Recent Posts (page 18 / 33)

Quentin's Weeknotes 2/20/22-2/26/22

This week:

via GIPHY

• My wife and I watched Hustlers, a fantastic movie that combines a cracking Robin Hood story, a scathing portrayal of patriarchy, a love letter to sisterhood and female friendship, and endless g-strings and high heels. Really excellent and one of the better movies about the 2008 financial crash that I’ve ever seen.
• I joined the Hartwick DEI - Indigenous Issues committee, with the goal of elaborating further engagement between Hartwick College and the Haudenosaunee peoples on whose lands the college resides.
• I wrote a recommendation letter for a student for the John Christopher Hartwick Fellowship.
• In MUST204: Collections Management, we talked about Museum environmental conditions, as well as collections management policies.
• I finished reading Tamsyn Muir’s “Gideon the Ninth” which was a funny, strange, and rich piece of speculative fiction about warring houses vying for the favor of an immortal emperor, but is really about the complicated emotions of close friendships. It’s as good as everyone says it is–read it!
• We also watched “Free Guy”, a fun popcorn movie about MMO NPCs gaining sentience and going on strike. I didn’t love it (it was a bit weightless for my liking), but it was definitely charming and entertaining, with some fun performances.
• Over the last month, I’ve been burning my way through the hilarious and informative podcast 5-4, which bills itself as “a podcast about why the Supreme Court Sucks”. Each episode, three very funny lawyers discuss a historical or recent case that was decided 5-4 and pick it apart with humor and a deep understanding of the law. A particularly funny episode is their dissection of Bennis V. Michigan, a 1996 case in which the Court upheld civil forfeiture. It’s laugh-out-loud funny, and very smart if you’re interested in the law and politics. Highly recommended.

Quentin's Weeknotes 2/13/22-2/19/22

This Week:

• I finished reading Kit Reed’s book on writing entitled “Story First: The Writer as Insider”.
• In MUST204, I taught about condition reports of objects, and about Museum nomenclature.
• We had our opening reception for “Juxtapositions: Warhol and the Baroque” at the Yager Museum. I helped install the exhibit, and did some design work on panels, and it came out quite well!
• I watched the British horror movie “His House”. It’s a dark and magical meditation on immigration, but I thought it pulled its punches, particularly in the face of horrifying xenophobia and racism gripping Britain right now.

Quentin's Weeknotes 2/6/22-2/11/22

This Week:

• I re-read M. John Harrison’s masterful novel “Light”, a book about quantum mechanics, exploration, and the tensions of running from or embracing immediate experience. I first read it almost 10 years ago, and enjoyed it, though I had not yet spent as much time with Harrison’s understated, exacting prose as I have since then. As such, I think I was a little bewildered by this novel, which follows three interlinked narratives across hundreds (actually billions) of years and hundreds of millions of miles, and contains so much weird but plausible future-speculation alongside its rich explorations of human fraility, self-involvement and self-deception. This time around, I was astonished and delighted by how well Harrison sticks the landing of its ending (which he ironically but emphatically calls “The Beginning”), despite all of this abstraction and complexity.
• I started teaching MUST204: collections management again. I’m trying to shift it towards more of an “ungraded” model, following on the work of educational scholars who are critical of our late-Victorian grading system. We jumped right in with basic object handling!
• I purchased the beautiful and haunting self-titled album by Doran. They’ve constructed their own folk-music language which I find enticing and foreboding in equal measure. This song is a good example, with its combination of gentle chanting, affection for nature, and lurking magic:[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8XpnyEmCzw&w=560&h=315]
• My wife and I worked our way through Staged, a wonderfully funny BBC series in which David Tennant and Michael Sheen star as outsized versions of themselves during COVID lockdown, trying to rehearse a play that was postponed by the pandemic. It was filmed largely on Zoom and has featured some wonderful cameos by Samuel Jackson, Adrian Lester, and Judi Dench. Well worth your time.
• I did some design work, and some planning on our just-about-to-open exhibit “Juxtapositions: Warhol and the Baroque”

Quentin's Weeknotes 1/30/22-2/5/22

This Week:

• I was mostly home with my kid, who was quarantining.
• I mourned the passing of Anthony Barrand, who died on Saturday the 29th. Anthonhy Barrand receiving a lifetime acheivement award from the Country Dance and Song Society (2009)

Growing up, my dad had a record by a group called Nowell Sing We Clear which was a regular staple of our household during the holidays. When I got to Boston University I discovered that the sonorous and bold tenor voice on that album belonged to a professor of anthropology and folklore there named Tony Barrand. He taught classes in folk music (largely from the British and American traditions), Morris dancing and Mummer’s plays, and folklore. I took every class he offered, each day of which started with a song from his astonishing and immeasurable repertoire. Despite the sadness at his passing, what I mostly remembered this week were his ribald songs, humorous or full of sexual innuendo (or completely lacking it in some cases). He sang us songs like “I wish they’d do it now” or “9 times a night”, “the Coachman” or “The Foggy Dew” and did so with a seriousness that made them somehow funnier and more insightful. I also remember a class in his folklore course on dirty jokes that was maybe the filthiest educational experience I ever had. 

Anthony Barrand as “Mother” His sense of humor and joy at performance was always present in classes and in person. The final project for his “English Dance and Ritual Drama” course was the entire class doing various Morris Dances in Marsh Plaza. For anyone who knows the BU campus, this is both a very public space on Commonwealth Avenue, and also a major route of prospective campus visits. Barrand would motor around on his mobility scooter, dressed as the “Mother” character, and whenever a tour would stop to gawk at these students making sword locks and jumping with hankies, he would yell out “I’M THE PROFESSOR!!!!” to bewildered parents and high school students.

The other memory I had is that his Folk Song class was the first one I went to after the news about 9/11 started trickling its way across campus. When we got there, he had us sing Shaker and Shape note songs about about death and it’s eternal promise at the end of all our lives. At first, I was upset about having to sing about death in a moment of horror, but gradually, I realized that he was using group singing to give us a community of grief. It was a profound moment of teaching and learning, especially when, as he later told us, he knew of two people he had lost that day.

He later served on my undergraduate thesis committee, and was gracious and thoughtful as I worked my through an eclectic thesis on archaeology and music. After I graduated, I saw him perform a few times, most notably with Nowell Sing We Clear at the Latchis theatre in Brattleboro. I also corresponded with him a few times, and he always took time to respond, even as his health continued to deteriorate.

He broadened and expanded my understanding of folk music and folklore, and his ability to educate, inspire, and entertain seamlessly has been a guiding star in my own teaching. The memories of all of this are what I’ll keep, and I couldn’t pick just one song to remember him by. But the song below, called “The Dreadful Ghost” shows off his beautiful voice, his engaged performance, and his understated but insistent feminism–he championed women students, dancers, and singers, and many of his best songs told the story of women scorned and women triumphant.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dU5Pl4hQmE&w=560&h=315]

Rest in Peace, Tony, and thank you.

Quentin's Weeknotes 1/23/22-1/29/22

This Week:

• I finished updating my syllabus for MUST204: Collections management. All ready for the Spring semester.
• I finished designing the title panel for an upcoming exhibit.
• I finished reading “Fledgling”, Octavia Butler’s take on vampire fiction, and her final novel before her untimely death in 2006. It was very good, typically richly written and engaging with many of the same questions of race and the emotional dynamics of power that Butler often wrestled with. It wasn’t my favorite of her novels (if pressed, I’d probably say “Lilith’s Brood”), but it’s still a masterful piece of fantastic fiction.
• I watched “Black Death” a gory and violent nightmare of a film set during the 14th century Bubonic Plague, and following a group of religious Knights who are hunting a community mysteriously untouched by the illness. The film was gorgeously and eerily shot, and captures the mud and mire of Medieval Europe–it reminded a bit of Valhalla Rising, with its almost operatic depictions of violence and blood in a lonely landscape. The film tries to make some profound points about ideology and faith, but it’s VERY ham-handed, and would’ve been better served without the moralizing speeches.
• As a bewildering cap on what was otherwise a fairly straightforward week, my daughter is home quarantining after a positive test at her daycare. So that’s the end of that!

Quentin's Weeknotes 1/16/22-1/22/22

This Week:

• I finished reading Kliph Nesteroff’s amazing book “We Had a Little Real Estate Problem: The Unheralded Story of Native Americans & Comedy”. It’s a kind of counter-history of 20th century popular culture, that finds Native people using comedy to confront colonialism, or finding humor in resistence to it.
• We finished de-installing “dadibaajimo: Two Mississauga Artists Share Stories”.
• We touched up the Elting Gallery to prepare for our next exhibit.
• I started compiling the student work-study schedule for the Spring semester.
• I did some work getting my Collections Management syllabus (MUST204) ready to teach in the Spring semester.

Booknotes: We Had a Little Real Estate Problem by Kliph Nesteroff

We Had a Little Real Estate Problem: The Unheralded Story of Native Americans & Comedy

by Kliph Nesteroff

Finished 1/15/22

A delightful and honest counter-history of stand-up comedy that parallels the story of Native American resistance to colonialism in the 20th century.

Nesteroff’s first book “The Comedians” cast a broad and almost encylopedic net over the story of stand-up comedy, whose origins lay in the minstrel shows and vaudeville circuits of the 19th century. But in this book, Nesteroff makes clear  that another form of popular performance accompanied these more well-known proto-comedies–the Wild West and Medicine shows that toured the country in the last decades of the 19th century. Many of these shows featured apperances or even performances by Native people, and he suggests that it is in this venue that Native American standup comedy was born. At the same time, he also points out the darkness that lurks in these early comedic performances–that the performers were often given the choice of touring with such shows or going to prison, or that the abject poverty of Native communities who were imprisoned on reservations forced many people to take this work as the only means of livelihood available. That story, plus the horror of the residential school systems where Indigenous children were taken from their families and had their culture violently beaten out of them, set the context for the stories of comedians that unfold over the course of the rest of the book.

Thus, this is a book about finding laughter in horror and violence, not as satire or ridicule, but as a means of coping with oppression and surviving in spite of it.

The book tells the stories of several 20th century Native comedians, and juxtaposes their experiences with the newer generations of 21st century comedians who are working today. The former are documented in Nesteroff’s usual exhaustive and rich style, and include characters like Will Rogers (Cherokee), Jackie Curtiss (Mohawk),and most importantly the Oneida stand-up Charlie Hill, from whose most famous joke the book takes its title. Hill’s career and influence are the beating heart of the book, and it is his appearances on television and in comedy festivals that influence many of the contemporary comics that Nesteroff profiles, including Adrianne Chalepah, Larry Omaha, Dakota Ray Hebert, and the sketch comedy troupe the 1491s.

A few overarching themes emerge from this astonishing and broad book. First, many Native comedians see themselves as pushing against a White idea of Native people as serious, stoic, and humorless. This idea is rooted in the romantic (and racist) ideology of the “vanishing indian” perhaps most famously personified in the “crying indian” commercial from the 1970s. But for many Native comedians, this idea has been flipped on its head, and throughout the book there are frequent discussions of the role of humor in Native communities (and comics) as a means of managing, reckoning with, and addressing the trauma of colonization, residential school abuse, land and cultural theft, and genocide. Nesteroff  largely lets contemporary Native comedians tell their own stories, a deliberate choice that diverges from “The Comedians” and foregrounds the relationship between their lives and their artistry, and how they lived with or resisted that darkness.

Nesteroff notes the role that comedy and satire played in the American Indian Movement, touching on people like the poet and musician John Trudell (Santee Dakota) who was part of the alcatraz takeover in 1967, and Vine Deloria Jr (Standing Rock Sioux), whose famous book “Custer Died For Your Sins” was a critical but humorous look at the place of Indigenous people in 20th century American society. The relationship of politics on Native comedy was clearly deeply embedded–Charlie Hill raised money for Leonard Peltier’s defense, and many activists used their platforms to improve the often racist representations of Native people in popular media. Thus, the very presence of Native people onstage or on television was itself political, and Native artists frequently utilized that power to advance a Native or even decolonization agenda. 

There’s a lot more in this book–rich discussions of the American Indian Movement, profiles of struggling or up-and-coming Native comedians and the difficulties they face, and fascinating discussions of informal performance circuits like Pow-Wows or the “Silver Circle clubs” in Nevada. It’s also a rich introduction to 20th century Indigenous history  and culture, largely from the perspectives of Native people themselves.  Absolutely recommended.

Quentin's Weeknotes 01/09/21-01/15/21

I had a long winter break that included visits from and to family, some rest, some stress, and very little work. Now I’m back, and there’s plenty to do.

This Week:

• I jumped back into work at the Museum with some inventory work.
• I continued the process of scheduling and organizing speakers for our series on acknowledgement.
• I finished Southern Cross vol. 1, which is space horror in the Event Horizon-vein. It was just sort of okay.
• Through the album “Twenty Four Seven” by Coope, Boyes, and Simpson, I found this short anonymous poem, entitled “There was a man of double deed” which I keep thinking about incessantly:

There was a man of double deed,
Who sowed his garden full of seed;
When the seed began to grow,
‘Twas like a garden full of snow;
When the snow began to melt,
‘Twas like a ship without a belt;
When the ship began to sail,
‘Twas like a bird without a tail;
When the bird began to fly,
‘Twas like an eagle in the sky;
When the sky began to roar,
‘Twas like a lion at my door;
When my door began to crack,
‘Twas like a stick across my back;
When my back began to smart,
‘Twas like a penknife in my heart;
And when my heart began to bleed,
‘Twas death, and death, and death indeed.

• We set up the panels for the permanent exhibit “Black Lives at Hartwick Then and Now” in the Stevens-German library.
• I did some work tracking down information on some prints in our collection by a Haudenosaunee artist named Bill Powless.
• Almost two years from when I put it up, I finally started de-installing “dadibaajimo: Two Mississauga Artists Share Stories” featuring the artwork of Cathie Jamieson and Luke Swinson. It was a wonderful exhibit, and I’m really proud that the Yager Museum could host such a beautiful and rich exhibit of contemporary exhibit of Indigenous art.

Quentin's Weeknotes 12/12/21-12/18/21

This Week:

• My wife got tenure, and my heart is full of pride and joy.
• We submitted grades for MUST251: North American Material Culture. The class was fun, and we’re looking for ways to teach it again in a more targeted way.
• My mother in law came down to spend the holidays with us.
• I did some preparatory work on Spring programming for our Haan speaker’s series on land acknowledgement.
• We started the process of taking down “dadibaajimo: Two Mississauga Artists Share Stories”
• I finished reading the first collected volume of Jack Kirby’s famous “New Gods” 1970s run of comics. It was almost like an opera, full of huge bodies and huge emotions, with clear lines of good and evil, and drawn in Kirby’s unique and vibrant style. It’s a classic for a reason.
• We welcomed a visitor from the ARC for a job shadow.
• I did some research on some collections objects for an upcoming project.
• I wrote my yearnotes for 2021.

My Yearnotes for 2021

What I felt most accutely this year was a shifting and mutable sense of time; the way it compresses and expands and warps and freezes. I found myself very aware of having no time for some things and the stress and anxiety that comes with that. For other things, I felt the slow drag of every second passing.

In many ways, this year felt so much harder than last year, where we all were just struggling, one foot in front of the other, through the pandemic until the vaccines arrived. Now they’re here, but lots of people aren’t getting them, and all of us are suffering the slings and arrows of a shrinking, but increasingly intransigent population.

Indeed, “the slings and arrows of a shrinking but increasingly intransigent population” might best characterize whole aspects of American life in 2021. 

So what follows is my record of a heavy year, alternatively frozen still and rushing headlong into some unknown horizon, and of what I did and felt and even enjoyed along the way.

Music was a big part of my life this year.

• I played two concerts with John O’Connor as a member of the Fellow Travelers.
• I saw my first live concert of music in many years, seeing Clutch, Stoner, and King Buffalo at the Empire theater in Albany, with my friend Thor.
• I purchased or received albums by Cloud Nothings, Craig Finn, Richard Thompson, Jawbreaker, Current 93, boygenius, Propagandhi, John K. Samson, Low, Superwolf, King Buffalo, All Them Witches, The Horror,  John Allison’s album of New England Ballads, the Old Sturbridge Singers album of Early American Choral Music, Pete Seeger and Brother Kirk, and Coope Boyes and Simpson.
• The Low album is as good as everyone says it is, strange and warped and beautiful. I was also really enchanted by boygenius, All Them Witches, and John K. Samson.
• I tried to make some more electronic music with the various tools in my kit, but found it hard to finish things I started.

I read 62 books year, for a total of around 15000 pages. The goal for this year was to clear my bookshelves of things I have been planning to read for a while, and overall, it was a success. Now they’re all in my basement. Progress!

Books that really stuck with me included:

• Railsea by China Mieville–a wonderful blending of weird fiction with various 19th century genres (especially sailing novels and political romances), set in a post-apocalyptic future where humans hunt mutated moles through a desert criss-crossed with overlapping railroad tracks.
• Beasts of Burden by Evan Dorkin and Jill Thompson–I heard this described as “Stranger Things” with household pets, which may be enough to entice. If it’s not, the gorgeous art of Jill Thompson should bring anybody to this delightful and fun graphic novel.
• Things that Never Happen by M. John Harrison–I continue to devour everything I can find by this genre fiction master. I’m trying to locate something I can’t quite name in his elusive and alienated characters, who barely notice the increasingly strange worlds in which they live. This is an out of print collection of short stories, but many are reprinted in the newly-released collection “Settling the World."
• Conspiracy of Interests by Laurence Hauptman–I’m a settler, on the lands of the Haudenosaunee people and the Oneida and Mohawk Nations, and I’ve tried hard to both learn the history of how that came to be, as well as incorporating that knowledge into my life and work. This book, which charts how New York State became a cohesive entity in the 19th century, through the direct dispossesion of the lands of the Oneida, Onondaga, and Seneca, helped me answer that question.
• Four Lost Cities by Annalee Newitz–A book about urban life in the past, present, and (potential) future that is hopeful, rich, and engagingly written. It’s also a love-letter to archaeology, and the joy of discovering all the ways the past is radically different from the present, as well as eerily similar.

I watched a few movies, including Spring, Underwater, Crimson Peak, In the Earth, A Ghost Story, Dune, Hamilton, Ghidorah the Three Headed Monster, Lake Mungo, Johnny Mnemonic, Midnight Special, High Rise, Jupiter Ascending, Summer of Soul, Con Air, Paw Patrol: The Movie (at the Unadilla Drive-in!) and Kiki’s Delivery Service. “Spring” was amazing; a weird, grotesque and heartfelt meditation on love and mortality. I also really liked “Midnight Special,” which is sort of dark mirror of the superhero film, and unlike other “gritty” superhero movies, asks profound questions of the consequences of power on the empowered and their loved ones.

Podcasts continue their central role in my life. WTF w/ Marc Maron, Why is This Happening, Double Threat, Greetings Adventurers, Pseudopod, Deconstructed, The Memory Palace, Our Opinions are Correct, and Explorers Wanted are staples. Beyond that, I enjoyed

• Know Your Enemy, a historical and cultural podcast where two socialists discuss the American right.
• What had Happened Was, where rapper Open Mike Eagle engages in a long biographical dialog with a significant figure in Hip-Hop. EL-P’s tenure in the second season is not to be missed.
• This Land, hosted by Cherokee journalist Rebecca Nagle, is an indispsensible and harrowing deep exploration of issues of Native American law and land. Season 2’s discussion of the Indian Child Welfare act was enlightening and emotional.
• Blowback, which shines a harsh light on American foreign policy. Season 1 walked through the disaster of the Iraq war, while season two focuses on American policy towards Cuba.Both are full of rich and enraging detail.

I tried really hard to write fiction, but mostly failed to produce anything of substance. I started out the year strong, writing short scenes every week, using wikipedia’s “random article” feature for prompts. But I just couldn’t make my brain focus on the creative spark enough to sit down and do anything longer-term than that. I did submit a piece of flash fiction to Crystal Lake publishing’s “Shallow Waters” contest, entitled “Torn Page Found at an abandoned circus” which you can read here.

Professionally, I got quite a bit done

• I taught Collections Management, and co-taught a new class, Introduction to North American Material culture.The latter has been something I’ve wanted to do since I put together a material culture syllabus for my doctoral comps, and I had a good time teaching it.
• I co-curated and installed a major exhibit entitled “For the Moment, Living Images: Masks of Mexico and Beyond."
• I facilitated the repatriation of brooches owned by John Quinney to the Stockbridge-Munsee band of Mohican indians.
• I took part in an AAIA Repatriation Conference Panel entitled “Nothing that deserved the Name of Purchase was ever made: The Implications of Patrimony and Ethics on Returning Diplomatic Items”,building off the Stockbridge-Munsee repatriation.
• I organized and implemented a speaker’s series at Hartwick on land acknowledgement, and welcomed our first speaker, the amazing Michelle Schenandoah.
• After years of delay, I finally finished and had printed the exhibit material from “Black Lives at Hartwick: Then and Now” into a permanent form.They will be on display somewhere at Hartwick once they return from the Greater Oneonta Historical Society.
• Since the museum was able to open up on a limited basis, we had some great events including movie screenings, performances, and general receptions and programs.

Politically, it was a dark year, and it’s getting darker. Trying to find a few points of light, I joined the Democratic Socialists of America, after cheering them on for years. I also joined the Black Trowel Collective, a group of archaeologists who are thinking about mutual aid and radical care operating in the past, as well as trying to implement those relationships in the present.

Our home and our home life continued to be a refuge and a source of strength.

• I bought a bike, and tried to spend less time driving. I wanted to get more exercise and lose some more weight, neither of which were particularly successful efforts. Still, the bike’s not going anywhere, and I hope to continue to find ways to use it both for my own health, and the health of the planet.
• We got a dog. Quill is delightful and an energetic and energizing member of our household.
• With my father and my wife and my son, I built a playhouse for our kids. I also built a picnic table, and learned how to replace a light fixture.
• Our family took little vacations to New Hampshire, Western Massachusetts, and Philadelphia, and did some regional travelling where we felt it was safe to do so.
• I got to see my parents, and my mother-in-law in person for the first time since the pandemic started. I also got to see my good friend, the Minister of Intrigue, as well as various old friends in Western Massachusetts.
• Both our kids returned to school/daycare this year, after months of being at home. They’ve both done really well settling back in, even with multiple quarantines and new procedures and uncertainty. I’m proud of them, even as I wish that it didn’t have to be this way.
• I got to cheer on my amazing wife as she worked and fought hard at SUNY to be a great professor and a great scholar, in the face of the continued upheaval of the pandemic and the emotional toll it is taking on educators and students. I also got to see her reap some professional rewards for her hard work, including tenure at SUNY Oneonta. I’m so proud of her, and proud to be with her.

So time passes. All told, I’m happy to be putting this strange and uneven year aside, and making something new and better with the next one.