Year in Review

It's been a year of ups and downs here at Flippism is the Key and in real life. The new year started with The Weaver, me and our newborn grandson recovering from serious medical issues. Everything thing turned out for the best, thankfully.

I began a memoir, Search For A Dancer, on New Years Day, giving a detailed look at one of my Reykjavík excursions. TMI for some, YMMV. In February I began experimenting with AI imagery, coming to the conclusion that it had some limited uses, but also some real dangers (note: I always label all AI on FITK.) I also (finally) got a pair of hearing aids which definitely help in conversations (and in listening to music) but can become a bit of a nuisance in the noisy world. Sometimes silence is golden.

A return trip to Santa Fe in March was a delight, plenty of places to explore, as was a return to Seattle in May. At that time my site-meter began logging dozens visits from one location in Singapore. What that meant is still a mystery, perhaps an AI bot scraping the site for material? A similar flurry of activity in FITK in November quintupled interest in the site for a week but its meaning was just as baffling.

In June I began a series of posts about “My Back Pages” that took on a special significance when my life-long friend and inspiration, Rich Lewis, had passed away.

Our summer vacation to Grand Marais, Minnesota, was ill-timed in that it was THE ONLY PLACE IN THE WHOLE WORLD where temperatures in July were below normal. Despite a drought, the rest of the summer was good, especially a family reunion in August with a whole new crop of little kids! A photo of mine made it into the State Fair Fine Arts Exhibit, where I even got to meet one of the subjects and both their mothers! My old pal Nicole also had a print there—a fitting scene seeing as it was the summer of Barbie™.

October found me back in Iceland, perhaps for my last hurrah. I can’t overstate how I have enjoyed these trips: the people there have been so kind to me over the years and Icelandic culture has enriched my life immensely. Iceland was a major impetus for the start of FITK and I’ve gotten a lot of material for the blog from these visits, but after experiencing a couple of earthquakes and narrowly avoiding an accident, those omens made me begin to think that my good-fortune there may be finally running out  (to say nothing of the volcanoes!)

The decline and demise of my big sister Jean in December put a damper on the holidays and made me reflect on my own mortality. Her last words to me were: “I love you, baby brother.”

Finally, here is a benediction I loosely paraphrased from Ingmar Bergman’s great film Fanny and Alexander:

“My dear friends, for 19 years, in the capacity of site administrator, I’ve existed here, making posts without really having any talent for that sort of thing. My only talent, if you can call it that in my case, is that I love this little world inside the thick walls of this playhouse, and I'm fond of the people who visit this little world. Outside is the big world, and sometimes the little world succeeds in reflecting the big one so that we understand it better. Or perhaps, we give the people who come here a chance to forget for a while, for a few short moments, the harsh world outside. My blog is a little room of orderliness, routine, care and love. I don't know why I feel so comically solemn this evening. I can't explain how I feel, so I'd best be brief: I wish you all a happy and joyous holidays. I Hope we meet again on New Years Day, strengthened in body and soul!

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

My Back Pages - Progress

Back in 1973, I used to live in Minneapolis on North Fifth Street, just across the street from this house. Upstairs, a married couple would host card parties every Saturday night, while below them a pair of Mormon missionaries resided. It was a vibrant scene that now remains only in memories, as the house was eventually torn down to make way for a parking lot:

Over the years, the neighborhood had already undergone significant changes, transitioning from a primarily residential area to a mixed-use industrial zone with an abundance of parking lots. This transformation took place gradually, with houses being demolished one or two at a time over a span of thirty years. Interestingly, my own house was the last to be taken down, managing to stand for an additional eighteen years. Living under the constant threat of condemnation caused me to lose my sense of place in the world, which in retrospect, may have actually prepared me for some of the challenges of modern life.

This experience profoundly influenced my perspective on permanence and the ever-changing nature of our surroundings.

“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

Younger Than Yesterday

The countdown begins. Five days until my 40th(!) high school class reunion. Now those thoughts of regret begin to creep in again, and not just in the middle of the night during a bad dream of the past. There are a million things to regret, although most of them, taken separately are too inconsequential to matter much. It is the combined weight of all of them which can be summed up as: "Why were we so mean to each other then?" Not necessarily overtly cruel or hurtful, although there was plenty of that. Rather it was the little snubs and put-downs, the cliques and castes, and the fear of being different which kept us apart.

We were just kids.

And living in a dream world, which changed dramatically in April of our senior year, when Martin Luther King was assassinated. And then it was Bobby Kennedy, right after our graduation. Nixon's escalation of the war, then Kent State shootings, and the dream was dying. With Nixon's reelection, cynically playing on class divisions, the dream died. And so it goes, right up to the current political scene.

So, in looking back at high school through that 'glass' darkly, I guess it wasn't so bad. We did, for the most part, get along, although a virulent streak of sadistic sexism was, as it always is, present. We were even becoming racially integrated, albeit imperfectly, until the King assassination, but at least it was something. And we did rise above our backgrounds, if only a little.

Saturday night I will see many of my classmates again. Not the widest representation, but those who will attend want to be there. And now, in our late middle age, the differences we once found so dividing have lessened. "I went to my reunion but there were just a bunch of old people there..." is how the joke goes.

That joke is on us and I, for one, will laugh.

A self-ordained professor's tongue
Too serious to fool
Spouted out that liberty
Is just equality in school
Equality, I spoke the word
As if a wedding vow.
Ah, but I was so much older then,
I'm younger than that now.

~Bob Dylan, My Back Pages

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 - 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

My Back Pages - The Stremel Brothers

Another photo-visit to the industrial near-northside of Minneapolis circa 1975.

The Stremel Bothers made fire doors and other fabricated metal items throughout the 20th century. Their work has never gone out of fashion, their venerable 100-year-old doors are still in demand as decor as well as for their original function; to prevent the spread of fire in industrial buildings.

The Stremels also had an affiliated old-time hardware store, just down the street from this facility. When I lived in the neighborhood I made use of it many times. The clerks would actually help you with your purchase; I gleaned a lot of information from those crafty shop-keepers.

Stremel was bought out by Chandler industries in 2012 but the building still stands, still doing business after all these years:

“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 — Rich Lewis

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

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

My Back Pages - Iowana

Decker’s Iowana Ham and Bacon was popular in the early 20th century, its slogan was “The taste is so good!”, this sign was probably painted on this 1880s warehouse sometime in the 1920s. These warehouses were replaced by light rail and the Minnesota Twins’ Target Field ball park.

Decker’s was bought out by Armour in 1935, but its promotional items are still popular with collectors:

“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 - 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 - #9245

Piccadilly Line, London, 1973

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.

Deathless Prose

… Scurrying about with my scatter-brain at the library, I happened across a tome which I have been looking for - although I didn't know it until I read it. “Internet Annoyances - How to fix the most annoying things about going on line” by Preston Gralla. Some of the stuff I knew, other things I didn’t need to know, but all of it presented in a readable, usable fashion.

But the top tip of all was The Wayback Machine - a separate archive of web sites (and blogs!) going back to 1996. Pages that have been stored there can be accessed if you have the URL - EVEN IF THE SITE IS DEFUNCT! It doesn't have all pages, and only some graphics are supported. But a quick check revealed an embarrassing biography of one of my alter egos that I had assumed (hoped) was lost forever. A few other searches revealed similar effectiveness. Not every page ever made is there, but usually something turns up, including a favorite post that I thought I'd never read again.

Just for fun, I searched for this blog, and I found about two weeks worth of posts from last year. It was in an older format, with long-gone links listed in the sidebar.

And then it hit me. With its expanding database (over 1 petabyte, and adding 20 terabytes daily), everything anyone ever writes here will likely end up in some server somewhere, forever…

Cool.

Uh-oh. I'd better pay a little more attention to my grammar.

… And I'd better make sure that all my elisions are faithful…

Elizabeth the Great

He left her then, but a strange delight
throbbed through her every vein with might,
That the world had opened so wide her gate,
That friendship had brightened the threads of fate,
That he knew her pain, but that loving both
He could shield intact her heart's pure troth.

~Jeanie Oliver Smith~

While going through some old books on a shelf in the guest room I spotted this artistic cover on a volume of Victorian Era poetry. I opened it at random and read the romantic, if somewhat corny passage quoted above. I was about to put it back when I noticed that the fly leaf held the ex libris of my father's sister, Elizabeth.

Aunt Elizabeth. Never Liz or Betty, she was the eldest of all of my aunts, a very dramatic Grand Dame, she was different from my other aunts in many ways, the most obvious being that she had no children and that she had been divorced.

Elizabeth loved books, we always got a book or two from her at Christmas, always with an inscription, and they usually came with a lesson on the "proper" handling of books:
"Don't dog-ear the pages"
"Don't crack the spine"
"Use a bookmark"
and, most importantly,
"Cherish them."

We would occasionally go to her house, a fabulous place, architect-designed, with a massive stone fireplace, the walls of her office included a large bay window. Her two German Shepherds would frolic with us in a large, lilac-lined yard.

Although she loved us dearly, I sensed that kids made her nervous. Actually, I think everything made her nervous. She had been in a bad car accident when she was younger, some said it had changed her. She had a habit of falling in love with drinkers, each one worse that the one before. She lost the big house, then a smaller one, ending up in an apartment, alone. Finally, her "nerves' got the best of her, and she was committed to Saint Peter, a state hospital.

We stored some of her things, books, a combination television/hi-fi console, some furniture. Her record collection was exotic and eclectic, with albums by Paul Robeson, torrid "torch" songs, even novelties from the likes of Slim Gaillard. My father would exchange letters with her, "Epistles from St. Peter" he jokingly called hers as he read from them at the kitchen table. After her condition continued to deteriorate he would read these letters in private.

Elizabeth gave us kids, at least the ones that were old enough to know her a little, a sense that there was more to the world than our tract-house and insular community. The fact that her life didn't play out so well, that she was unlucky in love, can't be held against her.

Sometimes that just happens, everyone is only a twist of fate away from abject misery.

She will always be "Elizabeth the Great" to me.

Paranoia

It isn’t that I think people are out to get me. After all, I could just kill my blog, close up the ol’ laptop, and disappear back into the pages of Ripley’s Believe It Or Not (‘Man writes meaningless blog for months, then vanishes’). That would be too easy and the coward’s way out. It’s just that I know that people are watching me: a couple of months ago I put in a site meter (click on the black number at the bottom of the sidebar) and it told me, in a vague sort of way, who’s been reading. The ordinary web portals, AOL, RR and other dot-coms are no problem. Some I’ve even managed to correlate to the reader. Just plain folks, nothing to be afraid of. But every so often some commercial address pops up, like glaxowellcome.com.

Now what would a huge international drug cartel want with yours truly? A new direct-marketing scheme? Do they think I’m importing drugs from Canada? Or are they concerned that “The Key” of Flippism is a powerful holistic healing method that will make all drugs obsolete? For another example, how about the Swiss consulting firm KPMG. Am I to think that a major corporation is checking into FITK with the eye for a hostile takeover bid? Or, finally, GOV.UK. Tony Blair knows where I live. He read my B&B from hell post, and it's payback time... My mind is running wild with possibilities of malfeasance. Isn't that the sound of a helicopter hovering over head? Isn't that a phalanx of jack-booted brown-shirts coming up the side walk? The door… they're breaking in… no escape… must not panic… ARRRGH!

“Bothered by persistent heartburn? Ask your Doctor about the purple pill.…”

~ a public service of Glaxowellcome...

My Foot is in the Door

The professor’s alter-ego has a picture in the 2020 Minneapolis Institute of Arts Foot in the Door Exhibition. Held every ten years, this year’s version is all virtual, which is both a good thing and a bad thing. Good, in that many people who otherwise might not have otherwise gotten in can be seen, bad, in that the formatting of the show is awkward—it is hard to go back and forth between the overall scroll and the close up of an individual work. Once you “zoom in” on a selection, when you click back you go to the the start, not to where you left off. In addition, the scroll pages are segregated by type, no painting with photos, for an example. A clumsy but doable work around is to change the last number in the url of the site to get to other works.

My old pal Nicole has one of her Barbie pics in as well.

Postcards From Chennai

Allow me to wallow in the tepid bath of my remembered past for a moment.

Going into the seventh year of this enterprise, it is far too easy to look backwards- especially when there is a tidy list of past posts on the right side of the page. There have been many who have wandered in here for a time or two, looking for something, perhaps intrigued by comment or two from a batty professor on their own pages. Some of them have returned, day after day for months.

"RS" is a young Indian woman, now retired from blogging, who liked what she saw here, the feeling was mutual. She ended up writing a fair amount on this blog, and many of the posts she had written on her blog ended up reprinted here as well. I had found her blog by searching "recently updated blogs"- her first blog was named The Whore of Mensa (the name of a famous Woody Allen short story.) She wrote prose and poetry, sometimes mixing the two. She wrote of her life in India, her struggle as a single woman, her loves, and posted pictures of her existence; and even recipes of the food she prepared. Hers was the classic dilemma of a person who was full of love but lacking a partner with whom to share it. She wrote for the world to see and respond to, looking for people who could appreciate her for who she was.

And then, as is often the case, a man began appearing in her photos. Soon thereafter, the writing slowed as is also often the case, then a death in her immediate family caused it to disappear altogether- hidden in private blogs and Facebook. Her traces on the internet began to fade away. I had only known a few people from India before, and none very well. RS changed that, and me. Sadly, the last time we communicated was when a stalker (in India) had found her name here so I removed her posts for a while, putting them back up later with her initials only.

There a several billion stories out there, but not everyone has the ability (and even fewer the inclination) to write what they feel to an indifferent world of strangers. But there have been enough connections to keep me doing this, when one link breaks another is forged, so the chain goes on- its strength undiminished.