Film Festival

No posts for days and days. Elderly cat is stable, Michele Bachmann is quiet, and Current Occupant is on his downward spiral, rumored to be drinking and begging Laura to stay. Life in cube land continues to be boring. Spring has come to Gotham-on-the-Prairie. In short, not much is happening.

And then, along comes the Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival. Apart from the fact there are no screenings in St. Paul, the title says it all. There's a nice array of movies at different film palaces around town. Some of the films will be in general release before long, while others would never otherwise be seen.

There does seem to be a large number of Norwegian films. Given where and who we are, AND the presence of a Norwegian consulate in Minneapolis, AND that said consultate was the sponsor of several of the screenings, this is probably not surprising. However, the lack of African films is pretty remarkable. They have an entire semester class devoted to African film at the University going on right now. In fact, Joe College is (allegedly) taking the class. There are clearly African films available that are worthy of study. But not many of them made the cut in Minneapolis. Given that this area is home to a large East African refugee/immigrant population, including the largest Somali population in the US, it might make sense to include more African films. As we all know, the flood of Norwegian immigrants ended sometime prior to the Boer War....note to Minnesota Film Arts for next year: remember where you are.

So far we've seen German and French comedies. Our next outing will be to a Romanian movie on Friday. That will probably be it, given our lack of time to spend hours each day in a movie theater, enticing though that may sound. And that's undoubtedly why most of the congregation at the screenings appears to be of retirement age....they don't have to get up the next morning.

Private industry--a view from inside cubeland

Let's talk about paternalistic employers. To be specific, let's discuss a large publishing firm in suburban St. Paul. You know the one I mean--the one that is trying to get tax breaks from the City of Eagan to expand its "campus", using the carrot of more jobs, and the stick of pulling up stakes and moving to Podunk, OK.

Don't get me wrong. It's not a bad place to work, as private industry employers go. However, the pay stinks, they are continually upping the production expectations, and the physical environment is something out of Dilbert--miles and miles of cubes and a party-hearty atmosphere among the 20-somethings that make up the bulk of the workforce. I wear headphones cranked up to top volume. Losing a bit of hearing is a small price to pay for not being forced to listen to 10 no-doubt fascinating conversations at once.

Anyway, this organization, number 55 on Computerworld's Best Places to Work in IT, possibly to compensate for its shortcomings, offers its employees lots of little perks. There's the free fruit on Tuesdays and Thursdays. There's the turkey at Thanksgiving. There's the free coffee, milk, and tea. There are the subsidized cafeterias, with each day's lunch menu published on the company web site so you can make your dining selection before you get in line. There's the in-house Carribou Coffee, reputed to be the busiest one in the Twin Cities. There's the dry cleaning pickup. There is the subsidized health club membership. There are the discounted Twins tickets. There's the ability to purchase Word software for $20. And on, and on.

But, since most of us do not take advantage of these perks to make up for the paltry pay, there is really only one good thing about this organization, at least from the point of view of a lowly writer like myself. And that is that everyone is smart. Everyone. And that makes those conversations by the metaphorical water cooler, or the ones I don my headphones to drown out, very interesting. And that is indeed worth the price of admission--almost.

Cat tails

My excuse for not posting for a week is the sick cat. She was a mess last week, and I got OLGS to take her to the vet, where expensive bloodwork revealed what we already knew. Her thyroid is out of whack, and we haven't been giving her the medication that regulates it. OLGS hates to upset her, and giving her medication upsets her. So he doesn't.

But the vet implied, not very subtly, that if we weren't going to follow doctors orders, we might as well put her down. So for the past week, I've turned into a screaming banshee on the subject of cat meds. I will not let OLGS shirk his duty, which is to hold her down while I shoot the stuff into her mouth. And she is better. Input equals output....

My excellent adventure in New York

Don't let anyone tell you that New Yorkers are cold, unhelpful, etc. Not true. In fact, they love to show off. If you are befuddled about the bus cards (no money is allowed for bus fare--you have to purchase a card), they jump in. If you want to know which subway goes where, they are delighted to tell you.

OLGS and I went to NYC for a very quick visit, ostensibly to help Joe College Grad with some stuff, but that was an excuse. We went to the theater, had wonderful bus rides, ate in little Italy, visited Orchard Street (see photo, left), and had lunch with long lost relatives. OLGS did some family history research at City Hall (incidentally, a beautiful building). We visited ground zero and St. Paul's Church nearby. All this and more we did in less than three days.

New York is expensive, so take plenty of cash or a well-funded credit card. And, if you can avoid it, don't fly into Kennedy. The cheap air fare is offset by the fact that it costs a fortune in time and money to get there.

Farwell to MPL

It will probably happen. The Minneapolis Public Library (MPL) will be swallowed up by Hennepin County Public Library. In some ways this is a very good thing, and probably inevitable. In fact, there are members of the MPL staff who believe that the hiring of the current director was engineered to accomplish what has now come to pass. I've always believed that people aren't really smart enough to institute conspiracies at this level. I'm also willing to admit that I may be wrong.

However, whether or not this is the case is fairly irrelevant. MPL is a dinosaur. It has had a collecting policiy for many, many, years that was out of the mainstream of public library practice. The beautiful new building, and the satellite at the caverns at the U of M, house thousands of volumes of books that have never been read, and will never be read. In some cases, there are even two copies of these books. This represents the "just in case" thinking that once prevailed in libraries and in businesses. This is a really expensive way to run a railroad, or library, and has contributed in some measure to the financial disaster that is MPL. It is horribly out of fashion, and very expensive.

Hennepin County Library, in contrast, is a "just in time" organization. The money goes to where it is demonstrably needed, rather than where it might be needed based on annecdotal evidence. Hennepin County is a rational library. Minneapolis Public Library runs on impressions, past practice, and guesswork. HCL is a modern library, and has won many awards and kudos. MPL, in contrast, has a low per volume and per capita circulation right up there with other dinosaurs such as Cleveland and St. Louis library systems.

However, the dinosaur library somehow represents the best in our city. It has an old fashioned, endearing quality. It caters to the kooks, the cranks, the artists, and the weird. It has collections that no one west of New York possesses on the slim chance that someone might want to use them. It does not discriminate based on the popularity of a book title, as HCL does. The tyrannical majority has not ruled at MPL until recently.

And so, even though it will almost certainly happen despite the serious practical obstacles to a merger, I feel a little wistful. MPL represents an effort to hold back the onslaught of cookie-cutter culture that the wildly successful libraries in Hennepin County promote. If the merger results in MPL abandoning its idiosyncratic collections, we will be a much less rich community.

We will be, in fact, a cold Omaha. While I'm sure Omaha is a perfectly fine place, it does not have a reputation as a fine, interesting, place. We need diversity to retain our competitive edge, and the death of MPL will be one more attack on diversity and one more step toward boring mediocrity.

March snow

Well, technically not March. But almost, and this amount of snow is more typical of March. There are two feet on the ground in Minneapolis. Lots of stuff closed--schools, corporations, libraries, churches. But it was a one day wonder. The plows came out, the salt trucks contributed to the degradation of the environment, and people put on their boots and shoveled out. "This", they said to themselves, "is what makes us different and (dare we say) better."

Michele does it again--gotta love democracy

Illustration by Robin Eley for City Pages

Where do we get these guys? The home of Paul Wellstone and Walter Mondale is also the place that elected Michele Bachmann, dubbed "Our nation’s loopiest congresslady" by the blog Wonkette. And is she ever. In addition to her other weird behavior, Michele is the "author" of a plan to use Personal Rapid Transit, a genuine dog of an idea, to solve the nation's transit problems. Of course, if you are paying attention, you'll have noted the word "personal" in the title of the scheme, which should tell you everything you need to know. The idea is that you can support "rapid" transit while still being a total loner, far from the madding crowd, serene in your individuality, and never rubbing shoulders (or in Michele's case, lips), with anyone else.
Just when you thought that Minnesota was too cold, too dry, too Norwegian, and too boring to be livable or interesting, along comes Michele to offer a bit of comic relief. And if we go to war in Iran because of Michele, we are dumber than we look.

And did you know that Michele was once a Jimmy Carter Democrat?

The end of the high school swimming season....sigh

Joe High School acquitted himself amazingly well at the sectional swim meet for the Twin Cities. He took four seconds off his 500 yard frestyle, coming in 5th for the region. While not enough to get him to the state tournament, he's determined to get there next year. College scouts, take note!

Teenagers in the house

Actually, two out of three are no longer teenagers. But even Joe College Grad appears to be in that limbo between student behavior and adulthood that apparently plagues Italian male children until about age 40. Example: the lad has a voucher for up to $500 for a Continental/Northwest ticket. He wanted to use it to come home for his winter break. He couldn't figure out how to get it to work. Between his girlfriend and me, we got it done. And he was a Phi Beta Kappa....

Joe College refuses to take money in the form of an established allowance for his living expenses, i.e., rent, food, etc. He prefers to ask as the need arises. When I point out that if he were living in a dormitory, I would be paying this and more, he rolls his eyes. But when he shows up for dinner, I know that there will be an indirect request for a check before leaving. My goal is to get him to take a pre-determined amount of money and either save it or spend it. If it's gone before the end of the month, so be it. My recollection is that OLGS was very similar with his dad. I, on the other hand, have little problem taking money...

Joe High School is in some ways the most grown up. Is there an inverse relationship between age and behavior in teenage boys? As a 10th greader, he is getting recruiting letters from various colleges and universities as the result of a test he took. He was very dismissive until he got letters from the University of Chicago, Duke, and Washington University in St. Louis. It was nice to see him figure out that there was a relationship between his performance on the test and the receipt of the letters. Input equals output...

Irangate. part deux

One question: Why in hell should we believe anything this man tells us?

In addition to demonstrating his reading skills with My Pet Goat, this guy could be the star of a morality tale in which a boy who lied was ultimately not believed when he told the truth. Sound familiar?

Reuters photo

Only in Minnesota

You have to love it. Our media types are now gushing about the "warming trend". The high temp today was above 0 degrees. There's some excitement about making it into double digits tomorrow. Living in such conditions apparently justifies our existence. That may be so, but I'm still glad it's a short distance from the parking lot to my little desk in cube land.

Deep Freeze

It's cold. The high temp today will be -5, with a wind chill not to be mentioned. Our ability to tolerate conditions like today's is what distinguishes us from other blue/purple states. We are the coldest large US city. We glory in it. But, it hasn't been this cold for three years. Global warming, anyone?

I have speculated before that Minnesota's cold climate is the cause of our odd political arrangements. We elect weirdos. Some of them are amazing, like the late Paul Wellstone. Some provide needed comic relief and a subject of conversation when meeting strangers at conferences, like Jesse Ventura or Michele Bachmann. Some become pretty good statemen, like Walter Mondale. And some are brought down by their strange accents and squeaky voices, like Hubert Humphrey.

This disparate group shares an ability to shrug off temps that max out at -5 degrees. This should make them pretty effective in DC. But we have a mixed track record. Maybe it's the natural contrariness that arises when you open the door and your eyelashes freeze. And contrary doesn't always play well among the smooth and powdered types who usually dominate the national political process.

Farewell to Molly Ivins

She was one of my heroes. She wrote so well. And surprisingly for a Smithy, she was so unpretentious. And she loved Texas. It went with the rest of her--it was all part of the package.

The one thing I don't get was her kindness to Current Occupant. She was an example to us all--remaining eternally optimistic, understanding why he was the way he is, and not despairing. Her last column, however, was a call to action. Read it and mourn her passing.

Dumpster diving senator

It just keeps getting better here in fly-over land. First we have Michele, the MN 6th district Congresswomen who can't keep her hands, or mouth, off Current Occupant. Now we have Senator Flexible, aka Norm Coleman, who showed up at the SOTU address on Tuesday with a big gash in his forehead. Turns out a redecorating effort had resulted in a treasured antique lamp being thrown in the dumpster. Stormin' Norm was dispatched by wife Laurie to retrieve it. The dumpster and the senator met, and the senator came out the worse for wear. Fortunately, the lamp was OK.

You just can't make this stuff up.

The girl in the white slinky dress, or Michele gets her man

What an embarassment. Michele Bachmann, the recently elected congresswoman from the MN 6th district, made a specatcle of herself on Tuesday night. Pawing the President, whom she admits is a hunk, Michele gave him a big kiss on the lips as he passed by her carefully selected aisle seat. She then kept her hand on his back as he pulled away from her. Luis, watching the State of the Union as part of his effort to understand Norteamericano politics, was shocked.

And Luis and I were not the only ones who noticed her surprising behavior. Even the New York Times mentioned it. And Michele is counting her lip-to-lip encounters with Current Occupant. "He kissed me in Minnesota, too", explained Michele. And I though Jesse Ventura was bad for the reputation of the North Star State....