was sort of drifting, and strange. My wife left for a research trip and I’m holding the house down while she’s gone (with the help of my folks–thanks Mom and Dad!) To quote my son, “I’m sad she’s gone, and I’m happy she’s doing something exciting.”
In MUST204, I talked about the history of collections management, and how to label objects in Museum collections.
I helped some students with rec letters.
I continued some collaborative collections research.
I kept hammering away on a revamp of our Indigenous exhibit.
Last week, I read Brian Evenson’s wonderful short story collection “A Collapse of Horses”, which is ostensibly horror, but with much of the horror taking place off-stage–my favorite! I also read Susanna Clarke’s wonderful “Piranesi” which is weird and beautiful.
My wife and I watched Violent Night, a cartoonish and heartfelt Christmas movie where a depressed and demoralized Santa saves a wealthy family from a professional home burglary and invasion. It’s incredibly violent, really funny, and features some delightfully scene chewing performances by David Harbour and John Leguizamo. It was also written by my good friends Pat Casey and Josh Miller and I’m impressed at the Ws they continue to rack up.
Trying to dig myself out of the hole that last week’s reception put me in, I’ve been doing work on a lot of long-term planning, exhibit prep, and collections projects.
In MUST204, we had a snow day, and then had an in-class activity where students had to make a case to accession an object into the Museum’s collection, using the guidelines of our collections policy.
I’ve finished a couple of books, but want to make notes about them.
In MUST204: Collections Management, we talked about Museum Nomenclature, and condition reporting.
I continued to work with students to finish our new exhibits on Micronesia, and Margaret Huntington Boehner.
I did guest lectures or tours of the Museum for courses in Museum Studies, English, and Political Science.
My wife and I finished watching the first season of Welcome To Wrexham, a show about the complex relationship between English football teams and the communities in which they reside. When I first heard about it, I understood it to be kind of a fish-out-of-water comedy about two Hollywood actors (Ryan Reynolds and Rob Mcelhenney) who buy a Welsh Football team without knowing anything about it. But the beating heart of the show is really the community of Wrexham itself, ravaged by deindustrialization and neoliberal dismantling, and for whom Football is one of the few forms of civic agreement and engagement. In that sense, it’s a rich and heartfelt show, and honestly some of the best parts are when Reynolds and Mcelhenney get out of the way and let the townspeople of Wrexham speak for and about themselves.
I am slowly but surely moving my way towards a static website.
Hartwick’s semester started so a lot of what I did was administrative jockeying. Forms filled in, emails sent and received, and sent again.
I started teaching MUST204: Collections Management.
I did some consultation around collections work.
I helped students to finish the installation of our newest exhibit on Micronesia.
My wife and I continued our Criterion odyssey by watching “The Man who Knew Too Much”, another early Hitchcock masterpiece. As I said to my wife, all of these movies are essential templates for what would become major blockbuster genres over the course of the 20th century, with this movie being in the “race against time” rescue film.
I bought albums by Sharon Van Etten and Neurosis
With the help of the Minister of Intrigue, I took a slightly bigger step towards setting up a static website.
I finished reading Charlie Jane Anders’ “The City in the Middle of the Night” which lives up to the LeGuin-ian accolades it received. It was a thoughtful and deeply human book that takes an outrageous and exciting premise (humans trying to live on a tidal-locked planet) and invests it with rich history, complex social and cultural politics, and rich and complicated characters. I also finished reading volume 2 of Garth Ennis’ short horror series “A Walk Through Hell” which is dark and mysterious but didn’t grab me by the end.
I played around with setting up a static website, which can be written in Markdown. It sounds like a decent amount of work to get set up, and a moderate amount of work to maintain. On the other hand, my current platform is legacy-locked in 2009 and I’m getting a little tired of accumulating bugs.
In preparation for the upcoming Spring semester, I updated my syllabus for MUST204: Collections Management.
I worked on a redesign of an upcoming exhibit, and did some collections research.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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]
