State Fair Patterns

Our first two attempts to visit the state fair were aborted this year. On Sunday morning the line into the Larpenteur parking lot extended west beyond the University golf course. It was simply too long. On Monday morning we got a late start due to a dentist appointment; the line seemed manageable, but just as it we got to the parking lot entrance someone brought out the LOT FULL sign.

(There are other places to park, I know, but the "bloom" would be off the morning by the time we got inside.)

Wednesday  morning we left the house at 7:30, waited patiently in the long line stretching west down Larpentuer Avenue, and finally bought our tickets and entered the fairgrounds at 8:40. We had no trouble finding something to do for the 20 minutes before the Eco-Building opened, because we almost immediately ran into an old friend of mine, Jim Hoey, and his wife, Ann. Jim and I have done four books together, and I think he's cooking up a fifth. "But I can't write in the summer," he said. "I take care of seven properties for a realtor friend of mine and I have too much grass to mow."

I don't have that problem. I hired a lawn firm to kill the creeping Charlie in our yard, and when they were done eradicating it, it turned out I didn't have any grass.

The displays in the Eco-Building get better every year. Solar Power, wind power, clean water, recycling, agricultural runoff, bicycle transport, peace coffee, kobucha, composting, kayaking on the Mississippi, all presented in a cheery easy-to-read displays, interactive kiosks, and clever do-it-yourself demonstrations.

I talked at length to the woman at the Gitchi Gummi booth about Duluth, and she gave Hilary a rub-on tattoo of Lake Superior. The woman at the PCA booth told us a little about the challenges of dealing with the Trump administration. 

At the "water bar" we sampled tap water from St. Paul (which gets its water from the Mississippi), Duluth (which gets it from Lake Superior), and tiny Buhl (which gets its famous water from a deep aquifer). The differences were subtle—almost undetectable. I suggested to the young man pouring the samples that they serve crackers.

As we wandered the hall I ran into another old author-friend, Stew Thornley, with whom I've worked on several books. Though he's an official scorer for the Minnesota Twins, his day job is with the Department of Health, and  he was scheduled to give a demonstration about water quality that morning.

At one modest booth we spoke with the same tree "expert" who advised us  last year to cut down a big maple in our front yard because it had a few dead branches. "You never know," she said. "One might fall on you."

This year, I asked her what might be a good thing to plant under some malingering blue spruce in the back yard. "Nothing," she said. "Anyway, blue spruce don't live much more than 30 years in Minnesota." I happen to know that the trees in our yard are now 70 years old at least, because my neighbor planted them in 1948.

I told her we had some volunteer ash coming up in the understory. "Ash are not good; they'll get green ash borer."

The woman was pleasant to talk to, and it occurred to me only in retrospect that she had a rather negative view of plant life, generally speaking.

Out in front of the building we did a lot better, chatting with a garden expert who confirmed most of my ideas about our ailing yard.  "Moss? Lucky you! Why not add some clover?" But that's a story for another time. 

 The art building is always a highlight, for both the diversity of mediums and the wide range of styles on display, which you'll find at no other art exhibit that I know of. The  sheer volume of pieces eventually tends to numb the brain, yet it's a healthy challenge to see if you can plot a route through the many side halls that will allow you to see them all.

This year, as usual, there were many beautiful but generic travel photos, angst-ridden but mediocre self-portraits, and clever non-representational "concept" piece that relied on their titles to get the point across. As I shuffled from image to image along with all the other gawkers, I was immediately thrilled by the bright colors and the impressive frames and mounting techniques of the pieces. Presentation isn't everything, but it counts for a lot. In fact, the very first piece in the line-up, a bright yet rich and dense photo of a poor Cuban family sitting on a couch together, a few of them wearing boxing gloves, packed a punch. At the next turn I saw a piece that impressed because of the medium being used. "Wow! How did he do that with colored pencils?"

There are always a few watercolors with an Asian inflection—a few stylized branches, two cranes in the distance. There are plenty of North Woods scenes. And no exhibit would be complete without five or six paintings of cows—a subject which, like old boots, is hard to botch completely, but also hard to imbue with any kind of depth.

This year there were a surprising number of photos of horses, in Wales or Iceland or wherever, and holy men from India or Thailand seemed to pop up at every turn of the labyrinth.     

My favorite piece was a photograph of men harvesting hay. It's a dark image, but it has the fury of desperation in it, as well as several marks of subtle artistry—the red hanky in one of the farmhand's back pocket, for example. The photo has a satisfying gravitas; It reminded me of the nineteenth-century French painter Géricault.

Another fine piece, a few walls down the way, was an oil painting of a vase of peonies. The subject is conventional, of course,  but in the folds of the petals and the shadows beyond the stems the artist takes us beyond appearances into melancholy depths that had me returning to it several times. Like Fantin-Latour, only better.

As we moved through the exhibition, I noticed at a certain point that the images I was drawn to most often presented patterns—usually organic—rather than representations.  I was mesmerized by drops of water on a dead leaf ...

and enthralled bye a Zen-like script that was actually a photo of bent reeds on a still pond.

One image offered a colorful vision of my favorite state in the manner of Giuseppe Arcimboldo, the sixteen-century master of vegetable art.

  Another consisted of three rows of individual tree leaves—aspen?—particularized by variations in shape and insect pattern.

Yet another piece consisted of an enormous zany doodle. Who knows? A section of it might show up one day on the masthead of the print edition of Macaroni!

I seemed to be taking a special interest in leaves, but this little piece had a subtle modulation between the various greens and a relaxed ambiance.

Alongside the zany, we also need to make room for the whimsical.

 And near the end of the show, I was impressed by a panorama photo of pre-dawn light on a frozen lake.

I happened upon my favorite political statement amid the cookies in the handicraft building.

 But here, even more than in the art building, it seemed that "pattern" was the order of the day. Well, that's what knitting and quilting is all about. Nez Pas?

Yet the works that I liked best often had a modern slant.

Back on the street, we stood  in line for 12 minutes to get our hands on one of the Star-Tribune's highly-rated new foods, the Heirloom Tomato and Sweet Corn BLT. Food critic Rick Nelson writes:

"The BLT is God’s gift to sandwiches. In the hands of Birchwood Cafe chef Marshall Paulsen — and his vast network of Minnesota organic farmers — it’s elevated into a heaven-sent fair experience. No detail is left to chance in this ingenious and obviously labor-intensive effort, from the swipes of basil-kale-sunflower seed pesto and chipotle-fueled sweet corn purée, right down to the sturdy focaccia, baked by Baker’s Field Flour & Bread in Minneapolis. Truly spectacular. $12."

Indeed, it was good.

We climbed the fire tower but skipped the all-you-can-drink milk stand, and later we ran into our friend Cindy Purser in front of the grandstand, where she was tending a booth for the public library association.

The day was cool and clear, and the scene was colorful and not too crowded. A perfect day. A heavenly day. We even bought some Norwegian cardamom cookies from a woman in the Osakis Bakery booth that we'd met this summer out in Osakis. (I can see this becoming a yearly tradition.)

We listened in passing to a hoe down violin-cello duet in front of the MPR building, and also endured some excruciating karaoke in a beer garden in the food building while we ate some delicious wood-grilled elote topped with jalapeno powder.

But we never made it to the animal barns and didn't see a single chicken or goat!