Chilled breakfast
This prosperous looking fox enjoyed a rodent in the snow outside the window today.
Don’t judge a bottle by its label
Preparing for the weekend, we stopped at the big liquor store in Springfield — kid in a candy store doesn’t begin to describe how much fun that is. But buying booze for the label / bottle is risky. The golden monkey Riesling was pretty good, but Yumberry liqueur, even artisanal Yumberry, wasn’t.
You can’t go home again
But you can head south to your old neighborhood where the spring snow is prettier since the forsythia are already starting to bloom.
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.
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.
Hartford heavy metal
Well, bronze and iron anyway, from a lunchtime walk around the Riverfront area.
Mary Todd gazes into Abe’s eyes.
The Hartford Water Works has its own documentary and even its own fan book…
The Hartford Electric Light Co. turned into the Connecticut Light and Power Co. in 1958, so these covers are at least that old…
Most of downtown Hartford was heated by a central steam plant at one point… although very few buildings are still hooked up to it.
Tomates
Finally. We’ve eaten the first few tomatoes and there are more on the way.
A very Brattleboro question
Updated June 12: It turns out this is a thing…
Epic trail ride
Great ride on the Cheshire Rail Trail yesterday. Nine of us set out, and everybody made it back. The trail started out serene and flat, but soon turned to a muddy mess. At one point we were threading our way between giant chunks of ice that had fallen off the rock walls cut for the railway. My new bike, bought specifically for days like this, rode like a champ. And, when one of the other guys broke a chain, I was so proud that the chain tool I’ve carried for 20 years finally got some use.
Brattleboro Adventure – the Auckland Edition 