On the Road

Dave, Ken & Lindsay

Toledo, the Glass City, was an unlikely first destination. Who would have thought that after months of planning a trip to the Canadian Rockies, we would end up in Toledo? But our friends Dave Beckwith and Lindsay Potts brought this city to life. Of course, one can't be around Dave and Lindsay for more than a minute or two without catching their infectious love for life. Dave directs the Needmor Fund and Lindsay has worked for Rep. Marcy Kaptor for more than two decades. They know the city.

Our trip to Toledo took us through Breezewood, PA as we listened for the first time to Bob Dylan's XM radio show. Bob was playing 'Diesel Smoke Dangerous Curves', a 1950' s truck-driving classic. If you haven't heard the show you should. Dylan's dry wit had us belly laughing, even in Breezewood where we stopped for Sushi but decided against it after seeing the restaurant (more dangerous than the curves).

Morning in Toledo. Dave and Lindsay introduced us to their good friends, sculptor and glass artists Jack Schmidt and Shawn Messenger who gave us a tour of their 'hot shop'. We watched Shawn create millefiore, the multicolored 'thousand flowers' she uses in vases and paperweights. In a painstaking process, layers of molten glass are built into a large glob. The final step is pulling the molten glass into a long strand - one person holds the rod and the second one runs to the other side of the studio, the glass pulled out like chewing gum between them.

Later in the day we headed off to a fundraiser for a 2009 mayoral candidate. We saw these signs posted in front of a house in the Old West End of Toledo.

It was not the only set of signs we saw. Obama signs were everywhere, dozens of them. There was not one sign with Hillary's name, no evidence she ran a ground operation or that she won the state. We can see the excitement for Obama as we travel, through OH, IL and now in MN.

Later in the evening in Toledo, Jack, Ian his son, Dave and Lindsay's son Judson and his friend Will, all came by to share in sipping some 1970 vintage port around an outdoor firepit. Oh what a night.

A few more images from our time in Toledo: a Mud Hens game...

the Toledo Glass Museum seen through a Dale Chihuly sculpture

overlooking the Maunee River, near Dave and Lindsay's house

a typical Toledo tree

We left Dave and Lindsay too soon, and bounded out for Chicago to see Joey Frank and his girlfriend Maria Dyer. They took us to Spring restaurant, an asian influenced American food hot spot. Maria is packing up for NYU grad school while Joey is plotting a still secret new film following on the heels of his successful film, Manda Bala (now in DVD!).

We then set out for Minneapolis across miles of rolling fields. We detoured to North Freedom to discover the Futuretron, the vast obsessive refuse-sculpture world of Dr Evermor and his family. The original Futuretron is a sculpture garden surrounded by several acres of fields populated by ever-expanding structures built of junk – rusted cars, machinery of all kinds. We wander amid a giant orchestra of bird/instrument sculptures, plagued by an army of rusty ant-robots. We felt like we were in a Stephen Spielberg movie only it was real.

Eventually, we crossed the Mississippi into MN. The river is beautiful in this part of the country. Blue and wide with islands off into the distance. Our first stop was the Walker Museum, one of the most interesting art museums in the country. But skip brunch there if the choice ever presents itself. The museum restaurant ‘20/21’- is a victim of Wolfgang Puck mass-marketing – it is not very good although it has great views.

There's an artist-designed Mini-Golf course outside, and we chose the tougher of the 2 courses – 7 “Green” holes (pun intended) that use recycled materials and alternative energy sources (including a bicycle that propels the ball through a giant pinball machine and out onto the green).

After tearing up our scorecards, we crossed the street to the SculptureGarden which is dominated by Oldenberg’s Cherry on Spoon fountain.

Inside the museum we focused on several exhibits drawn from the Walker’s permanent collection. “The Shape of Time” included many of the usual suspects – from Rothko to Jasper Johns, but also one of Yves Klein’s Anthropometries and a bathtub of brilliant blue paint that his models used to roll in before printing themselves. A room filled with Joseph Beuys works and artifacts took us back to his revolutionary world of bizarre ideas and actions. He once flew to New York wrapped in felt, and was transported to a gallery to meet with a coyote (representing Native America): after this ‘exhibit’ he flew home, still wrapped. Of course Micheline couldn’t miss “Mythologies” , a small but thought-provoking exhibit including a dramatic Anselm Kiefer riven by a tornado of twisted lead (hopefully not a weather preview for us) and a lyrical Julie Mehretu of layered charcoal and graphite markings drowned in translucent silica medium.

That night Harriet Barlow and David Morris welcomed us to the city. Harriet is ubiquitous in funding and activist circles. She runs the Blue Mountain Center, a special place in the Adirondacks for working artists, writers and activists. David, an eminent author, lovingly calls Harriet the "Guruess" of Art and Social Justice which is how we came to know her, after she invited us to the Blue Mountain Center a couple of years ago when we sought her advice. We spent the evening with them in the warmth and comfort of their home, talking politics, eating and drinking and taking a twilight stroll down to a beautiful nearby lake (one of the 1,000 in MN).

Heading toward Fargo, North Dakota, clouds started to amass and drizzle fell. This followed the previous day’s tornado, which wreaked havoc 15 miles from where we were in Minneapolis. The rain was our first disappointment of the trip, mainly because we had borrowed an incredible tent from our friends Sarah Stephens and Matt Wuerker, as well as a bunch of excellent camping equipment from other friends, and this was to be our first night under the tent. Back in Georgetown, just before leaving, neither Matt nor Sarah was available to walk us through the tent-raising (see below), and we were sort of glad they weren't. You see, Matt is a political cartoonist, and we didn't want to risk ending up the subject of one of his drawings in the increasingly popular Washington DC newspaper Politico. Fortunately, our friends Barbara Somson and Ross Eisenbrey were able to draw upon the muscle of the United Auto Workers (Barbara) and the brains of the Economic Policy Insitute (Ross) to help us.