Shadow Boxes

My love of the diorama and of dollhouses and other such miniatures is well-documented, as is my love of happy skeletons, bright colors and mirrors. Thus, it should come as no shock that this was probably my favorite booth at the Art Festival:

This is the artist:

Pictures at the Art Fair

Most of these I just found funny.

For instance, "Which came first?" The egg is inside the chicken shadow box:

"There is Wisdom in the Raven's Head," or guts, as the case may be:

This one was pretty cool, but I forgot to write down the title..:

The same artist made this one, "Road Hog,":



I swear that guy was behind me on the way to the archive that morning. Seriously, I paused for two seconds because I thought I was about to run a four-way stop and someone behind me lay on his horn, big and obnoxious, as if he were one of those Boston Mass-holes. Hell, the Mass-holes would have thought he was an asshole, a big, ole, gassy asshole.

He really was big, too. He had a good 105 lbs on me, and he drove one of those massive SUV pick-ups that looked like it hadn't seen a speck of mud or real work in its entire, polished life. He probably could have driven right over my little, rented compact with out-of-state plates and not left a scratch. Then, he gave me the bird, just like the sculpture. All because I kept him from getting to the stop light two seconds earlier. Not missing a green light, but getting to the red light.

How nice that his essence was captured by this artist.

You don't often see this, do you? Very creative millinery:

I love it! That witches hat on top looks like something from Harry Potter. Also notice the top hat on the bottom rack.

Jeez! Does everyone have to get on the Lincoln bandwagon? After three years of generally substandard historical works that could all be called  My Speciality and Lincoln, I expected better of artist at a juried fair. After all, they don't have to deal with Lincoln. Do they?

Shoot, now I'm getting grumpy. Here's a sock-monkey Hamlet to cheer me up:



"Why I'm late for work":

"Thoreau is driven from the garden by unruly nature":

My favorite artist I saved for another post.

Mitten and Twisty Straw

The Mitten on a mitten:

I was sorely tempted, but I don't cook. Although, I do wonder what they put the U.P. on. Ponder that for a bit.

On the other hand, after a bad day, I have often said that I was going to go home and drink a bottle of wine straight out of the bottle. With a twisty straw. Now, I can. Here is the mother of all twisty straws:

I got one each for my nephews, since, in lieu of seeing them regularly, I am purchasing their affection long distance by mailing them various presents. The cheaper the better, would you believe? Then, I thought, "why should they have all the fun?" So I got one for myself, too, 'cause even temperant drinking is more fun with a twisty straw.

New Shoes

Remember these?:


Essentially, I have walked around sock-footed on the balls of my right foot all day Thursday and Friday. You should see the bottom of the sock. The uppers ain't much better either.

I have this thing, possibly inherited from my grandfather, who inherited it from his mother. I buy things cheap and use them until they are unusable. I use them until they are rags, out-of-date, or of such an old generation that the guys in the shop look at them as if they are some sort of antique from the Middle Ages. I use them until they are no longer worn out items but actually souvenirs of whole eras of my lifetime, archaeological records ground into fabric or carved into surfaces, anthropomorphized into comfortable, familiar friends. I'm sure there is some group therapy for this, but first you have to admit you have a problem. I consider it a mere eccentricity.

Eventually, however, I must give in to the fact that the item in question is not longer up to the job at hand. I must consider that, if it were, in fact, a living creature, it would beg me to allow it to retire or to euthanize it. Sometimes, the item simply revolts or dies on its own. Such is the case of these tenny-shoes. They want to retire. They beg me not to find insoles and tramp on until the entire bottom falls off. "Go to K-mart, go to Meijer, go to Wal-mart, even go to the resale shop," these tenny shoes implore. "Just don't walk another step in me." My blistered foot says, "Amen!"

Except, do you know how difficult little, white tenny-shoes are to find these days? Sure, there are close imitations, variations, some even acceptable to my tastes and my wallet. Yet, should I find something the at least approximated my tenny-shoe needs, the store carries every size above and below 7 or 7 1/2, but no actual 7 or 7 1/2. That is, no 7 or 7 1/2 unless you want chartreuse, or pink, or rainbow peace signs on them. Not that I have anything against those colors. I just want basic, little, white tenny-shoes. Call it a failure of taste, call it a habit of thirty years, send me to group therapy where I have to introduce myself by first name only, but this is what I prefer.

First you have to admit it is a problem, and I consider it a mere eccentricity.

Still, I have been to the vintage shop, the resale shop, the Meijer, the K-mart, and even (gasp!) a Wal-mart. Nothing acceptable. Have they gone out of style, but not long enough to be vintage? Do those people who have them, hang on to them because of that? Ah, the mystery of the disappearing basic, white, little tenny-shoe! I thought the classics never died. How can this be?

At last, I drove by a shopping center and saw a Target. Why not try there? Their shoes are often not to my taste, if not downright ugly or obviously cheap. "Ugly," by the way, is a pretty broad category for me, and often intersects with "fashionable." For instance, I hated 99.9% of the clothes on Sex and the City, but everyone else seemed to think they were fabulous. What can I say? I make my own taste, and it is usually something completely out-of-date and uncool in every way possible. At least that keeps my spending on my wardrobe down; but, I digress.

Target came through for me! Basic, little, white tenny-shoes:

Look: no holes in the soles! (Although, I do still have to take the pills.):

My former tennies and my blistered foot would kiss me for joy if they had lips to do so.

You Know You Are Getting Old When

You know that you are getting old when, in the three days that include your birthday you encounter items from your youth in a thrift shop,:

and a museum:

(To be fair on the desk, it is in an exhibit on "duck and cover," but you went to elementary school in an old, un-air conditioned building in a tropical city, which your mother attended and at which your grandmother taught early in her career. Your desks were probably the same ones they used.)

(The Holiday Inn sign is partially boxed because they are renovating the exhibit, dang it! But you remember that shiny colorful sign on roadsides throughout your early childhood, especially the one at the end of your grandmother's street, beyond the canal, off of the interstate, in said tropical city.)

(Your love of Star Wars is well-documented, and the artifacts are still in your parents' attic. Sadly, they are not valuable nor museum worthy because they have been played with. A lot.)

(You actually preferred the one that looked like Snoopy's doghouse, but this will do. You also really coveted the blue Holly Hobby lunchbox, and really wanted a lunchbucket like they carried on the t.v. show Little House on the Prairie. Instead, you got the school lunch because your mom worked and, dammit, she didn't have time to mess with that lunch shit when the school already cooked a perfectly fine one. That's also why McDonald's is the comfort food of your youth, too. You now understand her position. Besides, you didn't want the lunch so much as the box. It's all about the accessories, you know.)

Try to identify all of the familiar objects in this case. Down on the bottom left is a Tab glass that narrows in the center, forming an hourglass shape. You remember the commercials that showed the "waist" on the glass getting smaller to underscore the dieting properties of Tab. God, you hated Tab. Your stomach turns even now to think of it. You must have been four when this commercial was on t.v., and now all of your teenaged eating disorders make so much sense if these messages assaulted you even at that age. Also not the birth control pill compact on the left. You have no stories to go with this because you were a big ole prude, mistrustful of men, and the compact was no longer in use when you finally started taking them.)

(Here is another angle. You wanted the candlestick phone, but not in Bicentennial red, white, and blue. God, you were a big ole history nerd, even in the '70. The Snoopy phone appeared in the film Time After Time, about H.G. Wells travelling in a time machine to San Francisco in the 1970s. Yep, big ole history nerd. A friend had the yellow donut phone, which fascinated you as you traced the outlines over and over and over, oblivious to whatever crap she was playing on her record player. You didn't like music until you were a teenager.)

Heck, your whole generation has been analyzed and considered worthy of inclusion in an exhibit:

(Being on the upper end of the Gen X spectrum, you did not have a computer in your bedroom. OM fact, the only time you've had a computer in the BEDroom was when you had a roommate and had to have your office there. Also,  you can only sing the Preamble to the Constitution, and had cable before MTV, which you did not like for a long time because your musical tastes were more of the Baby Boomer generation, when you finally decided that you liked music.)

So, you decide that you need to buy yourself a birthday present, because that is what grown-ups can do: buy themselves presents.

While you would like this, which combines the best qualities of a porch swing, rocking chair, and papasan:

you know it will not fit on the airplane home; but, oh!, was it a comfortable test ride and perfect for reading.

Instead, you opt for the vintage clothes shop -- and it is "vintage" not "thrift" or "resale" -- down the street where you purchase this lovely jacket that actually fits perfectly (you have a tendency to get a size or two too large because you overestimate your size, even when the clothes are on your body):

Very Mad Men, season 1.

You also accessorize with a gargoyle ring (plastic, but still cool):

and cufflinks, for those French cuffs you love, or improvise on the men's shirts you sometimes wear that sometimes have too long sleeves.:

Then, you get yourself some local, organic apple cider and Ben & Jerry's low-fat Cherry Garcia frozen yogurt and have yourself a party. Not much of a party, but a good enough one for a hotel room after a long day seeing your generation move into a museum. For the moment, aging is not yet painful, simply mysterious and new and a little bit amazing; and you wouldn't go back to any of those eras for anything, even the knowledge of how to live them better.

No Need for Mittens in Mitten Town

For the past day or two, the temperature has been unusually high for this part of the country. The thermometer says 98 degrees, but adjusted for all of the other factors, your skin feels the air as 114 degrees. Everyone recommends drinking lots of water, especially if you go out to the art fair.

Drinking lots of water at an outdoor festival can lead to a problem of the "what goes in must come out" variety. Fortunately, the heat allows you to excrete the water in ways that allow you to avoid using these and their attendant penicillin concession:

(I jest about the penicillin concession -- you actually have to go to the doctor for that.)

Later, as I stood in the line at the public ladies' room in the Going Out of Business Extravaganza that is Borders, the thought occurred to me that, with so many women using the Borders Stalls, they might not be any more sanitary than the Port-o-lets. Of course, in Borders, you don't have to hover your butt over the gaping maw of the Fluke Man.

(I don't jest about the Fluke Man. He's for real. Seriously.)

Meanwhile, I saw this:

That's a double decker doggie stroller. I took a picture because you wouldn't believe me if I told you.

Back at Borders, I browse the shitty history section. No women's history to speak of, outside of two books on Salem witches. The biography section was part pop figures, part queens (at least the ladies get some sort of love), or a president, preferably a Founding Father. I did, however, find an interesting book on reburials, which will be very useful in this cool section of my current work. Not-Clio will eventually talk about it.

Further down from Borders, I found this, which was decidedly not going out of business:

A used bookstore! Named after a ship in a children's story! The history sections are colossally shitty, of course, but the fiction sections remind you that so many books have been written and still wait to be enjoyed, even if they are no longer on the bestseller list -- if they ever were -- or even in print. You can plop down on one of the stools and read backs of books until you forget what you came in to find. Plus, the books are inexpensive.

I walked so much that my poor, beat-up tenny-shoes finally wore through:

 See? (Those are my fingers, not my toes.):

It seems I have a hole in my sole. Fortunately, I take pills for that.

Cool, Yet Daunting

There was this book, and it was a pretty important book for my research. It had everything: miscegenation, betrayal, never-before-used documents, suicide. Great stuff and central to my own work.

The initial problem that this book presented involved those never-before-used documents. They are in a language other than English, and they are in an archive that used to be behind the Iron Curtain and where the people speak yet another language other than English. No one ever told me that I might need to know these two languages back when I decided to study the antebellum U.S., by the way, although I did have 3 years of high school classes in one. Furthermore, these documents have been neither microfilmed nor digitized nor published, meaning that I would have to venture beyond the ruins of the Iron Curtain and see the actual things. Cool, yet daunting.

I began to wonder if I could get around actually seeing these items. After all, I could go by the research in the book, and look at the letters -- as few as they are -- in American collections. Except, I did start going through the American collections, and they weren't quite saying what the book was saying they were saying. Plus, many of the citations were "as quoted in [this other secondary source]" I'm familiar with that other secondary source, and the quotes there are sometimes taken out of context or they refer to documents that don't quite say what the book was saying they were saying.

It gets better. In this and other secondary sources, the authors had a propensity to use "frequently" and "constantly" and other such adverbs and adjectives that were not at all reflected in the primary sources. I also found another secondary source, an article, that described the "never-before-used" documents and both it and the book quote the exact same passages.

Then, I began to realize that this book made parallels between the actual actors in the book and characters in novels, implying that the actual historical people highly identified with the characters, but having little evidence to support this argument. In fact, the parallels were all of the author's observation, rather than a conscious and documented choice on the part of these historical actors. It would be much as if someone 100 years from now decided that I identified and based my life on the character of a novel published in my lifetime, but with no evidence that I had ever read the book, or if I read it, found anything interesting in the book.

Finally, this secondary source describes a relationship for which there is almost no evidence in other sources, only those in another language far across the ocean. One of the paramours in this relationship is mentioned only in passing and only a few times by all of the people who knew both people.

When I began to question the use of the sources in English, I really began to question the use of the sources far away and not in English, sources few biographers of an American figure might take the effort to pursue, thus making this secondary source the ultimate interpretation of this relationship. I don't think there is anything malicious in this set up, just that I began to realize that I have to see these documents. I have to see what they actually say. I have to see if there are innuendos "peppered" or appearing "frequently" throughout the correspondence, or if that is a case of historians' hyperbole. I have to make my own interpretations of their contents, unfiltered through the interpretation of someone else with different academic training. I can't cheat on this.

Fortunately, the Emerald City is (relative to the U.S.) not that far from the Former Iron Curtain City. Cool, yet daunting, yet must make it happen.

You Know You Have Been on the Road a Lot When...

When I came out of the archive today, an art fair was setting up in all of the streets. At this art fair are concessions selling "Philly Cheese Steaks."

"That's odd," I thought. "They don't call them 'Philly Cheese Steaks' in Philadelphia. In fact, I have it on good authority that it isn't really a Philadelphia-style cheesesteak if you call it a 'Philly Cheese Steak.' So why would they advertise 'Philly Cheese Steaks' here?"

Why? Because here is not Philadelphia. Here is Mitten Town. I was in Philadelphia over the weekend.

Sadly, I did not have cheesesteak. I did, however, find out that parts of Philadelphia still have trolleys. I also found out that Friends are quite friendly, and ran into two people who recognized my "Clean All the Things" t-shirt. (Here, in the Meijer in Mitten Town, someone wanted to take a picture of it.)

This song became an earworm in Philadelphia, mostly for the "hot as hell" line:


I find that I haven't had the will to blog lately because, after a whole day in the archive, in front of my computer, typing away, I can't face the same again. In fact, I get back to the hotel exhausted. How does that happen? Is it the lack of lunch? The seven or eight hours without caffeine? Do I need vitamins? In any case, the very thought of thought seems an insurmountable task, much less putting together sentences. So, despite many post ideas, the flesh is just too weak.

Also, what day is it? I've become the absent-minded professor. It isn't pretty, even with make-up.

Blue!

I'm not freaking out so much about the changes that my life is undergoing. In fact, I'm not really freaking out at all, anymore.

One of the things that was bothering me was that I felt like I was moving into someone else's life, rather than us putting our lives together. After all, I am leaving my job and my apartment in my city to move near his job in his city and into his house.  Understand, he isn't making me feel like this or making me do this. This is all an improvement, and we are putting our lives together. Just, at this point, the "together" part has not quite melded. It will, as more of my stuff moves in up here, but it is a process that won't quite get fully underway until next summer.

This summer, however, the Gentleman Caller has been trying to find ways to start the process sooner. One of the ways came about when we painted the house. His house has been painted a light blue that has turned lighter in the sun, especially on the front, which faces due west.

Now, we have already identified a decorating problem between us. He likes warm, neutral, brownish colors. I like bright, strong, super-saturated colors. After all, I painted my living room bright yellow. His is "teddy bear" brown, which is sort of a light, cafe au lait color.

Anyway, he wanted me to help him pick out the blue for the outside of the house, and with our different tastes, this might have become a problem. Instead, we found a blue that we both liked, without any real negotiation. We just both liked it.

This is it:

I'm sure this picture doesn't give the right impression. It's called "Cameron's Eyes," whatever that means. As it splattered on me, I thought, "I'm becoming a Smurf!" So, it's kind of a Smurf blue.

Then, since the Gentleman Caller and our Award-winning Houseguest, in town for the holiday, had been joking about Braveheart, I decided that maybe this was more like that color of the paint that the Scots anachronistically put on their faces. "Hey," I thought, "I could dip half my face in the blue and run down the streets shouting 'FREEDOM'!" It would be sort of appropriate for the holiday.

But that's not really the point. The point is that we agreed on a very strong blue. Then, since I love painting and since I am going to be living here, I got up on a ladder and got down to business turning the house Braveheart Smurf blue. The two of us painted, and held the ladder for each other, and discussed various topic of no import, until the sun became too baking hot to continue. Somewhere in all of this, the house started to feel less like his house, and more like ours. I'm not entirely sure that I've ever felt that before, but whenever I come up the driveway and see the bright blue, I feel less like a guest and more like a resident. I feel less of what I'm leaving and more of what I'm gaining.

Now, a sparkler: