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The Fish Doorbell of Utrecht

April 26, 2024 by suzannesmom

Photo: Trip.com.
The Weerdsluis lock in Utrecht, the Netherlands, has an unusual fish-friendly feature.

More often than not constructions that humans think they need really don’t work for wildlife. Some creatures adapt. Others need help.

Hannah Docter-Loeb writes at Slate magazine, “It’s a rainy Friday morning in Utrecht, a town just outside Amsterdam, and I’m looking for a boat lock. The city is full of them, but I’m looking for a very special one — the Weerdsluis lock. … (A boat lock is, for the uninitiated, basically an elevator for boats. It helps raise and lower them between areas with different water levels. There are a lot of them in the Netherlands.) There are lock attendants in a booth, waiting for boats to pass.

“But if you look closely enough, you can see a camera submerged in the water. Which from my vantage point, looks like … muddy water. But I know about 1,000 people are tuning in to the footage in real time to see what’s below the muck. They are waiting to ring the fish doorbell.

“The doorbell ‘opened’ for the season at the end of March. Fish will gather on one side, where the underwater camera keeps watch and livestreams the view on a website. People anywhere in the world can spot a fish, and press a button (the doorbell), signaling for the lock operator to open the barrier. ….

“The idea came to ecologist Mark van Heukelum in 2021. He had been studying the barriers to fish migration in Utrecht. Like many Dutch cities, the city is laden with canals, fixed channels, and boats. Although picturesque, some of these structures physically get in the way of fish that swim through the city during spawning season. One of the most troublesome barriers to fish swimming through Utrecht: the Weerdsluis lock.

” ‘One of the main issues for fish was that the boat lock is in the way,’ van Heukelum told me over Zoom, with three little decorative fish in the background. During that initial visit, he could literally see the fish queuing up at the lock — which is typically closed in the spring, and operated manually by lock operators.

“Van Heukelum, who works as an environmental consultant, thought it would take a lot of effort and bureaucracy to implement a way for the fish to get through. But the lock operator offered a simpler solution. ‘He listened to me and said, “Well I can also open the lock right now for the fish.” ‘

“In fact, the lock operator was willing to open the lock more often, as long as he knew fish were present. Within a year, van Heukelum and his team had installed a camera, livestreaming the ecosystem below the water. …

‘A camera on the water isn’t necessarily a new thing, but the fact you can actually do something and push a button and help out, that is definitely a first,’ van Heukelum said.

“The fish doorbell launched for the first time on March 29, 2021 — unfortunate timing, van Heukelum noted, as it was just a few days before April Fool’s Day. ‘We didn’t think about it,’ he recounted. ‘Media jumped on it because they thought it was so funny, it had to be a joke.’ ”

At the New York Times, Callie Holtermann adds, “Four years later, that skepticism has subsided. Mr. van Heukelum said he had been shocked by how many people had developed an obsession with his fish doorbell. He estimated that more than 6,300 fish passed through last year thanks to their efforts.

“ ‘Realizing that people from the U.S. or Australia or New Zealand are helping to get fish past a lock in the Netherlands, it’s such a strange idea,’ he said, adding, ‘I am living on a cloud right now.’ ”

Hannah Poole sent the Slate article. More at the Times, here.

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Releasing a Dam

April 25, 2024 by suzannesmom

Photo: Josh Miller via American Rivers.
Klamath River, California.

We have a lot of dams in this country that are now under consideration for removal, sometimes to restore land to tribes, sometimes to benefit wildlife, often for a combination of reasons.

Debra Utacia Krol of the Arizona Republic writes at AZCentral, “Tribes and environmentalists cheered last month as crews blasted out the concrete plugs holding water behind the JC Boyle and Copco I dams, the largest of four decommissioned dams on the Klamath River, allowing silt-filled water to flow down the ancient riverbed.

“Hope also flowed downstream alongside the muddy waters that the gigantic removal project supercharges the goal of restoring the environmental health of the river basin that traverses Northern California and southern Oregon.

“The water that once covered over 2,000 acres of land surrounding the river has begun to recede, revealing artifacts like old farm equipment, foundations and bridge pilings left over from pre-dam days. But local residents worry about the fate of local wildlife like deer and eagles that get stuck in the muddy grounds and mourn the loss of non-native fish that inhabited the reservoirs’ warm-water layers.

“The tribes, environmentalists and their allies celebrated the shrinking waters as an essential next step in what they say will be a decades-long process of restoring one of the West’s largest salmon fisheries and a region the size of West Virginia back to health.

“Yurok tribal member and fisheries director Barry McCovey was amazed at how fast the river and the lands surrounding the Copco dam were revealed. …

“The 6,500-member tribe’s lands span the Klamath’s final 44 miles to the Pacific Ocean, and the Yurok and other tribes that depend on the Klamath for subsistence and cultural activities have long advocated for the dams’ removal and for ecological restoration.

“Amid the largest-ever dam removal in the U.S., rumors and misunderstandings have spread through social media, in grange halls and in local establishments. In the meantime, public agencies and private firms race to correct misinformation by providing facts and real data on how the Klamath is recovering from what one official called ‘major heart surgery.’ …

“Residents and curious tourists were alarmed to see gray, sticky mud flats and masses of dead fish where the reservoirs once filled the canyons. They also were shocked to see brown, silty water running down the now-exposed river bed, miring deer in the mud. Social media feeds lamented the scene and claimed the ecosystem had been destroyed, possibly forever.

“But the people and organizations that had planned the removal had also forecast what would most likely happen after draining the reservoirs and said what looked like a gruesome scene was expected — and temporary.

” ‘Everything we’re seeing is exactly what has been predicted,’ said McCovey, adding that the large amounts of sediment moved by waters pouring out of two tunnels blasted underneath JC Boyle and Copco I dams were accounted for during the planning process. …

“The sediment now making its way to the Pacific was always destined to wind up in the ocean, he said, just as the fish convey nutrients upstream. McCovey likened the system to how the human body works.

” ‘The river is like the arteries of the earth, and the water would be the blood,'”‘ he said. And just as how a human body functions, blood transports vital elements throughout the body, McCovey added. When arteries are blocked, blood can’t convey nutrients or carry off waste, resulting in disease. ‘When you have such a blockage, you need to have surgery to have that blockage removed,’ McCovey said. …

” ‘After the river makes a full recovery, it’ll be much healthier,’ McCovey said.

“The Yurok Tribe also contracted with Resource Environmental Solutions to collect the billions of seeds from native plants needed to restore the denuded lands revealed when the waters subsided.

“The company, known to locals as RES, took a whole-ecological approach while planning the project. In addition to rehabbing about 2,200 acres of land exposed after the four shallow reservoirs finish draining, ‘we have obligations for a number of species, including eagles and Western pond turtles,’ said David Coffman, RES’ Northern California and Southern Oregon director.

“The plan included anticipating the effects removal and restoration could have on water quality and temperature, aquatic species and other species. … The company also plans to support important pollinators like native bumblebees and monarch butterflies and protect species of special concern like the willow flycatcher. And, Coffman said, removal of invasive plant species like star thistle is also underway. In some cases, he said, workers will pull any invasives out by hand if they notice them encroaching on newly planted areas.”

The long and interesting article at AZCentral, here, covers complaints by people who felt they were not in the loop and were adversely affected, what was done to compensate them and also rescue trapped wildlife, and goals for the future.

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Berlin’s Taxi Filmfest

April 24, 2024 by suzannesmom

Photo: Adrian Susec/Unsplash.

Film buffs, it turns out, are not only creative about making movies, they’re creative about ways to screen movies. That’s because a different locale can lend a whole new feeling to the movie-going experience.

Bryn Stole writes at the New York Times, “Some of international cinema’s biggest names gathered on [a Tuesday in February] at the Berlin International Film Festival as the event honored Martin Scorsese with a lifetime achievement award. Before accepting his trophy, Scorsese listened as the German director Wim Wenders gave a laudatory speech to an audience including celebrities and local dignitaries.

“Just around the corner, parked in the middle of a busy thoroughfare, a group of Berlin’s taxi drivers crammed into the back of a worn-out taxi van to watch a double-feature capped by Scorsese’s 1976 movie Taxi Driver.

“Klaus Meier, who has been driving a cab in Berlin since 1985, handed out bottles of soda and beer, popping the caps with the blade of a pocketknife. Irene Jaxtheimer, who runs a taxi company, passed around homemade popcorn. A generator outside the cab powered a modest television, a DVD player and a small electric heater.

“The unconventional screening, just outside a centerpiece event for one of Europe’s most prestigious film festivals, was part of the makeshift TaxiFilmFest. Running through Sunday, it is partly a protest over the miserable state of the taxi industry these days and partly a counterfestival to celebrate the taxi cab’s iconic place in the urban cultural landscape.

“It’s also in objection to an exclusive partnership deal between the festival, known locally as the Berlinale, and the ride-hailing giant Uber to ferry filmmakers between the city’s movie theaters during the event. … Beeping horns from the busy street outside — some of them coming from sleek black Uber vehicles emblazoned with the Berlinale logo — blended with the street scenes from Taxi Driver playing on the tinny television speakers. ‘Ah, I really miss those mechanical fare boxes!’ Meier said as the fares ticked away in the onscreen cab of the movie’s unhinged antihero, Travis Bickle, who drives around mid-’70s New York with growing hatred and menace.

“The back-seat festival is showing only taxi-themed flicks, and the potential repertoire is deep. Meier polled friends and fellow taxi drivers about which films to show, and said he had received dozens of suggestions about movies in which a cab plays a starring role.

“The early feature on Tuesday was Barry Greenwald’s 1982 quirky slice-of-life documentary Taxi! about some odd characters driving cabs in Toronto. The previous evening, a small rotating crowd beat the rain to catch portions of the 1998 French action-comedy Taxi, a lighthearted flick from the director Gérard Pirès about sinister, Mercedes-driving German gangsters, hapless Marseilles cops and a lead-footed rookie cabdriver who turns out to be the only person fast enough to catch the criminals.

“An early hit at the TaxiFilmFestival, which kicked off last Thursday, was Under the Bombs, a Lebanese drama set during the 2006 conflict between Hezbollah and Israel. In the movie, a Beirut taxi driver is hired to drive a woman into the war-torn south of Lebanon in hopes of finding her sister and son. Meier described it as ‘Shakespearean’ and ‘a masterpiece,’ and Berndt said it was clearly the ‘most moving taxi film’ he’d ever seen.

“But the clear favorite among attendees was Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth, a quirky, episodic 1991 film about taxi drivers and passengers in five cities around the world. The selection for TaxiFilmFest’s Sunday night finale had yet to be chosen, and Meier said he remained open to suggestions. …

“The festival attendees, squeezed into the back of the van on Tuesday, also reminisced about better days for taxi driving, such as ferrying around American and British soldiers from the occupying Allies stationed in West Berlin. (The French troops, the small crowd agreed, had less cash and rarely hailed cabs.) …

“The days before the fall of the Berlin Wall were ‘blissful times, hard to even imagine anymore,’ said Stephan Berndt.” More at the Times, here.

See also my 2014 post about a theatrical production in a taxi in Iran, here.

By the way, I hated the movie Taxi Driver when I saw it around 1976 — and walked out. Still don’t get what’s to like. You?

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Sign Language in Dance

April 23, 2024 by suzannesmom

Photo: John Labarbera.
Company 360 Dance Theatre in the show Nine.

To follow up on my recent post about deaf actors performing for general audiences, I have a related story about the use of signing in dance. I always felt that watching signing was like watching dance.

Lauren Wingenroth writes at Dance Magazine, “For Deaf audiences, watching performances with traditional sign language interpretation can feel like watching a tennis match: Their focus has to toggle between whatever is happening onstage and the interpreter, often off to the side, who might be communicating what the music sounds like or what’s being said. That’s if the performance even has an interpreter, which all too often is not the case.

“But attend a Company 360 Dance Theatre performance and the tables are turned. The Fredericksburg, Virginia–based company, led by choreographer Bailey Anne Vincent, who is Deaf, incorporates American Sign Language into all its productions. ‘If you’re a Deaf person, you’re in on the story more than a hearing person,’ says Vincent.

“For Vincent, using ASL in her choreography — which might mean incorporating a sign to emphasize an emotion a character is feeling, or to communicate what a lyric is saying — is both an artistic choice and an accessibility-related one. Though her audience is mostly hearing, ‘I still try to approach all our shows assuming there might be someone who is Deaf in the audience,’ she says. But it’s also just a natural extension of the fact that ASL is Vincent’s preferred language. ‘When I choreograph, the way that my mind thinks is in my own language,’ she says. …

“Deaf actress and dancer Alexandria Wailes feels similarly. ‘Dance and using ASL are both so embedded in who I am, as part of my identity,’ says Wailes through an interpreter. ‘I can’t really separate one from the other.’ …

“To get a sense of the deepening relationship between dance and ASL, look at choreographer and performer Brandon Kazen-Maddox’s career thus far. A GODA (grandchild of Deaf adults) and native ASL signer, Kazen-Maddox was long one of the New York City performing arts scene’s go-to interpreters, a reliable presence at performances, talkbacks, and more.

“But in 2019, choreographer Kayla Hamilton asked Kazen-Maddox to join her New York Live Arts Fresh Tracks piece not as an interpreter but as an artist. ‘She asked me to represent all sounds in sign language, and also use my body as a dancer,’ says Kazen-Maddox. ‘It was the most mind-shifting thing for me.’ …

“The experience was the beginning of a shift in Kazen-Maddox’s career, away from simply facilitating communication between­ Deaf and hearing individuals as an interpreter­ and towards an emerging genre Kazen-Maddox calls ‘American Sign Language dance theater.’ …

“Always key to this work, says Wailes: Deaf or Hard of Hearing performers who are ‘bilingual’ in dance and ASL. ‘If you’re trying to be more inclusive, great,’ she says. ‘Who are the people who are onstage? What are their lived experiences and how does this reveal itself­ in the work?’ …

“Until recently, Betsy Quillen experienced performances for Deaf audiences and hearing audiences separately. ‘It’s one or the other — it’s very isolated,’ says Quillen, who is a Hard of Hearing actor and theater director. …

“So when choreographer William Smith asked Quillen to collaborate with him on a piece for Roanoke Ballet Theatre that incorporated sign language, they had a clear goal: to make something that both Deaf and hearing audiences could understand and enjoy.

“ ‘My specific role was making sure that Deaf eyes would understand it, and that we were making our Deaf audiences feel welcomed and included and respected,’ says Quillen. ‘But we also made sure to show our hearing audience that this piece is made even more beautiful because we’ve included the Deaf audiences — that all of this ASL in every part of the production is enhancing the experience for everybody in the audience.’ “

More at Dance Magazine, here.

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Whistling as an Art

April 22, 2024 by suzannesmom

Photo: Shervin Lainez.
Molly Lewis, a professional whistler.

So many kinds of jobs in the world! And anyone who doesn’t see the ideal job out there can always invent one. In the case of Molly Lewis, she joined a very small elite of professional whistlers.

Shane O’Neill writes at the Washington Post, “If you’re a comedian, at some point you’ve gotten the dreaded ‘Tell me a joke!’ from a stranger. If you think that’s bad, try being a professional whistler. ‘It happens all the damn time,’ said Molly Lewis with a smile. ‘Sometimes I’ll oblige.’

“Lewis’s first album, ‘On the Lips,’ was released [in February]. She’s hoping that it can raise the profile of whistling. ‘People often don’t have a reference for whistle music apart from a jingle or a riff in a bad pop song,’ Lewis said. ‘I think it’s a beautiful instrument.’ …

“People are beginning to take notice. Her whistled cover of Billie Eilish’s ‘What Was I Made For?’ appeared in the Barbie movie, once in a scene and again during the credits. …

“Believe it or not, Lewis brings depth and nuance to a form that is usually cheerful or absent-minded. Still, she’s aware that there’s something novel and kitschy about what she does. … One of her chief inspirations was Marty & Elayne, the husband-and-wife lounge duo with a cult following in Los Angeles. ‘They played for 37 years, five nights a week, and it was this very special, beautiful thing,’ Lewis said. ‘They had great outfits.’ She bristled when this reporter implied that some people didn’t care for Marty & Elayne’s brand of camp. …

“Lewis learned to whistle when she was 4 years old. She occasionally fielded compliments from strangers, but hadn’t taken her talent seriously until she saw Pucker Up, a 2005 documentary about competitive whistling. She attended the International Whistlers Convention in Louisburg, N.C., in 2012 and has been plying her trade in music clubs ever since.

“Lewis’s whistling has brought her to a residency in Mexico and a show in Shanghai, but Los Angeles remains home.

‘To me, L.A. is a magical place where you can make a living doing wonderful, strange, creative things.’

“There, she has found a community of show people on the creative fringes, including puppeteers and theremin players.

“Starting in 2017, Lewis curated a series of shows called Café Molly at the Los Angeles music club Zebulon that drew the likes of actor John C. Reilly, Karen O of Yeah Yeah Yeahs and singer-songwriter Mac DeMarco. She also appeared at an open mic held at Canter’s, a beloved time capsule of a Jewish deli near West Hollywood. …

“On tour, she would strive to create an atmosphere of louche elegance. ‘I wanted to make a show that felt like the kind of show I would want to go to,’ she said. ‘Beautiful, lounge-y, something where you want to get dressed up to go.’ …

“Now, with ‘On the Lips,’ she wants to bring that experience home. The album comes with instructions on how to enjoy it: ‘Mood lighting is a must — the record will not play if you have bad lighting. Splayed on a chaise lounge with eyes closed works too.’ “

More at the Post, here. And speaking of whistling, check out my 2015 post on a Turkish whistling language, here.

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Yes, in My Backyard

April 21, 2024 by suzannesmom

Photo: Melanie Stetson Freeman/CMS Staff.
The Christian Science Monitor reports that the upscale Boston Back Bay neighborhood “worked with nonprofits to create affordable housing and apartments for formerly unhoused people, at 140 Clarendon.”

My friend Lillian and her siblings are among the few Black families that own their building in Boston’s upscale Back Bay. That’s because Lillian’s mother had the foresight to buy it in installments many years ago. Nowadays the area is prohibitive for most families, whatever their race. And as we know, affordable housing is usually fought tooth and nail in such communities. But …

Troy Aidan Sambajon writes at the Christian Science Monitor, “Garry Monteiro pauses and looks down, twiddling his thumbs. He contemplates the biggest change to his life last year. There’s a glint in his eye that wasn’t there before.

“ ‘To be honest with you, the refrigerator was a big deal,’ Mr. Monteiro chuckles, speaking in a community room at the 140 Clarendon building in Boston’s upscale Back Bay neighborhood. … But, he adds, the biggest change is having somewhere to call his own. Before moving into his apartment, the former mail courier spent nearly every night for two years on an assigned bunk at a men’s shelter.

“His routine was dictated by the shelter’s hours. He had to be out by 5:30 a.m. and back before 8 p.m. He spent his days looking for jobs or with his siblings. Every day, he worried about making it back by curfew. If he didn’t, he’d have to sleep outside. …

“The 140 Clarendon building is the rare story of a wealthy community finding solutions to homelessness. When private hotel plans stalled at the address in 2020, the neighborhood took charge. Community associations and developers backed a permanent supportive housing community – complete with on-site social services – in the heart of one of Boston’s most expensive neighborhoods.

“ ‘With homelessness numbers rising everywhere and the lack of affordable housing overwhelming, this project in the Back Bay is a welcome development,’ says Howard Koh, faculty chair of the Initiative on Health and Homelessness at Harvard University. Dr. Koh and his team say that 140 Clarendon is ‘highly unusual,’ because instead of worrying about property values, residents in a high-end neighborhood rolled out the welcome mat. …

“ ‘The collaboration of all the partners, public and private, to make such progress is a great example of how people can … rise to the challenge,’ Dr. Koh says of 140 Clarendon.

“The 111 studio apartments that now house Mr. Monteiro and his new neighbors also come with support services and case managers. The idea isn’t new, experts on ‘housing-first’ solutions say. Studies have shown the most cost-effective way to combat homelessness is to prioritize putting people in homes before securing other services. … What’s remarkable about 140 Clarendon is that Back Bay’s neighborhood and business associations signed letters of support, inviting the project onto their streets….

“ ‘It is one of those all-too-rare occasions when the public sector, the private sector, and nonprofits were able to come together and provide at least some relief,’ says Martyn Roetter, chair of the Neighborhood Association of the Back Bay, who signed one of the letters. …

“For nearly 100 years, 140 Clarendon has anchored the neighborhood’s educational and cultural character. The building was owned by the YWCA and, at various points, has housed the Lyric Stage Company of Boston, the Snowden International School, and a 210-unit boutique hotel.

“In 2019, the YWCA decided to sell the property. The first buyer planned to evict all tenants and face-lift the exterior to make way for a ritzy private hotel. When the pandemic sank the hotel market, a new developer – Beacon Communities – stepped in, while Pine Street Inn agreed to provide on-site services to formerly houseless tenants. ‘It checked all our boxes, and the location couldn’t be better,’ says Jan Griffin, vice president of Pine Street Inn. The 13-story brick-faced building has elevators and is easily accessible to public transit, grocery stores, the Boston Public Library, and churches. …

“The Back Bay neighborhood associations – which wanted to preserve the historic brownstone and its commercial tenants – had caught wind of the development plans. In two public letters of support, the associations advocated for affordable housing to be expedited in the neighborhood. …

“In addition to 111 apartments for people experiencing homelessness, 99 other units were made into affordable housing. All the commercial tenants supported the plan, which allowed them to remain in the building. ‘The fact that the local businesses and the neighbors wanted it is a really nice testament to how that neighborhood is leaning in to trying to end homelessness on their streets with housing rather than criminalizing people for existing in their neighborhood,’ says Ann Oliva, CEO of the National Alliance To End Homelessness.

“When Mr. Monteiro arrived at Pine Street’s shelters in 2021, his only possessions were the clothes on his back and a canvas messenger bag from his past life as a courier. … After 20 years of working, Mr. Monteiro left it all behind to take care of his parents. ‘I knew basically that once they passed away, I would have to start over,’ he says. ‘And I’d still do it again.’ “

More at the Monitor, here. No paywall. Subscriptions encouraged — and very reasonable.

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Women Tackle Illegal Mining

April 20, 2024 by suzannesmom

Photo: Adri Salido.
From the Christian Science Monitor: “Elsa Cerda (with spear) leads Yuturi Warmi, a group of Indigenous women who guard against illegal mining in the community of Serena in the Ecuadorian Amazon.”

As a group of indigenous women in the Ecuadorian Amazon have shown, when something is wrong in your neighborhood, it pays to join with others and fight.

Al Jazeera wrote a good report on this last year.

“As a child, Leo Cerda would spend his mornings helping his family cultivate cassava, plantains and other fruits and vegetables in their chakra, a traditional garden in Kichwa communities.

“In the Ecuadorian village of Napo, traditions form a large part of family and spiritual life. At around 3 am each morning, before heading to their chakras, many families take part in a traditional tea ceremony. Once freed from his farming duties at around midday, Cerda recalled running to the river to swim and fish with friends. Fish would later be grilled on an open fire and eaten with large amounts of fruit.

“ ‘As a kid, I got to enjoy nature,’ Cerda told Al Jazeera.

“These days, however, the 34-year-old spends his days chasing gold miners from his community and campaigning against those who threaten to destroy his ancestral lands. …

“ ‘Within three years, everything changed,’ Cerda said. ‘The land has been poisoned. There are no more fish, except ones that are contaminated. People eat them, and they get sicker and sicker.’

“A recent study carried out in mining areas of the northeastern Andean foothills of the Ecuadorian Amazon, close to where Cerda lives, revealed high concentrations of toxic metals. They are up to 352 times above permissible limits established by environmental guidelines. …

“Mariana Capparelli, a researcher who contributed to the study, told Al Jazeera it was ‘very sad to see the conditions these communities are exposed to as well as the total degradation of an ecosystem that is so important for the entire planet.’ …

“Due to what critics say is an absence of sufficient government regulation, mining in Ecuador has led to environmental pollution and adverse effects on the health of Indigenous communities. In recent months, authorities have carried out several raids against illegal miners.

But with widespread state corruption and tip-offs given to miners, machinery is sometimes withdrawn immediately before police operations take place, activists say. …

“Ecuador has a national system of protected areas that aims to safeguard biodiversity and local ecosystems in national parks, wildlife refuges, marine reserves and other designated areas throughout the country. Although the government has taken some steps to protect local water systems, rivers have traditionally not been included in this system. …

“According to Andres Tapia, a spokesperson for the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of the Ecuadorian Amazon, illegal mining has become ‘uncontrollable’ in parts of the country. …

“ ‘I thought I would always be able to drink from this river,’ Eli Virkina, a member of an Indigenous Kichwa community in Napo, told Al Jazeera. ‘Now I’m at this point where maybe I shouldn’t even swim in the water. That is really heartbreaking for me.’ …

“Across Napo, Indigenous communities and organizations have been monitoring, mobilizing and resisting mining activities. To defend their land, they have formed alliances and connections across riverine communities, including the Amazon’s first women-led Indigenous guard.

“In February 2022, a landmark Constitutional Court ruling recognized the rights of Indigenous communities to have a final say over extractive projects that affect their territories. The ruling ‘offers one of the strongest legal precedents in the world, which upholds the rights of Indigenous peoples to decide on the futures of their ancestral territories,’ according to the Amazon Frontlines advocacy group.

“But in December [2022], the ruling was disregarded when the government approved a mining project in Las Naves in Bolivar province without gaining the consent of affected communities.

“In the meantime, Napo has installed four alarm systems around the village to signal when miners are close by.

“ ‘In our territory, spears were not used anymore, but now we have one in at least every house because it’s part of the way we have to defend ourselves,’ said Majo Andrade, a member of the female-led Indigenous guard Yuturi Warmi. …

“Virkina says Indigenous resistance is vital to the region’s future. ‘Once [Indigenous people] disappear, it is way easier for miners and people to come in and access the river,’ she said. ‘When we have stronger Indigenous communities, we have stronger forests and a stronger river.’ More at Al Jazeera, here.

Adri Salido has a collection of beautiful pictures at the Christian Science Monitor and adds a few more comments to the story of Yuturi Warmi: “Yuturi Warmi refers to a type of ant (Paraponera clavata) that will attack when an enemy enters its territory.

“The group, which formed in 2020, joined with other Ecuadorian and international organizations to urge the government to enforce laws against illegal extraction and to restore habitat. But officials have not acted, according to Yuturi Warmi. Since then, the group has worked to ensure that no illegal mining takes place in its community. It patrols the riverbank, conducts canoe inspections, and maintains constant surveillance. So far, it has kept intruders out of Serena. 

“The situation is far different upstream, in Yutzupino, where illegal extraction has destroyed the basin of the Jatunyacu River, a tributary of the Amazon River.”

More at the Monitor, here. No firewall. Great collection of photos.

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Getting Around an Aged Power Grid

April 19, 2024 by suzannesmom

Photo: Hiro Yamagata, Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0
From Living on Earth: “VPPs are networks of small energy-producing and storage devices, such as solar panels and batteries, that are pooled together to serve the electricity grid.”

What to do about an old electrical grid that is having trouble keeping up with energy innovation? Steve Curwood, host of the environmental radio program Living on Earth, talks to the Brattle Group’s Ryan Hledik about using “virtual power plants.”

“Steve Curwood: Electric vehicles aren’t just useful for getting you and me from Point A to Point B. With smart policies they could also help decarbonize the grid. That’s because renewables like wind and solar don’t produce electricity around the clock. So there’s often a mismatch between when the power is being generated and when it’s being used. And until it’s needed, the big batteries in electric cars and trucks can help store some of that precious power.

“That’s part of the strategy called virtual power plants. A recent report by the consulting firm The Brattle Group estimates that virtual power plants could save utilities and their customers as much as $35 billion over the next decade. Ryan Hledik is a principal at the Brattle Group and joins us now. … So what exactly is a virtual power plant? Please explain how they would operate.

“Ryan Hledik: So a virtual power plant is basically a collection of customers [who] have been recruited into a program and are participating in that program and being provided incentives to participate in order to provide some of these services to the grid. It’s basically this idea where customers have a lot of flexibility in their demand for electricity. Customers who are buying electric vehicles have the ability to change when they’re charging that car to a degree, customers with smart thermostats can manage the thermostat in a way that changes when they’re cooling their home.

“So one example of this could be if you’re a customer who had made an investment in a battery at your home because you wanted to use that battery as a form of backup power during an outage, you could be paid by your local utility or another company to actually allow them to control that battery on a limited number of days per year, limited number of hours per day, to provide services to the grid from the battery. By doing this, the really interesting opportunity that we’re seeing here is, first of all, it’s a way to directly pay customers to participate in the decarbonization transition. And then in addition to that, instead of going out and building a [gas] plant that might only be used 100 hours per year, we’re able to tap into an investment that’s already been made for other reasons … and get more use out of that. …

“By encouraging customers to shift their charging to those off-peak hours in the middle of the night, when demand is low, or even in the middle of the day, when maybe there’s solar power that’s being curtailed, because you have more than you need, you can shift the charging load of the EVS into those hours to provide benefits that you otherwise wouldn’t have if the customers were to just simply drive home from work and plug their electric vehicle into the wall when they got home.

“Curwood: But what if somebody wants to get in that car right now and then wants to drive the 200 miles to Aunt Thelma’s because she called saying she has an issue?

“Hledik: That’s right and one of the important characteristics of virtual power plant programs is they are designed with constraints on how they’ll be used to make sure that customer comfort and convenience is maintained. So in the case of an electric vehicle, virtual power plant, you could have a program designed such that customers are always ensured that even if their utility is going to manage how that vehicle is charging overnight, that they will be starting the next day at 6 am with a full state of charge in their EV. …

“Curwood: What kind of money could we save in this country if we use virtual power plants rather than trying to just expand the traditional grid infrastructure?

“Hledik: We looked into the answer to that question in our study and what we found was if we reached a pretty significant but achievable level of virtual power plant deployment by 2030, we could save $15 billion to $35 billion over the ensuing decade, relative to if we were to make investments in those more conventional gas peakers and utility-scale batteries. …

“And we estimated that over that same 10 year period, at the level of deployment that I described, there can be an additional $20 billion of benefits associated with improved health and avoiding other detrimental effects that are associated with carbon emissions. …

“Curwood: What are some of the other ways that we could take advantage of that baseload that right now goes to waste? …

“Hledik: Providing customers with an incentive to shift their electric vehicle charging load into [off-peak] hours is one opportunity. But another example would be if customers were to pre cool their homes during that midday period, so that they didn’t need to run their air conditioners as much during the evening period. That’s one way to shift some of their electricity consumption to the middle of the day.”

More at Living on Earth, here. No firewall.

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World’s Biggest Comics Collection

April 18, 2024 by suzannesmom

Photo: Nora Hickey/ Hyperallergic.
A Veronica comic strip drawn by Dan DeCarlo.

What cartoonists and comic strips did you read as a kid? My mother wanted me to be a child always, so she bought Little Lulu comics until I was into my teens. Not that I didn’t like Little Lulu, but I really, really wanted to know about the romantic adventures of Archie, Veronica, Daisy, Jughead, and all that gang. I wanted to understand why the blond was never as popular as the brunette.

Comics are an art that draws in young and old. But they have not often received attention as an art. Until now.

Nora Hickey reports at the art magazine Hyperallergic, “In an unendingly flat city nicknamed ‘Cowtown,’ the Ohio State University (OSU) erupts as an archetypal college campus. A miscellany of stone and brick buildings from various eras look over pedestrian paths bisecting green lawns. In one of these limestone, academy-coded buildings resides a museum and library dedicated to a genre long thought to be miles from the ivory tower: comics.

“The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum claims to house the world’s largest collection of cartoon- and comics-related materials, including a range of inked paper, artifacts, newspaper clips, magazines, scrapbooks, and even the drawing board used by Chester Gould, who created the Dick Tracy comic strip (1931—77).

“But it is much more than an archive: it is at once a museum, center for scholarship, and venue for events, all of it surprisingly accessible. … First, it costs nothing to attend. Also, the materials and displays are easy for anyone to understand, comics aficionado or not. And, if you — that is, anybody — want to see any of the holdings, you can request to view it onsite.  

“This approachability may be due in part to the fact that the comics genre has been routinely underestimated, despite its outsize impact. It’s one of the only historically disposable art forms — think of those painstakingly conceived, drawn, inked, and colored newspaper funny strips smeared with wet from their hasty relegation to the recycling bin. …

” ‘The Billy Ireland was founded back in 1977 through a donation from the cartoonist Milton Caniff — who was at one point one of the most successful and influential American cartoonists in American history,’ explains Caitlin McGurk, curator of Comics and Cartoon Art and associate professor at OSU. Caniff, a ‘celebrity’ artist (‘he would appear on late night TV,’ McGurk tells me) who created the widely read Terry and the Pirates (1934–73) and Steve Canyon (1947–88) adventure newspaper strips, was an Ohioan and a 1930 alum of OSU. As he prepared for retirement, he aimed to donate all of his work to the library of the university to which he felt he owed his career. ‘The libraries at OSU actually turned it down,’ McGurk told Hyperallergic in an interview. …

We show visitors the archive and people cry — especially if you’re a maker of this form that has been so long disrespected.

“Luckily, as Caniff produced newspaper comic strips, the journalism department decided to take his archives. … With Caniff’s encouragement of his fellow comic creators and Caswell’s outreach, the Billy Ireland would become a top choice for donations.

“Bill Watterson, for instance, the famously private artist of the beloved Calvin and Hobbes (1985–95), entrusted his entire backlog to the museum — the only collection in the world to hold his archive. There are also lesser-known treasures, like the namesake of the museum itself, editorial cartoonist Billy Ireland, whose fame waned after his death but was resurrected by the Museum. …

“Behind the Ink: the Making of Comics and Cartoons … explores the variety of tools and art-making techniques employed by cartoonists over the years. The other current exhibit is Depicting Mexico and Modernism: Gordo by Gus Arriola, which details the life and work of the Modernist Mexican-American cartoonist.  Then, in May, a bonanza exhibition of the sardonic, iconic Nancy goes up, accompanied by a weekend-long Nancy fest on the 24 and 25 where Nancy scholars, cartoonists, and fans will dig into their favorite wisecracking character.   

“Below the exhibition spaces are the archives themselves. ‘Since OSU is part of a land grant institution, our archive is completely open to the public, which is pretty rare,’ McGurk explains. Some highlights are zines from the Riot Grrrl movement of the 1980s, which bear the raw emotion of their creators, and scrapbooks of cartoon engravings kept by a wealthy English family in the 1700s that painstakingly depict events long past. … There’s also a collection of 2.5 million comic strips saved by a single man (Bill Blackbeard). Personally, I loved seeing the colorful mid-century manga laid out as a huge page of frenzied activity punctuated by moments of photorealistic pictures. 

“The ability to see the comics in all stages of development — from nascent sketches, to embryonic penciled pages, to White’d Out and inked final pages — is a rare treat because of how such work is typically experienced: in reproduction on a mass scale, in frequent installments. To see the original version of a comic read by so many of us feels like seeing the artist at work. …

“ ‘We show visitors the archive and people cry — especially if you’re a maker of this form that has been so long disrespected,’ McGurk said. ‘Then you see this place and you’re like, all this is for comics? This is amazing.’ “

More at Hyperallergic, here. No firewall but subscrptions are encouraged.

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A Language Close to Aramaic

April 17, 2024 by suzannesmom

Photo: Jastrow at Wikimedia.
Slab with dedicatory Aramaic inscription to the god Salm. Sandstone, 5th century BC. Found in Tayma, Saudi Arabia, by Charles Huber in 1884. Now in the Louvre.

Among the world’s many endangered languages is one cherished today by a branch of Christianity in Iraq, a language close to the Aramaic Jesus spoke.

Sara Hassan reports at PRI’s The World, “In a small church in Baghdad, Iraq, a couple dozen people have gathered for prayers on a sunny Sunday morning. They stand in pews facing a crimson-colored curtain and a podium with a gold Syriac cross on it. The distinctive cross has a total of 12 circles at its points to represent the 12 disciples of Jesus.

“The congregants are reciting their prayers in an ancient language called Syriac. Today, it’s spoken mostly by Christians in Iraq and neighboring Syria. The language traces its roots to Aramaic, which was the script of the original Christian Bible and spoken by Jesus Christ. And it’s part of the family of Semitic languages in the Middle East region.

“The Syriac language is disappearing, with fewer and fewer people speaking it. The official languages of Iraq are Arabic and Kurdish.

“But now, after campaigning by some groups, a newly launched television channel, Al-Syriania, with funding from the Iraqi government, is hoping to change that. The community says it’s a good move toward preserving Syriac and in helping people stay connected with their language and culture.

“The channel has about 40 staff members and can be viewed in Iraq and around the world through satellite networks, such as NileSat and ArabSat. It’s a sister station of Al-Iraqiya, an Arabic television network that was set up in the country after the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, which also broadcasts in Kurdish and Turkmen.

“The news bulletins for the new channel are read in classical Syriac, but many of the other programs — which include cinema, art, history, cultural events and music — are presented in a dialect of the language.

“ ‘We have daily segments, like news and morning shows, and also, documentary programs about the history of the church and historical sites,’ said Jack Anwia, the station director. ‘We also play classical Syriac songs and music, the top-100 movies, and we have correspondents reporting from the field.’ …

“In 2003, the country was home to about 1.5 million Christians. Since then, that number has dropped to about 400,000. The war caused many of them to flee to other safer countries. But much of the decline also followed the onslaught of ISIS in 2014, which targeted Christians and other minorities.

“Many of the families settled down in other countries around the world, and younger generations have tried to adopt the languages of their host countries to assimilate better, losing touch with Syriac unless it’s spoken at home. …

“[Father Qasha Shamoun, a priest at the Ancient Church of the East in Baghdad] said the security situation has improved in Iraq over the past several years, but the Christian community is so small that it’s hard to bring people together for programs. … He added that Al-Syriania has been good for providing Syriac programming and that people in his community have told him they like watching it.

“Hundreds of Syriac books and manuscripts have still survived decades of war and migration. In fact, right before ISIS fighters captured large parts of northern Iraq in 2014, the Chaldean Catholic archbishop of Mosul, Najeeb Michaeel, rescued a collection of centuries-old Syriac manuscripts as he fled.

“Now, many of them are preserved at the Digital Center for Eastern Manuscripts in Erbil, the capital of the Kurdish region, which is supported by UNESCO, USAID and the Catholic Dominican Order.

“Back at the news station, Anwia said that it’s important not to lose Syriac. ‘It is one of the oldest languages of Iraq,’ he said. ‘And it needs to be protected from extinction.’ ”

More at The World, here.

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Film Tax Credits Tempt States

April 16, 2024 by suzannesmom

Photo: Jace Downs/AMC via AP.
A scene from the show The Walking Dead. Producers of season two of Walking Dead: Dead City are looking for extras in Boston. Click here.

Despite research from the Federal Reserve and others showing that film tax credits hurt the finances of states more than they help, they remain enormously popular.

Jon Campbell writes at the Gothamist about a recent New York study that is skeptical about this kind of tax credit. He also reports that many people just want to believe.

“New York’s $700 million-a-year tax break for film and TV productions isn’t providing taxpayers with a good return on investment, according to a new analysis commissioned by the state itself.

“The state Department of Taxation and Finance quietly released a 359-page report late last month analyzing New York’s major tax incentive programs, which are meant to attract and retain businesses. The analysis, authored by consultant PFM Group, was required by lawmakers two years ago.

“The results show a decidedly mixed bag, with some tax breaks — including the state’s marquee Excelsior Jobs Program — performing well, the report found. But the return for the state’s Film Tax Credit, which Gov. Kathy Hochul and lawmakers boosted by $280 million annually last year, was not nearly as positive.

‘Based on an objective weighing of the costs and benefits, the film production credit is at best a break-even proposition and more likely a net cost to the state,’ according to the report.

“For every dollar the state gave in tax breaks from 2018 through 2022, the Film Tax Credit drew an estimated 15 cents in direct tax revenue, the analysis found. …

“The state’s biggest industry-specific tax break belongs to the film industry, which gets $700 million a year to film or do post-production work in the Empire State. Hochul and legislative leaders are big supporters of the program, which has helped lure hundreds of productions over the years.

“The tax break can be considerable. It covers up to 30% of a film’s qualified production costs, with another 10% available if productions are filmed in certain counties north of New York City. The credit is also refundable, meaning the state pays out the excess money if it exceeds a film production’s tax bill. …

“Beyond the lackluster return on investment, PFM’s report surmised that much of the filming that occurred in New York would have happened regardless of the tax credit. … When adding indirect and induced jobs — employees who don’t work directly on production but whose employment stems from it — that return rises to 31 cents. …

“[A] prior state analysis, crafted by Regional Economic Models Inc., estimated the Film Tax Credit generated $1.70 in state and local tax revenue for every dollar the state gave up in 2021 and 2022.

“E.J. McMahon, founder of the Empire Center, a fiscally conservative think tank, argued that the prior analysis was too simplistic and assumed the film industry wouldn’t have created any jobs without the tax breaks. PFM’s analysis, he wrote, was ‘meatier’ and ‘less credulous.’ …

“PFM estimated the Excelsior program has a return of $5.25 in tax revenue for every $1 the state forgoes, when including indirect and induced jobs.

“[State Sen. James Skoufis, a Hudson Valley Democrat who pushed for the new report in the state budget] said the report’s findings on the Film Tax Credit fell in line with his expectations.

“ ‘There are some of us, myself included, that believe that the Film Tax Credit and the associated entertainment tax credits are such a bad deal that they ought to be repealed,’ he said. ‘But the politics is the politics in the state Legislature, and that continues to remain an uphill climb.’ …

“Josh Levin, vice president for state government affairs for the Motion Picture Association’s Northeast Region, said New York’s Film Tax Credit is ‘essential’ for ensuring the state ‘retains its position as a top hub for production activity and union jobs.’ …

“Lawmakers extended the Film Tax Credit for an additional 10 years. It’s scheduled to run through 2034.” More at Gothamist, here.

Maybe constituents’ delight in seeing movies being filmed in their neighborhoods is what motivates lawmakers. In that case, how about accounting for it differently — as a state expense for resident entertainment?

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A Magazine Kept Secret in Wartime

April 15, 2024 by suzannesmom

Photo: Stiftung Jüdisches Museum Berlin/Jewish Museum Berlin/ Convolute 816/Curt Bloch collection
Het Onderwater Cabaret, 1943. The satirical magazine, now on exhibit in Berlin, was produced by a German Jew hiding in a Dutch attic during the war.

Both the New York Times and the Guardian reported recently that a German Jew, hiding like Anne Frank in a Dutch attic during WWII, produced an angry, humorous magazine because he could. His magazine was in the news thanks to an exhibit in Berlin.

Nina Siegal writes at the Times that many people hid in attics during the war but that Curt “Bloch’s experience was different because, in addition to sustenance and care, his helpers brought him pens, glue, newspapers and other printed materials that he used to produce a startling publication: his own weekly, satirical poetry magazine.

“From August 1943 until he was liberated in April 1945, Bloch produced 95 issues of Het Onderwater Cabaret, or the Underwater Cabaret. … Writing in both German and Dutch, [he] mocked Nazi propaganda, responded to war news and offered personal perspectives on wartime deprivations.”

Charlie English at the Guardian has more from the perspective of Bloch’s daughter, Simone, now 64.

“As the daughter of antiques dealers, Simone Bloch grew up in a New York house filled with rare and mysterious materials. The dining room was packed with precious volumes, including a collection of small, hand-written magazines, illustrated with collages in a dadaist or surrealist style.

“ ‘All of my parents’ books were kind of intimidating,’ Simone, now 64, says. ‘But this was weirder. It wasn’t something I would ever want to pick up.’

“She found them a little creepy, with their frequent images of Adolf Hitler and other wartime leaders. It was only many years later that Simone came to understand that these magazines represented her father’s resistance to the Holocaust.

“Born in Dortmund in 1908, Curt Bloch was the first in his family to go to university, studying law in the German capital, which at that time was the centre of the buzzing avant-garde cabaret scene. Curt was Jewish and objected to Hitler from the first. In 1933, when Hitler introduced a law banning Jews from civil service positions unless they had fought in the first world war, Bloch wrote a biting response to the authorities, declaring that, no, he hadn’t served in the war since he was only five when it had broken out. When the Gestapo came knocking, Curt was ready. He slipped out of a top floor window with some cash he’d hidden, and fled across the rooftops, eventually reaching Holland.

“But he wasn’t safe for long. The Germans invaded the Netherlands in 1940, and … Bloch took refuge in the crawlspace above the attic of a small suburban house in Enschede, on the German border. It was here that he began to produce the first issue of his magazine. He wrote in fountain pen, made collages from cuttings and stitched the pages together by hand. He called his volume the Underwater Cabaret in reference to the Dutch term for people in hiding, ‘divers,’ and to the favored form of political theatre in Weimar Berlin. Friends in the Dutch resistance helped circulate the Underwater Cabaret to 30 or so other ‘divers.’ They would bring the issue back a week later, by which time Bloch had prepared a new one.

“Alongside political commentaries, Bloch published highly personal writing. His mother Paula and little sister Hélène had followed him to the Netherlands, and had also gone into hiding. In May 1943 they were detained. … He devoted several poems to Hélène, one of which contained the lines: ‘Stay strong against the hatred, betrayal, and scorn / And when the war someday comes to an end / I will go looking for you.’

“Writing this kind of material was extremely dangerous. … Why take the risk? Simone believes it was a way for her father ‘to fight his own despair.’ It was a demonstration that, even in such circumstances, resistance was possible. ‘It’s getting away with something when you can’t get away with anything,’ Simone suggests. …

“In all, Bloch produced 95 magazines. The last issue is dated 3 April 1945. By that day Enschede had just been liberated, and Bloch could leave his hiding place. He travelled back to Amsterdam, where he met and married an Auschwitz survivor, Ruth Kan. In 1948 they emigrated to the US. …

“It was only recently, after years of research conducted in part by her daughter, Lucy, that Simone came to understand the full significance of the zine as a rare literary monument capturing a terrible period in history.”

More at the Times, here. And at the Guardian, here. Is it any wonder that today’s Germany is a loyal supporter of Israel? Unlike America, I suggest, Germany has reckoned with the weight of history.

All 95 copies of the Underwater Cabaret are on loan to the Jewish Museum Berlin, where an exhibition will run to 26 May.

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When the Characters Are Deaf

April 14, 2024 by suzannesmom

Photo: Signature Theatre.
A behind-the-scenes look at the rehearsal process for the musical Private Jones, featuring deaf and hard-of-hearing artists.

When we were watching the Hulu series Only Murders in the Building, we noticed efforts by the producers to be inclusive. For example, a key character is deaf. When he is on, he uses sign language and we read subtitles. A few other characters use signing for his benefit. He can also read lips.

A push for diversity and inclusion is not happening only in streaming services. At the Signature Theatre in Virginia, for example, deaf and hard-of-hearing characters powered a whole musical.

As Thomas Floyd has the story at the Washington Post.

“Signing, singing and soundscapes are intermingled on a late-January afternoon at Signature Theatre’s Arlington, Va., rehearsal studio, where the cast of Private Jones is marching through the world-premiere musical’s opening scene.

“Loosely inspired by Gomer Jones, a deaf sniper who fought in World War I, the show opens in rural Wales with an 8-year-old Jones getting a lesson from his gruff father in sharpshooting and hard truths. As the only scene before Jones loses his hearing, it uses radio-play-like foley effects to create the sounds that will echo in the character’s head through the rest of his life — and give deaf and hard-of-hearing audiences visual cues to associate with those sounds.

“When Johnny Link, the hard-of-hearing actor playing Jones, raises a prop rifle, another performer flaps an umbrella to conjure the sound of birds fluttering overhead. A ratchet replicates a rifle cocking. A snare drum stands in for a gunshot. All the while, two actors narrate — one in spoken English, one in American Sign Language — and writer-director Marshall Pailet reminds his cast to be aware of the open captions that will flank the stage at every show. …

“Accessibility is a guiding principle for [writer-director Marshall Pailet], the hearing playwright and composer who wrote the book, music and lyrics for Private Jones. … The musical features a cast of hearing, hard-of-hearing and deaf actors performing dialogue in three languages — English, ASL and British Sign Language — while also delivering Pailet’s Celtic-inspired score. To Pailet and Alexandria Wailes, the show’s director of artistic sign language, no scene should be staged without careful consideration of how narrative intent is both seen and heard.

“ ‘If the piano does something that is supposed to evoke an emotion and there’s not a visual equivalent of that, we haven’t done our job,’ Pailet says. ‘Theater is taking psychology and turning it into behavior. So everything is visual, everything is behavioral, and it’s also therefore a perfect medium for sign language, which is a visual language. It exists to be seen.’

“Pailet acknowledges that the origins of Private Jones are fairly mundane: He was interested in writing a World War I trench warfare story — specifically exploring how being asked to commit violence can reorient a person’s worldview — when he came across an article with a couple of sentences about the deaf Welsh sniper. …

“After traveling to Wales … and tracking down war records he believes belonged to Jones, Pailet took an early iteration of the show to Connecticut’s Goodspeed Festival of New Musicals in January 2020. He subsequently connected with Wailes, the ASL master on the Oscar-winning film CODA, and the duo began swapping ideas during the pandemic on how to better integrate deaf and hard-of-hearing perspectives.

“While the show features a narrator performing in ASL, Wailes pitched the idea of also incorporating British Sign Language during dialogue exchanges between characters who would have spoken in that wholly different dialect. …

“Finding the right actor to enlist as Jones — a deaf character who tricks his fellow soldiers into thinking he’s hearing and carries much of the show’s vocals — also proved critical. As a musical theater performer who has used hearing aids since childhood, Link came with connections to the hearing and deaf worlds that the character bridges. …

“ ‘I have never felt so seen in a character,’ Link says. ‘Truly, this is one of the most special projects I’ve ever worked on because it pulls from different parts of my life. I feel a lot of the things that Gomer feels. I just knew I had to do it.’

“Pailet says unfamiliar perspectives are at the core of Private Jones, which uses its innovative soundscapes to place the audience in Jones’s shoes while interrogating how people empathize with or dehumanize those they don’t understand. …

“Having spent the better part of five years developing the show, Pailet hopes this isn’t his last shot at envisioning Jones’s journey onstage.”

More at the Post, here.

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House of Trees

April 13, 2024 by suzannesmom

Photo: Mitchell Joachim/Terreform ONE.

Most builders rely on steel and concrete in construction, but the production of those materials is bad for the environment. That’s why innovative thinking in architecture is so important. At Fast Company, Nate Berg describes one unusual experiment.

“In a forest along the Hudson River north of New York City, a strange new building is slowly rising. The strangeness of the building is that it’s meant to be occupied by humans, animals, and plants. The slowness of the building is that it’s made out of — made by, really — growing trees.

“Fab Tree Hab is a 1,000 square foot tent-shaped pavilion that uses grafted white willow trees to form its walls and roof. Using a computer-designed scaffolding system to precisely guide their growth, these trees are bent to create a living canopy that will, through specifically placed tree grafts and planter boxes, fill out the form and structure of the almost-entirely bio-based building. The scaffold can eventually be removed and reused elsewhere. Within 10 years, it would be a kind of multi-armed and interconnected mega tree house. It’s a prototype that could show how buildings may eventually be grown rather than built.

“The project comes from Terreform One, a nonprofit art, architecture, and urban design research group led by architect Mitchell Joachim. The idea behind this project has had a tree-like maturation period, starting from seed around 2002. Habitat for Humanity had launched a design competition looking for new approaches to building suburban housing. At the time, Joachim was pursuing a PhD in architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, exploring the application of ecological processes to design.

“Along with fellow doctoral researchers Lara Greden and Javier Arbona, he began to explore new ways ecological processes might be applied to the design brief of getting massive amounts of housing built. …

“The idea of shaping trees into usable structures goes back thousands of years. ‘You can find examples of this within illuminated manuscripts, within the bible,’ Joachim says. The main problem, though, is that these structures take a long time to grow.

“Joachim and his collaborators began thinking of ways to accelerate the process. Initially they explored growing trees hydroponically, and transplanting them into a scaffold. This would have given them height very quickly, but the strength of the trees would have been less than naturally grown trees. With hopes of turning this tree-based system into a viable approach to building, Joachim and his collaborators decided they also needed that strength.

“By this point, Joachim was years into the research process, and had launched Terreform One. In looking at other methods for growing trees quickly, the team learned about biomass farms, which grow trees that are harvested and burned to create electricity. These farms grow tightly packed rows of trees that rise dozens of feet in height within just a few years. The tall, slender trees seemed perfect for use in the scaffold Joachim and his team envisioned. The design shifted and the project was reoriented around replanting white willows harvested from a commercial biomass farm.

“The Fab Tree Hab pavilion that’s now standing in the forest in New York is made up of these replanted trees. Planted together in clusters, the trees make up a few dozen vertical ribs of the pavilion. Designed to graft together over time into a thicker tree, each cluster forms what will be a pillar of the building.

“While they’re still young and pliable, the clusters have been bent into the mass timber scaffold, which is itself a unique piece of architecture, appearing somewhat like an upside-down boat hull. The ribs of the scaffold guide the trees upwards and along the path of what will eventually be a sloping pitched roof. In the wall space between the vertical trees, the scaffold is outfitted with planters and habitat for other plant and animal species, each made from biodegradable materials like hand-crocheted jute and bioplastic. After a year’s growth, it’s estimated that the tree elements will be able to physically support the weight of these planters and habitat structures.

“ ‘It is kind of a land coral, or a terrestrial reef. It attracts all kinds of things to live inside it and around it and underneath it and then thrive in that section of the forest,’”’ Joachim says.

‘On day one we had frogs move into the shelter.’

“About halfway up the arched pavilion, additional planters create space for the Fab Tree Hab’s key architectural element. This is where additional trees can be grafted onto the tree structure as it matures, enabling the building to rise even taller. …

“ ‘The point of the entire structure is a prototype to really get this right so that this could be replicated anywhere,’ Joachim says. He envisions the system being scaled up, made into a kit of parts people could use to grow, say, a garage or a backyard pergola, and eventually even a house. There could be tree-walled museums grown over a decade, or even opera houses with resonant walls of willow timber that are alive and still growing.”

More at Fast Company, here. No paywall.

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Native Speech at School

April 12, 2024 by suzannesmom

Photo: Riley Robinson/Monitor Staff.
Kawehnokwiiosthe teaches the Mohawk language to students from both sides of the US-Canada border at the Akwesasne Freedom School, St. Regis Mohawk Reservation, northern New York.

Today many languages are in danger of dying out as the elders who speak them die off and young people don’t learn them.

Fortunately, in some places there are efforts to educate new speakers. Consider this Mohawk language school at a reservation in upstate New York.

Sara Miller Llana writes at the Christian Science Monitor, “Students and teachers, as well as some parents, sit on two wooden benches running the length of the hallway of their school, organized not by age or grade but by their clans.

“They take turns reading from the Ohén:ton Karihwatéhkwen, which translates from the Mohawk language to ‘Words before all else.’ These words, which recognize all life forces in creation, mark the day’s start at the Akwesasne Freedom School.

“But the 60-odd students here wouldn’t understand these lessons if it weren’t for this little schoolhouse at the United States-Canada border that for decades has been fighting to preserve Mohawk language and culture. ‘This makes us who we are, and if we don’t have this, who are we going to be?’ asks teacher Kawehnokwiiosthe, whose name in English means ‘She makes the island beautiful.’ …

“Kawehnokwiiosthe turns to her young pupils, who introduce themselves by their clans – Wolf, Bear, and Eel – and state that they are wisk, or age 5. Every class in K-8 that students take is full language immersion.

When a child asks a question in English, Kawehnokwiiosthe responds in Mohawk.

“Most parents pay tuition with a quilt sold at an annual auction in August. The school is run as a co-op, where parents do the cleaning (along with the students) and the maintenance work. Students come from American and Canadian sides of the border, but the school has never accepted funds from either government, says Alvera Sargent, who heads the nonprofit Friends of the Akwesasne Freedom School and is one of the last first-language speakers of Mohawk.

“That makes her precious, says Waylon Cook, former teacher and now project manager of the school’s nonprofit arm. ‘We treasure our first-language speakers,’ he says. … ‘If you lose [Mohawk], you can’t go to France like you could to learn French. There is nowhere else to do it but here.’ More at the Monitor, here.

Meanwhile, in the state of Washington, there’s an effort to bring Native language teaching into public school, too.

Lauren Gallup wrote at Northwest Public Broadcasting, “A number of Washington state public schools are partnering with tribes to bring Indigenous languages into classrooms in an effort to rectify the marred history of Native American boarding schools.

“Rachael Barger is a teacher on special assignment with Bethel School District, one of the districts partnering with the Nisqually Tribe to bring its Southern Lushootseed language into the classroom for a small subset of students. 

“5% of Bethel’s student population identifies as American Indian, Alaskan Native, two or more races or Hispanic and Native. Barger serves over 200 Title VI Indian Education Program students for the district. Title VI is a federal program that aims to meet the specific needs of Native American students. 

“The tribe and district have partnered, so far, to bring the language classes to two elementary schools for students who qualify for Title VI. Bethel School District had 461 qualifying students this last school year, which is around 2% of its student population.  Barger said those students were excited to learn the language because it felt unique to them. …

“The tribe’s partnership with the Bethel schools is part of the Nisqually Language Resource Center which started two years ago.

“ ‘It makes — it chokes me up,’ said Catalina Sanchez, research coordinator for the center. ‘It’s just something new that we’ve always needed in our community. So I’m proud of us for finally getting our own program in our schools and in our community.’

“The language work being undertaken by the tribe is part of broader efforts to expand and uplift culture and identity for the tribe. 

“ ‘You’re starting to see everything kind of awakening right now here in Nisqually,’ said Willie Frank III, chairman of the Nisqually Tribe. …

“Frank said he thinks it’s a perfect time to focus again on the tribe’s cultural traditions. ‘What I was taught was to tell our story, and, you know, keep building our people up,’ Frank said, ‘and that’s what we’re doing with all this great work in here. I think about the art, the culture and the language; that’s going to be something that sustains us.’ ” 

More at Northwest Public Broadcasting, here. No paywall for either article.

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