RUDIMENTS, pt. 978
(more overlooked than remarked upon)
Elmira was always kind
(more overlooked than remarked upon)
Elmira was always kind
of funny, because it had,
among its inhabitants -
and most probably due to
remnants of its legacy of
old industrial money and,
as well, the presence of
the college - this sort of
'rube,' outside pretension
to 'culture,' as they defined
it. That meant, mostly, a very
mannered art sown in the
local Arnot Art Museum, and
the attendant pretensions to
European high art of culture
of old. Lots of swashbuckling
portraiture, enormous scenes of
elites, and estates, battlements
and, curiously, they also had
a sub-specialty of old, 19th
century 'Medical' paintings.
That's what I called them
anyway. Paintings of old
operations and operating-room
arena-seating medical scenes.
It was weird, yes, but if you
gave a minute's thought to
how the citizens kind of held
high all that old, period, stuff,
it made sense, or some sense,
to see the painted scenes of
medical theater and drama.
I never got into it myself, and
wondered about it. Firstly, it
seemed always male - the
doctors, and the patients, - and
any female portrayal was just
holding a tray of implements,
in the manner of an extra. And
the explanations alongside the
painting never made mention
of anything except Dr. So and
So and his skills and the steps
he'd implemented with his
groundbreaking work leading
to advances in battlefield
trepanning or surgical removals,
or some British guys, in their
operating theaters, perfecting
appendix removal or whatever.
It was all pretty matronly, in
fact, except there was never
any mention of the female side.
I used to wonder who cleaned
pans and drained the bloods and
boiled the needles and all that.
No mention ever given.
-
The one thing I noticed, in fact,
about Elmira's version of 'High
Society' was how matronly it all
was, almost Victorian in manner.
Shock and surprise seemed always
next to come : The Garden Club;
the Ladies Society of Elmira; The
Elmira Women's Club; etc. Half
proper, half smart, half dumb,
and half perverse. I think if they
had seen a roomful of real 'modern'
art, or 1970's nudes, or anything
like that, they quite possibly would
have swooned. The other funny thing
was how I never saw any 'Daughters'
of Elmira. It was kind of weird;
either they never had female kids,
or the girls left town immediately;
marrying off maybe, or fleeing.
The College had its own coterie
of girls, yes, of course, but they
were from somewhere else. I never
saw any overlap. My one friend,
Mary Kay, was Elmira born and
bred, and a very cool, odd person,
but she was peripatetic and her
travel habits had her everywhere
but Elmira. Worth every penny
of a dollar for sure, but little
connection to Elmira. And there
were the Trell sisters - from
Colonia, in fact, right by the
monument on Chain o' Hills
Road. They were triplets, as
I recall, each with a 'D' name,
Debbie, Diane, and Donna, I
think, and I remember them,
together (or maybe two of them
anyway) in the years around 1974,
being enrolled as a group. They
lived in the new 'dorm towers'
just a block or two off from my
house. There were two things,
back then, that were the new
pride of Elmira College : those 2
new, matched, dormitory towers,
(which I called the Twin Towers,
after NYC); and the geodesic
sports dome that had just been
erected over in a field about
5 or 6 miles from the College.
It was the (pretty dumb) college's
effort to attract males to the
school (which until 1969 had
been females only, for some 150
years previous). The school's
leaders paired Males with Sports,
and thus built the equivalent of
a quite trendy, Buckminster Fuller
Geodesic Dome (maybe 2 of them,
I can't remember that either), for
the crush of indoor Winter sports,
for males - basketball, hockey,
ice-stuff, and an indoor running
track. Nice try. They're still there,
and they seem to have aged OK,
and are now played up with major
signage and all that. It's the scholastic
equivalent, in its way, of the Elmira
art world proclivity to matronly
things; except this is to the tune
of boys. Odd. The other big thing
the school had (this might have
'something' to do (ha!) with having
males recently aboard) was a new
facility for women's health and
medical needs. The new Medical
Center was a big on-campus deal.
I guess guys could use it too, but
there were enough controversies back
then about dispensing condoms,
or not, venereal stuff, and even
abortion services, to make one
wonder. That too is still there.
-
In the same way that Mark Twain
was held sacred and renowned
for the old city of Elmira, so too
were all the traditional formats of
'culture,' fine taste, and 'proper'
deportment and breeding. Even
if no one really knew what they
were doing in doing so. A lot of
today's consciousness, in the 1970's,
was not fully around : eco-culture,
reverence for Nature, and all that.
Even Mark Twain's gravesite and
graveyard - now all done up with
signs and notes and storyboards
about him and his family, and the
other graves of 'notables' like Hal
Roach and Ernie Davis, and varied
slaves and runaways and all that
Underground Railroad stuff - AND
the old prison camp, the masses of
Confederate dead, etc., all of that
was more overlooked than it was
remarked upon. No one cared,
and it was all just another scruffy
grave, here and there, of this and
of whom. Whatever, and a big yawn.
I remember one time, my family
was visiting, and I took them over
to the Mark Twain site - not that
it meant anything special to them -
and in the ensuing rush, my mother
got the car door slammed on her
finger - blood gushing everywhere,
a quick trip to the hospital needed,
etc. That took the place of any
Twain grandiosity.
-
Charles Tomlinson Griffes, as I said
in the previous chapter, was an Elmira
boy - a local by birth anyway. He died
young, of influenza, but left a body of
music, ('modern' in its terms, then), and
a society for him and his music, also
quite revered, by the same people who
revered all the Arnot Art Museum stuff.
I don't know, he seemed without any
gumption, and pretty ball-less to me,
but that was just me and an unschooled
opinion. No one else around town
knew what to make of him. He certainly
was no Led Zepplin for his day (big
around Elmira's bars). I've always
liked definition and precise lines
and borders (well, maybe, not always),
and Griffes never seemed to offer any
of that. My friend John Barry, as I
recall, a college guy from Indiana,
was a clarinetist or something in one
of the Griffes ensembles there. He
seemed to perfectly embody the music,
somehow. He'd relocated, with his wife,
from Indiana, and to make the trip, they
had a large moving van they rented, and
he drove his Mercury Capri up into
the truck, and loaded boxes all around
it. Lo and behold, I'll never forget, they
got to Elmira and the car, from the
boxes rubbing it all during the trip, had
been chafed of its paint in every spot
that a box had touched the car. 'Hi!
How do you like my polka-dot Capri!'
(The body shop guy called it 'chafing').
(The body shop guy called it 'chafing').
