Category Archives: Art and Culture

Art and Culture, Great Work, Weather +Climate

And the Soothsayers Predicted Snow

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55  bar falls 29.79 0mph SE dewpoint 54  Spring   light rain

                Waning Gibbous Moon of Growing

And the soothsayers predicted Snow.  Oh, no.  Really, not a big deal.  Slush is more likely.  The precipitation now is all good.  As the weather continues (generally) to warm, the combination of rising soil temperatures and moisture puts plant life on the quick track up.

Randy, from Randy’s plumbing, called.  He will come out Friday am to install the gas piping to the generator.  Center Point will come out on Tuesday afternoon to give us the bigger meter necessary to provide adequate gas to the generator when it works.  Soon we will have protection against power outages.  One more block for the retirement security perimeter.

Membership in Permaculture in a Cold Climate is another one.  As we make the transition here to more and more home grown produce and hopefully some home captured energy, we will reduce our need to leave the property for grocery trips.  All this moves us toward a smaller and smaller carbon footprint. Although, I have to admit, the steam room probably eats up more than we’ll balance for awhile.  Gotta figure that out one of these days.  When we get that Prius two years from now, our balance sheet will look better.

Allison has asked me to consider a short article on astronomy for the summer Muse.  She wants me to focus on the moon since there’s enough written about sun cults. (her language)  Made a quick survey of objects in the MIA collection.  If you thrown in those with stars, there are over 100 objects that have either a moon or star connection.  Finding a good 8 or 10 for a Moon and Stars tour would be easy.  This plays to an interest I developed in archaeoastronomy while I belonged to the Minnesota Astronomical Society.  We’ll see what she wants.  More later.

Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality

A Vocabulary for This Age

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69  bar steady 30.11 2mph SSE dewpoint 35 Spring

                Waning Gibbous Moon of Growing

On the way home from taking Kate to the airport I listened to an NPR interview with choreographer/dancer Patricia Brown.  Her company dances Friday at Northrup and she has some kind of an exhibition at the Walker.

Here’s the takeaway for me.  She is 72+.  A newspaper announced she was about to retire.  She said, no, I haven’t said that.  Instead, she said she was “…looking for a vocabulary for my body at this age.  When I find it, I will perform again.”  This is a great strategy for aging.  We do not look at our deficits, rather, we assess our capabilities and design a vocabulary that uses them, then we get on with our life.

Art and Culture, Our Land and Home

A Failure of American Education

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46  bar rises 30.08 0mph N dewpoint 32 Spring

            Waxing Gibbous Moon of Growing

“There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.” – George Santayana

Santayana liked football, but only practice.  While at Harvard, he attended practice faithfully, but never went to a game.  His philosophical wisdom has a firm place in American letters though he retained his Spanish citizenship until his death.  Here’s a sample of his poetry:                    

I give back to the earth what the earth gave,
All to the furrow, nothing to the grave.
The candle’s out, the spirit’s vigil spent;
Sight may not follow where the vision went.             

As Americans we too often forget our own poets, philosophers and people of letters.  We scan back over the literary and artistic output of Western civilization to find exemplars.  If we’re truly catholic, we might even include Asia, but how many among us know Santayana?  Dewey?  James?  Emerson?  Thoreau?  How many have read, say, Moby Dick?  Whitman?  Emily Dickinson?  Even Frost and Sandburg beyond their iconic poems?  Willa Cather?  Have we heard of Charles Hartshorne?  How about Ambrose Bierce?  Wallace Stevens?  John Dos Passos? Sherwood Anderson? American has produced great artists like Pollock, the Hudson River School painters, John Singer-Sargent and Whistler, but again who knows them?  Only a few.

This is a failure of American education and of our willingness to learn our own heritage.  This is not trivial.  A people who do not know where they come from, as Santayana famously said, are doomed to repeat the same mistakes. 

I will add a brief bio here from time to time of more American persons of belles lettres.  Our future depends upon us becoming more than casually acquainted with them.

Art and Culture, Garden, Great Work, Weather +Climate

The Hydroponics Are On

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34  bar rises 29.50 3mph NNW dewpoint 31  Spring

               First Quarter Moon of Growing

The calendar says spring; the snow says not yet.  It’s all moisture, though, and if it doesn’t run away to rivers and streams, some of this goes to recharge ground water and aquifers.  A good thing whether it comes chilled or just wet.

Last night it looked the drive in to the MIA this morning would be a nightmare.  Predictions of 1 foot snow depths and high winds could have lead to blizzard conditions.  The temperatures never dropped far enough.  So, instead of a foot of snow we got about 3 inches of slush, suitable for snow cones if not so oil impregnated.  The drive in was uneventful.

Sachei Makabe brought her kids from Robbinsdale.  Marilyn Smith and I divided them up and took them through Weber.  Each one of the Japanese language classes I’ve taken through have been attentive, observant and interested.  Can’t ask for more than that.  The diversity in the classes surprise me.  There seem to be far more Asian, Latino and African American students than Caucasian.  This speaks well for the schools and the students but only reinforces the dismal record us white folks have with learning a second language.  I’m one of those who never learned.  Shame on me.

Came home.  Kate had a great lunch made with fish, green beans and acorn squash.  I added a salad. 

After the nap I got out the books and handouts for the hydroponics and got started.  The meter I got a couple of weeks ago I handed over to Kate because it required precision and a chemistry background, neither one of which characterizes me.  It will help us quickly diagnose problems and repair them.  It measures ph, temperature and conductivity.  All of these measures have to do with the uptake of nutrients, though I don’t understand the relationships by any means at this point.

The lettuce seedlings that I started a few weeks ago have started to push roots through the rock wool medium.  This signals the time to transplant them to the hydroponics.  Each planter in the smaller hydroponic system (We have two.) has round lava rocks which hold moisture, but do not interfere with the plants root system reaching the nutrient bath in the reservoir below the planters.  It took 3 gallons of nutrient solution to fill the reservoir to the 2 1/2″ depth recommended.

The nutrient goes into the reservoir through the planters.  This charges the lava rocks.  Then I got a pair of forceps (Adson’s, Kate says.) and plucked the rock well medium out of the seedling beds one at a time.  With a soup ladel I scooped lava rocks out and let them sit in the left over nutrient solution while I positioned the small cube of rock wool and its single lettuce plant.  When I had it where I wanted, one per planter, I scooped the lava rocks around the cube.  Planted.  It’s a strange process compared to gardening directly in mother earth, but it’s fun, too.

After the nutrient solution was in the reservoir, a plastic tub in essence, I plugged the pump into the black tubing that leads inside the reservoir to a plastic tube with two airstones.  Airstones are permeable and the bubbling of oxygen through them creates a nutrient rich mist that reaches the bottom of the planters.  The roots of the lettuce seedlings will head down, through the lava rock to the mist.

With the small pump sighing the only thing left was to switch on the Halide light.  It’s a big thing, 250 watts, with a ballast that feels like a large rock  in weight.  It now glows about 22 inches above the seedlings.   The distance is necessary while the seedlings are still  young and fragile.  After they become well rooted and mature, I’ll move the lamp down to 6 to 12 inches above them.  It will be on roughly 16 hours a day.

We’ve begun.

Art and Culture

Deepening

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37  bar steep rise 29.91 4mph N dewpont 30 Spring

                   New Moon (Growing)

Amanda (MIA staff) interviewed me today for a promotional video for the museum.  In the process I met a videographer who has full time employment the museum doing “random assignments” that museum staff create.  Amanda asked for a one-word summary of my experience with the museum.  Took me a while, but I came up with deepening.  She also asked me to reflect on how the guide and docent program had changed my perspective on the museum.  “I’ve gone from voyeur to participant.” 

How had my view of art changed?  “I see art on two levels (at least):  spiritual and historical.  The spiritual aspect involves responding to the aesthetic choices made by the artist.  One of the fun things about the MIA is that as an encyclopedic museum, I get an opportunity to experience aesthetic choices from a vast range of human history.  That aspect remains much the same, though I’ve had more time with the objects which does deepen the experience.”

“I’ve always loved history, but now I can add the aesthetic dimension to my historical knowledge.  In this sense my view has changed quite a bit as I’ve added in art historical approaches.”

“The biggest impact overall, though, has been an opportunity to deepen my knowledge of Asian art.  This opportunity has, in turn, led to an outside the museum reading in more and more Asian history.  I’ve gotten more interested in Taoism, Confucianism and Shintoism.”

Interesting session.  Don’t know whether they’ll use much of mine or not.  Several people agreed to the interviews.

Art and Culture, Friends, General

Bloggers Need Union?

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51 bar steady 29.68 2mph SSE dewpoint 36 Spring

                    New Moon (Growing)

Don’t know whether you caught the article in this morning’s paper about bloggers.  It seems bloggers are the new cottage industry, working at home at piece rate, grinding out post after post after post in a grueling 24-news cycle that, this article claims, often leaves little time for sleep or food.  In fact, the premise of the article was that there might be a new cause of early death.  Blogging.  Yikes!

Here I am, doing two to three posts a day most days, eating and sleeping and exercising, plus living a life.  Not to mention that I blog for free.  In fact, I pay for the privilege since Kate and I rent webspace from the nice folks at 1&1 Internet.  There’s also that 6.99 a year for the domain name, ancientrails.com.  OK, the price is cheap, especially for what we get, but still.  This article said some people make as little as $10 a post.  As little.  I could pay my entire internet overhead with 3 posts, maybe 4.

Oh, well.  If something’s worth doing, it’s worth doing cheaply. 

This is more of a point than I make it sound.  The garden.  My novels and short stories to date.  Touring at the Art Institute.  None of it pays a dime, at least so far.  Yes, I did make $80.00 last year doing tours after hours at the MIA, but that hardly counts.

None of this discourages me, but it does make me wonder if I could find a nice patron who’d like to hype ancientrails and pay me, too.  Wouldn’t turn it down.  Unless it interfered with my editorial prerogative, of course.

Paul Douglas, who mentioned this website in a recent Star-Tribune weather column, got released from WCCO.  Several people wrote him notes.   He deserves it.  He’s a creative guy and a Minnesotan through and through.  Doesn’t sound like he’s gonna line up for unemployment either.

Groceries this AM, then making CNS (Jewish penicillin) for my ailing docent colleague, Bill Bomash.  He’s the guy who broke his femur in five places.  The class will provide a few meals for him and his wife over the next few weeks.

Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality

Doing Those Things I Would Not Do And Vice Versa

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58  bar steep fall 29.69 1mph S dewpoint 34 Spring

    Waning Crescent Moon of Winds

“Anger, if not restrained, is frequently more hurtful to us than the injury that provokes it.” – Lucius Annaeus Seneca

I’ve had two instances of this this week and I seem to have trouble learning the lesson.  On Wednesday AM Heather, who manages the corral in the museum’s lobby, demanded my presence and Grace Googins.  We were needed immediately, at 9:50 AM, to greet our 10:00 tours.  When we showed up a bit later than she liked, she was rude and insistent that “a memo had gone out.”  Later, I confronted her, told her I did not like her attitude.  She had an attitude and her facts were wrong.  Our tour group, it turned out, didn’t show up until 10:10 AM.  She apologized later, but I was still angry.  My reaction to her injured me, a lesson I recognize from years of being angry at my father.  Still, not a lesson I’ve learned.  Such confrontations weigh on me.  I need to learn a new style.

This morning I had a chance to indicate I’d learned a lesson.  Michelle Byfield-Stead was the lead docent for a tour I had agreed to do as a sub for Careen Heegard.  This was the third time I had Michelle as a lead docent.  Each time she has called at the last minute, last night it was late in the evening, and had this excuse or another.  I have never had a tour with her where she was prompt.  This is disrespectful and downright annoying.

So, I could have gone in this morning and assertively explained to her my problem.  Instead, I only saw her in a group and I was rude.  Again, not a positive response.  I was downright passive aggressive.  Geez.  I know better than this, but somehow, every once in a while, especially if I’m really irked, I act out.  Not always, but sometimes. 

Still niggling at me even now.  Sigh.   I expect better of myself, but like Paul, find myself doing those I would not do and not doing those things I would.

Art and Culture, World History

Something Famous, That They Might See in Books

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57  bar steep fall 29.82 3mph SSW Dewpoint 31 Spring

           Waning Crescent Moon of Winds

A highlights tour today with kids from Hudson.  We saw Frank, the Chuck Close portrait, then the Promenade of Euclid by Magritte.  After that the teacher wanted to see “something famous, that they might see in books.”  That’s ok, so I took them to see Van Gogh’s Olive Trees, Goya’s Dr. Arrieta and Rembrandt’s Lucretia.  They had a theme of westward expansion underway in class so I then took them over to the Minnesota gallery and we looked at first, the long rifles, then the painting of Ft. Snelling with the Lakota camped on the opposite shore of the Minnesota River.  The kids were there, engaged.  Fun.

On the way down and back I’ve continued listening to From Yao to Mao, the history of China.  I’m now on disc 17 of 18 and this is my second time through the series.  Mao has just begun to push for the peasant community in China as the vanguard of the revolution, replacing the urban worker, the industrial proletariat, whose communist members had been ousted in raids by the Nationalist Party and the tongs.  This will result in the long march and the eventual attrition of Mao’s forces by the thousands.  In this campaign Mao will create the modern guerilla war, sometimes called 4th generation warfare.

Art and Culture

Fireman’s Robes and an Ugly Bureaucrat

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42  bar falls 2mph SSE dewpoint 26 Spring

          Waning Crescent Moon of Winds

Two tours today, both Weber, but very different.  The first was a Shakopee Japanese language group who had some very sharp kids.  They were with Hotei, the Moon, the calligraphy, the tea ceremony, Genji, the Bull and the fireman’s robes.  The second group was from a city recreational center.  There were 11 kids.  They started out a bit disinterested, but I began with Shokei, the ugly man denied a job as a Chinese bureaucrat after passing the exam.  They liked that story and the fact that he rode a tiger.  They also liked the rice planting and harvesting screen, the rabbit looking at the moon, the tea bowls, the black bull and the cranes.  The fireman’s robes are a great hit with kids of all ages.  We ended by looking at Mickey Mouse on the kimono.  Good groups, engaged and interested.  Fun.

Art and Culture, Friends, Weather +Climate

Simple, Straight-Forward Human Decency

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30  bar steady 29.83  5mph N  Dewpoint 29 Spring

                  Last Quarter Moon of Winds

“Let us all be thankful for today, for if we did not learn a lot, at least we learnt a little. And if we did not learn a little, at least we did not become ill. And if we became ill, at least we did not die. So let us all be thankful. – Buddha, attr.

This snow is serious.  The rocks in the garden have white cloaks and look as if they will disappear once again.  The winds stay high and the accumulation has weighed down the trees.  Vale and Breckenridge may have powder, but in the late spring we have heart attack snow.  Heavy, wet, voluminous.  Still pretty.

I love the quote attributed to the Buddha.  Put that together with Grandpa’s, “You come from nothing and the purpose of life is to make something from nothing.” and you have a complete philosophy of life without all the dreary textual criticism, dogma and fancy dress.

A docent colleague has organized a food service for Bill Bomash who broke his femur in five places while vacationing in Brazil.  This kind of simple, straight forward human decency is enough.  It allows us to make something from nothing and, as Grandpa said, that’s the purpose of life.