Category: Events

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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Strange bedfellows 

  
As the news crew idled outside the Utah Republican Party offices early Wednesday morning and I took an Eastern-time-zone predawn run, I enjoyed a rare moment of solidarity with my right-wing brethren. Trump got hammered in Utah the day before, even though he assured voters there that he loved the Mormons. 

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NECCA Circus Spectacular 2016

2016-03-05 18.45.49We had a great time at the show, which celebrated reaching the $1 million mark on their fundraising campaign. Although I am still concerned that the new facility they’re building will be too “shiny”, there’s no question it will make their lives easier than wrestling with the grungy but charming quarters they’re in now.

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Step right up, step right up, everyone’s a winner, bargains galore

2016-02-27 18.26.40

A couple of weeks ago we got invited to B&K Green Mountain Auctions with Sherry and Prov. We had a great time, and bought a pair of nice nesting end tables and an old wall clock that might turn into something someday, or it might not…

Many of the people in attendance, who were mostly old men, were obviously regulars, and we could see how they end up with barns packed to the rafters with stuff… you could easily fill a pickup for $50 or less. Of course, most of what you bring home that way is junk, but you always hope for that antique whatsit to be worth something someday.

They’re there twice a week… and Lee is glad that we don’t really have a place for me to store stuff.

And PS — if you don’t know the reference in the post title, it’s worth tracking down. I never really got Tom Waits until I heard this song…

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Only a game

2016-02-24 22.37.39Last Wednesday during my training class, I signed up for the optional evening training session, which was OK. When we finished, about 10 PM, I was planning to take Uber back to the hotel. However, chatting with one of my fellow students who was headed to the metro made me change my mind and take the train instead. It had been a long day, and I certainly was tired, but why not.

It turned out that I was in the subway system at the same time as several thousand dedicated but disappointed Washington Capitals fans. They had just suffered a 4-
3 lost to the Montréal Canadiens, and this year that’s an embarrassment. A couple of stops after I got on, all the fans got on too, and suddenly the train was packed. I was happy to give up my seat to this gentleman so he could sit next to his lovely wife.

They expanded my mental model of hockey fans… I don’t know if I’ve ever seen hair as perfectly lacquered, and partcularly at that hour after attending a hockey game.

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Thank you

My home this week was the little conference center hotel at Gallaudet University. 

   
 
The campus is beautiful, situated behind a tall fence in a neighborhood that is just beginning a period of gentrification. 

The little breakfast restaurant was nice, staffed by deaf people as is only to be expected. I communicate a lot, and I felt really alone being so utterly unable to talk to these folks. They understood me pretty well… I was clueless. 

But that’s why we invented the Internet. It turns out that Thank You is even easier to sign than to say… and so I tried it and it worked! One phrase made a big difference, to me at least, even though I think my accent was off. 

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They all fall down 

  
Yesterday, we went to the Brattleboro Museum and Art Center’s annual domino-toppling fundraiser. I think they said this was the seventh year for the event, but it was our first. I goofed on the time, meaning that instead of being half an hour early so we could get a good spot to watch, we just barely made it in time and so had to crane our necks to see over the people in front of us. Obviously, it wasn’t possible to jostle our way to the front… If one person had tripped, it would have been a real disaster.

Almost 28,000 dominos were set up, and with only one extra nudge right at the beginning, the entire chain worked. 

Kids came from all over the area to spend their entire Presidents’ Day weekend setting this up, only to have it all disappear in a few minutes. I imagine there are some important life lessons there.

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C’sted Puppy Parade

Just as we were enjoying our last painkillers yesterday before leaving for home, the annual Puppy Parade was assembling on the Boardwalk. This year’s theme was “Arabian Nights.” Most of the dogs were stoic, or even enthusiastic, about the whole thing. That little puppy is available for adoption…
 It looked like a fun chance for the townies to get together, even though it was rainy.


High society dogs. But if you look carefully in the background, you’ll see that this sort of thing is not for everybody. The Dude Abides, but he’s going diving and not wearing a sweater. 

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The Ephemera Archive for American Studies

Yesterday, right at the end of my long walk, I chanced on this man, who was taking his recycling out to the curb.   I crossed over and said hello, and learned that yes, he is the tenant in the storefront there.

That storefront has been hard to keep full. It was a Jamaican vegan restaurant when we first got here, but that closed before we ever tried it. Then it was a candy store where you reach into jars and fill up candy to be sold by the pound. Given my estimate of the population who are more or less constantly stoned– and more so in that particular neighborhood — I thought that business might work well. After not very many months, they added a Thai restaurant, where we ate once and it was good, but then the whole venture collapsed.

More recently, however, the windows have been filling up with stuff. And not just stuff, but interesting stuff.

Mr. Kit Barry was more than happy to indulge my curiosity. “Window Theater,” he explained. “First time anybody’s seen such a thing in America.” It was cold, I was tired, and the conversation moved quickly, so I did not ask him to elaborate as to whether that meant that such a thing happened in other countries.

This window, then, isn’t just an assortment of stuff. The Elvis lamp, well, it represents Elvis, looking vapidly and emptily past the dinosaur, his dedicated fan. The King’s tragic career is represented by the tapes, moving right to left from his innate genius and early success through a period of greater and greater mismanagement and corruption. See the marbles being lost? Finally, the whole thing unravels (get it?), and the scary Halloween skull tells us what happened next. But wait! look up! The blissful optimism of the human spirit watches over all and gives us hope.

On the basis of my expression of interest, Mr. Barry invited me in for an introduction to the mind, the context behind this and the other windows that are visible from the street. It turns out that he’s been collecting ephemera since his teenage years. And I even got a good definition of ephemera, a word I mostly hear on Antiques Roadshow (which program Mr. Barry disdains). Ephemera is printed material specifically designed to be used for a defined and relatively limited period of time and then thrown away. Advertising, posters and fliers, tickets, newspapers, and so on. Magazines and catalogs and phone books.

He’s got hundreds of thousands of pieces of paper in there, mostly from the 19th century, all (or at least mostly) neatly cataloged and arranged in 3-ring binders. Is it the largest collection of such objects outside the Smithsonian as he claims? Hard to know for sure, but why not?

Fascinating and overwhelming, both for him and for any visitor. He’s always on the lookout for visitors to share the collection with, and even willing to entertain the idea of volunteers to help manage it. He’s not much computerized… that would be quite a web site!

We only spent about 15 or 20 minutes together, as I was eager to get home to a nice hot tub and a nice cold beer. However, I hope I’ll have the chance to talk with Kit Barry again. He is another of those unexpected and uncategorizable souls that seem to be overexpressed around Brattleboro. One thing he said particularly resonated with me: most of what we learn in school these days is designed to provide answers, but the Ephemera Archive is all about supplying questions.

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One foot in front of the other 

Yesterday I walked to Putney and back, a total distance of about 22 miles.  I was one of about 25 people who joined this walk in order to raise awareness of the problem of military and veteran suicide. One common figure is that 22 veterans kill themselves every day. Their shadows loom.

  The event was organized by 22-year-old Lauren Mabie, daughter of a prominent local family, and newly commissioned Army 2nd Lieutenant.


I met some nice people on the walk, including a couple of very active Veterans for Peace, whose views are strong and whose spirits seem unbroken despite decades of crying in the wilderness.

I know my legs are sore today, and I didn’t even carry a rucksack like fresh-faced Lt. Mabie, whose recovery will surely be harder… tomorrow she ships off to Germany for her first tour with a Patriot missile battalion.

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Two-Headed

Last night we went to see Gan-e-meed Theatre Project’s inaugural production of the play Two-Headed by Julie Jensen. Here’s a good review from some production a few years ago, which includes the following explanation from the author (the link is mine)

We were two-headed about a lot of things, meaning that we kept secrets. We had public heads and private heads. Sometimes I was two-headed about the Mormon Church. I just didn’t want to talk about it. Most of us from long-established families were also two-headed about the Mountain Meadow Massacre. It had happened in 1857. No one alive remembered the events. But our families had been involved, or else they knew families who were…And so we knew and didn’t know. We imagined and didn’t talk about it. The same was true of polygamy. Many of us had polygamous grandparents, great grandparents. Many of us were distantly related because of it. And yet we didn’t talk about it. We knew and we didn’t.

Kara Manson and SerahRose Roth did a fine job with the play’s vignettes from the intertwined lives of two pioneer Mormon women. The play’s emotions are restrained, and so the audience left dry-eyed. That made an interesting comparison to the production of Doubt that we saw a few weeks ago, where it was all right there on stage and the entire house was teary by the end. Appropriate, though… it seems to me that being a good pioneer wife required keeping it bottled up, especially in public.

Afterwards there was a Q&A with the actors and director, and the quality and tone of the questions was as interesting as the answers. Echoing a current controversy, the troupe was asked if they felt that a play written by a man could have moved them the same way. Yes, they replied, we’re actors… a good answer. Another audience member had been a VISTA volunteer in Southern Utah and shared her remembrances of the area, and we had been in Utah more recently and Lee shared her thoughts about the duality of Mormon life for women that persists even today. All in all, a nice discussion to cap off a nice evening.

The show was held at the New England Youth Theater, where we’ve been several time. Ms. Manson is an NEYT alum, having answered the very first audition there, according to the nice article that came out in the Reformer and alerted us to the show’s being in town.

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And God bless us, not even a mouse (cookie)

Tonight we are at New England Youth Theatre’s production of A Christmas Carol. At the lobby snack bar we got these MOST adorable cookies ever. Holiday magic sprung from half an Oreo, a Hershey’s kiss, a maraschino cherry dipped in chocolate and slivered almond ears.

In true Brattleboro style, the director’s notes explain that this production teaches lessons of solidarity with Occupy Wall Street.

The show was wonderful. Too long, but still very entertaining. The kids seem to take direction well, and the crew knew enough ‘real’ theater tricks to keep things moving. The Greek chorus girls, heavily influenced by Helena Bonham Carter, stole the show.

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