Category Archives: Art and Culture

Art and Culture, Asia, Family, Garden

Camp Fire Girls

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Lughnasa                                     Waning Grandchildren Moon

Last night over edamame and potstickers I discussed gardening with a fellow docent who had just seen Ran.  We agreed it had been a peculiar gardening season with plants blooming two weeks to a month early.  We also agreed no one could care for our gardens like we do and produced examples to prove it.  Hers:  a $10 an hour weeder who took up Astilbe instead of the stinging nettles.  Mine:  ok, I didn’t have one since only Kate and I weed here.  August finds our gardening spirit on the wane, too, and we both look forward to the blessed onset of snow.  She plants no white in her garden because winter provides it.  Don’t have many occasions to discuss gardening with somebody else obsessed by it.  Fun.

Kate has really done a knockout job on the orchard.  We’ll have it in tip-top third growing season form before the end of August with mulched paths, new plants for the guilds and mulch on the mounds around the trees.

Finally back to resistance work and it feels good.  I need to get stronger, both for personal stability reasons and for ability to do the gardening tasks I want to do.  Bee keeping requires strength with full honey supers at 50 pounds and honey laden hive boxes heavier than that.

Got a tour together for the Camp Fire girls tomorrow.  We’re going to look at how artists have represented women and women artists:  Woman of La Mouth (20,000 years old), Lady Teshat (the mummy), a japanese dancers garment from the Noh theatre called a choken, a Japanese woodblock print showing beautiful women, the Lakota fancy dress, the MAEP’s gallery with women artists and finally, if we have time, the clay and wood gallery, all by women artists.  Should be fun, too.

Art and Culture, Humanities, Humor, Politics

Spotlight Turned Off

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Summer                                                    Waning Grandchildren Moon

Thank god, I’m done with the spotlight.  Please never again.  Interrupting people on their journey through the museum, a private journey done under their guidance, is intrusive, invasive.

I had two folks on the Anishinabe to Zapotec Tour, Carl and Carol.  When I said, I’ll bet you’ve got jokes on that over the years, Carl said, nope. We haven’t been together that long.  We wandered in the galleries looking at the kachina, the house screen, the Bella Coola frontlet, the transformation mask, the Nayarit house and the Valdivian owl.  I told them the story of turtle, loon, beaver and muskrat, the pointed out the turtle sign on the Lakota fancy dress.  It was a good tour, engaged and interested.

Spoke with Margaret afterward.  She got me up to date on Sierra Club work and sent me a quick note with a timeline for the legcom process.  I’m also to call CURA and Macalester seeking interns.

Finally got over to Big Brain comics and picked three issues of the Good Minnesotan, a comic done by an MIA guard and her husband. The guy behind the counter shaved his beard and looks like a slightly pudgy groucho marx.  A lot like a slightly pudgy groucho marx.

Art and Culture, Asia

Conversations About Art

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Summer                                    Waning Grandchildren Moon

The kids from Washington Technical College did not find this tour very interesting.  Not sure why, didn’t connect with them.  A few, yes, but there were wanderers, heading off to other objects.  The age range was wide, from 15 to 7 or 8.  That was part of it.  They perked up at the Han horse, the jade mountain (which I hadn’t planned to show them) and the Zhou and Shang bronze swords, spears.  Finally, I went with the kid who said he wanted to see samurai stuff and ended the tour in Japan.  Not a bad tour, not a great one.  Although, one of the women, whom I recognized from last year, said, “You gave us a great tour last year!”  Nice.

Wandered over to the new MCAD show and spent fifteen minutes or so talking with Aldo Moroni.  He’s an interesting, affable guy.  We have a shared interest in history and especially the classics.  The work under way at MCAD is set in fantasy mountains high above the earth, modeled after Chinese landscape paintings in the MIA collection.  I told him I’d just a tour of Chinese art so we talked a bit about Taoism.

Art and Culture, Asia, Family

He Lives

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Summer                                              Waxing Grandchildren Moon

By God.  I’m beginning to feel human, here in my own skin, awake.  No, not enlightenment, in fact, I don’t even think I want enlightenment, but recovered.  Feels pretty damn good thank you.

Had no takers on the Kachina spotlight.  I’m not a carnival barker for art.  When I go to a museum, I like to wander, reflect, not get pulled into a conversation by a stranger.  The tour, that’s something else.  People choose to go along, to have a companion who guides their experience.  I like that.

The Anishinabe to Zapotec tour though had 10 including two docents.  We had a lively and interesting conversation about the Kachina, the house screen, the Valdivian owl, and Chalchiuhtlicue.  We finished with the Lakota ceremonial dress and the Whiteman.

After the A to Z Roy Wolf brought two friends and Judy, his wife, to see the Matteo Ricci map.  We had a good conversation about it.  They all had Jesuit connections.

Back home tuckered out from 2+ hours on my feet.  Long nap and out to eat with my sweetie.  We sat next to a table of 40-50 somethings who were out on a date.  The table talk included a lot about the scumbags they’d left and the things they didn’t do:  no dancing, no dining out in public and not anything normal like hanging out at the mall.  Wish I’d had a tape recorder or a note pad.

Now I’m back with a few free days ahead, only a China tour coming up next week, a tour type I enjoy with a group, a Chinese language study class, I’ve done before.  Bee day looks like Sunday.

Kate gave Ray, the kid who mows our yard, a packet of comb honey and promised him a jar when we extract.  He smiled.

Art and Culture

The Butterfly Maiden

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Summer                                            Waxing Grandchildren Moon

Once again I have a spotlight on the Kachina, Butterfly Maiden, and an Anishinabe to Zapotec tour.  It went well last time and I hope I get some takers again today.  Roy Wolf may show up with friends to see the Matteo Ricci map.  It’s up until August 29th, then it moves to the James Ford Bell Museum at the University of Minnesota.

Still at about dull normal energy wise, but gaining.  Kate and I plan to attend a blue-grass concert at Andover Station tonight.  I want to use some of the time freed up from Latin’s intensity to do things with her.

Gotta get dressed.  Bye.

Art and Culture

Museum Work

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Summer                               Waxing Grandchildren Moon

In Hopi culture Ruth would now have a total of 8 kachina dolls, each in a place of honor and used to explain to her the symbolism of the Kachina personated by Hopi dancers during their 6 months residence on the mesas.  Gabe would not yet be included in a kiva, but that time would not be far off.  In these ways the Hopi faith tradition passed from parents to children.

I had four people at the kachina doll spotlight and two on my tour.  Plenty in my world, perhaps not in the museum’s.  Lance and his mom, Jan, went on the tour.  We started with the kachina, moved to the wonderful housescreen from a Tlingit clan house and stopped by the Olmec mask, the ball game clay figure and the Valdivian owl, a newby like the kachina and the housescreen.  From there we saw the Lakota woman’s fancy dress with its turtle motif and looked in general at the objects there, then ended with Whiteman’s wonderful modern piece.  The heart line idea, that a line connects your heart to your mind and that it’s shape reveals your ethical and personal development hit home.  Jan asked Lance how he thought his heartline was.  Profound.

Back home, tired and ready for a nap.

Art and Culture, Asia, Commentary on Religion, Family

OK. Here’s The Guy To Blame.

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Summer                            Waxing Grandchildren Moon

Ruth and Gabe have napped, like Grandpop and Granma.  This means they have considerably more energy.  Gabe covered a complete circuit of the patio to front door run, moving as fast as his stubby little legs and slightly forward leaning motor could take him.  I was in hot pursuit.  By hot I mean dew point that is absurd from a Minnesota perspective.  Gabe did not seem deterred.

Ruth and Grandma, in other news, had feathered boas and performed various short versions of 1920’s flapper era music.  The show moved upstairs only a moment ago.

Jon has the trailer attached to his car.  It will travel to Colorado and not return except under unusual circumstances.  He needs it for his remodeling and his fledgling custom ski business.  It’s absence frees up space in the third garage bay.  I know, I can’t believe we have three garage bays either.  If you come to our house from the west, it looks like we are pets of three internal combustion driven machines who have the big home.

Due to a spotlight event tomorrow and an America’s public tour immediately after, I’ve had to study while the grandkids are here.  This morning I read the material on the butterfly maiden kachina and this afternoon I read about Tlingit culture and house screens.  The Hopi faith tradition fascinated me as I learned more about it.  They have a tradition of peaceful living, living that consciously seeks a balance with the natural world and all living things.  The Tlingits have a similar perspective.

In listening to a set of lectures titled Religions of the Axial Age, I’ve learned that it may have been Zoroaster who pushed Western culture away from a natural, earth centered faith and toward a pantheon, adherence and propitiation of which had a direct correlation to eternal life.  Which was, at least according to this guy, also a Zoroastrian notion.  By developing the notion of a messiah, an end-times judge, and, along with it, the idea of an apocalypse, Zoroaster stuck us with the linear understanding of time.

(a tower of silence where zoroastrians exposed their dead to vultures and decay)

Give me the kachinas who come back from their home in the San Francisco Peaks for a six month period beginning around the winter solstice ready to help out.  Makes much more sense to me.

Art and Culture, Family

Public Art

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Summer                                                Waxing Grandchildren Moon

Ruth surprised me after I took a shower this morning.  She talked to me while I got ready to go into the MIA.  I have psoriasis on my knees.  She saw it, and asked what it was.  I told her it was a disease.  “You’re gonna die!” she said.  “Yep.” I said, “But not from this.”  “You’re silly, Ruth.”  “So are you Grandpop!”  We agreed we were both silly.

After that unusual morning conversation, I headed into the MIA for Glenn Keitel’s presentation about public art.  He talked about the process of conceiving and selling the book, presenting a book proposal and having the whole process revised after Adventure Press of Cambridge, Minnesota bought it.

(Theodore Wirth Park)

He has a website, www.scenefromthesidewalk.com, which has not gone live yet, but it will have printable tours of various public art installations in both Minneapolis and St. Paul.  Glenn has a grandfatherly presence and showed in a keen interest in public art that will appeal to children.

The Summer Camp notion added a few more names to the roster and made its first foray into the official side of the MIA with the use of the Friend’s Community Room.

Afterward a few of us ate lunch with Glenn.  Tom Byfield bought Glenn and me lunch.  Thanks again, Tom.

Home.  Nap.  Up. Workout.  The usual.

Art and Culture

To the City and Back Again

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Summer                                      Waning Strawberry Moon

Back from the museum.  A quiet Thursday.  The women from Salem Covenant said they found the tour interesting.  We didn’t get to all the Chinese material because I took too long on the Matteo Ricci.  There is   so much to talk about.

It was nice to get back to the museum after a hiatus.

Still feeling a little punk so I’m off for a nap.

Art and Culture, Bees

From Bee Hives to Art Galleries

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Summer                                            Waning Strawberry Moon

Today I’m back to the world of art.  The bees will work on now until next week without me.  Probably what they prefer.

A tour today on my new tour day, Thursday.  I have a group from Salem Covenant Church.  They wanted to see the Matteo Ricci map and the Old Testament prints.  Based on that I decided to take them on a tour of art at the time of Matteo Ricci and the late Ming dynasty.

We will see a Ming dynasty painting, Towering Mountains and Fantastic Waterfalls, the Wu family reception hall and then move upstairs to the Old Testament prints.  We’ll finish with Morales’ Man of Sorrows and Honthorst’s Denial of St. Peter.  The late Ming dynasty coincided with the Counter-Reformation and Reformation era in Europe.

Later on, Sheepshead.

Oh.  My ear.  Much better this am.  Thanks.