The Rake Magazine

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  • Stand and Deliver

    So, I’m sitting at this casino bar outside of Carlton, Minnesota, last month, and this rather handsome gent rolls up alongside me and says, “Nice mustache-ride joke. Can I buy you a drink?” I’d just closed out the bill at the Black Bear Casino’s “Free Comedy Night Thursdays.” Now, I don’t mean to brag, but that’s headlining, baby. Top o’ the hog pile.

    When I say the guy rolled up, I mean that literally. My beer benefactor was in a wheelchair. Marine Corps, Vietnam, but that came out after the second round of beers. He told me he lost the leg in a poker game.

    As it turns out, the guy wanted to talk shop. He’s just started making the rounds with his own stand-up act at open mikes in Minneapolis. That’s a long drive for someone who lives in Hinckley, but when you love performing, a couple of hours’ drive time can weirdly sweeten the deal. Whets the appetite for a crowd.

    I took the Lady Slipper Lounge gig for the money. No mistaking that. But also for love. I’m called a comic, but I’m more of a B.S. artist. Anybody who has the audacity to take a microphone in hand and stand on a stage alone in front of strangers in a strange place with the intent to bring them together in a symphony of delight is both an artist, and full of it. I mean, talk about the impossible.

    In truth, it had been years since I headlined a room of any size as a stand-up. You can leave the stage, but you never get over the laughs. I wanted to see if my old love would have me back.

    The stage was a set of steps that led into the bar and a mike on a stand. No lighting, pre-show music cued in from a Discman. The crowd numbered fifty. The house emcee wore matching “Ziamond” pinky rings on each of his hands and did a pretty convincing Burgess Meredith impersonation. Kind of a mid-eighties vintage if you ask me, but the crowd lapped it up. Every grunt was underscored by the ringing slots.

    In the middle of the first comic’s act, a drunken heckler roared to life. She was the prototypical Birthday Girl. Slumped in her seat, melon breasts spilling out of a shiny party blouse. Toy tiara from Wal-Mart perched on her head, queen for her day. She emitted giant eruptions of slurred sass, angrily ensuring that all eyes remained on her. Because they were tanked, she and her friends could only understand so much of what was being said to them from the stage.

    The opening comic handled her like a brilliant neurosurgeon that is suddenly forced mid-operation to work with butter knives. He had a pattern. Mollify, compliment, insult. Apology, flattery, personal attack. Dig, dig, push. Tamp down the dirt. Bye-bye birthday girl. Twenty minutes later, she and her friends were stunned into shamed silence, the rest of the audience laughing at them. The comic killed her. He killed them. He killed.

    I followed, and my set went fine. What I like to call “wildly OK.” My beer buddy was right; the best joke of my set was the mustache joke. It was a toss-off, part of a crowd riff. A fella in the front row sported a humongous Tom Selleck tickler, and I couldn’t take my eyes off it so I said: “Hey Tiger, how much are they charging for a mustache ride these days? Used to be twenty-five cents, and you’d see those T-shirts everywhere. What happened? Do you think there might have been a big mustache-ride accident? What do you think it was—whiplash? Or a dislocated jaw? That’s a damn shame. Bunch of litigation-happy people gotta screw it up for the rest of us!”

    It was hilarious—really, it was, but I guess you had to be there.

  • Ghetto Is As Ghetto Does

    Until a month ago, I did not think that I lived in “the ghetto.” North Minneapolis, the inner city, and even, on occasion, the ’hood—but not the ghetto. However, that was before a string of troubling incidents occurred in my neighborhood—and before I got some surprising reactions to them from some of my South Minneapolis friends. I’ve seen first-hand what happens when urban geography, race, and our notions of individual self-worth get mixed together.

    “Ghetto” derives from the name of an island near Venice where Jews were forced to live in the 1500s. Now, according to Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, a ghetto is a “thickly populated slum area, inhabited predominantly by members of an ethnic or other minority group, often as a result of social or economic restrictions, pressures or hardships.”

    Things started to get strange a few weeks ago when I asked some of the young men in my neighborhood about the dramatic increase in cars parked near my home at odd hours and often with suspicious-looking passengers. I made it clear to these men that I would report any drug dealing or other criminal activity to the police.

    A few days later, a young African-American man approached me as I was headed to work. “I heard you were asking about drug dealing around here,” he said. “Nobody is dealing drugs. But you gotta understand—you live in the ghetto.”

    I was just a little perplexed. “I live in the ghetto? What does that mean? Am I supposed to accept trash in my yard, open drug dealing, and general mayhem because of my ZIP code? People in Linden Hills or Kenwood don’t have to put up with this.”

    “Brother, you don’t live in Linden Hills or Kenwood.”

    “Fair enough,” I replied, “but my parents placed their lives on the line in Mississippi during the Civil Rights movement so that black people could live in decent neighborhoods. I am not going to disrespect our struggle as a people by accepting that kind of defeatist thinking.”

    Then our eyes locked for a moment, each looking at the other with mutual bemusement. He clearly did not understand me, and I surely did not understand him. Did I challenge his expectations of what he and other Northsiders were entitled to from their surroundings? He probably thought I was setting the bar too high with my Kenwood comparisons, and I thought his ghetto comments provided an excuse for condoning subpar living conditions and bad behavior.

    Less than thirty-six hours later, a ten-pound rock crashed through my living-room window at three o’clock in the morning. Was there a connection? Was I being punished for being too bourgeois and not accepting the consequences of my geographic place?

    When I told two of my best friends, both Southsiders, I thought that they would surely empathize. Instead, I got lectured about “ghetto life” and strongly encouraged to “git while the gettin’ was good” to the relative safety of South Minneapolis. “I warned you about messing around with those Northside Negroes,” one told me. “They don’t look at the world the same way you and I do. You are dealing with men who don’t value their own lives, let alone yours.”

    My other ABC (“ace boon coon,” Southern lingo for close personal friend) largely agreed. “You’ve got a choice to make,” he began. “If you don’t do anything else, they probably won’t either. Don’t start a neighborhood block group, don’t write about this in your column, and for God’s sake, do not challenge them again. Next time, you might just really piss them off. Inside your own home, say whatever you want, but do not ruffle their feathers by trying to impose your view of appropriate behavior on them. Accept that you live in a ghetto, populated with bad people who, if pushed, will do bad things to you.”

    However, I am not going to ignore trash in my yard and criminal activity on my street because of my address. I strongly encourage my fellow “Northside Negroes”—and Northside Hmong, Latino, and all the other hyphenated Americans—to have zero tolerance for bad behavior. We’ve got to let the bad boys and girls know that the heat is on. We all deserve what people in Kenwood and Linden Hills take for granted—clean, relatively crime-free neighborhoods.

  • Mock & Roll

    There is a rock god on stage at the Triple Rock Social Club bestriding the speakers like a colossus, his Loverboy T-shirt sacrificed to a Dionysian frenzy, his tongue out and waggling, his fingers pulsating. With a quick kick and flip, he’s down in the crowd, then up on the back bar, strutting around the beer bottles and whiskeys as he brings the music directly to the people. The fact that he has no instrument is of no consequence; this is rock ’n’ roll.

    At the Minneapolis regional of the Air Guitar World Championship a couple of weeks ago, nine contestants took the stage to see whose mimicry of real rock-star moves would be good enough to win a slot at the L.A. nationals. There, one lucky American would be chosen to represent the red, white, and blue at the world tourney of “airaoke” in August.

    Though amateurs have practiced the art of air guitar for generations (you only start feeling stupid doing it sometime in your thirties), the formal World Championship first took place in 1996 in the city of Oulo in northern Finland. Though the annual Finnish event has been a reliable source of silly-season news stories since then, only last year did the nation that invented the electric guitar finally send a competitor. Davie “C. Diddy” Jung swept the title just the way the U.S. dominated Olympic basketball after NBA players were allowed to compete. And there are signs that the world’s newest Sport of Kings is headed straight for the Hollywood machinery that builds American Idols.

    The championship is set up in that mode, with the contestants playing to both the crowd and a panel of three local judges (rock critic Melissa Maerz, Cities 97’s Brian Oake, and Andy Lindquist of Willie’s American Guitars) who are hamming it up as much as anyone.

    In the first round, contestants freeform for sixty seconds to the song of their choice. Things have been heavily stage-managed; all contestants have outlandish costumes and goofy stage names, and it’s impossible to miss the camera crew filming the proceedings for Ben Affleck and Matt Damon’s production company, Project Greenlight.

    All contestants were entertaining, though maybe in spite of themselves. One, who used the nom de guerre “Iron Ranger,” had a peculiar floppy style, as though she were trying to get a handle on a twenty-pound trout instead of teasing power chords from a guitar. And the mullet-wigged “Ax Action,” concentrating with furrowed brow on the riff to AC/DC’s “You Shook Me All Night Long,” almost fatally misjudged the length of the Triple Rock stage. He told me later, “Falling off the stage is a classic guitar thing. I really should have gone down to the ground, played for a second, then come back from the dead.” So that was on purpose, then? “Oh, sure,” he deadpanned, then burst out laughing.

    The best was “Bob the Murderer,” an orange-haired Triple Rock employee who enthralled the crowd with a perfect punk pantomime of Sex Pistol Johnny Rotten and The Young Ones’ Vyvyan. Though he did little in the way of actually mimicking a guitarist, he stomped and glowered and spazzed brilliantly. An added plus: That was not technically a costume, since it’s the way he dresses all the time. Even in air guitar, authenticity adds extra weight.

    After the second round, in which all contestants performed “Cat Scratch Fever,” the judges declared a tie, leading to an “air-off” between Jon “Jackicaster” Maki, who performed in a painted-on seventies pornstar ’stache and orange jumpsuit emblazoned “Stroke This,” and the clear crowd favorite, Michael “Mother” Rucker, in the Loverboy T.

    “It’s a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock ’n’ Roll)” erupted from the speakers. Jack and Mother strutted homoerotically. Jack flashed his nipple ring, but Mother stripped to his Calvins, and the screaming crowd sealed his win.

    Of course, there was one little thing: Mother was a ringer, an L.A. actor and story editor who’s worked on (surprise!) the Project Greenlight TV show. But it seems churlish to complain about fakery in an air-guitar contest, especially when there was no real attempt to hide the setup. Minutes after the closing jam, Mother basked in air fame as he answered questions from two journalists and signed a T-shirt for a besotted female fan, who was greatly saddened when his Sharpie pen turned out to be dry.

    In the end, air guitar is all about love. Nick “Swami” Swanson, who took third place, told us: “Air guitar comes from you expressing what you wish you could have done yourself. You want to be like the real thing. It lets you forget for a moment.”—Christopher Bahn

  • Don’t Panic, It’s Not Organic

    It’s nice to see former Senator Rudy Boschwitz still flying the flannel after all these years. Like any self-respecting legislator on the receiving end of a populist pink slip, he’s gone quietly into the private sector. There, the glad-handing, expense accounts, and corporate logrolling aren’t scrutinized by every craven reporter and party activist (as if there is a difference) with an axe to grind. For a price, a former senator will throw his considerable weight behind just about any cause, even a specious one. Today, Boschwitz is taking up the cause against alternative farming techniques.

    What on Earth could possibly be wrong with organic food? You’d be surprised. We recently learned that among Mr. Boschwitz’s many roles in public service, he is the chairman of something called the Center for Global Food Issues. We must admit that under normal circumstances, we wouldn’t have noticed. But he stepped out from behind the curtain few weeks ago, in a letter to the Star Tribune complaining about that paper’s intolerable position on food that contains genetically modified organisms—hybrid corn and other produce usually identified through the cautionary acronym “GMO.” According to the letter, Boschwitz and a CGFI colleague named Dennis Avery believe that GMOs can have a positive impact on Third-World economies and farming by increasing yields of pest-resistant crops. This sounds perfectly reasonable. Why, then, is it so creepy to realize that Boschwitz and Avery are shilling for the companies that stand to profit the most from the idea? Perhaps it is because the truth is not even salient, because they have forfeited their authority; they are essentially writing advertisements for their corporate benefactors.

    The Center for Global Food Issues is run by the Hudson Institute, a conservative “think tank” that is funded by Cargill, Monsanto, Novartis, and McDonald’s—among many other corporations. A full list of Hudson’s underwriters reads like an all-star roster of petro-chemical agribusiness.

    If mercenary lobbyists like Boschwitz and Avery actually believed what they say about the benefits of big-business farming, we think they would be less disingenuous in their rhetoric. In promoting their brand of high-volume, low-quality, non-sustainable agriculture, they are shameless about arguing all sides. All is fair in love and war; agribusiness has been taking it in the gut for a decade now. Why wouldn’t they marshal their forces to fight back against the insidious tide of hippy-dippy paranoia about proven modern farming techniques? (The only thing petro-chemical farming ever killed was the family farm, duh!)

    Boschwitz and Avery say that genetically modified crops are preferable because they reduce the need for pesticides and herbicides; suddenly and inexplicably, they are worried about Third-World farmers trudging through their fields with backpack sprayers. This is surely a recent and isolated case of dementia, rather than a prick in their conscience, since their supporters continue to claim that glyphosate herbicides and pesticides are perfectly safe for man and beast alike. This old saw is still a good one, it turns out. Many experts agree that GMOs—excused as a technology that would make pesticides and herbicides obsolete, after that nasty business with DDT a few years back—actually increase farmers’ reliance on chemicals. As GMOs have spread around the world, pesticide use has increased. How odd.

    There’s more of this brand of double-talking dishonesty. Organics are wasteful and inefficient, says the Center for Global Food Issues, because they allegedly require a lot more acreage to produce the same yield as “conventionally grown” produce. This is the first we’ve heard that Cargill, Monsanto, ADM and the rest are worried about land-use issues and the preservation of wilderness and wetlands. (They might ponder the considerable evidence that monoculturing—planting millions of acres of the exact same hybrid of, say, “Roundup Ready” corn—is destroying the basic building block of biology: diversity.)

    Worst of all, the Cargills of the world have cynically peddled at least one Dennis Avery prevarication. Avery invented and spread the falsehood that organic foods are less safe than non-organic foods (because, he said, they use manure as a fertilizer—which conventional agribusiness does too, but never mind). In a widely syndicated article, he cited an epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention saying that organic foods are eight times more dangerous with regard to bacteria like E. coli. The problem was, that source is a CDC scientist named Paul Mead. Mead never said anything of the kind. He merely hung up on Avery when he called to beg someone at the CDC to confirm his views on the matter. In fact, the CDC subsequently clarified the issue, and retractions were published all around: Avery’s claim was as bogus as it was self-serving. No less an authority than the New York Times gave Avery the public scolding he deserved.

    So what is the honorable former senator doing in the same byline as this industry flack who is prone to stretch the truth, or simply invent his own? Funny how these sorts of people never seem to espouse beliefs that are independent of their corporate benefactors—or undertake any “public service” that isn’t somehow connected to commercial interests.

  • Sisu Coffee and Tea

    Not many Americans remember that we were once at war with Finland, and unlike the Vietnamese, Finns have not tended to migrate here and open restaurants that might remind us of this history. Lori Luchsinger and Karen Salmey, therefore, have been left pretty much on their own when it comes to satisfying the metro’s pent-up demand for pulla. They’ve been running out of it at their new coffeeshop near Ford Parkway on Snelling. But since pulla is really just cardamom bread, we recommend piirakat, a pastry crust wrapped around sweetened creamy rice and topped with egg butter. It’s possibly the most soothing food in the world.

  • Dave Chappelle

    If Richard Pryor were thirty years younger and tapping the same inspirational vein as the South Park guys, he might be very like Dave Chappelle: smart, scatological, splenetic, and not interested in slaughtering sacred cows so much as stampeding the whole herd off a cliff, or maybe through Dick Cheney’s front yard. His sketch series, Chappelle’s Show, is one of Comedy Central’s sharpest and most consistently hilarious offerings, thanks to his take-no-prisoners attitude and recurring bits like “Charlie Murphy’s True Stories” (that’s Eddie’s real-life brother), featuring Chappelle’s blistering impersonations of guys like Rick James and Prince. For a preview, check out the show’s first season on DVD; on stage, Chappelle is sure to be even more ferociously funny—and they won’t be bleeping him, either. 910 Hennepin Ave., Minneapolis; (612) 339-7007; www.hennepintheatredistrict.com

  • Blue/Orange

    Now here’s a worthy import. The Guthrie Lab closes its 2003-2004 season with a play the London Guardian called “the year’s funniest and most important.” Winning the “triple crown” of British theater awards, Blue/Orange depicts a struggle between two psychiatrists over the care of a soon-to-be-released Afro-Caribbean patient. Christopher suffers from multiple personality disorder, but the feud that ensues between his doctors—idealistic Bruce and conservative Robert—is the real heart of the matter. Infusing heavy-hitting issues of race, class, and human isolation with a refreshing dose of humor, Blue/Orange is sure to make as many waves here as it did across the pond. 700 N. 1st St., Minneapolis; (612) 377-2224; www.guthrietheater.org

  • The Mousetrap

    If classic whodunits really float your boat, you’re in luck. It’s reasonable to deduce that you’ll leave the Showboat with suitable closure on Agatha Christie’s crime classic The Mousetrap. It’s an archetypal Christie setup: Snowed in at an ancient manor, guests find themselves embroiled in a murder mystery when one of them turns up brutally strangled. As the killer walks among them, all wonder whodunit—and who’s next. The University of Minnesota Actors Theater adds flair to the story by interspersing choreographed olios—1890s-style show tunes—to amuse and entertain. But can they be trusted? Hey, who’s that lurking in the shadows? Harriet Island, St. Paul; (651) 227-1100; www.showboattheater.com

  • Les Miserables

    A humble fugitive trying to lead a life on the straight-and-narrow. A self-righteous inspector chasing the past. An orphan child in love with a man at war. The Victor Hugo classic, on a return trip to the Ordway for three weeks, has more characters than the Michael Jackson trial, but entertains with much more dignity. The original Broadway performance ended its sixteen-year run last May as the third-longest-running show in Broadway history—and now it’s hit the road as this four-million-dollar “replicate” production, which has drawn record sellout crowds in London, Chicago, and Boston. It’s the only production of Les Mis currently running in the States, so catch it while you can (or settle for more Jacko Court TV drama). (651) 224-4222; www.ordway.org

  • Wade Guyton and Kelley Walker

    Guyton and Walker are two up-and-comers whose work was most recently seen, respectively, at the Whitney Biennial and at the legendary Paula Cooper gallery in New York. For this show, the pair engaged in some pretty heady collaborative hijinks. They subjected a limited selection of imagery—including a designer couch, a knife blade, a private jet, and a photograph of another art duo, Swiss artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss—to a formidable array of techniques: scanning, spray-painting, cutting, computer printing, silk-screening, etc. You might say that they’re exploding, expanding upon, then giving a tech update to the Warhol tradition of multiples. As with the exhibit title, XXXXX BBB XXXXXXFFFFFF FFF, the works are interestingly off-putting—it’s incumbent on the viewer to dig in, do some decoding, and figure out just what’s going on. 2500 University Ave., Suite C2, St. Paul; (651) 917-1851