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Archive for March, 2014

Amtrak Artist Residency

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 16, 2014| 10 Comments »

Amtrak-trains-Boston

I love Amtrak, and I love writing, but I don’t think I am ever going to do an Amtrak Artist Residency, so I am passing along the info so you can apply. It sounds like fun. Just glimpsing the exposed backs of houses along the tracks with their hints of the private lives lived in them is inspiration for a ream of stories.

William Grimes writes for the NY Times blog ArtBeat, “The wheels have begun moving on Amtrak’s plan to offer writers a rolling residency aboard their trains. … Up to 24 writers, chosen from a pool of applicants, will be given a round-trip ticket on a long-distance train, including a private sleeper-car room with a bed, a desk, and electrical outlets. …

“The idea was born in December when the novelist Alexander Chee, in an interview with the magazine PEN America, casually mentioned his love for writing on trains, and added, jokingly, ‘I wish Amtrak had residencies for writers.’

“When Jessica Gross, a writer in New York, echoed the sentiment on Twitter, Amtrak arranged for her to do a trial residency on the Lake Shore Limited from New York to Chicago. She agreed.

“Her account of the trip, ‘Writing the Lake Shore Limited,’ published by The Paris Review in February, grabbed the attention of The Wire, The New Yorker and The Huffington Post. Soon after, Amtrak decided to turn the trial run into a full-fledged program.” More on when and how to apply.

Even before that series of events, there was the Whistlestop Arts Train, you know. I blogged about the rolling public art project by Doug Aitken last July, here.

Trains for dreaming. Holiday model train layout at Amtrak’s South Station, Boston.

model-trains-Amtrak-S-Station

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Stands Tall, Looks for Horse

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on March 15, 2014| Leave a Comment »

I confess I was put out at first.

After taking tai chi chuan for two years on Saturdays in Arlington, I was finally getting the hang of chung style when we switched to yang style. I quickly went to the bottom of the class because the other students go for classes several times a week.

But I was won over by the language — the charming terms from nature that describe the moves.

White Crane Spreads Wings, Stands Tall Looks for Horse,  Cloud Hands, Pick Up the Needle from the Seabed, Embrace the Tiger, Grasp the Sparrow’s Tail, and Repulse the Monkey, just for example.

Using a little imagination, you can see why the phrases match the moves. Although you might decide from this little YouTube video that Repulse the Monkey, being a move backward, is more suggestive of Being Repulsed by a Monkey.

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Detroit’s Ode to Joy

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on March 14, 2014| Leave a Comment »

In Detroit, with the globalization of the auto industry, the financial crisis, and ultimately the city’s bankruptcy, everyone has suffered — businesses, families, neighborhoods, and schools.

And when everyone suffers, arts organizations suffer, too. The famous collection at the Detroit Institute of Arts, which the city owns, is in danger of being sold and scattered to the four winds. And dwindling subscriptions have made the Detroit Symphony Orchestra take a hard look at finances and decide to go where the people are.

Rachel Martin of National Public Radio writes, “Detroit’s Orchestra Hall is one of the best symphony concert halls in the country. The acoustics are top-notch. The theater itself is grand. Important music is made there by some of the country’s most talented classical musicians.

“But what happens to the music when it’s taken out of that context, away from the pitch-perfect atmospherics, away from the grandeur, and instead it’s played in the community, say at a local IKEA in the middle of a busy shopping day?

“IKEA’s acoustics aren’t so great, but nothing about the power of the music changes.”

Ann Parsons, chief executive of the DSO, says, ” ‘We looked at zip codes, we did analysis. We could clearly see where everybody lived that used to participate. And we thought, “Well, what if we went to them, as opposed to making them come to us?” ‘

“That’s what they did, performing in community theaters, nursing homes, hospitals, churches and synagogues, in Detroit and the surrounding suburbs, in an effort to lure back patrons who had stopped going into the city to hear the orchestra. They also to tried to attract new music lovers.

“It started to pay off: Subscriptions went up, and now concerts at Orchestra Hall are selling out.” More at NPR, here.

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Cutting-Edge Amish Farm

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 13, 2014| 2 Comments »

I’m grateful to Scott, a former colleague, for putting this cool thing on Facebook. Looking at these healthy, growing plants is especially warming today, now that the temperature has gone back to 15 F.

Tim Blank at Future Growing LLC (which produces vertical aeroponic food farms) writes, “When you hear about a farm that supplies all-natural, sustainable produce, using 90% less water and 90% less land, one that utilizes the most advanced vertical aeroponic technology on earth, you surely would not guess it would be an Amish farm.

“Yet in Topeka, Indiana, you cannot get produce that is more local, fresh, healthy, and sustainable — even in the middle of an Indiana blizzard — like you can get at Sunrise Hydroponics, an Amish farm.

“Sunrise Hydroponics is owned and operated by husband-and-wife team Marlin and Loretta Miller on their rural farm in Topeka. I have had the privilege of working with the Amish community for more than half a decade, and have come to learn that, while their lives seem simple to many outsiders, their homes, farms, and businesses are highly innovative. The Amish utilize cutting-edge and creative forms of technology to improve their lives, while still falling within the guidelines of their belief system.” Read more here.

Greenhouse at Sunrise Hydroponics

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When Life Gives You Snails …

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 12, 2014| 6 Comments »

… turn them into escargots.

Lalita Clozel has a great story at the NY Times today about snails that nobody wanted.

She writes, “On this storm-weathered tip of Mont Saint-Michel Bay, the sweeping tides have washed away the line between land and sea. Fishermen drive their wheeled boats straight into the bay to gather their harvest: an assortment of shellfish prized all over France.

“But now they are finding their nets weighed down by an invasive species: the crépidule, or Atlantic slipper shell, a curious type of sea snail that has spread from the East Coast of the United States.

“Oyster and mussel producers here have watched helplessly as the colony has taken over their beautiful bay, flush with phytoplankton, the micro-organisms that make it a haven for all manner of shellfish and tint the water turquoise.

“Enter Pierrick Clément, a local entrepreneur who looked at the encroaching Atlantic slipper shell and asked an unthinkable question in a town that has built its livelihood on bountiful seafood: Would people eat the insidious creature?

“ ‘As a businessman, I see an opportunity here,’ he said. …

“The community of Cancale now finds itself torn between disgust and relief at Mr. Clément’s project to fish and sell the sea snails for consumption.

“After years of administrative haggling, he has coaxed local municipalities and producers to back his project and begin a campaign to rehabilitate the snail’s image. …

“His pilot factory, among the bustling oyster plants in nearby Le Vivier-sur-mer, ships to a few stores and restaurants in France, Spain and Germany.

“Eventually he hopes to process as much as 100,000 tons of slipper shells per year — enough to offset their growth in the bays.” More here.

This entrepreneur’s adaptability fits with what my father used to say about the French secret of beauty. It was along the lines of Feature what you’ve got.

“If you have a big nose,” he said, “hang a beer can on it.”

Photo: Catalina Martin-Chico for The New York Times

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The Sibley Bird Paintings

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 11, 2014| 2 Comments »

On Sunday, the Concord Bookshop had a guest speaker, bird maven David Allen Sibley.

There was a great turnout to hear him and to have him sign the new edition of his guide.

He talked about his painting process and his interest in perception as it applies to people who are convinced they see a bird they are looking for. From what he has read, he says, it’s very much like the phenomenon of witness identification of suspects — many factors may distort what witnesses think they see. (Consider the old guy in the play Twelve Angry Men, for example, who didn’t have his glasses on.)

When asked how 12 people who identified the probably extinct ivory-billed woodpecker in Louisiana in recent years could all be wrong, he tries to explain why it’s likely: They get only a glimpse, they are desperate to see it, they are being paid to find it, etc.

I want to believe they saw it, of course, but I thought his points were interesting.

Also interesting was the way he paints. He has a very good sense of the profile of the bird, having drawn birds since he was seven. So in the wild he looks for identifying markers, sketches in the profile, and adds the marks. Then he paints the bird in the studio. He does a lot of research, but once he has done all he can, he takes only about an hour to do each painting.

Read more at Sibley’s website, here, and at his Facebook page, here.

Below is a bird that a woman in the audience Sunday asked about, the Snowy Owl. The questioner wanted know whether the many Snowy Owls that were sighted around New England this winter would stay. He said that, no, they were already heading back to the Arctic and only came because there were a lot of babies hatched up north this year and not enough food to go around.

Art: David Allen Sibley
Snowy owl

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Native Americans Upend College Lacrosse

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 10, 2014| 2 Comments »

Photo: Nathaniel Brooks/NY Times
Lyle, Miles, and Ty Thompson have ignited a scramble for Native American recruits at lacrosse programs.

Maybe everyone who follows lacrosse knows that Native American players of the game that Indians invented tend to go to Syracuse University for college sports, but I didn’t.

I read the sports section only if there is a human-interest story, and today a NY Times front page article about a family of exceptional lacrosse players drew me in.

Zach Schonbrun writes, “The Albany lacrosse coaches stared at a small projector screen, searching for the black streak of a three-foot-long ponytail swooping toward the goal.

“They were watching Lyle Thompson, an Onondaga Indian from upstate New York, who has become a Wayne Gretzky-like figure in collegiate lacrosse. …

“He is a strong contender for this year’s Tewaaraton Award, lacrosse’s Heisman Trophy, which has never gone to a Native American. If he does not win, it could easily go to his older brother, Miles, who scored 43 goals in 12 games for Albany last season. And if Miles does not win, their cousin and teammate, Ty, has a chance.

“The Thompsons, who grew up on a reservation in upstate New York, are more than exceptional athletes thriving in the sport of their ancestors, a sport that is still endowed with deeply spiritual significance to Native Americans. They are trailblazers who have upended the athletic world and reservation life, and their success has ignited a scramble for Native American recruits at lacrosse programs across the country.” There’s lots more to the story here.

I especially liked this part, “One recent afternoon, Lyle Thompson, 21, took out a rattle made from the shell of a snapping turtle he had caught while golfing with his oldest brother, Jeremy. He uses the rattle to make music, part of the way he stays connected with Indian culture. Learning the Onondaga language is another.

 Art: Smithsonian Archives
What began as stickball, a Native American Indian contest played by tribal warriors for training, recreation and religious reasons, has developed over the years into the interscholastic, professional and international sport of lacrosse. See Federation of International Lacrosse.

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The Philadelphia Accent Under Siege

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 9, 2014| 11 Comments »

Though I can’t say I’m crazy about the Philadelphia accent — or, for that matter, the accents of other places I’ve lived, like Boston’s, Minnesota’s, and Rochester’s — I really would hate to see it go.

I do like trying to identify where new acquaintances might be from. And the homogenization of regional accents just seems a loss. Maybe not a loss on the scale of endangered languages, but a part of a regional culture we’re likely to miss once it’s extinct like the heath hen.

This was in the NY Times recently: “The Philadelphia regional accent remains arguably the most distinctive, and least imitable, accent in North America. Let’s not argue about this. Ask anyone to do a Lawn Guyland accent or a charming Southern drawl and that person will approximate it. Same goes for a Texas twang or New Orleans yat, a Valley Girl totally omigod.

“Philly-South Jersey patois is a bit harder: No vowel escapes diphthongery, no hard consonant is safe from a mid-palate dent. Extra syllables pile up so as to avoid inconvenient tongue contact or mouth closure. If you forget to listen closely, the Philadelphia, or Filelfia, accent may sound like mumbled Mandarin without the tonal shifts.

“Some dialects can be transcribed onto the page, but the Philadelphia accent really has to be heard to be believed. And when an accent goes silent, so do its speakers. A recent study out of the University of Pennsylvania reported that, like many regional phenomena, the Philly sound is conforming more and more with the mainstream of Northern accents. And that’s a shame.

“The beauty of the Philly accent, and I should point out it’s mostly to whites that these sweeping statements apply, is its mashing-up of the Northern and Southern. Nowhere but in the Delaware Valley can you hear those rounded vowels — soda is sewda, house is hay-ouse — a clear influence from Baltimore and points south.”

More at the NY Times, here. The article is by Daniel Nester. (Nester? Not related to I.H. Nester, my Philadelphia father-in-law’s long ago employer? Now, that would be a small world.)

By the way, if you are interested in the Penn study, check out the National Public Radio interview: “Students of Penn linguistics professor Bill Labov have been walking around some 89 Philadelphia neighborhoods for four decades. At the school’s linguistics lab, they have shelves and shelves of recorded conversations from Philadelphians born in 1888 all the way to 1992.” More here.

Graphic: Jennifer Daniel
Can you identify the sawf pressel, the wooder, torsts (as in ” ‘Lannic city is too torsty ennymore”), a samalem, arnj juyce, a sennid cannle, a miskeeda, and the tayyin rowll (Italian roll)?

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Heath Hen, Where Art Thou?

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 8, 2014| 4 Comments »

An old, falling-apart film of a heath hen has been unearthed.

Why is that thrilling? The heath hen is extinct.

Writes Carolyn Y. Johnson in the Boston Globe, “The bird stamps its feet on the ground, taking mincing dance steps through the corn stubble. Neck feathers flare like a headdress, and the male puffs out his neck, making a hollow, hooting call that has been lost to history.

“These courtship antics are captured on a silent, black-and-white film that is believed to be the only footage of something not seen for nearly a century: the extinct heath hen.

“The film, circa 1918, is the birding equivalent of an Elvis sighting, said Wayne Petersen of Mass Audubon — mind-blowing and transfixing to people who care. It will premier Saturday [March 8] at a birding conference in Waltham.

“Massachusetts officials commissioned the film nearly a century ago as part of an effort to preserve and study the game bird, once abundant from Southern New Hampshire to Northern Virginia. Then, like the heath hen, the film was largely forgotten.

“Martha’s Vineyard is where the last known heath hens lived, protected in a state preserve. But the last one vanished by 1932. …

“Jim Cardoza, a retired wildlife biologist who worked for the Division of Fisheries and Wildlife, said that for him, the film holds lessons about how conservation efforts have evolved.

“ ‘The thing that is striking to me is the habitat of the animal — it looks like they’re out in corn fields and open areas and things like that,’ Cardoza said. ‘That isn’t what the birds really inhabited — they were a scrub-land species.’ Conservationists at the time, he said, ‘didn’t know what the habitat requirements of the species even was.’  ”

Read the rest of the article and watch the film here.

I love the idea of a long-rumored, valuable film finally being found. It’s a great story. It’s also an argument for better filing systems.

State of Massachusetts woodcut, 1912. The fancier heath hens are males.

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If Readers Chose the Headlines

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on March 7, 2014| 2 Comments »

No sooner had I posted yesterday about the NY Times story on how a high school parent’s complaint to the Humans of New York went viral, than I opened a link in twitter that was unexpectedly relevant.

A blog called NewsWhip was showing the real front page of numerous newspapers and then, “using NewsWhip Spike’s publisher view, which breaks out stories by social shares, place of publication and other details,” it showed what each front page would have looked like if the layout had been based on the articles most popular with online readers.

And the lead NY Times article for that day (below) would have been the one I blogged about last night.

If you go to NewsWhip, here, you can see similar reworkings of front pages. Lots of fun. I felt quite reassured that the most popular stories were not all about movie stars or gruesome accidents. When I go to online news, I make a point of refusing to click on those. I don’t want the content generator to keep featuring them, and maybe if no one clicks on junk news, they will stop highlighting it.

 Right, people-powered front page from the NewsWhip blog.

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When Something Goes Viral

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 6, 2014| 6 Comments »

Do you remember a blog post about a photography and interview initiative called the Humans of New York? I wrote about it here.

It seems that a frustrated parent of a high school student who had no Spanish teacher decided to let it all out when asked what she was feeling, and the Humans of New York entry about her went viral. Now the school district must save face and choose among many offers of help.

Brandon Stanton saw Annette Renaud on the subway and asked to  interview her. As Soni Sangha writes for the NY Times, Renaud was upset.

” ‘We’ve got a new mayor and a new chancellor … So we aren’t blaming them. But they need to know how impossible they’ve made it to help our kids. Trying to get something fixed in these schools is like praying to some false God. You call and email hoping that God is listening, and nothing happens.’

“Someone was listening,” says Sangha. “The post immediately went viral, with 150,000 likes on the Humans of New York Facebook page, it was shared more than 16,000 times, and it had strangers from across the city and the country pledging to call the school in protest on behalf of the students. Someone in Michigan started a change.org petition calling on the school to hire a foreign language instructor; another Connecticut petition asked the Department of Education to help the students — it has more than 1,000 supporters. …

“ ‘We continue to work closely with the school community to ensure students have access to the courses they need,’ said Marcus Liem, deputy press secretary of the New York City Education Department. Mr. Liem said that officials from the department were planning to meet with the school’s administration about this and other issues even before the posting, but that those meetings have now been moved up.” Read it all here.

Photo: Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times
Alejandra Figueroa, a senior at the Secondary School for Journalism, believes the loss of her Spanish teacher jeopardizes her chances for an Advanced Regents diploma.

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Eccentric House on the Rock

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on March 5, 2014| 4 Comments »

Recently, documentary filmmaker and journalist Erin Kron collaborated with designer-printmaker-photographer Nathan Biehl on a Narratively feature about a very unusual house in rural Spring Green, Wisconsin.

The eccentric house is “the brainchild of self-trained architect Alex Jordan, who purchased land on the Deer Shelter Rock formation in 1956,” writes Kron.

“Jordan incorporated the rock’s contour into the base of the large house he constructed near the edge of the cliff, adding asymmetrical rows of canted windows looking out over the valley. He proceeded to fill the place with his extensive collections of kitsch  …

“He took a ‘more is more’ approach, tallying up tarnished collectible penny banks, reproductions of gothic and samurai armor, stained glass salvaged from churches, ornate replicas of the crown jewels, while slowly adding on wings to the building so he could pack it all in. …

“The Organ Room is perhaps the strangest of all. In it seems to be just a gigantic pile of metal machinery. It includes, as its name suggests, a few organs (and a lot of organ pipes). But mostly, it contains a nightmare-like assortment of large wagon wheels, stage coaches, church bells, typewriters, copper kettle drums stacked up to the ceiling, and a giant engine with a huge propeller.”

Matt Schneider, the House on the Rock’s marketing manager, admits that he doesn’t understand the Organ Room. “He’s quick to add: ‘I mean, it’s a really, really neat… I like the room! It’s not that I don’t—it’s just that I understand it the least.’ ” More here.

I wonder. Maybe, like the so-called Music Room in my house, it started life as a room with an organ, and they just kept calling it that after its function changed.

Photo: Nathan Biehl
House on the Rock in Spring Green, Wisconsin.

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Kerouac Meets Google Maps

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 4, 2014| 2 Comments »

Did you read Jack Kerouac’s On the Road? I was really into Kerouac for a while after being startled that Dharma Bums, read by Allen Ginsberg on an audiotape, sounded so jolly. I thought Kerouac was supposed to be gloomy. After hearing that tape, I went straight to the wonderful 1994 Kerouac biography by Gerald Nicosia, Memory Babe.

Andy Cush, of Animal New York, recently posted driving directions for On the Road using Google Maps.

“In case you want to replicate everyone’s favorite overrated Beat Generation novel,” he says, “this is On the Road for 17,527 Miles, an ebook that catalogs every twist and turn in Sal Paradise’s epic cross-country journey as a set of Google Maps directions. The exact and approximate spots Kerouac traveled and described are taken from the book and parsed by Google Direction Service API. The chapters match those of the original book,’ writes the creator, [German college student] Gregor Weichbrodt.

“It’s 45 pages long of pure, unadulterated driving directions — ‘Passing through District of Columbia. Entering Maryland. Take the 2nd left onto US-1Alt N/Bladensburg Rd,’ goes one particularly stirring passage — and if you’re interested, you can get a paperback edition here.” More.

I am not sure I agree that the book is overrated, but I must say I loved the Nicosia description even more.

Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac

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Giant Nets, Floating

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , on March 3, 2014| 4 Comments »

Another good one from This Is Colossal: Janet Echelman’s suspended net creations.

According to This Is Colossal, “In the late 1990s artist Janet Echelman traveled to India as a Fulbright Scholar with the intention of giving painting exhibitions around the country.

“She shipped her painting supplies ahead of time and landed in the fishing village of Mahabalipuram to begin her exhibitions with one major hitch: the painting supplies never arrived.

“While walking through the village Echelman was struck by the quality and variety of nets used by the local fisherman and questioned what it might look like if such nets were hung and illuminated in the air. Could it be a new approach to sculpture? …

“Echelman is currently embarking on her largest piece ever, a 700-foot-long sculpture that will be suspended over Vancouver … In collaboration with the Burrard Arts Foundation, she’s seeking funding via Kickstarter to make it happen. There’s all kinds of great prints, postcards, and shirts available so check it out.”

More here, at This Is Colossal, where you can see lots more nets. They will make you feel happy.

Art installation by Janet Echelman

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Camellias, Orangerie, and Piano

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on March 2, 2014| 8 Comments »

With snow and ice outside every window, and more expected tomorrow, we decided to take a little excursion to Tower Hill Botanical Garden, near Worcester.

The camellia show was the original impetus, but the warm, warm orangerie was an added treat, as was the Lemon House and the piano music of Joe Blanchard.

I made a point of memorizing the names of several plants that keep turning up on MisterSmartyPlants, where I go there to help John identify flowers that people post. It’s a bit of a challenge as the plants come from all over the world and are often not familiar to me. (I hope you’ll consider identifying some, here.)

Here are a few pictures from today’s outing.

030214-tower-hill-azalea

030214-tower-hill-camellia-competition

030214-tower-hill-orangerie

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