Potato Head Mash

We return to the lighter side this week with a new look at the perpetually ascending stardom of Pawtucket’s own Mr. Potato Head. As reported in previous posts, the globetrotting Hasbro toy continues to straddle the celebrity tightrope between fame and scandal, having served as courier in an ecstasy drug deal from Ireland to Sydney, Australia; an octopus’ boy-toy love child in Cornwall, England; potato paparazzi in a series of snapshots taken with 2008 U.S. Presidential Candidates; and charged as racist in his “Tourist Tater” appearance as part of a Rhode Island tourism campaign.

Last year, life imitated toy as bicyclists in the Netherlands created a 1,000-kilometer long bike tour called the “PieperPad” (Potato Trail), donning potato costumes to ride the route designed to get people “out into the countryside and enjoy potatoes, a well loved Dutch staple, in a totally new way.” And as part of the new economic reality, Starbucks began using Mr. Potato Head as a model for the benefits of efficiency, requiring its managers to reassemble and box a Mr. Potato Head toy during training sessions.

But the growing Potato Head dynasty has found even more fertile ground in 2010, threatening to overtake “size of Rhode Island” in the media barrage of Ocean State references. The British press has routinely taken to calling England footballer Wayne Rooney as “Mr. Potato Head.” Most recently, Rod Liddle wrote in The Sunday Times: “So, a nation heaves a sigh of relief. After all that worry, Mr. Potato Head is back in the ample, if recently sagging, bosom of Manchester United.”

Earlier this spring, Mr. Potato Head joined Barbie in a group art exhibition – “Bodies Unbound: The Classical and Grotesque” at the Johnson Museum at Cornell. As reported in the Cornell Chronicle:

Elizabeth Emrich, curatorial assistant at the museum, believes the show’s success stems partly from the wide range of objects on display. Hasbro Inc.’s Mr. Potato Head, for example, demonstrates the potential for amusement in manipulating and distorting the human form and shows that children’s toys can find a place in art.

This summer, Birmingham, Ala., hosted “The Adventures of Mr. Potato Head” at the McWane Science Center, highlighted by a collection of Mr. Potato Head memorabilia from Birmingham’s own Dennis Martin. Matt Cuthbert at al.com writes:

…one kiosk ties it all together, and it suddenly makes sense. Kids are asked “What’s ahead for you?” And given the opportunity to place themselves in the role of several different careers – from gardener to astronaut. And that’s what Mr. Potato Head has always been about. You can make him into anything you want…His theme isn’t just imagination, but the opportunity to be and do anything. At one station, kids get the opportunity to exercise those imaginations and play with a huge tray full of Mr. Potato Head parts. Go ahead and give him princess shoes and a construction worker’s hat. Plug arms into his nose and mouth holes. He won’t mind – he’s been through worse (just see “Toy Story 3”).

Speaking of which, Mr. Potato Head excelled once again as a supporting actor in the third installment of the “Toy Story” trilogy, one of the best movies of the year, leading Ty Burr of The Boston Globe to comment: “‘Toy Story 3’ hits a high point of comic surrealism when Mr. Potato Head is forced to reinvent himself as Mr. Pita Bread Head – it’s harder than it looks, especially when a pigeon turns up…”

Also this summer, the Elvis Estate in Graceland teamed up with Hasbro to create Elvis Potato Heads. The first figure, timed to be released for Elvis Tribute Week in August, featured Elvis in a jumpsuit. The second figure, Elvis in black leather, will be available for Christmas.

Residents of San Francisco also made Potato Head news this year when some of them discovered a Mr. Potato Head staring back at them from newly issued blue recycling bins scattered throughout the city. According to writer Joe Eskenazi of SF Weekly:

The concept is simple: Mr. Potato Head would be more appropriately named Mr. Plastic, of which he is entirely crafted – and, short of plastic wrap or plastic bags, any sort of plastic is acceptable in a blue bin. But city residents don’t see bits of plastic when they glimpse Mr. Potato Head. They see vestiges of their childhood. And then they get angry.

Mark Westlund, a spokesman for the city’s Department of the Environment, confirmed that it will be removing Mr. Potato Head from future printed materials as soon as possible. Quite simply, San Franciscans have been too emotionally affected by the sight of Mr. Potato Head to absorb the intended message of placing him alongside detergent bottles, disposable cups, and other plastic items. As a result, the city has received a number of indignant phone calls. “They say, ‘That’s Mr. Potato Head! You can’t throw him away! You’ve gotta give him to the neighbor kids.!” Westlund says. “People identify with him so much.”

What does the future hold for Mr. Potato Head? Steam punk and robots, apparently.

Which leaves us with this week’s question: What explains the enduring popularity of Mr. Potato Head?

Sounding Off

There are rare mornings in the cove when my half-waking to a new day dawns in utter silence. For a blissful few moments, nothing stirs. No planes take off from across the bay at T.F. Green, their rumbling departures amplified by the acoustics of water and sky. No cars start in their driveways, idling in the cold, before coming and going along the narrow streets of the neighborhood. No garbage trucks clatter. No utility vehicles beep. No doors slam. The relentless screeching of the everyday manmade world hasn’t yet found its voice.

I thought of that this morning, when rain drummed against the windows, making its own pleasant waking music. For I have no quarrel with the wind or waves, thunder or rain, birdsong or even foghorn – one of the few human-created sounds that works in harmony with nature. There are noises that I welcome, so long as I am able to shut off the buzzing alarm before it begins its daily banshee call. But I’ve learned to appreciate any lingering silence wherever and whenever I find it.

In an interview with The Sun magazine, acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton said that there may be only a dozen places in the country where a person can sit for 20 minutes without hearing a plane fly overhead or some other manmade noise. And Rhode Island isn’t one of them.

Examples are legion. Even my favorite places, such as the woods behind Hundred Acre Cove in Barrington, where the toll for moving through meditation and scenery is enduring a steady soundtrack of dull, distant traffic relentlessly motoring back-and-forth along the Wampanoag Trail, resounding across the water like a dying dentist’s drill. I went there on Saturday, before going to the library, where I found a seat in the “designated quiet area” next to two people who talked incessantly for two solid hours. Remember when whole libraries were “designated quiet areas?” How long before we have to start designating quiet areas in forests and churches?

My annual camping trip in the Maine woods used to end every night with the distant sound of the crashing waves against the rocks and the occasional disturbance of drunken harmonica or nearby bursts of laughter around the fireplace. Now, however, it is a constant parade of remote vehicle doors opening and locking. Where once there were ravens, now there are ring tones; owls in the pines have given way to car alarms.

As I type these words, another siren wails down High Street in Wakefield. The sirens are everywhere, even in once sleepy South County. I hear them constantly, whether jogging the bike path in Barrington, playing tennis at Hope High School in Providence, or spraying golf balls at Windmill Hill in Warren. These days, even recreation and reverie are merely fleeting pleasures between sirens; the cry of emergency is the default sound setting of civilization.

Hempton makes the point that all places once had a unique sonic identity, but everywhere people live now sounds like traffic. Artist Bill Fontana’s much-maligned sound installation of Rhode Island birdsong at the Kent County Courthouse makes this point rather eloquently. In the sprawl of Route 2, the birds that once sang these songs have been driven out – grasses and trees supplanted by concrete, wildlife replaced by chrome and engines. In this kind of world, the honking goose has become more invasive than the honking cab.

So is there a place in this state, outside of perhaps Block Island, where human sound rarely if ever intrudes? Where is your favorite quiet place in Rhode Island?

All Voters Eve

Sunday’s Halloween is over, and wind-ripped skeletons, broken pumpkins and toppled tombstones in yards throughout every Rhode Island neighborhood took on a more sober cast this morning in recognition of an even more bizarre festive season, culminating with tomorrow’s Election Day.

It’s been a wild ride so far, with the headless horsemen of the media falling all over themselves trying to explain why “FEAR” is the new “HOPE.” (Although the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations' motto, if not its name, seems safe for now.)

We even had our own Rhody Beast moment, when Democratic candidate for governor Frank Caprio uttered the “Shove it” heard ’round the world, using phraseology better suited to a Mamet play to tell President Obama – de facto leader of the Democratic Party – exactly what he thought of not getting the Dude of D.C.’s endorsement. It’s all very messy, especially given that Linc Chafee, a former Republican Senator from Rhody now running for governor as an Independent, is a favorite son in most Democratic households in the state, where many still remember crossing parties to vote for his father. Proving once again that yesterday’s Greek tragedy is today’s Rhode Island comedy.

If that weren’t enough, Bob Healey’s “Bullwinkle noir,” black-and-white political signs added a faux macabre touch to the predominance of red, white and blue in backyard campaign signage, a blur of names and phrases sharing the yard under tree ghosts, witches-on-broomsticks and – suddenly popular this year – phantom riders on motorcycles. (One nearby house even had a motorcycle dangling from an oak.) Whatever you think of Healey’s position, the candidate for lieutenant governor who is running on the pledge of eliminating the office of lieutenant governor has some of the most creative signage in politics, and it doesn’t hurt that he allows his own cartoonish mug – which looks like Ozzy Osbourne with a beard – to represent his cause.

Weird, wild stuff, as Johnny Carson (may he rest in peace) would have said.

Still, we have an election tomorrow, and, personally, I’m hoping we still have Providence Plantations by the end of the day. The argument for eliminating the phrase is essentially that plantations is a word associated with slavery. It wasn’t, back in the day, when it originally meant a “settlement,” “colony,” “estate or farm.” But even if today most people link the word “plantations” to the slave trade, the move to change the state’s name still rests entirely (albeit emotionally) on connotative grounds. It falls short historically, etymologically and geographically, given that Providence Plantations represented the area of the colony (Warwick and Providence) that wasn’t Aquidneck (or Rhode) Island. Somewhat ironically, as others have pointed out, it was primarily the "Rhode Island" part of Rhode Island that insisted on an economy of slavery, while the "Providence Plantations" part of Rhode Island largely and continually fought to eliminate the practice, establishing many first-in-America steps toward abolition in the process. It’s true that slavery is a significant part of the story of Rhode Island, and that by illuminating our inglorious past, we can begin to develop the conscience and compassion required of a civilized society. So let’s keep doing that. Let’s educate Rhode Islanders about our history without revising it.

Question of the week: What was worst Rhode Island political ad you saw this year?

The Offensive Offensive

This past Columbus Day, Providence residents woke up to see a statue of Christopher Columbus splattered in red paint and wearing a sign around its waist that read “MURDERER.” Similar acts of vandalism occurred on statues of Columbus throughout the country. Many in Rhode Island’s vast Italian American community reacted in outrage, with the Sons of Italy insisting that the state investigate and prosecute the statue desecration as a hate crime.

So maybe we should start arresting pigeons, too.

The incident and its resulting furor illustrate the lack of civility and level of debate in our society today. To many Italian Americans, Columbus is a legendary explorer and a cultural hero. To many Native Americans, he is a bloodthirsty butcher and evil oppressor. Somewhere in between lies a complex truth, but in an age that dismisses context, we will never find it. There are good reasons to debate Columbus’ place in history and the appropriateness of honoring him as a historical figure. But they are lost in a black-and-white world where all issues have distinctly polarized sides with no ability for light to penetrate.

Last year, Brown University eliminated Columbus Day from the calendar and replaced it with the generic Fall Weekend. That was offensive to me, not because it slighted the Italian explorer, but because it so banally shattered the storytelling inherent in the power of names and promoted branding over creative holiday conjuring. For many New Englanders, Columbus Day means getting into the car and meandering along rivers and over mountains to see leaves in their death throes, a metaphoric ritual (plus cider donuts and pumpkin pie) that connects us to all explorers – from the intrepid to the incompetent – and satisfies the human impulse to seek beyond our confines.

But Columbus Day isn’t the only controversial holiday. Practically every holiday offends someone. Consider Thanksgiving. Long a part of the New England and American chowder of history and myth, popularly celebrated by families at feast and high school football games, Thanksgiving is a National Day of Mourning to many indigenous Americans. On that day, members of the Wampanoag Tribe protest outside the grounds of Plimoth Plantation. Animal rights groups condemn the mass turkey slaughter. Hispanic Americans want the history books to reflect that earlier Thanksgivings, involving the Spanish, took place in Florida and Texas (while conveniently ignoring that American Indians have been celebrating Thanksgiving feasts on their own land for millennia).

Or what of Christmas? ‘Tis the season when the late Jerry Falwell’s “Friend or Foe” campaign still has legs. Woe to the unfortunate soul who accidentally slips and wishes the wrong person a “happy holiday” at Christmas. The merry season is a basket case of controversies. The devout protest its consumerism. Pagans blame Christians for co-opting their rituals. People like me bemoan the fact that we have to hear “Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer” starting in September.

As we approach Halloween – America’s second most popular holiday, even though it’s not very big with the fundamentalists – it would be nice to think you could wear your scary Rush Limbaugh mask without offending anybody. But you can’t. Not anymore. Better to play it safe. Stick with the Spider-Man outfit. Limit conversation to “trick-or-treat.” And keep a few buckets of red paint handy, just in case.

This week’s question: If you could change any holiday, which would it be?

Local Haunts

The ghosts of Rhode Island are a motley lot. They are scattered throughout the state, a collection of mysterious farmers, soldiers, lightkeepers, headmasters, stable hands, monks and nuns haunting swamps, graveyards, churches, schools, carousels, renovated barns, lighthouses, nursing homes, monasteries, fire stations, country clubs, hotels, sororities, fraternities and tourist attractions.

As chronicled on Web sites such as Shadowlands and Ghost Traveller and TV shows like “Ghost Hunters,” Rhode Island is rich in ghost lore, with apparitions that include Colonial settlers, Narragansett and Wampanoag warriors, Revolutionary and Civil War soldiers, Victorian women and spirits animated as recently as the age of disco. Some of them are named Patrick, Barbara, George and Banquo. Edgar Allan Poe is reportedly still strolling down Benefit Street in Providence some nights, pining for his lost love, although he is also spotted in Baltimore, where he was buried, which is difficult to explain, even with the low air fare on Southwest from T.F. Green to Crab City.

They are dressed in red capes and black dresses, wearing military uniforms or war paint, the same wardrobe night after night, year after year, suggesting that fashion is somewhat lacking in the afterlife version of The Gap. Not all of our ghosts manifest themselves in figural form, though. Some are orbs. Some are blue lights. One in Warren floats around as a grayish-blue cloud - not far from seven heads sometimes seen hovering over seven poles near the Kickemuit River.

They can alter the weather, creating cold spots or gusts. Some can shove and grab with invisible force. Most make noise in typical ways - slamming doors, shattering china, rattling silverware and turning on radios. In some parts of Rhode Island, ghosts are still making the sounds of previous centuries, an aural spectrum that includes cannons firing, horses galloping and carousel music.

In addition to our resident spirits, Rhody also hosts phantom ships, trains, horse carriages and horse-and-rider varieties of transportation ghosts, making a kind of RIPTA for the eternally restless.

The ghost at the Roger Williams University Theatre in Bristol has been dubbed the aforementioned Banquo. It is thought that he is a former farm hand who froze to death in the hayloft of one of the barns on site, before they were converted into the theater. The Cumberland Monastery is crowded with ghosts, including a monk who moves books, a phantom horse rider on the trails and a child in the swamp. One punctual spirit appears upon a lake in Foster each year on the opening day of trout season.

Eerie voices have been caught on tape recorders and unexplained objects have been captured on videotape, but so far there are no reports of Rhode Island ghosts Tweeting or posting on Facebook, suggesting two possibilities: 1) Ghosts are creatures of analog, not digital: or 2) The phenomenon of social media is just slow to catch on in the spectral market.

What is your favorite Rhode Island ghost story?

Size Archive
From Rebecca Solnit’s “Wanderlust: A History of Walking,” published in 2000 by Viking, on page 7 in the chapter “Tracing a Headland: An Introduction”:

I became in the 1980s an antinuclear activist and participated in the spring demonstrations at the Nevada Test Site, a Department of Energy site the size of Rhode Island in southern Nevada where the United States has been detonating nuclear bombs – more than a thousand to date – since 1951.

Loose Leaf

It was a three-hawk drive to work this morning, the roads empty thanks to Christopher Columbus and the holiday some Americans celebrate in his honor (while others, including the population of Brown University, wrap the Italian explorer into a more nebulous celebration called “Fall Weekend”). The barren drive made for an easy commute, a diversion worthy of an Explorers’ Day, with leaves just beginning to turn and red-tails perched like statue idols on street lanterns along Route 4.

Traditionally the weekend most associated with spectacular New England foliage, Columbus Day and its Saturday/Sunday predecessors got clobbered by a stray hot summer or global climate change or whatever else is going on out there. Based on our own experiences, tour buses traveled landscapes alternatively still green-leafed, withered and dried, or dominated by large swaths of deadstick, with trunks and branches in their wind-stripped, rain-ripped forms, more suited for winter. Nothing peaked on the Mass Pike. The gentle slopes of western Massachusetts and Vermont offered their satisfying fare of glistening rivers and buzzing villages, covered bridges and country stores, but were devoid of the Oz-like color we’ve come to expect with colder nights and the thickening coats of goats and dogs.

New Hampshire saved us, especially the stretch between Campton and Canterbury, and the communities along the Pemigewasset River, our old stomping grounds, where the blend of cool green-and-blue evergreens wove seamlessly among crimson-and-orange sugar maples and the brilliant yellows of birches, blaring like bugles. The counterpoint of dramatic mountains, with their purple shadows making still life scenes on a canvas of blue sky, and the spectacular sweep of wooded rainbows along the slopes and riverbanks, satisfied the ritualistic itch that gets under the skin of most New Englanders every fall.

So we can wait a little longer in Rhode Island for whatever color will come this year, appreciating the individual trees and the little groves for providing moments of tranquility in the midst of a noisy and harsh political season, when knee-high cardboard signs in the weedy grass compete with Halloween decorations and the gathering hordes of pundits, press, politicians and PR hacks appear everywhere, shouting through their megaphones like competing carnival barkers, poisoning the air with cackling crow noises.

On the back roads of Rhode Island, as we prepare for autumn’s late arrival, we see dozens of witches, already snared mid-flight, having flown their broomsticks smack-dab into trees and telephone poles – in the same locations, we suspect, where each Christmas we find skeletal Santa Clauses stuck in chimneys. The gourd-happy members of the Southern New England Giant Pumpkin Growers Association have weighed their monster vegetables at Frerichs Farm in Warren. The gang at “Ghost Hunters,” a “Scooby-Doo” crew for adults, whose founders work as Roto-Rooter plumbers by day and investigators of the paranormal by night, threw Little Rhody a bone – launching its new season by examining the spectral happenings at Rose Island Lighthouse. (The same episode included an investigation of the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. The best moment: When Jason and Grant make an appeal to the baseball ghosts by saying “We’re from Rhode Island. We’re Red Sox fans.” You’d think that would get a few Yankee poltergeists stirring.)

We savor new autumn beers like Vermont’s Magic Hat IPA on Tour and Maine’s Peak Organic Fall Summit Ale, watching woodpiles in the neighborhood grow into pyramids against chain-link fences and observing herons hunting in the eelgrass along the cove. We ramble along at Four Town Farm – where horses and harvest scenes occupy the crossroads between Seekonk, Swansea, East Providence and Barrington – pausing to enjoy a murder of crows looting a pumpkin patch, the black birds and the orange gourds mixing the colors of Halloween.

The days shorten. The light lessens. Autumn moves like a cat in the rivergrass – senses heightened, stalking its ghost, seeing what we don’t in the tangle that lies just beyond.

What is your favorite autumn ritual?

One Day in Providence

Providence is a city of potholes and rabbit holes. The former are rarely fixed, the latter are always on the move, making the Providence underground a notoriously elusive scene. Perhaps that’s because so much of it exists above ground, in artist’s lofts and cold warehouses, abandoned stores and condemned buildings. And that’s just the art scene. Sex and crime also have their own thriving undergrounds, but it’s the artists that have made the city a haven for cheap, radical, do-it-yourself creating, and the clues are everywhere.

They’re stapled to telephone poles and street kiosks, chalked on brick and pavement, plastered to Dumpsters and graffitied on bridges and buildings, appearing one day and vanishing the next, leaving only the trace evidence of stapled fragments and faint chalk to suggest their whereabouts, whenabouts and whatabouts.

The patron saint Andre the Giant still stares down from the odd red octagonal stop sign, warning all passersby to OBEY. That word may have evolved nationally into HOPE or CHANGE and a wrestler may have morphed into a President, but Andre’s stoic mug still shows up now and then as a ghost and an echo of a simpler time, in the same way that pagan symbols often find a niche in the carvings, rituals and texts of modern religious iconography.

Artists, like most folks engaged in a trade, communicate in code. In the past you could find their tracks and ciphers, runes and hieroglyphics at the Price Rite Dumpster, Eastern Butcher Block, Sparkle City, Pink Rabbit, Dirt Palace, Gold Mine, Anarchy Mark’s Basement, Castle Cinema, Columbus Theater, Building 16, Old North Cemetery, Cradle of Filth, Church of the Messiah, Firehouse 19 or Candle Factory. Some no longer exist; others retain their roles as urban tableaux rasa.

More than most cities, Providence is a kind of living canvas. Edgy and dodgy in spots, dotted with entrapments and enchantments, snags and escapes. It is a place where the line separating art from trash is finer than anywhere else, given how much sheer creativity is generated from the recycled detritus of the city's crumbling landscape. A place where garbage dumps are treasure troves. And a place where, if you're a visitor, free parking can be either the holy grail or a false idol.

Earlier this year, I parked on Benefit Street and wandered down to the R.I. State Council on the Arts offices across from the State House. One Andre the Giant stared down at me from a traffic light across from the RISD Museum. Another gazed out from a RISD Rides bus stop. A woman got off a bicycle to post a flyer on a street lamp, a notice of a two-night exhibition of paintings and installations titled “Dirty Laundry & Clean Thoughts,” scheduled for a house on Kinsley Ave. later that weekend. Graffiti on the RISD Museum wall, near the lion mosaics, revealed communication by chalk, mostly anonymous love notes, punctuated by hearts and exclamation points. The space between the concrete steps and the shadowy terrace at the second-floor entrance to the Chace Center was filled with odd noises – typewriter tapping, rain, thunder and lightning, church bells. The work of Wakefield storyteller, educator and artist Marc Levitt, “Audio Winds #1,” a multi-channel audio installation, produced sounds that might have been heard at this precise location during previous centuries. The walk continued, past yellow masking tape on brickwork spelling “YO” and pink chalk scribbles and doodles complaining about finals. I meandered down to a sidewalk with a series of stencils – a tire, a dove and a splayed human body. All the while the city was buzzing was jackhammers and beeping construction trucks. Street corners were wrapped in yellow caution tape. Orange cones and red signs barricaded deep holes in the road, where construction workers wearing hardhats popped in and out, chasing their own white rabbits. And when I returned to my car, still sitting under the watchful eye of Andre, the passenger side window was smashed, my iPod and cell phone were gone, and I was left to ponder a maxim I have long believed: Theft is the only true art.

What is your Rhode Island crime story?