Tuesday, March 12, 2024

After the Oscars


The songs weren't bad, and the drumming was memorable; the winners were mostly deserving, I can recall only one over-the-top dance number--"Just Ken"--and  Jimmy Kimmel took care of business as well as Johnny Carson ever did. The early focus on Barbie was gratifying to see. The worst bit involved a pseudo-streaker. I didn't "get" it.

Kimmel's worst joke—horrific, really—was to remark that in Germany The Zone of Interest fell into the rom-com category. The technical awards and the always tedious speech by the president of the Academy were scuttled. But the In Memoriam episode, brief though it was, didn't come off well: the camera was so far removed from names and faces that you couldn't see or read them, and the flailing dancers in the foreground looked ridiculous. By the same token, the film clips were meager. That's too bad. Jack Nicholson, Harrison Ford, and Meryl Streep were nowhere to be seen, which is fine by me. And the show was wrapped up by 9:30. It was hard to believe.

I can't recall an Oscar ceremony that gave us less to complain about. 

Then again, what do I remember about the event from previous years anyway? Not much.

Can anyone even remember which films won the Best Picture Oscar in recent years? I don't find it easy.

I just now called up a list of nominees, year by year. Here are some winners, followed in some cases by a runner-up that might have taken home the prize with equal justice.

Everything Everywhere All at Once ... or Tar?

Coda ... or Licorice Pizza?

Nomadland

Parasite ... or Ford vs. Ferrari?

The Green Book ... or Black Klansman?

The Shape of Water ... or Phantom Thread?

Moonlight ... or Hell or High Water?

Spotlight ... or The Big Short?

And so on.

I read a fair amount of Oscar chatter before the ceremony, and sometimes almost forget how trivial it all is when compared to the experience of actually seeing a film. Any film. For example, the energy, sweep, detail, drama, intensity, and moral import of Oppenheimer stagger the imagination. It's a very good film, I think. The question of how many statues it won seems vapid by comparison.

On a much smaller scale, The Holdovers  also won my heart. It's full of humor and sorrow and truth. And purposeful lies. It isn't a Christmas movie or a coming of age movie or a Vietnam movie or a 70s movie, though all of those elements play a part. It's one of those movies that develop organically as we learn more about the characters, and it's fair to say that even Classical Studies—you know, Latin and Greek, Horace and Thucydides—come into play, as do race and class and parental loss and academic vanity. 

Paul Giametti shines as the harsh and frustrated instructor, so lovelorn he's forgotten what the word means, though he does love his Latin quotations about nobility and sacrifice.  But the entire cast is up to the challenge of making a seemingly arbitrary and unpleasant situation into a funny and moving tale. Well done all the way around.

American Fiction also works well, though not quite so touchingly, as both a family drama and a charming, if someimes bitter, comedy about how academia, the publishing industry, and the reading public shape the dialogue about underrepresented communities. Very shrewd.

Past Lives  is a quietly enigmatic film that follows a few decades in the life of Nora, who emigrates to Canada from Korea at the age of twelve with her parents. Nora seems unperturbed by the change; a few frames later she's become an adult and moved to New York to pursue a career as a playwright. 

The plot centers on her relationship with Hae Sung, the boy she left behind in Korea when they were kids. They reconnect online and begin a vague, dreamy correspondence about where their lives are going, how they still think about each other, and so on. Meanwhile, Nora meets Arthur, a likeable novelist and self-styled New York Jew. The two are happily married by the time Hae Sung decides to come visit.

Barbie is a colorful, fun-loving, ingenious romp that examines gender roles with tongue partly in cheek. The production is unique and audacious. 


 Maestro is full of dazzle and bluster but it fails to offer a broadly satisfying portrait of its subject, the conductor, composer, and educator Leonard Bernstein. Nor does it probe very deeply into Bernstein's marriage or the career and personality of his wife. Director and star Bradley Cooper chose to focus instead on himself—er, I mean, the maestro's numerous gay affairs, and viewers are left with an energetic but hollow "long-suffering wife" tale, in which the musical genius and emotional complexity of the ostensible subject is largely missing. As Richard Brody put it in the New Yorker, Cooper "left out all the good parts." 

I fell asleep during The Boy and the Heron. The portraits of bird life are inaccurate and uncomplimentary, the facial expressions of the humans lack dimension, and the voices are cartoonish. Oh? It is a cartoon? Well, that explains it.

Anatomy of a Fall had piqued my interest even before it won the Oscar for best original screenplay. It revolves around the question of whether a depressed author living in the Alps killed himself by jumping out a window or was pushed by his wife. Neither of them are all that appealing, and the French courtroom scenes are full of badgering lawyers asking tendentious questions. Meanwhile, no one makes the slightest effort to look for the murder weapon, presuming there was one. Our sympathies come to rest with the couple's sight-impaired son and his cute dog, who also happen to be the prime witnesses.

In the end, it isn't that hard to figure out what happened. But I'll leave you in suspense, while also noting that the recent Japanese film, Decision to Leave, covers similar ground in more suspenseful and entertaining ways.

Now, on to the International Film Fest and the summer blockbusters! 

Thursday, March 7, 2024

A Note on Marilynne Robinson


During my days on the loading dock, my colleagues and I used to comment wryly on the exaggerations and absurdities that routinely appeared in the promotional copy on the books we were checking in. I was reminded of that the other day when I glanced at the blurbs on the back of Marilynne Robinson's collection of essays The Death of Adam. In the first line it's described as a "grand, sweeping, blazing, brilliant, life-changing book" that will leave the reader "shaken." That's not the impression I got while reading a few of the essays. To my mind it would more accurate to describe the book as modest, astute, carefully focused, cautiously articulated, thought-provoking, and leavened with only occasional touches of gentle irony. But I suppose such phrases are unlikely to sell many books. Post-modern readers want to be shaken, not stirred.

I heard Marilynne read maybe ten years ago at a book convention. She was soft-spoken, mournful, almost lethargic, yet animated by a smoldering inner fire that kept your attention. I don't remember what she was reading; the passages might have been from her novel Home.


After the event I went up to ask her a question. "You've devoted several essays," I began, "to the connections between Marguerite of Navarre and John Calvin—" Before I had time to come to the point, she said,  in a quiet but strangely troubled and insistent tone of voice, "But why would you be interested in that?" It wasn't a challenge or a put-down, as far as I could tell, but a serious inquiry. To be honest, I wasn't sure what she was driving at. What I might have said in reply was, "I like Marguerite of Navarre's Heptameron quite a bit, but have an altogether negative impression of John Calvin. I don't see the connection." I see now that if I had, she might have responded, in a courteous voice tinged with humor, "Well, if you'd actually read the pertinent essays in my collection The Death of Adam, you'd have seen the connection." But there was a line of eager readers forming behind me, and it didn't seem the proper time to elaborate on the sources of my interest.

A few days ago Hilary forwarded to me an article that Marilynne wrote recently about Joe Biden. I liked it so much that I tracked down my copy of The Death of Adam and gave it another look. I read an essay called "Psalm Eight," in which Marilynne describes the role religious feeling played in her childhood.

"I was becoming a pious child, seriously eager to hear whatever I might be told. What this meant precisely, and why it was true, I can only speculate. But it seems to me I felt God as a presence before I had a name for him, and long before I knew words like "faith" or "belief." I was aware to the point of alarm of a vast energy of intention, all around me, barely restrained, and I thought everyone else must be aware of it."

That's a remarkable passage, I think, To which she adds: "I do not remember childhood as happy but as filled and overfilled with an intensity of experience that made happiness a matter of little interest."

From there I turned to a piece titled "Puritans and Prigs." Marilynne likes Puritans, and thinks they've been given a bad rap. She hates prigs, though she sees them nowadays almost everywhere she looks. At one point she writes:

"The way we speak and think about Puritans seems to me a serviceable model for important aspects of the phenomenon we call Puritanism. Very simply, it is a great example of our collective ignorance to disparage without knowledge or information about the thing disparaged, when the reward is the pleasure of sharing an attitude one knows is socially approved of." Ouch!

 At another point: 

"For at least a century we have diverted ourselves with the fact that it is possible to translate whole constellations of ideas into terms inappropriate to them. And when, thus transformed, they seem odd or foolish, we have acted as if we had exposed their true nature—in its essence, the alligator was always a handbag."


These are fine examples, I think, of Marilynne's even-tempered (yet scathing) criticisms of the current state of critical judgment. Meanwhile, she seems to knows a great deal about Puritanism herself, both the Genevan original and the North American offspring. In fact, the thirty-five page essay titled "Marguerite de Navarre" is almost entirely devoted to the career of John Calvin, about which I, for one, knew almost nothing before reading it. It's a long and eloquent narrative, and at its heart lies the notion that divine energy is real and exultation is something valuable to share it. On a more prosaic level, she concludes:

"There are things for which we in this culture are clearly indebted to [Calvin], including relatively popular government, the relatively high status of women, the separation of church and state, what remains of universal schooling, and, while it lasted, liberal higher education, education in "the humanities." All this, for our purposes, emanated from Geneva—in imperfect form, of course, but tending then toward improvement as it is now tending toward decline."

Her assertion that American culture and institutions owe more to Continental than to English precedents is an intriguing one, and it seems to jibe with other treatments of the subject—for example, Guido de Ruggiero's History of European Liberalism.   

Marilynne's judgments are finely put, rather unlike the hysterical tone so common nowadays, and her prose has a kind of purring density that requires close attention. It reminds me more of Sir Thomas Browne than Hunter Thompson. She doesn't use Bible references to "prove" her points, but rather, offers glosses from afar that may, perhaps, alter our perspectives. For example:

"I believe it is usual to say that the resurrection established who Jesus was and what his presence meant. Perhaps it is truer to say that opposite, that who Jesus was established what his resurrection meant, that he seized upon a narrative familiar or even pervasive and wholly transformed it."  


But what about Marguerite of Navarre? Marilynne admits in the first paragraph of her essay that the appearance of Marguerite's name in the title is mostly a deception; readers would be unlikely to take up an essay devoted to John Calvin. And she may be right. Yet the association isn't entirely arbitrary. The two almost certainly knew each other, and Marilynne  makes the case, albeit briefly, that Calvin was deeply influenced by Marguerite's religious poetry, though she doesn't reproduce any of it. Meanwhile, she doesn't think much of Margaret's Heptameron, casually lumping that collection of moral tales in with Boccoccio's much less interesting, though far more famous, predecessor, The Decameron. With that judgment I cannot agree.

I requested a copy of The Grammar of Silence: a Reading of Marguerite de Navarre's Poetry from the library. It was the only thing they had that might serve. I expect it will be a scholarly slog that I'll dismiss in a few pages as worthless. But who knows?

 I'll let you know how it turns out.

Thursday, February 29, 2024

Have I Lost My Sisu?


It's been hard to find a good place the ski this winter. Or maybe I just haven't been trying hard enough. Looking out the windows at dormant grass and dead leaves spreading out in every direction is sort of pleasant, but it also engenders a listless sense of stasis, of waiting. But let's be honest: the recent string of mostly sunny days has been mostly magnificent.

A few days ago the Star Tribune ran a story identifying Minnesota as the "epicenter of a sauna revival in the United States." Well, we'll grasp at any excuse to feel "special," and I'm sure many snow-birds in Texas, Florida, and Arizona are now green with envy. I must confess, however, that I don't enjoy saunas as much as I once did. You get hot, then you want to go out but you don't. No one else is going out, and you don't want to be a sissy. Finally you do go out, coaxing someone to go with you, but as often as not there's no lake nearby to jump into.

The first sauna I ever took was in the mid-1960s, on the shores of Wake-Um-Up Bay on Lake Vermilion, near the cabin where my mom had spent her childhood summers. She still had friends in the neighborhood, and they had a sauna right next to the lake. During one visit my brother and I were introduced to that old backwoods institution. I was ten years old, and I didn't quite see the point. It was too hot for me. I was more impressed with the two-gallon galvanized kettle sitting in a shed nearby, filled almost to the brim with blueberries that our hosts had picked in the scrubby open country along a gravel road up beyond Elbow Lake. That was a lot of blueberries.

During the years I worked at a canoe camp a few miles from the Canadian border the sauna became a regular part of the routine. We'd stoke it for hours—the record temperature was 230 degrees, as I recall—then sit around inside, sweating like mad, before running out to jump in the lake, which was only a few feet away. I can remember one moonless night, swimming out into the lake under a starry sky and spraying water into the air, which would catch the light from the sauna on shore behind me and explode into silent clouds of mist against a black sky filled with stars.

The best part of any sauna is the tingle you get as your overheated body adjusts to the frigid  lake water. Is it actually good for you? I have no idea. In any case, these days a motel hot-tub suits me just fine.

Last winter the snow was so deep that rabbits gnawed all the bark off several newly planted shrubs in our backyard. I bought some green fencing and a few white plastic sleeves to protect the ones that survived, and it's nice to see them here and there in the yard, differentiated somewhat from the generally weedy things that show up every year.

I'm especially excited about a pair of volunteer chokecherry trees that I discovered last summer just inside the neighbor's new fence. All winter long I have had it in mind to remove a twenty-foot elm tree that's crowding their space. "It's only four inches in diameter," I would say to myself. "I could cut it down with an ax. And winter's the time to do it." The other day, with the temperatures in the fifties, I decided it was now or never. I got some rope, an axe, a little aluminum hand saw, and my long-handled pruning saw from the garage and set to work.

I tied the rope (not a very good rope) from the spindly elm to a nearby spruce tree with a taught-line hitch (not a very well tied knot.) I thought I might lop off some of the upper branches that were overhanging the power-line, but they were too high to reach with my extensions, and I was unsure of the wisdom of waving a long metal pole in that particular direction. When it starts to go, I said to myself, I'll tighten the rope and direct the tree out away from the wires.

I hacked at the base of the tree with the ax for a while, then decided it would be better to saw it off four feet up, so that it would weigh less when it fell. I made the lower cut in the direction I wanted the little tree to fall, but that didn't matter much. It was leaning in the opposite direction, out over the wires, and the minute I began to break through the trunk, it dropped down onto them. Not a crash, but a weighty and definitive movement that I knew immediately would be impossible to undue or counteract with the tools I had. That was not the way I'd imagined it.

Then I went inside and called the power company.

A jolly man not far from retirement age arrived two days later in a white pick-up truck. I met him at the door.

"A tree fell on the wires?" he said.

"It didn't fall; I cut it down. I guess I got in a little over my head."

"Don't worry about it," he said. "It happens all the time."

We went around back and he took a look around. "You stopped at a good time," he said.

His method for removing the tree was the same as mine, but he had much better tools, and a half-century of experience under his belt. He had a beautiful hank of supple pale blue rope at least an inch in diameter and a pole much longer than mine with an attachment on the end that he used to string the rope fifteen feet higher on a different tree nearby. "This pole doesn't conduct electricity," he said. "I think yours might."

Once he'd secured the rope he took my little saw from where I'd left it on the edge of the deck—I almost laughed out loud—and completed the cut. When he broke through the trunk it swung down away from the wires like a pendulum and came to rest against my neighbor's fence in the midst of a buckthorn thicket. What a relief.

He was having a slow day and we spent a few minutes talking about trees and birds. He owns a few acres up in Ramsey. When his kids were little he had a clock in the kitchen with birds instead of numerals on the face: robin, goldfinch, blue jay. Rather than chiming on the hour it would produce the appropriate bird call. "Imagine how thrilled my kids were when they heard a real mourning dove cooing in the back yard," he said. "And knew what it was!"

On quiet days I can now stare out the dining room window at a section of the yard that suddenly looks healthy, prim, and full of potential—the way I've been envisioning it for several years. In part, this is because I had to clear out several large buckthorns (which I should have done anyway) to get at the tree I wanted to remove. But now a new section of the sky has been exposed, too, and all summer we'll enjoy the extra sunlight shining down on our otherwise mostly shady garden. 

 


  

Wednesday, February 21, 2024

A Farm Morning

I read in the paper the other day that Bob Moore, who founded Bob's Red Mill, has died. His is an all-American entrepreneurial success story with Biblical overtones, not only the part where he struggled to learn Hebrew and Aramaic, but more especially the part where he spurned numerous offers from mega-food producers to buy his company and instead turned Bob's Red-Mill into an employee-owned outfit.

By coincidence, I happen to have a hefty bag of Bob's Red bulgur in the pantry. Fetching a few ancient cookbooks from the basement, I opened Paula Wolfert's Mediterranean Grains and Greens to the appropriate page and read, "There's no particular reason for eating bulgur." What? Oh. I had misread the line. It actually says, "There's no particular season for eating bulgur." That's better.

Bulgur seems to be an ecumenical grain, popular among Turks, Armenians, Jews, Arabs, Kurds, and aging hippies, which are more numerous than you might suppose. I didn't read Wolfert's analysis of the four or five types of bulgur, but skipped to the recipes, where "Zeliha GunGoren's Scallion Bulgur Pilaf with Golden Raisin Hosfaf" caught my eye. It sounds pretty good.


By coincidence, the previous night I had been reading The Dawn of Everything, in which anthropologists David Graeber and David Wengrow explode several myths about the nature of early humans by simply examining the archeological evidence. The huge structures found at Göbekli Tepe, in southeast Turkey, for example, which date from 9500 BCE, don't look much like the kind of things that small bands of egalitarian nomadic hunter-gatherers would have built. The even more massive structures at Poverty Point, Louisiana, which Hilary and I have visited, also date from before the agricultural revolution which, in the standard view, led to cities, hierarchies, and all of our current urban and environmental woes.  

Graeber and Wengrow seem to know their stuff, reaching back deeply into the literature, quoting Levi-Strauss, Radin, Lowrie, and other anthropologists whom I've actually heard of, in an effort to scuttle the conventional account of human development—a simple-minded scheme that ignores most of the evidence. In short, a far greater variety of ingenious patterns of social organization have been devised by humans across the millennia than we've been led to believe.

Did the seasonal inhabitants of Göbekli Tepe eat bulgur? I don't know, but maybe I'll find out soon. The Dawn of Everything is a long book. 


 
Meanwhile, I was cheered to read in the Star Tribune this morning that the average Minnesota farmer made $141,869 last year, more than twice the 2017 level, and also almost twice as much as the national average. And here's another reason to celebrate: Minnesota farmers planted 760,00 acres of cover crops last year, thirty percent more than five years ago.

There are more big farms than there were five years ago, and also more farms between 10 and 49 acres.  I imagine this odd fact reflects the bifurcation of production methods between mega-farms and those who are following a more sustainable path. You can buy cheap food or good food. You can work to preserve the health of the environment or follow in the footsteps of Louis XV — après moi le déluge.  I face that dilemma every time I go shopping for carrots at Cub.

The Guardian published an article the next day crunching the numbers on a national level. Among its conclusions:

"The steepest decline – 17% – was among the smallest farms with less than 10 acres. The US globalized agricultural system favors large and corporate-owned operations, as smaller farms struggle more with boom and bust prices, extreme weather linked to the climate crisis and access to government subsidies and other credit."

I don't know anything about farming, but it seems to me that a farm of less than ten acres is going to have a hard time staying afloat regardless of the weather or market conditions.

At times the analysts seemed to miss the obvious, while attaching undue importance to meaningless categories of their own devising.

For example, the Guardian observes that "the number of farms enrolled in USDA conservation programs that pay farmers to leave environmentally important areas such as wetlands fell by 7% between 2017 and 2022. Smaller farms saw the steepest decline, which is likely due to high commodity prices on the global market that offered short-term economic gains."

Does anyone really care how many farms in each arbitrarily created category are enrolled in conservation programs? No. From the environmental point of view, the question is, how many acres are enrolled in these programs. The Guardian observes that the acreage increased by 17 percent, but complains that the increase was mostly due to larger farms planting more nutrient-rich cover crops between growing periods for cash crops. Well, isn't that what the program is all about? Larger farms, by definition, have more land, so we should be happy they're doing their part, and more, rather than aping the quest of smaller farms for "short-term gains."

In the end, the health of the agricultural sector is a tough one to assay, with corporate profits, cheap food, environmental health, and a manageable lifestyle ceaselessly jockeying for priority. 

I get emails from the Ninth Federal Reserve District on a regular basis keeping me up to date, but I'm pretty sure it's a tough business any way you look at it. And I must confess I'd rather settle back in my easy chair and read a few lines from Virgil's Georgics:

Winter's the lazy time for husbandmen.
In the cold season farmers wont to taste
The increase of their toil, and yield themselves
To mutual interchange of festal cheer.
Boon winter bids them, and unbinds their cares,
As laden keels, when now the port they touch,
And happy sailors crown the sterns with flowers.
Nathless then also time it is to strip
Acorns from oaks, and berries from the bay,
Olives, and bleeding myrtles, then to set
Snares for the crane, and meshes for the stag,
And hunt the long-eared hares, then pierce the doe
With whirl of hempen-thonged Balearic sling,
While snow lies deep, and streams are drifting ice.

 


Sunday, February 18, 2024

World Cup in the Neighborhood


On a stunning Saturday morning we left the house after breakfast and made our way down Theo Wirth Parkway to the World Cup cross-country ski races being held on the golf course at the bottom of the hill. They've been making snow and grooming trails for months, of course, but the arrival of six inches of new snow was welcome, to say the least. A large TV screen had been set up in front of the chalet and we could hear the distinctive tone of Senator Klobuchar's voice as we approached. By the time we got there her face had been replaced on the screen with that of Governor Walz, who was welcoming fans to the first World Cup races to be held on American soil in more than twenty years. 

We joined the stream of attendees who were continuing west to the trailhead. It was a colorful scene.

The sprints were set to begin in a few minutes, and we clamored up a hill past some handsome oaks to a vantage point above the finish line and the grandstand full of VIPs and full-blooded skiing fans on the other side. 

Hilary and I have skied these same trails many times, like lots of other people, but it was fun to wander the hills watching these remarkable athletes move so swiftly across them, even from a distance. But the greater pleasure was to find ourselves in the midst of this joyous and colorful scene, with flags from all parts of the world dangling in the breeze nearby.

All of the skiers looked the same, for the most part, though quite a few of the women had pony-tails. It was easy to tell when Jessie Diggins went by, because the crown noise suddenly increased. Diggins was later quoted as saying: "That was surreal. It was already the best atmosphere we've had all season, and that was an hour before the qualifier."


After a while we crossed an open vale to another vantage point closer to the track where we could see the skiers better. As they passed I found it hard to tell if they were competing or merely getting familiar with the track. 

Twenty minutes later we moved on to another hilltop from which point we could watch the skiers descend the final hill before the finish line.

Then we walked home. 

I didn't hear a single remark from fans in the crowd in Norwegian, Swedish, or German, but a few interesting remarks later appeared online.

"A little snow came the day that we arrived," Andrew Musgrave of Great Britain said. "It's beautiful now; so different from anywhere else we race. 'Minnesota Nice' has definitely proven true so far."

"I had big emotions before the start," said Italian skier Federico Pellegrino. "I almost cried with all these people knowing my name."

Diggins finished fourth in the sprint final behind Scandinavian sprint specialists Jonna Sundving, Linn Svann, and Kristine Skistad. 

Today they held the long-distance races. We  watched them on TV. Alaskan Gus Schumacher pulled off a surprising win in the men's division, four seconds ahead of the Norwegian favorite, Harold Ostberg Amundsen. 


Incredible.

Sunday, February 11, 2024

The Ides of February

Though the skies have been gray, and the weather strangely warmish and out of season, it's been one riotous festival after another. Shall I number them?

1) February 7. It's the first day of spring, at least according to Cato the Elder. In his book on farm management (c.a. 160 BCE), he identifies that specific date, and even gives a reason for choosing it. The wind changes on February 7. (Which way it changes he doesn't say. Probably from North to South. I guess weather patterns were more consistent in his day.)

2) February 10. It's the lunar New Year!

3) February 12. It's Fasching! A two-day festival when Germans get drunk, run wild, and so on, prior to the onset of Lent.

4) February 14. Valentine's Day.

What am I doing about it all? Very little.

But that's not entirely true.

On the afternoon of February 7, I was sitting out on the deck after work watching the sun go down. The skies were blue that day, with a pale white band of thin clouds drifting by overhead. I'd gotten a pot of yellow-pea soup going on the stove. The recipe called for 1/2 cup of sherry, which isn't very specific. Oloroso? Fino? Almontillado? Well, all I could find in the cabinet above the stove was an old bottle of Marsala. Once I'd added the quantity specified there was only an inch left in the bottom, a bit muddy. I made short work of it, as a service to the household. Now we can get a fresh bottle of something similar.

As I sat on the deck, I took a peak at an essay about Johann Gottfried Herder from Arthur Lovejoy's Essays in the History of Ideas—a nice way to start the new year—but then I noticed that the buds on the branches of the silver maple above my head, those spiky little red clusters, seemed to have grown larger. Already? A red squirrel started chattering and the sun dipped behind a bank of clouds near the horizon. Four mallards raced by at tremendous speed, high overhead, traveling north. Why?

I could hear a CD of the Polish trumpeter Tomas Stanko on the stereo inside. I'd forgotten how good this CD is. But it's a moody thing. And the smell of peas wafting my way from the half-open door reminded me that it was time to stir the soup.

The following afternoon Hilary and I drove down to the Mississippi and along River Road downstream past the Guthrie and the Ted Mann Concert Hall to the Northern Clay Center on Franklin Avenue. It's always fun to see what the local potters are doing, but we were surprised to come upon a retrospective show of Warren McKenzie's work. McKenzie, who died a few years ago, is the long-standing local superstar of the Mengei tradition. It's an Asian tradition, in fact, appropriate to the lunar new year. 


These classic rustic vessels, exhibiting a wide variety of shapes and surface decorations, did not disappoint. If they had slipped a few pots by Guillermo Ceullar or Will Swanson into the show, would we have noticed? It doesn't matter, and such quibbles degrade the integrity and depth of the tradition.

I also have my doubts about the value of the price list, though its presence was unavoidable; the show was a fundraiser, after all, and all but a few of the pots had sold. But it's a little disconcerting to know that Hilary and I eat our breakfast every morning out of $400 cereal bowls. Better not drop them!


From Northern Clay we drove a few blocks to the West Bank campus of the U of M, where an exhibit of indigenous art was on display in the Katherine Nash Gallery. If I imagined that I was somewhat jaded by the seemingly endless influx of Native American stuff recently, this show was a pleasantly rude awakening. 


White walls, bright colors, exotic and familiar imagery. The incandescent purples and pinks of George Morrison's Lake Superior landscapes are always a treat. But I was no less taken by such large-scale works as Michelle Defoe's immense The Stars Remember: We are the caretakers of the land and our ancestors reborn. And Rabbett Before Horses Strictland's carefully rendered mythological scenes from Anishinaabe lore brought the works of Poussin to mind. Bright colors predominate; it's the age of acrylics. But Patrick DesJarlait's watercolors have that pleasantly old-fashioned WPA look and feel.


A few days later, on the spur of the moment almost, we decided to take a spin down to New Ulm, where we hadn't been in many years. Though hardly a tourist Mecca, the town is well-known for its German heritage. In a few hours you could visit the historical museum and Turner Hall, have a meal in the basement rathskeller or at the Kaiserhof downtown, then drive by the oversized statue of Herman the German at the top of the hill and the more modest statue of Bohemian immigrants down in the city park, before heading to the Shell Brewery or upstream along the Minnesota River to see the historical sites associated with the Dakota War of 1862.


But our plan was simply to see how the town was doing, then take a hike at nearby Flandreau State Park. 

We had a pleasant lunch at a place called Lola's, then walked down Minnesota Street to a fine brick building called the Grand that's been converted to an art center, with a beer hall next door. Along the way we stopped in at low-lit place called Sweethaven Tonics that had a few comfortable chairs and enough open space to host a pop-up bookstore. 

I noticed later on their website that the bar also hosts musical events, including a recent show by a group called Uccellino, two women who sing and play the ukulele and Melodica. Evidently Sweet Haven makes and distributes a variety of concentrated non-alcoholic  "tonics," including Lemon Basil Lavender and Ginder Lime Peppercorn. Just add some booze and you're all set.

While we were perusing the books a woman appeared from the shadows wearing a floral print dress and a big smile. I don't remember her name but she told us she'll be opening a bookstore soon across the street. I hope it goes well.

We also enjoyed chatting with the young woman at the nearby Grand Art Center. I asked her whether anything special was in the works for the weekend. "Do you know about Flasching?" she asked. "It's like Mardi Gras, but not so grand. Do you know what Narren are?"

"Are those the people wearing the grotesque wooden masks?"

"Yes. They gave me the creeps when I was a kid."   

"We haven't seen any on the street this morning."

"It's probably too early. I'm not sure what the schedule is. You can find more information online."

She gave us a tour of the cabaret next door, which had oversized images on the walls of Wanda Gag, Tippi Hedrin, and a famous local accordion player whose name neither of us couldn't remember. "That's not really my kind of music," she said.

"But you do know how to polka?"

"Kind of. You shuffle back and forth...."

A few storefronts down we went into a fair-trade shop stocked with fabrics, gifts, and doodahs from around the world. The proprietor, a retired kindergarten teacher, gave us a bit more information about how the town was changing. Someone was retrofitting one or two of the handsome brick buildings across the street. "And we've got a bookstore opening soon, too."

"We met the owner a few minutes ago."

"Isn't she a breath of fresh air!"

I asked her about Fasching and she said, "Did you see the rags hanging from the lamp posts. That's part of the festival. Spring cleaning. Out with the old." But not very festive, really; I hadn't noticed them.

Rags dangling in front of the Grand Art Center

I asked her about the Shell's brewery. "The last time we were down there, you couldn't sample the beer unless you took the tour."

"That was a long time ago. People didn't like that. Now they have a big beer garden. And one of the Marti sons has opened a distillery. You should come down here during Octoberfest." Indeed.

She and her husband are cross-country skiers, and we commiserated briefly about the lack of snow.

On our way back to the car we passed the Kaiserhof Restaurant—I could see a long line inside through the darkened window. And though we'd already had lunch, something in the air gave me the strong desire to sample a few sausages and some hot potato salad, with a pile of sauerkraut on the side.  

Next time.   

          

Sunday, January 28, 2024

Wandering Through Winter


On a gray Saturday morning in late January, no snow, we nevertheless feel it necessary to get out into the day. The plan is simple: drive down to the Old Cedar Avenue Bridge, where there might be some birds loitering in patches of open water, and at the very least, we can take a stroll without getting our shoes muddy; then swing north on 35 W to the Art Institute to take a look at a few of the "minor" exhibits. Very low-key.

There were a few birds down at the river. A flock of sixteen trumpeter swans flew by overhead, honking. (This is the kind of nature stuff we need right now.) They're big birds, pristine, shapely, and athletic, and their trumpeting is hardly less evocative than the hooting of a great-horned owl at midnight. Also louder.

We also came upon a flock of hooded mergansers when we got to the river channel.

It was nice wandering down the asphalt path alongside the rich orange grasses, with the myriad shades of gray ice and white cracks below. Groups of fat-tire bikers passed us on the reconstructed bridge, and five-year-olds on miniature bikes who had raced ahead of their parents were screaming wildly in the damp frigid air. It does feel good to get out.

But the cool, damp, almost Danish air also has a way of sinking in, and we enjoyed the warmth of the car as drove north on the freeway to the Institute, fifteen minutes away.

It's a handsome place. Also huge. Also free. 

We lingered at the Cargill Gallery admiring the Root Collection of pottery, though we'd seen that exhibit before. As usual, we were drawn to the more functional work. Admiring a thin blue bowl with a mottled glaze, I was tempted to say to Hilary, "You've done stuff as fine as this," but I didn't, because making things isn't a quest to be as good or better than others; it's a personal need and a loving, exploratory  process.

Looking at a piece by the Finnish-American potter Otto Heino, I was reminded of the visit we paid to his studio in Ojai, California, many years ago. We stopped in unannounced that day, and he entertained us with stories for an hour. He was a nice man, well beyond eighty, living alone. But he could still throw a nice pot with ease and remove it from the wheel, dry. 

I had printed out a list of the exhibits I wanted to see, including room numbers. They all seemed to be on the third floor. The building is a labyrinth of rooms and halls arranged in no obvious pattern. We finally found "Networks of Care" but were not impressed.  

I thought it might be fun to see the show in the Herberger Gallery devoted to art created by museum staff. Hilary had picked up an official map, but that gallery wasn't marked on it. Wandering through the remote southwest corner of the third floor, amid the Art Deco furniture and Moderne blown glass, we came upon a passing guard and asked him where the Herberger Gallery was.

"Oh, that's down on the first floor," he said cheerfully. "It's that long hallway going left just beyond the coffee shop."

"You mean the hallway where they display the cast iron piggy banks and the children's tempera paintings?"

"That's the one."

He looked like a friendly guy so I said, "Do you have anything in that show?"

"Me? No. I'm not an artist, though many of my colleagues are. I spent most of my career as a project manager for litigation projects. When I quit that, I wanted to work in a more inspiring environment. And here I am, surrounded by art."

"And you like it?" I said, slightly dumbfounded.

"Oh, yeah. And you meet interesting people almost every day. Yesterday I ran into a fellow rugby player. In an art gallery! What's the likelihood of that?"

"So you played rugby?" I said. "For the University?"

"Oh, no. It was club play. We were in tournaments all over the US and Europe, paid our own way."

"How are your knees holding out?" I said.

"My knees are great," he said. "I had them both replaced!"

On our way to the Herberger Gallery we passed through a special exhibit devoted to some documentary black-and-white photos by a young Gordon Parks of a cleaning woman in Washington, D.C. circa 1940—her work, her apartment, her little children. There were also photos of religious services and a dry goods store, Asian men working, large bags of rice sitting in piles. Sometimes chaotic, often dignified.


As we paused to take in these images, I began to hear the strains of a violin in the distance, as if it were being tuned. The sound of the instrument itself was deep and rich—something you often fail to take note of when you're focused on the music being played on it. 

I was reminded of a morning years ago when Hilary and I drove up to a village in the hills above St. Tropez. Three middle-aged men who had biked to the top were standing in front of a café. The village was otherwise largely deserted, but someone was playing a violin in a second-floor room on one of the narrow streets, rehearsing the same lilting passage over and over again. It was a haunting experience, something out of a dream. 

Then I remembered that an improvisatory concert had been scheduled for one of the galleries, to be performed in complete darkness. The show was called Black Box. It wasn't on my list, but I was hearing it. I walked around the corner from the Gordon Parks exhibit, pausing briefly to admire the foggy view downtown, and approached the entry to the Black Box, which was cordoned off. A sign requesting silence also mentioned the program and listed the starting times. A small basket of earplugs was lying in front of the door--a thoughtful touch.

As I listened, it dawned on me that I was standing in one of the galleries Hilary and I had been looking for: 369, Collage/Assemblage. I looked down at a few pages of Matisse's illustrated book JAZZ that were on display in a glass case against the wall nearby. I've seen them before; this time they didn't "draw" me. Then I noticed what appeared to be a fine collage hanging on the wall opposite. I walked over to take a look, all the while vaguely entranced by the snippets of music and scratching noises emerging from the gallery nearby. At one point I heard someone whistling. At another, it sounded like a flock of sandhill cranes was approaching overhead.

The collage, "Untitled (no. 708)," dates from 1953. Anne Ryan, an artist and sometime poet I'd never heard of, put it together, inspired by a German Dadaist named Kurt Schwitters; once again, no one I knew. The collage was maybe three feet long. It was described on the plaque as a "nonverbal poem, composed from a pictographic grammar of materials." 

But isn't that what all art is? Some kind of compositional arrangement, some kind of poem?  After all, the Parks photos may have been interesting because of their content—an era and a slice of life most of us aren't familiar with—but they were beautiful by virtue of the arrangement of shadows and highlights, the curve of a mirror frame, the careworn or perky expression on a human face. 



During all the time I was in the collage gallery, I saw one woman leave the Black Box, and no one enter it. I asked a passing guard, "Is anyone in there?"

"Oh, yes," she said. "It's a ticketed performance. It runs for ninety minutes. Everyone's sitting on the floor."

"Ninety minutes!?" I said. "I'm glad I'm out here." She smiled.

Philistine that I am, I added, "But I am enjoying it."