Morning Meditations: Election Day

Hilary is off to her post as an election judge, and I’m facing a blank grayish day. It starts with a mug of French roast coffee and a CostCo croissant from the freezer.

Are they any good? At fifty cents apiece they’re quite good. The ones at Patisserie 46, at $6 apiece, are only slightly better. And they’re a half-hour drive away.

I can remember a time when the only place in town you could get good croissants was the New French Café. This was followed by the era that produced two important works: The Preppie Handbook and Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche. From there, it was but a few short steps to the January 6th riots and the first major attempt to overthrow a freely elected U.S. government.

Before rosy-fingered dawn had shown her smiling pink face, I’d already done the Wordle and Connections, and read Paul Krugman’s latest column, in which he restates the (to some of us) obvious fact that the American health care system has been largely government subsidized for decades. He goes on to describe the private insurance industry as “parasitic.”

Everyone should read this column, but few will read it. I would go farther and suggest that all government activity is by nature socialistic. Good governments handle their responsibilities sensibly; bad ones don’t.

Krugman follows up the reasoning and the statistics with a popular song, as usual. Today it was “Closer to Fine.” I didn’t recognize the Indigo Girls. (They were after my time.)

I'm trying to tell you something 'bout my life

Maybe give me insight between black and white

And the best thing you ever done for me

Is to help me take my life less seriously… 

By now, so many popular musical groups are “after my time” that I can hardly make it through the daily crossword puzzle. “Lead singer of REM, Michael _____.” If they didn’t do a half-time show at the Superbowl, I’ve never heard of them. I just watched Help for the first time the other day—on DVD. (I liked it.)

Right now my main concern is to determine which translation of The Odyssey is best. The Emily Wilson version that I requested arrived at the library the other day. I’m finding that the iambic pentameter doesn’t really flow. She might just as well have straightened it out into prose paragraphs.

Of course, any translation will be radically different from the film, a medium that even in the surest hands lacks the tools to bring the lyricism of the original to life.

Down by the stony trail they made their way

As far as Clearwater, not far from town—

A spring house where the people filled their jars …

And round it on the humid ground a grove,

A circular wood of poplars grew. Ice cold

In runnels from high rock ran the spring,

And over it there stood an altar stone

To the cool nymphs, where all men going by

Laid offerings.

Yesterday was a marvel of serendipitous conversation. We chatted at length out in the street with our neighbors Brendan and Sara. They were hard at work digging up a rectangle of bare ground the local energy company had disturbed while installing a new gas line. We discussed the neighborhood owls, Brenden’s success at selling odd pieces of junk on Facebook Marketplace, and the deterioration of their mini-camper, which hasn’t left the driveway all summer.

Our next-door neighbor Rocky was also out in her yard—a rare occurrence. Brendan told me she bought a robot lawn-mower, and it seemed she was trying to program it with her phone. 

We might have stopped over to say hi, but we were heading down to Edina to pick up a book-club book from some friends. They were expecting us. We sat in their imaginatively landscaped front yard sipping drinks that Michel concocted in a big wooden bowl with fresh limes, Brazilian rum, and salt. Conversation roamed from the nature of “borderline personalities” to office politics at Metro State to the rising stars on the women’s tennis tour. Michel later brought out a succession of choice morsels from the kitchen. I might call them cheeseballs or bruschetta; he would call them acılı ezme or bolinho de aipim.

Late in the afternoon I took some newspapers out to the recycling bin and ran into our neighbor Brian, out for a walk with his daughter, Vivian. He’s seldom around; we chat maybe once a year.

“How’s the sound-track industry treating you,” I asked him.

“It tanked. My sponsor lost his funding. Now I’m installing audio systems.”

“Well, at least it gets you out of the house,” I said.

Vivian has grown in the course of a year. “Gee. Are you in college now?” I asked.

“I’ll be a high school junior next fall.”

Favorite subject? “English, I think.”

Good answer. All young people should read Middlemarch, All the King’s Men, Notes from Underground, and A Farewell to Arms, don’t you think? But who knows? Maybe she’s been reading Gravity’s Rainbow, Bel Canto, Olive Kittridge, and Bright Lights, Big City?

Now the sun is out. Rising. Along with the heat. It's the same thing every day, but with variations. The hummingbirds are starting to get belligerent around their red plastic feeder. 

"Take it easy, fellas. There's plenty for everyone."

And the catbird is devouring the berries on the dogwood. Cats and dogs.   

Any time now, I'm going to go vote down at the fire station. While I'm at it, I might as well check the water clarity at the bridge above Bassett Creek. It's getting better, year by year. 

Chalk it up to the efforts of the Bassett Creek Watershed Management Commission.  I wonder who's paying for that ...

The Odyssey: Grim Pageantry

A day does not go by when someone new doesn’t weigh in on the merits and defects of Christopher Nolan’s new film-version of The Odyssey, or tries to convince us which of the translations of Homer’s epic poem is really the best, or what the film tells us about the film industry, or our own society.

I saw it today. Didn’t like it much. It’s pretty grim. What is lacks isn’t the gods, or the swashbuckling heroism, or the eroticism of the original. It lacks the poetry.

Sea-faring films used to be good at that kind of thing. As a kid I was mesmerized by the romance of such matinee fodder as Jason and the Argonauts and The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad. I will admit that most of the films we watched in those bygone days on the afternoon TV program called Epic Theater didn’t reach that high standard. Many of them were made in Italy and poorly dubbed, which gave them a slightly creepy tone. But they also conveyed a sense of the open sea and a sort of corny nobility, by Zeus!

Nolan’s Odyssey does not. The soundtrack is too loud, the screen overfull of commotion. The flashbacks are sometimes so brief as to be all but incomprehensible.  And Matt Damon doesn’t seem at all like the wily Odysseus, fated by the gods to endure a seemingly endless string of calamities before they allow him to return home.

But the key point is this: in Homer’s original the barbarous elements in the story are counterbalanced by the beauty of the language and the lofty—if sometimes repetitive—tone of the narrative. To take one of countless examples:

At evening came the shepherd with his flock,

his woolly flock. The rams as well, this time,

entered the cave: by some sheep-herding whim—

or a god’s bidding—none were left outside.

He hefted his great boulder into place

and sat him down to milk the bleating ewes

in proper order, put the lambs to suck,

and swiftly ran through all his evening chores.

 

It seems like a bucolic scene, but of course we know better. The shepherd is Polyphemus, the one-eyed monster.

Then he caught two more men and feasted on them.

 

The tone doesn’t change. It’s all part of the narrative flow.

 

My moment was at hand, and I went forward

holding an ivy bowl of my dark drink,

looking up, saying:

‘Kyklops, try some wine.

Here’s liquor to wash down your scraps of men.

 

The Odyssey is riddled with such juxtapositions, but it’s a difficult trick to pull off on the screen. Nearly impossible. Nolan abandons the poetic element altogether.

The lines quoted above are from the Fitzgerald translation. Back in my college days, when I spent some time studying Classical Greek, the accepted wisdom was “Fitzgerald for The Odyssey, Lattimore for The Iliad.”

A few years ago. I took up The Odyssey again. I couldn’t find my mass-market Fitzgerald translation, but had a copy of the Fagles translation near at hand—a gift from a friend—and decided to give it a try. I made it halfway through, but it was a struggle. I felt there was some indefinable element missing in the tone. Gravity? Humor? Freshness?

Naturally a hubbub arose about various translations with the release of the film—Lattimore, Fitzgerald, Fagles, Wilson, Mendelsohn, and another new one coming out soon. I felt the need to revisit my old friend and bought a reissue of Fitzgerald’s version in trade paperback. It was cheaper than two tickets to the film. 

I’m glad I did.

Which reminds me of an old joke: What did the goat say after he ate a can of film? He liked the book better.

 

Film Fest Notes 2026

The MSP International Film Fest is in full swing once again, and the riverfront across from downtown Minneapolis is lively. The glorious weather doesn’t hurt.

The organizers have rearranged the venue somewhat, moving the office and various lounges a block down the street. There are now more bars and glitzy social spaces, but the buzz that used to enliven the halls east of the theater lobby is largely gone. Hilary and have developed a new routine, too; we cross the river at Plymouth Avenue and park on Marshall across from the Ukrainian Church, as close to Hennepin as we can get. From there it’s a ten-minute walk to the theater.

We’ve seen six films so far, covering a range, geographically, from China and Viet Nam to Belgium and Montreal, with stops in Iceland, Syria, the French Alps, and Germany. It’s been lots of fun.

Three of the best were Living the Land, Ky Nam Inn, and A Lovely Day. Also good were Girl in the Snow, and A Silent Friend.

Living the Land offers a portrait of rural China circa 1991. It follows the daily life of a young boy who’s been left behind to be raised by his aunt and grandma while his parents look for work in the city. Promotional material for the film highlights the themes of modernization and social change during that era in China, but the film actually dwells almost exclusively on village customs and farming techniques that haven’t changed for centuries. There’s a lot of shouting and horse-play, a funeral or two, a wedding, and disruptions caused by the local officials who are trying to keep track of who’s related to who, during an era when the appearance of a second child could lead to the loss of social benefits or a civil service job.

It’s polyphonic narrative. and the documentary style might remind some viewers of Tree of the Wooden Clogs—less polished cinematically, perhaps, but far more energetic. Director Huo Meng won the Silver Bear for his work at the 2025 Berlin Film Festival.

A Lovely Day is a comedy focusing on a single wedding day, but it draws together strands of narrative from every direction by means of flashbacks to earlier periods in the groom’s life, and also to incidents in his parent’s life before they divorced. 

Weddings tend to be fun, and this one is no exception, though it’s sullied repeatedly by Alain’s parent’s animosity, the untimely reappearance of an old “friend,” and especially by Alain’s long-standing personal anxieties and other health issues.

Alain, played by Neil Elias, reminded me of Northern Exposure’s Joel Fleishman—smart, fidgety, annoying, prone to excess … but likeable just the same. The film’s original title, Mille secrets, mille dangers (A Thousand Secrets, a Thousand Dangers) perhaps better conveys the atmosphere of the tale. Alain’s fiancée shows remarkable—almost unbelievable—calm and forbearance throughout the day.

It was a treat to listen after the film to director Philippe Falardeau answer questions. He’s a witty man, sharp, scattered, and self-depreciating. One highlight of the Q & A was the remark by a young woman in the audience who said; “I’m Lebanese, and I want to let you know that you nailed the ethos of the Lebanese community perfectly.”

Falardeau replied, looking right and left into the crowd, “Does she work for the festival? Did someone pay her? Thank you SO MUCH!”

The Girl in the Snow is an unusual piece, and all the better for it. Set high in the French Alps, it follows a few months in the life of a woman who’s been hired to give lessons to the children in a small hamlet during the depths of winter, when most of the village women have gone down the mountain to find work as domestics. The kids are unruly, the men taciturn and stand-offish. The snow is deep and it gets dark early. But gradually the woman begins to fit in, attending a gathering in a nearby lodge where the dance steps are as lively as the hurdy-gurdy music is simple.

Much of the film is shot indoors, in rooms lit by firelight with dramatic chiaroscuro reminiscent of Caravaggio. The men and older women tell stories about ghosts. Avalanches are an ever-present danger. But it isn’t long before one or two of the men start to take a deeper interest in the attractive newcomer. And as the story unfolds, it begins to take on the form of one of the occult tales the mountain folk have been sharing by the fire.  

Ky Nam Inn might be the most polished film we saw. It follows Khang, a quiet, well-mannered young translator who's landed a job translating The Little Prince into Vietnamese, in part due to the influence of a relative he hardly knows. He moves into a collective housing block and soon becomes acquainted with Ky Nam, the widow downstairs, who makes a living cooking meals for people in the neighborhood. When she injures her hand, Khang offers to help her out in exchange for regular meals.

In the course of the film, we also get to know quite a few of the building's other residents, including Ky Nam's son, who's soon to be married, and an elderly doctor with whom Khang plays chess when he's not in the kitchen or at the typewriter. It's inevitable that several of the younger women in the building take an interest in Khang. Everyone knows everyone, and gossip gets around. It comes as no surprise for us to learn that Ky Nam has a checkered past. We just don't know what it is. And neither does Khang.

The mysteries and complexities of the plot aside, the film has an unusual and attractive "look." Is this what Viet Nam looked like in 1985? I should have asked the director, who was present and spent a good deal of time answering questions after the screening. He told us some funny stories about the censors, and tried to explain some of the racial nuances between northerners, southerners, mixed-race Vietnamese, and "left-behind" offspring of American soldiers--distinctions of which some in the audience, including me, were only dimly aware.

Time and Water is a low-key look at Iceland through the medium of home movies. Its central event is the discovery by Icelanders that one of their smaller glaciers has entirely disappeared. It was declared dead in 2014. This really shouldn't have come as a surprise, considering that the glacier has been shrinking for a long time, Icelanders have been studying their glaciers for centuries, and the understanding of global warming can be traced back to the nineteenth century. In fact, glaciers have been coming and going for almost two million years now. Yet the narrator keeps repeating, very slowly, "I never imagined that ..."

More interesting than the central thesis are the grainy home movies that show the narrator's family having a good time, going on expeditions, celebrating birthdays, smoking endless cigarettes, cross-country skiing, and so on. Views of the landscape, the waterfalls, and the glaciers themselves also contribute to the film's interest. 

Our Silent Friend is a far more polished and ambitious film. In fact, it's three films in one. They're set in different time periods and are connected only by the fact that they focus on botanists and take place on a college campus in the vicinity of the same ginkgo tree.

The best of the three examines the history of a brilliant young woman who's struggling, at the turn of the twentieth century, against the rampant sexism of academic gatekeepers who would rather she devoted her sense and intellect to making coffee than to exploring the jungles of Indonesia. It's shot in a glistening black-and-white tone and is well acted. (Luna Wedler recently won the "emerging actress" award at the Venice Film Festival for her performance, joining the company of previous winners Gael Garcia Bernal, Jennifer Lawrence, and Mila Kunis.) Every frame is a pleasure to watch.

The second tale focuses on a young woman in more recent times (maybe the eighties?) who's conducting research on a potted geranium in her dorm room. She's hooked it up to a polygraph to study its responses to her watering schedule, among other things. She leaves on a backpacking trip and entrusts her research to a newfound campus friend--a self-styled farm boy who's sick and tired of plants and would rather spend his time reading Rilke. But in her absence, he begins to take an interest in the experiment, and eventually makes some remarkable discoveries.

In the third narrative, a child psychologist who's trapped on the same campus grounds during Covid, modifies some experiments he'd been using on pre-verbal children to see if he can arrive at similar insights regarding the inner life of trees. He eventually resorts to harvesting magic mushrooms from the botanical garden in his quest for results.  

These strands are intertwined time and again throughout the film, but they never coalesce, and none of the three arrive at a conclusion. The film ends, somewhat arbitrarily, with what might be called a cosmic New Age sensory forest bath.

One critic has described Our Silent Friend as "beautiful, elusive, and peppered with provocative nuggets about the nature of life and our place in it." My reaction was more in line with that of the critic who, in a generally positive review, described it as "glacially slow," "prioritizing philosophical atmosphere over narrative momentum," "not driven by cause and effect," and demanding a "surrendered mindset" from the audience. 

I guess I'm not ready to surrender. 

There has been a steady stream of material in recent years exploring what we might call "the hidden life of trees." I read (and liked) forester Peter Wohlleben's book by that name when it came out in 2015. The works of Suzanne Simard in this field have also been widely disseminated. Most of this material deals with biochemical relationships between trees and soil, trees and one another. Not much has been unearthed about what trees may have to say to us. 

It strikes me that we could develop a better rapport with our natural surroundings by dropping the quest for scientific exactitude and begin to think more like the infants the child psychologist describes in Our Silent Friend's opening minutes. You might get a sense of this more open and curious but less analytically focused attention in the films of Terrance Malick. In short, less science, more poetry.

 

The Academy Awards 2026

The Academy Awards ceremony has come and gone. We watch it very year, not slavishly, but with mild anticipation and curiosity, hoping the clips will be long and the production numbers short.

This year was a good one, right from the beginning, on the red carpet, where the breathy interviewers asked intelligent questions, mostly ignoring who made the gowns, and the stars mostly responded in kind.

Conan O’Brien handled his responsibilities well as MC, in the best Johnny Carson tradition, reaching neither the highs of Bob Hope and Billy Crystal nor descending to the lows of David Letterman and Kid Rock.

The tributes to Rob Reiner and Robert Redford were sincere and touching. The comedy skit about repetitive dialogue aimed at distracted viewers was hilarious. And to top it all off, the run of nominated films was good. Well, I only saw half of them, but I liked what I saw.

If someone asked me to rank them, I’d put them like this:

One Battle After Another. An adventure comedy with numerous twists and turns and an exquisite visual flow, marred only by the absurd overacting of Sean Penn as a deranged military man.

Marty Supreme. A good old-fashioned bildungsroman with lots of energy and color and an annoying protagonist. (Well, Citizen Kane was also annoying and abrasive. And when was Jack Nicholson not annoying?)  

Sentimental Value. A wandering family drama with four acting nominees including an Oscar-worthy performance by Stellan Skarsgård. (The question in my mind remains: by the end of the film, had Dad really changed?)

Hamnet. A “small” film with a single theme, but emotionally affecting.

Sinners. Many parts of it looked like a filmed theatrical performance, which isn’t good. It reminded me of the Saturday matinees I used to go to at the Avalon Theater in White Bear Lake when I was twelve. In short, hokey and over-the-top, yet fun.

After decades of movie-going, one thing I’m convinced of is this: However you imagine a film, based on reviews, clips, or word-of-mouth, it’s likely to be different … and richer, than you expected. Even if it’s bad, it’s likely to be bad in ways you never imagined.

What’s next on the list? It Was Just an Accident? or The Secret Agent?

 

New Year: Nouvelle Vague

The phrase “nouvelle vague” might not mean much to most readers. Even the phrase New Wave might conjure images of the Talking Heads, the Ramones, and Blondie, rather than Truffaut, Rivette, and Rohmer. The film released last summer under the name Nouvelle Vague refers to the second group, introducing us to a number of very young French film critics, most of them writing for Cahier du Cinema, who turned to making their own films in the late 1950s. It focuses on the making of a single film, Breathless, which was released in 1960 and became a classic.

Breathless wasn’t the first Nouvelle Vague film, nor is it the best of the lot. Director Richard Linklater chose it, no doubt, because it’s among the breeziest and best-known. Of equal importance, it gave him the opportunity to place Jean-Luc Godard, the most eccentric but also the most revolutionary and absurd director in the cohort, front and center in the narrative.

The casting department did a wonderful job of finding actors who actually look like Francois Truffaut, Jean-Paul Bemondo, Agnes Varda, Jean Seaberg, Eric Rohmer, Roberto Rossellini, Jean-Pierre Melville, Juliet Greco, and Godard himself.

Each character is identified by caption on first appearance. I’d never heard of many of the minor characters. It doesn’t matter. The film is a lark, shot in French (of course), in black-and-white, and in an old-fashioned, squarish aspect ratio. It’s a lighthearted and cheeky romp that zips along even as the cast and crew grow tired of Godard’s cranky philosophizing and unorthodox shooting schedule, which is based entirely on his own whims and the desire to capture fleeting and unexpected moments of “authenticity.”

Among the masterworks of the genre, three films by Truffaut stand out: Jules and Jim, The 400 Blows, and Shoot the Piano Player. I saw them all at the Bell Museum in the early 70s, and was indelibly struck by their charm. Truffaut made other films worth seeing—Bed and Board, Stolen Kisses, Small Change, Day for Night—but never entirely recaptured the poetic intensity of that early work.

Eric Rohmer made a long string of films with far more conversation that action. The scripts for the first set were translated into English and published under the title Six Moral Tales. The names might be familiar: My Night at Maud's, Chloe in the Afternoon, Claire's Knee. Many more films followed, grouped in other ways. Never especially dramatic, they were always worth seeing. 

The two films by Agnes Varda that I can recall are The Gleaners and Me, a documentary about gleaning, and Chloe from 5 to 7, a collection of zany and romantic Parisian events in the best Nouvelle Vague manner, 

Godard started out with a more cerebral approach, and reached a peak of narrative film-making with Pierrot le Fou, perhaps. It’s an outrageous blend of Hollywood tropes and existential mystification. In time his distrust of scripts led him almost inevitably toward documentaries. 

The documentary of his that I remember best is In Praise of Love, which was released in 2002. You can watch it for free on YouTube here:

The themes are the same as his early "dramas"—the natural inability of the sexes to understand one another, the evils of capitalism, anti-Americanism, the rooted glories of classical European (i.e. French) culture, and the enduring expressive power of cinema cliché. The "story" is fragmentary at best, hence impossible to summarize. 

Much of the film is shot in Paris, in black and white, and we’re reminded repeatedly of the crude and romantic beauty of Breathless, The 400 Blows, and other films of the early Novelle Vague. The tones here are more saturated, however, like an Atget print, and the contrasts more dramatic, while at the same time the ebb and flow of motion and conversation is more comfortably elegiac. Old men look at famous paintings in an office, while discussing a film project based on the idea that middle age, unlike youth and old age, is a region of doubtful substance and character. Young and old women audition for the film, while the film’s producer scours Paris for a particular actress that he’d met before in Brittany. She works scrubbing out train cars at night.

Rehearsals involve episodes in the lives of Parsival and Eglantine. Charles Peguy and Simone Weil are quoted from time to time. Well into the film, the scene suddenly shifts to a vividly unreal digital color, and we find ourselves in a flashback involving American film agents who’ve just purchased the rights to a World War II Resistance story from the grandparents of our mysterious actress. (In Godard’s view, America has no history: it buys history from others.)

These elements never coalesce, but the images build in the mind, layer upon layer, like a Breton novel or a long Desnos poem, and the elements involved—courtly love, Catholicism, the authenticity of honest work, the corrupting power of capitalism, the beauty of Paris, and the ineluctable movement of time, which obliterates almost everything in its path—form an attractive ensemble, full of sadness and mist, history and romance, heroism and self-doubt.

On the night I saw the film, twenty-odd years ago, the auditorium at the Bell Museum was half full. That’s not bad! Young bohemians, many of them perhaps students from university French classes, sat beside old bohemians--film buffs who had seen Masculin-Feminine or Band of Outsiders at that same auditorium 30 years earlier. 

The film ends with the narrator ( Godard himself?) reflecting on all the people going down into a subway station, all the lives, the possibilities. Suddenly the film cracks and the screen goes white. Someone (young) in the audience yells “Credits!” but an older guy wearing tennis shoes and a zip-up hooded sweatshirt, who was just getting up to leave, says, “That’s the way the film ends. I saw it last night. That’s Godard ...”  

Christmas with Marty Supreme

Afternoon matinees are almost as much of a Christmas tradition as sleigh-rides. Maybe more. On the day after Christmas, we decided to get out of the house before the bad weather arrived and see a film. There’d been a lot of hoopla surrounding the Christmas Day release of the latest Timothy Chalamet film, Marty Supreme, but we didn’t know anything about that. We’d seen the previews. The movie looked good.

And it was good. It has lots of razzle-dazzle, a relentless pace, an array of memorable minor characters, and a seemingly endless stream of plot twists. Enormous effort has been given to recreating the look and feel of New York City circa 1950. And Chalamet “nails” the central figure, a young shoe salesman (and ping-pong hustler), who thinks he can become world champion, if only he can drum up the funds to fly to London for the tournament.

The soundtrack is also good—and loud—though I wasn’t familiar with any of the songs.  Hits like "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" and “I Have the Touch” were prominently featured; I’d never heard of them. Perry Como and Fats Domino are also on the playlist. (Those two I’m familiar with.)

There are patches of violence in the film, and Marty himself steps on a lot of toes in his pursuit of personal glory. Well, so does Cary Grant in His Girl Friday. Come to think of it, what about Orson Welles in Citizen Kane? And how about the Jack Nicholson characters in a range of films from Five Easy Pieces to Chinatown and The Last Detail?

Marty has a good deal of youthful charm, and he seems to have a lot of friends at the local ping-pong parlor. In short, he isn’t a total jerk. Perhaps we can give him an added measure of sympathy second-hand by way of his sometime girlfriend, Rachel, played with anguished depth by Odessa Azion.

Ping-pong isn’t much of a spectator sport these days, but it was big in the early 1950s, and the tournament scenes are fun to watch. They’re given added political dimension due to the fact that the player Marty most wants to beat is Japanese. Marty also cracks a few Holocaust jokes along the way that are in very bad taste, but defends himself by arguing, “Hey. I’m Jewish. I’m Hitler’s worst enemy. And I’m going to be world champion.” 

But the political touches are minor, and the film has none of the “camp” flavor we find in works by the Coen Brothers. No, Marty Supreme is a vivid throwback to the days when a rollicking good romance/adventure story was all that an audience required.  

Minnesota State Fair — Questions of Space

I would never volunteer to join a mission to Mars. (I already saw the movie.) But that’s one of the questions they ask you when you visit the fascinating Journey to Space exhibit at this year’s state fair. To judge from the poker chips piling up in the plexiglass voting tubes, more people are claiming they would go than wouldn’t. I doubt it.

We went to the fair on opening day, to beat the crowds, and we approached in our usual way, from the west, down Larpenteur. The line was longer than usual; it took us an hour to get in, probably because they’ve put a new policy in place by which those who park on the streets in Falcon Heights are being charged $25. I suspect that many who used to park there are choosing to park in the lot, which is closer to the fairgrounds and now costs the same amount.

Once inside, our usual route is to begin at the eco-building, followed by the art building. Then hotdogs and maybe a Kiwanis chocolate malt. Then education, crafts, and out into the passing stream of hot bodies, on our way to agriculture, fish, milk, and four-legged creatures.

The Journey to Space exhibit threw a wrinkle into the itinerary. It's housed in a building just inside the north gate. As we were passing Hilary said, “Why don’t we stop in? The line's not that long.” I’m glad we did.

Inside the building we stood in another line for ten minutes--not bad. Then we were ushered up some stairs and into a re-creation of one wing of the international space station. We stood with eight or ten other people on a stationary gangplank while the walls of the eight-sided room slowly rotated around us and various science experiments and TV screens moved slowly past. Scenes from 2001: A Space Odessey flashed through my mind once or twice. I found myself gripping the hand rail, as if I might otherwise fall over. It was all slightly destabilizing, but it was also cool. It made me a little queasy, but it was something new, and the talking heads of genuine astronauts on the screen were interesting to listen to. The lights went dim several times, I’m not sure why.

Back on the exhibit floor, we wandered from one hands-on exhibit to the next. One of them recreated the effect of trying to use your hands to manipulate two toy blocks under conditions of weightlessness. There were also immense screens on which videos of solar flares were being projected, and others showing the northern lights as seen from various locations above earth.

Hilary was especially taken by the one explaining that if we lived on Saturn, we’d only be six years old. (We could have gotten into the fair for free!)

Back in the lobby, we took a look at some of the spacesuits worn by genuine astronauts while in space. But the highlight of that part of the exhibit was the discussion we had with a NASA volunteer who was standing by a small, pyramidal piece of moon rock embedded in plexiglass.

He knew all about various probes that were exploring the planets, their moons, and the asteroid belt. He seemed genuinely interested when I told him about 31/ Atlas, the new object that arrived from deep space just three weeks ago. We were soon discussing how speculative much of cosmology remains, and how important it is to make assertions that will secure grant money, regardless of the actual strength of the claims being made.

All in all, it was an unusual and stimulating start to the day. By that time we’d worked up an appetite, and Giggles Campfire Grill was right down the street. The walleye cakes were as good as I remembered them, and the smoked salmon on a stick wasn’t bad either. When we got our food, I took one look at the glass of pink lemonade and said, “But we ordered a large.”

“That is a large,” the woman said with a winning smile. “Have a nice day.”

_________

The science on view in the eco-building seemed modest indeed to someone who'd just been blasting through outer space. The art building offered an engaging mix of styles and themes, as usual. We chatted at some length with a highly enthusiastic couple at the Friends of the BWCAW booth, and registered to win a new tent.

"I hope we win that," I said. "We're still using a Marmot backpacking tent. The ceiling is only four feet high, and my back gets so stiff I have trouble crawling out in the morning."

"I just bring a folding cot," the woman said. "And a folding chair." As we were leaving she gave us each a dark green plastic spork.  

The knitted sweaters and quilts in the handicraft building were impressive, but a little hard to admire with the temperature outside pushing eighty. We stepped out into the glare and surveyed the colorful scene. Strange aromas were drifting our way from O'Gara's Irish Pub, where the sounds of a man playing the bagpipes rose above the din. We opted instead to find some shady seats at the bandstand nearby and caught the last number of Davina and the Vagabonds' set. That was enough for me. 

The thing that impressed me most in the agriculture building was the very long line of people waiting patiently to view the crop art. (Are we getting tired yet?) You never know quite where you are when you emerge from that eight-sided building, but we somehow made our way downhill to the DNR building to see the fish. 

Inside the cool and cavernous log cabin nearby we discussed buckthorn eradication methods with one of the volunteers. Clearly, it was time to go home.

During the long walk back to the car we passed the parade, which was heading in the opposite direction: Farmington, then Rosemount, then Worthington. Some of the kids weren't even playing instruments. Were they having a good time? Why did they sign up? Well, at best, high school is a bundle of confusion, anxiety, and mixed emotions. Under the weight of those conditions, listening to a bunch of trombones and trumpets blasting in your ears to a regular rhythm is probably good for your health.