In which I visit the American Museum of Natural History

As a sidebar, I have little use for Manhattan. Fun to visit for a day or two, but you couldn’t pay me enough money to live there (or enough money to AFFORD living there.) As I was walking north to the Whitney, I forgot where Times Square was and so accidentally found myself in it. I generally try to be optimistic about the future of our country. However, I do sometimes have moments of panic in which I imagine our entire society collapsing, Rome-style. In the moment right before this happens though, my dystopian imagined-future looks something like Times Square smeared all over the country. Horrifying.

On the positive and lovely side however, I took a long detour through Central Park after I left the Whitney and before I stumbled into the Museum of Natural History. I’d been in the park before, but really only in the open parts with benches and meadows and things. There’s a whole chunk of it that’s foresty and natural-looking and that was really quite beautiful.
Chicago is still, hands-down, my favorite U.S. city, but NY has us beat in the giant-public-park category. Millennium Park doesn’t quite cut it. Particularly since aliens from the future landed there and set up a “band-stand.” I went into Central Park from the Whitney on the east side of the park (around 75th street) intending to walk south and wind up coming out the bottom of the park (59th). I got a little turned around though, and came out on the west side of the park near the Museum of Natural History (81st). So…I got a little turned around. But all for the best because I’d forgotten to look up where the Natural History museum was, so I wasn’t expecting to find it on purpose. And then voila! I only had about an hour to spend there before heading back down to meet up with Alyssa (near 39th) but I could have spent all day in there. I hung out in the African and Meso-American exhibits, with a little junket through the Native American tribes. So much beautiful art, and elaborately decorated artifacts, and fascinatingly weird magic/religious/fetish items. There was a wind-chime-looking thing made by a tribe from what is now the Congo, that was supposed to make it rain, because the dangly loops are supposed to look like falling rain drops. If you’re going to have magical superstitions, they might as well be poetic and creative.

There was also a bad-ass charm for made by another Congo-area tribe. The caption called it “Medicine for protection against forest spirits.” I thought it kind of looked like a necklace Free People might sell for a couple hundred bucks, but it sure is a lot more interesting-looking than any medicine I’ve ever seen.

Another accessory you probably wouldn’t see in Free People was a necklace (headband?) made out of dead birds, from someplace in a South American rainforest. Some of the birds are Honeycreepers, which I remember we had in the Nature Museum’s butterfly haven where I volunteered in Chicago. I liked them better alive, but they’re still pretty beautiful dead, I guess.

In which I visit the Whitney

I took the Amtrak up to New York on Thursday morning to spend a couple days with some friends (Guts and Alyssa!!) I hadn’t seen in way too long. I got into Manhattan in the morning with a whole day to wander around before meeting up with Alyssa. I got into Penn Station and started walking North in the general direction of the Whitney. Before I made it to the museum though, I was waylaid by a thrift sale in a church basement in an absurdly rich-looking neighborhood off Madison Avenue. Figuring that the clothes absurdly rich people donate to thrift sales are probably still pretty nice clothes, I paid five bucks to get in and managed to make off with two cute BCBG skirts, an classy gray wool Armani skirt I can wear to work, and a white DKNY trench-style raincoat. All for the price of their Target-sales-rack equivalents! Ha! I had to fend off flying elbows and plastic laundry baskets overflowing with people’s purchases, but I made it out alive and feeling quite successful. Plus it was for some good cause or other, so I can feel doubly good about myself.

Then I went to the Whitney Biennial exhibit. Contemporary art is often very cool. It is often very prone to bullshit. Studying art as a major helped me get to know the work of some very cool contemporary artists that I might otherwise have put in the bullshit category. Wolfgang Laib, for instance, who makes art out of pollen he collects by hand in the meadows around his house in Germany.

Or Andy Goldsworthy, who makes art out of materials he finds in nature, like colored leaves, with no glue, no paper, no paint. He arranges them, and then photographs them, and then nature does its thing and the art disappears.

I saw a lot of art at the Whitney that I really liked. There were some poignant series of photographs of people. And some imaginative semi-figurative sculptures, and really beautiful abstract paintings. And a very cool tapestry by some Norwegian or Danish guy, all woven out of sisal and jute and things with fun textures and layers and a big hole meant to look like a sun. There were even one or two video installations I kind of liked.

However. There was also a healthy dose of art that makes you go “Seriously?”, which was made even more fun by the fact that I took one of those audio tour things with the head phones, so I got to hear the artists themselves explain their work, which made it all the more wonderfully silly.

My two finalists in the “Seriously?” category are…

A couch that the artist had covered with newspaper clippings about Barack Obama. Sitting on the couch were a couple big lumpy ceramic pieces, vaguely shaped like vases, but really awkward and non-functional. The artist’s audio tour explanation talked about how the couch was from her childhood home, and represented comfort, or security, or something. And how the meaning of the piece had maybe changed over the last year from a “couch of hope and promise” or something, to what might be seen as a couch of disappointment and broken expectations. I forget what the ceramics had to do with anything. Something about domesticity maybe? My verdict: kind of dumb and very boring.

My second favorite in the silly-bullshit category was an installation for which the artist had built a small room out of plywood in the middle of the gallery space. You go inside the dark room, and there is a pane of glass suspended from the ceiling, on which is projected a pale-green image of JFK’s head, floating disembodiedly. Under Kennedy’s head was an LP spinning around and around. There was another, larger projection making its way around the walls of the room that, as its own piece of abstract art, might have actually been pretty neat – it was some smeary, swirly paint or liquid photographed on a pane of glass. There might have been low music playing too. And that was it. JFK’s head floating above a vinyl record, looking like the big wizard head in the Wizard of Oz before Toto pulls back the curtain. Apparently the piece had something to do with the 1960s and the race to the moon. And jazz. There were some words and scientific-looking diagrams on the outside walls of the room too, that I’m sure tied into something, but that I could make neither heads nor tails of.

Sadly, no cameras were allowed in the exhibit (stole the couch photo from their website), so you all will have to go and pay your $12. You can actually scroll through a number of the pieces here: http://whitney.org/Exhibitions/2010Biennial

Swamp funk

I love doing outdoor work and feeling like a homeowner! Only minus the actual mortgage and responsibility. I wandered outside this morning to cut some flowers, and noticed that the one rose bush was looking scraggly. So I got the pruning shears and trimmed it a little, cut out a bunch of dead wood, and tidied it up nicely. But I tend to get carried away when I have clippers in my hand, so I wandered down the backyard and thought I’d prune the other rosebush. Then I noticed there were some unwelcome Japanese maple saplings that had sprung up around it and were blocking the light. So I hacked those back. Then I noticed the magnolia tree had some branches that were hanging down awkwardly, so I got the BIG pruners and lopped those off. By the time I was done I had a hefty pile of tree chunks sitting in the yard; but now there’s room to sit under the magnolia!! How lovely!

A week ago I had a dream that my dad was climbing on a ladder and the ladder fell backwards and he fell down – terrifying. The day after I had the dream, he pops up suggesting he should clean the gutters! Um, no way! Not that I’m usually a superstitious person, but why mess with that shit, right? So I said I would clean the gutters. Smelled like swamp funk, and there was a hole in one finger of my gloves, but when suddenly the gunk cleared and you heard a scratchy rushing noise and gobs of foul muddy leaves came gushing out of the downspout…HA! Victory!

Whew!

I can check a few more things off my giant Excel ‘To Do’ list. I observed two classes at my sister’s old high school yesterday. The teacher was a really nice, very earnest guy in a navy sport coat and khakis, maybe 30, teaching juniors about the Marshall Plan and the Truman Doctrine. I felt older than I did the last time I was in a high school classroom (as a teacher, two years ago), which was reassuring, but also a little depressing. (I never thought I’d be one of those people who freaks out about getting old, but 25 is less than a month away and I’m not sure I’ve made peace with the quarter-century landmark.)

I also got my content knowledge/multiple choice Praxis score online. I had to get a combined score (two tests) of 320. Perfect score on each is 200. So I needed about a 160 on each, assuming I did about the same on both. I felt good about the free response test (make up a lesson plan, write essay questions, etc.) The multiple choice test? Not so much. It was 130 questions on a little bit of everything: Pavlov and his dogs, the Missouri Compromise, the Silk Road, demand curves, the electoral college. I knew maybe a third of the questions for sure, made decent guesses for another third, and then did eeny-meeny-miney-mo for the rest. If I didn’t get the minimum score, I was going to have to take the test again in Charlotte after Teach for America ‘Induction’ week in June, which was going to put a serious kink in my plan for a leisurely three-day drive to Mississippi seeing friends and relaxing at the Whiting’s lake house. But…the multiple choice scores were up today and I got a 187. Whew. Thing is though, even though that’s a good score, I’m thinking to myself, um, I don’t really know THAT much about history. Or any other social studies topic, for that matter. I have a pretty decent smattering of general knowledge, but there’s no way I could, right now, walk into a classroom and lecture knowledgeably on anything in particular. I know schools feel the need for some standardized measure of what potential teachers know, but as far as I can tell, all the Praxis content knowledge test measured was whether I watched a lot of PBS growing up and spent a week reviewing the Civil War. So, I guess it’s a good thing I did both.

High school, here I come (again!).

Gettysburg and Antietam

This past week, all five Andersens piled into my Dad’s Camry and we did a two-day civil war battlefields trip: Gettysburg and Antietam. We stayed with family in Maryland, and my cousin Zoe, who just turned six, drew my portrait.

The battlefields themselves were similar in a lot of ways. Both involved a visitor center, with a dramatically-narrated movie (James Earl Jones for one, Morgan Freeman for the other) with lots of reenactors and some museum-type exhibits.

The main attraction at both battlefields was the self-guided driving tour through the farmland and woods where the fighting took place. The fields at Gettysburg, and Antietam to a lesser extent, were lined with memorials erected over the years by veterans groups to various regiments: the 11th Pennsylvania Infantry, the 1st Maryland Cavalry, the Massachusetts Sharpshooters, and so on. Hundreds and hundreds of stone markers, obelisks, bronze soldiers, men on horseback, crosses, slabs – over acres and acres of battlefields.

You drive along, and get out to look at some of them. The map tells you where to stop to see where this charge happened, or where this skirmish took place, or where the cannons were lined up. Military history per se has never really done it for me – battlefield strategy, maneuvering, who had what guns and what numbers – just not my thing. So honestly, I couldn’t tell you exactly what happened at either Gettysburg or Antietam. I know that Robert E. Lee tried to move North, and failed each time. The thing that hit me though, was the sheer number of people who died at each battle. Something like 8,000 men, all Americans, killed each other at Gettysburg. At Antietam, 4,000 people killed each other in a DAY. And in the whole Civil War, over 600,000 people died altogether. More than half a MILLION. I just can’t wrap my head around a number that big, period, much less when that number represents actual people. There was a quote from the period typed up in one of the visitor center museums: “Every name is a lightning stroke to some heart and it breaks like thunder over some home, and it falls a long black shadow upon some hearthstone." The other thing too is that there were so many photographs from the Civil War. So you see these mens’ faces, and their funny hats, and bad haircuts. I don’t know. Just unbelievably sad, I guess.

And you like to think we’re moving forward. We don’t line people up in fields and charge at each other with rifles and bayonets anymore. Soldiers don’t die from infection right and left, or have limbs sawed off in tents. But now, instead of slaughtering each other in cornfields, we can kill people half-way around the world with remote-control drone planes operated from some air-conditioned military base safely in the U.S. Which makes war much less terrible for us, of course. But there was another quote I remember from one of the museums, that Lee said at some point during the war: “It is well that war is so terrible – otherwise we would grow too fond of it.”

A less-somber side note. Gettysburg was swarming with groups of high school students. Hordes of teenagers, punching each other, singing songs and, mysteriously, pretending to be galloping horses running around the museum. Of course, in fairness, I remember field trips being basically fun times to hang out with your friends and act ridiculous. But man, I hope I am ready for the youth of America.

Food Shoes Flowers

I’m getting dangerously used to having all day, every day, to do whatever I want. Apart from working on a tan and sleeping in, I’m cooking a lot. Both my parents and my brother are at work all day, and when I got home a week ago it appeared that my family had been living on pretzel rods, frozen hamburger patties, boiled eggs, and coffee, simply for lack of time to make anything else. Having appreciative people to cook for and a food budget courtesy of the Bank of Dad is pretty nice. I made grilled steak tacos for Cinco de Mayo, pepperjack cheese burgers for my brother’s birthday, pan-fried salmon with citrus dressing for Mother’s Day. Tonight we class it up with a risotto, and salad with homemade Caesar dressing and homegrown romaine. I sound like a food network douchebag a lot these days. Oh well. Nothing food-snobby about a mini Weber kettle and 15-year-old lawn chair set up next to trash cans in the driveway. We like that carefree line between white trash and epicure.

In further enjoying that line, I bought a pair of Michael Kors shoes today at the Goodwill. They were eight bucks! My office building in Chicago also housed a silly-expensive shopping mall. Every morning I walked inside the building and past the Michael Kors store, but since my clothing budget isn’t in the gazillion dollars range, I never went inside. I’m not one to care about designers or labels, and wouldn’t have recognized this one if I hadn’t walked past the store every morning for the past year, but there’s something satisfying about spending less than a pair of shoes is actually worth (I’d have maybe paid $30 for them) when other people are spending ten times that for no good reason. Not exactly Schadenfreude, but something rewardingly similar.

I also have grand plans for landscaping my parents’ front garden. In the meantime, Dad and I went to the garden store yesterday and put together a little pot of perennials for Mom. I am newly determined not to rent another apartment without a yard, deck, porch or balcony.

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Josh Ritter and The Royal City Band

I saw Josh Ritter in Philly last night! It’s the second time I’ve seen him live and he’s just as fantastic as he was when I saw him in Towson three years ago. He’s married now, and his wife Dawn Landes and her band opened for Josh and his band (now called The Royal City Band). I think married musician couples are kind of adorable, especially when they don’t make a big deal about it. Someone from the audience yelled “Mrs. Ritter!” during Dawn’s act – she just laughed and said, “Except my name is Dawn Landes. But his mom is Mrs. Ritter!” Apart from that, we’d have had no idea they were married to each other. (But we would have known they were married to someone, because each of them played with their wedding rings on, which I liked.)

Watch Dawn and Josh sing together in their apartment!

Apart from his really beautiful lyrics, and really beautiful songs, I love watching Josh Ritter perform because he smiles almost the whole time. If his mouth isn’t moving to sing, he has a grin on his face. And sometimes even when he is singing, he’s grinning right through it. It’s just really nice, I guess, to watch someone do something they clearly find so much joy in – and such infectious joy! Performers who are arrogant or cynical may be great artists, but I don’t think they ever really communicate to their audience in the same way as artists who just plain old love what they are doing.

“A supermarket of surrogate experience”

One of the perks of living in a house where people have an almost unhealthy inability to throw things away, is that along with the piles of useless things, there are often some interesting things kicking around too. This morning I noticed pile of Life magazines from the 1970s sitting on a bench in the living room. The September 1971 issue promised a special section on “TV: The First 25 Years.” Wild. Maybe one day we’ll get “A quarter-century of Facebook.”

The article was eerily…not prescient, but something similar. The main gist of the piece is the isolation and segregation of TV viewing. I suppose TV hasn’t really changed much in that respect (texting your votes to American Idol does not a community make), but so many of the other technologies we have developed since 1971 have expanded, rather than reeled in, that isolation. Not all of them of course – Skype and cell phones and things connect us with real people we know in real life – but a lot of things keep us apart in ways we didn’t used to be apart. Riding the bus to work every morning for the past two years surrounded by 15 people all with ipods in their ears, who couldn’t hear my “Excuse me, can I get by?” much less any effort at friendly small talk, made me a little sad. I thought these bits were interesting:

“But as always before, to see a performance was to share an experience with a visible audience. At a concert, or a ball game, or a political rally, the audience was half the fun. What and whom you saw in the audience was at least as interesting, and often humanly more important, than what you saw on the stage. While watching TV, the lonely American is thrust back on herself. She can, of course, exclaim or applaud or hiss, but nobody hears except the family in the living room […] And while myriad island audiences gather nightly around their sets […] with more and more two-TV families, a member of the family can actually withdraw and watch in complete privacy […] A new miasma – which no machine before could emit – enshrouds the world of TV. We begin to be so accustomed to this foggy world, so at home and solaced and comforted within and by its blurry edges, the reality itself becomes slightly irritating.”

The article goes on to wonder if “TV-democratized experience” can “carry us to a new society, beyond the traditional democracy of learning and politics.” The answer given is, in part that “We must find ways outside TV to restore the sense of personal presence, the sense of neighborhood, of visible fellowship, or publicly shared enthusiasm and dismay.” Fair enough. The other part of the author’s answer is a bit different: “We must try every institutional and technological device—from more specialized stations to pay TV, to cable TV, and other devices still unimagined.” Pay-per-view as the answer to society’s problems! Oh, those wacky 70s.

Vitamin D production through ultraviolet B exposure

I love my Delaware backyard – especially when it’s just warm enough to be pleasant but not hot enough to be sweaty. I have decided to attempt the delicate and ambitious task of getting a tan. This has only really been successfully attempted once before: my freshman year of college when I had a convenient roof deck and classes that ended by 11. I don’t want to look like a leathery, crusty-orange tanning-bed junkie, but my transparent Irish-Norwegian skin could use something resembling color. Given that I have a large stack of books to read, or finish reading, this month, I can at least feel productive while I skirt carefully along the line of premature aging and skin cancer. I am also in the market for a large floppy sun hat, so that when I’m not intentionally working on my Vitamin D production, I can be safely guarded from wrinkles and freckles.

Mr. Bun Buns Arrives

My month of unemployment and leisure is off to a good start. Yesterday I got up early to unpack, clean, and rearrange my bedroom furniture. Today I got up late, lay in the sun in the backyard, bought a money order at the post office to pay the FBI to verify that I’m not a felon, and then, in memory of the Mexican army’s defeat of the French in 1862 at the Battle of Puebla, I made dinner for the family: grilled steak tacos, homemade salsa, and corn and poblano pepper salad. Also, my brother is taking care of some girl's rabbit for the summer, so we have a cute furry thing to feed celery to, and I’m pretty excited about it. His real name is C.J., which stands for Captain Jean Luc Jaeger Bomb Picard [something something] Louis Vuitton [something]. But we know him as Mr. Bun Buns.

Me, Sack and Xudohle

I kind of can’t believe that all worked. I picked up a Uhaul truck, got it in a parking space, all my stuff fit into it (barely), I got it out of the parking space (okay, well, Ben did), I drove it from Chicago to Charlotte, unloaded it into a storage unit where it (almost) all fit, and now I’m back in Delaware for the next month. Exhausted.
Driving the truck wasn’t as terrifying as I thought it would be. Sacajawea (my Garmin) was a fantastic tour guide. Mountain roads and crosswinds are a little scary when you’re about as un-aerodynamic as they come, but all in all, not so bad. I stayed in Shelbyville, KY on Saturday night, after driving through torrential sheets of rain in Indiana.
It cleared when I got to Kentucky, but caught up with me overnight and greeted me again in the morning. I drove through stormy rain all morning, until I got into Tennessee and the sun came out. I forgot how beautiful mountains can be. And how flat Illinois is.

I finally made it to Charlotte and the Uhaul storage place. My brother met me there and we somehow managed to fit my stuff into a 5x10 unit. The couch is standing on one end, there is a bookshelf balanced on top of the couch, my kitchen chairs are stacked about eight feet high, and there’s about a half-inch of clearance between the end of my mattress and the door when it closes. My kitchen table had to be left behind. We left Xudohle the Uhaul truck in the parking lot, dropped off the keys and headed to Greenville.
Two hours after leaving Charlotte we got to Greenville and stayed in an incredibly shitty motel. (I found a small plastic cat next to my bed and there was a beer bottle cap next to Toby’s. There was one partially-damp bath towel, no clock, no remote control, and everything was either peeling or stained.)
We got up early the next morning to be greeted by the same giant storm front that had been following me since I left. So we moved Hannah out of her dorm room into a storage unit in more torrential rain, hit the road about two and arrived in Delaware by midnight. Plus, Sack took us on a fun little detour through D.C., which was a little blast from the past for me.

It feels good to be home, but I can’t really relax yet. I have to officially request my background check from the FBI, arrange classroom observations with a local high school, study for the GRE next week, and get started on all the pre-Institute work I have to do before heading to Mississippi. But also in the mix are visits with friends I haven’t seen in too long, cooking for the family, and setting up the hammock in the backyard. Not a bad deal. Here goes May!