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Northern Spark kicks off on Saturday, June 8th, at 8:58pm in Lowertown St. Paul, Minnesota. This will be our third year attending Northern Spark (a little history of the Nuit Blanche movement in this piece). Last year we stayed awake from dusk to dawn, and ended our night viewing the sunrise from the top of the Foshay Tower. It’s more difficult than you think to stay awake all night, an insomniac’s dream!

Here’s a link to Northern’s Spark’s full schedule and two more to their Facebook and Twitter pages. Last year we downloaded the Northern Spark app on our Droids and highly recommend it. The slideshow is a glimpse into our night walk around Minneapolis at last year’s Northern Spark, and at a pre-Spark gathering the week before. We are looking forward to Lowertown, St. Paul. It’s a gift to share the night, the light, and the Arts in community.


-posted on red Ravine, Friday, June 7th, 2013

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Footprints, California Coast, circa 1995, b&w Tri-X film, Canon EOS Rebel SLR
film camera, © 1995-2013 by QuoinMonkey. All rights reserved.




Water pools
on an aging bluff—
webbed footprints
deposit a longing
for things that never were.






_________________________________________________________________

bluff

A bluff—a high bank above a river, a headland of precipitous cliffs—is created when elements of Earth go to battle. In nearly all Earth’s processes, one element is pitted against another, and the weaker is washed away, swept off, compressed. What is weakly held together breaks down easily. Bluffs come from such processes. Such bluffs were susceptible to prevailing winds, others to movements within the Earth, others to scouring ice. Some are layered up with the sand of a long-ago sea or the pebbles of a former stream or with the fossils of animals. Many bluffs come to life when water cuts down through seams of Earth layers, creating slippage and collapse. The ocean, the ever-ongoing movement of waves against the shore, carves other bluffs, as at the edge of Puget Sound and along the California coast. Rattlesnake Mountain in Nebraska was shaped by upward sweeping winds. Nana Wyah, the sacred Chickasaw Bluffs in Oklahoma, were renamed after the Trail of Tears. Mount Rushmore, carved into Lakota sacred land, is a granite bluff. And Bluff is a little town on the banks of the San Juan River in Utah, ringed by its namesake landform. In Islands in the Stream, Hemingway writes: “The house was built on the highest part of the narrow tongue of land between the harbor and the open sea. It has lasted through three hurricanes and it was built solid as a ship. It was shaded by tall coconut palms that were bent by the trade wind and on the ocean side you could walk out of the door and down the bluff across the white sand and into the Gulf Stream.”

-Linda Hogan, from Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape



-posted on red Ravine, Tuesday, May 28th, 2013

Memorial Day

Memorial Day, Savage, Minnesota, June 2009, photo © 2013 by QuoinMonkey. All rights reserved.


Memorial Day, a somber remembrance of the men and women who gave their lives in U.S. wars. I am fortunate; I only know of one family member who died while fighting a war—my Uncle James. When I visited the Vietnam Veterans Memorial at its dedication, I did a rubbing of his name (Panel 20W – Line 32). And when I started blogging, I discovered the Vietnam Veterans Memorial website where I began leaving him messages each Memorial Day. Uncle James died seven months into his tour, in Binh Long, South Vietnam, a long way from his South Carolina home. This is the time I dedicate to him.

Yesterday, I listened to CBS Sunday Morning and was taken with Lee Cowan’s story of Charlie Haughey, a Vietnam war photographer. It reminded me of the importance of photographs to remembering the dead. During his service as a photographer in Vietnam, Charlie Haughey chronicled the daily life of soldiers in his battalion. When his tour ended, he dropped his nearly 2,000 photo negatives into a shoebox, and hid them away. Now, after 45 years, Haughey’s mesmerizing images of soldiers battling the physical and emotional hardships of war are seeing the light of day. You can see in his eyes, they still bring him pain.

To all of the fallen, and for Uncle James. Never forgotten.


-posted on red Ravine, Memorial Day, May 27th, 2013

Minneapolis at night. Crossing the Mississippi.

Minneapolis At Night: Crossing The Mississippi, Droid Shots, Minneapolis, Minnesota, April 2013, photos © 2013 by QuoinMonkey. All rights reserved.






Lost city of lakes
an Instagram river ignites
your Polaroid skies.

Mississippi churning
across the dark drive home
a mist quietly settles.








-posted on red Ravine, Saturday, May 11th, 2013

leather

Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day graphic by Abdullah Rofii, April 2013, photo from Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day website.


Every year I plan to participate in Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day, and every year it falls too close to our biggest event of the year, Art-A-Whirl. While Liz and I are busy prepping and preparing Casket Arts Studio 318, photographers across the globe are creating images with handmade pinhole cameras. Many of us know pinhole photography from elementary school science when we made a pinhole camera from a Quaker oatmeal box. But you can also make cameras from matchboxes, film canisters, paint cans, and shoe boxes.

The history of the pinhole camera dates back to the 5th century BC when the basic optical principles of the pinhole are commented on in Chinese texts. Chinese writers had experimented and discovered that light travels in straight lines. The philosopher Mo Ti (later Mo Tsu) was the first – to our knowledge – to record the formation of an inverted image with a pinhole or screen.

Hopefully, one year I will be in sync with other photographers from around the world and get out in the field with my own pinhole camera to celebrate Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day. Until then, I enjoy the pinhole images posted by amateur and professional photographers worldwide. You can view the lensless pinhole photos submitted for 2013 at the Worldwide Pinhole Photography website.


-related to post: Pinhole Photography — History & Bones

-posted on red Ravine, Sunday, April 28th, 2013, Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day

The Honeycrisp Apple - 108/365

The Honeycrisp Apple, Archive 365, Droid Shots, The Minnesota Landscape Arboretum, Chaska, Minnesota, September 2012, photos © 2012-2013 by QuoinMonkey. All rights reserved.


Apples were a crisp, healthy snack when I was growing up. The apple varieties I was most familiar with then were Red Delicious and Granny Smiths. On a recent trip to the grocery store, I was introduced to two apples I had never tasted before: the KIKU and the Ambrosia. If you draw a thermometer and add a scale from sweet to tart, here’s where they fit in:  SWEET — KIKU, Fuji, Ambrosia, Gala, Jonagold, Cameo, Golden Delicious, Red Delicious, Honeycrisp, Kanzi, Braeburn, Pink Lady, Granny Smith — TART.

Apples are closely linked to place, and many of us are familiar with the Gala from New Zealand or the Fuji from Japan (both developed in the 1930s). In the history of the apple industry, the three varieties I favor are relatively new to the world. The Ambrosia originated in the 1990s in the Similkameen Valley of British Columbia, Canada where the Mother Tree still lives. Local favorite the Honeycrisp was developed by the University of Minnesota and introduced in 1991. The Honeycrisp is a cross between a Macoun and a Honeygold (the Honeygold itself a cross between the Golden Delicious and Haralson). The KIKU came about in 1990 when Luis Braun, the South Tyrolean apple expert, was traveling through Japan and discovered a branch in an orchard, which a few years later would become the sweet KIKU apple.

What’s your favorite apple?




Where does your mind go when I say apple? Is it your first bite of a lunchtime snack, a trip where you picked orchard apples with your family, or the smell of fresh apple pie right out of the oven (check out this great apple pie recipe from ybonesy: 1-2-3! Apple Pie Gluten-Free!). Are you reminded of a computer company? Or perhaps a certain snake and the precursor to the Seven Deadly Sins (another good Writing Topic). Do you believe the adage, An apple a day keeps the doctor away?

Let your mind wander to all the places where apples grow, and capture your impressions in a Writing Practice.

Apple, 15 minutes, Go!


APPLE 3 2013-03-03 09.35.16

The KIKU Apple, Archive 365, Droid Shots, Minneapolis, Minnesota, March 2013, photos © 2013 by QuoinMonkey. All rights reserved.




RESOURCES:

History of the Honeycrisp AppleNew Kid On The Block at Wood Orchard Market

History of the Ambrosia Apple - Ambrosia History at Ambrosia Organic

History of the KIKU AppleStory – 20 Years at Kiku Apple


-posted on red Ravine, Sunday, March 3rd, 2013


Undone

Royal - 152/365

Royal – 152/365, Archive 365, BlackBerry Shots, Minneapolis, Minnesota,
February 2011, photos © 2011-2013 by QuoinMonkey. All rights reserved.




Midwestern writer
pretending to understand –
what love left behind.






-posted on red Ravine, Saturday, March 2nd, 2013

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