The Miracle of America
Bittersweet Nostalgia Meets Post-Apocalyptic Dread in Polson, Montana
Yards and yards of battered old junk
The Miracle of America Museum in Polson, Montana is a maze of hallways, niches, nooks, barns, garages, sheds, and open yards packed with an array of objects, from lunch boxes to fighter jets. Hallucinatory in its variety but simple in its mission, it is less a museum than a sermon in junk, the result of decades of collecting by a local fellow named Gil Mangels who prayed to God in 1983 about what to do with his mountains of old stuff. One night at 3 AM his answer came, spoken by a disembodied voice: “Use your antiques to teach.” He established the museum two years later and since then, such is Mangels’ zeal and stamina, it has been open every day, seven days a week.
MOAM contains, by some accounts (which seem accurate once you step inside it), 38,000 items. Just ten paces into the main hall on a recent visit, I was already overwhelmed, having beheld a horse collar, several scales and balances, numerous …
Wheat Crop Disaster
Worst Since 1917
Stressed Wheat Produces Only a Single Grain
Dixon Palmer, a six-foot-two Kiowa warrior in a Cowboy hat, is the only man in Caddo County whose winter wheat isn’t failing. Caddo County, east of Kiowa County, is one of the top five wheat producing counties in Oklahoma. On the way to one of Dixon’s fields, we pass cattle turned out to graze on what Dixon calls 50 mile an hour wheat — a crop that only looks good when you're whipping past it in a pickup truck at 50 miles an hour. Other fields of 50 mile an hour wheat have already been cut for hay, their hulls empty, bearing only one grain, evidence of the dust bowl-level drought that's ravaged western Oklahoma over the past couple of years.
Stressed wheat produces just one seed, a single grain, the plant’s primary purpose being reproduction. Stressed wheat is worthless wheat. There is, at the moment, a lot of stressed wheat in Oklahoma being baled up into hay or eaten by free-range Oklahoma beef cattle. …
3000 Miles From Home
Girl Finds Art and Friendship Without Rejecting Her Family
New York City Has a Museum of Ice Cream.
She was late. I knew where I was going for once. It was the classic indie theater on the corner of Houston and Mercer Streets. Off the F train for me. The D train for her. A 4-minute walk from the Museum of Ice Cream.
My friend Anna had been taking a 12-week-long ceramics class, during which she had been making beautiful pots of various sizes and dotted glazes and photographing them for the internet. I figured this was why she suggested we see this particular film. I entered the theater alone and started munching on my popcorn. I consider it bad form to munch once the movie begins.
Showing Up begins with opening credits. A xylophone-like score enters the theater from all directions as the camera scans watercolor sketches and a row of arm-sized clay figurines kicking up their heels and bending their fingers like claws. The sculptor seems to be in flow, furrowing her brow and cocking her head …
