $10/$15.

  • Drinking on Borrowed Time

    For his fifth birthday, in February of 1993, my older son received a watch from his grandparents. It was a black Timex with a rectangular face, digital read-out, and several complicated buttons for setting the date, time, and alarm. Waterproof, shatterproof. He wore it everywhere, including the bathtub and bed.

    Andrew was a child with a precise and refined sense of time. He loved it. Clocks, hourglasses, sun dials. His favorite TV show was 60 Minutes, because it began with a wonderfully loud, ticking stopwatch that featured real moving parts.

    April arrived. A Sunday, damp with a yellow-tinted sky. It was late afternoon before we realized somehow — an inconsistency: some radio announcer’s "top of the hour" newscast or a store that said it closed at 5 o’clock shuttered by 4 — it was Daylight Savings Time. We’d been lagging. I quickly prepared dinner, a ridiculous effort to keep our kids on schedule, while their father re-set all the clocks. As we sat at the table, he noticed Andrew’s watch, held out his hand, and said only, "Let me see it."

    Our son unstrapped the watch and gave it over. But when his father started working the buttons, changing the time, Andrew began to scream. We tried to explain, both of us. But the facts became muddled; or maybe we never truly understood ourselves. Why did time have to shift time around? Who benefited exactly? Where was that hour we’d lost and would we ever really get it back?

    Andrew ran from the table, crying, and locked himself in the bathroom. We went after him — his father, his brother, and I. "Come out," we told him. "We’ll put your watch back the way it was." But there were only hiccups and sobs and whispered words coming from the other side of the door.

    "What’s he saying?" I asked Max, my younger son and Andrew’s only confidant.

    Max was a sturdy, spectacled three-year-old. Sober and wise. "He says," Max told us patiently, " that he can’t come out because he’s never going to know what time it is again."

    There has not been a Daylight Savings Time since that I haven’t thought of that glowing, quickly descending dusk. I’ll admit to being unsettled myself by the whimsical manipulation of time. It takes all meaning from something I typically treat as fact (it’s 6 o’clock, 7 out east) and makes my various plans and schedules seem ridiculous. Like some childish attempt to make order of the world.

    Autumn’s time change is always easier, though, than the one in April. I mourn the missing hour in spring but feel relieved when it’s returned to us. Or maybe we’re only borrowing it for six months. In any case, on Sunday — that 25-hour day when the time debt was brokered or re-paid — I lit a row of candles and opened a bottle of M. Chapoutier Belleruche Côtes-Du-Rhône 2005. This is a wine as balanced as Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony. Nearly metrical in its fruit, acid, and sugar composition, the Belleruche is elegantly structured but light in the mouth, neither too dry nor too sweet. A blend of Grenache and Syrah, it is soft and rubylike. And it is a reasonable Sunday night wine: $13 a bottle, with an alcohol content of 12.5%.

    Andrew — now nearly 20 — was visiting. Six-foot-four and bearded, he remains quiet and wary, unsettled by changing clocks but comforting in his stoic resolve. To spend the extra hour with him seemed right. So I poured a couple inches of wine for each of us and together, we drank.

  • Nothing At All, Really, Like A Bruce Springsteen Song

    Remember that time you threw your heart from the window of a speeding car?

    Was it burning?

    No, not that time. It was just heavy, a sodden wad of plumbed meat. It felt like a water balloon coated with grease. It couldn’t have weighed more than a softball, and it bounced once on the shoulder of the highway and skipped off into the ditch. Some kid who was out fucking around found it the next day, put it in a plastic grocery sack, and took it to school for show-and-tell. An alarmed teacher confiscated your heart and hauled it off to the principal’s office.

    The principal was a wattled walrus of a man, and he called the county sheriff, who came down, took one peek in that plastic sack, and had a pretty damn good idea what he was looking at, even as he wasn’t quite sure what to do with it.

    Within 24 hours posters started appearing on telephone poles around town, which is how you eventually got your heart back, although at the time you weren’t so sure you even wanted it back.

    Remember that dinky town? What a strange place. What a strange time in our lives that was. The town was so small that it didn’t have a newspaper or radio station, and the closest city that had either was almost forty miles away and had been pretending for half a century that the little town didn’t exist.

    The town had a serious inferiority complex going back almost a hundred years, and things had gotten so bad that there was a vocal cult of locals that was convinced they were living in the hallucination of a senile god. Somebody had made a trip to a big city in the north some years earlier and had returned with a state road map on which the town was nowhere to be found, further convincing many people that they, their families, pets, cars, homes, neighborhoods, and entire community did not, in fact, exist.

    A dwindling group of optimists formed the Existence Party and ran a full slate of candidates for local offices. Every one of them was soundly defeated. Yet still the town carried on as best it could; the residents dutifully paid their property taxes, sent their children to school, maintained their homes and lawns, and –for the most part, anyway– obeyed local laws.

    High school graduation became known as Vanishing. Almost without exception graduates fled town immediately with whatever memories they had left, never to return. Newcomers, even relative newcomers –anybody, really, who had not lived there all their lives– tended to suffer from gradually worsening memory problems, particularly regarding how they’d come to live in the town in the first place.

    You were definitely in this camp. When I first met you you no longer had the foggiest idea what you were doing in that place or why you had moved there. You insisted it was the most boring place you’d ever been, and you had the odd feeling that you were being held hostage. More and more often you felt like you were lost the instant you left your house. Often enough, in fact, you were lost even when you were in your house.

    The streets of the town had become a sort of labyrinth to you, and you often found yourself unwittingly driving in circles, sometimes for what seemed like hours at a time. The streets all seemed to either dead end or circle back on themselves.

    Sometimes at night you would park at one of these dead ends and shine your car lights out into the seemingly endless scrub brush beyond the city limits. You said you would see dark shapes moving around out there, and the occasional flash of yellow or red eyes captured in your headlights. Coyotes, you thought, or perhaps even wolves.

    It was the sense of captivity, the boredom, and the torment of your eroding memory that led you to throw your heart from the window of the speeding car. A woman had been driving, but you couldn’t remember her name or what she looked like. You retained a vague memory of being tormented by the woman’s incessant chatter.

    The day you retrieved your heart from the sheriff’s office, as you drove home with the plastic bag rattling on the passenger seat, you realized that your eyesight was rapidly fading. By the time you got home you were almost completely blind and had a difficult time finding your way into the house.

    You remembered that much, at least for a few days. Your house, you said, was dark, and you could barely make out the various familiar shapes in your kitchen. You could hear the hum of the refrigerator. You felt with your hands and located the counter next to the sink, and there you deposited your heart in its grocery sack.

    You were so tired, uncommonly tired was the phrase you used, and you suspected that you might be dying. How long, you wondered, could a man live without a heart? And how long had it been since you flung it from the window of the speeding car? Twenty-four hours? Forty-eight? You really had no idea. There was, however, very little doubt about this much: you were now almost completely blind. You were disconsolate. Words were beginning to break apart in your head; they had been slowing way down for quite some time, but now they were truly starting to disintegrate. There was a moment in which you said you were seized with a powerful longing to hear Louis Armstrong. A few snippets of a tune jerked momentarily between your ears and then just as quickly evaporated.

    At some point you fell into a deep sleep, perhaps even a coma. When you regained consciousness you were still sitting at your kitchen table, and you said you could hear your heart stirring in the plastic sack. Rattling, initially, and then jerking around.

    When I found you you had your heart in your hands, cradled like a rabbit.

    Do you remember the rest? Do you remember how we escaped together, and how, even slumped against the passenger window and blind and barely conscious, you mumbled that our getaway in the dead of night was "just like a Bruce Springsteen song"?

    Do you remember how I cut up your heart with a steak knife and fed it back to you one bite at a time?

    Can you remember that, baby?

    Can you please try to tell me what happened next?

  • Rendezvous

    I am experimenting here with this post but I assume you can click on this link and watch one of the most famous underground car films ever made.

    In case you are wondering, the French at the beginning of the video says, "the film you are about to see was made without any trickery or speeding up."

  • Shampoo or Carcinogenic Slop?

    Stacy Malkan, author of Not Just a Pretty Face, will be reading from her book at the U of M tomorrow evening. The effect, probably, will be a chorus of indignant gasps from a congregation of eco-conscious consumers. Malkan’s book chronicles all the harmful chemicals found in everyday cosmetics, like lead in our lipstick, coal tar in our shampoo, and dioxane in baby soap. What
    the … ?

    So long as it resides in Minneapolis any such forum must also include Horst Rechelbacher. (Other panelists include Jeanne Rizzo, RN; Jane Houlihan, V.P., Environmental Working Group and architect of the Skin Deep Cosmetics Database; and Lindsay Dahl, coordinator for the Minnesota Healthy Legacy Coalition.) Rechelbacher, of course, is founder of both Aveda and Intelligent Nutrients. I’m a fan of both product lines, even if my pocketbook mandates the occasional Suave purchase.

    Random aside: Some of my favorite local legends concern cash-strapped students at the Aveda Institute getting busted for using non-Aveda products. True story: My best friend from high school, who studied massage, was walking to class one day when a teacher approached and said scornfully: “Do I smell a synthetic fragrance on you?” She was kicked out for the rest of the day. You’d think that, for $20,000+ per year, she could have worn whatever the hell she wants. I recently asked my stylist, who also graduated from Aveda, whether these stories were true. Her response was an emphatic “yes!”

    Helpful aside: If you want to checkup on your favorite cosmetic, Rizzo’s database is quite helpful. As it turns out, my favorite face lotion, Neutrogena Original Formula Anti-Wrinkle Cream SPF 15 (with Retinol A), received a “moderate hazard” rating and includes ingredients linked to cancer and developmental/reproductive toxicity. Yikes! And who knew Neutrogena was still engaging in animal testing! Fooled again by another eco-feigny name, I suppose.

  • Death of the Imagination: Exhibit A


    I was going to comment on the recent article on American Imagination ["The Death & Life of American Imagination"], but I just couldn’t think of anything to say.

    Jeff Miletich, Columbia Heights
    Letter of the Month

  • Objection to Juno Review


    Nasty, nasty, nasty. Rob Nelson’s review of Diablo Cody’s new movie Knocked Up [editor’s note: I believe the writer is referrring to Juno] really stinks. Would that we all would have a past that
    would bear scrutiny. His snide harping about Cody’s stripper past just
    goes to show that white male priviledge and the double sexual standard
    is alive and well. Maybe she is a pain in the ass-I don’t know, but it
    seems to me that this review had to much of the "I haven’t made it and
    you did" in it.

    C. Carlson, Minneapolis
    Letter

  • You Can't Sue City Hall

    John Ashcroft, the predecessor of Alberto Gonzales and
    former title holder of “Craziest Attorney General since John Mitchell” has an op-ed
    piece     in today’s NY Times. In it he argues that the telecommunication
    companies who provided access for the Bush administration’s illegal wiretaps
    should be held immune from lawsuits.

    As he says, “Whatever one feels about the underlying
    intelligence activities or the legal basis on which they were initially
    established, it would be unfair and contrary to the interests of the United
    States to allow litigation that tries to hold private telecommunications
    companies liable for them.”

    I can see his point. Because if the administration can
    blithely get away with breaking the law, why shouldn’t the companies who helped
    the do it get away with it too? It wouldn’t be fair to stick them with the
    blame just because they didn’t listen to their mother when she said, “Well, just
    because George or Dick or John or Alberto jumps off the bridge, that doesn’t
    mean you have to jump off the bridge, too.”

    It’s easy to see why Ashcroft is advocating the immunity.
    After all, since leaving the Attorney General’s office, he’s made his living as
    a consultant—and op-ed writer—for, you guessed it, telecom companies.

    But, whatever his motives, I’m going to have to agree with
    him on this one, although not for the reasons he cites. No, revealing
    procedures of our intelligence community during the discovery process is not
    the most dangerous possible outcome of these lawsuits. (I mean, c’mon, do you
    think the guys who outed Valerie Plame really give a damn about that?) Not granting immunity from lawsuits to the
    telecoms is far more dangerous than letting the lawsuits proceed for the reason
    that this suit would inevitably end up in the Supreme Court.

    Imagine what would happen there. If you can’t, let me help
    you. What if the Court decided that it’s alright for people to break black-letter
    law if the president says so? Because if it came to that, that’s the only logical way to let the
    telecoms off the legal hook.

    And if we had the highest court deciding that it’s okay to
    break the law, pretty soon we’re gonna be hearing things like “Freedom is
    Slavery” or “War is Peace” or “Ignorance is Strength.”

    It’s not that far fetched. After all, Big Brother is already
    watching.

  • John Hines Out at KTLK

    John Hines’ 17 year-run with Clear Channel and what Clear Channel was before it was Clear Channel ended this morning — a Monday, go figure — when he was told he was being removed from his morning job at KTLK (100.3-FM). Hines was a standard at Clear Channel’s country music K102 until this past March when he shifted over — by his choice — to add a little mainstream professional sheen to ratings-deprived KTLK, an all right-wing talk station.

    Hines shrugged off the move when reached by phone around noon today. "It’s a part of the business. I accept that. They said we’re going in a different direction, and I get that."

    He said his six-month non-compete and six-month severance will tie him over, and until then he will happily entertain offers from other stations in the market. The most obvious of those being KSTP AM 1500, where rumors are swirling about their interest in KFAN’s Dan Barreiro — most likely for afternoon drive, were Barreiro to leave Clear Channel, and were Joe Soucheray agree to earlier tee-times — and where the usual, often clueless "experts" believe KSTP could use help in mornings.

    AM-1500’s program director, Steve Konrad, hadn’t heard about the Hines move when I called. "Hines? Really?" Konrad avoided any direct mention of Barreiro other than to state the obvious. "He’s a talent". On any possible interest in Hines, he said, "A well known, popular host? You always have to be open to someone like that."

    We are awaiting a response to our call to Hines’ boss, Steve Versnick.

    The first question to him being, "What new direction?" KTLK was originally pitched as a 21st century version of WCCO. Almost immediately it took an entirely familiar, hard right-wing turn and has stayed there despite consistently disappointing ratings.

    The hiring of Hines suggested to some that the station, then supervised by regional boss, Mick Anselmo, was beginning an evolution into something more mainstream. Another rumor floating in the wind last week was that Anselmo’s replacement, Mike Crusham, had decided the time had finally come to "blow up" the struggling FM talk experiment, supposedly to go in that more WCCO-like direction, with bona fide news.

    The problem there being that bona fide news would require bona fide reporters out on bona fide streets, something Clear Channel has been unwilling to do until now and, with the entire 1200-station company about to return to private ownership, it seems even less likely to bother with in the future. (Reporters cost money, and separating themselves from Hines’ hefty salary — likely in the $250K range — is an early example of 5% to 8% expense cutting expected across the Clear Channel empire.)

    More likely — another bit of gabble on the grapevine — is moving comparatively cheap Dan Conry into morning drive and dropping yet another (cheap) syndicated act, Glenn Beck, etc, into the 8 to 11 slot.

     

     

     

  • Water Wars

    First, it was Alice Waters who said NO to bottled water at Chez Panisse. Suddenly, something that seemed so lovely and useful (fresh, clean water wherever I go!) became downright evil, and almost … dirty.

    Fast Company’s piece outlined much of the concerns and issues held by conservationists.

    Restauranteurs have been stepping lightly it seems to me. On one hand, they want to serve the guest a quality product. On the other hand, they want to give the guest what they want, or don’t want. And on the last hand, they want to make money: can you push bottled water and still court a return visit from the ethical guest?

    It seems there is a sparkly idea on the front: house-bottled water. In a Gourmet Weekly e-newletter, I read about a restaurant that is now selling all-you-can-drink house-bottled water for $2.50. And they’re not alone. But this isn’t any old tap water, this is highly filtered tap water, bottled with connsumate care. It would never, ever be just tap-filled in the wait-station by a harried server … no, never.

    Is there anyone in town doing this? yet?

    Check out what the food cognoscenti from across the country are saying about it.