Blue Horizon

Rain Dogs Revisited - Big Black Mariah

2011-09-08T15:43:00.000-05:00

St. Vincent brings down the house

2011-09-08T15:38:00.000-05:00

2011-08-03T19:31:00.003-05:00

When Matt came to visit us this spring, Duluth's Homegrown Music Festival was going on. Homegrown is a weeklong music festival that takes place in bars and restaurants all over Duluth with about 150 local bands playing until the wee small hours of the morning. They have free trolleys that make loops around town all night. We boarded one of these with Matt at probably midnight or 1 AM (can't remember for sure; it was a while ago) to go back to our car, and sitting right there was Don Ness, the mayor of Duluth. Apparently he was once in charge of the festival before becoming mayor. He was about to get off at another show, but first we asked him to take this picture of us.

I'm reminded of this because I just saw this article about him.

Duluth mayor's high job approval rating no surprise

Posted by: Howie Hanson Updated: July 23, 2011 - 10:47 PM

Duluth Mayor Don Ness signaled to an audience member to ask a question during a press conference for the new Miracle Field in Lincoln Park. Howie Hanson / For StarTribune.com

In 2007, there were 12 candidates running for mayor of Duluth including the incumbent. After filings closed on July 19 of this year, there was only one candidate, Mayor Don Ness.

It marks the first time since Duluth was incorporated in 1887 that there will not be a contested race for mayor. Duluth has a long history of competitive and contentious local elections, and it’s not unusual for anywhere from 3 to 11 candidates to challenge the incumbent.

So what's different this year?

For one, a recent National Citizen Survey showed Ness has an 86-percent job approval rating. It’s a remarkable number considering the animosity directed at politicians and incumbents at all levels of government these days.

It’s also worth noting that the approval rating has come on the heels of very challenging times in the city of Duluth. Over the past four years Ness has cut popular services, reduced retiree benefits, raised taxes, challenged city unions, and had five different chief administrative officers in the first two years of his first term. Any one of those issues could have derailed a re-election campaign.

Ness has called himself a “lousy politician” because he prefers to work on administrative matters rather than make public appearances. As a young father of three, he often declines invitations for speaking roles in order to be home with his wife and kids. He is introverted, serious, and many would say awkward in social situations.

Not necessarily the model for electoral success.

"I have tremendous staff, (and) our success is based on the talents and determination of our employees who decided to take full ownership of our biggest problems and then solved them," Ness said of his approval rating. "We decided to be brutally honest with our residents and trusted that they would understand and support decisions that they didn't like, but deep down, they knew were necessary.

"As Americans we have become so accustomed to be lied to and pandered to that most politicians don't believe citizens are capable of accepting the truth. If I've been successful, it’s because I decided to trust that citizens would support our efforts to make tough, painful, and structural changes to how we do business in Duluth."

Many have assumed that Ness will run for higher office, but he has rejected the prospect of running for Congress in 2012.

"I love being mayor because I can see a problem, craft a solution, and implement it in a very short period of time," said Ness. "I'm fed up with politics in DC and unfortunately that sort of cynical, partisan, power-driven politics has infected our state capitol. Sure, I'm ambitious; I want to help make Duluth one of the great mid-sized cities in America. I've gladly given up any higher office ambitions to focus all of my energies to that goal."

There is something special happening in Duluth these days. There is a sense of optimism, confidence and pride that has been missing for decades.

By solving some of the biggest issues facing the city, Ness has had a role in that success. But he is quick to deflect the praise.

"This is a success story for the whole city, I'm just playing one small role," said Ness. "It’s really about the private sector creating jobs, a new generation of entrepreneurs competing world-wide, an authentic and crazy-talented arts and music community, and residents who have chosen Duluth because they want to live in a city with a sense of place that reflects their values.

"We're not interested in a zero-sum competition with other regional centers in Minnesota. Our sights are set on competing nationwide with dynamic, progressive cities such as Boulder, Asheville and Burlington. We want all of Minnesota to be proud of Duluth."

2011-07-05T19:57:00.000-05:00

getting there...

in a matter of time it would slip from my mind

2011-05-30T09:49:00.001-05:00

We're having our first all-out thunderstorm of the year here--finally. It's been an extremely cool spring, even by Duluth standards (apparently). Many of the trees are just starting, or have yet to start budding. Most days, even the clear sunny ones, start around 40 and top off around 45 or 50, which is about my favorite temperature, but can get tiring when it should be warmer, and when you're on a lawnmower and a windy bluff at 8 in the morning.

I had a day off after school finished before I started my summer job. I hadn't even finished my grading yet, but I landed a pretty great gig working at...wait for it...a cemetery. Being gone for three weeks in the middle of the summer made the job search a little more difficult, but I'm pretty happy to have something where I'm outside all day with probably one of the best views in all of Duluth. It's the biggest cemetery in town and it's spread out over a couple hundred acres of very steep hillside, high above the west Duluth bays and harbors. I'll try to get some pictures of it. I mow and trim all day long. I sing songs to myself as they come to me. My neck turns red in the sun and my hands grow numb and calloused. It's wonderful. The oldest burials there date back to the civil war. I look at the moss covered stones, read old names and dates, and smell pine and grass all day. I let my mind wander.

Our wedding is in 12 days. Lisa and I both have to move all of our stuff out of our places and over to our new place by Wednesday. We've recently had the strange and delightful experience of buying real furniture. We've never done that before. But don't worry, we're still hoping to have some classic thrift store items. If we're lucky, maybe the average age of items in our apartment will be something like...66, roughly. A good age.

I'm halfway done with grad school, which is exciting and daunting at the same time. I don't really know how to describe it when people ask 'how do you like it?' It's a mixed bag of opposing extremes. Overall, I wouldn't trade the experiences and things I've learned for anything, but this last semester tried my patience and will more than the first, despite some very positive things. There's something about it for me that's like being buried alive; it takes a part of your self away until you complete the necessary tasks and jump through the required hoops. You're just trapped there until it's done, and then you're set free again. This varies by class and task, but generally applies. It sucks up so much of my time and concern that it's difficult to process other aspects of life properly, and that's been troubling in the last five months.

That being said, I'm really looking forward to my classes next semester--an independent study on Existential Literature in which I'll get to read Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard and many others. It's actually a philosophy course, but I basically get to design it myself. I'm going to watch some cool movies, too...Ikiru, Pickpocket, Being There...etc. Then I'm doing a Teaching Practicum in British Lit, which should be good as it's with a professor whom I appreciate.

But thankfully, none of that will come before this summer. Lise and I are traveling up highway 61 after the wedding, from one end of MN to the other (almost), concluding with a canoe/camping trip in the Boundary Waters. After that, we're looking forward to having a home that is ours rather than crowded, make-shift places compromised by those we share them with; we're excited to explore and enjoy the many activities in and around Duluth, to visit friends and family, and to turn the record player up loud (with less worry about neighbors) and dance to Dylan in the kitchen.

Hopefully we'll see most of you for more dancing in a few days.

There's No Other Like My Baby

2011-05-08T22:40:00.000-05:00

songs are just really very interesting things to be doing with the air

2011-04-07T17:42:00.000-05:00

This guy's like John the Baptist meets Cannery Row. His performances here are really great, and this is one of the best Hall of Fame presentations I've seen.

raise a glass, make a cake, throw some bottles from the rooftops.

2011-03-07T10:35:00.000-06:00

From the Almanac:

It's the birthday of one of the great Texas troubadours and a legend in songwriting circles, Townes Van Zandt, born in Fort Worth (1944). He was born into wealthy oil family, and they moved around quite a bit when he was a young kid – to Minnesota, Colorado, and Illinois-- but he abandoned wealth for poetry and singing and living couch to couch. His focus was the words and the story. Though he never had a hit of his own, Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard took his song "Pancho and Lefty" all the way to No. 1 in 1983. Others recorded him too — Emmylou Harris, Lyle Lovett, The Cowboy Junkies.

His friend Steve Earle famously said he was "the best songwriter in the whole world," adding, "I'll stand on Bob Dylan's coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that." To which Van Zandt was said to have replied: "I've met Bob Dylan and his bodyguards, and I don't think Steve could get anywhere near his coffee table."

Years later, Earle recanted. He said, "When somebody's as good as Townes Van Zandt was and more people don't know about it, it's Townes's fault. Part of him didn't consider himself worthy of anything." Van Zandt died in 1997, at age 53.

It's been said that hearing a Van Zandt song "is like standing in front of a Van Gogh or a Renoir. You want to be able to access that part of any artist or writer or poet. ... They show you what a true artist is capable of doing."

The first verse of "Pancho and Lefty" (1972):
Living on the road my friend
Was gonna keep you free and clean
Now you wear your skin like iron
Your breath's as hard as kerosene
You weren't your mama's only boy
But her favorite one it seems
She began to cry when you said goodbye
And sank into your dreams

An Old Man's Winter Night

2011-02-14T17:04:00.002-06:00

I think I know this old man--and this house and farm, for that matter. He said after the war that he was going to die there, and now he is there, dying, the furnace going out on sub-zero nights, keeping him awake to sleep in the day.

An Old Man's Winter Night

All out of doors looked darkly in at him
Through the thin frost, almost in separate stars,
That gathers on the pane in empty rooms.
What kept his eyes from giving back the gaze
Was the lamp tilted near them in his hand.
What kept him from remembering what it was
That brought him to that creaking room was age.
He stood with barrels round him -- at a loss.
And having scared the cellar under him
In clomping there, he scared it once again
In clomping off; -- and scared the outer night,
Which has its sounds, familiar, like the roar
Of trees and crack of branches, common things,
But nothing so like beating on a box.
A light he was to no one but himself
Where now he sat, concerned with he knew what,
A quiet light, and then not even that.
He consigned to the moon, such as she was,
So late-arising, to the broken moon
As better than the sun in any case
For such a charge, his snow upon the roof,
His icicles along the wall to keep;
And slept. The log that shifted with a jolt
Once in the stove, disturbed him and he shifted,
And eased his heavy breathing, but still slept.
One aged man -- one man -- can't keep a house,
A farm, a countryside, or if he can,
It's thus he does it of a winter night.

-Robert Frost

you only want me when i'm fever dreaming

2011-01-28T10:38:00.000-06:00

in a silent way/it's about time

2011-01-11T12:37:00.002-06:00

Today is my first day back in Duluth. Lisa is at work and I'm using my time less productively than I should be, listening to a Christmas gift and wishing I would have bought coffee last night.

These pictures are actually from before Christmas, but it's snowing like this again now. The snow is coming down perfectly straight, almost like it's weighted. Such stillness is strange on my first day back from the prairies.

School starts again next week and I'm reminded of the weirdness of holiday break. People often asked me last summer if I felt weird about going back to school after a few years of being out; ultimately, this break feels more strange, going from 16 hour days seemingly focused entirely on school work to just under a month of no school whatsoever, in different places, with different people and different concerns, then back to school again. Very strange. But the coming week should help me get back into work mode, hopefully. And thus far, break has been quite good, to put it mildly.

I'm not really sure what to do with this blog yet, as you can likely see if you ever check here, so we'll see what happens. I know you're all waiting on pins and needles.