Awake, Asleep, At Home, Abroad

Today was the first day of my seminar, which focuses on the changing views on and perceptions about technology in the modern museum. When I heard about this topic, I was less than thrilled, but I think it will turn out to be very interesting, and also much broader in range than it seems. But more on that later. The class doesn’t begin until 2, which means I have to leave home at 12:45. I slept till 9, ate breakfast, watched TV, and slummed around before heading off to the blissfully empty metro station. The nice thing about the station when it’s not rush hour is that the fare is cheaper and you are guaranteed a seat. The not so nice thing is that the trains take forever to come round. Is it just me, or am I starting to sound like a Brit? I think I’m spending too much time with Symon (yes, that is how he spells it). Today at dinner, I learned that in England sweat pants are called tracky bottoms. I guess that makes sense because if you factor in the fact that pants are underwear, sweat pants take on a new and wholly unpleasant meaning.

Then off I went to my class, which is based out of this huge building on 9^th and H right next to China town. Class was pretty interesting. Every week we will go to a different museum and be lectured to by a different Smithsonian person. Today we were spoken to by the curator of the National Portrait Gallery. He has the biggest nose I have ever seen and I was sitting right next to him so I had a perfect profile view for 2 wonderful hours. It’s not that the whole thing is big; his nostrils were normally sized, but the actual tip of the thing was like a small island in the middle of his face. Between that and the fact that our professor, Dorothy Moss, has absolutely no muscle movement in her forehead, it was preparing to be a very entertaining 2 hours.

He talked about Peale, the first American to really look at the museum as something to better human beings and show the wonders of the natural world to people who might not necessarily get to see them. His was a portrait gallery and natural history museum which occupied the second floor of the third oldest federal building in Philadelphia. He was a fairly progressive man, and allowed women and children to enter his sacred museum space in the late 18 and early 1900s, when such things were not considered common. He was, however, kind of self obsessed (he was an artist himself and created 17 self portraits in his life time) and also of the firm opinion that man was the highest life form and must therefore look down on the rest of creation. His grand plan was to miniaturize the entire world and fit it into his gallery. One cool thing that he did do, was to excavate and display the first 2 Mastodons ever. Yay him.

On the way home, I stopped in China town and got myself some pastries (of course), and then I dashed back for diner. John and Gabby, through some complex web of relationships and friends, have this journalist who comes every few months and does a blurb on their family for the Viennese paper as an example of a typical American family. I find this very amusing, because the Abruzzis are anything but typical. To prove my point, we had some very excellent middle eastern kebabs with flat bread and tsastiki for dinner. The journalist brought his 19 year old daughter Miriam with him this time, and they have been doing a sort of grand tour of America. They’ve covered a very impressive chunk of the US and tomorrow they’re off to NYC. We had a great time, drank a tone of wine, and laughed hysterically. A good night.

Office Days: The Beginning of the End

Day one was overwhelming and packed with information. Everyone introduced themselves and I feel like I may have met the entirety of the Smithsonian Institution’s staff. The Folk Life collection is an entire floor of a massive office building and appears to contain every artifact from the collection that there is no room to display in a museum. Apparently, our office is known as “the black hole.” Things from all over the world are piled in the hallways and on every available surface, the walls are hung with colorful tapestries and row after row of CDs, and the people who walk the halls wear bright clothes and hail from all over the world. Then, the doors to the archives. You enter and silence falls. This is not a dead silence, but rather a quiet filled with the possibility of a staticy Leadbelly or Pete Seeger recording. The walls are covered with shelving, which are in turn filled with books about every kind of music imaginable, and LPs; oh, the LPs. They cover everything from American Jazz and Scandinavian folk songs, to the sound of the human voice after the uvula has been removed. 

Moses Ash, known through the office due to a very repetitive documentary as “a stubborn man,” thought that any sound created by any means was worth recording and saving. Also, as stipulated in his will and implemented during his lifetime, everyone of the two-thousand-one-hundred-something albums he recorded remain in circulation and available to the public. Yes, this includes the sound of the human voice after the uvula has been removed. He continued to record the sounds of the world until his death in 1985. (?)

So what, you may ask, have I been doing in this paradise of paper and vinyl? Well… The album covers and all of the paper work that go along with them are in these awful brown and definitely NOT acid free envelopes called “Job Bags,” which are stacked haphazardly in shelving in the archives. Not all of them are even there, however. A good portion of them are in storage in Maryland, and hopefully will not be brought over in my stint as an intern. I’m stressed out with the ones we already have, so I think the others might push me over the edge. I would be the shortest lived intern in all Smithsonian Institution intern history.

So Moses Ash was an extremely organized man, and he gave each of his albums a number. They are distinguished by which thousand they’re in. For example, I’ve been going through a box of slicks (the prints of the covers that get glued to the album covers), which are all from the 2000s. Because of the common numbers, they are all relatively similar; Pete Seeger, Leadbelly, Ginny Hawker, etc. Who knows what the 3000s will hold. The slicks were in random order in (thank GOD) an acid free box, so I spent hours going through them and putting them into numerical order while also creating a spread sheet with all of their numbers so that when I was done I would know what was in the box. The reason I needed these in order is because I will now be finding their corresponding Job Bags with all the original artwork, reuniting them, and then putting the whole shebang in a nice acid free box, giving it a lovely label, and putting it on a pristine shelf where it will then be available for anyone to find. The numbers on the boxes will say which thousand the box contains, the number of the box within that thousand, and then the numbers of the Job Bags in the box. For example: 2000-2 2513-2842.

Not all of my life will be spent in the archives, however. Today I went to a symposium on film and proper archival procedures. I learned about video and sound recording history and how to conserve it so that it will be available for generations to come. One of the speakers, George Blood, was showing us the difference between shellac and vinyl. As a demo, he snapped the shellac record over his knee and the whole crowd (all of them conservators and archivists) gasped and jerked back in their seats. Best moment ever.