The Woodman Institute Museum in Dover NH is famous for having a four-legged chicken, but that’s only a small example of the weirdness you’ll find inside. A big collection of snakes and bugs and bears in top hats along with other examples of taxidermy fills the first two floors. The top floor is dedicated to war and includes the obligatory rusty cannon ball that killed and maimed.

The absolute scariest part of the entire museum, however, is the hall of dolls. Amanda Etches-Johnson calls it the stuff of nightmares.

The Albacore is a post World War II experimental submarine now on display in Portsmouth NH. Seeing the sub on land, some height above sea level, is a bit surprising, and it’s clear that moving it there was no small task.

Five dollars will get you inside the sub’s tight and awkward quarters, where you’ll see the Frankensteinian bathroom (and that’s for officers) and details such as lithium hydroxide canisters and signal ejector instructions that stand as reminders of the dangers of submarining. Still, it’s open enough that you can sit down at the controls and pretend to pilot the craft.

Most travel guides simply call it the “shovel museum,” but it’s really the Stonehill Industrial History Center. Much more than shovels, curator Greg Galer tells us the collection reveals interesting facts about what we were building and how we built it over the past 200 years.

Located on the campus of Stonehill College in Easton Massachusetts, the collection does boast 755 shovels from the Ames manufacturing companies. From the FAQ:

By the 1870s Ames was the largest shovel manufacturer in the world, making three-fifths of the world’s shovels, although even as early as the 1830s and 1840s they struggled to meet the demand for their highly prized products. Ames shovels were the tool of choice in both the California and Australian gold rushes as well as in most major American building projects including the Erie and Panama Canals and most American railroad construction. Ames shovels literally built America.

Above is the Ames Centennial display of 19 silver-plated shovels as prepared for the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. Amusingly, they’re displayed in the original display case. Inside the vault with the rest of the collection, Galer proudly points out not only the typical shovels we’re familiar with, but shovels designed for working coffee beans, 10-foot-long shovels used to dig telegraph pole holes, and tiny trenching shovels used by US troops in WWI and WWII.

But shovels are just a piece of the collection. Deeper in the vault are the business records, blueprints, patents and other materials that offer primary source documentation of America’s early growth into an industrial superpower.

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I had a good opportunity to revisit the Museum of Bad Art in Dedham Mass earlier this week. Above is my buddy Corey, but I was amused to find that visitors appear to be leaving their own works for the collection.

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Atlanta was a bit of a lark. I hadn’t seen my friends for a while, and they were telling me that the weather was beautiful. So why not go?

Anyway, Chuck Close is on display at the High Museum. And the thing about Close’s work is that it frustrates my rule of “don’t do twice what you can automate once.” Many of his portraits are the result of carefully mapped and measured graph lines that allow him to create pixelated works. I want to use computers to do this, but he used a ruler and paper. Nonetheless, many of his works — like his early self portrait at the top this story — are truly stunning.

Rather more interesting to me was Roger Ballen’s “Shadow Chamber” show at the ACA Gallery. It’s not often that you can call a work of photography Surrealist, but, well, you might not have seen Ballen’s work. From the brochure:

Ballen uses the assumed objectivity of his camera to explore the subjective world of dreams, nightmares, and calculated chaos. He is at the height of his powers as a director, and each picture is architecturally rigorous, tonally stunning, and emotionally saturated.

Later, after some low-art/high-fun times at Whole World Theater, we stopped by Troy’s studio at Saltworks, where a collection of Iona Rozeal Brown’s provocative and fetishistic work was showing.

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Howard Hughes‘ Spruce Goose now rests in McMinnville, at the Evergreen Aviation Museum.

The Goose is as long as a 747 with a wingspan a third again as broad, and for a short few seconds in 1947, it flew.

The docent was incredibly pleased to tell us that the tail almost broke off during those few seconds in the air. He claimed Hughes hushed up the story and maintained the aircraft in flight-ready condition to protect himself from further attacks from government accountants.

The turbine below is one of a number on display, including one from an SR71 Blackbird. The rest of the Blackbird crouches under the Goose’s port wing.

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I wasn’t just surprised to find a gallery of velvet paintings, I was further surprised to learn they were hosting a show of Valentines velvet works by local artist Juanita and had cards advertising a show of LA artist Arnold Pander’s oil on velvet works at the local Vault Martini Lounge.

But the fact is, Carl Baldwin and Caren Anderson’s Velveteria is the place, if ever there was such a place, where such forces will collide.

Sadly, my visit Saturday evening was at a time when the owners weren’t hosting, and the woman who was there wasn’t able to offer much to explain the works. Fortunately, artist Arnold Pander (whose works span a broad range of media, including oil on velvet) lays out this history of velvet painting in his personal gallery:

For hundreds of years velvet paintings have been created in various ways, dating back to the fourteenth century when Marco Polo discovered samples of velvet paintings in Kashmir, where velvet was first woven. During the Victorian era, painting on velvet became a popular hobby amongst the British upper class with floral and still life subjects. It later came to the U.S. during the post revolutionary period where biblical scenes and landscapes were the dominant themes of this romantic medium. Edward Leeteg revolutionized the velvet painting in the 20th century with his figurative “pin-up” style of Tahitian native culture in the 30s 40s and 50s. Leeteg transformed the way velvet painting was perceived, solidifying it as a part of American pop-culture.

(Pander’s works can also be seen at the Mark Woolley Galery.)

The Velveteria stands in northwest Portland and offers about 150 works in two rooms. My knowledge of the medium was limited to badly rendered paintings of Elvis sold along with bull skulls out of the trunks of big American cars from decades past.

Portland Picks tells me the genre is typically represented by a “Elvis/Jesus/Clowns trifecta,” but we both agree that the range represented in the museum is almost beyond words. I say “almost” not because I’m going to attempt to describe them, no. I say it that way because I have this further link to the Portland Mercury about the whole thing (though it’s worth noting that they apparently couldn’t begin to report the story without quoting Dave Hickey’s famous “good taste is the residue of someone else’s privilege”).

But the Mercury did also explain the Velveteria’s nude room, saying “buxom lasses” as are the dominant subject of the black velvet medium.

Painting on velvet (paint is applied either by brush or air gun, or frequently a combination of the two) results in a unique luminosity when done well, and skin tones highlight this quality best.

The owners are said to have over 1000 velvet works in their collection, so this is clearly a passion for them, I’m just sorry to have missed the opportunity to meet them. Admission is $3, and the bumper sticker is $2. Tee shirts, postcards, and keychain peepers are also available.

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The first license plate to remember Nevada’s history as the host of the US’s nuclear testing grounds drew criticism for featuring a mushroom cloud (see the plate on the right, above). Now it appears folks are at it again, this time with a plate that depicts the site’s area and includes the classic illustration of an atom’s electron cloud.

All of this generated enough interest to bring the local media out to the Atomic Testing Museum to gawk at the proposed plate, including an actual-sized rendition being shown off on a Lincoln Navigator.

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I’ve been sitting on this story since October, hoping I’d be able to get to the show, but It’s increasingly clear that I’m not getting to NYC for a while. So, anyway…

MoMA is showing SAFE: Design Takes On Risk

Wired Magazine described it:

Just in time for the wave of catastrophes plaguing our fragile planet, some top designers unveil a series of aesthetically pleasing objects that could be handy in dangerous situations, from the banal to the apocalyptic.

[...]

The 303 pieces in SAFE cover six categories: shelter, armor, property, everyday, emergency and awareness. Some protect us from the trivial danger of embarrassment (Otohime, which muffles bathroom noises with the electronically generated sound of a toilet flushing), while others could help us survive a shipwreck in stormy seas (a Sea Shelter life raft with a step below the surface of the water that makes it easier to clamber aboard).

[...]

Not every exhibit item is a lifesaver. The miniature frog respirator and prairie dog work gloves in the Safety Gear for Small Animals exhibit are presumably meant to deliver more metaphorical impact than practical benefit. Such displays of whimsy help lighten the mood at what could have been a horror show of our darkest fears.

I’m consoling myself with the online exhibition, but wishing I lived a little closer to New York.

(Via Gizmodo)

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Dick Porter, of Onset MA, has been building his collection of over 5000 thermometers since the mid-80s, though the collection has nearly doubled since 1998 when it was just over 3000. He calls it the world’s largest and only thermometer museum. He’s certainly passionate about them, and he’s been an invited speaker at more than a few thermometer and weather related events, like the christening of the world’s largest thermometer in Baker California.

The collection, which Porter values at about $4 per piece, fills his home’s small basement, and visitors should expect him to be an active docent. He has stories about many of the thermometers, even some memories of the day the scientific community decided to honor Anders Celsius by eponymously renaming his centigrade scale. Thinking of scales, Porter even has a few Reamur thermometers. Impressive, yes, though Wikipedia notes a few more temperature scales he didn’t mention. I guess it’s challenges like that that get a guy through the day.

It’s all at 49 Zarahemla Road Onset, MA 02558, and visitors should probably give Mr. Porter a call (508) 295-5504 to confirm he’ll be home to host you. All info current as of my October 2005 visit, more info at Roadside America and Odd New England.

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I was browsing the NPR archives the other day and found this report on the International Balloon Museum in Albuquerque, N.M.. Of course I want to go there.

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