The Rake Magazine

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  • Okay, I'm Over It

    It’s amazing how quickly a breaking story can be covered from every conceivable angle. Early yesterday the reaction to Juan Rincon’s suspension was a mixture of shock, incredulity, and outrage. The details in the initial press release were sketchy, at best. It wasn’t clear what exactly Rincon might have ingested to merit the suspension, but it quickly became apparent –based on the immediate suspension– that it was something included on the list of banned performance enhancing drugs.

    It sucks to the tenth degree that MLB doesn’t release information on what chemical is detected in the dirty piss of violaters of its policy, because the secrecy ultimately raises as many questions as it answers. I’ve looked at that list of banned substances, and there are all sorts of things on there I couldn’t pronounce and which I wouldn’t recognize on a cold medicine label, let alone within the fine-print catalog of multi-syllabic nonsense that accompanies the average nutritional supplement.

    We can presume, at any rate, that Rincon fucked up, and I’m not going to excuse his mistake, whether it was committed in ignorance or calculation. There’s been plenty of talk and analysis of the whole issue already, and though I’ll admit that I was initially shocked by the news, I’m not quite sure why.

    But maybe that’s not quite true. I was shocked because Rincon is such a soft, mild-mannered, and physically unimposing character. None of those facts, of course, precludes the possibility that he used some sort of PED. Maybe, as some people have speculated, he used a little something to help his recovery time between appearances. Maybe he took something that he picked up somewhere, assuming because it came from a seemingly innocuous source that it was safe.

    Whatever the case, I sure would like to know what that little something was, and whether, in fact, it was a little something or a big something. I’d also be interested in hearing how long these banned substances supposedly stay in a player’s system. Does Rincon’s result mean he ingested or injected something in the last two weeks? The last month? The last three months? Maybe none of that matters. I don’t really know, and I’m not sure I care.

    I do wonder whether the team’s doctors or trainers might bear some share of the blame for the Rincon fiasco. Over the years there have been a number of occasions where I’ve had reason to wonder what’s up with the medical staff of the Twins. I wondered about it most recently during Grant Balfour’s sore arm saga, which, it sure seems to me, was allowed to drag out far too long, to the point where there was open suspicion that Balfour was a malingerer. We went through a similar situation with Joe Mauer’s knee last year, and if you want to go back even further (to Joe Mays and Eric Milton, for instance, or Scott Erickson) I think you’d notice a sort of disturbing pattern.

    Don’t you think it’s kind of strange that when push comes to shove the agents of players tend to send them elsewhere –to the physicians of other teams– for a second (or third, or fourth) opinion? If Balfour hadn’t gone to Cincinnati would we all still be wondering about the source of his lingering forearm pain? Now, though, we know that he’s facing season-ending Tommy John surgery, and we’ve heard that just such lingering forearm pain should be a red flag for significant elbow damage.

    Ultimately, I suppose, there’s no getting around the fact that Rincon’s to blame, even if he made a mistake of ignorance. It’s his career, his reputation, and his money that’s on the line, and the final responsibility is his.

    What’s sort of disturbing about all this –for me, certainly, and I’m sure for most fans of the team– is that the obvious implication is that if Rincon is doing this shit, then so could literally anybody else on this team, or any other team.

    The bottom line, though, is that it’s a ten-day suspension, and Rincon will be back in the fold soon enough. How people respond or what his suspension does to his reputation doesn’t particularly concern me, although I’ve no doubt the people in the organization are plenty worried about those angles. It does strike me as kind of pathetic that Juan Rincon is the most high profile player to be affected to date, but if this turns out to be merely an ugly blip in the season and the rest of the Twins pass their piss tests with flying colors, I hardly see how this can be the sort of thing to damage the team’s reputation in the long term.

  • Chasing Readers

    Can you build circulation and still sell a readership to advertisers? That would seem to be what newspapers are trying to do more and more these days, as circ money is slowly laundered into advertising revenue. That means old-guard dailies like the Star Tribune are caught between two worlds—the mass audience and the niche enthusiast. On the one hand, you like to believe that everyone in the greater metropolitan region should be interested in reading “The Newspaper of the Twin Cities” regardless of age, sex, political pursuasion, or high school hockey team. On the other hand, there seems to be a strong compulsion to change the newspaper itself to appeal to certain “underserved” readerships—presumably in an effort to add raw numbers to the circulation line, while improving the complexion of your readership. (More women! More suburban Republicans! More disposable income! More soft-focus enterprise stories about relationships and eating disorders!)

    One could certainly make the argument that to capture those coveted exurban readers, you’re going to lose your core city readers. More than one person has identified this as the dread disease afflicting the Pioneer Press at present. While the Strib is one of the very few dailies in the country to actually grow in circulation in the past year, all of their other numbers are down—suggesting that they may be reaching a point of diminishing returns in stretching the rate base and aspiring to attractive new readerships.

    Last Sunday, we were interested to read the Strib’s new ombud, Kate Parry, who feels very strongly that editors should get out of the building and meet some readers. She’s of the energetic opinion that the Strib must evolve in order to better reflect the values and needs of the community, and to comport with certain scientific studies about readers. In other words, she is very interested in how the Strib can grow its business. (Which makes her sound less like a reader advocate, and more like a stooge for the advertising department, but that’s probably just our bad attidude talking.) That all may sound good in theory, of course—what could be wrong with “interfacing” with the public? Building trust? Establishing credibility? But rather than worry about directly servicing the “needs” of readers, why not focus on the simple values of traditional newsgathering? For example, reporting hard truths tends to build credibility. Fully reasoned, civilized, and well-written opinion tends to build trust. Why are traditional newspapering values not enough to establish what is needed by newspaper readers today?

    We were especially interested to read the comments of Anoka-area readers as expressed in a little get-together organized by Parry. She writes, “Eleven very frank, funny, smart readers had accepted my invitation to have supper and talk about their lives to help this newspaper improve its coverage.” In particular, we were compelled by the words of Kate Lasota, a junior at Spring Lake Park High School. According to Parry, Lasota “explained how urgent it was for editors to think about readers her age. ‘You’re going to want to hook my age group right now by directing a few things towards me, some things I want to hear and read about. Because as I go off to college it’s going to be, “Which do I want to read?” I have that choice and you want my business.’”

    Now what could the Star Tribune do to capture that elusive, desirable business—the powerful, demanding, well-fed, chic, center-of-the-universe, eighteen year-old, suburban high-school student? In other words, how can the Star Tribune conform the news of the day to appeal to more young people who have such a clear view of themselves in their thrones high atop the attention economy? (Or is it the bottom?)

    Perhaps this is precisely the problem—chasing a reader instead of chasing the news. Perhaps Kate Parry could hold another seminar in which she returns the favor to her Anoka readership by empanelling a group of editors and reporters who can describe what news is and why it is important and why all intelligent members of a civil society should value it—precisely for its refusal to pander to any particular reader.

  • The Early Verdict On May? Guilty Of Something

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    Sometimes I feel like the days are a floor I’m crawling across, blind, with a dead flower in my mouth, trying to find my way to the other side, which is here, and a few body lengths into the darkness beyond here. It’s a slow business, often bruising.

    Where did the flower come from? And where do I think I’m taking it? To the graveyard out back? As if the day were a desolate old country church?

    I don’t know what you’re talking about. Try to speak more plainly. Please make an effort.

    Often, I’ll admit, I don’t know what I’m saying –what I’m saying, or even if I want to say. I’m not really looking for words; I’m merely asking for them. I’m not even in a position to ask nicely. I’m afraid I’m going to have to demand them. Civilized discourse is out of the question. I’m in no position to argue. I’m not going to fucking reason with you. I didn’t come here tonight to entertain you, either. If you’re looking for something in the way of a bedtime story you’re shit out of luck. All I know how to do is not tell stories.

    Words are nothing but beasts of burden which I must lash across the fields. When I am in no position to drive them –which is more and more often the case– they must drag me. I ask almost nothing of them anymore but that they drag me to the bottom of the day. Even our trek across the muddy fields is a charade. The fields are fallow. We are up to absolutely nothing.

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    The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour). I know, however, of a young chronophobiac who experienced something like panic when looking for the first time at homemade movies that had been taken a few weeks before his birth. He saw a world that was practically unchanged – the same house, the same people – and then realized that he did not exist there at all and that nobody mourned his absence. He caught a glimpse of his mother waving from an upstairs window, and that unfamiliar gesture disturbed him, as if it were some mysterious farewell. But what particularly frightened him was the sight of a brand-new baby carriage standing there on the porch, with the smug, encroaching air of a coffin; even that was empty, as if, in the reverse course of events, his very bones had disintegrated.

    –Vladimir Nabokov, from Speak Memory, via Whiskey River

  • Breaking News: What The Flippin' Hell?

    I just got word that Juan Ricon has been suspended for ten days after testing positive for a banned substance under Major League Baseball’s new drug policy.

    Scott Baker will be recalled from Rochester to take Rincon’s place on the roster.

    This makes absolutely no sense to me. Among the possible candidates for steroid use in the Twins clubhouse –presuming this is related to the whole steroid brouhaha, which I don’t know for certain– Rincon would be nowhere on that list.

  • Scooper & Scooped: Eating Crow Edition

    I was wrong.

    Well, I certainly stepped in it last Friday when I wrote that the Strib had been scooped by Salon in announcing Al Franken’s return to Minnesota. It turns out that Salon was guilty of the follow-on, and the Star Tribune deserves the credit for the earlier story. Deborah Caulfield Rybak had the scoop. We’re told there was an earlier story, too.

    It’s been periodically reported that Franken was entertaining the idea of a run for senate—it just wasn’t clear whether he’d run to take the place of retiring Sen. Mark Dayton, or wait to take on Sen. Norm Coleman. It also wasn’t clear whether he was planning to continue his Air America show from the Twin Cities or not, until Caulfield Rybak said so—as far as I have been able to determine.

    The Star Tibune deserves all the credit for having this story—although I’m a little surprised they didn’t trumpet it a bit louder. It was buried in a nice little Variety article about “Left of the Dial.” the documentary film about the founding of Air America. This, incidentally, made it hard to find the story in their public search engine. In fact, it still doesn’t show up under any search term that I can think of, including the author’s name, the headline of the story, “Air America,” or “Al Franken.” As near as I can tell, the story was never published online, and I have to confess that’s where I read the Star Tribune each day. That being the case, I’ll take the liberty of quoting the salient part here (kindly forwarded to me by one of Deborah’s many enthusiastic fans:

    “The next year may bring other changes. Franken, who has said he plans a U.S. Senate run from Minnesota, confirmed Tuesday that he’d purchased a house in Minneapolis and plans to start broadcasting his show from the Twin Cities as early as January. In a separate interview, co-host Lanpher was mum about a potential return to the Twin Cities – but that appears unlikely, since she’s working on a new project for the network. ” (3/31/05)

    I guess the question in my mind now is why the Star Tribune isn’t archiving the articles of one of their best reporters and writers—especially in a scoop that ought to be at least a 1E story, if not a 1A one?

    But, again, this is not an excuse for getting the story wrong last Friday—and I regret the error.

    UPDATE: With a little assistance, I was able to find Caulfield Rybak’s article. It is in the Star Tribune’s paid-only archive, and can be found either by typing the headline of the story or the words “Al Franken” (but not “Al Franken Moves,” “Al Franken Minneapolis,” or “Al Franken Home”). This leads to a results page giving the first several grafs of the story, but not the excerpt I included above. The point being, I guess, that the article is there if you know it’s there.

  • Just Because You're Paranoid…

    After mercifully disappearing for the first nine games of the season that song was back Saturday night. Lee Greenwood, I guess it is. I’ll take the blame (see this if you need any further explanation), because from here on out I’ve decided that I’ll take the blame for everything that goes wrong this year.

    I sure as hell can’t come up with any other explanation for the song’s reemergence that makes a lick of sense. Unless this Lee Greenwood character is somehow related to Hal Greenwood who, though a convicted felon, has old ties to the Twins through his days at the helm of Midwest Federal.

    And, look, I’ve got nothing against America, at least as a vague concept governed by a constitution that, though generally excellent, nonetheless failed to provide adequate protection against bad taste. If you’re dead set on turning the seventh-inning stretch into an exercise in patriotic indoctrination, though, there are certainly classier ways to go about it. There are surely better songs about America, songs that aren’t the work of bottom feeders like Lee Greenwood. Someone in the comments below took exception to my criticism of that jingoistic piece of herd trash on the grounds that America is at war. All the more reason, I say, to find offensive the spectacle of a bunch of safe, well-fed yahoos making merry at a sporting event and singing along with a crass ditty that could have been written by a computer program at the Pentagon.

    Okay, that’s all I’m going to say about that. Now I’d like to bitch about Bartolo Colon, if I could, a guy I regard as one of the more unsightly specimens ever to squeeze himself into a Major League baseball uniform. I can’t stand to watch the man, who, as he demonstrated today, is capable of pitching performances that are almost as nasty as he looks (or, as he showed against the Yankees in his last start, as ugly). Colon looks like the bastard spawn of Harvey Weinstein and Andre the Giant’s fat little sister.

    As much as I might loathe the sight of Colon, I have to admit he was pretty masterful today, painting the corners and getting the Twins to beat the ball into the rug all day long. He had to be masterful, of course, to beat Johan Santana. Santana was pretty damn good himself. Eight innings, two hits, two homeruns. There’s no shame at all in giving up a solo shot to Vladimir Guerrero, but Jose Molina? You’ve got to keep Jose Molina in the yard, and that shouldn’t be a terribly tall order –the guy had five career homers before today, for crying out loud.

    Oh well. It was a pretty good game, and a good series. It is, though, a dirty rotten shame that Shrek had to be the guy to put an end to Santana’s streak.

  • One More National Poetry Month Draws To A Close

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    This is always such a bittersweet night for me, as I curl up in my recliner before the fireplace with the last volume of poetry of the season and a glass of eggnog. Tomorrow, alas, all the verse will be packed away, the poetry decorations taken down, and the Caedmon Recordings of Poets will be returned to storage for another year. If tradition holds, my wife will give “Edna St. Vincent Millay Reading From Her Poetry” (Caedmon TC 1123) one final spin, and together we will intone along with “Elegy.”

    That’s always such a beautiful moment. This year, I’ve no doubt, it will be almost heartbreaking. The month seemed to fly by so swiftly, as we lost ourselves in the festive whirl of poetry readings, office parties, and neighborhood open houses. I try not to let the commercialization of National Poetry Month bother me. But as much as I might think I can simply block out the giant and frequently crass NPM displays at the Barnes and Noble and in the local malls (not to mention the garish advertising supplements for the small presses that tumble from the morning papers each day), I can’t deny that I am occasionally saddened. And I do sense that something important is being lost in our too eager complicity with the retail industry’s headlong rush to make a buck on the season.

    I know how important this month is for the continuing survival of bookstores, particularly those independents still hanging on by a thread. I understand that National Poetry Month and the sales it generates can be single-handedly responsible for keeping many of these smaller stores afloat. Yet I think that in the compressed frenzy of the month we too often lose sight of the fact that poetry is best mulled and savored in intimate gatherings, in the privacy of our homes, or in solitude.

    I am saddened as well when I hear of school poetry pageants being cancelled over complaints from conservative parents. What kind of a message are we sending to our children when we tell them there is something wrong with a celebration of the great universal spirit which finds its voice most powerfully in poetry?

    Tonight, however, as I raise a quiet toast to the waning moments of National Poetry Month, I shall try to push such gloomy thoughts from my mind, and I will share with you one final bit of verse to tide you over until next April:

    I’d rather, I can tell you flat,

    When for Parnassus bound,

    Have authored “Casey at the Bat,”

    Than the odes of Ezra Pound.

    –Robert Service

  • The lasting monument for the last day of Poetry Month

    The Latin poet Horace wrote this as the final poem of the third book of his Odes. (He later published a fourth book. We had one of those poems earlier.)

    Horace’s poetry has been the inspiration for poets through the ages. Dante, Dryden, Housman, Yeats and Auden all cribbed from him. He was the one who said “carpe diem”–“Seize the day,” and many other lines which have become a part of our language.

    The third book of Odes contains the “Roman Odes” in which Horace set out the characteristics that made Romans, and Rome, what it was–the ruler of the world. Duty, honor, self sacrifice, industry, love are all treated in that book. It ends with this poem, his succinct, and prideful, homage to his own contribution to Roman greatness–and to the place of poetry in his, and our, lives.

    I have built a monument more lasting than bronze
    And higher than the pyramids’ pile,
    Which no corrupting rain, nor impotent north wind–
    Nor even the innumerable years’ flight through time
    Can possibly pull down.

    I can never completely die. A great part of me
    Escapes the funeral rites. I’ll always increase,
    Fresh with new praise.

    As long as the tacit Vestal follows the priest
    Up the Capitoline hill,
    I will be known as he who brought this skill
    Out of the dry land where rapid Aufidus roars,
    And Daunus rules the rustic folk,
    And first led Greek song to march in Latin measure.

    So, Delphic Melpomene, lift up my deserved pride,
    Duly won through my merit,
    And gladly, with the laurel, wreathe my brow.

    Here’s the Latin.

    Exegi monumentum aere perennius
    regalique situ pyramidum altius,
    quod non imber edax, non aquilo impotens
    possit diruere aut innumerabilis
    annorum series et fuga temporum.
    non omnis moriar multaque pars mei
    vitabit Libitinam; usque ego postera
    crescam laude recens. Dum Capitolium
    scandet cum tacita virgine pontifex,
    dicar, qua violens obstrepit Aufidus
    et qua pauper aquae Daunus agrestium
    regnavit populorum, ex humili potens,
    princeps Aeolium carmen ad Italos
    deduxisse modos. Sume superbiam
    quaesitam meritis et mihi Delphica
    lauro cinge volens, Melpomene, comam.

  • Uncle Jumbo: The Proverbial Turd In The Punchbowl

    I had an incredible time at the ballpark tonight –and, yes, I’m in a good enough mood that I’m going to go ahead and refer to the Metrodome as a ballpark. It was a strange and amazing game, and a seriously gutty, inspired, and lucky performance by Carlos Silva. There was a point in the second or third inning where I was looking at my scorecard and going back over every batter in the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim California Angels lineup, certain I’d gotten so caught up in the fireworks on the field that I’d somehow missed three or four runs.

    But, no, there it was: four runs.

    The next thing I knew the Twins had tied it up, then taken the lead, and, finally, coasted to the victory.

    A bunch of other thrilling stuff happened at the game tonight, which I may or may not tell you about one way or another eventually. I’m too fried right now. It was a long day, and I walked back to my car from the Dome feeling tremendous but completely drained. I was –in accordance with a lopsided agreement I’d made over a month ago– expecting my old pal Uncle Jumbo to take me off the hook tonight. He was going to handle Fridays. That was the deal.

    Instead I came home to a rambling phone message from a clearly intoxicated Jumbo. This tirade, apparently, was in lieu of a column, although early in his heavily slurred monologue I think he said something like, “Write this down. My machine is broken.” I couldn’t make it all the way through his tantrum –I absolutely wasn’t in the mood– but I can tell you that there was a long-winded diatribe about Justin Morneau.

    Justin Morneau. The guy who went 3-4 and scored two runs in a 7-4 victory that was Minnesota’s fourth-straight win. The guy who is now hitting .432.

    “I can’t believe what I’m seeing!” Jumbo shouted into the phone. It sounded like he had a mouthful of potato chips. “Those morons have turned Justin Morneau into a fucking banjo hitter! The cursed and diseased Canadian who along with that other big white kid was supposed to be the Great Very-White Hope, who was supposed to hit forty homeruns! They’ve given the big bastard a Tony Gwynn makeover! This team is hopeless!”

    I listened for about five minutes, and then I hung up the phone. I’ll try to gut out the rest of the message in the morning, and if there’s anything of interest to report I’ll let you know.

  • Great Blurbs From Book Jacket History, Part One, And Other Miscellaneous Nonsense

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    –The day of Samuel Beckett’s Funeral. December 26, 1989. Montparnasse Cemetery, Paris. The Spam hat was my own humble offering.

    This is just the book to give your sister if she’s a loud, dirty, boozy girl.

    –Dylan Thomas’s blurb on the front dustwrapper of the 1966 first American edition of Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds (Walker and Company)

    These days the downtrodden God-Bless-You boys work the stoplight medians along Washington and Broadway in shifts. There’s a guy with a cardboard sign on every median and corner at the intersection, some days six guys holding down every possible point of access to motorists. There’s also always a gaggle of characters waiting on the sidelines, so to speak, sitting along the concrete freeway barrier and on the bus stop benches. It’s like pick-up basketball for the homeless.

    You tend to see the same characters every day. I suspect they all use each other’s signs. “Stranded,” one says, and nothing else. There’s the standard, “Homeless. Please Help. God Bless.” And, “Homeless Veteran. God Bless America.”

    I also saw this virtuous variant last week: “I’m Trying To Get Back On My Feet.”

    “Three Children In Texas” seemed to strike an odd note, and I was uncertain whether the appropriate reaction was sympathy or scorn. I do feel sympathy, or rather compassion, for all of them, especially now that there seem to be more of them everyday. My rule of thumb is that if I encounter one of them at a red light I give him a buck, and they have always been unfailingly polite.

    A couple days ago, in the rain, I saw a motorist hand one of them a pizza box through a car window, and yesterday, as I waited at the stoplight there was a guy who was holding an entirely blank piece of cardboard.

    “What’s your sign say?” I asked.

    “You know what it says,” he said, without the slightest hint of hostility. He was, of course, absolutely right.