Political Seed Art
Sep. 6th, 2007 12:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pen_gruntLast Thursday we went to the MN State Fair. We go early and we go during the weekdays--mostly because THAT is tradition.
When I was younger, we used to pack into the van at 5 a.m. and park inside the fair grounds. Mom brought a picnic lunch (mostly, I think, because we were poor...but also because we were thrifty and picky eaters). We spent the first three hours at the fair on machinery hill, where my dad would force us to look at tractors and such forever. We stayed until dark.
As I got older, I was allowed to bring friends and wander about on my own. This is when I discovered that there was a midway, and that you could get all sorts of things--like cookies and cheese curds--at the fair. Around the same time, I discovered boys. The night before my friends and I (they had to sleep over, since we STILL left for the fair at 5 a.m.) would psych ourselves up about all the cute boys we would meet at the fair. We did this every year, and yet, there were never any boys as a result of all our efforts. By efforts, I mean communicating to each other in our secret language that we thought a boy was cute, then following him around for a while. It's a miracle any of us survived into adulthood, really, with those stalker tendencies. We finally wised up and figured out that the fair is not actually the best place to meet boys--despite any tweenage movies we had seen. Besides, most were too old or too young, with their parents or with an intimidating group of friends, with their girlfriends or just plain out of our league. At any rate, the fair heralded the end of summer and the beginning of a new school year. The new clothes were already placed neatly in the closet--most of the time, first-day outfits were already picked out and book bags were already pre-packed.
As I've morphed into an adult-like thing, fair visits tend to concentrate on things that I would have deemed boring as a child--the animal barns, horticulture buildings and education buildings. I'm surrounded by ex-farm kids who seem to know everyone--last year the butter princess (they carve her head in a big block of butter) was one of Derrick's college friends. We can usually scare up some free dairy products and we'll most likely bump into people that he knows. We get to scratch cows, pigs and sheep behind the ears. Funny enough, scratching is the universal language of all animals. We are the pig whisperers.
While I don't always go every year anymore (it seems to be much the same from one year to the next--with the exception of the new food-on-a-stick...which was deep-fried fruit this year), there's always something intriguing that I hadn't noticed before.
This year at the fair, we ventured into the horticulture building and found the seed art. I hadn't remembered seeing this before, so I have no idea if this is typical of the genre. Seed art seems like a fad craft of the 70's--right up there with macrame' and decopage--so it was appropriate that we found this picture of Tom Sellick:
Really, you have to love someone to make them an effigy of seeds.
What we really didn't expect to find was the ultimate passive-aggressive political statement. The seed art portrait of a disgruntled state. You have to be pretty angry about something to bear out your indignation through the craft of seed art.
Cheney has really never looked better.
But think about it. You have to remain poised over your craft for hours...focusing on every little detail as you maintain the appropriate level of ire to create something like this:
I think that's W, Rumsfeld (though it could be Cheney, it's hard to tell), Rice and Powell. The Yellow Cake Road.
Then there are things like this, which I truly will never understand.
They've managed to make Al Franken look even more like a mutant pig than usual. I've met Franken at the airport baggage claim and can say that he's very nice and polite. However, I'm over the whole actor/novelty act-as-politician thing. Regan, what crap you started.
So that's my journey to the fair for this year. Now it's fall time and the kids wait by the curbs for their buses in the morning. It signals an upcoming shift in the weather, cool air, falling leaves, the smell of fall (mostly ripening apples, tree sap, an edge of snow and ozone), and all good things.
When I was younger, we used to pack into the van at 5 a.m. and park inside the fair grounds. Mom brought a picnic lunch (mostly, I think, because we were poor...but also because we were thrifty and picky eaters). We spent the first three hours at the fair on machinery hill, where my dad would force us to look at tractors and such forever. We stayed until dark.
As I got older, I was allowed to bring friends and wander about on my own. This is when I discovered that there was a midway, and that you could get all sorts of things--like cookies and cheese curds--at the fair. Around the same time, I discovered boys. The night before my friends and I (they had to sleep over, since we STILL left for the fair at 5 a.m.) would psych ourselves up about all the cute boys we would meet at the fair. We did this every year, and yet, there were never any boys as a result of all our efforts. By efforts, I mean communicating to each other in our secret language that we thought a boy was cute, then following him around for a while. It's a miracle any of us survived into adulthood, really, with those stalker tendencies. We finally wised up and figured out that the fair is not actually the best place to meet boys--despite any tweenage movies we had seen. Besides, most were too old or too young, with their parents or with an intimidating group of friends, with their girlfriends or just plain out of our league. At any rate, the fair heralded the end of summer and the beginning of a new school year. The new clothes were already placed neatly in the closet--most of the time, first-day outfits were already picked out and book bags were already pre-packed.
As I've morphed into an adult-like thing, fair visits tend to concentrate on things that I would have deemed boring as a child--the animal barns, horticulture buildings and education buildings. I'm surrounded by ex-farm kids who seem to know everyone--last year the butter princess (they carve her head in a big block of butter) was one of Derrick's college friends. We can usually scare up some free dairy products and we'll most likely bump into people that he knows. We get to scratch cows, pigs and sheep behind the ears. Funny enough, scratching is the universal language of all animals. We are the pig whisperers.
While I don't always go every year anymore (it seems to be much the same from one year to the next--with the exception of the new food-on-a-stick...which was deep-fried fruit this year), there's always something intriguing that I hadn't noticed before.
This year at the fair, we ventured into the horticulture building and found the seed art. I hadn't remembered seeing this before, so I have no idea if this is typical of the genre. Seed art seems like a fad craft of the 70's--right up there with macrame' and decopage--so it was appropriate that we found this picture of Tom Sellick:
Really, you have to love someone to make them an effigy of seeds.
What we really didn't expect to find was the ultimate passive-aggressive political statement. The seed art portrait of a disgruntled state. You have to be pretty angry about something to bear out your indignation through the craft of seed art.
Cheney has really never looked better.
But think about it. You have to remain poised over your craft for hours...focusing on every little detail as you maintain the appropriate level of ire to create something like this:
I think that's W, Rumsfeld (though it could be Cheney, it's hard to tell), Rice and Powell. The Yellow Cake Road.
Then there are things like this, which I truly will never understand.
They've managed to make Al Franken look even more like a mutant pig than usual. I've met Franken at the airport baggage claim and can say that he's very nice and polite. However, I'm over the whole actor/novelty act-as-politician thing. Regan, what crap you started.
So that's my journey to the fair for this year. Now it's fall time and the kids wait by the curbs for their buses in the morning. It signals an upcoming shift in the weather, cool air, falling leaves, the smell of fall (mostly ripening apples, tree sap, an edge of snow and ozone), and all good things.
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no subject
Date: 2007-09-06 02:04 pm (UTC)A friend of mine digitized dozens of seeds in order to do digital seed art.
no subject
Date: 2007-09-06 04:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-07 04:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-07 02:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-06 04:59 pm (UTC)Digital seed art? That's sort of like...doing photoshop embroidery, no?
no subject
Date: 2007-09-07 04:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-06 02:50 pm (UTC)It sounds like my kind of place!
no subject
Date: 2007-09-06 05:03 pm (UTC)This year I had a bite of Derrick's Deep Fried Twinkie (on a stick!). I confess, it was a little gross. They do have deep fried candy bars, hotdish on a stick, fried fresh fruit, fried SPAM nuggets and all kinds of oddities. Sadly, only a few of the listed are actually GOOD, the rest sort of get eaten as novelties. Every year there's something different to try. My favorite is still the roasted corn-on-the-cob, non-radical though it may be.
Deep fried pickles--amazing--just for the record.