Reading this week:

• The Story of my Life by Sir Harry H. Johnston

Every once in a while I get annoyed with myself for not being rich. I think I can rightly say it is entirely my fault. Mostly it’s just that like, look, I am a mediocre white guy so not only do I have that going for me but also I went to Yale. I am also, I sometimes like to think, a fairly smart guy, and have you seen the people out there who are rich? Do you really think they are all that smart? Like so much smarter than you that they get to have a billion dollars and you, and more importantly I, don’t? It is ridiculous to think so. So it’s gotta be my fault I am not fabulously wealthy. Besides me whining about not using my privilege to the utmost, I also have to admit I have made several career moves that were explicitly bad money-wise, not entirely but definitely in part because a buddy of mine, in response to me saying I didn’t care about money, said I did care about money, and I kinda just wanted to prove him wrong. And more firmly than being annoyed about not being rich personally is that I am annoyed at all the very silly things the fabulously wealthy do spend their money on. 44 billion U.S. dollars for Twitter??????? I can think of so many cooler and more fun things to spend even a paltry $100 million on and these people are out here blowing the GDP of Cameroon on things that very obviously don’t even bring them joy!

Which brings us to the Rubells. They are a rich couple with a penchant for buying a lot of contemporary art and then building museums to put it in. They seem nice! I’m not going to verify if that is true or not and it in no way reflects a change in the soft policy of this blog that the rich should be eaten (not me though, don’t eat me when I achieve the fabulous wealth of my idle ponderings). But man if I was rich this is what I would do! This and a lot of other things, let me tell you. Like funding local journalism and showering infrastructure on the village where I was a Peace Corps Volunteer and look I haven’t totally gamed out how I would spend $100 billion or whatever but not only would I fund so, so many cultural institutions but I wouldn’t even ask them to put my name on it. That last sentence was not a dig on the Rubell Museum DC (their other museum is in Miami) because it is a very nice place and I recommend you go.

My super amazing girlfriend and I visited the other weekend, making a whole day of it by eating some fried chicken beforehand and going to two bookstores afterwards. We got in for free because I used to be in the Navy and also the Rubells are very nice about only charging the tourists to see their art. The coolest part of the museum, it slowly dawned on me as I visited, is the space itself. It used to be a school and the news articles will tell you all about how Mera Rubell made sure to highlight the vaunted windows and it was a very, very neat thing that they have an exhibition of Keith Haring’s Untitled (Against All Odds) which was inspired (loosely) by Marvin Gaye’s album What’s Going On and they had it playing in the background and the significance here is that Gaye went to this very school. Like that is such a cool thing to do! But even without the Gaye connection I loved how the building itself affected how I viewed the art. The first room you enter is this gigantic cavern of a hall with four monumental artworks displayed. Then you traverse into the rest of the museum which is split over three floors with different halls and hallways connecting in a few different ways. The more open halls felt more like a regular art museum, but then you also had these tiny hallways where you couldn’t get very far away at all from the art, especially when it was crowded with other visitors. It forced you to get up close to the pieces even when they were large enough to ask for perspective that just wasn’t given to you. And since the rooms are put together somewhat mazelike you filter in and out of the exhibits in a very non-linear way and I hope the curators have a lot of fun thinking about what it means to put art in a space and spaces like that.

Another aspect of the museum is that it feels unfinished in a pretty exciting way. The walls are all brick but certain portions are covered with like drywall in what fells in spots to be done very randomly. You sort of float in and out of regular ole’ art museum walls and then these old bricks, some replaced by wooden blocks that are falling out. It makes the whole space feel more exciting and the art even more exciting by association. I noticed the floors would be updated in spots and then old in others. And the final space you wind up visiting is just sorta the basement and it feels like a basement with graffiti still on the walls in some spots and painted and unpainted brick and unfinished, low ceilings and twisty passageways with art just sorta stuck in there. It’s great! We should never design an art museum ever again and instead just stick art in repurposed buildings.

Anyways here are some of the pieces I liked. I liked the above piece, Chalkboard Drawing #3, because it is a chalkboard and the museum used to be a school and so I liked how that all fit together. They didn’t mention anything in the description about putting a chalkboard in a school which was a very hip move, if you ask me. Anyways that’s why I liked this piece.

The next piece, Big Black Rainbow (Smoky Eyes) was one of the four pieces in that first gigantic hallway. My photos don’t convey the scale but it is huge. What I found really interesting about this piece is that it was painted on terrycloth, which is not a painting medium I would have ever thought of. I have documented my interest in impasto and this picture for me was all about the impasto. So that was very neat.

The final piece I wanted to highlight is Existing in Rose Thoughts by Jamea Richmond-Edwards and I hope to be in enough with the art crowd someday to own one of her artworks. This one reminded a lot of the painting/collage Vendor by Prudence Chimutuwah with the use of different media to highlight the themes of the painting and the fact they both center similar figures. It’s just such a beautiful piece with so many layers.

So that was my experience at the Rubell Museum DC. Maybe we’ll make it to the one in Miami someday.

Reading this week:

• Water, Wood, and Wild Things by Hannah Kirshner (beautiful)

The very same day that we visited the Green Mountain Spinnery we also visited Emily Dickinson’s house! In fact we visited it first but because I was so worried about forgetting the steps to spinning I wrote that first to ensure I got everything down. So it got published first. But now we are here to revisit the morning.

You may think that it was my super amazing girlfriend’s idea to visit Emily Dickinson’s house. You would not only be stereotyping the both of us, but you would also be wrong. It was my idea. In fact, the house is in Amherst, and my super amazing girlfriend had gone to college there, and never even been! You see what had happened was that while I was goofing off at work I read an article in the New York Times about the pandemic remodel they did to bring the house back to its “Technicolor 1850s glory.” I am a big fan of color, and pattern, and boldness, and this is a trait I share with the Victorians and Emily Dickinson. And Emily Dickinson is a famous literary person so I am right in my aesthetic opinions. Also like I don’t know much about Emily Dickinson nor am I sure I have ever actually heard one of her poems (though I did read another article about her baking so that is nice), so this was probably the only thing that was going to draw me to this house, and boy did it deliver:

I also really liked the bevy of rocking chairs. I should get a rocking chair. I could be a rocking chair kinda guy. Anyways the house tour. It was really nice! Our tour guide was obviously a huge fan Dickinson and really tied together the different experiences that Emily had in the house with the imagery and themes and language that came through in her poetry. Given that Dickinson wrote a lot of her poetry in the kitchen while waiting for bread to bake, etc, it is probably a little unfortunate that the house’s kitchen is now the entryway and gift shop, but there were plenty of other parts of Emily’s personality. One nice coincidence is that in the car on the way up I was reading American Eden, which talks about among other things the rise in popularity of botany as a pursuit in the early United States only to arrive and discover that Emily was a huge fan of botany and had a conservatory in the house where she spent a lot of time. The conservatory they have is rebuilt but with the original windows, and is a lovely spot that yeah I could see being the inspiration for a lot of poetry:

Besides the conservatory, the tour takes you through her dad’s office, which had a lot of neat furniture and a selection of the books she owned (the originals are at Harvard, apparently), to the entryway which had a very neat shellacked canvas floor covering, and into the parlor where the Dickinsons entertained guests and did other parlor-type things. There the tour also highlights the people who labored in the house, both Black and Irish servants. From there it is upstairs where there is a short lecture with some fun visual displays that talks about how Dickinson labored over the word choice in her poems and how she never titled any of them. An interesting perspective into an artist’s work. Apparently they date some of her poems by her handwriting. A particular highlight of our tour is there was a brave little boy who got volunteered to man a lot of the visuals and also play the piano in the house. A very talented fellow, that kid.

After that you go into Emily’s room where she spent much of her time especially in the later years of her life. The room included a recreation of her writing desk which looks like a nice little desk indeed. Her nieces and nephews would apparently play pirate games outside under her window and she would lower them booty in the form of cookies and the like, which is very fun. After this we were led outside to the back of the house where you can see an oak tree that was there in Dickinson’s time and could contemplate the span of nature that she also contemplated as inspiration for her poems. It was a touching and serene moment only punctuated by a poor lady who was walking through slipping and falling. She was fine but that poor lady. After that we bought souvenirs and then got some noodles for lunch. All in all a wonderful visit and I can’t wait to redecorate our house with the exact same wallpaper and carpets that she used because they are beautiful and historic and as long as we avoid the arsenic ones it’ll be fantastic.

Reading this week:

• Slaves for Peanuts by Jori Lewis
• The Brutish Museums by Dan Hicks
• Blockade and Jungle, edited by Christen P. Christensen from the Letters, Diaries, etc. of Nis Kock

For Thanksgiving week my super amazing girlfriend brought me back up north to her family’s ancestral home. We had a lovely time, I assume for the whole week, because it is actually Thanksgiving when I am writing this but will be the deep dark depths of winter by the time you read this (for the record it has snowed twice here already so maybe the Deep Dark Depths are already upon us). Anyways what I am driving at here is that to get out of town and to feed, irresponsibly for not, my super amazing girlfriend’s yarn passion/obsession we went to Green Mountain Spinnery!

It is a lovely place. It was started a long long time ago (the ’80s) by a group of knitters who were in a book club and the book that week was Small is Beautiful. Inspired to get into small business they started a small spinnery in a gas station. The small factor here is important because what they mostly specialize in is spinning the output of relatively small flocks of sheep (or other fiber-producing animals). Bigger spinneries have much larger minimums so the boutique flocks can’t get their yarn spun. I am gleaning all this information from the tour they took us on. Turns out you can just show up and ask for a tour and the extremely nice lady behind the counter will take you on one along with the other nice patron who happened to have also travelled up from the same town as you which is also where the aforementioned counter lady got married. New England is a small world, apparently.

Anywho it is a very interesting process involving a lot of old machines. When Green Mountain was setting up shop a lot of other shops were taking down shop and so the founding knitters travelled to and fro across the land buying the requisite machines. The process started in a rather large sink where the lanolin on the wool is removed via a good long soak in a mild soap. Then comes the tricky part, which is rinsing and drying the wool without turning it into a large lump of felt. That is the specialty of the above machine, which rinses and presses it firmly but gently before it is moved into the oldest machine in the shop (not pictured), a washing machine from 1898 which spins it right round baby right round. Then it goes into a regular ole’ dryer.

After being dried it then goes into a picking machine which opens and blends the fibers (so the website tells me, I missed that bit during the tour) and also moistens them nicely. The wool can go through this process a few times and this, I am to understand, is where you can figure out the colors so they’re all nice and stuff. The spinnery apparently goes through a cycle where they start with natural colors and gradually move to darker or bolder colors over the course of a few months. The day we were there it was clearly a bit early in the cycle as you can see from the pictures. How long it takes to go through the cycle depends partially on how often the machines break down. They are old and worked hard and there are also little bits of wool flying everywhere so I can imagine the works get gummed up regularly. When we were there two guys were working on fixing this neat-o conveyer belt that goes between the two carding machines and as you can see above there is an in-house mini machine shops decorated with extremely twee hand feed lever covers.

But like I mentioned the carding machines. These things were impressive. I imagined at one point making a tiny little one because even the tiny little ones can cost like several hundred dollars, but seeing this on an industrial scale, even if that industrial scale is relatively small, is extremely impressive. All the chains and belts and stuff! It comes out of this carding machine in a sheer layer of wool. That neat-o conveyer belt I mentioned gathers it up and spins it 90 degrees and then feeds it into another carding machine. This apparently makes the fibers extra strong and cross-linked and stuff which is cool.

The output of that second carding machine are these “pencils,” which are approximately pencil-width bundles of yarn. These get put on giant bobbins and then finally these bobbins are put on the actual spinning machine. The spinning machine takes these relatively fragile pencils and spins two or three of them together to finally produce the yarn. It is just a little bit more steaming from there before the yarn is finally split into skeins and then either distributed back to the people who sent them the wool (70% of their business) or else sold directly by Green Mountain (the other 30%).

My super amazing girlfriend threatened at one point to do this whole process in our spare bathtub, and I am disappointed that she hasn’t carried through with this threat both because I think it would be extremely neat and also because I would be excited to brag about our in-apartment sheep to shawl process to all the yuppie friends I would make specifically to brag about my super amazing girlfriend, not that I need an excuse. But if my bathroom fantasies can’t come true seeing it in person all the way up in Vermont is a very nice (if distant) second-best plan. My super amazing girlfriend of course bought a few (four) skeins of yarn from the shop they had there and we had a lovely time touring the place. I highly recommend a visit if you are in town even if you don’t like yarn. I forgot to mention the place smells like sheep. That isn’t really apropos of anything besides the artisanal authenticity of the spinnery. They are nice people who think a lot about their craft and hopefully if my super amazing girlfriend ever lets me raise a flock of sheep in our apartment I can use their services. Until then I will simply have to admire the shawl she’ll knit from the yarn.