Monthly Archives: August 2010

Art and Culture, Bees, Cinema and Television, Friends, Woolly Mammoths

Lunch

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Lughnasa                                      Waxing Artemis Moon

Slept well past 6:30 this morning, then a very long nap.  The body still marshalling its resources.  I’m ready to be done with this, but it does not seem ready to be done with me.

In between I went into the MIA to have lunch with Mark Odegard.  Mark’s a Woolly, a friend, an artist and a damned fine jazz piano player.  He has very interesting friends.  One friend of his is on a two-month journey in Peru working on developing a complete catalog of all, underline all, the plants in the Amazon.  Sounds like a crazy task, but he’s found somebody who’s already done a lot of the work.

This was a thank you lunch, in part, for the bang-up design work he’s done for Artemis Honey.  As we have before, we wandered through the museum, looking at various things, talking about them.  The Ricci map.  The Minnesota Artists Gallery works by two young Asian women.  Ceramics and glass and wood bowls by women artists.

In talking about my work I told him something I realized last week.  The museum work grabs my heart; I think about things there, mull them over, look forward to going in, get excited about new collections, new artists, encounter objects that pierce my soul.  Even the Sierra Club, which is important and I do it because it’s important, doesn’t grab my heart the way the art does.  I wish it did, but it doesn’t.

Spent most of the day without internet service.  I tried to alter the way my router plugs into the internet and it worked for a while, then the router just went all kablooey.  An hour and a half of reading the manual, trying this, then that and I got the connection back but I lost the alterations I’d made.  I’ll try’em again tomorrow.

Oh.  The Wolfman.  I spoke too soon.  As I watched the end, I found it gained texture and strength.  The cinematography was wonderful and the pathos of the altered conclusion–altered from the Chaney original–made the story more emotionally gripping.

GeekWorld

Geeking Around

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Lughnasa                                    Waxing Artemis Moon

Yet one more day of running in place, a bit unfocused though things are moving.  The thing I got myself into seems about to work itself out.  How about that.  The honey extractor is stuck in bureaucracy land at Dadant.  They have no record of my order. Maybe not but they have our $915.  We’ll get it resolved.

Since I got my newest computer, I’ve gone through several semi-geek experiences, so far all of them successful.  I don’t consider myself a full geek since I never learned programming, but I do love fooling around with computers.  It’s a similar fixation to working on cars only one I understand.

Family, Holidays

So Ordinary. So Unique.

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Lughnasa                                   Waxing Artemis Moon

Kate’s birthday has drawn to a close.  We spent part of the afternoon continuing to assemble her long-arm quilter.  This machine is big, a full 10 feet in length, large enough for a queen size quilt.  We have the base set up and need now to put on the rollers and mount the quilting sewing machine.  That’s the last step and she’ll be off to the races.

In some ways birthdays are so ordinary.  Every one has them.  They commemorate a day, a particular spot in the earth’s orbit, when birth occurs.  Births are common; we’ve each been through at least one, the women among us sometimes many more than one.   People are common; there are billions of us.  Billions.

At the macro level birthdays are ordinary.  But in the particular, in the idiosyncratic, in the once ever in all of history side to it, birthdays are downright unique, very special, celebrating the beginning of a life, a life that will never be lived again, will never be lived by anyone else.  So special.

Take Kate, for instance.  There is no other person on all the earth, in all of history like her.  She’s a combination of genes, a lived history, a spark, a singularity.  She has a rare compassion, a keen mind, manual dexterity, dogged persistence, creativity and a talent for relationship.  I’ve been lucky that my own journey joined hers.

Here’s to another 20 journeys around our Sol, maybe 25, for Kate and me.

Commentary on Religion, Politics, US History

Build the Mosque

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Lughnasa                                Waxing Artemis Moon

On mosques and sites and sealing wax.

Are we fighting with Islam or with terrorists who use Islam as a cover?  You know the answer.  What message do you give to the ummah, the worldwide Islamic community, if you deny a mosque near a site where the terrorists who use Islam as a cover delivered a powerful blow?  That you don’t know the difference.

Or.  What message do you give if you allow the mosque?  That you know the difference.  Which strategy has better long term potential both within the US and outside it.  Again, you know the answer.

When demagogues pander to the lowest common denominator on volatile matters like this, it corresponds to yelling fire in a crowded theatre.  This is intentional inflammation of an issue not because you believe the matter is substantive, but because you know it will rouse the sleeping dogs.

There is, in fact, no issue here.  Let me say again.  No issue.  The first amendment, even earlier than the holy and blessed 2nd, protects freedom of religion and freedom of association and freedom of speech.  Which of these constitutional, black letter law freedoms do you wish to ignore?  Where’s a strict constructionist when we need one?

Let them build.  Let them demonstrate that the United States can discriminate between friend and foe.  Let them demonstrate that the constitutional protections that make us a desirable place for immigrants from around the globe are still in place.

Let us demonstrate that the coward and the bully will not, should not win this kind of rhetorical battle.

Let them build.

Here’s the contrary argument from the New York Daily News:

“…But what about common sense and decency? If Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf had either, he and his group would reconsider the location out of respect for the hordes of Americans, many of them 9/11 family members themselves, who think that this idea just plain stinks. And if it weren’t for political correctness and our decidedly 21st century paranoia over offending Islam, our national leaders would proudly echo those sentiments.

Enough is enough. The speechifying and pontificating on the mosque’s constitutionality are a distraction and a straw man. No one in serious circles who opposes the mosque at Ground Zero is suggesting it should be made illegal to build a Muslim house of worship near the site of the 9/11 attacks.

What they’re trying to say, and largely to plugged ears on the left, is that having the right doesn’t make it right.”

Aging, Family, Holidays, Retirement

Happy Birthday. Giggle, giggle.

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Lughnasa                                Waxing Artemis Moon

A red letter day here at chez Olson/Ellis.  Kate’s 66th.  She’s upstairs right now signing up for social security.

We went out for breakfast this morning to Pappy’s, a place that already has a place in my heart.  It reminds me so much of Indiana, a part of it that I didn’t know I missed.  As a gift, I gave her a photo album of her ascent to grandmahood starting with a pregnant Jen and running up to the present.   She liked it.

Being married to Kate these 20 years we’ve shared many birthdays and each one finds me more in love with her than the last.

We had a waitress at Pappy’s that had a Fargo accent and ended each encounter with a girlish giggle. More coffee?  No?  Giggle, giggle.  Here’s the check, pay me when you’re ready.  Giggle, giggle.  Creeped me out.  Like having too much sugar in your coffee.  Hee, hee, hee.

Cinema and Television, Great Work, Politics

Chicken Wings, Legislators and a Wolfman

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Lughnasa                                        Waxing Artemis Moon

More napping.  Still getting the body back to its old form.  Maybe tomorrow.

Into the Sierra Club for the Legislative Awards.  It was the first time these awards have happened.  Justin’s idea and a good one.  Speeches, good strokes.

Ran into Randy Neprash.  From days gone by.  He was part of Phoenix Builders who worked with the West Bank Community Development Corporation.  I remembered him, he didn’t remember me.  He’s now doing some multi-city storm water drainage project as a civil engineer.  I knew him from somewhere else, too, but it didn’t come to me.

Back home after picking up fried chicken wings from the Wing’s Joint.  It used to be on Nicollet, a ways past Lake Street.  How it ended up in Blaine in a strip mall, I haven’t figured out, but I’m glad its there.  Best wings in town.

Watching the Wolfman with Benecio Del Toro spent the first half of the movie–what I’ve seen so far–trying to capture the heaviness, grief-stricken weariness and stolidity of Lon Chaney.  He’s just not Chaney.  Anthony Hopkins is, as one reviewer said, Anthony Hopkins.  It’s easy to see where they were heading with this.  The set, the costumes, the whole ambiance is right, but the story is draggy, too complex, too frilly.  With Hopkins and Del Toro there are enough acting chops here to produce a good film, but it likes a great story line.  Too bad.

Aging, Art and Culture, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality

Lapsed Unitarian

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Lughnasa                     Waxing Artemis Moon

Oh, boy.  Just got myself into another situation.  Promising things I’m not sure I know how to accomplish.  I hope this goes with do one thing you fear every day, month, year–whatever time frame you can stand.  Cannot reveal details right now, but this could be a lot of fun for a lot of people or a complete bust.  Feels like the old days when I used to do this kind of stuff all the time.  Dream up something, contact a few folks, make it happen.

Still fatigued.  Kate says it’s my body still healing itself.  I hope so, because it feels like I’m still sick.

A friend the other day referred to herself as a lapsed Unitarian.  Lapsed Unitarian.  That made me wonder.  What are the spiritual and metaphysical consequences of falling away from the only faith named for two doctrines, Unitarianism and Universalism, in which none of its members believe?

I have come to see UU as a way station of sorts, a caravan serai for the pilgrim lost in the desert or high on a mountain and in need of refreshment, companionship.  Maybe a spiritual decompression chamber where individuals are brought safely back to their spiritual sea level.  It’s clear to me that my decompression is complete, has been complete for several years now.

Now, this is probably idiosyncratic, but I’m pretty sure it’s not unusual.  When we step away from a long time, culturally supported faith tradition like Christianity or Judaism, the lag time for decompression can be lengthy.  Not only do we have to unlearn one faith identity, we have to find or create another.  The UU movement is perfect for that time, for the initial time of confusion and disorientation and for the development, the constructing of a new faith.  Once that work is done however it most often results in a person anchored no longer in institutional faith, but in a place more like the world, the world of the human and the animals and the rock and the lake, a place where the spiritual moment is every moment and where the faith commitment may have an introspective, interpersonal, natural, and/or political expression, but not an institutional one.

So.  Perhaps lapsed Unitarian is the destiny of most of us no longer inside the Christian hermeneutical circle.  It still helps to have a place to rest along the way.

Aging, Friends, Humor, Woolly Mammoths

Tom’s Place

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Lughnasa                                                        Waxing Artemis Moon

Back from Tom’s gracious home in Shorewood.  He served corn on the cob, salmon, an egg salad and spinach.  Delightful.  A pileated woodpecker ate from his feeder just as I came in.  What a gorgeous bird.  We ate on the deck of Tom’s unusual housing arrangement.  These are homes with a connecting wall, though quite large on the interior with a long deck high above a sloping yard filled with maple trees and ending at a small pond.  The entrance to the homes are modest affairs with little lawn and a walk-way cum patio after passing through a small gate.  They open up once inside and have the decks facing the back that have complete privacy while fairly close to each other.

Tom, Ode, Scott, Bill, Frank, Warren and Charlie were there.  We sat outside on unseasonably cool August evening and discussed violence.  It was an interesting conversation.  I’m a little too tired right now to comment.  Perhaps tomorrow.

Ode brought me copies of the label.  Very cool, copies on label paper.  Gotta test the size of them on a honey jar and their stickiness.

I did hear this joke from Frank.

Tarzan, swinging vine by vine, comes finally to the porch of his tree home.  He jumps down onto the porch and says, “Jane, I need a scotch.  No, Jane, make that a double.”  He pauses, “No, make that a triple.”  Jane comes in with his drink, “Honey, you know alcohol doesn’t solve anything.  What’s the matter.”  “Oh, Jane,” he says, “it’s a jungle out there.”

General

Another Quayle.

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Lughnasa                              Waxing Artemis Moon

Personal note:  Dan was at Depauw when I was at Wabash.  We never met.  The parent seems to have bred true.

On apples not falling from the tree:

Republican congressional candidate Ben Quayle Friday night lashed out at his political foes and the media for what he described as their “coordinated effort to assassinate my character.”

The 33-year-old son of former Vice President Dan Quayle was besieged by controversy this week after Nik Richie, the founder of the now-defunct DirtyScottsdale.com, outed Quayle as one of the original creators of the raunchy, sex-themed website lampooning Scottsdale’s trashy nightclub scene.