11.30.07
Jack pauses to take stock of his career plans at the Children’s Museum block factory.
11.29.07
One of our favorite Children’s Museum activities is the conveyor belts. There are two levels to this contraption: on the bottom level is a series of conveyor belts that kids run with big wheels to move gray foam cubes, terminating in an elevated belt that carries the cubes to the top level; at the top level are more conveyor belts that terminate in a chute through which the cubes are dropped to the lower level’s conveyor belts. An old fashioned intercom system (plastic tubing with a grate at either end) connects the workers on the two levels, who yell up and down for more cubes. It’s a perfectly closed system that keeps everyone busy–a much more realistic introduction to the workplace than any “Take Your Kiddo to Work Day” . . .
11.28.07
Rockin’ out in the Children’s Museum shadow room. The museum doesn’t actually provide a sound track, but the boys have been known to hum the songs from “Dance Dance Revolution” while practicing their moves; surely “Centerfold” and “Do Ya Wanna” are appropriate for 6-year-old boys to hum…
11.27.07
More fun at the Children’s Museum shadow room.
buy unique gifts at Zazzle
11.26.07
The Children’s Museum features a room where kids can play with light; here, Jack experiments with the shadows that different colors of light make (which all turn to shades of gray with Ilford Delta film, of course).
11.25.07
At La Sirena Gorda (“The Fat Mermaid”), Midtown Market; did I mention the seafood molé?
11.24.07
The Midtown Market, housed in the old Sears building on Lake Street, may be the best place in town for a family lunch. There’s a whole collection of fabulous food stands, serving everything from Mexican to Italian to West Indian to Middle Eastern chow–no fussing, no negotiating, just head to the stand that has what you want.
Me, I’m torn between the torta Cubana at Manny’s and the seafood at La Sirena Gorda (“The Fat Mermaid”). Here we see the queue at La Sirena–the seafood molé was more than worth the wait.
11.23.07
The builder who first bridged Niagara’s gorge,
Before he swung his cable, shore to shore,
Sent out across the gulf his venturing kite
Bearing a slender cord for unseen hands
To grasp upon the further cliff and draw
A greater cord, and then a greater yet;
Till at the last across the chasm swung
The cable then the mighty bridge in air!
Anchored to the Infinite by Edwin Markham
Not that Hiawatha Avenue is quite “Niagara’s gorge”, of course, but this is still pretty darned impressive for a bicycle bridge. Would that the design of the new 35W bridge were as inspiring…
This print available at Etsy.
11.22.07
Happy Thanksgiving to all!
11.21.07
Read more about the new Greenway cable-stay bridge at MinnPost. (The little smudges in the middle of the bridge are Jack and Peter, on their way back from a Saturday lunch outing to the Midway Market, where the kids can get pizza, Mom can get a vegetarian tamale, and Dad can get an amazing plate of seafood molé…)
11.20.07
The new Greenway cable-stay bridge over Hiawatha Avenue; now, this is what a bridge should look like–a soaring piece of art, not a boring piece of infrastructure!
11.19.07
11.18.07
Sanford Middle School by night.
11.17.07
Grain silos behind the ADM mill at 38th Street and Hiawatha Avenue.
This print available at Etsy.
11.16.07
Tracks behind the ADM mill at 38th Street and Hiawatha Avenue.
This print available at Etsy.
11.15.07
MinnPost, a new on-line and print news outlet largely staffed by refugees from the Twin Cities’ two daily papers and primary weekly, has started with a whole slew of wonderful stories. MinnPost challenges the current media models in two interesting ways: its focus on deep coverage (their tag line is “a thoughtful approach to news”) rather than fast-breaking, short-lived stories; and its economic model, more like membership-driven NPR than like the shareholder-bound dailies. With veteran writers like Jim Walsh, Sarah Janacek, and Joe Kimball on board, I’m expecting a lot of really good reading. (Arts editor Casey Selix is a pub-quiz teammate, short-story first-reader, and good friend, but I certainly wouldn’t let that sway my opinion of this site …)
A few articles you ought not to miss:
Sam Grabarski wants cars on Nicollet Mall by Britt Robson: a look at the lobbying efforts to turn Nicollet Mall, which is currently restricted to bikes, buses, taxis, and pedestrians, into a car-centric thoroughfare. While I can see the point of the retail consultants/lobbyists who worry that no one will know what’s on Nicollet Mall if no one drives it (see the next story), I also can’t imagine the Mall without its luxuriously-wide sidewalks, clogged with honking cars.
Urban designers critique Minneapolis and offer this idea: Tear down all those horrible skyways by Steve Berg: the extensive downtown skyway systems (over 7 miles in Minneapolis, over 5 miles in St. Paul), argue architects Jan Gehl and Gil Penalosa, aren’t good for us; they rob the city sidewalks of crucial pedestrian traffic, and create a stratified city, both literally and socially, with the affluent striding through the climate-controlled halls above and the poor on the gray and lifeless streets below. I don’t spend as much time in the downtowns as I’d like, but it’s true that the downtown streets, especially in the fall and winter, are pretty desolate; the skyways, by contrast, are vibrant, colorful, and busy during the weekdays, though in a decidedly private (think shopping mall) rather than public (think outdoor plaza) way. When I worked downtown a decade ago, I had to keep two conflicting maps in my head, one of the street grid and one of the skyway maze, and there were places I could reach by one route but couldn’t navigate by the other. Perhaps the answer to the Nicollet Mall problem above is to chase people out of the skyways, at least during the glorious summer days we frequently experience on the tundra: temperature-controlled gates, maybe, that lock when it warms up? Or photosensitive skyway walls that disappear when the sun is out but close us in during those bleak weeks when we get less than 9 hours of sunlight a day? This seems like something a creative mind could puzzle out…
Word by word, typo by typo, page by page by Dave Wood: though afflicted with a Parkinsons-like disease that makes typing a Herculean challenge, Jon Hassler continues to work his magic with words. Indeed, he expects to finish a new novel for Viking in December. I’m not sure whether a writer should be inspired to greatness by his example, or shamed into silence by his perseverance.
11.15.07
Maria Sanford Middle School, Minneapolis–named for “the best loved woman of the North Star State”, about whom more can be found here.
11.13.07
Riverview Theater, Minneapolis.
11.12.07
Dowling Community Garden at night (well, at 5:30 PM, which is the same thing as night in November at the 45th parallel).
This print available at Etsy.
11.11.07
Four things I’ve stumbled upon lately:
- reCAPTCHA: this is an interesting twist on the “CAPTCHA” (“Completely Automated Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart”) tools that ask people to enter a distorted, digitized word to prove they’re not a spam-bot. It asks people to enter two words: one is a known entity, like the standard CAPTCHA key, but the other is a word that a book-scanning computer wasn’t able to convert from an image to text. By entering the second word, you’re helping the Internet Archive digitize texts that might otherwise be lost to the vagaries of time and dampness and bookworms (of the silverfish variety, of course; the human kinds tend to treat books a little better when digesting them). I heard about this on the Book Show from Australia’s Radio National, and just had to give it a whirl; not that I have a big problem with spam, and not that I have a whole lot of comments pouring in, but if you do leave a note and have to enter two CAPTCHA words, know that you’re doing your small part for the digital library.
- Mixed Emotions: I stumbled on this short-lived visual blog on the New York Times site while reading the book review section. Israeli illustrator Rutu Modan marries words and pictures in a series of wonderfully evocative “comics” (seems the wrong word entirely for the likes of Modan, Jules Pfeiffer, Lynda Barry, and Jean-Jacques Sempé, but “sequential art” seems so stilted). This a great series to lose yourself in for a little rainy-day browsing.
- Tom Hunter: photographer Tom Hunter captures the light and shadows most often associated with figurative painting in a series of interpretations (not stagings) of Vermeer and the pre-Raphaelites. He has a stunning control in these photographs, which appear to use available light; most are noted as being “Cibachrome prints”, which means they probably began as touchy slide film in the camera. I’m jealous.
- To catch a (butterfly) thief: a fascinating Midmorning broadcast from MPR on the subject of smuggling endangered species.
11.11.07
Riverview Theater, 38th Street and 42nd Avenue.
11.10.07
Although everything was fragile and crucial right now, it would all be perfect once they achieved the state of being medical students. It floated before them like a transcendental and elusive plane of existence. They allowed that it would be a challenging profession, but it felt obvious that once admitted, the difficult thing would be done.
Vincent Lam, “How to Get into Medical School, Part I”, Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures
In these dozen interwoven stories, Vincent Lam charts four characters–Fitzgerald, Ming, Sri, and Chen–from medical school through to the middle of their careers. The focus is as much the personal as the professional, but this is no “Grey’s Anatomy” nor even “E.R.” soap opera; Lam’s language is far too poetic, his characters’ internal lives too rich, to boil the stories down to the romantic triangle and emergency-room drama that nevertheless run through them.
The book’s richness owes much to its form. As a novel, the pull of the soap opera may have been irresistable. But these really are stories, each able to stand by itself though gaining much from the echoes that run across the pieces. We are given a chance to spend at least one story in the head of each of the male characters (interestingly, we are never in the head of Ming, the female recurring character, though she does have a solo turn or two), and there are also stories seen from the point of view of non-recurring characters which give us the opportunity to see the quartet from outside as well. By shifting the stories’ voices and tenses, Lam keeps us on our toes, and draws out aspects of the characters that may have been hidden in a more conventional telling.
This isn’t just an interior book, though. There is plenty of excitement, too: a midnight medical flight to Guatamala, a harrowing encounter with SARS (the stories occur, for the most part, in Toronto between about 1990 and 2003), an emergency C-section, and enough emergency room chaos to fill a few episodes of “Grey’s Anatomy”. Lam handles these sections as masterfully as he does the slower, more thoughtful passages; the tension is as gripping as that in any thriller.
“Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures” won the 2006 Scotiabank Giller Prize, Canada’s most prestigious award, in 2006; he has also gained the attention of prominent writers like Margaret Atwood and Sherman Alexie, attention that is certainly well-deserved. A novel, “Cholon, Near Forgotton”, is due out from Doubleday soon, apparently based on one of the stories in “Bloodletting”.
11.10.07
The same boo lights, but through the Minolta Maxxum with slide film.
11.9.07
Pumpkins at Mother Earth Gardens, 38th Street and 42nd Avenue, Minneapolis. These are the pre-Halloween gourds, of course; Mother Earth Gardens is currently in the fallow period before the Christmas trees arrive around Thanksgiving. (Though if you’re in the neighborhood, stop in anyway; there’s plenty of stuff inside the shop to keep a gardener happy through the dark days of winter.)
11.8.07
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11.4.07
Dia de los Muertos ofrenda at the Minnesota History Center honoring fallen soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan; read more about offrendas in St. Paul at the Night Editor.
11.3.07
11.2.07
Jack on the “rocket swing”.
11.1.07
How about something a little lighter after all that Halloween Sturm und Drang?
Back at the start of October, we took our last “camping” trip of the season; we were planning to go in the tent, but the weather was wet and grim, so we ended up at a friend’s place up north, in Outing, Minnesota.
In front of their place was a simple swing–a board on a rope on a tree–that went far out over a steep hill. The big kids–Jack and Peter, 6, and Ella, 7–demanded “rocket rides” on this swing, which involved a big push over the precipice. I was only too happy to oblige.
