Paper dolls at a war conference

By Byrd

Taken literally, the phrase ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’ usually applies to your average book in a bookstore. It also applies, however, to rare books.

When I first decided to highlight pieces of the Cotsen Children’s Library rare book collection for this series on archives, I was eager to talk about some of the showier items the collection has to offer–Queen Elizabeth’s Latin grammar book, the Beatrix Potter original letters or elegant Spanish toy theaters from the 1930s.

That is not, however, what we ultimately decided to kick off the series with. Instead, Andrea Immel (the curator of the collection) suggested this book, ‘The Paper People.’

It’s an unassuming text, printed and cloth-bound in the 1800s. But in this interview, which you can listen to above, Andrea explains some of the information that can be gleaned from the contents, the cover, the catalogue of advertisements, and even the end-papers.

So give that a listen, and check out our gallery of photos for better visuals than audio can offer. For a complete, three-dimensional experience, you should absolutely head down to the Cotsen Children’s Collection at Princeton’s Firestone Library and page the book for yourself.

Claire & Ellie on their journey

Eight days ago, Claire started an eight week journey across the United States with her two friends.

This isn’t a self-indulgent On the Road type field trip. Instead, the inspiration of this trip–and a part of what ties these girls together–is a mission to talk to “sibs” across the country. For eight weeks, they’ll be gathering the stories of people with special needs siblings, covering a broad range of disorders.

You can (and should) read more about their progress and their project on their blog. For a quick summary of their goals, here’s an interview I did with Claire about her project and her motivations for it.

By Byrd

This summer, I’m doing a series on archives.

I’ll be taking a look at specific collections and articles within them, like the Cotsen Children’s Library collection, but I’ll also be having conversations about archives, curation and collecting with various people, bringing you a broad range of stories about collecting.

One of the people I hope to have a series of conversations with is Professor Tom Levin, a media theorist in the Princeton University German department, a collector with an incredible collection of audiovisual technologies and audio postcards from the thirties to the present.

I’ll be playing these on my radio show, Mondays from 1-3 PM. I’ll also have these blog pieces, however, where I’ll type up extra information and suggestions from professor Levin, and post photos of his collection or any other material we looked at.

By PNP Staffer, Nathan

If you’re not going to choose music based on quality, the next best bet is quality of the album covers. And honestly, an artist’s visual aesthetic says a lot about their musical choices. I clearly have a certain preference, but here are some choices for the best album artwork thus far of 2013 (in no particular order).

James Blake — Overgrown

Arc — Everything Else

Like other album art more? Email us at pnp@wprb.com 

By Byrd

All week, we’ve been bringing you stories from our trip to the Hidden City Festival in Philadelphia. We talked about one collective’s work to turn an old club into the home for a new secret society, about a research project to recover Edgar Allen Poe’s home in an architecture library, and about the transformation of a historical society’s artifacts into an audiovisual archive.

Each project worked within its own space, interacting with the architecture or the concept of the place to produce an interesting hybrid.

But the last place on our tour stands alone, as both place and art. As you can hear in the piece above, the John Grass Wood Turning Company only recently closed its doors in 2003.

Up until then, around 15 wood craftsmen worked to create everything from pillars to bowling pins on machinery–lathes and saws–dating back to the 1930s.

Listen to our story to learn a little more about the exhibit, and check out our photo gallery.

We’ve spent a lot of time this week trying to explain visual exhibits through sound and text, which makes this stop on our tour of Hidden City Festival destinations particularly relevant.

As with every Hidden City exhibit, the experience was as much about the place as it was about the work of the artist herself. And the Athenaeum is an incredible space: a rare book collection founded in 1814 and both built and named in classical Greek and Roman style.

It’s gorgeous–with curlicued couches and an old, giant globe, the main reading room is a golden space with oak bookshelves and leaded glass panes.

Artist Ruth Scott Blackson found her inspiration in this collection: a book describing the colors of Edgar Allen Poe’s house entirely in text.

She used a variety of historical source to reproduce the colors, and collected all of those into a series of books, one for each part of the house. Each color is juxtaposed with a fitting line of Poe’s text.

The text paired with color forces you to consider how the colors surrounding Poe in his home might have had an effect on his lines of poetry.

This in itself would have been interesting enough, but the setting renders the whole project that much more interesting as a meditation on the research process. Scott Blackson displays her research material intermixed with her final project, complete with her original notes (printed on the back of library catalog cards.)

It’s a really effective way of bringing the Athenaeum itself into the equation. Because you’re made aware of the research, and because the exhibit is in the research space itself, you start to wonder how the space influenced this project.

Check out our gallery from the exhibit, but also make sure to go and visit the Festival! It’s entirely worth your while.

Do you ever miss that sense of absolute delight that you used to get from a playground?

It’s not lost forever.

A few posts ago, we told you about the Hidden City Summer Festival in Philadelphia. One stop in the Hidden City tour is the Society of Pythagoras, created by the Rabid Hands Collective in Hawthorne Hall, an abandoned clubhouse that used to house actual secret societies like the Knights of Pythias and the Odd Fellows, as well as boxing and dancing.

The Rabid Hands Collective has taken over this space and in a flourish of peeling paint and splintering boards, chipped tiles and charred pages, created one of the most incredible adult playgrounds I’ve ever had the privilege to explore.

Playing with their Pythagorean theme, the artists fill the space with angles–right angled triangles most specifically. But they also bring a hierarchy into play beautifully, in the very levels and floors of the house itself, but also in the way that each room builds from simple to intricate.

The house is full of secret entrances. They’re not marked for your convenience, and you can’t be sure that you’ve caught them all. Through each rickety passage or hidden door, there’s a fresh example of minutely detailed craftmanship–portraits of society’s supposed presidents (in a gold frames, against velvet curtains, a woman with blue lips and a vacuum coming out of her head), melting candles or rusting saws.

The most impressive piece in the whole exhibit is the top floor. There’s a giant table zig-zagging upwards in the half gloom, with a mess of chairs careening towards the ceiling.

This is no formal exhibit, where you have to look at the art without touching. You’re allowed to climb all over this table, just like you can climb anywhere else in the building. You feel as though you were actually exploring some abandoned clubhouse, not a curated, created space.

As you move upwards towards the elevated top of the table, the flatware grows more and more fancy and cluttered, until there are plates and bowls piled up on one another and filled with molding food.

Look down from your perch on the top table and you see a giant hole sliced into the floor, shaped like an arrow and pointing towards the highest seat in the house.

I won’t reveal all the secrets of this hidden world, though you should definitely check out our photo gallery. I can only encourage you to visit the space, because it’s truly incredible.

By Byrd, PNP Director

The Hidden City Philadelphia works to bring people attention to forgotten parts of the city–interesting architecture, murals, historical sites in Philadelphia and the surrounding areas.

This summer, they’re having an amazing festival. They brought artists in to work with nine different sites, mostly abandoned, across the city, using the material they found there to create something new and different.

The WPRB staff visited four of these sites last Saturday, the first of which was this tour of Data Garden’s A/V Archaeology Project at the Historical Society of Frankford.

Check out the link above for the radio piece we did on the exhibit and the society, which has an incredible collection of historical artifacts, ranging from epaulettes to doll-sizes circus carriages to butter seals and birds in bell jars.

The artists transcribed these objects into sound, recording coffee grinders and turtleshell fans on audiocassette technology from the 1970s. Each player is hooked up to a central switchboard, so you can control them all from one point in the room, playing and blending the sounds of trolley cars and wax cylinders.

As the festival progresses, the recording technology itself will deteriorate. As the sound itself changes, visitors will be less aware of the sound of cradles, and become more aware of the fact that the recording technology itself is an artifact, though it doesn’t have the same neat, handprinted label dangling from its side.

We couldn’t photograph in the exhibit space itself, but here are some photos DJGV3 took of the first floor of the Historical Society of Frankford, and check out the Hidden City website for a slideshow with more images.

We’ll be showcasing a different exhibit every day in a series of blog posts, so keep reading!

If you’ve been to Hidden City, let us know what you think! pnp@wprb.com

By Chester

Hey! If you listen to my show regularly, you’re probably familiar with the term “YouTube Scholar.”

I use it a lot on the air—usually to describe myself before playing something I’ve discovered while browsing that site’s incredible collection of user-uploaded old-school music videos, ripped .mp3 files, and four-minute-long camera shots of record players spinning out-of-print 45s.

These finds are an integral part of my TOTALLY WIRED programming, and YouTube scholarship so shapes the way I approach exploring music that I figured I’d write a weekly blog column about the art.

My boy Matteo came up with the phrase “YouTube Scholar” to describe the quasi-academic approach he and I take to navigating YouTube in search of rarities and totally badass musical artifacts that fall outside the bounds of common music knowledge.

Continue reading →

By Pablo, from Death of Tango with Pablo, Saturdays from 6PM to 8PM  

“Tango is dead” is one of the phrases that I heard most often growing up in Argentina. Many years have passed and times have changed, and now it is once again alive, and very much so!

To prove this to us, the Oscuro Quintet, a group of very talented musicians based in Philadelphia, have been playing tango music together since 2007.

They will be performing live today, Tuesday, June 11th, at 7:30 PM at El Rincón Argentino, 1603 W Passyunk Ave, Philadelphia, PA.

This is a very casual and easy-going setting, a great way to listen to authentic tango music without going through the sometimes scary experience of going to a milonga (tango-dancing event).

The Quintet will feature two guests. Former quintet violinist June Bender will turn the quintet into the Oscuro Sextet for one night. Also, singer Pablo Andrade will join in for a few tunes.

Admission is free, and there will be a bar serving empanadas and drinks for very reasonable prices. El Rincón Argentino is a social club and all the proceeds go towards maintaining the space working, and organizing other events in the future.