the cost

There is no peace on the way to security.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

call me crazy . . .

. . . but I love Minnesota winters.

scenes from the daily commute

I have always loved walking and riding bikes. When going at a slower pace, you have the capacity to take in your surroundings. I have seen some strange and wonderous sights on my morning and evening commutes.

Last week, I was approaching a freeway overpass, and happened to look up. Ahead of me, just off the path were two fawns. Behind them, on top of the overpass, noxious black smoke was billowing up from a car fire. Above this incongruous scene arched a beautiful rainbow.

I have resolved to capture such wonders and curiosities as they cross my path, and I will offer an occasional scene from my daily commute.

post-postmodernism

The reemergence of the grand narrative in the form of global ecological disaster has rendered all forms of postmodern thought dangerous anachronisms.

Douglas Haddow

Adbusters 88

Nature

An actor friend recommended that we go see Nature, a play that is debuting at the University of Minnesota Landscape Arboretum. Because Ginny and I both love nature and want our kids to love it too, we thought it would be a good idea to make the play a family outing. Ginny and the kids picked me and my bike up from work, and we headed to the Arboretum.

The play is a fictionalized re-enactment of the historically significant and tempestuous friendship of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Both actors, along with the supporting cast and ensemble, do a beautiful job of taking the audience back into time to experience the lives and ideas of these men. Much of the script is borrowed from the men's writings. The costumes are simple replicas of period clothing, and the music hearkens back to the traditional folk and sight music popular in New England during the early nineteenth century.

Nature is dubbed by its creators, Tyson Forbes and Sam Elmore of TigerLion Arts (Emerson and Thoreau, respectively), as a 'walking play'. As far as I know, the concept is unique to this play. The stage is a section of the arboretum itself. Scene changes are not accomplished by stagehands moving set pieces; rather the ensemble beckons the audience to arise and follow to the next scene. Both because ofthe scene and the setting among the prairie grasses, trees, and flowers of the arboretum, this works remarkably well. Furthermore, the timeless natural scenery recreates the perios feeling far moer effectively than any artificial set could hope to.

The play is winding down its maiden run, but I hope the company has the opportunity resurrect here and in other natural settings. If the play comes to a field near you, I would highly recommend that you learn from this chautauqua.

Image property of TigerLion Arts

phila

From the look of my blog, the images I tend to post, and the creations I have featured, it should be no surprise that my aesthetic tends toward minimalism. There's nothing more pleasing than clean lines, defined geometry, crisp colors, and minimal elements. As with most things, I suppose I could trace this aesthetic back to my childhood in Colorado. There, the quality of the light and the simplicity of the desert landscape fit these criteria. On the Front Range, the sky dominates. In the west, the junction of prairie and sky is seamed with a distinctive jagged pattern of mountain peaks. Elsewhere on the horizon, the gold of the grass meets the brilliant indigo of the dry high desert sky with a sharp break. Sometimes, billowing cumulonimbus towers pile above and to the east, the sunlit white of their billows contrasting with the background firmament.

When Phil sent me the link to Phila Audio Corp, I was understandably floored. As soon as I saw these beautiful turntables, a jolt of electricity traveled through my body and into my past experiences of minimalism: Peyton; the German Pavilion; the Dolomites . . .

These analog beauties are hand-crafted from natural materials: wood, granite, etc. Their circuitry is clean and simple, as are their mechanism. The softness of the organic components provides a clear but fitting contrast with the hard mineral components. Very few mass-produced machines possess as much balance and beauty.

The way in which mechanical, electronic, and natural are so pleasingly integrated in these pieces of art reminded me immediately of Pirsig's insistence in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance that technology is not the antithesis of quality. So often technology is the scapegoat for the ills that beset society.  Technology is not to blame; it is the nature of our relationship with technology that determines whether technology gives life or takes it. The key difference is how we approach technology. Even simple machines are not purely linear. There is always the human intentionality behind their design, structure, and use that makes the most simple machine an object of immense complexity.

In the case of these turntables, it is not only their function as instruments of music that thrills me; it is the fact that the design encompasses the instruments themselves into the beauty of their result that gives me so much joy.

Image proeperty of Phila Audio Corp