The Rake Magazine

Tag: city pages

  • A Cultural Complaint

    I was recently quoted in print saying, "I don’t particularly like complaining." This came as a huge surprise to many of my friends, who immediately contacted me about what they perceived as a glaring inaccuracy in the article. Of course, I protested that it all made sense in context: I was being interviewed about a music festival I co-curate and produce, and was trying to explain the genesis of the event. I was tired of hearing that there was "nothing going on" in town and decided to make something happen and give the lie to that particular complaint. I’ll admit, though, that anyone who knows me well will have often heard me complain about a number of pet issues. (e.g., Unless you have some time on your hands, don’t get me started on Daylight Saving Time. If you must, ask me about that in the fall, when you "gain" an hour.) However, I stand by my statement: I don’t particularly like complaining.

    I have two explanations for this seeming contradiction. One is somewhat legalistic: I don’t like complaining; it’s just that the world too often conspires to force me to do it. The other is closer to the truth: I think that once you find yourself complaining about something repeatedly, you have two options–either do something to create the change you want to see or shut up, OR get used to it and leave the rest of us in peace. Ideally (though this is often not the case) a complaint has a function, like the pain that makes you pull your hand out of the fire. It ought to help you organize your thinking about the world you wish to see and spur you to some kind of action.

    One of my favorite recurring complaints regards the visual arts coverage in the Twin Cities. Or, rather, the near complete lack of it. Our local media seem quite happy to repeat, ad nauseam, that we have a strong arts scene, or that the Twin Cities are somehow supportive of the arts. Well, this may or may not be true, but there is a difference between supporting "The Arts" and having any sort of meaningful or engaging discussion of any specific art. This is especially troubling as visual art thrives on discourse and withers in its absence. In some ways the difference between a piece of art and any other object is that the art object is a locus for discourse, an attempt to embody, however tenuously, some kind of idea or meaning, and to engage in some way with the history of those ideas. This means, in turn, that works of art are always contingent objects, and require community and context for their very existence.

    Oddly, though the local dailies and weeklies have "Art" sections, this tends to mean CD, film, theatre and dance coverage. Of course, there is nothing wrong with any of these forms, but when I tell people I went to art school, they rarely assume I must therefore be an actor. It’s been somewhat galling to me, as an artist, that the "Art" sections have precluded it’s very namesake: art. It seems odd to me that any day of the week I can find a review of a play, a dance piece, a film, a new album, or even of live music events that have already passed, yet seldom find any coverage at all of visual arts exhibitions, despite the fact that they are on display for a month or more. I was especially troubled this past year (troubled enough to cancel my subscription) when the Star Tribune "Fall Arts Preview" listed exactly four upcoming visual arts events. Of those, three were at the major arts institutions in town, and only one had any local content. The only other visual art related article in the entire section was reprinted from the New York Times.

    So, what will follow in my upcoming posts is my attempt to do what little I can to contribute to a change, to be part of a larger conversation, and to put my money where my mouth is. Offered the opportunity to be part of a group attempting to start some discourse about local art, I really couldn’t say no, despite several reasons to be reticent. As a practicing artist, I fear any implication of conflict of interest. Having many friends in the local arts scene, I worry about being either perceived as too partisan or having honest criticisms received as unduly harsh. As a non-writer, I may not be the man for the job. I guess we will see. I am happy to say that my fellow writers here have already given me less to complain about. All the same, I am sure more complaints will follow.

  • Barnes & Ignoble

    For summer reading, Barnes & Noble recommends The Diary of Anne Frank. So here’s the presumed scenario: The sun is out, you’re under your candy striped umbrella at the beach, children in the near distance are making sandcastles on the shore, and you are immersing yourself in the magical world of WWII-era Amsterdam, through the eyes of a 13-year-old Jewish girl whose family was forced into hiding, and who later perishes in a concentration camp. If this is a bit light for you, Barnes & Noble suggests Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales as a summertime alternative, so you can brush up on your Middle English, like you’ve been meaning to. Or if Objectivist philosophy is your thing, an anthology of Ayn Rand’s previously unpublished writings – The Early Ayn Rand (only 508 pages)- is a welcome member of the B & N "Summer Reading" display.

    Really?

    By now it’s old news, if it was ever news at all, but in this year’s edition of City Pages‘ "Best of the Twin Cities," Barnes & Noble Booksellers took "Best Bookstore (New)" in the reader’s poll. In a city with as many funky community bookstores as ours, this was a bit surprising to me, because in terms of customer experience, I’ve always found B & N a bit lacking.

    I don’t want to rant about how B & N is bad for the universe and promotes global warming and cannibalism and pedophilia. We’ve all heard it all before. So I’m going to try and make a good, old-fashioned pro/con list consisting of the chain’s merits (which it certainly has) and demerits, and see if maybe one outweighs the other.

    I assume there might be some crossover in readership between City Pages and The Rake – possibly even some with this blog – so I invite anyone and everyone to comment with why they like (or don’t like) Barnes & Noble, and to educate me as to what I may have missed – probably a substantial amount.

    So here goes:

    PROS

    Squatter’s Rights – You can sit in a Barnes & Noble for as long as you want, without feeling guilty. (I tend to start feeling guilty after about fifteen minutes in Magers & Quinn if I don’t find anything I want.) It’s kind of like a library, but with newer, better smelling books.

    Bathrooms – I’m pretty sure that most B & Ns have bathrooms that are functionally, if not explicitly, open to the public.

    Author Events – Probably the biggest benefit B & N brings to its communities is their ability to get big-name authors in otherwise-skipped-over towns. The branches Downtown and in the Galleria are especially good at getting some writers of note to Minneapolis and St. Paul. To name a recent few: Keith Gessen, Darin Strauss, and, thank God, Mario Lopez.

    Discounts – When it comes to the bottom line, B & N is the best on giving us fairly significant price cuts on our favorite magazines and books.

    Kids’ Sections – I suspect this may have had a lot to do with its City Pages ranking. Maybe the one thing that many indy bookstores lack is a decent children’s section (though check out Birchbark Books in Kenwood). It seems B & N caters as much to youngsters as to any other demographic, fully aware that they still have imaginations to be stoked and exploited.

    Har Mar – More than any other B & N I know of, the branch by Har Mar mall serves as a neighborhood hub. They have one of the corporation’s rare ‘used’ sections, and are willing to host a Chinese conversation group. Also, I’ve heard it’s a good spot for singles to meet.

    And the CONS.

    Before I start, I want to say that I’m going to try and keep the cons to problems encountered within the actual bookstores. Whatever B & N‘s global ramifications may be, the CP poll was about user experience, not where we shop with the cleanest conscience, or where we shop because everywhere else has been mysteriously put out of business.

    More Discounts – No, I don’t want to save another ten per cent today by signing up for a new credit card. Nor give you my zip code in order to buy a magazine.

    Selection – It’s often hard to find the book I’m looking for. Despite their vast shelving space, B & N‘s management mandates that branches constantly cycle through their shelves, weeding out the books that don’t sell as well as they’re supposed to. Because of this, it’s difficult to come across older books. A lot of the time they’ll have an author’s best-seller, but none of the rest of that particular author’s output. Perusing the Calhoun Village branch, I was unable to find any books by Celine or Bernard Malamud, and they had only one book each of Chekhov, Grace Paley, and Proust. The poetry section is even more barren – a sort of Blockbuster video approach to stocking. Only one collection each by local heavyweights Robert Bly and Louis Jenkins, and several omissions (There were, however, several copies of the poetry collections by Jewel and Ani DiFranco.)

    Books, but not Reading – This is my biggest beef: B & N promotes books, and the selling of materials bound in traditional book form, but only minimally and incidentally promote any actual reading. Their ‘Summer Reading’ display, for example, is simply preposterous, and shows the company’s complete lack of attention to their readers.
    As is now well-documented, the books that appear up front and on the chain’s various ‘favorites’ tables aren’t selected by staff; publishers pay to have their books in those spots. This means that advertisers determine what we see, not people that care about what we’re actually reading.
    Because of this, some mismatching authors appear linked together. I especially liked how the new cardboard Ernest Hemingway display is next to the display with Mary Higgins Clark and James Patterson’s books. It’s kind of like putting Skittles next to the organic fruits.
    Call me condescending. But I assure you there is no way in Hell I’m more condescending than the Barnes & Noble executive who commands that there be a rack for "Magazines America Loves" in his stores.

    I think that’s all I’ve got. It seems the list is weighted toward the pros, though I have to say the last two cons are really the clinchers for me (I don’t live anywhere near Har Mar, nor do much shopping for kids, which effectively mangles my personal pros). Again, we here at The Rake are all about opinions, we thrive on them, so if you’ve got one, or many, throw it out there, yo.

  • Letting Go Of The Hate

    I used to think hating Diablo Cody was only a regional pasttime. This is, after all, an area lousy with writers who have not written Writers Guild of America award-winning screenplays or gotten incredibly rich and famous or appeared on David Letterman. And sometimes, when the wind is blowing in the right direction, I swear you can hear about 500 of them grumbling: I wrote for City Pages once years ago. . . .and I could have been some skanky sex worker if I were willing to stoop that low. . . .and every single one of those screenplays sitting on my closet shelf is about a million times better than Juno.

    Of course no one says exactly this. They jeer at her nom de plume and make fun of the length of her skirts and talk about how Juno — a sweet, decent film in a year full of overblown, overdone losers — sucked anyway. If Cody wins an Oscar, I imagine the gnashing and retching will go on in our local writing community (and believe me, I use that phrase loosely) for years to come.

    Now, however, I come to find that the irrational antipathy for Cody has spread. In an article in Slate, writer Dana Stevens describes how what I previously thought of as a Minnesota phenomenon exists from coast to coast. People all over the world, apparently, hate D.C. and her movie (which, by the way, has grossed over $100 million, so some people must like it. . . ). And despite a mostly even-handed exposition of the whole controversy, Stevens herself even gets in a few digs.

    In a strangely similar turn of events, it seems Hillary Clinton hating is on an upswing as well. Now, the Bush-Cheney set has always hated Hillary. (Since the day she announced her candidacy, my father has called her "Billary" — which causes me to grind my teeth practically into dust each time we’re seated next to one another at Sunday dinner.) But here’s a new twist: now, just as with Cody, it is Clinton’s putative fellow thinkers who are spewing the most bile.

    In "Hate Springs Eternal," his column in the New York Times yesterday, political commentator Paul Krugman wrote, "I won’t try for fake evenhandedness here: most of the venom I see is coming from supporters of Mr. Obama, who want their hero or nobody."

    What’s going on here? We’ve got two immensely talented women — and I’m not going to make this a gender thing, because I truly don’t think it is — being reviled as sport. Why? Jesus, I don’t know. Pure envy in the first case, it seems. Zealous and cult-like political behavior [and let me say, I think this has little to do with Obama himself] in the other.

    Now, listen my children: You should know that hate — whatever its genesis — will curdle your blood and cause painful ingrown hairs. It leads to cancer and shingles and bad posture. And more important, it’s just bad juju for the rest of us, making this world an uglier place in which to live. So stop it!

    And why should you listen to me? Because, I’m going to lead by example. I, too, have allowed hatred to creep into my heart. But I’ve seen the light and banished the darkness from my soul. I. . . .are you ready for this?. . . .have returned to Trader Joe’s.

    Back in November, I wrote about their trademark wine, Three-Buck Chuck, in a post that began, "Have I mentioned how much I hate Trader Joe’s?" Well shame on me! I have been guilty of doing the devil’s work with my foul words. What’s more, I’ve actually, sort of, in a sense changed my mind.

    It all started one day last week when I got a craving for white cheddar popcorn. One of my guilty secrets — even back when my soul was sullied — was my love for the snacky popcorn products available only at Trader Joe’s. So at 3 in the afternoon, I drove over to get a bag. And while I was there, I stopped into the wine shop and picked up an $8 2006 Bordeaux from Chateau Michel de Vert.

    It had a nice label. And we’re working on saving money, my husband and I, particularly where wine is concerned. What the hell, I thought. And I trotted home with my white cheddar popcorn, which I ate immediately, and wine, which I uncorked around six o’clock.

    I was dismayed even as I poured. The wine had a thin purplish color I didn’t quite like. And it tasted. . . awful. A combination of fireplace ash and cough syrup. I took a swallow, gave my husband one. Then we stuck the cork back in and opened a bottle of the Portuguese wine I was raving about last week that we now buy by the case.

    I had planned to absorb the eight dollar loss and call it a lesson: Trader Joe’s is vile (unless you need a popcorn fix). But then, I recalled something vaguely. I’d heard a rumor, once, that TJ would take back any product for any reason. All you had to do was show up and demand your money back.

    I was skeptical even so. I called the manager to ask, Could I return a bottle of wine that wasn’t corked or heat-damaged or in any other way defective, simply because it wasn’t to my taste?

    "Absolutely!" he said. "Just look for me."

    And so I did. Yesterday afternoon, I grabbed that old, warm bottle, took it back without so much as a receipt, and the manager — no questions asked — handed me my money. So pleased was I, it seemed natural to pick up yet another ultra-cheap Bordeaux: Les Caves Joseph 2005, which sells for (you’re sitting down, right?) $5.99.

    Was it special? Er, no. But what do you expect for six bucks. It was a spot-on average table wine, sweet and decent (much like Juno!), with a cherry-ish flavor and a little bit of rough wood.

    So. Heed this story. I have seen the light, given up my hatred, and cleansed my spirit with a profoundly mediocre French wine. If I could, I’d buy a thousand bottles, get all the writers and rabid Obama supporters I know, and put them all together in a room. I see a big, diverse Bachannalian event. An orgy of the liberal and literati. All cheaply lubricated, thanks to Trader Joe’s.