The Rake Magazine

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  • And Now This

    The King was widely regarded as a complete jackass: a foolish man who traded his Kingdom and his wondrous gifts for a chain of muffler shops.

    The Queen had left him immediately, and was followed in short order by his retinue (for he had, in fact, once had a retinue). A few desperate and greasy palace cooks and a handful of stable hands were all that remained of his old life, and these characters he depended on to do his dirty work. There was always much dirty work to be done around the muffler shops.

    Who knows where the muffler idea came from? The King himself didn’t have the foggiest notion anymore. All he could remember was that he’d been drunk one night on a riverboat casino, so drunk that he’d not only seemingly lost his magic touch but had apparently abused even the privileges of a king, and he’d been forcibly removed from the boat for urinating in a public drinking fountain.

    When he eventually sobered up in a Dubuque hotel room he had the realization that he’d lost all interest in being King. Even the gold business had become tiresome to him; when you could turn everything you touched into gold, gold entirely lost all significance and value. The whole formal world of the court bored him to tears. He hated all that ridiculous velvet and the snug knickers and, especially, the strange and foppish hats he always seemed to find himself wearing.

    When he found himself penniless in Dubuque he was pleased to discover that he felt absolutely nothing in the way of desperation or regret. If anything, in fact, he experienced something that felt almost like serenity.

    Who knows? Perhaps, ultimately, he had been inspired by his older brother, who’d walked out from under his kingdom to launch a hamburger empire. All he knew was that the muffler business—lark though it might initially have been—had eventually demonstrated (and demonstrated conclusively) that he hadn’t lost his old touch after all. Yes, he’d showed them all in the end, Midas had. A man could make boodles of cash in the muffler racket.—Brad Zellar

  • Psoriasis Is Not Contagious!

    “In the Altogether” by Colin Covert [cover story, February] contained an unfortunate claim that Covert had once “picked up a wretched case of psoriasis from the slimy sauna in the Detroit YMCA.” In fact, psoriasis is not contagious. Researchers posit that a combination of genetic and environmental factors cause psoriasis to occur in an individual. Stress or overexposure to the sun are examples of what may lead to the outbreak of psoriasis in someone with a genetic predisposition. Psoriasis is not “picked up” in saunas or from anywhere or anyone else.

    Clinton Dietrich
    Minneapolis

  • You Know, There's a "Rake, Iowa"

    I was raised on a small family farm in central North Dakota but have been a resident of Minnesota since I married in 1991. Since then I’ve lived in cities and towns varying in population, and I have never been able to understand one thing many Minnesotans seem to have in common. This one thing is the apparent need to look down their noses and belittle North Dakota and her inhabitants. Why? What has North Dakota done to merit such regard from Minnesota? Yes it is a sparsely populated state. Yes it is cold and windy and has mosquitoes. Yes the economy needs a boost. Why do you feel the need to publish something that would be more injurious to North Dakota’s image? Does The Rake feel threatened in some way that it sees fit to advertise North Dakota’s difficulties? Shame on you for sneering at the state’s attempts to boost its economy, and for trivializing its successes. I find articles such as yours personally insulting as well. It insults the intelligence, hard work, values, and choices of my parents, grandparents and great-grandparents. I couldn’t imagine a better way to have grown up, and I am fiercely proud of my North Dakota heritage. One thing that North Dakota and Minnesota actually do have in common is that The Rake is a tool used to spread manure.

    Brenda Reister
    Waconia

  • Not So Fast, Nodak

    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.”

    John Hoff
    Appleton, MN

  • North Dakota Calls Back

    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

  • Laughing 'Til We Cry

    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.

    Dave Rasley
    Tempe, AZ

  • Too Hot To Handle

    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.

    L.K. Hanson
    Minneapolis

  • Santino Fontana

    Enough already with the fat, bearded, balding guys playing Hamlet! The Prince of Denmark is twenty or so years old. While we certainly understand that anyone cast in the role–perhaps the most storied in all of English-language theater–should have something of a track record, Hamlet just doesn’t work when its titular character is middle-aged and sporting a pronounced paunch. Enter Santino Fontana, the twenty-three-year-old who’s been cast in the role for the Guthrie’s book-ending production at its Vineland Place theater. Not only is Fontana young enough to meet whatever romanticized notions we have about the role, but he’s also got actor-ly cred. Just two years out of college (he’s a graduate of the Guthrie Theater/University of Minnesota B.F.A. program), Fontana already has appeared in Guthrie productions of Six Degrees of Separation, Death of a Salesman, and As You Like It. Of course, Hamlet will expose and test him in an entirely different way. We caught up with Fontana to gauge his thoughts and fears about the role.

    hat was your first encounter with this play?
    I hadn’t read it, really, until my first year of college, which is sad. It was the year 2000, and Simon Russell Beale’s tour came through. [Beale arrived by way of London’s Royal National Theater’s touring production.] We studied the play in preparation for the show.

    In that production, Beale seemed far too old to pull off Prince Hamlet. Where do you put Hamlet’s age?
    Well, that’s the question, isn’t it? I think it depends upon which text you’re reading. We know that the actor who originally played him was well into his thirties. In most modern editions, there’s a line in the play that makes it sound like he’s thirty years old. But the word “youth” or “young” is used so much in the play. And when Shakespeare wrote this, if this man was a prince and thirty and unmarried and still in college, something was terribly wrong. What we’re going with is that he’s twenty-three, twenty-two, twenty-one. He’s a kid off at school. He heard about his dad dying and had to come home.

    Who is the oldest guy you’ve ever seen play Hamlet?
    He [Beale] was it, to be honest. John Gielgud played it, what, three times, four times? The last time he played it he was in his forties, and I think he even said he was too old.

    So how terrified are you?
    Um, well, I mean… There was a guy in London who was twenty-three. And at the time, that was two or three years ago, he was believed to be the youngest to professionally play Hamlet. So I’m not alone. But, of course, it’s frightening. It’s frightening! It’s frightening! It’s frightening! And I’ve got to get this one right! I don’t want to disappoint this director, this audience, this theater community that’s been so good to me. I’m finding a lot of inspiration in the character. I mean, being told by a ghost you need to avenge your father’s death? He’s not there yet. He’s not ready. [Director Joe Dowling] has talked several times about having wanted to pick someone who could capture the insecurities of youth. He couldn’t have picked a more insecure youth.

    What about that giant etching on the side of the new Guthrie of George Grizzard, the actor who played Hamlet in the Guthrie’s first-ever production?
    How ominous is that? I was touring the new Guthrie and the woman leading the tour pointed up and said, “There’s George Grizzard.” It’s thirty feet high, huge! She just pointed and said, “You’ve got some huge shoes to fill.” And I’m just stuck asking: Me? Are you sure?

  • Greta Pratt

    For years, photographer Greta Pratt considered herself a New Yorker. As a Pulitzer-nominated documentary photographer whose works hang in museums including the Smithsonian and the National Museum of American Art, she was thoroughly enmeshed in the East Coast art world. And then she went to a hog-showing competition in Nebraska. “I looked around me and realized that I looked just like everyone else there,” she said. “I was clearly a Midwesterner. No one on the East Coast truly understands what that means.”

    Pratt grew up in Minneapolis and, along with her husband, Mark Peterson, shot photographs for City Pages and the United Press International during the early eighties. After moving to New York in 1986, she returned for extended trips across the Midwest, haunting small-town festivals and county fairs for her first photo book, In Search of the Corn Queen. Pratt was so dazzled by the experience that two more book projects were born, Using History, and her latest, Nineteen Lincolns. Both explore the cultural icons–flags, cowboys, statues of livestock–that make life in America unique (and sometimes bizarre). “I became interested in how history, real or otherwise, becomes part of group identity,” Pratt said.

    Group identity is tough to come by on a deserted island, but we think Pratt will do quite well when she gets stranded on The Rake’s favorite pile of sand. She’s got that Midwestern-practicality thing going for her, after all. Looking at this more as a jolly solo camping trip than an imposed exile, here’s what she’d bring:

    1. A hearty supply of s’mores fixings. And, of course, matches to light the fire that will melt the marshmallows.
    2. A case of oak-y, buttery, full-bodied Chardonnay. It’ll go well with fish.
    3. The collected works of Jean Baudrillard. Contemplating simulacra and simulation should keep me busy for a while.
    4. My new digital camera and solar-powered laptop with satellite Internet connection, so I can email photos of my new digs and blog my thoughts about simulation.
    5. The lyrics for “Kumbaya”… in case I forget the last verse.

    Greta Pratt presents a slide show discussion about her work at the Minnesota Center for Photography on March 14, in conjunction with her exhibition, Using History, at Gallery 13, on view March 14 – April 7. Pratt will sign books at a reception at the gallery on March 18, 6:30-10:00 p.m. 302 13th Ave. N.E., Minneapolis; 651-592-5503

  • "The Minnesota Moment"

    On a blustery Saturday night in January, one of the year’s most anticipated gallery shows opened in New York City. As winds off the Hudson River barreled eastward down the charmless streets of Chelsea, the haute monde of Manhattan and the wider world streamed in from the west, down to Gagosian, at the very end of Twenty-Fourth Street. They came to see Niagara, the new series of photographs by Alec Soth, who lives in Minneapolis and works in a studio just over the border in St. Paul.

    Gagosian anchors one end of what is acknowledged as the “power block” among galleries in Chelsea. There are other big names on this street, including Barbara Gladstone, Matthew Marks, Mary Boone, and Andrea Rosen, but Larry Gagosian, with his towering stature, silver hair, and tanned skin, looms largest. Less an art dealer than an art mogul, he’s a perennial figure on Art + Auction magazine’s annual “power list,” and the kind of man whom people fear, admire, and envy in equal measure. Chelsea is just one outpost of his empire, which includes galleries on the Upper East Side and in Beverly Hills and London.

    At thirty-thousand square feet, Gagosian is the size of a small museum, and it was mobbed for Soth’s opening. Plenty of people were glammed up in full-length minks, in gold leather jean jackets, in Gucci ascots. They pivoted expertly on glittering midnight-blue stilettos, flipped their expensively colored, perfectly ironed tresses—and also admired two dozen large-scale photographs that Soth made in and around a place that is a quintessentially American honeymoon destination. Throughout the reception, a clutch of people slowly drifted around the main gallery; at the center of these admirers, well-wishers, collectors, would-be collectors, onlookers, old and new friends, was the artist. He smiled, chatted amiably, shook a lot of hands, had people tug on his arm and whisper in his ear.

    As the reception wound down, 170 guests made their way to an honorary dinner party at nearby Bottino, the art world’s version of Elaine’s. It was modest compared with last year’s notorious to-do for Damien Hirst, another Gagosian artist of a slightly older vintage. Considering that Soth was virtually unknown four years ago, though, it was impressive—and not undue. A few weeks later, one of Gagosian’s directors reported that sales—more than four hundred prints were available, for between $5,500 and $20,000—were considered “very successful.” Soth had a pragmatic explanation for the ardor with which his work has been received. “It’s in fashion,” he said, with a modest shrug characteristic of someone who describes himself as a “conservative Midwestern boy.” “And I don’t think it’s going to last forever.”

    Soth’s success is uniquely dazzling, but he is not the only Minnesota artist to make a recent splash in New York. A few days after the Niagara opening, paintings by Jin Meyerson, who was born and raised in Atwater, Minnesota, were being installed at Zach Feuer Gallery, a few doors down the block. Roiling with swirls of disastrous imagery, these floor-to-ceiling canvases were intended to overwhelm the space, which is as tiny as Gagosian is massive. Yet the gallery’s size belies its influence; though he’s only been in the business for six years, twenty-seven-year-old Zach Feuer has quickly become a powerful arbiter of the gallery world, one who merits his own spreads in glossy magazines.

    As it happens, Feuer also represents Aaron Spangler. Spangler is a native of Park Rapids who, after graduating from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, built himself a house outside his hometown. Last summer, he added a studio, reinvesting, in a sense, the earnings from his carved wood reliefs and sculptures, which fetch tens of thousands of dollars. (Many people are waiting to acquire work by both Spangler and Meyerson.) That same summer Rob Fischer, another Minnesota artist whose career has been taking off, built a studio and cabin nearby. Fischer too is an ex-Minneapolitan and MCAD graduate who now lives part-time in Brooklyn; a solo exhibition of his sculptures was on view this winter at the Whitney Museum of American Art’s midtown gallery. The week after it closed, a collector had asked for a private viewing of one of the pieces, a twisting form made up of battered hardwood flooring that might have been salvaged from an abandoned farmhouse.