The Rake Magazine

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  • Basting Tape

    Here’s my favorite line from First Comes Love—Marion Winik’s horrific yet touching memoir of marriage to an openly gay man who, between being diagnosed with AIDS and his eventual death several years later, stops working and starts skimming cash from Marion in order to support his drug habit: “There was a letter from the bank saying I should come in immediately and deposit $999,744.26 to cover my recent withdrawals. I reread this astonishing sentence several times . . . [and] arrived at the bank shortly afterward sans the requested million.”

    I read Winik’s book when my own life was teetering, and I laughed so hard at parts I lost my breath and tears rolled into my gaping mouth. When you’re down and out and a little bit ragged, somebody else’s unthinkable misfortunes can seem hysterical from a safe distance.

    The distance is what’s key. The rutted, weedy stretch of dirt road between my life and somebody else’s is often the geography I find most interesting, most inspiring. The company of others whose realities are starkly different than mine is revelatory and oddly motivating. That’s part of what I love about Julie and Sean, two of my closest friends. Both are single, childless, never been married, and also smart, attractive, educated, employed, and hilarious. Julie’s about my age, and Sean, since he is a man and can have his exact age revealed, is a crisp 39. I’ve tried all sorts of voodoo to get them to fall in love—since both of them really ought to, and besides, Julie longs for children—but so far, no dice. Fortunately, though, they enjoy each other’s company enough to hang out with Jon and me and the several thousand children who populate our blended family most Saturday nights.

    Coming over here is for Julie and Sean something like riding a unicycle on a congested street in India. There are big kids with filthy socks wheeling back and forth on the Total Tiger abdomenizer on the living room floor and pounding up and down the stairs and listening to music, and there are small kids with filthy socks toting rodents in pockets and begging the grown-ups to play Twister and have a disco party, and there is chaos and noise in wild excess. But it’s the contrast we revel in on Saturday nights as the kids drop off to bed and we sit around the dining table, talking over wine, laughing at ourselves and each other, swapping genuine secrets, and huddling in a weird helpless way against the menace of this awful war slithering under the locked door, unstopped by our protest signs and pink buttons and marches.

    The balm of shared history is powerful at these times, especially since Jon and I face the awkward and often funny task of sewing together biographies that were well into adulthood before they merged. Julie and Sean are a bit like basting tape, criss-crossing the widest seams and filling in historical gaps with fresh perspectives. Jon’s known Sean since junior high, they went to college together and remained friends through all of the years since, while Julie and I go back a decade and a half. We’ve watched each other’s lives unfurl in opposite ways, nonetheless beset with the same essential challenges of ambition, loneliness, stagnation, and change. You can’t hide yourself from someone who’s studied you for so long.

    I met Julie 14 years ago, when I was practically another person, a classified advertising sales manager at a weekly paper. Two or three months after returning from my maternity leave, baby Sophie in tow, I hired Julie to sell ads in my department. She was highly caffeinated and articulate and awfully pretty.

    On her first day, I was showing her around the office, when suddenly her face squished up into this horrible expression. She was staring straight at my breasts. What could I do but carry on? But when Julie’s face didn’t unsquish and her eyes kept returning to my chest, it struck me that something terrible was happening, because I was thinking of Sophie, asleep in the vinyl port-a-crib in my office across the hall. I looked down, and there was a dark wet spot the size of a half dollar slowly expanding around my nipple, as leaking breastmilk turned the crimson fabric of my dress a dark burgundy. What could two women do but blush, laugh, and become friends?

    Since then, several million other things have happened to each of us. And on Saturday nights, in a house warm with kids and candlelight, we open the wine and spill the events of the past week and year and lifetime onto the table and pick through the curious contents, laughing and commiserating over the serious hilarity of it all.

  • When Loyalty Hurts

    The most important decision most people will ever make is picking the person who owns the last face they see at night and the first face they see in the morning. My mother used to warn my sisters and me to avoid being “unevenly yoked” as we shopped for spouses. For me in particular, that meant “no white women.” She drilled into me that I had a duty to stay “within the race” so that decent black women like my sisters would have someone to marry. (I broke the rule.) My mother did not even worry about my sisters being in a white man’s romantic sights. Oh yes, she told us that white boys loved having sex with black women, and pointed to the many hues of black folk today as proof.

    Ironically, she also said that if that day ever came when white men were willing to marry black women, she would view “brothers playing in the snow” a little bit differently. Well, Mama, the day has come, forcing a confrontation between racial loyalty and personal fulfillment.

    According to the 2000 census, 20 percent more black women attend college than black men. A quarter of all black working women are in professional-managerial jobs, versus less than a fifth of black working men. A staggering three out of every ten black men are caught up in some part of the criminal justice system. Black men drop out of high school and abuse drugs at much higher rates than black women. And finally, black men date and marry interracially at higher rates than black women.

    Now, these statistics are hardly a news flash. There are many reasons for these numbers. However, they present black women with what many see as a difficult choice. According to a recent Newsweek cover story, many black women have decided they are going to “hang with the brothers,” even if it means dating or even marrying men who are far less accomplished.

    Unfortunately, many of these unions are doomed from the start. Sociologist Donna Franklin reports that highly educated black women have a higher divorce rate than other women. Franklin believes the fact that these women make more money and have better educational pedigrees than their husbands is a crucial destabilizing factor.

    Instead of settling for a less accomplished partner, or railing against white women for “taking all the good ones,” more black women have decided that playing in the snow ain’t half bad. Between 1980 and 1998, the number of white men marrying black women increased 260 percent. Granted, these marriages still represent a small portion of all marriages, yet the trend is unmistakable.

    More importantly, white men are beginning to actively pursue black women. When Adrian Brody went to claim his Best Actor Oscar last week, he grabbed presenter Halle Berry and gave her the mother of all smooches. The next day, one film critic remarked that Brody got to act out every man’s fantasy by lip-locking with Berry. Berry has become a desirable actress whose blackness enhances her appeal. I for one am glad to see white boys (and yellow and brown ones) drool over her.

    No one should limit his or her romantic options out of some misplaced sense of racial loyalty. In the Newsweek piece, one black woman was quoted as saying, “We need to think about getting a man when he gets out of prison…you’re not going to find one out here because most of them are either in jail, gay, or taken.” Now, I do not believe that being incarcerated should automatically eliminate a man from the marriage pool. However, skin color alone does not nullify that portion of one’s resume, nor should it. Character really does count. And if a sister happens to find a white boy with character, commitment, ambition, drive, and connections, she should go for it.

    Talk show host Star Jones agrees. “We have to look at all our options, and that means people of all colors.” In other words, black women should do what most women (and men, for that matter) have always done when it comes to matters of the heart—get the best person you can. The race will survive just fine.

  • Forgiving the French

    The early monks of the Egyptian desert often faced their demons head on. Abba Antony in the hot sandy silence of the wilderness found himself attacked by several wild beasts at once. They roared and hissed, they buffeted his makeshift cell until it shook. He stared them down. They gnashed their teeth and left.

    Often, though, subtle means were needed. The Sayings of the Desert Fathers is full of stories which show how simplicity and discernment (and often humor) learnt from long consideration of the human condition can outwit violence, distraction, and despair. There are plenty of later analogs: Sherlock Holmes caught his murderers by identifying myriad varieties of tobacco ash. Miss Marple and Father Brown recognized killers by applying to the motives of their fellow men the results of a lengthy and patient observation.

    Maybe it was something like this that the French Foreign Minister meant when he said France is an old country. He could scarcely have meant it literally. The present French constitution, that of the Fifth Republic, is substantially younger than the present President. Its ultimate ancestor, the constitution of the First Republic, emerged more than a century after the first constitution of Connecticut (supposedly the world’s oldest written constitution).

    In fact, France was drawn together as a single state only after the 16th century Wars of Religion. In the Middle Ages what is now French territory was home to two distinct Romance languages, the langue d’oc and the langue d’oui, named from their words for “yes,” the former derived from Latin hoc (“this thing”), the latter from hic ille (“this is it”). Large parts of it were ruled for centuries by the Kings of England.

    Wisdom, however, does not arise simply from the passage of time. It can grow out of reflection on shared suffering. As boys we were taught that French cooking might be good but it had evolved as an act of self-defense; the sauces and sausages had to be tasty because they needed to disguise dodgy meat cooked while French cities were being besieged by the armies of Henry V, the Duke of Marlborough, and other heroes. Our teacher had a point. As recently as the Prussian siege of 1870, the inhabitants of Paris were obliged to consume the inhabitants of their zoo, including the baby elephants Castor and Pollux.

    But French country cooking, like that which Elizabeth David taught us to love, grows from the judicious use of hard-won ingredients by sapient peasants making the best of a hard-scrabble life. Cassoulet is one of the splendid achievements of the southern region named (after its old language) the Languedoc. It consists of pork and duck, goose and beans (good for your heart) cooked together over several days. It is the foster-child of silence and leisure. An invitation from my friend the Philolog to her annual Cassoulet Dinner was therefore an act of kindness and one which deserved the offering of an appropriate libation.

    The wine would clearly need to come from the Languedoc, the hot Mediterranean coastal area across which Hannibal and his pachyderms passed on their way from Spain to the Alps. Languedoc produces lots of wine, but not all of it slips down easily. I recall a Corbières some years ago which was the color of red ink and tasted a lot like sucking the nib of a fountain pen. (No, I don’t. Not often anyway.)

    This time, though, Fortune smiled. The 2001 vintage of Domaine de la Brune, a property in the Coteaux de Languedoc, is a heartening dark red (and about $10 a bottle). Only a tenth of it comes from the Carignan grape, until recently the most commonly grown grape in the Languedoc. But that’s enough to give it an edge. It is mostly Syrah, the grape of great Rhones such as Hermitage, sweetened and softened by some Grenache. The whole is pleasantly rounded, redolent of sunshine and alcohol.

    Redolent too of craft and patience on the part of the winemaker who produced this pleasing balance. One should be suspicious of a wine that seems to make one wise (or, for that matter, a superior driver). This one encourages the drinker to recognize something better: the wisdom of the man who made it. Soyez sage.

  • Sour and Sweet

    What a funny quirk of verbiage that a bum car is called a “lemon.” There’s even a “Lemon Law” to protect us from people selling used vehicles with hidden flaws. This assumes the worst about people and, I think, slanders lemons. Calling a car a lemon should be a great compliment, akin to linking its heritage to Andre Citroen, the great French automaker. Back in 1949 his head was filled with visions of a new automotive standard, a small-engined car “designed to provide realistically priced transport to rural French men who had little interest or knowledge of motor cars.” The Citroen 2CV, that funky-chunky little icon of French motoring, was launched to assist in the post-war reconstruction of France. Seeing only the greatest of possibilities for his creation, Citroen ran true to the nature of his name. Like the citrus fruit he embodies, he was an optimist.

    It’s not hard to see citrus as optimistic. Many of us choose to welcome each fresh new morning with a ritual glass of citrus juice. Throwing back a tall serving of sunny orange, pink, or yellow liquid is a signal of our willingness to take on the day and all it has in store for us. Hope—it’s not just for breakfast anymore. What could be more optimistic than lemonade? Not merely for the happy end-product of Life’s Lemons, but for every kid with a stand on the side of the road who is sure that she will make enough money to buy that Barbie Dreamhouse.

    Optimism is inherent in a fruit with a tough, bitter skin which needs to be overcome to get to the juicy, drippy, tangy center. If it weren’t for the belief that something good can lead to something better, Florida’s number one export would be bingo chips.

    Oranges, lemons, limes, grapefruit, tangelos, pommelos, and even ugli fruit all owe their existence to the citron, a large, ungainly and rough-skinned oddball whose peel is prized above its flesh. It is widely believed that the citron is the progenitor of all citrus fruits. Although the exact place of origin is unknown, it is generally agreed that an ancient variety of citron took root around 8,000 years ago in the Near East, somewhere in India or the fruitful area between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Excavations of Mesopotamian sites have yielded citron seeds dating back to 4,000 B.C., and the mummy-makers of ancient Egypt recorded their use as an aid in embalming.

    It was the ever-optimistic Jews who had a great impact on the world of citrus, supposedly bringing the fruit to Israel from their imprisonment in Babylon around 500 B.C. Called “etrog,” the citron figures prominently in Jewish history. It appears on Jewish coinage, graves and synagogues, and was used as the handle for the ritualistic circumcision knife. The etrog is still used today in the Feast of Tabernacles ritual during the holiday of Sukkot. The original ritual called for a fruit of the hadar tree, or the cedar tree whose cone was called kedros in Greek. Kedros was Latinized as cedrus and this eventually turned into citrus.

    As the Jews traveled across the Roman Empire, they brought their beloved citron with them, planting the seeds throughout the Mediterranean, where the plant would flourish. Some historians believe that it was Jewish horticulturalists who were commissioned by the Romans to develop the orange and the lemon, by grafting and cross-pollinating variations of the citron. They believe what the Talmud refers to as “sweet citron” is actually an early orange.

    However the sanguine treasures were carried from culture to culture, citrus fruits came to be loved and cherished by almost all who discovered their fresh beauty. The Japanese used orange trees in fertility rituals and weddings because the tree bears flowers and fruits at the same time; the flower symbolized virginity and the fruit meant fertility. The Chinese used the dried fruits to repel moths from clothing. Arabic women distilled fruit essences and oils to cover gray hair, and the people in India still regard the branches of a citron tree to be a very lucky walking stick indeed.

    Medicinally, citrus has been a wellspring of cures for such maladies as seasickness, pulmonary problems, poisonings, dysentery, halitosis, rheumatism, and possession by evil spirits. Clearly, it takes an optimist to prescribe OJ for the latter.

    Columbus and his seafaring contemporaries knew that citrus fruits could prevent scurvy. He carried the fruits and seeds to the New World as part of his ship’s rations, spreading the crops throughout the Caribbean. Ponce de Leon is credited with bringing the orange to Florida in the 1500s, creating a future empire as he ordered his sailors to plant 100 seeds each wherever they landed.

    Floridians have always been optimistic about citrus. Because of the 1906 hurricane, the pineapple culture of the Florida Keys was abandoned in favor of a new crop. Limes were planted, and the pickled fruit was sent to Boston where it was a popular snack for kids. Most of the businesses were decimated by the hurricane of 1926, but production rose again as a cottage industry when the fame of the key lime spread. If there’s one thing that’s more optimistic than citrus, it’s pie. Put the two together, forget about it. Locally, the Oceanaire Seafood Room has a killer key lime pie that’s as big as the happy-go-lucky head of a cheerleader!

    Spinning the positive doesn’t have to be a big production. Your citrus lift can come from the simplest of places. Lucia’s adorns their mixed greens with an uncomplicated lemon vinaigrette that has brightened many a mood. And there’s nothing quite like a jumbo, citrus-jammed smoothie from Fresco on a bright spring day to put a kick in your step and make everything right with the world.

  • Look Back in Anger

    When I heard about EMI’s deluxe re-issue of Ice Cube’s first four albums, I was struck with a strange sense of nostalgia for both the albums and the era they represent. Of course, nostalgia is kind of a quaint emotion to feel for ultra-violent, incendiary, unabashedly angry albums that viciously attack Jews, white men, women, and Koreans (and that’s just for starters).

    Yet I couldn’t help but think back to the days of my tortured adolescence, when I memorized the lyrics to “It Was A Good Day,” watched Yo! MTV Raps every day and played Dr. Dre’s The Chronic until the tape broke. Like countless other melanin-light rap lovers, the bottomless rage of early gangsta rap spoke to me and my life in ways other kinds of music didn’t. It didn’t matter that Ice Cube rapped about being a cynical black outlaw in South Central L.A while I was a white, hooky-prone kid in Chicago. At its heart, gangsta rap, like The Sex Pistols’ Never Mind The Bollocks and a lot of other revolutionary music, was all about being young, angry, poor, and at war with corrupt authority—themes as timeless and universal as any in popular music.

    Nirvana’s Nevermind is generally given credit for banishing the plague of hair metal from the pop-music landscape, but the gangsta rap revolution initiated by NWA deserves equal credit. After all, compared to the scowling, police-hating, renegade bad-asses in NWA, Motley Crüe couldn’t help but come off as mascara-abusing girly-men recycling Sweet chords and dressing up in their mommy’s clothing. It’s no coincidence that when metal eventually came back, it had mutated into a rap-rock beast that drew heavily on rap’s unparalleled ability to piss off parents and antagonize adults.

    Popular music is inherently a young person’s game, and rap music is even more youth-obsessed than other genres. When Ice Cube wrote much of NWA’s seminal Straight Outta Compton and his own AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted (1990), he wasn’t old enough to legally buy beer, but he was experienced enough to convey to a receptive interracial audience the anger and hopelessness of life in the ’hood. Before the Rodney King riots, Cube’s music served due notice that there was a city full of people with nothing to lose who were mad as hell and weren’t going to take it anymore. Collectively, Cube’s music, the riots, and films like Boyz N The Hood (Cube’s cinematic debut) and Menace II Society forced white America to come to terms with the rampant poverty and alienation of its inner cities.

    There’s always been an element of voyeurism in white folk’s embrace of black music. Ice Cube’s early albums allowed white suburbanites to vicariously experience the heightened emotions and lawless hedonism of West Coast thug life without ever having to leave the security of their parents’ basement. Ice Cube’s early work rejected outright the utopian promises of integration and assimilation. In albums like AmeriKKKa’s, the crushing poverty and rampant crime of ghetto life made integrationist fantasies like The Cosby Show and similar yarns of endless upward mobility seem like particularly sick jokes. Like the great pulp novelist Jim Thompson in Pop. 1280 and The Killer Inside Me, Ice Cube invited audiences to look at the world through the eyes of a violent sociopath. But in his early albums at least, there was a distinct political context for his misanthropy. To borrow a phrase from Malcolm X, Cube was the hate that hate made, the stone-hearted consequence of America giving up on its inner cities. Cube threw the American dream back in his audience’s face, suggesting that greed, hatred, and racism were the building blocks of a nation founded on slavery and genocide.

    The first NWA member to bolt from Eazy-E and Jerry Heller’s Ruthless Records plantation, Ice Cube made a historic decision to record his solo debut with East Coast-based The Bomb Squad, Public Enemy’s sonic assault team, and one of the most innovative production teams in music history. Cube’s decision had long-lasting political and cultural ramifications, and his association with Public Enemy gave him added credibility among the sizable but largely overlooked rap audience described once by Common as “coffee shop chicks and white dudes.”

    Never one to hold his tongue, Cube made his opinions about that particular demographic painfully clear on Death Certificate (1991) and Lethal Injection (1993). On “Cave Bitch,” Cube railed against white women for, um, being white, while on “Horny Li’l Devil,” he chastised white men for the same crime. Ice Cube’s first four albums are maddening amalgams of razor-sharp social criticism and psychotic hate. One moment, Cube’s incisively calling out America for committing the very crimes it condemns in individuals; the next he’s launching a blatantly racist, unforgivable attack on Koreans for doing business in black neighborhoods.

    Lethal Injection marked Cube’s last solo album until War & Peace Volume 1: The War, which came out five years later, in 1998. During the interval, rap music underwent a distinct paradigm shift. The success and eventual martyrdom of Notorious B.I.G. presaged the P-Diddification of rap. Rap had always put a premium on image, but Puff Daddy’s reign led to an emphasis on crass materialism that drove countless people away from rap and did irreparable damage to the genre’s soul. Then too, Tupac Shakur’s similar martryrdom created an army of Tupac clones, some enormously successful (DMX, Ja Rule, Master P), some not, all essentially derivative.

    A generation of rap-loving crackers and whiteys who grew up on Public Enemy, NWA, Beastie Boys, EPMD, and Boogie Down Productions found little to identify with in music that seemed more concerned with flash, image, and money than social criticism. Lyrics became borderline irrelevant. Gangsta rap’s misanthropy and misogyny overtook its latent streak of social consciousness. Master P built an empire on little more than brand loyalty, assembly-line production methods and loud, flashy album covers. Mainstream hip-hop seemed to forget its history, focusing only on the now.

    Meanwhile, Ice Cube became a movie star. Rapping seemed to become a sideline, something to do between films, commercials, and television appearances. Accordingly, when he returned from his hiatus, he had absolutely nothing to say. The man who once boasted one of the most important voices in popular music was reduced to being just another anonymous gangsta rapper barking out monosyllabic bursts of unimaginative thuggery.

    Rap is far from dead, though. One need only look at MCA’s roster (Blackalicious, Mos Def, Common, Talib Kweli, The Roots, Nappy Roots, Black Star) to find signs that it’s not just alive but thriving. And that’s not even mentioning Outkast, Missy Elliott, N.E.R.D., Jurassic 5, Dilated Peoples, Timbaland, and Lauryn Hill. On the independent front, labels like Def Jux, Stones Throw, and Rhymesayers (home of Minnesota’s own Slug, rap’s most important slacker-depressive since Basehead) have all established sterling reputations for creativity and innovation. Good, important, relevant rap music is still being made. But do you care?

  • Jennifer Garner’s Underpants

    It was the commercials that first made me suspicious. My local cable conglomerate began running ads intended to remind me of two things: Satellite TV is crap, and I am extremely happy with my cable service. The only thing missing from the commercials was someone swinging a pocket watch in front of my eyes, exhorting me to become “verrrrrrry sleeeepy.”

    Then, about a week later, I discovered my monthly cable bill had suddenly gone up 10 bucks. Coincidence? I don’t think so. Now. Getting a straight answer on why my cable service was going up is like getting Bush to explain why he’s going after Saddam Hussein when bin Laden is currently making infomercials for al-Jazeera. What exactly was I paying for? Though this cable giant boasted cutting-edge technology, something as simple as channel surfing was a nightmare. Each digital channel took what felt like two weeks to change from one station…to the next…to the next. By the time I reached HBO, my fingernails had grown a quarter-inch. And while they promised a virtual cornucopia of channels, 40 percent featured either home-shopping or preachers reminding me how I’ll probably end up in H-E-double-hockey-sticks. But perhaps worst of all—and even though science has enabled us to peer into the outer reaches of the universe—when I tried to record one channel while watching another… cable was unable. That’s when I discovered satellite TiVo.

    Actually, I discovered TiVo at least a year ago, but the last thing I needed was another bill which refused to be paid on time. Still it was intriguing. For a nominal price each month, TiVo would digitally record up to 80 hours of beautiful, uplifting shows like Am I Hot? or Man vs. Beast or any of those Look How Crazy Michael Jackson Is! specials. And using the phone line, TiVo would also download a complete grid of upcoming television shows, which would completely negate the need to read TV Guide on the toilet—but we’ll just call that a minor design flaw.

    However, and perhaps most astonishingly, TiVo allows you to warp time and space itself. It sounds impossible, but it’s true: TiVo allows you to pause live television. It also allows you to rewind live television, and then it allows you to catch up with live television.

    Allow me to illustrate. Let’s say you’re watching the opening moments of Alias. Secret agent Sydney Bristow (played by the hotsy-totsy Jennifer Garner) steps out wearing a black bra and panty set from Victoria’s Secret while carrying a riding crop. PAUSE!! PAUSE!! FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, PAUSE!!! With a quick click of the “pause” button, the action is stopped, and you are able to bask in the voluminous booty-liciousness of Jennifer Garner in her underpants. Now while the men among you would undoubtedly use this time to, er, applaud, I would choose to further heighten my revelry by using TiVo to continue the action—but in frame-by-frame SLOOOOW… MOOOTION. I back her up. I push her forward. I back her up. I push her forward… and behold. TiVo has turned Jennifer Garner into my own personal hoochie mama! Then I applaud.

    But! After I applaud, I remember there’s the rest of the show to watch, and possibly other opportunities to applaud. So I press play, and the show continues. Whizzing past the commercials, I eventually catch up to what the “real-time” Jennifer is currently doing in the show. Then, after Alias reaches its conclusion, I rewind back to the scene with Jennifer in her underpants, and once again, applaud.

    “But wait!” you cry. “This just sounds like a fancy-pants VCR designed for people who like to applaud.” This is true, and yet there is more. Unlike a VCR which is dumb and stupid, the TiVo has a computer brain which makes it smart and neat. Let’s say you’re a fan of that blood-sucking Buffy spin-off, Angel. As you know, they’re constantly frustrating viewers by moving it from Tuesday to Monday to Sunday to Wednesday to… did I leave out a day? But with TiVo, you can schedule what they call a “Season Pass.” This tells the machine to record Angel no matter what crazy day or time it comes on—whether you remember or not. And if you like, it can even skip over the repeats! You can also program in a “Wish List.” Say you want to see any TV show or movie starring Jennifer Garner (preferably in her underpants). Simply type in her name, and even if the show comes on at 3 a.m., your TiVo will automatically find and record Jennifer Garner: The Underpants Years. Mind-blowing, no?

    And yet, when I first saw this wondrous machine that would one day expose me to the new and amazingly varied world of Jennifer Garner’s underpants—I remained unconvinced. After all, what good is a TiVo when you’re stuck with a cable system that won’t allow you to watch The Many Underpants of Jennifer Garner while taping Jenny G’s Underpants Party Tonight?

    Then I saw the commercial. And in the commercial was a man hurling his useless satellite dish into a garbage can. This is when I said, “Now there is a cable company with something to hide.” After some quick research, I discovered that not only would it be substantially cheaper to get digital satellite television, I would be getting a plethora of additional channels. But here’s the real selling point: By purchasing a very reasonably priced combination TiVo/Satellite receiver (about $300, plus $40 per month subscription), I would not only receive tons of new channels, but with TiVo I could watch one show and record another simultaneously! FINALLY! Frankly, I was so happy I almost applauded in my pants. But then? I also learned I could record TWO channels while watching another show that was already previously recorded! And that, my friends, is when I actually applauded in my pants.

    Since then, life has been a freaking dream. No more searching endlessly through crappy videotapes for an episode my VCR neglected to record. No more fighting with the wife over whether to watch the French art film, La Culotte de Jennifer Garner, or her choice, Brad Pitt Strutting Around in a Leopard Print Thong. I watch what I want, when I want, and it was satellite TiVo that freed me from the insidious shackles of my cable-imposed prison.

    But I must admit, I would still be imprisoned without the assistance of my local cable conglomerate and their anti-satellite commercials. So thanks a lot, you guys. I never would’ve fired your ass without them.

  • Bound to the Earth

    It would seem a 39-year-old man playing at Legoland would stand out. But it’s obvious that Carl belongs; no one gives him a second glance. He’s absorbed in his task, concentrating on building the perfect Lego locomotive. It takes some time, but the finished train engine is a piece of work, heavily reinforced to withstand any obstacle it may encounter. Carl sends the locomotive careening down the Legoland race ramp alongside all the kids’ cars and trucks, and it comes to an abrupt stop as it hits the bumper at the bottom. Satisfied with the result, Carl walks back to his bike parked outside. For the ride home in the growing dark he turns on his lights, all 20 of them. With each light powered by two to four batteries, it takes large quantities of Ds and AAAs to keep the lights going. Carl keeps a few boxes of them on hand.

    It’s Saturday afternoon and Carl Bentson has pedaled his bike to the Mall of America. The ride from his St. Paul home isn’t too long, a little more than an hour each way. Starting from his place near West Seventh, Carl pedaled up the big hill at 35E and St. Clair Avenue and then west across town to the river, then south to the Ford Bridge and across to Minneapolis, around Fort Snelling and the airport to the Mall.

    Although Carl enjoys the ride, he does it mostly out of necessity. As a person with Cornelia de Lange Syndrome and its associated retardation, Carl doesn’t drive motor vehicles. His bike is his means of transportation. Every time he goes to his job, runs an errand, shops, or heads out to enjoy one of his many interests, he’ll be riding his bike.

    Cornelia de Lange Syndrome is congenital. Speech and communication are affected and there is usually some degree of retardation. Carl doesn’t let it slow him down. He has a seemingly endless supply of energy and enthusiasm. A powerfully built man, short and stocky with fireplug legs, he usually wears suspenders.

    Carl is special in another way, a way that continues to astonish anyone who knows him. Carl lives with Savant Syndrome, a rare and spectacular condition in which a person has developmental disorders but astonishing brilliance in one particular area. In Carl’s case, the disorder manifests itself in a nearly photographic memory for information and minutiae related to automobiles.

    If you want to know the original list price of an automobile, its standard and optional features, or just about any detail concerning cars—any make or model—ask Carl. Once, while driving with Carl in my van, I mentioned that I’d looked at another model that was slightly longer. Without hesitation, Carl recited the length in inches of the wheelbase of both my vehicle and the other model. I checked later, and found that he had remembered the specs correctly.

    Carl also recalls volumes of information on two other areas of interest to him: aircraft and weather data. Want to know how much snow fell during the Halloween Blizzard of 1991, what time it started, or what the temperature was? Ask Carl.

    The idea that some savant capabilities might reside in each of us—that there is a little hibernating Rain Man inside—is an intriguing one. Dr. Darold Treffert says there have been instances of “normal” persons in whom savant skills emerged following a head injury, a phenomenon called Acquired Savant Syndrome. Treffert, a psychiatry professor at Madison, says there are documented cases of elderly patients whose savant abilities emerged, sometimes at a prodigious level, after being afflicted with dementia. And some medical procedures such as hypnosis and sodium amytal treatment suggest that a huge reservoir of memories lies dormant, non-accessed, in each of us. Treffert says the often surprising images and memories that can surface during our dreams are also evidence of the huge store of buried memories that lie beyond what we can access in our everyday waking state.

    In Carl’s case, a passion for cars translates into reams of information that all goes into accessible memory space. One of Carl’s earliest childhood memories is the toy steering wheel his aunt put in the passenger seat of her ’65 Ford so that he could drive the car too. His fascination with automobiles started early and never stopped. He’s literally a walking encyclopedia of automobiles. As various cars pass by, especially the classic cars of the 50s and 60s, he might say “That one originally cost $3,500,” or “How do you like that one? It has shifters on the column.” Often he’ll just say “Niiiiiiiiiiiiiice!”—his highest praise.

    Where there are cars, especially vintage ones, you’ll find Carl. He’s a fixture at the classic car and hot rod get-togethers around town during the summer months. At Porky’s on University Avenue, the State Fair car shows, and the weekends in St. Paul when Kellogg Street is barricaded off. Carl’s been around cars so much that he knows about troubleshooting and repairing common automotive problems, without having actually done any of the work himself.

    People all over eastern Minnesota recognize Carl, as he pedals his bike just about everywhere to the east, north, and south from the Twin Cities. He goes to Northfield for Jesse James days, Taylor’s Falls to sightsee, to Red Wing, Hastings, and out on the roads in the St. Croix Valley. He shows up with his bike at many special events. I’ve seen Carl at political rallies, street fairs, and free concerts, and on TV at the State Fair.

  • Loose Lips Float Ships!

    The military has gotten very good at using the media for its own purposes. I should know—I taught them how to do it.

    As a public affairs officer in the Marine Corps, I taught military-media relations to commanders and staff officers. In other words, it was my job to teach Marines how to work with the media. To begin with, here’s what I usually said: “Think of them as an offensive weapon. Plan for their employment just as you would plan for any of your other supporting arms—your artillery, your close air support and your naval gunfire. They’ll be there and there’s nothing you can do about. It’s a fact of life.”

    Though I am a Vietnam veteran, I never developed the stereotypical contempt for the news media nor blamed it for losing the Vietnam War. Quite the contrary, if anything I blame all of us for not having the resolve or the strategy to win. To the journalists’ credit, they did their job and reported the events of the day. As watchdogs, they reported what they saw and asked our leaders the tough questions of the day—questions about our reason for being there and inconsistencies in information released on body counts. Their reporting contributed to the decline in public support for the war as they challenged the information the Pentagon was releasing based on what they were witnessing of the war from the villages of Vietnam. Inevitably, public support for the war eroded as information from soldiers on the battlefield conflicted with the information the Pentagon was releasing. While public support can be a positive tool for a military campaign, it’s not the role of a free press to serve that end.

    Maybe that’s why Australian journalist Tony Clifton recently characterized Vietnam as the most open war ever, which, he said, was “why the Americans will never allow such freedom again.” The American military has learned that giving the news media the freedom of unfettered access to information can adversely affect military objectives.

    Today, the military has refined its relationship with the media to an art form. Since Vietnam, military planners have a better understanding of how the media can be used as a “force multiplier”—a force that adds to the combat effectiveness of the commander. That force multiplication can be employed to generate a positive image, to control the damage of negative images, and to help achieve military and political objectives. The learning process has been evolutionary and, at times, halting.

    In 1983, the military denied the media access to the invasion in Grenada until the fighting was over. In 1989, during Operation Just Cause in Panama, the military was unable to get a media pool matched up with U.S. forces in time to cover any of the operation. In Somalia in 1993, the military was not prepared to respond to the impact on public opinion when images were broadcast of the bodies of American soldiers being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu. During the Gulf War, the military tried to control the flow of information almost exclusively through formal and frequent briefings by senior military officers.

    When I started telling commanders in 1986 to plan for the use of the media as an offensive weapon, I did so with the intention of using that weapon against an enemy to win a battle. As a staff officer in senior base and operational commands, I was responsible for developing those plans. I didn’t see it as an ethical or moral dilemma, because the information I was providing the media was honest and truthful. But it was intended to influence the actions of the enemy so as to contribute to success on the battlefield. One of those battlefields was Los Angeles.

  • Tombs of the Unknown

    Except for a few listing gravestones, you could easily mistake the vacant lot for a small park or the exceptionally large backyard of one of the lucky homeowners bordering it. A bus stop and a row of gnarled oaks describes one edge near the street. Two green beer bottles stand attention at a granite monument. There, a bronze plaque identifies the grounds as a “potter’s field.”

    Since biblical times, humans have set aside burial grounds for paupers and unknowns. After Judas betrayed Jesus, he passed off his blood money to the priests. They didn’t dare keep the tainted silver. So, according to Matthew, “They took counsel, and bought with them the potter’s field, to bury strangers in.” The priests chose a field where clay was dug for pottery, and the name stuck.

    The plaque in the St. Anthony Township cemetery, just east of Stinson Boulevard, details a more recent interment. In 1853, with Minnesota still five years from statehood, Lewis Stone donated a one-acre homestead “to be used exclusively for the uses of the public as a common and free burying grounds forever and never to be used for other purposes whatever.” It was an act of charity that made this quiet neighborhood lot some of the oldest hallowed ground in the metro area (excluding native burial grounds). But the cemetery itself has become something of an indigent.

    Searches of historical repositories for the city, county, and state reveal only cursory facts about the miniature necropolis. “We have absolutely nothing on it,” said Jay Hartman, the public works director for St. Anthony. “We maintain it because no one else will.”

    This funerary ground is not the only one of its kind. A dozen potter’s fields dot the metro landscape, in various states of disuse and neglect. Many appear to be abandoned lots. Some have been turned into parks appointed with jungle gyms and picnic tables. Some, like the cemetery just off the State Fair midway, or the plot at Fifth Avenue and Eighth Street Southeast, have simply disappeared beneath the asphalt of an expanding city.

    These burial grounds were often set next to “poor farms,” public workhouses charged with the care of the state’s destitute at the turn of the last century. One of these was the Ramsey County poor farm, just off White Bear Avenue in Maple Grove. There, in an unidentified parcel the size of a city block, nearly 3,000 bodies lie in unmarked graves. Through the years, nearby construction projects, such as widening the avenue, have accidentally uncovered human remains. In 2001, a protected zone was established to prevent further disturbances. It was modeled on efforts at the Gettysburg Memorial.

    “It takes a lot to move a cemetery. You don’t just do it,” said Steven Tibbetts from the Institute of Mortuary Science at the University of Minnesota. In addition to respect for the final resting place, it’s largely an issue of money. Scant records exist, graves were unmarked, and burial techniques were in many cases pre-modern. These realities turn any attempt at disinterment into a major archeological dig. Add to that reburial costs, and it’s easy to understand why the sites are forgotten and the land is slowly adapted to other surface uses.

    Mark Trostad’s backdoor is less than ten feet from the edge of the St. Anthony potter’s field. When he moved in, there was a privacy fence the previous owner had hastily assembled, apparently to help sell the property. The sight of a few random gravestones just past the kitchen window frightened away most prospective buyers. But the dead don’t bother Trostad, who sees the cemetery as a park.

    “I took it down the first week I was here,” he explained, although he hasn’t managed to extract the posts yet. “I work at home. I like to look at the trees all day.”

    Today, the county and Medical Assistance pick up the cost for the indigent dead, burying them in functioning local cemeteries. And the unknown? Well, there just aren’t that many of them. Since 1997, State Health Department statistics reveal only three unidentified deaths in Minnesota. Even in death, Social Security numbers, DNA testing, and computer databases pretty much ensure that the most down-on-their-luck don’t slip into the afterlife without a marker.—John Tribbett

  • No Pain, Much Gain

    A few weeks ago, we were blessed by a yearly event that has come to symbolize all that’s good and noble about the human spirit. United Health Group CEO William McGuire received his annual stock option grant. On Valentine’s Day, Minnesota’s best-paid executive notified the SEC that he has received an option for 650,000 shares of United Health Group stock. This tidy sum is a small token of the shareholders’ esteem and gratitude. Recently, the entire token of their esteem has been in the neighborhood of $50 million per year.

    That’s a lot of tokenage, and we wondered: If McGuire actually had a heart, and it was infarcted, how many transplants could he afford? (In the absence of a heart, we guess it technically would be considered an implant.)—Jem Casey

    McGuire’s Annual Income (2000–not including unvested options): $54 million

    Average Cost of a Heart Transplant/Implant: $200,000

    Number of Heart Transplants/ Implants possible per year for McGuire, paid in cash: 270
    Number of major medical policies that could be issued for $54 million 45,000

    Number of uninsured Americans 40 million