Yes, I watched it.

A classmate hosted a wedding-viewing brunch this morning, so I baked my most British scones, rustled up some clotted cream, pulled out a silly hat and sat down to watch The Event.

But amidst all the Sarah-Burton-for-Alexander-McQueen dress excitement (and in my secret, shameful romantic-dream-princess-Barbie heart, I have to admit to liking the gown) not enough people registered the coolest part of the dress: the Royal School of Needlework did the lace stitching!

The RSN is an incredibly awesome organization founded in 1872 by Princess Helena, Queen Victoria's third daughter, to provide lower and middle class women with marketable needlework skills. They are known for producing amazing stitchers and incredibly creative needlework designers. Much of the famous needlework done for the Arts and Crafts movement was done either at the school or by graduates, and they also did the needlework on Queen Elizabeth's coronation robes. They have one of the largest collections of needlework in the west and use their thousands of collection pieces as teaching examples to their students who still train in this highly traditional handicraft.

I got a chance to visit the RSN when I was in London with my graduate cohort this winter — besides being incrediby talented artisans, craftswomen and teachers, I can also say that the women of the RSN are almost absurdly welcoming. They took in 12 tired, hungry and cold graduate students and fed us tea and cookies while they told us the history of the school and the role of needlework in English dec arts history. And just think: while I was eating biscuits and gulping down hot tea, just a few rooms over the finest hands in English stitching were working overtime to make Princess Shinyhair's magical wedding dress. If only I'd known... I could have spilled some tea on it and made history.

Infinite Variety, or, quilts as far as the eye can see

I meant to write about this earlier, but my spring break was awesome. Why, you ask? Oh, no real reason... just going to New York and attending a groundbreaking and amazing quilt exhibition on its closing day.*

The show was incredible — over 600 quilts exhibited at once, more than have ever been shown at one time. And the one unifying theme was color: they were all red and white. The quilts were on loan to the American Folk Art Museum from Joanna S. Rose, and the exhibition (which only lasted six days)** was paid for by her husband as a birthday gift. The real recipient, though, was the city of New York — Rose's husband paid to make sure the show was free to all visitors.

The quilts are all unique — even ones that were made with the same pattern have small differences. They are also all American, spanning in date from the late 18th century to the present day. The vast variety of quilts was amazing, but the truly fantastic thing about the show was the exhibition staging. Assembled in the Park Avenue Armory, the quilts were suspended from the ceiling in a series of cyclical pods. If that makes no sense, don't worry — it was this ridiculously overwhelming sensory experience that really can't be described. The pictures below only go so far to explain how fantastic it was. To be honest, I think I cried a little bit.

The American Folk Art Museum website describes it as a "magical yet ephemeral event." I couldn't agree more. I'll also add that in this crazy museum industry that I seem hell-bent on entering, there are certain shows that live on in people's memory. My professors still talk about "THAT" show, the one that blew them away or made them want to pursue curating as a career. Staged in the American Wing of the Met in the 1960s or at the Whitney in 1985, about art, furniture, basket-weaving, whatever... the thing these shows have in common is that they opened visitors' eyes to the potential of exhibition, to the creativity and power inherent to objects. This is one of those shows, I think, and it is definitely that show for me.







*Thanks, Lizz, for the heads-up via materialconcern! It was truly phenomenal.
** If you missed it, don't worry... there is talk about it being mounted again as a traveling exhibition.

"Young women, you're going to be old women one day."

I would give anything to turn into one of these women as I age. ANYTHING.*

Image from advancedstyle.blogspot.com

*click on the link to get to the video - I tried to embed it but apparently that is a no-no on blogger right now.

The road is my middle name

Winter break was a whirlwind - I spent a few days in Chicago, then packed up my friend's car and headed southwest. After some less-than-ideal weather in the Ozarks, dullness in Oklahoma and the terrible traffic in Dallas, we pulled into Austin for a few days with another old friend. She showed us a grand ol' time, which mostly involved extensive amounts of eating. Austin has crazy good food, dudes. Like, ridiculously good. Like, I've-been-dreaming-about-it good. The tacos alone were reason enough to move there. And don't even get me started on the gourmet doughnut truck! And the cupcake truck... even me, hater of the frou-frou cupcake trend, was charmed!


And the shopping - I have never so badly wanted a pair of cowboy boots as I did during the thirty minutes we spent perusing the shelves of Allen's Boots.


Obviously, these shoes and I are meant to be - I just have to dig up a spare six hundred bucks somewhere. Easy-peasy, right?


Even the store signage was amazing!


My love of tacos and cowboy boots aside, Austin was phenomenal. After a weekend, though, the road started calling us, so we piled back into the car and drove west across the gorgeous sandy emptiness of west Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. The sunset outside of El Paso was particularly stunning, even with all the traffic:


Soon, though, we were dying to return home, and even the rain in Southern California couldn't dampen our excitement about being back in the Golden State. We celebrated with date shakes in Palm Springs:


After a near-disastrous break-pad experience, we pulled into Los Angeles for a night with Isaac and Lizz who wined and dined in the glamorous manner to which we would love to have become accustomed. Revived with a delicious dinner at Good Girl Dinette and a deep night's sleep, we decided to take on the torrential downpour and headed for the Grapevine. Six hours and eight chapters of Stephen Fry's autobiographical audiobook later, we were pulling into the 'rents home in friendly old Berkeley.

And so, after a week and a half on the road, three weeks in the warm embrace of my family, and two weddings, I returned to the great state of Delaware for winter term. Not for long, though - this weekend I take off for two weeks in London with my graduate cohort for a trip the Winterthur program refers to as "History of English Design" but that I prefer to think of as The "So, You Think You Like Museums? THINK AGAIN" Tour of 2011. Ah, the life of the international jet-setter.

Return to the Second City

Essays are finished, my sketchbook filled with drawings of questionable quality has been turned in, and I've worked very hard to stop thinking about the rococo armchair I misidentified on an exam. I woke up this morning in a tiny bedroom under a flight of stairs, looking out on a snow-covered street and thinking, "thank goodness I have my snowboots," and that can only mean one thing: I'm back in Chicago, baby!

My plans for the next few days are simple: visit friends at the Chicago History Museum, relish in the presence of public transportation, and eat everything, everywhere. And then I hop in the car with one of my oldest friends and we drive south for an epic roadtrip that will eventually take us home to California! All in all, I think this is shaping up to be a remarkable winter break.

The turduckin of cakes

I think this might be a challenge...



But I also think I might vomit if this comes anywhere near my kitchenaid mixer. Some things are sacred, y'all, and this might be the devil.

Stupidity, atrocious calumny, infamous wickedness!

Google Translate is my new favorite toy.

As I type I am sitting in Winterthur's rare book room and (carefully) flipping my way through La Mode Nouvelle, a French fashion and political periodical printed in 1832. I'm looking for early 1830s fashion plates in order to compare the styles against French paper dolls from 1822 for a paper that I have due on Friday (oh, graduate school!), but I keep on coming up against very impassioned-looking sentences written in italics and with multiple exclamation points that just cry out for translating.

My current favorite? "Gens de la revolution, avez-vous prodique aux pretres assez de menaces et d'outrages?" Which, according to Google Translate comes out to something like: "People of the Revolution, do you have enough priests to lavishes upon threats and insults?" Somehow I think something was lost in translation.

So, I ask you, people of the revolution: DO you have enough priests to lavishes upon threats and insults? Inquiring minds want to know.

Boxes for everyone!

No, actually, I just made one. So a box for me, I guess.


His name is Walter. He is big enough to hold maybe five pens and a mini-stapler, but he's mine, all mine!

I ended up using linseed oil as a coating instead of shellac - it lets the grain of walnut shine through more. And if I keep using words like "grain," "dovetail," and "chisel," I might be able to fool you into believing that I know what I'm talking about. Which, clearly, I don't.

Still, I made a box! I guess if this museum curator thing fails, I can always fall back on a career in cabinetmaking. (The furniture conservators who supervised our box-making just got pounding headaches and they don't even know why.)

Wood as far as the eye can see

Grad school is hard. We've got tons of reading, papers due every week, and then, of course, there's shop class.

Yes, internet, I am building a wooden candle box in graduate school. Yesterday I used a handsaw and a chisel to make the dovetail joints and then I assembled it using hide glue (which smells, by the way, exactly how you'd expect: gross, and a little like warm melted cow.) Today we're going to be shellacking our boxes to bring out the "shine" of the walnut wood.

Apparently this craft project is supposed to help us understand the experience of the 18th century cabinetmaker and appreciate the material goods they produced in a more hands-on fashion. I'm so busy being inordinately proud of my kind of sloppy dovetails, though, that I don't think I'm going to be able to focus on anything else.

Shoshana, Master Cabinetmaker! Just rolls of the tongue, right?

P.S. I'm in graduate school. I'm pretty sure I mentioned this earlier, but if not - yeah. Graduate school! Can't believe they were crazy enough to let me in, but they can't take it back now.

"Us rich white men cannot stand for this oppression."

Kids reenact the Revolutionary War! It goes a lot faster than I remember from 4th grade history, but I'm guessing they've got it right. British family across the pond, listen up! This is what happens when you try to tax us without giving us appropriate representation in Parliament: you get children in tricorn hats hitting you with baguettes! (mmmm, baguettes.)



Also, the kid at the end has it right: "Now let's party!" Happy birthday, America! Stay classy!

(Video from Babelgum, by way of Jezebel.)

The obligatory Blackhawks post

So, most people who meet me are not surprised to find out that I have very little interest in sports. I love the idea of sports and sports fanaticism, of a civil religion of sorts that draws communities together around a common goal, but actually sitting down and watching a game is sort of beyond me.

Except, apparently, for the fact that Chicago is totally changing me. I went to a Cubs game a few weeks ago (I know, I know, the Cubs suck and their fans are usually really unpleasant, but Wrigley Field is historic! And it's a classic baseball experience!) and I really enjoyed myself. Even more game-changing (see? I make sports puns!), though, is my Chicago Blackhawks experience.

I've always had a fond spot in my heart for hockey - any sport that involves ice skates, extreme speed, violence and toothlessness is okay in my book. But I've just watched a six-game play-off series for the first time, and I am astonished by how fun it was. And twenty minutes ago, the Chicago Blackhawks won the Stanley Cup series against the Philadelphia Flyers, and I found myself jumping and screaming at the TV in my hipster friend's apartment while the city below us went absolutely NUTS.

All of which is to say: Chicago has turned me into a bona fide hockey fan. And with a change like that, who knows what comes next? Maybe I'll even decide to watch Shakespeare in Love!* Crazy changes are afoot!

*Don't hold your breath. This will never happen.

Semper Gumby: always flexible

I am so freaking late to the game on this one, but it has to be said: Generation Kill is AMAZING. The miniseries, I mean... I haven't read the book it's based on, but after watching only two episodes of the show I know it's next on my reading list (after I finish a truly depressing non-fiction account of the building of the Oklahoma City bombing memorial... you can probably guess why it's taking me a while.)

But honestly, I can't get over how phenomenal Generation Kill is. I've been nursing a cold (four months of winter the likes of which is usually only seen in Siberia, and the moment the sun comes out I get sick) so I've been staying in a lot, which has given me TONS of time with which to watch tv on my crappy little laptop screen. Its just like the summer after freshman year of college when I sprained my ankle and spent two months catching up on Veronica Mars, Alias and Sports Night, only this won't last as long.

The show is so well-paced, so well-edited, and the writing is tight, terse and clever all at once. I don't know why I'm surprised, given that David Simon (he of the Wire and Treme) is so centrally involved, but I am just floored by what I've been watching. And I say this as someone who really doesn't like war movies. I mean, don't get me wrong: watching shit blow up on screen is one of my favorite past-times, but I'm well aware that I prefer my violence fantastical and escapist rather than realistic and depressing. In Generation Kill, though, they neither glorify the violence or try to make it a tragic epic about the moral costs of war - instead, it just really feels like we're following these men through an actual invasion, with all the violence and humor and bureaucratic screw-ups that comes with it.

Anyway, I'm only two episodes in so I'm sure my appreciation for the miniseries will become more complex and reflective as I make my way through, but I just thought it had to be said now: Generation Kill is FANTASTIC, and anyone who isn't watching it needs to start right now.



*Oh, and one more thing: this is Ray, my favorite character so far. He got burned by an illegal camp stove that one of the other Marines was using to make espresso! He was on the debate team in high school, but all his fellow teammates thought he was high on uppers all the time! He wears pimp sunglasses and knows all the words to Avril Lavigne songs! He also has some of the most epic speeches on American society, the war, and the ridiculous recruitment commercials the Marines made with that stupid dragon, but they aren't very family friendly. If I removed all the swear words from my favorite monologue so far there would be, like, five other words, and most of them would be definite articles. In short: I LOVE YOU RAY.

Occupation: Gentleman

So occasionally I think of something I want to write a blog entry about, but because I'm not at a point in my day where I can actually write it, I send myself an email or write myself a note about it. Ideally, I then remember to take care of it later. Usually, though, I forget to follow up on the notes and the idea gets lost for all eternity.

In this case, this is all half-true: I wrote the email and even remembered to check it, but it's been so long that I can barely remember what this cryptic note meant: "canfield, who said his occupation was gentleman, and who went to jail and called it his harvard. Whistler painted his portrait and called him his reverence."

Ignoring the horrible grammar for right now (I was on my cell phone, do you know how hard capitalization is on those things?), I think what this email is telling me to do is to research and write about Richard Albert Canfield, a contemporary of the American painter James McNeill Whistler and an honest-to-goodness eccentric. Apparently he listed his occupation as gentleman and was arrested for running a number of illegal casinos and gambling rings. And, as you can see above, he also called jail his "Harvard." He was a colorful and creative man who collected art by the droves and was eventually felled in a fatal fall in a New York City subway.

I'm not sure where I was when I learned this or why I thought it was important that you know it as well, but clearly I did. So there you go: a short and vague history lesson from Shoshi-of-the-past. I hope you enjoyed it.

out and about

So, things have been crazy-awesome lately, and while I don't have time to go into details right now (I'm supposed to be on the train to work at this moment), I will say this: Hawaii is so freaking beautiful and the week my roommates and I spent there at the end of February probably saved me from committing ritual suicide over Chicago's winter.


More to come, eventually.

"Unprintable acts."

Why I love my job, reason #5,021:
I'm researching a man named Oscar W. Brecher, whose wedding suit is in our collection. A quick google search brings up this article in the New York Times archives: "To Take Boy from Sun-Worshippers." In 1910, our friend Oscar was part of an attempt to rescue the boy-heir to a Philadelphia fortune from a cult of sun-worshippers who were planning to do something (probably nefarious, knowing those sun-worshipping types) with the boy and his money. Oscar was appointed his temporary guardian while the courts tried to figure out what to do with him and his mother, who had been implicated in the kidnapping plot.

Ten years later the leader of the cult, Zar Adusht-Hanish, was arrested on charges of "unprintable" acts against five children in Los Angeles, so unfortunately the story becomes much more serious. But still... SUN-WORSHIPPERS.

Sun-worshippers! Cults! Young boys with excessive amounts of money! Wedding suits! It reads like a late 19th century pulp novel, only it's my morning.

To another two centuries just like the last!

Happy 251st wedding anniversary, George and Martha!

Those crazy kids, so in love.


So what is 251 years? Silver? Gold? Adamantium?

Tweet the past

So I just joined Twitter, right? I figured, why not... all the cool kids are doing it, and I'm nothing if not a follower. But probably the best part of it? The National Museum of American History (Smithsonian represent!) has a twitter account that they use to disseminate fun facts about history. Just this morning I learned that today is Utah's birthday and that it is called "The Beehive State."

Oh, and today in 1847 Samuel Colt sold his first revolver to the U.S. government.

Oh, Twitter. Nerding it up, left and right.

P.S. Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson airport... I still sort of hate you, but I hate you much less now that you're providing me (accidentally) with free internet. Keep up the good work.

There's two things in the world you never want to let people see how you make 'em: laws and sausages.

Have I talked about The West Wing? I know I'm late to the party - like, ten years late, but I believe in making a fashionably tardy entrance. I've been watching the first season (in between writing up a storm of personal statements for grad school and battling the actual snow storm outside my house) and holy crap, that was an amazing show.

Aaron Sorkin is sort of a sore spot for a lot of TV enthusiasts. It seems like either you love him and think he's God's gift to television or you hate him and wish he would die in a fire. And preferably take his too-witty fast-walking characters with him. But I've always sort of viewed myself as a swing-vote when it comes to Sorkin: I hated Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip but I thought Sports Night was probably the most underappreciated tv show of the last 15 years (and given that that year-span includes Veronica Mars, that's saying something) Clearly, I have unresolved issues. But people, West Wing... it's a revelation.

I suppose I shouldn't be so surprised. I mean, this is a tv show about the United States! And government! And smart people! Those are three things I adore! And the writing itself is so unapologetically in love with the idea of America, so optimistic about what American government could do, the positive agent of change it could be... I'm getting all verklempt just thinking about it. It's sort of strange to watch it now with 8 years of the Bush administration under my belt, but I'm also noticing a lot of overlaps between the Obama administration and the rocky start of the fictional Bartlet government.

Mostly I think I love The West Wing because it's just so ridiculously nerdy, and completely willing to revel in that fact. To wit, I leave you with the Antiquities Act (my fave!), a banking bill, and a fictional American president waxing rhapsodic over the great insitution of America's national parks*:





*I love the national parks too! Come hang out with me, President Bartlet... we can drink tea and I'll tell you all about Grey Towers! It'll be awesome.

Snowsuit Up 4: Live Free or Die Snow*

L.L. BEAN I LOVE YOU.

Seriously, the quality of my life has been drastically improved by the presence of these boots. They are the wind beneath my wings, the peanut butter to my jelly, the yin to my yang, the traction to the ice outside my door, etc. It's enough to make a girl believe in Santa Claus.

*one day this blog will be about something other than snow. That day is not today.

Snowsuit Up 3: The Iceman Cometh

Icy streets of Chicago: 3
Shoshi's balance and physical well-being: 0.

Clearly, I'm losing the battle with the asphalt. My ass has gotten a bit too friendly with Chicago sidewalks recently. LL Bean, HURRY UP.