Ice Shanty Village 2026

The official name is “Art Shanty Projects” but I prefer to call it the “Ice Shanty Village.” It’s been a yearly gathering since 2004, though the location has changed a few times: Medicine Lake, then White Bear Lake, and now Lake Harriet. I’m wondering if it might even have been held in Stillwater at some time in the distant past. A few years ago, when the weather wasn’t cooperating, they set up the shanties on land.   

Wherever it pops up, the village consists of whimsical and sometimes elaborate structures—ice houses, basically—that have been created to advance a civic value, a scientific concept, or a mode of personal expression, and spread out across the ice with no apparent order or logic. Some function as performance venues. One shanty invariably serves as a Digger store, offering second-hand hats, scarfs, sweaters, and gloves to anyone who’s ventured out on the lake without the proper wraps.

Though the themes of specific shanties are often serious, the entire operation is conceived in the childlike spirit of “let’s build a fort.” Bike races are held from time to time—they provide the bikes--and there’s a kite day, too. In previous years we’ve come upon aerobic exercise classes, lip-synching contests, flamenco mini-juergas, and scenes from La Boheme. Years later, I’m still ruing the day we arrived too late to see a performance of “Waiting for Godot” on skates.

It was cold yesterday—we’d decided not to go—but patches of blue were appearing in the sky here and there, and next week is forecast to be colder. We were reading in front of the fire when it suddenly seemed like the perfect time to take a break before the afternoon got too dark.

“Let’s drive down the parkway to the ice shanties,” I said. “Maybe we’ll snag a good parking lot near shore. And if we don’t, we can just call it an afternoon drive and come home.”

By the time we got to Lake Harriet the clouds had returned, but we got lucky with the parking. (In previous years we’ve chosen to park in the neighborhood nearby, usually too far away.) And it wasn’t really that cold. The bad news was that the ice on the lake had only a thin veneer of loose snow on top, and it was slippery. But there were plenty of people wandering around, reading the signs, entering the shanties to warm up, or chatting with the creators about their shacks.

The shanties drawing the largest crowds seemed to be highly interactive. One was a witch’s candy house, inside of which they were concocting some sort of potion. Outside, a second group had formed to recite a curse together—perhaps to rid the city of demonic ICE agents. (Good idea!)

A few shanties away, a three-piece rock band was pounding away aimlessly on some bass guitars, as if they were just learning how to play. But perhaps they were just expressing their frustration that their shanty was located in the far corner of the village, a little off the beaten path.

Inside the Yellow Submarine shanty, you could get a look at images taken at the bottom of Lake Harriet through fake portholes. Not far away, a large group of heavily clothed visitors was square-dancing to a three-piece string band enclosed in a plastic bubble.

promenade left with your left hand ...

The caller was standing on a small stage outside with a mic. “Second-hand left, dosey-doe, and round the corner.” She was good.

A biologist was giving a lecture in the beaver dam house, constructed mostly of thin reed window-blinds. it was too crowded to enter, but we spent some time admiring the colorful papier-mache fish dangling from strings outside, designed to evoke the beaver’s largely underwater habitat.

One shanty focused on the notion of inescapable trade-offs. In order to feed the fire, you had to pull a slab of firewood off the wall outside, thus increasing the draft inside. Another option would be to spend some time outside in the cold, sawing new planks for the walls … or the fire.   

Near the entrance to the village, we passed a booth consisting of a large array of small chalkboards, upon which passers-by had taken the time to complete somewhat personal statements. Most of the statements were phrased as double-negatives, and I had a hard time determining precisely what was being said. For example: “I don’t try to not need ….” One of the answers was “drugs.” A second, scrawled on the same slate, was “financial planning.” Another statement began: “I know I want to not try ….” One of the answers was “gourmet mac and cheese.” A second was “insomnia.”

From first to last, it was a cheery and heartening scene. And the fun continues next weekend. Details here.

 

A Few Days on the Coast

After the extended Christmas hubbub, full of early darkness and general good cheer, Hilary and I almost invariably head for the fresh air, stunning beauty, silence, and solitude of the coast—the north coast, that is. Lake Superior.

It’s long since become a tradition.

We try to mix things up a bit from year to year, of course. Theme and variations. But the drive up is often punctuated by a visit to the Sax-Zim Bog. The following days are likely to include a few cross-country skiing excursions, pasties and fresh fish on the menu—not on the same night!—with herring, Jarlsberg cheese, Aunt Nellie’s red cabbage, and Ingebretsen’s liver pâté prominently featured on the lunch-time smorgasbord. Gooseberry Falls State Park. Two Harbors, and Shovel Point are all near at hand.

Our cabin is right on the shore, a half mile from Highway 61. It has a gas fireplace which generates a lot of heat and is easy to flip on. We’re always eager to relish the call of the coyotes (or wolves) and the startling brilliance of the night sky—especially the Quadrantid Meteor Shower on January 3.

And then there are the books.

What was that remark by Kierkegaard? “The more a person limits himself, the more resourceful he becomes.”

Operating on that principal, as usual, I limited myself to eight or nine books. That might seem like a lot, but you never know what mood you’re going to be in. Among my choices were a small early paperback of Milosz’s selected poems, a book about the Old Testament called People of the Book by A. N. Wilson, and a wide-ranging collection of essays about literature and art by Clive James called As of This Writing. Add to that a slim hardcover by a once-famous Columbia University prof, Sterling Lamprecht, called Freedom and Nature, an obscure (but handsome) paperback by Neal Atcherson called The Black Sea, and a fat hardcover collection of nature writings by Barry Lopez with a cool blue cover called Horizon. I was set. And if none of these books struck my fancy, too bad for me. I’ll have no choice but to read at least one of them, anyway. (Though in a pinch, the discard shop at the Two Harbors library is usually full of pleasant surprises!)  

But as we walked into the Wilbert Café in Cotton my mind was engaged in deeper issues: the burger or the pasty or the BLT? It’s a small but spacious room with pale green walls; several groups of people (with binoculars) are usually sitting in the booths along the window that looks out across the snow-packed parking lot and the four-lanes of highway 53, an expanse that’s uniformly flat and dreary. But the talk is lively. And during our recent visit Sparky Stennsaw, one of the moving forces behind the bog, happened to be eating there. As he was leaving, I heard him say to the group in the next booth, “Head for Two Harbors and on up the shore to Grand Marais. Look for that mountain bluebird. Look out beyond the harbor for long-tailed ducks.”

A man sitting alone a few tables to my right tried to catch my eye once or twice. I learned why a few minutes later, when he engaged another customer in conversation, telling the man about the ten acres he was developing near Cherry, and the two cabins he already had for rent. He gave the man a card.

Our own sightings in the bog were modest: a Canada jay near the visitors’ center, a boreal chickadee in the midst of a flock of black-capped chickadees at the Admiralty Road feeders, and a flock of pine grosbeaks at a platform feeder on Auggie’s Bogwalk  No hawks. No owls. Not even a siskin.

The bog had gotten a bit of snow, and the black spruce forest was stunning with the late afternoon sun coming in low and bright through the frigid air.

Rather than head back to Duluth and up the shore, we decided to cut cross-country through a chunk of the north woods we didn’t know well. I had never been to Forbes before. A few years ago we skied some sketchy trails near Brimson, a town better known for the New Years Eve bashes at Hugo’s, the local bar, which seems to be almost the only building in town. 

But the setting sun was behind us and the sky to the east was tending toward peach near the horizon. It had a scintillating dreamy quality that reminded me of childhood summers in Oklahoma. Quite a contrast to the street-light glare of the strip malls and body shops of the highway into Duluth.

It was still light when we arrived at the resort in Castle Danger. We drove to our cabin (#8) to find that it was already occupied! Hmm. I’d printed out the reservation. There was no mistaking the number. We stopped in at the office. “No, you’re in #11,” Jamie said, looking slightly confused. “The key’s on the kitchen counter.” End of problem.

There followed three or four days of reading, hiking, skiing, cooking, and staring out the window. Bright moon through the clouds, but very few stars. A few passing ore boats.

I won’t bore you with all the notes I took during our afternoon reading sessions, but one remark by Lamprecht is truly golden: “Despite the admirable character of the kindly Kant himself, the Kantian influence, in practice, has been as deleterious as in theory it has been incoherent.”

Bravo!

A second trenchant observation won’t hurt. “Nature is a lush welter of teleological profusion. Man faces the moral task of organizing as best he can what nature offers with total disregard of centrality.”

And while we're at it, how about this one? “Scorn of matter is a mark of arrogance of spirit. People of healthy spirituality never lose capacity for enjoyment of material goods.”  

We enjoyed our frozen walleye “from Canada,” breaded, fried, then baked, while listening to some poundy, youthful piano sonatas by Beethoven, then watched the gentle waves outside the window reflect a shimmering moon. 

It was a supermoon, in fact, and it also happened to be at perihelion. The last time than happened, in 1912, the extra gravitational pull set one or two icebergs loose, and the Titanic sank!

 

New Year: Nouvelle Vague

The phrase “nouvelle vague” might not mean much to most readers. Even the phrase New Wave might conjure images of the Talking Heads, the Ramones, and Blondie, rather than Truffaut, Rivette, and Rohmer. The film released last summer under the name Nouvelle Vague refers to the second group, introducing us to a number of very young French film critics, most of them writing for Cahier du Cinema, who turned to making their own films in the late 1950s. It focuses on the making of a single film, Breathless, which was released in 1960 and became a classic.

Breathless wasn’t the first Nouvelle Vague film, nor is it the best of the lot. Director Richard Linklater chose it, no doubt, because it’s among the breeziest and best-known. Of equal importance, it gave him the opportunity to place Jean-Luc Godard, the most eccentric but also the most revolutionary and absurd director in the cohort, front and center in the narrative.

The casting department did a wonderful job of finding actors who actually look like Francois Truffaut, Jean-Paul Bemondo, Agnes Varda, Jean Seaberg, Eric Rohmer, Roberto Rossellini, Jean-Pierre Melville, Juliet Greco, and Godard himself.

Each character is identified by caption on first appearance. I’d never heard of many of the minor characters. It doesn’t matter. The film is a lark, shot in French (of course), in black-and-white, and in an old-fashioned, squarish aspect ratio. It’s a lighthearted and cheeky romp that zips along even as the cast and crew grow tired of Godard’s cranky philosophizing and unorthodox shooting schedule, which is based entirely on his own whims and the desire to capture fleeting and unexpected moments of “authenticity.”

Among the masterworks of the genre, three films by Truffaut stand out: Jules and Jim, The 400 Blows, and Shoot the Piano Player. I saw them all at the Bell Museum in the early 70s, and was indelibly struck by their charm. Truffaut made other films worth seeing—Bed and Board, Stolen Kisses, Small Change, Day for Night—but never entirely recaptured the poetic intensity of that early work.

Eric Rohmer made a long string of films with far more conversation that action. The scripts for the first set were translated into English and published under the title Six Moral Tales. The names might be familiar: My Night at Maud's, Chloe in the Afternoon, Claire's Knee. Many more films followed, grouped in other ways. Never especially dramatic, they were always worth seeing. 

The two films by Agnes Varda that I can recall are The Gleaners and Me, a documentary about gleaning, and Chloe from 5 to 7, a collection of zany and romantic Parisian events in the best Nouvelle Vague manner, 

Godard started out with a more cerebral approach, and reached a peak of narrative film-making with Pierrot le Fou, perhaps. It’s an outrageous blend of Hollywood tropes and existential mystification. In time his distrust of scripts led him almost inevitably toward documentaries. 

The documentary of his that I remember best is In Praise of Love, which was released in 2002. You can watch it for free on YouTube here:

The themes are the same as his early "dramas"—the natural inability of the sexes to understand one another, the evils of capitalism, anti-Americanism, the rooted glories of classical European (i.e. French) culture, and the enduring expressive power of cinema cliché. The "story" is fragmentary at best, hence impossible to summarize. 

Much of the film is shot in Paris, in black and white, and we’re reminded repeatedly of the crude and romantic beauty of Breathless, The 400 Blows, and other films of the early Novelle Vague. The tones here are more saturated, however, like an Atget print, and the contrasts more dramatic, while at the same time the ebb and flow of motion and conversation is more comfortably elegiac. Old men look at famous paintings in an office, while discussing a film project based on the idea that middle age, unlike youth and old age, is a region of doubtful substance and character. Young and old women audition for the film, while the film’s producer scours Paris for a particular actress that he’d met before in Brittany. She works scrubbing out train cars at night.

Rehearsals involve episodes in the lives of Parsival and Eglantine. Charles Peguy and Simone Weil are quoted from time to time. Well into the film, the scene suddenly shifts to a vividly unreal digital color, and we find ourselves in a flashback involving American film agents who’ve just purchased the rights to a World War II Resistance story from the grandparents of our mysterious actress. (In Godard’s view, America has no history: it buys history from others.)

These elements never coalesce, but the images build in the mind, layer upon layer, like a Breton novel or a long Desnos poem, and the elements involved—courtly love, Catholicism, the authenticity of honest work, the corrupting power of capitalism, the beauty of Paris, and the ineluctable movement of time, which obliterates almost everything in its path—form an attractive ensemble, full of sadness and mist, history and romance, heroism and self-doubt.

On the night I saw the film, twenty-odd years ago, the auditorium at the Bell Museum was half full. That’s not bad! Young bohemians, many of them perhaps students from university French classes, sat beside old bohemians--film buffs who had seen Masculin-Feminine or Band of Outsiders at that same auditorium 30 years earlier. 

The film ends with the narrator ( Godard himself?) reflecting on all the people going down into a subway station, all the lives, the possibilities. Suddenly the film cracks and the screen goes white. Someone (young) in the audience yells “Credits!” but an older guy wearing tennis shoes and a zip-up hooded sweatshirt, who was just getting up to leave, says, “That’s the way the film ends. I saw it last night. That’s Godard ...”  

Christmas with Marty Supreme

Afternoon matinees are almost as much of a Christmas tradition as sleigh-rides. Maybe more. On the day after Christmas, we decided to get out of the house before the bad weather arrived and see a film. There’d been a lot of hoopla surrounding the Christmas Day release of the latest Timothy Chalamet film, Marty Supreme, but we didn’t know anything about that. We’d seen the previews. The movie looked good.

And it was good. It has lots of razzle-dazzle, a relentless pace, an array of memorable minor characters, and a seemingly endless stream of plot twists. Enormous effort has been given to recreating the look and feel of New York City circa 1950. And Chalamet “nails” the central figure, a young shoe salesman (and ping-pong hustler), who thinks he can become world champion, if only he can drum up the funds to fly to London for the tournament.

The soundtrack is also good—and loud—though I wasn’t familiar with any of the songs.  Hits like "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" and “I Have the Touch” were prominently featured; I’d never heard of them. Perry Como and Fats Domino are also on the playlist. (Those two I’m familiar with.)

There are patches of violence in the film, and Marty himself steps on a lot of toes in his pursuit of personal glory. Well, so does Cary Grant in His Girl Friday. Come to think of it, what about Orson Welles in Citizen Kane? And how about the Jack Nicholson characters in a range of films from Five Easy Pieces to Chinatown and The Last Detail?

Marty has a good deal of youthful charm, and he seems to have a lot of friends at the local ping-pong parlor. In short, he isn’t a total jerk. Perhaps we can give him an added measure of sympathy second-hand by way of his sometime girlfriend, Rachel, played with anguished depth by Odessa Azion.

Ping-pong isn’t much of a spectator sport these days, but it was big in the early 1950s, and the tournament scenes are fun to watch. They’re given added political dimension due to the fact that the player Marty most wants to beat is Japanese. Marty also cracks a few Holocaust jokes along the way that are in very bad taste, but defends himself by arguing, “Hey. I’m Jewish. I’m Hitler’s worst enemy. And I’m going to be world champion.” 

But the political touches are minor, and the film has none of the “camp” flavor we find in works by the Coen Brothers. No, Marty Supreme is a vivid throwback to the days when a rollicking good romance/adventure story was all that an audience required.  

Homage to Mercury

There’s moisture in the air again. I'm sure you've noticed. It's raining. It’s still dark at 6:45, but on a clear day, Jupiter is bright and high in the western sky, and the sun is brilliant on the ungainly heaps of snow. On a clear day, it also streams in above the piano on a lower plane than at any other time of the year, shoots across the room, and comes to rest on the light switch in the hall. 

Mercury is the god of quick changes, I think. They say you can see it just before sunrise in the southeast these days. I haven't made the effort, but I can see its influence everywhere.

It all began with a dreadful cold snap. During that bitter spell, we sat in the den by the warmth of the Jøtul stove, though we might just as well have been up on the North Shore. As usual in such situations, I had a stack of books by my side on the couch, including Petrarch’s Bucolicum Carmen, a biography of Erik Satie, a slim book about aesthetics by Bence Nanay (part of Oxford’s Very Short Introduction series), and a collection of essays by John MacQuarrie called Studies in Christian Existentialism.

Also near at hand was my journal, into which I occasionally jotted a few notes. For example:

“Nanay rejects both beauty and pleasure as foundations or standards for aesthetic judgment. In fact, he rejects judgment itself, preferring the term “analysis.” He quotes Susan Sontag, who characterizes aesthetic experiences as ‘detached, restful, contemplative, emotionally free, beyond indignation or approval.’ Evidently Sontag didn’t go to the movies much.”

The weather turned that night, and the next morning we went on a spectacular ski, following Tornado Alley south in bright sun through the woods, under Highway 55, across Bassett Creek, and around a loop through the white pines just north of Glenwood Avenue. We've walked these grounds many times, but had never skied them before. The freshness in the air was genuinely intoxicating. 

In order to make the most of it, I shoveled two feet of snow off the deck and oiled the track on the garage door, which was squeaking something terrible. (Alas! It still is.) Then I split a few pieces of the firewood stacked in the garage  into narrow strips for kindling, which will come in handy sooner or later. It won’t stay this warm for long.

The next morning the air was just the same, but the snow had crystalized during the thaw, and we left the skis at home during our morning ramble down alongside the creek.

Last night the rain arrived, slightly weird, but still atmospheric. 

This morning I was cleaning up some emails from Earth/Sky News and was cheered to learn that the universe, like me, is slowing down. The theory had been that it was not only expanding, but accelerating. New research offers a more reasonable view. In findings published November 6 in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, a team of astronomers argued that “the universe is in a phase of decelerated expansion.” 

Here's the gist: Early arguments for accelerated expansion were based on measurements of distance to faraway galaxies using Type 1a supernovas. These supernovas were regarded as the universe’s “standard candles,” but new research suggests that their brightness is related not only to distance, but also to the age of the stars that created them. Once you factor that information in, the data suggests that the universe expands and contracts like an accordion, rather than expanding and thinning out with relentless and ever-increasing speed.

I like that idea, and Empedocles would have liked it, too, I think.  

Advent Meditations

The Pope in Nicaea.

The new Pope. A wonderful man by all accounts, and better yet, he’s from Chicago!

A few weeks ago he paid a visit to Nicaea, in Turkey, in honor of the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea. Bishops from many nations gathered there in 325—hundreds if not thousands of them—to deliberate a wide variety of issues. (Who paid for the lodging, the food, the enormous travel expenses? The Roman state.) 

At the top of the agenda was the question of whether Jesus existed before his birth in the manger in Bethlehem. The Arians said NO. At the council this position was ruled a heresy. It was deemed imperative to underscore the position (we can hardly call it a “fact”) that Jesus was of “one substance with the father” since the beginning of time, and perhaps well before.

To most people who were raised in Christian traditions the issue isn’t that important. For many, the most enduring result of the council was the introduction of a new prayer—the Nicaean Creed— alongside the somewhat shorter Apostle’s Creed. Most people find the Apostle’s Creed easy to remember. The Nicaean Creed? Not so much.  

At any rate, I never got the hang of it. Yet the rhetoric did sink in, to the extent that I began to wonder what a “substance” actually was, from the metaphysical point of view. I’m still wondering.

It’s a good question. But at Christmas time another question perhaps looms larger: Was Jesus ever really a baby? Would he be “of one substance” with the Father during that rudimentary phase in his earthly ontogeny?

It might seem like a frivolous question, if not a blasphemous one, but it cuts to the heart of the Christmas event. Aside from the lights, the music, the gatherings and the food, it seems to me that people are often moved by what I might call the rural simplicity and innocence of the event.

Let me suggest that Christmas is the most evocative time of the liturgical year, in part, because it's the least didactic. The gold, frankincense, and myrrh are dazzling and exotic; we don’t really care what they symbolize. The Star in the East could be any star, if it’s bright enough to attract our attention. (Stars are cool and mysterious, especially in the deep winter night.) We can forget, for the time being, the sometimes dour, gnomic, and prescriptive episodes in Jesus’s adulthood, and enjoy the aroma of balsam, the sweet buttery taste of a spritz, or the slightly edgy bite of a home-made pepper kaka, hot out of the oven. And also, perhaps, a vaguely delirious sense of cheer and hope.  

Family memories resurface. Some of them are “magical,” while others may remind us, painfully, of how naïve and self-centered we used to be—and probably still are. 

But there is no need to dwell on such things during these celebratory days of darkness and light. Better simply to relish the color, warmth, and togetherness that are pleasantly adrift on a mysterious something. Is it time? Or substance?

Holiday Sale

On a Saturday in early December bright with new snow, what better thing to do than get together with friends, acquaintances, and a few utter strangers (friends of friends) at a low-key arts and shopping event? Hilary has been putting such gatherings together with a few friends for several years, and we hosted another one a few days ago featuring Hilary’s pottery, a friend’s dazzling runners, placemats, and other weavings, and even a few of my old books—plus a few newly printed miniature paperbacks on display as “stocking stuffers.”

Everything was priced to sell, and besides, any gift takes on added luster when it’s accompanied by the remark: “A friend of mine made this.” Not to mention the fact that the artworks themselves were first-rate. But matters of commerce aside, it’s fun to participate in an event where people come and go at odd intervals, bring a few friends, run into people they haven’t seen in a while or have perhaps heard about but have never met. They might eat a cookie or drink a cup of cider, watch the nuthatches and woodpeckers at the feeder out on the deck, or strike up a conversation at random as they examine the wares.

We sent out a few email invitations and so did our weaver-friend, Dave Taylor. We also invited a few young friends who live on our street. Three generations of Dave’s family showed up, two of Hilary’s brothers, a cousin or two, and numerous friends stretching back more than half a century.   

In the course of the day I found myself discussing the bison kill site at Itasca State Park, the Danish String Quartet, the comparative civic health of Chaska and Chanhassen, grizzly bear attacks at Glacier National Park, the novels of Thomas Bernhard, cross-country skiing at Wirth Park, the films of Mel Brooks (I somehow forgot to mention Young Frankenstein!), the merits of E-bikes, and sundry other things that escape me now. One friend was recovering from cataract surgery, another from knee surgery, 

Once the guests had gone home, as we sat around trying the sort the proceeds, Dave told me that he’d spoken at length with six people who owned looms, including one friend of ours who used to design them! (I’d forgotten that.) He’d sold nearly all of his pieces and gotten two commissions. It had been a good day. "Now I can buy more yarn."

Hilary has also “done well.” But I’m pretty sure they would both agree that the most precious result was the memory of friends and acquaintances chattering musically, getting to know one another on a bright December afternoon.