Monthly Archives: January 2011

Aging, Art and Culture, Family, GeekWorld, Retirement

Expressionists

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Winter                                          Full Moon of the Cold Month

A cold stretch coming up.  The night of Kate’s retirement party predicted to be -22 with a high of 3 during the day.  I have disposable cameras to buy, chipboard for small signs and a couple of things to print out.  That last may be a problem.  My HP laserjet printer, one I’ve had since the late 90’s, you know, back in the last century, seems unwilling to accept a new toner cartridge.  I’ve changed these out many times over the last 10-12 years, so this is a puzzle.  My other printer, a Canon color printer, is also down right now.  I’m going to take a stab at solving those while I’m out buying cameras and chipboard.

I’ve got my tour for tomorrow morning patched together.  We’ll start with Monet, the impressionist Haystack, to ground our further adventures in expressionism.  Where the plein air impressionists wanted to show just what their senses saw, color as created by light bouncing off of objects and received by painterly retinas, the expressionists gave up the senses to the camera and tried to depict that cavern measureless to man, the human mind and human feeling.  Using the formal aspects of painting in new and unusual ways, color, bright color, chosen for its expressive nature rather than its sensory veracity, flowing lines not always stopping at the borders of one object, compositions set flat against the canvas, shoved up toward the front with all the Renaissance experiments in perspective abandoned, the expressionists wanted to evoke feeling and the swirling inner life of the individual.

Some of my favorite pieces in the museum are in our expressionist collection:  Beckmann’s Blind Man’s Buff, Kandinsky’s Study for Improvisation V and the Egon Schiele painting to the right.

Well, back to the tour work.

General

Lot Going On

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Winter                                            Waxing Moon of the Cold Month

Boy.  A busy day.  Business meeting where we looked over our expenses from Denver and checked again on our budgeting for the retirement season of our lives.  Looks good.  We also noted those little odds and ends that need to get handled before a big party.  Almost done.  Checked our calendars.  And that was done.

I’ve begun to look into an expressionist tour and focusing on formalism and contextualism.  A fun task, but will require some heavy lifting.  Decided I couldn’t get any Latin done this week, so put off till next Friday restarting my search for a translation of Ovid’s work.

This and that, bits and pieces.  Back to the treadmill.  Finished the 4th part of the War in the Pacific, an HBO special on this aspect of WWII about which I know very little.

Now.  Tired.

Aging, Art and Culture, Commentary on the news, Memories, Politics, Retirement, Travel, US History

MLK

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Winter                                            Waxing Moon of the Cold Month

“Never regret. If it’s good, it’s wonderful. If it’s bad, it’s experience.” – Eleanor Hibbert

Ms. Hibbert, whoever she is, has it right; just the way life is.  And, by the way, I’ve had my share of experience.

Slept in my own bed last night.  Ahh.

Today is the tour of the Target Corporation’s art collection with lunch at Masa before the tour.  This one has been a bit problematic, partly because it came in when four other events also got organized.   However, the day has come at last.

Today will be the first day at home, a regular work day, when Kate does not go into the Allina Medical Clinic Coon Rapids.  She stayed up last night until 2:oo a.m. playing a word game on her Kindle.  Freedom.  A beautiful thing.   This is also the week of her party, Coming of Age:  The Art of Retirement.  On Thursday, January 20th, from 5-9 p.m. we will celebrate Kate and her medical career, but, with more inflection, Kate and the next years of her life.  If you read this, you’re invited to join us at the Minneapolis Institute of Art.  No gifts, just you and yours.

It’s also Martin Luther King day today.  My age cohort grew up during Dr. King’s rise to national prominence as the civil rights era took hold of the nation’s psyche.  The civil rights movement represents the US at its best and its worst.  Over the long haul since King’s leadership in 1955 the Montgomery Bus Boycott ignited by Rosa Parks to today cultural attitudes and practices have changed dramatically when it comes to people of color.   One way to note this is to consider the relative reputations of Dr. King and two of his chief opponents:  Lester Maddox and George Wallace.

Have we come all the way to a nation in which a person is judged “not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character?”  No.  Are matters demonstrably better?  Yes.  Can we stop working on the pernicious effects of prejudice and racism?  Of course not.  Can we celebrate a better day?  Yes, that’s what MLK day stands for.

All I’m saying is simply this, that all life is interrelated, that somehow we’re caught in an inescapable network of mutuality tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. For some strange reason, I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. You can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.

— Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

This perspective of King’s has its roots in the radical theology of Henry Nelson Weiman.  It was Weiman’s basic idea that god could only be found in relationship and, further, that god really was the mystical thread of connection between and among us all.  A fine idea, though a bit of a category mistake in my opinion.  Why call this mystical thread god?  Why not the mystical thread or deep relationship or interrelatedness?  In either form though it represents a distinct challenge both to American individualism and to the existentialist stance that I consider my own.

King and his intellectual mentor, Weiman, call to those of us who put our bold lettering under Individual to consider that there is an equally bold and distinct word, Related.  Martin Buber would approve.

Aging, Family, Humanities, Travel

Family Time

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Winter                                     Waxing Moon of the Cold Month

Kate sees this trip as vacation; I don’t.  Family related travel, the bulk of what I do, has a different purpose and feel.  It’s about relationships and the hard work necessary to maintain them.  It has the flavor of duty, but duty in a positive, not an obligatory sense.   The hard work has its pleasures, yes, lifting Ruth up in the air as she giggles, helping Gabe push his toys around on the floor, but it also has its rough edges.  A relationship with a sister, troubled since birth, breaks bad in a new, more intense way after she becomes pregnant.

The parents of young children face a plethora of challenges, too, noise and activity levels after a hard day at work, insistent demands for attention, keeping the kids safe indoors and out, little time for themselves separately or together.   None of this is new, this is the ancientrail of child-rearing, but it is one meant to happen in an extended family.  In our case, as in so many, many others, children and grandchildren live in one state, grandparents, uncles and aunts live in another.

Continue reading Family Time →

Art and Culture, Family, Memories, US History

West Colfax and the Wild West

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Winter                                       Waxing Moon of the Cold Month

Gabe and Ruth asked for us to come over tonight.  We did.  We went with Jon and Jen and Ruth and Gabe to an art teacher’s art show.  It was in the ‘hood, just off west Colfax, the Latino part of that very long street, not too far from Montview, where Jon met Jen and where he still teaches.

Jon had a cell phone photograph in the show, one taken at table setting level during a Halloween wedding.  The composition was clever and the cell phone grain gave the photograph a painterly feel.  It was easily the best piece in the show, though I should say the competition was not strong save for a couple of potters and a cartoonist.

Along the way we passed a dulceria where they sell pinatas.  It had pinatas hung from the ceiling and lots of brightly colored party favors.  Snow White and Cinderella, in large cardboard movie style images, graced the front of the store.  Down a bit further was a dress maker, dark on this Friday night with big girl dresses for Quinceañera. Ruth wanted Kate to make her a strapless one, but in the truth telling way she has, Kate said, “Not until you get boobies.  You couldn’t hold the dress up.”  “Well,” Ruth went on, “Maybe it could have sleeves.”

After the opening, Kate and I took off on our own to give the family a chance to decompress from a full week of grandparents.  Tomorrow I’ll see Ruth at her gymnastics, then around 2 pm we’ll board the shuttle for National Grand Western Stock Show.  This will be my second time and I look forward to it.

It’s an event similar to the state fair, but limited only to farm and ranch related vendors and activities.  Rodeos, judging of champion bulls, pigs, sheep, the Wild West Show we’ll see tomorrow at 4 and barrel races make up the bulk of the events outside of the ranch related wheeling and dealing.

A lot of that goes on in hotel restaurants and bars far from the Stock show grounds.  Men in cowboy hats, blue jeans and vests gather around shots of Jack Daniels and beer chasers, talk cattle and land.  It all gives January Denver a distinctly Western tone.

It also helps me define myself as a Midwesterner.  We’re agricultural, yes, but we’re row crops and feedlots, 4-H and county fairs, small acreages and farmers.  The West has ranches and cattle herds, oil and open land, brands and rodeos.  Yes, you could point to many similarities, but the differences are what strike me, making me realize I know very little about the West, in our past or in our present.

Aging, Family, Politics

Retired at Last

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Winter                                                Waxing Moon of the Cold Month

Kate’s sewing on the machine she keeps here at Jon and Jen’s.  We retrieved it last night and brought it back to the hotel room.  The room supplies an ironing board and iron, with her cutting mats and rotary cutters–and those $23 to transport scissors–she’s in her favorite place, sewing.  She said yesterday that her retirement couldn’t really start until she could start sewing.  Well, it’s officially started now.

The Sierra Club legcom meeting is at 5 pm tonight, so I spent an hour organizing material for the agenda and sending it out.  That’s finished.  Good thing Jon asked last night what time the meeting was.  I said, “5 pm.”  “Oh, so at 4 pm our time?”  “Huh?  4?  Yikes.”  I would have missed it for sure.  Not used to this jetset lifestyle.

Once again breakfast has cowboy hats and bluejeans.  One young boy, maybe 14, wore a t-shirt that read:  “Nothing’s more important than beating that COW COLLEGE on the other side of the state.”  Coach Bear Bryant  A clutch of young girls came up around his table where he sat with three slightly older boys.

Then began the mock teasing, playful hits, frowns and cagey responses.  One blond headed girl leaned over a boy with a RockStar hat, whispered in his ear, then went across the room and got him a cup of  coffee.  They were prodigies among children.

Tonight I plan to take Jon and Jen out to a country Japanese restaurant called Domo.  Sounds interesting.

Aging, Family, Travel

The Cheeky Monk and The Irish Snug

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Winter                                                          Waxing Moon of the Cold Month

And so it is.  The cold month I mean.  -7 last night here in Denver.  Not Minnesota cold, but still, it counts.  The snow though has mostly disappeared from the city streets and will be all gone by the weekend when highs in the 40’s hit the high plateau.

Kate and I went to the REI flagship store yesterday, a large brick building that used to be a tramway (don’t know what that is) now stuffed with ice axes, mountaineer boots and more fleece than you shake a sheep at.  It has a very Colorado feel with many young, hyper fit folks looking for the right gear for climbing a 14’er and then skiing back down.

Denver has a young persons feel with many interesting bars like the Cheeky Monk and the Irish Snug.  Gastro pubs.  Kate and I stopped for lunch at the Cheeky Monk, a woody homage to some form of Belgian culture with Belgian waffles on offer as a dessert item.  Kate had a beer sampler that included Stone’s Lucky Bastard and Avey’s Czar.  Potent stuff.  More so than Kate anticipated.

We’ve both eaten a bit too much fried and fatty with corresponding complaints from our digestive systems.  You’d think at our age…

In spite of its proximity to the mountains, the Rockies loom on the western horizon, Denver is a flat city, very Midwestern in that way.

Since this is the time period of the Great Western Stock Show the restaurants have many cowboy hats, cowboy boots and the occasional sequined Rodeo Queen.  It all gives Denver that Western feel that it sometimes lacks in the summer.

OK.  Off to the Denver Mint.

Aging, Commentary on the news, Politics, US History

This Shooting

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Winter                              Waxing Moon of the Cold Month

A decent snowfall here last night but not a lot.  The sun shines bright on the old Front Range.  Colder though.

This shooting.  It seems apparent to me that the general atmosphere of current political debate can give permission to some marginal folks to take action.  Reference to Second Amendment remedies leaves little room for the imagination.  So, I wish the tea party folks would tone down their rhetoric.  It seems to me the decent thing to do.

Here, though, I am hoisted on my petard since I will defend the right of even dimbulbs to say what they will and I count the tea party among them.  That same principle though allows me to say what I think of their analysis.

We were radicals once, and young.  The movement of the 60’s had its violent fringe, restricted to bombs, yes, but nonetheless.  I have some sympathy for folks who feel aggrieved and inclined to say the most inflammatory that floats to the surface.  I also have sympathy for those who say their language should not be seen as per se violent.

Still, I look back on those days, the anti-war, anti-establishment, anti-racist days, and remember that we did feel a certain joint responsibility for what others of us did.  We knew we were connected by our analysis and our perceived common enemy.

A common enemy shared, at least in part, with the tea party folks:  the Federal Government.  We thought they over reached with the draft and the war.

Here’s the big lesson from those times that I would pass on to my ideological mirror images.  We were wrong about the government being the enemy.  The government is only what we allow it to be.  The government is the sin-eater for the nation.  It collects the hurts and hopes and problems of us all and attempts to sort them out, improve things when it can.

Do they often get it wrong?  Yes.  Do we in our own lives?  Yes?  Our governmental process is sloppy, takes too long to come to a decision and, like generals, seems bent on fighting the last war rather than the next one.

Still, it is our form of resolving disputes and it is, I agree with Churchill here, the worst form of government save all the rest.

I would hope the tea party folks would back away from defensiveness, difficult, I know, and examine their message to see if it says what they want, check to see if gives succor to those fringe folks who would move beyond the pale of political discourse, no matter how heated, into the realm of violent action.  If they do this, they will gain some admiration for restraint, if  they do not, they risk losing it all.

Aging, Family, Retirement, Travel

Happy Grandpa

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Winter                                             Waxing Moon of the ColdMonth

When Kate and I arrived down south here in Denver, we got a 40 degree temperature swing.  At 8 am this morning, my weatherstation recorded -14.  When we got to Denver, it was 26.  If we’d left Minnesota at 50 degrees amd gotten a similar bump, it would be 90 here.

Now, there are school closings here with a snow that would only bring out the sanding trucks in Minnesota.  Strange.

After a nap, the grumpy traveler became a happy grandpa, taken upstairs by granddaughter Ruth to see her princess walkie talkies and her changeable Cinderalla doll.  Back downstairs grandson Gabe carried his toy train, Thomas, and came to me, “Up.”  So we did.

Gabe and I looked at the Dreidel lights Jen had strung over the window sill.

After a Mexican meal at the restaurant next to our hotel, the kids went home and the grandparents walked through the snow a short way to the hotel.  This snow is finer than most of them we get in Minnesota, light, but not fluffy.

Bedtime here in the Mile High City.  With snow.

Travel

Caution: Rant About Air Travel

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Winter                                           Waxing Moon of  the Cold Month

The grumpy traveler has arrived in the mile-high city, which I discovered at the Denver Airport is actually 5,280 feet above sea level.  How about that?  I say grumpy because air travel wears at me with the death of a thousand cuts.

First, when I went online yesterday to print out boarding passes, I was met with the opportunity to pay a checked baggage fee.  Kate wanted to check a bag because, being the raving terrorist lunatic that she is, she wanted to bring a good pair of scissors for sewing.  $23 to transport those damned scissors.  As long we’re on it, where did a word like scissors come from anyhow?  That spelling.

Second, parking at the airport.  In  this case you get to choose between an intolerably long ride on Airport Shuttle, a tour of the Twin Cities, or trying to park a large pick-up, our Tundra, in a slot made for a compact car.  Our Celica.

So we’re at the airport.  I don’t have to tell you the small insults visited on us under the auspices of national security.  Good news?  No body scanners yet.

The plane itself.  The logistics of the human body and the number of seats you can cram in–the maximum–create a very cosy, one could even call it crammed ride.  And I had the four  year old behind me who spent most of the flight taking the tray table down and putting it back in place.  Often.  Not news, but a nuisance anyway.

Don’t ask me about getting the bag.  Remember Denver’s airport?  It was the one that opened two years late because they couldn’t get the luggage system working.

Finally, getting to your rental car.  Ah, the third lane out at ground transportation.  Finding or waiting for the express bus, ha, that takes you to your car.  At a site far enough away from the airport itself to be in Wyoming.  Afterward, the always entertaining sales pitches by the rental car clerk.  No.  I don’t want an SUV with snow tires.  No.  I don’t want to pay $20 a day to supplement (unnecessarily) my already too expensive car insurance.

But.  The woman who took the yellow sheet about the car’s condition was very nice and helpful.

And thus endeth this complaint about travel by air.