Category Archives: Art and Culture

Art and Culture, Garden

An Appetite for Nutrient Fluid (not an alien)

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56  bar steady 30.05 4mph N dew-point 43  Beltane, sunny and cool

                          Waning Gibbous Hare Moons 

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” – Leonardo da Vinci

Less is more -always; and explore constantly.  Mario Odegard, Viking Explorer and Woolly Mammoth

Up earlier again this morning to take advantage of the cool temps.  Amended the second tier bed close to the house where we have had problem after problem with growing things.  This time I added two bags composted manure and a cubic foot or so of sphagnum moss. 

It’s too shady for sun plants and too sunny for shade plants.  Gotta find something that swings both ways and can tolerate our winters. 

Meanwhile on the hydroponic front my tomato plant started from an heirloom seed now reaches close to the ceiling.  It’s a good 2.5 feet tall, headed toward its interior limitation.  It has several small yellow flowers, but no fruit as yet.  Yes, the tomato is a fruit, not a vegetable.  The astonishing thing is its appetite for nutrient fluid.  It’s going through about a gallon every four to five days.  When the fruit begins developing, I imagine its appetite will increase again.  The lettuce produces enough leaves every few days for a salad a meal for lunch and dinner.  Both the lettuce and the tomato plant are the products of one seed germinating, coming to maturity and growing its edible product.

Outside, however, if we were pioneers and our lives depended on the crop, I’d be seeking part time employment.  To pay for food next winter.  The cucumbers and morning glories I grew inside so well atrophied and died outside.  The three tomato plants, on the other hand, have done fine outside.  After puzzling over the difference for a week, it came to me this morning.  The tomato plants were in soil in pressed peat moss containers.  They had a much larger soil contained root system.   The morning glories and the cucumber were in smaller, compressed soil seed starting clumps.  That meant their root system was much more exposed, having grown in the nutrient solution rather than soil. 

The take away for me is this:  if I’m going to transplant it outside, start it in a larger ground ready pot with potting soil.  It’s a learning curve.

On the other hand, we do finally have several germinated seeds in the garden, too.  The Country Gentleman corn has begun its skyward journey as have the Ireland Annie, Dragon’s Tongue and another one I can’t recall.  We also have beets, carrots, peppers and onions, lots of onions, doing well.  We need a stretch of hot weather to get these puppies on their way.  So far they’ve been sluggards.

Though I’m signed out now for the summer, I’m headed into the art museum today for a noon tour.  Carol Wedin, a fellow docent who prefers Asian tours, called me, sick with a cold and asked me for help.  Sure.  She is a wonderful botanical illustrator/artist.

Kate’s off getting her nails done; Lois is here cleaning house and I’ve got to get in the shower to get ready for my tour.  Bye for now.

Art and Culture, Travel

A Muse Fiction

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50  bar rises 29.74  1mph NNW  dew-point 29  Beltane

                          Full Hare Moon

A lot of people considered my piece in the Muse a non-fiction account of a real tour.  Hmmm.  Wonder what I could have done to have made it a bit more obvious as fiction?  It’s nice to get reactions to it anyhow.  Allison did a creative job with the Muse this year, a lot of new and different, including the many mini-robes for a Weber send-off.   Thanks to her for publishing Inspired.

Jon doesn’t need help with the garden.  By the time the bris happens it will be all planted, but I will go out and help him level the yard for sod.

The trip down to Alabama will happen in mid-June, so June stacks up as a heavy travel month.  All of it in my little red Celica with 240,000 miles, if it holds together.  The last long trip in it required a day and a night in Pueblo, Colorado to fix an electrical hiccup that knocked out power while I drove along on the freeway toward Denver.  That was fun.

I can only guess, but the full hare moon probably got its name from visible bunnies in gardens, illuminated by a full late May, early June moon. 

Haven’t heard from Mark and Mary in a while.  They both have busy lives at this particular point in time.

Art and Culture, Friends, Woolly Mammoths

Anne Looked Grand

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43  bar steep rise 29.74  1mph NW  dew-point 41  Beltane

                                 Full Hare Moon

Whoa.   More socializing today than I get in a normal month.  AM Eric Kjerlling, curator of Oceanic art at the Met, gave an information packed lecture on this vast geographic region and its varied art forms.  He was funny, knowledgeable and deep.  An excellent introduction that I will want to revisit if I get the Asmat special exhibition year.  It was my number 2 choice after William Holman Hunt and the Pre-Raphaelites.  The Pre-Raphaelites are among my favorites in Western art and I hope I get that exhibition.

Saw several folks at the coffee on break during the lecture, but then retired to St. Paul, 1394 Lincoln, for a wonderful couple of hours seeing others from our docent class.  Careen Heggard’s house is appointed by an architect, Careen, and wonderfully casual  and elegant at the same time.  She has a small cottage on the grounds, a former gardner’s residence, which she uses a cabin to which she does not have to drive, tea-house, escape.  Looks an ohana dwelling like we see in Hawai’i.

Morry, Joy and I stood out in the rain by the fire discussing literature.  Joy had a great line, one I hadn’t heard before, “Oh, that.  It’s just my stigmata acting up.”

Anne Grand was there and looked great.  She also seemed sharp.  Quite a relief.  I had worried about her.  Bill Bomash showed up, too, on crutches and looking wan.  I had to leave just as he came so I didn’t get a chance to chat.

Home for a nap at 2:30.  The morning and the lunch tired me out, as socializing tends to do.  I got up from my nap, went out in the rain, dug siberian iris, bearded iris and hemerocallis for Yin.  Scott brought three big bags of  hosta.  I felt like a piker.  I assured him there were more plants.

Woolly meeting at Tom’s.  On mastery.  Ode was home and it was great to see  him.  His report on the exhibit he did for UNESCO, sex ed for Thai teens, inspired me.  The meeting was a good one, deep and funny.  More later.  Paul and Charlie H. couldn’t make it.  More on the content tomorrow.

Art and Culture, Garden, Writing

More Homes for the Small and Furry

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51  bar steady  29.75 3mph N dew-point 31  Beltane, Sunny and cool

                                    Full Hare Moon 

“I am sufficiently proud of my knowing something to be modest about my not knowing everything.” – Vladimir Nabokov

Amen to that.

Another cool day.  Great gardening weather, not so great growing weather.  The cool temps have  kept germination slow, my carrots have not emerged at all and only a few stray beet and lettuce seeds have begun to push through, at least at close of growing day yesterday. 

We will see today.  Sometimes seeds all sprout at once, sometimes not at all.  Germination percentages vary with weather, timing of planting, quality of seed and amount of moisture.  We’ll get something.  We do not watch the soil with the same eagerness as pioneers, for example, whose lives may have depended on germination.  I can only imagine that then the progress of the seed received an attention bordering on pleading and prayer.

We have the grandkids playhouse in the truck, three very large boxes of a put-it-together by the numbers building we bought at Costco.  Today’s task is to unload it and cover it with a tarp until we can level the area now cleared by the Steve and Aimee’s assistance yesterday.  After that we move brush onto yet more homes for the small and furry.  Not sure what after that.

I’m signing out for the summer from the MIA.   In September 2006 I began the second year of the docent education process.  In summer 2007 I signed up for the Made in Scandinavia painting exhibition.  After labor day the school year touring got going.  I had a month off in February for Hawai’i, but other than nothing longer than a week since 2006.  It’s time for a break.  Besides, I need to get back to work on that novel.  And a children’s book or two, too.

Art and Culture, Family

Sayonara, Weber Collection

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79!  bar steep fall  29.62 5mph WSW dewpoint 35  Beltane, sunny

                       Waxing Gibbous Hare Moon

The final Weber tours.  A Japanese language class from Kennedy HS in Bloomington and a small group of stunned ladies of a certain age.  Neither tour was a flop, neither an engaging and vital time.  The Kennedy group had a few kids that were present the whole way, interest.  One young lady took out a notebook and started writing.  The second seemed timid, afraid to respond to inquiry, interested but reticent. 

At the end a woman told me she’d seen a Bhutan exhibit in Honolulu.  “The objects came with five Buddhist monks.  They came to bless the statues with water each morning.  Since in Buhtan, they received this sprinkling directly, but were in cases like this,”  she indicated the Nara Buddha at the beginning of the show, “they had, oh, I don’t know, a tupperware container,”  she spread her hands out and formed a large sloppy rectangle, “It had water.  Then they had a mirror.  They got the objects reflection in the mirror and sprinkled that.”

Sayonara, Weber collection and bon voyage.

I have a long stretch of days with little planned.  No docent classes, no tours, no preaching, no social engagements.  The right time to garden and to write.

Jon called while I was writing this.  They want to have the bris on June 2nd or 3rd.  Could I come?  I’m there.  I’m excited to see Gabe and Ruth, to see Jon’s garden and Jen with her new brood.

On to the treadmill.  I try not to remember this, but apparently in Victorian jails, prisoner powered treadmills were a form of human as donkey labor.  I’m not sure but that may be where the term comes from in the first place.

Art and Culture, Cinema and Television

Deerslayer

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56  bar steady 29.85  9mph N dewpoint 31  Beltane  sunny

               First Quarter of the Hare Moon

3 hours at the museum today answering questions, instigating conversations about Chinese bronzes.  It was a fun time with children and adults, variously interested.  I set out at the beginning, before people started showing up, to learn the vessel shapes.  I looked at the shape, memorized the name and then scanned the collection for examples.  I kept that up until I’d been through all the vessel shapes.  While doing it, it struck me that it would be useful to put these shapes and their names into SuperMemo.  A perfect fit.

I did go through the Supermemo cycle this morning while waiting for the steamroom to heat up.  It will take awhile to become facile with it, but once I do, it will become an important part of my learning environment.

Finished Last of the Mohicans.  I love costume dramas, especially early American and this one hits the bullseye on all fronts.  It has stimulated me to order the whole Deerslayer series, five novels. 

Art and Culture, Politics

He Who Dies with the Most Toys Wins?

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62  bar falls 29.85  3mph NNW dewpoint 29 Beltane

             Waxing Crescent of the Hare Moon 

“The capitalist bookkeepers’ theoretician was German sociologist Max Weber, whose 1910 book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism argued that the key feature of capitalism was that making money becomes ‘a calling’, an end in itself. The bourgeois worked for the sake of work, denying himself the fruits of his labour. The pre-modern man would have been flummoxed by this, says Weber: what is the point of this, ‘to sink into the grave weighed down with a great material load of money and goods’? ”  from an article in Spiked

I love this quote from Weber.  What is, after all, the point of sinking into the grave weighed down with a great material load of money and goods?  None, as far I can see.

I disagree with Weber though about the state of pre-modern people.  Many, many cultures not only thought this was a good thing, but literally did it. Those wealthy or high born enough took servants, food, furniture, money, painting, all manner of things to the grave.

Two tours today.  Winnipeg kids on a band tour.  They had been to the Mall of America and Bubblegum, a restaurant there and had lots of other places to visit.  They didn’t think the Days Inn where they were staying were showing them very good hospitality, though they did admit that having that many teenagers in one place created a lot of ruckus.  This was a bright, attentive and thoughtful group.  We saw the installation with the children’s photos, Frank, Magritte, Van Gogh and Goya.  They were talkative and had many ideas.

The Weber tour had three people, a couple and Stacy Pydych.  Stacy had to leave early, but the couple stayed on for the whole tour.  He had been to Japan when he was 24 years old and a serviceman.  They, too, were attentive and talkative.  We saw most of the exhibit because I skipped part of my usual tour in teaware and Tale of Genji.  They thought I was a professor of Japanese history.  I assured them the museum taught us what we needed to know.

Got a thank-you card today from Robbinsdale Japanese language students.  The teacher wrote a nice note and each kid signed it and some offered comments.  Amazing, when you consider these are high school students.

Art and Culture, Garden

I Am Still Learning

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52  bar rises 29.91 6mph dewpoint 33 Beltane

           Waxing Crescent of the Hare Moon

Short note.  Checked on the hydroponic grown tomato plants after their first night outside in mother earth.  They look ok, though the first one I transplanted might be a little droopy.  When I moved it out of the pot filled with lava pellets, I sheared off the long root system below the pot.  On the other two I used a different method and maintained the root structure intact.  The better way, I learned.

Hate missing the cool morning for work outside, though I have two tours today that should be fun.  A group from Winnipeg for a highlights tour and another Weber public tour.  Gotta be off for those.

Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality, GeekWorld

Eat a Peach, Live Forever

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75  bar falls 29.75 1mph WSW dewpoint 41  Beltane

                      New Moon (Hare Moon)

I chose the English medieval name for the moon this month because of a wonderful incense burner in the Weber Collection.  It is a bronze bunny, eyes lifted toward the moon, ears erect.  There are holes where the ears meet the head and at the mouth.  The label copy says this rabbit watches the moon to see her sister, a white rabbit, who, according to Taoist thought, lives on the moon.  There she brews up an elixir of immortality. 

This focus on immortality is typical of religious Taoism, not philosophical.  My interest is in the latter.  Religious Taoism grew from the intersection I mentioned a few posts ago between Buddhism and Taoism.  Going in the Buddhist direction one outcome of this convergence created Chan Buddhism (Zen in Japan).  Going in the Taoist direction Taoists began to create anthropomorphic gods in emulation of the Mahayana form of Buddhism that came into China.  Mahayana picked up deities and demons and guardians from the Hindu and Bon (Tibetan native religion) religious pantheons.   

The focus on immortality occurred at some point along the way, though I’m not sure when since I have not studied religious Taoism.  Another way to gain immortality involved a peach tree that bloomed once every 3,000 years.  If you were around when it bloomed and ate a peach, presto Immortalito!  I’ve hunted for places to by a 2,999 year old tree, but so far no joy.

Our generator is online and ready to rock.  Jim, the service guy who explained it all to us, said, “Now you’ll never have another outage.”  Sounds about right.  But, at least we’re ready if it  happens.

Art and Culture

One Psychiatrist Says to Another

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61 bar steep fall 29.73  6mph WSW dewpoint 33 Spring

                Last Quarter Moon of Growing

Some leaf curling and cupping on my lettuce and tomato.  Not sure if it’s a problem or not.  I can’t find any organisms.  No sign of mildew, virus, aphid, biting insects.  Still, it doesn’t look quite right to me.  Time will tell.

Fed the dogs at 11:00AM and took off for the Walker to talk to Stefan.  He asked me to edit and comment on his poems. 

I got there early and wandered through the Suburbs exhibit and the Richard Prince exhibit.  I’m not sure about Prince, as I know many others are not, but he has some funny jokes. 

Two psychiatrists are at a bar together.  One psychiatrist says to the other, “I had dinner with my mother last night and I had a Freudian slip.”  The other psychiatrist raised an eyebrow.  “I said, ‘You ruined my life you fucking bitch!”

Also, “You know what it means when you come home to a warm, loving embrace?  It means you’re in the wrong house.”

These are on monochrome backgrounds, sort of pop artish.  Most of the other re-purposed photographs show an interesting angle on American culture.  I can imagine a curatorial meeting where having Richard Prince and the Suburban show together would add irony, creative tension.  I’m not so sure. I found the suburban show more provocative than the Prince.  It has an original take on a widely experienced phenomenon.  Prince recycles material from our magazines, our popular culture, but his work seems more cool, distant.  The suburban exhibition is lively, engaged with the subject either ironically or in a non-judgmental way.

Stefan and I met in Gallery 8, the first place aside from United Theological Seminary I saw when I first came to the Twin Cities over 38 years ago.  Oddly, I had lunch with Lonnie, his wife, there many times when she and I used to keep up. 

We talked about his poetry.  I took a slash and burn approach to editing this batch.  “I’m trying to find the line here, Stefan.  Like skiing.  I cut out everything that didn’t get me down the hill fast.”  I told him that was an idiosyncratic method and that he could do whatever he wanted with the feedback.  He gave me a few more so I guess it wasn’t too bad for him.