humidity

It's midnight and rainy in Minneapolis.

After a week of promises, and a parched disappointment made bearable only by the cooler-than-predicted temps, it finally rains. A good soaker. "Tornado watch until 6am" warns MyWeather, though the lightning is distant in the south and the winds negligable at the moment. I opened my window here in the sewing room, just so I could listen to the dripping water as it falls. It sounds like bamboo chimes and birds chirping. It's one of the perfect sounds, ranked only by my son breathing calmly as he sleeps.

As usual, at this time of night, I think of all my friends who live nearby and wonder if they are sleeping. It's an open proposition, since most of them are night people by habit if no longer by lifestyle -- and just as I typed that line I had a brief recollection of a dream -- a flashback to a dream. Last night I think I dreamt that JJ had returned from San Diego, finished with grad school and a real architect at last. I miss her.

As for the nearer-to-hand; I can imagine their beds or their sitting rooms, their wet yards in the dark and maybe a bright window still glowing into the street -- I wish some of them lived closer, imagine how nice it would be to just walk across the alley in the night for a quick chat, leaning against a garage or propping open a gate. Instead we each return to our islands at night.

A few live on mountains of volcanic height, a few in more modest hilltops, one or two underground. Islands in a small sea of neighborly influence -- neighbors being those people who always stay the same distance from you, each house separated by a moat of sanctity, each apartment a denial of the unit next door. We have new neighbors here on Taylor; the rental unit to our south was vacated last week by the two Matts and a guy we referred to as Skeeziks, a pre-med student whose name I forget. Now it's Juan and his fiancee, not long out of Long Beach, hanging out in Northeast for a few years while they plot their careers. They have a little dog who makes my son nervous, and chews on rocks. No fence between our yards, and not much yard for them at all, so the husband and I are welcoming but watchful -- we aren't keen on dogpiles. But the newbies seem nice, and they moved here for the quiet they say. We agree that quiet is good.

Night in the night -- rain and wet. Warm and dark. Intimate in the way that summer nights can be, a warmth and humidity that brings out our sense of the nearest body to hand -- everyone damp and somewhat easier to find by scent alone, all of us connected by the thickening of the air, molecules bridging the distance between one body and the next. It's reassuring, in a way. Air conditioning on the other hand will freeze-dry a person if not mindful, and makes the soft air outside seem smothering by contrast. I remember the days of long talks in the dark -- late nights outdoors where the only privacy could be found.

Aztec Dancers - as promised

A few of the dozen snapshots from the Ketzal Coatlique performance this past Saturday at Logan Park:
The performers make their own costumes after studying the appropriate references, though their spokesperson (on drum) explained that "trends change, and artists change." The feathers (including some Chinese pheasant feathers that must have been five or six feet long) are hand-stitched into head-pieces by the dancers; the costumes include a variety of materials, some inexpensive, though obvious attention went into the construction. The leader delivered her introductions and info in both Spanish and English. It was every bit as engaging as watching U.S. Native American performances, the beauty of the choreography matching the costumes' appeal. Maybe more interesting for me, since I'd never seen this particular type of dance before.

(I heard from the guy who booked them that at a different sort of event, they have also presented historical reenactments of traditional Mayan rituals -- Joel mentioned human sacrifice and made reference to the most recent Mel Gibson-produced flick, Apocalypto. Makes me wonder what sort of event calls for it, not that I'm much interested.)

grab bags

A friend of mine has fond memories of a hometown event that always featured grab bags -- a few pennies for a mixed bag of who-knew-what obscured in brown paper -- something good, or something really lame or undesirable, maybe a bit of both. You couldn't know until you paid up, and grabbed a bag.

So far, that's been my week -- I put in my time prepping for an event, I cover my bases as well as I can, and when the time comes -- each of the past three days has been a slightly different "mixture" of nice surprises and disappointments. The time comes and you buy your ticket, and you don't know what you'll get, because my job has not yet reached a comfortable level of predictability.

I don't so much want to relive the details of each day, since the cumulative effect is exhaustion (and more to come this week); here are the emphatic points.

Thursday: Lists and lists and lists, beans and beans to count, this and that and this and that. I accidentally stood up an artist I'm trying to book for year's end (not a good move) -- my head is so utterly mired in minutia that I actually neglected to write the appointment down at all, terribly unlike me. I'm sure I overdid the apologies. I'm in a general state of frantic.
But then at day's end I went with some church members on a prayer walk. Which sounds really scary and evangelical; in fact it was neither. Five adults and three children, we literally walked the neighborhood, observing the folks who were outside and commenting on the houses we saw, greeting people, chatting each other up, growing thoughtful towards the end. We sat for a long time on the church steps afterward and debriefed: what is our neighborhood, how is it composed? Who sees us, whom do we see, how do we receive one another? It's not field work, we aren't looking for demographic data but rather, trying to get "the lay of the land." We opened and closed with prayer, and while I'd have been happy to do more of that as we walked, it was a naturally meditative experience. I do a lot of this same sort of walking alone, to and from work, or with my son -- and I do often think about the homes and the people I pass by: Wondering who they are, and why, at times saying a quick, quiet prayer for someone who looks especially aggrieved. So Thursday night was, for me, deeply enjoyable.

Friday was a stinker. After really working hard to tread water all week, I felt overwhelmed, and to make matters worse I was OBVIOUSLY striking out a second time at getting artists in the community interested in my latest project -- transportation as a political issue or a social justice theme. I had lots of inquiries, but nobody new came through by yesterday's deadline -- so at this point I have a great dance group, a nice little filmmaker, a poet and that's IT. I have to come up with some artwork FAST. And it can't all be mine. Dammit. Plus the last-minute prep for today's event incited an argument between my husband and I -- the subject, 300 hotdog buns. Don't ask. Friday was a stinker. It's possible the universe has thrown me a rope, per the exhibit that doesn't want to get off the ground -- an interesting email arrived last night that indicates some potential artwork out of South Minneapolis. Could it be that after eight years of genuine governmental disregard for the citizenry, artists just don't give a rat's ass anymore? Sitting at home smoking dope and drinking wine, while their paint brushes harden on the palette. One good thing: We got ninety percent of the food for today's picnic donated, by way of a pastor friend at the other end of the block, who has pals at Whole Foods.

Today, Saturday -- good things: lots of willing volunteers, 175 visitors during the first half of the picnic, the Ketzal Coatlique Aztec Dancers performing with their incredible feather headdresses (pics forthcoming), and all the new faces we saw from every walk of life. And lots of kids. Bad things: the sound guys were HOURS late, so no bands went on until after the crowd started to thin out. Things didn't pick up again much after that. Lots of leftover hotdogs (and buns). Sore feet from standing all day and shuttling things back and forth from the church to the park. And maybe one more good thing: we are helping the neighborhood to identify us with the park, which is a cool, happening place.

The grab bag is an adventure, in some ways. It's the mystery, the I-know-not-what (I'll spare you the French). It's the chance you take when you roll out of bed each day, that not everything will proceed as planned.

One year since the bridge collapse: 8/1/08

Tomorrow at about 6pm churches all over the area will ring their bells and the community will observe a moment of silence in remembrance of those killed and injured during the collapse of the 35W Bridge last summer.

It's difficult to view these images, and the many other pictures and videos that documented this terrible happening. I still feel the shock of this wound to the community and the landscape, here at the river's edge, the birthplace of the city. I still feel misgivings about the wisdom of erecting a new bridge so quickly on the old site -- only a seven-foot gap now remains to be closed and final steps are being taken to finish the bridge as quickly as possible. The last estimate I heard was that they would re-open the highway this month. It seems to me to be an afront to the lives lost and the lives crippled, especially given the ongoing controversy over local and national infrastructure. I had naively hoped someone would consider rerouting the freeway entirely, by turning highway 280 into a 35W bypass permanently. It was obvious soon after the collapse that no one had seriously consider any such alternative.

I watched the papers for a long time afterward, tracking the numbers of dead and missing as news filtered in. One story I never saw in print, but surmised from other stories written and obscured in the middle of the paper, was the terrible tragedy of a young woman and her infant daughter. They were on the bridge section that fell into the water, on the side that flipped many cars onto their backs in the river. Both were reported missing and considered lost from early on, but one man also trapped in the river reported that a young woman appeared on the floating deck crying for her lost child; she pleaded for someone to help her get the baby from the car, then jumped back into the river, probably to try again to retrieve the child. The report of the recovery of their bodies was never printed, to my knowledge, thought they were found later in the month and services were observed for them. Given the media's ability to narrow down the number of people involved as quickly as they did, it seems clear that the young woman drowned trying to rescue her daughter. I imagine the story was kept clear of the papers at the family's request.

The site of those drownings is the site upon which they want to celebrate the rapid rebuilding of another automobile thruway. No memorial signage or moment of silence can offset the injustice of commerce and construction on a gravesite, to my way of thinking. People will argue that it's happened countless times before. But I'm against a big monument to 9-11 as well; it's a wound, it's a scar and it tells a story that needs to be felt and remembered and considered, rather than plastered over and beautified, modified to hide all that's still wrong and rotten about the circumstances surrounding the deaths. Here in Minneapolis, I wish we had more confidence as a society, and more class -- characteristics that would allow us to make sacrifices for the remembrance of those untimely lost.

Sacrifices like a slightly slower commute.

groovy little blog

http://storkbitesman.blogspot.com/2007_10_01_archive.html

Led to this searching Google images for "Really Rosie," the Maurice Sendak/Carole King animated special from 1975. (A fond remembrance.)

(Be careful though, per Google. This classic animation has, like so many other cool, cute kids' show items, been appropriated by amateur pornographers. People who turn kids' cartoons into porn ought to get their computer privileges revoked for life -- every time I do a YouTube search for something my own kid requests, I have to carefully screen all the results for bullshit-infected copyright infringement. I bet they think of themselves as artists too. Morons.)

Milk in the batter!

"Milk in the batter! Milk in the batter! Stir it! Make it! Mix it! Bake it!"

In the children's book (and animation) "In the Night Kitchen" by Maurice Sendak, a young boy tumbles headlong out of his bed in a dream and lands in a giant bowl of cake mix. Three gigantic chefs, identical triplet clones of Oliver Hardy, sieze the bowl and have at it with wooden spoons while they chant and stir. "Milk in the batter!" The poor kid Mickey gets covered in batter and hauled off to the oven. Mickey escapes later, but yesterday when I sat down with my son and watched the cartoon version of the book from 1970, I suddenly recalled seeing the same show myself on TV as a girl about my son's age. I remembered my panicked empathy for poor Mickey then -- it sure looked like a nightmare to me! -- help! Somebody save that naked little boy!

My kid thinks it's funny, in that way one laughs at something that scares you just a little, but is too interesting to look away from. And actually that's how I'm feeling about this week -- "Milk in the batter!" Ah! Ah! Help, I'm drowning in sticky cake mix! In "a cesspool of detail" as I put it to someone earlier this evening. Too many events and tasks in the works this week. And the roaring chefs' refrain stuck in my head along with all that anxiety -- "Milk in the batter! Milk in the batter!"

I have to find some mechanism for escape, like Mickey, who pops out of the oven and yells "I'm not the milk and the milk's not me! God bless milk and God bless ME!!"