Lughnasa College Moon
Again, the quiet. I haven’t put a full push on with the Latin before today, but I could see the end of the Apollo and Daphne story and wanted to get there. So, I’m mentally fatigued, ready for some deep sleep, maybe some interesting chunks of rem.
Book illustrations, especially 19th century illustrations, give me a warm feeling. If they’re good. Sort of aesthetic comfort food. Not great in large doses, but every once in a while, just what’s needed.
Lughnasa College Moon
Mircea Eliade’s journals. Abraham Maslow’s journals. A biography of Dickens. A West Point set of maps for modern warfare. An atlas. Then, two. Three. Several Alan Moore graphic novels: V for Vendetta, the Watchman, the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Jung’s Red Book. Some egyptology texts. Cardboard mouths consuming my library, eating the books one at a time.
Tried listening to other sorts of music but outlaw country suits my packing mood. Gotta be a little bit crazy to sort through a collection gathered over a lifetime, especially crazy to jettison some of it. Outlaw country is a little bit crazy and not demanding on the listener.
As I pack, I fantasize about what I will do with this one, and that one, and those once they reappear, undigested by the cardboard. I’ll finally sit down and just read this one. Learn more about Alan Watts and Nikola Tesla. Tracking down changing national borders and following them backwards through time. Working to solidify my understanding of Egypt’s influence on the Minoans and the Greeks. All those projects, large and small. Touching these tools, not different really from hammer and screwdriver, ripsaw and router. Makes me ache to use them. (David Roberts)
Lughnasa College Moon
We’re off to the fair today. The last hurrah as residents of Minnesota. I’ve gone many times over the years, probably a bit more than half of the years I’ve lived here, say 25. As I’ve gotten older, stamina has become a modest issue, but a bigger one is sameness. Even with the amazing number of new food products and the changing line-up in the 4-H buildings and the animal barns there is a regularity, a predictability. On-a-stick! Blue ribbon! Necessary kitchen gadget!
Of course, that very predictability is one of the fair’s charms, too. It will always have that slightly wacky, down-home feel. The Midway will have lights; machinery hill will have tractors and the GOP/DFL booths will have politicians racing their engines for an upcoming election. And, there will be cheese curds.
For a guy trying to figure out how to connect Americans with the land, with what I think of as a kami-faith for this land is our land, the state fair is a huge ritual moment. Too often an opportunity lost to take our head out of the work-a-day cubicle world and go outside, to look down, to see the amazing, miraculous things happening in the soil and among the plants. And cows. pigs. llamas. rabbits. horses. In that sense it’s the ur-moment in the year for effecting change.
Lughnasa New (College) Moon
Kate and Annie were off to a quilt retreat yesterday afternoon and evening and all day today. Held in downtown Anoka in a large room over a bank on Main Street, this quilt retreat gathers a large number of quilters with their machines and projects; they share technique and support each others work.
(The Quilting Frolic 1813 John Lewis Krimmel)
That left the dogs and me at home. This morning, with the temperature at 66 and the dewpoint at 65, I picked red raspberries in a fog. A few tomatoes were ready to come in and another large batch of onions and garlic.
Watched an interesting William Dafoe mystery, Anamorph. An independent film, it had no upbeat parts and a grim ending. Intelligent and well-made it became repetitive near the end, then picked up as the climax neared. 3 stars out of 5.
Lughnasa Lughnasa Moon
Over the weekend and as deep into this week as I need to go, I’m packing up my former study. I’ve purged one file cabinet and consolidated its content into boxes for moving. A horizontal cabinet awaits attention. A large plastic tub full of art supplies went into the move with care pile. One small bookcase has been emptied and moved. The shop work bench I’ve used for storage is empty, too. That old printer, the one I bought in 1994, is in the truck and ready to go to a recycler. An HP laserjet, it still functions. That leaves three larger bookcases and some miscellaneous things on various surfaces, plus the art on the walls.
(what I hope to create in Colorado, my own version of this.)
When this room has been tidied up, the next and last big push begins. My study. This room has walls of books. Many will go in boxes with red tape, but most will not. The other areas have gone well, but this one will present some difficulty. So many projects. Some of the past, some of the future, some of today. Which ones do I imagine I’ll continue in Colorado? Which ones have enough spark to be valuable in the final third of my life? These are hard decisions for me and packing this room will be both valuable and difficult.
This is a chance to prune my work over the last third of my life, clear out the branches that have grown across each other. Take out that large branch that flourished then died. Increase the circulation amongst the remaining branches so they have air, can breathe. Pruning gives renewed vigor to plants and I hope to achieve the same thing when I pack up these materials, those closest to my heart, leaving behind what I no longer need.
Lughnasa Lughnasa Moon
a headline I never thought I’d see, in the Denver Post: handmade bongs and marijuana laced brownies. Colorado here we come.
“DENVER — Marijuana joined roses and dahlias Friday in blue ribbon events at the nation’s first county fair to allow pot competitions.
…
Edible products did require tasting. A secret panel of judges sampled brownies and other treats earlier this month at an undisclosed location.
“At first the judges were eating them all, but by the end they were really feeling it, so they just tasted them and spit them out,” Cain said with a laugh. “We offered them cabs home.”
The winning brownie was made with walnuts and dark chocolate. Top prize was $20 and a blue ribbon…
“For the handmade bong contest, three industry insiders judged 17 entries for craftsmanship, creativity — and functionality.
“It has to be something special, something you’d want to use,” said judge Robert Folse, who works at a pot dispensary as a “budtender,” sort of a sommelier for marijuana.”
Summer Most Heat Moon
After dropping Mary off at the airport, I drove into Minneapolis, taking Lake Street from Hiawatha all the way to the Fuji Ya, then after the Fuji-ya Bento special, on three more blocks to the Highpoint Print Co-operative. Lake Street is alive, predominantly Latino from Hiawatha to the 35W overpass, then changing briefly to urban poverty and quickly picking up scale as it heads toward Uptown.
There was much al fresco dining, including a place I’d not seen before “Louie’s Wine Dive.” A slogan on the window said, “Where foodies meet winos.” That got a laugh. From me. Fuji Ya had outside dining but I sat inside, watching the people come and go, young mostly, hip with flowing skirts, sleeves of tattoos, body piercings, hip young haircuts, one guy with an inexplicable mustache that featured a left side Fu Manchu and a right side more mundane trim close to the face. He looked imbalanced, but maybe that was the point.
The energy all along Lake, but especially in the area around the Bryant Lake Bowl, Louie’s and the Highpoint was buzzing. Sex was in the air with short skirts, young men and women dressed in their best Friday night out and cool casual attire, looking at each other with the uh-oh what am I doing with him, her look so familiar from another life era.
Shiva, Aprhodite, Isis all out for a stroll, winking and nodding at the sound, the colors, the heat generated by persons trying to get to know each other, to bridge the chasm between one universe and another. The multiverse on the hoof.
In this period of my life I was of the city, not living in the city, rather part of it, a blood cell swimming in the arteries and veins of urban politics. Different faces, a different time, but the same groping, flailing, hoping.
Tonight was the first time Minneapolis felt really big city to me. A young man, skateboard under his arm, pressed his entry code. This was a metal and brick apartment building right on Lake Street, a block from the Bryant Lake Bowl, on the same block as Louie’s. His life was of Lake Street. It was his milieu.
I was a bit intoxicated by the energy, surfing it, the years shedding off my shoulders until I was 28, 30 and standing there, ready to dive in.
At the Highpoint opening I went first as this younger me, having bathed in the waters of eternal youth along Lake Street. I wanted to fall in love, to find a print I couldn’t imagine life without-a striking image that would hang on a Colorado wall and call back Minneapolis, this adult home of mine. I wanted to fall in love, but I couldn’t find a partner. The prints were interesting, some of them, but nothing reached out and made an effort to cross the divide into my space.
(Lucas The Elder Cranach: The Fountain of Youth)
When I realized I wasn’t finding that image, the years came back on me and I was tired, a week of work outside and inside, playing host and chauffeur, dog rangler. No, I was not young, nor did I want to be. What I wanted was to go home.
Driving out, away from Lake Street and Uptown, away from the Dionysian street, I made my way toward the exurbs, the place where Dionysus gives way to Apollo, to Minerva, an ordered, thoughtful, peaceful place. My study is the antithesis of Louie’s Wine Dive, neither foodie nor wino here.
But I like the opportunity to visit that time of heat, of searching and yearning. Some of its fire remains on board, even as I write this. It’s that dialectic between fertile youth and stable old that makes culture exciting.
Summer Most Heat Moon
Latin has begun to feel similar to Kate’s sewing. In her sewing she can work for a bit, accomplish a small part and still feel she’s made progress. Now, I can work for an hour or so at a time (about the limit for me) and move my whole project forward a few verses. At the same time, like Kate and her sewing, I reinforce my skills and reaffirm them, giving me a sense of mastery. The aim is to put many shorter sessions together to make a whole quilt, or an entire translated story.
More and more I’m feeling like I may be on my own by this fall. An exciting and fulfilling feeling.
(Apollo_and_Daphne, Antonio_del_Pollaiolo_)
Summer Summer Moon
Visiting old friends. Saturday I walked through quiet galleries at the MIA, luxuriating in quiet spaces filled with Chinese sculpture and painting, then over to the Japanese collection. There were, again, no visitors while I spent a moment with the fine ukiyo-e prints hanging now.
Then I found myself heading up to the third floor to the newly restored Blind Man’s Buff. I love the gallery, which also holds a Kandinsky, a Cezannesque Braque, some Matisse, an Ensor and this painting. Beckmann is a wonder to me each time I see a piece of his. Blind Man’s Buff is a major work, one of his triptychs and one of the best of those. Its central panel arouses in me a sense of the mythological, the grand forces at work just beyond the veil of our daily life, a life represented by the two panels in this painting.
Even in daily life though there are mysteries and one of them, a common yet profound one, is love. A blindfolded man stares across a crowded room toward a woman, kneeling. Are they lovers? What mythic forces have been set in motion by them? Or what did they start? What separates them? While daily life is a hurly-burly of figures and symbols mashed together, the gods jam. Even time seems different there. Look closely at the clock.
After this I went to the contemporary galleries and found gallery 374 an eye opener. It now has works previously shown at other spots in the museum like Shonibare’s “Sleep of Reason”, Kehinde Wiley’s “Santos Dumont-The Father of Aviation” and Nick Cave’s “Sound Suit.” Seeing these works together, especially with Zang Huan’s “Text” and the etchings by Glenn Ligo helped me get a feel for the Baroque nature of some contemporary art, a feel I might not have gotten without seeing these works in companionship.
Old friends. And new ones, too.
Summer Summer Moon
When the student is ready. This writing stuff is hard. At least for me. I’ve been collecting rejections (which, believe it or not, is an advance) and wondering whether it makes any sense to keep at it.
Then, I ran into Megan Hogan again. Megan, a red-headed sprite of a museum guard, and
I started exchanging personal stories about the artist’s life three years ago. She’s trained as a portrait and fine artist and works at her art when she’s not reminding two young ladies who came into the museum while I was talking with her that they could not bring their non-fat, decaf cinnamon mochas into the museum.
“Yes, when I just got out of art school, I went around to galleries, trying to get in and kept getting rejection after rejection.” Megan has a friendly, warm smile, but with this story she shook her head, bemused, not smiling.
“I know,” I said, “and it’s hard not to take it personally, after all they’re rejecting your work. Your work. I know you’re supposed to let it go and keep on, but I start to doubt my own judgment.”
“I know,” she said, “I know.”
Her lesson, the lesson I took from Megan on Saturday, was the old one, one I need to relearn quite often it seems. Keep working. Whether for an audience or not for an audience. Whether the owl comic she’s working on right now will be worth the four-color print run or not. Whether the people at the comic convention, when offered a chance to buy her comics, say, “Meh.” Keep working.
“In the end,” I said, “We have to please ourselves.” She smiled. My teacher. This day. Did I mention Megan is in her late twenties? Age is no barrier to self-awareness.