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Yearly Archives: 2013
Cecil (on fame)
Better to be a king for a night than a schmuck for a lifetime. —Rupert Pupkin
As long as we’re talking about binary worlds, it seems to me that fame and failure are closely related ideas: without the former, you are the latter, by a contemporary understanding of the word (though it probably doesn’t work the other way). But if fame means being a Kardashian, count me out; I’ve learned to live with failure thanks to Cecil Elliott.
Fame hit me square in the face last night while watching “Chelsey Lately” and her coverage of the latest Kardashian melodrama. I weighed in on FaceBook© on Kris Kardashian and Bruce Jenner going splitsville, but of course that’s exactly what they hope for. It’s the old admonition for Broadway reviewers: “I don’t care what you say about my performance. Just spell my fucking name right.” Bad publicity is still publicity. It isn’t what you say, it’s that you say it.
But fame, if we achieve it at all, is fleeting. Remember Andy Warhol saying in 1968—the Summer of our Discontent—that “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” Have you had yours?
Given Cecil Elliott’s take on success (see earlier blog entry) you might imagine he had something to say on the topic of fame. You’d be right. Elliott called it “The Five-Minute Movie”.
We were having coffee in the Break Room, that unattractive space at the end of the long faculty corridor in the campus shoe box we occupied in the 70s, when department secretary Marlys Anderson suddenly appeared in the doorway. She stood there, framed by its institutional beige-ness until we had each turned to acknowledge her presence. “Well,” she said with import, “they called again about that.” Elliott’s brow furrowed. “Marlys, I need antecedents for those pronouns.”
Conversations with Marly frequently began in the middle. She had an endearing habit of beginning many of her conversations with you long before she actually saw you. This one had begun a few minutes earlier at her desk, following a brief telephone conversation about an unpaid invoice. So, in reply to Cecil’s request, “they” and “that” were given identities and he resolved the situation forthwith. Marly turned to make a return phone call and Elliott turned back to me and our coffee: “That would certainly make a great five-minute movie.”
The five-minute movie concept came up again and again, usually with regard to something about which far too much had been made. I’m absolutely certain he would see the current Tea-publican budget tantrum as worthy of a five-minute movie, rather than the multi-month melodrama it continues to be.
Congressman Ted Yoho is a “Five-Minute Movie”. So is Congressman Paul Broun. I only wish we could say the same for Michele Bachmann. Any more footage spent on her is a waste of film.
And I know this one thing: Elliott, flaming Liberal that he was, would agree.
PS: Marlys June (née Powers) Anderson [1928–2010] can be found in the cemetery at Canaan Moravian Church in rural Cass County, North Dakota. I was pleased to represent our department at her funeral and privileged to be a pall bearer, at the request of her daughter Lori. Marly covered my ass metaphorically for many years. I could carry hers for a few minutes. But we’re still not close to being even.
Cecil (on ornithology)
It’s possible to be around someone for years, to live with them for decades in fact, and still not know them very well. That is, not fully understand the way their mind works. I knew Cecil Elliott for twenty years but wonder now whether I knew him at all.
Elliott’s ability to identify an issue, a problem, was quick and usually spot on. He arrived at NDSU mid-year, for example, in the middle of a three-day January blizzard that trapped him in his North Broadway apartment with a partial fifth of rum and a can of minced clams. He always hoped for a cookbook that worked backwards: recipes didn’t send you to the store with a long and complex list of ingredients; the ingredients in your cupboard led to a dish that could be crafted from them. Now there’s probably something on-line for exactly such dilemmas.
If Elliott had chosen medicine, he might be my personal doctor. But his talents would actually far better serve the emergency room. For he had the innate ability to triage a la M.A.S.H.; to immediately assess a crisis, prioritize its elements and address them in an order that would allow optimal resolution of the situation. He arrived at NDSU, for example, after years of our department taking in more and more students with little or no increase in resources—budget, faculty positions or space. Previous chairs hoped for benevolence from above, but it was not forthcoming. Old Main saw nothing but increased efficiency. One can imagine conversations about us: “They did even better this year than last with what we gave them. Let’s see if productivity can increase next year within the status quo!” Cecil immediately saw the pattern in effect by default and proposed selective admissions. If we can’t have increased resources (for whatever reasons), then we have to narrow the entryway and offer the best service within what is available. If the department has survived, succeeded, thrived, it is based on that fundamental strategy.
One afternoon in the break room at the end of the long faculty corridor, we had a conversation about birds. I think Cecil liked our feathered friends, saw them as more than part of our diet, but also felt that science had overly complicated the world of animated flight. “There are really only two kinds of birds,” he said. “Little ones that sing; they’re canaries. And big ones that don’t; they’re ducks.” I’ve never been able to visit the poultry exhibit at the Minnesota State Fair and ignore this ornithological perspective. Whatever species occupies the rank and file of cages arrayed before me, to Elliott it would have been a room full of ducks.
On one of his nearly annual winter retreats to Mexico, his car broke down in a remote village, where the sole mechanic spoke no English. Anxious to convey an accurate assessment of the problem, in faulty Spanish Cecil said, “sings like a canary.” The mechanic smiled,
Problem solved.
Cecil (on success)
Success is not being recognized as an absolute failure by too many people you’re not married to. —Cecil D. Elliott
One of the wisest people I know died on June 16th, 2003.
At least fifteen years before that day, Cecil and I enjoyied a cocktail at the old Northern Exposure. Before 8 p.m. it was a simple dive bar, but after 8 it turned into a genuine biker bar where kookie academics like us were barely tolerated; the sort of bar where you didn’t risk ordering a manhattan for obvious reasons. I was probably drinking gin-and-tonics; straight bourbon for Professor Elliott. Incidentally, those were days when you could barely find a bar in Fargo or Moorhead where there weren’t architecture students as bar tenders. I suppose that’s one reason for choosing the Northern.
The other draw at the corner of Fourth Avenue North and Tenth Street was directly to the north: a terrific Chinese restaurant—notice I didn’t say buffet—called The Pearl. Elliott and I were such regular fixtures that the owner would call us when favorite menu items were in fresh supply. That night we’d received an alert that a particularly good batch of green beans had arrived, so the 8 o’clock witching hour entailed a simple shuffle across the street. In the meantime, however, I was distressed over something or other—rejection of a conference paper, a grant proposal, etc. I frankly don’t recall.
What I do recall, however, was Elliott’s pish-tush response to expressions of failure. “Failure?” he intoned between cigarette puffs (yes, smoking was still possible then), “Success is not being recognized as an absolute failure by too many people you’re not married to.” Read that sentence again to understand how many qualifications stand between you and failure. By that definition, ninety-eight percent of the planet is successful. Maybe more.
Those of you with origins in the Methodist tradition will recognize something Elliott called “the Epworth League Effect.” You’ve seen it: the stained glass window representing Jesus kneeling at the rock, praying to be relieved of his burden, as a heavenly shaft of light penetrates the night, bringing the answer he’d hoped to avoid. That night at a sleezy Fargo bar I experienced the Epworth League Effect: the acoustic ceiling tiles parted allowing a beam of light to illuminate Cecil. The words issuing from his mouth might just as well have come directly from God. It was a revelation. I understood this as a Moment for the Ages.
Grasping a napkin, scrambling for a pen, I scribbled Cecil’s quote, signed, dated it and put is safely in my wallet. After our Chinese repast and safely home (though still a bit tipsy), I saved the napkin in a file folder for posterity, to whit: “Success? Success is not being recognized as an absolute failure by too many people you’re not married to.”
Those moments—those Elliott moments—happened more often than you might imagine. We all had them now and then; in hindsight, too few and far between.
Oh, and not incidentally, June 16th also happens to be my grandmother’s birthday, another of the wiser people in my experience.
Cecil (on mortality)
Read some of Howard’s columns and my own commentary now and then and you’ll find people you think you know written into this blog. My dad is here; my mother started to be, but the Agincourt character I wrote turned out to be so likable it couldn’t possibly have been Marge. I actually cast her as a madam and even that didn’t work. Go figure: a lovable madam. Those of you who knew Cecil Elliott will see him in these pages, too. And also some of our relationship, mentor that he was to me and so many others.
These days — on the mend from heart surgery (four months ago on Friday) — I’ve been thinking a lot about the end of life, mine especially. And though the operation last June may have given me more years than I’ll know what to do with, I can’t help wondering how my departure will occur. Cecil spoke of people he had known before coming to Fargo; names that I sometimes recognized. About them he’d just as often remark, “When that son-of-a-bitch dies, no one is going to know in the next county.” That’s the way I’m feeling these days. I know it isn’t true, but I believe it none the less. Kinda like religion.
The Nature of Place
Sitting atop the toilet flushbox of my second floor bathroom there is a book. It’s a paperback. And it’s been setting there since January 2012 when I bought it at Zandbroz. If you should use my toilet, feel free to reach behind you, pick it up and sit a spell
. 
Avi Friedman, professor of architecture at McGill, authored The Nature of Place: a search for authenticity as a “worldwide quest for successful environments where people congregate and feel comfortable.” So far, so good. I very likely bought the book, though, for the same reason Greg Danz had stocked it: one of Friedman’s targets is Fargo.
Now, I live in Fargo and so have some of you. Some of us even like the place. Last weekend at our wedding party Jeremiah Johnson admitted he missed living here. So several of us might tend to be just a little sensitive when others are critical of Fargo. I admit approaching Chapter Seven with defensive interest.
I don’t want to be any more flip or superficial about Professor Friedman’s efforts than he may have been. In the best of all possible world’s, I don’t want to be either of those things at all. So I’m going to wait for another day to summarize his experience of Fargo on “a sunny, crisp and frigid morning” and, perhaps, offer a critique. He is, after all, the recipient of teaching, research, and design awards and has been named by Wallpaper magazine as “one of ten people from around the world most likely to change the way we live.” I am none of those things. But I do know Fargo better than he does. And I continue to be, like him, interested in the nature of place.
Agincourt could profit from all this.
Apropos of nothing…
Charles-Louis-Jules LENGYEL (born 1878)
Entrance to a Forest Exhibition [pencil, ink and water color on paper; April 1901]
This design exercise at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris is typical of sketch problems issued throughout the academic year. Often of no more than ten or twelve hours duration, the problem might have been issued at noon and due at midnight of the same day. Even today we call such exercises being “en charrette”, because a cart (a charrette) would pass through the studio at the appointed hour and any project not on the cart after it had passed had failed the exercise.
In 1902 Lengyel was elevated to the atelier (i.e., studio) of Jean-Louis Pascal. A 1905 photograph of Pascal’s students shows both Lengyel and his classmate Paul Cret, who later became chair of the architecture program at the University of Pennsylvania. Lengyel appears to have died in 1906 at the age of twenty-four, before graduating. But what career might he have achieved with a Beaux-Arts credential?
Incidentally, the surname Lengyel is of Hungarian origin.
Notes toward a play
The way things work…
Which is to say, the way I wished things worked.
01) Anson Tennant required a paper trail, a plausible sequence of events that could have preceded his entry in the public library competition. And among those events, there ought to have been the establishment of an office, the professional setting that presented the young architect to the world, i.e., his potential clients.
02) Enter Edith and Franz Wasserman, emigrés from Austria, who opened a hardware store. By 1912 they was able to afford their own building at James and Broad streets—twenty-five feet of store front with suites of offices above. Sioux City architects Joachim & Perlmutter had botched the job, however, which opened a door for young Anson to save the day. So he bartered his service: a redesign of the offices and conversion of one suite into the Wasserman apartment got him a long-term lease on space that would become his office–studio.
03) Creating a space for work and living allowed Anson to present a professional image to potential clients. Why not place a stained glass window in its dutch entry door, the window designed and crafted by our friend Dan Salyards. “Als ik kan” is says; “The best I can” in Flemish and the mantra of the Arts & Crafts movement.
04) Still looking for a design student who will want to create the period interior of Anson’s office, influenced by Stickley, William Morris and Native American artifacts from a southwestern vacation the family had taken that spring. Still looking; still hoping.
05) Edith Wasserman’s younger brother Reinhold Kölb, a psychotherapist from Vienna, came for a visit in the mid-1920s. He intended to stay for a few weeks but decided to remain and open a private psychiatric clinic [an opportunity for me to try my hand at a European Modernist architectural vocabulary, and to enrich the story with a character vaguely drawn from Dr Bob].
06) Dr Kölb reflected Jung more than Freud, but his practice required techniques that might set him father apart. How about alternate therapies based in art or theater?
07a) Art therapy let me use a collection of remarkable paintings bought on eBay.
07b) Drama therapy introduced me to Jacob Levy Moreno, a real historical character who just happened to invent the idea of drama therapy. In fact, his widow continues to promote it in New York City today.
08) Kölb’s spin on drama therapy employed aspects of Japanese Noh theater and the use of puppets. His patients would write plays drawn from their own ailments and then act them out with puppets to an audience of other patients. Eventually Kölb’s productions went public, performed in The Commons on Saturday afternoons in a puppet theater designed especially for them.
09) One of Dr specially designed ‘s last productions in the summer of 1944 was seen by James Edward Tierney, then twelve years old, who would found the Prairie Playhouse many years later.
10a) Tierney would eventually write a play based on the legend of Reinhold Kölb. Who can I find to write that play and perform it during the next Agincourt exhibit?
10b) And who can design the theater in which that play might be performed? I’d like to think Molly Yergens is that designer.
See what I mean?
The Golden Age of Civic Pride
The Golden Age of civic pride in the U. S. happily coincides with the heyday of the penny postcard.
I have long maintained that postcards represent the most egalitarian architectural history course you’ll ever take, because they depended solely on the desire of a corner druggist to sell postcard images of local buildings, evidence of community pride; cards that could be inexpensively printed in Chicago or Milwaukee via traveling salesmen who took the photo and processed your order. From a rack near the druggist’s cashier, impulse buyers could purchase a card for a penny and mail it for the same amount to distant friends or simply across town, a boast that everything’s up to date in Mugwump City, but we haven’t begun to go as far as we can go. Any why do them as egalitarian education? Because the choice of subject depended only on the eye of a Main Street business person, a minister, the president of the library board, or the mayor. Postcards are not the product of orthodox architectural history, for if they were, we’d never see the likes of this noble panorama.
Do you have any idea how badly I want this image to represent Agincourt? Some of you will recognize it; many won’t. It’s actually a panoramic shot of Broadway and N.P. Avenue in Fargo taken some time after 1900. The street on the right telescoping back to the horizon is Broadway. The one on the left is Northern Pacific disappearing into the haze of a late summer afternoon. How did those Edwardian ladies stand the heat in their layered floor-length skirts?
*
The building at the central hinge is the Fargo National Bank, a site later occupied by Fort Noks. Merchants National on the far right has long since been replaced by Dakota Bank, alias State Bank of Fargo, alias Alerus Bank and god knows what other subsequent banks in the current musical chairs of downtown financial institutions. At the far left is the building currently occupied by Old Broadway, though you’d hardly recognize it beneath coats of dryvit® (or what my friend Crazy Richard calls “puss”).
For this purported Agincourt exhibit in 2015, we hope to represent the city by such artifacts of civic mindedness. It would be amazing, in fact, to create a panorama like this—as soon as I learn Photoshop®.
Anyone want to take this on?
*This card is from my own collection, numbering close to 3,000, perhaps more.Yin and Yang and You and Me
The Founders incorporated Agincourt at at time when Transcendental perspectives held sway. At the core of its original townsite was a three-part organization, each zone reflecting a co-equal aspect of the human condition; I wonder sometimes if seven years’ distance from the origin of the project has given me any insight to those earliest decisions—or whether viewing at speed and seeing it in a rearview mirror has distorted my perception, everything reversed, in quick retreat.
Memory can be selective. Perhaps it has to be.
The town center consists of two Midwestern squares, three hundred feet on a side, east and west of Broad Street like civic saddlebags. To the east is The Commons; on the west, The Square. The Commons is Yin; dark, receding, passive, feminine, and politically incorrect today. The Square is Yang; light, advancing, active, masculine (and, in isolation, equally incorrect, I suppose). As a Daoist notion, though, they are not two separate entities—like good and bad—but a whole, the unified landscape of mountain and valley. My reading of Eastern philosophies is fractured, incomplete, wanting depth, needing more. I apologize.
As citizens, our lives take place in both domains. On weekend afternoons and weekday evenings, The Commons is scattered with people strolling, lying on the grass, reading in the shade of old trees, feeding koi in the pond, alone together; it is as casual a place as The Square is an ordered one. For there you will find the city’s other side, its pride; its flags and alphabetical lists of ultimate sacrifice. If one is estrogen, the other testosterone. Don’t make me choose.
Farther east and west are two larger polygonal blocks . Right of The Commons is (or, rather, was) the site of The Academy, space many would-be towns provided for an educational institution beyond or more properly outside the standard publicly-supported system. Such a site was generally offered to anyone willing to build such an academy. Ours was established just before the Civil War as Bishop Kemper Academy, a day and boarding school for young women, operated by the Protestant Episcopal Church and named for Jackson Kemper, first and only missionary bishop of the northwest. Institutions like Kemper Academy afforded an aura of status and stability, but most failed after only a few years, a couple decades at most. A detailed history of Kemper has yet to be written.
If the Academy represents the ancient Greek ideal of mind or intellect, then it was meant to be balanced by the courthouse block west of The Square. There the Founders acknowledged the body, our physical presence and its spatial needs. Deeds of property are recorded here, marriages licensed; breached contracts mediated, transgressions litigated, lost lives honored. Oaths taken. Flags saluted. Votes cast.
With Body and Mind safely set in place for all to see, they are framed—bracketed—by the parentheses of Spirit, the third of humanity’s facets. There you find the Church Blocks: four sites awarded by lottery to the city’s earliest spiritual institutions. They were churches* at the outset, but later joined by temples and mosques and meeting rooms where our spiritual welfare has been discussed, debated, deployed, debunked.
*Five denominations lobbied for four lots—Roman Catholic, Episcopalian, Baptist, Presbyterian and Methodist—but since then there have been a dozen more.
Here, now, I find the Daoist Yin-Yang less than required, and the Manx come happily to my rescue. Their triskelion has Bronze Age origins and fits more neatly with my understanding of the triune Greek notion of Mind–Body–Spirit that might have guided the Founders in their plan.
How many of Agincourt’s citizens today understand this, see this as I do?
Imagineers
When do you suppose Howard or I will have anything to say about sport? Eight years of grade school; four years of high school; seven more to achieve an undergraduate degree at the University of Oklahoma. Columbia University doesn’t count; I don’t know if they even have a football team. And then forty-two years among the Bison at NDSU. With apologies to all my friends and colleagues and to students, both current and former, I have no interest whatsoever in sports, college or professional. Please disregard the two Redhawks games I attended with Milton and Steve.
The bottom line? Who will tell the story of Agincourt’s athletic achievements. Leave it to me and you know what you’ll get. I can imagine people who paint and prune and potter; conceivers, composers, healers and the holy; writers of fact and fiction. But I cannot get inside the mind of sport, neither those who sweat, nor especially those who watch them.
Imagineers
Walt Disney coined the word “imagineer” to bind the prescient with the practical. Now that I think of it—looking back on seven years’ effort on this project—I see that some of Agincourt’s characters are poet-plumbers of the imagineering sort.
Take Reinhold Kölb, for example, our resident psychotherapist from the mid-20s until his death. Kölb introduced art therapy to the repertoire of health care in the community. And, in the remarkable way the one generation passes its torch to the next, Kölb transfered his non-traditional healing techniques to Seamus Tierney. Kölb adapted the therapeutic methods of his Viennese friend Jacob Levy Moreno, “drama therapy”, for the smaller scale of puppet theater, and those productions went pubic as Saturday afternoon events in The Commons. And there, on a Saturday afternoon when his parents shopped and transacted business, a twelve-year-old James Tierney attended one of Kölb’s last puppet shows. Tierney matured to be the founding director of Agincourt’s Prairie Playhouse, and who can tell what inspiration grew from that place.
I’m a great believer in torch-passing, which accounts I suppose for much of my own behavior: the hope that I, too, could be a Kölb or a Tierney. I’ll get over it.
Which brings me—never soon enough—to the point. I visited Molly Yergens show at the Rourke Art Museum again this afternoon and was inspired by three of her latest works: shadow boxes with intermediate stages in some of her thinking. Beginning with collages of magazine clippings, shards of color really, Molly has crafter three-dimensional iterations in light boxes. And those, in turn, have become large paintings, returning the imagery to a two-dimensional surface. It’s the intermediate step that caught my imagination.
The next Agincourt show wants to tell the Kölb-Tierney tale, and to do it we need the puppet theater that linked them; the physical object that represents the passing of that creative torch. Molly’s 3-D works seem to ripe to become the artistic frame for Kölb’s puppet action.