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  • Setting the Table

    Another from Ted Hughes today, from The Birthday Poems, his last book before dying, and the long awaited answer to Sylvia Plath’s Collected Poems. It’s a bit pathetic, as he claims to have wanted to be her support…and the one who suggested she write about her father.

    Ted Hughes won all the awards and was the English Poet Laureate. But he spent all that effort to build but a nice coal fire on earth while Sylvia was a white star in the heavens. Work’s no substitute for genius, I fear.

    Daddy, by Plath, is below.

    The Table by Ted Hughes

    I wanted to make you a solid writing-table
    That would last a lifetime.
    I bought a broad elm plank two inches thick,
    The wild bark surfing along one edge of it,
    Rough-cut for coffin timber. Coffin elm
    Finds a new life, with its corpse,
    Drowned in the waters of earth. It gives the dead
    Protection for a slightly longer voyage
    Than beech or ash or pine might. With a plane
    I revealed a perfect landing pad
    For your inspiration. I did not
    Know I had made and fitted a door
    Opening downwards into your Daddy’s grave.

    You bent over it, euphoric
    With your Nescafe every morning.
    Like an animal, smelling the wild air.
    Listening into its own ailment,
    Then finding the exact herb.
    It did not take you long
    To divine in the elm, following your pen,
    The words that would open it. Incredulous
    I saw rise throught it, in broad daylight,
    Your Daddy resurrected,
    Blue-eyed, that German cuckoo
    Still calling the hour,
    Impersonating your whole memory.
    He limped up through it
    Into our house. While I slept he snuggled
    Shivering between us. Turning to touch me
    You recognized him. ‘Wait!’ I said. ‘Wait!
    What’s this?’ My incomprehension
    Deafened by his language — a German
    Outside my wavelengths. I woke wildly
    Into a deeper sleep. And I sleepwalked
    Like an actor with his script
    Blindfold through the looking glass. I embraced
    Lady Death, your rival,
    As if the role were written on my eyelids
    In letters of phosphorus. With your arms locked
    Round him, in joy, he took you
    Down through the elm door.
    He had got what he wanted.
    I woke up on the empty stage with the props,
    The paltry painted masks. And the script
    Ripped up and scattered, its code scrambled,
    Like the blades and slivers
    Of a shattered mirror.

    And now your peanut-crunchers can stare
    At the ink-stains, the sigils
    Where you engraved your letters to him
    Cursing and imploring. No longer a desk.
    No longer a door. Once more simply a board.
    The roof of a coffin
    Detached in the violence
    From your upward gaze.
    It bobbed back to the surface —
    It washed up, far side of the Atlantic,
    A curio,
    Scoured of the sweat I soaked into
    Finding your father for you and then
    Leaving you to him.

    Daddy by Sylvia Plath

    You do not do, you do not do
    Any more, black shoe

    In which I have lived like a foot
    For thirty years, poor and white,
    Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

    Daddy, I have had to kill you.
    You died before I had time —-
    Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
    Ghastly statue with one gray toe
    Big as a Frisco seal

    And a head in the freakish Atlantic
    Where it pours bean green over blue
    In the waters off the beautiful Nauset.
    I used to pray to recover you.
    Ach, du.

    In the German tongue, in the Polish town
    Scraped flat by the roller
    Of wars, wars, wars.
    But the name of the town is common.
    My Polack friend

    Says there are a dozen or two.
    So I never could tell where you
    Put your foot, your root,
    I never could talk to you.
    The tongue stuck in my jaw.

    It stuck in a barb wire snare.
    Ich, ich, ich, ich,
    I could hardly speak.
    I thought every German was you.
    And the language obscene

    An engine, an engine,
    Chuffing me off like a Jew.
    A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
    I began to talk like a Jew.
    I think I may well be a Jew.

    The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
    Are not very pure or true.
    With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luck
    And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
    I may be a bit of a Jew.

    I have always been scared of you,
    With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
    And your neat mustache
    And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
    Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You —-

    Not God but a swastika
    So black no sky could squeak through.
    Every woman adores a Fascist,
    The boot in the face, the brute
    Brute heart of a brute like you.

    You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
    In the picture I have of you,
    A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
    But no less a devil for that, no not
    Any less the black man who

    Bit my pretty red heart in two.
    I was ten when they buried you.
    At twenty I tried to die
    And get back, back, back to you.
    I thought even the bones would do.

    But they pulled me out of the sack,
    And they stuck me together with glue.
    And then I knew what to do.
    I made a model of you,
    A man in black with a Meinkampf look

    And a love of the rack and the screw.
    And I said I do, I do.
    So daddy, I’m finally through.
    The black telephone’s off at the root,
    The voices just can’t worm through.

    If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two —-
    The vampire who said he was you
    And drank my blood for a year,
    Seven years, if you want to know.
    Daddy, you can lie back now.

    There’s a stake in your fat black heart
    And the villagers never liked you.
    They are dancing and stamping on you.
    They always knew it was you.
    Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.

  • Is There An Echo In Here?

    What the hell was that? I am sorely in need of some consolation, brothers and sisters. A weekend without baseball, followed by a train wreck in the Motor City, has left me sitting here listening to Skip James with my head in my hands (well, my head was in my hands, but I had to lift it up momentarily to type; as soon as I’m finished it’s going right back down).

    It’s bad, you know. Six stinking hits. A couple errors. A shaky afternoon for the bullpen, and, most alarmingly, for J.C. Romero, who seems to have gone feral on us again. Once again the bottom of the order looked like, well, the bottom of the order. Some of these fellas need to be taken out behind the woodshed and given a good ass thrashing.

    As for Brad Radke, and that three-spot in the first inning, what the hell can I say? I already said it, but maybe it bears repeating:

    There’s no rational explanation for the funny business in the first inning so far this year, at least so far as a team-wide phenomenon goes. Where Brad Radke is concerned, however, it goes back a lot further than this year, and is pretty easily explained by the kind of pitcher he is. Radke prides himself on throwing strikes, and isn’t a guy who ever seems comfortable wasting a pitch. He’s a deeply conservative operator, and at this point in his career isn’t going to change much. That said, he’s never had a single truly dominating pitch that allows him to get away with mistakes, and opposing teams know by now what he has, and that he’s pretty much always going to be around the plate. It seems like everybody he’s faced over the last couple years knows the book on Radke backwards and forwards, and they’re clearly being proactive in the early going and taking aggressive cuts. Hitting is incredibly difficult, but you give the other team a huge advantage when they know damn well you’re going to throw it somewhere over the plate and have a fairly limited bag of tricks at your disposal.

    Radke’s a smart pitcher, and he generally does a good job of making little adjustments and settling in as the game goes along, but it sure seems like if he’d take a more unpredictable and even erratic approach right out of the gate he’d save himself the trouble of having to make those adjustments in the first place.

    Right now I just hope like hell they get those games in in Kansas City, because I need to get this bad taste out of my mouth in a hurry.

  • Yes I Can

    My instincts at the moment are pretty minimal. Maybe instincts isn’t the word I’m looking for. I’m not sure what word I’m looking for, to be perfectly honest with you. Appetite? My appetite at the moment is pretty minimal? While that’s certainly true, it’s hardly what I meant to say in the first place.

    It’s no good now. I’ve completely forgotten what I meant to say. I’m not to be trusted (that, more or less, is perhaps what I meant to say).

    I can’t be trusted, speaking on a purely personal level. I don’t expect any sort of interaction that would involve the giving or receiving of trust, not today, at any rate. I can’t trust myself is what I suppose I am trying to say.

    For instance: I don’t recall where I placed an open can of soda, and neither can I say with any certainty that I actually opened a can of soda, although I have a dim memory of having done so. I have no recollection whatsoever of having consumed a can of soda, however, and am unclear whether in fact one even consumes soda. I think one does. I’m almost sure drinking of any sort is an act of consumption. Regardless of these finer points, I have now gone room to room looking for the can of soda I feel certain I opened and did not consume, and it has not turned up anywhere. Despite my virtual certainty that I have at no time today –at no time in the last several months, in fact– ventured downstairs for any purpose, I have searched there as well. I have looked in the laundry room, in the storage closet, along the shelves where cans of paint and mysterious solvents are kept (I’ve never in my life purchased any such items, so my assumption is that these things belonged to the bankrupt chiropractor who lived here previous to my arrival).

    There has been absolutely no sign of an opened can of soda, and while I realize that there is really no point in continuing to obsess about this issue –if you could go so far as to call it an issue, and I believe I can– I don’t care for lingering mysteries, of which I already have far too many. I also don’t know what else I might do with myself, feeling as I do so untrustworthy and disinclined to leave the house for a sandwich.

    Most days I rather enjoy going up the street to the sandwich shop, not so much because I take any great pleasure in eating sandwiches (I do not), but rather because I am fascinated by the interactive nature of the experience. The people who work at this shop wear plastic gloves and make incredibly orderly sandwiches with uncanny speed. I almost wish they would work more slowly sometimes so that the satisfaction of watching their hands move so quickly beneath the plastic shield could be prolonged. This satisfaction is both fascinating and oddly comforting to me. It is almost as if these people are performing veterinary surgery and playing beautiful music on a piano, virtually at the same time. They are in such a hurry, I imagine, because they perceive me to be a nuisance.

    I hate to be perceived as a nuisance, and also, as I have mentioned, my appetite at the moment is pretty minimal. Something else of mine, it occurred to me earlier, is pretty minimal, but I can’t for the life of me think what it might be. It could, I’ll acknowledge, be a great many things.

    Addendum: I should also say that I don’t enjoy being called a strumpet, even by an eight-year-old girl who perhaps doesn’t understand what she is saying.

  • Credit In Heaven

    Some readers have written to ask whether it is ethical to take a published story and write your own version of it. In the news business this is called the “follow on,” and we’ve written about it at length before. The short answer is that it is perfectly ethical; the long answer is that it is ethical but it is karmically fraught.

    The reason readers are asking about this today is because the Newspaper of the Twin Cities yesterday published what appears to be a different, contradicting version of our cover story this month. This was clearly a follow-on that was inspired by our story, and probably leveraged by our story, and that’s just fine by us. In fact, the Star Tribune’s alternative version added some very interesting elements to the dramatic narrative of how the folks at Pan Am flight school nailed Moussaoui.

    A little background: Reporters have been trying to talk to someone inside Pan Am ever since September 11th, and the school has been under water-tight lock-down. When we first launched The Rake (we literally decided to go for it on September 10, 2001, then had a rocky six months making it happen), we fantasized about getting the inside story. Even though we are not primarily a news organization, this was the kind of investigative journalism we wished to practice, whenever the opportunity presented itself. As it turned out, one very resourceful, intrepid writer did get the story that no one else could get, and he came to us with it.

    Once the cat was out of the bag, of course, we started fielding calls from all over the country—including local TV stations, CNN, and the folks at “Sixty Minutes.” It was a great story, and most interested parties asked if we would give them access to our main souce, flight instructor Clancy Prevost. For reasons of his own, Prevost wished not to speak with anyone other than our reporter. That was undoubtedly frustrating for journalists wishing to do follow-on stories. All we could offer them was our story, our reporter, our cover and inside images. Many in TV felt this was compelling enough, and our writer has been making the rounds. Newpapers, in contrast, ignored the story—until the Strib was able to publish their version six days after we’d published ours.

    By the way, our main problem with the Strib’s version is that it was positioned by their editors to contradict our story as directly as possible, almost to the point of dishonesty—the implication being that Prevost was not the guy who caught Moussaoui, Nelson and Sims were. The Strib muddied Prevost’s role, and focused on Nelson and Sims, the managers who ultimately made the call to the FBI after his instructor (Prevost) had got his first troubling impressions of Moussaoui. The Strib’s story at first attempts to make Prevost look like an unskeptical rube willing to teach any old customer how to fly a 747, but then it relies on Prevost quotes from our piece to paint the opposite picture. Nelson, in particular, seems to want to discredit Prevost in an effort to get some credit himself—he claims to have pulled Moussaoui’s file before he even arrived in Minnesota—and the Strib obliges him in this. It is possible that all three men had independently come to the conclusion that the Moroccan was up to no good. But both our story and the Strib’s suggest that there was some resistance from folks higher in the organization—Strib sources not very convincingly say that unnamed people at Pan Am’s national headquarters in Miami resisted. Our story, which names a lot of names, suggests that it was the local management that at first didn’t see any danger in Moussaoui—and we confirmed it with those managers. Again, it is possible that both accounts are true. People are certainly entitled to their own recollection of the events of a few days in August, 2001, and there is surely enough glory to go around. We didn’t wish to get into the nitty-gritty of the differences in the two stories, but we felt slightly tempted to swing back, when the Strib damned us with faint contradiction. It is not clear why it is important to discredit Prevost to tell this story, nor why both stories can’t in some meaningful sense be valid. It would not be the first time management wished to take the credit of labor, nor the first time a major newspaper did not credit the work of a petty little independent competitor.

    We want to be clear that the Strib’s story was quite good as newspaper stories go, and it revealed more of the story for anyone interested in how Moussaoui was initially caught in Eagan. Also, it is not in the Strib’s interest to promote our magazine (though they have done that in the past, for which we are grateful). In this case, the follow-on reporter, Greg Gordon, did an impressive job of finding and approaching two more sources with key, inside knowledge and their own compelling perspective. (It makes it easier to get others to speak on the record for the first time when you can show them that someone else has done so, and, y’know, don’t you want to set the story straight and give your side of it?)

    Anyway, we say congratulations to the Star Tribune. Also, we both recognize and appreciate the backhanded gesture of credit offered deep into page A-4—so thanks, fellows.

  • Equal Time

    We’ve had a bit from Sylvia Plath, so here’s one from her husband Ted Hughes. Just for balance, perhaps, because Plath is one of our favorites, but so is the much maligned Ted. Remember Plath supporters, she was nuts before she ever met him. It wasn’t his fault.

    Bride and Groom Lie Hidden for Three Days
    by Ted Hughes

    She gives him his eyes, she found them
    Among some rubble, among some beetles

    He gives her her skin
    He just seemed to pull it down out of the air and lay it over her
    She weeps with fearfulness and astonishment

    She has found his hands for him, and fitted them freshly at the wrists
    They are amazed at themselves, they go feeling all over her

    He has assembled her spine, he cleaned each piece carefully
    And sets them in perfect order
    A superhuman puzzle but he is inspired
    She leans back twisting this way and that, using it and laughing
    Incredulous

    Now she has brought his feet, she is connecting them
    So that his whole body lights up

    And he has fashioned her new hips
    With all fittings complete and with newly wound coils, all shiningly oiled
    He is polishing every part, he himself can hardly believe it

    They keep taking each other to the sun, they find they can easily
    To test each new thing at each new step

    And now she smoothes over him the plates of his skull
    So that the joints are invisible

    And now he connects her throat, her breasts and the pit of her stomach
    With a single wire

    She gives him his teeth, tying the the roots to the centrepin of his body

    He sets the little circlets on her fingertips

    She stiches his body here and there with steely purple silk

    He oils the delicate cogs of her mouth

    She inlays with deep cut scrolls the nape of his neck

    He sinks into place the inside of her thighs

    So, gasping with joy, with cries of wonderment
    Like two gods of mud
    Sprawling in the dirt, but with infinite care
    They bring each other to perfection.

  • If You'd Be So Kind

    dankert-sleepless.jpg

    —James Dankert

    I need some new links. I love most of the folks over there in the column to the left, but they’re all pretty much holdovers from my old site, and I’ve noticed lately that some of them are no longer active –a lot of them, actually, which I’m sure is a reflection of the often frustrating disparity between labor and reward that dooms so many excellent internet galleries or ‘zines.

    I’ve often pointed out how much I despise the term “blog.” I’m no longer quite sure why, other than that it means too many different things, and is a homely word. Lately, of course, blogs have made all sorts of news, most of which I’ve paid little or no attention to. When what people call the mainstream media starts talking about blogs, they’re virtually always talking about the Rock ’em-Sock ’em Robots world of political blogs. Many such sites are virtuous and even indispensable (i.e. Cursor, Daily Kos, Wonkette, and This Modern World), but though we may all be first and foremost political animals, however helplessly, I’m afraid I lack the spine to absorb the constant (daily, hourly, minute by minute) reminders of what wretched and ineffectual creatures human beings can be.

    I’ll beat you to the punch: I’m fully aware that this thing (see lengthy official title above) is one more such reminder, albeit a reminder in the abstract, wearing the threadbare clothes of the microcosmic, the prosaic, the down-on-his-luck sidewalk fire breather or the bedraggled and gibbering organ grinder. I’m down in the basement building ships in bottles while upstairs my family starves from malnutrition and neglect.

    I love people who build ships in bottles, though. I love, and am entertained by, too many things, even if there never seem to be enough of them to keep me entertained. I’m easily bored, and the internet is easily boring. I don’t have the slightest idea how to go looking for the things that might keep me entertained. In a perfect world I would have a curatorial office in a giant warehouse somewhere –a building that would be equal parts natural history and science museum, art gallery, rag and bone shop, and library– and I would have a team of interns and assistants who would come to my office each day laden with items of interest for my inspection. These people would understand that I am severely deficient in attention, attracted to all manner of peculiarity, and an incurable dilettante.

    I don’t live in that perfect world, but I’ve never stopped dreaming of it. And, strangely enough, people do come to me –not each day, but often enough– laden with the sort of odd and beautiful wonders that sustain me in what feels more and more like a vigil. I’m always waiting for something more, connections, voices or objects that stir something in me, minor miracles, visits from entertaining madmen and oracles; I’m always hoping that when I open an atlas I will find its pages teeming with new countries, strange roads, entire worlds of the wholly unfamiliar. Every time I crack the pages of a dictionary my secret wish is that all the words will suddenly be transformed into a language understood by no one on the planet but me and a small group of my closest associates.

    I’ve said before that my goal as a child was to create my own set of encyclopedias comprised entirely of entries on everything that had ever, however momentarily, claimed my attention, made my head spin, or given me a feeling of wonder or joy. Things that give me happiness literally make me leap around; when I am delighted my response is to try to leap as far from the surface of this planet as I possibly can, and when I am extremely delighted I can hurl myself again and again –straight up or, occasionally, at forty-five degree angles– into the air. I suppose I’m attempting to fly, or to “slip the surly bonds of earth,” as Ronald Reagan once said, cribbing the words of a dead World War II Canadian airman.

    You can make me leap by sending along sites that might be of interest to me (and, certainly, to you), or that you think would make worthy additions to my list of links. I’m going to go through there sometime soon and reluctantly prune away all the dead branches. If you haven’t taken the time to explore what’s over there, I’d recommend that you do so. There are lots of people and places there that make me happy on a regular basis, people and places like Big Happy Funhouse, letting loose with the leptard, Life in the Present, Paul Collins, The Minor Fall, The Major Lift, wood s lot, Glubibulga, and Word Shadows.

    Just today I discovered two more sites that I’ll be adding to my encyclopedia: the wonderful Village Eclair, and my pal Peter Schilling’s latest venture (a remodeled version of a lamented former venture), The Bug. Violet Horvath at Village Eclair has a voice that sounds like the sort of disembodied voices that comfort me at four a.m., and Peter would almost certainly be one of my associates in that museum of my dreams.

    I should also mention that this site is merely an offshore subsidiary of the magazine I write for, The Rake. It’s a pretty damn good magazine, I think, and you should make a point of checking it out and letting me (or us) know how you think it could be better.

  • The lesson for today

    lawrence2.bmp
    The Burning Man

    “Lawrence” by Tony Hoagland

    On two occasions in the past twelve months,
    I have failed, when someone at a party
    spoke of him with a dismissive scorn,
    to stand up for D.H. Lawrence,

    a man who burned like an acetylene torch
    from one end to the other of his life.
    These individuals, whose relationship to literature
    is approximately that of a tree shredder

    to stands of old-growth forest,
    these people leaned back in their chairs,
    bellies full of dry white wine and the ova of some foreign fish,
    and casually dropped his name

    the way that pygmies with their little poison spears
    strut around the carcass of a fallen elephant.
    “O Elephant,” they say,
    “you are not so big and brave today!”

    It’s a bad day when people speak of their superiors
    with a contempt they haven’t earned,
    and it’s a sorry thing when certain other people

    don’t defend the great dead ones
    who have opened up the world before them.
    And though, in the catalogue of my betrayals,
    this is a fairly minor entry,

    I resolve, if the occasion should recur,
    to uncheck my tongue and say, “I love the spectacle
    of maggots condescending to a corpse.”
    or “You should be so lucky in your brainy, bloodless life

    as to deserve to lift
    just one of D.H.Lawrence’s urine samples
    to your arid pychobiographic
    theory-tainted lips.”

    Or maybe I’ll just take the shortcut
    between the spirit and the flesh,
    and punch someone in the face,
    because human beings haven’t come that far

    in their effort to subdue the body,
    and we still walk around like zombies
    in our dying, burning world,
    able to do little more

    than fight, and fuck, and crow:
    something Lawrence wrote about
    in such a manner
    as to make us seem magnificent.

    Every now and then you like a poet who is just pissed off. Tony Hoagland, published (and we thank them for it) by the local Graywolf Press, is one of those. A friend has been sending me several of his poems, and believe me, this is one of the tamer ones. This guy’s got some fire that he doesn’t quite seem to sublimate completely with his poetry.

    Someday, I’m hope to go down to his home in Texas and buy him a drink and sit and talk trash a while.

  • Uncle Jumbo's Playground

    uncle jumbo 2.jpg

    –Illustration by James Dankert

    Here’s the deal: years ago —years ago– I spent a few holiday seasons working at one of those sausage and cheese kiosks at a local mall. I did this, as I do most things, purely out of laziness. The employee discount was attractive to me at the time, and I thought: How hard could it be to sell sausage?

    Pretty damn hard, actually, but thank God I wasn’t getting paid a commission. Six-and-half bucks an hour, straight up, which was like free money for sitting on my kiester all day with my nose stuck in a book. I have no idea how those places stay in business year after year, to be honest with you. I suppose the key to their survival is the fact that their customers are even lazier than I am –people who need some gift for somebody they don’t have any actual feelings for. Lazy bastards and senior citizens, that was basically the clientele for holiday sausage and cheese assortments. Apparently nothing says Merry Christmas to old folks quite like sausage and cheese. Lest you think I’m passing judgment on anybody, I should mention that I love both sausage and cheese, am a lazy bastard, and gave everyone on my gift list a cheese ball and a giant roll of sausage every year I worked at this place.

    I mention this because though, as I said, this was many years ago, I’m constantly running into or hearing from people from my old hometown who say to me either, “I hear you’re selling sausage,” or “Are you still selling sausage?” This misconception has been propagated by my mother for over a decade. Granted, I have a sketchy job history and have worked many, many terrible and insignificant jobs, and I probably can’t expect my mother to stay on top of my employment status. For the life of me, though, I can’t understand why she continues to tell people that I’m selling sausage. For the last several years I’ve told her I’m in building administration, but for some reason it doesn’t stick.

    That ‘some reason,’ if I’m going to be honest with myself, is that my mother is batshit crazy.

    Anyway, I called into sick at work yesterday so I could take in the game against the Royals at the Dome. I have not been in a good mood the last week, and for six months of the year my moods are almost entirely dictated by the performance of the Twins. Zellar’s terrible, and I say this as someone who I suppose considers him my friend –my old man had a word for guys like Zellar: fullofbeans– but he’s at least done a serviceable job of documenting the ugliness of the last five games. You probably know all about it as well, but it’s one thing to know about something and quite another to see it in person and to have paid to see it.

    By the second inning of yesterday’s game I had seen enough, but I’ve never left a game early in my life and I wasn’t about to set a dangerous precedent. So I sat there fuming, getting more pissed off by the minute, and eventually, yes, I suppose I was bellowing. I don’t throw things, as much as I might like to sometimes, but I do shout, loudly, and perhaps I jerk around and gesture aggressively. There are times, I know, when I’m no longer truly aware of what I’m shouting, and I become oblivious to the presence of people around me.

    So yesterday I’m in the middle of what I guess you could call a fit when this woman in front of me turns around and says that I’m frightening her kids.

    “If your kids were actually paying attention to the game instead of running up and down the aisles and shoving shit in their faces they’d have even more reason to be frightened,” I said to her, or possibly shouted. At which point a guy seated nearby says, “Relax, fella, it’s just a game.”

    There is virtually nothing you could say to me in a baseball park that would make me blow a gasket quicker than, “It’s just a game.” I don’t have a clear memory of the particulars, but things got pretty ugly in a hurry. The yahoos out in the bleachers were turning on me in a hurry, but I had no intention of backing down. Next thing I know a security guy is jerking at my arm. “If you could just step out into the concourse for a moment,” he said.

    I was furious, but I followed him up the aisle, accompanied by the applause and jeering of the yokels around me. When we got to the top of the stairs I paused and turned around so as not to miss a pitch in my scorebook. The security guy was standing next to me, blathering some nonsense, when suddenly he stopped mid-sentence and said, “Don’t you work at the Hickory Farms at Rosedale?”

    “Jesus,” I said. “I haven’t worked at that place in years. Are you from Blooming Void?”

    I couldn’t blame my mother this time. The security guy, it turned out, worked at a calendar kiosk opposite my sausage stand one year. He remembered that I used to sit there on my stool poring over the Baseball Encyclopedia. I guess this odd common ground must have cemented some sort of bond between us in his mind, because after making this connection he couldn’t have been a better shit about the commotion I caused, and he actually walked me around the concourse and let me sit in one of the empty seats above the bullpen.

    The rest of game was plenty ugly, but at least I didn’t have to lug a loss home with me. And now I’ll have the luxury of watching the games for the next week while sitting around my apartment in my underwear, drinking beer, screaming obscenities, and poisoning myself with frozen pizza and microwave chuckwagons from Super America.

  • Pressing On

    See now some people are just willful about not getting it. Matt Taibbi—the man who is now best known as the author of the world’ most tasteless dead pope jokes—is not happy until he has found a pile of his own shit to goosestep through. In yesterday’s New York Press, he offers his long and ultimately pointless critical attack on Tom Friedman. It comes down to this, folks: Friedman commits the heinous transgression of mixing his metaphors.

    For example, Taibbi writes:

    “(Quoting Friedman) I stomped off, went through security, bought a Cinnabon, and glumly sat at the back of the B line, waiting to be herded on board so that I could hunt for space in the overhead bins.

    “Forget the Cinnabon. Name me a herd animal that hunts. Name me one.”


    Only a man desperate to take a contrarian position will waste a thousand words on such trivialities, willfully ignoring the point—if there is one in this simple, throwaway, scene-setting passage. (Nit-picking off-topic metaphors: There is only one level lower on the totem pole of criticism—carping about typos on blogs.) So Friedman isn’t the world’s greatest stylist—does anyone on the planet, other than Matt Taibbi, care that Friedman is NOT James Joyce or Gustav Flaubert?

    Now there are many good reasons to disagree with Friedman, and reasons to point out his most glaring blind spot— his unexamined assumptions about globalism. (He has never adequately defended his First Principle—why the slow encroachment of internationalism, i.e. Western style democracy, capitalism, and conspicuous consumerism, is necessarily a good thing for all people in all places.)

    Taibbi has the opposite problem that he identifies in Friedman: He is all style and no heart, and most disturbingly of all, no reporting. (If he can accuse Friedman of being a lousy stylist, then we can accuse him of being a bedsit reporter.)

    Taibibi writes:


    “(Quoting Friedman, again) The walls had fallen down and the Windows had opened, making the world much flatter than it had ever been—but the age of seamless global communication had not yet dawned.

    “How the fuck do you open a window in a fallen wall? More to the point, why would you open a window in a fallen wall? Or did the walls somehow fall in such a way that they left the windows floating in place to be opened?

    Four hundred and 73 pages of this, folks. Is there no God?”

    To which we can only answer: one thousand words of this, folks. Draw your own conclusions about the sacred and the profane.

  • Rockin' The Teflon Dump

    The guy who pumps the music through the Metrodome speakers during Twins games is a fellow by the name of Kevin Dutcher. I have no idea how much attention people pay to that sort of thing during baseball games, but I started noticing a few years ago that the selection of tunes at the Dome was surprisingly eclectic and hip compared to any other baseball stadium I’ve visited. I love the ballpark organ as much as anyone, and I’ll admit there are times when I still get nostalgic for the days at the old Met when Ronnie Newman provided the bulk of the musical entertainment.

    Newman died a couple years ago, but he still held down his post in the Dome’s organ loft pretty much right to the end, and though it sometimes gets lost in all the other stuff that now goes on during a baseball game the Twins did hire a replacement. These days, though, the bulk of the in-game music comes from Dutcher’s perch above the press box behind home plate.

    Whenever I ask people if they notice the music during Twins games all anyone seems to recall is that wretched anthem of peckerwood patriotism that turned the seventh-inning stretch into an interlude of absolute brain-squeezing torture. I don’t even remember the faux-sodbuster’s name who warbles the damn thing (repression can be a wonderful survival tool), but I can assure you that he’s basically ripping off the incomparable C.S. Lewis, Jr. from the late, great Mr. Show.

    If you aren’t paying attention, however, you’re missing some wonderful music. In the last year I’ve heard, among others, the Replacements, Outkast, Modest Mouse, the Ramones, Iggy Pop, Kiss, Chuck Berry, The Who, Devo, Weezer, the White Stripes, and Bush. That’s the sort of play list that’s earning MPR’s new The Current so much adoration (and cash). Dutcher, meanwhile, works in almost complete anonymity, and provides his own tunes to boot.

    Each member of the Twins has the opportunity to select what Dutcher calls their “walk-up music.” These are the songs that get played when a player’s name is announced in the on-deck circle. Some guys are apparently very picky; others don’t give a rat’s ass. Jacque Jones, for instance, provides Dutcher with a number of selections, and likes to mix things up from time to time. For the players who don’t have any particular preference Dutcher chooses something he thinks seems appropriate. Last season he picked Joe Mauer’s music, alternating Joe Walsh’s “Life’s Been Good” and the White Stripes’ “The Hardest Button,” the latter, Dutcher said, because he figured “a twenty-one-year-old kid should like the White Stripes.”

    I’ll run down the songs for this year’s starting line-up, and include some selections apparently beloved by former Twins, but first I’d like to make a personal plea to Ron Gardenhire: Gardie, please call your slumping third baseman into your office immediately and discuss with him what strikes me as a hugely inappropriate and emasculating song choice (OutKast’s “Behold A Lady”). This reminds me of the days when Dodger pitcher Robinson Checo’s appearances would be heralded by the playing of Simon and Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson.” This, though, seems much, much worse.

    Here’s the line-up:

    Shannon Stewart: Last year Stewart used Usher’s “Yeah.” This season his walk-up music is an unnamed hip-hop instrumental that he provided to Dutcher.

    Jason Bartlett    : LCD Soundsystem, “Daft Punk is Playing at My House.” (Dutcher’s selection.)

    Joe Mauer: The Game, “How We Do.” (Never heard of it.)

    Justin Morneau: AC/DC, “Back in Black.” (Same as last year.)

    Torii Hunter: Bonecrusher, “Never Scared.” (Same as last year.)

    Jacque Jones: The Game, “Where I’m From.” Juvenile, “Bounce Back.” T.I., “Bring ‘Em Out.” (Dutcher: “Jacque likes variety and is very specific about his music.”)

    Lew Ford: Tree 63, “Treasure.” (A Christian rock song, if I’m not mistaken.)

    Michael Cuddyer: OutKast, “Behold A Lady.” (See above. Suggested inappropriate alternates: “Three Times A Lady,” “Dude Looks Like a Lady,” “Pretty Woman,” and “Lady Sings the Blues.”)

    Luis Rivas: Petey Pablo, “Freek-A-Leek.” (Dutcher’s selection. Suggested nicknames for Rivas: Petey Pablo and Freek-A-Leek.)

    Matthew LeCroy: Charlie Daniels Band, “South’s Gonna Do It Again.”

    You might recall that jaunty little Latin number that accompanied Cristian Guzman to the plate during his last several years here. For those who might wish to recreate those wonderful memories in the privacy of their own homes, the song is called “Fiesta Mora,” by Alabina, and is from a CD called “Sexy Latin Beats.”

    Corey Koskie’s song was Rush’s “Tom Sawyer,” and, sometimes, a tune called “Joy” by a Christian rock group whose name Dutcher did not recall. Eddie Guardado, of course, took the mound to AC/DC’s booming “Thunderstruck.” Joe Nathan’s warm-up music features “Stand Up and Shout,” by the fictional band Steel Dragon (vocals by Sammy Hagar) from the “Rock Star” soundtrack, mashed with Big Head Todd’s version of John Lee Hooker’s “Boom Boom.”

    There you have it. Somebody please burn me a CD of this schizoid mix so I can drive my wife bananas on road trips. I’d also be delighted to entertain suggestions for alternate selections –perhaps something you think might be more appropriate– for any of the above named players. Or any players, period, I guess. What would Ted Williams’ walk-up music be, I wonder? What was Ron Coomer’s? What should it have been?

    Oh, lord, the possibilities are endless.