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Archive for December, 2012

Thomas Hart Benton

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on December 17, 2012| 2 Comments »

Suzanne says I have an art esthetic. That makes me laugh.

My esthetic, as far as I can tell, is mostly a preference for painting that is wavy: Charles Burchfield, Virginia Lee Burton, Grant Wood, Marsden Hartley, Kate Knapp, Edvard Munch, Reginald Marsh.

A massive mural by one of my wavy favorites, Thomas Hart Benton, has recently been rescued from storage. Carol Vogel has the story in the NY Times.

“On New Year’s Day 1931, a new and radically different building opened amid the town houses of West 12th Street: Joseph Urban’s International-Style New School for Social Research, with one room in particular as a star attraction. Thomas Hart Benton, the American realist painter, had lined the third-floor boardroom with nine panels of what would be a 10-panel mural, ‘America Today,’ depicting a panoply of pre-Depression American types, from flappers to farmers, steel workers to stock market tycoons. Lloyd Goodrich, a prominent art historian, pronounced it a breakthrough that heralded a new approach to mural painting, ‘of actually taking reality and making mural art directly out of it.’

“Eight decades later, ‘America Today,’ now considered one of the most important and famous examples of American scene painting, is languishing in storage. That will change, however, because AXA Equitable, the insurance company that bought it nearly 30 years ago, has decided to donate it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. …

“The only problem,” writes Vogel, “is that the museum is so squeezed for space that the mural’s first public appearance after the handover won’t be until at least 2015, when the Met takes over the Whitney Museum of American Art’s landmark Marcel Breuer building on Madison Avenue (after the Whitney’s move to the meatpacking district).” More.

Something to look forward to in 2015.

Photograph: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

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Using Nature to Save Nature

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on December 16, 2012| Leave a Comment »

An editorial in the NY Times earlier this month praised the efforts of a Long Island organization committed to rescuing a lovely, endangered body of water.

The editorial said that in Shinnecock Bay, “pollution from fertilizer and septic runoff feeds frequent algae blooms that block oxygen and sunlight. …  Once-lush beds of eelgrass, shelter for the little fish that feed bigger ones, have largely disappeared from the western part of the bay.”

But there is hope. “What Shinnecock Bay has going for it are scientists working to restore its waters and tidal flats to health. The Shinnecock Bay Restoration Program, run by Stony Brook University’s School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences and its Institute for Ocean Conservation Science, means to fix the problem, not just study it.

“The institute’s executive director, Dr. Ellen Pikitch, said a big part of the job was as simple as replanting eelgrass and seeding the bay with clams and oysters, which filter the water clean and make the bay better able to fend for itself. …  Local officials were doing their part by agreeing to close sections of the bay to shellfishing.”

More on what is being done now and ideas for even bigger efforts here. The program could serve as a model for sustainability elsewhere in the world. And we can all do our bit by using less fertilizer and thinking first before putting pollutants down our drains.

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Alden Decides to Listen to Ella

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on December 15, 2012| 2 Comments »

Alden wrote on Facebook that he was going to cut off all access to the outside world last night and just listen his Ella Fitzgerald album. It sounded like a good idea to me.

Where do you look for healing? People have their ways. Getting lost in a book, attending a Handel’s “Messiah” (“Comfort ye, My people”), playing with a child too young to understand, breathing deeply in a florist shop, creating a self-imposed news blackout.

Once you turn your face to things that are beautiful and good, once you feel able to stand upright, you may be up for action. Donating to an organization that can help, volunteering, writing to your congressmen, composing a poem or a requiem. Take your time.

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Christmas Tree Rises from Broken Castoffs

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on December 14, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Every day, no matter what else is going on around the world, artists are thinking of new ways to express beauty.

Henry Grabar writes an Atlantic Cities “postcard” about two Belgian designers’ insight that plates lit from the inside could make something wonderful out of discards — while saving a tree from being cut down for Christmas.

The resulting “tree” of broken cups and plates glows ethereally and was selected for display in the town square of Hasselt, Belgium.

” ‘We decorated the tree with objects which would otherwise have remained invisible,’ MOOZ designers Inge Vanluyd and Stefan Vanbergen wrote in their DesignBoom submission.” Not just invisible, I would add, but thought to be useless.

More.

Photograph: MOOZ, via DesignBoom (an independent publication dedicated to architecture and design)

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Baha’i Temple

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on December 13, 2012| Leave a Comment »

For architecture buffs everywhere, an article on a collaboration between Hariri Pontarini Architects and Gartner Steel and Glass that has led to an unusual place of worship in South America.

Lisa Rochon writes in Toronto’s Globe and Mail that starting last September “at the Gartner Steel and Glass testing facility in Bavaria, Germany, translucent panels of cast glass [were] mocked up. Artisans at Toronto’s Jeff Goodman Studio, working in close collaboration with Toronto’s Hariri Pontarini Architects, produced the thick, milky glass for a Baha’i temple on the edge of metropolitan Santiago, Chile.

“The protective embrace of the domed temple, to be defined by nine petals (or veils), will be fabricated of myriad shapes in cast glass, with 25 per cent of them noticeably curved. Luminous and white is what design lead Siamak Hariri had in mind; seen up close, they look like streams of milk frozen in place.

“It took years of testing and the rejection of hundreds of samples at the acclaimed Goodman Studio (which typically makes chandeliers or small-scale screens of glass) to arrive at the 32-millimetre-thick cast glass with matte finish. ‘That the design is finally being mocked up in Germany represents a major milestone,’ says Hariri. …

“The project is unique in the world, says Gartner’s managing director, Armin Franke, from his office in Germany. Hariri’s exacting specifications have presented many challenges. For one thing, the architects want only the most minimal silicon joints between the heavy cast-glass panels. The panels – made from countless glass rods laid on a sheet and baked at Goodman Studio – are stronger than stone, according to tests, to satisfy a Baha’i requirement that the building endure for 400 years, and to survive one of the most active earthquake zones in the world.”

I love how many players around the world are collaborating on the innovations behind this project.

Lots more on the project here and at the Baha’i website, here.

Photograph: Hariri Pontarini Architects. A computer-generated rendition of the Baha’i House of Worship under construction in Santiago, Chile.

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Travelers Aid Evolves (oops)

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on December 12, 2012| 2 Comments »

The last time I looked, Travelers Aid helped people in train stations and bus stations who were lost or confused or needed a translator. The website still notes that history.

“Travelers Aid Family Services began in 1916 as an all-volunteer effort, one of hundreds of organizations that emerged around the country in response to the needs of the thousands of new immigrants arriving in the United States each day. The agency, which was incorporated in 1920 as the Travelers Aid Society of Boston, provided help with housing, transportation, and employment to new immigrants, stranded travelers, and the poor at Boston’s train stations and docks.”

I wish when I directed a stranded Amtrak passenger to the Travelers Aid office office this morning that today it has the deeper purpose of ending homelessness. Oops.

The traveler was a pleasant if anxious man in his 40s who had come up from Virginia to meet a flight his 14-year-old daughter was taking from Greece. Not knowing our wily ways up north, he gave money to another train passenger who asked for $10. After he got off the train, he realized his wallet was gone.

Amtrak police were surly and told him to go a Boston Police station to file a report — but didn’t tell him how to get there. He wandered around for a couple hours. Then he stopped me and asked where the police station was.

I am pretty wary of these hard-luck travel stories. People of all ages make them up on the subway (one woman has a different story every day about why she doesn’t have the fare for Fitchburg or Worcester), but the traveler was only asking for directions to a police station that I didn’t know how to find.

So I sent him to Travelers Aid across from South Station. At least there will be kind people there, right? Even if he isn’t homeless and doesn’t fit their new mission? I sure hope so. if you know anything about Travelers Aid today, please tell me.

Photograph: Travelers Aid Family Services

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Explaining America to Russians

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on December 11, 2012| 2 Comments »

A political analyst from Russia who has lived in the U.S. off and on for 20 years has written a book for Russians thinking of living in America, and it’s a knockout hit. It turns out that even Russians who are not planning to go to the U.S. find our culture deeply puzzling and want to learn more.

Reading about Nikolai Zlobin’s book in the NY Times is helping me understand how differently Russians see some everyday things. Live in a cul-de-sac with few neighbors? That’s a dead end. Very dangerous! Leave curtains open at night, and let people see what you’re up to? No way!

“In Russia,” adds Ellen Barry, “children are raised by their grandmothers, or, if their grandmothers are not available, by women of the same generation in a similar state of unremitting vigilance against the hazards — like weather — that arise in everyday life. An average Russian mother would no sooner entrust her children’s upbringing to a local teenager than to a pack of wild dogs.

“But of course much in everyday American life sounds bizarre to Russians, as Mr. Zlobin documents meticulously in his 400-page book, ‘America — What a Life!’

“It seems strange, 20 years after the fall of the Iron Curtain, that ordinary Russians would still be hungry for details about how ordinary Americans eat and pay mortgages. But to Mr. Zlobin’s surprise, his book — published this year and marketed as a guide to Russians considering a move abroad — is already in its fifth print run, and his publisher has commissioned a second volume.” Read more here.

Photograph: James Hill for the NY Times
Nikolai Zlobin, the political analyst and author, in central Moscow near the Kremlin.

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Oldest Continuous Volunteer Orchestra

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on December 10, 2012| Leave a Comment »

The holiday concert last Saturday deserves its own post.

I learned about the Melrose Symphony Orchestra, the oldest continuous volunteer orchestra in the country, because my friend Alden began playing the oboe there a year or so ago and loves it. Saturday was the first time we got to a performance, and we were amazed by the whole scene.

Memorial Hall, remarkable for its size and its caryatid-supported honorary box, must have had a thousand people in it. It seemed like everyone of every age in Melrose had come, and a look at the program suggested that every business in town was a supporter.

The website says that “the mission of the Melrose Symphony is to give the citizens of Melrose and surrounding area an opportunity to participate in the joy of music.”

The conductor, Yoichi Udagawa, is determined to make classical music fun and accessible to all. He is not only an excellent musician but a real showman, drawing applause from audience members who have attended before as soon as he said he was going to tell a joke.

Alden told us the orchestra provides scholarships for high school students who often join up again after college. And he explained that the kids who were walking around before the performance and in the intermissions selling tickets were raising money by giving audience members a chance to conduct the last number, a jingle bell sing-along.

We also had music from Grieg and Vaughn Williams, so it wasn’t 100% holiday. But the guest star, Renese King, sang Gospel music with two talented nieces, a backup group, and a lovely young woman who danced sign language — and that really got everyone in the spirit of the season.

I have to say, I have lived in New England 30 years and have never seen a whole community rally around a cultural institution to this extent. Melrose must have a secret formula. I’d like to know what’s in the water.

Photograph: Melrose Symphony Orchestra

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Five Golden Rings

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on December 9, 2012| 4 Comments »

Getting in the spirit: listening to carols on the radio, decorating the fat tree my husband found, attending my friend Alden’s holiday concert at the Melrose Symphony (a whole post on that to come), and baking cookies.

Even though I try new recipes, I find the sugar cookie recipe John got in nursery school to be the most reliable, and I love the worn cookbook he made, held together by yarn, and his scribbles on the cover.

I especially love this line in recipe: “use good-sized cookie cutters so children can be successful in handling shapes.”

Here I am working away. Please note my five golden rings, Suzanne’s creation.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

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Offering a Second Chance

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on December 8, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Mark Guarino has a nice story in the Christian Science Monitor about a Chicago woman of great determination.

” ‘Pollinate’ is a word that Brenda Palms Barber likes to throw around when talking to people about her work.

“She pollinates jobs for recently released inmates looking for a second chance. She pollinates faith among the people who take a chance in hiring them. She pollinates an upswing in North Lawndale, one of the most impoverished neighborhoods in Chicago, about five miles west of downtown.

“She also pollinates honey. At least that’s the job of the bees she has spent five years raising.

“Indeed, Ms. Barber has brought swarms of bees to the city’s West Side, using them to foster job creation among a stigmatized group of people who live on the bottom rung of the economic ladder: black males who exit the state or county prison system with little formal education or job skills….

” ‘We have to be their first employers,’ she says. ‘We have to prove to society that people who did bad things, people who need second chances, can be positive in the workplace, that they will be loyal and hard-working and honest employees.’ “

More here.

Photo: David Harold Ropinksi/Sweet Beginnings
Brenda Palms Barber’s honey-products program has hired 275 ex-offenders since 2007. After 90 days, they shift to the outside workforce.

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First Twitter Fiction Festival

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on December 7, 2012| Leave a Comment »

It took me a while to get into twitter, but I’m hooked now. In fact, some readers  of this blog follow me by way of @LunaStellaBlog1 instead of signing up for e-mails. (Luna & Stella is Suzanne’s company.)

The abortive revolution in Iran showed me the power of twitter and was a turning point for me. I still know the date by heart, June 20, 2009. If you searched on #Iran, the tweets came so fast with offers of new servers when sites were blocked in Iran, with up-to-the-minute photos and recordings, with citizens getting the word out that I got hundreds of tweets per minute and the U.S. president had to ask twitter not to do maintenance one night because it was a critical time of day in Iran.

Now I learn a completely different thing about twitter. It seems that people have been writing fiction in 140-character bites and that the practice has matured to the extent that twitter fiction is ready for a festival.

Writes Jennifer Schuessler at the NY Times, “The participants, some two dozen published and neophyte authors from five continents chosen by a panel of American publishing insiders, are posting in five different languages, often with input solicited from readers. The Iowa-based writer Jennifer Wilson is posting photographs of gravestones and then writing ‘flash fiction’ in response to epitaphs submitted by followers. The South African author Lauren Beukes is writing mashups, gathered under the hashtag #LitMash, based on ‘incongruous suggestions (the weirder the better!),’ according to the festival’s showcase page.

“The French fantasy novelist Fabrice Colin is writing a serialized story of five strangers trapped on a bus. And an anonymous Chinese author is contributing ‘Censortive,’ a story exploring the limits of free speech in the People’s Republic, tweeted out in a series of late-night installments.” Read more here.

It’s not War and Peace, of course.

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Le Jongleur de Notre Dame

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on December 6, 2012| 2 Comments »

I read the Anatole France short story “Le Jongleur de Notre Dame” in high school French class, and although I have retained only a fuzzy memory of the details, I have a pleasant feeling about the ending.

A poor juggler (jongleur) goes into a church wanting to show his gratitude for something to Mary but feeling he has nothing to offer. Standing before her statue, he decides to present the thing he knows best: juggling. Just when church’s clergy appear and are about to reprimand him, they see the statue bend and reach out to receive the juggler’s gift.

I have blogged recently about gifts that serve a second purpose, like TOMS shoes, which gives a pair of shoes to a needy child when you buy shoes for yourself. Now Suzanne says that Luna & Stella will donate $5 to the Homeless Prenatal Project for every purchase now through December 24. Use the code ANGEL12.

I am still looking for your suggestions about gifts that do good. I myself ordered three of Dancing Deer’s charitable gifts this year. Ten Thousand Villages is, as a fair trade retailer, pretty much all about doing good.

And if you live in Rhode Island, please consider supporting the Granola Project.

For angels only. Birthstone jewelry by Lunaandstella

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Puritan Opposed Forcing Religion on People

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on December 5, 2012| Leave a Comment »

The Puritan thinker Roger Williams got fed up with the rigid Puritans in the Massachusetts Bay Colony and went off to found the state of Rhode Island and advocate for freedom of religion.

Recently Lucas Mason-Brown, a Brown University math major, worked with a small group of undergraduates to crack the shorthand code Williams used while making notes.

According to Martine Powers in today’s Boston Globe, here, translation of the notes was an achievement that had resisted scholars for centuries. No major insights about Roger Williams were revealed, but some were confirmed.

For example, the notes show that Williams was against baptizing Indian children — a new example of how adamantly he opposed pressure to convince anyone of any religious belief.

In an earlier AP article in the Herald Online, Erika Niedowski writes, “College history professor emeritus J. Stanley Lemons and others at Brown started trying to unravel the so-called ‘Mystery Book’ a few years ago. But the most intense work began this year after the university opened up the challenge to undergraduates, several of whom launched an independent project.

” ‘No one had ever looked at it systematically like this in generations,’ Widmer said. ‘I think people probably looked at it and shrugged.’

“Senior math major Lucas Mason-Brown, who has done the majority of the decoding, said his first instinct was to develop a statistical tool. The 21-year-old from Belmont, Mass., used frequency analysis, which looks at the frequency of letters or groups of letters in a text, but initially didn’t get far.

“He picked up critical clues after learning Williams had been trained in shorthand as a court stenographer in London, and built his own proprietary shorthand off an existing system. Mason-Brown refined his analysis and came up with a rough key.” Read more.

AP Photograph
The preface page of the Mystery Book from Brown University’s John Carter Brown Library. Lucas Mason-Brown, a senior mathematics major, helped crack a mysterious shorthand code developed and used by religious dissident Roger Williams in the 17th century. The handwritten code surrounds the printed text on the preface page.

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Invite a Farmer to Use Your Land

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on December 4, 2012| Leave a Comment »

There are people who want to grow crops but have no land and people with arable land that lies fallow, and never the twain shall meet.

Oh, wait a minute.

“Susan and Paul Shay bought their four-acre dream spread years ago, with the idea of returning some of the land to farming,” writes Michael Prager at the Boston Globe.

“Meanwhile, when Seona Ngufor immigrated to America 10 years ago, she held onto the idea she would take up farming — as in her native Cameroon — if only she could get access to a farmable plot. …

“They were brought together by an unusual matchmaking service that uses geographic information system mapping data to pair would-be farmers with property owners who have extra land.

“The matching service is the work of the New Entry Sustainable Farming Project, a nonprofit organization in Lowell that trains farmers in organic growing and helps them find a plot to work. …

“New Entry uses GIS mapping data to screen for potential farm plots. The map sets contain a long list of criteria to distinguish individual parcels. … The system is so sophisticated it can pick out suburban homesteads with large patches of unused land, so New Entry was no longer limited to looking at obvious candidates, such as existing farms. …

“Once New Entry identifies sites, it approaches agricultural officials in the towns involved to work with landowners interested in turning over property to farmers.

“In Groton, for example, New Entry and the town’s agricultural commission hosted an information session with property owners. …

“ ‘There was a lot of information, a lot of resources,’ said Susan Shay, 63, a programmer and analyst at a medical malpractice insurer in Boston. …

Program director Rebecca Weaver “brought Ngufor, 56, who had taken the New Entry training program, to meet the Shays. …

“The Shays were so eager to see some of their land used for farming that they drove an easy bargain: rent of $1 a year, in exchange for a free go at whatever is growing.”

To see how New Entry’s maps identify potential farm space and to read the whole story, see the Globe article, here.

Photograph: Suzanne Kreiter/Globe Staff
Susan Shay (left) leased land she owns in Groton to Cameroon native Seona Ngufor for farming. Ngufor has just completed her first growing season.

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Gratitude Leads to Career Change

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on December 3, 2012| 2 Comments »

Suzanne pointed me to a special story about a high school classmate, Taishana Lewis, whose gratitude to the EMTs who saved her brother’s life led to a career change.

Melissa M. Werthmann wrote about it in the Boston Globe today.

“A worried sister called her younger brother one warm June night in 2009 to see if he wanted a ride home. There was no answer.

“Taishana Lewis soon learned that Matthew Lewis-Grant had been shot five times while leaving a barbecue. Thanks to the efforts of Boston EMS responders, Lewis-Grant survived the drive-by shooting.

“Now his sister is determined to give someone else the same chance. Grateful for her brother’s rescue and inspired by the commitment of emergency responders, Lewis graduated from the Boston EMS Academy today.

“ ‘I’d like to be able to give back what was given to my family and hopefully give someone that same reward of getting their loved one back,’ Lewis said. …

“Lewis-Grant, 25, now lives in Florida, but made the trip back north to see his sister graduate as an EMT and pin the badge on her at the ceremony, she said.

“ ‘He’s excited,’ she said. ‘He’s super-proud.’ ” More.

Photograph: David L. Ryan/Globe Staff
Taishana Lewis, with son Tyler Lewis looking on, gets her badge from her brother, Matthew Lewis-Grant.

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