Show me the way
Category: Blog Post
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Seriously, I'm Asking You Nicely
I had this period in my early thirties when I would have what I guess for lack of a better word I’d have to call visions. I once saw a woman –a stout, elderly woman in a disturbingly translucent gown– levitating in the lovely chapel of a huge hospital in the Midwest.
This chapel was a spectacular and ornate place. It was bigger than many of the Catholic churches I’d attended in my childhood.
The place was entirely abandoned at the time I saw the levitating woman. It was very late at night, and the chapel was eerily silent and cloaked in shadows. I’m not even sure that what this woman was doing could properly be called levitating; she was actually floating, and hovering around up in the rafters high above the pews, her gown billowing around her and swollen with what appeared to be moonlight.
In the silence of the chapel I could clearly hear the labored, wheezing respiration of the old woman. She seemed to be having a tough time of it up there. She also seemed to be entirely oblivious to my presence. I wondered if perhaps what I was witnessing was an angel or a saint, although I could recall no instances where such beings had been portrayed as either quite so stout or so elderly.
I had some change in my pocket, which I proceeded to throw at the woman one coin at a time. I finally managed to hit her, but she didn’t seem to even flinch. Many of the coins I threw ricocheted back down to the marble floor, where they rattled around noisily. I recall listening as several of them rolled all the way down to the altar.
A short time later the woman disappeared, and I shrugged the whole thing off as an exhaustion-induced hallucination.
The next morning, however, the word was going around town that some nuns had discovered the body of an old woman on the floor of the hospital chapel, and the local newspaper later reported that the woman had a quarter embedded in her ribcage.
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That’s More Like It
Sixteen hits, thirteen runs, three home runs, a grand slam, a nice recovery by Brad Radke, and a swell 2006 debut for Francisco Liriano.
Very encouraging, I’d say.
But this is what I really want to know: Rogers Centre? What the hell kind of name for a baseball park is that?
Seriously, that is just so wrong.
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Children of Persephone
It’s time to light the fires. It’s above 45 degrees, it’s time to reclaim cooking outside.
Nothing is more significant to a warm April evening than the smell of a freshly ignited grill wafting through the neighborhood. I guarantee that campus kids all over town will be huddled around their mini-Webbers, grilling up burgers and dogs to go with their leftover keg beer.
It’s the same thing that drives us to look for restaurants with open patios on the singular sunny day in March. We’re coming above ground, we’re leaving the coats at home, we’re wearing flip-flops even if our toes are cold. It’s the understood bargain of living here, we are the children of Persephone, escaping Hades for the beautiful and the brief.
In celebration, I think it’s completely appropriate to burn some food. A crispy blackened hot dog, splitting with exuberance is a fitting tribute to the first frog sounds in the swamp. Daylight Savings allows me to actually see the steak I’m cooking, leaving the pinky warm center uncompromised. I don’t care if the kids are covered in mud, as long as they stay clear of the asparagus while I gently roll it across the hot iron. All this and no bugs.
But just as Holiday stations started stock-piling bags of charcoal, a story came over the wire about another study showing that grilled meats caused cancer in rats. Does it give me a moment of pause? Do I look at my grill through the window and consider shutting it down? Never.
I’m not glib to the potential darkness of cancer, quite the contrary. I lost a very important man during the Spring a few years ago. This man was a thunderstorm, sometimes bellowing and causing confusion, but always leaving things greener and fresher in his path. He took nothing for granted, whether it was the last beer in the case or just a good day to take the kids for a ride on the orange tractor. Harding’s cancer came in the worst way possible for someone in our circle, his throat closed and he could no longer swallow food. Yet he still sat with us at dinner, enjoying us enjoying the meal.
He taught me that it’s not the quantity of life lived, it’s the quality of it.
I refuse to let the fear keep me underground. Granted, I’m also not going to go and eat three charred chickens everyday either. What I really seek is the balance. I love a blackened rib eye, but this year I’m making sure it’s from Thousand Hills Cattle Company where the grass-fed beef is chocked full of healthy omega-3’s. And certainly I’ll wash it down with a glass of red wine as I watch the sun moving quickly across the sky.
Light ’em up. Grill on.
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And How Quickly A New War Began…
Images from Me and Mr. Marshall (top) and The Bridge (bottom).
“Selling Democracy: Films of the Marshall Plan” at the Walker Art Center, April 5 – 8.
Tonight, Part One, Out of the Ruins. Featuring: Hunger, It’s Up to You, Between East and West, The Bridge, Me and Mr. Marshall, Life and Death of a Cave City, and Houen Zo. Post-screening discussion by Sandra Schulberg, project director; and Dr. Eric D. Weitz, professor of history and director of the Center for German & European Studies; and Dr. Lisa Disch, professor of political science at the U.
For the next four nights, the Walker Art Center will be showing a collection of some of the most interesting and thought-provoking little movies you could hope to see. Selling Democracy: Films of the Marshall Plan are pretty much as the title suggests–these are propaganda shorts, shown at theaters in Germany and throughout Europe (and especially Germany) after WWII to help win the minds of the populace to the Marshall Plan.
Now, one might assume that propaganda films outside their context and without a discussion with prominent historians (which we get at the Walker) would be frightfully dull, that this is really no more than a series of movies leading to a lecture on history. This is far from the case, however: with the exception of Life and Death of a Cave City, the movies are fascinating. Hunger, with its Bernard Herrmann-like score, drives home the difficulty of post-war life, with horrific shots of children and the elderly scraping together enough food to keep from dying (or chewing on bark to hold hunger at arm’s length). This one did not sit well with the Germans who, according to a provocative City Pages review, shouted out that they were well fed under the Nazis. That’s winning the minds!
It’s Up to You asks the German people straight-up: are you going to walk back into the dark past or strut forward into a bright, democratic future? That is, are you going to go back to being Nazis or toe the line? “This,” the narrator bellows, “or that?” We see shots of happy children crossing the street in “this” and children being rushed screaming into basements to avoid bombs in “that”.
The Bridge was my personal favorite, corny though it is. Dually narrated by a soft-voiced German and then a tough guy Yank pilot, the film documents the Berlin airlift, which was no small feat. The German, who sounds like an American with a silly accent, tells us how the airlift feeds and powers Berlin and how grateful he is, while the Yank is learning more and more about those friendly Germans and no good Commies. There are some odd moments in this one, such as the exchange of a musical teddy-bear, culminating in two American pilots waltzing on the tarmac to the bear’s music.
Me and Mr. Marshall is narrated by another German, this one a “Marshall Man” or “Marshallite”, I can’t remember–suffice it to say he’s committed fully to the Marshall Plan. We see him digging coal out of the ground for Germany’s future, and, as with The Bridge, dissing the Communists.
Life and Death of a Cave City, the only color film, is as dull as those old Disney nature shows. But there are some shots, notably a man carrying a spray of multi-colored balloons against the blinding white buildings, that please the eye.
Houen Zo is the most beautiful of the movies, a “symphony of sounds” accompanying film of Rotterdamites (?) rebuilding their town. It’s like David Lynch without the madness–the noise of machinery, of broken buildings being put back together, men pulling in nets with a handful of fish, man wrestling with giant ropes and spinning mops, all in beautiful black and white cinematography. Gorgeous and hypnotizing.
Mostly, though, the films of the Marshall Plan are a night of self-reflection. I came away amazed at the level of forgiveness in these movies–after all, the friendly Germans in The Bridge and Me and Mr. Marshall were evil Nazis just a few years earlier. (Though this also begs the question as to whether or not we would ever have the same scenes with the Japanese; I have not-so-distant relatives back in Michigan who still refuse to buy Japanese cars but won’t hesitate to own German vehicles). And with It’s Up to You, we could ask ourselves some of the same questions: “This” or “That”? Although if you ever watch movies about the rise of Nazi Germany you really see that, no matter what we Bush-haters may believe, we are quite a ways from that here.
More intriguing to me is how quickly we were ready to fight in the years following the second World War. These films are not just about trying to convince a former enemy of the victor’s goodwill, but really, they are about creating a new Nazi, a new oppressor, in the Soviets. And how many wars have we fought since then? And how many peoples have we had to convince of our goodwill?
For the next few days, you could spend your time at home, watching whatever’s on the tube, or at the movies, with the newest Ice Age. Or you could go to the Walker and watch films that will never see the light of television, never find their way into a DVD, films with such beauty and meaning they’ll follow you for days.
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Why "I'm going to the library" is getting to be a less believable cover
Minneapolis Public Libraries keep just terrible hours! You’ve noticed this, I’m sure.
Me, I live in and about the uptown area, and it seems the Walker Branch is just about never open. I had much more luck with the library back when I was a freelancer: Central hadn’t yet shutdown and I often found myself free during daylight hours when I could actually catch the Walker during operating hours to peruse its slim-pickings. These days I try to make it there on Monday or Wednesday evenings, when the branch is open late, but only 8 p.m. late–which is not very late at all if you ask me. Saturdays are more convenient: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. But there are two used bookstores just a stone’s throw away. If I’ve got a hankering for a certain book, or any random one for that matter, you’ll often find me chatting up the booksellers at Booksmart (nice guys, all–except that new one!) or scouring the stacks at Magers & Quinn (better selection). I find the urge to pick up a new book is greatest during the wee hours. And I can generally scrounge together–what–five or six bucks to blow on some used paperback. Damsel though I might be, I’ll brave the dark, mugger-ridden streets of uptown whenever there’s a hankering for a new book.
But I miss going to the library and look forward to Central’s re-opening.
Indulge me now in this parenthetic thought: I recently got to tour Central Library-in-progress. I’d heard a lot of people criticizing the edifice, generally hurling such predictable insults as “Too much sunlight! Bad for books!” or “It looks just like the old library.” The detractors might have a point on this last one–because the new library’s golden exterior certainly resembles that of the old. But the inside bears almost no resemblance. I found it to be quite the airy, anodyne space. The best part is definitely the foyer, that huge hall living just beneath the spear-headed cantilever. There’s something here that’s reminiscent of Centre Georges Pompidou–perhaps it’s the out-lying escalator. It reminds me of a futuristic, self-contained city, or maybe just a posh modern hotel. Something straight outta Jacques Tati’s Playtime–only better constructed. (However, on the topic of great phallic structures: I noticed the cantilever was dripping some ominously long and dagger-like icicles after that snow storm a few weeks back.)
Back on-track: Friends of the Minneapolis Public Library is hosting a series of discussions about restoring hours and lost services to both neighborhood and Central libraries. (Central is set to be closed on Sundays for example.) Tonight’s meeting is at the Northeast Branch from 6:30 to 8:00 p.m.. Check out www.friendsofmpl.org for more info.
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Pistol Opera
I happen to be of the mind that there’s nothing very interesting happening tonight… And you know what that means: movie night!
Cinema des Artistes is the fittingly pretentious name for a recurring event sponsored by Cinema Revolution, that foreign and indie DVD shop that’s located just above one of the three-dozen new Dunn Bros. in south Minneapolis. (I don’t mind.) Tonight’s feature being Japanese director Seijun Suzuki’s very artsy and very colorful action flick, Pisutoru Opera.
If that fails, that interesting-seeming Thank You For Smoking plays the Uptown. I just saw the preview for that one last week, and I want to see it very badly. But the boyfriend is promising to make catfish and has just rented Good Night and Good Luck, so I’ll be watching that instead.
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Driving Above .300
Hitting a baseball is one of the most difficult feats in athletics. Engineering a car that is well-engineered at the right price is equally tricky. A lot of things have to come together at the right time and price. That is why getting a car that’s one-third right rarely happens.
While rare, the Americans have finally built a mid-sized sedan that gets it at least half right and then some. That car is the Chrysler SRT-8.
From a chassis, engine and design perspective, this car exemplifies a near-perfect raid on the Daimler Chrysler parts and chassis bin. It drives like a Mercedes because it is a Mercedes–from the chassis up. It’s fantastic 425 HP Hemi engine can burn rubber in third gear. The styling is sensational and is just too chunky to be transient.
Both cars are worth what you pay for. My advice, with a few caveats, would be to wait until it comes off two-year leases then buy it.
The first caveat is that both cars seem to have inherited the good and the bad traits of modern Mercedes–the first being abysmal quality. A 300 that I recently rented had a stuck parking brake and needed a valve job at 3000 miles.
The second caveat is that the interiors of both cars belong in a Rubbermaid store at the outlet mall. While the basic design is there, the execution is as insulting as anything from GM. You are surrounded by grey rubber and cheap switchgear everywhere you look. While the 300’s rubberized plastic is softer to the touch than GM’s thin melted cotton-candy quality variety, it envelops you in cheapness. I am willing to trade a certain cheapness for performance; I just don’t need to shoved in my face.
Yet, today the styling and driving dynamics of the 300 have been enough to make this car a bonafide hit. Until they fix a few things, however, its only batting around .500.
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It's Time To Get Behind The Mule
I guess this is really it, huh?
My God, it doesn’t seem possible.
One of my problems with baseball of late is that everything that could conceivably be said about the game in its past and present incarnations has already been said. I feel like I’ve said plenty myself, and the older I get the more I’m certain that I spend much of my time repeating myself.
But what the hell, I guess I’m back to repeat myself some more.
I think it was Tom Boswell –or maybe it was Tom Bosley, or possibly even James Boswell– who once said “Time begins on opening day.”
That’s utter hogwash, of course. For anybody who’s really helplessly conscripted to baseball, time ends on opening day. From here on out, right up until winter starts tearing down the autumn foliage (which generally and cruelly coincides with the precise moment when the last out is made in the last World Series game), my days are pretty much shot to shit.
I spent the winter trying my best not to even think about baseball (this was a first, at least since those lost adolescent years when I was too busy snorking into a bong to pay proper attention to hygiene, let alone professional sports). I was tired of steroids, whose presence in Major League clubhouses over the last decade was apparent to anyone with even compromised eyesight and half a brain. I was disgusted when the baseball establishment ignored this obvious reality as records were being obliterated and power numbers were going through the roof.
We all knew what was going on, of course, and why Bud Selig and the baseball establishment was pretending nothing was going on. Nobody wanted to acknowledge the presence of steroids and the effect they were having on the game for the obvious reason that baseball needed all those fireworks and all the attention they brought.
Because without Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa and Barry Bonds et al, Major League Baseball would have been in big, big trouble, and the Pooh-Bahs might have had to acknowledge the serious economic problems they were facing. Without all those home runs and all the money and attention they brought to the game, I’d have to imagine that an awful lot of those new stadiums –many of which will spend much of the coming season half empty– would never have gotten built.
I’m still sick to death of steroids and inflated offensive statistics and the ever escalating economic absurdities of the sport, but I’ve realized in the last few months that I still love baseball. I can’t help myself. Kirby Puckett died and I was shattered, but I was also reminded of how much pleasure –personal and, more importantly, communal pleasure– and real joy baseball has given me over the years. The game is hard-wired in my brain, and the moment the snow started disappearing from the city parks and the baseball fields –the baseball diamonds— started to emerge, I realized I was getting antsy.
One night a few weeks ago, without even quite realizing what I was doing, I found myself in the bookstore, standing in the checkout line with a pile of baseball annuals in my arms. I started picking up the newspaper again, and scanning the notes from the spring training camps.
Yesterday, as I read through the baseball previews in the Star Tribune and the New York Times, I recognized that I was genuinely excited. My hiatus from the game, which stretched back to sometime around last year’s all-star break, was good for me, but it’s time for me to take baseball back, to bring it back into my life.
I’m ready for another season to begin, ready for the old comfortable routines of box scores and evenings at the ballpark and Baseball Tonight, for road trips and radio broadcasts. And, as always, I’m fully prepared –well, perhaps not fully prepared– for the usual surprises and disappointments, and am holding out hope for more of the former than the latter.
I will also say this, as prelude to a whole bunch of other crazy and contradictory stuff I’ll eventually get around to saying: I think the Twins are going to be a pretty damn good baseball team. That might be wishful thinking, but there haven’t been a whole lot of years where I’ve even been willing to indulge in that sort of wishful thinking on opening day.
And from a purely personal standpoint, that’s as good a way as any to kick off another baseball season.
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Notes on 'The Natural Look'
Did any of ya’all see the done-up harlot modeling the “natural” look on the back page of the Signature section in yesterday’s Star Tribune? Hmpf! Here I’d been thinking I was rocking the natural all along–for some ten years now, ever since I gave up on foundation, back in college, when I figured how poorly it stood up against my bike commute. Of course, I was wearing drug store varieties–cheap Cover Girl and Maybelline stuff. In any case, it’s disappointing to know that achieving the natural look will require hauling back out the powder, and then smearing on rose-colored blush and lipstick. Oh, and I see that natural girls don’t get to wear eyeliner. But gobs of black mascara is okay. Does the natural look require freckles? And will Sephora be carrying freckle appliques this fresh, new season? (And do they carry those nibble appliques? That’s a sort of natural look too, right?) The natural look: isn’t that what casper-white Keira Knightly and Scarlett Johansson were doing on the cover of Vanity Fair last month, while that uber-icky Tom Ford whiffed ’em over? Ew!