Secret Squirrel

It was Tina Turner who proclaimed to the world "I'm your private dancer, a dancer for money, [I'll] do what you want me to do." Having recently been near water (as is my native wont) and having seen the sights I have seen (suggested by the photograph above), the logical question becomes: what is a secret squirrel? And can this creature be made to do things for acorns or, perhaps, half-eaten sandwiches?

As you contemplate those pointed questions, Old Ken would like to apologize for his absence from the bloggin' scene of late: "a lotta ins, lotta outs, a lotta 'what have yous,'" seem to have obstructed the possibility of consistent attention to our friend Nice Bird but not, I would dare say, the larger project that is LearningQuest 2005.



From the photographs scattered here and there, you may be able to surmise that Old Ken has been on the move. Indeed, like an itinerant peddlar in days of yore, Old Ken has recently had a rucksack on his back, a sturdy walking stick in his hand and a song in his heart as he set off to find the true England. And where better to look than in Bath?



Do you bathe? Well, let me rephrase that question as it might sound a bit personal: do you enjoy bathing? Evidently, the Romans did, as they built bathing complexes throughout the distant reaches of their empire. Ruins of such now survive from Britain to Turkey. As you may readily discern from our photographs, the Roman baths at Bath in England became a serious object of local appreciation in the eigthteenth and nineteenth centuries. For, the Enlightenment—a period to which Old Ken has always felt something of an affinity—privileged the "water cure" for its ailments, only to be replaced by the "talking cure" and more recently, I lament to say, "retail therapy" as favored panacea.



Now, there are many sights of interest in Bath and one needs to look (and think, more challengingly) beyond the famous, eponymous "hot spots." I muster in support of this claim the rather fabulous Bath Abbey with its twin angelic ladders, which flank the massive late medieval wooden door.



The going story about these angelic ladders is that they were the materialization in stone of the contents of a dream by a patron-bishop. His sleeping dream, so this story goes, became a waking dream of builing an impressive abbey with an idiosyncratic facade design that testified to his architectural inspiration.



Now, Old Ken has always been a big advocate of the phrase "dare to dream," which indeed I have had emblazoned on my familial crest (replacing the prior motto "snack attack!"). All this talk of dreamy bishops and their desire to build stone testimonials to night-time visitations sounds a little Romantic (in the nineteenth century sense), but I leave such questions to be adjudicated by ye who study all things medieval.



Well, so maybe this virtual trip to Bath has not gotten us any closer to puzzling out what makes a secret squirrel. But, take heart. After all, Roman baths weren't built in a day.

Gift of the Gods!

Sometimes, you happen to be walking somewhere, perhaps by a river (say, the Quaggy) and something catches your eye (say, World of Wood's Marquetry Craft Kit). What happens next? Do you stop and pick it up. Or, do you fall down on your knees in a gesture (either affiliated with a religious faith or simply as an expression of great thanks—I think the gesture has that kind of breadth) in appreciation of that which has been mysteriously, kindly, even miraculously offered?



While you ponder that searching question, please allow Old Ken to take you inside the niceties of marquetry. As you may have guessed, being an utter novice to this fine art—no, science, Old Ken used the Simplified Window Method (or SWM as it will henceforth be known). What exactly is SWM?



Not single white female, I assure you. No, the SWM required for the production of a beautiful, heirloom-quality veneer picture is something a little different. According to the techniques advocated by one W.A. Lincoln (whose 1971 The Art and Practice of Marquetry remains foundational to SWF practice), we should use carbon paper and trace our design onto a piece of stiff cardboard. But, before we go any further into the fine points of SWF technique, what should our design be?



One word: Mordiford. Also known as "pure English countryside at its very best," Mordiford-on-Lugg (the River Lugg, mind you) is, so to speak, the jewel in the crown of Herefordshire. Kindly, World of Wood has already enclosed a charmingly picturesque view of Mordiford. Thus, all we need to do is find some cardboard and get tracing.



Now, once the basic design has been traced, out comes the trusty knife. Careful, it's sharp; it'll up and bite you, as they say. Ever so carefully, what we need to do is to cut away the larger portions of Mordiford traced onto the cardboard; these excised fragments are trash. Please recycle them, or place them into the fire. Instead we need to place the partially-butchered traced image on top of an appropriately-colored veneer sample and cut away.



World of Wood (or, W.O.W. as they have always been known around the Digby household) are very considerate—always anticipating the needs of the beginning marquetor. For, they have numerically co-ordinated the portrait of Mordiford with our "palette" of choice woods. Finally, once we have cut out our piece, we can begin to glue them together, presumably, using this pearly, mucilaginous substance.



The results of this afternoon of fun? Well, as you can see, Old Ken—ever committed to what he calls "haunting realism" was determined to include the inhabitants of Mordiford exactly as I observed them. Admittedly, my marquetry technique needs some work; but I think you will agree that marquetry truly is the most appropriate medium for the work of an uncompromising, unflinching realist like Old Ken.

All I Ever Needed to Know I Learned at the Convenience Store

Say you were in a grocery store in a foreign country—let us say, for the sake of simplicity, that it is France. While perusing the aisles, you pass by the racks of potato chips, crisps and other delights. And there something catches you eye: it is a bag of chips with a small, soft-focus image of a football cheerleader leaping in the air, pom-poms flying, in front of a football stadium. The chips are called "Les Americains." (Or, to translate this to an English idiom, let's say the woman is decked out in Burberry drinking a pint of Scrumpy Jack and the crisps are called "Les Anglais"). Well, this is precisely the kind of experience Old Ken had on a recent trip to a convenience store in greater London, where he found a variety of chips called "Latinos."

Now, coming from a country that has a substantial Spanish-speaking poplulation, Old Ken is well aware that the term "Latinos" is a common term for those who identify with a Latin American heritage. The Oxford English Dictionary cites the first usage of this term, which adds the Spanish masculine/inclusive plural suffix "os" to an abbreviation of Latin-American, to a Texas newspaper in 1946. Old Ken, never much of one for figures, can't quote to you the population of those of Latin-American heritage in Britain, but anecdotal evidence suggests that it is much, much lower than in the US.

Surely we have many cases where a people or a place gives name to a food or food-related item: turkey (which is an abbreviated form of "turkey-cock," a North African bird akin to the American turkey, which was imported to Europe through Turkey) or china (the high-quality porcelain imported to Europe and later America from China). So, isn't it just a bit of marginally offensive commercialism that one can buy a bag of "Latinos" in Britain? Said differently, is attention to cultural eccentricities such as this any more than that "narcissicism of insignificant differences," which seeks to produce distinctions where profound similarity is really operative?

Perhaps; but it strikes Old Ken that the historical legacy of the British "Latinos" is informative. As you will no doubt recall, Britain has a long heritage of distrust and animosity toward things Spanish—a "black legend" that can be traced back to Elizabethan propaganda (if not before) casting Spaniards as cruel, conniving Papists eager to enslave Protestant England. Maritime heroes of the Elizabethan era, such as Raleigh and Drake, were celebrated for their exploits against the Spanish Armada. And as recent cultural historians have demonstrated, the justification for British colonial expansion (particularly in the Americas) was frequently articulated by means of comparative claims for the rapacious cruelty of the Spaniards' colonial project.



So, with these things in mind, let's take a little closer look at "Latinos." In the upper right hand corner of the bag (and repeated on the back as we will see momentarily), we find a half-length depiction of a costumed female dancer, her outfit reminiscent of the garb worn at the pre-Lenten Carnaval in Rio de Janeiro. Although the photograph above is fairly poor quality, the image on the bag is no gem itself; the image is so heavily saturated with a kind of fuchsia film that we can scarcely make out the details of the dancer's tiara and impressive feather headdress. Pity!



In any case, on the back we find the following remarkable caption. The claim that these are a "new" kind of chip was intriguing to Old Ken. They will hardly surprise anyone who has had this brand of chips previously; same shape and texture. And where were these "fantastic flavors"? The chips I sampled taste something like a cross between barbeque and "cool ranch." Whose fantasy is that? Well, Old Ken isn't sure exactly how illuminating this little meditation on a bag of chips has been; but once again one senses that there is something to be learned in everything, as long as we are willing to look in the right way.