The Rake Magazine

Blog

  • Al Franken : The Rakish Interview

    Fresh from the flap over his new book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, our favorite local boy Franken (he’s from St. Louis Park, you know) has never been better—even when he won five Emmys for his work on the original cast and writing staff of Saturday Night Live, or when he won a Grammy for best comedy album in the 1980s, or when he starred as ersatz new-age twelve-stepper Stuart Smalley in the nineties. Perhaps he reestablished himself as a household name by cleverly arranging to be sued by Fox TV, who objected to the subtitle of his book (“A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right”). Fox wisely dropped their suit last month, recognizing that they’d done nothing other than make themselves look ridiculous and guarantee Franken’s place at the top of the New York Times bestseller list. They crowed that Franken could now “return to the obscurity that he is normally accustomed to.” Which only confirmed just how clueless they are. As one wag wrote in a media insider’s prayer, “Dear Lord, please let me some day achieve the level of obscurity currently enjoyed by Al Franken.” Indeed, for three decades, Franken has never been far from primetime TV or the bestseller list. For his latest act, he has taken on the role of a prophet in the wilderness. At a time when the political left is demoralized and exhausted and just about humorless, Franken has become a one-man crusade defending the good name, high ideals, and biting humor of old-fashioned bleeding-heart liberalism. Lies is a delightful deflation of the monopoly conservative pundits have established in broadcast “journalism” in recent years. It also hits close to home, with a deft analysis of what exactly went wrong in the days and weeks after Paul Wellstone died, one year ago.—Editors

    The Rake: For Minnesotans, your chapter on how the right-wing punditocracy spun the Wellstone memorial was chilling.

    Al Franken: Well, that’s what the chapter is really about. The Republicans’ idea was to take this memorial and use it for political purposes. That by sorting through what was there on the videotape and taking a couple moments that were inappropriate and showing them over and over again, they lied about what the rest of the memorial was about.

    You were at the memorial. What did you think?

    At a wake you tell funny stories about people, and laugh and celebrate their life. There was a lot of that, and there was also a lot of weeping and sobbing, and cheering. And it was interesting to see that someone like Joe Klein in the New Yorker wrote a piece about it, and his was a more straight-ahead understanding of what happened, what it was. And it was a reflection of Paul. Paul was an advocate for the dispossessed and the poor, and that’s what this thing was about. It looked like a campaign thing, but it was just really, “Carry forward what Paul believed in.” The only actual campaigning—“We’re gonna win,” that kind of thing—came from Rick Kahn and from Mark Wellstone. And Mark Wellstone lost his dad. Lost his mom, and lost his sister.

    What was disgusting was that the Republicans kept saying this had been planned to fool everyone. “It was advertised as a memorial but it was just a political rally.” And that they had planned it. Limbaugh was doing a whole thing like this had been planned. Like it wasn’t what it was—which was an event that the kids had a huge part in planning, an event that the speakers who spoke eloquently about all the people who were lost in the crash, the closest people to Paul, his surviving sons—who had just gone through this trauma—had basically organized, approved of everything, and it was a spontaneous thing. Twenty thousand people came to this thing because they wanted to express their grief, and their joy about his life, and celebrate their lives, and that’s what it was. And people like Limbaugh literally said that people had been bused in. That the audience had been planted. He literally said this. “This was a planted crowd.” And what happens is, there is a right-wing media, Fox and Rush Limbaugh, the Washington Times and the New York Post, and they report this horrible outrage. And especially talk radio.

    They get people to complain, and that becomes the story, the complaining. And you know, you have someone in Minnesota, Sarah Janecek, who added to the distortion, saying that it was all scripted, and that the proof was that it was on the Jumbotron, what everyone was saying, and that the people were even cued to laugh and applaud. And of course she was referring to the simulcast. She either didn’t understand what a simulcast was, or she didn’t understand what closed-captioning was, which I think is hard to believe, or she was presenting it as something that it wasn’t. Which is sort of in keeping with all the kinds of distortions I heard in the aftermath of the memorial. There’s something very unspiritual about that kind of taking a tragedy and exploiting it. And that’s what they accused the Democrats of doing, but the only way they could accuse the Democrats of doing that was by distorting what happened.

    Let me say something positive. There are definitely people of good conscience on both sides who do try to talk to each other. I have a number of friends who are on what I consider the religious right. One of my best friends might say he’s a Christian conservative or a cultural conservative. He and I probably disagree on almost every social issue. But we’re friends. And I’ve been trying, with not a great deal of success, to get him together with people, for example, from the gay and lesbian community, to get him just to see them more as human beings. And I think he would say that gays and lesbians should have basic rights—not be discriminated against in employment and things like that. But you know, he won’t go that far on things like adoption, and that kind of thing, and that’s because of his deeply felt religious views. I disagree with him. But we can have a civil conversation. And I think he’s a sincere and serious person.

    I think that there are sincere and serious people on all sides. Like Paul Wellstone went together with Senator Pete Domenici on certain things. There are people on both sides of the political spectrum who can get together and seriously come to a consensus on things and not do the kind of things that Limbaugh does.

  • Should Married Men Go To Strip Clubs?

    RAKE READERS RESPOND TO STUART GREENE

    Oh Stuart,

    I’m afraid you’ve done more harm to your gender than simply violating a sacred trust. You’ve managed to succeed in adding yet another robust belch to the dirty-laundry list that includes, “loves the Three Stooges; won’t ask for directions; doesn’t wash hands post-urination; and is generally ruled by the front and center-most extremity.”

    That said, OF COURSE you’re in need of visual stimulation! You’re an American man! There hasn’t been a day in your life without it – magazines, billboards, movies, TV, advertising -Goodness knows, I’d never force you to go cold turkey. But BEFORE you enter into a trusting, ring-bearing relationship, be fair and lay all your strip-poker cards on the table.

    Chances are you’re marrying an American woman – one who has lived in the constant curvaceous shadow of those ever-present air-brushed beauties (who have seemingly nothing better to do than deliberately bend over, sheepishly glancing back at you while laying a finger on the pink tongue peeking out between pouty lips) and your harmless night out could turn out to be the unwitting catalyst that opens old rejection wounds or recalls low self-esteem moments. Bummer. This woman you love would like to think those competitive, comparative days are over, and that she’s finally entered into a relationship that resides on a higher-heeled plane. Act too stupid in public without her understanding your intent, and you’re tiptoeing down a path that leads to mistrust, which is, by the way, located a hop, skip and a jump from disaster.

    Your wife in the buff should be enough, but really “more is better?” Come on. More is better? WE know THAT. There isn’t an honest woman alive who couldn’t write an 800 word essay entitled, “Yes. Size DOES matter.” But, just as a flat-chested babe can sport a fabulous derriere, so can a man lick (sic) his shortcomings… Alas, that won’t stop men from looking at huge breasts; nor will it stop women from longing for a big hunk of “more is better.”

    What do I think? Women will always crave attention from someone other than their husbands, and men will crave visual stimulation from women other than their wives. Discuss it. Accept it. Then love each other, make sure one another feels safe, help each other find a purpose, eat, drink, and be married.

    —What1WomanThinks

    Stuart Greene replies:

    I like your point that we all pretty much must live in the shadow of our own insecurities– and must somehow, at the same time, learn to trust and support and love each other.

    And I think we do– but of course everyday is a battle against both ourselves and our better halves.

    A mundane example: It drives me nuts that the wife leaves her melty snowboots at the top of the basement stairs, and if I ask her kindly and respectfully not to, then she typically tries not to. When I do something that drives her absolutely bananas (I have a lot more of these faults than she does, I’m afraid– dirty dishes in sink, beer cans in the office, unmown lawn, unsorted mail), I do my best to evolve and get it done. Lots of times I don’t much like it, and I’m thinking dark thoughts, but I do it, cuz that’s what adults do.

    In any working relationship, there is an understanding that we make sacrifices–particularly in action, because action counts more than words and sweet thoughts–on behalf of the relationship.

    Now– my little exercise in morality was only meant to shed a little light on what we both seem to agree on: certain intractable cognitive realities. Should we try to change the way men think, the way they conduct their own internal realities? Should we expect that of them (us)? Should we all have to base our morality on the lowest common insecurity we have about our own bodies? I don’t have a particularly large, uh, endowment– and it has never made me particularly worried about it, nor does it bother me when my wife notices or comments on some Chippendale dude’s “package.”

    Speaking of which, I also loved your insights on the issue of “more is better,” and your honesty about it. but I have to add that I personally am repelled by large breasts, and have a personal fetish along the lines of “small is better,” about which an upcoming column will be concerned.

    Let me say that Woody Allen is a child molester. You should do more research before spouting off your very narrow opinion about any subject.

    You opinion is very immature and your passive attitude about the realities of the issue only expose your inability to have a truly deep relationship.

    By permitting yourself to believe that what you wrote is true you have denied yourself and you wife the respect your relationship deserves. You no more than said that Campbell’s soup is the best when you haven’t matured to Progresso or whatever the richer thicker stuff is called.

    If it is true that men should follow the instinct of any animal that fits their sexual desires, because after all he is just an animal, then you can also say that murder and any other survival technique is also acceptable. Maybe next time I see you I should lift my leg and urinate on you, because after all I am just an animal.

    Have you figured out the difference between man and animal yet? When your wife divorces you later for being so immature she will probably take the kids away from you because you are such an idiot.

    —MC

    What you say may certainly be true, but I’m afraid you’re polarizing this into a man versus woman issue. This is part of the problem I’m trying to address, I guess, with honesty, regarding the way most average men think (and act). By your moral lights, every man I know– including some very good and decent family men– are incapable of having a “truly deep” relationship. From my admittedly limited perspective, I just think you’re wrong, because I’ve seen otherwise. Any self-respecting person must feel very uncomfortable indeed with your proposition that he or she does not “think the right thoughts” and therefore is incapable of an evolved relationship– though it’s gratifying to know that there is ~always~ room for my relationship to grow and change in interesting new ways, no matter how great it seems to me right now.

    I certainly would never argue that men are ~merely~ animals, just that there seem to be plenty of animal instincts that remain, judging by my extended circle of friends who are in great and healthy marriages.

    Unfortunately, Woody Allen still walks free. as I recall, he’s never been charged or convicted, other than in the peanut gallery.


    Perhaps if society weren’t so puritanical about sex and nudity, there wouldn’t be this tension between men and their Gen X women? Women I know love sex every bit as much as men, but can reasonably live without it when life circumstances require and do just fine; they don’t need to go to strip clubs. I’ve never been to a strip club, but I would imagine they aren’t the most tasteful joints in town. I think I might be offended, not by the nudity, but by the general atmosphere of all those men lusting after strangers who are obviously exploiting their sex drives for a living.

    You say men like to look at pictures of nude women and you include porn in that category. I see a distinction; porn is pretty much about only body parts, big body parts and self gratification, sometimes taking that to new extremes. And it ain’t pretty. The purveyors of porn aren’t sending out this stuff for your ‘pleasure’, they are trying to get you hooked and sell dildos — exploiting sex drives, loneliness, curiosities, whatever, for financial gain.

    Ever look at the photo spreads in Playboy of say, maybe 30-40 years ago? Sexism notwithstanding, those photos were beautifully shot and really did showcase the gorgeous female body; all of it (I know, to sell magazines). They were quite modest by today’s standards and didn’t even expose pubic hair; but guess what, they
    were very sexy pictures.

    Doesn’t everyone find themselves attracted to the human body? Isn’t it beautiful, or when not beautiful, at least fascinating? I find it really sad when some degrade it. Painters and sculptors have always and ever will be truly admiring the human form. And they’re not making the quick buck. There are different venues for viewing and appreciating the human body — and people (esp. men) will always want to look. But because society is rather prudish about nudity and sex, strip clubs and porn are the forbidden fruit that cause some men, the ones who still have some growing up to do, to have fun at being bad boy and getting away with it.

    Should married men go to strip clubs? Who has the right to tell them they shouldn’t? I look at it this way: I like that my partner admires the female body and he can look all he wants. I just hope that mine is the only one he touches.

    —SN

    I love your point about prudishness and the human body– although i have to admit I’ve never really understood the argument that “porn” is degrading because it focuses on particular parts of the body (and not necessarily “big”, but that’s another subject altogether.) At the same time, I confess that this is an argument that I’ve used myself and hear quite often from my wife and my more righteous buddies– that depictions of sex or sexuality without “the context” of a relationship and a fully-formed human being (with feelings and fears and a Life and relationships and everything else) is an empty, nasty thing. But that’s starting to feel like an awfully pat, PC answer that may not comport with reality.

    It’s just not that simple, I’m beginning to fear. Or maybe it’s even simpler than that. I mean, there is plenty of fine-art photography that focuses on details of “the nude”– including pubic hair, and yes, genitalia. I guess the distinction is supposed to be that one cultivates prurient interest (i.e. turns viewers on in a sexual way) while the other does not. (Does this distinction make any sense to you? Less and less, to me.)

    I think I’d also argue that conventions and mores have changed significantly since the golden age of Playboy, which you mention. Back mid-century, photographic nudity of any kind was seen as unmitigated filth by all the usual prigs, it seems to me, and I’d certainly be willing to bet that what is considered tame and acceptable and even beautiful today was considered the hard stuff back in the day (though I admit to being a bit too young to Say anything authoritative at all on this point).

    I think your rule is a good one– for moral and practical reasons, the “diner” model (you can look at the menu, but you can’t order) may not be the highest road to take in a marriage, but it’s probably the most honest one.

    I agree, too, that the overwhelming emotion in a strip club is one of desperation and frustration ( after all, it’s not legal to get any kind of satisfaction, in the traditional male sense of the word). I don’t know if the business proposition is as complicated as you suspect, though. The purveyors of these services and products don’t need to get anyone hooked, per se– there will always be an endless reservoir of paying clients for the simplest of reasons: Sex feels good. (And sexuality is right up there with eating and sleeping, in terms of involuntary appetites.)

    Why didn’t you just come out and name your column what you really wanted to: Honey, Can I Go to the Strip Club With Don and Pete?

    Your first column with the Rake was at its roots a plea to the public in general and perhaps your wife in particular to approve of your desire to see all women with a pretty face or slammin’ figure naked. “It’s a biological reality blahblahMenArePigsblah…” Sorry, but there’s a deeper issue here than that tired old “boys will be boys” crap.

    Just because a woman doesn’t happily stock her hubby’s wallet with a crisp stack of ones before he heads for the strip club doesn’t make her a prig, as you say. I don’t want my husband to ogle naked girls, not because I’m a prude, but because it’s hurtful. Maybe it’s real CarrieBradshawNewMillenium to say that I’m okay with my significant other frequenting strip clubs, but I’m really not. And perhaps it’s sooo last season to value the exclusivity of marriage, but I do. You and your buddies, though, think that wives everywhere should just be cool with their guys enjoying the strip club scene. Be a nice, understanding gal, wontcha?

    Deal with my behavior with your intellect, not your intuition, which tells you that my going to strip bars doesn’t feel right. Meanwhile, I’ll go ahead and think with my weiner. See you after last call!

    But underneath all your chest pounding and caveman proclamations about male sexuality, there is a quiet rumble of guilt about your own “robust desires” that you can’t seem to shake. From what I gleaned from your writing, your wife is one of those women who finds your interest in “more naked women, more of the time” a bit hurtful. You said you steer clear of the strip club scene because your wife disapproves (“I try to avoid it, because I’m a horrible liar and the wife has ESP for this kind of mischief”), thus becoming one of the men you ridicule (the Gen X priggish woman’s overcompensating man). And then you resent that you feel guilty, and you write whiny pieces for the Rake.

    Take a second look at the whole “women don’t care” issue. I think you’ll find that a fair amount of women actually do have beef with their husbands checking out other naked people, despite trying to transmit an aura of calm indifference.

    After that, if you still feel like going to strip clubs, that’s your business. But dude, just go and stop asking the Twin Cities (and the wife) to sign your permission slip.

    —SW

    I’ll have to confess up front that I don’t have much interest in going to strip clubs– not really. I suppose that makes my column a little disingenuous. I find strip clubs singularly desperate and bizarre, the moment I stop “thinking with my wiener.” But plenty of my buddies do go, and they’re perfectly good guys–some of the most noble men that I know in the world. Go figure.

    One could make the argument that we are all unevolved, but I think that’s kind of a bootless observation. Most men think this way– at least the men I know. It’s more than a “boys will be boys” issue. It’s kind of a “boys will be boys in spite of themselves” issue– by which i mean that we Gen Xers are more than aware of how to walk the walk and talk the talk with our wives, while we certainly act and talk differently with each other. The fact is, we don’t find our essentially prurient interest in the random female form to be nearly as threatening to our primary relationship as our wives and girlfriends do, and I was wrestling to parse this a little bit, without resorting to cliches.

    I think it’s totally cool that you, and I suppose my wife, find your husband’s natural appetite for “desirable” women with “slammin” bodies hurtful. But that doesn’t mean you should expect him to pretend, in the privacy of his own mind, that the appetite doesn’t exist. it feels as natural, in many respects, as the hurt you feel. One might say that you are susceptible to jealousy– one of the ugliest and selfish of human emotions (certainly as negative as fantasizing about sex with a stranger) since it would reject or deny a simple, very manageable male reality. (Sex feels good. Sexuality is fun. Women are attractive. You can look, but you can’t touch. ) You want to be the only woman in the world for your husband, and you are– or as close as you’ll get, assuming you have the wonderful kind of relationship you have with your spouse that I have with mine.

    I’m sincerely curious whether you ever fantasize about good-looking men, in a totally sexual way– and whether this might be a fundamental difference between men and women. (If you do, do you dismiss it as a mo
    rally reprehensible reflex, rather like farting in public?) I tend to think men and women are more alike than not, and I find it slightly depressing that they could be so different on this score. That view would argue that women don’t actually enjoy sex– they aren;t sexual beings– unless it’s with Prince Charming, the Man of Their Dreams. Or the kind of insidious stereotype that women cannot enjoy sex except in the context of a long-term monogamous relationship (which automatically makes women who do NOT meet this stereotype some kind of whore or, naturally, a victim of abuse.) I’m sorry, I just think sexuality is so much more complicated, subtle, beautiful, and individual than any of these political paradigms allow for. But I stray from the context of sex and the married man.

    Action is worth more than words, of course. I don’t do things my wife doesn’t want me to do because I’m an adult, and that’s what adults do in working relationships. My point was simply that men carry on this duplicitous mental life. Ask your husband or boyfriend about it, and if he’s perfectly honest with you, he’ll tell you all about it, and maybe your relationship goes to the next level. Or maybe not.


    I enjoyed reading your article on men and strip clubs. I couldn’t agree more with you, and I’m tired of my fellow Gen-X males pooh-poohing strip clubs as if they were interactive tours of livestock slaughterhouses.

    Sure, we all went to the Alan Alda School of Sensitive Men back in the 80s, only to find that women still need us to kill spiders in the house. What a shock! Women want us to be sensitive, but macho enough to make them weak in the knees, and, of course, every women in the world wants a different combination of these attributes. Welcome to the Love Lottery!

    Oh, yes, here come the admonitions from women about, gosh, how hard it must be to be a man – boo hoo! But I find among my friends, and, frankly, in myself, men’s ability to accept the faults and shortcomings of a mate more than women. After the “honeymoon” phrase comes the ever-present mental check-list of every little personality quirk that sends you off the deep end. Unfortunately, one of those quirks we have is enjoying the sight of a beautiful woman. Every beautiful woman. But it doesn’t keep us from massaging your feet, making you dinner, and yes, killing those damn spiders with our big manly shoes.

    I like your stuff, Stuart, and I’m looking forward to you stirring the pot a little bit.

    —EH

  • Who Wins the Custody Jackpot?

    Todd Strand is in a world of hurt. It’s called Hennepin County Family Court, where he’s spent the last three chilly midsummer days in divorce trial proceedings, after almost three years of legal warfare. His personal tab—not including his wife’s legal fees—has already pushed past the $100,000 mark. Seven thousand dollars of that went to cover his half of the cost of a private custody evaluation that spanned from last summer to this one. His trial didn’t conclude, so he’ll be headed back to court in two or three weeks. If things get backlogged, it could be as late as October. After hearing this deflating news, he’s not sure he’s got it in him to keep his commitment to this interview with a writer who wants him to discuss—yet again—the complicated details of his personal life. Plus, this story will be in readers’ hands long before his case is decided, which could be as far off as January 2004, depending on how long the trial drags on. It makes Todd edgy. “I don’t want to make this any worse,” he sighs into his cell phone, saying that even if we change his name, which we have, certain details might be specific enough to stick out and identify him. “Look,” he concedes, “I’m standing in line waiting to buy a burrito. I’m starved. Give me two minutes, and I’ll talk to you.”

    So despite his reservations, despite his understanding that this story is not going to be strictly the one he’d like to tell about how “men are discriminated against” in family court, despite his exhaustion and stress, despite all of it, this forty-three-year-old father of two school-aged children still wants to talk. In fact, he can’t stop talking—the words just spew out involuntarily. “I’m exhausted, but I don’t mind telling about this, because when it comes down to it, this whole system is just a tragedy, and if there is anything I can do to help anybody else, it’s worth it. There has got to be a better way.”

    No matter how you look at it, modern American divorce is a costly spectacle. With about a million new marital dissolutions each year, divorce is a twenty-billion-dollar-a-year industry, and the average admission price these days is fifteen to thirty thousand dollars per spouse (a figure that’s even higher in many urban areas or for complex and highly conflicted cases, such as Todd’s). Attorneys take the biggest piece of the pie, with meters running at $150 to $450 an hour to handle the legal documents. And then there is the best interest of the children to consider—a process that’s become unfathomably expensive, financially and emotionally, in a growing number of divorce cases.

    For Todd, the custody dispute has gone poorly. “They want you to say every horrible thing you can come up with about the other person, and I haven’t done that. I’ve stayed on the high road the whole time, and as a result I’m losing big.” Todd wants joint legal and physical custody; his wife wants sole legal and physical custody. In Minnesota, almost all divorcing couples have joint legal custody, which means major decisions will be shared regarding the children’s education, religion, and health care. Minnesota law presumes joint legal custody except in extreme cases, such as documented abuse. Physical custody, though, pertains specifically to the everyday care and residence of the child, and while joint physical custody has gained popularity in recent decades, the majority of divorcing Minnesota mothers still retain sole physical custody (usually by agreement of the divorcing couple).

    Despite these legal presumptions and precedents, Todd’s evaluator, a private professional whose work was paid for by Todd and his ex-wife, recommended sole legal and physical custody for the mother. Todd told me he didn’t feel comfortable with the evaluator from the start. “It’s crazy. What I keep coming back to is that the punishment doesn’t fit the crime. Not that I committed any crimes,” he insisted. “I haven’t. But the bottom line is they want full legal, and they want to prove I’m such a crappy dad, but it’s not true. You can just see that the custody evaluator is very biased.”

    About one million American children experience their parents’ divorce each year, and nearly half of all children born today will go through some sort of custody dispute in their lifetime, because today’s divorcing parents don’t readily agree on the care and custody of their kids. Neither do the laws that govern our family courts, nor the people who practice there. Getting the issue of custody decided in court via the prevailing “best interest” standard has become a quagmire. Family court judges and referees frequently order a child custody evaluation to be conducted, and they base their decisions on the report submitted by the evaluator after the assessment has been completed, which usually takes several months. Custody evaluators can be employed by the county or by the divorcees themselves, in the former case being almost free to parents in Minnesota, and in the latter costing anywhere from two thousand to twenty-five thousand dollars.

    Custody evaluations involve a full workup of “research,” including home visits, parenting observations, parent interviews, child interviews, questionnaires, psychological testing, intelligence testing, chemical dependency assessments, and interviews with friends, neighbors, teachers, doctors, dentists, babysitters, and so on. One cottage industry begets another: On the web, there are dozens of sites that describe the ins and outs of winning custody by impressing evaluators, passing psychological tests, and showcasing your ex-spouse’s parenting deficiencies without staining your own hands. There’s a tidy profit to be made from the panic and helplessness that strike when parents are being scrutinized and graded by a random stranger.

    These issues and the systems governing them are so complex and variable across states and counties that to ponder them makes your head spin. Yet Sarah Ramsey does it every day. Ramsey is a law professor at Syracuse University, where she specializes in family law. She coauthored the popular casebook Children and the Law: Doctrine, Policy, and Practice. “Children aren’t so harmed by divorce, per se, but by a high level of conflict, whether it accompanies divorce or is part of the ongoing marriage,” she told me. “It would seem logical that conflict over custody would be even worse for children than conflict over something else. It is very important for parents to put their kids first and keep them out of their conflicts.”

    To determine the total number of cases in which custody is disputed is to count grains of sand on a windy day, because, contrary to Todd’s experience, the overwhelming majority of disputed cases do not go to trial, even when they involve expert custody evaluators. Instead, roughly ninety-five percent of divorce cases—even the most vicious—are settled out of court without a trial. But the term “settled” is misleading in its civility, because most of these settlements occur on the courthouse steps, after a year or more of damaging accusations, affidavits, court hearings, evaluations, tests, home studies, motions, countermotions, and endless other machinations of the adversarial family-court system, including the paralyzing stress and financial strain of it all.

    Still, the number of contested custody cases has increased over the last three decades. According to Canadian psychologist Tana Dineen, “This area of practice is a tremendous source of income for psychology ‘experts.’ In the mid-1970s it was estimated that in the U.S. the yearly price tag for all the custody evaluations done was $24 million.” Today, courtroom psychology is a billion-dollar industry, and custody evaluations account for a substantial slice of that revenue, probably at least $100 million.

  • It’s Greek To Me

    When a restaurant has been around your neighborhood for more than 20 years … and you’ve sort of grown up with it, you sometimes forget why exactly it is that you keep coming back. Is it the service, the feeling that you actually know the people who own it, or the food? In the case of It’s Greek to Me—all of the above. We stopped in the other day for our semi-monthly lunch fix and were reminded why we love peninsular Mediterranean cooking. The Greeks, the Italians, the Spanish all seem to have an intuitive understanding that, with simple ingredients, such as a lamb chop or salmon fillet, and olive oil and some herbs mixed with the proper care and grilled perfectly, you make the morning’s cares melt in your mouth. What most don’t know is that It’s Greek to Me also makes the best potatoes in town. The slab-cut french fries are always wonderfully crunchy outside and soft inside. It’s difficult to choose them over the oven-browned potatoes, which you should mash with your fork, salt and pepper liberally, and savor the herby flavor of Greece. Let’s also consider the actual items one thinks of as Greek—the taramosalata, a wonderful puree of some sort of salty fish eggs, and (surprise) potato; the gyros, the Greek sausage, the burning cheese, the
    honey-dripping baklava are all predictably delicious. That’s just what we want from our neighborhood—predictable savory delight.

  • Eddie Izzard

    If you’re not a fan of British humor, we’re afraid there isn’t much hope for you. Whether it’s John Cleese, Rowan Atkinson, AbFab, or whoever, you gotta give it up for the good people who brought us Land Rovers, shortcake, and the Ministry of Silly Walks. Eddie Izzard proves that comedy in the Queen’s English is capable of evolving beyond Benny Hill, too, and embracing the new millennium. He may be no Lenny Bruce (though he has literally played him on the stage), but his transvestite stand-up shtick is timely, if not quite as shocking on the less snobbish side of the pond. The question of whether Izzard’s humor lacks edge has more to do with the times than with his act. Pantages Theatre, 710 Hennepin Ave., (612) 339-7007, www.hennepintheatredistrict.com

  • The Night of the Iguana

    Really great theaters and their directors tend to select productions that inherently offer a commentary on the times. One of our favorite exercises is to figure out: Why this play? Why here and now? Well, we could hazard a few guesses as to why Joe Dowling has decided to stage Tennessee Williams’s most autobiographical play—and it may have something to do with a theater coming to grips with a kind of midlife crisis, on the eve of its controversial (and expensive) sojourn down to the river. Williams’s play is set in a Mexican seaside resort, and features a wayward and philandering minister wrestling, as they say, with his many ghosts. Ultimately, the play is a wrenchingly honest testament to the fact that wisdom might come with age, but wisdom also comes with a hefty dose of skepticism about some of life’s most fragile truths about God, faith, security, sexuality, and death. Guthrie Theater, 725 Vineland Pl., (612) 377-2224, www.guthrietheater.org

  • Isis Rodriguez, Nancy Mizuno Elliott & Kathy Aoki

    Imagine this show as the gallery-crawl equivalent of everything the latest Charlie’s Angels sequel tried and failed to do. That is, girl power projected by three women who know how to be badasses and also know how to have fun doing so. What these three northern California artists share is probably greater than what divides them, and that includes a joyous embrace of pop culture, irreverence and a serious amount of up-with-sisters sass. Rodriguez combines cartoons, graffiti and psychedelia to scramble around concepts of femininity while Mizuno Elliott’s paintings are confessional works in the vein of Lynda Barry, drawing from Latino murals and the abrasive vigor of punk-rock posters. And Aoki’s deceptively cute images of girls driving bright pink cranes and purple dump trucks hides a subversive sense of humor: Look closely, and you see the girls are burying teddy bears in some kind of strangely huggable mass grave. Now, let’s bring in Crispin Glover and some kung fu, and maybe we’ll really be on to something. Flanders Contenporary Art , 400 First Ave. N., (612) 344-1700, www.flanders-art.com

  • Ragamala Music and Dance Theater’s Body & Soul

    Years ago, there was a wonderful series of albums called West Meets East that paired Ravi Shankar with violinist Yehudi Menuhin. A boondoggle in theory, the marriage of sitar and violin was as brilliant in the listening as it was prescient. Today, of course, these kinds of cross-cultural juxtapositions are as common and crazy as corned-beef eggrolls at Chang O’Hara’s. Some cultural succotash works better than others, but we’re awfully excited to see what Ragamala does with this tribute to Billie Holiday. We doubt whether there will be a lot of tabla and sitar, but there will be plenty of bharatanatyam—the ancient South Indian dance form that Ragamala specializes in, along with the live stylings of jazz vocalist Charmin Michelle and the Twin Cities Seven. Southern Theater, 1420 Washington Ave. S., (612) 340-1725, www.southerntheater.org

  • Maria Muldaur

    Her big 1973 hit “Midnight at the Oasis” got new life when it was covered by the acid-jazz combo Brand New Heavies, but Maria Muldaur’s style of blues has been moving more and more away from both the new and the heavy. She’s proven especially adept at putting her own smoky stamp on the songs of the great woman performers of days gone by, including excellent covers of Bessie Smith and Memphis Minnie standards. Lately she’s been alternating between children’s albums like last year’s Shirley Temple tribute and much sultrier fare like 1999’s Meet Me Where They Play the Blues, featuring “It Ain’t the Meat, It’s the Motion,” which is apparently a double entendre of some kind. Her latest disc, A Woman Alone with the Blues, reinterprets a dozen songs made famous by Peggy Lee, including the classic “Fever,” in sophisticated smooth-jazz style. Bring your torches; she’ll get them lit. Dakota Bar & Grill, (651) 642-1442, www.dakotacooks.com

  • R.E.M.

    We’ve got to be honest with you and say that Georgia’s finest have been inducing yawns and indifference since their second album. Back when all they wanted to be was the second coming of the Byrds, we loved them. But as improbable as it sounds, somewhere along the line they got tagged with the “Best Band in America” label (to complement U2’s concurrent title as “Best Band in the World”), and what followed was an odious stream of radio-friendly catarrh like “Pop Song 89” and “Crush with Eyeliner,” two songs that bizarrely maintain their hold on the stunted imaginations of program directors everywhere. (OK, “Fall on Me” and “Losing My Religion” were great, but they only proved how far the band had fallen from its state of grace. And Michael Stipe turned into a self-important horse’s ass right about then, too.) Now that we’ve sufficiently pissed you off, be sure to go see them. They’re great live! Xcel Energy Center, 199 W. Kellogg Blvd., (651) 726-8240, www.xcelenergycenter.com