Woodstock 2017: The Kids Are Alright

It’s mid October in Woodstock, but at the woodsy Applehead Studio it feels more like Midsummer’s Eve, missing only Titania and Oberon. Mature trees out front are illuminated to the canopies with bulbs no brighter than fireflies. Several folk are roasting marshmallows on the perimeter of a soaring bonfire. Others enjoy the taste of the crackling fire, its multiple orange tongues licking up the darkness. A small bar beneath the trees dispenses beverages and the fixings for s’mores. The night is a starry dome, but no scratchy rock and roll tonight. Instead it’s indoors to witness the reimagining of Joni Mitchell’s Blue by Arc Iris.

Jocie Adams, Zach Tenorio-Miller, and Ray Belli want to honor the singer-songwriter, but aren’t interested in a tribute band’s nostalgic performance. They want to remake the forty-six-year-old album for a younger generation. Implicit, but unspoken, is their desire not to offend old farts who bought the iconic vinyl half a lifetime earlier when they were the age of today’s band members. The free concert is being filmed and recorded before an invitation-only audience. It’s also being streamed live on Facebook.

Back in the day, I attended some intimate concerts. One summer Minneapolis’ fourteen-hundred-seat Guthrie Theatre, with its thrust stage, hosted luminaries like Neil Young, Cat Stevens, Jim Croce, and Jethro Tull. I remember seeing folkies like Tom Paxton perform before a full house that numbered fewer than a hundred patrons. I didn’t count heads, but figure some number south of fifty were invited to the Arc Iris show. It was like attending a concert in your living room.

I’m something of a purist when it gets down to people messing with the Canon, but I’ve noticed the music industry (not a pleasant rubric for singers and songwriters who are mostly artists and not really an “industry”) is quite good at policing itself, unlike “literary” folk who mess with Conan Doyle, for instance. I chalk it up to a reverence, camaraderie, and sensitivity, which inhibit folk from messing with something bigger than they can handle. I’m not aware that Arthur Brown or James Brown covered a Dylan tune, but I think Jackson Browne could.

That said, I walked away from the Arc Iris show impressed with the new sound, which did not in any way diminish Joni Mitchell but certainly enhanced Arc Iris. It was a magical evening. As Pete Townsend might say: the kids are alright.

Thoughts While on the Road to Woodstock

It often seems people who demand equality really desire to be more equal, as did the piggies in George Orwell’s Animal Farm. This occurred to me while driving through eastern Canada. Leaving the no-longer-so-good U S of A (I’m in the apparent minority who believe the “Party of Lincoln” has evolved into the “Party of Hitlerjungend”) at Sault Ste. Marie, we headed toward Montreal. It had been many years since I’d been to Ontario. I was quite surprised to find the Trans-Canada Highway was still only a two-lane ribbon of asphalt (with regular passing lanes) though it broadens near major municipalities. I quickly became aware the highway signage was in English and French, which surprised me not at all.

At the turn of the last century, Canada created the territory of Nunavut, essentially turning over political control of one-fifth of the country’s land, a chunk of real estate larger than Alaska, to the indigenous Inuit. A country that would do that would have no problem dictating road signage be in French and English to satisfy the Quebecois, the Francophone population.

What did surprise me was entering Quebec and finding all English signage gone, something that would piss me off if I were a resident of Ontario. More interesting, perhaps, was the denial or perhaps the neglect of the province’s own history. Communities settled by the English and later taken over by the French haven’t gone so far as to deface the English words carved into the stone of public buildings, as the Copts did to Egyptian hieroglyphics, at least as far up as they could reach without a ladder.

Some local historians aren’t so much revisionist as moronic. How many century-old buildings have a history that reaches back to only 1937, for instance? They do exist in southern Quebec. While this behavior doesn’t reach the enormity of the destruction of the Buddahs of Bamiyan, I find it reprehensible.

Of course, a sizable number of Quebec’s population want secession and their own country, but the French tend to be better lovers than fighters—it’s been a long time since Napoleon. One might argue the French won WWII as a member of the allied forces, but that is stretching it. How many French units stormed the beaches of Normandy on D-Day? Then again how many wars has the US won since 1945? My guess is about the same number as the French have.

Maybe in the end Quebec will become an independent country and designate French as the only official language, as does France and Monaco in Europe, which will make Quebec one of fourteen countries to recognize French as the only official language, joining several island nations such as Haiti and Madagascar and a handful of African countries.

On Sisyphus

Albert Camus

I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain. One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself, forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Your son is in a burning house. Nobody can hold you back. You may burn up, but what do you think of that? You are ready to bequeath the rags of your body to any man who will take them. You discover that what you set so much store by is trash. You would sell your hand, if need be, to give a hand to a friend. It is in your act that you exist, not in your body. Your act is yourself, and there is no other you. Your body belongs to you: it is not you. Are you about to strike an enemy? No threat of bodily harm can hold you back. You? It is the death of your enemy that is you. You? It is the rescue of your child that is you. In that moment you exchange yourself against something else; and you have no feeling that you lost by the exchange. Your members? Tools. A tool snaps in your hand: how important is that tool? You exchange yourself against the death of your enemy, the rescue of your child, the recovery of your patient, the perfection of your theorem...Your true significance becomes dazzlingly evident. Your true name is duty, hatred, love, child, theorem. There is no other you than this.

An Immodest Proposal

Oscar Wilde said that the one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it. The nation is in a revisionist mood. Why not start today? And why not start at the beginning?

The fact is twelve of the first eighteen US presidents owned slaves, and the zeitgeist of our era suggests it’s time we do something about it. The coincidence of having a sitting president who enjoys good relations with the Russians could be fortuitous. If the American public could convince Trump to invite Putin to play eighteen holes, our country could be the better off for it. If you are of a certain age, you may not remember how surgically adept the Russians are at disappearing those who have fallen out of favor—images and names of the discredited disappear from public records. Even entire cities fall off maps.

Extra care will have to be taken for the top-three criminals: Washington, Jefferson, and Madison. Adjusting names might be a good start in changing the identities, the rhetoric, and the mythos of the guilty.

George Washing is fairly simple, as he is already known as the man who would not be king. A little fiddling with documents will show his dominant wife, Martha, was the actual slave owner in the family. If we wished to discredit him further, we could remove Valley Forge from the map of Pennsylvania. No Valley Forge, no suffering.

Thomas Jeffers is easy. He did not write the Declaration of Independence. The document attributed to him uses the word inalienable, but the revised document uses the word unalienable, enough evidence to show the author was actually John Adams. With enough digging, the license Jeffers and Hemings used to marry might be found secreted in a butter churn at Monticello, which was built to the design of Hemings, a white woman who married the enslaved black man, Jeffers.

John Madman is problematic. He and his two fellow authors of the Federalist Papers (a practice run for the Constitution), Jay and Hamilton, owned slaves. The eponymously named musical has made Hamilton a star. If Ringo, another Starr, were to create a musical about the fifth president, the nation might forgive and forget Madman’s foibles. Another possibility is the moronic majority on the Supreme Court, with enough incentive, may just declare the Constitution unconstitutional.

Coming up. Monroe and Jackson, two more pesky presidents.

House With a Heap of History

“House on Virginia Avenue” was printed in the lower right-hand corner of the drawing of the building’s front façade. Below it was the architect’s name, “Cass Gilbert.” Virginia was no longer an avenue, but a street. Nor did the house sit on its original site. It had been moved two blocks south to make way for the Aberdeen Hotel, built in 1899.

The Aberdeen, once the most posh residential hotel in St. Paul, was long gone. After WWI, the federal government leased it for use as a veterans’ hospital. By 1927, it was vacant. Ten years later, a thirty-year-old waitress, Diane Munson, was found brutally murdered after a second-floor fire. In 1944, the building was razed.

Though the years had been unkind, the Virginia Street house still stood. Many of the original shingle-style details had been lost when the building was moved. Others likely just rotted away. The original interior was barely recognizable. A slumlord had gotten hold of it during the Depression and carved it up. The original living room had been converted to two apartments with back-to-back baths. The staircase to second floor had been reworked and pedestrianized.

The proud new owner dragged me over to the seller’s house. I’d seen some pretty cool libraries in my day—public and private—but nothing prepared me for Mister Earl’s. One wall of his office, floor to ceiling, were shelves filled with abstracts of title. He found the one for the Virginia Street house. A notable early owner was Judge Flandrau. Flandrau’s father practiced law with Aaron Burr. Flandrau served on the Minnesota Territorial Council, Minnesota Constitutional Convention, and Minnesota territorial and supreme courts. His real claim to fame occurred after the Sioux Uprising in 1862, when he joined the Union Army as a captain and raised a force to relieve the siege of New Ulm. Flandreau (sp), South Dakota is named after him.

The new owner began his years’ long research of the building. A later tenant of Flandrau was his son, Charles, a writer. An earlier tenant was Jerusha Sturgis, widow of Civil War General Samuel Sturgis (Sturgis, South Dakota is named after him). He graduated from the US Military Academy in the class with McClellan, Reno, Stoneman, “Stonewall” Jackson, and Pickett. After the war he commanded the infamous 7^th Cavalry. He just happened to be on detached service in St. Louis when his second-in-command met Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. One of Sturgis’s sons died at the Little Bighorn. Another became a general as did his son. It seemed there were a lot of Civil War generals, as Samuel Gilbert, the father of the building’s architect was also a general as was his brother, Charles, and his great uncle, Lewis Cass.

Jerusha Sturgis’s granddaughter revisited the Virginia Street house in her ninth decade, arriving in a chauffeured car. She rattled off the names of the neighborhood’s children. She noted the changes to the building, describing the original staircase. She didn’t have any inside information on the diary found in the attic of a neighbor’s house, a diary belonging to William Clark, Meriwether Lewis’s second-in-command.

Jerusha’s granddaughter, Eleanor Jerusha Lawler married John S. Pillsbury. Why do I care? My grandmother, a widow with two children, dated her son, and my grandmother’s son attended Pillsbury Military Academy. I didn't ask enough questions. All the players are dead. The truth may be out there, as Mulder and Scully claim, but not the answers.

The Death of the Hired Man

Robert Frost

MARY sat musing on the lamp-flame at the table
Waiting for Warren. When she heard his step,
She ran on tip-toe down the darkened passage
To meet him in the doorway with the news
And put him on his guard. “Silas is back.”
She pushed him outward with her through the door
And shut it after her. “Be kind,” she said.
She took the market things from Warren’s arms
And set them on the porch, then drew him down
To sit beside her on the wooden steps.
“When was I ever anything but kind to him?
But I’ll not have the fellow back,” he said.
“I told him so last haying, didn’t I?
‘If he left then,’ I said, ‘that ended it.’
What good is he? Who else will harbour him
At his age for the little he can do?
What help he is there’s no depending on.
Off he goes always when I need him most.
‘He thinks he ought to earn a little pay,
Enough at least to buy tobacco with,
So he won’t have to beg and be beholden.’
‘All right,’ I say, ‘I can’t afford to pay
Any fixed wages, though I wish I could.’
‘Someone else can.’ ‘Then someone else will have to.’
I shouldn’t mind his bettering himself
If that was what it was. You can be certain,
When he begins like that, there’s someone at him
Trying to coax him off with pocket-money,—
In haying time, when any help is scarce.
In winter he comes back to us. I’m done.”
“Sh! not so loud: he’ll hear you,” Mary said.
“I want him to: he’ll have to soon or late.”
“He’s worn out. He’s asleep beside the stove.
When I came up from Rowe’s I found him here,
Huddled against the barn-door fast asleep,
A miserable sight, and frightening, too—
You needn’t smile—I didn’t recognise him—
I wasn’t looking for him—and he’s changed.
Wait till you see.”
“Where did you say he’d been?”
“He didn’t say. I dragged him to the house,
And gave him tea and tried to make him smoke.
I tried to make him talk about his travels.
Nothing would do: he just kept nodding off.”
“What did he say? Did he say anything?”
“But little.”
“Anything? Mary, confess
He said he’d come to ditch the meadow for me.”
“Warren!”
“But did he? I just want to know.”
“Of course he did. What would you have him say?
Surely you wouldn’t grudge the poor old man
Some humble way to save his self-respect.
He added, if you really care to know,
He meant to clear the upper pasture, too.
That sounds like something you have heard before?
Warren, I wish you could have heard the way
He jumbled everything. I stopped to look
Two or three times—he made me feel so queer—
To see if he was talking in his sleep.
He ran on Harold Wilson—you remember—
The boy you had in haying four years since.
He’s finished school, and teaching in his college.
Silas declares you’ll have to get him back.
He says they two will make a team for work:
Between them they will lay this farm as smooth!
The way he mixed that in with other things.
He thinks young Wilson a likely lad, though daft
On education—you know how they fought
All through July under the blazing sun,
Silas up on the cart to build the load,
Harold along beside to pitch it on.”
“Yes, I took care to keep well out of earshot.”
“Well, those days trouble Silas like a dream.
You wouldn’t think they would. How some things linger!
Harold’s young college boy’s assurance piqued him.
After so many years he still keeps finding
Good arguments he sees he might have used.
I sympathise. I know just how it feels
To think of the right thing to say too late.
Harold’s associated in his mind with Latin.
He asked me what I thought of Harold’s saying
He studied Latin like the violin
Because he liked it—that an argument!
He said he couldn’t make the boy believe
He could find water with a hazel prong—
Which showed how much good school had ever done him.
He wanted to go over that. But most of all
He thinks if he could have another chance
To teach him how to build a load of hay——”
“I know, that’s Silas’ one accomplishment.
He bundles every forkful in its place,
And tags and numbers it for future reference,
So he can find and easily dislodge it
In the unloading. Silas does that well.
He takes it out in bunches like big birds’ nests.
You never see him standing on the hay
He’s trying to lift, straining to lift himself.”
“He thinks if he could teach him that, he’d be
Some good perhaps to someone in the world.
He hates to see a boy the fool of books.
Poor Silas, so concerned for other folk,
And nothing to look backward to with pride,
And nothing to look forward to with hope,
So now and never any different.”
Part of a moon was falling down the west,
Dragging the whole sky with it to the hills.
Its light poured softly in her lap. She saw
And spread her apron to it. She put out her hand
Among the harp-like morning-glory strings,
Taut with the dew from garden bed to eaves,
As if she played unheard the tenderness
That wrought on him beside her in the night.
“Warren,” she said, “he has come home to die:
You needn’t be afraid he’ll leave you this time.”
“Home,” he mocked gently.
“Yes, what else but home?
It all depends on what you mean by home.
Of course he’s nothing to us, any more
Than was the hound that came a stranger to us
Out of the woods, worn out upon the trail.”
“Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in.”
“I should have called it
Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.”
Warren leaned out and took a step or two,
Picked up a little stick, and brought it back
And broke it in his hand and tossed it by.
“Silas has better claim on us you think
Than on his brother? Thirteen little miles
As the road winds would bring him to his door.
Silas has walked that far no doubt to-day.
Why didn’t he go there? His brother’s rich,
A somebody—director in the bank.”
“He never told us that.”
“We know it though.”
“I think his brother ought to help, of course.
I’ll see to that if there is need. He ought of right
To take him in, and might be willing to—
He may be better than appearances.
But have some pity on Silas. Do you think
If he’d had any pride in claiming kin
Or anything he looked for from his brother,
He’d keep so still about him all this time?”
“I wonder what’s between them.”
“I can tell you.
Silas is what he is—we wouldn’t mind him—
But just the kind that kinsfolk can’t abide.
He never did a thing so very bad.
He don’t know why he isn’t quite as good
As anyone. He won’t be made ashamed
To please his brother, worthless though he is.”
“I can’t think Si ever hurt anyone.”
“No, but he hurt my heart the way he lay
And rolled his old head on that sharp-edged chair-back.
He wouldn’t let me put him on the lounge.
You must go in and see what you can do.
I made the bed up for him there to-night.
You’ll be surprised at him—how much he’s broken.
His working days are done; I’m sure of it.”
“I’d not be in a hurry to say that.”
“I haven’t been. Go, look, see for yourself.
But, Warren, please remember how it is:
He’s come to help you ditch the meadow.
He has a plan. You mustn’t laugh at him.
He may not speak of it, and then he may.
I’ll sit and see if that small sailing cloud
Will hit or miss the moon.”
It hit the moon.
Then there were three there, making a dim row,
The moon, the little silver cloud, and she.
Warren returned—too soon, it seemed to her,
Slipped to her side, caught up her hand and waited.
“Warren,” she questioned.
“Dead,” was all he answered.