Bonus Song of the Month: Pete Seeger - "The Phoenix and the Rose"

Pete Seeger's Fifty Sail on Newburgh Bay bears the dubious honor of being the only album I have ever shared with a history professor. This song, "The Phoenix and the Rose", is a big part of the reason I did. My professor was writing her book about New York during the 18th century. Naturally she'd want to hear Pete's four minute plainsong a cappella recording of some vaguely contemporary satire from the Hudson River Valley.

Pete Seeger & Ed Reenhan - "The Phoenix and The Rose"

I loved this song when I was 8 years old. I loved the story, and I especially loved the way Pete told it. And I still do. I love the marching, mocking, formality and the perfectly petty British: "into the vacant stores they stormed/in search of things for tea." I love how the sailors "cursed the town in language unrestrained", and when I was 8 years old I especially loved the way Pete trusted me to understand that line.

This was a huge part of Pete's gift. He trusted children to understand adult complexities and he trusted adults to find wisdom in the experiences of childhood. His songs give us a language for speaking in meaningful ways to children and adults at the same time. Anyone old enough to have made an excuse should empathize with the steward on The Phoenix.

It's been quite a busy day sir, what with all the shelling

and the raiding and the burning, and the general raise-helling//

//there's been precious little time to spare for foraging and looting

because of which aboard this ship of some four and forty guns

there was not a single thing to eat, but some carrots and stale buns

Song of the Month: William Tyler - "Country of Illusion"

Nobody likes getting told what to think. William Tyler's lush guitar arrangements are calibrated to provoke an emotional response, but they leave plenty of space to welcome each listener's unique reaction. On Wednesday night he closed his set at The Cedar with this song, "Country of Illusion." He introduced it by sharing context, not answers. Here is my attempt to paraphrase:

A lot of times people think that because my songs don't have any words they're not about anything, but that's not really true. Sometimes my songs are about relationships or whatever, sometimes they're just evocative of a landscape. This song I wrote during a long road trip and I was reading a book about peak oil...I was thinking a lot about how a lot of the country thinks things are this way and they can't imagine how they could be any other way.... 

And I also think that we just have a lot of nostalgia, and a lot of that's cultural and a lot of that's personal. So I'm just trying to reconcile some of that.

Preservation: A Case of Triage

Great news, historians! The alps are melting!

In northern Italy, melting glaciers have exposed the mummified bodies of World War I soldiers who died in battle at 12,000 feet of elevation. The story is fascinating: "shelling lowered the summit of one mountain, San Matteo, by 20ft." In recent decades, "[m]ore than 80 soldiers who fell in the White War have come to light." A curator at the historic monument at 6,500ft hopes that "intrepid hikers will be able to visit...and, as he puts it, 'smell the war'."

Researchers are still struggling to identify the names of the soldiers they have recovered, and search parties have hunted for the body of Italian captain Arnoldo Berni for almost a century without success. Glacier archaeologists, however, are accustomed to these sorts of obstacles. [Excerpt]

Glacier archaeology, as the field is called, has been referred to as the silver lining in the cloud of global warming...But it is a race against time. As soon as organic material melts out of the preserving ice and is exposed to the elements again, it starts to decay...The sheer amount of material now in this precarious condition -- Swiss glaciers, for example, have lost a third of their volume since 1860 -- means that archaeologists simply cannot reach it all in time, not least because it is often inaccessible outside the narrow window of summer at these altitudes. It's a case of triage, says [Craig Lee at the University of Colorado, Boulder.]

Even when the past reveals itself to us most directly, we cannot recover - let alone study or evaluate - the full revelation. This will always be true about the past. Meanwhile, the fact that these recovery efforts require racing against melting glaciers suggests that triage also operates on a geologic scale. It reminds me of William Cronon's thoughts about preserving wilderness.

If visitors come [to the Apostle Islands] and believe that they are experiencing pristine nature, they will completely misunderstand not just the complex human history that has created the Apostle Islands of today; they will also fail to understand how much the natural ecosystems they encounter here have been shaped by that human history. In a very deep sense, what they will experience is not the natural and human reality of these islands, but a cultural myth that obscures much of what they most need to understand about a wilderness that has long been a place of human dwelling.

What set of priorities allows us to understand preservationist archaeology as a silver lining to climate change? Partly it is the cultural myth of a pristine past, free from present day challenges. These glaciers remind us that the past will always be a place of human dwelling.

My Favorite Museum Pt. 1/3

At the end of December I was lucky to travel to Berlin with my wife. Lucky both because, hey, it was Christmas in Berlin and because my wife speaks German. Lucky also because we spent most of a day touring Berlin's famous Jewish Museum, which quickly took over the top spot on my favorite museums list. As I've attempted to explain what it was I liked so much about the museum I keep coming back to three aspects of my visit. I will cover these in three short posts as opposed to one long one...

"Fallen Leaves" - Menashe Kadishman
(photo cr. Florence)

1. The Experience of Absence

The Jewish Museum's central originality is the way it organizes an interpretive experience of absence to communicate an historical experience loss. The immediate point of comparison for me, and for most American visitors, is The Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. If The Holocaust Museum taught me the power of museums, The Jewish Museum taught me their humanity, and how they might be essential.

The Jewish Museum organizes this interpretive experience in three ways, and the first is very explicit. Somewhere in almost every room a sign will remind you to consider the voices missing from modern Berlin. We are told right away that, today, there are about 100,000 Jewish residents of Berlin and that in 1930 the city's Jewish population had been about 200,000. We are reminded again in the final galleries of the exhibit.

"The Gallery of the Missing"

Second, throughout the exhibit visitors are encouraged to linger in empty spaces. Sometimes these are alcoves that display artists' representations of absence. Some are corridors that offer only the disorienting experience itself; home to nothing but too redundant to be shortcuts. When these turn a corner overlooking Menashe Kadishman's, "Fallen Leaves", the experience is immediate, sustained and dramatic. When they bring us face to face with black "marble" radio installations featured throughout "The Gallery of the Missing" the experience is frustration, confusion, even anger. A sign reminds you to listen for what you do not hear as you struggle with a faulty headset.

Third, these sensory-emotional experiences support the intellectual experience of learning an enormous amount about the history of Jews (and Judaism) in Germany. That story begins around 300 AD. In another context the scope of information confronting a visitor could feel daunting, but at the Jewish Museum the weight of historical narrative is balanced by a more contemplative dimension. As we enter, visitors are invited to hang wishes on an artificial pomegranate tree. Invitations to rituals like this one create space for visitors to reflect on the museum's historical narrative and provide tools to help us navigate the experience of absence.

Inside the Museums

Henry's pelt was put on sundry walls

where it did much resemble Henry and

them persons was delighted.

Especially his long & glowing tail

by all them was admired, and visitors.

They whistled: This is it!

                                                                   -John Berryman, Dream Song 16

I am trying to pull together my pelt. Herewith some notions on interpretation and permanence and museums and experience, and how the latter slips over permanence like a glacier, carrying it along faster than museums normally move.