Windsor, VT: Small Towns

Old towns have tales to tell. In New England, that’s just about all of them. Welcome to Windsor, “the Birthplace of Vermont.”

That’s the title Windsor obtained in 1777, when Vermont’s Constitution was drawn up in a graceful white clapboard building that’s now a museum called, naturally enough, Constitution House. By the way, that document forbade slavery in Vermont, which set itself up as an independent republic until 1791, when it became the 14^th state–on the condition that slavery would not be the price of admission.

Then came the early 19^th century, when Windsor became an industrial village where leather harnesses, guns, and furniture were produced. Robbins and Lawrence made machine parts and some say their factory is where interchangeable parts were first made. Try having an Industrial Revolution without them! That factory closed in 1866 and it was an armory for the next hundred years until it was converted to the American Precision Museum, a sturdy red brick building that showcases the age of water power where Mill Brook tumbles over a small dam and makes its way downhill to empty into the Connecticut River. Inside the museum there’s enough info on engineering and tools to warm a gear geek’s heart.

In the 20^th century, Cone Machine Company and Goodyear were the largest employers. Both have closed and, like postindustrial towns everywhere, took a big chunk of the population with them. In 1960, there were 4,468 people in town; today there are just 3,553 and it would be fewer still were it not well-situated. Vermonters would be loath to admit it, but being on the border with New Hampshire has something to with that. Windsor is the gateway to the section of Cornish, NH that was once a thriving artists’ colony.

One of them, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, left behind studios and a home that is now a national historical park. If the name doesn’t ring immediate bells, Saint-Gaudens (1848-1907) was one of the most famous sculptors of his day. Among his works are The Puritan, Abraham Lincoln: The Man, and the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial that stands on Boston’s Beacon Hill. There’s hardly a major city that doesn’t have one of his works–mostly of those you don’t want to topple. At the park, you can see various pieces, studies, and casts. It’s also a very pleasant place to stroll through well-kept gardens and hike.

Crossing the Connecticut River is one of Windsor’s big attractions, and that’s no joke. One does so via the Windsor-Cornish Bridge, a 449 ½ foot long lattice truss covered bridge. It was the world’s longest covered bridge until 2008, when a faux steel and wood structure was built in Ohio. It’s a thrill to bore into a wooden tunnel that often requires headlights to penetrate the darkness. Some folks drive across several times and almost everyone stops on the New Hampshire side to snap a few photos.

Back in Windsor, a saunter down the main street reveals some of its postindustrial wreckage. It’s higher in elevation and affords a look at old factories and rundown properties. This is not a part of Vermont synonymous with rustic charm. Think abandoned or barely repurposed factories and homes that display the attendant poverty associated with job flight. It’s not a nice side stroll, but it does explain why Windsor’s town center is a mishmash–factory housing reborn as apartments, once-grand but still-handsome homes set back from the road, housing stock of varied quality, churches, and a quirky business district. You’ll find a greasy spoon diner, a striped pole barber shop, an insurance company, a credit union, antique stores, and some open-whenever stores. But you’ll also see an arts center and a firehouse whose upstairs morphs from one thing to another. It used to be a place where you could see Maxfield Parrish chromos, but that’s gone now, as Parrish’s studio in Cornish is no longer open to the public. I won’t lie; Windsor is trying but it has a way to go. I often wonder if locals appreciate the ironic name of its sleek new(ish) coffee shop: Boston Dreams.

Here’s the thing, though. Unless you pack a picnic, you’ll spend time in Windsor if you want to eat. Boston Dreams does nice breakfasts and lunches. There’s also an eatery and bar in the town’s Amtrak station, which is unique these days in that part of the railroad station is actually a station! There are pizza shops in town and a few restaurants I’ve not tried. Most visitors head a little further up the road.

Windsor is also where one accesses the road to Mount Ascutney (3,144’) where there’s a nice overview, hang gliding, and skiing on the northwest side of the mountain. It’s south of town, but if you drive north of the center you can sample distilled spirits at SILO or make your way to the Harpoon Brewery. I confess that Harpoon isn’t my bière de choix, but lots of folks like it and there’s very good pub grub to be grabbed. If you want to spend some silly money, Simon Pearce has a glassblowing and retail studio nearby.  Also close by is an unlikely pairing, an outdoor center where you can rent a kayak or canoe to paddle the Connecticut, or you might want to stay land-bound to Path of Life Garden. Cross some 60s hippies, New Age mystics, Eastern religion, and quirky artists and this is what you get. You walk counter-clockwise through sculptures, environmental art, enigmatic carvings and installations and make a symbolic journey from life and death to rebirth. If this sounds too funky, chill; it’s actually a magical one-of-a-kind place. Plus, there’s a high-hedge maze where you, your kids, and everyone in your party can get lost. I think of the Path of Life Garden as a metaphor for Windsor and towns like it.  
visit the

Rob Weir

August 2020 Artist of the Month: Two Bird Stone

Two Bird Stone

Hands and Knees (September 2020)

There are a lot of great bluegrass bands these days. Perhaps too many, as after a while they begin to step on each other’s phonic turf. North Carolina/Nashville-based Two Bird Stone is different in that it often sounds like a Celtic band that strayed a bit far from home. Perhaps that’s the meaning of the band’s moniker–as in killing two birds (bluegrass and Celtic) with a single projectile. The Irish-tinged country rocker “Shoebox Money” certainly crosses a few borders.Two Bird Stone isn't the first band to use this formula, but they do it very well.

Two Bird Stone brings together four guys who have done a lot of stuff for other people, including documentaries, movies, commercials, and touring in other people’s groups: Liam Thomas Bailey (lead vocals, banjo, fiddle, guitars, piano), Chad Kelly (accordion), Judd Fuller (bass, mandolin), and Rohin Khemani (percussion). Their debut album was prefaced by the release of the single and video of “The 99,” which also has a touch of pump organ. Is it a riff on the Biblical parable of the lost sheep, or does its imploring come and find me lyric mean something else? Listen and make up your own mind. I like to see it as the companion piece to “Handsand Knees,” a reverse road song about coming home.

A lot of the band’s material falls into the love song category. Another single, “When Somebody Can See Your Soul,” is a nice corrective to the love at first sight cliché. The lyric you can feel it…/when it’s someone that you think you should know…/when somebody can see your soul reminds us that this kind of attraction is Platonic as well as physical. Sarah Siskind guests throughout the record and is a terrific counterpoint to Bailey’s vocals–a balancing sweetness to his strong, reedy voice. She shines again on “Drive It ‘Till the Wheels Come Off.” This one builds to a soaring harmony and Siskind punches her way through the mix. For the record–pun intended–this song isn’t about handing over a jalopy; the keys go to the heart. “Needle and Thread” is another nice relationship song; it pays homage to the one who stitches things together so that everything makes sense.

I found the band’s Celtic fiddle and accordion melody lines refreshing. That’s not just because of my love of Celtic music. As accomplished as many young bluegrass players are these days, too many bands have fallen into predictable patterns of short establishment of a melody line, vocal, alternating instrumental solos. That was the norm of the early days of bluegrass, but the crossover “newgrass” emerging from the 1980s disrupted the old Bill Monroe paradigm. I’m certainly not knocking Monroe or what is oxymoronically called “traditional” bluegrass–it’s problematic to use the term traditional for any music whose exact origins we know–but bluegrass strikes me as a musical form in which retro should be used sparingly. After all, Monroe, Doc Watson, Earl Scruggs, Norman Blake and other such classic stars are mighty big shoes to slip on. By sliding into Celtic melodies, Two Bird Stone again uses a single rock to accomplish two useful things: their melody lines sway and linger, and Celtic music has already been thoroughly hybridized.

I have a reservation, though. I’ve not seen this band live and I worry that it’s so much Bailey’s band that it might be hard to capture the studio magic on the stage. Bailey sings leads, but he’s also the string lead on backing tunes. Some of the tracks, for instance, overlay banjo and fiddle–both of which Bailey plays. The album also uses Kenny Vaughan on guitar and that’s another stringed instrument Bailey plays. Unless he’s amazing at laying down melodies and using pedal playback, much of what we hear on the album would need to be altered for the stage. And, of course, Sarah Siskind has her own career.

A final caution: There seems to be another band called Two Bird Stone that plays funk, so if you go video surfing make sure you get the right band!

Rob Weir

 See also this new video of "If You Want to Come Back," which is on the album.

Utopia Avenue a Stroll Through the 1960s

Utopia Avenue  (2020)

By David Mitchell

Random House, 592 pages.

★★★★

Blend Lester Bangs, Nick Hornby, Neil Gaiman, Thomas Pynchon, and (yes) David Mitchell. Flavor with Zelig, psychosurgery, sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll. That’s a good start for delving into David Mitchell’s new novel, Utopia Avenue. It’s a rare Mitchell offering that’s mostly straight narrative. Key word: mostly.

Utopia Avenue opens in London in 1967. It may be swinging, but it’s not the Summer of Love and Carnaby Street isn’t Haight Ashbury. But it is a place where risks are taken and new sonic explorations are considered. Enter Levon Frankland, a manager/music producer who dreams of putting together a new band. He has no interest in sugary ersatz pop bands like The Monkees. Instead, he wants one that will break genre boundaries. To that end, he brings together four unlikely musicians: Dean Moss, a hunky working-class bass player from Gravesend; Elf Holloway, a young woman from a solid middle-class background who already has a reputation as folk music goddess; Peter “Griff” Griffin, a jazz percussionist from Yorkshire; and Jasper de Zoet, a blistering lead guitarist originally from The Netherlands, who might be mentally ill.

In 1967, The Beatles ruled, The Rolling Stones were palace courtiers, and bands such as The Who, Ten Years After, and Pink Floyd were storming the ramparts. Mitchell’s novel is Zelig-like in that fictional characters interact with all manner of real-life celebrities: Francis Bacon, Syd Barrett, Michael Caine, Mama Cass, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Brian Epstein, Jerry Garcia, Jimi Hendrix, Brian Jones, Janis Joplin, John Lennon, Pigpen McKernan, Keith Moon, Steve Winwood, and many more. You might notice that some of the names on the list come from the infamous 27 Club–those who died before their 28^th birthdays. Fame requires sacrifices.

Mitchell does a superb job of capturing a Zeitgeist that stretches from London and the Midlands to New York’s Chelsea Hotel and Laurel Canyon. His characters also embody cultural shifts. Elf is a chanteuse who also happens to be as accomplished on keyboards as she is with an autoharp or acoustic guitar. She’s also in an on/off relationship with her former duo partner Bruce, an oink-oink Aussie sexist whose days are numbered by the early days of second wave feminism. Dean is the guy who can’t keep money or his tallywhacker in his jeans; Griff a sort of Ginger Baker type whose soul is always in jazz, though the money’s in rock n’ roll; and Jasper is on another plane altogether, or perhaps several. He’s been treated for schizophrenia, though he might be less Brian Wilson than things appear. At the height of acid rock, being stark raving mad wasn’t necessarily a career impediment, but in Mitchell novels one must keep open the possibility that demons might be real.

If you’ve read any of Mitchell’s past works, you know he recycles better than a backyard Earth Machine. Jasper is descended from a Dutch East India Company trader featured in The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, Levon appeared in The Bone Clocks, and journalist Luisa Rey showed up in Cloud Atlas. Nonetheless, you need not have previously read a word of David Mitchell to appreciate Utopia Avenue. You could just read it as–to borrow a phrase–a long strange trip through the 1960s. The book is divided into three sections named for Utopia Avenue’s three albums: Paradise is the Road to Paradise, The Stuff of Life, and The Third Planet. Think of an Icarus parallel with part one being preparation for flight, part two the ascent, and part three descent. By populating the book with real bands, you could do worse than go to YouTube to assemble your own accompanying playlist. Utopia Avenue is more than rock n’ roll, though. It shows the seedier sides of the music business, doesn’t shy from presenting the recklessness of the drug culture, and reminds there is nothing “instant” about bands that suddenly appear on the charts. It is also superb in probing family dynamics. In what Joni Mitchell famously labeled the “star maker machinery,” it is easy to forget that every celeb is somebody’s son, daughter, brother, sister, etc. Jasper has an especially complicated family background, which puts him at the center of skin-crawling creepiness that might keep you up at night.

Mitchell is to be congratulated for getting so much right. He makes us feel as though we are in the room at the Chelsea Hotel chatting with Cohen about madness or in Laurel Canyon listening to Frank Zappa diss the counterculture. Mitchell was, however, born in 1969, so there are places where his hits wrong notes. He overstates cooperation between some musicians who were bitter rivals and treats feminism as more developed than it was in 1967. Also, my memory is that gay people were much more closeted than they appear in the novel. In 1967, Britain had just decriminalized homosexuality, but acceptance took much longer. (It would not be legal everywhere in the United States until 2003.)

I’ve long held mixed feelings about David Mitchell novels. Because they are often weird, they encourage over-intellectualizing in the same way that Thomas Pynchon novels have done. This time, though, Mitchell soars like a Jasper de Zoet arpeggio.

Rob Weir

The Nesting Has Loose Twigs, but Intrigues

The Nesting: A Novel (September 2020)

By C. J. Cooke

Berkley/Penguin, 368 pages

★★★

Folklore is tricky. Why do we tell fanciful stories? For instance, are monsters real or imagined? Metaphors? Jungian archetypes? Psychological projections? What about pantheistic religion? Are there nature spirits? Is nature sentient? Can it seek revenge?

These questions come into play in C. J. Cooke’s The Nesting. Its protagonist is down-on-her-luck Alexi Ellis, whose addict mother stuffed her daughter into various foster homes, each one increasingly worse. At one point, Alexi tried to kill herself. Now 28, she’s still a mess–especially after she’s left homeless when her boyfriend has had enough. Opportunity comes in an unexpected fashion. On a train, she overhears a phone call in which a woman tells a friend she’s abandoning a potential nanny job in Norway. Moments after hanging up, she asks Alexi if she will watch her laptop for a moment. Just enough time for Alexi to look at the job for which she is withdrawing and to scan her resumé. In a unique twist on identity theft, Alexi becomes Sophie Hallerton and applies for the job.

When you’ve been exposed to manipulative people, you learn some tricks. Alexi-as-Sophie has impressive credentials and aces her phone interview. Can she cook vegan? Of course! Can she teach using Montessori methods? She’s all about Montessori. She hasn’t the faintest idea about either, but, hey, that’s what the internet is for. Per the resumé, in her ten years of nannying she’s handled it all. Her future employer Tom Faraday, an English architect, is impressed; Alexi/Sophie makes her way to London and is then on to Norway to care for Coco, a toddler, and her precocious sister Gaia. There’s serious healing in need, as their mother Aurelia has recently committed suicide. Tom is drowning his grief in work. He is obsessed with building the dream house he and Aurelia planned on a clifftop piece land overlooking the fjord where she died. Tom is joined by his business partner Clive and his interior designer girlfriend Derry, but the only other resident is housekeeper Maren, who never seems to do any domestic tasks.

Sophie/Alexi gets on with the children so well that they crack her pouty, angry exterior, but the situation is more than weird. She learns that the first house was near completion but washed away. The old house on the property where they temporarily live is one in which things goes bump in the night; Gaia reports seeing elk tracks and a “Sad Lady” in the house on occasion and Sophie also imagines seeing a terrifying figure. Outside, strange phenomena take place.

Cooke’s novel is arranged in “then” chapters in which Aurelia is the narrator, and “now” in which Sophie, the children, Tom, Clive, Derry, Maren, and several supporting characters interact. It appears as if things began to go wrong when Tom diverted a river and, as Aurelia saw it, nature fought back. Much of the work crew from Tom’s money-hemorrhaging project quit because they are creeped out. There is talk of a vengeful nøkk, a legendary shapeshifting water sprite. In folklore, a nøkk–also called a neck, nix, or nokken–is usually just mischievous, but sometimes turns deadly and preys on pregnant women and unbaptized children. Is a nøkk seeking to punish Tom, who allegedly desires to build and live in absolute harmony with nature, but cut down a tree and tampered with an ancient river? Or are we reading about people losing their minds in a place too far from civilization for comfort? Is this a thriller dressed in bunad or a tale of the supernatural? Or perhaps a story in which one deception is piled upon other deceptions?

The Nesting draws us in, which is a good thing as it’s a bit clunky at first and, to be honest, I nearly bailed. It eventually becomes an unsettling page-turner, in good and bad ways. Cooke does a nice job with questions of identity. (Sophie/Alexi isn’t the only person who isn’t quite who she pretends to be.) She also deftly plays off of various meanings of the book title and makes you ponder which is the nesting. On the other hand, there are definite plot holes, including a rather large one involving a find in the cliff that goes nowhere. Cooke builds suspense well, but not entirely believably, and her slow simmer stands in marked contrast to resolution that comes so fast that it seems forced. On a personal note, I think she treads onto essentialist turf when she asks us to believe that someone of Alexi’s background is instantly transformed by proxy parenthood. The Nesting is certainly worth reading, but be forewarned that parts of it fail to fledge.

Rob Weir

Ramen Heads: Humble Noodles as You've Never Imagined Them

Ramen Heads (2017)

Directed by Koki Shigeno

Gunpowder and sky, 94 minutes, PG-13

In Japanese with subtitles

★★★

If your take on ramen is a quarter for a pack for dried noodles and a salty yellowish lump alleged to be chicken flavoring, you are badly misinformed. In Japan, ramen is serious, even gourmet, food. How serious? If you wanted to slurp–and that’s the only socially accepted way of consuming–a bowl of ramen at Osamu Tomita’s 10-seat ramen restaurant in Chiba prefecture, plan to queue at 6 am just for the right to punch your name into a machine. Stand quietly and hope that you can get a table time before all the reservations are gone. Watch as the unsuccessful contemplate hari-kari. (The restaurant is only open from 11am-5 pm.)

Ramen Heads is a fascinating, though uneven, documentary that peers into Japan’s ramen cultures. Notice I used the plural. Analogous to its Italian cousin pasta, ramen can be prepared in a seemingly infinite number of ways and in settings as humble as a Tokyo marketplace stall or as upscale as fine restaurant. The number of things that end up in ramen broth stagger the imagination and a few might make you queasy. Ramen Heads puts its focus on Osamu, and there are reasons why his shop is harder to get into than Harvard. We watch as he arises well before sunrise to make his way to the wholesale food market, where he purchases flours for his noodles and ingredients for the broth. The latter includes things such a pig heads, whole chickens, and bones–and he’s pickier about bones than most people are about their partners. Broth ingredients will simmer in caldrons for three days before he uses them, and only then after being combined with liquid from two other pots, one of which is leftover broth from the day before. He measures nothing and can tell by color and smell if the broth is correct.

If this sounds as if Osamu is obsessive, he is. He has a family, but ramen is his life and has been since he was an aimless youth who first wandered into the kitchen of legendary ramen chef Kuzuo Yamagishi. Osamu became a prize-winning chef in his own right and his perfectionism extends to making employees who do something wrong to take a time out and stand outside in shame as if they were naughty five-year-olds. Aside from an odd affectation of dressing like he’s part of a motorcycle gang, Osamu seems to have no other hobbies. He even takes his family to ramen restaurants when they dine out. I doubt his kids have ever been inside a MacDonald’s. 

The film has three parts, a look into how Osamu does ramen, a quick survey of ramen cultures elsewhere in Japan, and finally preparations for Osamu’s 10^th year in business anniversary fete. The middle part of the film gives a sense of how Japanese people share Osamu’s obsession with ramen in all of its guises, but is marred by some rather cheesy animation that could have been jettisoned in favor of a deeper look at humbler shops. The 10^th anniversary bash involves a collaboration between Osamu; Shota Iita, who has the top-rated shop in a different district; and Yuki Anisha, the first ramen chef awarded a Michelin star. The three men have very different styles, but work together as teammates rather than rivals.

Director Koki Shigeno had access to Osamu for 15 months. His approach is sometimes as much anthropological than biographical. This occasionally results in a drawback that’s more glaring than the dumb animation. Individuals in the film, especially Osamu, have flat affects. It’s as if the only warmth is the steam rising from the stovetops. One hopes, for instance, that Osamu has relations with his family and friends that go beyond the business-like exterior on display in the film. Perhaps the director simply wished to focus on obsession and the quality of preparation rather than emotions.

There is arguing results, though; Osamu’s shop has been voted Japan’s best ramen restaurant for four consecutive years. Oddly enough, he managed this without ever resorting to a 25-cent pack of dried noodles and a lump of yellowish whatever.

Rob Weir     

Simon the Fiddler Saws Too Many Sour Notes

Simon the Fiddler (2020)

By Paulette Jiles

HarperCollins, 352 pages.

★★

 

                             

Paulette Jiles’ previous novel, News of the World thoroughly enchanted me, as I followed the peripatetic Captain Kidd around the West as he old newspaper stories to barely literate settlers in the American West. Simon the Fiddler is also about a sojourner, a young tunesmith who makes his way across Texas at the end of and immediately after the Civil War.

 

Simon the Fiddler has many elements I should have loved, not the least of which is Simon’s love of music. Yet, I barely finished it and found it as tonally flat as parched prairie land. The central figure is Paducah, Kentucky-bred Simon Boudlin, whose weapon of choice is a Markneukirchen violin, also known as a German Cremona. They hale from a Saxony village where quality stringed instruments have been made since the 1700s and today sell for as much as $6,000. In other words, it was quite a big deal for a young man such as Simon to have one of these and carry it around the South through the Civil War and into Texas in its waning days. It is, in fact, one of many elements in the books that straddle the improbable/impossible line.

 

What Jiles does best in her new novel is capture the craziness that prevailed as the Civil War “ended.” I placed ended in quotation marks for a reason. Glib history often labels Lee’s surrender on April 9, 1865, as the end of the war. Do I need to tell you that wars are born from discontent, not reason? Or that they are messy and seldom switch on and off at the drop of a Kentucky slouch hat–Simon’s sartorial head covering? The war continued in numerous places for weeks after Appomattox and the final battle of the war did not take place until May 12, 1865, when a group of Confederates routed Union troops at the Battle of Palmito Ranch, where they declared victory and surrendered on the same day!

 

Our hero, Simon, reluctantly took part in that battle. Although he was 23, his pale complexion and boyish looks allowed him to pass for 15, thus too young to fight. Plus, in a time of war, good music and a demon fiddler were rare commodities to be protected. Simon might have pulled off his subterfuge, had not his hot temper lured him into a bar fight that made him look like prime soldier material. He entered the Confederate army, saw one battle, and absconded without either an official discharge–he entered the Confederacy under a false name–nor identity papers to pass freely in occupied Texas. How did he manage? More war madness. Texas didn’t officially surrender until August 20, 1866, and even then, there were parts that held on. There was no state government, so who was in charge? Good question!

 

Jiles does a fine job of thrusting us into a world that was more like the lawless Wild West than subsequent myths of said place. We follow Simon as he makes his way from Victoria, Texas, to Galveston–138 tough miles. He assembles a band consisting of tin whistle player Damon, Tejano guitarist Doroteo, and bodhran thumper Patrick. He also meets Irish immigrant Doris Mary Dillon and is instantly smitten, though she is meticulous to his raggedness and culturally polished in ways that extend beyond Simon’s one refined trait: musicianship. Dark-haired Doris is also indentured to the tyrannical Colonel Webb for three years. We follow Simon from yellow-fevered Galveston to muddy and heartless Houston and onto San Antonio, more than 400 miles altogether and most of it on foot. His pursuits are to play music, acquire land, liberate Doris from Webb, and win her hand. Along the way Simon has adventures and squirms out of more tight holes than a fat rattlesnake.

 

In essence, Jiles gives us an adult male version of the perils of Paulette. I adore music and am very familiar with many of the tunes Simon rosined his bow to play, but it’s hard to convey the feel on the page. Jiles–a whistle player herself–over indulges in music scenes that should have flavored rather than saturated her prose. The romance was quite conventional, which one would not have anticipated between two unorthodox figures, and the book’s cliffhanger resolution defied reason.

 

I found myself wishing that Jiles had simply written a small essay on post-Civil War anarchy in Gulf and central Texas and dispensed with–if I might–the fiction of fiction. Simon the Fiddler simply didn’t strike enough realistic chords.

 

Rob Weir

 

Arrival of the Animals at the Clark

Arrival of the Animals

Lin May Saeed

Clark Museum of Art (Lunder Center at Stone Hill)

Williamstown MA

Through October 25, 2020

(Click on images for larger views)

 

The Clark Museum of Art is open once again for visitors. (Call ahead for tickets unless you are a member. Midweek is a good time to go.)

 

A small but powerful current exhibit is on display at the Clark’s satellite Lunder Center at Stone Hill, a pleasant hilltop setting with lovely views of the Berkshires. The bucolic surroundings are perfect for Arrival of the Animals from multimedia artist Lin May Saeed. She is a German artist of Jewish and Iraqi descent whose exhibits have mainly been shown in Europe. Her provocative work deserves wider recognition in North America.

 

Allow me to drop two quotes from the Clark’s website that I think are a bit deceptive out of context. The first concerns the assertion that Saeed’s work is about “animal subjugation, liberation, and cohabitation with humans.” Yes and no. Her horror at subjugation is certainly obvious, but hers is not a mushy liberalism that envisions kind-hearted liberation at the hands of human masters. One of the more poignant images is a drawing of an ungulate staring at an array of goods made from leather hides. When we see animals liberated, it is either by their own efforts–a bull that has trampled a matador or an all-out war against humankind–or through cooperation with other animals.

 

Saeed even engages in some reverse mythmaking, such as a primate counterpoint to the story of St. Jerome and the lion. We see, for instance, a not-quite-human figure on an iron gate helping a lion, and then a drawing of a simian assisting a donkey.

 

The website also speaks of Saeed’s use of a “new iconography of interspecies iconography.” Again, this needs more illumination. The most powerful message that comes through is that animals can get along just fine without the guidance or care of homo sapiens. We see a panel titled “Panther Relief” amidst what we realize–even before the panel informs us– is “the remains of a Persian Gulf megacity,” one that also has elements of a “posthuman world” representing several periods of history. Ultimately, this is a double pun. The panther is in repose, but is also relieved to be living in the post-Anthropocene era. We see another relief of two large cats at ease amidst lotuses. The Arabic quotation is directed more at Ms. Saeed’s multiple identities, but irony lies in the title “Lion School,” one distinctly lacking human pupils.

 

Saeed works in brass, paper, canvas, paper, and Styrofoam. The last is also shot through with meaning. It is material such as Styrofoam that will contribute mightily should humankind perish. It is a worthless petroleum-based junk that is made solely because it is cheaper than eco-friendly alternatives. It does not biodegrade well and fragments of it are everywhere, including in our water sources. One might call it a lightweight monument to human arrogance. It is thus fitting that Saeed repurposes it to make bas relief, and to fashion it into animals such as a cow or pangolin.

 

Saeed offers both a powerful message and an equally powerful warning. We are eased into the exhibit

with drawings that explore human/animal relations, including Albrecht Dürer’s fame

d woodcut of St. Jerome at work in his study, while the lion whose thorn he removed sleeps at his feet. If only it were this simple. We also see Hercules wresting with a lion in a woodcut from Niccolò Boldrini. It and others remind us that liberation and subjugation are at odds an

d that, thus far, the latter has gotten the upper hand.

 

Can anything save us? Perhaps creative vision. Let’s focus on just one image from Lines from Life, an exhibit of French drawings on display downstairs in the Clark’s main building through December 13. It is Eugène Delacroix’s study for his 1798 canvas “Battle of Poitiers.” Look at the sketch and then the painting. Marvel of how we get from A to B. The painting is ultimately a war scene involving bloodshed and destruction. I prefer to contemplate the good to which such vision could be put to use.

Rob Weir