RacketCast

Mitch Hedberg conceived his jokes with a deliberate eye toward timelessness. 

The Minnesota-launched comedy great’s widow, Lynn Shawcroft, confirmed as much during a 2013 episode of WTF with Marc Maron. And for about 15 years, the timeless comedy of Hedberg—surreal one-liners, musings, and wordplay delivered in his unmistakable stoner drawl—attracted a massive following. Jokes like, “I used to do drugs. I still do, but I used to, too” and, “I like rice. Rice is great when you're hungry and you want 2,000 of something,” keep finding new fans through his albums and specials. 

But now, 20 years after Hedberg’s death, one artifact remains frustratingly elusive: Los Enchiladas!, the 1999 movie that he wrote, directed, starred in, and bankrolled. Shot in St. Paul, the super-goofy indie comedy set at a Mexican restaurant debuted at the 1999 Sundance Film Festival; an official release has never been secured, despite Shawcroft hinting at one for over a dozen years. All fans have is a rickety, leaked workprint version that’s available on YouTube. 

To celebrate the 25th anniversary* of Los Enchiladas! and to better understand its mastermind, Racket assembled a roundtable of core sources: Brian Malow, a comedian and Hedberg’s friend who co-starred and co-produced it; Jim Jorgensen, a veteran local actor who plays the over-the-top chef; Matt Ehling, a locally based filmmaker who served as co-director of photography; and Jeff Siegel, an Emmy-winning filmmaker who's currently years deep into making the definitive Hedberg documentary. (*OK, 26th anniversary by a couple of weeks—the famously chill Hedberg would forgive us.)        

“I discovered Mitch's comedy in the early 2000s, and I saw that he made this movie that played at Sundance. I was fascinated,” says Siegel, who hopes his doc will introduce a whole new generation to Hedberg. “I got to meet him a few times, and I was always asking him questions about the film. I wanted to see it! Mitch signed my copy of his first album, Strategic Grill Locations, with, ‘Jeff, Los Ench is coming, 2002.’ So, I have a longstanding fascination with the film.”

Us too! Let’s dig into the world of Los Enchiladas!, and maybe, just maybe, help drum up some excitement that’ll lead to the long-lost movie’s proper release.  

Subscribe to RacketCast wherever you get your podcasts—Spotify, Apple Music, Pocket Casts, etc. Wanna advertise on RacketCast? Email us at [email protected]. Special thanks to local band Van Stee for supplying our podcast music!

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It's the first RacketCast episode of 2025!

Before '24 ended, we reviewed the year in music, bozos, politics, and movies, though we didn't have time to bite off a biggie: food 'n' drink. So, for this ep, we recruited two great dining writer/reporters—James Norton (Heavy Table) and Justine Jones (formerly of Eater Twin Cities)—to hashbrown out the year that was, assess the state of the local restaurant scene, and make bold predictions for what you'll be ingesting during the next 11.5 months.

Here are the two articles Em and Jay mention up top:

• How to Win Votes and Influence Neighbors: City Politics as a Way Forward in Dire Times
• Read an Excerpt From ‘The Many Facets of Eyedea,’ a New Oral History on the Celebrated MN Rapper

Subscribe to RacketCast wherever you get your podcasts—Spotify, Apple Music, Pocket Casts, etc. Wanna advertise on RacketCast? Email us at [email protected]. Special thanks to local band Van Stee for supplying our podcast music!

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Did you that co-owner/editor Keith Harris is the only regularly published movie critic in all of Minnesota? Sounds wild, but we believe it to be true! As such, movies are a big part of the equation over here, though we've never addressed them via the podcast medium. To remedy that, we enlisted a silver-screen freak you know and love: Racket super-commenter Taco Mike!

Enjoy over an hour of Keith, Em, and Taco Mike discussing, debating, and, when it comes to the contested value of Kevin Costner, dueling throughout this year-end ep. There's agreement (Argylle stinks), there's disagreement (Joker: Folie à Deux... doesn't stink?), there's plenty of chatter devoted to whether movies are sexy enough these days.

Be sure to check out Taco Mike's movie podcast, I Can't Believe You Made Me Watch That. And here are links to the stories riffed on at the top of the episode: Park Point Break: Cargill vs. Duluth; Keith & the Train; Gun Bingo!

Subscribe to RacketCast wherever you get your podcasts—Spotify, Apple Music, Pocket Casts, etc. Wanna advertise on RacketCast? Email us at [email protected]. Special thanks to local band Van Stee for supplying our podcast music!

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A special bonus episode of our biweekly RacketCast? Believe it.

Happy Lizz Winstead Day!

Minnesota comedy great Lizz Winstead is a legend of lefty media, having co-created Comedy Central's Daily Show as well as Air America Radio. Every holiday season, Winstead returns home for a show that recaps the year that was. And folks? Good god... what a year we've had in 2024. "Lizz Winstead’s Project 2024: This Super Weird Year In Review" will hit the Parkway Theater in south Minneapolis for two nights—Dec. 28 and Dec. 31—and before that Winstead was kind enough to drop by RacketCast to riff on Trump 2.0, the so-called manosphere, and her career in showbiz.

Learn more about Winstead's group, Abortion Access Front, here; buy tickets to her year-end Parkway shows right here.

Subscribe to RacketCast wherever you get your podcasts—Spotify, Apple Music, Pocket Casts, etc. Wanna advertise on RacketCast? Email us at [email protected]. Special thanks to local band Van Stee for supplying our podcast music!

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What were the biggest, strangest, buzziest, most important, least important, and/or riffiest Minneapolis politics stories of 2024?

Glad you asked! Because that's more or less what we posed to John Edwards, Taylor Dahlin, and Jason Garcia of Wedge Live!, a collection of folks who pay as close attention to such matters as anyone in town. They teed up eight topics, and we knocked 'em all down together as a roundtable of townie pundits. If you like what you hear, be sure to check out the guest-packed Wedge Live! podcast, which drops weekly via your preferred pod app.

Oh, and here are the two Racket articles referenced by Jay: "Bob Kroll Is a Professional Burger Boy Now" and "‘I Don’t Get Off On It’: Meet Will Stancil, the MN Man Caught In a Perpetual Twitter Fight."

Subscribe to RacketCast wherever you get your podcasts—Spotify, Apple Music, Pocket Casts, etc. Wanna advertise on RacketCast? Email us at [email protected]. Special thanks to local band Van Stee for supplying our podcast music!

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A sincere and gratitude-stuffed "gobble, gobble" to all our RacketCast listeners ahead of this, the final episode before Thanksgiving.

As such, we're talkin' turkey—local folks deserving of our unenviable "Biggest MN Turkeys of 2024" designation, that is. (How did we possibly come up with this idea?) Em, Keith, and Jay go around the horn, picking the biggest fools, phonies, and/or foes of '24 and then riffing on 'em accordingly. If you're sensitive to overuse of gobbling sound effects, you may want to skip this ep!

Then, to honor our final turkey, we hear a dramatic reading from friend of the pod Scotty Gunderson, a Minneapolis-based artist and creative director making the world weirder and more mesmerizing through his storytelling studio Matter Level. 

Honorable Mention Biggest MN Turkeys of 2024...

• The Pohlad family
• AI
• The death of winter
• Pete Hegseth
• Hyperloop grifting 
• Epoch Times billboards
• The traffic-clogged revamp of northbound I-35W
• Kitty Cop Klub

Subscribe to RacketCast wherever you get your podcasts—Spotify, Apple Music, Pocket Casts, etc. Wanna advertise on RacketCast? Email us at [email protected]. Special thanks to local band Van Stee for supplying our podcast music!

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A special bonus episode of our biweekly RacketCast? Believe it!

When Minnesota Public Radio's Cathy Wurzer reached out about the new TPT documentary she's co-executive producing, Broadcast Wars, we figured: hey, nice opportunity to run a Q&A about the doc, which explores the pioneering and often cutthroat world of Twin Cities TV news from the 1950s through the '80s. Hell, we could even plug the premiere event, which is set for 6 p.m. Thursday at the Riverview Theater in Minneapolis (details here).

But then we got to thinking: The podcast gear is right over there, waiting and ready, would it be nuts to... put a celebrated local radio professional on our humble pod?

And that's exactly what we did. Enjoy our chat with Cathy!

Subscribe to RacketCast wherever you get your podcasts—Spotify, Apple Music, Pocket Casts, etc. Wanna advertise on RacketCast? Email us at [email protected]. Special thanks to local band Van Stee for supplying our podcast music!

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In this edition of RacketCast, get to know Racket’s first-ever Picked to Click winner: Papa Mbye!

A terrific new album, Parcelles 16, helped vault the Senegal-born, Minneapolis-based musician to the top of the poll, and deservedly so. The music he makes—drawing from rap, electronic music, and indie rock—would have been unthinkable when the original P2C launched in 1991, and he’s only getting started. But now, as a Picked to Click winner, 25-year-old Mbye is already an indelible part of Minnesota music history.

Speaking of that history, Keith and Jay begin the episode with a "Remember Some Guys?" speed round of past Picked to Click winners, spanning back to when the best-new-band poll first appeared in City Pages.

And, at the very end of the pod, enjoy the Parcelles track "SENEGAMBIA."

Wanna advertise on RacketCast? Email us at [email protected]. Special thanks to local band Van Stee for supplying our podcast music!

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There's no disputing it: This is the spookiest episode in RacketCast history.

First up, we've got Dan Suitor, winner of last year's skyway-themed flash-fiction horror contest, doing a bone-chilling reading of his spooktacular winning story, Skyway Hungers.

Then Em and Jay chitchat about their gun bingo and bigfoot conference stories (what a website!) before our seasonally appropriate guest arrives: Dawn McClain, leader of and investigator with the Twin Cities Paranormal Society.

Happy Halloween!

Wanna advertise on RacketCast? Email us at [email protected]. Special thanks to local band Van Stee for supplying our podcast music!

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Depending on who ask, St. Paul educator/social media star Mandi Jung is either "the fun teacher" who cares deeply for her middle school students (that's according to HBO's John Oliver). Or she's the "anti-capitalist teacher [who] promotes anarchy" (that's according to Fox News).

We absolutely loved chatting with Jung, who regularly shares her funny and heartfelt insights into education, politics, and culture with her 158K TikTok followers.

"I'm like the queen of freak teacher TikTok," Jung says with her infectious laugh.

Wanna advertise on RacketCast? Email us at [email protected]. Special thanks to local band Van Stee for supplying our podcast music!

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.