Monday was a rainy today.  We didn’t care.  The gentle rain gave the woods the patina of an oil painting. The ground was intense yellow with leaves, soon to be covered with the first snow of the season.  The gentle rain, and gusty wind that did not impede our enjoyment of movement throughout the day.

These photo’s are a sample of the experiences that came our way.

We traveled to the Wood Orchard Farm Market, having received a recommendation on the quality of the SweeTango variety of apple.  We are apple lovers, enjoying the apple year round.  The SweeTango is a variety developed by the University of Minnesota and is a hybrid of the Honeycrisp apple.  They are available for purchase only at the Wood Orchard Market in Door Country.  We purchased a big bag and yes they are delicious.  With a bite of the apple, the taste filling the mouth is sweet with a faint tart quality.

The Market was quite extensive with many products, and lots of sampling offerings.  It would be easy to fill a shopping cart with delectable canned fruit for pie filling, and many types of sauces. —a delight for the eye as well as the palate.

For lunch we decided to return to the Bayside Tavern in Fish Creek.  The Friday night fish fry was impressive, and from our look at the menu we knew that we could not go wrong.  This is a tavern that is serious about the quality of their food offering.

Our waiter described the buffalo burger which was their special of the day.  His portrayal of the lean paddy convinced us so that is what we ordered.  We were not disappointed.  I enjoy soaking up the buzz of a busy neighborhood Wisconsin tavern.  Such a place is crucial to the well-being of the town.

From our table I managed to catch the image of our waiter preparing two Bloody Marys for several patrons which were seated nearby.  The drinks were served with pride, and received with notes of excitement in their voices.

Laura expressed interest in visiting the Island Lavender Farm store in Ephraim. There is a large lavender farm on Washington Island.  The harvested lavender is brought to the store in Ephraim for distillation.  I learned about the benefits of lavender while visiting the store.  Lavender takes two years to grow to maturity, and requires quite specific growing conditions.  It is used in food, aromatic cosmetic products, and in the seductively beautiful chocolates that were displayed for purchase at the store.  Lavender has so many uses and benefits.  I plan to learn more from the publication that I was given.

As the rain continued to fall outside I felt an inward happiness to be learning about lavender.  We decided for our next trip to Door County we will spend a day exploring Washington Island.

You might be able to guess how we finished off our afternoon.  We found a great book store, the Peninsula Bookman, a purveyor of used books.  I happily came away with my discovery, The Element of Fire: Science, Art, and the Human World.  Can hardly wait to get into it.

Finally we returned to the Blue Horse coffee shop and found a table to enjoy our cup of coffee and tea, while we read for an hour.  Here are a few lines from Paul Virilio’s book Art and Fear.  Virilio was one of the last of the great French cultural theorists.  He died in September of this year.

Machine for seeing,
machine for hearing, once upon a time;
machine for thinking very shortly with the boom in all things digital
and the programmed abandonment of the analogue.
How will the silence of the infinite spaces of art subsist,
this silence that seems to terrify the makers of the motors of any kind,
from the logical inference motor of the computer
to the research engine of the network of networks?
All these questions that today remain unanswered
make enigmas of contemporary ethics and aesthetics.

–excerpt Silence on Trial p. 39
by Paul Virilio pub. 2000

I am provoked by Virilio’s words to consider how much of our reality is presented by technology, by electronic media.  While seated in the Blue Horse I overhead a conversation between three young female friends.  One individual offered how many You Tube videos she had watched the previous day.  Electronic media, especially the audio visual comes with the values, the point of view, the ethics of it’s creator embedded in the viewers experience of the video..  The viewer is deprived of the critical distance of contemplation.  Without a interval of silence how is one to formulate one’s own values?

Have you felt unease, a sense of discomfort at the images presented, rapid fire of product advertising, or the caricature, and gross negativity of political pitches?  It feels like emotional assault, a form of attempted emotional rape to me.

The objectives of the organization or the company behind the video are aimed with relentless, battering effectiveness at the insecurities of the viewer.

Triumph of the Will, the 1935 Nazi propaganda produced, edited and co-written by Leni  Riefenstahl comes to mind.

And so it goes.