Valþröng*

Like persistent weeds in a flowerbed, thoughts of a return trip to Iceland (#11) have sprouted.

An idle search for airfares and lodging revealed some real bargains, along with some caveats. One aspect of my fall sojourns to Reykjavík that remains constant is the travel dates: the last week in October through the first week in November. This is when the Iceland Airwaves music festival occurs and when the theatre season is in full swing. The weather then is usually pretty nice, although I’ve been unbelievably lucky in my last seven trips (my first three trips were in March.) I found a good price on airfare (under $400) and a great deal on lodging in a place I’ve stayed in and loved before (under $200 a night.) Inflation adjusted, these are probably the best prices I’ve ever seen outside of 2022, which was the year after Covid had shut everything down. 2009, the year after the crash, was also low, but I was burned by having my return flight canceled and had to return through Boston and Philadelphia, which was expensive and no fun at all.

My last four trips (2018, 2022, 2023, 2025) were rousing successes, in so much that any additional trips might be tempting fate. Last year I arrived a day after a record-breaking snowfall butrather than being a disaster it just made Reykjavík all the more picturesque. The Weaver says “Go for it, you can’t spend your money when you’re dead!” I guess that is a good a reason as any. On the other hand, I’ve looked at the musical offerings for Iceland Airwaves 2026 and although the schedule isn’t complete, those initial offerings were anemic at best, especially the Icelandic acts of whom I’ve seen many and, with a coupe of exceptions, wouldn’t want to hear again. Most modern pop music isn’t my cup of tea anyway and my interest in those trends have been dwindling for several years now. My back-up for the last three trips has been the theatre, and even those choices are diminishing too. Covid hit all the performing arts hard and Icelandic theatre is no exception. One constant plus I have enjoyed over the last 22 years has been the swimming pool culture, which just gets better and better. The intangibles, i.e., special events at Norræna Husið and other happenstances, are unplanned and unpredictable serendipitous events.

So…

I’m writing this on Friday morning (yesterday.) I have to pull the trigger soon, the airfare alone may jump a couple hundred dollars at any moment and the lodging will sell out soon. I’ll sleep on it and announce my decision tomorrow.

UPDATE: I’m going.


* valþröng = dilemma

Batty’s Workbenches

The professor’s garage, clean, for once:

Lots of tools, mostly scavenged:

But some bought new (’cause they were red):

Tune in Monday for a different kind of workbench.

Thinking Inside the Box

Twenty Years Ago on FITK

One third success. Two-thirds disaster.

The New Guthrie Theater complex is complete. My Weekend of Culture™ continued with a tour and preview of the facility that is located on the banks of the Mississippi River in Downtown Minneapolis. The theaters themselves: one is a thrust stage that virtually reproduces the legendary original; one is a conventional proscenium; and the third is a small (250 seat) experimental ‘box.’ Thankfully, all three are excellent, the thrust stage in particular maintains tradition and actually has had some of the old one’s problem areas ‘massaged’ a bit. I fully expect that those improvements will be appreciated more and more as the season progresses. The backstage and production areas (both of which were extremely limited in the old theater) have reportedly been elevated to the state of the art.

So: what, you may ask, is the problem?

A theater is, basically, a box within a box. There is the inner box, the sanctum mysterioso, where the dramatic experience happens. A place where technical requirements trump any ‘aesthetic’ concerns, once the house lights go down “The play’s the thing” as it should be, the form truly follows function.

The outside of the box, the architectural face that the new Guthrie Theater presents to the world, is massive, cold and impersonal. Even the laser-etched graphics suggest a remove from reality. Its scale and appearance are more suited to a race of metallic 40 foot tall robots than puny flesh and blood humans. Here is another take on the externals from Lileks.

In the critical space between the outside and the inside is where the "theater-going experience" takes place. This is where couples and groups meet and talk before, during and after the performance, where people see and are seen by each other. The coldness of the exterior is magnified in the interior, with dark, gloomy spaces accented by stainless steel and black enamel, Euro-Moderne circa 1960. The creepy hallways around the main auditorium are dismal, with tiny and crude photographic scenes from previous productions as the only decor. There is, of course, the skyway to nowhere: a stunt of a cantilever which is, admittedly, brighter. It opens to a balcony that overlooks a vital and often ignored component of Minneapolis: the Mississippi River. A bird’s-eye (God’s eye?) view is hard to condemn although this view is somewhat distant and removed from the immediate surroundings. Elsewhere in the complex there are tinted windows that allow partial vistas of the neighborhood, these views should improve as development continues (although the specter of a sea of tacky billboards and banners is always a possibility.)

Lest I seem reactionary in my opinions, consider these facts: in the old theater's common spaces, you entered and were bathed in north-light, you could see (and be seen) and connect with people on all levels, on the mezzanines, on the stairs, on the patio, even with those in the street and even with the beautiful sculpture garden beyond. All of this made you a performer in a wonderful, three-dimensional play with gorgeous lighting, a sense of expectation and drama—a completely integrated experience! Contrast that with entering the new building: dwarfed by unadorned (except for the vapid laser-etchings) 40 foot tall walls (hope you like dark gray), torture-chamber furniture and a vertiginous/claustrophobic 200 foot 4 story escalator to take you to the lobbies. Kafkaesque is the first adjective that springs to mind.

The stakes in this project are high ($135 million, about 1/3 taxpayer money) so I wish it well. If it can elevate the performing arts in Minnesota's cultural scene, so much the better. We will support it (and the actual theater company, under Joe Dowling’s direction has been superlative) with our typical Midwestern enthusiasm (“ya, it was pretty good”) and hopefully the new venues will bring back the excellence and daring of the 1960s, when Tyrone Guthrie created a dynamic and challenging regional theater. I heard Sir Tyrone speak once, in 1967, and he was brilliant, espousing a theater of danger, one that was a threat to mediocracy and complacency, a theater that made a difference.

You’ve gotten your new theater Joe, bring it on, but don’t ask me to linger in those hideous lobbies.

Absolutely Black & White

Car Show, Anoka, Minnesota via  “Retro Digital Camera” litho setting:

This Old Heart

Another “blast from the past” with The Explodo Boys, a Minnesota-based multi-genre band. Live performance from 1979:



The original was an early James Brown release on the Federal label in 1960. It reached #72 on the Billboard charts before fading away into obscurity.

When I made this recording The Explodo Boys band was on the verge of splitting apart. They had one last week booked at the Minneapolis Dinkytown nightclub Bootlegger Sam’s. Jimmy Derbis and Danny Rowles pulled this ‘nugget’ out of their collective hat—it may have been a tune they had sung together in Mainstreet, a band they had been in eight years earlier. Del Gallagher was drumming, having joined the band only a few weeks earlier, Frankie Paradise (Paul Peterson) added the ‘twangs’ while his brother Johnny Vincent laid down the bass groove. Paul Scher and Max Ray were on alto and tenor saxes.

It was the only time The Explodo Boys played the song.

Not the Best Fireworks Ever

Twenty Years Ago on FITK

Barry, Brian, and me, on a juvenile fireworks shooting spree, through the northernmost fringes of Minneapolis, 40 years ago. I don't remember how I hitched up with those two: Brian the carefree, Barry the heart-breaker.

Brian had just come back from South Dakota with a grocery bag of fireworks, his summers were a continuous series of explosions. I had been to his house a few years earlier, his uncle and grandfather sat in the back yard with beer and eight-foot long strings of crackers, lighting them from their cigarettes—one after another, for hours. It was in his blood.

Barry, sinfully handsome even at 15, was a Bud Abbott to Brian's Lou Costello.

It was quite dark, after ten at least, as we made our way through various neighborhoods, randomly punctuating the songs of crickets with our explosive outbursts. We arrived at the Shingle Creek park, which had a sledding hill- the perfect site for shooting Brian's “big” rocket. We were trying to figure out a way to prop it up to shoot it when we saw a squad car in the street below. We took off in the other direction, laughing, over the creek where the police couldn’t follow, and headed off to the neighboring suburb, Brooklyn Center, leaving a trail of explosions on the way.

Even the most incorrigible delinquent can weary of this past-time, so we finally found an empty lot where there was an old bucket that we could use as a launch pad for our mighty missile. All that running that we had done must have loosened the rocket’s powder for when Brian lit the rocket it fizzled a bit, rose about six feet into the air, and exploded in a shower of colorful sparks. We thought that was really hilarious. Especially when Brian noticed that his polyester shirt was riddled with tiny burn holes.

By the next summer we could drive, take part-time jobs, go on dates, and have different kinds of fun/trouble.

The most memorable skyrocket of my childhood was the one that was a dud.


Image: ChatGPT

Colorado Springs

October, 2013:

Depth-of-Field

Ultra wide-angle lens views from Iowa (without the corn):

Des Moines, 2023

burning feet.

Twenty Years Ago on FITK

The sandals of my life, I guess, have met the hot summer asphalt of adulthood… all warm and gunky, trapping my shoes, leaving me either stuck there in my melting sandals... or running out and burning the pads off the bottoms of my feet as I search out some kind of shade.

ah.

Mixed metaphors and manic hyperbole, as I try to distract myself. But I’m left with no distraction and just a further feeling of non-accomplishment, a further reminder of what the hell I do with my time... brood, write occasionally... work in a job that’s obscured in a bureaucratic mess... hoping to win the lotto, I suppose, or impress someone with my writings in some desperate painful hope to extricate myself from this mess... I can feel everything I hold dear slipping, the lines I swore never to cross getting fuzzier

Accuse me of laziness for not thinking that’s the answer - compare me to burnouts and cripples and failures for it. But damn if it doesn’t sound safe. Safe, stupid, fruitless, and arbitrary, but well-organized and constructed in a fashion where failure and success are easily rendered…

I am wasting my life, I think.
But not in the way that they think I am.

Stuck between hot asphalt and stupid sandals and the sun keeps getting hotter... Standing here for too long just makes me sweat.

~ RS

Reposted

Scottsbluff

Nebraska, 2013:

Scottsbluff was the starting point for a nice drive across Nebraska, not the interstate but as an entry to Nebraska 2, which took us east to Farwell, which was also interesting.