Margotlog: Oil and Water: Minnesota Sandpiper Project
Two things in recent StarTribune articles sent mini-shock waves through my thoughts: first that Enbridge Energy in Calgary wants to add another pipeline to carry oil from the North Dakota tar sands under and near iconic Minnesota bogs and lakes and parks -- think Lake Itasca. The pipeline already there skirts Lake Itasca by what looks like only a few miles.
The second item of note, from the same area, came in today's paper - Fargo, N. Dakota, and Moorhead, MN, on either side of the Red River of the North, could soon be in the middle of a huge flood-control project that would flood hundreds if not thousands of farm land acres, especially to the west of Fargo. Flooding spreads pesticide residue and disrupts all kinds of life systems. No surprise: farmers in the area are up in arms.
Oil and water do not mix.
Flooding along the Red River suggests flooding further east in the bogs and wetlands where thousands of already endangered waterfowl nest, or rest, to and from summer and winter grounds. Many prairie and water birds once swarming through western MN and eastern ND in the hundreds of thousands have already been reduced due to draining of land for farming, pesticide damage and other predation.
Every time I hear the "Big Oil" wants to put down probes in a watery environment, I think the British Petroleum disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Not only did this kill thousands of dolphins, fish and water birds, but many more have been dying slow deaths, damaged by oil residue. Most recently, the StarTribune published an article about tuna in the Gulf whose eggs now show malformations. This means that for decades to come, tuna fisheries will find slim pickings. No doubt all kinds of other creatures are likely damaged "in the egg."
Oil damage does not go away. It is very difficult to reverse.
Of course, the bottom line is our own inordinate appetite for fuel. Yes, President Obama has set higher standards for retiring coal plants, for reducing electrical energy use. But this oil from North Dakota will probably fuel cars/trucks/planes.
We are going so fast we forget to notice the consequences until "But Oil" does a nasty and we're all shocked and appalled.
Here's something we can do: The Minnesota Public Utilities Comission is the ultimate permitting authority for PROJECT SANDPIPER. (Innocuous name for such a nasty business, especially when we consider that a big oil leak would no doubt kill many many sandpipers.)
I just called Tracy Smetana at the Public Utilities Commission who kindly told me that there are two ways to be involved:
1st: email sanpiperdocketing.puc@state.mn.us and ask to be put on their email list for updating on the project.
2nd: Once the assessment is completed--by the MN PUblic Utilities Commission, the MN Commerce Dept, and US Army Corps of Engineers--there will be A PUBLIC COMMENT PERIOD.
3rd. Go on line and let the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission know that you oppose the additional pipeline and why.
Help keep Oil and precious wetlands and water going their separate ways.
Monday, June 9, 2014
Wednesday, June 4, 2014
Margotlog: Trout Lilies and Bakken Tar Sands Oil
Margotlog: Trout Lilies and Bakken Tar Sands Oil
I had a job to do this evening while it was light. Cleaning up a mess, a pile of stems and their roots clogged with dirt, pulled up from a patch of Trout Lilies.
I will not tell you where they are, these lovely trout lilies, native to Minnesota and impossible to transplant. I know because I've tried. I won't tell you because they are rare, not in some places, but here, along a St. Paul alley half a mile from my house within walking distance, which is where I found them one early spring years ago.
Trout because their long low leaves are flecked with dark shadows, like water running over rocks in a trout stream. The white flowers with back-curved petals bend low yet are perky with a shape like a jester's cap.
What a charm, the first years of their discovery and spring return. Because they die back completely. Now, for instance, it is almost impossible to perceive they grew there. The first time I saw them, I knew they were rare because I had never seen them in the neighborhood before.
The Moyles' book of Northland Wild Flowers lists them as abundant in Nerstrand Big Woods Park near Northfield, along with their even rarer kin, the Minnesota Trout Lily. They grow, write the Moyles, along the margins of streams, where perhaps once trout swam. It's possible the alley margin where I see them was once a stream. Over 300 years ago what is now Ayd Mill Road was a river which has been diverted underground, yet the high banks on either side of Ayd Mill Road, and even the "Mill" itself, suggest a river to turn a water wheel.
It puffs me up with unnecessary pride to know these small local secrets--of trout lilies and hidden water--and to keep these secrets except now when I tell you. And it infuriated and horrified me when about five years ago, someone on the other side of the alley discarded slabs of concrete in the trout lily bed. I moved some, but the ground was scarred, which opened the way to noxious weeds. This spring when I visited the trout lilies, I saw how starved out they were getting from these huge spiny weeds. I vowed after the next big rain, I would pull the weeds. Which I did, and left a pile of broken stems and clods of roots along the alley. This evening I cleaned that up.
On my way back across Ayd Mill Road and the railroad tracks that run beside the road, I was stopped by a huge line of ominous black tanker cars. The train slowly clunked by, car after car as I memorized the messages on the cars: Chemical Spill, call 800-424-9300. I stopped counting at 75.
Possibly the cars were empty, returning to the Bakken oil fields in North Dakota for refills. Slowly it occurred to me how close the tracks are to the houses I pass on my way to the lilies. How close in fact the tracks are to my own house, three blocks away. There have been terrible oil fires and contamination of rivers and ground water from overturned oil cars just like these.
These cars, in fact the whole business of digging up tar sands and leeching oil out of it, are analogous to the slabs of used concrete someone threw on the trout lilies. They are a disaster.
I will call our Congresswoman Betty McCollum and our city council person, and urge that these trains be rerouted away from homes and families. But the truth is, there is no safe place for such trains. The practice itself is so damaging environmentally that it's only because it has flooded N. Dakota with jobs and because we all use far too much oil that we tolerate it at all.
Trout lilies--persistent even in their secret spot until some careless remodeler turned their small slice of land into a dump.
Note: As I return home and begin writing this message, our lights flicker and go out. The darkness is intense. I am in an island of darkness with no help, Sometimes, even if only for a few minutes, I feel alone and endangered. Until I remember that the lilies wait underground. Perhaps our humanity and good sense must wait too.
I had a job to do this evening while it was light. Cleaning up a mess, a pile of stems and their roots clogged with dirt, pulled up from a patch of Trout Lilies.
I will not tell you where they are, these lovely trout lilies, native to Minnesota and impossible to transplant. I know because I've tried. I won't tell you because they are rare, not in some places, but here, along a St. Paul alley half a mile from my house within walking distance, which is where I found them one early spring years ago.
Trout because their long low leaves are flecked with dark shadows, like water running over rocks in a trout stream. The white flowers with back-curved petals bend low yet are perky with a shape like a jester's cap.
What a charm, the first years of their discovery and spring return. Because they die back completely. Now, for instance, it is almost impossible to perceive they grew there. The first time I saw them, I knew they were rare because I had never seen them in the neighborhood before.
The Moyles' book of Northland Wild Flowers lists them as abundant in Nerstrand Big Woods Park near Northfield, along with their even rarer kin, the Minnesota Trout Lily. They grow, write the Moyles, along the margins of streams, where perhaps once trout swam. It's possible the alley margin where I see them was once a stream. Over 300 years ago what is now Ayd Mill Road was a river which has been diverted underground, yet the high banks on either side of Ayd Mill Road, and even the "Mill" itself, suggest a river to turn a water wheel.
It puffs me up with unnecessary pride to know these small local secrets--of trout lilies and hidden water--and to keep these secrets except now when I tell you. And it infuriated and horrified me when about five years ago, someone on the other side of the alley discarded slabs of concrete in the trout lily bed. I moved some, but the ground was scarred, which opened the way to noxious weeds. This spring when I visited the trout lilies, I saw how starved out they were getting from these huge spiny weeds. I vowed after the next big rain, I would pull the weeds. Which I did, and left a pile of broken stems and clods of roots along the alley. This evening I cleaned that up.
On my way back across Ayd Mill Road and the railroad tracks that run beside the road, I was stopped by a huge line of ominous black tanker cars. The train slowly clunked by, car after car as I memorized the messages on the cars: Chemical Spill, call 800-424-9300. I stopped counting at 75.
Possibly the cars were empty, returning to the Bakken oil fields in North Dakota for refills. Slowly it occurred to me how close the tracks are to the houses I pass on my way to the lilies. How close in fact the tracks are to my own house, three blocks away. There have been terrible oil fires and contamination of rivers and ground water from overturned oil cars just like these.
These cars, in fact the whole business of digging up tar sands and leeching oil out of it, are analogous to the slabs of used concrete someone threw on the trout lilies. They are a disaster.
I will call our Congresswoman Betty McCollum and our city council person, and urge that these trains be rerouted away from homes and families. But the truth is, there is no safe place for such trains. The practice itself is so damaging environmentally that it's only because it has flooded N. Dakota with jobs and because we all use far too much oil that we tolerate it at all.
Trout lilies--persistent even in their secret spot until some careless remodeler turned their small slice of land into a dump.
Note: As I return home and begin writing this message, our lights flicker and go out. The darkness is intense. I am in an island of darkness with no help, Sometimes, even if only for a few minutes, I feel alone and endangered. Until I remember that the lilies wait underground. Perhaps our humanity and good sense must wait too.
Monday, May 26, 2014
Margotlog: The Upper Room
Margotlog: The Upper Room
It was first my daughter's when we moved into this tall St. Paul house. One of two rooms on the third floor, it was the one facing south. And until the locust and olive trees grew tall enough for shade, it was flooded with morning light, even in winter. She wanted pink carpeting and blue fleur de lis wall paper--a feminine, girly look, for a teen in the interesting, challenging process of growing up.
Initially, given the divorce agreement that split her time between her dad in Minneapolis and our blended family in St. Paul, she spent only half her time in this lovely room, with postcards of moon and sun from Nuremberg above the door, winking and blinking in deep night sky. Midway through high school, she tired of shuttling back and forth and made this room her permanent abode.
For six more years through college, the room absorbed her sweet smell: eyelet pillows on the bed, a dream-catcher I'd commissioned from a Minnesota Native American artist hanging on the door to catch her bad dreams and let them melt in morning light.
The pink carpet, blue fleur de lis wallpaper, and dream catcher are still there, but I can no longer sniff her presence on the air. Slowly over the twenty years since she left, I've positioned my own mementoes along one wall.
There is a photograph of my great-grandfather from Sicily, the soldier turned Protestant minister who was forced from a chapel outside Palermo. Ruffians burned missals, shattered windows and cracked the organ. Leonardo D'Anna--his first name passed on to my father, and his last to my operatic sister. The man himself I never met, yet I see above the huge walrus moustache of the era, a "lead on, oh kindly light" in his eyes. They were blue, inherited by his grand-daughter Eleonora, named after Eleonora Duse, the great Italian soprano. My Eleonora, the last of her tribe, who died two Februaries ago at age 94.
There is a photograph of our family in New York when I was five, wearing heavy bangs and long bob, sitting beside my sister with pale eyes and curls. We were 5 and 3, sitting on a table in a famous New York seafood restaurant which my mother had bragged about. Our parents, Maxine and Leonard, sit at the table across from his paternal cousins, Lena and Eda.
My parents' beauty, those many years ago, takes my breath away. Their faces unlined, their hair well coiffed, and my father, smirking below his rimless glasses, full of pride and self-confidence. He is the apple of every female eye. My mother, shy and subdued, yet covered in a quiet sheen of loveliness. Not yet dashed aside by marital argument and bringing up daughters "on a professor's salary."
There are other photographs but today they don't speak to me. Instead I notice a copy of H. G. Adler's Panorama, a quiet yet damning memoir of the Holocaust--hard to read because of the author's elisions but unmistakably, a work of genius. Many other books line the shelves, but few others claim my attention like this one. I believe it was either lost or repressed for years until it came to light and was reprinted. Perhaps I've made this up. Yet, that something like this happened feels authentic since until this century the book was not well known in the United States.
Also on the shelves sits an "upside-down" doll from my South Carolina childhood. The face and dress that are currently "up" belong to a blond, vacant-eyed white lady. Under her skirt wait the face and plainer dress of "a colored lady." The weight of prejudice, barely conscious as I used to slip these two--mirror images of each other, but now so obvious--racist, joined under their skirts. In my South Carolina childhood, racism against black men often took violent, jeering forms, but its formula among colored and white women was more subdued. Out of necessity, perhaps, because white women and their children depended on black women to work their stoves and laundry tubs, to clean their toilets, even raise their children. There is a sickening fondness for "Mammy," in some closets of white culture, the Mammies who were shuttled to shacks along Low-Country roads, who sat toothless in their old age, sucking their gums as they rocked back and forth, staring at the passing traffic.
This too is a strong memory, not that I was raised by a woman of color, but I noticed the exhaustion of those maids and cooks who mounted the steps of a city bus in the days of segregation, carrying heavy shopping bags, and making their way to the back. The color of my skin weighed like a judgment of shame. I was so ashamed of what my white race made these tired brown women do. And I was proud when the ones, namely Rosa Parks and those she inspired in Montgomery, Alabama, boycotted their segregated buses.
This shame has entered my bloodstream and made me attentive to the burden racism puts on African Americans. When I teach these students in Minnesota schools, I tell them this memory and read them my poem "No More Back of the Bus" (published in my poetry collection, "Between the Houses," from the Laurel Poetry Collective via Amazon). The poem helps ease the students' mistrust of me. Helps me reach through history to encourage and empathize, acknowledge what my kind of people owe their kind of people. I cannot forget, or pretend that just because "kids" of color act up, they are deficient, or not open to learning. We who are complicit must work against what has hurt us all.
.
It was first my daughter's when we moved into this tall St. Paul house. One of two rooms on the third floor, it was the one facing south. And until the locust and olive trees grew tall enough for shade, it was flooded with morning light, even in winter. She wanted pink carpeting and blue fleur de lis wall paper--a feminine, girly look, for a teen in the interesting, challenging process of growing up.
Initially, given the divorce agreement that split her time between her dad in Minneapolis and our blended family in St. Paul, she spent only half her time in this lovely room, with postcards of moon and sun from Nuremberg above the door, winking and blinking in deep night sky. Midway through high school, she tired of shuttling back and forth and made this room her permanent abode.
For six more years through college, the room absorbed her sweet smell: eyelet pillows on the bed, a dream-catcher I'd commissioned from a Minnesota Native American artist hanging on the door to catch her bad dreams and let them melt in morning light.
The pink carpet, blue fleur de lis wallpaper, and dream catcher are still there, but I can no longer sniff her presence on the air. Slowly over the twenty years since she left, I've positioned my own mementoes along one wall.
There is a photograph of my great-grandfather from Sicily, the soldier turned Protestant minister who was forced from a chapel outside Palermo. Ruffians burned missals, shattered windows and cracked the organ. Leonardo D'Anna--his first name passed on to my father, and his last to my operatic sister. The man himself I never met, yet I see above the huge walrus moustache of the era, a "lead on, oh kindly light" in his eyes. They were blue, inherited by his grand-daughter Eleonora, named after Eleonora Duse, the great Italian soprano. My Eleonora, the last of her tribe, who died two Februaries ago at age 94.
There is a photograph of our family in New York when I was five, wearing heavy bangs and long bob, sitting beside my sister with pale eyes and curls. We were 5 and 3, sitting on a table in a famous New York seafood restaurant which my mother had bragged about. Our parents, Maxine and Leonard, sit at the table across from his paternal cousins, Lena and Eda.
My parents' beauty, those many years ago, takes my breath away. Their faces unlined, their hair well coiffed, and my father, smirking below his rimless glasses, full of pride and self-confidence. He is the apple of every female eye. My mother, shy and subdued, yet covered in a quiet sheen of loveliness. Not yet dashed aside by marital argument and bringing up daughters "on a professor's salary."
There are other photographs but today they don't speak to me. Instead I notice a copy of H. G. Adler's Panorama, a quiet yet damning memoir of the Holocaust--hard to read because of the author's elisions but unmistakably, a work of genius. Many other books line the shelves, but few others claim my attention like this one. I believe it was either lost or repressed for years until it came to light and was reprinted. Perhaps I've made this up. Yet, that something like this happened feels authentic since until this century the book was not well known in the United States.
Also on the shelves sits an "upside-down" doll from my South Carolina childhood. The face and dress that are currently "up" belong to a blond, vacant-eyed white lady. Under her skirt wait the face and plainer dress of "a colored lady." The weight of prejudice, barely conscious as I used to slip these two--mirror images of each other, but now so obvious--racist, joined under their skirts. In my South Carolina childhood, racism against black men often took violent, jeering forms, but its formula among colored and white women was more subdued. Out of necessity, perhaps, because white women and their children depended on black women to work their stoves and laundry tubs, to clean their toilets, even raise their children. There is a sickening fondness for "Mammy," in some closets of white culture, the Mammies who were shuttled to shacks along Low-Country roads, who sat toothless in their old age, sucking their gums as they rocked back and forth, staring at the passing traffic.
This too is a strong memory, not that I was raised by a woman of color, but I noticed the exhaustion of those maids and cooks who mounted the steps of a city bus in the days of segregation, carrying heavy shopping bags, and making their way to the back. The color of my skin weighed like a judgment of shame. I was so ashamed of what my white race made these tired brown women do. And I was proud when the ones, namely Rosa Parks and those she inspired in Montgomery, Alabama, boycotted their segregated buses.
This shame has entered my bloodstream and made me attentive to the burden racism puts on African Americans. When I teach these students in Minnesota schools, I tell them this memory and read them my poem "No More Back of the Bus" (published in my poetry collection, "Between the Houses," from the Laurel Poetry Collective via Amazon). The poem helps ease the students' mistrust of me. Helps me reach through history to encourage and empathize, acknowledge what my kind of people owe their kind of people. I cannot forget, or pretend that just because "kids" of color act up, they are deficient, or not open to learning. We who are complicit must work against what has hurt us all.
.
Tuesday, April 29, 2014
Margotlog: The Mayor and the Cottonwood Tree
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.
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.
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.
Friday, March 14, 2014
Margotlog: Beyond the Palms, Hawai'i
Margotlog: Beyond the Palms, Hawai'i
Not this year, but a few years ago, we entered the Kasbah of Hawai'i hipsters, circa 1970. No clue outside the low, white dwelling with palms-and-hibiscus yard. No clue in the blue-green lapping lagoon and fluffy white clouds above. But once we opened the door to our room, we entered a den of dusty delight. I'm laughing as I write this. Jam-packed. The glitz of compulsive collecting.
The bed was fine, sheets and towels too, but as we sat on the commode, there facing us was a bunny-hop child's game at knee-level on a table also containing a Rubix cube, and a placard posing a mind-ball game challenge. As I stood to wash, the soap entered my hand via a naked brass cupid, smirking and salacious. The soap lathered nicely.
Either side a Victorian bureau with long mirror stood huge dolls with long lashes and very red cheeks. The flapper wore ankle-strap pumps, sausage curls, and frilly dress. Her pal, a 1940s career gal sported in ankle socks and pumps and straw hat with off-kilter plume. Each wore a blessing of dust. Each doll's face was quite mannish, minus the five o'clock shadow--our first clue that our hosts were gay.
Behind the dolls hung images of nuddish women wreathed in mist. Could these have been the front for a gay bordello, circa 1890?
The orange carpet was worn in places, the wallpaper covered in orange, pink and white stripes. Yet mostly hidden behind dark, maudlin art--old pensioners, dowager ladies in gossamer throws, a Hudson-River-School landscape, a Currier and Ives snowy scene, a seascape containing a rotting hulk, and a portrait of a prognathous young man in a Nazi uniform. My husband suggested he was the Nazi-loving American artist Marsden Hartley.
A small settee covered with a plaid blanket was crammed with needle-point pillows of fruits and vines. A den of moldering teddy bears slumped beside the bathroom door.
In another corner a table covered with nylon lace held a knock-off Tiffany lamp, a compote of plastic fruit, a wooden mountaineer whom I expected to be a nut-cracker but was actually offering a posy and adjusting his bows and arrows. Above a tiny chandelier anointed us all with wisps of dust.
Inside a mirrored cabinet wobble dolls held still, while above, strange faces with huge noses bent down to sniff us.
We couldn't leave--there was nowhere else to stay the three night. Nor did we particularly want to. The hosts were kind and enjoyed displaying their wares--as we arrived the dining room table was studded with silver candelabra. But inside "our" room, with the door closed, something musty and unhealthy edged closer and closer, not to hurt us, but to absorb us into one of them.
Not this year, but a few years ago, we entered the Kasbah of Hawai'i hipsters, circa 1970. No clue outside the low, white dwelling with palms-and-hibiscus yard. No clue in the blue-green lapping lagoon and fluffy white clouds above. But once we opened the door to our room, we entered a den of dusty delight. I'm laughing as I write this. Jam-packed. The glitz of compulsive collecting.
The bed was fine, sheets and towels too, but as we sat on the commode, there facing us was a bunny-hop child's game at knee-level on a table also containing a Rubix cube, and a placard posing a mind-ball game challenge. As I stood to wash, the soap entered my hand via a naked brass cupid, smirking and salacious. The soap lathered nicely.
Either side a Victorian bureau with long mirror stood huge dolls with long lashes and very red cheeks. The flapper wore ankle-strap pumps, sausage curls, and frilly dress. Her pal, a 1940s career gal sported in ankle socks and pumps and straw hat with off-kilter plume. Each wore a blessing of dust. Each doll's face was quite mannish, minus the five o'clock shadow--our first clue that our hosts were gay.
Behind the dolls hung images of nuddish women wreathed in mist. Could these have been the front for a gay bordello, circa 1890?
The orange carpet was worn in places, the wallpaper covered in orange, pink and white stripes. Yet mostly hidden behind dark, maudlin art--old pensioners, dowager ladies in gossamer throws, a Hudson-River-School landscape, a Currier and Ives snowy scene, a seascape containing a rotting hulk, and a portrait of a prognathous young man in a Nazi uniform. My husband suggested he was the Nazi-loving American artist Marsden Hartley.
A small settee covered with a plaid blanket was crammed with needle-point pillows of fruits and vines. A den of moldering teddy bears slumped beside the bathroom door.
In another corner a table covered with nylon lace held a knock-off Tiffany lamp, a compote of plastic fruit, a wooden mountaineer whom I expected to be a nut-cracker but was actually offering a posy and adjusting his bows and arrows. Above a tiny chandelier anointed us all with wisps of dust.
Inside a mirrored cabinet wobble dolls held still, while above, strange faces with huge noses bent down to sniff us.
We couldn't leave--there was nowhere else to stay the three night. Nor did we particularly want to. The hosts were kind and enjoyed displaying their wares--as we arrived the dining room table was studded with silver candelabra. But inside "our" room, with the door closed, something musty and unhealthy edged closer and closer, not to hurt us, but to absorb us into one of them.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)