Thomas P. Campbell's TED Talk on Interpretation at The Met

He feared that [formal training] filled people up with jargon, and then they just classified things rather than looking at them. 

Whose Legacy?

In 2008 Minnesota voters decided to set aside about $6.5M annually to pay my salary. That money also covers most of the expenses for the exhibits I develop at local history museums. So to start, thank you!

The $6.5M from which I draw my (almost-) fraction is itself only about 9% of approximately $75M set aside for Legacy projects each year. The Outdoor Heritage & Clean Water Funds each earn 33% annually. The Arts & Cultural Heritage Fund earns 19.75%, about half of which goes directly to Minnesota Historical Society programming, and the Parks & Trails Fund get 14.25%. The percentages seem reasonable even if they adhere to a certain inevitable logic of policy-making, but it still comes as a surprise to learn that "Outdoor Heritage" means that a single private non-profit organization has received $45M in Legacy funding since 2009 to make land and easement purchases. MinnPost wants to know, "whose legacy will taxpayers really end up supporting?"

Several possibilities spring to mind. The first is that Minnesota's Legacy Amendment has created a windfall for private organizations that not many people know much about. A second is that this is not surprising after voting to set aside about $25M annually that "may be spent only to restore, protect, and enhance wetlands, prairies, forests, and habitat for fish, game, and wildlife." Third is that much of what we do know about projects funded by Legacy money is omitted from discussions like these. And fourth, simply and broadly, acts of remembering our heritage also become part of our heritage. 

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"Helmer Aakvik"

On Sunday night at The Cedar Cultural Center, a Legacy project took the stage and played songs drawn from Minnesota history and folklore for about 300 enthusiastic fans. Joey Ford received a 2013 Artist's Initiative Grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, the state agency that distributes the bulk of Legacy's Arts & Cultural Heritage money. The grant paid for Joey's band, Tree Party (better known as The Poor Nobodys), to travel around Minnesota, visit small museums and chat with locals, write songs drawn from the stories they heard, record an album and host Sunday's concert. Joey delivers Marty Robbins-flavored story songs about Minnesota folk heroes like Dorothy Molter, Wrinkle Meat, John Beargrease and Helmer Aakvik. His liner notes conclude, 

Our history lives in the voices of old-timers and sits in small town museums, waiting for us to find it. 

Watching the Opening Ceremonies With David Lowenthal

Tonight I invited David Lowenthall over to watch the Opening Ceremonies of the 2014 Winter Olympics. We played a drinking game where we drank beer from Minneapolis while we watched the same interpretation of Russian history seen by millions around the world.

Dave pounded his Day Tripper and observed:

Venerated as a fount of communal identity, cherished as a precious and endangered resource, yesterday became less and less like today. Yet its relics and residues are increasingly stamped with today's lineaments. We may fancy an exotic past that contrasts with a humdrum or unhappy present, but we forge it with modern tools. The past is a foreign country whose features are shaped by today's predilections, its strangeness domesticated by our own preservation of its vestiges. 

Then the local news came on and it turned out that the past is a foreign country in south Minneapolis.

Local Events: The History of Hip at the Turf Club

The Minnesota History Center is sponsoring a series of events at the Turf Club in St. Paul in connection with their fantastic exhibit on Prohibition. In January the program covered the history of cocktails and distilling in Minnesota. Last night the subject was DUIs, Bootlegging and Murder in the Midway. In March they'll cover beer. The series is part of MHS' ongoing "History of Hip" programming, and each event has sold out well in advance. For $10 you can head over to the Turf Club, walk downstairs to the Clown Lounge, order a beer from the guy in the Hymie's T-shirt, and hear a history lecture in the same venue where, three years ago, you would have been hearing Fat Kid Wednesday play experimental jazz. The woman next to me in the front row pulled out a pen to take notes. I did the same thing, and I couldn't help thinking: all of us here are causing the history of hip.

For one thing, the Minnesota Historical Society is not often cited as an arbiter of hipness, historical or otherwise. Institutions like MHS confer a different kind of cultural value on the events and sites they interpret; they select particular aspects of popular culture to exhibit for an exclusive audience. MHS hopes that this series will draw first time visitors to the Clown Lounge, and that people who have never been to the MN History Center might attend this event because of its setting. Which is awesome. But bridges between institutions can also isolate them from a broader community, separating culture from public culture to paraphrase a smart friend.

At an institutional level this separation seems inevitable. At the Clown Lounge on Tuesday it was more difficult to discern. The crowd was a little different from normal - mostly seated; mostly sober - but MHS is working hard to treat these events like a community meeting. Priority goes to local voices and the audience. At each of the first two History of Hip programs we had conversations with local brewers and distillers about their experiences living and working in the Midway. An historian is on hand to provide some context, but the important details were manifest as discussion. When nobody could remember the name of the distributing company on Prior that used to be Griggs-Cooper, our bartender shouted out, "Mark VII!"

"We buy from them," he explained.

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A few more words from our bartender might have helped us measure our proximity to or distance from public culture at the Clown Lounge. The club has struggled to keep its doors open in recent years, and three months ago First Avenue took over operations. The sale means that the Clown Lounge will continue to function as a cultural center for the Twin Cities community for the foreseeable future. Meanwhile, another iconic club that was forced to close its doors in Minneapolis' West Bank neighborhood is hoping for a similar result from a similar institutional partnership. The 400 Bar is planning to re-open in June on the fourth floor of the Mall of America. The venue will be part of a 25,000 square foot entertainment complex that will also feature a restaurant as well as the brand new Midwest Music Museum.