While Republicans from around the country gather in Tampa this week, a Burlington designer is looking back on his small but significant contribution to a different presidential campaign.
In the summer of 1992, Doug Dunbebin was a graphic artist living in Beltsville, Md. when he came up with a design and slogan for the Clinton-Gore ticket that would soon catch fire and become one of the iconic images of the 1992 and 1996 presidential campaigns.
In June 1992, then-candidate Clinton appeared on the "Arsenio Hall Show" and ripped out a bluesy version of Elvis Presley's "Heartbreak Hotel" on his tenor saxophone. It was a seminal moment in Clinton's political career — as Hall remarked afterward, "It's good to see a Democrat blow something other than an election" — and earned him new found respect and support among young and minority voters.
Click here to continue reading on Off Message, our new politics blog.
Green Mountain College's Ames Tower was looking pretty shabby, so facilities director Glenn LaPlante was inspecting its domed cupola, airborne in a hydraulic lift, paint scraper in hand. And that's when he made an amazing discovery: a glass-encased, art deco clock, still in "excellent condition," LaPlante declared, despite a layer of 1960s-era paint.
It was time to call in an expert and, as it happens, there was one nearby. Joe Duffy operates, with his brother, Christopher, Church Specialties right in Poultney. Their specialty? Church bell and clock tower restoration. The college contacted Joe Duffy to come and look at their clock, which he determined is a Telechron model.
Inventor Henry Warren established the Telechron company in Ashland, Mass., in 1912 and made battery-powered clocks. Three years later, he invented a "self-starting, synchronous motor consisting of a rotor and coil," reports college spokesman Kevin Coburn. When Warren retired in 1943, General Electric absorbed the business, and clocks labeled "Telechron" or "General Electric" were made in the Ashland plant.
In fact, it's still operating. Duffy got in touch and agreed to deliver the GMC clock to Ashland.
He said it could be functional again with a new motor and some "superficial cleaning," says Coburn.
Why was the clock painted over? No one at the school remembers. "The Ames building was dedicated in 1908, and photos show a clock, but it couldn't have been this one," Coburn says. "We think in the 1930s it was replaced with the Telechron, and painted in the ’60s." And then, everyone simply forgot about it.
Coburn says the clock should be returned in about three weeks and once again will tick off the minutes in the life of a small Vermont college. "We want it in place when students arrive the third week in August," he notes.
Just in the nick of time.
Photo courtesy of Green Mountain College
All of the exhibits the Shelburne Museum opened last month are pretty groovy — from vintage snowmobiles to man-stitched quilts to life-size metal elephants — but the one that's arguably the coolest is finally opening this Saturday: "Time Machines: Robots, Rockets and Steampunk."
Along with other members of the media, I got a preview today, and I can vouch for its coolness.
The general idea for "Time Machines," curated by Kory Rogers, is visions of the future ... from the past. And so there is a fantastical replica Time Machine inspired by the H.G. Wells novella and realized, at least on celluloid, in a 1960 movie. There are baby-boomer-nostalgic midcentury toys in the Flash Gordon (see puzzle, right) and Buck Rogers vein. And there are post-Sputnik (1957) items of both Soviet and American origin —from "Star Trek" figures to Apollo 11 memorabilia to Russian posters.
From a private collector in Ohio comes a variety of toy robots, divided into helpful robots and killer robots. The former are colorful, kid-friendly ’bots with rounded shapes and bug eyes; the latter are, of course, menacing and apocalyptic. To understand how our view of technology shifted from optimistic to doomsday, one need only compare cheery little Robby the Robot to techno-macho Robocop.
And then there are the humorous robots in human poses made by Burlington artist John Brickels, who subverts the whole notion of robotics by making them from brown clay.
Steampunk splits the difference between low- and high-tech with a kind of back-to-the-future approach. A whole subculture unto itself, steampunk is a fantastical futurist aesthetic deriving from 19th-century science fiction. Its aficionadoes are given to wearing Victorian-inspired costumes and invent byzantine devices with dubious functions. Such as time traveling. The Shelburne's Webb Gallery devotes a couple of rooms to contraptions made by contemporary steampunk artists, from the animatronic arachnids (one at right) of Christopher Conte to an inexplicable but wonderful time-travel thingy by Burlington metal artist Steve Conant.
In the basement level of the Webb Gallery, curatorial fellow Sara Woodbury has curated an exhibition of paintings and prints from the museum's vast archives. Titled "How Extraordinary! Travel, Novelty and Time in the Permanent Collection," the works consider how 19th-century Americans and Europeans viewed exotic locales — such as China — to which they may or may not have actually journeyed. Several paintings by Albertus Del Orient Browere (circa 1880) depicting scenes imagined from the life of Rip Van Winkle further play with the notion of time "travel."
Look for more extensive commentary on these exhibits in future issues of Seven Days. For now, enjoy the photos, courtesy of the Shelburne Museum and moi.
A few months ago a young woman named Katrina Roi contacted Seven Days. She's an intern at "State of the Re:Union," a syndicated public-radio show and website that reports on locales around the U.S. I had heard this program on Vermont Public Radio a number of times and really enjoyed its in-depth explorations of not just the who/what/where of a place but of what makes its people tick. The soul of the community, as it were.
I also enjoyed the show's host, Al Letson, who's the executive producer, as well. He came from the poetry-slam movement and really gets delivery.
So I was excited to find out that SOTRU was coming to Vermont. Tropical Storm Irene was the impetus; Letson and crew wanted to know how Vermonters lived through, and came out of, that experience, which devastated so many small towns in our state.
The program SOTRU put together took them to Pittsfield and Bethel, and even to a quintessential Vermont town meeting. Their report contrasts those two towns and how each responded, or didn't, to post-Irene realities. If you missed the broadcast last Saturday, you can download it here. Though Vermonters have heard plenty of stories since the storm of August 28, 2011, I still strongly recommend listening to this one.
But I started out this post by introducing Katrina Roi. She was looking for additional Vermont stories. I corresponded with her and — though we gave her a number of story suggestions — I found myself waxing enthusiastic about White River Junction. The town had been hit by Irene, too, but the broader story was how the place has slowly emerged from a long post-railroad-industry slump ... through the arts.
Seven Days readers are no doubt familiar with the biweekly cartoon we publish in the print edition from a student or graduate of the Center for Cartoon Studies. I told Katrina about the school, and about how it, along with the Main Street Museum, Northern Stage theater company, Two Rivers Printmaking Studio and other arty establishments, had infused WRJ with new life. Moreover, some of the students who come to CCS — like many of us — love Vermont and decide to stay, thus becoming a part of the creative-economy infrastructure.
Katrina investigated WRJ herself and, with SOTRU radio producer Laura Starecheski, ended up creating a delightful short video, cartoon style, about the town and its history, in collaboration with CCS student Sophie Goldstein. The production, titled "White River Junction: A Town at the Crossroads," can be viewed on the website. Sophie's brown-hued illustrations (see image above), have a vintage look, but the voiceovers are contemporary, including those of MSM owner David Fairbanks Ford and CCS cofounder Michelle Ollie. Check it out.
This month Catamount Arts begins a series called "Courageous Conversations" that will address somber issues "facing the nation in general and the Northeast Kingdom in particular," says an announcement from director Jody Fried. Poverty, mental health and disabilities are the general topics for June, July and August, respectively.
So what's the art part?
Artists have long tackled weighty topics using a variety of media, and the "Conversations" series follows suit. Catamount is augmenting its live community/panel discussions with relevant films on Monday evenings and visual-art exhibits in the organization's Eastern Avenue gallery.
For the discussion about NEK poverty on Thursday, June 14, the panel will include Melissa Bourque from the Vermont Workers' Center, Greg MacDonald from the Agency of Human Services, Northeast Kingdom Community Action executive director Joe Patrissi, Pru Pease from Bridges Out of Poverty, Wilhemina Picard from the Department of Corrections' Community High School and local resident Margaret Drew. Facilitator of the discussion will be Steve Gold, former interim president of Lyndon State College.
In the gallery for the month of June is an exhibit called "Parallels" featuring photographic portraits of local residents (one of them is shown above). Photographer Libby Hillhouse suggests in her artist's statement that there is a "slim margin" separating any of us from the "world of the poor," and that for society to denigrate those living in poverty is to devalue all of us. With her portraits, Hillhouse aims to illustrate that "everyone deserves to be respected and to maintain his/her dignity."
"Parallels" opens with a reception on Friday, June 8, 5-7 p.m.
June's Monday-evening film series, free to the public at 7 p.m., includes the following:
June 4: Precious
June 11: Winter's Bone
June 18: American Violet
June 25: Frozen River
For more information about the "Courageous Conversations" series and the rest of the summer's schedule, visit Catamount's website.
The big, red, Fairfax barn that houses Vermont Woodworking School was abuzz yesterday celebrating its new designation as Vermont's first State Craft Education Center.
VWS joins the ranks of the state's other official craft centers, Frog Hollow in Burlington, Artisans Hand in Montpelier and Gallery at the Vault in Springfield.
The designation is largely symbolic; it doesn't secure the organizations any extra funding or perks (besides a flashy decal to place in the window and a listing on the state's website). But the nod lends a dose of prestige to the school, which is still relatively new.
Vermont Woodworking School — which is affiliated with Burlington College — was founded five years ago. Around that time, "I was looking for an escape," recalled director Carina Driscoll at a ceremony yesterday marking the designation. The event took place in the basement workshops of the school's converted-barn facility.
Driscoll had started dabbling in furniture making at a community woodworkers' shop in Colchester, where she met master craftsman Robert Fletcher. When the shop closed down, Driscoll, her husband, Blake Ewoldson, and Fletcher took over the lease together in hopes of starting a school in the little space behind Costco. They enrolled half a dozen students and got started. But something was missing. "We got the notion we needed a big, red barn in the country," said Driscoll.
They found it on a winding stretch of Route 104 in Fairfax: a late-1800s dairy barn. Cows hadn't lived there in 20 years, but "you couldn't tell because all the stanchions were still in place," said Driscoll.
The place still has the rural romance of a soaring Vermont barn, but it's been turned into a contemporary woodworking facility with 30 student benches, several specialized workrooms, a resource libarary and a studio for photographing finished work. The silo-turned-dormitory is so cool, it could make you consider quitting your job and enrolling in the immersion program just to live there.
Yesterday's ceremony doubled as a reception for students' final projects. A gallery was filled with turned wooden bowls, a standing-height desk on elegant curved legs, a Zen-garden coffee table, and other striking works.
Yuko Yanagidaira, a student in the 12-week immersion program and one of only two women currently enrolled at VWS, came to Fairfax from Japan with no woodworking experience — but you'd never know it from browsing the sleek bento boxes and elegant writing desk she created in her first semester. "I like to make things with my hands," she said. Yanagidaira will spend this summer honing her woodworking skills in Maine, where she has a seasonal job harvesting seaweed.
Rob Palmer, a young carpenter from Harpers Ferry, W.V., is two years into the BFA program. He showed me his first-semester project: a three-string cigar-box guitar in a coffin-shaped, leopard-print-lined case (pictured). The instrument was inspired by Palmer's love of the blues; the case was a response to an instructor's observation that no VWS students had yet attempted to build a coffin.
"The leopard print is a nod to my dad," said Palmer, explaining that his father drives an '88 Saab convertible with a leopard interior. (His creation won an international competition last year, as noted in Seven Days at the time.)
Palmer enrolled at VWS when carpentry jobs started to dry up during the recession. "I was going through a hell of a time and I was fed up," he recalled. He was thrilled to discover the BFA program at VWS because it meant he could brush up his skills, and also get a college degree. "I'm not a book-learning type of guy," Palmer conceded. "I would love to be an artisan and a craftsman as a career... but getting the BFA opens me up to other opportunities."
America's most popular — and richest — artist died in California on Friday at age 54. But unless you're an aficionado of kitsch, you may not have been familiar with Thomas Kinkade. He made many, many millions by painting pictures that deftly catered to mass tastes but caused outbreaks of aesthetic hives in those who look to art for something more than syrupy sweetness, corny theatrics and unnatural scenes of rural bliss.
The Middlebury College Museum of Art presented a sampling of Kinkade's work in 2009, with curators proceeding from the premise that his popularity warranted thoughtful appraisal. The nonjudgmental approach did help illuminate the reasons why the self-styled "painter of light" was so successful in market terms. But Kinkade, who actually functioned more as a corporation than as an individual creator, was a terrible painter in the ways that matter most. The organizers of the Middlebury show surely knew that, and their unwillingness to say it seemed disingenuous.
Image courtesy of Middlebury College Museum of Art for Seven Days' review of "Making Sense of Thomas Kinkade."
I'm sad to pass along the news that Sid Couchey died yesterday at the age of 92. I had occasion to meet and interview this delightful, funny and humble gentleman for an article in 2010. He was not a household-name cartoonist, but fans around the world knew his work, primarily from the 1950s comic book "Richie Rich." It had been translated, he told me, into many languages.
Later, the story of the tow-headed "world's wealthiest kid" — ever clad in a prissy black jacket and oversize bow tie — was reincarnated in an animated TV series and, in 1994, in a film adaptation starring Macauley Culkin. Couchey also drew for the comics "Little Lotta" and "Little Dot," among others. (He proposed to his sweetheart, Ruth, in a "Little Lotta" episode, he told me, some 52 years ago. The couple were married more than 50 years.)
Couchey worked for Harvey Comics (now Harvey Entertainment) in New York City, but lived since 1961 in Essex, N.Y., — a ferry ride from Charlotte, Vt., and quick zip down Rt. 9. When I went to visit him on a warm summer day, Couchey graciously showed me some comic-book archives that collectors would have drooled over, as well as casual piles of other drawings. Many were of Champy, his affectionate nickname for the Lake Champlain monster that residents on either side of the water like to claim as their own.
The denizens of Essex are no exception. "Port Henry thinks it's the home of Champy," Couchey told me. "We say Essex is its summer home." Take that, Vermont.
Couchey was all twinkly blue eyes and self-effacing quips. I might say he was even a little flirty. But that's OK; he was 91. And Ruth was right there the whole time.
Both of them could not have been sweeter. I don't know who was more tickled that a reporter from Vermont had come to talk about his life. Not that Couchey had faded from the public eye; a founder of the Adirondack Artist Association and still actively making art himself, he was something of a celebrity around Essex. Former New York governor George Pataki, who had a summer home just down the road, had a Couchey-created sign in his front yard. And the cartoonist's renderings of Champy in the style of the great masters (signed by "Sid Seurat Couchey," "Sid Monet Couchey," and so on) were sold in the AAA Gallery in the village.
Couchey was given a well-deserved Lifetime Achievement Award in 1994 by the Kansas City Comics Convention. But for a guy who never stopped drawing, he also enjoyed lolling about with his buddies in the Do Nothing Club, a group Couchey cofounded in Essex. "We can talk and eat doughnuts," he informed me. "We can suggest things, but we can't act on them."
After the story about him came out in Seven Days, Couchey sent me one of his Champy illustrations, rendered in pen and watercolor. In this one, a pissed-off monster is tangled in the nets of some hapless fishermen in a rowboat (based on "The Gulf Stream" by Winslow Homer). Gritting his teeth, Champy glares at the men, the water roiling around them. The work is signed "Sid Homer Couchey."
Now, Sid Couchey has signed out. I'm going to miss him.
Photograph by Pamela Polston
The last time I sat in the audience at Burlington's FlynnSpace, I was riveted by Jane Comfort's wild and inventive dancers (including one in a Superman suit) as they brought Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie to life.
This afternoon's FlynnSpace offering was considerably less inspiring.
Mayoral candidates Miro Weinberger, Wanda Hines and Kurt Wright gathered for a "conversation on the arts" sponsored by the Flynn Center for the Performing Arts, Burlington City Arts and the South End Arts and Business Association. It was the only event on the campaign trail, Miro said, that was devoted to the arts.
So what did I learn?
Here's where I admit this was my first Burlington mayoral debate. My first mayoral anything. (I live in Winooski, OK?) In fact, I don't think I've ever seen Miro, Kurt or Wanda in person. I'm much more familiar with the caricatures in the Marc Nadel illustrations we've been using since the race began.
So here's the takeaway: All three are pretty satisfied with the art community's "status quo," and nobody wants (or would admit to wanting) to slash the city's art funding (duh). Miro's really into development and boosting the creative economy on a larger scale. Kurt repeatedly invoked his decision last year to redirect money from the city council account, rather than pit the city's art against its library budgets. Wanda spent most of the hour and a half shifting the questions back to the audience ("I want to hear what you want") and reminiscing about a collage she made in 1975.
Some decent questions bubbled up from the audience, most of which were diverted. The most interesting, I thought, came from a man who explained he had grown up in poverty. He credited an art teacher for turning his life around. The arts are crucial to people like him, he said, but they can often be threatening to working-class people, who see them as a sign of gentrification. He asked the candidates how they would ensure that the arts in Burlington were inclusive. The topic could have carried an entire debate, but nobody really had an anwer.
For the most part, the rest was all soundbites and stammering. Still, I did learn some interesting factoids:
Kurt Wright isn't nearly as chubby as his caricature counterpart.
Miro is a fan of American glass artist Dale Chihuly, whose installations he stumbled upon during a cross-country road trip. He called the work "a celebration of color and joy."
As a kid, he played the trumpet "until that came into conflict with braces," Miro revealed.
It's true: He really does say "fresh start" a lot. Too bad we weren't participating in the Seven Days Burlington Mayoral Debate Drinking Game; it would have brought some life to this snoozer.
Kurt gave out his home phone number and invited us to call him with questions, but I forgot to write it down (oops).
He likes the idea of getting artists into empty storefronts à la the Winooski pop-up galleries.
Wanda told us she made a clay head with curly hair called "Alfie" in the seventh grade, which she kept through college.
Aside from that and a collage, she grew up thinking of art as something that was barred to her because she couldn't afford it. These days she sees it as something that can "bridge our differences," Wanda said.
Apparently, Wanda has a catchphrase, too: "Less is bes'.'" Add it to the drinking game for next time?
A Seven Days reader nearly drove off the road the first time she did. The white-clad figure was walking down the sidewalk on Shelburne Road near Liberty Inn & Suites around 7:45 a.m. Wednesday morning.
"It's the strangest thing, they wear this ankle length white puffy coat with large red balls hanging off of it," writes the reader. "The coat is a little odd, but typically, I wouldn't take much notice. It's the fact that they are also wearing a very bizarre white plastic mask (kind of like Phantom of the Opera, but covering their entire face)."
Fortunately — or unfortunately, depending on how you feel about creepy-looking characters wandering the streets — this is not an "abominable snowperson," as our reader suggested. It's artist Kate Donnelly, in the midst of “Also There: A Performance for the Commuter." From 7:45 to 8:15 each weekday for the next few weeks, Donnelly will don her white-and-red suit and mask, and walk the sidewalks south along Shelburne Road, west along Home Avenue, north along Pine Street and, finally, east along Birchcliff Parkway.
Why?
Donnelly says she's interested in transition. Her white figure, "momentarily interrupts the attention of an audience who are engaged in a daily transition — that is, their commute from home to work, from one self to another," she writes on her blog. "The diversion is fleeting, the sight familiar (human) but not identifiable. With the daily reappearance of the figure, the audience may witness the sight again and again, begin to notice it changing, perhaps even look for it. It may become part of their routine."
She adds, "We take comfort in titles, certainties, tangible outcomes ... I wish to remind the audience of the absurd and unpredictable, to remind them to notice the anomalies and embrace adventure.”
Word.
I wonder what she'll do if someone tries to talk to her on the sidewalk. I'd try it myself, but for some reason, that suit really freaks me out.
For more (slightly nightmare-inducing) photos of Donnelly in action, check out her blog: alsothere.blogspot.com. Learn more about her other projects at katedonnelly.net.