dispatches

Prairie Home Companion land

I am sitting in the restaurant at the Winneshiek Hotel in Decorah, Iowa, with a view of Water Street, as the monsoonal cascade from a thunderstorm turns the street into a literal watery street. Bolts of lightning strike the ground beyond the end of Washington Street. It is a glorious show.

I was up well before dawn for the drive to the Pittsburgh airport. Venus hung bright and high in the east. Overhead I heard the calls of migrating birds, fellow nocturnal travelers. I left the crowded hills and fog shrouded valleys of western Pennsylvania, boarded a plane, circled Eau Claire in a holding pattern for twenty minutes, then landed in the wide open, rolling prairie of suburban Minnesota.

The first three stops on the seek button were MPR affiliates, and Garrison Keillor accompanied my southbound drive through rain so thick you sometimes could not see the road. Then it cleared to reveal shorn cornfields and Victorian era farmhouses and copses of imported spruce trees.

Having never seen Walleye on a menu before I ordered that, and discovered that it belongs to that category of tasteless freshwater white fish that properly should be breaded and fried in some trans fats to acquire any character, but I had senselessly ordered it grilled.  I am well outside the coastal gourmet zone (despite the preponderance of public radio stations) and ought to have recalibrated my expectations accordingly, but one can always have hope. And have it dashed. The town has potential though--there's a food co-op on the main (Water) street where I bought my roasted almonds, and on opposite corners are campaign offices for Hillary and Obama, and none for any Republican candidates. I think I'm going to have a fun time at this college.

The Larry Craig Memorial Restroom

Conversation with a sales clerk at the DVD store, opposite the Larry Craig (R-Closet) Memorial Restroom, at the Minneapolis St. Paul International Airport.

"Lots of people stop and take pictures?"

"Yeah."

"You tired of people asking about it?"

"Yeah."

Evangelizing

Years ago I was at a friend's house, where my college-age niece Felicity (Brown) and her friend Nina (ASU) were playing a game of Scrabble with some friends. This was not ordinary Scrabble with a board and the interminable wait. They were playing Speed Scrabble, a fast paced, competitive take on the crossword concept.

It works like this: There's no board, only tiles. Every player takes seven tiles. They turn them over simultaneously, and try and complete a crossword using all seven letters. The first one who does shouts "Go!", and everyone has to take another tile. You can rearrange your crossword endlessly (in fact, it's mandatory, especially when you get a "J" or a "Z" at an inopportune time). The game demands a quick mind, a large and, at times, useless vocabulary, and the ability to think under stress. If you have 5 or more players, it's over in 3 minutes.

I have taken it upon myself to spread the word of this game to college campuses whenever I can. At a tech school, a player cried out, "I don't need to spell! This is hard!" She would have preferred the letters to be in Greek and to be composing formulae with them.

At this small, Catholic school, it seems to be a hit, though they sometimes exhibited a propensity to use words in Latin. Later on, one of the players greeted me on the sidewalk, "That was fun!"  I told her, Great! Now spread the word throughout the dorms!"

Revisiting Antioch

I am driving from Chicago to Pennsylvania for my next assignment. Yellow Springs, Ohio, home of my alma mater Antioch College, is at the halfway point, and I'm spending the night.

As you may know, the college board of trustees voted to close the campus earlier this year. So I was surprised to see the campus populated with students. Lightly populated, but present. "It seems that it would have been a contractual violation to close immediately," a freshman student told me. Nonetheless, he's taking classes that will transfer.

I walked through the campus in a thick nostalgia fog. I have not been back since I left, in 1975. My entering class, in 1973, was just after the general strike that nearly closed the campus for good then, so it appears falling apart is an old Antioch tradition. Then there were 2000 students, and it felt vibrant and full. Now there are 250. The place has a near abandoned feel.

I looked for my old dorm,  Normant House, but was not finding it. The memory of my footsteps kept taking me to a vacant lot, until I figured out that my footsteps were right. The campus map still included it. The lot looked like it had been vacant for a long time.

Across the street was the Friends Meeting House, which was a place of refuge and solace for me back then. I attended regularly, and meditated often there when I needed a quiet space to cope.

The art building, my other old haunt, looked abandoned. Vines were creeping up the old garage-door exterior walls. It was a big metal shed, build in the early 70's, and it had not aged well. I was certain it was vacant until I found an unlocked door and a long haired, spacy student in the painting studio. He and I were equally surprised to run into each other. I found the very spot where my easel sat, and my head went light with a deep incoherent swirl of feelings. Nostalgia, the pain of my unhappiness then (I was a deeply depressed kid--I couldn't get laid to save my life, and in 1973 that was quite an accomplishment),  sadness at the current decrepitude, wonder at how important this phase of my life was for everything subsequent, despite everything. Bittersweet is the conventional turn of phrase, but I was neither bitter toward the place nor inclined to elevate my experience at Antioch to the "It made me who I am" myth. Yet it did, in important ways, in how I found myself and found means of expression for the extremes of feeling in my highly sensitive nature. "Kind Mother" (alma mater) works only ironically for me regarding Antioch. but everything makes sense in the end, because we live in sequence and by contingency.

I'm not alone

Finally, I learn that I'm not alone in my rant about incongruent bird sounds in movies. I am in a darkened theatre, engrossed in the story and the reality on the screen in front of me, and suddenly, there's a bird sound that has absolutely no place in the scene. I am jolted out of the artistry, and I am mad. For an industry that takes such care at getting period details right in Jane Austin re-creations, why do they overlook, say, eastern Blue Jay calls in a scene that takes place in the California redwoods (Kinsey), or the cry of a Red-tailed Hawk whenever a Bald Eagle flies by? Don't they care?

Here is a Washington Post article that let me know that I have a lot of company in this regard. It begins:

"In James Mangold's new blockbuster Western "3:10 to Yuma," the first time we meet Ben Wade, played by tough-guy actor Russell Crowe, he is making a natural history sketch of a bird just minutes before carrying out yet another murderous stagecoach robbery. The scene establishes Wade not only as a complex character, but as a savvy birder who takes the time to document what is surely the first and only sighting in the United States of Africa's augur buzzard."

First day at the University of Chicago

The University of Chicago makes a big deal for freshmen entering the college. Here is a selection from my documentation of the day. If there's no display in your browser, use this link to get to the show: http://dplummer.slidez.net/uchicago

(Thanks to Joe Gaylor for the lead to Viewbook.com and the slide show display)

Starstruck

One of the great failings of my life is that I am a losing contestant on the NPR news quiz show, "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me!" I picked the wrong answer in the "Bluff The Listener" round. Admittedly, it is the hardest contest on the show, and I should stop beating myself up and regretting that, years hence, I failed to win Carl Kasell's voice on my home answering machine. But I achieved some measure of solace tonight by attending a live taping of this week's show, held every Thursday in the Chase Auditorium in downtown Chicago.

Do I sound like an NPR promo yet?

Listen this weekend and hear how the name for Seattle's new transit line, the South Lake Union Trolley, becomes an object of national hilarity.

Peter Sagal and me: two short balding guys in Dockers.

Warblers in Wisconsin

I had thought to blog about this trip chronologically, but the impressions of the moment have overtaken that intention. I am in Door County, Wisconsin, in between Chicago assignments (University of Chicago last week, Illinois Institute of Technology later this week). I am supposed to be working on the UC files. The birds are proving more compelling.

For someone from the West Coast, the landscape of the upper Midwest is, well, tame. Dramatics are not going to be in the picture, except, perhaps, with weather. It would be nice to see some dramatic weather this trip, so long as I don't have to fly through any of it. But it is breezy and clear.

It is bird migration season, and it could be more dramatic than it is. Bad weather would help. With clear skies the birds fly through all night and don't stop off. Were a cold front to come through at just the right time, say, just before morning, one could see a dramatic fallout of birds. Especially on a lakeshore, and doubly so on a peninsula. That is why I decided to perch myself on one for the duration.

Nonetheless, the birding today was not bad. It was superb by West Coast standards, where we have a barely discernable passerine migration, in contrast to the vast tide of birds that wash across the middle and eastern parts of the continent twice a year. I went to a state park at the tip of this peninsula, and heard a lot of chickadees in the forest. When I would annoy the chickadees with a “pishing” sound, I'd gather the flock around me. Within it would invariably be a warbler or two or three.

As I spied an American Redstart, then a Red-eyed Vireo, then a Myrtle Warbler. I turned and found two other birders watching what I had brought in. Ron and Marianne joined me for the next two hours, they with their superior knowledge of the CFWs (confusing fall warblers) and with patience equal to mine to sort through each flock of chickadees along the trail.

In those hours I logged more warbler species than even exist on the West Coast, it seemed. Bay-breasted, Nashville Warbler, Tennessee Warbler, Black and White, Orange-crowned—the list kept growing. Along with a Ruffed Grouse. a couple of Thrushes (they appear to be moving through big time right now), and some Swans on a rocky peninsula across a small bay.

The NWS is forecasting a weak cold front to come through tonight, about 1am. I think I'm going to go to bed early.

Opinions

Two big photo shows at the Art Institute on this trip to Chicago, Richard Misrach's On The Beach, and the Jeff Wall show. I have opinions.

I have always been a fan of Richard Misrach. His Desert Cantos series is one of the pinnacles of contemporary photography, and it is work that will last. He is not afraid of beauty, which makes him a suspicious entity in some circles. He brings the strands of minimalism, formal landscape, conceptual art and documentary work into a coherent artistic stance. 

I only saw a portion of the beach show, as it wasn't to open until the next day, but the work I did see just sings, loudly. These are huge prints, technically stunning, and haunting in their aerial God-view of figures in a vast space of sand and water. This is Large Work (9 feet wide, some of them) that works. They are photographs that won't translate to the printed page, which brings up all those issues as to whether photography is a reproducible medium or one in which the photograph as object is the point. With Misrach, the judgment is clear—you have to go stand in front of one of these and be amazed.

Now then. Jeff Wall has been an art world darling for a long time. Six months ago he was the subject of back to back profiles in The New York Times Magazine and The New Yorker. His star has never been more ascendent.

It helps to have read about this guy before you see the work. Maybe have an advanced degree in Artspeak (where, for example, you learn to compose prose such as that inanimate objects engage in Dialog, and Things are Informed by something or other). Then you can comprehend that these photographs are made to Mean Something. There is a Big Concept behind them. There is Great Intention. What is absent, however, is any heart. If you read about this guy's working methods, it is evidently the output of an obsessive compulsive narcissist, who will put his subjects through grueling take after take, and spend years constructing a set so that it doesn't appear that it was set up. There are interesting formal compositional elements in the work, there are Ideas, but there is no connection. I left the exhibit feeling as though I had been fleeced. This work will be forgotten, and none too soon.

Previews of coming attractions

Seven colleges, five states, six weeks. I leave tomorrow for Chicago, to hang out with and photograph a freshman student for two days as he arrives at the University of Chicago. There'll be a little time for travel and birding too, so stay tuned for stories.