Category: Brattleboro

Stairway to …


Brattleboro’s big parking structure was an impressive thing both structurally and politically when it was built back in 2003. As a major New England tourist destination on the rise, we needed a place to put all the Volvos and BMWs sweeping in each weekend. And electric car chargers!
Time marches on, all too quickly in my opinion, and now the staircase on the side of the garage is falling apart and is about to be replaced. We do still get some of those tourists , but unfortunately the spot is better known as a hangout for people with nowhere else to go. 

Atop that crumbling staircase – 13 years, really? – some of those people truly do find Heaven, or at least a little baggie of something else that starts with “h” and makes you feel better about things for a while. I don’t think the new stairs will change that dynamic, but one can always hope. 

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Pamrex 32″

  
This seemed like a pretty fancy manhole cover, with the hinges and all, and sho nuff it is. 

Best of all, the Pamrex web site gave me a term I’ve been looking for: access covers. I’d been resistive to the term “manhole”… but access covers captures the range of things I want to categorize and avoids any potential misunderstandings about just what kind of blog this is. 

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Give a man an earthmover and he’ll dig things up for a day. But teach a man to make the earth move, and he’ll always have a date. 

Or something like that. 

  
See that guardrail in the background? Before that went in a couple years ago, they just plowed the snow over the edge. Now, they push it into a nice neat pile with bigass bucket loaders, then later they scoop it into dump trucks and take it to Area 51 where it’s used to keep the aliens cool. All good, and vital to our national security. 

The problem comes when the dump truck is in between trips. For those minutes, the guy in the giant bucket loader doesn’t have anything to do. Bored, he drives back and forth tidying up the snow pile. I mean, it’s gotta be kind of fun… ok, Disneyland fun in my opinion… to drive one of those things, and I would do the same. Scrape, lift, push, lift, sprinkle, scrape, repeat, until every little snow lump is piled just up to the angle of repose. 

As shown here, all that futzing around with a snow pile centered on the foreground guardrail does have consequences…

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The stories we tell 

Last night, thanks to the unexpected generosity of the Retreat, we got tickets to The Hatch’s annual storytelling extravaganza at the Latchis.

Fronted by Tom Bodett and led by a gang of local movers and shakers masquerading as soccer moms, the Hatch brings storytellers (in the vein of This American Life or The Moth) to town for a fundraiser. Each year they choose one charity, and last night was Youth Services. A fun event for a worthy cause.


As it happens, there was also a Paul Stone painting available via silent auction… that brings our collection to two.

The program was certainly entertaining, and it really was a good cause, and we were happy to be there. But of course there’s a niggle…

In these times we live in, it has become possible for a whole class of people to get astoundingly good at doing spoken word performance stuff (and also blogging !!!), from standup to serious. This show leans heavily toward the personal and confessional, the kind of reflective story you’d unexpectedly share with a college friend you haven’t seen in 20 years.

Except these stories are edited, polished, perfected, and practiced so they seem even more real than they already are. Which somehow makes them less real to me. Constructed rather than lived… recited rather than shared.

Somehow the standard for “truth” in these spoken memories seems uncomfortably fuzzy to me. In photos, when we airbrush our fashion models, or rearrange the bodies on the battlefield, most people object that there’s been an act of deceit. And when Ben Carson talks about West Point… But when these radio storytellers deliver their homilies about life and loss and love, we aren’t fact-checking. I think even if  we did find things to quibble about in these stories, we’d decide that the authenticity of the emotions they conjure outweighs the heavy use of craft to convey them.

Anyway, it’s all just a niggling question, of little real importance. The Hatch’s mission is clear and benevolent … use the power of narrative to raise money for groups that need it. Since I support the causes they support, and since it really was a great show, I’m quite willingly complicit.

And years from now, using all the techniques I’ve been able to glean from watching and listening to Bodett and crew, I’ll lean over to the tourist who just walked into the beach bar and tell him my story.

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Tripping Feyly, Gayly Over the Verandah

Probably Tina Fey and I agree pretty often, but we don’t know each other that well, so I can’t be sure. One point on which we are united, however, is that neither of us is impressed with Gay Talese. Maybe for different reasons, but still, me and Tina, we’re in harmony on this thing.

My reason for being unimpressed with Gay Talese is that I just barely know who he is. He was/is a journalist who pushed at the literary edges of that craft in his own books and some of the major American magazines of the 1960s and 1970s, along with a bunch of other famous guys  people. I didn’t really read those magazines at that time, and there are other journalists and other magazines that wormed their way into my reading habits. Mostly, it’s just a generational thing, I guess.

Tina’s reasons, however, are more pointed. At a recent conference, 84-year-old Talese bumbled an answer to an audience question about the women writers who inspired him. None, he said, women weren’t into that kind of thing at that time, didn’t really know of any good women role models for him. Ouch! As recounted in the Brattleboro Reformer, a sharp intake of breath was followed by mad typing on 500 smartphones, and a whole bunch of smart, influential women eviscerated Talese on Twitter. Fey was just piling on, but I love how she did it… an absolute stone-cold put-down, but funny in just her quirky deadpan way even if you didn’t understand the reference: just a silly non sequitur to wrap up the interview. Bam!

But this is not “Boston literary seminar adventure” or “New York literati of a certain age adventure,” no indeed. This is Brattleboro Adventure, and yes this story does belong here. The audience question that started the whole discussion came from local poet and Packers Corner commune co-founder Verandah Porche. Never met her, but I bet she and I would agree on a lot of principles and very few details. I feel the same way about Bernie Sanders, come to think of it. Honestly, I have a hard time getting past her name.

Why would you raise your hand and ask somebody a difficult or challenging or provocative question in public? Maybe you want to call out an old codger whose attitudes toward women are outdated at least and probably worse. Maybe you want helpfully to prompt an expansion of his original answer so he doesn’t unintentionally come off as a misogynist. Maybe you just want to hear your own voice and show your insightfulness. Maybe you hope the answer will shine a good spotlight on the women he neglected to mention. Maybe you’re just genuinely curious. Whatever her reasons, Ms. Porche showed the power of a short, simple question, and reminded us that even our best and brightest have their smudges. For her as a poet, I would think it would be profoundly satisfying to create such a stir with so few words, and profoundly sad that the stir stirred up something unpleasant from the bottom of the pot.

Best of all, she inadvertently brought me and Tina Fey a little closer together (Tina, please feel free to come over for coffee anytime…).

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Starry Mountain Singers

  
Last night we saw the Starry Mountain Singers do their very particular thing. 

Even among choral singers, these guys are uber-dorks, people for whom it’s all about the music. They obviously love all the arcane precision that goes into any a cappella singing, and I’m sure there’s a lot of  head-trippery born of squashing eight rabid perfectionists into an intimate and ill-remunerated artistic endeavor. They have further chosen to perform in a style unburdened by showmanship, unbuoyed by popularity, and lacking even the dubious social status lift you might get from hanging around with a human beat-boxer or wearing a funny blazer. And, by the way, most of the repertoire is in some obscure language and an even more obscure tuning. Dedicated to their craft. 

The concert started out with some Kentucky songs, haunting lonesome harmonies as expected, and then moved to Georgia. But no, not that Georgia, the other one. Half chant, half song, and utterly mesmerizing, it was hard to tell the Caucasian liturgical music from the folk songs, but since it all pretty much focused on death and sorrow, maybe the distinction isn’t so important. 

They then did a cycle of Corsican and Sardinian music (“we’re rock stars in Sardinia”), also mystical and captivating, and finished up back in the USA with some gospelly stuff. I liked the gospel least… they might be just a little too tightly wound, a little too white, for that music to seem authentic. 

The concert was held in the recently renovated 118 Elliot space, a former laundromat that is now being used as an occasional performance space. It was not great… I would much rather have heard this group in a stone church with a high ceiling and demons chasing sinners in the stained glass.  Still, it’s always nice to have another venue available, and nice that the new owners were willing to sink the money into our downtown. 

The Starry Mountain Singers annual tour continues around Vermont and Massachusetts, and then hits Brooklyn and some points south. They ask for donations at the door, which I hope are enough to cover expenses, because–as quirky as it was — this is art that should be out there. It’ll never be big, but the world would be just that little bit dimmer without these voices lifting up and aiming for perfect harmony. 

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How impromptu anyway?

  
At first glance, this looks like some shoes tossed up on a ledge in the foundation wall of the (new) Co-op building. The handwritten sign does not appear to be lettered with any particular care, and the whole thing kind of looks like something a drunk person did, perhaps with some grander purpose in mind, but without a great deal of effort. My first thought was to refer to this as in “impromptu” art installation.

But then, I got to thinking… I don’t actually know how much effort went into planning this, nor do I have any idea what it “means”. Did the artist pick out each shoe for its unique characteristics? The brands of the shoes suggest they might just be things that were laying around… but they could also represent the highly available Chinese-made brands that have, arguably, made American manufacturing obsolete, and forced millions of people into poverty and drug addiction when their jobs, and indeed the primary purpose of their lives, disappeared for no reason. And they’re all in “normal” sizes… Not too big, not too small. Again, is this because there’s a bell-curve distribution of shoe sizes at the thrift store? Or is it a subtle, well-reasoned representation of the decline of the American middle class, the bell curve’s hump flattening even as the tails get bigger and taller? 

And what wall is it that we are trying to climb? Racism? Prosperity? Happiness? Cruelty to animals?
And did the artist, funded no doubt by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, travel the country for a year looking for a blank concrete wall with a ledge suitable to display these shoes? 

The last time I saw an art installation composed primarily of shoes, it was in the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC. The shoes weren’t remarkable in any way until you read the text explaining that these were the shoes of people who died in the gas chambers. Suddenly, those fucking shoes made you cry. 

On balance, I think this is more likely to be something done by a drunk person… but that is a question best answered by the beholder. 

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The Two Towers 

   
 I snuck in a run before heading to the airport today, and cruised a ways up the West River Trail, my first time there since sometime last summer. In addition to a new megawatt solar array in a former cornfield, I found this nice stone cairn and got an up-close look at progress on the highway bridge. 

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