Randomocity

Thoughts, observations and leftovers picked up from the jumble of a sloppy desk:

Inner City
The streets outside the RISD Museum last week were cluttered and clanging with the fixing and rebuilding of Providence. Blue and yellow scaffolding scaled the museum walls. Jackhammers jumped. Trucks rumbled and beeped backing up. Construction workers wearing hardhats and drinking cups of Dunkin Donuts coffee joked between duties. Officers diverted traffic and pedestrians around concrete Jersey barriers, yellow caution tape and orange barrels and cones.
The sights and sounds of city making, part of the daily routine in the epic narrative of urban living, was coincidental but also complementary to the installation inside the Chace Center, where ceramic sculptor Arnie Zimmerman and architect Tiago Montepegado have staged “Inner City,” featuring 200 figurative and architectural elements. It’s a stunning exhibition, about 80 pieces larger than previous versions that toured Lisbon and the Netherlands. The room of anonymous city buildings and workers and the detritus of urban streets – trashcans, graffiti and broken walls – captures the vibrancy and absurdity of modern life in its cycles of boom and bust and moods alternating between whimsy and hopelessness. Walking back out from the gallery, trying to avoid being bulldozed and cement mixed on beautiful Benefit Street, I passed the live versions of those workers and told them that everything they were doing had already been done in clay inside. A few expressed an interest in checking it out but one guy shook his head and said: “I like breaking things. Not making them.”

Mobile Art
If you see a 16-foot Penske truck rumbling through Rhode Island blaring sounds of gulls and waves and the rhythmic clicking of shrimp percussion, follow it until it parks. The truck is the vehicle of choice (at least for now) for the Mobile Art Project, an initiative coordinated by Viera Levitt and Hera Gallery, both of Wakefield, to bring art on wheels to locations in Rhode Island where you don’t usually find any. So far it has shown up at village greens and elementary schools, train stations and sea walls, supermarket parking lots and senior centers. The first artist featured is Warwick’s China Blue, who created a 9-minute sound installation titled “Aqua Alta.” She recorded around and under the waters of Narragansett Bay and the Providence canals using hydrophone arrays and seismic microphones, along the way capturing the chanting of gondoliers, the radio singing voice of Marvin Gaye, an osprey crying and the gloop-glop-glubbing sounds of sloshing seawater and river chop. To immerse yourself, you have to walk inside the box at the back end of the truck. Organizers told me that the most surprising thing they’ve discovered is how many people take pains to avoid getting near the truck wherever they park. Among the hundreds who have responded to the work in surveys, one person wrote: “Not your average Belmont parking lot experience.”

Newport’s Best Kept Lunch Secret
Unless you’re a mariner, you probably don’t think about having lunch at the Seamen’s Church Institute in Newport. The building at 18 Market Square was designed in the 1930s to serve all seafarers, including naval personnel, fishermen, yachtsmen, ferryboat captains and crew, freighter crews, customs officers, Coast Guardsmen, old salts, transients and travelers from around the world. It has a painted chapel, designed symbolically to look out upon the Seven Seas, and an altar hung with an embellished sailcloth held by nautical knots. There’s also a little library and a small café with a few tables and a short counter that delivers tasty cheap eats, ranging from burgers and grilled cheese sandwiches to more exotic chowders and soups. Called the Aloha Café, the place serves mostly grizzled mariners and sun-burnt seafarers, but it’s open to tourists, and the elbow-to-elbow conversations about weather, waves and wayfaring makes you realize that in the passage of life, we’re all just human driftwood.

Word of the Day
Over on the paper side I write an occasional column that adds new words to the lexicon. Sometimes words find me. From Bob and Diane Smith’s letter to the editor about the Antique Autos/Perryville Day celebration earlier this summer comes “automobilia” – a word used by collectors and antique car fanatics to describe anything related to vintage vehicles.
Leading to this week’s question (which was actually posed by my friend Tom, but since I haven’t come up with a good solution, I’m passing it on):

What would be a good word for that situation on the highway when everyone in traffic is forced to swerve simultaneously at high speed because lanes have shifted?