November 24-26 -- St. Paul and Minneapolis

I was in St. Paul to visit Becky and speak at Macalester College, but my home away from home there was Koppelin's, hands down the best coffee shop of the tour.  Koppelin's is a study in both art and craft: every cup is a meditation on the craft of coffee; the venture overall is an art project.

The first morning there, Becky, my host, and I headed there for a cuppa, and I returned over and over.   If I had spent any more time there, I would have had to put a vase of flowers and a family photo on the table. 

Each of the first three times I ordered, I got it wrong.  They have a Seinfeld-soup-nazi adherence to doing things their way, but the tone is totally different.  Each mistake (on my part) was a "teachable moment.  First, I ordered a triple-shot latte (in fairness a phrase that only doesn't sound ridiculous because of Starbucks habituation).  Their response was to explain, in a kindly adult hipster version of a second grade teacher voice, that they pull ristretto shots so each one is like two and did I want six effective shots of espresso?

The second time, I asked for skim milk.  They only have whole.  The third time I asked for a cappuccino to go.  "We don't make cappuccinos to go, but I could make you a latte in the style of a cappuccino."  It's the kind of place they hand-write the roasted date on each bag of coffee beans.  They sell many, many different kinds of drip / filter coffee, all at different prices.  (Now that I write that, I am guessing they say something else besides drip or filter, but I don't know how to correct myself.)  They make the coffee with a machine that a scientific research standards board would certify.  Here is the counter, machine at the right:

I knew Becky, Pete's wife, a little in school but, as covered in the Chicago post, know her best from a summer in Williamstown a few years ago when we had Sunday night potluck (along with Jen and Tom, Maddy's parents pictured in the first post of this blog).  The dinners were so fun and full of life, I hold it as a vision for what I would like my life overall to be like.  

In the picture above, Becky is sitting with Andrew, the owner of Koppelin's.  On the table are pastries from a bakery called Rustica.  The square one with almonds, in front, is a Bostock -- and it would be on my short list of foods to take to a desert island.  Becky and Pete are chefs -- who would call themselves cooks -- and so Becky could mentally suss out the Bostock ingredients: day-old brioche, soaked in honey and rosewater (or similar), covered in almond paste, with almonds on top.  Here is Andrew, portait of the artist:

He and I talked at some length and bartered a Koppelin's mug for my collection for a copy of Museum Legs.  As a side note to their thorough good design, that whole banquette of little cafe tables that Andrew and Becky are sitting at has an unobtrusive, industrial strip of outlets across the base so there is none of the coffee shop politics of who is trying to plug in a laptop where or when.  

Becky very, very kindly hosted me, even though she is in her first semester of law school, coming up on exams.  After coffee, she went to study and I went to see the Walker Art Center.  I had never been though have always loved it from afar.  Here are the two pictures I took before I was told no photography, art installation under the stairs:

The building's exterior:

And sculpture garden.  (These are across the street; if you turned 180 degrees between these pictures you would see each of them in turn.)

The Walker is wonderful -- in people and space.  I can hardly count on one hand the luminary people I know of in the art world who have the sincere respect of their colleagues who have come through the Walker.  I have been lucky to encounter others who have given years of service to making the institution what it is.  I love the place.  I will allow myself to whinge for a brief moment about two pet peeves in the arts that happen to come up by chance, no disrespect, in this context: creative types who can't park in a way that speaks to weird lack of spatial awareness or a total lack of public consciousness, and creative types who begrudge their jobs at the admissions desk and are therefore both unpleasant and smug.

To elaborate, I had to arrive early because the Walker doesn't open til 11am and I had a lunch date at 12.30.  Where possible, I like to visit the museum in the city before I speak, as invariably people ask questions about their own galleries.  As a longtime admirer, I was also just excited to see the place.  As I was sitting in my car waiting for it to open, parallel parked across the street, someone came and parked in front of me on an open stretch that would fit three cars.  He reversed just to the point where no car could park between my car and his, but there was just enough dead space to make it look almost possible.  Then he got out of the car with a big camera bag and went into the museum.  I saw him in the gallery twenty minutes later being introduced to the guard as a photographer from the Star Tribune. (a) I feel like parallel parking is one of those Utilitarian activities where you have to think about what is best for the overall, not just for yourself.  You park near my car so more people can fit in front of you.  Not doing this speaks to a kind of self-centeredness, or lack of spatial awareness that most artists actually have.  The guy wasn't in a hurry.  (b) It reminds me of the stereotype of a lack of practicality and hard skill in the arts, as I was reminded in a museum panel weeks later when someone fainted and the call went up to see if there was a doctor in the house.  A definitive no.

I arrived inside the museum as many families with small children were queuing for a nicely titled program called Arty Pants.  Immediately someone cut me in line, one of those 'oh! I didn't realize there was a single joint line.'  I have a decent radar for false politeness, however, and it strikes me that this sort of Arty Pants line cutting was of exactly the same type as aggressive people in kumba-ya healthy food co-ops and people in New York who cut you off on the sidewalk on a Sunday morning while carrying a yoga mat.  Come to think of it, I have actually never been cut off on the sidewalk in New York on a Sunday morning by someone who wasn't carrying a yoga mat.

Finally, I arrived at the till of Joseph, the disaffected creative youth, who asked me a series of cross-selling questions about wanting a membership.  These questions make me feel helpless since I don't have an address, at all, much less in the Twin Cities.  Joseph also happened to be a smart ass, to use the descriptive term.  So I headed into the museum a little the worse for wear.  The galleries are great -- lots of interesting stuff to look at, and all separated by only a half-flight of stairs at a time, so you never get that feeling of trudging up an architectural masterpiece, but rather just looking at art.  Going a half flight at a time, there came a point when I had absolutely no idea where I was on any axis and I did have to ask directions to exit the building.

There was a wonderful show called Benches and Binoculars in which lots of paintings were hung salon style up to the ceilings of a tall and relatively narrow room.  Benches in the middle had binoculars attached so that you could take in individual canvases in detail.  I happen to love a book by Benjamin Ives Gilman, longtime secretary of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, called Museum Ideals of Purpose and Method, written around 1918.  Gilman made the basic and insightful observation that museums are one of the only areas of life where we are expected to stand to concentrate and to sit to rest.  Offices, cinemas, theatres are all the opposite.  You sit to think or look, and stand to rest or walk it off.  It's an open question how you would design museums accordingly, because of the small scale of the art, the requirement that people look at the original not a blown-up copy, and the throughput of people.  This was an interesting response.

I also really enjoyed walking into a Robert Irwin room -- the sort of minimalist installation such that when Lawrence Weschler interviewed some of the artist's mother's friends for the book Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, one of them told a story about trying to see an Irwin installation at MoMA and thinking the gallery was still closed for set-up, so subtle the effects.  Well, I walked into the room and there were the Arty Pants kids, all sitting happily on small mats in a big circle, with a teaching artist who really was wearing yoga trousers.  I think the kids were later making artworks about light.  The installation was in fact so subtle that I inadvertently leaned way into it, getting reprimanded in a way I hadn't since leaning in to look at a Seurat a few days before.

I went to lunch afterwards with Glenda Holste, my mentor editor from the Op-Ed Project.  She took me for a beautiful meal at W.A. Frost, a restaurant she had described aptly as midwestern Victorian.  She has a wonderfully interesting life story, and long suit in being able to encourage younger writers (while having the background as an editor to constantly remind one not to go over word count).  Afterwards, she and I drove to the Mississippi Co-op down the street to buy real-deal wild rice.  

Before lunch I had hopped into Garrison Keillor's bookstore across the street -- Common Good -- and in the greatest moment of cheek of the whole tour, sold a copy of Museum Legs out of my own bag to a woman who was shopping there.  The sales clerk was trying to help her buy a book for her niece.  As they danced around non-fiction and essays, I said that if she liked art I could give her a signed copy of a non-fuction book of essays.  "Done," came the reply.  I tried to consign the book through the store (cheek, with economic boundaries), only to learn that the woman I was asking about this was the bookbuyer, hitting two birds with one stone.  They said they were going to stock Museum Legs.

That afternoon at 5, I gave a book talk at Macalester, a small liberal arts college I can't say enough good things about.  Here is the set-up for my talk in their art gallery.

I was hosted by John Kim, a friend from college who is a professor there and whom I had last seen the summer before at the pig roast Pete has hosted in Vermont for well over a decade.  Here's Becky reading a psychology textbook while waiting -- thanks again for taking time out from school:

Here's the speaking set-up.  I love fizzy water:

John, in a candid shot.  He came straight from class to set up, which is a shift from metaphysical theory and computer programming to AV that would give me whiplash but for which I am grateful:

Audience members, including Macalester students (left) and Sheff and his mother-in-law Nor (right, and far right):

Here's the gang: Nor, Sheff, me, Becky, John:

I headed out for dinner afterwards with John and some of his colleagues, celebrating his colleague/the writer Marlon James' birthday.  

The next day, I hung out at Koppelin's and had lunch with Sheff, who bears further mention here.  Sheff was in my entry when I was a JA, meaning I was his dorm advisor when he first arrived at college.  Sheff became a JA himself, two years later, and Becky was in his entry. He is a lovely, decent, kind guy, and I hadn't talked to him in probably more than a decade.  I felt like I had though because he wrote an article in our college alumni review called Seven Under Seven about the fact that he and his wife have seven children, now under nine.  (To read the article: http://www.williams.edu/alumni/docs/review/spring08/cover.pdf.)  

Given that, Sheff has more excuses than anybody to fall off the radar.  I have a lot of friends who have one kid or two who retreat, however understandably.  In that context, it is even more amazing that when I wrote Sheff to say I was coming to town he replied with a long list of leads -- including all the websites; it was incredible research -- and went out of his way to introduce me to a couple of people, including a lovely woman at Minnesota Public Radio, Marianne, who interviewed me.  (I appeared on her arts blog.)  Then Sheff came to the reading, and brought Nor, who is super interesting in her own right, and made time to take me to lunch the next day.  Me being navigationally challenged, making time for lunch also meant picking me up and dropping me off.  Here is Sheff in his office:

The office itself:

Sheff is a contractor with a particular interest in restoration, and personal knowledge of carpentry.  If you need any work done, here is their number:

Their offices are in the front part of a Civil-War era cannonball factory (or similar), and right behind their offices are these huge open storage rooms that back onto other tenants' studio practices.  There was a set designer and a few other things, and right in the middle, a fine artist, with these delicate sculptural frames, amidst heavy machinery.

The next day was Thanksgiving.  Becky and I -- and Flicka their dog -- got in the car early to drive to her brother's in Hayward, Wisconsin.  We stopped at the Mississippi Co-op for bread.  It hadn't been delivered yet so we asked the clerk who said we could try our luck and wait five minutes.  In a "Thanksgiving miracle," it arrived:

Baguettes in hand, we made our way in the car.  Here is one of the pumpkin pies Becky made and which were miraculously transported without injury (or eating by Flicka) to Hayward.

Postscript: Sheff has this thing called Dadiator, a way for dads to spend time with their kids, and get a workout, using their kids as resistance weight.  Here is a link to an article and video about it: 


"Bicep reps ... boring! But who could resist the "Baby Girl Car Seat Curl"? Sheff Otis, a Roseville carpenter and father of seven, has come up with a way to get both a good workout and quality time with the kids. . . "