One of life’s great truths—one that we desperately seek to avoid with proverbs and catechisms and even magazine articles—is that beneath its surface lies complexity. Our beloved fictions of heroes and villains crumble with scrutiny, leaving only convolution, shifting meanings, and unstable realities. The same is true of things. Even the simplest object has its … Read more
When I was a kid, I wanted to grow up to be a lot of things. I wanted to be Carol Burnett. I wanted to be a trapeze artist, performing death-defying loop de loops high above the crowds while wearing a dazzling bikini made entirely of rubies and sapphires. I wanted to be a kindergarten … Read more
As a relative newcomer to the Rake family, I was reassured and gratified by fresh research asserting that you, the average Rake reader, are not much of a couch potato. Or if you are, your eyeballs are fixed to a book or magazine rather than a TV screen. The numbers say twenty-six percent of you … Read more
A few months ago, while walking along the Stone Arch Bridge with a friend from Manhattan, the bright blue Guthrie Theater looming above us, I realized that Jean Nouvel’s big new thing might be one of the few places in Minneapolis that would actually impress a New Yorker. So we wandered into one of its … Read more
Do you know who wrote your favorite film? If the names Sidney Howard, Frances Goodrich, and Joseph Stefano fill you with a sense of admiration, then congratulations on recognizing what most of us consider trivial: These are the people who wrote the classics Gone With The Wind, It’s A Wonderful Life, and Psycho. Even among … Read more
I have often thought that the Forty Martyrs of Sebasteia should be the patron saints of Minnesota. Never mind that they are most likely mythical; they can stand for all the other martyrs the Romans executed in the first three centuries A.D. And the myth is certainly appropriate to our chilly state. The Forty, it … Read more
I never expected to find love at a roadside market. In Florida, no less. But there, down an aisle from stacks of bright oranges and piles of juicy grapefruit, was a small, plastic tub of guacamole so smooth and delicious, so perfectly spiced, that I fell head over heels. It’s uncommon to find guacamole that … Read more
The definitive sound of the North Country remains elusive, even as the Twin Ports become glutted with great live music venues and bands worth checking out. Is Duluth a folk music town, or a hotbed of alternative rock? We have no idea, but straddling those genres is Trampled By Turtles—a band loosely related to a … Read more
Mahler’s romantic, moody, and sometimes maudlin compositions were among the final artistic statements of the nineteenth century, a goodbye to all that and a wary greeting to a new century. In the symphonic song cycle The Song of the Earth, he sets themes from Chinese poetry about the end of things to music that moves … Read more
A decade ago, Mark Linkous almost joined the long list of self-medicating rockers found dead in hotel rooms; he overdosed in a hotel bathroom and passed out with his legs pinned underneath him for fourteen hours. When doctors finally straightened out his limbs, he had a heart attack and was declared medically dead—if only for … Read more