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.

Battle Road Made a Man 

On By kittycalashIn Events, Living History, personal, Reenacting9 Comments

(with apologies for the child-centered content.)

Well, sort of.  The Young Mr sported a brand-new, all-hand-sewn frock coat and breeches, as well as brand new size 15 shoes (thank you, USPS Priority  Mail and Robert Land’s stock of the rara avis size 15.)  He was spotted in photos that were shared with me later, and there he is, front and center, in his new, blue wool broadcloth suit. (I do like the side eye Mr C is giving as he checks on the second row.)

When he was dressed on Saturday, the Young Mr had a real presence. There is something about a suit that changes a man– well, in this case, a boy into a man. On the ride home, he told his father, “Now that I’m growing up, it feels weird to call you mom and dad. I think I should call you by your first names.” (I’ll wait here while you finish laughing. Yes, it is funny. No, we did not laugh at him.)

It’s a curious idea to us now, marking transitions with clothes. For some, coming of age is marked with a car or at least a driver’s license. For others, it may be a first job, or apartment. But once, stages were marked in clothing, as boys moved from gowns to breeches, and later from dresses to short pants to long pants.

 Our clothing is so much less formal, that we are less accustomed in most cases to seeing men in suits. Even as young as I was in those last “Mad Men” years, I remember more formal times, and shopping with my parents, seeing coats marked up in chalk and thread for my father, and the ranks of shirts and heavy-hangered trousers and coats at Brooks Brothers downtown in Chicago.  (I went there once as a teenager with a friend to buy a present for her father; we were not warmly welcomed in our punk clothes, but the glass cases were unforgettable.)

For the Young Mr, that kind of formality is lost. There’s not much point in buying him a modern suit: he’s all t-shirts and hoodies and hand-me-downs from a friend at work he’s rapidly growing past. He’d never wear a suit, except as he steps into the past, and his fittings happen in private homes or workshops, and not in front of a three-panel mirror.

The Young Mr steps into the past to step into adulthood, and comes back to a present where he has many more years and rites of passage before he will truly be an adult.

Waistcoat Wanting? Workshop!

On By kittycalashIn Clothing, History Space, Living History, making things, Museums, Reenacting2 Comments
Gentlemen of Rhode Island
Gentlemen of Rhode Island

I managed, with sore fingers and considerable snake-eyed concentration, to get breeches and coats finished enough to send these two off to Battle Road better dressed than ever before. I’m pleased indeed with how the blue suit turned out, and planned to make a blue wool waistcoat to complete the set. Except…the Young Mr prefers some contrast in his clothing (a change from his prior preference for complete camouflage) and now wishes for white. I ask you.

Mr S is need of a new waistcoat himself, and he’s registered for a workshop with Henry Cooke to make a new waistcoat for himself. He was awfully taken with Mr B’s clothes two Saturdays ago, when he dressed as George Claghorn, the Naval contractor who supervised the building of the USS Constitution

Plush. No, really, it's made of plush *and* it's fancy, at least for us.
Plush. No, really, it’s made of plush.

.

L’Hermione is coming to Boston and Newport in July, and then we have An Afternoon in 1790 planned, with What Cheer Day not far behind, so there’s plenty of need for new waistcoats in a variety of styles– 1780, 1780, 1800 each have their variations.

Why not join us May 2nd and 3rd in Providence, and make your own fabulous waistcoat? There’s still a space or two left! Register here.