High School Reunion

A fifty-year reunion is, by many accounts, a wonderful way to revive old friendships and jog the memory. And I could tell, the minute we arrived at the Hopkins Art Center, two hours late, that this kind of warm social interaction was in full swing. The lobby was packed, and the din of conversation was already considerable. It was clear that for many attendees, the anxieties and insecurities of youth were a thing of the past. The fact that beer and wine were included in the price of admission might also have contributed to the bonhomie of the occasion.

Many of the faces in the crowd looked to me like older, thicker, and more mature versions of the teenagers I went to high school with. I loved them all, but I didn't recognize any of them, undoubtedly because I didn't go to high school in Hopkins.

We threaded our way to the front desk to get our name tags, and the man behind the counter asked: "Lindberg or Eisenhower?"

 "Neither," I replied. "We're here to listen to the band."

Hopkins was a hotbed of rock-n-roll back in the mid-seventies. (Maybe every high school was?) At the time, Hilary's brother David was in a band called Seth that also included Steve Almaas (who went on to fame as part of the Suicide Commandos) and Jeff Waryan (later the lead guitar for Figures and other local bands). Dave played the keyboards and sometimes sang.

Recently someone got the idea of reviving the group to play at the fiftieth reunion. They got a hold of drummer Jay Peck, who had also played with Figures, rehearsed mostly remotely, and in the course of a few weeks worked up a play-list of covers that included the Yardbirds' "For Your Love," the Stones' "Under My Thumb," the Beatles "Oh, Darlin'," and a few golden oldies by Fleetwood Mac, the Allman Brothers, and other bands that were after my time.

In performance the reconstituted Seth was clean and crisp. Front-man Steve Almaas was in his element with both the bouncy bass and the lively patter, reminding the audience, for example, of the first gig the band played at a junior high dance half a century ago. Commandos guitarist Chris Osgood stepped in for one number. People danced. More often they merely chatted with friends or videoed the performance.

Hilary and I joined a group of family friends and relatives at a large table near the back, though the vibe was so infectious I spent most of the set out in the crowd, digging the music. Hey! The Yardbirds were one of my favorite bands in junior high. I can whistle the guitar solo from "Shapes of Things" even today.

Though jazz later occupied most of my attention, I also took a brief dive into New Wave rock-n-roll in the early eighties, during which time I was introduced to the Suicide Commandos, the Suburbs, the Flamin O's and other local groups. Somewhre in the basement I have a great four-minute super-8 film of the Suburbs performing live at twilight down in Loring Park. (It's probably worth a fortune.)

After the set I went up to Steve Almaas and said, "You sounded great. But I wish you'd done a favorite from Suicide Commando days: 'I Just Moved into a Haunted House.'"

"That's goin' WAY back," he replied with a laugh.

The tone, character, and even the volume of the music was perfectly suited to the evening, and the crowd of not-so-young listeners all appeared to be having a wonderful time. I'm sure David was proud to look up from the keyboard to see his two sons, both of them now fathers themselves, out in the crowd, and also his brothers Paul and Jeff, who were monitoring and adjusting the mix throughout the set. 

One final touch was the "Seth" coasters that the band had printed up, which were now scattered on tables all around the room.

_____________________

The romance of high school never dies, and it was a pleasure to be standing among women and men who had outgrown it without entirely losing it. The music brings all of that to life. 

As Hilary and I were leaving, I snapped a photo of our friends in the crowd, who by chance happened to be lined up like something out of Velazquez's "Las Meninas."

Twenty-Five Years of Writing ... and Not Reading

I took a look at the NY Times list of the hundred best books of the 21sr century, as voted on by 503 novelists, nonfiction writers, poets, critics and other book lovers, to see how I stacked up against the real literati. Not bad, though I guess it depends on how you look at it. I have not read any of the books on the list cover to cover but I've heard of almost half of them, and I've read more than a few of the pieces collected in The Short Stories of Lydia Davis.(88) I thought I had a winner with Tony Judt's Thinking the Twentieth Century, which I read and enjoyed, but a second look reveals that one of Judt's other books, Postwar (43), had made the list.

I think I also ought to get a little credit for other near-misses. I haven't read the number-one title on the list, Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend, but I read volume two of the tetrology, The Story of a New Name, which was difficult because I didn't know who any of the characters were. Likewise, I haven't read Lucia Berlin's collection,  Manual for Cleaning Women (79) but I did read the sequel, Evening in Paradise. I didn't read Small Things Like These (41) but I did read Keegan's recent collection, So Late in the Day, which might more accurately have been titled Creepy Men I Have Known.

I was surprised to see Austerlitz (8), a novel-essay-whatnot by W. G. Sebald, in the top ten. I own that book, but haven't read it. I have read Sebald's previous books, Vertigo (my favorite), The Rings of Saturn, and The Emigrants, all of which I enjoyed, though I enjoyed each one a little less than the one before.

I started to read Joan Didion's Year of Magical Thinking (12) but found myself strangely unmoved. And I seem to recall that many of my friends read Correction (5) to the end with grim fascination, then admitted that they hated it.

At a certain point, as I scrolled through the list, drawing mostly blanks, I began to wonder if I'd actually read any books published after the year 2000. Of course I have. Here are some of my favorites:

Borges and Me / Jay Parini (2020)

The Round House / Louise Erdrich (2012)

Catharsis: On the Art of Medicine / Andrzej Szczeklik (2005)

The Weil Conjectures: On Math and the Pursuit of the Unknown / Karen Olsson (2019)

Literature and the Gods / Roberto Calasso (2001)

The Fruit Thief / Peter Handke (2022)

Out Stealing Horses / Per Petterson (2003)

Dept. of Speculation / Jenny Offill (2014)

The White Road: Journey into an Obsession / Edmund de Wall (2015)

Beyond Sleep / Willem Frederik Hermans (translated from the Dutch in 2007)

Netherland / Joseph O'Neill (2008)

Philosopher of the Heart: the Restless Life of Soren Kierkegaard / Clare Carlisle (2019)

The Fly Trap / Fredrik Sjōberg (2014)

The Last Days of Roger Federer / Geoff Dyer (2022)

Normal People / Sally Rooney (2018)

In Search of Zarathustra / Paul Kriwaczek (2003)

Paris to the Moon / Adam Gopnik (2000)

A Gentleman in Moscow / Amir Towles (2016)

I'm not suggesting these books are among the best of the era; I'm in no position to judge, dilatory reader that I am. All I'm saying is that they stick in memory as good enough to mention.

From the Times list I extracted the names of an essayist unfamiliar to me, Elisa Gabbert, and a "philosophical" novelist, Rachel Cusk, and put in requests at the library for The Unreality of Memory and Outline. 

I also found it interesting to investigate the individual picks of selected judges, where I sometimes came upon books I liked that didn't make the consolidated list (e.g. Netherland) and also spotted titles I want to check out that I'd never heard of (e.g. Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched The World, by Deirdre McCloskey. )

One final aspect of the article is worth mentioning: the graphics. (See above.) The editors separate the finalists into groups of twenty, and often make use of well-worn and sometimes shabby paperbacks for the group shots, rather than the pristine hardcovers we see in the individual listings.

It's always a pleasure to peruse a shelf of someone else's books. Or your own.

After the Storm

I awoke in the middle of the night to thunder in the distance, impressive, like the Battle of Waterloo. But the throbbing rustle in the leaves was ominous, and it occurred to me I ought to go out on the deck and take down the umbrella. 

It was like an adventure. Half-awake, wandering barefoot to the back of the house, I flicked on the light above the deck. It was raining. The umbrella was lying awkwardly, bottom up, in the shadows on the steps down to the back yard, twenty feet from the table out of which it has been lifted by the wind. There wasn't much more I could do.

The day dawned sunny and warm, with twigs and clumps of leaves lying haphazardly here and there across the yard, but no serious damage in sight. It looked like a good morning for tennis. We had been invited to a dinner with friends and instructed to bring along some "good crusty bread," and we hatched a plan to proceed down Wirth Parkway to the courts at Beard's Plaisance just west of Lake Harriet. It would give us an opportunity to check out the storm damage, if any, along the way, and we could pick up the bread at Patisserie 46 after our match. And in so doing, we'd be paying some sort of feeble homage to Bastille Day.

A few large trees were down west of Cedar Lake, and a smattering of isolated mid-sized trees were twisted and split in odd and disturbing ways, but the roads were clear. 

The puddles on the courts were already evaporating, and we'd brought along an old broom to spread the water and accelerate the process. While I was sweeping I heard a woman sitting on the balcony of a house nearby shout to her neighbor, "Our power is out. Is yours?"

As we were finishing our set, three late-middle-aged men showed up. Hilary offered one of them our broom to dry off the other court, and he gladly accepted. "It's good that you thought to bring it," he said.

I could hear a few "Va bene"s in their conversation, and as we were leaving I asked them where they were from.

"Italy," one of the men said. 

"But where in Italy?"

"Genova," he said.

"You've got some great young players on the tour," I said. "Did you read the article in the Times about how Musetti beat Fritz with the backhand slice?

"I did," the man said. "And a one-hand backhand at that!"

Ten minutes later we were standing in line at Patisserie 46. We couldn't decide between a baguette and a levain and ended up ordering both. As Hilary was paying I walked over to a woman I thought I knew who was just retrieving her latte. 

"Are you Jan Leigh?" I said.

"Yes I am," she said, as she probed my face, trying to figure out who I was.

"I'm sure you don't recognize me," I said. "John Toren. I worked on the loading dock at Bookmen."

A light went on. "John, of course! Bookmen!" And she gave me a big huge.

"I'm sort of sweaty," I said. "from the tennis. Last I heard you were working at the Chautauqua in Bayfield."

"I'm still up there," she said. "I built a theater in Washburn. It's called Stage North."

"You built that?! I saw a great movie there once about a guy who kayaked every lake on Isle Royale."

I was about to tell her the funniest part, where the kayaker's WhisperLite stove flames up unexpectedly, but she said she had to run and made a quick exit. 

It was a promising start to the day. 

Daylilies and the Spectre of Idealism

Every plant has its problems. For example, daylily blossoms only last for a single day. We've got a couple of clumps of Mary Todds in our front yard that are well established and currently at their peak. The blooms are staggered, which is nice, but the deer love to nip off not only the blossoms but also the buds. That's a second problem.

This year I put some green plastic fencing around one clump, and Hilary suggested we put some old netting that had been idling in the garage for decades around the other. This has preserved the blossoms ... but blooming daylilies don't look all that hot when seen through such fabrics. This morning I removed the netting from the clump under the piano window. The flowers look great! Will I remember to replace the net in position tonight. Who knows?

Wandering out back, I loaded some decaying leaves from the compost pile into a galvanized bucket and spread them around on the floor of our "cherry orchard," where I recently planted a turtlehead and Hilary transplanted some groundcover. That might sound like a grandiose name— "cherry orchard"— for a strip of land where, a few years ago,  I discovered two volunteer cheery trees amid the underbrush. But what better place to be grandiose, and playful, and a little imaginative, than in one's own back yard?  

I was enjoying the morning, unalloyed by the nagging thought that I wasn't doing anything productive, because I'd already done a few things. I sent a file to a client in Massachusetts to be proofed. I'd looked up some royalty figures for Norton. I emptied the dishwasher. I uploaded some files to SpeedPro to be made into posters.

One of them was for a rock band called Seth that will be playing at the Hopkins High School 50th reunion in a few weeks. My brother-in-law, David, was in that band, back in the mid-seventies. Will we "crash" the reunion just to see David up on stage? It's hard to say.

Settling down to a recent issue of the New Yorker, I spotted an essay by Adam Gopnick about the historian Charles Taylor. I was reminded of one of Taylor's earlier books, A secular Age, that I bought decades ago. I didn't think much of it at the time—it seems to be arguing for a utopian return to medieval guilds and  faith communities. To judge from Gopnik's critique, the new volume, which carries the vaguely portentous title Cosmic Connections, is cut from the same cloth.

Yet when I fetched my copy of A Secular Age from the basement. and opened it, my eyes immediately came to rest on a passage brilliantly exposing the poverty of materialist explanations of history, while underscoring the role played not only by concepts in general, but by ideals specifically, in historical development.

"In general, a new practice will have both “material” and “ideal” conditions; which of them we try to explain may depend on which is problematic. Why did a democratic revolution occur just then, and not before? The answer may be: because people hadn’t suffered from monarchical rule as much as they came to on the eve of the turn-over; or it may be because they began to see from some striking example that democracy brings prosperity (the draw of Europe?). But it might also because at that moment they had developed the repertory which allowed for a self sustaining democracy, as against just a revolt which changed one mode of despotism for another. And it may also be because democratic forms of rule came to seem right, and in keeping with their dignity, around that time. There is no good empirically-based reason to think that the second kind of explanation must always give way to the first. The weighting between the two can’t be determined a priori, but will be different from case to case."

But there is really no need to choose between the two. Material and conceptual (or spiritual, if you will) elements are at work at every moment of our lives.

At this point Taylor feels the need to explain in some detail what the interaction between ideas and conditions looks like, by considering the question of "how the new idea of moral order came to acquire the strength which eventually allows it to shape the social imaginaries of modernity." Good question.

He begins by mentioning the "discursive practices" of thinkers reacting to the devastations of the Wars of Religion, who felt the need to identify a basis of legitimacy unsullied by religious differences. Reaching further back in time, he draws our attention to the "domestication of the feudal nobility" between the 14th and 16th cen­turies.

"I mean the transformation of the noble class from semi-independent warrior chieftains, often with extensive followings, who in theory owed allegiance to the King, but in practice were quite capable of using their coercive power for all sorts of ends unsanctioned by royal power, to a nobility of servants of the Crown/nation, who might often serve in a military capacity, but were no longer capable of acting independently in this capacity."

All of this makes perfect sense to me. In fact, it's a fine description of the dialectical process itself, though that specific word, "dialectic," doesn't appear in it. Taylor clearly wants to stick close to events, hoping to avoid even a whiff of Hegelian meta-history or teleology.

A Secular Age is 800 pages long, and I'm suddenly convinced I'll have to get back to it soon.

But maybe not right now.

 

Wild River State Park -- No Floods

For a casual weekday overnight, you can hardly do better than Wild River State Park, not much more than an hour north of the Twin Cities. Don't believe the Star Tribune reports of flooding. (News thrives on disaster.) Hilary and I spent a delightful 24 hours there yesterday, hiking the trails (almost entirely dry), listening to the birds (44 species) and sometimes spotting them through the leaves, and tending the evening fire made up  entirely of charred pieces of wood Hilary  gathered from neighboring fire-rings.

Yes, the St. Croix River is high, and the dock at the boat landing has been dragged up on shore for safe keeping. Good idea. Yes, the dumping station is closed due to a damaged pipe. But I think it's been that way for months. (And to be honest, I don't actually know what a dumping station is.)

On the park website I read:

Ponding water has provided excellent mosquito habitat. Screen tents are recommended for camping, and don't forget your bug spray!

Mosquitoes in Minnesota? Unheard of. What next? Killer bees? And has anyone manufactured tents without screens since the days of Nessmuk and the baker tent?

Nessmuk

It's gorgeous at Wild River, on the river and in the woods and across the prairie fields. Birds are singing everywhere, though at this time of year you don't often see them through the leaves: ovenbirds, wood thrushes, yellowthroats, bluebirds, orioles, catbirds, sapsuckers, peewees, kingbirds, vireos. Out in the fields we saw hoary alyssum, butterfly weed, hoary puccoon, false indigo, leadplant, and all kinds of unnamable grasses. Regardless of the names of individual plants, the patterns and textures are stunning.

We ate a fantastic dinner of Subway sandwiches we'd picked up in Stacy, accompanied by a kale salad-in-a-bag from CostCo and some Old Dutch Mexican Street Corn tortilla chips that I bought on sale at the grocery store, without bothering to read the fine print at the bottom of the bag: "flavored with a special blend of paprika, garlic, & lime."

As evening drew near, I noticed a fawn lurking in the grass ten feet from the edge of our site. A welcome guest. Mom showed up an hour later and lead her child away.

After "dinner" we tended the fire for an hour, adjusting the scraps of wood to take advantage of changes in the draft. This is a full-time activity, perfectly suited to a vacant and meditative evening.

A barred owl hooted several times. (The whippoorwill came later.)  Three cyclists—two adults and a teen—appeared out of the woods from the trail leading to the amphitheater and whizzed off into the gloaming.

The next morning we hit the trails again early. Cool air, dew in the grass.

The hop hornbeam are flowering. But are these hop-like growths flowers or fruits? In either case, magical times.

Three Shades of Blue:: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool

Jazz is a world unto itself, a world of oral traditions, insider knowledge, nightclubs, drugs, and the constant struggle to earn a living playing music that very few people like—but some people adore. The Golden Age of the art-form stretches from t  he Swing era, when Broadway musicals, movies, dance bands, and ballroom orchestras flooded the theaters and radio waves, to the small-group scene that followed, during which the most gifted of the musicians who had cut their teeth in the big bands formed small combos within which they could "stretch out" and "strut their stuff" in more intimate environments.

In 3 Shades of Blue James Kaplan has chosen the ideal form for exploring this world, drawing on established narratives, interviews, and previously unpublished oral histories to convey the uncertainties, inspirations, marketing challenges, personality clashes, and dumb luck, both good and bad, that fueled this remarkable burst of creativity. He defends his chosen point of focus in the introduction as follows:

Other categories would follow, but I confess that in the genres of bebop and hard bop, jazz created, in the quarter century between, roughly, 1942 and 1967, I find almost all of the jazz I want and need.

That's not a good sentence grammatically, but it conveys the author's personal enthusiasm, and that's what keeps the narrative rolling.

Kaplan relishes the gossip, the stories, and he knows how to milk the material. For example, he offers an extended quote by trumpeter Wallace Roney about how Miles got Coltrane to come back to his band. At the time, Miles had just returned to the States from Paris, and he wanted to form a new band. Coltrane was just finishing up a gig at the Five Spot with Thelonious Monk, and Miles wanted Coltrane back. Here is Roney's version:

One night he comes to Trane and says, 'Trane, come on back in the band, man.' Trane said, 'No, Miles—I like it here. I’m havin’ fun.' Miles said, 'You don’t want to play this shit—we playing some different shitl' Coltrane said, 'No, Miles, I’m enjoying this.'

Miles said, 'Come on. Come on back home.' He said, 'Philly’s back. Red’s back. And we got a little boy, Cannonball.' He said, “Just come on and play some with us.' 

In Roney's version, Miles hires Sonny Rollins on tenor and books a gig at Cafe Bohemia. Then one night Coltrane shows up, carrying his horn. Cutting a solo short, Miles goes off the bandstand to talk to him. Sonny takes the next solo, and then, as Miles later tells the story to Roney, “Wally—Trane got up there and played so much shit, took the championship belt away from Sonny. Made Sonny go to the bridge!”

It's a fine tale, the kind of insider scuttlebutt that those who love the music relish, Kaplan among them. But he prudently adds:

If the account is taken literally, it has a couple of chronological issues. For one thing, Sonny Rollins had left Miles’s band in September, while the Monk-Coltrane stand at the Five Spot was still in full bloom. For an­other, Rollins’s famous sabbatical from jazz, during which he practiced every day on the walkway of the Williamsburg Bridge, didn’t happen until the summer of 1959, and by his own account, a cutting contest with Coltrane had nothing to do with it. And Red Garland didn’t rejoin Miles until late December, at which point Rollins was long gone. 

But the spirit of the legend is intact in Roney’s telling. Coltrane’s play­ing had developed exponentially during his time with Monk: “Working with Monk brought me close to a musical architect of the highest order," lie told Down Beat editor Don DeMicheal in August 1960. “I felt I learned from him in every way—through the senses, theoretically, technically....

Kaplan not only loves the stories and the music, he also possesses the technical smarts to explain, in layman's terms, what was novel about the new paths these musicians were charting. For example, he makes an effort to explain what the shift from "playing the changes" to modal jazz was all about by a brief reference to Miles' tune "Milestones."

The tune was the first full example of the change in musical direction Coltrane referred to in that 1960 interview, Miles’s moving to the use of fewer and fewer chord changes in songs. “Milestones” is based on just two changes, focusing on modes rather than chords: the heart-racing opening section, with the three horns puffing its familiar staccato four-note figure, bop-bop-BOP-bop, is in G Dorian (you can find it yourself by playing a white-keys-only scale from G to G on a piano); the tune then shifts to A Aeolian (white keys from A to A), then back to Dorian before repeating the progression.

No one else in jazz was doing this then.

I'm not sure how interesting any of this would be to someone who isn't already familiar with the music, but Kaplan does the reader a favor by devoting a good deal of his time to a single LP, Kind of Blue, widely considered to be the greatest work of the post-bop era. That album is unquestionably great, and very easy to like, because all of the tracks are slow, quiet, moody, and brilliantly executed. But due to that very fact,  it doesn't really exemplify the era, which spanned from hard bop and bossa nova to dreamy West Coast cool. Then again, no single LP possibly could.

I had the good fortune to take to jazz at an early age, and I heard the second legendary Miles Davis Quintet--the one that included Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter--twice within the intimate confines of the old Guthrie Theater. But by this time, the late 60s, Miles and his band were well down the road into edgy modal compositions. Sure, I liked Kind of Blue. But I liked Sorcerer, Nefertiti, and Filles de Kilimanjaro better.

Which raises the question Kaplan presents in the subtitle of his book. "The Lost Empire of Cool." One of his themes is that jazz lost its audience because it got too far out, too cool, too something. You could no longer dance to it.    

Well, every book needs a one-line "hook," I guess, as a gift to reviewers and publishers' reps. Kaplan spends little time defending it. He toys in one chapter with the phrase "Jazz Died in 1959," but  neither he nor anyone else believes it. No one could listen to pianists Red Garland or Wynton Kelly today, for example, without being reminded of how much Bill Evans, Herbie Hancock, and Chick Corea brought to jazz in the 1960s. 

Kaplan himself obviously loves the music of the era he's describing and he wouldn't have it any other way. Maybe Jazz died in 1970, when Miles released Bitches Brew? 

Well, no one paints like Giotto these days, either.

Out of the Past

Minneapolis was recently ranked as the happiest city in the United States by the London-based Institute for the Quality of Life. It's hard for me, or anyone, to say for sure if that's true, but it brings to mind the slogan that was briefly popular when the eyes of all baseball fans were turned toward the Twin Cities during the 1991 World Series. "We Like It Here."

I prefer this slogan, anodyne though it is, to the more recent saying associated with the Timberwolves playoff run, "Bring y'ass," which was even embraced briefly by the people at Explore Minnesota. How times have changed.

But sometimes the days and weeks slip by, with remarkable events occurring so often that you hardly remember them. Here are three that I wouldn't want to forget:

A few weeks ago we paid a visit to the Ted Mann Concert Hall to hear the Oratorio Society, with some help from the University of Minnesota Chorus and Orchestra, perform a massive work called The Three Holy Children. I'd never heard of it, nor of the Anglo-Irish composer who wrote it, Charles Stanford. It was only performed once, in 1885, and considering its obscurity, I would have taken it to be a hobby-horse of the Oratorio Society's talented and energetic director, Matthew Mehaffey—appealing to archivists and fanatics but not the general public—except that a friend of ours who sings in that choir assured us it was worth a listen. She was right.

During a lengthy but informative spiel before the concert, Mehaffey explained that an archival discovery did underlie the performance, and went on to describe the painstaking work that was required to turn the score into serviceable singing parts. But if the piece is so great, why was The Three Holy Children performed only once before vanishing from view? Because oratorios were a dime a dozen in those days, and very costly to produce. There was little motivation to do the same one twice, and by the turn of the century the genre was dwindling in popularity.

Final question: Who the heck was Charles Stanford? Turns out he was an eminent composer, conductor, and educator in his day, and numbered Gustav Holst and Ralph Vaughan Williams among his pupils. A dyed-in-the-wool Brahmsian, he found little to like in the modernist tendencies stirring at the time, and the younger generation, once fledged, seldom gave him a backward glance.

Though lengthy, the oratorio was, in my view, richly varied and uniformly splendid. It was like listening to a long-lost companion piece to Brahms' Requiem, gentler perhaps but hardly less rich in melodic and harmonic interest, and free of the weird and ghastly swoops and ostentatious harmonic clashes that mar so much modern liturgical music.

The three holy children mentioned in the title, in case you're interested, are Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, who were tossed into the fiery furnace by Nebuchadnezzar during the Babylonian Captivity. It's one of the few Old Testament stories that kids like. Bing Crosby, Louis Prima, Sonny Rollins, and many others recorded a different version of the tale that ran to two minutes rather than two hours. That version was introduced in the 1930s. Here's a video of Louis Armstrong doing it in 1951. But with all due respect, the Oratorio Society does it better.

A few weeks later we stopped in at a photo exhibit called "Portraits: Past & Present," at a smallish gallery called Praxis in the Seward neighborhood. The pictures were taken by students of retired Star Tribune photographer Richard Sennott at a commercial photo studio of Gust Akerlund in Cokato, a small town roughly an hour west of Minneapolis on Highway 12. 

The studio first opened its doors in 1904, when people in London might still have been humming snatches of The Three Holy Children—though probably not. Gust Akerlund retired in 1950, but the studio is still open for business, still using natural light, and still equipped with some of the original backdrops. The Cokato Museum in now in the process of digitalizing many of the 14,000 negatives Gust took during his long career—workers, salesmen, carnival performers, funerals, weddings, family portraits.

In 2009 Sennott did a photo shoot at the studio for the Star Tribune. He recently took a group of students out to photograph some of the same people, fifteen years later, at the 74th Cokato Corn CarnivalIt struck me as a relaxed, warm, friendly, and good-natured show. I enjoyed chatting with the director of the Cokato museum, Johannah Ellison, sharing with her how much I enjoyed the exhibit of canned corn labels at her museum (it's true!), and also the stuffed bobwhite in the wildlife diorama. It was also fun to chat with Cokato's long-time professional story-teller Bob Gasch. Half a century ago I heard Bob recite "The Cremation of Sam McGee" at a training weekend when I was a canoe guide.

I eavesdropped on two old codgers—probably from Cokato—as they discussed the recent drought, the price of corn, and whether the gigantic ball of twine on display in Darwin, a few miles down the road from Cokato, is really the largest in the world, or only the largest one made by a single person.

And Hilary and I especially enjoyed running into her cousins Laura Sennott and Dan Olsen. Dan's wife and two daughters had flown south to a Caribbean meditation retreat. Dan wasn't in the mood, and decided to come west instead from his home in Boston to do some fishing with his sister and brother-in-law up on Cross Lake. Good idea.

A third event anchored in the past comes to mind: a performance by La Grande Bande at the Black Forest of cantatas by Bach and Handel and shorter pieces by Corelli and others. It was billed as "Summer and Songs" with a meal provided by the Black Forest. We went with friends, and also enjoyed talking with the two young university professors who joined us at our table, but the opening peroration read from a sheet of paper by harpsichordist Michael Thomas Asmus was somewhat boring, and one of the violinists—there were only two—was slightly out of tune for much of the performance. It didn't help that to get a beer you had to leave the room and walk through the courtyard to the bar, then wait for the bartender, who seemed to be new at the job,  to tend to your order.

But the voices of soprano Catherine Sandstedt and baritone Andrew Kane saved the day.

Le Grande Bande is based in Gaylord, an hour southwest of town, though many of the musicians in the troupe are from the Cities and elsewhere. The size of the group varies with the repertoire being performed. The pieces we heard were memorable--especially the one featuring a hunting horn--but I think we'd have better luck with a larger ensemble.