TO THE MUMBLING GLITCH-SOUL GURU bopping in Omaha parking lots: I hear you. I’m ready to embrace your teachings. I watch your channel and await further instructions.
And, most recently, a badge for surviving the Boundary Water Canoe Area Wilderness, one of Our Best-Ever Summer Excursions. No motors. No cabins. Just 1,000,000 acres left much as they were when the glaciers receded (Modern Man went ahead and dug latrines, happily).
Click once or twice for the full high-definition photo experience.
Spunky expeditionists Johanna and Isobel get friendly with Smokey at the ranger station (or as Jo calls him, “Bear in Pants”).
It’s mostly like this—smooth, steady, under control—though it’s the rocky segments that linger in my memory.
Portaging makes you look and feel strong. Though with modern canoes that’s more of an illusion.
Seasoned travel companions, Lucas, Iz and Jenney (they knew pro-tips like bringing maps and how to steer a canoe) savoring haute cuisinede camp by Chef Jenney—stirfried veggies and tofu with soba noodles. Only another box of wine could have improved this spread.
In the lottery of first-come-first-served campsites, we hit the jackpot.
There was a vast peninsula off our main camp where we ventured to fish, watch sunsets and listen to loons.
With the pack-load-land-unload-unpack routine, it takes awhile before you can just sit around.
Eventually relaxation sets in.
Lucas running missions on Clear Lake.
They return from Operation: Waterfall (we stayed back and played cards).
We got the full gamut of weather: sunny and calm, gale-force winds, thunder storms, misty rains.
A springy mattress of lichen Sarah said takes five years to grow an inch…
… but only an instant to pick to pieces.
The pajama performances were top notch (mostly free-form jamming to music in their heads).
Clear Lake—true that.
Hello Kitty coloring during repack and reload. You’d think we had a thing for Chinese T-shirts.
Headed home. You’d think we have a thing for vintage mesh caps. Turns out they’re breathable unisex canoeing headwear par excellence.
AN OUT-OF-CONTROLPADDLE throughthe Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness left my hands shredded and my right arm tweaked. My career as a hand model was never promising, but this wrist thing is gonna hurt my job performance. Keyboarding and mousing is slow; pen use is accompanied by stabs of pain. I need to rethink my oft-stated dismissal of disability insurance for writers. And I need a stenographer.
It was entirely worth it, of course. Non-injury-related highlights reel to come.
IS IT PREMATURE to compare mix-making to dying arts like blacksmithing or millinery? Probably. But when Barrett proposed an old-fashioned mix-trading club a month ago, I was giddy. I bombed friends with comps back when they took hours to create. Now it’s appallingly cheap—sequencing and burning a CD takes less than 60 seconds; there may be love there, but not much labor.
For old-school skills to survive, you have to make sport of it. I got a turntable with a USB output, so I can eat up time converting vinyl tracks to include. There are little challenges like repping music from five or more decades, going for gender balance (if not equity), and floating some highly improbable juxtapositions. Here’s what I came up with: Download Adult Contemporary Mixtape Club #1: Vegan Safari.
01 Nobody But Me – The Human Beinz
02 We Are the Men You’ll Grow to Love Soon – Let’s Wrestle
03 Feet and Bones – Trampled By Turtles
04 Is It True – Brenda Lee
05 Dixon’s Girl – Dessa
06 Work – Gang Starr (R.I.P. Guru)
07 Action – Oh No
08 Academy Fight Song – Mission of Burma
09 Die Right Now – Lemonheads
10 Mambo Sun – T. Rex
11 Subtractions – Dosh
12 Tortoise Pace – Memory Tapes
13 I’m So Green – Can
14 Getting Nasty – Ike Turner & His Kings of Rhythm
15 I Can’t Stand The Rain – Ann Peebles
16 Balcony Beach – Latyrx
17 The Style You Haven’t Done Yet – Boogie Down Productions
18 Half of Two Times Two – Barr
19 Mother of Pearl (edit) – Roxy Music
20 Paris 1919 – John Cale
21 Love Rules – Pens
21 Anyway You Like It – Holly Golightly
22 Old Enough – Nelly McKay
23 Golden Apples – Country Teasers
A SLEW OF VINTAGE FREIGHT COMPANY PADS were my booty from Sarah’s recent trip to Salem (Oregon), quirky artifacts from the Early Modern era of office stationery scored at a flea market. They’re nice to have by a desk phone (preferably corded), with an in-between size and parchment-like surface that’s good for drawing. You gotta love the tiny maps and type that looks like it’s in a hurry (click a couple times to enlarge).
SPECIAL SCREENINGSOF HITCHCOCK are happening within walking distance, at the strange new Trylon microcinema and the Riverview, our ‘hood’s best bragging right. I’m a Hitch-lover, but I underestimated the charge of seeing “The Birds” in a crowded house—with buffs hooting and laughing beyond usual Minnesota decorum.
I found details I’d missed: Tippi Hedron’s green suit that stays unruffled through a half-dozen attacks, only to be pecked to shreds at the end (along with her steely demeanor); Suzanne Pleshette’s brooding, loser-ish existence that (I see now) marks her as a casualty even before the birds finish her off.
It even felt topical. At the peak of the berserk attacks, townsfolk are left wondering if they themselves are to blame for nature turning on them. Nearly 50 years later, there can benodoubt.
- + – + – + - Nick Reding’s “Methland” explains the rural methamphetamine epidemic in terms of disappearing industrial jobs, shrinking wages, and an abundance of fertilizer, which contains a key ingredient for the drug’s production. Congress had a chance to shut down the source of ephedrine (another main ingredient) in 1985 and nip the problem in the bud. Instead they caved to the pharmaceutical lobby who cashed in on those who would crush up and cook the pills into a drug much more powerful and addictive than crack.
I have family in the immediate vicinity of Oelwein, Iowa, the town the book examines, and I live only 150 miles away. Yet I have no reference point for the “delusional violence, morbid depravity, extreme sexual perversion and almost otherworldly, hallucinogenic dimension of evil” meth has wrought in Reding’s description. Since reading “Methland”, I’m attributing people’s odd behavior to the drug: the woman clearly shoplifting at Walgreen’s who, when stopped for her receipt, abruptly hands her “purchase” to the cashier saying “just hold this while I have a cigarette”; The girl behind me at the coffee shop with the awful scabs on her face who struggled to pull her dollar out of her pocket.
Of course, you don’t know who’s a tweaker, who’s sick or who’s just unlucky (or maybe all three). It’s reassuring to think addiction only happens to people who’ve made lousy choices—people we’re separated from by good sense and propriety. But when it wrecks a whole region, we all share in the moral failing. That a drug can erode the humanity of so many people, families and communities and yet be invisible to those living comfortably nearby deepens the tragedy.
NOT SAYING I’M ALOOF about catastrophic climate change. But I don’t recall an April in Minnesota more resplendent.
You only get to enjoy this color for about a week.
“I like summer best, but I like winter more. Because of the snow.”
First backyard barbecue of the season at Allie’s sweet new place.
Kirk firing up the bubble pipe for Lola.
We put a third-wheel contraption on my bike for Johanna to ride. She begs to do it, even after falling off while in motion, an awful moment that stopped traffic, but resulted in only minor scratches.
In neighborhood news, the school next door will not be turned into an fugly assisted living facility as planned. It will continue to sit overgrown and unoccupied for teenagers to hang around at night and drink Mike’s Hard Lemonades. Which I’m all about.
MUCH HAS BEEN PROMISED by Friday—names, radio spots, proposals, all-day planning sessions, a de-dandelionification plan—and my hours are numbered. I’ve set up a backyard control center to ease myself in with warm breezes, fervent birdsong and the rustle of new leaves. You and me, Nature: let’s get busy.
MIRED IN INTERNETDETOURSdu jour, it can take me years to get around to printed matter that matters. So I’m indebted to East Lake Library for setting out Marjane Satrapi’s Complete Persepolis. The movie version was a treat, but I’m over the moon for the original comics. I’ve raced through 30 years in the life of an Iranian child-prophet/radical/ex-pat/artist in a couple days. Satrapi’s flat, unfussy drawings somehow perfectly complement the epic sweep of a memoir punctuated by war, prison, suicide, puberty, punk and political revolt. It makes the First-World banalities of contemporary American graphic artists feel especially scant.
* * * * *
It’s with serious pride (and a little envy) that I watch Sarah’s Rectangle Designs efforts fully bloom in 2010. Nearly a thousand inky hands took turns at block-and-leaf printing during her one-woman workshop at the Walker Art Center. Meanwhile the discerning eyes at the Walker Shop have made her shirts their marquee spring display (get a load of ‘em below). She’s doing a massive environmental art piece with Edison High School students later this month and an artist profile in the ‘Strib is expected this week. And so our family’s fame grows. Wealth can wait.
