The Rake Magazine

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  • Seis de Mayo (I could get used to this)

    BOOKS & AUTHORS
    Keith Gessen and His Sad Young Literary Men

    In honor of Max Ross’s Cracking Spines defense of McSweeney’s, n+1 founding editor Keith Gessen is in town tonight to discuss his first novel with us. (We’ll just have to be sure to let him know that’s why he’s here.) Actually, side-pokes and literary journals aside, Gessen has proven himself quite adept at slacker fiction. All the Sad Young Literary Men weaves together the stories of three college grads as they sort out their literary and romantic ambitions. Soviets, Zionists, online dating — Gessen touches upon a host of interesting topics — and a host of different forms of abuse and self-abuse. Meet him tonight, hear what he has to say, and have him sign a copy of the book for you. I mean, after all, it is Keith Gessen!

    7:30 p.m., Barnes & Noble Booksellers Galleria, 3225 W 69th St., Galleria Shopping Center, Edina; 952-920-0633.

    THEATER & PERFORMANCE
    Come to the Cabaret, Old Chum

    "Putatively, this Cabaret is the stage play of ’66, with an English
    Sally and a regal German landlady (played by the absolutely magnificent
    Suzy Hunt). But it also alludes to the male-on-male dalliances of its
    hero, the American writer Cliff Bradshaw, which is confusing because
    the complications here are completely ignored. In fact, other than the
    single reference to his cruising days, Bradshaw, as played by Louis
    Hobson, comes off as a well-scrubbed prude. … In between there are dance numbers introduced by the ’emcee’ (Nick Garrison), a shiny-headed bald man wearing lipstick with
    an impossible loud and grating voice. He’s impossible to love at first,
    as he descends from the ceiling in the Cabaret sign’s ‘C,’ but by
    intermission he is impossible not to. A feat that Garrison effects by being alternately funny, self-deprecating, clownish, and sad. There
    is also that strident back story about the Nazis: they are infiltrating
    the club through the person of Ernst Ludwig, Bradshaw’s patron and
    friend." —read Ann Bauer’s full review. Tonight is the official opening.

    8 p.m., Ordway Center for the Performing Arts, 345 Washington St, St Paul, 651-224-4222; $20-$55.

    MUSIC
    Eric Nassau and Mary Bue

    In the mood for a light-hearted evening of folk-troubadour crooning? Ohio folkster Eric Nassau might be just the thing. His sweet, lilting vocals keep the dark longing of the lyrics at bay, lending a playful air to adversity. And, though his vocals are front and center, Nassau masters his guitar with equal finger-picking charm. Joining in the charm-delivery tonight is Mary Bue, another sweet sounding folkster (and recent Minneapolis transplant) with a touch of Tori Amos in her soul.

    9 p.m., 331 Club, 13th Ave. N.E., Minneapolis; 612-331-1746.

    Secret Songwriters Ball

    It’s also time for another Secret Songwriters Ball at everyone’s (or at least someone’s) favorite watering hole. And since it’s a "Secret," I won’t reveal much. Expect a rockin’ set of his tunes from host Chris Thompson and a slew of talented songwriters of all varieties. Ok, one secret: Ben Glaros will be performing at around 10 p.m.

    9 p.m., Lee’s Liquor Lounge, 101 Glenwood Ave., Minneapolis; free.


    Motion City Soundtrack Releases First Acoustic EP

    As of today, you should be able to download Motion City Soundtrack’s first-ever acoustic EP from iTunes. The EP features acoustic versions of five tracks off of their latest release Even If It Kills Me. The two can be purchased as a bundled package for $11.99, or you can download the songs individually: "Fell in Love Without You," "It Had To Be You," "Broken Heart," "Can’t Finish What You Started," and "Point of Extinction."

  • Jade: What's a Critic to Do?

    The question I get asked most often, (after "what’s your
    favorite restaurant?") is "do you get recognized a lot when you review
    restaurants?"

    The answer is, sometimes I do, and sometimes I don’t. When a
    longtime local restaurateur opens a restaurant in downtown Minneapolis, and
    staffs it with servers who have been on the local dining scene for ages, then
    the odds are pretty good that somebody is going to spot me. But if I go to a
    new theme restaurant in the outer burbs, my anonymity is pretty secure — the typical
    hostess is about 19 years old, doesn’t read restaurant reviews, and wouldn’t
    recognize my name if I handed her a business card.

    Ditto most ethnic restaurants.

    I suppose it has gotten a little easier to spot me now that The Rake runs a line drawing of me on this blog (see above), but if you had to
    pick me out of a police lineup, I don’t think the picture would be much help.
    (I’m the guy on the right.)

    I used to think that anonymity is really important, but the
    longer I stay in the restaurant reviewing business, the less convinced I am.
    There is at least a trade-off involved. On the one hand, when I am anonymous, I
    don’t get any special treatment, but on the other hand, when chefs and
    restaurateurs know who I am, I sometimes find out stuff that gives me a better
    sense of what the restaurant has to offer.

    Maybe it’s more than that — often, what’s really the most
    satisfying part of a dining experience is the human element — learning
    something about the people who work at the restaurant, and developing a
    relationship with them — and the detached
    "secret shopper" approach to
    restaurant reviewing misses out on that.

    At any rate, I stopped in last night at a new ethnic eatery — Jade Asian Bar and Restaurant in the Midtown Global Market at Chicago and E. Lake St., and promptly did
    get spotted by owner Carl Wong. Wong is the former owner of the Seafood Palace
    on Nicollet, which I always used to consider one of the best Chinese
    restaurants in the Twin Cities. (I haven’t dined there much since he sold it,
    so I don’t know how good it is these days — if you have dined there, please let
    me know.) Carl’s three-year non-compete agreement expired recently, and he is
    back in the restaurant business.

    Jade — in the space briefly occupied by Chang Bang — turns
    out to be a nicely styled casual dining restaurant with a menu of traditional
    and contemporary Chinese cuisine, plus a sushi bar. The sushi bar is only open at night, and for lunch they offer a buffet (nothing particularly impressive, when I tried it.) The bar part isn’t open
    yet, but the license has been approved, and the restaurant will start serving
    liquor after May 16. Live seafood tanks will also be arriving soon, and will be
    stocked with everything from lobster to abalone.

    Fire and Ice

    At any rate, my wife and I ordered a couple of items off
    the menu — the deep-fried stuffed seafood tofu ($9.95) and the salted fish with shredded pork and
    eggplant in casserole (hot pot; $10.95), plus an item on the sushi menu that I had
    never heard of before — "battleship sushi" — gunkan maki sushi. It turns out
    that’s the name for a kind of sushi that I had seen before — the kind that has
    a collar of nori, and a filling of sea urchin, or flying fish roe, or other
    ingredients that need to be held in place. The sushi chef — Tony Sin Tuy — said he would make a
    special order for me. What arrived at our table a few minutes later was a real work of art (or two works of art, to be precise) — each a narrow band of
    nori wrapped around a belt of Atlantic salmon, with a filling of sushi rice topped with chopped tempura fried scallops in a spicy mayo, with tobiko roe and a pineapple soy reduction. Tuy calls it Fire & Ice ($5.50), and it is definitely worth asking for.

    We had barely finished that delight when another dish
    arrived, unordered, at our table — a long snake of a specialty roll — a wild
    caterpillar, we later learned — wrapped in avocado, tuna and ripe mango, filled
    with spicy shrimp, flavored with Thai seasonings ($10.95). This, too was wonderful.

    Then Tuy stopped over and
    introduced himself. He obviously knew who I was, and he told us a little about
    himself — he grew up in Minnesota and California, is of Thai and Chinese ancestry, and
    previously worked at Crave in Edina, where he learned the art of sushi from
    chef Tony Lam. He really tries to make sure that every specialty sushi
    specialty he creates is distinctive, different from who diners might get
    anywhere else, and he works a lof of Thai flavors into his original creations. (Hence, the Thai spices in the wild caterpillar.) I came away
    from the conversation genuinely impressed. This is a nice guy who takes sushi
    seriously. It was a conversation that I probably wouldn’t have had if I had succeeded in remaining anonymous.

    Then comes the other dilemma that goes hand-in-hand with
    being recognized: the bill arrives, and there’s no charge for the sushi. I am a
    little torn by this because on the one hand, I don’t believe in accepting free
    food, and on the other hand, it can get really expensive to pay for a lot of
    food that I didn’t order, and it also can feel rude to refuse food that
    somebody with good intensions sends over.

    So I tell the waiter that I need to pay for everything
    that we ate, and the waiter sends me to Carl, who says that the free sushi is
    from Tony, so I better take it up with him. Tony doesn’t want my money, but
    finally agrees to accept a $10 tip — not quite what the sushi would have cost
    if I had ordered it off the menu, but enough to salve my conscience. And I warn
    him that I can’t come back unless he agrees to let me pay, next time, for
    everything I eat.

    And I do want to go back — the seafood stuffed tofu and the salted fish, pork and eggplant casserole were both delightful, and there is a lot more on the menu that I would like to try, ranging from the whole Dungeness crab ($19.95) to the barbecue pork with oysters in hotpot ($10.95).

  • Yes, This is a Contemporary Blog Post

    Employing a tactic I’m pretty sure I’ve picked up from the current presidential administration, I’ve decided to take a new approach to truth. Namely, I’m going to make it up. And make it up in such a way that justifies every decision I decide(r), and in such a way that makes me feel better about my life, and the enveloping society thereof.

    So here goes: Everyone is reading.

    And because everyone is reading, there is a high demand for poetry.
    And because there is a high demand for poetry, once a week, possibly on Mondays, but certainly not limited to Mondays, I’m going to try really hard to post a Poem Worth Reading on this blog.

    I know I know I know, this is supposed to be a blog about books, and probably shouldn’t contain any actual literature, unless it’s hyper-linked. Nevertheless, poems are great. They’re (often) short, and powerful, and sometimes they even rhyme, which makes you feel happy for reasons you probably can’t define very well. And people should read more of them. More, even, than they already are. Which is lots. Because everybody is reading. Obviously.

    This week’s Poem Worth Reading is by Ron Padgett, from his collection You Never Know, which came out in 2001 from Coffee House Press. Notice the yeses, maybe.

    Read it. Everyone else is.

    The Drink

    I am always interested in the people in films who have just had a drink thrown in their faces. Sometimes they react with uncontrollable rage, but sometimes -my favorites- they do not change their expressions at all. Instead they raise a handkerchief or napkin and calmly dab at the offending liquid, as the hurler jumps to her feet and storms away. The other people at the table are understandably uncomfortable. A woman leans over and places her hand on the sleeve of the man’s jacket and says, "David, you know she didn’t mean it." David answers, "Yes," but in an ambiguous tone – the perfect adult response. But now the orchestra has resumed its amiable and lively dance music, and the room is set in motion as before. Out in the parking lot, however, Elizabeth is setting fire to David’s car. Yes, this is a contemporary film.

     

  • Grand Theft Autopilot

    Here’s the problem with Grand Theft Auto (and a solution).

    Its not that Grand Theft Auto is stealing minds. The problem is that the program allows you to experience fear in an artificial context. I have found that fear is much more exhilarating and useful when it is real. I took up mountaineering, for example, to experience the imminent fear of disaster. (In addition to my job.)

    The real issue with ultra-violent, pornographic video games is sensual isolation. Far better to feel the imminent threat of lightning on a mountain-top (which will kill you) than on a monitor. As any pilot will tell you, flight simulators just can’t beat flying.

    Not to overuse the metaphor, but there is nothing uplifting about Grand Theft Auto. It can’t even lift your blood pressure as high as a real fight with the opponent of your choosing. Which is why I suggest the following adrenaline-upgrade during purchase.

    Bring back Shinders and stock all the copies of GTA IV in the "back room." This way healthy underage young people and really sick older ones can experience the dread of being caught in a spot they really don’t want to be.

     

  • Travels with Mel

    Now that I
    have been in Scotland for a bit I have begun to notice the great shadow
    the infamous creator of Braveheart still casts over this hilly
    northern country. If you venture into any bargain store in Edinburgh
    or Glasgow you will find many bric-a-bracs aimed at spend-happy tourists. These items range from the relatively funny "kilt beach towel" to
    the aggravating "William Wallace doll." Now, there’s nothing
    wrong with the historical figure of William Wallace. The man heroically
    stood against the English in order to defend Scottish independence,
    and this I can respect. And I really can’t judge the people
    who are making money from the dolls themselves; far be it for me to
    begrudge anybody the right to strike gold by abusing national symbols.

    No, the William
    Wallace doll is an abomination because it is just a little version of
    that big schmuck, Mel Gibson. It is a vivid rendering, capturing
    accurately even the most Jew-hating contours of the man’s face (from
    an era before the expert ironist decided to grow a strange Abrahamic
    beard). I know Braveheart is one of the most profitable
    things that has happened to Scotland since whisky became the local manna,
    but when you hold a lil’ Mel in your hands you do not want to fight
    for your freedom, you just feel sorry for all the civilizations Mel
    Gibson has ripped off and made a mockery of (e.g. Scots, Mayans, ancient
    Israelites, and counting).

    I could forgive
    this if it were a phenomenon confined to shops that sell inflatable
    heart-shaped mattresses and "I’m not as think as you drunk I am"
    t-shirts, but unfortunately Mel Gibson has managed to worm his way into
    actual history. I went to the city of Stirling one day, and visited
    the National William Wallace Monument, a great 19th-century
    century-built landmark perched loftily on a lovely, green hilltop.
    After making my way down from the summit, I encountered something that
    morphed my good feeling into outright disgust. By the foot of
    the hill stood a big stone statue of Mel Gibson, mace in hand, screaming
    triumphantly. It seemed like stone-Mel knew he was ruining my
    time in Stirling and that there lied his ultimate victory over me. The word "FREEDOM" carved into the rock mockingly reminded me of
    how very trapped I was in the Mel-universe.

    Next to the
    statue there was a plaque with the story behind the work written on
    it. Some poor guy carved the thing because when he was down in
    the dumps (slowly dying from some horrible disease), he watched Braveheart,
    and the movie had been able to fill him with national pride and confidence. I thought it was strange how the one thing that made this sculptor so
    hopeful in his final days was the source of so much unpleasantness for
    me. Why couldn’t the guy have seen The Mary Tyler Moore Show
    on his deathbed and carved a statue of its namesake, like the one that
    dazzles in the streets of the fine city of Minneapolis, Minnesota?
    I guess some people just aren’t lucky enough to get Nick at Nite.

  • That's Why They Play Nine, You Communists: Meet Your First Place Minnesota Twins

    AP Photo/Hannah Foslien

    I’m not a fair weather fan. Honest to God, I’m not.

    Seriously.

    I’m not.

    This season, however, I am trying very hard not to let the game eat me alive. I’m also trying very hard not to allow the game to eat up so damn much of my time. It’s a hard habit to break, though, and so far it’s been a rough balancing act. I was in New York for a week –the Yankees were out of town, but I did get out to Shea to see the Mets– and I had promised myself that while I was out of town I would limit myself to a brief perusal of the boxscores each morning. No Baseball Tonight. No channel surfing. No sitting in front of a computer tracking the Twins on the internet.

    I didn’t do so well on that last one, but it really could have been a whole lot worse.

    I was at Shea the night Morneau hit his grand slam to put the Twins up 5-0 at Texas. They flashed that bright bit of news on the scoreboard. It seemed like fifteen minutes later I looked up there again and saw that the score was suddenly 5-5.

    I should have kept that night in mind on Sunday afternoon, when I turned off the game after the first inning –with Boof and the Twins down 6-0– and headed off to the May Day festivities at Powderhorn Park. Throughout the afternoon, whenever I saw somebody wearing any sort of sports apparel (rare, this), I’d ask them if they’d heard a score for the Twins game. I got a lot of blank stares and shrugs. Eventually I encountered an old fellow sitting on a blanket, wearing a Twins cap, and listening to a transistor radio.

    "Do you have a Twins score for me?" I asked.

    The guy scowled. "They were getting killed," he said. "I turned it off."

    It was a beautiful day to be outside, even without baseball, and even though I was surrounded by thousands of communists and hippies (just kidding, comrades; like millions of other people, if I could really believe in the things I think I believe in I could be one of you, just as long as you didn’t ask me to ride around on one of those Dr. Seuss bikes or forsake Mountain Dew and Twizzlers).

    At any rate, it was wonderful to come home, call up the ESPN page on the computer, and discover that the Twins had come back to knock off the Tigers.

    And if you’re paying enough attention that you’re paying attention to me and my blather (which means, obviously, that you’re paying way too much attention), then you know that our local nine has now won five straight at home and moved into first place in the Central, a division that is suddenly –at least through the season’s first month– locked up in a pleasant and almost inexplicable parity scrum.

    I like this Twins team. Right from the get-go I thought they were going to be fun to watch for the long haul, won-loss column be damned. And they haven’t disappointed me so far. Do they look or feel like a first-place team to me? No, honestly, I can’t say that they do. Not yet, at any rate. But neither do any of the other teams in the Central at the moment.

    This is crazy, I’m sure, but I’m ready to write off the Tigers. A month isn’t a large enough sample size, I know, but this is a team with some serious problems, a blockbuster roster with a severe identity crisis. They seem to have a different problem every night, and I don’t think that bodes well for either them or for Jim Leyland’s sanity. Only three teams in the AL have scored more runs than Detroit, but only one (Texas) has given up more runs –the Tigers have surrendered 174 runs, 44 more than the Twins. And all those runs Detroit has scored have come in bursts; they’ve also been shutout four times, and scored just one run on four other occasions (true to their schizoid nature, they’ve also scored ten or more runs four times). The starting pitching has been miserable. The bullpen is worse than it’s looked –even though it looked plenty shaky against the Twins. The defense is sketchy, and has been made even worse by Leyland’s insistence on playing guys out of position.

    There have been plenty of encouraging things about the Twins performance thus far, but this is by far the most encouraging number to me, particularly given the insane unbalanced schedule: they’re now 12-6 against the Central. Detroit is an astounding 4-12, and everyone else is hanging around .500.

    I’ve also been encouraged by the starting pitching, the Liriano debacle notwithstanding. Livan has been Livan; living large and dangerous, and fun to watch when he’s spotting his fastball [sic] and working in that outrageous 60-mph shazam special. I know I made the Ramon Ortiz comparison early on, but the difference here is that even when Hernandez has been mediocre in his career he’s always been a freakishly healthy innings eater.

    Most surprising to me has been the poise of Bonser, Scott Baker, and Nick "The Milkman’s Mauer" Blackburn. You saw it from Bonser on Sunday; after getting nicked and knocked around in the first –and throwing, what? 48 pitches?– he managed to gut out five more shutout innings (without walking anybody) and get the game to the bullpen. Baker and Blackburn have done the same thing time and again. Even at their worst they’ve all pitched; they just keep making adjustments and mixing their pitches and grinding, and it was a huge thing for the offense to come back on Sunday and hold up their end of the deal. For the most part the entire rotation has been performing like crafty veterans, and that was a whole hell of a lot more than anybody expected back in March.

    The starting pitching may yet be the serious concern we all thought it would be –particularly if injuries become even more of a factor– but right now the more obvious worry is the offense, and that seems to me to be one thing the Twins could reasonably address. I worry about an American League team with an on base percentage of .310 and a slugging percentage of .374, and a team with the second fewest runs scored in the league. I worry about a team whose one and two hitters are tied for the team lead in strikeouts.

    Carlos Gomez is worth the price of admission. He’s serious fun to watch, and, at 22, promises to be even more fun to watch in the years to come. When he gets on base he might already be one of the most exciting players ever to wear a Twins uniform. Despite being a pretty crummy bunter, he’s on a pace to obliterate the team record for bunt hits in a season. But, fun and exciting as he is, Gomez is not a leadoff hitter. A guy with 26 strikeouts, three walks, and a .297 OBP is not a leadoff hitter, particularly when he’s generally being followed by a guy –Brendan Harris– with 26 strikeouts, six walks, and a .315 OBP. This is just basic baseball logic, and you’d think it would be more widely accepted by now.

    What do you think the over and under is on Gomez’s 2008 OBP? I’d be delighted –and surprised– if he cracks .325.

    This is the third year in a row I’ve harped about this, and maybe the problem here is that it just makes too much logical sense, but Joe Mauer should be leading off for the Twins. Every night. I know he just seems to be getting comfortable in the three hole, but tough shit. That sort of thing is hogwash anyway. If a guy can really hit, he can hit anywhere in the lineup. Mauer now has a .396 OBP; he doesn’t strikeout much, has pretty good wheels, is one of the most fundamentally solid baserunners on the club, and he’s not yet –and may never be– a consistent middle-of-the-order run producer. What he would be, though, is a damn good leadoff hitter. He already leads the team in runs scored batting in the two and three spots.

    So, dammit, move him up. Start there, move Gomez down to ninth, and he’ll still have Mauer batting behind him every time he’s on base and wreaking havoc. Go ahead and bat Harris second if you want –I can’t think of anybody else, other than Mauer, wh
    o’s suited for that slot– and why not toss Jason Kubel into the three hole and see if he can get some better pitches to hit (and learn to be a lot more selective)?

    Watching the Chicago series last week, I was a little bit astonished by how incredulous Dick Bremer and Bert Blyleven were by the fact that Nick Swisher, with his .220 batting average, was leading off for the White Sox. They couldn’t believe it. How long, they wondered, would Ozzie Guillen persist in this folly? Never once did they mention Swisher’s walk totals, runs scored, or on base percentage (23, 20, and .354 as of this moment).

    It amazes me that so many apparently serious fans of the game –and so many people within baseball organizations (including managers)– still don’t seem to get it.

    Why not try to assemble a fucking batting order that actually makes baseball sense and is designed to maximize production?

    Why the hell not?

    What do you have to lose besides games?

  • Cinco de Mayo

    The Corcoran Neighborhood Organization invites you to celebrate Cinco de Mayo today with Kalpulli Ketzal
    Coatlicue, an Aztec drumming and dance troupe.

    6 p.m., Corcoran Park, 3334 20th Ave. S., Minneapolis; free.

    THEATER & PERFORMANCE
    Minnesota Fringe reconstructs Romeo and Juliet

    Five
    local performing arts companies — Brave New Workshop, Commedia
    Beauregard    , Zealots and Mystics, Rockstar Storytellers, and Four Humors
    — break Shakespeare apart and glue him back together in Five-Fifths of Romeo and Juliet tonight. This is the fifth annual Five-Fifths of…
    performance to benefit the Minnesota Fringe. Each participating company
    received one-fifth of a script and reinterpreted their part as they saw fit. Companies haevn’t discussed each of their parts with
    the other four companies, so the results ought to be quite amusing
    — a coherent piece with divergent (sometimes conflicting)
    interpretations.

    7:30 p.m., Theatre de la Jeune Lune, 105 N. First St., Minneapolis; 612-872-1212; $35.

    ART
    Roots of the Future — a College Of Design Senior Show

    The
    College of Design graduating seniors have each selected one or two
    examples of their best work for the 2008 Roots of the Future: College of Design Senior Show. Participating students are from
    academic programs including: Architecture, Clothing
    Design, Environmental Design, Graphic Design, Housing Studies, Interior
    Design, and Retail Merchandising. The exhibit features poster presentations of research, 3-D projects of clothing and
    architectural designs, and PowerPoint presentations displayed digitally
    of their design process. The Awards Ceremony, on May 16th, will feature
    awards from professional designers who
    will review the exhibit work and select winners.
    There will also be a special Peoples’ Choice Award for which exhibit attendees can vote.

    10 a.m. – 4 p.m., The Goldstein Museum of Design, 241 McNeal Hall, 1985 Buford Avenue, St. Paul; 612-624-7434.

    MUSIC
    Sweet, Sweet Music

    Apparently, DJ
    Breckheimer     is getting tired of making his way into Minneapolis for live music. According to his email, he has been hoping and wishing that we had a bit more live
    music down "South of the River," so he finally decided to invite some of the great acts and artists to Apple Valley for an evening of music at Luxury Sweets candy store. (It sounds so wholesome.) Head on down and enjoy the sweet sounds of Stook, Chastity, Erin Kate, Katey Bellville, Roger Flyer and Carl Franzen.

    7-9 p.m., Luxury Sweets, 15322 Galaxie Ave #105, Apple Valley.

    Also tonight, enjoy one the hottest young Latin bands — Grammy-nominated Tiempo Libre — at the Dakota (7 p.m., $30).

    FILM
    Frida

    The Parkway is bringing Frida back — the triumphant motion picture about an exceptional woman (and artist) who
    lived an unforgettable life. Enjoy Salma Hayek, Alfred Molina, Antonio Banderas , Ashley Judd, Edward Norton, and Geoffrey Rush in this fabulous film that was nominated for six Academy Awards. For whatever reason, tonight’s screening is free!

    6:30 & 8:55 p.m., Parkway Theater, 4814 Chicago Ave. S., Minneapolis;
    612-822-3030; free tonight.

  • If you don't like this blog then you are a BOOBIE

    photo by Jessica Hegland,

    Hair by Jon Richards. Make up by Leilani Baker, Make up Artist Goddess.
    Wardrobe from Melly’s Closet of Phases: Dress-BADGLEY MISCHKA-purchased at the DAYTON’S 2day warehouse sale during my lunch break at KSTP TV. Price for me to know and you not! Shoes: don’t have a clue because someone stole them from me when I took them off to dance at some random club downtown.

    I am so sick and tired of people making fun of people they assume do not have an appreciation or sophistication for the FINER THINGS IN LIFE. I have had the great PRIVILEGE of traveling to places most people only dream of, eating food that makes my mouth feel like it’s having a big old party in there, and best of all, seeing beautiful ARTWORK every day. So what is my problem?

    I am sorting through a lot of "things" right now that are valuable and deciding what I should do with them. I am in no hurry to sell anything, but I am in a hurry to make sure the right people are given some of the great privilege that I have been given all of my life so I can put the same smile on their faces that they have put on mine.

    So when I recently met with "X" and expressed my frustration and confusion over starting this process, I was given that "look" of disgust when I was talking to her about ART. Apparently, being the unsophisticated person that I am, I was not using proper "Art Speak" while I was talking.

    Who made this random person the "Chief of Art Speak"? I will tell you who did. SHE did. And since I am now "Chief of the things that I have been blessed with," that gives me the right to say that she can go take a flying leap, and I hope that her perfect hair looks the same wet as when it’s dry. I am guessing it probably looks more along the lines of something a bunch of rats would enjoy calling home.

    Insult after insult, I sat there and took it like a trooper, and then I got in my car (paid for with my own money) and went home and looked around my house, appreciating even more the beautiful ART that my husband and I have.

    As to the kind of ART that we enjoy looking at every day, it consists mostly of My Mother’s artistic genius.

    The so-called valuable pieces that Mrs. "Snotty Butt" would love to impress her Clients with will be given to people in my life who DESERVE the choice as to whether or not they want to hang the work on their walls or sell it on E-Bay.

    I found it beyond comprehension that I was being frowned on because I was not B.S.ing my way with small talk and essentially saying what comes natural to me. In other words, I was being Melinda Jacobs, the person who wakes up the same way every day with hair that is starting to gray from wasting MY VALUABLE time on phony baloneys.

    So, where the heck am I going with this?

    Remember, blogging — thank god — is still one of the few ways that we can ALL express the person who we really are without a certain code of conduct. That is why I love it. In fact, I am passionate about it! It’s ART to ME.

    What is beautiful to you, what wakes you up in the morning and gets your heart pumping, your energy going… that feeling of Passion is truly your choice. And if someone tries to diminish that or hurt you, just because they think they know more than you or are better than you, here is my suggestion:

    Next time you get "the look" for being authentic and being yourself, look that person straight in the eye and say "Boobies." It has done a lot for me in being able to weed out the phonies and reel in some treasures of pure gold.

    Enjoy the picture of this statue that I have sitting in my office. That is a piece of ART that may have dollar signs on it, but to me it’s not only a metaphor of my life but a priceless one in so many ways.

    By the way, it’s for sale.
    (I am kidding.)

    —Melinda Jacobs

  • Cabaret: Tits, Ass, and Monopoly Money

    In the 1972 Bob Fosse film Cabaret, an American Sally Bowles, played by Liza Minnelli, falls in love with a rambunctious Englishman who is — as she is — having an affair with her bisexual boss. Whereas in the 1966 stage play Cabaret, it was Sally who was English, her boyfriend who was American, and there was a wholesome subtextual storyline about their elderly landlady’s romance with a Jewish fruit merchant.

    In the Ordway’s current production of Cabaret, there’s a little bit of each mixed in.

    Putatively, this Cabaret is the stage play of ’66, with an English Sally and a regal German landlady (played by the absolutely magnificent Suzy Hunt). But it also alludes to the male-on-male dalliances of its hero, the American writer Cliff Bradshaw, which is confusing because the complications here are completely ignored. In fact, other than the single reference to his cruising days, Bradshaw, as played by Louis Hobson, comes off as a well-scrubbed prude. And when Sally turns up pregnant with a baby she claims could be anyone’s, he immediately volunteers — no qualms about her decided female-ness — to make her his wife.

    In between there are dance numbers introduced by the "emcee" (Nick Garrison), a shiny-headed bald man wearing lipstick with an impossible loud and grating voice. He’s impossible to love at first, as he descends from the ceiling in the Cabaret sign’s "C," but by intermission he is impossible not to. A feat that Garrison effects by being alternately funny, self-deprecating, clownish, and sad.

    There is also that strident back story about the Nazis: they are infiltrating the club through the person of Ernst Ludwig, Bradshaw’s patron and friend. Ludwig is a tall, ebony-haired Aryan who somehow riles the entire club into raising their arms to the Third Reich. The fall-out comes first when gentle Herr Schultz, the fruit seller, has a brick hurled through his window. And then when Bradshaw, the stalwart American, gets beaten because he refuses to put up with all that Gestapo guff.

    I wish I could say that I loved this play. I do love the Ordway; I think it’s as stately a theater as the Twin Cities has. The set was amazing: morphing from nightclub to modest rooming house with the twitch of a few items, by evening’s end lit with colored bulbs that gave it a festive, garish air.

    There were some truly outstanding performances — the best by far by Ms. Hunt who infused her Fraulein Schneider with imperious yet tentatively regal carriage. Her voice was pure starch and honey. I could have listened to her all night. Unfortunately, though, most of the songs were sung by Tari Kelly who played Sally Bowles. And while she was a dead ringer for Minnelli (at least from Row S) her theory seemed to be that sheer volume would make up for feeling or finesse.

    The dancers were lovely and scantily-clad in a pleasing, authentically bawdy 1930’s Berliner sort of way; God knows, I like hot pants and fishnets and sequined bras as much as the next red-blooded American girl. There’s even a very charming moment during Money Makes the World Go Round when Monopoly money drifted from the rafters and into the audience, twirling in the twinkling lights.

    But in the end, as the curtain came down, I felt as if all the brilliant parts of the Ordway’s Cabaret had not quite added up to something as whole and extraordinary as I would have liked. True, they missed the mark by a very small margin — and this may be fixed by Tuesday, the official opening night — but as it is there are uneven edges. The first act was too long; the second felt incredibly rushed.

    More important, the story was not consistent. I wanted either a playboy love interest or a wide-eyed gee golly one, not a weird mish-mash of the two. And without that, the production fell just short of what it should.

    Not that you would have known to see the audience at the end. I know. . . .I’ve been beating this drum for years. But NOTHING to my mind marks Minnesotans as more universally ignorant than the standing ovation, which is obligatory at every single concert, opera, comedy routine, and play. I am sick and tired of going to shows that are good but not great and watching everyone around me jump out of their seats like so many obsequious, brainless cows.

    Yes, I feel strongly about this. But to my mind, it’s like over praising a child for efforts that fall short. How is a toddler to learn if you keep showering kisses down because he or she piddled almost in the potty? By doing this, you simply reinforce the puddle on the floor.

    And so it is with the stage, where standing ovations for performances that are almost but not quite extraordinary, like Cabaret, lower the bar. Which given the talent and resources and venues we have here in town is a goddamn shame.

  • Starting Out in the Evening

    Remember those days when you would wait for your parents to leave the house so you could invite your girl- or boyfriend over for an evening of videos and cheap wine and illicit sex?

    Well, here’s a funny thing. Those days return, when you’re 42 or so. . . .You discover there’s a Friday evening coming up. The kids are going to be out — one at a sleepover, the other doing whatever high school seniors do — and you plot. You get a DVD from Hollywood and a cheap bottle of wine and think about how you’re going to have the house all to yourself.

    Ah. . . .the romance of middle age.

    My husband and I recently ran into just such a Friday night. Teenage daughter at a friend’s house; adult son out for most of the night. We ran out to rent a film we’d been wanting to see ever since it hit Uptown for about ten minutes last winter then disappeared and opened a bottle of Tiziano Chianti 2005.

    The film was called Starting Out in the Evening, a sleeper from 2007 that sprang from a book by Brian Morton, whose entire canon I happen to have read.

    Morton is a fascinating writer. Around 50, Jewish, a New Yorker. He clearly has some personal demons to excise. Each of his books covers much the same ground: There is some combination of an older, Jewish, intellectual writer — a contemporary of Bellow’s and Roth’s — a 40-ish woman who is grappling with her desire to have children, a leftist, and an aged but understanding therapist. Morton is, in my experience, the most formulaic writer on the planet today. Yet what he produces is at once readable and fresh. Each time he enters the same territory he has something strangely new to say. He comes at it from a different facet. He makes this single story work, over and over again.

    So it is with this film. It’s the story of a 70-year-old novelist (Frank Langella) whose books have all fallen out of print. He is trying to finish that one last novel that will become his legacy when a graduate student (Lauren Ambrose of Six Feet Under fame) appears at his door to tell him she is writing her thesis about his body of work. Meanwhile, his daughter and — for all intents and purposes — best friend, played by Lily Taylor, is turning 40 and debating whether or not to trick her childless-by-choice boyfriend into an "accidental" baby.

    There were rumors Langella would be nominated for an Academy Award for Starting Out, and I think it’s a shame he was not. He is a burly, bullet-shaped elderly man, yet he managed to turn from obdurate to frail after his character suffered a stroke. The scene in which his daughter’s boyfriend must haul the old man out of the bathtub — chest to chest, dripping wet; in some way getting the "child" he was so determined never to have — was worth an Oscar nomination alone.

    But back to the evening, OUR evening and the wine. Chianti generally is made out of Sangiovese grapes. It is the cousin of other richer Tuscan reds, such as Montepulciano and Carmignano. But Chianti tends to be smooth and forgettable — a thin table wine with no real character.

    This one, however, blew me away — especially for the price, which is around $9 a bottle. Sweet strawberry and honey married with a sturdy, dry, deep forest oak, it’s a light but sophisticated wine. A perfect match for the quiet, poignant film. Exactly right for two exhausted parents grateful simply to be sprawled across each other like puppies in a large chair, drinking in the quiet on a Friday night.