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CATHY WURZER: It's the 5th of November, and it's First Friday. Minnesota Public Radio's monthly magazine of the arts and popular culture. I'm Cathy Wurzer, sitting in for Beth Friend. In the next hour, we'll revisit Nazi Germany and hear why German women did not speak out against the Third Reich. We'll also hear about one who did.

The Minnesota Orchestra celebrates its 90th birthday. Electronic art catches on in this high tech age. Arts reporter Euan Kerr will have that story. Salsa in your fridge, astrology in your office, and poetry to read out loud anywhere, that's all coming up during first Friday.

[INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC PLAYING]

SPEAKER: [SPEAKING GERMAN]

CATHY WURZER: On a dark November night, 55 years ago, German army officers joined mobs of ordinary people to rampage through the streets of Germany, destroying Jewish homes, stores, and synagogues. The event was a turning point in the escalation of violence against Europe's Jews. When Germans awoke the next morning, their neighbor's shops and temples were in ruins or in flames, and 30,000 Jewish men had been deported to concentration camps.

November 9th became known as Kristallnacht, the Night of Shattered Glass. Kristallnacht made clear early on the Nazis' potential for organizing violence on a wide scale. Yet, events like these generated little protest from ordinary Germans. The question historians have asked since the Holocaust, how could this have happened, is at the root of a new book by journalist, Alison Owings. Owings set out to interview the women of Germany who were adults during the Third Reich.

Her book, Frauen, German Women Recall the Third Reich is a chilling look at how very ordinary women understood their society and their place in it. Although Owings is neither German nor Jewish, she says she felt compelled to hear from these women before they died to document what they did or did not do in Nazi Germany.

ALISON OWING: I cast about trying to find a book similar to the one I wrote, hoping in a way that I didn't have to write it. But it seemed to me important that the voices of these women be heard because they were, after all, half the Third Reich. And then, when I went to Germany, it turned out really that it was a help that I was neither German nor Jewish, but I was simply interested, I guess, from the viewpoint of being a woman myself and being a journalist.

CATHY WURZER: Why do you think it was a help to not be German or Jewish? Do they open up to you more as a journalist?

ALISON OWING: I think so. As far as I could tell with many of the women, they had had lots of problems with their children who often had asked them in different ways, how could you have let something like this happen? And had I been a German and, one, the age of their children, I think they would have found me just a little too close. And, also, I probably would not have asked the sometimes stupid questions I asked that got quite extraordinary answers, very naive questions at first, like, did you suggest that your husband desert? And they all looked at me as if I were crazy. But a German would not have asked those questions, so I probably got more information than I might have otherwise.

And, as for not being Jewish, only one woman asked me if I were. She asked it kind of matter of factly, but I think the others felt a little less self-conscious than they might have had I been Jewish. And I'm sure I heard a lot more anti-Semitism than I would have had I been a Jew. It was certainly a mixed blessing, I must say, considering what I had to listen to.

CATHY WURZER: When you began the research for this book and all the many interviews that you did for it, were you expecting a specific female response to the Third Reich?

ALISON OWING: I had expected that to be the case in some degree. I really went to hear the women's stories to hear what they had to say so that their testimony wouldn't be lost forever. But I did expect that the women would be somewhat of a homogeneously noble group, and they were not that at all. The first woman I spoke with spoke of the idealism of national socialism, and I think the second woman talked about joining the Nazi party before it was even legal or before the Nazis had been elected.

So I realized that these women were not lining up in this noble über Frau line that I had staked out for them, but that they were indeed, as one might have expected, individual human beings. And they were very, very different from one another.

CATHY WURZER: Among the many women that you spoke to, who stands out in your mind? Whose story will you always take with you?

ALISON OWING: Well, there are several, but I think probably the one who is my heroine, and that's not necessarily the only one that I'll keep in mind, but the heroine is a woman named Frau Dubnack, who hid her Jewish girlfriend for two years in her apartment, in her apartment next door to Nazi neighbors. And they met on a beach in Berlin when Frau Dubnack went over to her because, as she said, "Oh, she looked so Jewish." That's probably why she was alone.

So she went over to her and said, "Oh, why don't you join us," her and her friends, "and come go swimming with us?" And they became friends. And she, just as a matter of course, extended herself to this woman after her own sister, the Jewish woman's sister was deported, and said, "Oh, you can stay with me." And she hid her for two years. And in her apartment were also her young son, Frau Dubnack's young son, five to seven during this time, whose life she also endangered by hiding her friend.

And, in one of the typical contradictions of the Third Reich, and there are so many, one way she helped feed the friend is that her husband, who was a soldier in the German army, sent them both back food. And he knew his wife was hiding her.

CATHY WURZER: Were there any commonalities among the women who intervened in some way, such as Frau Dubnack, women who hid Jews? Who resisted? Where did they find their bravery through that time?

ALISON OWING: Well, I really don't know where they found their bravery, but bravery seemed irrelevant to them. It certainly seemed irrelevant to Frau Dubnack. Hilda Naumann, the woman she hid, she said, was just her good friend. There was no question of bravery. But I think the commonality among these women, sometimes called Righteous Gentiles, and Frau Dubnack was certainly an exception, I must say. But, of those who oppose the Nazis and tried to do something about it, was that they had at least one role model at home, who showed them what was wrong and right, I think, who developed in them a sense of seeing people as individuals.

CATHY WURZER: What do you think then prevented some of the women from noticing, from not noticing what was going on, or for not standing up to the Nazis?

ALISON OWING: Well, I think, there are at least two things at play here. For one, some did, in fact, many did talk of trying to see the best of what was going on. One woman specifically said, I wanted to believe all that they were propagandizing, that things were going to be good and better, and that we were all working for world peace. And she said she felt like seeing that. She wanted to be idealistic. That word came up frequently. And other women talked of the German word as "verdrangung," which is repression. They said, well, maybe I verdranged what happened.

And some of them indicated they kind of did that all along. They put on blinders, which I sometimes think is not typically necessarily German trait at all, but something maybe anyone would do if something horrible is going on around them, and they don't want to see it. I sometimes feel I do that with the homeless, for instance. Not that there's a comparison, but just that, if you feel that you want to get on with your life, and you feel overwhelmed by something else going on, you make your accommodation perhaps.

CATHY WURZER: What about some specific women that you talked to along these lines, women who knew what was going on but were swept away in it all and didn't respond in the way that, you know, we would like to think that they should have responded?

ALISON OWING: I think there's a difference between a woman who was swept away and a woman who knew everything that was going on because the strictures against the Jews, there were a lot of them at first, and then they were more gradual, and some of them were kind of hidden. It wasn't as if every citizen was informed about what was going on at the concentration camps, which of course, in great measure started later. I'm talking specifically about the annihilation camps. But women who were swept along, I think, wanted to be swept along. And they also were influenced by the anti-Semitism that had been in Germany as well as other countries before the Third Reich and certainly was well used and in a diabolical way during the Third Reich.

And they did begin to see in their view that the propaganda was right. One woman who was a Nazi party member said-- well, she had some nice Jewish neighbors, but then they were saying, "Look around. All these stores are owned by Jews." And she said, "Yes, we looked around, and these were owned by Jews and those were owned by Jews. And we thought, yes, it's time for us, us to get ahead, too. We're not just the effortless ones," as the phrase was. And I think they truly believed the anti-Semitic propaganda. I think, as I wrote somewhere, it was somewhat like tossing mushroom spores into a damp and expectant forest. It was just ready to blossom because it had been there as throughout much of Europe, among other places, for quite a while.

CATHY WURZER: Did you find, Alison, during the interviews, the women talked about their own individual experiences, but did they really address the complexity and the horror of the Third Reich in an overall sense and a cultural sense?

ALISON OWING: Well, some of them were so focused on their own stories that what they recalled didn't always go beyond what they themselves had seen. But I think of one woman, a [GERMAN], who is among the youngest in the book. And I almost, in fact, an interviewe-- because I thought she was too young. She was born in 1926. She spoke a lot about the complexities and the contradictions of the Third Reich.

I'll give you two examples. She said it was like a spider web. I think "spinnanetz" was her expression. And if something happened on one part of the web, the rest of the web vibrated. And it was all terribly interconnected. For instance, just in trying to do something against the Nazis. Her father was in a business trip in Zurich and saw a movie. And it was preceded by an English newsreel, which was verboten for Germans. When he got back to Berlin after the trip, he was immediately called to the Nazi headquarters to say, why did you see this forbidden movie? And he was able to talk himself out of it. But that's one small example of just how people were tracked.

CATHY WURZER: What did you think of these women who did not look at the overall picture that only looked at their own little small corner of the world in their overall experience and didn't seem to want to branch out and look at the ramifications of what actually occurred?

ALISON OWING: Well, some women, of course, did branch out and became much more vigilant, I think, after the Third Reich. Those who didn't, I think, didn't in part because it was too horrendous for their psychological beings, perhaps. I have this feeling that they kind of fogged up their mirrors with exhalations of alibis, that they didn't want to see too much more because, out of the corners of their eyes, they'd see Auschwitz. So they could concentrate in a way on what they went through, on being raped by the Russians or by being bombed out or by losing their husband in the war because it's simply easier to figure that out when it just has to do with.

They also had not been encouraged to think in a wider view because, after the war, there was such a scramble to stay alive because there was no more ration system. There was so little food. People were starving to death in Berlin, 46 for instance, that they had something else to occupy their minds with, and gladly occupied their minds with that, and maybe even got used to thinking more about how to stay alive than about all those millions and millions and millions of people who had been killed in part because they had not themselves done anything earlier. But then you get to the question of what could they have done. And that's a whole other issue. What could anyone risk?

And also, risk at a time early on, when they weren't sure it was good or bad, some of them, I think. And they also, as time went on, knew that to risk anything was essentially to risk arrest, and arrest could lead to death. So it's a very complicated situation. I don't really know why they all did not think beyond their own lives. I imagine it's, in part, self protection and, in part, they were doing what others were doing. And I sometimes think, you know, the witnesses were gone. The Jews were gone. So they didn't have eyes following them. They didn't have fingers pointing at them anymore. I mean, they felt the shame that the world cried at them. But with each other, they could say, well, what could I have done? And that wasn't always an irrelevant question.

CATHY WURZER: Journalist, Alison Owings. Her new book is Frauen, German Women Recall the Third Reich. It's published by Rutgers University Press. Ms. Owings was in the Twin Cities earlier this week to discuss her book with local Jewish groups.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

For commentator Helen Rubinstein's family, the Holocaust meant the loss of memories, as well as loved ones.

HELEN RUBINSTEIN: In 1967, my mother traveled from New York to Brazil to visit her uncle, Aaron. She had not seen him since he left Poland 40 years earlier when she was only six years old. Among the mementos he gave her before she returned home was the only existing picture of her mother, my grandmother, who had been killed in the Holocaust. I was 13 years old at the time and very curious about the picture of this young woman for whom I had been named. I would take the photo out once in a while to look at her face at once familiar and strange.

And then, one day, I opened our album and found that the photo of my grandmother had disappeared. I looked in all the hiding places that my parents didn't know I knew about. No picture. When I asked my mother where the picture was, she told me she couldn't find it. And then, last year, my 18-year-old nephew, Erez, came to New York for a month-long visit. We had a wonderful time together. He really is a delightful kid, and I was not looking forward to his going home to Israel.

On the last day of his visit, Erez mentioned that safta, which means grandma in Hebrew, had told him that he looked just like the picture of her mother. The picture of her mother? My grandmother? Had he seen it? No, she hadn't shown it to him. But, apparently, there was this picture in which he looked just like his great grandmother, Haya. That could mean only one thing. I called my mother. "Mom, do you have that picture of your mother that you brought home from Brazil? "Yes." Very calmly I asked, "Where is it?" "Oh, it's somewhere. I have to look for it." "Will you bring it when you come over tomorrow?" "I have to look for it." "Will you look for it?" "I'll try."

The next day, no picture. She hadn't looked for it by the following week when my husband and I came to visit, nor by the week after that. At this point, I was obsessed with seeing the picture that had disappeared so long ago. Finally, a month after Erez casually told me that safta had referred to the lost photograph, my mother brought out a Manila envelope from which she removed the original picture and some copies she had made.

Later, I would think that maybe my mother's joy at seeing her own mother brought to life in the face of her 18-year-old grandson had broken some kind of spell. Only now could she bring Haya's photo out among the living. Now we could talk about her, and I could ask the questions I hadn't gotten to as a child. Was my grandmother religious? Had her marriage been arranged? Did she ever talk about her girlhood? Was she close to her siblings? Did she ever go to the movies?

Maybe we would even get to talk about my grandfather, about whom I knew almost nothing and whose likeness I will never see. For the moment, however, I stared, trying to memorize my grandmother's face, though I now had my own copy of the photo. My mother was right. The photo of her mother at age 24 showed a feminine version of Erez, the same straight eyebrows, long, narrow nose, and most touchingly, the same overbite. Erez has his great grandmother's buck teeth.

It feels strange to think of this young matron in her modest dress with a delicate crocheted collar as a great grandmother or even a grandmother. So I just think of her as Haya, for whom I am named. Somehow calling her by her name seems more lighthearted, more informal as one would be with someone in their 20s. I gaze at the photograph, trying to find something, anything that will make her more real to me. Of course, it's the buck teeth. What a little orthodontia could have done for Haya.

So here are the facts. Granny Haya is 24 years old in this picture. She will bear a total of 10 children and lose two of them to illness. She will raise the remaining eight with her husband, Itzhak Perkal, in the town of Stoczek and later in Warsaw. During the war, she will encourage her children to flee in all different directions, so that there will be a greater chance of at least some of them surviving the Nazi murder machine. Two of them did. She will then be murdered in Treblinka in the winter of 1942.

As I look at her face mirrored so exactly in her great grandsons teenaged features, I'm grateful that Haya decided to pose for a portrait in the year 1910, and that this photo traveled its lucky way from Warsaw to Brazil to New York. A few months after his visit to the US, Erez is also posed for a portrait when he was drafted into the Israeli army. He looks very handsome in his uniform, with his hair cropped within half an inch of his scalp. He smiles shyly. This photograph, too, has made its way to Brazil and to New York.

CATHY WURZER: Commentator Helen Rubinstain. You're listening to First Friday on Minnesota Public Radio.

[MARCELA SEMBRICH, "FRÜHLINGSSTIMMEN "]

A waltz aria, composed by Johann Strauss, was one of the selections 90 years ago, at the first concert of the then Minneapolis Symphony, now the Minnesota Orchestra. The voice belonged to Marcela Sembrich, a world-renowned soprano. She was hired by symphony boosters for the first concert back in 1903 for $1,800, a lavish amount at that time. Saturday night at Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis, the Minnesota Orchestra will recreate that first concert as part of its 90th anniversary observance. Minnesota Public Radio's Dan Olson reports on the direction the Minnesota Orchestra is headed as it tries to build an audience for the future.

DAN OLSON: Touring was a big part of the orchestra's audience building strategy in the first half of this century. Record sales were buoyed when audience members heard the symphony. The Minneapolis Symphony crisscrossed North America playing in gymnasiums and Cow Palaces. Cliff Johnson remembers the stop at the Edmonton Cow Palace, still redolent with fumes from the previous night's livestock exhibition and with a leftover lonesome Dougie.

CLIFF JOHNSON: Backstage by the last base case was a cow. And, of course, in the soft movement it went, "Moo", and which broke up everybody.

DAN OLSON: Cliff Johnson has been a bass player with the Minnesota Orchestra for 46 years. The Cow Palace was packed for the symphony concert. It was the same virtually everywhere, Johnson recalls. Big audiences gave the Minneapolis Symphony a warm reception.

CLIFF JOHNSON: Even when we played above the ice in Calgary, in the hockey rink with overcoats on, some wearing gloves, it was grim, but they filled the place.

DAN OLSON: Johnson says, 40 years ago, the symphony was on the road for up to two months out of its six month season. Rising costs put a lid on touring years ago. These days, audience building for symphonies, including the Minnesota Orchestra, is done at home. The season is 12 months long, and the schedule is filled with pops, classic coffee, subscription, and other concert series.

One of the most popular is the young people's concert. Every morning for a week, thousands of schoolchildren from around Minnesota are bussed to Orchestra Hall to hear a one-hour session about the life and music of Ludwig van Beethoven.

SPEAKER: Beethoven begins to make his dreadful noise upstairs, bumping and pounding--

DAN OLSON: Two actors portraying Beethoven's neighbors stand in front of the Minnesota Orchestra. The name of the Beethoven piece being played is flashed on a large screen above the players. Associate conductor, Bill Eddins, conducts from the podium and the piano as the actors talk over some of the music. Eddins says the decline of music education in schools and the rise of the video culture means orchestras cannot afford to be bashful about techniques for attracting young people to symphony music.

BILL EDDINS: The first time they've heard of Beethoven is a couple of weeks ago, and you have to at least get them interested somehow. I don't have much pride anymore in being a classical musician. And I don't care how I get my audience. I just want people from a young age to start thinking, hey, you know, this could be a very interesting thing for me to, at least, you know, keep my ears open and not just disregard it completely.

DAN OLSON: The audience of 2,200 five to 12-year-olds is rapt as they listen to passages from Beethoven's greatest hits and snippets of his personal life. Pressure to adapt to the short attention span of popular culture troubles orchestra violinist, Herman Straka. He remembers as a child attending two-and-a-half-hour long Minneapolis symphony concerts with his older brother when there was no question that everyone would sit still and listen.

HERMAN STRAKA: The students sat there as quiet as you can be, and they didn't need any props whatsoever. It was just Jascha Heifetz and Tchaikovsky that did the trick. So I don't think children are any different today, but I may be wrong about that. I don't know.

DAN OLSON: Student reaction to the Beethoven production allowing for the euphoria of a morning's escape from the classroom was positive.

SPEAKER: Beethoven, really good music.

SPEAKER: He was deaf.

SPEAKER: He was deaf.

DAN OLSON: How many pianos?

SPEAKER: Four.

SPEAKER: Four.

SPEAKER: It was awesome.

DAN OLSON: Good. What did you like about it?

SPEAKER: The music.

SPEAKER: Yeah, it was great.

SPEAKER: The actors are the best.

SPEAKER: I like the piano.

SPEAKER: I think trumpet's the best.

SPEAKER: I play the piano that's why I like it.

DAN OLSON: You're going to come back to Orchestra Hall maybe to hear another concert?

SPEAKER: Yeah.

SPEAKER: Whenever I can.

DAN OLSON: Thank you.

SPEAKER: I'll save up all my money to get a ticket.

DAN OLSON: Even with the rave reviews and earnest intentions of young listeners, the Minnesota Orchestra, as with others, is trying to broaden its appeal to adult audiences. 90 years after the orchestra's founding by the white business people who prospered after the native people had been killed off or chased out, the orchestra stage this month will feature Native American flute player, Jay Red Hawk and the Cola Singers.

Later in November, when the King's Singers perform with the orchestra, there'll be music of Ellington, Paul Simon, and the Beatles on the program. Conductor Bill Eddins says popular music was common in orchestral programs before the turn of the century.

BILL EDDINS: You know, things that we would consider fluff and pop music was just regular. The whole basis of it was the music here is to entertain you. It's not here to involve you with great social issues that are immediately relevant to everything that you are doing today. The music is there to entertain you.

DAN OLSON: If entertainment is the outcome, the goal for most major American symphonies, including the Minnesota Orchestra, has been survival. The collective deficit of symphony orchestras in this country is in the tens of millions of dollars. The Minnesota Orchestra deficit at 1.2 million is considered manageable. Luella Goldberg, the first woman to chair the board, says the Minnesota Orchestra earlier than most cut costs but kept its commitment to building an audience in the late 1970s and early '80s.

LUELLA GOLDBERG: We were making some exceptional efforts at that point to get into inner city schools, to get at particular programs, master classes with kids who had particular talents in a variety of ways, extending ourselves beyond what some of the ordinary programs were in other places.

DAN OLSON: The risk of trying to attract a broader audience is that the well-heeled boosters who contribute huge sums of money to support the orchestra will be put off by some of the music selected or by the changed appearance of the crowd. Current board chairwoman, Nicky Carpenter says influence of other cultures on the orchestra is inevitable and desirable.

NICKY CARPENTER: They have good music as well. And we need to learn from them, but we must make it an inviting environment. Tails, tuxes, three-piece suits are very difficult for many people. And even some of our old symphony goers will say, well, I'm not quite sure I enjoyed having the gentlemen sit next to me in his Levi's and Hard Rock T-shirt, maybe. But I do believe generally they'll respond. They'll respond well.

DAN OLSON: In the years around World War II, the Minneapolis Symphony tried to attract ticket buyers with events that included baton twirlers, programs with Big Ten college songs and concerts, which included polka music and beer. A newspaper critic of the time sniffed, the orchestra reached rather low to win new friends and draw in the non-musical. Winning new friends is virtually the top priority these days as symphonies cope with strained budgets and compete with other forms of entertainment. I'm Dan Olson, Minnesota Public Radio.

[MARCELA SEMBRICH, "FRÜHLINGSSTIMMEN "]

CATHY WURZER: It's First Friday. I'm Cathy Wurzer. OK. All the snow and cold means winter has had a head start in our region. Time to heat up our spirits with something new. At the Iconic Culture newsletter, Vickie Abrahamson has been busy tracking trends. Her picks for what's hot this month begin with the body and some unusual ways to cleanse it.

VICKIE ABRAHAMSON: We're going into cold season now, and so I think, to clear your sinuses out in LA in Beverly Hills, they're doing an ancient Egyptian cleansing, which is called coning, ear coning. What you do is just like what Cleopatra must have done many years ago, you lie your head on a pillow. Touch a small end of a 10-inch cone of beeswax and cheesecloth to your ear opening and light the large end with a match. And I guess it's simple physics, where the hot air rising pulls the mucus from your ear and nose canals up into the cone. Voila, you breathe easier and the bacteria is cleansed from the canals.

CATHY WURZER: You know, I can't see good Scandinavians in Minnesota doing this. Sorry, Vickie.

VICKIE ABRAHAMSON: Well, I asked, could I get on their mailing list. And she said, of course, for four cones-- $35 buys four cones from the Total Health Connection in Beverly Hills. But I don't suggest doing it by yourself because you might set your head on fire.

CATHY WURZER: What other methods are hot when it comes to cleansing the body?

VICKIE ABRAHAMSON: Talking hot, everything seems to do with heat here. Cupping is what we're also seeing. And you may remember from an old Zorba the Greek movie. He was Zorba who was cupped. It's a Greek method where you take a empty shot glass and heat it over a candle, place the shot glass on the sore or, as they say, stagnant part of your body. And the heat cups the skin pulling the tissue and flesh apart. And it releases a built-up bad bacteria. That's what's happening in health care.

CATHY WURZER: OK. Ear coning and cupping. Still a little new age for some folks. So we'll keep in this theme of new age by talking about another trend that's happening is astrology in the workplace. What's this about?

VICKIE ABRAHAMSON: Well, astrology, we're seeing it on Wall Street. An international commodities trader named Americans Future Group has created an official position called the Astrological Research Director. This is kind of the first position to be officially acknowledged on Wall Street and we think maybe a trend.

CATHY WURZER: Do we know if it works?

VICKIE ABRAHAMSON: I don't know. I don't know if I'd bet my money on it. In Chicago, also, we've picked up on astro finance seminars where, for a three-day seminar, you pay $4,000, and they'll charge your finances in the stars. There's just a raft of new-age software coming around. Chart your own horoscope with [? maturoscope. ?] There's a software called Psychic Rewards, I love this. It helps you develop your paranormal skills, shows you how to predict the future, and best of all, helps you manipulate matter. I guess you'll be moving the spoons around the kitchen table.

There's also Visionary Mindset, which delivers inspirational messages and affirmations on disk. And there's a really neat software name out there called Synchronicity based all on the mystical teachings of I Ching.

CATHY WURZER: Now, I've heard that death is a hot topic too. It sounds a little macabre to say this, but death is a pretty hot marketing tool according to what you've found out.

VICKIE ABRAHAMSON: We found that there are some really hot new products using the death name in the brand, two new cigarettes, Death, cigarette and Black Death cigs are in Venice, California. And we've also found Black Death vodka. It seems that these brands are so popular. They just can't keep them in the stores. And people are tired of being told they can't smoke because it's bad for their health. So they're confronting it up front with death.

We're also seeing-- this is just really wacko, I think-- hot holiday gift catalog is coming out of the LA Coroner's office. They have a catalog called Skeletons in the Closet, and it features toe tags and beach towels with body lines on them and T-shirts, corner baseball hats, mugs, and watches. And all of this, I think they've sold over $15,000 worth of product already, and it's been being marketed by the LA Coroner's office to help fund a program to keep kids from drinking and driving.

CATHY WURZER: Toe tags.

VICKIE ABRAHAMSON: Toe tags. Put your personalized toe tags.

CATHY WURZER: How chic. Well, to finish up the conversation, another hot trend, and I use hot not a pun here, is salsa.

VICKIE ABRAHAMSON: Sure, not a pun. Sure.

CATHY WURZER: Salsa. Salsas are hot.

VICKIE ABRAHAMSON: Salsas are very hot right now. Salsa is surpassing ketchup as America's number one condiment. And the names alone make your tongue quiver. Mad Dog Salsa, Emerald Salsa, Kick Yo' Ass Hot Salsa, Snake Bite, Pistol Packin' Picante, and my favorite Suicide Salsa. I guess we're getting back to death again.

CATHY WURZER: Death again, right.

VICKIE ABRAHAMSON: Go down to the farmers market, and you will see salsa makers, Minnesota salsa makers.

CATHY WURZER: Minnesota salsa.

VICKIE ABRAHAMSON: Minnesota salsa.

CATHY WURZER: Vickie Abrahamson watches trends for the Iconic Culture Newsletter.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Is it art or is it a video game? This is just one of the many questions that will be asked as the Minneapolis College of Art and Design hosts the fourth International Symposium on Electronic Art. Participants from all over the world are expected to discuss the ways artists use computers to break new ground and challenge long-held definitions of artistic endeavor.

Alongside the symposium is an exhibit of the work that is being produced. And for this weekend only, there will be a special show of interactive art where the viewer can have an effect on what is displayed. Minnesota Public Radio's Euan Kerr, who has always had a fascination for things that beep and whir went along for a look.

[INSTRUMENTAL SOUND EFFECT]

EUAN KERR: This isn't what you think. On a screen on the second floor of the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, a couple of geometric figures are flying around above a beautiful rural landscape. It's called Gratuitous 3D. A click of the mouse and the scene changes to a bar in outer space.

[INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC]

It's all very interesting, but is it art? The idea of electronic art brings visions of white coated, pointy headed nerds squinting at machines encrusted with flashing lights. But as computers become more powerful and accessible, the image should probably be changed to include someone in a paint-splashed smock.

BRIAN SZOTT: And I would say through the end of this decade and into the next century, computer-generated art will probably be among the primary art forms in contemporary visual art.

EUAN KERR: Brian Szott is the gallery director at MCAD. He is very excited by the opportunities brought by hosting the symposium. This is the first time the event has been held in the US and the first time it's actually been held at an art college. Szott says this has allowed the college to develop the focus of the event.

BRIAN SZOTT: Surprisingly, there has been a longer history of computer art than one may assume. And we felt here at the college that now is the time to begin discussing it in the context of art instead of the context of technology.

EUAN KERR: Thus, the gallery is hung with a selection of works showing the combination of computer-generated images with more traditional artistic techniques. But upstairs, the fun really begins.

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This is the brainwave rider, a system using a person's brainwaves to decide how fast images of a computer-generated landscape fly by on a screen. The rider sits in a chair that vibrates from the sound, wearing goggles embedded with flashing lights. When first shown in Japan, people waited in line for three hours to try it. So is it art? Scott Sayre is the curator of what is being called the interactive gallery. He says it's up to visitors to decide.

SCOTT SAYRE: I'm sure they're going to all be asking these questions. I think that there's a large enough spectrum of work here. That, if you're going to open your mind to accept any electronic art as being true art, that you'd probably find a piece of it here because we have full spectrum of things from very clean, well-dressed installations to very, very crude kind of hacker art.

EUAN KERR: In another dark room, five plants stand on pedestals in front of realistic pictures of similar plants displayed on a large screen TV. Artist Christa Sommerer explains the real plants are connected to the computer by sensors, and the computer-generated images can be made to grow through caressing the real plants.

CHRISTA SOMMERER: The tension of your body is transmitted to the plants, to the real plants. They capture this tension. They compare it with their own tension. And this tension difference or electrical potential difference is then triggering the artificial growth. So what you can do as a visitor is to, first, initialize and to start the growth of these plants, to modify them, to change the color, to change the size of them, to change the rotation, and to decide on which places they will grow.

EUAN KERR: The interaction of art and technology is also being explored down the hall at the Exquisite Fax Invitational. Curator Craig Ede is gathering works from around the world, starting with 64 specially invited individuals who are collaborating on one-eighth by 6-foot drawing one fax at a time.

CRAIG EDE: Each artist links to the artists immediately before them on this grid. So they get a piece to the left of them, a piece above them, and a piece above and to the left of them. They take those three pieces, and they add on another piece. They then send that back to me. I use that piece to send out to the next person, and we cascade from the upper right to the lower left. Or I'm sorry, the upper left to the lower right.

EUAN KERR: The resulting image is a mélange of intertwined figures and shapes ranging from the Da Vinci-esque to comic book. On the other wall, there are only a couple of sheets. But Ede hopes that in time this will change.

CRAIG EDE: We've invited people from all over the world to send us what they consider to be fax art that they've made. And we have two fax machines here. We have a plain paper fax and a roll machine. So if somebody wants to send a scroll piece that might be four feet long, they can do that. And we're just going to put up whatever we get.

EUAN KERR: Like the interactive art exhibition, the fax Invitational will only last through the weekend. The other piece is at the MCAD gallery will be on display through mid December. However, some of it almost didn't get there. Gallery director, Brian Szott, says, just as the symposium set out to try to define art, the US Customs became involved in the debate.

BRIAN SZOTT: The US Customs has a fairly traditional definition of art, meaning it, A, has to be made by hand and doesn't consist of manufactured goods. And so when you're bringing in computers, you're bringing in machine-made objects, common everyday objects in the creation of this work, customs was really quite skeptical of whether this was indeed art. And so, while they were very cooperative, this pushed-- not only we're pushing our own definition of art, we had to push the US Customs' definition of art as well.

EUAN KERR: Brian Szott, gallery director at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. I'm Euan Kerr, Minnesota Public Radio.

CATHY WURZER: By the way, if you'd like to contribute to the Exquisite Fax Invitational, the numbers are for regular faxes, 612-874-3797. For longer faxes, a roll paper fax is available at 612-874-3748.

[HOT BUTTER, "POPCORN"]

You're listening to First Friday on Minnesota Public Radio. Think back now to your high school English class. Did you have to memorize classic poems like "The Raven" or "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner?" For many of us, memorizing and reciting a well-known poem was a typical class assignment. But have you ever spoken that poem out loud again?

For author and editor Robert Rubin, poetry is meant to be heard out loud. His own habit of reciting poems around the office got on the nerves of his colleagues until they finally convinced him to put some of his favorites in a book. The result is poetry to read out loud, a quirky little volume chock-full of poems that trip off the tongue.

It's got funny margin notes, an eclectic choice of poems, and beautiful Matisse-like illustrations. It's just the kind of book you find yourself dipping into and actually reading out loud. We asked editor, Robert Rubin, to share some of the poems and some tips for not being intimidated by poetry.

ROBERT RUBIN: I think poetry sort of scares people sometimes. I think they figure, gosh, I have to have gone to college for four years and maybe graduate school and done a lot of reading before I can really enjoy it. And I think that that's the wrong approach to take. I mean, you're setting yourself up to be intimidated by poets. And I think a lot of poetry is very accessible.

Sure, there are hard poems, and there are poems that you need a lot to read. But, in a way, you can teach yourself what you need to know by reading the poems that are accessible and sort of working up. In my own case, once I stopped studying poetry, that's when I really started enjoying reading it. Once the pressure to learn it came off, I could just enjoy it.

CATHY WURZER: You mentioned that you try to make connections between poems in your book, and I'd like to give listeners a little taste of what you've done. You've paired classics with some modern poems. And I'd like you to, if you would please, set up a couple of poems that might serve as a real good example of what the book is all about for us.

ROBERT RUBIN: Well, poets talk to each other over the centuries, so you'll have one poet in the 1700s writing a poem. And then, you know, in the 20th century, somebody will write a poem that sort of answers it. Poems tend to come back to the same subjects. An example might be a poem that we all probably heard as children. One of the poems from Robert Louis Stevenson's Child's Garden of Verses."

I've included some children's poems in this because I think it's a place where almost all of us who like poetry got started, was listening to children's poems and children's rhymes. And then you can see how, in that poem, it's a simple sort of celebration of riding in a railway car. And then a modern poet taking an airplane ride, You can see how somebody who's not quite so excited about the trip might feel. And so here's the Stevenson poem, which is from a railway carriage.

Faster than fairies, faster than witches,

Bridges and houses, hedges and ditches,

And charging along like the troops in a battle,

All through the meadows, the horses and cattle,

All of the sites of the Hill and the plain

Fly as thick as driving rain.

And ever again in the wink of an eye,

Painted stations whistle by.

Here is a child who clambers and scrambles,

All by himself and gathering brambles.

Here is a tramp who stands and gazes,

And there is the green for stringing the daisies.

Here is a cart run away in the road,

Lumping along with man and load.

And here is a mill, and there is a river,

Each a glimpse and gone forever.

He's just celebrating the joy of flying along a railway train and the excitement of doing that. And that's the childish joy of traveling. Well, a modern poet dealing with a similar subject, which is traveling, finds it not quite so innocent. This is Mona Van Duyn, who was the poet laureate a year or two ago, and part of her poem, which is called "Views."

SPEAKER: I fly all the time, and still I'm afraid to fly.

I need to keep both feet on the ground,

The Earth within reach of my eyes.

In airports, I comfort myself by assessing others.

Look at that handsome necktie,

The weave of that suit, the portfolio.

People of worth are going to be on this plane.

The pearls on that shelf of expensive bosom,

The hairdressers' art,

All this tells my shuddering spirit,

That God wouldn't tip my seatmates,

All these important people from sight.

Once, the stewardess passed the word,

That Liz would be joined in Rome by Richard Burton,

Who was up in first class.

I have never felt so safe on a flight.

ROBERT RUBIN: Well, that's part of the poem. It's a longer poem. You can see how, in a way, it's that same sort of childish-- there's that little child who's in that poet, too. In this case, it's a scared child rather than one who's excited by flying along through the countryside. But you can see that the poems have something in common, even though they're written many years apart and with completely different intents.

CATHY WURZER: The poem by Robert Louis Stevenson, "From a Railway Carriage," why does that work so well? Faster than fairies, faster than witches, bridges and houses, hedges and ditches. Why does it-- just because it trips off the tongue so well?

ROBERT RUBIN: Well, listen to the rhythm of that. It's like the sound of the rails and the crossties under the train, you know, faster than fairies, faster than witches. It's got this bouncing, excited rhythm to it. It creates an impression, a feeling in the reading of it. That's like the feeling you get riding along in the train.

CATHY WURZER: What makes a poem work out loud?

ROBERT RUBIN: What makes a good poem to read out loud? Well, I don't always know, but sometimes it is rhyme. But sometimes it's just something that has a very strong rhetorical force. Something when you read it out loud, has a real memorable line or two in it that just sort of sticks in the memory.

The Crane poem I think is interesting. It's not rhymed. It's a very short poem, and you may even have heard a few lines from it. This is one of the cases where Stephen Crane's poem, "The Heart," comes across very well when read out loud.

SPEAKER: In the desert,

I saw a creature naked, bestial,

Who, squatting upon the ground,

Held his heart in his hands

And ate of it.

I said, "Is it good friend?"

"It is bitter, bitter," he answered.

"But I like it because it is bitter,

And because it is my heart."

ROBERT RUBIN: Well, is that really a poem? I don't know. He called it-- He called them lines. But I think it's one of these things that you hear it, and it sticks with you.

CATHY WURZER: I asked you what makes a poem work out loud, but what do you need to know when it comes to reading a poem out loud? I mean, do you have to wear a beret and be in a smoky cafe? Or can you-- do you have any steps you could pass along to listeners as to how best to read a poem out loud to friends and family?

ROBERT RUBIN: Well, if putting a beret on makes you loosen up, I think that's fine. I think that's the first thing I would say is to loosen up a little bit and not worry so much about being self-conscious. I often find myself reading poems out loud or at least reciting them because I don't take the book in with me but in the shower. I think that you have to be willing to almost do like the people do at the karaoke bars, you know, get up there and have some fun with it and goof around with it and not be so critical.

I think, after having done that, you have to be willing to try to understand the poem a little bit. Take the time to find out what the poet is really trying to say and, in a sense, put it in your own words, make it your own language, understand what the point of it is, and try to imagine what this person was saying when they wrote the poem, and then say it yourself, make the language your own.

CATHY WURZER: There seems to be such an increase in interest surrounding poetry. I mean, we have-- here in the Minneapolis Saint Paul area, there are open poetry readings at several cafes and coffeehouses. And it's really taken off in this area. And, of course, Maya Angelou, with her poem at the Clinton inauguration, also helped fuel that interest. Do you think that would also translate the interest, translate into folks actually sitting down pen in hand or at the computer keyboard and try to write their own poems, too?

ROBERT RUBIN: Well, I hope so. I mean, it's one of the things that I hope will happen. I think I was just delighted to see all the attention that Maya Angelou got. And that's going to have an effect. Not that all poets are going to be all that happy about that. I was at a conference about a month ago in which I led a discussion with three poets. And I was the moderator, and they were all quite critical of Maya Angelou.

CATHY WURZER: Why was that?

ROBERT RUBIN: Well, they didn't think it was a very good poem. And so they were all eager to say the ways in which they didn't like that poem. They went on essentially to say that they don't write poetry to be read out loud. They don't write it for people to experience out loud. They write it for themselves.

Well, I think in a sense that poetry can, if we're not careful, become just the province of the poets. And it shouldn't because it wasn't that way in the beginning. It was for all of us. And by reading it out loud, I think that we bring it back to its roots.

CATHY WURZER: Poetry, I think, is a way that we speak to one another. And when I was going through your book, I did come across a poem that spoke to me, when you listen to some of the place names in this. And it's a very American type poem. It's called "American Names" by Stephen Vincent Benet. And I'm wondering if you could try to set this up for us a little bit, talk about this poem and how it relates to this thought of speaking to one another on a little more of a grass roots level instead of being so academic, you know. And maybe set it up for us because I hear it's quite controversial as well.

ROBERT RUBIN: Well, I think it would be-- I guess the phrase would be politically incorrect these days when he wrote it. The racial attitudes were different than they are now, and it was perfectly acceptable for a poet to condescend to other races and other cultures in writing for the white-bred American audience. Public poetry, we had talked about Maya Angelou earlier, is a long tradition. And I think this is an example of a public poem, a poem that's supposed to try to make people think about where they come from and the names of the towns and the places they come from.

Benet is somebody who is of both French and American and English extraction. His poem is about America as opposed to France and England. He calls them Henry and John, Henry being France and John being England. I think it's a very interesting poem because it's about the sound and feeling of this place where we live. The fact that some of these words have such power today in this sort of politically correct atmosphere, I think, just is an indication that he was really touching on something. Here's the poem.

SPEAKER: I have fallen in love with American names.

The sharp names that never get fat,

The snakeskin-titles of mining-claims,

The plumed war-bonnet of Medicine Hat,

Tucson and Deadwood And lost mule flat.

Seine and piave are silver spoons,

But the spoonbowl metal is thin and worn,

There are English counties like hunting tunes

Played on keys of a postboys horn,

But I will remember where I was born.

I will remember Carquinez Straits,

Little French Lick and Lundy's Lane,

The Yankee ships and the Yankee dates and the

Bullet towns of Calamity Jane.

I will remember Skunktown Plain.

I will fall in love with a Salem tree

And a rawhide quirt from Santa Cruz.

I will get me a bottle of Boston sea

And a blue-gum nigger to sing me blues.

I am tired of loving a foreign muse.

Rue des Martyr and Bleeding Heart Yard,

Senlis, Pisa, and Blindman's Oast.

It is a magic ghost you guard,

But I am sick for a newer ghost,

Harrisburg, Spartanburg, Painted post.

Henry and John were never so

And Henry and John were always right?

Granted, but when it was time to go

And the tea and the laurels had stood all night,

Did they never watch for Nantucket Light?

I shall notrillionest quiet in Montparnasse.

I shall not lie easy in Winchelsea.

You may bury my body in Sussex Grass.

You may bury my tongue at Champmedy.

I shall not be there. I shall rise and pass.

Bury my heart at Wounded Knee.

CATHY WURZER: That's American names by Stephen Vincent Benet. Robert Rubin's book, "Poetry to Read Out Loud," is published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. Well, that's First Friday for the month of November. Beth Friend will be back in this seat in just a few more months.

We had help this month from poetry readers, Nathaniel Fuller, Steven Epp, and Brenda Wheel, and from Euan Kerr in our newsroom. If you want more information about anything you heard today, including our music, you can call our listener comment line at 290-1191. You know, calling the comment line is a good way to let folks know you support arts coverage on Minnesota Public Radio. So fire away your questions, suggestions, comments and, yes, even poems are welcome. Call us at 612-290-1191.

First Friday is produced by the hardworking Kitty Eisele. Our technical director is Randy Johnson. I'm Cathy Wurzer. Thanks for listening and have a great weekend.

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