If I had a fireplace I would most certainly have been sitting in its welcoming orange glow last night as I enjoyed my first Winter Skål of the season. Piper, no doubt, would have been with me basking in the warmth of the flames, the flickering light cascading over her. As it was, I simply enjoyed my beer in the glow of a lamp while Piper lay on the couch.
Yesterday was a busy day. It was a social day. And a day that engendered much reflection.
It began with a trip down to Stoughton with a friend to check out the bake and craft sale held by the Sons of Norway lodge there. The morning air held a chill that was a portent of the months to come but I enjoyed its brisk welcome to the day. I didn't recall what street the lodge was on but knew it was just off Main Street and enlisted my friend's assistance. Her navigation seemed off to me as we tacked a course through various side streets but who am I to question the declarations of an iPhone?
"Turn down Fourth Street!" she cried to me as my car darted forward down an unfamiliar street. A look of giddy anticipation began to creep over her face as the promise of rosettes and crafts drew nearer.
"Hmmm. This doesn't look familiar to me," I offered in my defense.
Her route or rather her phone's route brought us to the Mandt Community Center where we saw multiple families walking inside clutching hockey gear. A quick consultation of the Google and she realized that our destination was, in fact, the Mandt Lodge.
Our course was soon corrected.
We parked a couple blocks away with my friend surmising - quite correctly - that there would be no parking to be had close to the Lodge. We walked up the street and made a short stop at a memory garden where the sun has risen over the mill pond.
It was a lovely space that must look even lovelier in the warmer months.
The path was lined with bird feeders and statuary. This one reminded me of the clock egg hoolie in the video game The Last Express.
"It looks like a giant butt plug," my friend offered with a hearty laugh that made me chuckle. I think this was the first time I'd heard such bawdiness from her.
This statue brought Twin Peaks to mind and prompted me to make the much less ribald comment, "The owls are not what they seem."
When the lodge came into view so did a long line of folks waiting to enter.
In an attempt to alleviate crowding, people were being let inside in small groups as others left. We spent 20 minutes or so in line much of it with the infant in its mother's arms in front of us intently staring at me. A real cutie.
When we were finally let inside, we found that the place was packed with people scrambling for rømmegrøt, a Norwegian porridge, and all manner of Nordic cookies and sweets. I ended up with a small section of almond cake and some kransekake fingers which are the small, tubular siblings of a different and larger almond cake which apparently consists of rings of nutty goodness stacked one upon another.
On the crafty side, there were alpaca socks of all manner plus hats and scarves made from the wool of the South American(!!) animal. I was hoping to add another bar of pine scented soap to my strategic soap reserve from Suds & Harvest so that my skin would be redolent of evergreen through the winter. Mission accomplished.
I also snagged a tube of lip balm as mine was just about depleted.
We didn't stay too long as the lodge isn't very large and I had a date in the woods later in the morning. However, as we walked back to the car, my friend pleaded, "Can we go down to the bridge?" This was a bridge that went over the mill pond and of course I consented. We passed by a house that had a hound in the yard who was desperate for pets. We happily obliged.
It was a gorgeous morning and the bridge made for some fine scenery.
My friend dropped me off at home and I scrambled to find my gloves and put my boots on for I had a date at Token Creek Park ridding it of the dreaded buckthorn.
Having done a fair amount of traveling in October, November is shaping up to mostly be spent close to home.
My Frau and I went to see progressive rock stalwarts Yes on the 9th. It was my 5th time seeing them live, 6th if you include an Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe show. The band formed back in the late 60s and, while a couple of the guys are a bit long in the tooth, some newer, younger members are helping to keep the flame alive.
Having been around so long with many, many albums to choose songs from, every fan is bound to have a tune that they really want to hear but doesn't get played. The band performed a couple songs I didn’t expect to hear along with several that I did and are, simply put, obligatory these days. The tour was to mark the 50th anniversary of Close to the Edge, their 5th album and so they performed it in its entirety.
The church organ section of the title track never fails to send a shiver down my spine. Similarly, the vocal arrangement in that section, called "I Get Up, I Get Down", is truly a thing of beauty. One autumn evening many years ago, I was driving down Bailey Road east of Madison listening to the song very loudly and, when that section came on, I felt surrounded by grandeur and as if I had been transported somewhere else. Perhaps to the land of Roger Dean's album covers where everyone talks impressionistically - like Jon Anderson's lyrics. It was simply a beautiful moment.
Still, I wish that there had been a bit more variety in the setlist. "On the Silent Wings of Freedom" was an unexpected choice and I enjoyed it greatly. This opened the concert and it was my first time seeing Billy Sherwood on bass. He played reverently but not in slavish imitation of Chris Squire, to my ears. Plus, they did a couple new songs from their latest album, The Quest. But it was really a show dedicated to a trio of their early 70s work - The Yes Album, Fragile, and Close to the Edge.
With Geoff Downes in the band, I find it a shame that they included no Drama material or anything released since he rejoined the band in 2010. "Fly From Here" or a chunk of it would have been great to hear.
Despite my desire to have more eras of the band's history represented, it was still fun. They seemed happy to be onstage and played a spirited show.
Someone who sat 8-10’ in front of me shot some video and posted it online. Here’s most of the epic song “Close to the Edge”.
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A few days later I donned my apron and headed over to a local church where the Polish Heritage Club – Madison was holding its Christmas Bazaar. I believe it was the first once since the pandemic took hold.
Although it was a bazaar and there were plenty of things to buy, I always think of eating when it comes to this event. This is because I spend all day back in the kitchen cooking. I think I grilled up a metric ton of kielbasa.
While I enjoy cooking at home and helping out the PHC, I am glad that I no longer work in a commercial kitchen having to feed hungry hordes.
As folks ate, they were serenaded by these fellows.
There was a room with information about Poland as well as materials to help people take their first steps into genealogical research.
If you need Wianek (floral headbands), we’ve got you covered.
There was a craft room for kids, lots of food for sale to take home including a plethora of tempting sweets such as Makowiec. Sadly, I neglected to get in line early and all of the tasty sweet treats were gone by the time I had finished my duties in the kitchen.
Polish pottery was to be had as well as all manner of amber jewelry.
Working in a hot kitchen all day is hard work and we needed to stay hydrated. And so we did. With Polish beer, er, piwo.
Next up for me will be on the Polish heritage front will be Pączki Day on 21 (or 23) February. Then on Palm Sunday, I will again be cooking for the Club’s Spring Festival.
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Man cannot live on kielbasa alone so I took advantage of this year’s bumper cranberry crop and made some cranberry pork chops.
I thought they turned out rather well.
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The UW’s main repository of human knowledge, Memorial Library, has an exhibit on display called “Press Play” which gives a brief history of recorded sound and draws from the library’s holdings. A friend and I stopped down there recently.
The first thing we saw was this:
Described as a “flat disc”, it dates to 1896 and features George J. Gaskin singing “Tramp Tramp Tramp” which was apparently on the hit parade during the Civil War.
Next to this was an Edison Phonograph from 1919.
The platter on that magnificent looking turntable features the earliest known vocal rendition of “On, Wisconsin”, which is not only the UW’s fight song, but also the State Song of Wisconsin.
Next to Edison’s phonograph were some of his wax cylinders.
At about this point, a young woman came into the exhibit who looked to be of undergrad age. She was smart and donned her headphones, scanned QR codes, and listened to the audio portion of the exhibit which allowed one to hear the recordings behind the glass.
I am not sure how to scan a QR code. Instead, my friend and I chatted away about what we were seeing. We had heard of these recording doodads but probably hadn’t actually seen many of them in person. One playback technology I hadn’t encountered before were these records that were 20” in diameter. Reading the card next to one, I was quite surprised to find that they played at 100(+) RPM. 100 RPM?!
“If that thing flew off the spindle, it could surely decapitate someone like Odd Job’s hat in Goldfinger,” I reasoned.
This display featured local (south central Wisconsin) history. WIBA is a Madison radio station while that marionette is Jim Kirchstein, the founder of Cuca Records. Cuca was formed in Sauk City, a town about 25-30 miles northwest of Madison, in 1959 and it released a lot of polka and other “ethnic music” of the area from European immigrants and their descendants, including the polkabilly stylings of the Goose Island Ramblers, a favorite group of mine.
But Cuca also recorded rock bands and is most famous for The Fendermen’s cover of “Mule Skinner Blues” by Jimmie Rodgers. The Fendermen, a.k.a. - Jim Sundquist and Phil Humphrey, were Wisconsin natives and met while they were both attending UW-Madison. The song was recorded in the basement of a music store in Middleton, a Madison suburb.
Before the records yielded to cases of 8-tracks, cassettes, CDs, and iPods, there was this handy guide for aspiring DJs and rappers on how to scratch.
Lastly, I’ll note that the exhibit also featured a record from the legendary blues singer Ma Rainey on the Paramount label. While I knew of Paramount, I don’t think I’d ever actually seen of one their discs in real life.
Paramount Records was a subsidiary of the Wisconsin Chair Company which made, in addition to chairs, cabinets for phonographs. They got into the record business in 1918 and Paramount lasted until the early 1930s. Although they released music by a variety of artists in a variety of genres, the label is best known these days for the blues recordings it did from the late 1920s through the early 30s.
Contacts in Chicago arranged for blues (and jazz) musicians from all around, including the deep South, to head to a small town – Grafton – in Wisconsin, a bit north of Milwaukee. And so the vaunted label gave us recordings by such hallowed figures as Charley Patton, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Ma Rainey, Louis Armstrong, Meade Lux Lewis, and many others.
Rock star Jack White became so enamored of Paramount's blues recordings that he had his record company, Third Man Records, put out deluxe sets of the material called The Rise & Fall of Paramount Records: Volumes One and Two. This surely involved lots of time and effort simply spent tracking down recordings alone, not to mention that spent getting them cleaned up for the best possible sonic experience. These sets include vinyl records, tons more digital recordings, books worth of liner notes, and replicas of ads for the records that appeared in the Chicago Defender in the 1920s such as this one.
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In a previous entry I related how I had finally read Adventures of Tom Sawyer. I figured in for a penny, in for a pound so I went ahead and read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
I appreciated the vernacular language as well as the descriptions of the Mississippi River and environs, but I missed the more playful aspect of Tom Sawyer. That book had funny bits but this one is much darker. The humor is replaced by life or death gambits.
I’m glad I read it but Huck Finn is a historical relic to me and not a piece of literature to which I shall return.
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Bonus photo! Here is Grabby being very naughty and scouting for food on the kitchen counter.
Bad news on
the floor front. We were supposed to have had it installed on Monday but I
received a call from Home Despot the preceding Friday that I did not want to
receive. The guy on the other end of the phone began by giving me some gobbledygook lesson
on vinyl floor taxonomy that went completely over my head. I was then informed that there had
been a mistake and that their flooring installers do not, in fact, deal with the type of
vinyl planking that I had purchased.
From Home
Despot.
It took them
nearly 6 weeks to figure this out. Less than 1 business day before the install
was set to be done. I was given the choice of keeping the materials and finding
someone else to do the install or to get a refund. I opted for the latter.
So we were
back at square one. I have hired another (smaller, local) company and am now awaiting them to
assign an installation date that should, I have reliably been told, be a day in
the week of 12 July. It's been so long since we've had something other than
plywood in the kitchen that I've forgotten what it's like to have a nice,
easily cleaned vinyl floor.
OK. Here's a
photo of Grabby and Piper to cleanse the palate after my griping.
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I've known
for a long time that Georgia O'Keeffe was born in the neighboring town of Sun Prairie. Well, it's fairly sizable these days with 30,000+ inhabitants
so it's more of a city, I suppose. There's a historic marker on Main Street
downtown noting that the artist and one time student at the School of the Art
Institute of Chicago grew up on a farm south of the city and I recently found
out exactly where that was.
The
farmstead is on a county road east of Madison that I used to drive fairly
frequently back in 2002-2003 on my way to the town of Marshall where I had
friends. I never noticed the sign previously. Or, if I did, I had completely
forgotten about it.
Here is
the O'Keeffe home. I am unsure when it was torn down.
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The Frau and
I had originally planned to spend some time up north in the Upper Peninsula the
week of her birthday. We were to stay at a hotel called The Fitz, named after the
Edmund Fitzgerald, on the shores of Lake Superior. She has a friend that
lives up there and we were to visit with her as well as cruise around the U.P. to enjoy the bucolic scenery and try to avoid hitting deer with our car.
These plans
were thrown into jeopardy when we were told by Home Despot that the earliest
date to have our floor installed was the day we were hoping to leave town. I
felt badly because Covid and the Frau's surgery conspired to scrap last year's
plans to spend her birthday in London and history was repeating itself, more or
less. Eventually we abandoned the U.P. trip and she decided that she wanted to instead head west to Dubuque to visit the National Mississippi River Museum &
Aquarium. I convinced her to make it an overnight affair instead of a day trip.
Since our
drive would take us by Dickeyville, we just had to stop there.
Dickeyville
is in the far southwest corner of Wisconsin and is the subject of the Goose Island Ramblers song "No Norwegians in Dickeyville".
The Goose
Island Ramblers were a Madison band that started in the early 60s and played
what their biographer (and UW-Madison folklorist) James Leary calls
"polkabilly" at a weekly gig at Glen 'n' Ann's Cozy Inn, a tavern on the outskirts of campus until
the late 1960s. At that time it was bought by Marsh Shapiro who rechristened it the Nitty Gritty and took the music into a rock direction. After they were dismissed, the Ramblers packed up and headed east to play at The Packer Inn (now Chief's Tavern) which is a just few
blocks away in my neighborhood.
Their
repertoire was a mix of songs from Anglo-Scotch traditions – hillbilly – and
those that come from non-English speaking traditions such as polkas, waltzes,
and schottisches. "No Norwegians in Dickeyville" uses the music from
a Swedish waltz called "Kväsarvalsen" but adds distinctly Wisconsin
lyrics.
Aside from
an old fiddle tune, Dickeyville is also known for its grotto. The Dickeyville Grotto is actually a series of grottos and shrines on the grounds
of Holy Ghost Parish. Stones, dishes, seashells, glass shards, etc. are all held in
place with mortar. It was built in the 1920s by one Father Mathius Wernerus who
was pastor at the time.
It is quite
the sight.
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No entry would be complete without something food related. Last weekend the Frau came
home from the farmer's market with a loaf of Korean cream cheese garlic bread.
I presume that, if it's available in Madison, it's available in all larger
metro areas and has been for a while.
The best way
I can think of to describe it is to imagine challah bread having a baby with a
crab rangoon. You've got a cream cheese core surrounded by a mantle of garlic
butter nestled inside a crust of vaguely sweet, light bread. Is this really available on the streets of Seoul? I don't know but it's tasty stuff.
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Bonus photo.
I spied these in someone's yard on a recent bike ride. I guess they're really
into old sci-fi b-movies.
Last Thursday night I headed out to Mt. Horeb for a book signing by UW professor James Leary. He was promoting his new book, Polkabilly, a look at local legends the Goose Island Ramblers.
The group started out in the early 1960s playing at a tavern called Glen and Ann's, which is now the Nitty Gritty. "Uncle Windy" Whitford, "Smokey George" Gilbertsen, and Bruce Bollerud entertained audiences for years playing a mix of hillbilly and Wisconsin folk music. Windy passed away in 2000 so the night was George and Bruce playing fiddle and accordion, respectively.
I pulled into town and found the Prairie Bookstore. It was small but warm and the children's book area in back was setup with chairs. Walking in, I found that Bruce and George were tuning up. Bruce had his accordion and George turned to me and joked that he was their first accordionist. Professor Leary was chatting with a couple folks and a couple guys were setting up a video camera and a mic to record the night. A mostly older crowed slowly drifted in and it became clear very early that a lot of these people knew Bruce and George. Folks chatted with the band and a line formed to get copies of Polkabilly signed as well as to buy cassettes and videotapes. I mentioned to Professor Leary that my polka ramblings led to the article in Isthmus and he remarked that he enjoyed my writing. Perhaps there is a career for me in folklore! At one point, an old high school classmate of Bruce's came up and said hello. Everyone seemed to know one another from back in the day and it felt almost like a family gathering.
George
Bruce
With a few stragglers still in line for autographs, Professor Leary began the evening by telling us why he wrote the book. He talked about growing up in Rice Lake. For those unfamiliar with Wisconsin, Rice Lake is a small town in the upper northwest part of the state. As a kid, Leary listened to WJMC, a local radio station, and heard lots of different kinds of music. In addition to pop standards, there was much that was representative of the upper Midwest: Scandinavian dance music, the Polish Barn dance, a bit of yodeling, et al. This was the folk music of the largest ethnic groups that settled Wisconsin – Germans, Poles, and Scandinavians. But there was also plenty of music to be had around town and he lovingly recalled the Buckhorn tavern where fiddlers would gather to play on the familiar 4-string variety as well as the Norwegian Hardanger fiddle. Leary noted the wonderful musical mixing up nort. Not only did the whites learn from other whites but there was also a 2-way influence between the Native Americans and the white folk. All of these people trading techniques and songs created quite a heady musical brew.
Despite the diversity of cultures contributing their music to the brew, Leary noted how academia has largely ignored the folk music of the upper Midwest. Long ago the definition of American folk music became that of the music derived from the British Isles and later from former slaves. The sound of American folk is normally thought of as the sound of Appalachia and the Mississippi Delta. Leary thinks this is a tragic state of affairs and his book is an attempt to show the wonderful diversity of the equally American folk music found in the upper Midwest and perhaps start a process where the music will get the respect it deserves. And, for him, the Goose Island Ramblers epitomize the variety of styles to be found here. With his introduction over, he handed the reins over to George and Bruce.
They played a spirited, if short, set and told stories in between songs. Bruce talked about how he grew up on a farm and that many of the farmhands were from Norway. One of them told him that, if he wanted to learn how to yodel, he had to eat grass. And so, much to his mother's chagrin, Bruce ate grass. He also told us how he inherited a massive collection of 78s from a neighbor. George recalled playing at schoolhouses in a trio when he was 8 or 9. Later on, he left the area and traveled the world - Asia and the Pacific Rim during World II – playing music.
They played a number of songs including their most famous tune, "No Norwegians in Dickeyville". If I recall correctly, they opened their set with "Going to Mt. Horeb For a Beer or Two". There was a polka in there as well.
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