Month: April 2015

Room, Officers’, for the use of.

On By kittycalashIn Events, Food, Living History6 Comments

Sometimes I feel like a third wheel at Rev War events. There is not always a lot for women to do besides chores, and the public often ignore us. Still, there is one maxim I know to be true: if you’re bored, work.

Thus, when I found myself drifting off Saturday, I started dinner. The best part was where I got to make dinner: in a chamber off the main room of the Temple at the New Windsor Cantonment. These two rooms were occupied by the 10th Mass this year. Last year, the unfinished room had been the scene of Dirt Stew.

Cutting vegetables on a table was a major upgrade; last year, I think I used the kettle lid, the floor being too gritty even for me.

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It’s End of Stored Root Vegetable season here, so largish carrots and parsnips went into the pot, along with potatoes, onions, and a cooked chicken disjointed by hand (a task I have experience in).

This year, we brought the only iron we own, a small trivet-like stand to put the big kettle on; the little one went on bricks from the Temple’s other fireplace. Was that slim piece of iron wrong? Probably, but in a place where we can’t dig a kitchen or make a fire outdoors, we compromised in the name of keeping supper unspilled.

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Why no fires outdoors? Red flag warnings, due to high winds and low RH. That all hobbies will be affected by climate change was clear on Saturday, as we discussed invasive species, transporting wood across state lines, and various site rules on using brush to build shelters. It’s not just about digging fire pits or kitchens and archaeology anymore.

Surreal School

On By kittycalashIn Events, Living History, Reenacting2 Comments
On the King's Highway, behind Knox's HQ
On the King’s Highway, behind Knox’s HQ

The School of Instruction is always interesting, and this year was no exception. One of my favorite activities is walking with the troops (well, behind). The experience is usually surreal, and the walk we took behind Knox’s Headquarters met expectations.

Clash of the Time Periods
Clash of the Time Periods

Knox’s Headquarters was a new location for us, with new activities: we played a Jingling Match, which resulted in as much giggling as jingling, and felt like the Walking Dead met the 18th Century.

Jingling without Giggling is the hard part
Jingling without Giggling is the hard part

The game is pretty simple: mark out an area, blindfold as many as are willing to play, and set one without blindfold loose. The object is to touch the person ringing the bell, and it is a hilarious and merry game indeed, though I do agree with Mr McC that playing with a number of men full in their cups, or at certain sites (Stony Point comes to mind) would be too dangerous.
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Still, it’s simple and fun, if a little Kubrickian when you first tie on the blindfold. The person who catches the jingler is the next one to taunt the blindfolded.

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Next stop? Bell research, of course. I definitely want to play this in Newport later this summer.

Getting Cultured

On By kittycalashIn Art Rant, Museums1 Comment
Mark di Suvero at Storm King
Mark di Suvero at Storm King

Cats don’t like travel. You might, therefore, expect that Kitty Calash would prefer to stay home, but I’ve had a few travel adventures, and the hardest part is usually finding decent and strong coffee early in the morning, though sometimes dinner is a challenge: like my cats, I like my own bowl.

Happily, we’ll be cooking our meals for real tomorrow, boiling roots and meat and slabbing cheese on bread. Thank goodness for the 10th Massachusetts’s own John Buss and his love of cheese, but why did I forget the Massachusetts man who carried a pound of chocolate in his militia knapsack? We could have had drinking chocolate!

We’ll be at the New Windsor Cantonment tomorrow, but today, the last blustery snow-squally day of April School Vacation, we spent at Storm King.* The Young Mr enjoyed our visit last year, so we went back again.

 

Fun with framing
Fun with framing

This year, we did another quarter or so of the park, mostly di Suveros but also Magdalena Abakanowicz and Andy Goldsworthy. It was an interesting exercise in scale, and specificity. I used to joke that the worst part about making sculpture was that once it was done, you’d have to dust it forever, but Storm King presents another issue: the sculpture that must be weeded.

In St. Louis, we experienced Mark di Suvero pieces at Laumeier Sculpture Park , but not on this scale. They’re more interesting together; as with so many things, mass makes a difference—though with di Suvero, acres of ‘gallery’ are required for mass.

Goldsworthy at Storm King
Goldsworthy at Storm King

Goldsworthy has long been a favorite, the site-specific and temporal nature of the work appealing and similar to the kind of immersive, living history performance I prefer. Here, the wall wraps the trees and runs through the lake like a low, grey and solid version of Running Fence .

It’s a funny thing, walking the acres of art, and thinking about the kind of parkland gentlemen used to maintain—Pemberley and Stately Homes—and how yesterday’s folly is today’s site-specific sculpture.

Mozart's Birthday: another di Suvero, with snow. Snow!
Mozart’s Birthday: another di Suvero, with snow. Snow!

*Not for nothin’ is it called Storm King, as they would say in No’t Providence.

By Jupiter!

On By kittycalashIn History1 Comment
Ladd Observatory, 1898, back of the transit room.
Ladd Observatory, 1898, back of the transit room. Brown University image

On Tuesday, after a long hiatus, the local observatory was, at last, able to open to the public. Between the Snow on Monday theme of this winter, and the tendency to clouds and rain in what New England calls Spring, Ladd had been closed, and sending plaintive and apologetic emails, for weeks.

We walked up shortly after the 8:00 PM opening to find long lines, and a crowd as large or larger than the Halloween open house nights, when the staff and students turned the Observatory into a haunted house, neighborhood naughties swiped too much candy, and the roof deck was open for star gazing. Being Tiny Town, the Young Mr’s middle school art teacher was in line ahead of us with her young son and wife. To his credit, he did acknowledge her.

The telescope used by Benjamin West to observe the Transit of Venus, 1769
The telescope used by Benjamin West to observe the Transit of Venus, 1769. Brown University image.

There’s a long history of astronomical observation here, with a street named Transit for the 1769 Transit of Venus, observed by Benjamin West and other local notables.

We were happy to join the queue to look through the much larger telescope to see Jupiter, easily visible now.

It is really is a “wow!” moment, cooler even than the packages that make it here from India and astonish me. All that distance, light. How truly awesome the view through a telescope must have been in the 18th century, when we, collectively, knew less about the world and universe. How awesome it is now, to be able to see a world so far away, and to wonder what it is like.