It was a very busy and bewildering week. Last Saturday was commencement at Hartwick and SUNY Oneonta. I had the great delight of taking the kiddos and seeing Alanna be presented with her Chancellor’s Award. I’m so proud of her and all the scholarly and research work she does.
AND….she’s doing some of that now. On Sunday, we spent the day in Albany, visiting the New York State Museum, and the Rensselaer aquarium, and then dropping Alanna off for a research trip to Mexico. She’s there for two weeks, and I’m holding down the fort, with some help from my parents, who are visiting.
I finished reading Brian Evenson’s wonderful short story collection “Song for the Unraveling of the World”. He’s one of the best contemporary horror and weird fiction writers, and is in the same league as Shirley Jackson in his ability to fill his stories with quiet, understated dread.
Post-commencement, it was quiet at the Yager Museum, and I used the time to get some work done that had fallen by the wayside during the semester. I followed up on some potential new collections acquisitions, as well as some exhibit planning and summer program planning. I also attended a workshop on teaching our Freshman experience classes, and took in a job talk in the History department. Whew!
At the end of the week, I surprised my dad with a short trip down to New York City. He turned 80 a few weeks ago, and I thought that seeing some world-class Museums would be a nice way to celebrate. We visited the Met, and had a delightful tour of the fabrication and conservation labs from my good friend Nisha (thanks Nisha!), and then spent the afternoon exploring the bewildering and beautiful European painting galleries. Today we’re going to visit the MOMA, and then try and visit the Cloisters before heading home. My dad is in his element here, and then even more so when we had a wonderful glass of Cotes du Rhone at Benoit.
It was finals week at Hartwick, and my Collections Management students had their final class, which largely consisted of them finishing up the project they spent the last month and a half working on: cataloging the excavated material from Hartwick Seminary. They did a fantastic job, working well together and individually. I’m really proud of them and the work they did.
I spoke to some students about summer internships and projects that they are working on.
We did some planning for our summer programs and activities at the Museum.
I did some work on collections research for a potential set of acquisitions.
I finished reading Cory Doctorow’s “Walkaway” which I liked overall, though found the characters to be a little wooden–not unusual for a utopia. Mostly, it made me want to 3d print giant things, like houses, furniture, and clothes.
I finally finished and submitted a NAGPRA repatriation grant, to help pay for the costs of returning human remains and a cultural object back to the Ute tribes from whom they come. It was a lot of work, and I’m glad to have it out the door. Fingers crossed, but I’m optimistic that we can get this done in the Fall.
My Collections Management students had their final class on Thursday. We’ll do some more work on their project during their final exam period next week, and then we’re done!
On Saturday of last week, I went to my daughter’s ballet recital. She’s been taking ballet lessons for the last few months, and really enjoys it, and it was great to get to see her onstage. I’m so proud of her!
This semester, we hosted an intern this semester named Peyton Legg, and among many other things, she put together a wonderful display of objects of personal adornment in one of our hallway cases. She also took over the Museum’s instagram account this week and is showing off pieces from her display. Great job, Peyton!
Like so many people, I was shocked and saddened to hear of the death of Steve Albini this week. He made music both in bands (Big Black, Shellac) and as an engineer (Nirvana, Slint, the Jesus Lizard, and so so much more… that has been vital to me throughout my life. I never met him, but I’ve found myself quite affected by his death. I think it’s because, despite the image of him as a cantankerous hater (which the many tributes this week have completely blown apart), he clearly loved music, and believed in its power to move people and change them, and bring them together. This belief held together his own approach to making and recording music, his anti-capitalist politics, his feminism, and by all accounts, the way he comported himself with the people around him, and his commitment to sharing what he knew about music. My heart goes out to the people who did know him, family and friends and colleagues, and to everyone who loves and respects music and musicians.
More diligent work from my Collections Management students on the Hartwick Seminary materials.
I’m in the final stretch of finishing the NAGPRA grant…which is good, because the deadline is next Thursday!
My wife and I finished watching “The League”, a funny, filthy show that used a friends fantasy football league as a vantage point for talking about adult friendship, sex, parenting, and aging. It’s also a cartoonish show about fairly terrible people getting up to madcap antics, and works in that regard as a kind of zany romp. The last season was definitely not as funny as the first few, but the last few episodes had both of us laughing quite a bit, so we don’t feel particularly cheated by it.
My dad turned 80 on Monday. He’s over in the Czech Republic right now, and my mom threw him a party, which we called in to to wish him a happy birthday.
I did some last minute touch-ups on the art we installed at the President’s house on Friday.
I watched with sorrow and horror as students, staff and faculty around the US were arrested and assaulted by police and others, while (by and large) peacefully protesting. While such protests are not outside the norm for most colleges, the near-instantaneous crackdown and the deployment of police by University administrators seems to be fairly novel. Stay safe, friends.
For reason’s I can’t exactly articulate, I’ve been listening to Bob Dylan’s 1979 album “Slow Train Coming”, which is the first of his “born again” albums. Nick Cave famously called it “the nastiest Christian album” ever made (and he would probably know!), and its combination of genuine faith with damning indictments of the selfishness and violence of the world is really something only Dylan could pull off. “When He Returns” is an astonishing and rich gospel number, full of rage and blood and hope.
Dominic and I keep working our way through Louis Sachar’s “Wayside School” series. It’s a very strange and clever series, and occasionally laugh out loud funny. I’ve come to think of it as “Young Adult Weird Fiction”, sort of like if Jeff Vandermeer wrote books for elementary school kids. This week, we finished “Wayside School is Falling Down”, and we’re on to the next.
Friday, we installed some new artwork at the President’s residence.
In MUST204, more cataloging work on Hartwick Seminary.
I worked with a student intern on her display, which is coming together nicely.
More work finalizing the NAGPRA grant. Deadline in two weeks!
I finished watching “A Field in England”, another triumphantly strange Ben Wheatley film. This is a faux historical piece about greed, violence, and magic, set during the English Civil War. It was delightfully weird, ambiguous, funny in places, and gorgeously shot. I’m still thinking about many aspects of it, especially the divining scene, which, though not violent or grotesque in any way, manages to be one of the most disturbing and shocking scenes I’ve seen in a film in a long time.
I had one kiddo all day Monday and the other for a half day Thursday. We took the opportunity to climb up table rock and have a picnic
In MUST204, we continued with our final group project, which is cataloging the collection from Hartwick Seminary. We’re working out the kinks as we go, but we’re on track to get a big chunk of it done before the semester ends.
I finished reading Daniel Mills novel “Revenants”, which I’ve been describing as a kind of Puritan Gothic. It’s a lushly written, occasionally hallucinatory novel about a fictional 17th century Puritan New England village called “Cold Marsh”. Underneath its dream-like mystery of several missing young girls is a contemplation of patriarchy, colonial violence, and the degree to which the past remains viscerally alive in the present.
I had a sick kiddo this week, so spent a lot of time at home. In the meantime, I did some work on campus beautification, NAGPRA grants, and some exhibit planning.
I played some music with some local friends, finally taking my new guitar out for a public spin. It was fun!
In MUST204, we started on our final group collections project, developing and implementing the cataloging procedure for the archaeological materials excavated from Hartwick Seminary.
We hosted Hawhenadies Neal Powless, an internationally ranked lacrosse player and renowned coach, as well as a member of an important traditional family of leadership among the Onondaga Indigenous Nation. Neal’s talk was inspiring, insightful and funny, and I’m glad we moved it from the Museum to a larger venue–we had over 100 people in attendance!
I finished reading Robert Jackson Bennett’s novel “Foundryside”. The Minister of Intrigue gave it to me a while ago, but I didn’t tackle it because I had read his earlier “City of Stairs” and hadn’t really enjoyed it. I was worried that this book would give me the same feeling, and I am delighted to be wrong. It was well written, exciting, and compelling, in its exploration of class inequality, urban life, and the way the past haunts the present.
We got as good of a view of the eclipse as one was likely to get in New York, by hiking it up to Oswego. The clouds were out, but we were in the path of totality, and got to have the ethereal and strange experience of seeing darkness surrounded by light.
In Collections Management, I taught the students about care and conservation for paintings, prints, drawings, and photographs, and also talked about the complicated history of “ethnographic objects”.
I gave a tour of the Museum to Art History students and talked about the history of our Renaissance painting collection.
The Museum held a collections committee meeting, in which we talked about de-accessioning an object for repatriation, and potentially accessioning a collection of materials from a local illustrator and artist.
I did some more work moving our repatriation grant towards the finish line.
It was Oneonta schools Spring Break, so I spent a bunch of the week with a kid in tow at the Museum. He’s still happy to tag along and I’m happy to have him.
We had a quiet but fun Easter, with egg hunts, decorating, and a very tasty roast courtesy of Alanna.
In Collections Management, we washed and waxed the outdoor statue by Konaver, and talked about caring for metal objects and textiles. We also held our week 7/mid-term assessment meetings.
We had our opening reception for our newest exhibit “No Childs Play: The Impressionist paintings of Anna Richards Brewster”. It was a great event for a delightful art exhibit.
I did some work on a repatriation grant, as well as on some future potential grants.
I made some progress on prepping for our upcoming talk by Neal Powless.
I finished reading “The Magician’s Nephew” by CS Lewis with Dominic. This was a fitting prequel for the Narnia series, funny and strange and with all kinds of references and call-backs. I liked it considerably better than “The Last Battle” which I thought was kind of dour and abrupt. We’ve now gone through the whole Narnia series, and while I didn’t have as much as with Earthsea, it was fun to read with Dominic.
I also finished reading “The Centauri Device” by M John Harrison. It has been described as one of the opening salvos of “the New Space Opera”, but I didn’t have the background in the sub-genre before reading this, and so I’m kind of blind to all that baggage. It’s a murky and inventive book, where the main character is a drug-running (and addicted) ex-soldier and self-described loser, who gets caught up in a horrifically violent interstellar conflict. His ultimate heroism derives from his refusing to take sides in this pointless endeavor, and instead to choose to side with the refugees, the poor, and the victimized of the universe. It has all of Harrison’s hallmarks of gorgeous and pointed prose, an obsession with landscapes, and discomfort with the trappings of genre. At the same time, it doesn’t move outside of genre or critique it the way that his later works would so successfully do.
It was Hartwick’s Spring break, so things were a bit quiet around here.
I spent the time putting up some Anna Richards Brewster paintings for an upcoming exhibit.
I did some logistical work for our upcoming talk by Neal Powless. We’ve gotten a good buzz and we’ve moved to a larger venue to accommodate!
I also did some more work on repatriation, both in meeting with tribal reps, and working on a grant to get objects and ancestors back home where they belong.
I finished reading “Trouble Boys: The Real Story of the Replacements”, which is an incredibly detailed rock biography about one of the great unsung bands of the 1980s. It makes clear that the Replacements were a working class rock and roll band, all of whom came from essentially tragic circumstances, and whom the record industry of the 1980s treated with either ignorance or outright predatory maliciousness. There’s something both heroic and tragic in frontman Paul Westerberg’s quote that opens the book, stating that the band was the only future available to them, outside of “jail, death or janitor”. Mostly, the book made me revisit the music, which is sloppy, fun rock and roll that and in some cases reaches sublimity.
Sunday, we took a quick jaunt up to Utica to do a little shopping. We ate great Greek food at Symeon’s which has become a regular stop for us when we’re up in Utica.
I’ve now a Light Phone 2 for a month. Its advertising tag is that it’s “designed to be used as little as possible”, and it’s essentially an up-market “dumbphone” with little to no internet or apps attached. The concessions it makes to 21st century devices are a podcast aggregator, a music player, and a maps/navigation feature. I’ve gone back and forth from smartphones to feature phones in the past, and I’m fairly happy with this new minimalist phone and hope it will stick in the future.
Things I like about it:
It’s small and very light, especially compared to the android brick I used to carry around.
Call quality is good, maybe even better than my last android phone.
Interface is intuitive with everything is basically right where you want it.
The e-ink screen is very easy to see and read
Things I don’t like:
It can be a little quirky. It’s sometimes slow to respond, and you have to write texts on a small, thumb keyboard very slowly to get anything legible. The maps app is better for plan-ahead navigation that actual turn-by-turn navigation.
