Category Archives: Uncategorized

11/25/2012

Vicky’s Viking Room in Valley City, North Dakota

By Aaron Barth

The menu cover of Vicky’s Viking Room in downtown Valley City, North Dakota.

If you plan on stopping in to Vicky’s Viking Room for breakfast in downtown Valley City, North Dakota, you’ll need to get just a bit off the Eisenhower Interstate 94 corridor. But that doesn’t take more than 10 minutes. Valley City is nestled in the Sheyenne River Valley in east-central North Dakota, and before I-94 was built, Old Highway 10 used to take you right through central downtown. The Eisenhower Interstate system created new points of gravity for any city it went through (and any city it bypassed). And this initially threatened to suck activity from the historic downtowns. But it’s unnecessary to let high-speed travel corridors dictate the course of culture and Thanksgiving weekend trips. So when you begin seeing Valley City exits while on I-94, take the County Highway 21/8th Avenue SW exit, and head north. Turn east on Main Street and drive over the Sheyenne River to Central Avenue and turn north. You’ll head in that direction on Central Avenue for just a couple blocks. When you hit 3rd Street NW, turn west. Find a parking spot on that block right away. You can identify the façade of Vickey’s Viking Room from the three gable extensions jutting out of the entryway. It has classic cafe restaurant fare. For breakfast try the spinach quiche, or the Messy Jessy, or the biscuits and gravy. The biscuits are huge. Seriously. They may be as large as Ragnarok’s shield. And they provide an excellent base for large volumes of coffee. I was taken to Vicky’s by Valley City native Molly McLain.

While in Vickey’s, some Sunday mid-morning conversation was launched back and forth between two patrons. It went down like this:

Patron at the cash register to patron seated in a booth, in a tone of humorous yet restrained judgment: “I didn’t see you in church this morning…”

Patron seated in booth, responding in exonerating tone, said, “I sat in the way back.”

Patron at cash register, in monotone voice, responded by saying, “I prayed for you.”

Patron seated in booth, in a grateful voice, countered with, “Oh, I need all the help I can get.”

You’ll wonder if you’re in an episode from Prairie Home Companion while at Vicky’s Viking Room. But then you’ll also think that this is where Garrison Keillor gets his most honest material (and what makes up his best shows), from the reality of our northern Great Plains. Go to Vicky’s Viking Room.

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11/23/2012

Black Friday at the State Historical Society of North Dakota

By Aaron Barth

Earlier today I dropped in to the archives of the State Historical Society of North Dakota, officially “Black Friday,” to comb over some coveted primary sources. It was quiet when I strolled through, the construction for the addition at a momentary standstill on this day after Thanksgiving. The bookstore and gift shop, normally at left of this photo, have been relocated to make way for chop saws and ladders and piles of lumber and extension cords and so on. Some of the ceiling panels have been removed, and bits and sections of the SHSND’s 1980 skeleton exposed. After my time in the SHSND looking at some letters sent to Washington, D.C. from Dakota Territory and some official surgeon reports from Fort Abercrombie circa 1857-1863, I thought I’d snap a photo of the historic addition and remodel. So here is that shot, looking to the north-northeast.

Note: there are some spectacular holiday gift ideas within the gift shop of the SHSND.

 

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11/21/2012

Quick Remarks on How to Live Sans Irony

By Aaron Barth

A couple days ago (11/19/2012) Nick Steffens wired a facespace message to me from Salt Lake City to Fargo with the attached New York Times “Opinionator” piece by Christy Wampole entitled, “How to Live Without Irony” (11/17/2012).

The title of the article communicates a hipster trope from any age that seeks to outflank the absurd by acknowledging, amplifying and asserting that absurd. For example, “How to Live Without Irony” is a funny thing to say or read, although the humor is seven-chess moves removed (or what we might call deep humor). To live without irony, or to say there is a way to live without irony, is arguably irony.

Wampole’s introductory paragraph smacks of Anatole Broyard’s 1948 piece, “The Portrait of a Hipster,” and Wampole might do a bit more to tip a hat to Anatole within the 2012 piece. For example, check out this Wampole excerpt from November 17, 2012:

“The hipster haunts every city street and university town. Manifesting a nostalgia for times he never lived himself, this contemporary urban harlequin appropriates outmoded fashions (the mustache, the tiny shorts), mechanisms (fixed-gear bicycles, portable record players) and hobbies (home brewing, playing trombone). He harvests awkwardness and self-consciousness. Before he makes any choice, he has proceeded through several stages of self-scrutiny. The hipster is a scholar of social forms, a student of cool. He studies relentlessly, foraging for what has yet to be found by the mainstream. He is a walking citation; his clothes refer to much more than themselves. He tries to negotiate the age-old problem of individuality, not with concepts, but with material things.”

And then compare it with this excerpt from Anatole circa 1948 (first published in Partisan Review, June 1948):

As he was the illegitimate son of the Lost Generation, the hipster was really nowhere. And, just as amputees often seem to localize their strongest sensations in the missing limb, so the hipster longed, from the very beginning, to be somewhere. He was like a beetle on its back; his life was a struggle to get straight. But the law of human gravity kept him overthrown, because he was always of the minority—opposed in race or feeling to those who owned the machinery of recognition.
The hipster began his inevitable quest for self-definition by sulking in a kind of inchoate delinquency. But this delinquency was merely a negative expression of his needs, and, since it led only into the waiting arms of the ubiquitous law, he was finally forced to formalize his resentment and express it symbolically. This was the birth of a philosophy—a philosophy of somewhereness called jive, from jibe: to agree or harmonize. By discharging his would-be aggressions symbolically, the hipster harmonized or reconciled himself with society.

Maybe Wampole had initially included an Anatole reference in an earlier draft, but some hipster editor didn’t recognize it as important and therefore sliced it out? I don’t know. And this is not to say that the irony-amplifying hipster surfaced only after the Second World War. If thinking deep about the hipster-ography (which is the study of hipsters over time), the name Diogenes enters the brain, an Ancient Hipster, or moreso a Punk, from the Mediterranean if there ever was one. Diogenes lived in a gutter with his dogs and ate bags of onions and questioned everything — if his delivery was off, he would certainly be regarded as a jerk. In the words of Oscar Wilde, it is very impolite and even impossible to be 100% honest with everyone all the time. Was Socrates a hipster? I’m not sure. But I’m willing to pose the question if it leads today’s hipster or student into considering whether philosophers and thinkers from yesteryear were in fact hipsters in their own time and place. Thanks for the article forward, Nick.

Note: Perhaps the most thorough contemporary exegesis on hipsterosophy is the 2010 piece published by n+1 (Brooklyn, NY) titled, What Was the Hipster?: A Sociological Investigation.

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11/17/2012

Natural Turkeys: Spring Prairie Hutterite Colony in Clay County, Minnesota

By Aaron Barth

Last week I started texting friends about where they might source organic turkeys for a Thursday afternoon gorging on Thanksgiving Day. These friends rightly pummeled me with a miscellany of suggestions local to their, well, locale, this from Burleigh and Morton counties in central North Dakota. I also posted the question on social media about where folks were getting their organic turkeys, and Tom Isern (the arguable Herodotus of the Northern Great Plains) said the Spring Prairie Hutterite commune was the place to go. I should have known, since Isern has been known to distribute Spring Prairie hams around jultid. So this mid-morning I headed off to find the Spring Prairie Hutterite Colony. Below are some photos from the meat-sourcing expedition.

At this intersection, turn north. Drive that way for 1.5 miles to the entrance of the Hutterite Colony.

After you hit the intersection above, point the vehicle north and drive for approximately 1.5 miles to the entrance of the Hutterite Colony. At this entrance, turn west and follow a sort-of-looking main road that arcs briefly to the southwest, and then turn west again. By this time you should have the below in view. To be sure, it is a bit nondescript, the antithesis of Robert Venturi’s lament in Learning from Las Vegas. It seems Hutterites never had to learn from Venturi or Las Vegas in the first place.

Spring Prairie Meats within the Spring Prairie Hutterite Colony in Clay County, Minnesota.

The photo above is the south entrance to Spring Prairie Meats. Note the dormitory building reflections in the automotive glass and the building’s glass door. You are in Hutterite central. This religious commune has worked hard to bring its religious and social structure into the 21st century, and they are doing great work of it. Silke Van Ness says in “The Current Status of Research on German Dialects in North America,”

The purchase of poultry, beef and pork products at a Hutterite meat bazaar.

from The American Dialect Society: Duke University Press (Vol. 70, No. 4, Winter 1995) that German language maintainence in North America results from socio-religious isolation, “the only factor which retains full force.” When you’re going over the various pork, poultry and beef products within the fridges at Spring Prairie Meats, there’s a strong chance you’ll encounter this insulated dialect, especially if unintentionally overhearing Hutterite conversation.

A Hutterite man eventually asked me in English if I needed help. I responded and told him I needed a lot of help, but for now was only interested in help finding turkeys. He laughed and obliged my turkey request. I purchased a 17lb turkey for just over $1.52/pound, or right around $25. This in addition to some summer sausage and beef sticks came to around $32 and change. Not bad at all. The label of the Prairies’ Pride turkey says it is “all natural, home grown, young turkey,” and “minimally processed – no additives – no artificial ingredients – no growth hormones (Federal Regulations prohibit the use of growth hormones in poultry)” — this latter statement I was unaware of. This labeling that requires labelers to call pre-Industrial agriculture practices “natural” or “organic” is a bit silly: the majority of sedentary human history, at least up to the turn of the 19th century, was what today we’d call “organic” farming. Why not return to just calling organic farming, farming? We could then require produce produced from industrialized and mechanized means to be labeled as such: this produce was made from industrial means, and we shot a ton of antibiotics into the mammals and anhydrous ammonia in the ground to get the stuff this big. Nevermind, though. I got my natural turkey. I will be back to the Spring Prairie Hutterite Colony. I’m glad they are around. Happy Thanksgiving, and happy brining.

Prairie Turkey label. The brining will commence within days.

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11/13/2012

Punk Archaeology: Joe Strummer on DIY

By Aaron Barth

This evening I revisited the documentary, “Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten” on the Web 2.0/DIY platform that is YouTube. I have AppleTV jacked into a shamelessly huge flat-screen, and the AppleTV somehow allows me the ability to stream any YouTube selection through it. So by punching in “Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten,” YouTube’s search engine returned a series of 2008 uploads by the YouTuber named “madferrett.” Smack dab on 4:02/8:24 in the fourth of eleven installments (the subtitle is “Squatting 101’ers DAY’S”), the late Joe Strummer defines Punk as straight-away Do-It-Yourself. Of this DIY ethos, Joe in the video says:

We had the nerve to rent a room above a pub, and charge people 10 p [aka, pence] to get in. That’s how we learned to play, by doing it for ourselves, which is like a punk ethos. I mean, you gotta be able to go out there and do it yourself, because no one is going to give it to you.

Here is the Joe Strummer YouTube embed:

In the long-winded scheme of things, this is also referred to as being an autodidactic, or a self-taught learner. As fellow blogger Bill Caraher and I continue conversations with any and all about Punk Archaeology, this invariably has helped develop and shape the all-important fineries of the Punk Archaeology conference scheduled to take place in downtown Fargo, North Dakota on February 2-3, 2013 (it starts Saturday evening and is scheduled to end Sunday morning).

It seemed reasonable to post Joe’s remarks, if nothing else to continue to consider what the phrase Punk Archaeology means. In one sense, there is the localized archaeology of punk within Fargo-Moorhead, where any number of bands formed up in DIY fashion to cut loose on stage. In another sense, there is punk archaeology (or Punk Archaeology, depending on how formal one wants to be), the latter word “archaeology” not only specific to the discipline of said archaeology, but also to other DIY attitudes intrinsic to sustaining the disciplines and vocations and trades, and also as in the archaeology of knowledge. Punk archaeology is all around, and often right in front of us. Back to it on this end.

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11/13/2012

Coffee Science in Fargo

By Aaron Barth

I was trying to think of something epic to blog on for this 100th theedgeofthevillage.com post. Since winter has taken over autumn on the northern Great Plains, hot coffee seems just as good a topic for analysis as any. There are a couple places around the campus of North Dakota State University to purchase cups of coffee. As of late, I have wondered about coffee temperatures. This thought came from being served super-heated coffee in paper cups with those petro-plastic lids within NDSU’s memorial union — a place that fosters memory and unity, no doubt. In the last couple weeks, I have encased the paper cup in one of those cardboard sleeves, and have had to let the super-heated coffee cool enough to sip. Once cooled, I sip the coffee, but then wonder whether the heat melted the insides of the cup: was I just tasting burnt coffee? Or was I tasting coffee infused with melted glue? And was this more damaging to my innards than, say, drinking pints of chilled energy drinks that seem to have begun replacing otherwise traditional coffee drinking? I have no idea, but this in turn led to another idea: data collection on the heat temps of coffee around the Fargo-Moorhead area. So this is the first entry of coffee SCIENCE! in Fargo, North Dakota.

The coffee reviewed in this case is not from the coffee shop alluded to above. Instead, this coffee is from Jitter’s, a coffee house located to the southwest of the intersection of 12th Avenue North and Albrecht Boulevard in Fargo, North Dakota. Here is the raw data from my field notes. Equipment used: one of those thermometers you pick up for around five bucks at the grocery store.

Coffee science.

Objective data: On November 13, 2012, at 9:30AM, the temperature reading from the medium roast coffee just pumped from a thermos into a heated ceramic mug at Jitter’s read 151° F.  The room temperature read 70° F, and the outside winter temp was 19° F (this according to AccuWeather.com). A second reading was taken after a refill at 10:25AM, this at 139° F.

Subjective data: at 151° F, I was able to sip the coffee immediately (no need to let it cool). This immediacy was important since it is necessary to intersperse coffee sips with apple fritterer bites upon the ceremonious opening of the pastry bag. Before getting my coffee, I only had to stand in line for approximately 13 minutes while waiting for the two patrons ahead of me to order some kind of double soy latte decaf with a re-caffeinated infusion loaded with Italian syrup and topped with whipped cream (this will eventually contribute to the downfall of the West to North Korea, a running hypothesis of mine here).

Contribution to Coffee Memory: The rise of the prepared sugar bomb drinks could be felt easily in the year 2000 if a person was engaged in serious coffee drinking at the Dinkydome or throughout the coffee houses in Dinkytown, Minneapolis, Minnesota. It seemed a bit more gendered, though, at least in my mind, as I remember it. Young women tended to order white cafe mochas left and right. Today, full grown men are shamelessly purchasing these types of drinks — not that there’s anything wrong with that. Nonetheless, I’m fairly supportive of nudging our culture in the direction where there are separate but equal ordering lines in coffee houses: one for straight-up coffee drinkers, and the other for sugar-bomb drinkers. More to come on objective and subjective coffee data collection throughout Fargo, ND.

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11/01/2012

Leaning Towards Great Plains and World History

By Aaron Barth

The final chapter in Mischa Honeck’s 2011 work, We Are the Revolutionists: German-Speaking Immigrants and American Abolitionists after 1848 is titled, “A Revolution Half Accomplished: Building Nations, Forgetting Emancipation” (Athens & London: The University of Georgia Press, 2011). To capture the opening point of this chapter title, a Thomas Nast cartoon illustration is included from a November 20, 1869 issue of Harper’s Weekly, “Uncle Sam’s Thanksgiving Dinner.” The illustration shows a global thanksgiving table with a “Universal Suffrage” centerpiece. Surrounding the table are representative cartoons from a variety of ethnicities, including African-American, Chinese, Russian, Native America, and so on. This cartoon does not capture the realities of U.S. policy toward Native America at that time, but it does reflect Nast’s personal ideals. This tension between the ideal (or the way things ought to be) and reality (the way things are) is a crucial element to setting down a good piece of history, and in this vein Honeck delivers.

During the American Civil War, Anglo-America battled with one-another over abolition and that “peculiar institution.” This struggle between brothers and cousins is captured by the ever-growing and all-important industry that is Civil War historiography, nostalgic Ken Burns documentaries notwithstanding. If wanting to think about the Civil War in the context of the Atlantic World, or in the context of Global or World History, however, Honeck is where to find it. Numerous immigrants arrived to the United States in the years preceding the Civil War, and Honeck’s history focuses on the German element.

By the late 1840s, population dynamics contributed to the upheaval of existing institutions throughout Europe, and political factions in Germany eventually induced the revolutions of 1848 — the revolutionaries had these crazy ideas about democracy and voting on their brains. On the ground throughout the cities of

A German lithograph from 1849 depicting the Aristocratic crackdown on the democratic revolutionaries of 1848. Note the coast of western France, and the two boats loaded with Europeans preparing to cross the Atlantic.

Europe, street fighting was the norm. In order to escape this street fighting and the Aristocratic reaction to the democratic requests, individual Germans started chain migrations, or emigrations out of Germany and into the United States. By the 1850s numerous pockets of German-Americans had began settling the Great Plains, including liberal German thinkers and the North American Turnerbund throughout the continent (New Ulm, Minnesota is an example of a free-thinking Turner Society settlement). There is a paradox with the arrival of German-American idealists to settle in territories and states throughout the Great Plains, though, and Honeck only hints at it (in his defense, though, his study is mainly concerned with the eastern 3/8s of the United States and the Atlantic World). That paradox is this: while German-Americans carried with them democratic ideals, their physical settlement on the Great Plains invariably contributed to the protracted displacement of indigenous populations.

Nonetheless, many German-Americans became part of the Union Army fighting force during the Civil War. Honeck references the words of the radical Eduard Schläger who in 1871 noted how German-Americans had abandoned those — ahem — silly notions of egalitarianism and gained, “…a growing respect for ‘Anglo-American business methods,’ particularly the disagreeable ones, such as ‘the greed for the dollar.'” Schläger was particularly grumpy, in part because he felt philosophical foundations were being undermined once a little or a lot of money was put on the table. Honeck concludes with how German-America appropriated ideas of industrial capitalism, and this is a ground-level view of how Max Weber’s nineteenth- and twentieth-century industrial capitalism eclipsed Adam Smith’s eighteenth-century notions of moral sentiments, empathy, sympathy, and compassion. We are well aware what happened throughout the Minnesota River Valley in August of 1862, from Fort Abercrombie, Dakota Territory to New Ulm, Minnesota and everywhere in between and on the periphery (including Mankato, Minnesota, the site of the largest mass execution in United States history). Native America would indeed feel the brunt and shock-wave of this industrial capitalism throughout the Great Plains, and there is definitely more work for historians and archaeologists to carry out. In this way much of the past has yet to be considered and written. Honeck’s concluding chapter is an excellent starting point to push scholarship in needed directions, at least as it concerns how Anglo- and German-American ideals gave way to the nation-making processes within the continental interior during and following the American Civil War.

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10/31/2012

Archaeological Disturbances in Western North Dakota

By Aaron Barth

I came across this October 29, 2012 article, “Land eyed for oil well may be on burial site,” through a colleague and friend, Richard Rothaus.  With the Bakken oil boom going full tilt, this article concerns oil drilling development near and around the Killdeer Mountains in Dunn County, western North Dakota. The part within the article that is incredible is from Lynn Helms, the director of the North Dakota Oil and Gas Division. Mr. Helms said, as paraphrased by the Forum, that “he had no doubts the proposed drilling area has no artifacts.” Once again, this was a paraphrase, but it caused in me the following thoughts: I don’t know whether Mr. Helms physically visited the lithic scatter and possible burial, nor do I know if an archaeologist explained it to him. In the event that he did not physically visit the site, there are quite a few of us that would be happy to explain to him the processes, and why they are necessary. But his lack of doubt is  disturbing. This is why.

The very nature of science and our legal system necessitates constructive and deconstructive doubt. Without this doubt, a case cannot be made one way or another. And without this kind of doubt, and without verifying one’s assertions, a statement is simply a statement sans substance (this is often captured in the saying, “You have no case here.”) Further inquiry into Killdeer is indeed necessary. Numerous archaeologists are concerned with these high profile sites, as they should be, and we are quite interested in showing Mr. Helms why and how. Education is powerful that way. That’s all. Back to it on this end.

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10/25/2012

Brewing in Bismarck: Updates from Laughing Sun Brewery

By Aaron Barth

On the afternoon of October 25, 2012, I dropped in to the construction site that is Laughing Sun Brewery in downtown Bismarck, North Dakota. Laughing Sun Brewery is co-owned by two friends, Todd Sattler and Mike Frohlich (certainly pillars of northern Great Plains culture and society). When Sattler isn’t practicing law and when Frohlich isn’t practicing the digital humanities, they are thinking incessantly about how to make better beer and beer making better, and how to bring a public tavern to fruition. The first video is Todd expanding on the brewing vats from 10/25/2012. That video is here:

I continued pressing Todd for more information (the people want beer! and they want to know the processes of getting beer!) after he got down off the ladder, and he showed me some rough hewn slabs of cottonwood recently milled and donated by the Suchy family. Last year the Missouri River bottoms flooded (every where between Fort Peck, Montana and St. Louis, Missouri), and this in turn caused massive erosion and property loss, in addition to felling large cottonwood trees that typically grow in the river bottoms of the northern and central Great Plains. Todd and Mike are considering how to make this lumber work for table tops, and this will be a bit tricky. Todd expands on the cottonwood logs here:

The trick with building with cottonwood is that it is soft and fibrous. This means that when these boards

Rough milled cottonwood boards donated by the Suchy family to Laughing Sun Brewery in downtown Bismarck, North Dakota.

dry, they will certainly bend. Todd said he is looking for ways to deal with controlling some of the bending, and they may just end up fixing, latching and securing the large slabs down to a horizontal surface while they dry and — as the punk-DIY ethos goes — see what happens. There may be a way to slice up the rough hewn boards after they dry, and re-fix them with epoxy into shapes that are more conducive to holding level large mugs of tasty beer.

 

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10/23/2012

Changes in the Flat-Scape: Cedar Shelves and Plants in the Winter

By Aaron Barth

One of the opening quotes in William Cronon’s Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983 & 2003) is from George Perkins Marsh, Man and Nature (1864), and it says,

…As we have seen, man has reacted upon organized and inorganic nature, and thereby modified, if not determined, the material structure of his earthly home.

Thank you Mr. Marsh.

Earlier this evening I thought about Cronon’s book when I decided to organize and

A new cedar shelf to elevate plants and allow them to capture the low-hanging sunlight during a northern Great Plains winter.

determine the organic and material structure of my earthly flat.  From Home Depot I picked up a couple cedar 2″x6″ and 5/4″x6″ pieces of lumber, and set to building some free-standing shelves to help plants capture the sun in the vertical, south-facing windows. This is preparation, I figure, for the eventual onslaught of a northern Great Plains winter. The thing with enjoying winters when one is not too far south of the Yukon is to simply keep busy, and keep moving.

Since it was drizzling rain outside on this cool October evening, and since water is an excellent conduit for electricity, I decided to bring the back patio wood shop into the kitchen. While Jack and Meg White belted out Seven Nation Army on the iPod and logic desktop speakers, I imagined what my very polite apartment neighbors may have thought every time the saw screeched to life at around 7:15PM — I had a back up plan, though, ready to invite them in for a cola or beer to show off my new cedar shelf idea should they come knocking. I could even offer to build them one if necessary: it’s important to be neighborly, and important for many reasons.

This indoor DIY wood shop also doubles as a kitchen.

Without making this too tedious of a blog entry, I simply cut the cedar into proper lengths to fit the bathroom window. I secured the legs to the walls with those little plastic anchors and simple screws, and capped the legs with horizontal 2x6s. It now smells like a cedar-lined sauna in there with hints of earthiness from the terra-cotta potters. The basil plants will be able to capture the sun all winter long. The tentative plan is to get rosemary in there as well.

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