Monthly Archives: November 2010

Aging, Art and Culture, Great Work, Politics

Good Pharma

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Samhain                                             New (Thanksgiving) Moon

When I walked into the Northrup King building last night, I had to pause a moment to let another time in my life, also spent there, sink in, too.

The period was not unlike the current one with high unemployment and plant closings dominating the news.  This was the mid 1970’s, the era when the contraction of the American automobile industry began in earnest and my hometown went from Smalltown, USA to Shutteredtown, USA.  No longer at home, I had lived in Minnesota for five years at the time, involved in anti-war work and organizing for labor unions and local neighborhoods.

In 1975 ripples went out through the activist community in Minneapolis that Sandoz, the pharmaceutical giant, had plans to purchase the Northrup-King seed plant and close it down.  Many of us rallied to the workers there and began a campaign to stop the plant closing and save the jobs.  As our research proceeded, we learned an important and, to me at least, sobering truth: pharmaceutical companies were buying up seed companies; Northrup-King was far from the only one.  Why?  Because the pharmaceutical companies had the perspective and vision to see the imminent emergence of biotechnology.

They realized that future profit streams could require as many patents as possible on genetic material; germplasm would be the new precious metals, the oil fields of tomorrow.  And they wanted to control as much of it as they could.  Seed companies like Northrup-King already had patents on many of the cultivars of wheat, corn and soybeans, foodstuffs necessary to humanity’s most basic survival needs, add to them patents on specific chemical combinations and plant-based medicines already held by Big Pharma and the potential for mischief, if not downright evil seemed self-evident.  This was before the big push to patent parts of the human genome, now well underway.

We fought hard, working regulatory, legislative and union channels, organizing street protests and trying to raise the visibility of these issues, but we lost.  As did most plant closing campaigns.

After this sifted through my memory banks and into present experience, I walked up the iron steps onto a former loading dock, walking into a studio filled with brightly painted flowers and novel re-uses of older technology.  Art Attack! was a good anti-dote, good pharma.

Art and Culture

Art Attack!

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Samhain                                         New (Thanksgiving) Moon

Just back from Art Attack and the VIP event I helped organize with Debbie Woodward, the manager of the Northrup-King Building.  What an evening!  So many artists studios, most of them open, running along the corridors that used to hold the work of the Northrup-King seed company.  Three floors of long corridors, then an L turn and more corridor in a connected building, also with multiple floors.  Way bigger than I imagined.

Debbie put together the event itself, hired a caterer, engaged a jazz band, secured a performance artist and set up tables and chairs in a very large room with old wooden flooring, grain ducts cut off at the ceiling, huge concrete pillars and a wonderful shabby ambiance.  I would estimate a 150 guides or so total, coming from the MIA, the Weisman and the Walker.  The energy in the room was wonderful, a fun up beat, hip feel.

Glad it worked.

GeekWorld

When Bad Service Is All You Expect

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Samhain                                               New (Thanksgiving) Moon

Over to Comcast offices, a 20 minute drive, to pick up the multi-channel cable card a Comcast chatline worker told me I could pick up there.  After taking a number, 14, while the number being served was 90, I sat down, thinking the wait was worth it because I’d driven the whole way.  So I sat.  As the numbers ticked off, I watched a guy who had an angry countenance grimace, a man a good 6 feet five inches walk in with a cable box under his arm.  His pants had a belt and suspenders.  Safer that way.  A small boy with a mischievous smile ran up to the number dispenser and started to take one, then looked back at his mom so the proper expression of dissatisfaction could register, smiled and ran over to her.  Most folks sat resignedly cable boxes, dvr boxes or modems clutched in their hands, having done Comcast the service of getting in their cars, using their gas and coming all this way just to do business with the folks to whom each of us shell out so much money each month.

(I’m not the only with complaints against Comcast.)

13.  “13.”  “13.”  Ah.  “14.”  “I need a multi-channel cable card, please.”  “We don’t carry those, you have to schedule a service call.”  The drive, the wait, for something I could have handled over an interminably long phone call, but at least I would have already been at home.  Unhappy camper here.

I’m gonna start looking at alternatives.  Right away.  Like right now.

Faith and Spirituality, Friends, Great Wheel, Memories

My Friend

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Samhain                                                   New (Thanksgiving) Moon

Thursday night around 9 pm I went out to the mailbox to drop The Book of Eli in the mail back to my buddies at Netflix.  It was not a cold night, a slight chill, but the night was clear.  From nowhere in our house can we see the eastern horizon, neighbor’s houses and woods block our view, so it came as a surprise to me to see an old friend there when I opened the mailbox and glanced to my left.

Orion’s brawny left shoulder and his glittering belt had begun to emerge.  Back a long while ago, the winter of 1968 and 1969, my last year in college, I worked at the magnalite corporation as a week-end night watchman.  I had a round leather clock with a shoulder strap and a key hole and every hour I had to walk a circuit in the factory, find a key hung from a metal chain, insert it in the clock, turn the key, remove it and move on to the next station.   I had no protective duties, rather I served at the leisure of magnalite’s insurance carrier who insisted on hourly inspections when the plant was empty.

When I was not on my ten-minute round, I spent time in the guard shack at the entrance to the parking lot.  I often divided my time between studying and dozing off since I had the 11:00 pm to 7:00 am shift, but when I left the shack for my rounds or to wake myself up, Orion was there.  Being in a large factory complex alone, at night, on the weekend, is lonely duty.  I liked it for that reason, but I found Orion’s presence companionable, and it gradually grew into a friendship.  He and I could talk.  We both stood watch in the night.

Since those days, now 41 years ago, each fall when Orion rises, I greet him as an old friend, a true snowbird, one who returns when the snow comes and leaves as it does.  My old college friend has come for his annual months long visit.  And I’m glad.

Art and Culture, Asia, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Politics

An Unwelcome Thought

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Samhain                                               New (Thanksgiving) Moon

Spent two hours in the Southeast Asian galleries talking to docs who came through during the Fairview Southdale corporate event.  A group of four wanted information about Cambodia.  One guy had lived in Thailand for a year and a half, “a long time ago.”  Another man, maybe Pakistani, and I talked about the Buddha.  “A peaceful religion.  Right?”  “Yes, in principle.  But look at the Thai.  They’re Buddhists and they’re killing each other.”  “Yes,”  he shook his head, “I’m a Muslim and we’re doing the same.”  It was a weary observation.

On the way home I stopped at the Holy Land restaurant for a to-go order of gyro.  While in there, I experienced a fleeting moment of “OMG.  What if these people are here to kill us.”  I squelched it both as an unwelcome and an unworthy thought, but it was there anyhow.  The other side of me, the side that delights in difference, wandered looking at hookahs, mounted recreations of Quran pages, elaborate mounted photos of the the dome of the rock.  All the middle eastern foodstuffs, female staff in headscarves.   There were, too, a Chinese couple, a Caucasian couple and African couple eating at tables alongside several middle-easterners.

Now, even here in Minnesota where the skin color is almost the same as winter, diversity has begun to seep in.  Thank god.  No matter what I thought earlier.  Thanks god.

Politics

The Politics of Scumbags: Recount Redux

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Samhain                                                      New (Thanksgiving) Moon

Though I’ve adopted patience and perseverance as my attitude to this election, here’s an item from Politics in Minnesota that makes my hair stand on end:

“Recount II: This time we win!

Nine thousand votes is a very tough nut to crack, and most Republicans realize they’re unlikely to prevail in the looming gubernatorial recount. (my emphasis) But there are other fish to fry here, as there were in the Coleman/Franken recount: to undermine the legitimacy of a Dayton administration from the start, and to delay the installation of a DFL governor who figures to block most GOP legislative initiatives. Already many Republicans are exulting, and Democrats cringing, at the thought of a few months’ worth of Gov. Tim Pawlenty paired with a conservative Legislature.

That wouldn’t happen in the course of a normal recount, which should be completed a few weeks ahead of Inauguration Day. But it’s entirely plausible in the event of a court battle following the recount. Both sides are amply lawyered up: Tony Trimble and Michael Toner for Emmer, David Lillehaug and Charlie Nauen for Dayton. All but Toner are veterans of the Coleman/Franken recount. But Toner strikes us as the telling figure here: He has a gleaming national GOP resume — the Bush II-appointed chair of the Federal Election Commission, before that chief counsel to the Republican National Committee, and before that the lead attorney for the Bush-Cheney 2000 transition team — and his inclusion gives Team Emmer a pipeline to top national GOP election counsel and a rainmaker to help fill its legal coffers. You don’t hang a legal gun like that over the mantel in Act I if you aren’t prepared to fire it.”

Art and Culture, Humanities

Declining With Pleasure

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Samhain                                            New (Thanksgiving) Moon

Did pretty well in the sight reading and translating today.  Felt good.  My english to latin was pretty good, too.  I still have trouble with a few tenses; well, ok, a lot of tenses, but they’re becoming clearer.  I’m gradually conceding that I will have to go not only word by word, but possible declension by possible declension, withholding judgment until I’ve worked out the one that makes the most sense.  This means any given sentence can have polyvalent meanings.   Not to come to translation too quickly is important, holding things in suspension until many options have been tried holds out the best hope for a satisfying translation.

Working on Latin trains the mind, has an equivalence to gymnastics.  As I move further into the language and into the text of Ovid, it becomes more intriguing, like the study of art.  That’s a good sign for me since I’m dedicated to this work until I get through Ovid or until I can’t do it anymore.

Corporate event tonight for Fairview Southdale, A Taste of Asia.  I have the Tibetan and Southeast Asian galleries.  6-8 pm.  Earning money as a docent.  Nice.

General

Noodling

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Samhain                                          New Thanksgiving Moon

Latin today.  I spent several hours on Wednesday translating, or attempting to translate, one sentence in Ovid.  One sentence.  At this rate the world will have a long wait for the Ellis translation of the Metamorphosis.  On the other hand, I’m getting a word by word, phrase by phrase introduction to this central text for understanding mythology and its appropriation in the Western literary tradition.  Which is, after all, what I am after.

As chair of the Sierra Club’s legislative committee and in that role responsible for the Northstar chapter’s presence at the legislature, I’m still sorting through the results of Tuesday’s elections.  They changed the entire direction of our 2011 effort, no doubt, but in what way we won’t know quite yet.  A lot of thinking ahead.  On Monday I’m going to attend a meeting of environmental lobbyists who will begin group discussion of what the playing field will look like.

Next week I have my first tour of the Thaw collection with the Rochester Friends of the Institute.  My current plan is to select objects for that tour as Thaw selected his objects, i.e. by choosing the most aesthetically pleasing works.  Most pleasing to me, that is.  Here’s my current list:  Yupik masks, raven-who-owns-the-sun frontlet, fish bowl, ferns basket, the medicine bag, the boy’s shirt, ledger book, Elgin artifacts.

Art and Culture, Asia

Tours

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Samhain                                    Waning Harvest Moon

So.   Two very fun tours.  The kids were great.  Excited, eager to see the next object, came prepared from their work with Mr. Bowman.  It was a treat to take them through the museum.  The interior design students and their teacher were, equally, excited and eager though in a more adult, subdued way.  We talked about wabi-sabi as an aesthetic, the tea ceremony, Taoism and Confucianism, ancestor veneration, bridle joints, huang hua li wood, Ming dynasty folding chairs and we even tacked on a sort of overview of the African galleries.  Both groups seemed happy and cheerful and I felt appreciated.  A good morning.

Now.  Tired.  Nap.

Art and Culture

Tours Today

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Samhain                                                  Waning Harvest Moon

Cooler here today.  Into the MIA this morning, then back home.  Tomorrow, more election analysis and Latin.  Over the weekend, put up hardware cloth around the fruit trees, harvest more leeks and make some more pot pies, prepare the bee colonies for winter.  Miscellaneous other matters.  Chapter 23 in Wheelock.  More Ovid.  That sort of thing.

Haven’t heard from my boy lately, but I know he’s alive because he posts to Facebook.