We de-installed all the exhibits from our main gallery, to make way for a new exhibit entitled “Front Row Center: Icons of Rock, Blues, and Soul”. We’re setting it up now and we’re really excited about it!
I printed and delivered the panels that tell the story of John W. Quinney and the repatriation of his regalia to the Stockbridge-Munsee Community.
I finished reading the excellent Lovecraft Anthology “Wonder and Glory Forever” edited by Nick Mamatas. I’ve read a LOT of Lovecraft-inspired anthologies in my life, and this was one of the best. The stories use Lovecraft’s mythologies and ideas as set-pieces for broader things. I particularly liked Michael Cisco’s eerie “Translation” about a scholarly couple who are trying to unravel an encoded egyptian text from a lost Pharoah.
Well, technically last week….I finished reading John Hodgman’s “Medallion Status”, a thoughtful memoir about the ridiculous and silly perks and trappings afforded to the only minorly famous, and what happens to a person when those perks start to disappate. I really loved it–it’s funny and smart and very self-aware, kind of an anti-tell-all memoir.
We held our last Crafternoons of 2022 in the Yager Museum. It’s been fun to have children back in the galleries, and our summer museum assistant Josephine has been an absolute champ at setting these up and running them.
I finished reading “Beezus and Ramona” with my son. I have a faint memory of having it read to me by a teacher when I was a kid, and it was just as funny and sweet as I remember. My son liked it too!
I finished reading Mike Davis' first book “Prisoners of the American Dream” which is his masterful labor history and analysis of the dark times of the Reagan era. It’s so vast in scope and knowledge that it’s hard to even summarze, but I genuinely appreciated the way he deftly reckoned with the complicated interlocking of race and class in his analysis. Davis is currently off treatment for cancer, and its hard to think of a more signifcant and incisive scholar, historian, and activist.
We finished our formal inventory of the collections! Now we just have to find all of the things that are still listed as missing in our database, and we’re done!
We held another crafternoons at the Museum, this time with the theme of “places”.
My wife and I finished watching “Breaking Point”, a documentary about the Maidan revolution and the annexation of Crimea. It’s a powerful film, about everyday people in extra-ordinary and horrifying circumstances, that is made even more powerful by current events.
Was my first week back after a vacation to Toronto and Bancroft, Ontario. We went up for the first time since the pandemic, saw friends, visited Grandad’s Forest, and just enjoyed ourselves in a wonderful city. Some photos:
While I was in Toronto, I finished both Drew Magary’s “The Postmortal”, and James Morrow’s “The Asylum of Dr. Caligari”. The former was a dark, funny dystopia about the end of death, while the latter took on Cubism, the origins of film, and WWI in an adventure about art and love and violence.
The Museum restarted its Summer Crafternoons program! We had kiddos in last Wednesday and this Wednesday doing crafts and a scavenger hunt, watching old cartoons from the Internet Archive, and eating snacks. A great time was had by all.
I have been cracking the whip on trying to finish the Museum’s five year inventory.
No Weeknotes from last week…lots of slow moving stuff but not a lot of tangible outcomes. Also, the shadow cast by the new beachhead of Christian fascism made it hard to focus on much of anything.
This last weekend, my family and I went to Chenango Valley State Park and stayed in some CCC Cabins. It was a delightful weekend of swimming and grilling and getting some fresh air and sunshine.
Sunday was my and my wife’s anniversary. Love you, baby, now and forever.
I finished reading Sara Gran’s “Claire Dewitt and the City of the Dead”, one of the best crime novels I’ve read in a long time. Taking place in slightly post-Katrina New Orleans, it follows the eponymous Claire as she attempts to find a man who went missing during the storm, using the methods of her mentor, a strange and philosophical French detective. The book is genuinely weird, full of miracles and coincidences and bizarre connections. I couldn’t put it down and I am looking forward to tackling the sequels.
After weeks of watching it in 15 minute chunks, I finally finished Tarkovsky’s “Stalker”, a strange and ambiguous film about faith, desire, and the sad decay of the world. It was great though jebus it’s long.
The Museum opened back up again for the summer, and we have a summer assistant. Welcome aboard, Josephine!
I did a LOT of inventory at the Museum. We have about 20,000 objects, and our policy is to check the status of each of them once every five years. You would be surprised at how not-at-all straightforward of a job this is.
I finished reading “Mycroft Holmes” aka Kareem Abdul Jabbar’s Sherlock Holmes novel. It’s not bad. What I liked about it was that it located the Holmes stories in the broader history of British colonialism, slavery and conquest, set as it is on Trinidad during the British occupation, not long after the end of the US Civil War. I can’t say it was the most well-written book I’ve ever read, but Jabbar and co-author Anna Waterhouse clearly love the Sherlock Holmes stories and know the history of African-descended peoples, and both come through enthusiastically in a rich and entertaining novel.
On Saturday, I took my son and a friend of his to Robot City Games in Binghamton, NY, as a belated birthday treat.
I was back at work after a week of kid quarantine and another week of self-quarantine.
Collections Management had our final, which consisted of finishing up some inventory work, and having a debriefing session about the class as a whole. Despite the ups and downs of health and power-outages and everything else, it was a really great class this year, with a fun and engaged crop of students.
I finished reading “The Wild Road” by Gabriel King. It’s a wonderful piece of fantastic fiction, with cat protagonists, beautifully written and richly imagined.
A musical rabbit hole sent me to the work of legendary british folk musician Nic Jones, and I’ve been obsessively playing his obscure and beautiful songs all week. This version, of the 18th century gender-bending sailing song “Canadee I-O” is majestically and artfully played and sung, much better (imho) than the Dylan version on “Good as I Been to you” which clearly cribs from this: [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlFKwY_YgZ4&w=560&h=315]
Last Saturday, my son turned 9. He’s a smart, funny, interesting guy, and I’m so lucky to be able to watch him grow and come into his own. Love you, kiddo.
