Category: local

Culture

Last night Kevin, Ben, Johanna, Jon, & I set out to get ourselves some culture, Harrisburg-style.

We began the evening at The Design Museum @ Fathom where they currently have a Chindogu exhibit. I like the idea of Chindogu. I enjoyed the exhibit at Fathom. The humor quotient was good. The art quotient was low. But if you need a bit of a chuckle and happen to be downtown on a Friday or Saturday evening, it’s worth the price of admission (which happens to be $0) and the few minutes it’ll take to peruse the items on display.

After checking out some of the crazy things the Japanese create, we headed across the street Miyako (nee Tokyo Express) to consume some of the wonderful things the Japanese create. While no sushi around here is of the blow-your-mind-delicious variety, Miyako is nearly as good as Sapporo East (my local favorite). They even gain a few points by being the only area sushi place I know of to also hold a liquor license. Despite the sluggish speed of the service we managed to dispose of an inordinate amount of fish and rice and left the restaurant ready to explode with culture.

The last stop of the evening was Shady McGrady’s where we took it upon ourselves to create some culture of our own. Meet Cigarette Man and his pet camel:

As you may or may not be able to see, he comes complete with argyle socks and curly chest hair. We’re artists, I tell you. Full of culture.

Fireworks & Gmail

I’ve been such a slacker. Excuses: burn out after the trip, home very infrequently so internet access is scarce, taking classes full time stifles my brain, etc., etc. Two quick things:

1. Went to see the fireworks last night in Harrisburg. Pyrotechnic display itself was pretty good, even worthy of our quest to be considered a real city. The music accompanying the fireworks, though, seemed to be of a “Places I’d Rather Be” theme. Each song highlighted a different US city or region. IE, “New York State of Mind,” “Country Roads,” “Viva Las Vegas,” etc. I’m sure this was meant to be patriotic, creating a portrait of our entire beautiful and diverse country, but instead it just kind of felt like we didn’t have anything closer to home worth celebrating. It’s time to start acting like a big dog, even though that might, in some cases, seem even sillier.

2. I have 6 gmail invitations and can’t think of a single person to give one to. This makes me feel like I don’t have any friends. If you’d like one, or would even take one from me just to make me feel better, email me and I’ll hooketh you up.

Mom & Pop

Newport to lose an institution with appliance store’s closing

This article is noteworthy mainly because it doesn’t once mention that Home Depot or Lowe’s hurt the Shiffer’s business. I would guess that many people today aren’t interested in continuing their parents’ small shops, so as the proprieters age, it’s only natural that some of them are going to close. Of course the mega-stores have an impact, but I wonder if it’s as devastating as we often believe.

Heavyword Poetry Slam

Last night marked the Fifth Annual Heavyword Poetry Slam, held at the Appalachian Brewing Company.  I didn’t take notes or anything so I can’t give you a lot of detail, but there were some good performances, and even a couple of great performances.  Chris August won the competition, as well as the People’s Choice award, with his theatrical narrative rants, a stylistic departure from most of the other performances.  It was clear that he is a seasoned slammer while many of the staples of the Harrisburg poetry scene are more accustomed to non-competitive lower-key readings.  I can’t complain too much since I didn’t enter the slam, but I would really love to see some Harrisburg poets work on improving their slam style so we can compete with the amazing performers from York and Baltimore. 
 
Kudos, though, to the Heavyword Society for putting on yet another fun and successful event!

To kill or not to kill

I arrived home from dinner this evening to an email from Marty.  “Tonight at 8pm, they’re messing– or YOU’RE messingwith a piano, playing or kicking or draggin’ down to theriverside…interactive performance thang,” the email said, among other things.   I got the message at 7:40, but since I’d just walked in the door, I was already all set to walk right back out — so I did.
 
I didn’t know what to expect.  I know very little about The Mantis Collective, the gallery holding the event, and, as Marty pointed out, they seem to do very little publicity.  The one opening I had previously attended there was unimpressive, both in terms of the artwork and the organization, but I have heard great things about other exhibits they have done, and I’m all for any kind of art in Harrisburg.
 
Due to traffic on I-83 I didn’t get to gallery until ten minutes after 8.  When I arrived the piano was situated in the middle of the small room that is The Mantis Collective with an assortment of tools placed just inside the door.  The piano had been beaten a bit but was largely intact at this point.  I was relieved to see Rusty Baker, director of the Susquehanna Art Museum, as a familiar face is always nice when you don’t know anything about an event.
 
As the crowd watched from the sidewalk outside the gallery individuals from the audience would walk in the door, select their tools, and proceed to interact with the piano.  Rusty hit the back of it over and over with an axe and a sledge hammer, creating a deep resonant sound that vibrated through my body, a rich and discordant noise.  One girl picked a flower from a planter down the street, ran her hands over the body of the piano as she circled it, then gently placed the white blossom on the splintered top.  Someone asked, “Can we do a duet?” and two men walked in, one with the axe, the other with the sledge hammer, and they alternated slamming their tools on what was left of the keys in a strange and destructive rhythm.  I used the prying end of a hammer to strum the now exposed strings of the piano, then silenced it with my hands before using the same tool to carefully remove even more of the keys.  It was interesting to see how people approached it — most used brute force and the biggest tools they could find.  Very few people acted with any appearance of deliberateness or purpose, instead looking very much like they were simply acting out their aggressions on the instrument.
 
I wasn’t sure whether or not the folks from Mantis would be okay with me taking pictures of the destruction so I didn’t pull out my camera until Marty arrived shortly after 8:30.  After I spoke to him for a few minutes I handed it to him.  He’d only taken a couple of pictures, though, when they announced it was over, at an apparently significant 8:44.  We took a few mroe pictures of the wreckage and the building and I heard one of the gallery employees say, “Oh good, someone has a still camera.”  I wish I’d pulled it out sooner.
 
I’ve posted the pictures I did get here, and Mantis is planning to send DVDs to everyone who participated, so it has been documented.
 
The thing I keep coming back to is that I don’t know if I consider tonight’s destruction to be art.  Could we pretend we were making some great statement as we walked up to that piano?  Sure, but I don’t think anyone with a sledge hammer in their hands was thinking about splintering the wood as a symbol of the silencing of creative voices or the destruction of traditional values or any of that.  Was it cool?  Certainly, because it’s always fun to smash things that are supposed to be sacred.  Somehow it almost feels like this could have been art if the piano weren’t already ruined, which I heard one of the Mantis folks say it was.  If the gallery, or some eccentric billionaire, commissioned a master piano maker to create the perfect instrument, had the best pianist in the world perform one song on it, then unleashed the crowds with their axes and sledge hammers and saws, then I would more easily be able to see it as art.  As it is, I like seeing stuff like this being done because it does push some people’s boundaries, but whether or not it’s art depends on one’s definition of art — as, I suppose, is the case for many things.  I don’t have a highly developed definition of art or Art, but what I keep coming back to is that it just doesn’t matter.  I had fun tonight, as, I think, did everyone else.  And that’s all that does matter.

Dancing for twenty years

This weekend we celebrated The Circle School’s 20th Anniversary. We had a big potluck on Friday, and then yesterday was the big event, with an Open House, guest speakers flown in from Massachusetts, a fabulous talent show, and a spectacular dinner for 150 current and past students and their families, as well as friends of the school. I chaired the committee responsible for the weekend, and planning of the celebration has consumed my life for the last few weeks, which is why I haven’t updated recently. It went better than I had ever dreamed it could, but the best part, for me, was dancing under the tent after the public had left and we could relax.

I am grateful for The Circle School’s existence in a way that I cannot ever hope to express. It is an inextricable part of me, of my family, of everything I will ever be. But one of the things that I wanted during my high school years was just to be a normal teenager, as do, I think, many long time TCS students. We *want* all that stupid adolescent drama and the crushes and the falling in love and the school dances celebrating that adolescence. Especially, we want to celebrate the end of all that stupid glorious shit with the very specific event known as PROM.

In planning this event, Johanna kept talking about dancing after dinner and I scoffed and said it would never happen, that TCS people just don’t dance, that we would never get that prom we had always hoped for, even tried to have during my final year at TCS, but never did. I mean, how do you have that kind of event at a school where not only are all ages treated equally, but also where the the lines between students, staff, and parents are often blurred? How do you have that event when some years there is, as there was in my final year, only one graduate? It’s something we’ve all wrestled with, and we’ve never come up with an answer.

I graduated from The Circle School six years ago, though it feels like only a few months since I left. I guess there are parts of me that never let go of that desire for a prom, even though I have left the rest of adolscence long behind. While we were dancing our hearts out last night, Johanna turned to me and said simply, “The prom we never had.” And it was. It was our celebration, the end of The Circle School’s adolescence, in true TCS fashion, with students, staff, and parents all joyfully bouncing to amazingly fun music.

Of course it was even sweeter because of the success of the other events of the day, because it was the first time in weeks that I felt truly able to relax, and because the people who stayed until the end are the ones who have been, and always will be, my family. Of all the things The Circle School has given me, the community is what I cherish most.

But a couple hours of dancing in the pouring rain until my feet hurt so much I can barely walk is pretty good too.

Baseball & more

Would you believe that I took even more pictures? Believe it. These are from Thursday, 4/15. Tim and I went to Sapporo East for sushi, then I let him talk me into heading over to City Island for the Harrisburg Senators’ opening night. They won, something like 8-4, and I hear it was a good game. I was too busy taking pictures and watching the people around me to notice. I promise if I ever go back I’ll take notes so I can tell you all about it.

Anyway, after the game, Tim and I headed downtown to Scott’s to hang out with the folks from Poetry Thursday (see the link in the previous post). We had a good time there, before ending the evening at the old standard, Shady’s.

There are lots of pictures here. I don’t want to add captions for all of them right now, and I absolutely never will for the baseball pictures. As a result, even I think most of these are boring. But since I took them, I feel obligated to put them up, and since I put them up, you should feel obligated to look at them. Especially admire the many faces of Dan Chiavaroli. He’s my new favorite dwarf.