Outsider art

Thrift store art

The naive, the innocent, the self-taught,
the visionary, the intuitive, the eccentric;
The schizophrenic, the developmentally disabled,
the psychotic, the obsessive, the compulsive.

Outsider art, also known as art brut, grows in popularity as fine art becomes more esoteric. Recent rediscoveries include Henry Darger, Adolf Wölfli and Charles A. A. Dellschau. A collection of general sites and link lists:

• Intuit
• Interesting ideas link list
• an Art brut museum in Switzerland
• Randomviolins link list

The underside of outsider art is thrift shop art. Some artists, despite being innocent, self-taught, visionary, schizophrenic, etc. simply have no talent. Collections of their work can be found at:

• Thriftstoreart.com
• Huge Magazine

[link]

Materia: SI neg numbers 81-12615, 84-2385, 85-19406, 88-8142;
videodisc frames 2A-44509, 2B-41416;
Processing: Paint Shop Pro v. 5;
Motivation: a quick self-indulgence.

[link]

Tiger Lady

Mabel Stark was one of the great tiger trainers of the 1910's and 1920's. Her life is now the subject of a novel, The Final Confession of Mabel Stark by Robert Hough, a book which has generated some controversy because it describes the sexual nature of Mabel's relationship with her big cats. Film rights have already been sold; Kate Winslet will play the lead.

Elsewhere on the Web, writer Rip Rense recalls seeing Mabel as an old woman, still handling big cats in Jungleland, California. (The article originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times in 1993.) And this article from 1950 describes some of Mabel's many maulings; at her death, she was covered with scars left by her beloved cats. Mabel's autobiography, Hold That Tiger, is long out of print; copies currently available on Abebooks start at $99.

Appropriately, the current top tiger tamer of Ringling Brothers, Barum and Bailey is also a woman, the flamboyant Sara Houcke. Unlike Mabel, Sara comes from a circus family. Mabel came to the circus from outside, which makes her career all the more unusual.

Would you like to raise big cats in your home? This handy guide covers matters such as litter-box training, feeding, and keeping the tigers from destroying the furniture.

posted by Barbara Weitbrecht at 5:30PM

posted by Barbara Weitbrecht at 5:30PM

Errata and addenda

My colleagues have been making helpful comments on previous posts, most of them starting with "I hate to pick nits, but...." Well, what are nits if not for picking? So in the interest of increased accuracy and completitude in blogging, we present:


The truth about the Boeing Dash 80:

Last Friday I wrote: "(They're also supposed to send us a Dash 80.)" But it is not a Dash 80--it's the Dash 80. The plane (also known as the 367-80) was the prototype of the Boeing 707. There was only one of them; it's unique. Additional information can be found at Boeing, ASME and this private site.


The Arcata police log

Arcata, California, currently notorious for passing a city ordinance against the federal USA PATRIOT Act, may be better known for its quirky online Police Log, published in the Arcata Eye, the town's newspaper. This is not your average city crime docket. (But then, Arcata is hardly your average city.) Some recent entries include:

Saturday, March 22. 1:02 p.m.

A slight, freckled man who exuded
Booze-reeky style vapors, intruded
A Valley West lobby
Then, just as a hobby
Went door-banging till he was booted.

Tuesday, March 25 1:37 a.m.

He wasn't exactly the town crier, that hooded-sweatshirt figure interrupting the sleep of upper H Street residents. He was more like the town vomiter, augmenting his noisy heavings with dire bouts of screaming and moaning. Police found a cocktail victim, his beard and his dog, and sent the aromatic entourage on their way.

Thursday, March 27 9:29 p.m.

Six travelers halted in their wanderings long enough to block Tavern Row's sidewalk, and that's illegal in Arcata.

posted by Barbara Weitbrecht at 5:30PM

A colleague informs me that the 1,300 reels of microfilm reported yesterday in Curtiss-Wright's press release to be coming to NASM is actually "more like 22". It sounds like Wright State is getting the lion's share of the archive. More rumors as they break....

A somewhat more reliable rumor: The FAA is discontinuing its library, and the NASM branch of the SI Libraries will be receiving 20 years worth of materials.

posted by Barbara Weitbrecht at 6:00PM

Freelance decamping

With the war in Iraq now all but officially over, independent reporter Christopher Allbritton has posted his last entry to his weblog, Back in Iraq 2.0. Allbrittton has been blogging live from Kurdish territory since early April. An exerpt from the final post:

The war here is winding down, and the long, laborious process of rebuilding has started. Much of the activity in Baghdad involves the U.S. command looking for qualified people to help get the city back on its feet. Water and power still have to be restored. A state economy now lacks the state, so people have no jobs; no one is there to pay them. Kurds, Arabs and Turkomen in Kirkuk are a hair’s breadth away from Yugoslavia-style ethnic clashes. Mosul is still savage, with little order. One reporter who returned from there yesterday described it to me as "like Mogadishu" with the city divvied up into territories for armed gangs and almost no civil authority. There are fewer than 300 American troops for a city of two million people. This has gone almost completely unreported from what the journos in Arbil are hearing from editors back home. No one seems to care about Mosul, they say

posted by Barbara Weitbrecht at 6:00PM

There will always be an Arcata

In these times of cultural upheaval, it's comforting to know that northern California is still marching (or perhaps tap-dancing) to its own drummer. The tiny town of Arcata (population 16,000) has become the first community in the nation to pass an ordinance against voluntary compliance with the controversial federal PATRIOT Act. [more] [more] [more]

As usual, California leads the rest of the nation. The Washington Post reports that "...to date, 89 cities have passed resolutions condemning the Patriot Act, with at least a dozen more in the works and a statewide resolution against the act close to being passed in Hawaii." A spokeswoman for the San Francisco FBI office complained that the PATRIOT Act was misunderstood. "We still have to show probable cause for any actions we take," she said. "It's not just an agent descending and saying, 'Hey, I want to go in and see what this person is doing.'"

The Arcata ordinance takes effect on May 2. However, there is unlikely to be a wave of civil disobediance (in either direction) since as far as one knows, the PATRIOT Act has never been used against Arcata residents.

posted by Barbara Weitbrecht at 6:00PM

There's something disturbing about a war so short that losing your weblog for two weeks locks you out of commenting on most of it. The news now grows fragmentary and chaotic, like a dream in the small hours of morning.

Meanwhile, I see that the restoration (or the re-restoration) of our Boeing 307 Stratoliner has run into a few problems. The plane, the only Stratoliner still in existence, had been restored by Boeing for incorporation into our new museum near the Dulles airport. But a routine test flight in March, 2002, went horribly wrong when the plane ran out of gas and ditched in Seattle's Elliott Bay. Repairs began. But Boeing is feeling a little short of money these days. Will we see the Stratoliner in time for the Hazy Center's December opening? (They're also supposed to send us a Dash 80.)

And, it looks like we'll be getting a Concorde from British Airways when they retire the fleet.

On a more archival note, I see that NASM is receiving a complete set of Curtiss-Wright aeronautical blueprints, which include an estimated 1,300 reels of microfilm and 30 large cabinets of paper drawings. I trust that someone has figured out where to put these things? We'll be holding the collection jointly with Wright State University in Dayton, so perhaps they have the space to store the collection until our new offices at Hazy are constructed. We'll probably learn the details at next week's Archives staff meeting.

posted by Barbara Weitbrecht at 5:45 PM

We take our gardens where we find them.

posted by Barbara Weitbrecht at 5:30PM

This is getting exceedingly annoying. Blogger has not been posting, although it cheerfully informs me that all posts are successful. Blogger, of course, will only give tech support to paying members. I attempted to become a paying member, but their paying-member page was 404'd. As Nero Wolfe would have said, "Pfui!" A friend suggested that I convert the site to Movable Type. Which was a grand idea, except my ISP wouldn't support their database on my old account. So I upgraded the account (hence the shiny new domain name, which the new account required). Then I read the Movable Type documentation. I'm sure I can learn enough UNIX eventually to understand it, but dammit I want my weblog back NOW! The same friend who suggested Movable Type then helpfully suggested that I do the whole thing by hand. After all, that's how he does his weblog. (And a fine one it is, Allan!) I do confess to a major laziness when it comes to updating archives by hand. I could, I suppose, write my own file generator in FileMaker. And I probably will when I get the new iMac at home. Or maybe I'll learn UNIX. But for now, it's back to good old HTML-Kit, and the archives will get updated when I damn' well get around to it. On the other hand, I always did like to drive stick-shift.

posted by Barbara Weitbrecht at 7 PM, more or less
As long as one has total freedom of content, one might as well exploit it.