Category Archives: Art and Culture

Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality, Garden

A Wabi-Sabi Soul

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Summer                                                                             Moon of the First Harvests

The first yellows and browns began to show up in the gardens a couple of weeks ago.  One dicentra has turned completely.  A few hemerocallis have yellowed leaves.  The process of maturation leads on past fruiting bodies to the dying away either of the whole plant, counting on seeds to carry its generations forward, or of its above ground components stalks and leaves after sufficient energy has made its way into the root or tuber or corm or bulb, sufficient energy to ensure a new beginning in the next growing season.

In this sense you could say humans are more like annuals.  We die away, leave the field entire and only our seed lives on.  There are though those artists, poets, painters, playwrights, architects, writers, composers, musicians, engineers who store energy in their works, works which often disappear for a season or a century or even a millennia only to be unearthed in some latter day renaissance (rebirth, after all).

Not sure what it says about me but my sentiment, my inner compass points toward fall and winter, toward the longer nights and the shorter days, toward the cold as opposed to the heat.  A part of me, then, a strong and dominant part, sees the yellows and the browns not as grim harbingers but as the colors of the inner season only weeks away.

I don’t have quite the patience right now to explain, but I believe I have a wabi-sabi soul, a soul made content by the imperfect, the accidental, the broken and repaired, the used, the thing made real by touch and wear.  Fall and winter are the wabi-sabi seasons.  Their return gives me joy.

Art and Culture, Writing

Theater

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Summer                                                           Solstice Moon

Though slow to get there, we’ve now seen shows in the Wuertle thrust, Dowling studio and McGuire proscenium platforms at the new(er) Guthrie.  The Wuertle, of course, conserves the old Guthrie’s radical proscenium thrust stage which pushes the performing space out into the audience. (see picture)  This design the Guthrie shared with Tyron Guthrie’s other major theatrical location, Stratford, Ontario’s Festival Theatre.  It was, and is, a compromise between theatre in the round and the traditional proscenium stage, like the Guthrie’s McGuire.

The Dowling studio recapitulates the old lab theatre over on 1st avenue in the Warehouse district.  Even more so than the old lab and the thrust stage it puts performer(s) and audience in a very intimate space.  We saw the Iliad in the studio last month, a one person performance by Stephen Yoakam.

The proscenium presents a play up and far away from the audience, performances with a barrier to the audience, the “fourth wall.”  Each platform has its virtues and its drawbacks. The thrust and the lab try to break the fourth wall by enclosing the stage itself by seating, trying to place the audience almost in the action of the play.  And, if you attended any theater at the old Guthrie by the Walker Art Center, you may remember actors rushing up the aisles to get on stage, or actors at times stumbling off stage and apparently into the audience.

Live theater and live music share the ephemeral nature of their productions.  Finished, there is nothing that remains but a script or a score, neither alive as the performance just was.  Yet live music can now be reproduced in 5 or 7 speaker stereo in your home to a remarkable level of fidelity.  You cannot see the performers, no, nor can you hear some of the subtle harmonics (or so they tell me, but with only one good ear, I can no longer tell), but the experience is very close.

Not so with live theatre.  A play on television or filmed as a movie is a dead thing, a different event altogether from sitting with the actors, breathing the air they breathe and watching them, flesh and blood, as they transform themselves into something or someone else.

Art and Culture, Politics, US History

Clybourne Park

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Summer                                                                          Solstice Moon

Theater has been a passion of mine since early high school.  I acted in high school, college and seminary, quitting only when the time demands of theater exceeded what chunks I could give.  Not only did I act in college, but I had nearly enough credits for a theater minor, most of those credits in the history of theater.

Live performance, perhaps even more so in the age of high technology, has a sacred aspect, as it did in antiquity.  It bridges the solitary creative act in the playwright’s mind and yours with real people, not paint or notes or words on a page, but people who choose to imagine themselves into other people’s lives and feelings.

Tonight it was Bruce Norris’s edgy, often nasty Clybourne Park, a play willing to grasp the charged cable of race, in this case a cable stripped of its insulation, fully alive to our past and present predicament.  This play is worth reading, but even more it is worth seeing.  It is on the page minimalist, clever and spare; but on the stage it snakes like a downed power line, sparking here and there, totally dangerous.

( photo of the Guthrie performance)

If you believe race has settled down in our culture, see this play.  It will remind you that the road is long and the journey often bleak.

Art and Culture, Memories, Minnesota, Music

Destination Twin Cities

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Beltane                                                                               Solstice Moon

 

Butch Thompson is an elegant guy who can really get down.  “Two Minnesota artists — celebrated choreographer Sarah LaRose-Holland and jazz pianist Butch Thompson — have collaborated to present “Destination Twin Cities,” an impressionistic, time-traveling exploration of neighborhoods, landmarks, people and places that define urban life in Minnesota. Who were we, and who are we today?”

Butch played piano and one very soulful clarinet piece and Sarah LaRose-Holland’s dance troupe, Kinetic Evolutions, gave movement to a nostalgic look back at many Twin Cities’ notable places from the Lexington Restaurant to the Hennepin Avenue Strip.  The latter roughly located where Block E is now.  It was a place full of dives that provided steady work for many Minnesota jazz musicians.

Slides of Twin Cities past:  the Wabasha Caves, street cars, winter scenes in neighborhoods, the Stone Arch Bridge, the West Bank accompanied the music and dance projected on the brick wall of the former Guthrie Lab space, 700 N. 1st Street.

Butch’s music was sad, cheery, bouncy, wistful and cool.  The choreography had some fine moments, especially two two person sets, one ironic and intentionally so I imagine, paired a fine African-American dancer, Kasono Mawanza, with a superb Chinese dancer, Jenny Sung, moving through an evening at the haunt of the white power elite, the Lexington while the second featured a mother and daughter walking on Selby Avenue.  The daughter was 5 years old, maybe 6 and kept right up with the adult who could have been her real mother.  The Lexington piece was elegant and smooth, all careful sinuousity while the Selby Avenue work had improvisation and the kind of charm only a young performer can bring to the stage.

 

 

Aging, Art and Culture, Music, Third Phase

Technology Is My Friend

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Beltane                                                                      Early Growth Moon

Repeat after me:  technology is our friend.  Again.  Technology is our friend.

A month or so ago I bought a 300 CD carousel player.  This dates me in so many ways.  In the first place to enter memos (we’ll talk about those in a moment) you can use a keyboard, but it’s not a usb connection rather it is the old male/female pin receptor.  Fortunately, in my ever increasing museum of used computing equipment I had one.  Score!

What that means is that I input a memo about each disk using the keyboard rather than the dial and point method necessary without it.  That would have found me tossing the discs in the thing.  Anyhow so I decide to put a memo for each disc because otherwise how could I know what it is?

Well, that means developing a system.   We have a faux Dewey Decimal CD storage piece that has 4 rows across and 6 down of small wooden boxes that hold anywhere from 12 to 15 or so CD’s.  So we named the rows A, B, C, and D.  That means that each CD has to have a box number, so A1 puts the CD case in the upper left hand corner box.  We’re keeping the cases for the liner notes.  But, wait, there’s more.  Each CD has to have its own number in the box so the first CD is A11 then the name of the CD in very short hand.

Another wrinkle develops with multiple sets of which we have many.  For example, we have a 25 CD set of the complete works of Chopin.   In this case, we’re now into the 3rd box, the number was for one disc, A316D24.  The D24 meaning D24 in the Chopin set.  In order to enter this data two buttons on the carousel player have to be punched, then the text entered, then saved.  300 times.  I’m up to 60 right now and have already begun chewing on my foot so I can escape the trap.

Now to the charming reality that this dates me.  First of all, who buys CD’s anymore?  I mean physical objects that store your music and take up space in your house?  What?  Second, you mean you have to manually enter the information about the music?  Why can’t the file just put it up like it does on my I-phone, I-pad, I-pod?  That’s way easier.  Not nearly so much work.  In fact, no work at all.

That’s the frictionless world most digital natives inhabit.  Their idea of a record collection weighs about 5 ounces and has ear buds.  If you want to listen to at home, you just drop it in a receptacle that links your device to your home speaker system.  Easy peasy.

Kate and I, however, inhabit the stubbornly physical recent past.  Which means we were born before this millennium for sure and far back in the 20th century, too.  This is probably the last time we will try to organize our music because if we decide to do it again, I’ll flee to the 20th century in my time machine.  I carry it right here on my belt.

Art and Culture, Writing

Racing

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Beltane                                                                        Early Growth Moon

A holiday weekend, chilly and gray, some rain.  It has reminded me, all day today, of another Indy race day, sometime around 1957 or 1958 when it was rainy and cold on Monroe Street in Alexandria, Indiana.  Nobody else wanted to listen to the race, so I went outside, crawled in our 1957 Ford, turned the radio on and followed the race.  Nothing in my memory about who won, what the race was like, but I recall feeling perfect in the car, in the rain, alone with the commentary.

(like this except it had white detailing)

I’m beginning to think I may push myself too hard.  Ha, you say.  Finally.  Well, it hasn’t really occurred to me, but when I took that day last week and read poetry, it gave me a feeling of luxury, of relaxation.  When I mentioned this thought to Kate, she said, “Uh-huh.”  We both push ourselves, Kate and me, in different arenas of our life.  Kate wants to get practical tasks done:  laundry, weeding, cooking, paying the bills.  I want to get a book written, Ovid translated, art ingested, faith reimagined.

Here’s the interesting twist on this for me.  I want to get things done, too.  That is, words per day, verses per day, a painting or sculpture analyzed, a specific concept mastered–like the work I did on the numinous over last three weeks.  Or, writing this blog.  In this way, I have a trail of bread crumbs, I guess, a path that can show I’ve been up to something.

(Yue_Minjun-Execution)   [It occurred to me as I wrote this entry that execution has two starkly different meanings but that they might be related.]

Oddly, this does not include reading, except for very focused reading in service of a particular project.  Oh, I read plenty, at night, after the work day is done, but I don’t have time in my schedule for serious reading like the works on Ovid I’ve collected, or poetry, or that biography on Edward Hopper.  Strange, really, since I consider myself a reading partisan, working the trenches to keep the Philistines well away.

Somehow, I imagine, all this will result in a changed schedule for me, what it will look like I don’t know, although I’m going to keep the morning for writing.  That’s my good time.

Notice, however, as I just did, that this does not include the sabbath, a day of rest or a week of rest or a month of rest.  Our trip around South America had as one of its chief merits an enforced laziness, especially during our days at sea.  Watching the ocean go by.  I never sit around and watch the ocean go by.

Art and Culture, Holidays, Humanities, Myth and Story

An Ancient Memorial Day

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Beltane                                                                      Early Growth Moon

Once in a while.  Once in a very great while.  Tonight was one of the times.  An Iliad, a one person, Stephen Yoakam, long time Guthrie actor, show.  This was a play that distilled the Iliad’s core story, Achilles’ rage and its consequences, especially the death of Patroclus and Achilles killing of Hecto and Hector’s humiliation, then spun the story into contemporary cloth, going back and forth between the age of heroes and age of road rage.

In fact, the play compares Achilles’ rage to road rage, a visceral always with us ultimate anger that can transform men into killers.

And the story line with its compelling contemporary moments are good, but Yoakam was better.  He gave these words flesh.  In a bravura performance extending almost two hours Yoakam never leaves the stage, barely pauses in his dialogue with nothing but stagecraft to help him shift scenes, characters, times.  His body language and use of his arms were a masters class in non-verbal acting.

This was in the Dowling Studio, the replacement for the old Guthrie lab theater where Kate and I saw several good performances.  The Dowling space is even more intimate, fewer seats and closer to the stage.

Here though is what put this whole evening over the top.  It’s Memorial Day weekend.  In the age of heroes the hope of immortality lay in the words of the poet.  The  Iliad and the Odyssey are both Memorial Day poems for ancient warriors and their stories.  Both give testimony to the gritty horrors of war, describing with often gruesome detail, say, a spear entering below the jaw and piercing through the soft palate into the brain and to the remarkable men who lived and died in these wars.

 

Aging, Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality, Feelings, Health, Music, Woolly Mammoths

It Won’t Be Long Now

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Beltane                                                                        Early Growth Moon

A poignant and salient answer to how to live the third phase came from an 18 year old Minnesotan, Zach Sobiech, who died yesterday of bone cancer.  Not much of a conversationalist or a letter writer, Zach’s Mom told him he needed to do something, something that would let people know he was here and leave them memories of him.  Diagnosed with osteosarcoma when he was 14, the cancer did not prevent him from writing and singing songs of his own.

He became an internet viral celebrity with the song, Clouds, downloaded over 3 million times.

Those of us in the third phase understand the challenge Zach faced.  Death was no longer an abstraction, but a certain visitor.  As he says in this song, it won’t be long now.  Oh, we may have 20 years or 30 years, compared to his 4, but the link is the moment when you come to know this life ends.  For good and for ever.

(Alphonse Osbert – Les chants de la nuit.)

How did he respond?  He dug into the riches of his Self, shrugged off the self-pity and depression, and turned those feelings into art.  This is the best and healthiest way to greet the coming of the Sickle Bearer.  Find out who you are.  Find out what best expresses your journey, the ancientrail that has been, is, your life.  Then open up that expression, put it outside yourself for the rest of us to learn from, to cherish, to embrace.  Because it won’t be long now.

Art and Culture, Family

Arty Whirl

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Beltane                                                                        Early Growth Moon

Grandma and I got in the machine and went into the big city.  Where we ate dinner at the Gasthof on University, weiner schnitzel for both of us, a nod to our honeymoon late night dinner in Vienna, then we motored over to the Northrup King Building, one of several repurposed large building complexes in Northeast that house artists and galleries.  This is Art-a-Whirl weekend and all those buildings have open houses.

Cars and people and walking from gallery to gallery, studio to studio, talking with the artists, looking at the amazing range and skill levels represented.  I chose the Northrup-King building because it has three floors of artists in a long, L-shaped brick structure.  We only made it through the first floor and we saw many studios and galleries.

An impressive metal sculptor on the far northern end did small shoes to large table pieces ranging from the representational like the shoes to the very abstract.  He had a great shock of white hair and very neatly organized shelves of metal materials for his work.

At another stop I bought a small blue print, Ocean, that reminded me of the color field painters and Kate got a print of Jerry Garcia for Jon.  Mostly we looked, seeing this and that we liked, not buying, not really in the mood, though I did see a large ceramic piece, bees as the motif, that I would have purchased in flusher times.

An important part of this kind of jaunt for me is the stimulation, knowing others are out there giving their lives over to their imagination, seeing it come outside into works accessible to others.  Made me wonder what it would be like to have a building full of writers with people coming through looking at short stories and novels, maybe buying one, maybe not, talking about them with the writer.

Art and Culture, Politics

Went Fast

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Beltane                                                                      Early Growth Moon

Writing and revising in the a.m., translating in the afternoon.  A busy day.  About to be punctuated by a visit to the Northeast’s art gala, Art-a-Whirl.  Ironically we will visit the Northrup-King building, site of a long ago demonstration on behalf of the grainmillers union folks who worked in the plant as seed specialists.  Northrup-King got bought in a corporate raid by Sandoz at a time when pharmaeceutical companies were putting the farm back in pharma.  They were basically buying up seed patents.  Seed patents.  Think about that.  This was in the late 70’s.