Shark jumping

Has the Providence underground art scene jumped the shark? Last year's media blitz on "The Apartment at Providence Place Mall," in which a group of artists "micro-developed" abandoned, neglected mall storage space into a furnished flat, brought CBS and Fox News to town and generated headlines worldwide. It was the latest salvo in a barrage of underground art strikes bringing attention to the capital. Providence first gained international buzz in the late 1980s when former RISD student Shepard Fairey created stickers that said "Obey" and "Andre the Giant Has a Posse" and stuck them on lampposts and Dumpsters throughout the city. Ten years ago, more people in Helsinki and Stockholm knew about the street art/pulp comic/noise punk scene happening on the West Side of Providence than people living on the East Side. (The Fort Thunder era of the mid-1990s was recorded for Rhode Islanders in the acclaimed RISD exhibition of street posters and giant installations, "Wunderground Providence: 1995 to the Present.")

Now television executives have floated the idea of re-staging the "Apartment at the Mall" project for a reality TV show in Manhattan. And all of those Andre the Giant faces that sprang up on stop signs and bulletin board kiosks can be purchased at Urban Outfitters. (There's even a store on the formerly sticker-plastered Thayer Street in the heart of the Brown University community.) Proving once again the adage that all successful subversion eventually mutates into commodity.

Buddyspotting

Only in Rhode Island could an ex-con become a celebrity invitee at the state's biggest social gala - in our case, the Bristol Fourth of July Parade. It has been a wild year of freedom for former Providence Mayor-turned felon-turned mayor again-turned felon again-turned talk radio host Buddy Cianci. His own release from federal prison last spring came on the heels of an acclaimed documentary on his life, by Cherry Arnold, released a month earlier. His story is the subject of an in-progress film version of ProJo reporter Mike Stanton's "The Prince of Providence." And he was the best interview featured in David Bettencourt's documentary on the rise and demise of Rocky Point Park, "You Must Be This Tall." Now he's going to be a star attraction on the red, white and blue median at this year's Bristol Parade. (Also coming along for the ride: The Red Sox' 2007 World Series trophy.)

The invite shouldn't come as a surprise, since the parade route was lined with homemade signs pleading "FREE BUDDY" every year during his incarceration. As much as Blog on the Half Shell would like to be a Buddy-free Zone, we have a rule to never turn down a good (reasonably clean) story, especially a good Buddy story. Share one if you've got it.

Balance of State

This state has only five counties. They include Bristol, Kent, Newport, Providence and Washington. (South County isn't a county, even though it's called one, but is instead a region of historical and cultural distinction encompassing most of Washington County.) To promote the state, however, officials split the five counties into seven tourism regions, one of which lumps East Greenwich, West Greenwich and Coventry into South County. So the region is marketed to the world as something that doesn't pass the snuff test at Gilbert Stuart Birthplace and Museum for anyone living in South County (or the other three towns, for that matter).

Even stranger, Global Insight, a national economic analysis firm hired in 2006 to assess tourism in Rhode Island, decided that seven tourism regions still weren't quite enough. So they made eight. Now we have Providence, Warwick and the West Bay, East Bay, Block Island, Blackstone Valley, Newport County, South County and an eighth piece that could have only been named by a bureaucrat: "Balance of State." Lucky enough to live in Rhody limbo as the puzzle pieces that don't fit are Cranston, Foster, Johnston, North Providence, Scituate and West Warwick.

Collectively, "Balance of State" seems to be a region known for cold strip pizza, apple orchards, the reservoir that provides water to most of us and strip malls. Coming soon to Green Airport: "I (Heart) Balance of State, Rhode Island" T-shirts?

Cardi Idol

The folks at Java Madness in Wakefield want all Rhode Islanders to know that Narragansett singer-songwriter James Grande, a Java regular, is one of five finalists for a special Cardi Brothers promotion to be featured in a 60-second commercial on the season finale of "American Idol." He's actually one of four South County musicians/groups in the mix. The others are Meline Vergne Skelly of North Kingstown, Melanie Donnelly of North Kingstown, The Ticonderogas of Narragansett (full disclosure: band member Dylan Sevey of South Kingstown writes a monthly music column for the Independent newspapers), and Nick Tetrault of Assonet, Mass. You can hear the musicians and vote by logging on to the Cardi Brothers Web site. Voting ends on May 7.

The competition falls on the heels of "Rhode Island Idol," a statewide crooning contest to be held Saturday at Stone Soup Coffeehouse in Pawtucket. Here at Half Shell, we've never seen "American Idol," but we have strangled our way through some bad Rhode Island and Australian karaoke, so we're supportive of anyone brave enough to get up in front of the world and sing into a microphone.

The Breakfast State

Our license plates say "The Ocean State," but an old friend from New York was always convinced that Rhode Island was "The Breakfast State." His belief was founded on a seemingly limitless number of breakfast joints in South County/southern R.I. - Dad's and Crazy Burger in Narragansett; Phil's, River's Edge, Camden's ("the bowling alley") and the Bluebird Cafe in Wakefield; diners like the Beacon and Jigger's in East Greenwich, Snoopy's in North Kingstown and The Middle of Nowhere in Exeter. What really sold him was the range of summertime breakfast nooks, from the upscale Olympia Tea Room in Watch Hill to the low-key Jim's Dock in Jerusalem.

Sometimes there's a lot of truth in a throwaway line. Rhode Island gave birth to the diner and the tradition of May breakfasts. Other times the reputation exceeds the reality. There are more active lighthouses in Rhody (14), for instance, than there are traditional working diners (13).

On the plus side, Providence is home to the still-in-progress American Diner Museum and a local initiative to involve at-risk teens in a project to restore and preserve classic trolley car diners. And Oak Lawn Church in Cranston is the birthplace of the May breakfast, first held in 1867, when it was the Old Quaker Meeting House. The event is unique to Rhode Island, sponsored by churches, senior centers, fire departments, granges and other community locales throughout the state from mid-April through the end of May. On May Day, the R.I. Governor invites any Rhode Islander over the age of 100 to a May breakfast at the State House in Providence. People over the age of 60 can go to any number of senior centers in Rhody for what are called Governor's May Breakfasts - only without the governor.

The menu depends on the venue, an eclectic mix that usually includes jonnycakes or johnnycakes. (Drop the "h" if you use Rhode Island-grown stone-ground whitecap flint corn; the "h" is required for johnnycakes made with any other kind of corn. This is no joke. It's law in Rhode Island.) Other breads range from pancakes to French toast, doughnuts to muffins. Meats include ham, sausage or bacon. Eggs are usually served scrambled. Most May breakfasts also offer baked beans and a variety of pies, coffee and juice. Clam cakes were on the original menu at Oak Lawn, where they're still served today. Some Rhode Islanders make a spring ritual of weekly May breakfast-hopping. Two other points in Rhody's favor as "The Breakfast State": 1) Here, breakfast is an any-time-of-day kind of meal. 2) Coffee as a vital liquid is second only in importance to blood.

One-potato, two-potato...

Somewhere on the back streets of the Beacon Hill neighborhood of Boston, there's a Volkswagen wearing the words, "RHODE ISLAND IS THE UNIVERSE," on its rear windshield. My friend John Murphy, who previously owned the car, spliced together two UNIVERSITY OF RHODE ISLAND decals to make the motto, and the current owner liked it enough to leave it there. During the past seven years of travel and journalism, I've been amazed at how often John's Zen-like axiom has proven true.

Take the saga of Pawtucket-born Mr. Potato Head, recently snagged in a drug bust in Australia and caught in an illicit relationship with an octopus in England. The official spokespud of Rhode Island (Hasbro's words, not mine), member of the Toy Hall of Fame and star sidekick of the Toy Story movies, Mr. Potato Head is no stranger to controversy.

In 2000, a tourism decision to make Mr. Potato Head the "official family-travel ambassador" by scattering dozens of the 6-foot Potato Heads into communities throughout Rhode Island backfired when the project suffered local and international ridicule and criticism, with many of the statues repeatedly vandalized. Communities didn't know how to get rid of the things. Hometown Pawtucket tried to re-gift its own Mr. Potato Head, valued at $8,700, to Belper, England, but only succeeded in enraging the locals. Rhode Island tried a reclamation project a couple of years later, as Hasbro and the R.I. Community Food Bank teamed up for a good cause, giving vanity plate conscious Rhode Islanders a chance to "Help End Hunger" by purchasing a Mr. Potato Head license plate for the toy's 50th anniversary. Just a week ago, the most famous Rhode Island toy this side of G.I. Joe continued to make Mr. Potato headlines during the first round NBA playoff series between the Boston Celtics and Atlanta Hawks.

Visiting hours

Driving into Rhode Island is anticlimactic. The ocean part of the Ocean State is nowhere near the highway, until you get to Providence. Otherwise, nothing stands out in the landscape. We have no Gateway Arch, Golden Gate Bridge or Statue of Liberty to speak of and even the Big Blue Bug is a 40-minute drive from the southern border (and 20 minutes from the north). The only clues that you've crossed into Rhode Island are a couple of road signs, a pothole or two and the tidy R.I. Welcome Center in the pines of Richmond, located off I-95 before Exit 3.
During a recent visit, a woman who worked on staff but didn't want to be identified said the question most commonly asked by tourists is, "How do I get to Newport from here?" Those looking for information about South County are mostly interested in "beaches and seafood." Summer is the busiest season for vacationers, while truckers make up the bulk of visitors in fall and winter. "You'd be surprised to know how many truckers don't know where they're going," said the unnamed source, Deep Tourist.
Counters built into the doorway keep a running tally of all visitors. Hand-scrawled grids, recording the data for last year, indicated an 11-month total of 377,538 walk-ins. (The page for the August count was missing the day this reporter dropped by. Deep Tourist had no explanation for this, but was confident that the page would turn up eventually.)
"One question we hear all the time is 'How come Rhode Island is called Rhode Island' if it's not an island," Deep Tourist said. "So we inform them that the state's official name is actually the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations and that the Rhode Island part is actually Aquidneck Island, where Newport is, and the Providence Plantations part is everything else, which confuses them even more. But if they ask why it's called the Ocean State, all we have to do is show them a map, and they go quiet when they see all that blue."