The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

Beck opened with "Loser." Talk about instantly winning over a crowd - a good portion of the audience mouthed along with the semi-non-sensical lyrics, and kept their lips moving Franny-like for the rest of the show. Mellow Gold came out fourteen years ago, and because this was an eighteen-plus show, this means some of the concertgoers were only four years old when it dropped.

This is easy.

I read in the Pioneer Press that your magazine is going online.

So, I wanted to thank you for all these years of the print version, for including the Colleen Kruse columns, and for the coverage of books and writers. 

Cheers 

Some years ago I was stranded at Minneapolis-St Paul airport for 24 hours on route from Portland, Oregon back to the UK.  Unfortunately, and admittedly completely unfairly — as I did not see anything of the Twin Cities themselves — I acquired a distinctly jaundiced view of the area, assaulted as I was by the sound of miniature, furry, mechanical pigs and cows that barked (the only word I can think of to describe the odd yapping sound they made) and Holstein patterned tee shirts extolling the virtues of Mooonnesota. 

On my weekly trip to the Ridgedale Library this past week, I noticed that The Rake stand had been moved from its usual location, then found it on the first floor. After conversing with a friendly (yes, your readers are very pleasant people) fellow reader, I found out that this would be your LAST PUBLICATION! Ouch!! Since television is so "polluted" with misinformation and silly, brain-dead entertainment, I do not watch it; so this was the first time I heard you were going to end this wonderful source of information and amusement. PLEASE reconsider

I thought I heard, via MPR, that The Rake is closing it's doors. Too bad! Thanks for all the great stories and your sense of humor. I'll be watching for the next venue [which you're looking at online].

I opened my electronic correspondence this morning to discover that, scattered among the many missives from such devoted readers as Floyd Whopping Cock, there were a number of notes from acquaintances calling my attention to the fact that in the pages of the Southwest Journal local media rascal David Brauer was weighing in on the future of my employer, Rake Media Worldwide.

A little more than five years ago a few of us sat down around my dining room table with some legal pads, a laptop computer, and a long list of ideas. Our starting point was an executive summary of an idea for a magazine that I’d written up three years earlier. The magazine had the working title The Village Idiot.