Mozart's Birthday Flow

I sometimes teach a class on jazz appreciation, and one of the first things I tell my students is that our goal is to appreciate the music, not to understand it. And there is no way to come to an appreciation of music except by listening to it. Music scholars love to examine scores, of course, and discuss innovative approaches to sound, but that has absolutely nothing to do with getting to know the music. Music is sound, not notes on a page, and the parts of the brain that take in these two types of thing are entirely different.

It isn't easy to convey in words music's sometimes subtle, and often inexplicable appeal. That's why music critics dwell at such length on biographical and technical issues. Various adjectives and catch-phrases can steer us toward pieces similar to others we already know and love, and the algorithms of music streaming services do the same thing. "If you liked this, then you might like ...."  In the end, the only way to start "digging" the music is to keep listening to it. And there's no guarantee that the appreciation--the emotional connection--will never come.

It being Mozart's birthday, I got to thinking about how easy it is to overlook the depths of his compositions, because we're dazzled, and perhaps bored, by its always graceful surfaces. Two things stand in our way, I think. First, it ought to be pointed out that many of Mozart's works are largely froth. They may be pleasant to listen to while chopping onions or playing dominoes but there isn't all that much going on. 

Beyond that, we need to recognize that passionate intensity, disgruntled rage, and lugubrious moaning are not the only emotions worthy of our interest and affection. Mozart gives us a measure of such stuff—just think of the finale of Don Giovanni or the almost Beethovian Fantasia in C minor, K. 475 for solo piano. But the most unusual and distinctive quality to be found in his work, I think, is a glowing and vibrant melancholy that arises more than occasionally from the midst of those seemingly "typical" passages of formal late eighteenth-century court music.

And the quality that seals the greatness of Mozart's expressiveness, while preventing any of it from getting too far out-of-hand, is its ineluctable flow. Or, to put it another way, in Mozart everything sings.

My interest in Wolfgang's work dates back to my college years. I was a big fan of Stravinsky and Prokofiev in those days. I had purchased an LP of David Oistrakh playing Prokofiev's 2nd Violin Concerto, but it didn't take me long to notice that I preferred the B-side: Mozart's 3rd Violin Concerto. I could whistle it for you now, though I haven't heard it in years. (Better not.) 

Since then I've expanded my range of exposure quite a bit, and a few years ago I even purchased a budget forty-volume set of CDs devoted to Mozart's works, which has allowed me to explore the Piano Concertos and other, more obscure, compositions, performed adequately by a catch-all of ensembles including the Strings of Zurich, the Südwestfunk Symphony Orchestra Baden-Baden, and the Noordhollands Jongenkoor and Koorschool of the Grote of St. Laurenkerk. This ample set puts me in mind of the Vox boxes and the Murray-Hill collections of my college years.

Earlier today I gave the 3rd Violin Concerto another listen. Still delightful, and the adagio would serve well on many a romantic film soundtrack, along the lines of Elvira Madigan. What next? I've become partial to the piano trios in both modern and pianoforte versions. Susan Graham singing arias? The truly brooding String Quintet in g minor, K. 516? Or better yet, one of Mozart's two later string quintets, with which I'm not so familiar. The clarinet quintet? (A gem.) The so-called "dissonant" quartet in d minor? 

Perhaps the work that best conveys Mozart's flow—his ability to move a variety of voices ahead coherently while retaining a strange and wonderful freedom from the weight of musical architecture—is the Prague Symphony (#39). We often hear it said that the first movement of Beethoven's Fifth offers the pinnacle of musical "development." I beg to differ. To me that opening movement sounds halting and repetitive, as if the composer couldn't figure out how to continue the thought, and therefore returned to his opening statement, only LOUDER.

I had always assumed that my preference for Mozart's 39th was idiosyncratic. After all, it receives less attention by far than the two symphonies that follow. But just now I opened Alfred Einstein's classic work on Mozart (c. 1945)  to the relevant passage and came upon this astute remark.  

"After the elo­quent tension of the slow introduction—how proudly it begins and what conflicts lie behind this apparent assurance!—there comes a move­ment saturated with polyphony, even though the naive listener would not be aware of it. The thematic material, stated in the first thirty-five measures, seems quite heterogeneous, and yet it forms a wonderful unity."

This is exactly the sublime unity of disparate elements—the development within freedom—that I was trying fitfully to describe. A few paragraphs later Einstein makes another important point.  

"For the de­velopment section he reserves a feature of increased intensity: canonic treatment. This development section is one of the greatest, most seri­ous, most aggressive in all Mozart’s works. In it, characteristically, the second theme cannot take part, but must remain untouched. The slow movement is marked only ‘andante’ again, but what a deepening of the concept andante is here! This is no longer a mere intermezzo be­tween two animated movements; it has its own inner animation, and it embodies the most complete combination of a singing quality and polyphonic character."

These enthusiastic, if somewhat technical, phrases don't actually summon the music, but I would hope they'd make you want to go and hear the music.

Einstein's book isn't the kind you'd read cover to cover, but before the day is through, I'll probably pull Wolfgang Hildesheimer's Mozart off the shelf.  It's a book-length meditation rather than a straightforward biography, carrying some of the flow and hidden logic that animates Mozart's greatest works. 

Now I have it here beside me. Opening it at random, I come upon a passage in which Hildesheimer takes Theodore Adorno to task for criticizing the conductor Otto Klemperer for retaining the final sing-song didactic scene in his recording of Don Giovanni.

Of course, any scene coming after what is probably the greatest scene in all opera will be a letdown, but the idea that a work has to end with its dramatic high point is just as great an aesthetic error as the one Adorno rebukes Klemperer for.    

I guess that's not such an interesting example. Without much effort I hit upon the author's criticism of those who glibly make use of Mozart's letters and other documents to advance their theories about who he actually was.

The mas­tery of means which made [Mozart] the greatest and most mysteri­ous musician of all time also stood him in good stead in his verbal statements. He had at his disposal a tremendous syn­thetic-emotional range, with which he could assume many shapes or hide himself entirely, and he employed the whole range without hypocrisy, but also without any compunction about objective truth. When writing, he assumed one of his many personae. He wrote as he saw himself, as he wished or ought to have seen himself, as he had to or sought to appear to others, and as he imagined that others imagined him. But his own words give us no sure way of knowing him as he was.

And while I'm engaged with Hildesheimer, I'm thinking that Mozart's Gran Partita for 13 wind instruments might be just the thing to cue up on the hi-fi. Poking around online I came upon a wonderful display of the original score in Mozart's hand at the Library of Congress. You can take a look here.

Some scholars suggest that the inclusion of a "notturno" movement in this elaborate serenade might indicate it was written for an outdoor performance by torchlight. A pleasant thought on a gray January day. 

Zug Zug the Caveman

With six inches of snow on the way, we went down early this morning to see Zug Zug, the caveman encased in a block of ice that appeared suddenly in the neighborhood a few days ago. It's only a fifteen minute walk from our house, but we drove down before breakfast, planning to beat the crowds and maybe take a stroll through the woods or across the golf course.

Artist Zach Schumack was commissioned to create the life-sized figure for a trade show a year ago. Since then it's been standing in his garage. That seemed like a waste, so he convinced the  Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board to grant permission to relocate it to one of the city parks. The Bassett Creek Gorge in Theodore Wirth Park, on the western edge of the city, was an inspired choice for the new site. It's wooded, there's a delightful creek running nearby, yet it's easy to reach on foot from the parkway, and the golf course parking lot isn't that far away.

Schumack's motive for putting his caveman on exhibit al fresco was to encourage people to get outdoors, stretch their legs, and get some fresh air. In that he succeeded. An article appeared about Zug Zug in the Star-Tribune a few days ago, and since then parking has sometimes been hard to find nearby. By mid-afternoon cars are often parked illegally all the way up the parkway to Golden Valley Road and beyond.

There was no one in sight when we arrived. I was impressed by the sophistication of the sculpture. Zug Zug doesn't photograph well. He isn't encased in ice but in a plexiglas box sitting on a sturdy plinth. It's only when you get close that you can see, through the translucent box, the richness of detail—the boots, the furs, the hair. He looked cool, but he also reminded me of something out of an old Time-Life book.

Then I heard a kingfisher rattling off in the distance. The creek was frozen where we were, but there were some rapids just upstream, also a beaver dam and some wide, reedy pools.

It's hard to get around the fencing protecting the golf course in the summer, but nowadays you can simply walk under the bridge on the ice. Which we did. As we walked across a snow-covered fairway beyond we heard a downy woodpecker drumming, a white-breasted nuthatch beeping, a chickadee gurgling, a robin clucking. A jogger ran by in the woods above us. We passed piles of dead buckthorn that had been flattened as part of a clean-up effort, and copses of living buckthorn, full of sinister black berries, right alongside. At one point we came upon a tree at least a foot in diameter that a beaver had brought down fairly recently.

I've never seen a beaver in the creek, though I've seen a few mink over the years.

 

Five Days in the Woods

Castle Haven. How many years have we been coming up here on New Years, as a Christmas present to ourselves ? I don't know, but we could measure it in decades. Today most of the cabins here are modern, but they're still knotty-pine woodsy. The quilts on the wall were stitched by the owner's mother, I think. And the small painting of the big lake hanging by the bathroom door, to judge from the initials on the bottom, was done by the current owner herself.

On the North Shore, your "cabin in the woods" is likely to be only nominally in the woods. At best, the scene is dominated by the vast openness of the lake: the sky, the clouds, the infinite variety of waves—or ripples— on the water's surface.

Our cabin is only a few feet from the shore of the lake. We come here to ski, to cook, to eat, and to read.

The forecast was for cloudy weather, but we had blue skies and tremendous stars at night.

Everything was coated with frost on the way north, starting with the swampy country in Lino Lakes, just north of Minneapolis. A luminescent morning. The white glow on the branches varied as the cloud cover changed, as if someone had spun the dial of a celestial rheostat back and forth.

We stopped at a wayside rest near Mora, vacant except for seven hunters in camouflage, none of them wearing masks. It's hard to figure what they were hunting this time of year. Squirrels? 

I've always been intrigued by the Cloquet Cutoff. Though the term seems to be going out of style, I heard it many times as an adolescent. It refers to Highway 33, which branches off of I-35 at the Black Bear Casino (a recent addition to the landscape) and takes you to Cloquet rather than Duluth, and on to Virginia, Lake Vermilion, Ely, and even International Falls.

Along the way you pass such lesser outposts as Canyon, Cotton, Aurora, Cook, and the turnoff to the Shangri-La of Meadowlands. When I was young, we almost always went that way to my mom's home town of Virginia or to the family cabin on Lake Vermilion. Nowadays we almost always head for Duluth and on to either a North Shore destination or the BWCA.

But on our recent trip we decided to veer left on the "cutoff" past Cloquet to the Sax-Zim Bog, just north of Meadowlands. It's long-since become an international birding "hotspot," though I can assure prospective visitors that if you want to spend a few hours driving down totally deserted snow-covered gravel roads in the dead of winter, this place is for you.

Hilary and I are supporters. I even carried my "certified Bog Buddy" card in my wallet, in case someone wonders why I wasn't dropping a "Jackson" into the tip jar at the visitors' center. I "gave" at the office.

But all this is entirely beside the point. On our way to Meadowlands we came suddenly upon five vehicles on the shoulder—trucks and SUVs—and we pulled over, too.

"What  are you looking at?" I whispered to the young woman with binoculars wearing an immaculate white stocking cap.

"Great Gray Owl," she replied tersely, without looking my way. I was tempted to ask her, "Where is he?" But to judge from the parallax of the camera-scopes set up on the shoulder nearby he couldn't have been more than forty feet away. Finally I saw him, right in front of me, just beyond the highway ditch, but very well camouflaged.

It's more fun if you spot him yourself, but it's an impressive bird all the same.

Evening grosbeaks

I won't detail our other adventures—grosbeaks, redpolls, Canada jays, etc. We visited several black spruce bog walks and looked at hundreds of chickadees intently without ever seeing a "boreal" version. More than once we heard, "There was one here 15 minutes ago."   

We swooped into Duluth from the north on highway 53 past the metropolis of Twig, down, down, down the hills past four or five iterations of Sammy's Pizza, various health clinics and snow-mobile trailer outlets, an airport, a county jail, and a federal detention center. Churches. Liquor stores. None beautiful, all resting firmly on the billion-year-old Duluth complex. I Think.

A short detour on Woodlawn Avenue to the Mont Royale supermarket for fresh fish. And ketchup. (For the pasties.)

The sun was low and at our backs as we continued up the shore, no frost here on the trees, but blue water, and a single ore boat silhouetted out on the lake near the canal.

Here at our cabin, we "ignite" the gas fireplace, pour ourselves a glass of wine, fry the fresh whitefish we picked up in Duluth, boil the potatoes, and look around for the pepper and salt. What? No salt?    

At dinner we listen to some blowsy ballads by Archie Shepp and Mal Waldron, followed by Anna Netrebko and Rolando Villazon singing duets from La Boheme.  We're enjoying the true taste of whitefish and Yukon gold. Lots of butter. (Tomorrow we'll drive up to Beaver Bay and buy some salt.)  

Christmas with Terry Eagleton

To call Terry Eagleton a critic, or even a Theorist (note the capital T) is really to damn him with faint praise. The man is uncommonly erudite and he writes with singular panache—so much so that when reading him I'm reminded of social critics on the order of Voltaire and Nietzsche, with touches of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis thrown in for good measure. 

Like those brilliant and scurrilous gadflies, Eagleton is a counterpuncher who feigns and jabs, often hitting his mark, while seldom planting his feet on the mat long enough for us to figure out where he really stands.

But perhaps this is a false impression, based on the fact that I’ve read only a few of the essays collected in his book Figures of Dissent: Critical Essays on Fish, Spivak, Žižek and Others.  

My favorite line from that book: “For postmodern thought the normative is inherently oppressive, as though there was something darkly autocratic about civil rights legislation or not spitting in the milk jug.”

That remark strikes me as both funny and true.

I recently stumbled upon Eagleton’s book, Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate. Reading the first chapter, “The Scum of the Earth,” I was impressed by his grasp of Jesus’s mission, Aquinas’s analysis of first causes, and so on. He’s well aware, as few thinkers are today, that we all live in the midst of numerous categories of being--the practical, the ethical, the aesthetic--and often partake of several simultaneously.

A few Eagleton sallies:

In Nietzsche’s view, the death of God must also spell the death of Man—that is to say, the end of a certain overweening humanism—if absolute power is not simply to be transplanted from the one to the other. Otherwise, humanism will always be secretly theological. It will be a continuation of God by other means. God will simply live a shadowy afterlife in the form of respectable suburban morality, as indeed he does today.

He responds to Christopher Hitchens assertion that “thanks to the telescope and the microscope, [religion] no longer offers an explanation of any­thing important” as follows:

But Christianity was never meant to be an explanation of anything in the first place. It is rather like saying that thanks to the electric toaster we can forget about Chekhov.

Pursuing the issue of God as creator, Eagleton continues:

God for Christian theology is not a mega-manufacturer. He is rather what sustains all things in being by his love, and would still be this even if the world had no beginning. Cre­ation is not about getting things off the ground. Rather, God is the reason why there is something rather than nothing, the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever. Not being any sort of entity himself, however, he is not to be reckoned up alongside these things, any more than my envy and my left foot constitute a pair of objects.

In case we haven’t quite wrapped our heads around this concept, Eagleton lays it on a little thicker, jumping from point to point as if he’s afraid our attention might be wandering.

God and the universe do not make two. In an act of Judaic iconoclasm, we are forbidden to make graven images of this nonentity because the only image of him is human beings. There is a document that records Gods endless, dispiriting struggle with organized religion, known as the Bible. God the Creator is not a celestial engineer at work on a superbly rational design that will impress his research grant body no end, but an artist, and an aesthete to boot, who made the world with no functional end in view but simply for the love and delight of it.

Or, as one might say in more theological language, for the hell of it. He made it as gift, superfluity, and gratuitous gesture—out of nothing, rather than out of grim necessity. In fact, for Christian theology there is no necessity to the world at all, and God may have long ago bitterly regretted succumb­ing to the sentimental impulse which inspired him to throw it off in the first place. He created it out of love, not need. There was nothing in it for him. The Creation is the original acte gratuit.

The danger implicit in this position is that morality relinquishes pride of place to delight. But where’s the danger?

If we are God’s creatures, it is in the first place because, like him, we exist (or should exist) purely for the pleasure of it.

And where does Jesus fit into all of this? The radical Romanti­cs (according to Eagleton) including Marx, find in Jesus a character who fully grasped this radical disjunct between instrumental reason and the ontological freefall we actually live.

 Jesus, unlike most responsible American citizens, appears to do no work, and is accused of being a glutton and a drunkard. He is presented as homeless, propertyless, celibate, peripatetic, socially marginal, disdain­ful of kinsfolk, without a trade, a friend of outcasts and pa­riahs, averse to material possessions, without fear for his own safety, careless about purity regulations, critical of traditional authority, a thorn in the side of the Establishment, and a scourge of the rich and powerful. Though he was no revolu­tionary in the modern sense of the term, he has something of the lifestyle of one. He sounds like a cross between a hippie and a guerilla fighter.

A friend of mine remarked recently that life's two great mysteries are God and death. I would suggest that these mysteries are corollaries of a still greater mystery out of which they flow--presence. Being here, now. You and me and everyone we know and don't know. This is what seems to vanish at the end of life, and also what drives our most rewarding theological musings.

Christmas has a moral dimension, to be sure--our savior, charitable living, and all of that--but it also has a magical dimension: darkness and twinkling lights and warmth and togetherness. Colorful packages. Extravagant Food. Familiar music, most of it vocal. This year, it will be quieter for most of us. More open space, perhaps, to pursue--among other things--that elusive zone of existential frisson, both personal and cosmic, that defies description.

At Play in the Fields

 A landscape is like a poem, and walking it is like reading it. You don't have to understand it—the geology, the human history—to appreciate the lay of the land: the balance and perhaps the depth. Variety of vegetation and terrain, openness, density, expanse. The rise and fall, the arrangement of woods, fields, marshes, potholes, lakes. A shapely island of sumac here, a copse of silvery aspens in the distance over there.

Hilary and I have been walking quite a few landscapes these last few months. We have our favorites, but we don't want to wear them out through familiarity. We try to visit new places, too, and also attack the old ones from new perspectives. The back route into William O'Brien S.P. from the gravel parking lot on County 4 stands near the top of our list, though it's no longer new. We recently began a hike at O'Brien from the standard trailhead but headed south across the fields immediately, turning up into the lozenge-shaped hills from a new angle. And just the other day, we felt our way along back roads to a new point of entry into Afton S.P. off 50th Street, which made it easy to reach the beautiful fields in the park's northwest corner without first walking a mile and a half from the main parking lot down to the St. Croix River and then up through a ravine (yes, a beautiful ravine) and on through the backpacking campground.

Afton State Park

But it might have seemed that we were getting desperate when we ventured, a week or two ago, up to Crow-Hassan Regional Park.  Although it's arguably the wildest—or at any rate the least developed—of the parks in the Three Rivers system, we have never found it much fun to explore. We would invariably arrive at the gravel parking lot after a dull drive up Interstate 94 followed by a seemingly endless meander through the farm county west of Rogers, our only real hope being to spot a rough-legged hawk on one of the stunted trees alongside the last stretch of two-lane road leading to the park.

A mink fishing on the Crow River

Upon arrival, we would head off to the west over a few hills and then through a stretch of maple woods, eager to make contact with the Crow River, which forms the park's western boundary. 

After wandering alongside the river, which is substantial, for a few hundred yards, the trail would bring us up a hill through oak woods and past a stand of handsome Scots pines planted  by some long-forgotten farmer, or perhaps a park ranger, decades ago. Here the vast expanse of rolling, grass-covered fields that covers the north half of the park presents itself. To the northeast, maybe half a mile away, you can see another grove of stately pines in the midst of a deciduous woods. 

A glance at the map—I hope you print out a PDF of the park map before you leave; signage in the park is terrible—will suggest that the river valley curls to the east just beyond those trees. It would be nice to explore up that way ... but it's windy and cold out there in the open, we've already walked a mile or two, and we're ready to head back to the parking lot, following a trail that hugs a bank of woods and then veers out into some low hills briefly before rising to the north side of the lot.

A few days after that hike, so similar to previous hikes—decent enough, but hardly exhilarating—it occurred to me that we were going the WRONG WAY. Why start off so precipitously to the west every time, heading for the river? Why not head north towards the fields immediately? Or better yet, wander amid the woods and ponds on the east side of the park on our way north to the fields and wooded patches that have always remained just beyond our reach?

With only a hint of reluctance—after all, we'd just been there—Hilary agreed to return to Crow-Hassan with me to try out the new route. And we agree, it gives the park an entirely new and more agreeable flavor. It happened to be a cold, blustery day, and our meander east and north through the woods took some time. As a result, we once again decided to turn back before reaching the enchanted woods at the northern edge of the park. But we did see a lot of new and attractive terrain, and we also explored one or two trails that don't appear on any map. The trail heading south along the west side of South Twin Lake was especially nice. We passed fields of bluestem dotted with blazing star and bee-balm—all dead, but lovely just the same in their variegated shapes and textures. Bird-life consisted of two low-flying trumpeter swans that appeared out of nowhere and one low-soaring bald eagle.

At the first of several unmarked junctures we turned right, not wanting to head back to the trail we'll come north on. At the next fork we went left; didn't want to curl around in a circle—it's easy enough to do. It was a thick, gray day and the sun was no help at all.

I knew roughly where we were, but when we finally arrived an intersection with a park sign and a map, I discovered I was wrong. We weren't anywhere near where I thought we were. I had become discombobulated by a good ninety degrees as we jogged this way and that amid the rolling hills and ice-covered ponds. "Number 11?" I said in disbelief. "That can't be right."

"I seem to remember that last week we came up through those woods," Hilary reminded me. "We went down this hill and turned left." She was right. That's what we'd done, arriving at the same point from the opposite direction. But it didn't jibe at all with the directional scheme I'd build up in my head.

So, Crow-Hassan is back on the map. Lots of new trails to explore in the months ahead. We'll make it to the north end of the park one of these days, it isn't that far. Maybe on skis!     

December Lockdown

Let's just call it a quiet holiday: wandering the house like a good citizen, going for walks in the woods daily, working desultorily on projects on the computer (as usual), making pre-dawn runs to the supermarket, figuring out new things to do with the left-over turkey, chatting with friends and family on the phone, streaming the occasional TV show, and taking advantage of the ample arts and entertainment events being offered online by local organizations in dire need of support.

We're used to hosting three or four generations for Thanksgiving, but this year it was just the two of us. We roasted a twelve-pound turkey nevertheless, along with stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy, and pumpkin pie topped with masses of fresh-whipped cream. Hilary put together a hearty assortment of leftovers for her mother, but we still had quite a bit of turkey to consume.

That first plate of leftovers is almost better than the original meal. The second one isn't too bad, either. A few days later I was eating turkey salad sandwiches heavily laced with tarragon. The next night turkey quesadillas were on the menu.  And just last night we finished things off with some delectable turkey pot pies.

The musical offerings have also been top-flight. We listened to several performances from the Schubert Club's Courtroom Concert series, which are traditionally staged at noon at the Landmark Center in St. Paul. One of them featured a local ensemble of musicians performing music from India, and another was a rebroadcast of a sterling performance of Debussy's String Quartet which lacked a video component. 

It might seem strange to be sitting in front a computer screen looking at a static image of four musicians, but it nevertheless gives one the feeling of attending a musical event. And the music itself was gorgeous.

On December 3 the Schubert Club will be streaming an outstanding vocal quartet, "To Joy," by local composer David Evan Thomas. We heard the original performance and were stunned by its exuberant accessibility and sensual appeal. The entire text was extracted from the Oxford English Dictionary's entries for the word "joy." And joyous it is.

The most unusual of the events we took in recently was a two-part performance by the Boston Early Music Society of Monteverdi's opera L'Orfeo and —two days later—Charpentier's La descente d'Orphée aux enfers. Oblivious to Eastern Standard Time, we tuned in to the first one an hour later, just when Orpheus is crossing the Styx, and we left the second one early ... because we'd heard the story before. But in both performances the singing was measured, stately, and haunting.     

After the second show I pulled my copy of Robert Graves' classic The Greek Myths off the shelf, and also Ann Wroe's Orpheus: the life and myth of humanity's eternal muse. There are quite a few variations to the tale, and no one seems to know exactly what any of them mean.

On another occasion we listened in on a poetry reading sponsored by Subtext Books during which Norita Dittberner-Jax and Mary Moore Easter read from recent works. In case you missed it, these two poets will be joined by Margaret Hasse and Emilio DeGrazia at Next Chapter Books on December 10 for a repeat performance. It should be a stunner. Tune in here.

The highlight of the Minneapolis-St. Paul Film Society's fall season has been the new documentary by Frederick Wiseman, City Hall. It follows a number of events taking place in the city of Boston, from firefighting to Veteran's Day gatherings to garbage collection to community zoning meetings. Sound dull? It's not. During the first hour we hear a little too much of mayor Marty Walsh's oratory, perhaps, but the film soon finds its pace and begins to direct its attention not only to people merely talking about doing things but also to people doing them. We watched it in installments over the course of three days,  and by the start of the fourth hour, we were hooked.

Just joking. But the film is four and a half hours long, so be prepared.

The best of the Netflix shows we've been streaming is a five-part series on dance called MOVE. Dance is not a medium of expression we explore often, but these shows are dazzling, high-energy pieces focusing on Jookin' (Florida and LA), Gaga (Israel), flamenco (Spain), Dancehall (Jamaica), and Kathak dance (England/Bangladesh).

Home-grown entertainment can also be top-flight. One Saturday evening our friends Tim and Carol put together a pub-quiz that kept us up well past our bedtime: politics, geography, and even a music round that required the identification of brief clips by Eric Satie, Neil Sedaka, and Sugar Ray (who?). Which, do you think, is the largest of these three countries: Chad, Sudan, Algeria?

The closure of bars and restaurants has been rough on proprietors and waitstaff, no doubt, but we've made it a point to explore a few new takeout options. We stopped in at the Mill Valley Market at the Trailhead in Wirth Park several times with my sister after hiking the circuit along "tornado alley" and under Highway 55 to the Wirth Lake Pavilion and back. The food there is much better than you might expect.

And the Japanese street food from PinKU, right across the steet from Surdyk's Liquor Store, is mighty fine. And just the other day Hilary discovered that a taqueria that had burned down in NE Minneapolis has relocated nearby.

Thus the days remain interesting. But it sure would be nice to see a few friends face to face, the way we used to do, sitting around a firepit, or even inside! The lockdown expires on December 18. Just in time for a solstice party?

 

Foot in the Door - At Last!

 I've been negotiating with the Minneapolis Institute of Arts for quite some time, trying to get them to add some of my work to their collection. My curriculum vitae is fairly impressive, if I do say so myself, and I'm not sure why they've been dragging their feet.

- When I was five I grew a picture of a clown with a conical hat and sent it in to Highlights Magazine. Month after month, when the new issue arrived, I would turn immediately to the page with the crossword puzzle, the cryptogram, and the drawings, hoping to see my work in print at last. After a few months of such anticipation, invariably followed by ill-concealed disappointment, my mom, a talented painter in oils herself, felt it best to interject a bit of friendly criticism: "Well, it wasn't one of your better drawings."

- In third grade, a drawing of mine—a full-color rendering Crayola of a flying egret—was included in a exhibition held in the basement of a deconsecrated church in White Bear Lake, several miles from the town where I grew up. One dark night after supper my dad drove me around the lake to see it. Meh. For some reason I felt rather more embarrassed than proud to see my "work" exhibited in the midst of so many more vivid and arresting pieces.

- Yet I did somehow develop a reputation as an artist, at least to the extent that I was recruited, along with a friend of mine, to make the plaster statues for a high school production of Antigone. You can see the results here. (It's clear that at this stage in my career, I hadn't shaken Rodin's influence entirely.) 

- After performing dismally on a pre-entry math test at the University of Minnesota—our small-town high school didn't offer anything remotely resembling calculus—I dropped that subject and became a studio arts major. I must confess that I wasn't seriously considering art as a career, but you never know, and the designation made it much easier to enroll in art classes. Which I did. Tom Egerman was the most memorable of the professors I "studied" with. His work was fresh, loose, and often funny, and so was he.

After years spent in aesthetic oblivion, my career got a reboot at the art shows we used to hold after hours at the Bookmen, a warehouse where I worked for quite a few years. I organized one or two of the shows myself. There were lots of talented individuals on the staff, keeping body and soul together while they waited for their big break. We had everything on display from Gothic chainmail to farm aprons to installation art. At one of the shows I entered a couple of hand-made album covers.

When the warehouse operation folded, I applied for all sorts of jobs, in the classic bohemian style, but before long I became involved in editing and designing books. As I honed my "style" in a serious way, I began to contemplate the next big step: the state fair art show. Trouble was, this thought would occur to me only when I was AT the state fair art show. Always too late.

So you can imagine how pleased I was when I got an email from the MIA soliciting my work for its "Foot in the Door" show. I hope you realize I wasn't the ONLY one to receive such an invitation; anyone who sends in a piece will be accepted, as long as the artwork is one foot square. And you might complain that I didn't give my entry as much thought as I should have, considering how long I'd been waiting: I sent in the screen-saver from my computer monitor.  But what's done is done, and I've learned over the years that the first impulse is often the best one.

The MIA holds a foot-in-the-door event every five years, and I've been to most of them as an appreciative art-lover on the lookout for people I know, both in the crowd and up on the wall. The new digital event doesn't have the same buzz, but it does have its advantages. For one thing, you can see the art better, because each piece is right in front of you rather than ten feet above your head. Also, presuming you have a nice 30-inch screen like mine, the pieces have that wonderful digital luminescence that enhances many, if not all, works of art. On the other hand, the webpage loads only twenty or thirty pieces at a time, and when you ask it to load more, it just slips a few more rows onto the bottom of the array. And once you click on a work to examine it more closely, it seems to disappear from the array entirely.

All the same, if you want to add a little color and whimsy to your life, these vivid and arresting works are sure to please. 

Why not take a look?  Link