The time comes when the holiday gatherings are over and
things are quiet around the house. It's raining, in fact, and you ought to go
out and shovel away the slush before it turns to ice, transforming your driveway
into a scale model of Antarctica. But first, there's time to read in the
newspaper or in Pamela Espeland's ArtScape column about the fifteen "most
memorable" cultural events of the years—maybe three of which you're likely
to have attended. Then you take a backward glance yourself, and see ...
nothing. It's not because you haven't done or seen anything, but because memory
doesn't really work like that.
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| Actress Mia Farrow |
No, I said to myself, I'm going to limit myself to a few
passing events that were flying "under the radar," as they say. And
to give you an idea of what I mean, let me begin by passing over Nicola
Benedetti's brilliant recital, during which she expounded at length and also
played all three of Brahms's violin sonatas, to remind you of the performance
of Brahms's late Clarinet Quintet that a few members of the Saint Paul Chamber
Orchestra performed last spring, along with some lesser pieces by Franz and
Clara Schumann. There is no composition in the classical repertoire more
deserving of the word "sublime," in my view, than this quintet—it's
so depressing that I never think to listen to it, though I have it on CD—yet the performers negotiated the shifting tempos and dynamics flawlessly, so that
the autumnal melancholy veritably oozed from the stage.
On a Sunday evening in early September, we went with some
friends to Crooners Super Club in Fridley, (a municipality hitherto famous only
as the hometown of my friend Steve Herrig), to hear jazz pianist Geoff Keezer bust it up with Gillian Margot, a vocalist I'd never
heard of. Geoff (a native of Eau Claire) was ever-smiling and ebullient to a
fault, and Gillian delivered the standards with true feeling. I was enthralled.
A minor highlight of March was the sight of several snowy owls at the Mpls/St. Paul airport.
Half the fun was taking Cargo Road through a tunnel and emerging in the midst
of the runways.
I devoted quite a bit of time during the winter to reading Dante's Divine
Comedy. It took a while, but
having completed the journey, I almost feel like starting in again from the
beginning. Thumbing through an old journal, I spotted an entry that might be
relevant:
"I'm sitting by the back door. Glass of wine. Dante. One problem with reading Dante is that he doesn't really hold your attention. So you're trying to grasp or visualize some very celestial description of stars and light and eminences, but then you jump up to tend the fire, go to the bathroom, or check your emails, and you end up playing a few hands of bridge on the computer. Then you return to the book, and read the same passage all over again."
Speaking of celestial eminences, just the other day Hilary
and I went out for our pre-dawn walk and took a detour up onto the hill behind
Margaret Mary Church. Venus was very bright, as usual, but we were also hoping
to see Jupiter and perhaps even Mercury, low and elusive though it invariably
is, before the sunlight obliterated them. And we saw them all. It's not often that they line up so
conveniently. I tried to visual the orbits, Jupiter huge and far beyond our
own, Venus and Mercury closer in to the sun and therefore following tighter orbits
inside ours. It can be done, especially if you keep in mind that gigantic,
brightly painted mechanical model of the Solar System that the roving science
teacher (later my football coach) kept in the "cooler" alongside the
gym in grade school.
Some memorable days slip our minds because they're made up
of succession of minor events. I recall one sunny afternoon that I might
describe as a Lake Street Ramble. Our first stop was Highpoint
Print Studio, where we took in an exhibit of Inuit prints.
Next we wandered a few blocks west to the Soo Vac Gallery, where an aesthetic
"flip-side" was on display. The Inuit artists had obviously been
influenced by modern printmaking techniques and ways of displaying an image.
The art at Soo Vac, by one Sophia Heymans, claimed to represent a landscapes
beyond or after humans, whatever that means. The best of these very large
canvases succeeded in putting forth strange yet appealing patterns and color
schemes. Yet the technique was intentionally crude, as if Heymans wanted to
make it clear that she wasn't interesting in making anything look refined or
"pretty."
Hilary and I used to live two blocks from here. Considering
that it was forty-odd years ago, things haven't changed all that much. The Jungle Theater has moved down the street, Falafel
King is gone, and there are far more apartment buildings and cafés now than
there were then, but Bill's Imported Foods is still standing on the corner, and
the same woman is still standing behind the cash register in front of the same
faded poster of Santorini. I suspect her
grandsons rather than her sons now tend the olive and cheese counter, but lush,
squarish icebergs of feta still glisten in the tubs of brine behind the glass:
Greek, Bulgarian, French, and domestic.
Our final stop was to Moon Palace Books, several miles down
Lake Street. The store had moved, but we hadn't been to the new location. It's
a much bigger space, with a coffee shop and theater in the back, and the place
was jumping. The average age was perhaps 29. The future of books is secure.
And while we're on the subject of Lake Street, I ought to
mention the Mid-Stream poetry reading we attended in a long shadowy room upstairs
from the Blue Moon Coffee Shop at 39th and Lake one hot summer evening. The readers
were Sharon Chmielarz, Michael Dennis Browne, and Danny Klecko—a group as
stylistically diverse as, say, Penelope Fitzgerald, George Moore, and Raymond
Chandler.
The readers were all engaging, in their different ways--Sharon wry, Michael musical, Danny gruff--but what I remember
most clearly is the buzz on the street after the reading. Hot night air, cars
passing, a slight breeze, perhaps, and words flying everywhere among writers
who've known one another for a very long time, and their spouses, partners,
friends, fans, and well-wishers.
Where are those hot summer nights? (as Francois Villon might have said, had he lived in Minnesota.)
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