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This family-owned Italian restaurant, just blocks from downtown, has been a Northeast institution since 1951. Owner Steve Elwell bought the place from his grandma, Rose Totino—whose portrait is on proud display throughout the interior—10 years ago. Up until then, Rose and her husband Jim operated the eatery, which they originally opened with the intent to offer take-out pizza only. But customers wanted to sit down and enjoy a slice, so the Totinos added tables, and 10 years down the road, started offering their pizzas for sale in the frozen-to-go state. Eventually Rose and Jim sold off the frozen pizza empire to Pillsbury, who still manufactures it. But back at the little Italian kitchen, their eldest grandson sticks to Grandma Rose’s tradition of homemade-from-scratch food. While Totino’s is fondly believed by its aficionados to be the most underrated restaurant in town, the place—which isn’t small—is jammed on Friday and Saturday nights. Maybe it’s the heaping portions, authentic retro atmosphere, friendly service, and reasonable prices. Special number two is wildly popular, because you get a big helping of spaghetti with spicy Totino’s marinara and a meatball and a taste of pizza, plus a bowl of ice cream (vanilla or spumoni). But we love the cheese ravioli best of all. It’s made with a mysterious and flavorful blend of cheeses and herbs and comes with that delicious red sauce. Yum. The pizza is unique and bready (and bears no resemblance to the frozen party pizzas, by the way), the salad is surprisingly good—a tangy vinegar dressing almost makes up for the inevitable iceberg lettuce—and the meatballs are classic. And Totino’s offers a full selection of run-of-the-mill beer and wine. So come on, forget your frozen pizza bias and give an old classic the respect it deserves. You won’t be disappointed.

Succulent beef wraps itself in lemongrass and water chestnuts; rich bites of chicken mingle with spicy peppers and peapods; the fried rice is savory, the egg rolls zesty. But it’s the tofu that’s truly extraordinary. You must try the tofu. In this rainbow of wonderful flavor the tofu falls like a cloud into a hot tub of sesame oil—soft, crisp, delicious, and always perfect at Kinhdo. In a town where Vietnamese cuisine actually means cuisine, Kinhdo stands a head above most of the competition (even if the decor still screams in vinyl). There are no duds on the menu. Instead, some of the specialties are truly outstanding. Dishes such as the stir-fry basil unfold on a dozen different turns of the palette. Great food on the (reasonably) cheap has its downside: Some evenings, it’s a long wait for a table. If you’re willing, you can always join the loyal cast of regular take-out characters. Better yet, drop in for a late lunch and watch the cook’s assistant delicately hand shape the evening’s wontons by the hundreds while her mentor (her aunt, her great aunt, her great, great aunt?) peers critically from over the top of the current issue of Forbes magazine. With three locations, you don’t have to travel far even if you do encounter a waiting list. (612) 870-1295.

Given the choice between self-proclaimed “Greatest Living American Writer” Neal Pollack and self-proclaimed “Best Band in the World” Tenacious D, we’re inclined to go with the latter. Not only does Jack Black do a better job of keeping his chest hair under control, but rock stars are a hell of a lot more fun to lampoon than exceedingly egoistic writers, whom Pollack lambastes by satirical example in his first-person Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature (new to paperback). From Conan O’Brien’s relentless self-deprecation to Pollack’s relentless self-aggrandizement, turn-of-the-millennium comedy seems mighty preoccupied with the overstated self-image. What gives? Did Seinfeld and family sitcoms simply wring all the laughs out of ordinary life? Maybe so. But as the buzz surrounding the McSweeney’s clique of wry, irreverent young writers ebbs, Pollack’s grand delusions sound more and more like a desperate (read: not-so-funny) and disposable kind of shtick. As with his cohort and benefactor, Dave Eggers, it’ll take another couple of books (er, sorry—“anthologies”) to properly measure how much literary mettle lies behind the hokum. Judge for yourself—and catch a glimpse of all the local McSweeney’s groupies at this St. Paul reading.

(Harcourt)

Reviving Ophelia, Mary Pipher’s groundbreaking classic on the not-so-pretty realities facing adolescent girls, spent almost three years on the New York Times bestseller list. Since then, just about every word Pipher has written has turned to gold. Her last two books, Another Country and The Shelter of Each Other, explored the demands of caring for our aging parents, and the transforming needs of the American family, respectively. Those were also bestsellers. Now this “great wise woman of American psychology” turns her attention to the intriguing and complex issue of immigration and the changing constitution of the American “melting pot.” Pipher was apparently inspired to write this new one when her Nebraska town became an official refugee resettlement center. Suddenly people from 52 countries—including Sudan, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, Bosnia, and Vietnam—walked and shopped and congregated in the same Lincoln streets which had previously been populated by an essentially unchanged demographic for decades. As a therapist and “cultural broker,” Piper spoke with new Americans about family, culture shock, and resettlement issues such as work and school. Her conversations reveal much about distant cultures, and even more about our culture as witnessed through the eyes of the other. Harcourt is donating a portion of the proceeds from this book to the Pipher Refugee Relief Fund. Pipher reads on Monday, April 8, at 7:30 p.m at Weyerhaeuser Chapel, Macalester College, 1600 Grand Avenue, St. Paul.

Magicians occupy a peculiar place in American pop culture. Logically, they should be an anachronism, an antiquated relic of a time when simpletons were easily duped by non-digitally enhanced sleight-of-hand, a time when minstrel shows and vaudeville competed for ye olde American’s hard-earned entertainment dollar. After all, who could possibly be duped by an old-fashioned rabbit-in-the-hat act in an age where television and film can create entire universes out of cyber-scratch?

Yet magic has not only survived but thrived. Blockbusters like Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, and the Star Wars series all draw heavily on magical forces, while David Blaine has unsuccessfully attempted to make magic cool by dating Fiona Apple and hanging out with Leonardo DiCaprio. Blaine, like many of his peers, has thrived largely because he’s working a niche—in his case as the world’s only “street magician,” a patently ridiculous title that conjures up images of B-boys pulling alley cats out of trash cans and gangsta-ass magicians capping their enemies with elaborate card tricks.

Blaine’s street magic has admittedly breathed new life into the field, but he’s only one of a number of magicians who’ve discovered and cultivated a marketable, magical niche. Smart asses Penn & Teller have cornered the market on hip, ironic anti-magic, while their ideological opposite, Siegfried & Roy, dominate the über–kitschy world of tiger-enhanced, Vegas-style conjuration. Harry Blackstone Jr., Doug Henning, and Harry Houdini all have that “dead” thing working for them, which leaves only David Copperfield, perhaps the most famous solo magician of them all. But what is the secret to his appeal? Unlike Blaine, he’s never canoodled with Fiona Apple or kept it real with his street magic, and he doesn’t possess the hipness and credibility of Penn & Teller, or the camp value of Siegfried & Roy. Yet he remains a pop-culture fixture and one of the highest paid entertainers in the world. Why?

Like all inquiries into the strange, unfathomable, and extremely dorky, mine began with a search on the web. And like nearly all web searches, mine yielded a bizarre web of exhibitionism, broken links and dreams, emotional neediness, and paranoia. My journey into the unknown began, naturally enough, with Copperfield’s own site, a clean, minimalist site distinguished only by its unintentionally revealing “rumors” section. In it, Copperfield addresses the various rumors that have plagued him throughout his career. The rumor that ruffles him the most, of course, is that he’s gayer than Siegfried & Roy on a Judy Garland-themed float on Gay Pride day in San Francisco. “Of course not!” begins Mr. Copperfield’s amusingly defensive response, the exclamation point seemingly intended to illustrate just how not gay he is. Elsewhere, Copperfield refutes the rumor that his marriage to Claudia Schiffer was a sham. “She doesn’t need the dough, and frankly, I don’t need to pay a woman to be seen with me.” Presumably this means his leggy female assistants are volunteers, or at least fans whose payment consists of getting to bask in their idol’s reflected glory.

As a source for advertising about herbal viagra and penile enlargement, the internet is, of course, priceless. As a conduit for other kinds of information, however, it’s extremely limited. So The Rake decided to go straight to the source and attend a David Copperfield show in advance of his appearance here. More specifically, we attended the seventh of eight shows the highy virile magician played over four nights at the Rosemont Theater in Rosemont, Illinois.
As befits a decidedly non-homosexual performer, Copperfield made his grand entrance on a motorcycle. Granted, he wasn’t actually riding the motorcycle, but merely sitting on such a masculine machine was enough to assuage any lingering doubts about his sexuality. He then began his show in earnest, mixing Catskills-style banter with vague new-age talk about the importance of escape and fantasy (the loose theme of the matinee show) and magic tricks that felt uncannily like slight variations on tricks he and every other magician have been doing for years.

And though Copperfield’s dark good looks have won him a reputation as the Fabio of magic, onstage he’s disconcertingly life-sized, less romance-novel hero than reasonably handsome Jewish dentist, right down to his George Hamilton-like perma-tan. Copperfield’s onstage patter is similarly humanizing: He might be able to walk through the Great Wall of China, but he has considerable difficulty getting his audience helpers to do what he tells them to. At one point, Copperfield grew visibly irritated by an especially confused senior, but later tipped the moral scales back in his favor by magically reuniting a sad-sack grandma with her estranged granddaughter through a “portal” connecting the show with a tropical island. It was pure, unadulterated cheese, but at least it was cheese of some scope and vision, which is more than can be said of nearly everything that preceded it. At another point, Copperfield brought out a clown for some urine-related comedy, followed by a barrage of Michael Jackson jokes that so amused the pair that they giggled for more than a minute, making only the feeblest attempt to muffle their guffaws.

By the time Copperfield finished sleepwalking through his final trick, it was difficult to conceive of anyone, no matter how devoted, being impressed by the show. Walking out of the magic man’s schlockfest, I was confused. Copperfield’s appeal still eluded me. I have faith though that fans will keep coming, fattening up Copperfield’s bankbook and ego, and making sure he retains his vaunted thirteenth place on the list of the world’s highest paid entertainers. That, perhaps, is the most impressive trick of all.

David Copperfield appears at the State Theatre, April 26-28, 2002.

(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Ian Frazier has been popping off funny and insightful little essays for what seems like a hundred years. He’s one of those annoying writers who basically gets to write anything he wants, for whomever he wants, and probably gets edited with a feather duster. Such are the perks of being, well, brilliant. And of course we’d blow our whole budget on him if he’d consent to send us so much as his grocery list. But enough with this sycophantic revery! This book is vintage Frazier, quite literally, collecting essays and anecdotes on one of Frazier’s favorite topic—fishing—going back to the 70s. It’s especially delightful to revisit his early scribblings on the phenomenon of urban angling in and around New York City. These wonderful little sketches make you realize that all the funny old men perched on pickle buckets around the Calhoun lagoon are actually sitting on some of the best stories you’ll never hear—unless you’re willing to swap spoons or barter bobbers with them.

After nine novels (and 13 plays) in his native Britain, Frayn finally garnered an American cult with Headlong, an engaging meditation on art, ambition, and the value of things cast in the form of a screwball caper story worthy of Charles Portis. His new novel, Spies, goes to quieter places. As an old man Stephen Wheatley returns to the street he grew up on, a place he hasn’t seen in 50 years, and tries to unravel a mystery from his wartime childhood. Was his best friend’s mother a German spy? There aren’t many surprises in the end, but it’s a rewarding book all the same, and one of the better coming of age stories anyone’s written in a long time. Nick Hornby, Martin Amis, and Will Self may get most of the ink reserved for Britguy novelists in American media, but Frayn and Jim Crace are the best of the bunch.

Chank has a dream. Minneapolis fontographer, painter, and illustrator Chank Diesel is attempting to beat Picasso’s Guiness world record for producing more than a million pieces of work in his lifetime (he’s at 8,985 and counting). We at The Rake, however, value quality over quantity, and Chank indeed seems to have both. While the limousine liberals search for the next tortured soul with a bloody brush, Chank for the past seven years has been making hundreds of typefaces as well as vibrant paintings that combine touches of Lichtenstein, Haring, and Baseman. His most recent works, featuring his bug-eyed, jaundiced, globe-headed muse in various scenarios—as well as kinder, gentler works featuring puppies, kittens, and hearts (what a softie!)—will be for sale at the show. That includes #8899 Why Me, Lord?. Paintings not sold will be auctioned off on eBay the week of April 8 (keyword: chank). Local jazz artists GST will play an acoustic set during the opening reception on Friday, April 5, 5-10 p.m. The works will be on display at the Frank Stone Gallery, 1226 2nd Street NE through April 7. Call 612-617-9965 to confirm gallery hours.

Unless you take a somewhat scholarly shine to period Parisian architecture or 19th century European etchings, don’t kick yourself for not knowing much about the French printmaker Charles Meryon. Viewed from a distance, his short life (1821-1868) bears all the marks of a tortured artist: troubled childhood, lingering depression, persistent poverty, time served in a mental hospital where he ultimately died alone and underappreciated. (Sounds like movie material to us—get Malkovich on the blower!) But it’s his dark and detailed etchings of Paris in the mid-1800s—particularly its famed bridges and medieval spires—that furnish a singular legacy. As the urban trappings of the industrial revolution began to encroach upon the city’s oldest stone buildings and landmarks, Meryon took to the task of sketching these architectural treasures in hopes of preserving their memory, inspiring successors from Baudelaire to Whistler. It’s a far cry from the debacle on Block E, maybe, but the protective nostalgia at the root of his obsession resonates just the same.

Since entering into a hellish and utterly surreal divorce almost two years ago (for starters, think accusations of adultery and public humiliation, job threats, slashed tires, rumor-mongering, a bitter and protracted custody dispute, an order for protection when things got really scary, $40,000 in legal fees on a teaching salary of $30,000, and a small, intimate fishbowl community where I teach and where my three children attend school and where I have brazenly carried on to this day in a love relationship that wasn’t adultery but wasn’t politic, either, with a teacher who used to be my son’s teacher and who also used to be married to my daughter’s teacher and who has three children of his own in this fishbowl school whose murky waters he has since left and in which I still swim) I’ve taken up the habit of thinking in captions.

My mind floats slightly above the scene in which I see myself, just the way people describe near-death experiences (or delusory mental illness, I suppose). My mind coolly surveys the situation, casting off pithy one-liners. For instance, there I lie on the couch, mail unopened, phone unanswered, mind untamed, alternately sobbing wretchedly and staring vacantly into space. Caption: “Had Good Life, Wrecked It.”

Or I watch myself jump at the sound of the front door, my face lights up as I run to greet my love, he sets down his bag and puts his arms around me for as long as I want. Caption: “I Can’t Believe I Found Him” or “Love is Worth It.” What about the kids, though? There my mind becomes relentless with its incessant captioning. Scenes: Youngest daughter sobbing and kicking when picked up by her dad, or me holding my son who is weeping because he misses the old days when his parents were married. Identical captions: “Selfish Mother Destroys Children’s Lives.”

In another scene, I’m going into stress palpitations on the night before an important observation and review at my job as a second-grade Waldorf teacher. My oldest daughter, 11, is helping me select a story to include in this important lesson plan, and she’s sitting on the couch beside me, reading something from a favorite anthology. Our bare feet are softly touching. Her hair glows around her face, backlit by the table lamp beside her. She is lovely. Caption: “Happy, Healthy Daughter With Loving Mother—Whom She Loves More Than Ever No Matter What You Think You Self-Righteous Assholes.”

Funny how the captions, emerging unbidden (and sometimes unwanted) from my subconscious are a barometer of my emotional landscape, revealing the intermittent hostility, the terror, the hysteria, and the inexplicable joy despite it all. Joy? Yes, oddly, more than you could imagine. For as much as I have suffered and wailed and stared, I have also never laughed so hard or so often as in these past twenty months. I have discovered that what James Baldwin says is true: “One discovers the light in darkness. That is what darkness is for. And what the light illuminates is danger, and what it demands is faith . . . ”
So the darkness has shown me the light, the pain makes possible the pleasure. Where once I was numb I am now skinned alive, and while raw flesh is vulnerable to excruciating pain, it is also apparently ticklish and amazingly sensitive to the slightest comforts. I am tinglingly alive and dangerously exposed. I’m naked tied to a post in a parking lot. It’s miserable when its hailing and I’ve got some frostbite scars, but there are these moments when the sun is clear and mild and the breeze is tender and carries the scent of new grass. There are these moments that I remember my humanity, and it is sublime.

Scene: Me in January, gloriously warm winter sun shining down as I walk to the corner coffee shop. It’s been a beautiful morning in the classroom among children I love, and it is a stunning afternoon outside. I walk alone down Nicollet Avenue; two young men in their sagging jeans and windbreakers pass by and whisper, “Pretty lady.” I smile at them, distracted for a moment from the paralysis of my upcoming divorce trial. A beam of light shoots down from heaven and nearly blinds me. Caption: “God Makes Winter Day Especially Bright For Young Woman as Consolation For Her Troubles” or “Later this Girl Will Drive With Windows Down and Sing Along to Love Songs.”

This terse captioning is unlike me and yet it is comforting. I have come to understand that my captions are my means of deconstructing judgment and giving up on defense. Life is much too complicated to explain anyway, so why try? I’ve come to prefer seeing each detail as a perfect reflection of the ever-emerging whole.

Take this scene: Me with my beloved getting hugged and hugged and hugged until I think I will die of happiness, and surrounding us are his three children and my three children, my little daughter adoring his middle daughter, his older daughter bringing her boyfriend over to hang out, my son looking up to his son, both embroiled in love and jealousy and the newfound thrill and agony of potential brotherhood, all of them giving something to the vision, all of them demanding, accepting, rejecting, baking creampuffs in September, sharing Christmas in December, throwing tantrums in January, chasing away shadows in February. Caption: “Maybe Selfish Tramp Mother Has Not Ruined Their Lives After All” or “Find and Circle the Two Crazy People.” Scene: Me, paying and mailing bills, holding down my jobs, meeting my deadlines, borrowing money, not from a bank, but from a couple of angels posing as human beings stepping in to help me when I desperately need it. Caption: “She is Lucky and She Knows It” or “She Brings Home the Bacon But Doesn’t Eat it Because She is a Vegetarian and That’s Why She Keeps Losing Weight.”

Or maybe it’s time to graduate from captions and simply write a pull-quote for the whole montage: “Look, She’s a Mother, a Teacher, a Writer, Making a Life, Picking Through Rubble, Finding Agates and Putting them into Her Children’s Pockets, Carrying On, Becoming Real, Dreaming Everything, Expecting Nothing, Letting Go, Being Water, Believing Love, Relinquishing Everything, Practicing Faith. The End. The Beginning.”