The · Affected · Provincial’s · Almanack

Spent the Solstice last Friday evening at the reception for Mark Dion's show at Bartram's Garden. It was a beautiful evening with a wonderful mix of people--horticulturalists, patrons, historians, artists and the botanically inclined. Mark seemed to be in high spirits, and the staff seemed pleased with the turnout. Couldn't imagine a better place to spend the Summer Solstice, especially in my mock-druidic white linen suit. Gave friends a nickel tour of the new pond and bog garden while our man Joel Fry did the heavy lifting, dispensing his seemingly inexhaustible knowledge about the plants and history of the place, eventually winning a hearty round of applause from the guests. Enjoyed some of the jaunty floral displays, some of which were almost seven feet tall and included lovely pitcher plant cuttings. It brought to mind a Mondrian sketch.

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Our good friends B and E along with new friendly acquaintances C and S joined us for delicious Greek fare and Retsina afterwards. B was far too generous and sprung for the whole spread, bless his heart. Thank you again, B!

~W

In my previous post we saw Adam's chandeliers, but he and his lovely lady Jodi have also been tinkering with the house's interior as well. Here are a few extra shots I had from this weekend. Enjoy.( Read more... )

I dropped in on my good friend Adam Wallacavage over the weekend, who is currently putting his finishing touches on the handmade chandeliers he'll be showing at Jonathan LeVine Gallery starting June 28th. Behind the cut is a sneak peek at a few of the new pieces. ( Read more... )

Epicurus called his school The Garden. Voltaire advised us to tend our own garden. John and William Bartram left us with their garden. I wear my garden on my back (I go through loofahs like you wouldn't believe).
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Behind the cut are pictures from last week's UPenn class at Bartram's Garden, where I prattled on about the notion of "aesthetic ecologies". I brought along my terrarium of tipitiwitchets (a plant that figures large in the Bartram songbook) for the amusement of the class, and to illustrate the principles behind the hobby horse in question.

Just wanted to thank Joel, John, Emily and their class. It was a voluptuous afternoon.

For Philly people: this Saturday is the much-awaited annual Spring Plant sale! The following Saturday May 10th is the annual guided tour of the Pine Barrens. I will be serving as a guide along with the eminent Joel Fry, curator of Bartram's Garden, and Bill Cahill, an amazing gentleman whose Pine Barrens kung fu is the stuff of legend. We will be pointing at things for your edification and pleasure. See you there!

~W

Built for the 1876 World Exhibition, Horticultural Hall was built on the site where the modest Horticultural Center now sits today, in Philadelphia's Fairmount Park. (Attended a rather nice wedding there once. Great buffet by the succulents. Tell a friend.)

Horticultural Hall was designed by Hermann J. Schwarzmann. Schwarzmann, an engineer for the Fairmount Park Commission, had never designed a building before. Horticultural Hall had an iron and glass frame on a brick and marble foundation and was 383 ft long, 193 ft wide and 68 ft tall. The building was styled after twelfth-century Moorish architecture and designed as a tribute to The Crystal Palace from London's Great Exhibition.

The structure was certainly designed with an eye towards showmanship: In true high Victorian form, the elegant, functional qualities seen in earlier and later greenhouses were obscured by themed ornamentation, giving it an air of fantasy. A German architectural critic described it as “the true embodiment of Arabian Nights”.

Unlike most of the buildings constructed for the Exposition, Horticultural Hall was meant to be permanent. The building's exhibits specialized in horticulture and after the Exposition it continued to exhibit plants until it was badly damaged by Hurricane Hazel in 1954 and was demolished.

~W

Philly friends: Next Wednesday night there's a fun lecture going on at The Wagner Free Institute, one of my favorite places in Philadelphia:

"How the Turtle Got Its Shell"

An Illustrated Presentation By Dr. Scott Gilbert

Wednesday, February 27, 2008, 4:00 - 7:00PM (Lecture at 5:30PM)

The turtle's remarkable evolutionary novelty, its shell, represents a classic evolutionary problem - the appearance of a major structural adaptation.

Evolutionary developmental biologist Dr. Scott Gilbert and "Team Turtle" at Swarthmore College have been studying this exact problem, and they have recently published the first comprehensive hypothesis for how the turtle shell forms.

Dr. Gilbert will explain how the turtle's skeleton is unique among vertebrates, as no other has a casing made almost exclusively of bone. He will also describe the principles of "evo devo" biology and how they can explain the formation of novel body plans.

Dr. Scott Gilbert is the author of Developmental Biology, a bestselling textbook now in its sixth edition. He joined the faculty of Swarthmore College in 1980 where he teaches developmental genetics, embryology, and the histoy of biology. Dr. Gilbert is also the recipient of a grant from the National Science Foundation to study how the turtle forms its shell, and he continues to do research and write in both developmental biology and the history and philosophy of biology.

Many thanks to obscura_mike for bringing this to my attention.

Good luck, George.

~W

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Author and entertainer Ian Svenonius will give a thought provoking instructional lecture entitled HOW TO START A GROUP for all those would-be musicians and anyone else interested in what rock 'n' roll is, what it should be, what it's uses are and how to best subvert the official noxious narrative of the culture. Q&A session and book signing to follow. Ian and David Chadwick of Golden Ball will spin hip-shaking tunes afterwards in the downstairs bar. Ian F Svenonius is the author of the book THE PSYCHIC SOVIET (Drag City Press 2006) and the singer on several dozen LPs and singles by the groups Weird War, Make-Up, The Nation of Ulysses and more. He is also the host of the chat-show Soft Focus (VBS.TV).

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SATURDAY OCT 6th
Please Kill Me: An Evening with Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain
9 pm – National Mechanics, 22 South 3rd Street- FREE

Iggy. Dee Dee. Joey. Debbie. Patti. Nico. Sid. The story of punk is told by those who lived it in Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk by co-founder of Punk magazine, Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain. Join Legs and Gillian for an intimate reading and an uncensored history lesson about the origins of the punk movement.

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For more info: 215 Festival Website

Was walking around the city tonight alone, feeling a bit like a ghost--a ghost full of crepe, pastis and licorice ice cream, yes, but a ghost nonetheless. Amazing how empty the streets get after a certain hour. Strange tableaus present themselves. It's both marvelous and melancholy.

Local media personalities and dear friends Mark and Audrey had Lady P and I out for a Philly jaunt a few weeks ago to film an installment of their charming ongoing series previously known as Cheap Dates, now dubbed Illadates. For those both familiar and unfamiliar with Philadelphia, it's an informative and entertaining exploration of the charms and pleasures found in the many neighborhoods that lie beyond Philly's touristy center. Milling through their older episodes is both fun and worthwhile.

We'd like to thank Mark and Audrey for a lovely afternoon, and for giving us an excuse to revisit some of our favorite Philly haunts. Click the picture above to view the video. Enjoy.

~W

Visited the new Perelman wing of the Philadelphia Museum of Art yesterday, which concentrates on photography, costume, and design. Wonderful work I hadn't seen before--inflatable Italian furniture, embroidered gowns inspired by Cy Twombly, large color photos of colorful backyard "shrines" with taxidermed squirrels dead pigeons and stacks of fruit with cheap colored lights overhead.

Afterwards, I ascended to the rocky museum mount overlooking Boathouse Row and Fairmount Park. Below, among the bike paths and Beaux Arts marble waterworks along the river were a troop of willowy, white-clad ballerinas stretching and practicing their pas de deuxs--for what purpose I've no clue. Nearby were century-old trees, ornate fountains and throngs of people enjoying the gorgeous weather. "Here be Elysium", I thought.

Cornell and Baudelaire might have enjoyed it--the dress, rhythms of traffic and speech, body language--but the lot of a flaneur is a solitary one. To each, his own age.

~W

A lovely evening last night at the Philopatrian Literary Institute at the Stotesbury Mansion, just off Rittenhouse Square. "The Philo" is the last of the Rittenhouse Square mansions, and was the home of the late Mayor Edward T. Stotesbury. The 18th Century Grand Ballroom was imported from a London manse, corinthian columns, antique chandeliers and a 14th century Italian marble fireplace sit beneath 22-foot solid gold ceiling make for other architectural details. The front parlor’s fireplace was purchased from the White House in 1890. A labyrinthine of halls and chambers lead to a sitting room on the second floor and a billiards hall on the third level.

An old friend was having a belated wedding reception; she was always a disarmingly beautiful woman, but was in her glory last night. The groom looked sharp as a pin, as did everyone else. It was a grand, glamorous affair, full of pageantry, slow dancing and winding staircases. It was nice to catch up with friends we hadn't seen in some time--new babies, new careers, new cities, etc.

Also found out that a friend who works at the Philly Museum of Art has just accepted a position at Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum as the head conservator of metals. I see cold canals and rainy bike rides in my future...

~W

The Rosenbach Museum & Library was the home of two brothers, Dr. A.S.W. and Philip Rosenbach. A.S.W. Rosenbach was a legendary dealer and collector of rare books and manuscripts, while Philip's expertise encompassed the fine and decorative arts (and was also a bit of a dandy, as evidenced by his huffy letters complaining about the poor finish on his canes he had repaired). Founded in 1954, the Rosenbach is a major research center that is home to one of the nation's great collections of rare books and manuscripts, as well as a beautiful, historic townhouse filled with fine art and antiques.

The Rosenbach is an aesthete's paradise, in the sense that the collections are eclectic, but each individual item is the finest and rarest of its kind (I'm sure there have been nicer mummified penises than Napoleon's but that's a matter of taste). I am still stunned at what I saw today; indeed, I was quite overwhelmed. Below is but a partial list:

-- Two bejeweled tiaras once owned by Josephine Bonaparte

-- One of the finest works by Blake, drawn from Revelations. In fact, it was in the Met's show a couple years back, which I had the pleasure of seeing.

-- A marble pedestal clock from eighteenth-century France, made by Antoinette's clockmaker.

-- One of Rosenbach's canes, made of alabaster and ivory, reputed to have been owned by Marie Antoinette. The head of the cane had small beetles carved all over it.

-- Joyce's death mask, of which Michael had some highly amusing stories of transatlantic flights in a handbag.

-- The reconstructed living room of Marianne Moore's Greenwich Village apartment, meticulously installed, right down to the matchbooks in her desk drawer, and a slice of mummified wedding cake in the dresser. Walking around the room was as close to time travel as I can imagine. It was a lovely little room, very welcoming and in the best possible sense, unmistakably 20th century.

-- I held in my hands and flipped through Oscar Wilde's handwritten draft of Salome, including stage directions. He wrote the play in French to see whether he could make anything beautiful out of his French.

-- Michael took me to the archive room, and produced a box full of letters and correspondences between Marianne Moore and Joseph Cornell. I immediately recognized Cornell's handwriting on the envelopes, and the collages are just as fresh today as when they were first mailed. One letter was typewritten on blue stock, and had paper pockets glued to the margins which contained small clippings of animals (Moore was working on a fable involving animals at the time). Cornell at one point in the correspondence included a small slip of paper that had on it a short but vivid description of a room in one of Balzac's works, suggesting that it might have been a room that Marianne Moore might have enjoyed. (Cornell would have loved Live Journal).

-- One of the few remaining copies of the first book printed in North America: a bible printed in the Algonquin language, circa 1640.

-- At the end of our tour, Michael shared with me one last thing: a copy of The Ballad of Reading Jaol, containing a handwritten letter by Wilde to his old friend Bobbie Ross. The letter went something like this:"Here is a copy for you dear Bobbie. I had the idea while waiting in the dock during my trial. Do not allow Bosie to claim it as his idea. I am very miserable. --Oscar".

Needless to say I was deeply moved by this experience--and I'm certainly glad I brought along that pie.

My sincerest thanks to Mr. Barsanti, who has given more to me than he will ever know.

~W

( Inside: A perfectly preserved Victorian museum of the natural sciences... )