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We’re very excited to have Schuur back in Minneapolis. Through her decorated singing career, we’ve come to expect her to trot out the jazz and pop standards—from big-band arrangements to intimate nightclub combos. But her third record came out last summer, and it was a wonderful departure, pairing her with the one and only Barry Manilow. No, he just writes the songs and produces them—she sings them. (You gotta hand it to him: He’s a mensch and an ace, and if there were still a Brill Building, he’d be its landlord.) Rossi’s, 90 S. Ninth St., (612) 312-2828, www.bluestarjazz.com

Perpetually touring Ani DiFranco hits the stage with a few of her favorite f-words—“folk,” “feminism,” and undoubtedly one more—as she continues her winter tour after a much-deserved monthlong hiatus. Intimate venues have always been DiFranco’s preference, and the Northrop will be a fitting platform from which to unveil tracks from her latest album, Endangered Species, due January 20. Ani’s always had a stubborn independent streak, but she’s gone a step further on Species, playing all the instruments and providing all the vocals. Ani also singlehandedly recorded and mixed the songs on an analog eight-track reel-to-reel in a shotgun shack in New Orleans, complete with passing trains and rain falling in the background. And you thought she couldn’t get any more raw! She’ll have a backup band in concert, of course, except during the album’s patriotic spoken-word pieces, but audiences will have to warm up to new drummer Daren Hahn, who replaces longtime favorite Andy Stochansky, gone to chase his own star after last year’s successful solo release Five Star Motel. Hammel on Trial, a fellow Righteous Babe artist who describes himself as the Beastie Boys rolled into one, opens. Northrop, 84 Church St. S.E., (612) 624-2345, www.northrop.umn.edu

Maybe Governor Pawlenty’s idea of reinstating the death penalty in Minnesota will spur young people into some political interest, if not action. My stepdaughter was certainly disturbed when her research on the issue turned up the facts of the last Minnesotan execution in 1906, which didn’t go well. The hangman miscalculated the necessary calibration between the length of rope and the height of the scaffold, and William Williams’s feet struck the floor. Deputy sheriffs grabbed the rope and hoisted Williams up for almost fifteen minutes until the convicted murderer died by strangulation.

We all have our mile markers along the path of political ignition, some stranger than others. Do you remember the night Bill Clinton trounced George Bush? God knows, I do. That was the same night my fourteen-year-old foster daughter Erica snapped the braces off her teeth with pliers. But I didn’t discover that until the next morning.

On the night of the election, I was twenty-four years old. I had a colicky newborn in arm and a toddler at my feet. My chic, academic sister called from her cramped apartment on Manhattan’s Lower East Side as soon as victory was assured. She said something triumphant about how this election was really going to show the old boys club where they could go, now that old Georgie was a paltry single-term weenie. I stood barefoot in my nineteenth-century farm kitchen and let myself inflate like a balloon with hope like I hadn’t known since my own political awakening at the age of sixteen.

It was 1984, and I was an avid supporter of the Mondale-Ferraro ticket. I couldn’t vote yet, but I could stay up late into the night poring over my mother’s assigned college reading on the horrors of the nuclear world and systemic poverty. I could leaflet the neighborhood for my candidates and watch every televised debate. Ferraro was tough and smart and even pretty, with her arched brows and wide smile. It enraged me how the other side made fun of her. Mondale was sage and fatherly and good and honest. Of course they would win.

I was overly righteous and awkward as an adolescent politico, but I deserved some credit for my sincerity, which was so intense that it frequently ignited the wick afloat in my vast reservoir of ignorance and naiveté.

Not much had changed by 1992, when my team finally won for the first time. I crept into our foster daughter’s bedroom to herald the news. Except Erica wasn’t in her bed, or her room. She wasn’t anywhere in the house. She had climbed out her window and run off down some rural road to hang out in a friend’s basement plucking off her orthodontia, one tooth at a time.

That wasn’t the last disturbing episode from Erica, who remained a part of our family for years even as her primary residence kept changing as she transferred from one intensive therapeutic setting to the next, while she stayed with us on weekends. Eventually she ended up in my hometown of Duluth, where we continued to visit her until she emancipated herself from the system to become an exotic dancer, or at least that’s what she told me during one of our last conversations. I was not surprised, based on all that I knew about the abuses Erica had racked up at the hands of her toothless father, her disinterested mother, and a string of others who had swung through her life.

I think of Erica often, especially during election years. That girl really had something. She was smart, talented, and profoundly wounded. She had every reason to be consumed by rage, but she wasn’t. She was self-destructive, yes, but also unabashedly enthusiastic. She was resilient. She walked with grace and operated out of kindness and intuition an astonishing amount of the time. Sometimes I see someone in a car or standing in line at a store and I think it’s Erica, but then I realize she’s not sixteen anymore. She’d be closer to the age I was when I stood in as her mother. Chances are, I wouldn’t even recognize her, even though I can still picture the shape of her small white teeth that stayed straight even after she pried her braces off herself. Truth is, I saw something admirable in Erica’s do-it-yourself dentistry, violent though it was. Erica didn’t waste a lot of time feeling sorry for herself and she had the brains and the guts to make her own solutions when necessary. No doubt she’d have had a knack for politics, and I sure do hope she’s out there somewhere, getting by just fine, and raising a little hell in all the right places.

Reports are sunny regarding David Bowie’s newest album, Reality. It’s a good thing. The Thin White Duke’s career (gawd, we always hated that sobriquet; gawd, we hate that word, “sobriquet”) has been marked by long lazy periods where his butt was comfortably installed on its nest of laurels. But once a decade or so, he gets up and proves he’s still got the goods. Yet, in the parallel universe of performance, his roadshow has always been a spectacle to behold. Put this one down in the category of concerts you’ve got to stop telling yourself you’ll see next time he comes to town. Bowie’s old enough now that there may not be a next time. Besides, you don’t want to be one of those dorks who waited until the guy was knighted before you saw him onstage. Target Center, 600 First Ave. N., (612) 673-0900, www.targetcenter.com

Every small town used to have its hip record store, run by college dropouts who were looking for a volume discount on punk rock and one-hitters. The Lost Chord down in Mankato is where we first came across the Church, twenty years ago. They were Australia’s answer to the Psychedelic Furs and Bauhaus, hidden away in the import bins in heavy plastic sleeves. Theirs were lush, melodic productions full of stark and stylish images—and the records sounded pretty good too. After all these years, we suddenly realized that they’ve been chugging along without our involvement. We’d caught wind of this disturbing fact with last year’s After Everything Now This, and now they’re releasing album number seventeen. (Seventeen!) Not a lot of bands hang around that long, and they usually manage to do so only by going through a few drastic overhauls and makeovers. The Church, though, have stayed true to their original charter of jangly, moody, melodic alt-rock. In the absence of Echo & the Bunnymen, the Feelies, and a dozen other seminal art bands of the eighties, we’ll keep throwing into the Church’s offering plate.

I conducted a little poll among the usual crowd—meaning Ben, Pete, and Don. I asked them what they thought about the body-hair issue. I was gratified by the wide variety of answers I got. (OK, here’s your mixed-metaphor alert: Buckle up, we’re going for broke on this one.) Pete says his wife likes a completely clean slate, and he likes it that way too. Don says his current girlfriend sports a “landing strip,” but he’s actually got a kink for wall-to-wall carpet.

I have to admit that my own taste is bizarre. I won’t try to excuse it or explain it, but I like hairy underarms and bare bottoms. There is obviously much disagreement on the subject. There are plenty of women who feel that shaving or waxing is not only a pain, it’s morally suspect. Their thinking goes like this: If you want your woman in any state but the natural one, you’re probably a closeted pedophile. The suggestion is that if you get turned on by hairlessness, you’re actually fantasizing about prepubescent Lolita. (Women who, without male influence, prefer to be clean-shaven have either bought into the misogynist myth of beauty, or they have some neurotic “cleanliness” issue.)

Now that’s a pretty extreme view. Are all men supposed to grow beards, because that’s our “natural state”? Because your hubby shaves every morning, do you have a fetish for preteen boys? I doubt it, and you can see where I’m going with this. The less extreme view says that men are trained by looking at porn to want Cupid’s cupboard to be bare. My view is that you should do whatever turns you on and stop apologizing or feeling guilty about it, unless you’re breaking the law. Enlightened women dress well and wear makeup not to support the hegemony of a sexist paternalism, but because it makes them feel good. Sometimes feeling good means feeling bare.

Just as an aside, I have to point out that science is no help on the matter. There is a wide variety of views among biologists and evolutionists as to the origin and purpose of body hair. The natural assumption is that since we evolved from primates, these parts of our bodies are further behind than the rest. Though there is no consensus as to what role body hair plays, there are actually some theories abroad that it is strictly for sexual purposes (it marks the target, it retains pheromones, it signals biological readiness for mating).

We all talk about waxing, shaving, and trimming when it comes to women—but what about men? I haven’t checked into the latest generation of men’s spas, but I’d bet there is plenty of waxing going on, and not just for back hair. Still, it’s not something we talk about.

A few years ago, I happened to be at the gym with Don, and in the flash between boxers and swim trunks, I noticed he keeps things pretty trim below deck. (At the time, he was dating a woman who was obsessed with getting a piercing down below the Mason-Dixon line, so there was some adventurousness already happening in the boudoir.) I was impressed, though I didn’t say anything. There’s something inherently feminine about a guy looking after his garden, and since then I’ve asked Don about this. He says in certain mixed company, more manly men automatically assume he’s gay and sometimes give him a hard time about it.

For men, keeping trim is an interesting exercise in empathy. You do it for yourself and your lover, and no one else. You may even try to hide it from the guys. Unfortunately, most men don’t make any effort, though they secretly expect it of their wives. Seems to me that one of the reasons Queer Eye for the Straight Guy is such a hit is that it taps into the vast pent-up reservoir of straight-male vanity. Regular guys have been neglecting their hygiene and looks for decades.

Ladies, how do you like your men? I realize variety is the spice of life. Some women like burly football-players, some like ’em hairy, some like ’em boyishly bald. My precious and I like a clean work area. Recently, I’ve enjoyed taking it all off down there, and she seems to like it too. Razor burn is always a problem, but we’ve got our secret formula. Three words: Magic Shave Powder. This stuff is a chemical depilatory supposedly designed for the beards of black men, but women have been on to it for years. What the hell, guys, give it a try. Like the barber always told you, it’ll grow back. You’ve got nothing to lose but your inhibitions.

Just six months after releasing The Man on the Burning Tightrope, acerbic New York combo Firewater returns with this collection of covers, a good showcase for their sense of the smartly sinister. We’ve got no argument with their song selection, a nice blend of the obvious (“Folsom Prison Blues”) and unexpected (“This Little Light of Mine”) that alternates numbers by 1980s underground guys like Robyn Hitchcock with old standards made famous by Peggy Lee and Frank Sinatra. And there’s fire in their playing; clearly, these really are songs the Firewater boys wish they’d written. Sometimes that means a little too much faithfulness, as with “Diamonds and Gold,” too much of Tom Waits’ original with the edges sanded off—which begs the question, what’s the point? On the other hand, their slow-burning psychedelic take on “Paint It Black” is pretty great.

We’ve never cared for the term “blaxploitation,” but we do love the movies it describes—those early-seventies action flicks that explored the experiences of African-Americans in ass-kickingly cinematic terms. They’re very much of their time—funk and seventies fashion at its most outlandishly ghetto-fabulous—but also full of attitudes toward gays and women that wouldn’t fly today. And most were made cheaply, quickly, and with an eye toward a buck rather than an Artistic Statement. But they’re important pieces of film history, and they’re still pretty fun. Superfly, propelled by Curtis Mayfield’s fantastic score, is one of the genre’s high points—a gritty noir directed by Gordon Parks Jr., whose father, the great St. Paul photographer, kick-started the genre by directing Shaft. Meanwhile, other than changing the ethnicity of its hero and villain, 1972’s Blacula stays firmly within the strict genre conventions of the vampire film; it seems almost old-fashioned next to, say, Roman Polanski’s 1967 Fearless Vampire Killers. It’s redeemed by Shakespearean-trained actor William Marshall. We specially like his throaty performance as Mamuwalde, the African prince who asks Dracula to sign an anti-slavery petition and gets “fangs, but no thanks” in response. The sequel’s not as good but gets extra points for costar Pam Grier, who livens up any film she’s in.

“You know, you’ve got beautiful nipples for piercing,” she said. “Yeah,” he replied. Zac was nervous—his voice unnecessarily loud and shaky. “You should do three to four piercings in these nipples,” she said. How old was he? Eighteen. Ever been to Saint Sabrina’s before? No. How long had he had the lip ring? About a year. Plans for later that Friday night? The overnight shift at a Chaska gas station. “Are you nervous?” she asked gently. “Yeah, a little,” he said.

Zac laid back, drew several deep breaths, then winced and moaned as Jesika Bornsen pierced both his nipples in a matter of seconds. Bornsen, a beautifully tattooed and pierced twenty-nine-year-old, is well versed in the art of being sensitive to people’s fears. After seven and a half years as a piercer, she’s seen clients do it all—panic, vomit, cry, faint. There’s still a large chip out of a wood display case outside her piercing room where it intercepted a client’s boyfriend’s head, after he passed out.

“The person on my table is the most important thing to me,” she explained the other day, while disinfecting the gray gurney. “I have to walk them from a place of fear to a place of calm.” This takes a lot of energy, and it explains the high rate of turnover in the profession. A lot of what piercers see and hear does not constitute a pleasant experience. Stretch marks and cuts on thirteen-year-old bellies. Poor hygiene. Botched DIY jobs. They see much evidence of lives littered with bad decisions and bad luck.

A large woman in her forties came in and wanted Bornsen to pierce a nipple and her clitoral hood. The woman wanted privacy. When I returned, Bornsen had another client about to get an “industrial”—a piercing that has two points of entry through one area. The girl and her friend looked like college freshmen, their pale pure complexions virginal in the presence of Bornsen’s tattoos and nine facial piercings.

As Bornsen pierced her ear, the girl curled her toes, her flip-flops clamped against her heels, but she didn’t make a sound. A few moments later, after asking Bornsen about genital piercings, the girl sat, then stood. “You all right? You look a little pale. Grab a sucker,” Bornsen said, pointing to a “Mother” coffee mug filled with red lollipops. “The sugar helps.” It’s no wonder she’s busy with modish young women who have delicate questions. Between Fargo and Chicago, Bornsen is the only female member of the Association of Professional Piercers.

Bornsen led me to the sterilizing room, where she logs many hours disinfecting and packaging jewelry and needles. “This is a really important part of it all,” she said. Sterilization education becomes very important when you consider that many piercers stick themselves with needles just as often as, if not more than, medical professionals. Bornsen told me about the time she got stuck with a needle while piercing the head of a client’s penis: “It was horrible. My finger was attached to this guy’s penis with a needle. He was cool though, and offered to go get tested.” (Everything checked out just fine.)

A tall blond woman came into Bornsen’s room for a navel ring consultation—also a big part of a piercer’s job. “My boyfriend’s a surgeon and can’t wait to get his hands on me,” she said. But the woman’s bellybutton was shallow and lopsided, and Bornsen said it could barely be done without puncturing the umbilicus, a major source of blood supply for the intestines. She advised her to have it done by a professional piercer and not her boyfriend.

When the woman left, Bornsen began to giggle. “I’m just picturing this romantic scenario with her on the bed, and her boyfriend pierces the umbilicus, and all this blood starts squirting out,” she said. With her finger, she mimicked the blood pulsing. “I can guarantee you that she won’t have her navel pierced anywhere else.” —Erin Madsen

Who’d have thought that a documentary about spelling would be one of the most tension-filled, broadly American films of the year? True, some of us here at The Rake find it fascinating to see a bunch of bright young folks on the fast track to careers in the glamorous field of magazine copyediting, but we wouldn’t expect the rest of you to get excited about it. You ought to, though. This Oscar-nominated look at the 1999 national spelling bee is about spelling bees the way Hoop Dreams was about basketball—namely, only on the surface. Deep down it’s about much bigger themes, like the melting pot and the American Dream. Spellbound introduces us to eight finalists and their families, a quorum of nerds from wildly divergent ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds. One’s well-to-do father pays for a team of private tutors; another is the daughter of a Mexican immigrant who doesn’t speak English. Director Jeffrey Blitz avoids what could have been D-U-L-L by making sure we get to know the kids—which is why we feel the same nailbiting anxiety as the boy at the microphone struggling through “Darjeeling.” (It certainly doesn’t hurt that Blitz has an eye for irony; that boy’s parents are from India.)