My son spent the week in Iowa with his grandparents. I miss him, but I’m delighted for him and for them that they get to have this week together. I’m picking him up in Erie, PA on Saturday and can’t wait to hear all about the week he’s had.
On the way back from dropping him off last Saturday, I listened to an audio recording of Shirley Jackson’s “We have always lived in the castle”. I came to Jackson late–unlike seemingly everyone else, we never read “The Lottery” in high school–and am now falling in love with her precise and understated prose, and her masterful ability to build tension and strangeness. “We have always lived in the castle” does this over the course of a short novel, featuring familial murder, sympathetic magic, a menacing community, and the power of commonplace objects. Brilliant.
Hazel was feeling a little sad that Dominic was gone (really, all of us were!) so we took a trip to Binghamton to visit the Ross Park Zoo, and the Southern Tier Discovery Center. The zoo requires some comfort with climbing, as much of it is built into a hill, but it’s quite nice. The Discovery Center is a lot of noisy fun.
In the Museum, we finished putting up all the labels for “Velocity and Position”. I also finished the designs for the title and abstract panels and sent them to the printer.
We had a delightful visit from our Toronto Cousins, who stopped with us on their way back from New York City.
This is our last full week with our summer student assistants, so we took them out to lunch. They’ve done amazing work and I’m really proud of all of them.
I did some work on getting my student loans in order for when the pause ends, and for getting my passport renewed.
My supervisor and I drove one of the Renaissance paintings in our collection to the Williamstown Art Conservation Center for assessment and eventual conservation. The Museum is putting together a grant to pay for this, and an assessment is the first step. I had sworn that I had been to Williamstown before, but while we were there I didn’t remember a thing…
Still working my way through Leguin’s The Books of Earthsea. I just finished reading Tehanu, which was absolutely devastating and powerful. I’m also reading through A Wizard of Earthsea with my ten year old, and he and I are loving it.
In the Museum, we are still putting the finishing touches on the human figure exhibit. We had some trouble with our interpretive labels warping with the high humidity, so we reprinted them and tried a different adhesive. Fingers crossed!
My son and I got him packed up for a week-long trip to visit his grandparents in Iowa next week. He’s really excited!
We were planning on camping at Gilbert Lake State Park last weekend, but for a variety of reasons, we ended up just taking the day and going to Chenango Valley State Park for a swim, picnic, and beach frolic.
We had our last Crafternoons! This week’s theme was “music” and we had kids making and decorating rain sticks, tambourines, cardboard guitars, and more. I love this event and it’s so wonderful to be able to see it all come together.
We picked up my mother-in-law in Niagara Falls for a visit. We also took the opportunity to see the Falls, and to visit the wonderful Butterfly Conservatory nearby. We also availed ourselves of some wonderful Jamaican food, which I miss very much from my Toronto days.
I got some stuff around the house fixed, including a noisy furnace and a leaky basement pipe….in the sense that I called the guy who did it. Progress!
We did some more installation and preparation work on “Velocity and Position: The Human Figure at Motion and at Rest”
The Museum held another Crafternoons, this time with “masks” as the theme. This gave us an opportunity to get out some of our wonderful Mexican mask collection.
With my wife and mother-in-law, we watched Howard Hawks' screwball comedy “Bringing up Baby” on the Criterion Channel, which is completely bonkers and a lot of fun.
I’ve been rocketing my way through “The Books of Earthsea” which are as delightful and enchating as everyone says. This week I finished both “A Wizard of Earthsea” and “The Tombs of Atuan”, with illustrations by the great Charles Vess.
My wife and I watched “I am Mother”, a dark and deeply cynical science fiction film about a robot that raises a human child inside a sealed, post-apocalyptic bunker. It was well done, but definitely emotionally and morally messy.
The museum hosted our second “Crafternoons” centered around the theme of storytelling. Our student workers made storytelling dice and kids made comics and picture stories. It was tons of fun!
We did some more work installing “Velocity and position” in the Elting gallery.
With the holiday, my fam did several fun trips. We went to Ithaca and visited the Museum of the Earth, a really fascinating and beautiful paleontology musuem. We also went to Binghamton and took the kids to see “The Little Mermaid” and “the Flash”, respectively, as well as paying a visit to Robot City Arcade. Finally, we went to a 4th of July cookout at a friend’s house, and had a great old time, despite the heat.
My wife and I celebrated our 13th wedding anniversary. We had a great lunch at Mt. Fuji and exchanged gifts. I love you, baby!
I finished watching the Netflix Sandman mini-series. The original comic was vitally important to me when I read it as a teenager, and the series did a good job of capturing the poetry and darkness of the comic that so captivated me.
In the Museum, we de-installed “Juxtapositions: Warhol and the Baroque” and began the installation of a new show I’m curating tentatively titled “Velocity and Position: The Human Figure at Motion and at Rest”.
We had our first Summer Crafternoons! The theme for today was “Water” and our visitors made paper boats and paper fish with designs by our student assistants. It was a lot of fun and a joy to have children in the Museum.
I tried to buy Diablo 2 from Blizzard, which was on sale this week, only to discover that despite the game being almost 20 years old, it was not ported to run on systems without dedicated graphics cards, like my laptop. This seems a very silly oversight, but it’s too bad for them, I guess. Refund requested!
My wife and I re-watched “The Freshman”, a largely unheralded but hilarious and strange early 90s movie about friendship and kinship, film-making, pre-Giuliani NYC, and a Komodo Dragon. The cast is astonishingly rich, with amazing performances by Bruno Kirby, Penelope Ann Miller, Frank Whaley, Paul Benedict, Maximilian Schell, BD Wong, and of course, Marlon Brando re-capitulating Don Corleone. It’s remained one of my favorite films since I first watched it with my dad in the 1990s, and my wife and I quote it to each other constantly.
At the Museum, we had a week of half-day fun: craft events and activities during the afternoons after early dismissal at local schools.
My son finished up the 4th grade. What a trooper!
I finished Nick Mamatas' excellent conspiracy thriller “The Second Shooter”. It’s a fun, energetic conspiracy thriller, with a little bit of Marxism and situationism thrown in for good measure. Recommended!
My wife and I watched “American Born Chinese”, a Disney series based on the graphic novel by Gene Luen Yang, which delightfully mixes together teen drama, immigrant anxiety, Chinese mythology, and martial arts. The beating heart of the show is the friendship between Ben Wang and Jimmy LIu, but the show has wonderful and entertaining cameos by Michelle Yeoh as Guanyin, the Goddess of Mercy, Ronny Chieng as the Mad Monk Ji Gong and Ke Huy Quan as a a Chinese actor playing a racist caricature from a fictional in-show 80s sitcom.
We went to Gilbert Lake on Sunday, and let the kids splash in the ridiculously chilly spring water.
Father’s day was a delight. Thanks fam!
I did some work on moving a repatriation case forward to completion.
My wife and I watched “Last Action Hero” which I had never seen, but enjoyed a lot.
We welcomed over forty 4th graders from Valleyview Elementary School the Yager Museum. We haven’t had any school classes visit the Museum since I started in 2016, but many local community members have fond memories of visiting the Museum years or decades ago. Thus, it was really wonderful to start that up again. We had a great time, and the kids asked really wonderful questions about archaeology, native american life, and history.
At home, we did a lot of gardening, putting some more future-food in the ground, and trying to get part of our front yard closer to rewilding.
My wife and I watched Robert Eggers' “The Lighthouse”, a dark, strange and elusive movie about two men trapped with each other in ways both physical and psychic. I’m still pondering whether I liked the movie or not. It’s much more open-ended than “The Witch”, which I loved, but but so much of that open-ness was filled with violence and depravity that I’m not sure what I could take away. Maybe I need to watch it again?
I switched my Raspberry PI home music player from Runeaudio software to Volumio software. I’ve used Runeaudio for years, but have grown tired of it bricking the PI every time I have to update. Volumio does basically all the same stuff and promises to be much more user-friendly. Fingers crossed!
I sold some more comics on ebay. Here’s to making room for more!
My Wife and I finished watching “Color of Night” on the Criterion Channel. It’s a sumptuously shot and totally preposterous movie where Bruce Willis plays a psychiatrist who moves to LA after one of his patients commits suicide, only to take over his best friend’s therapy group after the friend is murdered by one of the patients. It has outrageous violence, gratuitous sex, and a monstrously great cast including Brad Dourif, Lance Henriksen, Lesley Ann Warren, Scott Bakula, and Ruben Blades. It’s totally insane but pretty engrossing in its insanity.
The Museum brought on two new summer employees. Welcome Ethan and Stephanie!
I supervised the return of our exhibit “Black Lives at Hartwick Then and Now” back into the Museum galleries, and the painting over some old labels in the Herzog gallery.
We did some great long-term planning for a whole bunch of summer programs for kids. It’s going to be a busy June and July at the Museum!
We ended up having a four-day weekend over memorial day, so we did a bunch of fun stuff, travelling to Albany and Cooperstown, doing some gardening, and going to the movies. Guardians of the Galaxy 3 was the fun, popcorn movie that I wanted.
At the Museum, we welcomed our summer graduate intern Lara, and immediately put her to work on some exhibit prep and some program prep.
After multiple weekends of work, we finished repainting our garage.
I finished reading David Stradling’s interesting “Making Mountains: New York City and the Catskills” and wrote up some notes. Stradling draws on Raymond Williams' masterful “The Country and the City” as well as the American tradition of environmental history pioneered by William Cronon. It’s as a good of a guide as I’ve found to the complex history, development, and romantic imagery that the Catskills have embodied and continue to embody.
If all goes well, Dominic will finally have his 10th birthday party tomorrow, going with six of his friends to see “Spiderman: Across the Spiderverse”. I’ll be there, but only to chaperone, and not at all because I loved the first movie and am hearing great things about how good the sequel is supposed to be.
