We love the fall

My antidote to heartsickness: a visit from mom!

My mother will come to stay with us for about ten days at the end of October-beginning of November. She usually visits us at this time of year because it's birthday time. We'll be celebrating my daughter's birthday, and mine, a week later. Yes, we are a double Scorpio household, and we enjoy it.

This photo is from a big fall party two years ago that celebrated birthdays and anniversaries; it also included an impromptu dessert competition. We have a special chocolate cake recipe we use for birthday cake. It never fails.

In between our birthdays, there is Halloween, and the trick-or-treat gang has been planning their costumes all year. Last I heard, there was a Midsummer Night's Dream theme going on, with some influence from those Ren Fest costumes.




Although I'm sure I'll be plenty busy with work, I'm scouting out things for us to do when she get's here, because my mother is a great companion for outings of all kinds. I'll show her the new buildings: the Minneapolis Public Library, the Guthrie, the addition to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. I'll take her to the St Paul Farmer's market.

Shameful complicity in state-sponsored terror

Naomi Klein wrote this article for The Nation at the end of last year, reminding us that for decades, the U.S. trained torturers in the School of the Americas. The shameful bill that Congress just approved, and that the President will sign is wrong. But it isn't about some new practices that the Bush administration came up with. It brings out into the open policies and practices that have been going on with U.S. support and consent for decades.

What are the headlines in the Star Tribune? The Republican National convention will be held here in 2008.

Here in Minneapolis, the Center for Victims of Torture provides healing and advocacy for victims of government-sponsored torture from all over the world.

I can't say anything else right now because I am sick with disgust.

Kitty rituals

My cat has me well trained to perform the following necessary rituals.

AM: If I linger in bed, the cat jumps on my pillow and purrs. If I don't get out of bed soon enough, he then will knock items off my bedside table. If I persist in my slothful attitude, he will stand outside in the hall and make the piteous meow noise. He will do this for as long as it takes to get me out of bed. His record is one hour.

Once I get up, he gallops ahead of me to the kitchen. Although my daughter has already put food in his bowl, it is necessary for me to touch the food before he will eat. A few pats are enough. Usually, I observe that he has positioned a few of his toys next to his bowl, or in his water dish, during the night. While I make my coffee, he eats, and then announces loudly that it is time for me to comb his fur with the special fur rake. I do this gladly because it is fun, and because the large amount of fur I remove each day will then not end up on the floor, couch or rug. At this point, my morning duties are over, and the cat is happy to join us while we get ready for the day.
Optional daytime ritual. Meow loudly at the door until I let him out so he can roll on the front steps, provoke the squirrels, or eat grass. Meow loudly at the front door about ten-twenty minutes later, until I let him back in.

PM: The cat has always accompanied us in our bedtime routines. When I read to my daughter, he would hang out in the bedroom. He would always jump on the bed and spend about five minutes, no more, purring with us. Then he would take up his guardian position ( crossed forepaws) at the door until my daughter went to sleep. Although I no longer read in bed with her, he still joins us when I say goodnight.

He always wants to spend the night on the back porch, but will only go there if we carry out the following routine. First, I must go to bed. Then he must station himself next to the living room couch and meow very loudly until I get out of bed. I walk in his direction, and he scampers past me to hide under the dining room table. It is required that I touch his behind to signal that it is time to scamper to the kitchen. Whether or not the door to the porch is open, I must then say, "go outside, cat" (or some version of this statement, sometimes less polite). He exits, I close the door, and go back to bed. If I do not do this before I go to sleep, he will be sure to wake me at 3AM so we can do it then.

Writing and images

Today in class we talked about corn, history, writing, and work. I used a new tool in class for the first time: the Offline Image Viewer of the electronic database ArtSTOR. I'll write more about that tool another time, but what it allows me to do is have access to a fabulous database of images and use them for class without violating copyright laws. I used it to search for images tagged with corn or maiz, and turned up one famous image of a Maya scribe writing, who is depicted with an ear of corn in his headdress, probably associated with the Young Corn God.
The photo here in this post was taken by Ana and Jose on their travels in South America (gracias) and they lent it to me to use in class because we had been talking about the challenges we teachers will face as we try to take advantage of the latest groovy technologies for multimedia in the classroom, while trying to respect the rights of authors and artists to their work. It is a challenge for the blog as well. I am trying to only post images I shot myself, or links to images, but it's so easy to copy and image and post it--when do we cross the line?

The subject of writing in the Americas--writing systems that pre-date European arrival and the introduction of alphabetic literacy--is one that fascinates me, and on which I've done a lot of research, although I am not a specialist in that area. This explanation of how Maya heiroglyphic writing works, and how that compares to the alphabet we use, is a good explanation to start with. The links on the page are excellent. It is part of the very cool FAMSI site (Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies, Inc).

There has been much written on the Popol Vuh. I recommend this post on the blog Posthegemony, not as a "starter" post, but as an excellent sythesis of the scholarship and thinking on the topic.

"This is what democracy looks like..."

Military Families Speak Out said "Support our Troops; Bring them Home Now and Take Care of Them When They Get Here!" They work with Iraq Veterans Against the War, Veterans for Peace, Vietnam Veterans Against the War and Gold Star Families for Peace as well as other organizations.
Two friends joined me for the march. We met up at noon, and were part of a large, peaceful presence at a very busy intersection. I don't know how many people were there--several hundred? Lots of folks passing by honked to show support. A few made (thumbs down) gestures to show their disagreement.
I met a few people I know from work. I saw the Women Against Military Madness there, as they always are. There were families, students, all kinds of folks. It wasn't a huge rally, but we did walk peacefully down the streets and through the neighborhood.

One of the speakers was an extraordinarily articulate, effective young woman from a local high school. She spoke about military recruiters coming to her gym class, about how a teacher counseled cyncism and apathy, "That's just the way it is in America now." What a horrible thing to say to a young person! But she and her friends have refused that lesson. She told us that they were not allowed to post their flyers or hand anything out at school, but they haven't given up speaking out, and talking back, politely but firmly, with the administration and that, as a result, the other kids are starting to know more about their group and their message. She was our teacher.
There were, of course, no cameras. The eyes of the press may be blind to our presence, but we saw each other. We have to keep working to make visible an alternative, so that we can prove that teacher wrong.

Peace march today, and Keith Ellison

"I don't see you?" or "I got your back?"
Today I will be joining some folks in a peace march at noon. It is so important to show up and make your voice heard. The din of negativity and hate that comes over the airwaves can be so loud that it can fool us into thinking that there aren't other voices out there, or people who share our goals and values. Sometimes the most important thing for me about attending a gathering (a small house-party to hear a candidate, a seminar to talk about the connections between research and activism, a march for peace that will be taking place in communities all over the country) is to be able to look around and SEE that I am part of a larger group of people who want to do something to make the world a better place. One of the reasons I need to do this now is because I had a conversation with a colleague from Lebanon whose cultural collaborator has just been arrested by the Syrian government. He is angry and afraid for his friend and feels that we in the US don't know, don't care, and won't do anything to make change. didn't argue with him about it, but I would like to believe that he is mistaken. Despair is not where I want to start my thinking, or my action. Working against ignorance is something anyone can do.

So it is also important for me to recognize that peace marches are really great, but working to change the political landscape is also necessary. In the upcoming elections, I am thrilled to be able to vote for a candidate to represent my district whose stands on the issues I can support whole-heartedly (and it is rare that I can say that) . Keith Ellison won the DFL primary (there were other good candidates in that race) by running a positive campaign and getting out the vote, in spite of a extremely nasty attacks by his opponents (and not just Republicans). He worked to moblize the anti-war community, Somali and other immigrants, gay and lesbian voters, folks living in the poorest districts of Minneapolis, and those who see in his record of activism and experience a person who would continue the legacy of Paul Wellstone.

If Keith Ellison is elected, he would be the first Muslim in Congress. Here is some footage from his victory party on MN Stories (those folks at the top of my blogline over there). This interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now is well worth checking out.

luna lunera, cascabelera

The Moon passed in front of the sun today. This partial solar eclipse was photographed from South America. It wasn't a total eclipse; because the moon was far enough away from the earth that it could not completely block the sun, it looks as if the sun makes a ring around the moon, so it's called an annular eclipse. NASA's "Astronomy Picture of the Day" site has a wonderful photo of a similar event from last year. It's easy to search their archive.

Looking for images of moon goddesses, I came across this post on Moleskinerie with an image of Ixchel, Maya goddess of the moon. The post was actually about a fun site called the Godchecker! ("your guide to the gods"). You can search for gods or goddesses by topic or by pantheon.
Moleskinerie is a treasure trove; it also had a post that led me to the The New York Public Library's Digital Gallery . What a gorgeous collection of hundreds of thousands of images from their holdings, Here are some from a Japanese book called "100 Aspects of the Moon", woodblock prints by the artist Yoshitoshi. .

O Sleep

O Sleep, Why Dost Thou Leave Me?, from Semele

George Frideric Handel (1685-1759). Text: William Congreve, after Ovid: Metamorphoses Act II.

Semele:
O sleep, why dost thou leave me?
why thy visionary joys remove?
O sleep, again deceive me,
to my arms restore my wand'ring love!




If I attend this conference on dreams

will it help me sleep?

Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"

In class yesterday we talked about looking at art, and ideas about art. One person told a story of a trip to a museum in England with her art teacher. He apparently declared that anything that he could have made at home was not art, and proceeded to conduct a tour in which he pointed at things and said, more or less "That's art. That's not art." (or, "I may not know much about art, but I know what I like").

In our conversation, some important ideas emerged that took us back to an essay written by Walter Benjamin in 1935, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (or as it could also be translated, " in the age of its technological reproducibility"). His ideas continue to influence our thinking today about art in relation to the technologies of reproducing the image: film, photography, printing, and all the new electronic means of reproducingn and transmitting images, sound, etc.
The text of the essay can be found in many sites on-line. Here is one, which includes a brief "cliff notes" summary before the link to the essay.
Here is the another, with key concepts highlighted and illustrated by flash movies.
Michael Taussig's new book is called Walter Benjamin;s Grave, and here is an excerpt.
What would Benjamin, the author of "Unpacking my Library" have thought about blogging?

The Blue House/La casa azul de Frida Kahlo

Amazingly enough, despite the fact that the Blue House has been a museum, tourist attraction, and destination for countless people over the years, it was only when it was being repaired that some rooms were opened and a treasure trove of objects were found: Frida's clothes, photographs by her father, objects that are familiar because they can be seen in paintings and photographs (earrings given to her by Picasso, for example). I plan to follow up on this story. Meanwhile, here is the Tate Modern's virtual tour of the Blue House.

Spanish-speaking readers can learn more about Frida from this wonderful illustrated chronology of her life by Susana Hermoso-Espinosa on Homines.com, a portal site with great articles on art and culture.
Artist Annie Gillingham has created a wonderful virtual Casa Azul, a site with reproductions of art by Frida Kahlo, but also art inspired by Frida's work and sections dedicated to other imporant women artists of Mexico, Remedios Varo and Leonor Cunningham.

La casa azul is the title of a theater piece, inspired by Frida's writings, written by Quebecoise Sophie Faucher and brought to the stage by reknowned theatrical creator Robert Lepage.


Here is a spectacular set of photos from the Flickr Frida and Diego pool. If you click on the photo during slide show, you can see information about the photographer and whatever caption or text has been provided about the image. There are some beautiful pictures of La casa azul itself, but also images of Trostky's house, the two connected houses built by Frida and Diego, and many photos of art and objects inspired by Frida and her work. I especially like the images of a bathroom in which a reproduction of What the Water Told Me is hung over the bathtub.

Is there a song that has made a difference in your life?

I found this video of a live Jeff Buckley performance by way of a post by Pachacutec on Firedoglake. Buckley is singing the Leonard Cohen song Hallelujah. Pachacutec's post is about how often we confuse asking hard questions with personal attacks. So many times, our righteous anger and pain about the state of the world can lead us to turn on each other rather than work together to bring to life our common goals. His words were particularly inspiring and necessary to me this weekend. And I love Leonard Cohen's words and music, and this song in particular. Finding it today has made me feel a sense of renewal.

Pachacutec also asked, as part of his post, which artists, too soon gone, inspire us? There are a lot of thoughtful answers in the comments, and more links that I intend to explore when I have the time. This question suggests another one to me: is there a song that made a difference in your life? Not necessarily your favorite song, but one that made you think about the world in a different way? I have very clear recollection of listening to a Joan Baez record when I was in first or second grade, the one with "Stewball," "There but for fortune," and "Birmingham Sunday." That last song had a huge impact on me. I remember vividly what it felt like, swinging on the playground at school, singing "Birmingham Sunday" to myself, thinking about the mysterious words ("the falcon of death was a creature they knew"--did that mean they knew the falcon was a creature? or that they knew the falcon?), I wondered why someone wanted to kill those four girls (girls, just like me) because they were black. I didn't understand much else about the song then, but I do remember clearly the powerful recognition that I a song could tell me something important about the world.

"Soy infeliz"

I caught the first film in the Pedro Almodovar retrospective that opened this weekend in Landmark cinemas. Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios (women on the verge of a nervous breakdown) came out in 1988, the year I moved from California to Minnesota. I saw it when it opened, and loved it for the wonderful colloquial language and rhythms of the dialogue: totally Spanish but reminiscent of those great Preston Sturges screwball comedies. If you've seen the film Easy Living, scripted by Sturges and directed by Mitchell Leisen, then you'll recognize how Almodovar riffs on the way that actions flow when an exasperated character throws something out the window. In Easy Living, a rich man throws his wife's sable coat out a window, and when it lands on Jean Arthur's head, it sets the crazy plot in motion (my mother loved the automat sequence with Ray Milland).















Some of the things Pepa throws through her window: her telephone, her answering machine,
the record "Soy infeliz" sung by Lola Beltran. She's in a phone booth outside her ex-lover's apartment when his wife throws a suitcase out the window, which is how she discovers that he has a son, played by Antonio Banderas in a great suit and hilarious haircut.

Other things I love about the film: the incredible voices of the main characters who make their living dubbing films and commercials; the mambo taxi, the moment when Rossy de Palma opens the fridge and says "Mmm, gazpacho" not realizing it has been spiked with sleeping pills, the fab apartment that is the center of the action. I was struck then by the vivid colors and loving attention to clothes (those 80s suits! the shoes!). Back in 1988, the fetishizing of the phone and the answering machine were funny--I bought my very first answering machine in 1987 so I wouldn't miss any calls from schools offering interviews at the MLA! This episode of This American Life on the telephone revisits the years when answering machine messages were recorded on tape.

Leo in a bag

Feminist art at the Weisman

The Weisman Art Museum (that shiny building by the river) has an important show documenting the feminist art organization, WARM (Women's Art Registry of Minnesota). I visited this show with my freshman seminar students because I wanted them to see the place, and so we could look at art and not just at pictures of art.

The layout of the house in relation to the barn

To get a better idea of the layout of the house, the barn and the garage, here's a picture that shows the approach from the driveway, looking southwest; the garage is on the left, the barn is on the right, and the house itself is visible between them. The garage is not attached to the house. You can see how the buildings are arranged around an open space which I have been thinking of as a courtyard, although I'm not sure how it will end up. This is an earlier stage of building, before the windows were in.

This is what the house looks like from the opposite direction, from the south looking north and east. It sits on a slope. The driveway come up on the left, behind the barn, and around to the back of the barn. This view shows the main floor and the basement. Part of the basement is underground, but you can see that there are windows and a door so you can walk out on the east. On the main floor, the kitchen windows are on the left; the dining room is in the middle, and the living room is on the right. All have lovely views to the south. The building has an L-shape, and the bedroom wing extends north on the east side, past the living room.
The third photo shows how the buildings look from the east, still from the southern slope, but now looking toward the kitchen end of the house, with the door that will probably be the main entrance. You can see how the barn and the L-shape of the house enfold a space in the middle. From this level, you might not realize that there is a basement floor. Guinness is exploring the exciting scents, probably food from our picnic. Now the siding is on, the exterior is painted, and the inside is prepped and ready to paint as well. If things keep going as well as they have been, the house will be livable by the end of October.

I voted! voting matters

Democracy: use it or lose it.

Like most people in this country, I have often neglected to vote in the primaries. This means that I effectively hand over my voice to the few who do show up because they determine which candidates I'll be able to vote for during the elections. There are several really excellent candidates on the ballot, and I want to see their names on my ballot in November. One of them is Mark Ritchie. He is running for Secretary of State against a person who has misused that office in a state normally known for its clean elections. I met him at a house party and was incredibly impressed by his ability to relate the big picture to very specific goals and actions, and by his long history of work in the areas of sustainable agriculture, fair trade, and voter registration. This comes from his experience as with the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP), and with the company Peace Coffee. He also coordinated the Nov 2 campaign, a non-partisan effort to register new voters that succeeded in adding 5 million new voters to the rolls. He has a strong chance of winning the election, but only if we show up and vote.
What about American citizens who have been deprived of their right to vote? Chris Uggen has done some important work on the history and politics of felon disenfranchisement, an issue that has had an important effect on recent presidential elections.

Farm news

This weekend some progress was made in painting the exterior of the house. The weather has turned chilly and wet, so fall has definitely arrived. We have some new animal buddies at the farm as well.

This puppy was rescued from a certain fate from an animal shelter. He seems to be about five months old, and is a sweet and friendly guy. His name at the shelter was Piggy (because he snorted when he ate) but our friends think they'll call him Guiness. The hope is that he'll learn how to keep some of the varmints away (coyotes, foxes, racoons) from the hen house. Right now, the goose is busy guarding the three ducks and the rest of the chickens, but it's a big job and she needs some help.

Meet Clay. He (or she? I think I'll try using the gender neutral pronoun "ze") was taken in when his nest was abandoned. Ze still had baby feathers on his head then, and had to be fed chick mash with a syringe five times a day. Clay is still a very young pigeon, but ze is starting to exercise zir wings and make little fluttering sorties. Ze can eat solid food now, but still peeps at us begging for food as if we were mama pigeons, about to regurgitate. It is great fun to watch a bird grow and change, up close. Ze has bonded with B, and sat on his shoulder for almost an hour yesterday. When ze is older, ze'll go to live with some folks who have other pigeons.

Filoli

On my next trip to the Bay Area, I hope to visit the Filoli Estates

Latin American blogs

Now it is time to explore a few, just a very few, Latin American blogs.
Greg Weeks edits the academic journal The Latin Americanist, and his blog Two Weeks Notice is a good place to start for the political science perspective. A blog also called The Latin Americanist rounds up stories on business, politics and culture. La Profesora Abstraida writes about Mexico. The Latin American News Review gives a left perspective of LA politics. Ricardo Carreon is a Mexican living in Brazil who works for Intel; he gives a great overview of how the Mexican elections have motivated a host of new bloggers.

En castellano:EBRmx (El blog de Rodrigo) is described as a "citizen journalist" blog and has incredible photos, a huge blogroll of press sites, and a soundtrack! Chilangabanda is a metroblog about el D.F.--more commercial and cultural than political. NO HAY TAL LUGAR is a fabulous feminist creative "space" where Cristina Rivera Garza writes. Her co-conspirators include Amaranta Caballero, and they sometimes hang out together in their "ciberestudio" Un Blog Propio.

Mexico-in-English is a good place for folks who don't speak Spanish to connect with Mexico. Here is a clip of Lila Downs singing La cumbia del mole. And here's the biggest, most comprehensive Frida site.

The legacy of Eugene V Debs

Today is Labor Day, and so I set out to learn more about why this is a national holiday. This led me to learn more about Eugene V. Debs and his extraordinary legacy of activism, struggle, principled dissent, solidarity and integrity.

David Rodiger reminds us that we also learn from what visionaries like Debs couldn't see in their moments. Debs worked in solidarity with black laborers in the Pullman strike, but his confidence in socialism led him to subsume the particularities of racism into the class struggle in some instances. I will make it a goal to learn more about Eugene Debs and his time, but also to continue to think about what we need to our understanding of labor today if we want to keep that legacy alive.

Xocolatl

Chocolate. Mmmmmm.
Early this summer, I was in London, and came across the Chelsea Physic Garden, where a rather self-satisfied looking statue of Sir Hans Sloane, doctor, botanist, collector, and chocolate entrepreneur stands next to a cart of the kind that marketed his chocolate "remedy." He financed the collection that later became the British Museum by selling chocolate.

Here are some fun places to learn more about cacao and chocolate:
Cacao is not only used to make chocolate; is has medicinal properties as well.
"The sweet lure of chocolate" is a good place to start. The Field Museum in Chicago has an on-line excursion into the history of chocolate. Sophie Coe's book The True History of Chocolate is one I plan to read this semester for a class. I would like to have a tasting club like these folks.
I'm not sure how I feel about this concept--Music from the Chocolate Lands--but I suppose I can see if it is Fair Trade certified!