An oddly McSweeney's
kind of day started to unfold here in
waiting-for-the-blizzard land when I heard
somebody
on the radio talking about Timothy
Dexter. That woke me right
up. My big spurt of interest in Lord Timothy Dexter was
back in 1999 (starting here;
links to more entries can be found in my 1999
booklist). So who's talking
about Newburyport's favorite eccentric and why today?
Paul
Collins, writer for
McSweeney's and author of Sixpence House and
Banvard's Folly (which I got for $3.98 on the
bargain table at The Book Rack in Newburyport) and today
is Dexter's birthday. Now that's something I didn't know.
Seems like Newburyport should go all out for Timothy
Dexter's birthday. Or at least sprinkle around some
punctuation marks. :-)
Still under the illusion that I was
going to drive to Providence before the storm I met the
Hermit Potter of Worcester at our favorite breakfast
place in Tewksbury with a plan to head to Lowell again
for coffee and art. Having already had a flat tire this
month, I figured it was safe to do art with the Hermit
Potter (who is nothing whatsoever like a Harry Potter or
a Hermit Crab)
in Lowell without affecting my
tires. He brought me a
bagful of goodies including:
- A current issue of
The
Believer, a McSweeneys
zine I hadn't seen before. This issue is devoted to
the visual arts and comes with a DVD containing a
bunch of short films.
- Fireplace in a Box, a tiny
fireplace in which, according to the documentation,
you can make tiny s'mores by roasting a mini
marshmallow on a toothpick and placing it on a piece
of graham cracker cereal with a chocoalate chip -- I'm
not making this up.
- And a magnetic top, which while
trying to make it spin I promptly dropped into my
homefries.
We went back and forth on whether
we should give up on doing any further coffee or art and
just go hole up in our respective domiciles for the
storm. Having finally decided the prudent course of
action was to go home, we promptly went to Caffe Paradiso
in Lowell instead. A good cappuccino is worth getting
snowbound for? Well, that and the ricotta pie. Besides,
it wasn't snowing yet. Sipping coffee while watching some
Italian TV show in which a woman interviews a guy who
appears to be inside a misty tube (a hologram? sombody
caught in a Star Trek transporter beam? probably both)
and watching a guy in a cherry picker taking huge Xmas
wreaths off the buildings on Palmer Street really seemed
like a trip to Italy, especially when a skinny guy
dressed all in black came and started chatting with the
waitress in Italian.
Around the corner at the
Revolving
Museum they were having an
exhibition called "FREE WHEELIN': The Art of Rolling" and
it still wasn't snowing yet, so we decided to live
dangerously and take in the art. One wall featured a
collection of irons on wheels, giving new meaning to
"travel irons". There were cars and motorcycles and a
juggernaut, you never know when you're going to need to
storm a castle, and oddly liberated Barbie dolls with
wheels in place of their useless legs. There were mobile
shrines and even a mobile pope -- he was my favorite. One
artist/teacher had designed several pushcarts for moving
his books around from classroom to classroom after a
shoulder injury. Hmm, after my shoulder injury I didn't
design art carts to move stuff, I just called Ned.
Anyway, one of this guy's carts represented the Fitchburg
railroad complete with a detailed scale model of Walden
Pond on top and Thoreau in jail on the side. Another
highlight was a motorcycle made out of wooden molds from
the Rice Barton factory in Worcester. The Hermit Potter
recognized the motorcycle from the Patterns
of Worcester show. It
finally did start to snow.
I settled in by the tiny fireplace
for the blizzard reading, making corn chowder, and
watching nonstop storm coverage on
NECN. The broadband thing
keeps going out even though I still have cable. Blizzard
with intermittent broadband, I get the feeling this is
some odd art form.
