Food and Work. The Usual.

We've been eating lots and lots of good food lately... and taking lots of pictures, but i'm too lazy to get them off the camera. One thing i love about my notebook is that i can take pictures with it, and voila, there's the pic. No wires, no camera, no hassle. Someday soon i suppose some next generation bluetooth thingy will just beam photos from the camera to the computer. That will be nice.

Tonight I cooked; Steven spent a bunch of time in the garden getting all his sprouting babies some tlc. Still a few more weeks until all the plants in the house and greenhouse can emerge back into the front and back gardens. We had a nice Porterhouse steak, some simple broiled asparagus, and totally sinful potatoes: boiled and then tossed with scallion, butter, SNOWVILLE CREAMERY cream cheese, and some wonderful chicken stock paste we've been buying at Trader Joes.



In other news, I went to Sioux City for my project there (the eighth trip now?) and got to survey an old, trashed Eisenhower-Interstate-System-era concrete road paver. This baby is going to be restored (by the gentleman standing next to me, who owns it, and is donating it to the museum that is my client) and placed in the visitor experience. All told, with it's 1957 Mack Diamond T dump truck in the front, dumping raw material into the skip, the drum and mixer, and the boom with the traveling bucket, it is nearly 90 feet long. So, as the designer, actually placing it is going to be a really fun challenge.



Along with a couple of airplanes, a 1902 Oldsmobile (think mahogany Chris Craft: mostly made out of wood!), numerous buckboards, broughams, carriages and buggies, several other 20s and 30s era vehicles, many industrial and stockyard and meatpacking fragments, hundreds of pieces of terra cotta and other architectural fragments, gobs of furniture and household material culture, and thousands of other smaller artifacts, the road paver above is being arranged into a coherent story of Sioux City history. Coherent sentences be damned.

The giant artifacts are really fascinating and have many stories to tell; but the most exciting parts i'm working on involve audio-visual environments that work in conjunction with the collection. A burned out building recreation will house giant projections of Sioux City disasters (fires, floods, explosions, the crash of United 232, etc.). Another environment is Sioux City's Attic, and will celebrate the bizarre, cryptic, and often surreal connections between what a museum collects, the stories of the people involved, and the networks out into the rest of the world that result. Many of the artifacts demonstrate an essential irony: here, in the city history museum, one finds pieces that really have nothing to do with Sioux City... well, except for the fact that a Sioux City native collected them. The gallery will have lots of a/v tricks: mirrors that dissolve into ghost stories, televisions and music boxes that mysteriously come to life, furniture that flies and rugs that pull out from under one's feet. Another theatrical space will recreate a portion of a Corn Palace from SC history; a show-controlled theatrical presentation with object reveals and dramatic overviews of this place that--with all the exuberance and hucksterism of the 1880s--once tried to market itself as Chicago's rival.

I think i'm going to walk (waddle?) across the street now for a little tub of ice cream.