Kantharos

Our Vocab Word o’th’Week is a wine jug. Which, apparently, makes me wax rhapsodic about curation and immortality. Who knew…

This is going to be a totally scatterbrained piece, I’m warning you right now. But maybe we can just think of the scatteredness as less a bug, more a feature. Like the multiple jagged bits in a kaleidoscope. You can look at the whole, turn it around, and see neat trippy moving mandalas of color and light fragments. Or you can break it open and dump out the bits to see if there’s anything precious inside. Let’s do that, shall we? Sounds like fun…

“...After all, a sense of invincibility often accompanies a big glass of wine.” Really, Mr. Museum Curator? Really? I mean, you’re not wrong, but…

Read the placard in this image, describing this kantharos. The pic is one I took myself, from my bizarre and fun trip to Wichita’s Museum of World Treasures, a mishmash of seemingly random curiosities, with no rhyme or reason that I could find. The whole place was an odd beige maze of cubbies and corners filled scattershot with everything from WWII memorabilia to crystals and fossils to a shrunken head to real mummies, and some random yellowed mannequins, tiltedly posed to represent various wartime uniforms and technology use from various wars.

Seriously, I have no idea what this museum even is: you walk in, and on your right there’s a huge display of dinosaur bones, arranged so that you can feel like the T-rex is lunging at you from the entry, the glass elevator, and the third floor landing. But then directly across from the dinosaurs is a tall, narrow section of the Berlin Wall. And the whole place was sort of old and dusty and badly lit, but not in a cool museum-y way. More of a: how long has it been since this place was vacuumed, kind of way. 

Somehow, all of this made for a fun experience overall—I kept saying, “What the heck am I looking at?” but then going “wow…” and not always in a bad way. I loved this kantharos placard—what a weird quip, like a history teacher with an awkward sense of humor. Loved seeing some real mummies, and I always like looking at sparkly rocks and minerals. But their literature display was so bad: a handful of library editions of a couple classics, under grimy glass cases, as though they were valuable. And a Wizard of Oz display near the books, for some reason. And a low-ceilinged, stuffy cafeteria with gray industrial carpet, thronging with chattering elementary school aged kids. What a field trip this must be for them! I felt like I’d been through a life-changing journey, as I wound through each war room in reverse chronological order and followed my friend out, gift shop haul in hand, to a local pub. I washed my hands before touching my lunch.

The insanity of this museum’s collection has stuck with me, and makes me muse about curation. I always felt like I’d be a great curator–I often made little displays of (what I thought were) interesting objects as a kid, and one of my favorite college jobs ever was as the attendant to an art gallery with adjacent study room–no idea what it was called, if it indeed had a name at all. I was never the curator for the gallery part, but I did watch her as she took down and put up each exhibit. My job was to man the entrance, make sure nobody stole the art (not sure what I would’ve done had anyone tried), maintain the private study cubicles, and play music. 

Would I be a good curator? Who ‘nose’...

See, the study hall part of this paradisiacal area was adorned with old leatherbound seats, wooden study chairs, large ornate wood tables, and long slotted windows that let in not much light. It looked like the Diogenes Club, or a fantasy Victorian gentleman’s club, without the billiards, smoking, or liquor. Around the corner were three private rooms replete with cushions, each lockable from the outside and largely soundproof. In the sound booth bridging the big room and the wee cubes was a large array of music—mostly on vinyl, some moving towards CDs (it was the ‘90s, kids). So my job, in a nutshell, was to sit at a desk between an art gallery and a library-quiet study room, and curate the music that would be piped through into the room (as well as organize the cubicles’ sign-up sheets and provide the music those private studiers requested). This was quite literally heaven for me–I sat, put on the Chopin and then the Coltrane, while chatting about art with my friend or indulging in the very great pleasure of slogging through Joyce’s Ulysses, which was one of the senior courses I was taking.*

*Seriously, if anyone has any idea how I can open a place like this in “real life” and be its curator, let me know. I have a feeling that anywhere other than there at school it’d be a nightmare to manage, let alone fund. But doesn’t that sound amazing?

In a way, my casting of a monthly variety show is also curation of a sort, now that I think about it. Except that instead of visual or literary art, I’m curating displays of performing arts. We do call our group a pop-up cabaret, and isn’t that what a pop-up gallery or a trunk show for jewelry is? Huh. Never thought of it that way till now. And, talk about a collection of oddities—any number of our shows include: a poet, a singer, a drag queen with a beard, burlesque dancers of all body types, a magician, a contortionist, a belly dancer, a comedian, and once, a stripper who explained to his audience why Pluto is in fact a planet. Heck, you wouldn’t be surprised to see a T-rex skeleton across from a section of Berlin Wall on our stage, would you?

I guess, if the Museum of World Treasures (and my own Blue Dime Cabaret) has taught me anything, it’s that an eclectic collection of weird things can make for a really cool experience, and a fun afternoon (or night) out.

I picked kantharos as today’s vocab word because it was a new word to me, and it was one of the coolest things I saw at the museum, no less because of the wry dry description underneath it. I do like to feel invincible whilst drinking wine. Hell, I like to drink wine even if I’m feeling vincible. Quite able to be vinced. I’m going to say that’s a real word now. Hey, I’m an English professor. Linguists, don’t @ me… 

But kantharos wasn’t one of the names for ancient booze vessels I’d ever heard before, and I always like it when little windows into ancient life open up, giving a look into how people were basically the same even thousands of years ago. It takes my breath away, much more than concepts of vast space does. Vastness of time hits me harder, for some reason. I’ve always been interested in immortals through literature, too, growing up: Rice’s vampires and Tolkien’s Elves and even the Highlander (just the one. Not the sequels. The sequels suck. There can be only one)... 

But it’s always breathtaking to me, strolling through a museum among the white statues of gods, emperors, and famous philosophers, and then, being arrested by a random stained fresco depicting someone called Unnamed Woman. And she’s got brown curly hair that’s kept under a headband, and her brown eyes are looking at me and she’s holding a pen and a piece of paper and it’s like… hello. I know you. 

I suppose this newsletter is my own cabinet of curiosities, or Museum of Zuko’s Treasures, isn’t it. One that you can browse through on your own time, like any exhibit, instead of the disappearing ephemeral nature of live performance. So.

Welcome. Watch the T-rex in the corner. He bites.

(P.S. Re: the Doctor Who reference: If you know, you know. Yanno? Who knows…)