The Rake Magazine

Month: November 2004

  • Inherit The Wind

    True life is the stuff of great art—an axiom put to great use in Inherit the Wind, a play loosely based upon the infamous Scopes “monkey trial.” Written in 1955, the script re-imagines the plight of John Scopes, the high school biology teacher who, in 1925, was famously prosecuted for teaching evolution theory. Both the sixty-year-old script and the ninety-year-old trial are still timely, with evolution versus creationism continuing to dog our public school teachers. (All of this makes us question any theory that suggests humans—especially lawmakers—might actually be evolving.) This staging is part of Fifty Foot Penguin’s “anti-Christmas show” tradition, offering a dramatic courtroom battle a la The Crucible and Twelve Angry Men. Cedar Riverside People’s Center, 425 S. 20th Ave., Minneapolis; 612-381-1110; www.fiftyfootpenguin.org

  • Santaland Diaries

    The 1992 telling of this anti-holiday tale on National Public Radio launched the career of author and commentator David Sedaris. His look at Christmas from the perspective of a verbally abused adult, one wearing the curly-toed shoes and green tights of a Macy’s Christmas Elf in New York City, is hilarious and uniquely Sedaris. Bryant-Lake Bowl’s version of his modern classic will make you think twice before you stand in line to sit your kids on the lap of a strange fat man. 810 W. Lake St., Minneapolis; 612-825-8949; www.bryantlakebowl.com

  • John Frusciante

    Any Red Hot Chili Peppers fan or Behind the Music devotee had a hard time shaking off the ghostly image of John Frusciante during his heroin haze years—but now? Talk about Dead Man Rocking. Deemed by Flea to be one of the most musically creative souls in music today, Frusciante has cleaned up, pulled himself together, and rejoined the Peppers. He also continues to make solo records. Six in the last year, to be exact. His goal was to make a full-length recording every month, and with his label Record Collection (also home to local fave Har Mar Superstar), he has thrown his hardcore fans the ultimate musical bone.

  • Allison Krauss and Union Station

    When Allison Krauss walked out of the river singing in O Brother, Where Art Thou?, she put a whole new face on bluegrass music. But the Coen brothers weren’t the first to discover her dulcet tones; she’s been a mainstay of the old-time music scene since she was a kid. On her new album, Lonely Runs Both Ways, Krauss’s sweet soprano contemplates troublesome topics like rainy days, wanderlust, and loneliness. She’s backed once again by Union Station, whose sound is as exacting and precise as an orchestra’s, albeit one dominated by a mandolin and fiddle.

  • The Trashy Little Christmas Show

    Nothing warms up a grubby Minneapolis bar like a few hours of honkytonk Christmas carols. For the eleventh year, Trailer Trash reprises its beloved holiday shows at Lee’s. Nate Dungan’s band has earned a reputation for rocking so enthusiastically about the season that many an anti-Christmas stoic considers this event their token holiday outing. Half the fun is watching unsteady revelers vie for an opportunity to shake the trademark, five-foot-long, tambourine-topped Jingle Stick. And parents, it’s never too early to introduce your tiny dancers to the thrills of live music. No, you don’t have to drag them to Lee’s—this year, Trailer Trash is also setting up at the smoke-free Theatre de la Jeune Lune for a special kid-friendly matinee. Good wholesome fun! Lee’s, 101 Glenwood Ave., Minneapolis, 612-338-9491; Theatre de la Jeune Lune, 612-333-6200; www.trailertrashmusic.com

  • Edith Frost

    Despite her gritty alto, the Chicago-based Edith Frost seems convinced that God intended her to use her vocals as a pretty pop instrument. This peculiar voice, which she subdues until the most poignant moments, brings a sense of understatement to the waves of catchy melodies put forth by her back-ups. Frost’s compositions tend toward introspection and poetry, especially those from her 2001 release, Wonder Woman, an album basking in the beauty of simple chord changes and stark, confessional prose. Edith Frost’s live show is a retrospective of this newest, most mature work, as well as bluegrass covers and psychedelic soundscapes from earlier releases like 1998’s TTelescopic (which included the college radio hit, “You Belong to No One”). 400 Cedar Ave., Minneapolis; 612-332-2903; www.400bar.com

  • Sweetness and Lime

    There are three golden things that never perish: gold, honey, and the sun. An archaeologist friend of mine once put this to the test. She was excavating at the Bronze Age citadel built at Mycenae during the Greek Civil War when her team came across a large jar full of honey. They agreed it would be a pity to let the honey go to the museum, so each morning they had some for breakfast. It was delicious, but it took them most of the season to get to the bottom of the pithos. When they did, they rather regretted their self-indulgence. For what they found at the bottom was an offering to the chthonic gods: the well-preserved bones of a small child. It was quite some time before my friend could be induced to eat honey again.

    For Greeks and Romans, bees and honey were special. Honey, they thought, came from heaven, like dew. (“Pour upon us the continual dew of thy blessing,” says The Prayer Book of 1662.) And bees had a perfect polity, everyone with a place and everyone in her proper place (even the gentlemen of the Drones Club), all ruled equitably by their king. No one tumbled to the sex of the queen bee till the 1670s, when a Dutchman, rejoicing in the name of Jan Swammerdam, peered down an early microscope to dissect and draw a queen bee’s ovary, which, so he calculated, contained more than five thousand eggs.

    I learned early to respect the political judgment of bees. The tyrannical headmaster of the boarding school where I spent the years seven to thirteen kept several hives, and one afternoon as he was pumping smoke into them the bees turned on him in their thousands. He became an apian pin-cushion and had to be whisked off to the hospital and dosed with antihistamines. In the long run it did nothing to improve his temper, or temper his countenance, which was the color of port wine (yohoho, his nose doth show how oft the black jack to his lips doth go). But it put the old brute out of circulation for an appreciable stretch, so preventing him from caning us.

    The sweetness and light our ancestors had from bees was, of course, not all metaphorical. Beeswax made candles and much else, and honey was the principal sweetener of food until the eighteenth century, when imports of cane sugar from the West Indies began arriving in bulk. It is amazing how thoroughly sugar corrupted eighteenth-century taste. The sugar basin of a Georgian tea set is huge, out of all proportion to the teapot or the fat-lipped cream jug; the tea Jane Austen sipped was a syrup. After dinner, eighteenth-century men drank Madeira and port, but they also drank mountain, a super-sticky dessert wine from Málaga in southern Spain, and Marsala, a ditto from Sicily. The Royal Navy ran on rum.

    With corruption of taste went corruption of language. Sweetness came to mean simply the presence of sucrose. An earlier age was subtler. When Horatio says, “Good night, sweet prince,” to Hamlet’s corpse, he is not inferring that his royal friend had a high concentration of C12 H22 011; it was more a matter of the air that breathes upon a bank of violets, stealing and giving odor.

    All of this came to mind as I was trying to describe the nose and initial taste of an excellent 2001 Chardonnay, Broquel from Argentina (around $15 locally). Others I consulted named fruits. The word that came to my mind was “honeyed.” Not sweet like the sugar-water that oozes from the nozzles protruding from the trepanned plastic bears you buy in supermarkets. But fragrant like lime flowers or thyme—the stuff, in fact, which bees collect and pack so neatly in the pouches on their little thighs. (Even Virgil knew about those, but for the full story, try A Hive of Bees by an apiarist called John Crompton.)

    There is nothing flimsy about this wine, which makes it quite unlike the penny-plain Chardonnays you often meet at dull parties. The color is that of wheat straw. There is a faintly smoky aroma and a firm grip on your tonsils as you swallow; then suddenly you are left with freshness. I found it strong enough to stand up to chicken thighs roasted with salt and fresh limes. It would be equally fine with green salad or sharp cheese. In Mendoza, where it originates, it is now late in the southern spring; no doubt there are flowers on the foothills of the Andes. This is a wine which will clear the indoor indulgences of a cold and cloying yuletide. Look on to April and his showers sweet.

  • Burnt Sugar

    Burnt Sugar is a big musical mixing bowl spilling over with jazz, funk, blues, hip hop, and rock. Add some African beats and a little contemporary classical composition, and you’ve got what could be the world’s most eclectic jazz ensemble, one whose inspiration comes from such diverse sources as Miles Davis, Metallica, and Mobb Deep. Each member—there are a dozen, including African Americans, Middle Easterners, Europeans, Asians, and even a Minnesotan—also lends his own musical influences, and an instrument or two, to the band’s jubilantly raucous happenings. To reign in this torrent of grooves, Burnt Sugar founder Greg Tate (also a journalist for the likes of the Village Voice and the New York Times) serves as conductor, using hand gestures and baton movements he invented expressly for the purpose of unifying this improvisational force. 416 Cedar Ave. S., Minneapolis; 612-375-7622; www.walkerart.org

  • ElGordo

    Knollwood Mall has been in a continual state of either death or revival for the last twenty years. It’s hard to tell which way it’s going right now, but the presence of an authentic, family-owned Mexican restaurant on the strip side of the mall is a definite score for the revival side. El Gordo makes the requisite mondo burritos, stuffed with ample cheese and topped with creamy guacamole; among its taco options, we’ve become fans of the steak version seasoned with onion and lime. That is, when we’re not going for the three-colored enchiladas, the ideal plate for the indecisive. We love moving back and forth across the platter: a bite of savory red sauce, a bite of tangy green sauce, a bite of chocolatey mole. Repeat. Yum! 8140 Highway 7, St. Louis Park; 952-935-6237

  • The Seasons of Sex

    The correct answer is: No. Actually, in my experience—and a quick survey of all the usual suspects confirms it, anecdotally anyway—transitional seasons seem to be the more active time for human, uh, rutting. Among ourselves, we men frequently talk about how the “sap begins to run” in the spring, and I can tell you from personal history that there is some truth to this. When the snow begins to melt, and the sunshine begins to stick, we start feeling just slightly more amorous than usual. (Obviously, we don’t go into hibernation through the winter. It’s just that in the spring, there seems to be a slight acceleration in the hormonal urgency to repeat that old act in the human comedy.)

    Now, it may be that part of this elevated interest is related to sartorial triggers. No doubt men, being visually stimulated as we are, grow a little randy when we see our women begin to de-layer after a cold Midwestern winter. But all of creation follows this pattern: Procreation, especially among mammals, takes place early in the year. I assume this is to maximize the opportunities for the young to feed and grow and mature before life-threatening weather returns.

    So it may be generally true that animals like to do it in the early spring, when the days are beginning to get warmer and longer, but we humans are more complicated than most animals. I think there is an equal kind if libidinous upswing for us in the late fall. When the light begins to fail, and the chimney has been cleaned, and you make the switch from summer lagers to winter porters—well, that can be an awfully romantic time of the year as well.

    Do married women experience the same seasonality with their libidos? I asked my precious, and she doesn’t think so. She said that women tend to be overwhelmed by their own monthly schedule, and biologically seem less affected by seasons. Some interesting anecdotal evidence may bear this out. It used to be that a solid majority of children were born in the spring months—particularly in April. That would mean that most conceptions occurred in the late summer, just when the nights are beginning to cool down and you need an extra blanket on the bed. If you consider the relatively long gestation period of human babies, autumn would actually be the time of heightened sexual interest in the species, to maximize the chances of a spring birth.

    But that’s all changed now, and there is an even distribution of birth throughout the year. I would hypothesize that this evening-out of the sexual calendar is a direct result of women being empowered to dictate when they want to get friendly, and not just accommodate their men as part of their “wifely duties.” And the downside is that married men, no longer being able to count on seasonally enhanced periods of intimacy, may go even longer than normal without any discernible uptick in the action. (Variety is the spice of life, they say.)

    This is a sort of cautionary tale to married folks, I guess. My friend Steve recently told me the painful story about how, years ago, he’d gotten involved with another woman. It was a disaster, and, as you might expect, it almost ruined his marriage. He and Suzy spent months with a marriage counselor who forced them to talk about a lot of things that—in hindsight—Steve says were very hurtful, and probably would have been better left alone. But things were said, and new wounds were made that merely worsened the breach. One insight, however, did help their relationship a lot. It was a discussion related to this biological seasonality of sex. Their counselor told them that it was a proven fact that couples who are more frequent and irregular and creative about their intimacy tend not to have problems with infidelity. Which sounds pretty obvious, but it’s worth repeating in the simplest terms: Married men who have an active and not entirely predictable marital bed tend to have fewer problems with the wandering eye and the lustful heart.

    It makes sense, then, that as long as we are acknowledging the biological imperative to make whoopie, we might want to be sensitive to the subtle fluctuations in desire that happen throughout the year. Whether they are seasonal or monthly, we married folks have to work extra hard to make our time tables jibe. Philandering is a moral failing, but there are certain forms of insurance a couple can take out, and one of them is a simple matter of scheduling. In the long run, it literally saved Steve and Suzy.