About Elly - Country Weekend Goes Bad

One of my favorite film genres doesn't even have a name, but we can call it the "country weekend" genre. In such films, family members or friends of long standing go on a short vacation together, share some meals, wine, and conversation, along with perhaps some shocking revelation or illicit encounter, and return home, their lives changed in ways they never could have anticipated.

The classics in the genre include Betrand Tavernier's A Sunday in the Country, Mikhail Mikhalkov's Unfinished Piece for Mechanical Piano, Claude Sautet's Paul, Vincent, Francois and the Others, and Renoir's seminal Rules of the Game. American attempts would include The Big Chill and The Return of the Secaucus Seven, and Kenneth Bragnaugh's Peter's Friends might also qualify, though I haven't seen it.

Iranian director Asghar Farhadi explores these themes in About Elly, during which three married couples make their way to the Caspian Sea from Tehran for a holiday weekend.

The film starts out with a flurry of activity as the group, traveling in several vehicles, stops for a picnic, and it remains confusing as they arrive at the resort only to find that due to a reservation mix-up, they must accept accommodations in a spacious but seriously rundown seaside villa rather than a more comfortable and secure unit.

Several of the women are virtually indistinguishable to the foreign eye, and it took me quite a while to sort everyone out, but it eventually becomes clear that along with three married couples and several children, another woman has been invited. This is Elly, the kindergarten teacher of Sepideh's daughter. Sepideh is eager to introduce Elly to Ahmad, a recently-divorced friend who's also been invited. 

And therein lies the crux of the drama. To circumvent Iranian legal restrictions on unmarried couples traveling together, Sepideh tells the proprietor of the resort that Elly and Ahmad are newly-weds. As the day progresses, Elly and Ahmad become the butt of numerous wisecracks and knowing smirks and glances. The married couples think this is all in good fun. (Of course, the men will be sleeping in one room, the women in another.) And Ahmad, who finds Elly appealing, is also quick to join in the humor, but Elly finds such over-familiarity embarrassing.

As the group tidies up the villa and prepares the evening meal, there's plenty of dancing and raillery, and even a lively game of charades, though tensions are building below the surface. Why did Sepideh invite this woman, if she's going to be so shy? And why did Sepideh do such a bad job of booking the reservation?

Shohreh is not happy about being so close to the water, which her children find irresistible: They'll have to be watched continually. One of the vehicles gets stuck in the sand. And to top it all off, the next morning Elly decides she wants to go back to Tehran. Sepideh insists that she stay.

By this time, in the midst of all the swimming, the meals, and the volleyball, several marital spats have developed, and the ugly patriarchic underpinnings of Iranian culture have begun to strip the weekend of its remaining vestiges of fun.

And then, Elly disappears.

I don't mean to give away the second half of the film, but Sepideh is eventually forced to admit she knows more about this mysterious Elly than she's let on. The police, the owners of the resort, and a few new characters become involved in a quest to determine what happened to Elly, and who she really is. A good deal of tension develops and recriminations start flying in every direction before things finally get sorted out. Along the way director Farhedi raises a host of troubling questions about honor, lying, and social solidarity.

Unfortunately, they're the kind of questions we can't discuss without giving away too much of the plot.

About Elly makes a good companion piece to Farhedi's subsequent film, A Separation, which deservedly won the 2012 Oscar for best foreign film. It's equally intricate, well-acted, and unpredictable, but slightly less brutal.    

Bastille Day Meditations

At a time when the Eurozone is fraught with stress, Iran has cut a nuclear deal with the West, China's markets are tanking, a Serb has defended his Wimbledon title with force and his character with a healthy dose of small-town charm, a new pentaquark particle has been discovered, and the Americans are sending a spacecraft alongside a planet so far away that it only circles the sun once every 250 years, Bastille Day arrives—and none too soon.

Unlike the slightly frantic and explosion-centered Fourth of July, Bastille Day has become a more broadly international, non-religious, open-ended celebration of personal liberty, artistic expression, social indulgence, and community values—all the things that make civilized living worthwhile.

Though their political clout has diminished considerably since the nineteenth century, the French maintain a certain cachet as a culture in which nature, life, and work sit in easy harmony with one another.

At the warehouse where I used to work,  members of the receiving department used to celebrate Bastille Day with strong, fresh-roasted coffee, croissants, and marmalade. Year in and year out, we would invite someone from another department—invariably a woman who could speak French—to recite a poem by Apollinaire, Nerval, Rimbaud, or some other deranged poet. Those days are long gone, but I can nevertheless offer a reading of my own, chosen less for substance (I don't know French) than for brevity.

Le Dromadaire

Avec ses quatre dromadaires

Don Pedro d' Alfaroubeira

Courut le monde et 'ladmira.

Il fit ce que je voudrais faire

Si j'avais quatre dromadaires.

We missed the Bastille Day parties in town this year, but on Sunday evening we wandered down with friends to the Dakota on Nicollet Mall to listen to the South Side Aces play the sprightly tunes of Creole jazz clarinetist Sidney Bechet.

Tonight will be a quiet celebration: lamb chops on the grill along with grilled red peppers, carrots, and onions, and maybe a bottle of cheap Cote du Rhone. On the turntable? Accordionist Richard Galliano's new duo album, La Vie en Rose, with guitarist Sylvain Luc.

It's a nice album, but if it starts to sound a little too French, we can turn to a CD I picked up today at the library for a dollar—Art of Love: the Music of Machaut. The artist, Robert Sadin, was unfamiliar to me but the CD had been shelved in the "jazz" category. Listening to it on the way home from the library, it struck me as neither jazz nor Machaut, but some sort of African hodgepodge. Yet I suspect a lot of thought went into the arrangements. Glancing at the liner notes Sadin is quoted as saying: "Recent studies suggest that the performing style of the late fourteenth century was not as pristine or as 'classical' as once was believed. In any case, we were looking for a far-reaching, free-form approach to the music." Should be interesting.

I had gone to the library to pick up a book I'd requested, Phantoms on the Bookshelves by Jacques Bonnet. The introduction was by James Salter, who died recently, and as I read it I came upon a wonderful, and typically Salter-esque phrase. He's describing what it's like to visit Bonnet's 40,000-volume library:

"You recognize, with a kind of terrible joy, all that you haven't read and that you would like to read. Titles and names strike what can only be called chords of desire."

You can probably tell that I'm not getting much done today. But as a woman in Arles once told me, "aujourd'hui personne travail." I think it's the only French sentence I ever understood, and there's a story behind it, but I don't have time to tell it now.

The chipmunks are enjoying the ripening berries on the dogwood outside the bedroom window. And four full-grown turkeys continue to pass by regularly out on the front lawn. Today they remind me of Porthos, Athos, Aramis, and D'Artagnan.

Summer Reading

Does anyone actually go to a beach in the summertime to read? More likely the cabin in the woods, at least in this part of the country. In any case, it's a handy trope for gathering together a list of reading suggestions for idle summer evenings. Here are a few of mine.

Bears: a Brief History, by Bernt Brunner (Yale, 2007)

Everyone likes to talk about bears. And it seems everyone has a few bear stories to tell, though most of them center around unseen bears that wreck the bird feeder or a fear of lurking bears that, in the end, never show up. In this slim volume Brunner, a German, has gathered together a wide variety of information (and misinformation) from around the world about the animal that most closely resembles us—ursa major. The book is crisply written and rich in both folklore and historic illustrations. Opening it at random we come upon sentences like this one:

The moon was shining the night in January 1856 when Leopold von Schrenck, a Russian-German zoologist, geographer, and cultural anthropologist, and Carl Maximowicz, his colleague and illustrator, reached Tebach, a village in easternmost Siberia...

Easy to pick up, and easy to put down, Bears is a perfect woodland summer read.

The Witness of Combines, by Kent Meyers (Minnesota, 1998)

Meyers lost his father at age sixteen, and he lost the family farm near Sleep Eye, Minnesota, the next year because his father was no longer there to manage it. It was a sad time for Kent, though he didn't shed a tear until three years later, when he began to write about it. 

His descriptions of canning tomatoes, chatting about roses with grandma, fixing the hammermill, picking rocks from the fields every spring, watching cuddly little chicks grow up to become his father's birthday dinner, and other farm events, are vivid. 

He occasionally ends a chapter by spelling out simple notions that he's already conveyed effectively in images and sentiments, but such passages are rare and easily forgiven. Kent is trying to illuminate the bonds, and also the empty spaces, that develop between father and son, while at the same time conveying how rich an attachment to a piece of land can be, regardless of the labor involved—perhaps because of the labor involved.

The Strange Case of the Rickety Cossack and other Cautionary Tales from Human Evolution, by Ian Tattersall (Macmillan 2015)

It seems a week seldom goes by without some paleoarcheologist unearthing pieces of a skeleton that doesn't have an obvious place on the Hominidae family tree. Tattersall reviews the history of the field, reminding us of names we haven't heard since high school—Peking Man, Java Man, Piltdown Man—and tries to explain why it's been so difficult to modernize the nomenclature of the various branches of the evolutionary tree to more clearly suggest that homo sapiens is only one of many, rather than the final product of a single inevitable progression. Along the way he gives us detailed accounts of the most recent theories regarding the mechanisms by which life continues to develop, which are considerably more complicated (and poorly understood, even by the experts) than we tend to think.    

Ardor, by Roberto Calasso (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014)

Calasso has been writing about "the sacrifice" since 1984 at least (see The Ruin of Kasch) and in Ardor he returns to that theme, taking on an explication of the collection of pre-Hindu sacrificial hymns and rituals called the Vedas.

The Vedic sacrifice was "an attempt to redress a balance that had been upset and violated forever" when humans began to kill and eat other animals. However, Vedic sacrifice was designed to exalt the act of killing and eating, rather than expiate the guilt associated with it. In any case, it took several forms: sometimes an intellectual dispute, and at other times merely the pouring of a few tablespoons of fresh milk on a carefully laid household fire to the accompaniment of ritual verses, some of them intentionally mumbled, others spoken aloud. A sacrificial plant, perhaps hallucinogenic, was also part of the scheme.

The book is riddled with both arcane information about the ancient Aryans and oracular pronouncements about the seams and fractures of life itself. For example, at one point Calasso takes up the evidently important issue of why a man should not be naked in the presence of the cow. At another he informs us how, in Vedic lore, the four phases of a household fire—first lit, burning, blazing, and reduced to embers—correspond to the divine forms Rudra, Varuna, Indra, and Mitra. 

In a later chapter, he explores the interrelationships described in various Vedic hymns between the Self (ātman), the "I" (aham), awareness (citta), intention (saṃkalpa), knowledge (veda), meditation (dhyana), and discernment (vijñāna).

Along the way he offers references to Parmenides, Schopenhauer, Kafka, and Ignatius of Loyola, among other thinkers, to clarify similarities and (more often) differences between Vedic and Western concepts.

Readers may find it difficult to keep their bearings in the midst of all the digressions, elaborations, and asides. But anyone who has enjoyed Calasso's previous books will be familiar with this method of criss-crossing the landscape of a foreign time and culture. (A more detailed review of Ardor is forthcoming in Rain Taxi Magazine.)

Time Ages in a Hurry, by Antonio Tabucchi (Archipelago, 2015)

Tabucchi is a master story-teller with a vast range of experience, and settling into this collection may remind readers of the pleasure they once took reading Henry James, Chekhov, or Proust.

The "method" of the collection might well be taken from the story "Between Generals":

I've come to realize one thing, that stories are always bigger than we are, they happen to us and we are their protagonists without realizing it, but in the stories we live, we aren't the true protagonists, the true protagonist is the story itself.

The stories this volume aren't thinly veiled autobiography, in short, but well-structured, keenly imagined narratives set in New York, Switzerland, Italy, Croatia, and other locales. The common theme, if there is one, is aging. I don't mean decrepitude, but various forms of awareness that eventually life just runs out. Thus, in one story a man visiting a botanical garden feels a tramontana breeze that sets off some speculations:

He thought of the winds of life, because there are winds that accompany life: the soft zephyr, the warm wind of youth that later the mistral takes it upon itself to cool down, certain southwesterly winds, the sirocco that weakens you, the icy mistral. Air, he thought, life is made of air, a breath and that's it, and after all we too are nothing but a puff, a breath, then one day the machine stops and that breath ends. He stopped too because he was panting...

The story in question is actually a love story, a single, six-page paragraph of interior monologue. It becomes clear (sort of) that the garden holds romantic associations for the narrator. He sees, or hallucinates, a woman hanging clothes on a line. A boy arrives. The two embrace. She sings a song, which the narrator, now slumped against a wall, can hear:

I was in love with the air,

With the air of a woman,

Because the woman was air,  

I was left with a handful of air...

I could go on, but a more complete review can be found in the current print edition of Rain Taxi. It's lovely stuff, though Tabucchi often makes thing difficult by forcing us to ask ourselves: what part of this story actually happened, and what part draws on the narrator's memories and dreams? Andr more fundamentally, what is this story really about?

Charles Lloyd at the Dakota

Ninety minutes of jazz, no breaks between songs, a journey, a roller-coaster ride, an exploration of the psyche, a thumbnail history of jazz, an inventory of human emotions, an endless doodle—pick your cliché.  Never boring, often poignant, tirelessly lyrical, though occasionally irritating, especially near the end of the set, when I was dying for the band to come to the end of a cadenza, bring a number to its conclusion, wrap it up—and start a new one.

I first heard Charles Lloyd at the Guthrie in 1968. I wasn't ready for him then, couldn't get my bearings. A young man named Keith Jarrett was at the keyboard that night. Lloyd has had a long string of distinguished band-mates since then, including Michel Petrucciani, Bobo Stenson, Brad Mehldau, and Jason Moran. His current pianist, Gerald Clayton, is right at home in such company.

Before the set Lloyd said, "I never play clubs anymore. People are eating dinner, cash resister ringing..." He looked around, where many people were eating dinner. Then he added, "...but Lowell [Dakota owner Lowell Pickett], he really digs the music. I'd follow him anywhere." Then  he added in a kindly voice, "Don't worry, go ahead and enjoy your chittlins."

In response to the unending applause after the set, Lloyd came back on stage and delivered a rambling peroration touching on music, kindliness, barbeque sauce on corn-on-the-cob, GMO agriculture, and whether he should wear white socks at the upcoming jazz festival in Iowa City. The rhetorical style landed somewhere between Dave King and Maynard G. Krebs, and it added yet another dimension to an already sweet and genuinely exploratory musical evening.

Canoeing the Kickapoo

Some people claim that the Kickapoo River, which meanders through the rolling countryside of southwestern Wisconsin, is the oldest river in the world. (The New River in West Virginia is also in the running, along with a nameless river in Antarctica.) In any case, it's been cutting its way through the sediments of the region for roughly 500 million years. Geologists estimate that the Grand Canyon, by way of contrast, could not be more than 70 million years old.

Of course, the Kickapoo is not nearly so grand as the Colorado. In many places it's hardly more than fifteen feet wide, and its pace tends to be gentle as it wends its way past farms and pastures, woods and small cliffs. (After a few hundred million years, even a river gets tired.)  People in search of adventure take two-week rafting trips down the Colorado. People in search of relaxation take three-hour tubing trips down the Kickapoo, drinking beer the whole way down.

We "did" a stretch in early May, before the summer hordes arrived. During our four-hour descent we met only one other group - a party of young men taking a break on a mid-river sandbar. It was more common to come upon fly fisherman standing on the banks, especially during the early part of the trip. The current was moderate, the paddling was easy and often all but unnecessary.

The logistics are simple. There are five outfitters in Ontario, a small riverside town a half-hour southeast of the freeway exit in Sparta. We went with Titanic Rentals, simply because it was further away from the highway and perhaps needed the business. The owner was a man of few words. "The water level is low for this time of year, but it will be fine," he said. He handed us two life jackets and two paddles. One size fits all.

"The canoes are down by the river," he said. "Pick one you like and get going." He had trips of varying lengths on offer, from two to six hours, though they all cost the same amount: $30 per canoe, including a shuttle back to your car. We chose a four-hour trip—we'd arrived after lunch. The bridges downstream were numbered and the man assured us that the Titanic bus, a tired-looking blue jalopy parked out front, would be waiting for us at the parking lot near bridge 5 at the appointed time.

It was a muggy Spring afternoon with a veil of haze in the air. On our short stroll to the riverside we could see evidence of the summer mayhem we were avoiding: perhaps a hundred red canoes stacked three high on trailers parked out in a nearby field. Down at the beach there were eight identical keel-less Old Town canoes made of what seemed to be bright red rubber, lying on their sides against one another.   

Two young boys were fishing for sunnies on the beach with their mother. They reeled in their lines as we dragged a canoe to the shore and clambered in. We chatted briefly with the woman as we departed.

"This is your first time down the river?"

"We've never been within a hundred miles of this place."

"You're going to love it," she said. And we did.

The most distinctive aspect of the river, at least in this section, is the geology. For much of the distance we traversed, one bank was defined by handsome, often moss-covered cliffs. Sometimes on the left, sometimes on the right. I guess these are the sediments on the basis of which the Kickapoo lays claim to its advanced age. 

But we were also impressed by the wildlife. In the course of our four-hour descent we came upon two minks at very close range, also two woodchucks and a muskrat. A pair of spotted sandpipers could often be seen a hundred-odd feet ahead, flying on around the next corner as we approached.

This led to the one dispute of the afternoon. Hilary was convinced that the same sandpipers were leading us along throughout the entire seven miles we paddled. It seemed to me that we spooked at least twenty separate pairs along the way. 

We arrived at the parking lot a good forty-five minutes early. (Better early than late, I guess.) While we waited, we tracked down a blue-winged warbler that was wheezing away in the aspens nearby. The bus arrived on time, and empty. We were the only canoeists on the return trip. The owner was driving. On the way back to the car we chatted with his wife, a soft-spoken woman who told us all about her immigrant ancestors from Denmark.

 If you're planning to do this stretch of the river, it might be a good idea to reserve a campsite at nearby Wildcat Mountain State Park. In the morning you can hike up through the hemlock woods to the top of Mt Pisgah and look out across the countryside you paddled through the day before.

  

La Rondine - Times Two

Puccini is the world's most popular opera composer, but also, strange to say, a little underrated. The two are probably related.  It seems hard to believe that music we enjoy so much could actually be that "good."

Verdi is enormously entertaining, yet grave. Mozart is seriously entertaining, yet suitably "classical." Wagner's relentless portentousness finally wins us over.  But Puccini had the misfortune to be enormously entertaining, yet romantic. His greatest operas—Tosca, La Boheme, Madame Butterfly, and Turandot—share an intensity that some have described as sadistic. La Rondine is nothing of the kind. It's a romance, pure and simple, and a good choice for the Skylark Opera Company of St. Paul, which has hitherto devoted itself largely to operettas.

We went on a hot Sunday afternoon. The theater at Concordia University is only thirteen rows deep. The opera was sung in English, which was a mixed blessing: Italian sounds better, and subtitles would have been helpful even in the English version.

We sat in the back row ($15 cheaper) but could hear everything just fine. The man sitting next to us had neither a computer at home nor a subscription to the Star-Tribune. He got his arts news from a free tabloid called  Vita-Min that's recently been discontinued. He had arrived at the theater by bus. (Bless his heart.)  I think he went away disappointed. It wasn't Sondheim. You couldn't tell what people were saying. The music was shifty, there weren't that many good "tunes."

We loved it. In the role of Magda, Cecilia Violetta Lopez was superb. I later came across a review of her performance as Violetta in Verdi's La Traviata in the Washington Post that's worth repeating.

"Lopez is as compelling a Violetta as I’ve seen. As the consumptive courtesan who, for the purest of reasons, is compelled to relinquish her true love, only ultimately to die in his arms, Lopez managed to infuse every gesture, even in her most consumptive paroxysms, with suggestive sexuality. Her voice, big and rich over its entire range, is remarkably agile for its size and as focused when she sings quietly as it is when she just lets it go. Her “Sempre Libera” was as convincingly radiant and joyful as her “Addio del Passato” was sad and wistful."

We're very lucky to have had her here in Saint Paul, performing on an intimate stage. (Hilary and I are lucky to have shown up, thanks to Carol Jackson's recommendation.) In La Rondine she plays a role similar to that of Violetta, though Puccini had a hard time coming up with an ending that suited him. He rewrote it several times.

I guess Puccini's music is like a drug, because it puts you in a mood to have more of it. Back home, it's only six p.m., and Hilary finds a complete performance of La Rondine on YouTube (for educational TV) in Italian, with Spanish subtitles. Of course, we watch.

Now, don't get me wrong. the Skylark production was very good. But we've jumped to a different level here. Puccini's operas benefit from volume, and lavishness. He was obsessive about the theatrical element: how did the scene work? And here the gushiness for which he's famous is far more pronounced.

 In this version Magda (Ainhoa Arteta) can sing ... and she looks like Jessica Lange. Ruggero (Marcus Haddock) sounds Italian, rather than Chinese. (In the Skylark production, Won Whi Choi sang gallantly and inhabited the role of the bumpkin Ruggiero convincingly, but had troubles with diction.)  And the Italian language flows.

The third act of La Rondine has always been a little weak. We know this is not going to work out. But it was more than a little disconcerting to see Ramboldo showing up on the beach, after Lisette and Prunier had just arrived.  Highly implausible. And it was heartless of Ruggiero to reject Magda, just when she needed him most.

No, Puccini's first ending—the one the Skylark did—is better. Magda knows that a "fallen woman" like her is unfit to appear before Ruggiero's mother. Goodbye Ruggiero. Back to Ramboldo. Oh, well. 

Northern Spark

Northern Spark is an all-night urban party that takes place every summer and we're all invited. So many events are running throughout the night that it's virtually impossible to get a bead on the goings-on. The event organizers have prepared a website making it easier to read descriptions of the activities and create an individualized schedule, but the descriptions tend to be outlandish or incomprehensible. 

Your best bet is to identify a few must-see events, and beyond that, decide which parts of town appeal to you. So many guests were expected this year that a number of "rooms" were prepared in several parts of the city: The Walker Art Center, The Mill Ruins riverfront, the University of Minnesota's East Bank campus, and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, to name a few.

Our plan was to meet some friends at the Mill Ruins, see the local opera company briefly, and then wander the building, where twenty or thirty exhibits and activities were to take place. Stop two would be the U of M Mall, where various tents had been set up and a gamelan orchestra would be performing throughout the night in Northrup Auditorium.

We arrived at the Spark, cheery and well fed, from our niece's graduation party in Woodbury, and were surprised to find a parking spot on Washington Avenue only a few blocks from the Mill Ruins. Well, it was only eight o'clock: we were early. 

At nine we were allowed to enter the roofless confines of the ruins, where revelers had paid $60 to get an early start on the drinking and eating. (Hilary and I had just finished off an order of fish ($8) from the Anchor Fish and Chips food truck on the street just outside.)

Members of the Mill City Opera began to belt out arias from Puccini, Verdi, and Delibes from the catwalk thirty feet above the ground, but it was hard to hear them above the chattering of the multitudes who had just been listening to the electrified sounds of Adam Levy and the Professors.

Inside the building we met up with another musical event—Instant Composer: Mad-libbed Music. An assortment of musicians were on hand—violin, bass clarinet, keyboard, drums, tenor sax, nine in all—to perform music in the style dictated by anyone who felt the inclination to sit down at the computer kiosk and fill in the blanks: What mood, what instrumentation, what pace, what duration? 

The music was entirely improvised, needless to say. There were precious few melodies to be heard, but the sounds were rhythmic and interesting, and the concepts involved, projected on a screen so the musicians could find out what they were supposed to play, were also visible to the audience, who could decide for themselves: Did this piece fit the requirements? At the very least, it was a fun place to grab a table, buy a beer, and relax—although the mood chosen by listeners was seldom "relaxed."

Several choirs were performing upstairs, but it seemed odd to see them singing their hearts out within the confines of an old mill, badly lit and with the rough-hewn limestone walls encroaching on every side. Bad acoustics, and nobody listening.  

When we reached the eight floor, we found ourselves in the offices of Meyer, Sheer, and Rockcastle, one of Minnesota's premier architectural firms. There were at least twenty desks covered with huge drawings, many of them half rolled-up, though the lights weren't on and the desks had been shoved together to keep people from snooping around. In any case, most of us were up there to ogle the view out across the Mississippi River toward the Stone Arch Bridge.

Back on the street, our friends got some food and we sat on the steps in front of the Guthrie Theater, just taking in the passing scene. Nordstrom's department store had sponsored a booth where you could stand with your girlfriend (or boyfriend, or grandmother) and have a giant selfie taken that would be projected a few minutes later high up on the surface of a grain elevator nearby, with the word NORDSTRUMS written in large letters across the top and bottom. By now it was pitch dark, and fame is fleeting, and why not join in the fun? (But we didn't.)

We probably should have wandered out onto the Stone Arch Bridge to see the photos of Syrian refugees, but we opted to jump in a car and drive across the river to the U of M campus (where our friends knew of obscure parking spots very close to Northrup Auditorium) to hear the Schubert Club's gamelan orchestra. You could listen for minutes, or hours. It would seem the same. It was great.

There were other artsy activities going on in Northrup. You could fold little pinwheels out of origami paper, or turn a photograph of yourself (which they would take)  into a Chuck Close digital rendering using a computer, a pencil, and a big piece of tracing paper.

Out on the Northrup Plaza there was a booth where you could sample water from three different municipalities to see how water quality differed even within the metro area. Plenty of idealistic young students were on hand to explain the niceties of water resources to you if you got the bug.

You could also follow the labyrinthine pathways within a heavily sheeted booth to meet up with an oracle. But I walked in one side and came out the other without ever meeting up with the gal. Perhaps that, too, is a sign?

Down on the mall itself we enjoyed standing barefoot under an illuminated pyramid to gather in its power. (Spending five minutes under that shape, I'm sure I extended my lifespan by five years and won't have to shave for a month.) We also listened to a band at the nearby Wiseman Museum, which I enjoyed even though I couldn't understand a word the vocalist said.

Out on the terrace, we watched as, a hundred feet below us, some art students poured molten lead into a mold of the Mississippi River. Another group on the Washington Avenue bridge was doing a dance. But each dancer was dancing to a different tune and beat, using ear buds and an iPod. It looked crazy. It looked pointless. But it was pretty clear the dancers were having fun.

But isn't it fun just to be out on campus at midnight? On our way back to the car, I was reminded that the last time I'd been on that stretch of campus turf, I was a recent high school graduate, on my way to an interview with Professor David LeBerge, hoping to get into his honors class in psychology. I got in. But looking back on it now, from a distance of forty years, I suspect it was less because of anything I said during the interview than because I had succeeded in finding the man's office.  

Our friends drove us back downtown and deposited us near our car. They returned to the Mill Ruins to revisit one or two of the events we'd bypassed earlier, and we went home, with the sounds of Indonesian gongs, desultory rock bands, and throngs of happy youths ringing in our ears.