My Back Pages - Time Must Have A Stop

Scene from an abandoned farm in Deuel County, South Dakota:

Like numberless others, the farm stands forgotten and forlorn,

Waiting for a rebirth that will never come.

The work clothes in the garage are still hanging.

On nails, where the last tenant left them.

The insects and the weather has turned them into tatters,

In due course the whole farm will return to the soil.

The soil which once nourished it.

Time must have a stop.

There is a time each of us must hang up our clothes.

One last time, a time to let it all go,

A time to let time flow on without us,

Untroubled by the eddies of our lives.


First posted June 10, 2008 on FITK


AI re-write:

Subject: Cleaning and Organization of the Garage

Dear Team,

I hope this email finds you well. I wanted to bring to your attention the current state of the work clothes in the garage left by the previous tenant. Unfortunately, they have been left hanging for an extended period of time and are now in tatters due to the impact of insects and weather.

It is essential that we address this situation promptly. I kindly request that someone take charge of removing and disposing of these clothes. Additionally, we should take this opportunity to organize and clean the garage to ensure that it is maintained in a better condition moving forward.

Please let me know if you have any questions or if you need further clarification on this matter. I appreciate your attention to this task.

Thank you for your cooperation.

Best regards,

My Back Pages - Two Tickets to Paradise

This is a re-post from FTK, May 22, 2013


Broadway Theater, Minneapolis 1973

Roger, a kid in my ninth grade civics class, kept bugging me.

He had a cousin, Janet, an eighth grader who attended a different school. She lived over by the Drive which was a parkway just off Broadway. Roger said she was tall and she wanted to go on date with someone who was taller. I was OK with that as a premise for my first blind date. He set it all up. There was a double feature playing a a theater a few blocks from Janet’s house: Get Yourself a College Girl with Love Me Tender. The suggestiveness of the two titles was completely lost on me. My dad dropped me off at her house. Janet answered the door.

She was tall, nearly as tall as me, and considerably bigger.



The theater was kind of run down, but Janet made sure that we sat in a row in a dark corner near the rear of the auditorium where one of the seats was missing an arm rest. Janet had evidently done this before. I don’t remember much of the first movie, and Janet wanted to leave soon after the second movie started. We went back to her house, where I was introduced to her St. Bernard. We drank lemonade. Later, her father gave me a ride back home. Janet must have liked me, she wanted me to give her a ring, which I did. I saw her a couple of times after that, we had a “stormy” relationship. She mailed my ring back to me a little while after that…

Years later, when I was doing a photo project of some of the older buildings on Broadway, I took some pictures of the movie theater, it had evidently been closed for quite a while:

“But now… when that world is no more… the spirits rise up from the well of oblivion. People and pictures from a vanished world are reincarnated and assume a significance which was hidden at the time.” ~ Halldór Laxness, The Fish Can Sing

DJs

Chapter 26 of Search For a Dancer, a memoir of a week spent in Iceland in November 2022

Suitably refreshed and inspired from my visit to the pool, I took care of some business (this blog doesn’t write itself, you know) at the apartment and then went out for some late afternoon off-venue entertainment before dinner and my evening visit to the theatre.

Taking my usual route to the “upper” city centre (Skálholtsstígur-Þingholtsstræti-Spítalastígur-Ingólfstræti) brought me to to the corner of Bankastræti where the bar/restaurant Prikið is situated. As I came nearer I could hear a steady thumping thrum of a EDM track. Getting closer, through the window I could see a young woman, hair whirling as she moved to the music. Another dancer, this one oblivious to her surroundings and lost to the moment, as it should be:

I continued on until I was once again in the basement of Smekkleysa. Amidst a pile of instruments, a hapless DJ duo was punishing the small crowd with uninspired beat selections.

One patron, however, was in Nirvana:

After the DJs gave up, the place started to fill in anticipation of the afternoon’s featured act, Groá. Three young women whom I had seen perform in 2018; punk-ish rockers with a definite touch of anarchy in their performances. There was expectant hush in the crowd as the women set up their instruments:

And there, in the milling crowd, was a woman who I thought I recognized:

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My Back Pages - Green Lake

It may be fair to assume that one does not live in the nicest part of town when your nearest wilderness contains a 10 acre chemical dump.

Such was the case in my idyllic childhood where, a few blocks from my house, a lake of caustic lime (sodium hydroxide) existed for many years, a by-product of an air-reduction plant that manufactured industrial gases for welding and other uses. Children were warned to stay away from the pond. With its eerie cyan-green hue and stifling odor, we were aware of the hazard but this is where we liked to play. If there had been a lot of rain, the lake was big, if it had been dry, the lake bed was exposed—a gooey mess of chemicals said to cause severe burns if left on the skin for any length of time. There were also pipes of super concentrated chemicals; they ran right into the river.

If you were careful, you could walk all around this pit on the firmer areas (wear boots just in case) somewhat similar to walking on another planet, or so we imagined. There were no fences, only a rusting warning sign. People would dump tires in the alkaline lake, earning it the name of “The Tire Farm.” After a while it seemed as if the tires were emerging from a primeval ooze. No one had a sense of the environment in those days. A photo of mine depicting this mess ended up on the front page of the local newspaper and a lot of tsk-tsking was done so the pit was eventually cleared; the lime was used to treat fields that had become too acidic. They built a freeway over the whole area, so now this place is completely obliterated. Lord knows where the tires ended up.

Located close to the Mississippi River, with subsidized housing (and lots of kids) nearby. It was their nearest playground. When it was finally drained and filled (in the late 70s) I-94 was built over the site.



I spent a good deal of time there, it was my “gateway to nature”.

Children can imagine a paradise out of next to nothing, if they have to.

“But now… when that world is no more… the spirits rise up from the well of oblivion. People and pictures from a vanished world are reincarnated and assume a significance which was hidden at the time.” ~ Halldór Laxness, The Fish Can Sing

My Back Pages - Air Reduction

Minneapolis, 1974

A view of the Air Reduction facility.

This building, hidden among the trees, housed equipment for reducing nitrogen and other gases from the atmosphere for industrial uses. Its discharges created “Green Lake”—a holding pond of caustic sodium hydroxide.

More on this topic Friday.

Cirrus-ly Soaking

Chapter 25 of Search For a Dancer, a memoir of a week spent in Iceland in November 2022

It’s good to live in the moment when on vacation.

No what-might-have-beens, no second guessing your itinerary, no comparing this trip to another one. The weather, while still warm by November standards, had turned a bit windy, so I spent most of the afternoon in the hotpots at Vesturbæjarlaug swimming complex. There were a lot of people there with Airwaves armbands, and even a couple of performers (Hi, Pale Moon!) Lolling in the shallow oval hot-pot, laying back with my head on its rim, I gazed at the wispy clouds floating high above me. Allowing my brain to stop, just being one with them, was a moment I will long remember.

Discovering and being part of the pool culture in Iceland has been one of the great  joys of my life. There is now a film about it, here is the trailer.

I spent a long time in conversation with Lárus Halldór Grimsson, a Icelandic music veteran who had been in the prog-rock band Eik in the seventies. He was full of stories; hanging out with David Bowie, writing music for plays, and had even portraying a young Halldór Laxness in a television production! Lárus seemed to know everybody in Iceland, and was full of arcane references, but I think I surprised him when he mentioned Baggalútur and I said that I not only knew of them that I had seen them perform and I even had one of their CDs. I spoke of the Ákadóttir twins of Pascal Pinon and he knows their father well. We also spoke of the late, great Jóhann Jóhannsson whom he knew back in Jóhann’s days in Ham, which brought out my story about seeing Ham perform the previous night. From Ham and Johann it was just a slight turn in the conversation to Hildur Guðnadóttir, the Academy Award-winning composer. He had given her a stuffed Pink panther doll when she was a small child!

Speaking of children, a young man with a boy came into our pot, the man explained that the boy was autistic, and liked to take water-bottles! I moved my $8 medical-grade water bottle away as the scamp cavorted around the pool as we talked. The man wasn’t his father, he was just a friend of the family (and not even an Icelander!) and had some free time so he took the boy to the pool to give his parents a little time off. No big deal, it takes a village to raise a child. I managed to give the boy a side-eye wink that he caught and answered with a shy  smile.

After the pool, I sauntered back to the apartment. It was a bittersweet trip; by this time tomorrow I would be in the Keflavík airport, waiting to return home. Along the way back I took lots of pictures, I know from previous trips that I will revisit them as a way to make the trip come alive again. Some people say that taking pictures doesn’t allow a person to fully experience the moment, but I would disagree. When I take pictures I pause and reflect on my surroundings and take the time to absorb details and vistas that would otherwise be lost.

Rehab in Vesturbær:

Hóllavallgarður:

Skothúsvegur:

Listsafn Íslands:

Castle House Apartments:

My home away from home…


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My Back Pages — Rich Lewis

Snookies Malt Shop

This fine establishment serves soft ice cream and frozen novelties.

On a hot day it is a magnet for its neighbors, mostly walkers, a most agreeable time-warp.

The mix wasn't yet cold enough to serve, hence the lack of customers.

I went back a couple of hours later and everything was peachy.

I’m in Beaverdale, Iowa on a secret mission.

My Back Pages - Pioneer Steel Elevator

Fifth Street and Twenty-fifth Avenue, Northeast Minneapolis, circa 1975.

Left over from the heyday of Minneapolis milling, its then-novel design was by the Gillette-Herzog Company and constructed by the Barnett-Record Company in 1901.

It was owned by the local grain merchant George Frank Piper and ultimately demolished in 1995, the steel no doubt ending up in China, I can remember train loads of scrap heading out west at that time.

“But now… when that world is no more… the spirits rise up from the well of oblivion. People and pictures from a vanished world are reincarnated and assume a significance which was hidden at the time.” ~ Halldór Laxness, The Fish Can Sing

Midnight Snacks

Chapter 24 of Search For a Dancer, a memoir of a week spent in Iceland in November 2022

It was nearly midnight by the time I left the cabaret. Seeing all that exposed flesh in the burlesque acts had made me hungry.

Is any food more Freudian than a hotdog? Available 24/7 at the Bæjarins Beztu Pylsur stand, right on the way to the art museum. Even at midnight you’ll have to wait in line:

After partaking of this toothsome comestible, I went into the art gallery venue. A Turkish delight was to be had there in the folk-rock stylings of Altin Gün:

Rocked-up traditional Turkish tunes, with a great singer and a killer electric bouzouki player. The real deal, albeit in a strange pearls-before-swine situation; a jaded crowd in an Icelandic music festival  might not be the best venue for them; a wedding dance scenario would be perfect. You can catch their whole act here (at a different festival):



Keeping with the food metaphors, I went back to Gamla Bíó for some tasty HAM:

Salty veterans of the Icelandic music scene, going back to the 70s: meaty, beaty, big and bouncy. They are older but still untamed, with the scary Óttarr Proppé growling out the vocals:



Looking down from the balcony, the churning crowd reminded me of Brownian motion of germs under a microscope. With the threat of Covid still lurking around, I was wary of joining the throng in the mosh pit, although I did stay to the end (in the balcony). After getting back to the apartment I unwound a while with a glass of red and the last of my harðfiskur. It was after 2 a.m. by the time I got to sleep.


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My Back Pages - Bird’s Grocery

Northeast Minneapolis, circa 1975. No trace of this shop on the internet, although an old city directory might hold some information.

Most of these mom-and-pop grocery stores (with the apartment on top) had started in the 1920s, and there may have even been a few remaining in the 1970s whose owners had operated it since it had opened!

With the rise of chain convenience stores, this old style grocery may have already succumbed to the modern trend by the time this picture was taken. Some were re-purposed as art studios.

“But now… when that world is no more… the spirits rise up from the well of oblivion. People and pictures from a vanished world are reincarnated and assume a significance which was hidden at the time.” ~ Halldór Laxness, The Fish Can Sing

My Back Pages - In and Out Freight

A building in Minneapolis’ warehouse district, circa 1975. The Soo Line was a Minnesota-based railroad company, a subsidiary of Canadian Pacific Railways. The Soo Line name was retired in 1992.

When this place was built (in the 1880s), the workers in these warehouses unloaded boxcars on one side of the building and loaded horse-drawn wagons on the other. Most of these places have been torn down for condos or repurposed for other commercial use.

“But now… when that world is no more… the spirits rise up from the well of oblivion. People and pictures from a vanished world are reincarnated and assume a significance which was hidden at the time.” ~ Halldór Laxness, The Fish Can Sing

Terra Incognita

Chapter 23 of Search For a Dancer, a memoir of a week spent in Iceland in November 2022

One of the goals of my trip was to catch some Icelandic Theatre.

With a thin Airwaves line-up this night, I was glad that there was a stage production that I could attend. I have had numerous transcendent moments attending plays in Reykjavík and tonight’s offering at Þjóðleikhúsið was solidly in the tradition of surreal Icelandic theatre.

Sjö ævintýri um skömm (Seven Fairy Tales of Shame) a play by Tyrfing Tyrfingsson had been expanded from an earlier one-act which had been a hit in a festival setting. Several of Iceland’s most celebrated stage and screen actors were in it, including the lead Ilmur Kristjánsdóttir (from the TV series Trapped!) as Ölga, Ólafía Hrönn Jónsdóttir (White Night Wedding) as Ölga’s mother Amma, the venerable Kristbjörg Kjeld (who starred in the 1962 film The Girl Gogo) as her grandmother Fanney, and Hilmir Snær (101 Reykjavík) playing against his usual leading man type, as an alcoholic psychiatrist who takes on a troubled client: Öğla.

The psychiatrist abhors cognitive behavioral therapy, and believes that the cure for Ögla's distress lies in finding its roots—which is shame. We follow the two of them throughout the play as she tells the doctor about seven adventures that are crucial to her dilemma, and were caused by the people who were closest to her.

The key dynamic of the work is the uneasy relationships between Ölga and her grandmother and her mother as it shows us how ‘wounds’ are inherited between generations. Playwright Tyrfing used a lot of his childhood memories for the set pieces with the grandmother.

In Ilmar’s performance as Ögla she draws the audience in, and then she falls apart like an onion as the play progresses. She is not easy to love, she is on edge and confrontational throughout the play. Olga is married to Hanna (Kristín Þora Haroldsdóttir), and the two women have the most outrageous artificial insemination scene-gone-wrong I had ever seen:

A crucial scene of the play revolves around the relationship between Ögla and Hanna, about the paradox of the fantasy of love with love in everyday life.

Seven Fairy Tales of Shame celebrates the magic of the theater, queerness and everything that is strange, oblique and excessive in life. This was not your standard dinner theatre fare, and yes, there were dancers:

Immediately after the play, there was an old-school cabaret in Kjallarinn, the basement stage of the theatre, a room I’ve loved ever since seeing several good sets there in Airwaves 2006. This night it featured classic burlesque routines, including a raunchy cowboy, an upside-down strip tease by a man balancing on a hoverboard and, of course, counter-whirling tassels. A little bit naughty (although really quite quaint compared to the play I had just seen) and even had a sword-swallowing clown! It was all in Icelandic, the MC said that if you didn’t understand it, just ask your neighbor—who will become your new bestie!

All images taken from Þjóðleikhúsið promotional materials


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My Back Pages - The Lyndale Diner

Today’s excursion into North Minneapolis in the 1970s is this image of The Lyndale Diner/Lounge.

Now defunct (and I can’t remember its exact location) but it appears to be around Lyndale and Lowry.

A nice concept: a greasy spoon on the left and a low-life bar on the right, with a pool hall in between. Its clientele was working-class and blue collar, no doubt the watering hole for a few dedicated drinkers too, although this may have been a 3.2 tavern, due to quirks in Minneapolis zoning, bars in certain wards of the city only had low-alcohol beer.

The lad in the foreground might be on his way back from a candy store—life prep for his future as a lounge lizard. Oral gratification is only a drink or a bite away.

Most of these places on North Lyndale closed after the freeway went through a couple of blocks east. Lyndale was a major route (Highway 169) in town for many years, part of the West River Road and leading to all points North of the city, after the freeway opened in 1984 the amount of its through-traffic dwindled.

“But now… when that world is no more… the spirits rise up from the well of oblivion. People and pictures from a vanished world are reincarnated and assume a significance which was hidden at the time.” ~ Halldór Laxness, The Fish Can Sing