What I Did On My Summer Vacation

We're a little ways back into the year now -- and incidentally, this is the part I dislike, because no one has papers yet so there are almost no students, except for the panicked older students who are expected to use technology, but aren't being taught to use it.  The other day, M and I worked with a very nice gentleman.  She taught him to make capital letters on the computer.  I taught him how a printer works.  She taught him to use the mouse.

There is a lengthy diatribe on educational priorities in here somewhere, but I will limit myself: Did it ever occur to anyone to maybe require a computer-usage placement test?  It's seemed to me since high school, when I volunteered to drive some of my friends home after they missed the bus staying late in the computer lab, that the requirement of technology usage reinforces class distinctions in educational opportunity.  Clemson University requires that every student own a laptop -- and in my current still-a-bit-under-the-weather state I can't decipher whether this fixes or exacerbates the problem.

Anyway.

We've gotten started now, but before we did, M and I went to spend a couple of days in Asheville, North Carolina, where O. Henry lived for a while.  We went on the first day to Biltmore, the Vanderbilt family's estate.  After looking at the website, I came away with the impression that it was where rich people go to buy expensive branded wines and jellies and be rich together, but M's grandmother was kind enough to give us tickets and it was absolutely and completely worth the trip.

I've been to California's Hearst Castle, which is a melange of stuff imported over the Atlantic to build a fantasy Mediterranean village -- the architect called the style of that place something like "Franco-Anglo-Arabesque-Mediterranea-Japano-Rusko-screw-the-look-whatever-my-client-wants architecture."  Biltmore was a useful companion, since it is also a very Victorian-American estate -- appropriated spoils of empire and of education, combining in a large, somewhat asymmetrical cathedral-inspired house on top of a hill -- but Biltmore is much better-designed, and you can see how people would have flowed through it, both the guests and the downstairs class.  It's useful to see how the estate would harmoniously operate.

Also, some very inspiring wallpaper-decor combinations, including some beautiful examples of using rich jewel tones to make the very Victorian damask and tapestry feel masculine -- I'd give a photo, but they apparently never release them, contributing to my previous impression that it was a fancified wealth getaway -- and some wonderful 1890s-1900s clothing was on display, including a probably Worth-inspired gown and several pieces with delightful nostalgic touches that made my inner costumer dance.

Also, this fountain:


This view of the gardens (August is not a good time for gardens in the Carolinas, but these still looked pretty good):


And this carved marble pillar from the outside, which I'd love to "translate" into a jewelry design, somehow:


As for dining in town: The Jerusalem Garden Cafe is out of this world.  We ate there the first night and went back the second.  Try their curried mango shrimp -- it's delicate and warm, not spicy, and is served over perfect couscous.  It's atmospheric and lovely, especially the floor seating, and the servers are wonderfully attentive.  Asheville's more famous Tupelo Honey Cafe, however, was terrible and not worth the wait.  M's meal, the shrimp and grits, was drenched in hot sauce (not listed on the menu) and too spicy to eat; when we remarked on it, the server suggested stirring it around a bit.  Mine was a fried chicken something-or-other and was too salty to have more than a few bites.  However, if you still want to go, the peach rosemary lemonade is delicious.

Asheville can be described like this:  If you took a mellower version of the free-spiritedness and general artsy insanity of San Francisco and fused it with the prissy exclusivity of San Diego, their hipster love child would be Asheville (two silent E's.  And it went to North Carolina.  You've probably never heard of it).  The shopping is delightful -- don't miss the Spice and Tea Exchange, where they sell ras el hanout with black pepper and hibiscus flowers, and also onion-infused sugar and powdered extract of burgundy wine.  Malaprop's Bookstore is also a must-do -- we shopped a while and then sat drinking their amazing ginger lattes for hours.  And Woolworth Walk is not to be missed -- yes, there are all kinds of little art studios down by the river, but they were like an IRL Etsy, so you might as well visit through a screen -- and also overpriced and of questionable quality.  Woolworth Walk is right in town and features some truly amazing art -- pottery, installments, and traditional.  We purchased, or rather my parents purchased us through the magic of plastic and our birthdays coming up, a piece by Brenda Marks.  It's a three-dimensional giclee over wood rendition of her photo collage "Serenity."  Here's a picture of it on our wall, but visit her site because our lighting does it no justice:


Doesn't the dark luminous aqua balance the red so very eye-catchingly?  Stunning.

A necklace I wanted to talk a little more about

Available here.

I named this necklace Arc of Ages, which is supposed to be a cleverish allusion to Rock of Ages (still a'rollin, rock of ages ...).  We got the vintage (I date it to the 1970s based on style) necklace base from Grandma's Antiques and Things, a fantastic little store run out of a garage in Pendleton which has become my primary steampunkerie supplier (the octogenarian proprietor is really having trouble figuring out what those nice girls are doing with all that weird hardware).

What I wanted to point out, because my blog, not my item descriptions, is the place for annoying self-congratulation, is the rather coherent symbolism that forms in the strange combination of materials here.  (Note that M deserves the majority of the credit for this.)  The large watch face, of course, aligns it with the sf-clockwork look.  The rectangular shield has an odd, delightful filigree pattern reminiscent of a somewhat mechanized paisley -- and of course, nothing is more neo-historical than shamelessly appropriating the motifs of other cultures (see here.)  The arrangement of the subtle gears (really, they're barely visible in person, the light picking them up for an instant before they vanish for a moment in the harmonized chaos of the design) arcs gracefully around the watch face like an event horizon.  Also suggesting the passage of time and the "message of ancient days," as the sole quote I know from Cicero pontificates, is the centerpiece of the watch face: an antiqued silvertone pewter connector in the shape of a Celtic knot, representing infinity.

Multicultural, neo-Victorian, time-traveller-esque -- I think I found steampunk, honey!  Two different thicknesses of triple-link cable chain (vintage) complete the necklace in a statement-goddess-waterfall shape.

I'm also proud of the rather slick wirework on the piece.  See the back:

Wonderful, weird couture

From the Department of Cool Victorian Clothing, in conjunction with the Department of "Stuff You See a Lot Of in Steampunk Jewelry that Is Surprisingly Historically Accurate":

The internet was abuzz a couple of months back over the restoration of the dress from John Singer Sargent's Lady Macbeth:


Courtesy JSSGallery.org.

If you missed it, it's well worth a look: here are Virtual Victorian's and the Daily Mail's articles on the dress.

The interesting elements? A.) The dress was famously worn by the gorgeous redhead actress Ellen Terry, who I have always found M to rather resemble, in 1888, and B.) it's adorned with hundreds and hundreds of actual beetle wings. You know, like these and these.

The description of the repair process in the first article linked is also quite technically interesting for those who do such delicate work.

Multiculturalism in Victorian Accessories

Victorian clothing was slightly more resistant to extremes than we are sometimes led to believe.  Then as now, Paris was the center of the fashion world, where extremes of couture included (during Jane Austen's era) piercing the nipples and wearing sheer, dampened bodices so the piercings were visible through the clothing -- and the Parisian fashion plates we think of as our primary sources for Victorian clothing were to the dress of, say, wealthy English and German women in the 19th century as high-fashion magazines are to day-to-day celebrity attire today.
However, while dresses might stay plainer and more conservative than fashion plates show, worldly socialites wished to bedeck themselves in all the luxuries of Empire; colonial capitalists wanted to adorn their daughters in the spoils of their trade.  This meant both other parts of Europe, plus "the Orient" (Africa and the East). Yet, this article discusses, the Eastern woman was stereotyped to be the antithesis of everything a Victorian woman ought to be.  So how to combine that "exotic" allure with good, stolid Western virtue?

Accessories and trimmings.


Victorian outerwear mantles from the 1850s and 1870s, North African inspired, in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, whose online exhibit of Orientalist clothing is here and as droolworthy as it is educational.

Hence, we get turbans worn for evening in the 30s, patterned Chinese and Japanese silks and velvet brocades in at-home and bedroom wear throughout three centuries (the wallpaper in the Ribbon and Ladies' Bedrooms at Woodburn is another great example), and mosaic jewelry, Etruscan Revival jewelry like the demi-parure below, and (I kid you not) chandelier earrings.


Image courtesy of Jewels at South Kensington.

Unbeknownst to most, cameos are actually an expression of, not Orientalism but definitely multiculturalism.  They're an old art form; there's a tale of Alexander the Great presenting his lover Bagoas with a cameo portrait in chalcedony.  The best place in the world to get cameos was (and is) Pompeii, where there was a school of cameo-making and where students sold their work to pay their tuition. Lava cameos, made from the remaining lava rock from the Mt. Vesuvius explosion, were most popular. Lava cameos were a frequent gift to sweethearts when a young gentleman just out of school finished his Grand Tour. Owning one meant that you or someone you knew had either been to Rome or paid an exorbitant amount for an import.

For more on multicultural Victorian accessories: Have a look at the references to African imported silks and the turban Algerienne (remember Algeria was a violently oppressed French colony at the time) in these 1844 fashion forecasts, and later, this discussion of Poiret's exoticized Edwardian hats and slippers.  And Beyond Victoriana has a wonderful analysis of what incorporating Orientalism (or the delightful neologism "Victorientalism") in steampunk actually means; I don't entirely agree with the discussion, because I frankly think the alternative to Victorientalism is whitewashing, but it is intelligent and anyone interested in Orientalism should give it a read.

The glory that was Rome

A necklace heavily inspired by Gradiva, the novella by Wilhelm Jensen based on a Roman bas-relief; the artwork and book jointly inspired some of Freud's ideas about fetish and a Dali painting.

Here's my interpretation:

Available here.

The cameo is a vintage glazed ceramic piece I've had for donkey's years, worked into one of my nest-type bezels.  When I'm making those I'm always convinced they're not working, but they almost always do ...  The wirework on the chain is not just decorative, but secures the connections between the chain and the beading in a graceful, textural manner.

Cameos are an old art form.  In the pre-industrial age, cameos were not the molded-resin pretties we are familiar with today, but were hand-carved from ivory, shell or stones.  There is some (possibly apocryphal) record of Alexander the Great presenting his Persian lover, Bagoas, with a ring containing a portrait cameo of himself carved in chalcedony.  You can still find some natural-material cameos, like these black lip shell examples, but hand-carved ones are rarer than ever.
More on cameos, plus multiculturalism in Victorian accessories, on Monday!

A more ephemeral creation

Inspired by the menus of the Steampunk Cookery blog, for St. Patrick's day yesterday I decided to do a steampunk-style holiday meal: a made-from-scratch meal incorporating a number of different cultural culinary traditions into a Victorian-style course plan.

St. Patrick's Day is very much an immigrant holiday. Though celebrated in Ireland, there it's a literal holy day. In the U.S., it marks an entire day celebrating an immigrant culture that was once rejected. It celebrates through the unthinking use of really terrible stereotypes, mind you, and consequently bothers me, but I honor the spirit of it, at least.

M loves corned beef (which is multicultural in itself; it's a traditionally Jewish dish adopted as a bacon replacement), but we're waiting for it to go on sale as we do with most holiday foods, so I prepared the following:

I quartered, boiled and mashed with butter five pounds of small russet potatoes. Mashed potatoes are remarkably easy if you don't mind the skin; actually (cocktail party fact), a diet of milk and potatoes with the skin on provides all the nutrients necessary for human subsistence, the same as a diet of rice and beans.

Then, I made Swedish-style baked cardamom meatballs with a couple of Italian-style additions: torn fresh basil and extra garlic. These bake for thirty minutes, then are covered in sauce and baked for twenty more; I replaced the traditional sweet-savory brown gravy with a sauce inspired by the traditional Middle Eastern garlic-yogurt dressing for dishes like Turkish cacik. My version used thinned sour cream, garlic, paprika and some red pepper flakes.

I served the baked sauce and meatballs with sliced onions over a bed of the mashed potatoes. This was accented by a spinach, romaine and homegrown kale salad tossed in honey mustard dressing, plus my homemade wheat bread with butter (about which more next week). We replaced the traditional beer-or-whiskey with a pear cider.

The meal was a huge success, the five pounds (99 cents) of russet potatoes and one pound ($1.96) of ground beef yielded easily enough for four to six (we love our leftovers!), and I spent an hour concocting the recipes from five different online sources. They are now taking a proud place in my recipe box -- another old tradition that I am wholeheartedly adopting as my own.

History, costuming, and houses, oh my!

Before I arrived in SC, M got involved in the Pendleton Historic Foundation, which runs two antebellum farmhouses (not plantation houses; plantations were single cash-crop places) in the area, Woodburn and Ashtabula.  It seems Woodburn functions as more of a museum and Ashtabula as the reenactment headquarters.



They're big, graceful white Federal-style wooden manors (Woodburn at left, Ashtabula at right), and the collections are pretty incredible.  Woodburn has a ghost, it seems; the local police would check on the place at night and kept reporting seeing a woman or boy looking out the attic windows, but a couple of years ago a photographer for the National Register of Historic Places accidentally snapped a photo.  I can't find a copy online, but it's a striking one; there's a copy framed in the original entryway (there are two entryways.  The house's second owner turned the house back-to-front.  We are mystified as to why).

The other day we went in to do the tour training at Woodburn.  It's a remarkable place; in 1966, it was redone with 1830s reproduction wallpaper throughout.  Lovely stuff, nice touches of the Orientalism of the 1850s-and-on in one of the bedrooms, and we have much of the Adger and Pinckney families' original furniture, including a desk with tariffs and taxes still glued to the inside of the cabinets and the Adgers' exquisite Wedgwood china.  Upstairs is a wardrobe which is entirely filled with French-imported ladies' gowns.  We're not fully aware of the era yet; M is intended to be going through the clothing collection in the next few months.

Entertainingly, no one can agree on anything about the place.  Every historical society or local volunteer group I've ever worked with (there have been at least three) have "a person" for various things.  "We don't know about the clothing or quilts," says E, the president (I think), "but with Megan here we now have a clothing and textiles person," or, "Our genealogy person couldn't come today, but he thinks this."  No one is entirely sure of some things: They debate whether a room off one of the bedrooms was a closet or not, they debate whether the wall through the ballroom/drawing room-parlor in the Pinckney back/Adger front was original to the house or added, and they're pretty sure all the Oriental-style rugs are American-made and old-but-not-antique, but "we don't really have a rug person."  The major problem?  Everyone who originally worked on the home restoration in the 1960s is now dead.  These kinds of societies don't tend to draw the young.

I was quite pleased to hear that they've got all kinds of uses for my weird skill set.  There's an herb garden at Woodburn which I'm to be working in, and possibly a trail tour I might assist with and talk about native plants and ecosystem restoration.  They were quite excited to hear about my jewelry skills; I'm supposed to help Megan do a lecture on clothing at Woodburn, and there are also Mourning Tours at Ashtabula that could use someone to talk about jet and hair jewelry.  There's a Native American Heritage Day in March that could use a trained cultural anthropologist, and an African American Heritage Day which I will not be remotely an expert in but which I want to pick up on before I start guiding tours.  But mostly I'd like to be the "jewelry person."

Woodburn is literally across the street from the technical college (where I now officially work; hooray!), so I expect to spend a lot of time there.

M and I are happily talking about making me an 1840s-era dress in dusty rose (this would make my mom laugh; I refused to wear pink for years, and only now that I am a damn queer living with a woman have I reluctantly acknowledged that I look really good in it).  We're talking about the possibility of doing one full skirt and two bodices, one a sleeved day dress and one an evening gown with a deep off-the-shoulder decolletage.  This allows a lot of different types of jewelry display, always important to me, and since the houses tend to be in the mid-20s in the winter, I'll have something warm and daytime-appropriate for giving tours in.  The interesting part is the decolletage; we're planning to try making it snap-in/tie-in/velcro-in/something so that I'll wind up with 1.) a fairly standard 1840s evening gown, 2.) a steampunk 1840s dress by adding jewelry, a mini top hat, a slightly more daring decolletage, and a pocketed bustle belt similar to these, and 3.) a heavily lace-trimmed decolletage that, with accessories, could become a Fat Lady costume for our next Harry Potter conference or a "Porcelain Doll from Hell" sort of thing for Halloween.

So yeah!