Back from the beach.

Here we are toting a few sandwiches out to the Lake Michigan shore before Saturday's sunset, the last of our 4th of July vacation. This picture kind of reminds me of the old Stone Roses video for "I Wanna Be Adored." I wonder if I have a copy of that cd that isn't scratched to death.

Married!

Just Married

What a beautiful weekend of catching up with old friends and watching your brother marry your new sister. Our whole family is so happy about it we just don't know what to say.J was a great flower grrlI got to sing a Daniel Johnston song

Solstice State of the Garden

Bergamot, maybe my favorite plant.

Echinacea, blooming and on the way

Herb Buddha in control as always

Cobalt (at least that's what I call it) getting ready to go off.
This cool new silver I got last year but I forget the name. I want more.

Update

This picture shows you everything you need to roast your own coffee: green coffee beans, a popcorn popper, wooden spoon, timer, notebook, and the newest dwell in case you have time to read. I pretty much just stared at the beans jumping around in the popper, though. Those beans cooling in the colander are the result of my first attempt. I am far from a coffee connoisseur, but I read somewhere about how you can buy green coffee really cheap and it keeps longer than roasted coffee, and it sounded fun. Haven't tasted it yet, but it smells like coffee, so I'm optimistic.

What's going on? This weekend, the little brother is marrying a real sweetheart of a babe. I was trying to find a poem to read during the ceremony but we couldn't find one that fit, so they asked me to play and sing Daniel Johnston's "True Love Will Find You in the End." Such a cute song for a wedding, I think. I bet all crying babies will stop and listen while I play.

Not much else is going on, the way it should be. I put up a hammock on the sleeping porch off of our bedroom and it's a super cool place to read. I'm also looking forward to the Saturday of the Pitchfork music festival.

Anyway, keep making the most of your summer.

Small Town Rodeo

The summer fair season hadn't quite started up yet last weekend, so I had to travel a little farther than usual to find something fun for the kids. I didn't even know they had rodeos around these parts and was a little skeptical so when I heard about this'n in Monroeville, I had to see it.

Praying Cowboys

And it was pretty cool. I'm not sure what I expected, probably just a few cowboys going through a sham rodeo. Instead, though, it felt like an actual competition. I guess there's no way to fake getting on the back of a bull and trying not to get killed. Because of the high fences, it was almost impossible to get close enough for good photos, though. This image is the closest my kit lens could zoom.

Girl Texting her Prayer

The people watching was pretty good, too. Lots of country-mouse tweens on parade, which is always funny to see. Such posturing. Rodeo Clown's Last Smoke

This picture isn't so great because he caught me focusing. I could have been a lot closer if I'd kept my cool, but I had two kids with me, and that makes it tough to be a sneaky photographer.
This clown's job was not to spook the bull away but to provide a hokey play by play. He had a head set and cracked insults between the time a cowboy was thrown from his bull and the next one was released: "That bull must be related to OJ Simpson . . . He doesn't want to go to the pen!" And people would laugh. More bizarre was this "insult" he delivered when the emcee was introduced: "Hey, it's one of the actors from Brokeback Mountain!" That one got a big laugh. So, apparently, even portraying a gay cowboy in a Hollywood movie is enough to set you up for ridicule in these parts. And the 10% of the cowboys who were gay all thought to themselves "Gosh durn it, don't he know those comments just kill me on the inside?"

Anyway, something to put on the calendar for next year, definitely.

Summer Hours

School's out, so MonkeySquirrel will be on a summer-
occasional-photo-blog-schedule. I was so lazy the last few days. It took me almost a week just to get our last Netflix in the mail. But summer is here, and big plans are in place. Today, for example, I was supposed to buy guitar strings and go to a rodeo, but I took two Benadryl for this terrible hay-fever season and I forgot they knock you out. But now I'm awake, and it's time to get to work enjoying the work free season.

The movie that sat around was Old Joy, something I got just because it has Will Oldham in a starring role and a soundtrack by Yo La Tengo. A very quiet, pretty thing, this movie. Kind of a Raymond Carver or Ann Beattie simplicity on the surface. I just can't decide if it has as much beyond the surface. Anyways, have a nice summer.

Fortune's Wheel

Zabel about to win a sprint, second from left.

"Mr. 60%"

I'm Having trouble processing the doping news coming out of the European peloton today. The sad news is that Erick Zabel, an all-arounder who was one of the few German cyclists I generally like, admitted to doping. The good news, kind of, is that Bjarne Riis, the cocky Dutch guy I hated when he rode finally admitted to being doped up when he beat Indurain in 1996. Even that is a little sad, though, because I have really enjoyed the way Riis has run Team CSC in the past few years, getting great production out of some riders who people thought were past their prime. He knows his stuff. I think his doping was an open secret, really. I know people who referred to him as "Mr. 60%" because his hematocrit allegedly hit that absurd number once or twice back in the day.

It's just sad all around, though, really. It's such a great sport to follow, but I don't know whom to support anymore. I still believe Lance was clean, though. I hope I can always believe that.

Spring Hiking

This is the time to get out there--no bugs and no real heat, either. This Sunday's day trip was just under an hour of country-driving to an old girl scout camp that had a real live waterfall, high enough that it would really hurt if you were to fall off of it.

The disorienting thing, especially for an Eagle Scout, was getting lost. I didn't take a map, assuming that the place would be small enough for me to find my way around. And then I actually lost track of north, which I almost never do, and which was nice. I don't wear a watch so that I can forget about time, but it had been a while since I'd experienced the confusing pleasure of being lost in a woods, especially in this state.

Irises et al

I like when the Irises start to pop because that means the Siberian Irises will be coming soon and that is almost the highlight of the year in my inner life. In fact, this year my inner life will hold its third annual Siberian Iris Festival. It's going to be huge.

More Irises.

And Clematis.

The best new addition to the garden this year is probably going to be the Delphinium. When I brought them home, I had this conversation:

Wife: Did you know that Delphinium are my favorite flowers?
Me: No. How could I not know that?
Wife: I don't know.
Me: How come we've never had them before?
Wife: I don't know.

See how filled with mystery and how endlessly renewing a marriage can be? It's remarkable.

Daisy May and Seth Bernard

Great show downtown tonight by these twenty-something folky singer-songwriters. They're Michigan people and I'd heard their names up North before, but never their music until they were on Garrison Keillor a few weeks ago. In person, they're fabulous. Daisy herself is quite charming and has this great Michigan accent when she talks that turns into something very full and versatile when she sings. I don't know how to talk guitars, but Seth reminds me a fair bit of David Rawlings, with one of them tiny-like guitars and a similar elegance to his solos. They even covered Gillian Welch's "Orphan Girl." It sounded beautiful sung in a duet with a woman singer/ multi-instrumentalist named Laura Bates. That song is so great; I wonder why people don't cover Welch more often--it seems like "Orphan Girl" is one of the few you ever hear people do.

The show was held in a downtown ministry called Come 2 Go, and it was part of their regular programming, a relaxed, smoke-free, all ages gathering. It had such an nice vibe, I wondered if that was where Wes and Sarah go. It's interesting that church based organizations are bringing some of the more daring theater (at First Pres) and authentic original music (here) to town. While traditional music venues like bars keep booking reunion tours of Guns 'n Roses tribute bands, the churches are supporting the arts.

This July, either the band or the label that Daisy May and Seth work with are putting on some kind of family camp out weekend full of music and kid stuff and vegetarian cooking. It sounds great for a first time camping experience for my chilluns.

The book I made.

I made this book. It's a small book, but I made it and wrote the stuff that is in it, and the feeling that gives just reinforces my belief that the more things you make, the better. This is the last poem on the last page:


Contributors

Squirrel is the author of two nests: Hubcap Emporium (1965) and The Long Branch (2002).

Purple Coneflower’s latest ring-box of weevils, Train Song City (2003) is a finalist for the Purple Coneflower Prize for Third Books of Lunar Punditry.

Open Field is the author of Closed at Noon (2006), a critical study of tiny post offices.

Bird is a bird. This is his first contribution to poetry.

Long Walk is the Green Tea Professor of Flannel Sheets. Her first collection of seeds will be published by Warm Milk Press in November, 2009.

Left Turn at 5:20 uses Loma photography and coconut rice in an effort to answer a question posed to it by a muddy road that leads to a barn where a mummified cat is caught behind a beam in the upper hay loft.

Spouse is the foremost water-color graffiti artist practicing in the three recognized East-South-Eastern watersheds. The first retrospective of her work, Yo!, Murder of Crows!, is set to open soon after the next Scurvy Equinox.

Good News

As you can see above, the utilities all came out to mark their buried hardware, and, thank goodness, the sandbox is only minimally affected. We can easily tell the kids to avoid the flagged areas and play in the rest. And the flags add a nice, kid-friendly touch, I think. So, good news all around.

The real drawback to a sandbox, I'm just now realizing, is all the sand. Watching the kids play, I keep hearing myself tell them "now, don't get too sandy." How do other parents, wiser parents, deal with this? I mean, apart from not having a sandbox? It's a conundrum.

Okay, last sandbox post for awhile, promise.

The numbers are in.

Four trips from Mike Lough's house with sand. 22 wheelbarrow-loads. One shovel. All told, it adds up to 22". I might just keep saying it's "two feet deep" anyway. I had to measure it even though I knew that, in digging to the bottom of my sandbox, I would get a little sad.

I like how in this picture the bottom is shrouded in darkness. Yes, it is only 22", you say, but in truth it is much deeper than that in the ways that truly matter.

Now this here is a sandbox.

They kept trying to escape, and I kept pushing them back in.

Okay, maybe I didn't dig down quite two feet deep like I have been telling folks, but that has to one of the deepest hand-dug home-made sandboxes in the county. And the picture doesn't even do it justice. It started out with me just trying to dig enough to make the box level on a slight slope, but then you start thinking, as I was explaining to some people today, about how there are few things sadder than digging to the bottom of your sandbox. I realized if I could do something to lessen the possibility that my kids would experience that disappointment, I would, and I started digging a little deeper. I am thinking that the sand will be to my kids like the sea is to Ahab, this dark mystery of life that they know they can never fathom, but which compels them to keep trying. Maybe I'll dig one section down to like four feet and put some treasure down there, though that wouldn't parallel the Moby Dick metaphor.

Again, as I was saying today, there is one thing worse than digging to the bottom of your sandbox, and that is striking a gas line and blowing yourself up. In the photo there is J, standing and jumping on the possible gas line that I encountered during the dig. Notice that I didn't let it put the project behind one bit. When you are 8" into the earth and going strong, you don't let things like that bother you. If it does actually turn out to be a gas line, we'll shut off the gas and go solar or something.

Great photo stuff at the MoA

Portrait of HUYNH THANH MY
Mekong Delta, Vietnam, 1965

The museum downtown is pretty much all photography right now. Last night they had an opening for a show called Requiem, consisting entirely of photos of the Vietnam war taken by correspondents who were killed there. I'd forgotten that Capa stepped on a mine there. They had prints of the last two frames he ever shot, one each from the B&W and color cameras he was carrying at the time. One of them shows the dike where that he was about to climb and find the mine that killed him. It's an amazing show and you realize that if it weren't for the insane journalists who shot nothing but photographs, the war simply wouldn't even exist for most people.

Capa's last B&W frame

The opening included an hour talk and slide show by a veteran who had no real connection to the images in the exhibition, but provided you with one more thread of tragedy to the narrative of Vietnam that I have pieced together in my head. It kills me to realize that all 3,000,000 (not sure about that number) of the men who served there could give a similar but unique show.

It got political, of course, but with a twist. Usually, when people invoke Vietnam in reference to Iraq, it's to argue that Iraq is a mess, unwinnable, a bad idea to start with. The speaker we heard did the opposite: to him, and he's not alone in this, Vietnam was a loss because we left "before the job was done." So, when he said that Iraq was just like Vietnam, he was trying to argue that we should not make the mistake of leaving before we have "won." That was a little hard for me to take, but you can't raise your hand and argue with a veteran. I'm a veteran of the Boy Scouts, but that doesn't carry the same weight. But when he pointed out how politicians back then used "Communism" the same way today's say "Terrorism" to justify foreign interventions, I was thinking "wow, he's going to point out the emptiness of the rhetoric in front of this conservative crowd," but I was wrong; to him, these were legitimate, imminent threats that could only be resolved with force and the parallel, to him, suggested that we stick with things. I dunno.

Holga by Jarrid Spicer

This picture is from the other show going on there, devoted to the Holga, Diana, etc. Jarrid's were probably my favorite there, and made me want to glue my old Arrow back together. I found some old prints I made with it, including some from up in Michigan during a winter about ten years ago and they still look cool to me. I wonder if Jarrid sells prints.

It's beautiful out. I love living in a place that has seasons. We're going to get C a new mountain bike today so I might wait until next year to get a new road bike. I like my Lemond a lot still. Thinking this summer I'll plant, in addition to bamboo, a row of Hydrangea next to the neighbor's.

The Trees

The Wild Back 40

Philip Larkin, "The Trees"

The trees are coming into leaf

Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too.
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

Spring Music

Finally, it makes sixty degrees, and I am starting to warm toward of this year's new music. It is Charlotte Gainsbourg for one. The music by Air, no less. That probably has something to do with it. On it's first 6-7 spins, I'm preferring it to the new Air, actually.
And then, really, after Charlotte, it's all Bill Callahan for me lately. Sick this week, my voice could even growl out the country number, "A Man Needs a Woman or a Man to be a Man" that closes his new record. What a cool voice he has. I always had trouble with some of the real early (Smog) stuff he released, but the last 4-5 records by him have been great, I think. I keep singing the line "Fireworks are wasted in the day/ I set 'em off anyway/ to pass the time/ 'til you return/ with fireworks, more fireworks."

Teacher New Year

A.C. Filling Curtain Like a Dress, South Bend

It's getting close now. I always get a few new year's resolutions in my head around January, but the more serious ones happen in mid April to late May, when I know that summer is coming and I will actually have time to devote to doing more stuff. So I'm trying to think about what to do this summer. Assignments are what I'm looking for, things to assign myself, because that's how it works for me.

My friend Mike is doing a photo project called "Four States." I'm thinking of making this the summer of shooting my Holga more. But of what? I need something tangible. Another project I am working on is "plant bamboo in the yard" and another is "change my guitar strings." Those could take some time, but I might have some left over. Hmm. The summer is my oyster: what to do?

First Cliches

In the car today, 4 year old J says to me "Daddy, the wind is blowing the grass and it looks like waves!" Of course I was about to lecture her on the inability of people to "hear" dead language like the too-obvious "waves of grass," but before I could make my point clear she burst in with "Daddy, when I grow up, I want to be a rock star!"

Her first two cliches within a single minute. I was almost proud. But more concerned. I want her to be an oil-painting, fiddle-playing, clogging, documentary filmmaker.

The Compromises of Marriage

Used to be, there would be two bikes on this car. Here is C on her way to the great single-track at Lake Winona, snow or no, and I am left taking pictures in my socks from the porch, chilluns yelling for cinnamon toast behind me. It's enough. No complaints.

The Library Review

Well, it's nice and cold for Spring Break '07, so it's a good time for me to develop my opinions about the new library space. The main judgment, and it's one that I seem to share with lots of folks, is that it's pretty great. I've overheard other people say, and I've thought it myself, that it will "be my new hangout." It is space this town can be proud of--it feels ambitious and progressive and democratic and you can sense these feelings in the people, patrons, you pass in the great hall, above.

It's definitely attracting more business. I'd be curious to hear numbers on that. I know that the checkout desk now has anywhere from 3-4 people working it now where it used to have only two, and the lines always seem longer. When I'm there, it always seems like at least two checkout clerks are busy with patrons helping them something complicated like appealing their immigration status or changing the name on their passport. Probably just seems that way.

But what do I think of the details of this new space is the question I've been asking myself lately. I think I do like the big hall. The light is great, and the feeling that you're someplace important is nice. One major disappointment is the wall of quotes you see on the left side above. They put up a canvas 50 yards long or so and I'm all excited about the possibilities and all we get is this sort of pedantic, officious mess of words. The quotations are nice, but it feels like a lecture. A huge opportunity for public art that could have challenged and identified us wasted. An Eric Tarr or e4 collective work would have been a knockout. Fortunately, the new library gallery space and theater are helping to make up fo that letdown. But still. Grade: B This small reading room is one of my favorite places to hunker down. I can sit along the windows at the far end there and read and it's a great place to see people you know as they walk by. My only real problem with this space is that it serves as an echo chamber for all of the noise generated in the "great hall." Somehow, it feels louder than when you're in the hall itself. Every kid that gets smacked by its teenage parent and then cries gets magnified in there. It's also a little cold by those windows in the winter. Still, it's one of the first places I go to read. It feels secluded except when the latch key kids come there to hang out and flirt after school. They're pretty obnoxious. Grade: B-

The other decent place to read is the "silent reading room," which is glassed off from the rest of the library and contains about thirty leather wingback (is that the word?) chairs scattered randomly. It is quiet in there, but it's too quiet for me, almost. I want to feel like I'm in something public when I go out to read, and this does not give me that. All the chairs are a little absurd, too; they look like a chess board full of kings, and their random organization makes it look they are sadly roaming the small room in search of a fireplace to settle in front of. I feel bad for them, and avoid them, rarely using this room. Grade: B-
And here, Business & Technology, is the best place to set up the laptop. It's a corner that almost always has an open table, lots of outlets built into the tables, and the wi-fi is always fast. What I love most is the light here--great corner windows that let you feel like you're sitting at the bow of a great ship or something. Not too many kids running around here, either, which is nice. I think the name of the department scares them off or something. Grade: A.

Children's Services is a pretty sweet set up. The kids all love it, and this room feels like it got the most attention during the planning stage. I think it feels a little cramped in the stacks, though. A kids' room should feel more open. There are actually places in there that feel like the dead end of a maze. Grade: A-

Okay, so my overall grade is still an A. I'm a holistic grader. I've yet to see the Genealogy dept. because I'm afraid that it will mean I'm old if I go in there. I am curious, though. I also didn't say anything about the bizarre wall separating the Audio Visual dept. from the Art books room. It makes no sense to me. And I've left out the new coffee shop/book shop and the periodicals area. The jury is still out on that, I guess.