This New England

Three places in New Hampshire undying

-- Photos and commentary by WILLIAM MORGAN

New Hampshire Welcome Center, Spaulding Turnpike (Rte 3), Hooksett, N.H.

Summer! Time to head for the White Mountains or Lake Winnipesaukee. But first, one has to deal with this, perhaps the tackiest, most unattractive, most un-welcoming official state "welcome center" anywhere.

This asphalt bit of hell harks back to the days when the Granite State had the first lottery in the nation, and its cheaper liquor was sold in stores most of which were an easy run from the Massachusetts border. This isn't exactly an incentive for first timers to move on into the state, as beautiful as some of it is.

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Ashland, N.H., downtown with Civil War memorial to right; building with cupola is a mill perched over the stream; mill worker housing to left.

While New Hampshire may be the quirkiest of the New England states, it shares the constant contrast of poverty and wealth that characterizes much of the region, particularly its northern parts.

One finds, for instance, a mill town like Ashland, which peeled away from its tonier parent of Holderness in search of greater economic autonomy in the middle of the 19th Century. But prosperity seems to have eluded it ever since..

Elisha Marston House (1848), now the Sandwich Historical Society, in the heart of Center Sandwich.

White bread and white clapboard. Some natives tell me the difference between Ashland and Center Sandwich, which isn't far away, is a sense of self-respect, but it seems more likely that it is simply luck.

No need for the hose now, Janet Lage

''Hosed 4,'' oil, oil bar, graphite on canvas, by Janet Lage (2009), at Eo Art Lab, Chester, Conn. (eoartlab.com). July 1-Aug. 2

This is one of the playful images in Connecticut artists Lage's "Hose Me'' show, celebrating, among other things, the joys of gardening in New England. Of course, you'd hardly need to hose anything these says.

You need to bail, and take cover from the advance of giant slugs. We've been turned into swamp dwellers lately. But wait until the heat comes on, and the vegetation in the soaked ground takes on a Congolese menace. (I''l be in Africa next week on business and so am thinking about such things.)

The deer ticks will really go crazy, and, I fear so will Lyme disease, named for that pretty Nutmeg State town not far from Chester.

This is not to say that we won't be warned about a vicious drought by Aug. 15, with no hosing allowed -- a drought broken by a hurricane Sept. 7. The New England climate constantly reminds us of the transience of life, and the usefulness of insurance policies, dehumidifiers and humidifiers, all in due course.

I also note the amusingly S&M titles of two her shows -- "Hose Me'' and "Tie Me Down.''

That'll bring them in!

Anyway, here are some of gallery's notes on this fun show:

Eo art lab is pleased to announce the premier of Connecticut artist Janet Lage's newest body of work, entitled "Hose Me." Lage, in her characteristically entangling fashion, weaves abstract tales of outdoor garden bliss. Refreshing splashes of cool blue water and streams of warm summer sun make her garden grow . . . wild!

This work, unlike previous series, explores, more directly, the relationship between the inanimate and the animate. Twisting and bubbling forms are found to represent both the man-made and the organic. Pale fields of green foliage and umber soil form subtle backgrounds for the playful dance of water droplets, flower petals, and small stones. Zig-zagging and criss-crossing stems, vines, and rubber tubing serve as both boundary and breach both containing and leading the eye.

The question is, "How does your garden grow?"

Lage is well known for her highly animated, painterly canvases that come in all sizes and shapes. In the first half of 2007, Lage created a series of paintings entitled "Tie Me Down," which featured abstracted piles of rope sprawled on the lawn of a roadside store.

Later that year she created a series entitled "Laid Rubber," which featured an inflatable child's toy lost on top a pile of discarded tires adjacent to an auto shop. In early to mid 2008, she created an interim series loosely entitled "Bombs Away." Her inspiration, in this case, was old World War II bombs she witnessed hanging in a local airplane hanger scrawled with messages of impending doom. Her visit to Pearl Harbor around the same time further influenced this body of work.

In "Hose Me", like her other series, Lage has brought the inanimate to life, giving the seemingly inconsequential consequence, and stirring it into the whirlwind of our everyday existence. She depicts the process where still scenes, events, and words are set in motion by our minds desire to form connections.

With great success, she intuitively organizes contrasting colors, forms, and lines to represent both discord and harmony, giving us the feeling that we are eyewitnesses to life in transition - colors materialize as force fields and portals, forms divide and multiply, and lines seek to bind and wrap. In addition, Lage views the edge of her canvas as participating in this overall sense of animation. She consciously exposes the battle scars of the artistic process to further blur the line between contrasting states of existence.

In Lage's paintings, forms are found intuitively through the painting process. Colors, muted or clamorous, and dashed or looping lines, are caught in the act of their making, emphasizing the physicality of painting and the natural thrill of spontaneity. Through this connection with unconscious forces, Lage contacts the fresh and new.

The large works on canvas aggressively convey this course. The smaller paintings on paper are intimate accounts of the larger, completed canvases. In these smaller pieces, Lage interprets the imagery many times over.

While she experiences a sense of familiarity in each piece, a distortion of memory occurs and a new image evolves.

Norwich's golden age

-- "View of Norwich,'' oil painting by John Denison Crocker done around 1873. At the nifty Slater Memorial Museum, in Norwich, Conn.

The eastern Connecticut mill town sure looked pretty back then, especially if you avoid thinking of the children laboring within the mills. This must be a Sunday; otherwise, there would have been considerable smoke..

Buzzards Bay 'saved'; Sununu stays out; Dept. of the Interior

--"Kennebunkport Tug,'' by John Wheatley, part of a show at the Providence Art Club scheduled for July 12-31. The presidential Bushes, the most prominent local rich summer people, use considerably sexier craft to move around that town's waters in the summer casting for stripers and bluefish. They also, commendably, have a windmill, which generates electricity for their mansion at Walker's Point (as in George Walker Bush and George Herbert Walker Bush).

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People using Buzzards Bay won't have to look at big wind farms apparently. Maybe bad news for developer Jay Cashman, who has had big plans for same.

While two small areas southwest of the Elizabeth Islands would be made available to big wind farms (bumping into Rhode Island wind farms?), Buzzards Bay would be off limits. State officials consider it too crowded (among others things, the Cape Cod Canal is at the head of it) and environmentally sensitive for a big project. This is according to a draft Massachusetts ocean-management plan that could go into effect as early as next January.

But Nantucket Sound's big Cape Wind project, in federal waters, can go forward, as can numerous community-based operations of up to 10 turbines in various towns. Hull, Mass., which has two windmills, might be a model.

And sorry, some Mount Hope Bayers. Nothing in the plan would bar that LNG facility planned there.

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Former New Hampshire Sen. John Sununu won't run for the seat being vacated by fellow Republican Judd Gregg after all. Mr. Sununu and his family are very well know in the Granite State and many people certainly would consider him a major candidate.

But he says he's too engaged with business and nonprofit organizations to run for the Senate. Still, the collapse of the Republic Party in New Hampshire might have more to do with it.
Perhaps Northeast Republicans, of what's left of them, should form a new party -- the New Whigs or something.

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Belgians and Greeks do it
Nice young men who sell antiques do it

From Noel Coward's version of Cole Porter's "Let's do it.''

We all can do it -- become interior designers.

Bravo for a federal ruling that struck down a Connecticut law that required people to get a state license before calling themselves interior designers. Demanding licenses for such work is silly.

After all, it depends on one's taste far more than any training. And while one could be irritated by a bad job by an interior designer, it's difficult to see how one's life could be ruined -- which can easily be done by, say, bad legal or medical work.

Let a million interior designers bloom to fancy up all the houses in Greenwich! Let a thousand patterns and furniture styles clash with joy (as in my house)!

Clothesline crisis! Laid-off greyhounds

-- Photo by CHARLES PINNING

No, this isn't a setup for a joke about taxpayers as state legislatures adjourn. It's SVF Foundation's Annual Visitors Day, June 6, 2009, in Newport, R.I. Now give those poor animals wetsuits!

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Project Laundry List has declared a "clothesline emergency, '' reports the Associated Press. The outfit, which urges people to use clothelines instead of electric dryers to save energy, says it has been too cloudy and rainy to dry stuff outside on most days. They recommend indoor drying racks.

To deal with the wet weather, Project Laundry List is asking people to use indoor drying racks. Or head to a coin-operated laundromats because they tend to use natural gas.
And waste gasoline driving there?

Oh, well.

The dimmest new England June since thus endeth with a drizzle.

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The last two greyhound racing tracks in New Hampshire, at Seabrook and Belmont, have won permission from the state to drop the loss-leading activity, even as the Rhode Island's legislature tries to force Twin River, the slots palace, to keep their dogs racing.

That's even though Twin River is in bankruptcy protection and is trying to get out of the mandatory greyhound boondoggle.

But Rhode Island's greyhound kennels have powerful political supporters, who trump the state's practical fiscal concerns.

This might be taken as one small hint of why the Granite State's economy tends to grow at a brisk rate over the years while the Ocean State's treads water, in between sinking spells.

Governor's 'furlough'

New Hampshire Gov. John Lynch said he'd be willing to furlough himself to save the state money.

But he emphasized he'd still come to work. "I would just come in (and) take the day without pay and be here," he told the AP. Governorships are not life-long jobs anyway. What's a lost day of pay?

None of this disappearing al la South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, though the most spectacular part of the Appalachian Trail is close to Concord.

The Currier Museum

-- Photo by Jose Martinez

"Origins,'' by Mark diSuvero, welcomes visitors to the Currier Museum of Art.

The Currier Museum, in Manchester, N.H., is perhaps not what you'd expect in that old mill town, whose Amoskeag Mills complex, on the Merrimack, was once called the biggest building on the world.

It was indeed once the biggest cotton-textile mill.

The city was named after Manchester, England, which was one of the first great industrial centers, in the modern sense. The Manchester, N.H., mills thrived until the first half of the 20th Century and then gradually collapsed because of their unwieldyness and sclerotic management. The city has since remade itself into something of a technology center.

The current show at the Currier is "Spotlight New England: Gary Haven Smith and Gerald Auten''

From the museum's notes:

This second exhibition in the Currier's new Spotlight New England series pairs two of the state's finest artists--Gary Haven Smith and Gerald Auten. While they exhibit regularly in New York and nationally, this is the first major show at the Currier for both artists. The elegant installation offers viewers an opportunity to explore the visual and creative affinities between these two prominent New England artists who both work with minimal
forms, sensuous surfaces and repeating patterns.

CVS chief's fine piece on health-care mess

I highly recommend that everybody read CVS chief Thomas Ryan's piece in today's Boston Globe:

Bankrupting legislation -- but bad for unions too?

The Rhode Island legislature, at the command of public-employee unions, is about to pass legislation that may well soon bankrupt several Rhode Island communities.

The legislation, H5762 and S0713, would force very generous teachers union contracts to be extended yeah unto generations.

But as one observer noted, once the communities are bankrupt, union contracts may become null and void. A judge or judges would take over the distraught towns.

This legislation might not be all that good for the unions after all!

Booze -- and then sex? -- in N.H.; pizza and paint

"Joe's Pizza, '' oil on wood, by Mathew Matera.

This is a pizza joint in Northampton, Mass., near the Connecticut River and in a region famous for small colleges -- but they no longer grow tobacco there.

Mr. Matera's work will be shown at the Hosmer Gallery at the Forbes Library in Northampton, in July. He'll also be selling work at the A.P.E. Gallery in Northampton as part of the Giant Sale (community art market) staring July 10.

Smith College, with its very forceful and self-assertive Smith College women, is in the same town.

He says:

"I'm most interested in representational painting and its relationship to color theory. Two years ago I took an opportunity to move back to Northampton. The town has been wonderfully supportive to my painting career. I'm fortunate enough to have shown my work in Thornes Marketplace last Summer as part of the Storefront Arts group. And I've been selling prints of my paintings at Faces on Main Street."

It's hard to believe now, but way back in the '50s, pizza parlors in little towns like Northampton were considered sort of ''foreign restaurants,'' serving up a dish unknown before that in America except to those who had traveled to Italy and the South of France. (But then, no one used the term "pasta'' either. Everything was spaghetti or ravioli.)

GIs fighting in the long slog up the peninsula in World War II encountered the pizza and presumably talked it up back home. Cheap, tasty and filling -- if an artery clogger, too. (Few worried about such things!)

Then there were those "Chinese restaurants'' serving a ''chow mein'' never seen in China, which had been recently 'lost'' by America to the Reds.

What they lacked in fresh ingredients they made up for in MSG, which gave a lot of people migraines starting an hour after they ate.

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New Hampshire, still true to its tradition of having no state sales or income tax, will pour even more booze to offset the decline in state revenue caused by the recession.

It's opening new state liquor stores in Manchester and Nashua and plans other new outlets, too. It gets a lot of money from these sales, including from many out-of-staters drawn to the low prices and stores very conveniently placed next to big highways. This may not sound like old-fashioned Yankee rectitude, but Granite Staters tend to be eminently practical.

Indeed, I'm surprised that the bigwigs in Concord haven't turned yet to adding prostitution to its list of "sin tax'' revenue sources. State brothels could be put right next to the liquor stores along the highways, particularly serving skiers in the winter, campers and mountain climbers in the summer and leaf-peepers in the fall. (There is no spring in New Hampshire.)

New Hampshire, unlike, say, Nevada, New Orleans or even Rhode Island (where prostitution is still allowed!), has rarely been associated with sex --a gigantic exception -- Peyton Place. Well, sex sells, and here's an opportunity.

Muse-sick; mansions for drying out

-- Photo by DANA TARR

Viennagram, a madcap post-apocalyptic pop muse-sick group, specializing in, among other things, cartoon violence.

It will perform in festivities at Firehouse 13 on the evening of Friday, July 10. Firehouse 13, near downtown Providence, is one of New England's most quirky and interesting art venues. See www.firehouse13.org; (401) 270-1801.

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It's wonderful having academics, with their high-end references. For instance, a task force examining the the University of Maine System is calling for the system to "act as a union (of universities) and not as a confederation."

The reference seems to be to the weak Articles of Confederation that originally tied together the former British colonies after the Revolution and had to be replaced by the more rigorous union produced by the U.S. Constitution and then further strengthened by the blood of the Civil War.

I gather the UMaine history and political science departments have not yet been abolished to free up money for more football-team locker rooms.

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Times are so tough that more and more of us must become direct salesmen. You see more street vendors. Even Maine lobstermen are selling their creatures directly from their trucks and garages rather than going through middlemen. When they start selling them in return for, say, laptops we'll known we're in an updated version of the '30s.

There's a big square below my office next to a civic center. I'm thinking of selling bubble-blowing equipment to the kids before the next game, circus or circus to offset some of my financial losses in the past couple of years. The Pustefix panacea.

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Richard Connor, the new publisher/editor of the Portland Press Herald and two other Maine dailies, has begun giving away newspapers in some spots as part of a promotional campaign to attract new readers with promises of more local news.

Since these dailies are the source for about 80 percent of news stories in their places, they'd do better to just start charging for access to their Web sites and get some steady, new (!) revenue. Giving stuff away is what has gotten newspapers in such a pickle.

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Someday I'm going to do a short book on the many glorious New England mansions (Beech Hill Farm, in Dublin N.H., was the highest one) that were converted to drying-out spots for alcoholics, especially in the glorious days of generous insurance coverage in the '60s and '70s. (Exciting road at 2 a.m. in a blizzard, the usual situation when I found myself chauffering someone to it.)

They were a social phenomenon, attracting celebrities as well as obscure people like one or two of my relatives. People would stay there for weeks, all paid for by the likes of Aetna. (No more.)

While these places had a medical wing to deal with the newly arrived drunk (watching out for seizures, etc.) they also had very pleasant club- or hotel-like accommodations, where people consumed vast quantities of coffee and smoked like chimneys while playing bridge for hours.

Sadly, tighter times have driven many of these places out of business.

I do not know what percentage of their alcoholic guests were actually ''cured.'' Probably about as a high a percentage of schizophrenics or manic-depressives who were cured by psychoanalysis: Zero.

God knows, the managements of these joints made sure they were attractive to return too -- drunk or sober. They were also careful to replace the antique furniture with pretty good replicas.

Sector fishing; a bad case of plaque; Maine cuts taxes; Cape Cod Day

''Frank Pierce'' (circa 1968), by James Fitzgerald (1899-1971), oil on canvas.
This scene, of a Monhegan Island, Maine, fisherman, can be found in the Portland Museum of Art's "Call of the Coast: Art Colonies of New England'' show.

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I hope that the New England Fisheries Management Council, now meeting in Portland, approves a plan to allocate shares of the annual groundfish catch by sectors of fishermen instead of by individual quota. A sector would be closed down if it exceeds its limit.

This would be a much easier and more orderly way to prevent overfishing than going after fishermen one by one.

Of course, the commercial and recreational saltwater fishermen don't really want any quotas. They resent controls that treat them as freshwater fishermen, weighed down with permits, have long been treated

But such has been the overfishing that some species in the vast oceans have been as fished out as trout in some lakes. Some are close to extinction.

Not even the oceans are an infinite protein factory. And we have put enough poisons and trash into them to pose a real question as to how safe a source of food they will be within a few decades.

The New England fisheries have become a classic case of the ''tragedy of the commons,'' wherein no one takes responsibility for a common resource, and so that resource is damaged or destroyed. But it's probably not too late to save much of it.

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There is something very New Hampshire about this: U.S. Sen. Judd Gregg (even his name sounds like something from a Frost poem) has introduced a bill in Congress that would bar the use of plaques that identify projects as being done with federal economic-stimulus funds.

(Which makes me wonder again why Senator Gregg briefly accepted the job of Obama's commerce secretary. How was he planning to do the job in a liberal Democratic administration?)

He's been railing against stimulus spending ever since (while deciding not to run for re-election and not having to face the public's outrage that, say, a new road couldn't be built for an impoverished town in Coos County.

Apparently signs are being constructed at $300 a project to promote the stimulus bill -- and thus President Obama and the Democratic Congress.

The Feds don't usually put such signs on other federal projects, which are paid for by a more diffuse political provenance of taxpayer cash.

Gregg, who has a rather tortured face, may be an old grump, but he's right about this use of all funds from all taxpayers -- Democrats, Druids, Republicans and Rotarians. Nix the signs.

I wonder: Will the signs make most people feel better that the government is coming to our rescue (until the money runs out), or just make them mad about the waste? Depends on how rich the town where the work is being done maybe.

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Meanwhile, Maine, one of the more liberal states, will cut and simplify its state income taxes.

To make this work, it plans big cuts in the state budget and will close tax loopholes and extend the 5 percent sales tax to such delights as ski tickets.

This will be an interesting experiment. Will it mean, for instance, that Maine's cities and towns will raise their property taxes big time to make up for lost state funds and services?

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Best wishes to the folks putting out Cape Cod Day, a new five-day-a-week "daily'' serving the sandy spit. Nice to see a paper being started rather than closed!

Of course they hope summer people will give the paper a big push -- enough to keep it alive the rest of the year. It's a tabloid. I love tabloids.

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Heard at a wedding reception last Saturday from a Rhode Islander whose family has lived in the state for hundreds of years: "This state is intimate and lawless.''

Last exit to Brooklyn: Assault on northeast Connecticut

-- Photo and caption by William Morgan

Brooklyn (settled 1703) used to one of the prettiest towns in the
formerly unspoiled and mostly rural northeastern quadrant of Connecticut (Windham County accounts for less than 4 percent of the Nutmeg State's entire population).

Even before a proposed Wal-Mart rends the fabric of a once cohesive farming community (the Brooklyn Fair is American's oldest continuously operating agricultural fair), the Connecticut Department of Transportation cut out the heart of the
village when it widened U.S. Route 6.

Everybody who has ever traveled the Providence Pike between Hartford and the Rhode Island knows that Route 6 can be a hairy, potentially life-threatening driving experience.

The motorist passes through dozens of small (and once picturesque) towns, past farms and mills; the road winds and is hilly, and it used to be narrow. In short, it was not a road to make time on, which is why it was one of the great scenic drives of southern New England.

How was the Connecticut Department of Transportation chosen to decide the visual fate of this last quiet place?

The highway planners confused widening the road and adding more signs and lights--and destroying countless sugar maples and stone walls--with making it safer.

Route 6 would be safer if drivers slowed down and enjoyed the scenery. The noisome assault on the townscape of historic places like Brooklyn is symptomatic of the ongoing destruction of one of New England's unsung treasures.

'The idea of New England'

From Ernest Hebert's Live Free or Die (Hanover, University Press of New England, 1990).

"Center Darby Village was several miles away from the Route 21 highway turnoff. In contrast to the old cemetery, the grass on the common was well tended and already beginning to green up; the fine eighteenth- and nineteenth-century houses surrounding the common had never looked better. The reason, in the language of the times, was gentrification. Educated, prosperous people from downcountry had moved into the neighborhood. The new people (which was the local term for anyone whose family had not been in Darby for at least two generations) liked to fix things up, and they had the money to get the job done. Unlike the natives, the new people believed in the idea of New England, even if the idea wasn't exactly true to the place, whereas the natives believed in the place and lacked any true idea of that place."(page 67)

Fishing future; solar stealing; data farming

New England's cities should do more to bring greenery and open-air markets into their otherwise sterile open spaces created by ''urban renewal.'' This little market near Boston's South Station is the right idea.

It's good to remind city dwellers that there are still farms not that far away. Not everything has to come in a refrigerator truck from California filled with ethylene.

New England states are leading the charge against a new federal law that goes into effect next year that requires all salt-water recreational fishermen to register and pay an annual fee of $10-$25. The idea is to develop better data to more strongly protect fishing stocks.

Some species are under a great deal of stress. The more information the better, I say. I think New England fishermen should support this -- if they want more assurance that their favorite fish will be around in a decade. And, hey, lots of people have to get fresh-water-fishing permits.

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Thieves stole solar panels off a roof in Browington, Vt., in what may be a sign of a more prosperous future for alternate energy. But after the last few weeks, I'm more dubious about the future of solar energy in these parts.

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Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont have commendably sought to battle the rather creepy "data-mining'' of personal health records. This is the practice whereby data-farmers collect electronic information on the drugs that physicians order for patients and then sell it to drug companies. Big Brother is drugging you!