Recent Posts (page 17 / 37)

Quentin's Weeknotes 1/22/23-1/28/23

This Week:

via GIPHY

• My parents were visiting, which was a wonderful second Christmas. It was also a wonderful second birthday for my daughter, who had a cracking good birthday party at local institution Noah’s World. It’s been a good week to be surrounded by family.
• I continued to help get our Micronesia exhibit up on the walls.
• I did some more collections research work.
• I mostly watch movies in small chunks, when I have a few minutes. This week, I finished watching two movies. The first was “Computer Chess”, a strange love-letter to early computer culture, about a computer chess tournament and the colorful and unusual people who attend it. It was filmed with a very poor quality video aesthetic that added to the surreal mood of time-travel that it created.
• The second movie I finished was “Cure”, a late 90s ancestor of modern J-Horror, directed by Kurosawa (but not the one you’re thinking of). It’s a dark supernatural police procedural about a series of grisly murders, committed by random individuals who both admit the murder and also have no sense or reason for doing so. They are, in turn, all connected to a strange and anonymous man who may have amnesia, but may also have a hypnotic power to manipulate anyone he meets. It was a brilliant and shocking film, with a strong social criticism about mental illness, lonliness, and fate.
• Continuing our Criterion Channel streak, my wife and I watched Hitchcock’s “The Lady Vanishes” which was funny and exciting. As my wife said, despite being almost 90 years old, if feels very modern and fresh. Plus, movies on trains are awesome.

Weeknotes: 2/19/23-2/25/23

• We ran towards the finish line of our two new exhibits, on Micronesia and Margaret Huntington Boehner respectively, and held our reception on Thursday.
• I started getting our tax documents together, with the goal of getting everything filed through Hartwick’s VITA tax program.
• My kid was off school this week, and so I did a bit of shuffling him around to a few programs, including kids camps at Bright Hill Press, and Oneonta World of Learning.
• In Collections Management, we talked about environmental conditions, as well as collections policies.
• With my son, I finished reading “Runaway Ralph” by Beverly Cleary.

Quentin's Weeknotes 1/15/23-1/21/23

This Week:

• I finished reading Jeanette Winterson’s “The Daylight Gate”, a dark and entertaining historical yarn about the Pendle witch hunt, and the people caught up in the mix of political intrigue, anti-catholic persecution, and patriarchal violence that spurred it.  It’s beautifully and hauntingly written, and doesn’t pull any punches with regards to the cruel brutality of witch trials and imprisonment.
• My parents came out to visit us!
• I worked on some collections projects that will hopefully bear fruit soon.
• I continued to help with the installation of our new Micronesian exhibit.
• I have really enjoyed Pitchforkmedia’s sunday reviews, which feature a long-form review of an album they have never reviewed previously. This past Sunday’s delight was a review of “Monsters of Rap”, a 90s-era TV-infomercial 2CD set from the people who had made “Those Fabulous 70s” and would go on to make “Kidz Bop”. It’s a delightful review that takes me back to the landscape of pop radio in eastern Iowa in the 1990s, which was my first real exposure to anything like popular music. There are also plenty of jaw-dropping factoids (Ice-T shouting out MC Hammer?, Pharrell co-wrote “Rumpshaker”?) that made it endlessly entertaining and draws a thru-line from this early crossover success to contemporary popular music in all kinds of interesting ways. Overall, it charts the tensions between rap music’s undeniable commercial appeal and its parochial, urban, black-cultural origins.

Quentin's Weeknotes 1/8/23-1/14/23

This Week:

• My wife and I watched “The Net” a frankly preposterous and bewildering artifact of early internet culture that was saved only by a really engaging performance by Sandra Bullock. There’s lots of geocities-era websites and glib mentions of viruses and missing disks and mainframes, and an oppressive anxiety about privacy that almost feels quaint. Having said that, the film was fairly entertaining, despite some of the nonsense.
• With my son, I finished reading J.K. Rowling’s “The Christmas Pig”. To paraphrase the West Wing: JK Rowling. Boy, I don’t know…. The book was good.
• I finished reading Austin Grossman’s “Crooked” a book that is written as the secret memoirs of Richard Nixon, and posits him as having been fighting in a vast magical and supernatural conspiracy during his adult political life. It’s a fun and interesting book that is weakened by the glaring omission of discussions of race and racism, which were pretty central to Nixon’s political and personal life.
• I finished reading Volume 1 of Die by Kieran Gillen and Stephanie Hans. It’s a sort of dark fantasy about some kids who get sucked into a fantasy world while playing a Dungeons and Dragons-like game in our world, a la the 80s Cartoon. But they stay there, and when they finally return two years later, one of them is missing and the others are all broken or warped in some way. It was a recommendation from the Minister of Intrigue and as usual, it was well-deserved. Great, thoughtful storytelling and gorgeous illustrations.
• I worked on de-installing the last of “Front Row Center”, and with some students, started the process of installing our newest exhibit about Micronesia.
• More Criterion! My wife and I watched “His Girl Friday”, a funny and intense movie about the perils and joys of newspaper journalism and the tensions between work and relationships. Rosalind Russell is funny, glamourously kooky, and cutting, but my favorite scene probably involved Mr. Pettibone, the hapless deliverer of pardons. Criterion likes him too, and there’s a great essay about his scenes and Billy Gilbert, the actor who played them.

Quentin's Weeknotes 1/1/2023-1/7/2023

This Week:

• I returned back to work after a wonderful and enriching break. It was Christmas, Hazel’s Birthday, and the New Year, along with family visits, trips to fun places, and lots of great food.
• Like seemingly everybody, we watched Glass Onion. Despite the shared character, it was a very different movie from Knives Out, zany and madcap compared the latter’s austere mannerism. But it was tons of fun all the same.
• I finished reading M. John Harrison’s retrospective collection “Settling the World”. Many of the stories are collected in a now-out-of-print collection that I had already read called “Things that Never Happen”. But reading those stories afresh was almost more delightful and rewarding than the first time I read them. I had missed the fierce and anguished Thatcher-era politics of “Running Down”, the thoughtful and genuine feminism of “Science and the Arts”, and the creepy medicalization of “Yummie”,  and “The Crisis”. And the new-to-me stories of “The Causeway”, “The Machine in Shaft Ten”, and “Doe Lea” were equal parts engaging, unconventional, and brilliantly written.
• Thanks to a delightful gift from my folks, we got a year of the Criterion Channel. It’s a pretty bewildering streaming service, and with the addition of many films I’ve never heard of, it’s a big exciting apple from which to take a bite. We started out with a bang, watching Hitchcock’s “The 39 Steps” a movie that was equal parts preposterous, funny, and exciting.
• A lot of my work this week involved just catching back up after a week off. I spent a lot of time de-installing “Front Row Center: Icons of Rock, Blues, and Soul” and prepping the galleries to be painted for the new exhibit curated by Museum Studies students.
• I finally got around to watching the video of “Sing Nowell” which was a tribute concert to Tony Barrand, who died about a year ago. Tony was a brilliant singer, dancer, and teacher and a big influence on my life. The music he made with Nowell Sing We Clear (some of which is performed here) is a regular part of my holiday season and this was delightful performance by enthusiastic and talented folks: [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wUa6U_zwEY&w=560&h=315]

Yearnotes 2022

This is my year as sentences on which I could put a period, and a few that require more complicated or delicate punctuation.

I read 53 books this year:

• I devoured the first two of Tamsyn Muir’s Locked Tomb books, “Gideon the Ninth” and “Harrow the Ninth”. The former was amazing, funny and exciting and strange and emotional; maybe the best book I read this year. The second one rubbed me the wrong way, but won’t stop me from picking up the third as soon as I can. I also read and loved the first two of Sara Gran’s “Claire Dewitt” books, a cracking-good series of gritty mysteries woven together throughout with a kind of weird philosophy of what it means to solve mysteries, and what it costs.

• This was a year I let myself read some dystopian or apocalyptic books that had been lingering and hungry on my bookshelf, including Station Eleven, Tropic of Kansas, The Postmortal, Hyenas, and Future Home of the Living God. Most of them were fairly hopeful, actually. Except for “Future Home….” which was so close to our current reality that it shook me to read.

• For Non-fiction, I really liked John Hodgman’s thoughtful and funny “Medallion Status”, a book equal parts silly and serious about the fleeting nature of fame and what it does to one’s heart. I also loved the contrarian socialist analysis of “The People’s Republic of Wal-Mart” and the combination of humor and widescreen Indigenous history of “We Had a Little Real Estate Problem”.

Besides books, my most regular medium of choice is podcasts. My staples for this year have continued to be WTF w/ Marc Maron, Why is this Happening?, Double Threat, Explorers Wanted, Pseudopod, Our Opinions are Correct, Weird Studies, Know Your Enemy, the Memory Palace, and Deconstructed. New additions include:

• Unclear and Present Danger, a podcast about post Cold War movies of the 1990s, which is informative and thoughtful, though focusing on movies that are mostly neither.
• 5-4, a very funny and incisive podcast “about how much the Supreme Court Sucks”
• “The Land You’re On”, a wonderful exploration of contemporary and historical Haudenosaunee life and culture put together by the great Neal Powless.

I saw some good (and some bad!) movies and TV this year, including

• “His House”, “Sorry to Bother You”, “Blade Runner 2049”, “The Harder they Fall”, “Black Death”, “Staged”, “Free Guy”, “Hustlers”, “They Remain”, “Zoolander”, “Sonic 2”, “Stalker”, “Station Eleven”, “The Bad Guys”, “Roadrunner”, “Breaking Point”, “Prey”, “The Devil’s Backbone”, “We’re All going to the World’s Fair”, “Hellraiser (2022)", “Werewolf by Night”, “High Plains drifter” and “Get Back”.
• “Sorry to Bother You” was dark and radical and funny. “Prey” is wonderful Indigenous science fiction. And somehow “Get Back” made me love the Beatles even more than I already did.

I mostly buy music on Bandcamp, and this year I bought albums by:

• Doran, Monster Magnet, Superchunk, The Knife, Green Lung, the Mountain Goats, and Sufjan Stephens. I also bought non-bandcamp records by Can, Rush, Richard Thompson, and Nic Jones. Finally, I received copies of Bob Mould’s “Copper Blue/Beaster”, Meat Puppets II, and the self-titled James Blake album as gifts.

• Nic Jones was pretty revelatory for me for me this year. I can’t get over his unusual vocal phrasing and his percussive but melodic guitar playing. I was inspired by him to record a version of the Australian rebel song “Jim Jones in Botany Bay” in his idiosyncratic tuning and style. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6jVLi2ErZM&w=560&h=315]

Professionally I got a bit done.

• Teaching-wise, I again taught Collections Management, and this year, taught it Ungraded, with grades developed in consultation with students based on their and my mutual assessment. It was a great experience that I’m doing again. I also taught North American Material culture up to 1700, with far-too-brief surveys of the rich and diverse object-worlds of Indigenous people on Turtle Island. Finally, I was a guest speaker in SUNY Oneonta’s capstone course “Issues in Anthropology”. I spoke about the archaeology of race, a subject to which I used to devote substantial intellectual and practical effort.
• We finished a speaker’s series on Land Acknowledgements with amazing talks by Bonney Hartley (Stockbridge-Munsee Community) and Darren Bonaparte (Mohawk of Akwsesasne).
• We finished and installed two exhibit panels documenting our repatriation of brooches used by John Wannaucon Quinney to the Stockbridge-Munsee. These panels were developed by Hartwick students and staff and members of the Stockbridge-Munsee community, and copies are on display here and at the Arvid E Miller Cultural Center and Library on the reservation in Wisconson.
• I applied for and successfully received a NYSCA/MANY Partnership Grant for Capacity Building. This grant is currently funding our consultation by Indigenous Concepts Consulting, a Haudenosaunee-owned consulting firm, who is helping us re-think and re-imagine how we exhibit and talk about Native people at the Yager Museum. We held a day-long workshop with Michelle and Neal in November, and now we are in the process of coming up with a new exhibit plan to install next year.
• With some money from the Richard and Gerri Haan fund for Native American studies, the museum hosted a weeklong residency and exhibit by Jason Medicine Eagle Martinez, an artist and teacher based in Rensselaer, New York. Jason’s work and process were enthusiastically received by students, faculty, and staff, and I’m honored to continue to be able to use the Yager Museum as a space to exhibit exciting contemporary Indigenous art.
• Speaking of that, earlier this year we de-installed dadibaajimo: Two Mississauga Artists Share stories, and after months of wrangling, I finally managed to return Cathie Jamieson’s paintings back to her on the Misssissauga Reservation, with the help of Luke and August Swinson. Luke has agreed to donate his artwork to the Museum’s collection, and we have purchased two of Cathie’s paintings as well. I am excited to help the museum grow and blossom as a repository of interesting and gorgeous contemporary Indigenous art.
• I completed the Museum’s five-year collections inventory, with the help of Hartwick students Moussa Niang, Gabriel Valenzuela, and Josephine Becker. My son even helped too! We also repaired and re-installed St. John of Nepomuk in the Museum’s Van Ess Gallery.
• Along with Josephine, I installed “Front Row Center: Icons of Rock, Blues, and Soul”, a travelling exhibit of photographs by Larry Hulst. I also directed the installation of “Juxtapositions: Warhol and the Baroque” and did some design work for the display panels. Finally, I installed some Mexican Masks from the Museum’s collection for display at Thornwood, the home of Hartwick’s new President, Darren Reisberg and his husband John Hilliard.
• After two years of locked summers in the Museum, we re-started the Museum’s Crafternoons programs, with weekly activities for kids. I love this event and am happy that the Museum can be a space for children’s creativity again.We also showed a bunch of movies, had a live concert, and hosted another successful “Horror in the Museum”.
• I joined Hartwick’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion subcommittee on Native American issues. We are working largely on aesthetic and built-environment changes to the College, including street signs, the college alma mater, a land acknowledgement and the placques on Yager hall. We are also building a case for greater engagement with New York Indigenous communities through recruitment and retention of Indigenous students and faculty.
• Oh yeah, and I got promoted to Museum Curator, too!

I tried, in halting ways to take better care of myself this year. Inspired in part by weight-lifter and fitness-culture critic Casey Johnston, I started doing strength-training again at the gym. I feel strong in my body and better overall. I also started talking to a therapist regularly, which has made my brain and my heart feel better too.

On the other hand, this is the year my whole family got COVID. Thankfully, none of us seems to have developed any long-term or debilitating symptoms. We also managed to get the usual kind of sick that was held at bay by quarantining at home for two years.

We spent an atrocious amount of money on car repair. If you’re up there God, please send me a future that looks more like Wakanda than NYC. Or at least send me a Tern GSD electric bicycle.

When vehicles were working, we did take the opportunity of a slightly epidemiologically safer world to travel a bit.

• We visited Toronto (and Bancroft, ON) for the first time in two years, and I ultimately ended up going back twice more–once to pick up my renewed PR card, and once to celebrate my Mother-in-Law’s 80th birthday!
• We also took a trip out to the North Shore of Massachusetts, which is a gorgeous, fun and personally resonant place to which I am always happy to return.
• We spent some time in Iowa with my parents and my brother. And they spent some time in Oneonta with us.
• We also did some shorter outings to Oswego, and Chenango Valley State Park.
• We sent our son off to summer camp at the amazing and inspiring Camp Stomping Ground. It was a bit rocky for him (and for us!), but he made it through his first time and is excited to go back next year.

I mourned the passing of influential people in my life, including Tony Barrand, Mike Davis, Mimi Parker, and Wilco Johnson.

I voted and gave some money to good people, and like most of us, I mourned the many dark turns that America and the World took. I did spend some time working on the Black Trowel Collective’s Microgrants Committee, helping provide microgrant funding for financially distressed archaeology students. I wanted to do more.

I played second guitar for John O’Connor at a wonderful summer evening concert at Meadowlinks Golf Course in Cooperstown.

Late in the waning hours of 2021, I wrote a Christmas ghost story that I’m still fiddling with. I also finished a draft of a short story that I’d been working on for a year, but when I shared it with some writer friends, they suggested I open it up into something bigger. In a fit of blind hubris, I’m now slowly turning it into a novel about the Catskills, the violence and weakness of men, faith, and conspiracy. Stay tuned–maybe by next year I’ll actually have something substantive written.

…

As I was writing this, I kept thinking of things I didn’t do; didn’t make, didn’t arrive at, didn’t finish this or that thing I started, didn’t even start this or that thing I thought a lot about, didn’t call when I should have, didn’t help out when I could have, didn’t get around to something or other. I’m not sure why I feel so weighed down by the alternative 2022 I construct in my head; there are a lot of words and deeds in the previous paragraphs! Somehow it just feels tentative and uneven when I try to take it all in.

What I do feel good about are my people, who are the ultimate measure of any of us. I love Alanna (who was amazing this year in too many ways to count), and Dominic and Hazel who I get to watch grow anew every day. I love my folks, and my brother (who made quite a year for himself in a new city). I love my friends with whom I communicated in a variety of lengthy and brief ways this year: the Minister of Intrigue, Randall (who had a baby–here’s to you Julian), and Bill (who bought a house), and Pat (who made a hit Christmas movie), and Matt (who moved) and Matt and Paul and Ian and Thor and Juan and Liz and Dan (who also had a baby whose name unfortunately escapes me as I write this) and Anthony and Bob and John and Jon and Nate (who still hasn’t told me the name of his new baby!). Thanks everyone for the various subtle but essential acts of listening and talking to me that you did this year.

May we all hope to give as much nourishment, joy, and care to the people around us as we draw from them, in this new year, which will be better than the last.

Quentin's Weeknotes 12/11/22-12/17/22

This Week:

• A bit of calm after the storm. The semester is over, and now it’s time to pick up some of the projects that got piled on my desk and ignored.
• I ordered some supplies for our upcoming student-created exhibit about Micronesia.
• I did some Christmas shopping for friends and family.
• I wrote and submitted some letters of recommendation for students applying to grad school. Here’s hoping they make it through, given that it’s mostly a scam.
• I finished reading Catherynne Valente’s “Space Opera” a funny love-letter to campy and outrageous music, wrapped in a bewildering and rich first-contact story.

Quentin's Weeknotes 12/4/22-12/10/22

This Week:

• I listened with genuine enthusiasm to China Mieville on Chris Hayes' podcast, talking about his new book on the continued relevance of the Communist Manifesto. Hayes, who is most definitely on the left, is in the somewhat unique position of defending liberal social-democracy from the radical, communist critique. What results is a genuinely thoughtful conversation about Marx, politics, nationalism, and freedom. Recommended!
• I finally got Cathie Jamieson’s paintings back to her, after they stayed here for nearly a year, following the de-installation of the exhibit “dadibaajimo: two Mississauga Artists Share Stories”. Thanks to Luke Swinson (whose art was also in the exhibit) and August Swinson for picking them up in Buffalo and crossing the border!
• I finished reading Louise Erdrich’s gorgeous but incredibly bleak dystopia “Future Home of the Living God”, about an Ojibwe woman who describes the breakdown of the US into a totalitarian nightmare in letters to her unborn child. It’s not an easy read but it was powerfully affecting, especially as a parent myself. Recommended, if you can handle a horrifyingly possible glimpse of what the world could easily look like.
• I also read volume 1 of Garth Ennis and Goran Sudzuka “A Walk Through Hell”, a dark and creepy procedural about two FBI agents trying to track down a child murderer. Grisly and moody–well done!

Quentin's Weeknotes 11/20/22-11/26/22

This Week:

• I put 42 years in the can.
• Most of the week was spent on break. We don’t tend to do a traditional Thanksgiving. Some of it is that none of us like the traditional foods, some of it is because my wife is Canadian and Thanksgiving is a completely different holiday there, and some it is because for many people, it’s a day of mourning. This year, we’re making Puerco Pibil, homemade flour tortillas, guacamole, and eating the remains of a delicious birthday cake.

Quentin's Weeknotes 11/13/22-11/19/22

This Week:

• I prepared for our upcoming consultation and workshop with Indigenous Concepts Consulting. The workshop will be this Saturday and I’m really looking forward to re-imagining our exhibits and how they speak about Indigenous people.
• I finally finished reading “Starting Strength: Basic Barbell Training” by Mark Ripetoe. I’ve been going to the gym for the last nine months, after years of not going, and this book was a good (if somewhat bluntly-toned) book that helped me think about strength and form in new ways.
• I also finished reading “Claire Dewitt and the Bohemian Highway” by Sara Gran, which is the second Claire Dewitt mystery. I like it better than the first one, which is saying something. It was a gorgeous and tense meditation on love and what it costs, wrapped up in a genuinely perplexing and exciting mystery. Wonderful.
• The Yager Museum hosted Killdeer Trio, a multi-genre ensemble who drew inspiriation from our current exhibit “Front Row Center: Icons of Rock, Blues, and Soul.