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(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.”

Everyday is both the title of DMB’s most recent blockbuster disc and the frequency with which you’re likely to hear the band’s music, regardless of whether you actually want to. Let’s be honest, though. There’s lots to cherish about Matthews and his groove-heavy, love-hungry pop. Die-hard fans tend to get hung up on a recent shift in the group’s MO. Early on, it was their jammy, almost jazzy disposition that endeared the band to alt-rock fans. These days, it’s an increasing penchant for brevity and outright radio-readiness that move Matthews units. The extended jams and hyper-athletic solos are still a primary ingredient of the live set—if only to justify the $44.25 ticket—but the band has certainly reined in its aesthetic, creating something that’s more instantly saleable. For better? For worse? Judge for yourself. Meanwhile, we can’t help but observe that, for a guy who seemed hell-bent on emulating Sting at the outset of his big mid-’90s breakthrough, Matthews appears to be a little behind schedule—he still hasn’t 86’d his bandmates, starred in a sci-fi movie, or grown totally aloof. Tick-tock, sir, tick-tock.

In the rock world, cover bands are too often dismissed as cop-outs who either can’t or won’t be bothered to come up with their own original repertoire. There’s more tolerance for such cribbing in the jazz realm, where so much of the genre’s best music still cries out for spontaneous reworking. Still, it’s a rare recording artist who’ll cover the Monkees without so much as a wink, let alone a jazz singer as competent and captivating as Cassandra Wilson. Proven as a fearless, well-rounded interpreter of familiar standards and unlikely selections from the pop, rock, and blues canons, the Mississippi-born and Manhattan-transplanted Wilson consistently surprises. Belly of the Sun—her first new album since 1999’s Miles Davis tribute Traveling Miles—falls right in that same beautifully crooked line, offering emotive twists on songs like the Band’s “The Weight” and Glen Campbell’s classic “Wichita Lineman.” We’d be tempted to write off this brand of calculated spontaneity as novelty. But she’s got killer pipes, spellbinding presence, some lovely originals, and genuinely eclectic musical ideals to back it up. Great taste in the studio, too, but the live stage is where this lady shines.

We can’t speak to the current whereabouts of Bubbles the Chimpanzee, but among the rest of Michael Jackson’s former sidekicks, Sheryl Crow (an ex-backup singer for his freaky pop Highness) seems to enjoy the most far-reaching success. The sunny pop-rock of her long—awaited new record may not rewrite the rule book on Top 40 escapism, but at least this fetching singer-songsmith knows her way around a guitar. C’mon, C’mon even delivers the best musical tribute to an actor (“Steve McQueen”) since what’s-her-name did that “David Duchovny” song. Indeed, if Madonna ever manages to curb her tendency toward Jacko-like self-absorption, she’ll do well to follow Crow’s example by letting her own personality come through in her music again. In Sheryl’s case, that means knocking out a thoroughly believable mix of humor and hurt, even spinning a few golden threads in a duet with fellow VH1 mainstay Don Henley (“It’s So Easy”). Go on, girl. Speaking of duets, that’s Liz Phair singing backups on a Jolly Rancher of a single, “Soak Up the Sun,” lending credence to our suspicion that the two may be related.

The folks at Island Records assured us we’d be on the guest list for last month’s Ryan Adams show at the Orpheum. We weren’t. Bent on revenge (we paid for parking and everything!), we threw a dart at the label’s spring release calendar and vowed to publish a ruthless slag of whichever forthcoming album met its menacing steel tip. Lucky for them, the would-be victim turned out to be Elvis Costello, who’s way too cool to be swept up in our petty little grudges. In his own words, Elvis’ When I Was Cruel is “a rowdy rhythm record,” marking a full recovery from his recent bout of balladeering alongside the likes of Burt Bacharach and Anne Sofie von Otter. Good timing, El—that whole retro-lounge thing was, like, so 90s. Distorted guitars abound on the new album, as do the tactile and literate phrasings that earned Britain’s most fiercely human rock star his rep. He doesn’t get name-checked as often as Nick Drake these days, but Costello’s influence is manifest; post-post-punk comers from Ben Folds to Phantom Planet owe him big, and Rhino’s recent reissue of This Year’s Model is just one piece of material evidence. It’s about time a four-eyed 40-something other than Spike Lee got us pumped up for summer.

It’s easier than ever to love movies, yet harder than ever to prove yourself a bona fide movie-lover. When home theaters have displaced pool tables as the most prevalent rec-room fixture, and the guys on KFAN are just as likely to jaw about box office figures as T-wolves stats, it takes a certain amount of dedication and genuine curiosity to set yourself apart from the multiplex masses. In that spirit, your office Oscar-pool winnings are well-spent on a pass to this year’s MSPIFF, and not just for an all-you-can-watch value that rivals anything in your Happenings coupon book. Now in its 20th year, the region’s biggest and best film fest makes the Independent Film Channel look like the WB, boasting more than 100 films from all over the planet (browse the full schedule at www.ufilm.org). Director and consummate film geek Peter Bogdanovich (The Last Picture Show) headlines the opening night kickoff at the State Theatre, appearing in the flesh to introduce The Cat’s Meow, his new movie starring Kirsten Dunst and Eddie Izzard (cast as a Prohibition-era hottie and Charlie Chaplin, respectively); promising series include roundups of Chinese and children’s films. Homegrown highlights include the premiere of the locally shot Wooly Boys (featuring Peter Fonda and Kris Kristofferson) and a revival of 2000’s hilarious I Hate Babysitting! from local filmmaker Tara Spartz. But there’s nothing provincial about this globe-spanning, genre-swirling event. Our butts are already aching in sublime anticipation!