first efforts

Gone fishin'

Melting

I took this photo of Greenland during a flight from Reykjavik, Iceland to Minneapolis in July 2002. The old saying goes, "Iceland is green, and Greenland is ice." Except it wasn't. The pilot said that you typically didn't see this kind of melting on the southern tip of Greenland until late July or early August. We were "lucky," he said, to see it looking this way. If you believe Al Gore (and I do), we're about to get a lot luckier. The movie opens this Friday at Boardman's.

Which superhero are you?

Andrew Sullivan is Spiderman; so am I.

[Update: Because we are "intelligent, witty, a bit geeky and have great power and responsibility."]

Portraits and politics

Over the weekend NPR had a story on the re-opening of the National Portrait Gallery in the Old Patent Office Building in Washington, D.C. The NPG's web site includes a virtual tour of the "Hall of Presidents." This study of Roosevelt made by Douglas Chandor in 1945 was supposed to be part of a larger painting commemorating the Yalta meeting, but it was not completed because Stalin wouldn't pose.

Aren't the hands simply wonderful? In his book Acts of Portrayal, David Lubin writes,

To the extent that a portrait is a testament to individuality, it succeeds best when showing how its protagonist is unique. It does this by following the peculiar twists and turns of character and appearance, delineating that which distinguishes the protagonist from that which does not.

Family business

Knight-Ridder corporation, the entity perhaps best known for giving me a college scholarship, is about to cease to exist. Dad has written a book about the history of the Ridder family's involvement in newspapers. Today's St. Paul Pioneer Press has published a nice, long excerpt from it, titled "A Dynasty's Final Editions."

The motherland on film

Last weekend in Nashville my beloved and I saw "A Prairie Home Companion." We came to three conclusions about it: (1) it's an Altman film, which means it has a lot of famous people in it, it's meandering, and nothing really happens; (2) Meryl Streep is beautiful no matter what accent she uses; and (3) you will only love this movie if you love the radio show. Because I unabashedly subscribe to the whole "Minnesota has a culture" myth, I loved it.

Seeing a Minnesota movie in Nashville reminded me of when I saw "Fargo" in Skokie, Illlinois. It was very clear who the Minnesotans in the audience were because we all laughed at parts of the movie that nobody else laughed at. Early in the movie Marge Gunderson gets called out to a crime scene in the middle of the night. As she's dressing to go, her husband asks her if she wants him to make her some eggs before she leaves. No, she says. They talk about other things, then he offers again, "Are ya sure I can't make you some eggs?" No, she says. I believe she even denies him a third time. Cut to the next scene, where Marge is sitting at the kitchen table--eating eggs. I howled and so did about three other people. Nobody else got it.

During "A Prairie Home Companion" I got warm fuzzies when Mickey's Diner appeared onscreen. And how often does a mainstream film contain Sven and Ole jokes? You can't beat that.

Ole: Sven?

Sven: Yah, Ole?

Ole: Didya hear da police caught da guy who stole Viagra from da pharmacy?

Sven: No, did dey now?

Ole: Yah, dey were on da lookout fer a hardened criminal.

In related news, apparently the city of Fargo now boasts its very own statue of Marge Gunderson--created by a chainsaw, of course.

Downloads and one-clicks

Vis-stuff I've downloaded or ordered recently:

David Morgan, The Sacred Gaze: Religious Visual Culture in Theory and Practice. Cal UP, 2005.

Journal of Visual Culture goodies:

"On Visuality," Nicholas Mirzoeff, 5.1, April 2006, 53-79.

Special issue on Iraq War, 5.1, April 2006, 81-118.

"Visual Culture, Historiography, and Aesthetics," Cheetham, Holley, and Moxey, 4.1, 75-90, April 2005.

"Mediating Political 'Things' and the Forked Tongue of Modern Culture: A Conversation with Bruno Latour," Art Journal, Spring 2006, 94-115.

Joshua Brown, Beyond the Lines: Pictorial Reporting, Everyday Life, and the Crisis of Gilded Age America. Cal UP, 2002.

BAM!

There is a giant hole where my campus parking lot used to be. The business school is building its "instructional facility" on the corner of Gregory and 6th and they tore up Lot E-12 to do it. (Has the business school not been in the business of instruction until now?)

I now park in a lot adjacent to the giant hole. Walking to my car last night, I watched intently while an excavator did its thing. Up would go the arm slowly, and then down would come the flat end of the shovel, BAM! Up slowly, down hard with a sharp metal BAM! Raise, lower, BAM, repeat. Only when enough dirt was loosened would the excavator actually get down to excavating; until then it had to be all BAM, all the time.

All I could think was, God, isn't that the perfect metaphor for my writing process. Right now I'm in the early stages of work on the talk I'll be giving at the Public Address conference in October. I need to have a good draft of it to my respondent by mid-August and the summer's already whizzing by. Much of my work up to this point has been of the BAM variety: take an idea and pound away at it until something loosens and gives way. During this morning's writing session I think I finally got past the BAM and into some real digging. Which makes this a good day.

Tacky tourist photos

   

In the spirit of GeekBro's comment yesterday regarding the taking of tacky tourist photos...I stopped in Metropolis, Illinois on the way home from Nashville. Just cuz.

 

Enhanced viewing tip: Enjoy these photos while listening to the Sufjan Stevens song, "The Man From Metropolis Steals Our Hearts."

OK, one more -- this one's my favorite; it's got a Supermanesque Walker Evans vibe, don't you think?. Remember, if you click on the images they get bigger. Like magic!

Jacksonian tourism

With my housing needs addressed, my beloved and I were free over the weekend to do some tourism. Off we went to The Hermitage, home and plantation of Andrew Jackson. The price of entry is a hefty twelve dollars but well worth it. In addition to the 16-minute interpretive film (always a crowd-pleaser), you get to visit a museum, the house, the tombs of Jackson and his wife Rachel (described in her epitaph as "amiable," ugh), and slave cabins and other buildings recently excavated in archaeological digs.

And of course there's the gift shop. Recalling his purchase of a Gettysburg Address tie at the Lincoln Museum a few months ago, my beloved announced that he hoped to find "a tie commemorating Jackson's veto of the bank bill." Alas, no such thing exists. He had to settle for this instead: