November 27-29 - Thanksgiving - Hayward, Wisconsin

In potluck fashion, Pete and Becky very kindly included me in family Thanksgiving at Becky's brother's in Hayward, Wisconsin.  

I was warmly welcomed into the occasion by the lovely Chris and Judy, and their equally lovely son Egan, the most kinesthetically intelligent child I have ever met.  Egan is the opposite of afraid of heights.

(Becky with her brother Chris)

(Egan with his grandmother)

(Pete and Becky with Judy)

It being a family occasion, the setting was somewhat incidental, but Hayward is also a really interesting town.  It was, variously, the country hangout of Al Capone, the current home of the American Birkiebeiner cross-country ski race, and the site of the freshwater fishing hall of fame and a giant 100-foot long fish you can walk inside.  

Re local color and news: a few months before, a bear had walked into the grocery store, walked around politely, and settled into the freezer section, where it was stunned as it peered into the frozen foods.  They now sell t-shirts and are planning to inlay paw prints in the linoleum to mark the bear's path.

Becky and I left early Thanksgiving morning from St. Paul, baguettes and pumpkin pie in hand, Flicka their German pointer, lounging out in the hatchback with all of our stuff.  

Becky had graciously agreed to listen to the last CD of Harry Potter book six.  (Having listened to the books around the country, I was planning to read the seventh and final book on paper and wanted to finish listening so I could start over the holiday.)  As I was giving her background on the characters, I realized how much I had become emmeshed in an imaginary world -- even little things like being able to casually explain that a hippogryph is like an ostrich crossed with a llama, and flies. I also realized how much I had fallen in love with the character of Dumbledore.

Chris and Judy live in a beautiful house in the woods, a place they designed and had help building with their contractor friend.  They run a ski shop in town called New Moon.  Here they are in the upstairs office of the shop:

(Apparently a lot of Twilight fans have inadvertently "friended" them.)  I am told by friends who ski a lot more than I do that the annual release of the New Moon catalog is an event in the Nordic world.  I got to visit the shop while I was there and became very partial to a couple of head-to-toe skisuits of a retro, preppy 1970s stripe that I could only wear if I learned how to ski more properly.  Judy is so wonderfully knowledgeable about anything that they believe in carrying that I nearly left with some other stuff, and may order yet.

Occasionally, I have clusters of friends who are all expert in something I don't understand at all: squash or Spanish or renewable energy, or in this case skiing.  Pete and Becky had both gone to ski high school.  Becky's mother is pictured (in a great outfit similar to the ones I was idly coveting) in the New Moon catalog, post-race.  Jenny, who came to my reading in Denver, used to ski professionally.  Pete once mentioned ski practice that involved running uphill backwards. . . while carrying someone on your back.

The American Birkebeiner is based on a Norwegian race first staged in 1932 to honor this story:

"In 1206, two warrior soldiers, called "Birkebeiners" because of the birch-bark leggings they wore, skied infant Prince Haakon to safety during the Norwegian civil war. Prince Haakon subsequently became King of Norway, and the Birkebeiner soldiers became a Norwegian symbol of courage, perseverance and character in the face of adversity."

In the Norwegian race, competitors are required to carry a twelve-pound pack to represent the baby.  Apparently if you win in your age group they weigh your pack after the race.  Many people start with a twelve-pound canteen of water that they drink during the race.

Since everyone was traveling Thursday, we celebrated Thanksgiving on Friday.  Becky and I went into town that morning:

Overheard at the coffee shop:

Man 1: I don't drink this fancy designer coffee.

Man 2: I don't even drink coffee.

Daughter: Oooh, Daaad!

In the local paper, an exchange student from Chile had gone out hunting for the first time with his host dad and shot a five-point buck.

Becky and I spent a long time trying on these great Wisconsin hunting hats called Stormy Kromers.  Motto: "Helping people live where they have no business living since 1903."  We were on the receiving end of legendarily friendly service (after trying on men's hats for ten minutes, we got a "you know, there are women's hats across the store").  

Another local shop was selling t-shirts that said, "Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder." 

We headed down to an amazing, old-fashioned candy shop:

next to a small-town bakery with world-class sourdough and compelling donuts.  Here are the Pilgrims and Indians in the bakery window:

On the way home, Becky and I ran an errand for Chris to stop at the deer processing place.  (More on hunting later, an art and craft as practiced by Chris).

Becky and I were standing in the back when a woman walked in and said, "It smells wonderful in here!"  I concured reflexively and then wondered what it actually smelled like.  I asked Becky who said sausage.

The Meat facility is right next to the registration center, where someone said they used to have very good espresso:

Chris and Judy eat what the kill, including a wonderful venison barley soup Judy made the first night.  Pete knows how to cook deer heart, and so Chris gives them to Pete.

So, over the time I was there I became fascinated by hunting.  I am not vegetarian.  I am from the South. I am familiar with the concept.  I have never seen it practiced--in the sense of practicing an instrument or having a studio--as Chris does.  I told him I wanted to write about the art and craft of hunting on my blog and Judy wondered if people would misread it and be anti-hunting.  I really hope not, as I was sincerely interested and amazed.  Here is Chris in a tree in the backyard, where he might sit for two hours, quietly watching for deer:

He knows the pathways of the deer because he studies them.  He has motion-sensitive nighttime cameras that take time-stamped pictures:

Philosophically, the basic art-craft distinction is that for craft you can know the outcome at the beginning, whereas for art the sheer process of working on it changes you and it.  You can know the direction you are headed, but if you are making something new, you won't generally know it beforehand.  There will be phases of craft and execution, but, as Heidegger says, a work of art is something new in the world that changes the world to allow the new thing to exist.  By definition, if the work changes the world, you can't know the finished work while still in the old world.  

You can argue hunting as craft.  But then nature has that element of unknown and the commitment to process is there.  Chris would go out morning or evening, or both.  And simply be there, ready.  The deer seemed to know it was hunting season, so it wasn't until the last day that Chris--who is very skilled and normally can take his whole quota of deer the first day--was successful.  Hunting is strictly regulated and ends at 4.45.  He was not home until 6.55 (time to move them), and said, "I got two."  I went out to see them and Chris said, "If I could close their eyes respectfully I would." 

Thanksgiving itself was a gorgeous meal, and I may have been away from my own family but our tradition of overeating was fully in force.  Pete and Becky's dog Flicka had gone to the vet earlier that week after she had eaten a plate of chicken off the counter, bones and all.  The diagnosis was "dietary indiscretion," which became something of a catch phrase.

After dinner, Chris laid out the path with wax bags with votive candles and we all took a candlelit walk in a big loop through the woods.  Pete and Becky and I all got to talking about least favorite words, which are strangely all related, a network externality of cringe.  Heavy petting, being a ridiculous favorite.  

Here is sweet Flicka, recovered valiantly from her dietary indiscretion.

And stylishly in hunter-friendly blaze orange:

Her parents:

Further Eph-friendly local color:

It was a relaxing few days.  I read Harry Potter and felt like part of the family.  Becky's mom Paulette even included me in Amaryllis gifting, and Scott shared his crowd-favorite oyster dip.  

Shortly before we left town, I noticed that the local McDonald's is fashioned to look like a log cabin.

Becky and I drove back to St. Paul and I started out from there for Detroit.  I stayed on the far side of Chicago (note to readers: if a chain motel has an anomalous no-cancellation policy, it is possible it is in a bad neighborhood).  All was well and I drove on into Michigan the next day.

November 30 to December 2 - Detroit and Cranbrook

After a brief stop through the land of Zingerman's Deli empire (Ann Arbor), I arrived in Detroit.  

I was staying with the parents of my friend Chris from college.  As Chris' dad had charmingly written when their travel plans were still in flux, "In the next week, I will know for sure if the B. Bed and Breakfast will be open for business.  It has received high ratings for visitors, although you would have expected that, Amy."

Owing to travel schedules, it was just Chris' mom and me.  The timing worked to pick her up from the airport, which was a nice way to get directions.  That night, we visited and had minestrone - with pesto!  (A family tradition I experienced in Portland at Chris').  

The next morning I met Charlie Shaw, the head of upper school at Cranbrook, a very special collection of schools that includes everything from kindergarten to 12th grade, plus a well-known graduate program in studio art.  The campus was largely designed by Saarinen, and is beautiful.  It is an experiment in art in education or art in everyday life.  The founding patrons, the Booths, had strong ideas along these lines.  I was being welcomed on the coattails of Chris' kindness and enthusiasm and good nature, and people could not have been nicer.  Here is Charlie in his office:

(A lot of the art on the walls is by students.)

Mary Ellen, who works with Charlie, even printed Mapquest directions for me to get to my next stop.

Charlie drove us around the campus in my car.  This is the girl's school, which was built last and is said to be the most unified in design:

I loved the weaving studio:

And was amazed by how much students live around these architectural treasures in an everyday way.

Mary Ellen then drove me to meet with Greg, the really nice director of the Cranbrook museum.  

The art museum is closed for renovation.  We saw a great Richard Barnes show in the science museum.  (The show, Animal Logic, features photographs of taxidermized animals as they are kept in storage and other ways of seeing the diorama presentation of natural history as constructed.  They happen also to be beautiful and arresting.)  Borrowed from Barnes' website:

Greg knew the gallery guard--something I always find telling and heartening in equal measure--a graduate student named Wes who had just finished his studio work for the term.

Greg and I sat in the cafe and chatted for a long time.   His wife studies violence in images.  Greg said the average tenure of a museum director is four years.  He has been there for twenty-four.  As Greg said, "you have to reinvent your programs but you also have to reinvent yourself."  He cites "heroic efforts of a small staff" in the museum's ability to play on a bigger stage.  

It is specifically an art museum in an art school, part of greater Cranbrook.  The art academy is graduate education only, all funded, with no undergraduates for the grad students to help teach.  As Greg said, "Talk about a bad business model."

On the walk up to lunch, I learned my favorite detail. The Booths built the school, at a time you built a bowling alley in the basement.  The founding patron was alive and also living across the street.  If he wanted to change out part of the installation, he simply walked the object over from his house.  Thus, the art museum had a bowling alley but also no closets.  In earlier renovation, the bowling alley became storage.

In the dining hall pictured above, I had lunch with Greg, Charlie, and a colleague of theirs named Jim, who had had a first job dealing European cars.  I learned a lot.  Charlie kindly said he hoped it was the start rather than end of a conversation.  

They sent me on my way to the Detroit Institute of Art (DIA) where the lovely Nancy Jones, director of education, gave me a marathon tour of their reinstallation. After a couple of hours I had to remind her I had written about museum legs after all and point out her generosity with her time. 

The DIA is huge, not to scale with other museums the way a linebacker would look in a crowd of regular people.  It's one-way to drive around and park, and the building just keeps going and going.  We started at Diego Rivera's Detroit Industry, 

a famous mural that was for many years the first sight coming into the building.

Nancy had spearheaded a move within the museum to interpret their permanent collection differently.  She had gotten buy-in impressively, hired an interdisciplinary staff, and set about to write wall texts to specific purposes.  Here are two examples to give a feel.  I should say, museum workers all over the county have been visiting to see it.

1. If you glaze over at Greek vessels, the new installation shows how they were used:

Including this film that further illustrates the uses:

2. In the section of French decorative tableware--a place I personally glaze over--there is this wonderful film projected onto a table that makes it seem like you are having a period meal.  

Your seat has a character with period dress sleeves.  

The meal is served in the same containers that are in the display cases around the table.  

I have never taken such interest in French decorative tableware.

Many other examples abound.  Even the overall themes, for instance, how the French aristocracy arranged their day (paintings organized by time-of-day activities), were novel and approachable.  And the labels on the paintings created ready-made discussion topics.

That kind of intervention could, in theory, go horribly wrong, but in this case it was playful, spare, and elegant.  The materials created a positive feedback loop where my looking was rewarded and caused me to want to look at more stuff (in contrast to glazing over at armor or whatever else).  What a nice thing to say about museums: Looking begets better looking.  There were even real globes in the galleries so you could see the areas of the world in question -- both the modern-day nation states and the ancient empires shown.

I enjoyed a lot of what I saw, including this landscape:

This Otto Dix is Nancy's favorite:

Here I am with a sculpture (literally a donkey, figuratively a sacrificial lamb) that they keep in the entry hall and that you are supposed to touch so that the real accumulation of fingerprints will show how much they do damage the art.

That evening I met back up with Chris' mom. John Corso, a college friend who teaches art theory at Oakland University, came by and he and I went to Meadow Brook on an epic tour.  Meadow Brook Hall  is the fourth largest residence in the United States.  It is 88,000 square feet.  We were excited that it stayed open late on Mondays.  Then we got there and realized it was Tuesday.  A nice docent let us look around as long as we left at 7pm.  Just before 7pm, we ran into an incredibly nice groundskeeper who took us around.  I felt like we were sneaking in as he took us down staff passageways, into linen rooms or the children's bedrooms (each with its own separate guest room for friends to stay over).  We heard the story of Matilda Dodge and her family while standing in Matilda's bathroom suite, which by New York standards is a four-bedroom apartment.  (Our host was a young guy, very knowledgeable, and there was this moment where he said Matilda married her second husband--the first died of influenza with his brother at a New York car show--"when she was around fifty."  Immediately another docent materialized, "She was 42 when she married, 46 when she moved into the house."  The kind of details women remember, I suppose.

I don't mean to sound cynical at all when I say John and I would make a great con artist team.  He was local, teaching at the affiliated university.  I was this author just passing through town, one night only.  We didn't in any way misrepresent ourselves, but at the end, we both ducked into the coat closet while our host went to get us a brochure.  I was hoping we didn't run into our first kindly docent who might have realized how far past 7pm we stayed.  John ducked into the closet because, "My provost is out there."

Detroit has a burgeoning film scene.  Danny Glover had been filming in town.  Parker Posey had been there too.  Our host had met her and not known who she was, thereby I think talking to her in a charmingly everyday way.  Later realizing who she was, he seemed a bit struck.  "She's really cute," I offered, as if he might have noticed something else about her, if not her fame directly.  He replied with no hesitation, "She's hot."

And then we picked up takeout from Lamarza, a great Lebanese takeout in Bloomfield Hills, and had dinner with Chris' mom, the three of us.  The next day, Chris' mom took me kindly to tour Christ Church Cranbrook.  The space was beautiful, in a not-quite-austere way:

I was really struck by these embroidered (bargello?) kneelers:

And loved the water fountain:

Everyone was so kind and welcoming, and also so interesting and delightful to talk to.  Greg of the Cranbrook museum, said Adam Lerner of the Denver MCA used to host lectures at a place called the Lab where he would invite disparate speakers and see at what point in the Q&A people started to relate the two thematically.  The standout had been TV theme songs and Walt Whitman.

A nod to the United Kingdom, here is the Michigan intersection of Kensington and Charing Cross, on my way out of town: