Surprised by the Falls — Owamni

 

It was a crisp morning, with heavenly blue sky and sharp sunlight igniting the yellow leaves, and it cried out to be experienced. I could see that from every room of the house. When Hilary returned from an early morning walk along West River Road with a friend, she was eager to get back out in it, and take me along.

"Well, why don't we go downtown," I said. "There's an article in today's paper raving about the architectural features of the newly opened riverside park down there."

Good plan. We parked in a pay lot across the river from Boom Island and began our stroll under the brilliant trees along the pedestrian path past a very active children's playground, past the Federal Reserve building, and under the Hennepin Avenue Bridge to Water Works Park, which architectural journalist Linda Mack was calling "the most intriguing new building in the Twin Cities."

We weren't seeing it at its best. It was half-wrapped in mid-morning shadows, the charcoal firepits hadn't been lit, the chairs were tilted up against the tables, and almost no one was using it. I found it hard to remember what used to be there, because the area had been under construction for many months. But all of that being granted, this short slice of riverfront looked handsome. No doubt next spring it will look even more appealing.

A spanking-new two-story building stands at the east end of the park.(see top photo) The facade is partly rough-hewn limestone of the type used to build the flour mills than once dominated the riverfront neighborhood. The rest is faced with attractive fresh-cut stone, perhaps of the same kind, if not the same vintage. This is the home of Owamni, the Native American restaurant that has been in the news off and on for years, though the restaurant itself opened only a few weeks ago. (I picked up a copy of chef Sean Sherman's cookbook at a book convention several years ago, and I've actually tried to make a few things.)

It was dark inside, but the heavy glass door opened when I pulled on the handle, and we went in. To the left I could see a hall containing several comfortable-looking chairs; to the right a man was sitting behind a desk, minding his own business. We continued straight up a long flight of stairs, eager to see as much as we could before they kicked us out.

Upstairs a young woman was standing behind a podium, talking to someone on the telephone. "No. We take a few walk-ins, but reservations are booked until the middle of December. Once the reviews appeared in New York and Los Angeles ...."

When she hung up I inched closer and said, "Can you find a place to squeeze us in?"

"Two? I can seat you at the bar."

"That would be great."

 We hadn't planned to eat lunch at Owamni. We'd never discussed it. But we followed her into the restaurant without a word or a glance.

When we'd seated ourselves the bartender said, "You know the basic idea here, right? No dairy, no wheat, no care sugar." He handed us a couple of menus.

Sitting at the bar has advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, you can't see the river. But we've seen the Mississippi hundreds of times. No big deal. On the other hand, you can see things being done in both the bar and the kitchen, so much so that you almost feel involved. You can chat with the staff from time to time; they're right in front of you. On the other hand, you see food under the heat lamps that you wish you'd ordered, but didn't, and your server is often standing three feet in front of you, mixing a drink for someone else. A drink you wish you'd ordered.

The food was very good. The drinks only fair.

We've made two of the drinks on the menu ourselves at home or on the trail more than once using ingredients we'd gathered in the field. Sumac tea tends to be bitter, like Lick-um-Aid without the sugar, and Labrador tea tends toward a nauseating vegetative flavor. In a word, terrible. We were curious to see how Owomni's versions, which came iced rather than hot, compared. The flavors were the same, but much milder, and refreshing at first sip. By the third sip, however, and especially with the food, I felt we might just as well have stuck with tap water and devoted the funds to other food items.

Waksiti (left) and Garden Sisters (right)

The dishes we ordered were all good in different ways. The fresh tostatas that accompanied the smoked Red Cliff lake trout, blueberry/maple syrup reduction (wojape) and tepary bean spread were wonderfully light and crispy. The Garden Sisters, which consisted of black bean puree, pickled squash, and purslane on a chubby corn disk, had a complex blend of flavors and a surprisingly spicy kick. And the native grain bowl (waksica) with bison offered a complex but balanced palette of  flavors drawn from the beans, nixtamal, wild rice, quinoa, pesto, wojape, and grilled vegetables. (I ought to mention that our servers described these things to us one by one as they were being served, but I had to look them up on the menu later and google a few Ojibwe and Spanish terms to complete this paragraph.)

Looking around, I didn't see a salt or pepper shaker anywhere in sight. The bison could have used a pinch. But I suppose it was hard to come by in precolonial times.

Smoked trout with crispy tostadas and wojape

Lots of other things on the menu sounded interesting. I wouldn't mind going back, though we might not be so lucky as to get in next time.

 A young woman with long blond hair was sitting alone next to Hilary. She was trying quite a few of the dishes. I wondered if she might be a reviewer, but she wasn't writing anything down. Hilary struck up a conversation, asked her which dishes she'd liked best. Turns out she was from Los Angeles, but not a food critic. She had enjoyed most of the things she'd ordered, but found the squash too spicy, and had hardly taken more than a bite. (I was tempted to ask her to pass it over to me, but I didn't want to reinforce the widespread bi-coastal stereotype of Minnesota Gauche.)

She expressed disappointment that the walleye only appeared on the dinner menu. "We don't have walleye in Los Angeles," she said. I was on the verge of remarking, in order to add to the stereotype, that walleye was delicate, but didn't really have a distinctive taste.

Our bartender/waiter, who was also hers, assured her near the end of her meal that all of the wild rice served at the restaurant was Minnesota-harvested. She had no idea that most of the wild rice on the market comes from California and Manitoba. I tried to explain that most wide rice is now paddy-cultivated and machine-harvested, though the natural Minnesota type grows in shallow lakes and stream margins and is harvested by canoe with wooden poles.

Do they taste different? I have no idea.

As we left the restaurant, I heard the couple to our right mention that they were from New York. But anyone can come to Owarmi. And you don't even have to come inside. The outdoor seating is accessible from the street. After all, it's a public park.

First Fire of the Season

Wednesday night. First fire of the season blazing in the fireplace. Chunks of dead branches from our maple out front that I cut up during the summer. Wonderful smell.

Thus, one thing leads to another. The branch falls. I saw it up, and months later we burn it. Then, smoke.

One of T.S. Eliot's most famous lines deals obliquely with this phenomenon. Something about "exploring," followed by a remark to the effect that "the end of all our exploring will be to arrive at the place we started from, and know it for the first time." Not a direct quote, obviously.

I could look it up—I see the collected poems on an upper shelf, almost out of reach—but the exact wording isn't important. I received that book as a gift from a friend back in college days. On the end paper he wrote, "Merry Christmas, and I'll be seeing you when we're both famous." An atypical remark, considering how modest and self-effacing he tended to be. He and his wife headed east to grad school, and I haven't heard from him since. 

I have never liked that line by Eliot. Pseudo-profundity, or at best sheer speculation. After all, when he wrote it, Eliot hadn't reached the end of his searching, so how would he know? And in any case, it doesn't seem likely we'll end up right back where we began, unless it's in oblivion, a place we won't be able to recognize at all.

I prefer my own pseudo-profundity: "One thing leads to another." But let's not confuse this notion with an altogether different one: "One thing leads to the next." That phrase implies that the steps are preordained or somehow causal or unavoidable, which isn't the case. Considered in retrospect, they often seem entirely fortuitous.

Such notions often cross my mind when I spot a book on the shelf—one that's been there for quite a long time—and chide myself for having bought it. "I'll never read that book. I should get rid of it," I say to myself. But I almost invariably leave it be, though once in a great while I will actually pull it down and take an extended look. Occasionally, in some small way, it changes my life. How close I came to missing this path entirely!

A few weeks ago a collection of essays by Theodore Adorno caught my eye for perhaps the twentieth time. The title, Critical Models, stands out in thick yellow lower-case italics on the spine. I have rued the day when I bought that book many times, because it reminds me of an entire realm of thought, loosely referred to as the Frankfort School, that I've never investigated. But on this occasion, I said to myself, for no reason that I can think of, "I'm finally going to read some Adorno."

I read a few pages dealing with interactions between the city and the country, and I found them interesting. I even went so far as to copy out a few passages.

"Urbanity is a part of culture, and its locus is language. No one should be reproached for coming from the country, but no one should make a virtue out of it either."

"The persistent divergence between city and country, the cultural amorphousness of the agrarian, whose traditions are meanwhile irrevocably on the ebb, is one of the forms in which barbarism perpetuates itself."

"I am always astounded by the acumen exhibited by even the most obtuse minds when it comes to defending their mistakes."

I suppose these remarks sound sort of cranky and high-handed, but it's worth noting that Adorno escaped Nazi persecution as an adult and returned to his home after the war to find that the German's hadn't really changed that much. Though he has plenty of scathing things to say about modern culture, his heart seems to be in the right place, to judge from this somewhat longer passage about spirituality and teaching:

"Intellectual activity may be more questionable today than in Schelling's age, and to preach idealism would be foolish, even if it still had its former philosophical relevance. But spirit itself, to the extent that it does not acquiesce to what is the case, carries within itself that momentum that is a subjective need. Every person who has chosen an intellectual profession has under­taken an obligation to entrust himself to its movement."

I find this association between "spirit" and "momentum" very attractive.

Some of Adorno's reflections on authoritarian personalities have obvious relevance to the American political scene today, but one or two sentences will suffice:

"Authoritarian personalities identify themselves with real-existing power per se, prior to any particular contents. [e.g. fascism, communism] Basically, they possess weak egos and therefore require the compensation of identifying themselves with, and finding security in, great collectives."

At one point a blurb on the back cover caught my eye in which Susan Sontag praises another of Adorno's collections, Notes to Literature, and especially that volume's introductory essay, "The Essay as Form." I requested the book and it arrived at my local branch a few days later, after having sat on a shelf in the semidarkness of the downtown stacks for years, in all probability.

Good stuff, though rather dense. For example:

"The essay does not stand in simple opposition to discursive procedure.  It is not unlogical; it obeys logical criteria insofar as the totality of its propositions must fit together coherently ... but it neither makes deductions from a principle nor draws conclusions from coherent individual observations. It coordinates elements instead of subordinating them, and only the essence of its content, not the manner in which it is presented, is commensurable with logical criteria."

A better gloss, perhaps, appears a few pages earlier:

"[The essay's] efforts reflect the leisure of a childlike person who has no qualms about taking his inspiration from what others have done before him....[It] reflects what is loved and hated instead of presenting the mind as creation ex nihilo on the model of an unrestrained work ethic. Luck and play are essential to it. It starts not with Adam and Eve but with what it wants to talk about; it says what occurs to it in that context and stops when it feels finished rather than when there is nothing to say."

This particular essay is quite a bit longer than it needs to be, I think. Adorno clearly feels the need to defend his chosen form against the strictures and the ridicule of the positivist scholarly community that had come to dominate German culture well before the 1960s.  At one point he writes, "In its allergy to forms as mere accidental attributes, the spirit of science and scholarship [Wissenshaft] comes to resemble that of rigid dogmatism. Positivism's irresponsibly sloppy language fancies that it documents responsibility in its object, and reflection on intellectual matters becomes the privilege of the mindless."

Reading such humorously scathing passages, I almost feel like I'm rereading a Thomas Bernhard novel.

Yes, one thing leads to another. And another. And sometimes three or four things. I really ought to order a used copy of Adorno's Notes the Literature. (Really? To sit there on the shelf beside Critical Models till the end of time?) But perhaps I ought to take a look at Susan Sontag's collection Against Interpretation. And why not her Notebooks, which offer fresh snippets of thought devoid of the hidden formal excellences that Adorno attributes to the essay form? For that matter, there are unread Thomas Bernhard novels scattered here and there on the shelves—Frost, Gathering Evidence. It's a beautiful situation: a plenitude of options, sullied only by an agonizing sense of insufficient time in which to do the exploring adequately.

Yet it strikes me that this agony of overwhelming possibilities grows weaker as we age. We don't give up in despair or resign ourselves to a third-rate understanding of things, but we come to recognize that our microcosmic worlds echo or exemplify the larger ones lying beyond our grasp, and the things and people we know best offer far more enrichment than a scattered and superficial familiarity with everything.

This may be what Eliot means when he says that at the end of our exploring we finally "know" a place for the first time. You can see, I think, how clumsy the wording is. There isn't much finality to the process. We gradually get to know and love things better, sink into them, feel more at home, limiting our field of view while honing our senses. Once eager to hike the Compostela Trail, we now stroll down to the creek at the bottom of the hill and relish every step.  

Which is not to say we won't be doing the Compostela Trail one of these days!   

Alec Soth in Park Rapids

The Nemeth Art Center is located on the second floor of an old government building—maybe a courthouse?—with dim lighting, blue-green plaster walls, and oak woodwork all around. A quilt hangs from one wall in the lobby above a scale model of the building itself, with an old (but fancy) dress hanging from a manikin nearby. It was as if we were entering an enormous historical museum cum B&B.

We climbed the stairs to the second floor, which houses the art galleries. The words “Alec Soth, Paris / Minnesota” had been painted in an elegant font on the glass transom above the double doors into the large open gallery space, though which we could see a few very large photographs and also two or three long tables around which little kids were crowded, engaged in some sort of craft project.

A quick glance at a few of the photos reinforced the opinion I had already formed of Soth’s work. The quotidian subject matter and the superb handling of light and color drew me in; but as I looked, I felt my interest fading into a kind of cold admiration and a puzzling disappointment.

I know very little about photography as an art-form, and I’m halfway toward agreeing with the viewer whom you sometimes overhear at a show mumbling, “My daughter takes better pictures than this.” But every famous photographer has his or her signature tone. Henri Cartier-Bresson’s warmth and humanity, Garry Windogrand’s exuberant and chaotic street-formlessness, Diane Arbus’s weirdness, and so on. Alec Soth doesn’t probe his subjects; he forces than into our faces with a flat, visual uniformity that’s almost uncanny, and is usually less about them—the subjects—than it is about the distress of taking a photograph without succumbing to the “picturesque.” Comparing his work with the images in a volume like Joel Meyerowitz’s Cape Light, one of my favorites, may be taken as an example of a photographer whose work can be formally and tonally astute, rich in atmosphere, and unafraid to include images of people having fun together.

On the far wall an array of smaller images had been arranged in a square. I was going to take a picture of it—I didn’t see a sign saying you couldn’t—but then I saw a young woman standing nearby with a camera, and I said, “Are you taking pictures?”

“I’m Tessa Beck, the museum director,” she said. “I was doing some video of this textile workshop.” And she came over to talk. She had a friendly smile, and wore a bright blue and white checkered blouse that almost matched her eyes. 

“Are you familiar with Soth’s work?”

“Sort of,” I said. “Though I’m not sure I like it. We saw a show at the Weinstein in Minneapolis a few years ago ... and then there’s the Mississippi series.”

“Well, this show predates those,” she jumped right in. “Alec went to Paris to shoot a fashion show, mostly back stage. Then it occurred to him to come back here to photograph the style of people in this area. Everyone has a style of dress, don’t you think?” I looked at the bright blue squares on her blouse, which were actually shaped like small, bent, stove-pipe hats. Then she started talking about something called “W.” I’d never heard of it. A fashion magazine? She spoke rapidly, interjecting “like” and other place-holder phrases liberally here and there, like young people often do, and for a while I lost the thread. She was enthusiastic and obviously very bright.

“Are you from around here?” I asked, changing the subject slightly.

“I’m from the Fargo area, but my family has a cabin on Bad Medicine.”

“Fargo’s getting to be pretty hip,” I said. “Especially along Broadway.”

“Yeah, and they have that new hotel.”

“The Donaldson?” Hilary and I explored the lobby ten years ago.

“No. Now they’ve got the Jasper,” Tessa updated me. Then, hardly stopping for breath, she pointed at the array of photos on the wall and said, “These pictures were in a box.”

She used a photographic term for them that I’d never heard before, describing them as part of the process but not intended for exhibit, the rejects from an oversized contact sheet. “Alec said, ‘If you want to frame them, you can use them.’ Most of them have never been seen before.”

Tessa was excited about that.

“Do you get to keep them?” I asked, naively.

She rolled her eyes as if to say, “Dream on.”

Hilary said, “Where are the photos from Paris?”

“We decided to omit them from the show, so we could add more of the images from this part of the world.”

“Hmm. Interesting.”

Tessa let us go, having enriched our visit immeasurably,  and returned to her textile workshop. We wandered the floor for fifteen minutes. Many of the images were of teenagers at a dance. Formal poses. Lots of seemingly blank faces and empty space all around. But was there more?

The most memorable image, I think, was of an adolescent girl wearing a pink coat and a crocheted stocking cap: colorful, wistful, enigmatic, slightly wary, bordering on the sentimental but not quite tumbling in. Perhaps the photo nearby of the adolescent male looking out through a gray window showed us the same world, but from the opposite point of view.

It would have been interesting to see the photos from Paris, too. But perhaps the division between haute couture and backwoods “whatever” would have been too obvious. Yet wasn’t that what Soth himself was driving at? Maybe. Maybe not.

Poking around online when we got home, I discovered that “W” refers to a book disguised as a fashion magazine that Soth put together for Magnum Photos. I located it in the library catalog and requested a copy; it arrived a few days later. Running along the top of the front cover, in thick black capital letters, are the words “Fashion Magazine by Alec Soth,” but on the center of the cover, in larger letters, it says “Paris Minnesota.” A library cataloger’s nightmare, but a postmodernist’s dream, I guess. It’s a complex, multi-layered work, loaded not only with formal and casual photos but also with articles that a fashion magazine might run. Are they for real? I’m not sure I could tell the difference, and I didn’t take the time to check. But the curators in Park Rapids were wise, I think, to limit their focus to images taken nearby.

I'm reluctant to look too deeply into W or other secondary materials. Often that ancillary verbiage, which tells you what you're looking at, or how you should be looking at it, is doing the work the art itself is supposed to do, while obscuring its intrinsic value intuitively considered. 

But I'm warming to Soth's work, almost in spite of myself.