Beat Blog: The Beginning

by Steve Downing, Acting Producer of The Beat

In the first two weeks of The Beat, Northern Community Radio’s Morning Show poem-for-a-day, we’ve featured some very famous, very dead poets with Minnesota connections: Gregory Corso, a charter member of the Beats back in the 1950s; John Berryman, a highly acclaimed poet and teacher when he jumped to his death from a bridge over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis in 1972; James Wright, a Pulitzer Prize winning poet who taught at both the University of Minnesota and Macalaster; and Joyce Sutphen, Minnesota’s current Poet Laureate.

And we’ve included poets who are known (as poets) only to their families and friends.  In time, as this project heats up, you’ll even hear poems written and read by kids who don’t think of themselves as poets. There are really only two criteria at The Beat: 1) the poetry has to be good, and 2) Minnesota has to figure prominently in the poet’s personal story.

An RFP (Request For Poems) is floating around the state now, after a few strategic emails, and poetry is pouring in from everywhere, particularly from established, published poets who are well connected to each other and to the grapevine and who know what a unique opportunity The Beat is. We won’t be able to use every submission, but we promise to look carefully at everything, without bias as to where it came from.

Listen for The Beat after Best Wishes, between 7:30 and 8:00 Monday through Friday mornings. We’ll likely find other times to use it, too. We’re making this up as we go along, in true Northern Community Radio fashion, and the feedback is telling us we’re most definitely onto something

The Beat is funded by Minnesota’s Arts & Cultural Heritage Fund.

Steve "Guido" Downing's take on Christmas Music

This week Grant Frashier hosts KAXE's Between You and Me on Saturday from 10-noon.  His topic is Christmas Music.  Do you have a favorite?  Email us or call during the show 218-326-1234.  

CHRISTMAS BLUES by Steve Downing

            Between you and me, I do not love Christmas music, which I grew up singing, around Mom’s piano and in church choirs and school choruses. And playing, on every instrument I ever picked up. And it’s true that Dodger and I have a pile of Christmas CDs. But, with notable exceptions, I do not love it. Partly because of the brain-killing repetition. You hear the stuff, endlessly, hourly, from Halloween until the season’s over, by everybody from Bing Crosby to George Thorogood. On the radio, TV, in stores, out on the street, in the office, church, parking ramps, restrooms. It’s everywhere. You can’t not hear it. And when you achieve my great age, your relationship with Christmas music, as with body-parts and memory and the chainsaw, is simply tuckering out.

            My earliest difficulty with Christmas music, as a logic-challenged young man, was a philosophical dead end. The secular Christmas music had come to seem completely disconnected from the calendar-defining event in Bethlehem. And, more disconcertingly, the sacred music had absolutely nothing to do with what the Holy Day had morphed into: a godless, shameless, commercial lollapalooza. Gifts. Office parties. Gifts. Travel. Gifts. Light displays and fireworks. Gifts. Mass quantities of cookies. And so on. As I learned, you cannot resolve these contradictions. They’re too structural. Too big to fail.

            Jazz versions of the Christmas canon I can actually still listen to, especially if there’s no singing. And there’s one song on the compilation CD A Rock’n’Roll Christmas, produced by Bob ‘Bah-Humbug’ Bell on PolyGram, 1994, that I always get a kick out of: “Christmas Wrapping” by The Waitresses.

            We also have a compilation put out by Rhino Records in 1995, titled Punk Rock Xmas. This one reliably provides a few chuckles over tumblers of milk-and-bourbon punch, Christmas morning, an old Dodge family tradition. It features bands you’ve never heard of. Bouquet of Veal. Pansy Division. The Celibate Rifles. Stiff Little Fingers. Dodger bought this, thinking of it as a Christmas gift for our nephew, Sam Dodge, when he was a kid, middle-school-age or so. Then we noticed the song titles. Some of them, if I said them out loud on the radio (even just the titles), would jeopardize KAXE’s license and very existence. We decided we should jury the CD before sending it off in the Christmas mail. It did not make it into the Christmas mail. We said at the time that we were protecting Sam from inappropriate material, but really we were protecting Dodger’s brother and sister-in-law, and our relationship with them. Sam would surely not have been corrupted by songs like “Daddy Drank Our Christmas Money” or any of the others---which, as I say, you cannot say out loud over any air waves---and, like us, he would deploy them once a year, no more, for a little merriment around the Christmas tree. Unless, like us, he has no Christmas tree. To get the full measure of Punk Rock Xmas, you should probably have a tree. Fake, of course.

            You can still buy this CD. I checked the other day, and Amazon had five new ones, at forty bucks each, and nine used, at twenty. Priced for the niche market, go tell it. Or you could borrow ours and copy it. But not right now. Right now, it’s tied up. It’s on.

Ice by Steve "Guido" Downing

This week on Between You and Me on KAXE (Saturdays from 10am-noon) we talk ice.  People have taken to the lakes this winter because our our lack of snow and reignited their passion for all things ice.  Check out the KAXE Ice Skating facebook page here

Here's Steve's story:

DOG THOUGHTS

            The hands-down best ice for skating is a lake that has frozen fast, overnight, when the lake was not generating even slow-motion waves, and before there’s anything more than a dusting of light fluffy snow. This sort of alignment occurs no oftener than once a decade. It’s as impermanent as a Martini. You must act right now, not tomorrow.

             Right now, between you and me, imagine that I’ve just pushed off from our house onto Shoal Lake, north of Grand Rapids. My skates are sharp. It’s a beautiful morning, sunny, no wind, cold enough that the lake is still making ice but not so cold that your eyelashes and front-brain freeze up.

            I  strike off into the southeastern bay, where the lake is outlined by gravel pit and swamp, no other houses. I’m about twenty yards from shore, on perfectly clear see-through ice, that looks to be four inches or so thick. The lake’s only six or eight feet deep here in the bay. Suddenly, something catches my eye down there, under the ice. I put on the brakes. Wheel around. Drop into a squat. There. It’s a boat, an old-timey wooden row-boat. Gunwales, seats, ribs: all cloaked in dark underwater moss. I first saw this sunken boat a few summers ago, from the canoe and kayak. Then it seemed to somehow fade away. Last year, it simply was not there, not anywhere. I presumed wind and current had moved it, or someone, implausibly, had raised it. But here it is, more or less right where I remember first finding it. I go down to all fours, for a better look, working on new theories. I’m sure the boat was closer to the surface the last time I saw it, from the kayak, so maybe the mystery is related to changing water levels, or maybe to processes and conditions on the lake-bottom or the underside of the boat.

            As I’m working through this, on hands and knees, my face probably an inch off the ice, I see…a dog. A dog, underwater, alive, swimming, with a mouthful of sticks, passing over the sunken boat, headed for deeper water. This so startles me, I jerk up, not quietly. I might even speak in tongues here, just for a second, hard to tell. The dog reacts. Its head swivels up. One eye registers my presence. It blinks, kicks, does a little course correction, and is gone.

            Of course it’s not a dog. It’s a beaver. Which only enhances the impact of the encounter. For one exceptional moment, I participated in that animal’s unexceptional morning. It does feel like a privilege. A beaver, on its way home after a hard day’s night doing dirty commerce, gathering provisions for the clan. Is it too much to hope for, that it might be able to stop and have a drink with the gang at the local watering hole? Too much to hope for, that it’ll get into some excellent trouble, moral and physical, between here and hutch?

            Suppose it does stop at the watering hole. Would it share with the gang anything about the exchange we, it and I, just had?

            Guys, you won’t believe what happened. Up top. This old four-legged-four-eyed geezer is staring down at me. At first I think it’s a dog. I’m serious. A dog. I wink at him. I do. I wink. The geezer flat-out has a stroke….

            And so on. Bar talk. Between you and me: I’m fine.

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Radio Potluck with Guido

PROSE POEM: POTLUCK

by Steve Downing, aka Guido

            Pot. Luck. Two words, become one. Let’s leave the first for another poem and focus on the second, as it relates to you and the thing our two-word word identifies.

            How is your luck running? At the potluck, there may or may not be E. coli in the home-made beef stew. Salmonella in the deviled eggs. A very long---or, worse, short and curly---hair or two in the fruit salad. Lead in the venison chili. Mercury in the pickled fish. Suppose whoever brought the gallon jug of ice-house punch has an axe to grind and spiked it with one or another friendly chemical: mescaline, say, or laboratory tetrahydrocannabinol.

            Still: at any given potluck dinner you’re more likely to discover a new (and nice) spice combination, or dessert presentation, than you are to assume your role in the next life, or even to wind up lie-down, sit-down, get-down sick.

            The offerings on potluck dinner tables always exude hope, don’t they. Hopefulness. Remember: potluck dishes, themselves, are no strangers to the vagaries of luck. Lovely as they look, they could easily have blown up in the oven, or collapsed as they cooled, or acquired the unmistakable flavor of dish soap somewhere, almost anywhere, in the process.

            To say nothing of the transit risk. Who hasn’t had a crockpot full of chutney curry soup turn dramatically un-full, in the car, potluck-bound, when a stop sign materialized out of nowhere, or a deer?

            A key tenet of old-school Occidental philosophy---“When something is spilled, something else is not spilled”---won’t mitigate the crockpot mess in your car, but it does remind us that everything is connected.

            And this is the point of the potluck meal, too: we may be up to our eyeballs in hard times and bad ways, but we’re in it together. What’s mine is yours. Yours, mine.

            That may warm the cockles of your chilled-out Marxist heart, but, between you and me, a cautionary note: think twice about bringing anything ostentatiously left-wingy-healthy to the potluck. Most folks will take a forkful and pretend to love it, but the Bubble-Up Pizza Hotdish with added blue cheese and bacon bits is what everyone will be talking about tomorrow.

            My theory: bring bread. Period. Not for nothing are there more than 300 references to bread in the Bible. And a loaf of bread that doesn’t catch on at the potluck will seem a lesser failure than a fussy, fancy (or un-fancy) tofu loaf that sits there on the table at the party looking just hopeful.

Steve Downing on Road Trips - This Saturday on Between You and Me

ROADTRIPPING

            Our last true roadtrip was two summers ago, in Costa Rica. Dodger and I were tooling around the west and west-central regions of the country, in a rental SUV, equipped with a GPS device that alternately worked for us or took us to Nowheresville. We needed the SUV, because one of our stops was at a small resort directly across from the ever-smoking Arenal Volcano, and this place was at the pinnacle of one of the most primitive uphill roads I have ever driven on. I include the old logging road that delivers us to our cabin up in the boondocks, which is sometimes not a road at all and on which you can get into serious trouble without cracking a sweat. We did have trouble on that Costa Rican quasi-road, but it turned out to be related strictly to the SUV and its compromised idiot-warning-light-system.

            One of the adjustments we had to make on that trip involved the stark difference in sheer road usage. On the highways around here, you see almost exclusively motorized vehicles. An occasional bicycle or two. A hitchhiker, only very rarely nowadays. And deer, of course. Other roadkill potential. On the roads in Costa Rica, even on the Interamericana, the main Central American highway, you’ll see anything, and up close. People, whole families of them, walking, doing business, socializing, arguing, parenting, playing soccer, whatever. Plus, every kind of animal: cows and horses and dogs and cats and chickens and goats, and critters we couldn’t even name. All of them right there on the road, either hanging out or on the move. The Costa Ricans are ready to help you, feed you, chat. They’re among the most friendly, civilized people we’ve run into anywhere. You don’t make good time on a road like that; you might as well slow down and get to know the neighborhood, the community, the country.

            Contrast that experience with cruising at 70 or 80 m.p.h. along one of our Interstates, roadways designed to make all of the above impossible. You’ll get from Point A to Point B faster, no question, but you will never, ever, see a young girl having the time of her life trying to train a goat to dance, so close to the road you can reach out your window and touch them both.

Signs and Omens on Between You and Me

This week on Between you and me our topic is signs and omens.  What does that mean to you?

BOW-WOW

by Steve Downing

          When the universe decides to send me a message, it does so by way of our dog, Basil. This makes elegant cosmic sense. As I’ve reported, Basil’s grasp of natural phenomena borders on clairvoyant. Each of his senses is more finely tuned than any of mine. He doesn’t know this (I don’t think). If I understand the process correctly, Basil simply absorbs the quotidian flow of information in his doggy-dogged manner and then reacts intuitively, unerringly.

            For example, earlier today I was outside with Basil. As he took care of his daily hygiene business, I idled between the deck and the lake, thinking my thoughts. Suddenly Basil was circling me in a lazy zigzagging trot and occasionally stopping, then making a fake charge at me, head low, as though he planned to ram my knees or hips. Remember: Basil’s big. Huge, actually. I’d never seen this bullish behavior before. He went round and round a few times, back and forth, circling and fake-head-butting. Then he lost interest and wandered off toward the lake. Near the kayak, he dropped down to what I think of as the sphinx position, forelegs straight out, head up. And he just stared, unmoving, at the lake, or the horizon, or maybe a worm-hole in the next galaxy over, I had no way of knowing. He was literally motionless, for 10-15 minutes, totally out of character, impressing on me that it was I, not he, who lives the unexamined life. When he stood up and turned around, he looked directly, intently, not to say philosophically, at me and through me, his eyes locked on mine, unblinking, for a lonnnnng time.

            Clearly, Basil was channeling a message from the universe. I’m still working it out: is the universe telling me I ought to become a rodeo clown?---or go back to grad school and get my doctorate in philosophy? Aside from the Hobson’s-choice nature of this question, it strikes me that there’s a larger, more critical issue here, related to the true organizing principle of the universe: is it that of the clown or the philosopher? And between you and me, is there a functional difference in a world such as ours, so beholden to the corrupt and corrupting politics of the day?

            Basil: speak!