Dear Mayor Coleman, a bevy of city workers met me at the cottonwood tree this afternoon - if bevy is quite the word to include a burly Public Works guy. There they all were, kind, and informative.
What seemed to doom the tree at this meeting was the traffic circle which is part of the bike way now slated to exist on Griggs.If the traffic circle is put where the corners are in the crossing, it will impair the tree. Yes, the traffic circle could be moved somewhat west in the intersection, thus making more room for a cottonwood tree boulevard, but neither the burly public works guy nor the slender forestry guy was particularly hep to this notion. Could it be possible to make such an adjustment to a plan that had been federally funded for months and needed to be implemented? They kept shaking their heads and talking about digging down and injuring the tree which would surely fall on something or someone.
For me, at this point, the root of the problem goes back to initial Lex-Ham discussions of the two choices for the bikeway through the neighborhood - should it be narrow Griggs with many older trees or should it be broader Dunlap with broader boulevards and almost all young trees?
The community had no "forestry input" at the point of deciding. No one came to tell the group that mature trees would be in danger of being removed if two traffic circles were put in.
Here's my suggestion: that there be a plan put in place to do just that--to make sure that community members asked to help make a decision about city streets and traffic patterns be informed about just what would happen to current trees if certain solutions were put in place. I suspect knowing the cottonwood tree would be doomed with putting a traffic circle on Griggs and Portland might well have swayed the community against selecting Griggs and instead choosing Dunlap.
Meanwhile I keep hoping that a tree fairy will wave a magic wand and gently ease the traffic circle west, expanding the boulevard for the cottonwood. Just maybe the cottonwood could become the Poster Tree for St. Paul's new bikeway system. After all, both trees and biking help lessen the CO2 that cars spew into our atmosphere. Both trees and bikes are part of a global solution.
This is the perspective of a poet tree lover who's written a poem about that very tree: It's called
Miracoli
Something divine in the daily exercise
rafter of clouds,
the sun shafting its spear,
a wasteland colonized
with milkweed's sails of white,
a grey squirrel suddenly white
in high-pitched shade
reminder of the day
when overnight a cottonwood let fall
its gold-white hearts, and
kissed the ground all over.
Thank you for all you've done. With best wishes.
Tuesday, April 29, 2014
Sunday, April 20, 2014
Margotlog: Mozart and Matisse
Margotlog: Mozart and Matisse
I used to believe that I was the young Mozart. This came about when I read his biography, a book with an orange cover, sitting in my father's huge, over-stuffed chair, during the heat of a South Carolina summer. When our mother took my sister and me to the Charleston Symphony concerts at Memminger Auditorium, I suspected that the boy Mozart hung suspended within the velvet folds of the curtains at the left of the stage. Never the right. Something of the rascally, talented boy waited there.
In those days, there were many biographies for young readers with orange covers. Another told the story of Madame Curie, a celebrated female scientist, unusual at any period. She lived in Paris. Cure and Curie sounded alike. Yet, though I admired her, I did not want to be Madame Curie, but always the young Mozart. He came alive under my fingers running up and down the piano keys, the years I studied piano with Grace Miller, walking down the irregular slate sidewalks of Charleston, and presenting myself at her door. She had a face peppered with orange freckles, and surrounded by a frizz of orange-brown hair. Something of a leprechaun.
I chose Mozart and not Beethoven or Haydn, whose concerto for four hands I learned well enough to perform with Miss Miller at my last piano recital. I chose Mozart because he was a boy genius, full of fire and jokes and whimsy. We were a family of sudden inspirations and surprises--my father embracing my mother in the kitchen instead of yelling at her about spots on his Citadel uniform. A rat running across the Old Citadel courtyard, its tail long as a ladle. Slabs of ceiling plaster falling and crushing our little play table. When we returned who knows how many days later, long strands of straw, ancient as the Old Citadel itself, hung over the wreckage.
When "Amadeus," the film about Mozart and his rival Salieri, came out in 1984, I believed in it with a child's abandon even though by that time, I considered myself more than grown up. I wanted to be that boy genius so endowed with grace that he could make silly faces while performing like an angel. Creating music of soaring divinity while sliding a frog down the soprano's décolletage. Struggling in poverty toward an early grave even as he composed one of the world's most enchanted opera, The Magic Flute.
Now I've seen a production of The Magic Flute by the Minnesota Opera Company that does justice to my early vision of Mozart's comically sweet, dark music. The production uses animation with dragons built of clockworks, devils playing hangman with one's chances, yet reversing the tune just in time toward sublime, tumbling delights. Maybe I'm entering my second childhood. Maybe Mozart never left his first, but trundled it along toward his death at age 35, fulfilling symphonic demands yet retaining inside his pocket a pop-up nose of a delightful nihilist who brings joy even as he sings these madcap harmonies toward the grave, to the tune of bells.
Matisse, the French Impressionist, turned wild colorist and final graceful abstractionist, could not have led a life less inspired by childhood. He was a quintessential pater familias, good bourgeois who went to work in a suit. I bring him up here because also this week I saw an exhibit of Matisse's work at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Opera in St. Paul; painting in Minneapolis. We are very arty twin cities sometimes.
These two artists, separated by almost a century, tell different tales of how talent discovers itself. The boy Mozart, born with genius, bestowed in relatively few years and reverenced ever since. Matisse, taking years to work himself beyond a rather dry repetition of the time-honored subject--woman in a chair. Yes, Matisse became a Fauve, a wild beast throwing bright colors against each other, sometimes even slashing a green stripe down his model's face. Yet there remained in him the
careful, constant revisionist. Take his series of drawings of an odalisque--that exotic import from a sultan's palace, aka the reclining nude, sometimes as in Ingres, very tightly painted despite her naked curves, sometimes as in Delacroix, tinged with shadows and patterned cloth, a hint of hand cymbals just beyond the frame.
For Matisse toward the end of his painterly development, this motive was played back and forth, from more naturalistic to greater simplicity and monumentality. We know because he took pictures of the more than 12 studies of an odalisque which he made over a week or two. How interesting, I say to myself, noticing how in one he retains the slit of buttock against buttock, yet how in another that elides that to a simple curve. The final painting is almost Egyptian in its rock-like U shape. I'm not sure I like it.
But I love what happened not long after, when giving up painting for paper cut-outs, Matisse began an experiment with bright colors, flat shapes, and jazzy placements. Wavy curving thin thick light dark blue chartreuse red black arranged almost at random on time-honored 9 x 12 paper. Or as in the Barnes Museum in Philadelphia, set a line of huge cavorting females in an array of colors across a huge mural--the essence of motion so joyful as to obliterate anything but itself.
I used to believe that I was the young Mozart. This came about when I read his biography, a book with an orange cover, sitting in my father's huge, over-stuffed chair, during the heat of a South Carolina summer. When our mother took my sister and me to the Charleston Symphony concerts at Memminger Auditorium, I suspected that the boy Mozart hung suspended within the velvet folds of the curtains at the left of the stage. Never the right. Something of the rascally, talented boy waited there.
In those days, there were many biographies for young readers with orange covers. Another told the story of Madame Curie, a celebrated female scientist, unusual at any period. She lived in Paris. Cure and Curie sounded alike. Yet, though I admired her, I did not want to be Madame Curie, but always the young Mozart. He came alive under my fingers running up and down the piano keys, the years I studied piano with Grace Miller, walking down the irregular slate sidewalks of Charleston, and presenting myself at her door. She had a face peppered with orange freckles, and surrounded by a frizz of orange-brown hair. Something of a leprechaun.
I chose Mozart and not Beethoven or Haydn, whose concerto for four hands I learned well enough to perform with Miss Miller at my last piano recital. I chose Mozart because he was a boy genius, full of fire and jokes and whimsy. We were a family of sudden inspirations and surprises--my father embracing my mother in the kitchen instead of yelling at her about spots on his Citadel uniform. A rat running across the Old Citadel courtyard, its tail long as a ladle. Slabs of ceiling plaster falling and crushing our little play table. When we returned who knows how many days later, long strands of straw, ancient as the Old Citadel itself, hung over the wreckage.
When "Amadeus," the film about Mozart and his rival Salieri, came out in 1984, I believed in it with a child's abandon even though by that time, I considered myself more than grown up. I wanted to be that boy genius so endowed with grace that he could make silly faces while performing like an angel. Creating music of soaring divinity while sliding a frog down the soprano's décolletage. Struggling in poverty toward an early grave even as he composed one of the world's most enchanted opera, The Magic Flute.
Now I've seen a production of The Magic Flute by the Minnesota Opera Company that does justice to my early vision of Mozart's comically sweet, dark music. The production uses animation with dragons built of clockworks, devils playing hangman with one's chances, yet reversing the tune just in time toward sublime, tumbling delights. Maybe I'm entering my second childhood. Maybe Mozart never left his first, but trundled it along toward his death at age 35, fulfilling symphonic demands yet retaining inside his pocket a pop-up nose of a delightful nihilist who brings joy even as he sings these madcap harmonies toward the grave, to the tune of bells.
Matisse, the French Impressionist, turned wild colorist and final graceful abstractionist, could not have led a life less inspired by childhood. He was a quintessential pater familias, good bourgeois who went to work in a suit. I bring him up here because also this week I saw an exhibit of Matisse's work at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Opera in St. Paul; painting in Minneapolis. We are very arty twin cities sometimes.
These two artists, separated by almost a century, tell different tales of how talent discovers itself. The boy Mozart, born with genius, bestowed in relatively few years and reverenced ever since. Matisse, taking years to work himself beyond a rather dry repetition of the time-honored subject--woman in a chair. Yes, Matisse became a Fauve, a wild beast throwing bright colors against each other, sometimes even slashing a green stripe down his model's face. Yet there remained in him the
careful, constant revisionist. Take his series of drawings of an odalisque--that exotic import from a sultan's palace, aka the reclining nude, sometimes as in Ingres, very tightly painted despite her naked curves, sometimes as in Delacroix, tinged with shadows and patterned cloth, a hint of hand cymbals just beyond the frame.
For Matisse toward the end of his painterly development, this motive was played back and forth, from more naturalistic to greater simplicity and monumentality. We know because he took pictures of the more than 12 studies of an odalisque which he made over a week or two. How interesting, I say to myself, noticing how in one he retains the slit of buttock against buttock, yet how in another that elides that to a simple curve. The final painting is almost Egyptian in its rock-like U shape. I'm not sure I like it.
But I love what happened not long after, when giving up painting for paper cut-outs, Matisse began an experiment with bright colors, flat shapes, and jazzy placements. Wavy curving thin thick light dark blue chartreuse red black arranged almost at random on time-honored 9 x 12 paper. Or as in the Barnes Museum in Philadelphia, set a line of huge cavorting females in an array of colors across a huge mural--the essence of motion so joyful as to obliterate anything but itself.
Tuesday, April 8, 2014
Margotlog: Another Silent Spring, a Spring Without Bees?
Margotlog: Another Silent Spring, a Spring Without Bees?
When Rachel Carson published Silent Spring in 1962, she imagined a neighborhood so quiet as to be dead. All the birds gone due to DDT's effect on thinning their shells and killing the worms and insects they ate. Today we have recovered the sounds of spring--gulls returning north wheeling in the sky, silver against the coming dark. Beautiful reminder that winter is ebbing and we in Minnesota are returning to the land of the living, the melting, the growing.
My heart clutches. What am I going to plant this year that won't kill the bees? For many seasons I've bought my container flowers for the back deck from Menards. Think Fleet Farm, or any local hardware store that caters to backyard gardeners who want a quick fix. Recently I've become convinced that I can't do this anymore. It's too deadly.
For several years I've been reading about bee colony collapse. It's taken a while to finger the culprit, but scientific evidence now points to a widespread pesticide family called Neonicotinoids. Think Neon - I - cotin-oids.
Not only is this family of pesticides widely used against so-called pests, meaning insects that harm row crops (and potatoes, etc), but they are also applied to garden plantings before these seedlings make their way to our yards. Thus, we simple flower lovers are unwittingly spreading death to some of the most crucial insects on the planet--bees who pollinate many many kinds of flowering trees, many of whose flowers turn into fruit and nuts. Think apples as the most basic. But also almonds which I personally love to crunch.
Alerted to this phenomenon last year, I began paying attention to the flying insects in my summer yard. Yes, there were fewer bees. Monarch butterflies had decreased for the past six or seven years almost to invisibility. We didn't even have wasps any more--those pesky stingers who used to live in the ground just at the edge of the house. Only an occasional honey bee, bumble bee, only an occasional white cabbage butterfly hovered around my flowers on the deck last year. I saw one Monarch butterfly all summer long.
This change has occurred incredibly fast. Was it only a few years ago that driving south from the North Shore of Lake Superior, I encountered so many Monarchs drifting across the highway that I clutched the wheel, hoping against hope not to hit them?
There is no doubt in my mind that many of our crucial foods are being threatened by agri-chemical giants like Monsanto, and by our own greedy stupidity. It may be something of a diversion but I can't help thinking of underlying patterns. Seeing the documentary film "King Corn," made by two "kids" with Iowa roots, teaches that raising an acre of corn today in mid-continent U.S., involves an enormous outlay of herbicide, possible because the corn plants via their seeds have been genetically modified to resist the herbicide. Note: the herbicide kills sideline "weeds" too, to the detriment of Monarchs and other flying insects who have a special bond, aka, eating, nesting, etc., with them.
Now only does the US today raise more corn by a factor of several thousand than our farmers did forty years ago, but most of that corn goes to two truly disastrous operations: the making of corn syrup and fattening feed lot cattle. Corn-fed beef, which is what is mostly sold today in the US has over 9 grams of fat/unit versus grass/fed beef's 1.3 grams. This endangers our health, not to mention the gross environmental damage created by concentrating cattle in feed lots--their waste products rival that of medium-sized cities. All I need to say about corn syrup is that it's in nearly every food product manufactured in the US, especially soft drinks, and in concentrations high enough to add hundreds of thousands to the ranks of diabetes sufferers every year.
We can't all be chemists or farmers, but since we all like to eat and many of us care deeply about the beauty and viability of our natural world, it behooves us to pay strict and unflagging attention to what the Wizards of Chemistry are up to, and to raise our voices and put our bets against their sneaky promises of "a better life through Chemistry."
I'll be searching out organic flowers this season, and turning in ever greater numbers to foods that are not genetically engineered or chemically enhanced. I'll also be keeping tabs on the bees, hoping against hope that my flowers sustain and do not derange them.
This is as crucial a crossroads as Rachel Carson's outcry against DDT. We must prevail against chemical companies like Monsanto. We must follow the European Union and outlaw the production and use of neonicotinoids. It is a political and environmental battle for our own and our planet's health. One and the same.
When Rachel Carson published Silent Spring in 1962, she imagined a neighborhood so quiet as to be dead. All the birds gone due to DDT's effect on thinning their shells and killing the worms and insects they ate. Today we have recovered the sounds of spring--gulls returning north wheeling in the sky, silver against the coming dark. Beautiful reminder that winter is ebbing and we in Minnesota are returning to the land of the living, the melting, the growing.
My heart clutches. What am I going to plant this year that won't kill the bees? For many seasons I've bought my container flowers for the back deck from Menards. Think Fleet Farm, or any local hardware store that caters to backyard gardeners who want a quick fix. Recently I've become convinced that I can't do this anymore. It's too deadly.
For several years I've been reading about bee colony collapse. It's taken a while to finger the culprit, but scientific evidence now points to a widespread pesticide family called Neonicotinoids. Think Neon - I - cotin-oids.
Not only is this family of pesticides widely used against so-called pests, meaning insects that harm row crops (and potatoes, etc), but they are also applied to garden plantings before these seedlings make their way to our yards. Thus, we simple flower lovers are unwittingly spreading death to some of the most crucial insects on the planet--bees who pollinate many many kinds of flowering trees, many of whose flowers turn into fruit and nuts. Think apples as the most basic. But also almonds which I personally love to crunch.
Alerted to this phenomenon last year, I began paying attention to the flying insects in my summer yard. Yes, there were fewer bees. Monarch butterflies had decreased for the past six or seven years almost to invisibility. We didn't even have wasps any more--those pesky stingers who used to live in the ground just at the edge of the house. Only an occasional honey bee, bumble bee, only an occasional white cabbage butterfly hovered around my flowers on the deck last year. I saw one Monarch butterfly all summer long.
This change has occurred incredibly fast. Was it only a few years ago that driving south from the North Shore of Lake Superior, I encountered so many Monarchs drifting across the highway that I clutched the wheel, hoping against hope not to hit them?
There is no doubt in my mind that many of our crucial foods are being threatened by agri-chemical giants like Monsanto, and by our own greedy stupidity. It may be something of a diversion but I can't help thinking of underlying patterns. Seeing the documentary film "King Corn," made by two "kids" with Iowa roots, teaches that raising an acre of corn today in mid-continent U.S., involves an enormous outlay of herbicide, possible because the corn plants via their seeds have been genetically modified to resist the herbicide. Note: the herbicide kills sideline "weeds" too, to the detriment of Monarchs and other flying insects who have a special bond, aka, eating, nesting, etc., with them.
Now only does the US today raise more corn by a factor of several thousand than our farmers did forty years ago, but most of that corn goes to two truly disastrous operations: the making of corn syrup and fattening feed lot cattle. Corn-fed beef, which is what is mostly sold today in the US has over 9 grams of fat/unit versus grass/fed beef's 1.3 grams. This endangers our health, not to mention the gross environmental damage created by concentrating cattle in feed lots--their waste products rival that of medium-sized cities. All I need to say about corn syrup is that it's in nearly every food product manufactured in the US, especially soft drinks, and in concentrations high enough to add hundreds of thousands to the ranks of diabetes sufferers every year.
We can't all be chemists or farmers, but since we all like to eat and many of us care deeply about the beauty and viability of our natural world, it behooves us to pay strict and unflagging attention to what the Wizards of Chemistry are up to, and to raise our voices and put our bets against their sneaky promises of "a better life through Chemistry."
I'll be searching out organic flowers this season, and turning in ever greater numbers to foods that are not genetically engineered or chemically enhanced. I'll also be keeping tabs on the bees, hoping against hope that my flowers sustain and do not derange them.
This is as crucial a crossroads as Rachel Carson's outcry against DDT. We must prevail against chemical companies like Monsanto. We must follow the European Union and outlaw the production and use of neonicotinoids. It is a political and environmental battle for our own and our planet's health. One and the same.
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