Across the Great Divide

Stop and Smell the Fertility Symbols.

This dancing scarecrow, bundled from straw at a community garden along the Midtown Greenway just east of Lyndale, is placed high uphill, so if you've got your nose to the derailleur, you'll miss her.

And speaking of feminine fertility symbols, you may remember that I posted about another mysterious madonna-like sculpture (seen here from the other side).

I first saw it following a big storm, and because the rest of the split tree was still in the yard, speculated that it might have been created naturally, since it was more refined than your average chainsaw yard sculpture.

On a later pass, I could see its final version  was created intentionally. Three large branches from the rest of the fallen tree form archways over the walk, and the wood's surface is preserved.

But an even more serendipitous discovery awaited.

Some good friends had recently moved into that neighborhood. When my DP went to their house for the first time, who but our friends should happen to own the sculpture!

However, they had taken to calling it The Phallus and were discussing whether to remove it. I think my fervent appeal has given the dead tree new life.

And finally on the topic of serendipity, our family has been going through some health issues that are going to turn out all right.

One day, we received two cards in the mail — one from my family members in Colorado and the other from our military nephew's family in Texas. I see this stuff all the time.

Do you?

The Safety in Beauty.

Spend it on cops

I find it deplorable that the mayor and City Council have approved $500,000 for the installation of 10 artistic water fountains when we clearly do not have enough police to keep the city safe and many of our roads and other infrastructure are in poor condition.

How many more police could we have on our streets for that $500,000? I would personally prefer the romance of safety and security.

SUSAN PETERS, MINNEAPOLIS

Given the choice between a beautiful place and a place with the most cops, which would you choose?

Of course, choosing beauty should not be either/or. In fact, making the place you live more beautiful is a strategy for fighting crime and neighborhood decline. More people are attracted to aesthetically pleasing spaces, and with more people come greater safety. (Note the gang banger types started to congregate around the soulless City Center, not Peavey Plaza next to Orchestra Hall.)

When you travel to other places, what delights you and makes you want to return?

When you take a picture on your trip, it's not of the police — unless they are wearing oddball uniforms or the tour guide tells you not to take their picture.

Our auto-scaled cities,  electronic door-locked commutes, prepackaged culture and big box branded commerce have desensitized us to the small detail, the grace note, the accident, the gifts left by strangers long dead, who wasted their money on beauty instead of centurions. They, too, are investments in community infrastructure.

But to answer Susan Peters, Mayor Rybak's budget for 2007 did include $3.4 million for 43 additional police officers. I don't know what the recurring costs will be after they are recruited, vetted, equipped, trained and paid salary and benefits, but for the first year, that's $79,000 per officer.

The fountains come out to $2,000 a year each, over 25 years, and if Rybak's plan to sign up more suburban cities for Minneapolis water adds just St. Louis Park or Eden Prairie (both have nasty drinking water), it'll all come out in the wash.

Kersten in a Larger Context of Meaning and Beauty.

MEMORANDUM

To: All District Personnel

From: Ruskin Middle School Director of Curriculum

Subject: Sex Education Visual Aids

By now, you have heard about the unfortunate mishap at Ruskin Middle School in which two students were exposed to graphic information about sexual development and reproductive processes. A boy, who apparently has also not yet learned the function of eyelids, threw his shirt over his head to avoid seeing the educational materials. A girl went home in tears, much like other girls who come home in tears fearing they will bleed to death after experiencing their first period.

As a result, Ruskin has received unwanted publicity, and lost two students to home schooling for the coming academic year.

I am sorry to declare our experiment with post-1880s sex education a failure. We will revert to the wise principles of visual representation of sexuality as exemplified in the life of our school's name sake. (For those unfamiliar with the seminal role John Ruskin played in advancing young people toward loving and mature sexual relations, please see the attachment.)

Effective immediately, the following changes are to be implemented in visual aids used in the district's sex education curriculum. The proscribed visual images are listed below. Acceptable substitutes follow in parentheses.

• Naked males and females in various stages of development (clothed prepubescent males and females in various stages of development) NOT chimpanzees or other primates in any state of dress!
• A bra (gingham sun dress; basketball jersey over a sports bra; Brenda Starr comic strips (Dale Messick version only). Note: Realistic images featuring deep cleavage, even with a prominent crucifix, are not acceptable.
• A tampon (an out-of-focus shot of a personal hygiene products shelf; an out-of-focus shot of a rest room vending machine; a calendar with the date circled) Note: The Tampax web page How to use a tampon is now blocked from all district computers.
• An infra-red demonstration of an erection (Until further notice, there are no approved substitutes.)  Need I remind you of the Kielbasa Incident? And if you have information as to how the DVD of Boogie Nights got into the library's sleeve of "Conjugating Spanish Verbs," please notify the assistant principal.
• A live birth (bird's eggs hatching; still images from the State Fair's Miracle of Birth Center) Absolutely NO SHOW AND TELL home videos.
• Vaginas and those whatchamacallits (a halved peach; the flower paintings of Georgia O'Keefe)
• Condoms (At this time, the only accepted alternative is a Playtex Living Glove filled with water, while reciting condom failure rate statistics provided by the  Minnesota Family Council.) Our pilot program with Clyde the Condom Clown was not a success. Some parents failed to appreciate the balloons on bananas as a metaphor, and some boys went home in tears when the banana broke.

It has also been brought to our attention that the program materials have stripped sex of its larger context of meaning and beauty. Effectively immediately, you are instructed to:

• Remind students that, while reproduction is a biological process, sex has a larger context of meaning and beauty, provided you are a monogamous human being and not any other form of mammalian life.
• Play the cassette tape "Handel's Greatest Hits" during all Health Education classes
• Refrain from answering questions about the immaculate conception, the sexuality of Jesus or the relationship between Viagara, Bob Dole and Britny Spears, if any. Refer students who have questions not explicitly addressed in the curriculum to their parents and/or their minister/priest/rabbi/imam

While ignorance has not been proven 100-percent effective in preventing pregnancies among 11- and 12-year-olds, I know you share my goal of preventing teen pregnancies at least until 9th grade. Thanks for your cooperation.

Attachment

John Ruskin was a renowned British Art critic who pioneered the use of visual aids in sex education during the mid-1800s. His parents, of Scottish descent, were first cousins who were so concerned that he have a appropriate orientation toward the meaning and beauty of sex that they arranged his 1848 marriage with Euphemia Chalmers Gray and accompanied the couple on their honeymoon.

Six years later, the marriage was annulled on grounds of "incurable impotency," although Euphemia Ruskin had by then fallen in love with the painter John Everett Millais, whom she then married. There is scholarly disagreement over the precise reasons for Ruskin's marital non-consummation. As leading proponent of the idea that painting must convey "truth," Ruskin may have mistakenly believed that the idealized female forms painted by the masters were biologically accurate. He was therefore horrified on his wedding night to discover that Euphemia's nether regions sported hair instead of the widely painted, but ill-defined, bald mons venus. Some theories hold other natural feminine processes may have been involved.

Naturally, a little less parental supervision and more accurate information might have  avoided this unfortunate outcome. For the rest of his life, Ruskin tried to make up for this gap in his schooling.

Four years after the end of his marriage, Ruskin met and became enamored with Rose la Touche, an intensely religious 10-year-old who may have reminded him of his devout mother. He proposed when she was 17 and for years afterward, until he was finally rejected in 1872 and the young woman died.  

Ruskin also repeatedly asked children's book illustrator Kate Greenaway to draw her "girlies" without clothing:

Will you – (it’s all for your own good – !) make her stand up and then draw her for me without a cap – and, without her shoes, – (because of the heels) and without her mittens, and without her – frock and frills? And let me see exactly how tall she is – and – how – round. It will be so good of and for you – And to and for me.

That quest to share accurate but not-too-explicit information about the developing bodies of children continues to animate Ruskin Middle School. Go, Aesthetes!!

Seeing Straight.

This front yard sculpture achieves a more refined-than-usual aesthetic. [Click to enlarge.] Most such dead tree reclamation projects around here result in a hoot owl or a chainsaw grizzly.

But I guess in this neighborhood near Cedar Lake, you'd be ostracized if you commissioned kitsch, so they found an artist* who could bring out the abstract form that wanted to burst forth.

*****

Where was Robert Gates when we really needed him? One Bush appointee who knows how to be a leader.

*****
On the other hand, nearly a decade of employers trying to develop leaders has been for nothing, according to a new report.

"There is still some discrepancy between senior leaders who are reporting the importance of leadership and actually putting their time, money and commitment where their mouth is in terms of supporting the agenda."

*****

Note to the guy at the local Second Harvest Food Shelf benefit last night:

A. Sometimes two women sitting together are friends who came to hear the band

B. Sometimes they are a couple

C. When they get up to dance together, consider A and B

D. When you introduce yourself and start dancing with the cute blonde, note how the big brunette doesn't want to shake your hand

E. On the next song, do not start dancing close as if she had just asked you to take her home

F. When they leave the dance floor, do not complain to your buddies about how "I can't help it if she isn't comfortable with herself!"

*****

* Except maybe the artist was Mother Nature and it was made last week. I hope the owners plan to clear the fallen portion, maybe add some preservative to the trunk and leave it as is.

Art Changing Hands Among the Moneychangers.

The Strib has the story about the loss of a landmark St. Paul public artwork, but not the sizzle of what it looks like.

You'll have to go to Start Seeing Art's photostream (from which this image is swiped) to get a fuller sense of the monumental George Sugarman sculpture that changed hands one too many times.

First National Bank (now U.S. Bank) commissioned it, then disavowed ownership after selling the building, leaving the current owner -- a real-estate investment firm -- free to dispose of it.

The new concept for marketing the building is more historic character-driven, so...

[C]hunks of the Sugarman were hauled off this week for restoration and reinstallation in Austin, Texas. "This is just wrong, so wrong," said Christine Podas Larson, founder of Public Art St. Paul, which raised $20,000 in an unsuccessful effort to keep the work in Minnesota.

I did some work for U.S. Bank, starting in the days not long after the art buyer regime left Dodge in the early '90s. As then CEO Jack Grundhofer put it, the previous execs got lucky in the bond market, thought they were geniuses and nearly tanked the company. But not before they amassed a pretty impressive modernist art collection that was still peppered throughout lobbies and hallways of the corporate offices.

I imagine much of it has been dispersed to private collections by now.

Of course, people with more money than taste have always acquired art (and books by the yard) to signify success. In Europe, many of its great cultural treasures were privately commissioned and ultimately saved by the wealthy for the public to enjoy. It's just too bad for St. Paulites, their future enjoyment of this piece will also involve travel to another land.

Identity Crises.

Our social identity as a member of a community has given way to an individual identity as a homeowner with sovereignty over our property.
— Janna Caywood, Minnesota Journal [pdf]

*****

Artist Geoffrey Raymond has been painting portraits of Wall Street figures and placing them in public so passersby can annotate them. His latest is former Bear Stearns CEO Jimmy Cayne. The failed Bear Stearns was folded into J.P. Morgan on Friday, and as Cayne's speech to employees was met with silence, Raymond was outside.

Raymond intended to sell the portrait on eBay, but he's already received an offer he couldn't resist. No word on whether it was from an art lover or Cayne hater or both. [h/t She muses]

*****
The Strib has a story about two Best Buy employees who've written a book about the Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE) "which allows employees to put in their hours whenever, wherever and however they want, as long as the work gets done."

I agree with the premise of hiring the right people and trusting them to get the job done, with a minimum of oversight and mandatory meetings.  But I'm skeptical that ROWE's results are as rosy as portrayed.

First, it doesn't work for all jobs, which may cause problems that have yet to bubble up in the culture. And what message does it send to customers? We're available for you 24/7? Or it's all about us?

Second, it contributes to the general noise pollution as ROWEving workers carry on conversations from non-work settings like beaches, restaurants, airplanes and parks. I had to endure a long sales call in a store last month as the caller worked his way around the shelves. Maybe he was entirely focused on winning the business on the other end of the call, but it sure didn't look like it where I stood.

Third, when you need to get people together it becomes more of a production. I have a friend who works for Best Buy. He left his old position three weeks ago and took some time off. Now, he'll be in Minneapolis, but in three weeks he flies back to his former office so he can attend his going away party.

*****
The online Star Tribune's search engine apparently doesn't recognize phrases in quotes very well. Or maybe it searches for subtext as well.

Looking to do a quick count of the space dedicated to Sex and the City in the last week — at least nine stories with photos covering several pages by my recollection — I found this story on the first page of hits: "Coleman calls on GOP to be party of hope and toughness."

*****

I thought of the SATC PR splurge when I read Gail Dines claiming the distinction between soft core vs. hard core pornography has changed. Pop culture is the new soft core porn.

According to Dines, who is working on a book titled Slut Culture, Playboy magazine invented the modern porn industry, she says, by putting "high-class" women in a context with "high-class" products. Hefner's genius was understanding the line of explicitness that attracted male readers without driving away the high dollar advertisers.

This is Not a Blog Post.

When I first saw this image next to a story about a David Byrne art/music project, I thought: "Oh no! Please don't tell me he needs to label the keyboard."

Expanding the image (click) made it even more disorienting — a Treason of Images image — at least to anyone who ever took piano.

The story explains the project, and the old organ's function as interface to the bones of a vintage waterfront building, but not the notation system. Perhaps the labels represent the approximate pitches of the actuated columns, beams, radiators and pipes.

The Name is Familiar, But I Don't Recognize the Place.

Last night Ruth had asked me if I'd seen some mutual friends lately and suddenly I was playing 20 questions with my own brain.

Yes, we saw them just after the new year. Went to the Institute and saw... (what exhibit was it?) the show. You know, woman painter... (poster reproduction in Kate's living room)... Taos... (why can't I reel this in?) married to a photographer (no, not Leibnitz; now two names are escaping me).

I waved my arms a bit before I gave up, and Ruth, my former teacher said, I'm the one supposed to be forgetting things, not you. And it was true she couldn't come up with Georgia O'Keefe, either.

Despite a good memory for faces I've seen only once, in recent years, familiar names have begun to abandon me at inconvenient times. It's not that I don't know who you are. I just can't retrieve what you are called.

Random, organic forgetting.

I also heard about two more bicycle accidents — four in a week — with one common thread: The victims have no memory of what happened. They were riding; they were on the ground. Not memory's trick so much as the  mechanism to allow them to go on without too much fear.

Adaptive, merciful forgetting.

We attended a reading of a work in progress that asked, among other questions, whatever became of the America that once saved Europe? How did we transform ourselves from liberator in fact to liberator in name only, spreading democracy and generosity as a veil for ruthless self-interest? When did we begin disappointing the hopes of friends and fulfilling the prophecies of our enemies?

Willful, perilous forgetting.

Bush Facing Trial, But First...

WHAT IS YOUR GOAL AS A PLAYWRIGHT?
I didn’t realize playwrights were required to have goals. It may be that I’m a playwright because I have no goal.

WHAT DO YOU KNOW NOW THAT YOU WISH YOU KNEW WHEN YOU BEGAN PLAYWRITING?
That kissing ass is a life-skill.
— Lee Blessing, quoted in The Playwright' Center's Dialogue

The title of Lee Blessing's latest play, "When We Go Upon the Sea," sounded so familiar that I went searching for its literary reference. A Quaker hymn? Something from Yeats's "The Shadowy Waters"? A line from Edward Lear?

But all Google returned on that search string of six simple but resonant words were a few pages announcing its upcoming staged reading at the Guthrie Theater, Monday May 19th, and this description:

A man named George Bush arrives one evening in The Hague, Netherlands, where he faces the difficult task of going on trial the next day. Before that, however, he has an equally difficult job: getting through the night.

Not a literal depiction of the historical President Bush — or even a projection of his future — the play deals with the decisions he's made and why he made them.

Don't mistake a staged reading for a very watered-down live production. With professional actors, no sets and minimal stage business, a reading focuses your attention on the writing — its beauty and its meaning. Think a story being told through a poetry reading for multiple voices.

I'd be there even if I weren't affiliated with The Playwrights' Center, which is working with Blessing to develop the script.

Slow Sunday.

Email down, and a Growth & Justice post out of the way, I headed into ranch country northwest of Fruita for a long ride. It was much more beguiling than I've made it look.