White Out

Apparently, reports of the death of Old Man Winter were greatly exaggerated. Last Thursday’s overnight snowfall followed by Saturday’s all-day white-out left New Englanders with the sense that the universe had righted itself again – a feeling accentuated by yesterday’s victory/escape by the New England Patriots over the Baltimore Ravens sending the home team back to the Super Bowl for the fifth time during the Belichick/Brady era.

A weekend of bunkering, shoveling, football and stew cooking – Narragansett porter turns out to be a good water substitute when simmering in combination with pork, potatoes, carrots, onions and garlic – felt like Rhode Island in January again. So maybe those fat backyard squirrels (referenced in a previous blog) were onto something after all. (One is pictured here indulging in a bit of leftover fruit from the compost pile at my parents’ property in Barrington, courtesy of a photo taken pre-snowstorm from my sister, Kai, visiting from England.)

For nature lovers, one of the signature signs of a Rhode Island January is the sighting of snowy owls. According to the Audubon Society of Rhode Island’s “bird alert,” one has been spotted for the past couple of weeks at Island Rocks off Sachuest Point in Middletown. The owls nest in the Arctic tundra but winter south and have been reported in Rhode Island with regularity in recent years. They primarily feed off lemmings up north but will make do with any small rodents, birds, rabbits, fish or carrion in the Ocean State (in owl circles, Rhody road kill is known as New York System Carrion). Adult males are virtually pure white, which combined with their large size and hunting skill, gives the birds a mythic reputation.

Yesterday’s New York Times had a story on America’s “unusual spike” in snowy owl sightings. According to Denver Holt, director of the Owl Research Institute in Charlo, Mont.:

One showed up at the airport in Hawaii, and they shot it. It’s the first ever in Hawaii and they shot it!

As reported by Jim Robbins: “The owl was killed on Thanksgiving by federal officials who feared that the bird would interfere with landings and takeoffs.” A valid concern, perhaps, although Boston’s Logan Airport, which attracts large numbers of snowy owls “because the airfield looks like tundra,” traps and removes them – 21 so far this year, closing in on the record of 43 in 1986.

Why so many are showing up all of a sudden remains a mystery. But with a plethora of white owls suddenly in our midst, coupled with last year’s sighting of a white hart in Dartmoor, England, isn’t it about time we saw a white lobster pop up in Narragansett Bay? (For the record, by “white lobster” we mean the albino crustacean. White lobster is also the term used in Central American fishing villages to describe the bounty of discarded cocaine from drug dealers fleeing federal agents that washes ashore or circulates in local fishing grounds, inspiring a trade that turns thatched hut communities into islands of mansions and satellite dishes.)

What is your most memorable animal encounter in Rhode Island?

Squeezebox Idol

Among the many classic Gary Larson cartoons that form “The Far Side” oeuvre was a split-panel showing on one side an escalator of the dead going to heaven with St. Peter at the top handing out harps to the incoming angels while below on the down escalator the devil greets rookie demons with accordions.

The much-maligned squeezebox, although a staple of folk music around the world, barely ranks above the kazoo in the minds of many. But a Rhode Island man may change all of that.

Cory Pesaturo, a 23-year-old Cumberland native, recently won the World Digital Accordion Championship in New Zealand. Like breaking the 4-minute mile or landing on the moon, he has done for mankind what was once considered impossible: Making the accordion cool. (In fact, he does for the accordion what Hawaiian Jake Shimabukuro does for the ukulele.)

The guess here is that Pesaturo is already on the short list for the newly created R.I. Music Hall of Fame, which inducts its first class next month. The inaugural roster includes Roomful of Blues and John Cafferty & the Beaver Brown Band, along with Dave McKenna, Eileen Farrell, Oliver Shaw, Ken Lyon, Anders & Poncia and Gerry Granahan.

I’ve told my Beaver Brown story before, but it’s worth repeating here. Once, when I was on a bus in Australia’s Outback, the driver played the band’s "Eddie & The Cruisers" soundtrack album (featuring “On the Dark Side”) over and over. Eventually I worked my way up to the front of the bus and casually mentioned that it was nice to hear a Rhode Island band so far from home. The driver asked what I meant by that.
“Beaver Brown. They’re a Rhode Island band.”
“Sorry, mate. That’s an Aussie band.”
I started arguing with him, but he got more animated, no doubt thinking yet another stupid septic (rhyming slang: septic tank = Yank) was trying to take credit away from a hardworking, blue-collar Oz band. At that point it occurred to me that I was in the middle of a vast wasteland of red clay and scraggly bush, and getting in a heated argument with the bus driver was probably not the best use of my time.
“How long to Darwin,” I asked.
“About 14 hours.”
“Right. Aussie band it is, then.”

This week’s question: What is Rhode Island’s signature instrument?

Rhode Sized
Kudos to Betty Cotter, managing editor of Independent Newspapers, for catching the following size-of-Rhode Island reference in a recent edition of The New York Times. The item appeared in the second paragraph of a story about New Year’s Day violence between Russia and the former Soviet republic of Moldova, which just celebrated 20 years of independence.

Russia has roughly 1,100 troops based in the separatist enclave of Transnistria, a ribbon of territory roughly the size of Rhode Island that has large ethnic Russian and Ukrainian populations.

Beyond The Onion

If you know anything about Rhode Island, you’re probably not surprised that the state’s most popular New Year’s tradition is playing the Rhode Island Lottery’s Million Dollar Raffle. The way it works: Buy a ticket for $20 for a shot at a million bucks, with the drawing to be held on New Year’s Eve.

So while the rest the country watches a ball drop in Manhattan, Rhode Islanders are watching numbered ping-pong balls being sucked out of an air-mix machine during a live telecast on WPRI-12.

A North Providence man won the million-dollar ticket this year (playing 033122). Again, if you know anything about Rhode Island, you’re probably not surprised that he bought the winning ticket at Club Fantasies, a Providence strip club.

Providence, once known as a city of churches, where tolerance for religion in all of its forms and expressions became a stamp of honor, has morphed into the strip-club capital of the North Atlantic, where tolerance for undressing in all of its forms and expressions has become part of the culture. Between the patrons and the strippers, that’s where we get most of our news.

So people don’t even blink anymore when a longtime police chief gets arrested after allegedly chasing down an ex-stripper in an unmarked car, losing her on foot, taking the cash out of the purse she left on the front seat, handing it to a subordinate and telling him to go spend it in Vegas. (The police chief from North Providence is being sued by the ex-stripper from the Satin Doll to the tune of $250,000.)

Rhode Island is living satire. Which is why even though we are grateful The Onion, “America’s Finest News Source,” has introduced hard copies of its newspaper to the state’s café, coffee shop, bar and diner culture, its humor is somewhat diminished by the fact that what actually happens in Rhode Island is funnier than anything a satirist could ever write. Give the paper’s franchisee – Gaspee Publishing in Providence – credit for trying. It chose Buddy Cianci to headline the launch party. The twice-former mayor of Providence, who sold pasta sauce, flicked cigarettes and spent time in a federal prison before embarking on a new career as a media personality, was the perfect choice to introduce America’s premier spoof newsweekly to the irrelevant yet endearing universe that is Rhode Island. Maybe that will change our Onion luck.

The last time the Ocean State got decent play in The Onion was in a story under the April 18, 2007 headline: “Rhode Island Votes to Move 2008 Primary to Tomorrow.” So we might not be the brightest bulbs in the Onionverse, but here’s hoping that Rhode Island, as one of 16 markets now carrying the print edition, will find its way into a few Onion-worthy “breaking news” headlines. Like these:

Rhode Island No Longer the Size of Rhode Island: Experts Blame Global Warming, Faulty Rulers
Scientists Discover Black Hole in Ocean State Job Lot
First Apple Grown from Tree Root of Roger Williams Accidentally Eaten by Connecticut Tourist
Impact from Rhode Island Pothole Causes Rift in Time and Space
Big Blue Bug Topples, Injuring Pogo Dave, Santa George during Morning Commute
Rhode Island Becomes First State to Place Entire Budget on Black 13 and Let it Ride
New York System Wiener Joint Cook Fired for Short-Arming Customers
Tiverton Hermit Believed to be Only Rhode Islander Who Doesn’t Know a Guy
Rhode Island Man Invents Hybrid Car that Runs on Dunkin’
G.I. Joe Confesses to Intimate Relationship with Mysterious, Potato-Shaped Boy Toy
Newport Loses Latest Bid to Host America’s Cup – City Officials Hoping Tourists Throng to First Ever Twelve-Meter Rubber Duck Race

What Rhode Island headline would you like to see in The Onion?

Winter Slush

A miscellany of holiday remnants…

Except for the freak pre-Halloween snowstorm that added a chilling grace note to the weekend of molten iron pours and trick-or-treating zombie brides, late autumn and early winter were unseasonably warm this year, as the southern New England landscape never got out of its bleak brown-gray bathrobe day after day. So even the most hardened cynic might be forgiven for believing in a little Christmas magic on the morning of Dec. 25, when a few fat snowflakes tumbled down and the neighborhood cove cascaded in flurries for an hour or so, giving us a taste of a white Christmas, if not the feast that many had hoped for.

There was less poetry in the real world, but no shortage of holiday weirdness, at least in the news pages. The following item comes from the South Kingstown police beat in yesterday’s South County Independent:

A LITTLE HO-HO-HO
A North Kingstown woman is under arrest after she allegedly tried to give the Wakefield Mall Santa a lap dance and then stole DVDs from one of the stores.

The item goes on to describe the woman’s bizarre behavior. According to the photographer on the scene, Santa handled the situation with the dignity one would expect from a centuries-old elf. Before allegedly stealing five DVDs, the woman managed to get the photo of herself on Santa’s lap from the photographer, telling him and St. Nick to “come watch her dance at Cheater’s [a Providence strip club].”

Another item, this time from the North Kingstown police beat in yesterday’s North East Independent, falls under the Grinch category:

LARCENY
Greg Pignolet, of 91 King Phillip Drive, reported on Friday that his decorative winged pig was stolen from his front yard overnight.

While we certainly don’t condone the theft, it does strike us as odd that a winged pig would go missing around the holidays. We have heard that animals can speak on Christmas Day. Perhaps pigs can fly, too.

Finally, we also noticed in our papers that one local senior center plans to hold its New Year’s Eve celebration on Saturday at 10:30 a.m. “with the ball to drop at noon.” We like this idea. Beats having to spend another midnight watching Z-List celebrities complain about the cold in New York and Fergie introducing lame musical acts from Los Angeles.

Having said that, perhaps it’s appropriate that, in households across America, “dropping the ball” is the signature moment of New Year’s Eve. Isn’t that the year in a nutshell? We begin with hope and promise and resolutions of change; we end worn-out, beaten down, glad it’s over. Year after year, fumbling through, mostly dropping the ball. And yet there it is again, lying in front of us, waiting to be picked up and carried across the goal line.

What’s your New Year’s resolution?

Making Soupy

Most families and cultures have their own Christmas customs, honed over the years to the perfection of a jeweled ornament. This year I had a chance to celebrate someone else’s tradition. On Wednesday, thanks to the Garafola family of Bradford – and Bill Lucey, our publisher, for inviting me along – I was allowed to participate in a winter ritual native to Rhode Island, or more particularly, the town of Westerly: Making soupy.

Which is how I ended up with my hands buried in pork butts and carrying raw sausage from closet to cooler and sausage casings from kitchen to basement. Short for soppressata, soupy is a cured sausage mixed with secret herbs and spices – every family has their own you-die-if-you-discover-it recipe – that hangs over winter and is ready to eat by the following Easter. The Garafolas, a friendly bunch, put up with my intrusion and inexperience, allowing me to work the drill that fed the meat into a synthetic casing managed by the family’s patriarch, Lou, whose touch is amazing to watch. If I had any say in such matters at all, I’d bestow upon him the title of soupy maestro.

The tradition dates back to a town in Calabria, the birthplace of many Italian immigrants who settled in Westerly around 1900 to work the granite quarries as stonemasons. Now Westerly is the soupy capital of the world, while just across the river, in neighboring Pawcatuck, Conn., settled by Sicilians, hardly anyone makes it. In fact, it is a food so identified with the families and villages of Westerly that many lifelong Rhode Islanders have never heard of it, much less tasted it. (Although Pat Garafola, the family matriarch, said that you can get a white soupy in Providence. The Westerly version is red.)

Every family thinks they make the best soupy, of course, which is how it should be. The sausages are passed on at Easter to family (at least family that is still on speaking terms) and close friends. Our own family Christmas tradition includes a South African Mixed Grill, made by my father, who usually combines a bit of steak, back bacon and sausage to eggs over easy, fried potatoes, tomatoes and banana, with baked beans and toast. This year the sausage will be soupy, before the curing.

What are your family traditions for Christmas, New Year or any of the winter holidays?

[Note: Publishing a bit earlier than usually since Monday is the official holiday. Same next week. Expect a pre-New Year’s Day post on Friday. Merry Christmas!]

On the Civil War Trail

War is the scribe of history, and its imprint smudges the news of the day in every generation. Last week the Iraq war was declared over, but our country’s military engagement continues around the world, a reminder of the shadow that always accompanies the season of peace and light.

The story of Rhode Island in wartime has been sporadically documented. A couple of weeks ago this blog focused on Christian M. McBurney’s “The Rhode Island Campaign: The First French and American Operation in the Revolutionary War,” a book that contributes significantly to the Ocean State’s historical narrative. The Revolutionary War, at least in New England, has always been a primary concern. There are trails with landmarks and burial grounds telling the Patriot story scattered throughout the six states, and all New England schoolchildren grow up with a fundamental understanding of the region’s importance to the emerging nation’s aspirations and sense of identity – even though Massachusetts gets most of the ink.

Recent scholarly excursions into King Philip’s War have expanded our understanding of Colonial-era Rhode Island and the surrounding Puritan New England colonies as well. From June 1675 to August 1676, the war was fought between the growing population of New Englanders (aided by some local tribes) against Native American tribes comprising the Narragansett, Wampanoag, Nipmuck and others.

The World Wars are commemorated in monuments. All Rhode Islanders know the World War I monument, a towering shaft of Westerly granite that used to occupy the crazed DownCity roundabout known as “suicide circle” until it was relocated to its current position in front of the Superior Court building in the 1980s when Providence moved its rivers. World War II left a legacy in V-J Day, now known as Victory Day, denoting the date when the Japanese surrendered. Rhode Island remains the only state in the U.S. to mark the date with a holiday. A Rhode Islander is also purportedly the young sailor depicted in the world’s most famous photograph of a kiss. Alfred Einsentaedt’s signature image of World War II, of the sailor kissing a nurse in a white dress, taken on V-J Day in Times Square, is one of the iconic American scenes, even though in recent years other veterans have laid claim to putting their lips on the moment.

Given the level of fascination with all things historical in these parts, it’s surprising that Rhode Island shows such scant interest in a war that much of the rest of the country can’t get enough of – the Civil War. Especially since by the time of the War Between the States, Rhode Island was a hub of manufacturing, with many of the mills generating fabrics for Southern plantations then switching over to produce material for the Union cause. Rhode Island regiments served with distinction in the Civil War, and yet even this year’s 150th anniversary of the war’s beginning didn’t generate much play in a state that saw its capital celebrate its 375th anniversary.

A new organization in Massachusetts is trying to bring more attention to New England’s role in the Civil War. The New England Civil War Foundation is seeking to create a New England Civil War Discovery Trail that will spotlight houses of historical significance (such as the residence of Gen. Ambrose Burnside – whom we have to thank for “sideburns” – on Benefit Street in Providence), places of maritime activity (such as Newport), and factories that made products for Union soldiers, including uniforms and guns. The only Rhode Island location mentioned to date on the Web site is the Mill at Shady Lea in North Kingstown. According to the site, blankets were made there for Union soldiers. Also, several POWs from the South, who were stationed at Fort Adams in Newport, ended up working there, with many of them staying on and settling in the area.

The South County Museum in Narragansett and the Pettaquamscutt Historical Society in Kingston are just two of the local historical landmarks that contain objects and ephemera detailing Rhode Island’s involvement with the Civil War. Anyone who wants to nominate historic spots for the New England Civil War Discovery Trail should e-mail editor@battlefieldjournal.com.

What was Rhode Island’s most significant contribution to the Civil War?

Sea-struck

The watery side of Rhode Island gets the gallery treatment in a couple of exhibitions hereabouts. The Artists for Save The Bay Sale & Exhibit, featuring hundreds of artworks in a variety of media made by more than 70 Rhode Island artists – all focusing in some way on the state’s most precious resource, Narragansett Bay – will be on display through Dec. 27 in Providence. I’ll have more this Thursday in the paper and online.

While the Save The Bay show emphasizes the bay’s scenery, biodiversity and variety of moods (in all seasons, types of weather and times of day and night), an exhibition at the Dorrance H. Hamilton Gallery at Salve Regina University in Newport goes for something deeper. Titled “Ocean States,” and curated by Ernest Jolicoeur, the gallery’s new director, the exhibition showcases five Rhode Island-based artists responding to the sea.

Two installations stand out. The first, at the entrance, is a companion to the exhibit – Bert Emerson’s “A Day at the Beach,” a large-scale construction of found objects, glass, wood, plastic and aquarium filters transformed into something that on first glance appears culled from the mad scientist’s laboratory in “Young Frankenstein.” (The one where Igor, played by Marty Feldman, dropped the first brain, so he took the one belonging to “Abby someone…Abby Normal.”)

Emerson’s inventive installation contains 75 items, representing a fraction of nearly 1,000 pounds of trash, everything from those ubiquitous crushed Styrofoam Dunkin’ Donuts cups to fishing lures and SpongeBob SquarePants novelties, collected during a local beach cleanup in September. The piece is a collaboration with Clean Ocean Access, an organization whose mission focuses attention on the cleanliness and safety of the water at the Rhode Island coast and issues of public access. COA provides a weekly program that tests levels of unseen contaminated water in our shore areas. While people are sometimes warned about contamination, the sea life of Narragansett Bay doesn’t have the option of closing the beach. COA’s idea, according to the artist, is to make “the invisible visible,” which is what Emerson has done here with his provocative and labor-intensive artwork.

The other eye-grabber is “Waveform 1,” a kinetic sculpture by Mikhail Mansion and Will Reeves, made of steel, wood, aluminum and stainless steel, that mimics the undulating quality of ocean water. The contrast between the construction’s hard materials and its fluid action is disorienting and visually engaging, all the more so since the rhythmic accompanying sound here is not sloshing water but the mechanized noise associated with engineering (echoing the age of steam). Positioned in the center of the gallery, the installation is 100-by-128-by-120 inches in size, and demands attention throughout the visit. The mechanical wave rises and falls from a battery of overhead controls that include pulleys and wires, gears and cams, turning metal and wood into the shape and motion of a jellyfish. Thus the wave, as the primal act of the sea, is ingeniously reconsidered here.

Other artists present multiple works. All have their highlights. As a series, Allison Eleanor Bianco’s screen prints featuring grounded and sinking ships in highly saturated colors is a successful blend of the comic and tragic. A staggered fleet of tall ships, tugs, trawlers, tankers, ferries and cruise ships are depicted in their beached or submerging vessel forms at their voyage’s unexpected end. Dramatic color choices and the specificity of each vessel’s design add to the poignancy of works, which resonate with evocations of loss, memory and the ultimate inevitability of all journeys, human and otherwise.

Buck Hastings cultivates surreal scenes using old magazines and oceanographic textbooks, creating dream-like photo-collages inspired by the adventure of deep-sea exploration, while Todd Moore presents large India Ink drawings on paper, immersing viewers in topographic detail along the rocky New England coast. Both artists add to the collective of the re-imagined ocean that cradles Rhode Island (and, by extension, the world beyond). And, with Narragansett Bay pounding the rocks below the Cliff Walk just a few hundred yards away, the Hamilton Gallery is ideally situated to offer the tantalizing bit of sea-smack found in “Ocean States.”

The show ends Wednesday. Hours are 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. tomorrow and 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Wednesday.

This week’s question: What is your favorite artwork depicting Rhode Island?