It tells you everything you need to know about Rhode Island that the state lottery commission is located next to the state prison. All Rhode Islanders are born with a lottery gene, and if the “CSI” franchise ever moved to Rhody, the celebrity forensics experts would discover silver latex ink under our fingernails, smoothed-over edges on our nickels, pennies and quarters, and a tendency to defy the laws of probability in our DNA. That’s the only way to explain the obsession with PowerBall numbers, scratch cards and Keno games in the Ocean State, which happens to be number one in lottery sales per capita in the country. Here, residents think that all Ping-Pong balls come individually numbered, scratch tickets are the perfect stocking stuffers at Christmas, and meeting regularly for late-night coffee and Keno at the corner convenience store is considered an acceptable date.
This gambling fixation is as old as the state itself. Even before The Lot opened in 1974, Rhode Island embraced the notion of taking a chance, any chance, anytime, with whatever money was leftover in the pocket. One example: The part of Westerly known as Avondale was once called Lotteryville until the 1880s, because original settlers received their houses as part of a lottery scheme.
But Rhode Island’s true lottery legacy is the scratch ticket, most of which involve familiar characters or offer a theme. The latest features Aerosmith’s “Dream On,” which seems about 30 years too late for it to be so popular – except that in New England some things, like pewter and Steven Tyler, never really get old. In the past you could also buy scratch games for “The Three Stooges,” “Family Guy” and The Crypt Keeper (host of “Tales from the Crypt”). The state legislature even allows the lottery to make money for good causes through its scratch ticket program. Two years ago, the R.I. State Council on the Arts had a scratch card that raised funds for local arts organizations and communities. It was followed by a “Scratch the Tick” game, with part of the proceeds funding tick awareness programs.
Lot of Art
A Providence artist has found a way to make something of value from all of those shredded hopes and confetti dreams. Rebecca Siemering’s “A Fine Suit,” made from more than 1,000 discarded scratch tickets and representing over $3,500 in gambling losses, was presented as one of the Providence Art Windows in 2007 and now stands in the offices of its new owners, Fidelity Investments in Smithfield.
Siemering, now the director of Providence Art Windows, began creating additional objects out of lottery cards, while developing installations for other projects that represent some of the most intriguing art being made in Rhode Island. Among them: Her latest art window, “piece(work),” a time-based installation on Eddy Street, and “The Bells Ring for Thee,” still decaying in the North Burial Ground as part of the Cryptic Providence group installation. For her window, which she visits and works on weekly, she designed a “crazy quilt” that reflects the news of the world and the buzz of conversation around Providence. For the graveyard, she created a landscape of sound in an adjacent field, “planting” rows of metal flowers that played a vibraphone’s range of tones in the breezes, gusts and rainfalls that filled the seasons.
Future Scratch
The Rhode Island corollary to Andy Warhol’s “15 minutes of fame” theory is that in the future every Rhode Islander will appear on his own scratch ticket. Until then, we have plenty of opportunities to add to the state’s rub out culture. How about:
“Scratch What, Netop?” (To repair the fingers on the statue of Roger Williams in Providence’s Prospect Terrace Park and to develop a foundation that will supply the statue with permanent maintenance and a lifetime of replaceable fingers.)
“Scratch That Nuke.” (To entice another Russian nuclear sub to dock in Providence and serve as the city’s Russian Sub Museum, since the previous one sank, was scrapped and is being recycled into millions of toasters and electric razors.)
“Scratch That Kirk.” (To refund the R.I. International Film Series after William Shatner canceled an appearance last-minute to receive the first ever Nathaniel Greene Humanitarian Award in Rhode Island, causing the festival to give back $5,000 in advance tickets.)
“Scratch That Hound.” (To bail out the state’s beleaguered greyhound-racing industry.)
“Scratch a Buddy.” (To put a little extra cash in Buddy Cianci’s pocket in exchange for favors to be named later.)
Now it’s your turn. What would be a good subject for the next R.I. Lottery scratch card?
Monday, November 2, 2009
Monday, October 26, 2009
Eastwick or Leastwick?
“The Witches of Eastwick” is not John Updike’s best work, but it may be his most lasting. It’s a novel about Rhode Island witches that many critics charged as misogynist but Updike said was intended as a satire on feminism. In his view, contrary to the popular idea that the world would be better off with women in power, Updike felt that the world would be in exactly the same mess as it is now. In other words, power corrupts absolutely, regardless of gender.
Subsequent renditions of his tale have squeezed dry whatever satire sustained the original story, focusing instead on perpetuating a soapy “Peyton Place” meets “Dark Shadows” view of New England. A place where attractive women are subject to relentless gossip and, therefore, turn to witchcraft between mornings clamming and nights boiling lobster for their boyfriends. You know. A place like Barrington.
Kidding, kidding. Nobody boils their own lobster in Barrington. Actually, to create Eastwick, Updike merely combined East Greenwich with Wickford, where his family name is prominent. But in truth the Ocean State has a checkered history with his story. Hollywood wanted to film the movie version (starring Jack Nicholson, Michelle Pfeiffer, Susan Sarandon and Cher) in Little Compton, but the locals weren’t crazy about Nicholson-as-the-Devil character spewing inside the little church on the town common. So the production moved to Massachusetts and was filmed primarily in Cohasset, with other scenes shot in Scituate and Castle Hill in Ipswich.
This year’s ABC TV version is the first televised production of the story to make it on the air, after two previous attempts. The show tries very hard not to pin down Eastwick’s exact location, except to put it somewhere “on the edge of New England.” The opening sequence features images of Ocean Drive in Newport, but for some reason the show’s creators are reluctant to come out and say it’s set in Rhode Island. Instead, they’ve invented a pastiche of New England towns – a blend of Maine’s fog (stolen from “Murder, She Wrote”), New Hampshire’s foliage, Vermont’s covered bridges, Rhody’s seaside charm, the witch legacy of Massachusetts and Connecticut’s New York hand-me-down fashion sense. The result is like putting Yankee magazine in a blender with “Desperate Housewives,” “Charmed” and “Providence.”
Lucky us. “Eastwick,” based on the first few episodes, is a mess. It’s not funny enough to be a comedy, not scary enough to earn its horror bones, not dramatic enough to be a drama and, despite the predominance of eye candy, not sexy enough to be worth staying up for.
A press release earlier this year by the R.I. Film & Television Office lauded the show for its aerial shots of Newport and for planning to film more location shots in Rhode Island. As it turns out, guess-the-location might be the only reason for a Rhode Islander to watch.
This week’s more important question: Where can you see houses decorated for Halloween in Rhode Island?
(There’s a nice little stretch beginning in Wakefield on Saugatucket Road, going through the Peace Dale Rotary and back into Wakefield via High Street, where three homes go wild decorating in the kitsch of the undead, making menageries of giant spiders, skulls on fence posts and cobweb-covered ghouls. If you’re in the neighborhood…)
Subsequent renditions of his tale have squeezed dry whatever satire sustained the original story, focusing instead on perpetuating a soapy “Peyton Place” meets “Dark Shadows” view of New England. A place where attractive women are subject to relentless gossip and, therefore, turn to witchcraft between mornings clamming and nights boiling lobster for their boyfriends. You know. A place like Barrington.
Kidding, kidding. Nobody boils their own lobster in Barrington. Actually, to create Eastwick, Updike merely combined East Greenwich with Wickford, where his family name is prominent. But in truth the Ocean State has a checkered history with his story. Hollywood wanted to film the movie version (starring Jack Nicholson, Michelle Pfeiffer, Susan Sarandon and Cher) in Little Compton, but the locals weren’t crazy about Nicholson-as-the-Devil character spewing inside the little church on the town common. So the production moved to Massachusetts and was filmed primarily in Cohasset, with other scenes shot in Scituate and Castle Hill in Ipswich.
This year’s ABC TV version is the first televised production of the story to make it on the air, after two previous attempts. The show tries very hard not to pin down Eastwick’s exact location, except to put it somewhere “on the edge of New England.” The opening sequence features images of Ocean Drive in Newport, but for some reason the show’s creators are reluctant to come out and say it’s set in Rhode Island. Instead, they’ve invented a pastiche of New England towns – a blend of Maine’s fog (stolen from “Murder, She Wrote”), New Hampshire’s foliage, Vermont’s covered bridges, Rhody’s seaside charm, the witch legacy of Massachusetts and Connecticut’s New York hand-me-down fashion sense. The result is like putting Yankee magazine in a blender with “Desperate Housewives,” “Charmed” and “Providence.”
Lucky us. “Eastwick,” based on the first few episodes, is a mess. It’s not funny enough to be a comedy, not scary enough to earn its horror bones, not dramatic enough to be a drama and, despite the predominance of eye candy, not sexy enough to be worth staying up for.
A press release earlier this year by the R.I. Film & Television Office lauded the show for its aerial shots of Newport and for planning to film more location shots in Rhode Island. As it turns out, guess-the-location might be the only reason for a Rhode Islander to watch.
This week’s more important question: Where can you see houses decorated for Halloween in Rhode Island?
(There’s a nice little stretch beginning in Wakefield on Saugatucket Road, going through the Peace Dale Rotary and back into Wakefield via High Street, where three homes go wild decorating in the kitsch of the undead, making menageries of giant spiders, skulls on fence posts and cobweb-covered ghouls. If you’re in the neighborhood…)
Monday, October 19, 2009
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?
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?
Monday, October 12, 2009
'Hurricane,' the musical
All Rhode Islanders have a Hurricane of ’38 story, passed down through the generations by family or friends, describing how this beach or that house was completely wiped out to explain why they now have a water view.
More than 70 years have passed since the Sept. 21, 1938 blow, also known as “The New England Hurricane” or “The Long Island Express,” wreaked havoc on the Ocean State. But to paraphrase the Alan Alda character in Woody Allen’s “Crimes and Misdemeanors,” tragedy + time = musical. The hottest show to come out of this year’s New York Musical Theater Festival is “Hurricane,” the story of a storm, a weatherman that nobody listened to and the Rhode Island village of Napatree, which ended up being obliterated.
“Hurricane” is based on news accounts, anecdotes and books written about the storm. The show features scenes of Depression-era New England life with music ranging from traditional sea chanties and folk songs to chorales, lullabies and a turn-of-the-previous-century waltz. Think of it as a hip-shaking, toe-tapping “Our Town” meets “The Perfect Storm.”
While the play’s Rhode Island-ness is a mix of fact and fiction, some of the early critics have some catching up to do to establish their Rhody cred. One review featured on the musical’s Web site states: “While the original storm has been forgotten, this show should not be.”
Forgotten? In a state where everyone still gives directions to the red bridge, which hasn’t been red and was actually demolished as a bridge almost 40 years ago? No, I don’t think so. Seventy years isn’t long enough for a Rhode Islander to forget a hurricane that quite literally changed the puzzle-piece shape of the state and helped stamp our identity as hopeless storm worriers grounded in the knowledge that behind every snowflake lies a new opportunity for bureaucratic incompetence.
When the Hurricane of ’38 hit Narragansett, Benjamin Curtis Jr. was 12 and living at The Dunes Club, which got destroyed. The next day was his birthday.
Not all of the news was tragic, though. Some of the monkeys that survived the storm escaped the monkey pit at Rocky Point Park and spent the rest of their lives in the woods and suburbs along Warwick Neck. There are still Rhode Islanders who remember feeding the monkeys on the way to the amusement park. And when the venerable Lobster Pot restaurant in Bristol was destroyed by the hurricane, 10,000 pounds of live lobsters earned a reprieve from the boiling pot, escaping the menu to return to the bay.
Speaking of Rhode Island storms: If someone made a musical of the Blizzard of ’78, what songs would make the soundtrack?
Some suggestions:
“Welcome to Rhode Island (Closed for a Week)”
“Milk and Bread”
“I-95 Where Are You?”
“Stranded at Benny’s (Love Among the Glue Guns)”
“Why Does the Snow Always End at the Massachusetts Line?”
“There’s Never Any School in Foster-Glocester (Salty’s Lament)”
“Sledding to Almac’s”
“My Kingdom for a Front-Loader (The Governor’s Song)”
“Milk and Bread (Reprise)”
“The Dead Are Sleeping On The Roof Tonight (The Coffin Song)”
More than 70 years have passed since the Sept. 21, 1938 blow, also known as “The New England Hurricane” or “The Long Island Express,” wreaked havoc on the Ocean State. But to paraphrase the Alan Alda character in Woody Allen’s “Crimes and Misdemeanors,” tragedy + time = musical. The hottest show to come out of this year’s New York Musical Theater Festival is “Hurricane,” the story of a storm, a weatherman that nobody listened to and the Rhode Island village of Napatree, which ended up being obliterated.
“Hurricane” is based on news accounts, anecdotes and books written about the storm. The show features scenes of Depression-era New England life with music ranging from traditional sea chanties and folk songs to chorales, lullabies and a turn-of-the-previous-century waltz. Think of it as a hip-shaking, toe-tapping “Our Town” meets “The Perfect Storm.”
While the play’s Rhode Island-ness is a mix of fact and fiction, some of the early critics have some catching up to do to establish their Rhody cred. One review featured on the musical’s Web site states: “While the original storm has been forgotten, this show should not be.”
Forgotten? In a state where everyone still gives directions to the red bridge, which hasn’t been red and was actually demolished as a bridge almost 40 years ago? No, I don’t think so. Seventy years isn’t long enough for a Rhode Islander to forget a hurricane that quite literally changed the puzzle-piece shape of the state and helped stamp our identity as hopeless storm worriers grounded in the knowledge that behind every snowflake lies a new opportunity for bureaucratic incompetence.
When the Hurricane of ’38 hit Narragansett, Benjamin Curtis Jr. was 12 and living at The Dunes Club, which got destroyed. The next day was his birthday.
“I remember one thing my uncle said: ‘People down there,’ meaning the Pier, ‘they’re drowning like rats.’
Not all of the news was tragic, though. Some of the monkeys that survived the storm escaped the monkey pit at Rocky Point Park and spent the rest of their lives in the woods and suburbs along Warwick Neck. There are still Rhode Islanders who remember feeding the monkeys on the way to the amusement park. And when the venerable Lobster Pot restaurant in Bristol was destroyed by the hurricane, 10,000 pounds of live lobsters earned a reprieve from the boiling pot, escaping the menu to return to the bay.
Speaking of Rhode Island storms: If someone made a musical of the Blizzard of ’78, what songs would make the soundtrack?
Some suggestions:
“Welcome to Rhode Island (Closed for a Week)”
“Milk and Bread”
“I-95 Where Are You?”
“Stranded at Benny’s (Love Among the Glue Guns)”
“Why Does the Snow Always End at the Massachusetts Line?”
“There’s Never Any School in Foster-Glocester (Salty’s Lament)”
“Sledding to Almac’s”
“My Kingdom for a Front-Loader (The Governor’s Song)”
“Milk and Bread (Reprise)”
“The Dead Are Sleeping On The Roof Tonight (The Coffin Song)”
Monday, October 5, 2009
Leaf blog
The swamps and woods of Rhode Island are already blushing here in the early part of autumn. Shades of red in maple, tupelo and sumac join with yellow birch to create fiery contrasts with the cool or neutral tones of gray, brown and paper-white trunks, stands of evergreens and pools of pastel blues and murky purples. It’s early, but you can see the color changing every day, especially along the swampy William C. O’Neill (South County) Bike Path, where deer and hawks and great blue herons are commonly spotted in the wooded rainbow.
Perhaps this is not breaking news – “Autumn arrives in New England.” But I felt compelled to point out to the rest of the world that just because the leaf-tracking Web site The Foliage Network has decided to drop Rhode Island from its deciduous tour, doesn’t mean the color is lacking in the Ocean State. According to the site:
So that leaves it to Rhode Islanders to cover our own state. With help from my dog-eared copy of Neil Jorgensen’s “A Sierra Club Naturalist’s Guide” to southern New England, here’s a brief description of the showstoppers in our autumn landscape:
The first to turn are the red maples – the Rhode Island state tree – in the swamps, glowing bright red and occasionally orange. Also early are the white ash found on uplands and stream banks, making a variety of distinctive colors from maroon to rust to a dark greenish red.
As the season moves on the bright orange of poison sumac adds to the warm look of swamps and bogs while twiggy tupelo turns an intense dark red on the edges of swamps and ponds. On the slopes of upland forest, red maples turn vivid orange, yellow and red, often hanging on until Halloween. The intense yellow of hickories, lacy in appearance, and the slightly duller canary of black birch will also come out during the middle fall period. Beech can be found in moist, shady sites, leafing light green to yellow to brown.
Sugar maples, the postage stamp tree of the New England autumn, pose for desk calendars on roadsides, in cemeteries and churchyards in their brilliant peach color. Alternating shades of yellow in old fields and waste grounds are often painted by quaking aspen alongside the pinkish-orange and yellowing sassafras (which also like the wood’s edge and dry spots). They are joined by Staghorn sumac, featuring vibrant orange turning to vivid red leaves, growing in large clumps suggesting a frozen fire. The middle season also features the purplish maroon maple-leaved viburnum, traditionally spotted in upland woods, especially among oaks.
Speaking of oaks, it is a species that sometimes gets short shrift when discussing New England’s fall foliage, but some autumns the oaks can be quite lustrous. Both red oak and black oak present variable colors, with the former generally reddish-brown and the latter mostly yellowish-brown, in canopy that has been known to last well into December in Rhode Island. Norway maple, the last of the maples to turn, goes out in a bright yellow flash while the last flush of fall is usually played by the wild cherry, gradually progressing from green to yellow. Even past peak, in their copper, rust and russet skins, the raw umber and burnt sienna remains of failed Crayola colors, the local leafscape is worth exploring, no matter what the Foliage Network says.
Because it’s not just the act of looking at a leaf that defines the season. It's the quest for color, an adventure of fresh-air encounters and surprising discoveries on rambling back roads that makes foliage seeking such a pleasure in New England. It’s all part of the region’s carnival of fall – days of fermented cider tasting, wood smoke ghosts writhing like dryads from chimney stacks, mutant pumpkins in the patch, obscene gourd shapes spilling out from handmade baskets, the scent and crunch of pine needles in the frosty forest. Leading to this week’s question: What is your favorite spot in Rhode Island for fall foliage?
Perhaps this is not breaking news – “Autumn arrives in New England.” But I felt compelled to point out to the rest of the world that just because the leaf-tracking Web site The Foliage Network has decided to drop Rhode Island from its deciduous tour, doesn’t mean the color is lacking in the Ocean State. According to the site:
Due to a lack of foliage spotters, we regret that we will no longer be covering Delaware, Minnesota and Rhode Island.
So that leaves it to Rhode Islanders to cover our own state. With help from my dog-eared copy of Neil Jorgensen’s “A Sierra Club Naturalist’s Guide” to southern New England, here’s a brief description of the showstoppers in our autumn landscape:
The first to turn are the red maples – the Rhode Island state tree – in the swamps, glowing bright red and occasionally orange. Also early are the white ash found on uplands and stream banks, making a variety of distinctive colors from maroon to rust to a dark greenish red.
As the season moves on the bright orange of poison sumac adds to the warm look of swamps and bogs while twiggy tupelo turns an intense dark red on the edges of swamps and ponds. On the slopes of upland forest, red maples turn vivid orange, yellow and red, often hanging on until Halloween. The intense yellow of hickories, lacy in appearance, and the slightly duller canary of black birch will also come out during the middle fall period. Beech can be found in moist, shady sites, leafing light green to yellow to brown.
Sugar maples, the postage stamp tree of the New England autumn, pose for desk calendars on roadsides, in cemeteries and churchyards in their brilliant peach color. Alternating shades of yellow in old fields and waste grounds are often painted by quaking aspen alongside the pinkish-orange and yellowing sassafras (which also like the wood’s edge and dry spots). They are joined by Staghorn sumac, featuring vibrant orange turning to vivid red leaves, growing in large clumps suggesting a frozen fire. The middle season also features the purplish maroon maple-leaved viburnum, traditionally spotted in upland woods, especially among oaks.
Speaking of oaks, it is a species that sometimes gets short shrift when discussing New England’s fall foliage, but some autumns the oaks can be quite lustrous. Both red oak and black oak present variable colors, with the former generally reddish-brown and the latter mostly yellowish-brown, in canopy that has been known to last well into December in Rhode Island. Norway maple, the last of the maples to turn, goes out in a bright yellow flash while the last flush of fall is usually played by the wild cherry, gradually progressing from green to yellow. Even past peak, in their copper, rust and russet skins, the raw umber and burnt sienna remains of failed Crayola colors, the local leafscape is worth exploring, no matter what the Foliage Network says.
Because it’s not just the act of looking at a leaf that defines the season. It's the quest for color, an adventure of fresh-air encounters and surprising discoveries on rambling back roads that makes foliage seeking such a pleasure in New England. It’s all part of the region’s carnival of fall – days of fermented cider tasting, wood smoke ghosts writhing like dryads from chimney stacks, mutant pumpkins in the patch, obscene gourd shapes spilling out from handmade baskets, the scent and crunch of pine needles in the frosty forest. Leading to this week’s question: What is your favorite spot in Rhode Island for fall foliage?
Monday, September 28, 2009
Hope, the motto
Given the average Rhode Islander’s chronic and pervasive cynicism, it is more than a little ironic that the state motto is “Hope.” One of the three great Christian virtues (along with faith and love), hope has not always been considered a positive force in human culture. To the ancient Greeks, hope was as deadly as all the world’s evils – it was the only one that didn’t initially escape Pandora’s Box.
Roger Williams and the early Rhode Islanders, however, had no such qualms. Having named their first settlement Providence, they took a Pilgrim’s progressive view of the world, finding metaphors everywhere, especially in the landscape. To them, hope was a spiritual gift from God. In the marketing of the times, given the “lively experiment” that this eclectic colony was undertaking, it made perfect sense for “Hope” to be the original Rhode Island brand – or “motto,” in ye olde jargon. Most believe that the motto (along with the state’s symbol, an anchor) was taken from a Biblical passage in Hebrews 6:19:
Rhode Island’s state motto was adopted as an element of the “arms of the state.” It is found on the state’s coat of arms, seal and flag. (The seal of Rhode Island is the sole image to illustrate the concept of “Hope” on Wikipedia.) As excerpted from Rhode Island Statutes, Title 42, Chapter 4, Section 1:
So Rhode Island takes its hope seriously. The state has a Hope village and a Hope Valley. Shepard Fairey, the former Rhode Island School of Design student whose street art became a local sensation, borrowed the motto, added a little Andy Warhol and provided the lasting image of President Obama’s successful campaign. And now a University of Rhode Island professor has co-written a book with a professor from Keene State College in New Hampshire titled “Hope in the Age of Anxiety.” To gauge your own level of hopefulness, take the Hope Test.
So this week, in the spirit of our state motto, we ask: What does Rhode Island get right?
House cleaning
It’s a crossover Monday here at the Independent. In last week’s Arts & Living section, I previewed the 10 finalists for the Manhattan Short Film Festival. The movies were screened at the Courthouse Center for the Arts in West Kingston last Thursday – one of 173 locations on five continents to show them last week. The global tally concludes tomorrow, when the winner will be announced in New York City. My choice? “Mozambique,” a powerful documentary in which AIDS orphans are empowered to tell their stories using donated cameras and videocameras. Runner-up in my book was “Skhizein,” a darkly comic animated film from France. It was a difficult choice between two very different films. Ultimately I went with the film that emphasized hope over the one that succumbed to despair.
Roger Williams and the early Rhode Islanders, however, had no such qualms. Having named their first settlement Providence, they took a Pilgrim’s progressive view of the world, finding metaphors everywhere, especially in the landscape. To them, hope was a spiritual gift from God. In the marketing of the times, given the “lively experiment” that this eclectic colony was undertaking, it made perfect sense for “Hope” to be the original Rhode Island brand – or “motto,” in ye olde jargon. Most believe that the motto (along with the state’s symbol, an anchor) was taken from a Biblical passage in Hebrews 6:19:
Which hope we have as an anchor of the soul, both sure and steadfast, and which entereth into that within the veil;
Rhode Island’s state motto was adopted as an element of the “arms of the state.” It is found on the state’s coat of arms, seal and flag. (The seal of Rhode Island is the sole image to illustrate the concept of “Hope” on Wikipedia.) As excerpted from Rhode Island Statutes, Title 42, Chapter 4, Section 1:
Arms of state. The arms of the state are a golden anchor on a blue field, and the motto thereof is the word “Hope.”
So Rhode Island takes its hope seriously. The state has a Hope village and a Hope Valley. Shepard Fairey, the former Rhode Island School of Design student whose street art became a local sensation, borrowed the motto, added a little Andy Warhol and provided the lasting image of President Obama’s successful campaign. And now a University of Rhode Island professor has co-written a book with a professor from Keene State College in New Hampshire titled “Hope in the Age of Anxiety.” To gauge your own level of hopefulness, take the Hope Test.
So this week, in the spirit of our state motto, we ask: What does Rhode Island get right?
House cleaning
It’s a crossover Monday here at the Independent. In last week’s Arts & Living section, I previewed the 10 finalists for the Manhattan Short Film Festival. The movies were screened at the Courthouse Center for the Arts in West Kingston last Thursday – one of 173 locations on five continents to show them last week. The global tally concludes tomorrow, when the winner will be announced in New York City. My choice? “Mozambique,” a powerful documentary in which AIDS orphans are empowered to tell their stories using donated cameras and videocameras. Runner-up in my book was “Skhizein,” a darkly comic animated film from France. It was a difficult choice between two very different films. Ultimately I went with the film that emphasized hope over the one that succumbed to despair.
Monday, September 21, 2009
Rhody Universe: The Moon
Belated thanks to Rick Spilman, host of The Old Salt Blog, (a must-read for all who love the sea and a good yarn), for taking note of Half Shell’s theory that the two Russian subs reportedly lurking off the East Coast might have been auditioning to be the next Rhode Island museum.
But if you thought lamenting for a Russian Sub Museum that sank and was turned into scrap metal was as odd as it gets when it comes to the marriage of Rhode Island and museums, consider the recent news from Rijksmuseum in Holland. According to an Associated Press report a few weeks ago, the Dutch national museum confirmed that its celebrated moon rock, a popular tourist attraction, is really just a hunk of petrified wood. Naturally, when museum officials traced the rock to its source, it led back to a Rhode Island man.
Apparently, the museum was bequeathed the rock after the death of Prime Minister Willem Drees in the late 1980s. Drees had received it as a private gift on Oct. 9, 1969 from then U.S. ambassador J. William Middendorf during a visit by the three Apollo 11 astronauts as part of their “Giant Leap” goodwill tour after the moon landing.
Talk about lending ammunition to the conspiracy theorists who believe the first moon landing was staged. Moon rocks may be passe now, but three months after the first manned mission, they probably weren’t the kind of things you’d hand out willy-nilly – like, say, engraved dinnerware – to every dignitary on the planet. Did the State Department pawn off petrified wood as moon rocks as a matter of practice? Was it a one-time practical joke? Or perhaps someone in the department pocketed the rock and substituted the wood he’d picked up in a gift shop at Yellowstone earlier that summer. Middendorf says he doesn’t remember, but then, since all diplomats do is give gifts and go to parties, it’s not hard to imagine forgetting the time you handed over a nondescript gray lump to the Dutch PM in exchange for a wheel of Gouda.
Anyway, all this talk about museums reminded me that a few years back on the paper side of things, I called for Rhode Island to be more innovative and experimental in its museum culture. Among the suggestions:
The Bayquarium: An aquarium built on the waterfront focusing on the natural history, biodiversity and sea lore of Narragansett Bay (plus a raw bar).
The Museum of Horror: Emphasizing Rhode Island’s gothic culture, including stories of local vampires, ghosts, witches, phantom ships and associations with horror writers such as H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe. A separate ghost wing, featuring holograms of commonly sighted Rhody apparitions, could include a new office for Rhode Island’s TV team of Ghost Hunters.
The Museum of Scandal: Telling stories about everything gone tabloid in Rhode Island, from the Claus von Bulow trial to Plunder Dome, lottery abuses to blizzard snafus, through collected news footage, memorabilia and ephemera.
The Museum of Religion: Celebrating Rhode Island’s central role in establishing freedom of religion as a basic tenet of American life, the museum would explore all forms of religious belief and ritual practiced in the state, from its indigenous cultures to present-day storefront churches.
Companion buildings, The Narragansett Museum and The Wampanoag Museum, could detail the contributions of Rhode Island’s most prominent native communities, from their interactions with early settlers to stories of art, commerce and language that continue to influence our culture.
This week’s question: What kind of museum would you like to see in Rhode Island?
But if you thought lamenting for a Russian Sub Museum that sank and was turned into scrap metal was as odd as it gets when it comes to the marriage of Rhode Island and museums, consider the recent news from Rijksmuseum in Holland. According to an Associated Press report a few weeks ago, the Dutch national museum confirmed that its celebrated moon rock, a popular tourist attraction, is really just a hunk of petrified wood. Naturally, when museum officials traced the rock to its source, it led back to a Rhode Island man.
Apparently, the museum was bequeathed the rock after the death of Prime Minister Willem Drees in the late 1980s. Drees had received it as a private gift on Oct. 9, 1969 from then U.S. ambassador J. William Middendorf during a visit by the three Apollo 11 astronauts as part of their “Giant Leap” goodwill tour after the moon landing.
Middendorf, who lives in Rhode Island, told Dutch NOS news that he had gotten it from the U.S. State Department, but couldn’t recall the exact details.
Talk about lending ammunition to the conspiracy theorists who believe the first moon landing was staged. Moon rocks may be passe now, but three months after the first manned mission, they probably weren’t the kind of things you’d hand out willy-nilly – like, say, engraved dinnerware – to every dignitary on the planet. Did the State Department pawn off petrified wood as moon rocks as a matter of practice? Was it a one-time practical joke? Or perhaps someone in the department pocketed the rock and substituted the wood he’d picked up in a gift shop at Yellowstone earlier that summer. Middendorf says he doesn’t remember, but then, since all diplomats do is give gifts and go to parties, it’s not hard to imagine forgetting the time you handed over a nondescript gray lump to the Dutch PM in exchange for a wheel of Gouda.
Anyway, all this talk about museums reminded me that a few years back on the paper side of things, I called for Rhode Island to be more innovative and experimental in its museum culture. Among the suggestions:
The Bayquarium: An aquarium built on the waterfront focusing on the natural history, biodiversity and sea lore of Narragansett Bay (plus a raw bar).
The Museum of Horror: Emphasizing Rhode Island’s gothic culture, including stories of local vampires, ghosts, witches, phantom ships and associations with horror writers such as H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe. A separate ghost wing, featuring holograms of commonly sighted Rhody apparitions, could include a new office for Rhode Island’s TV team of Ghost Hunters.
The Museum of Scandal: Telling stories about everything gone tabloid in Rhode Island, from the Claus von Bulow trial to Plunder Dome, lottery abuses to blizzard snafus, through collected news footage, memorabilia and ephemera.
The Museum of Religion: Celebrating Rhode Island’s central role in establishing freedom of religion as a basic tenet of American life, the museum would explore all forms of religious belief and ritual practiced in the state, from its indigenous cultures to present-day storefront churches.
Companion buildings, The Narragansett Museum and The Wampanoag Museum, could detail the contributions of Rhode Island’s most prominent native communities, from their interactions with early settlers to stories of art, commerce and language that continue to influence our culture.
This week’s question: What kind of museum would you like to see in Rhode Island?
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