Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Theater for the Poor and the Outcast

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on February 8, 2018| 2 Comments »

Photo: Paula Keller
Actor Luverne Seifert demonstrates techniques of Ten Thousand Things, which brings free, low-budget, high-quality theater to people who are not rich.

A new theater company trains actors to do high-quality, free performances for new, nontraditional audiences. Somehow I knew it would be based in Minneapolis, a hotbed of theatrical innovation in the late 1990s when I lived there.

Theresa J. Beckhusen reported the story at American Theatre.

” ‘If I was going to spend my life making theatre, I didn’t want to make art for rich people.’ This is how Michelle Hensley, artistic director of Ten Thousand Things (TTT), a theatre company in Minneapolis, kicked off a recent conference. …

“The gathering drew around 100 theatre makers from across the country to compare notes about working with the grass-roots theatrical model championed by Hensley’s company. Its motto could be fairly summed up as … art for not-rich people.

“For 30 years Ten Thousand Things has been touring productions to prisons, transitional housing, rehab centers, immigrant centers, shelters for survivors of domestic violence, and more — and all for free. …

“TTT productions are performed in the round, in whatever space their tour sites have available. … Actors mingle with audience members, interacting before, during, and after performances.

“The productions are spare: no lavish costumes, no fancy sets, no lights. Hensley puts a premium on story and language. …

“Many conference attendees shared stories … One incarcerated woman in particular was moved by a wedding scene in The Tempest because she’d missed all the weddings in her family. [Another told] how audience members drove from Tijuana to San Diego just to see a bilingual Twelfth Night. …

“Playwright Kira Obolensky led a session on choosing material that would work in the intimate settings pioneered by TTT. She began by posing a question … : What story would you tell if everyone was in the audience? … ‘I don’t think a lot of American playwrights and directors ask themselves this question.’ …

“Brad Delzer reported that he recently began employing TTT’s model with True North Theatre, his new theatre company in Carlisle, Pa. Sensing an opportunity to bring theatre to places that don’t typically see it, and to connect with the strong military community in the Carlisle area, Dezler toured Lisa Peterson and Denis O’Hare’s An Iliad to a soup kitchen, a men’s shelter, and the town’s Army Heritage Center, before holding two public performances. …

“He had been generally apprehensive about the whole thing, but had particularly fretted about how a six-minute list of wars from the last few centuries would go over. ‘It played really well, he said, noting the power that came from the moment. ‘It surprised us.’ ”

There’s more at American Theatre, here, where you can see how different TTT groups manage to fund free performances.

Read Full Post »

Suzanne’s Lockets

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on February 7, 2018| 4 Comments »

LunaAndStellaLockets

Suzanne’s lockets were featured in the Boston Globe last week, and I wanted to tell you about that — and the lockets — in time for Valentine’s Day.

Longtime readers know this blog has a connection to Luna & Stella, Suzanne’s jewelry company. It’s easy to forget that, as she was willing from Day One to let me write about whatever interested me, and I’m interested in an awful lot of things in addition to jewelry.

The antique and vintage lockets are a fairly new addition to Suzanne’s offerings, and they have been a pretty big hit. Although Suzanne acquires them from all over, many, if not most, originated in the greater Providence area, once known as the jewelry capital of the world. Some of the lockets have the original photos in them, but Suzanne will size your photos to fit if you like.

Among the more fascinating aspects of the lockets, in my opinion, are the handmade hinges, which are practically invisible. Hinges made today tend to be clunky and stick out. Suzanne went through a long search to see if anyone could make hinges the old way and even looked into buying some antique machinery, but in the end, attending flea markets and working with vintage dealers meant she could sell the lockets for a more reasonable price.

You can see lockets here, some in Valentine shapes. And the website also has chains and birthstone charms to pair with a locket — Luna & Stella‘s trademark stars, moons, suns, hearts, and more.

Read Full Post »

New “Villages” Support Seniors

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on February 6, 2018| 2 Comments »

 

Photo: Kristen Norman/NPR
Nearly half of the people in the Englewood neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side (where artist Matthew Hoffman created the above installation) live below the poverty line. Seniors living there had no idea there were public services that might help them.

Many older people want to stay in their homes a long time — if not forever. But when a friend commented the other day that if you stay too long, “the only person you eventually socialize with is your caregiver,” it got me thinking about the down side.

That’s why I was curious when Ina Jaffe weighed in at National Public Radio (NPR).

From her report: “Debra Thompson is throwing a block party. She has good weather for it — never a sure thing in Chicago — a warm and sunny autumn afternoon. Music is playing, hot dogs are grilling.

“But this party isn’t just for fun. Thompson is the volunteer chairwoman of Englewood Village, an organization that connects low-income older adults on the city’s South Side with services from nutrition to job assistance to home repair. And this is how she is reaching out to potential new members. …

“The Englewood Village has been around since 2015. But its roots go back 17 years and all the way to Boston, where Susan McWhinney-Morse and her friends were grappling with anxieties about aging. They wanted to stay in their homes as long as possible. They wanted to remain in their community on Beacon Hill.

“After a couple of years of effort, they produced the concept now known as the village. It’s a membership-run organization that provides access to services like transportation, help with household chores, even trouble-shooting computer problems, along with classes and social activities. …

“An independent organization has been founded to support the expansion of villages. It’s called the Village to Village Network, which has a map on its website showing where villages are located. …

“This fall, we traveled around the country to take a look at how villages are evolving. We found an effort in Chicago to create villages that serve low-income communities of color. We found a village in rural California where older adults don’t just receive services, they also provide them. Ultimately, what we found was that in practice, the village model isn’t so much a fixed formula, as an expression of older adults’ desires to age with dignity and independence. …

“At her Chicago block party, Debra Thompson cannot be ignored, with her dyed blond hair and a bright yellow T-shirt. She calls out to everyone, hoping they’ll fill out her survey so she can find out what they need. And Englewood seniors have a lot of needs. Nearly half of the people in this African-American neighborhood live below the poverty line. But many of them have no idea that there are public services that might help them. Thompson wants to change that.

“And she persists even when some people are reluctant to put their names on anything. …

“Thompson also passes out information on a lottery for free roof repairs and discounts on utilities and tells people about a service that can help frail older people remain in their homes. …

“[One] observer of the block party is Joyce Gallagher, and she likes what she sees. She is Chicago’s deputy commissioner for senior services. Gallagher loved the village concept from the first time she heard about it and wanted every older adult to have access to such a supportive community. The hang-up was the dues. The Chicagoans who could benefit the most from a village couldn’t fork over a few hundred bucks a year on top of paying for services.

“Then Gallagher had her lightbulb moment. What were the dues for? They paid for office space and computers and phones. But her department already had all of that in its 21 senior centers. …

“So Gallagher began to call meetings at senior centers around the city to see whether anyone was even interested in becoming part of this. She had no expectations about how she would be received. …

“In Englewood, Debra Thompson was interested. In fact, the Village has become her cause. ‘I devote every day to my seniors,’ she says. ‘I’m always looking for ways and partnerships and issues that can assist us to assist them in achieving what they need.’ ”

Read how the movement started in Boston, here. My husband’s friend, who lives on Beacon Hill, told us about it in 2000. Other forms of the concept are practiced around the country. For example, check out several groups in Vermont, here.

Read Full Post »

Ethiopians Preceded the Enlightenment

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on February 5, 2018| 5 Comments »

Are you familiar with the journal Aeon? It’s a nonprofit website that has long, thoughtful articles from the world of ideas. Recently, I saw an article on a brilliant Ethiopian thinker — from the 17th century.

Dag Herbjørnsrud, founder of SGOKI (the Center for Global and Comparative History of Ideas) in Oslo, writes, “The ideals of the Enlightenment are the basis of our democracies and universities in the 21st century: belief in reason, science, skepticism, secularism, and equality. …

“As the story usually goes, the Enlightenment began with René Descartes’s Discourse on the Method (1637), continuing on through John Locke, Isaac Newton, David Hume, Voltaire and Kant for around one and a half centuries, and ending with the French Revolution of 1789, or perhaps with the Reign of Terror in 1793. By the time that Thomas Paine published The Age of Reason in 1794, that era had reached its twilight. Napoleon was on the rise.

“But what if this story is wrong? What if the Enlightenment can be found in places and thinkers that we often overlook? Such questions have haunted me since I stumbled upon the work of the 17th-century Ethiopian philosopher Zera Yacob (1599-1692), also spelled Zära Yaqob.

“Yacob was born on 28 August 1599 into a rather poor family on a farm outside Axum, the legendary former capital in northern Ethiopia. At school he impressed his teachers, and was sent to a new school to learn rhetoric (siwasiw in Geéz, the local language), poetry and critical thinking (qiné) for four years. Then he went to another school to study the Bible for 10 years, learning the teachings of the Catholics and the Copts, as well as the country’s mainstream Orthodox tradition. (Ethiopia has been Christian since the early 4th century, rivalling Armenia as the world’s oldest Christian nation.)

“In the 1620s, a Portuguese Jesuit convinced King Susenyos to convert to Catholicism, which soon became Ethiopia’s official religion. Persecution of free thinkers followed suit, intensifying from 1630. Yacob, who was teaching in the Axum region, had declared that no religion was more right than any other, and his enemies brought charges against him to the king.

“Yacob fled at night, taking with him only some gold and the Psalms of David. He headed south to the region of Shewa, where he came upon the Tekezé River. There he found an uninhabited area with a ‘beautiful cave’ at the foot of a valley. Yacob built a fence of stones, and lived in the wilderness to ‘front only the essential facts of life’, as Henry David Thoreau was to describe a similar solitary life a couple of centuries later in Walden (1854).

“For two years, until the death of the king in September 1632, Yacob remained in the cave as a hermit, visiting only the nearby market to get food. In the cave, he developed his new, rationalist philosophy. He believed in the supremacy of reason, and that all humans – male and female – are created equal. He argued against slavery, critiqued all established religions and doctrines, and combined these views with a personal belief in a theistic Creator, reasoning that the world’s order makes that the most rational option.

“In short: many of the highest ideals of the later European Enlightenment had been conceived and summarised by one man, working in an Ethiopian cave from 1630 to 1632.”

Read more about the remarkable 17th century Ethiopian at Aeon, here.

 

Read Full Post »

Barbershop Harmonies by Techies

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on February 4, 2018| 2 Comments »


Photo: The Guardian
Silicon Valley companies are sprouting a cappella groups with sui generis names.

I know that some people don’t like barbershop quartets and their stylized singing, but I have always gotten a kick out of them, whether they are harmonizing over traditional songs like “Ain’t She Sweet” to benefit the New Shoreham fire department or adapting contemporary pop songs like those you can hear at All A Capella on WERS.

Singing in harmony without instruments does not have to be hidebound. And it’s cropping up in strange places.

As Olivia Solon writes at the Guardian, “What’s the first thing that comes into your head when you think of Silicon Valley? … It’s probably not an a cappella Destiny’s Child mash-up where the opening lyrics of Bootylicious have been altered to include the names of technology companies.

“ ‘Apple, can you handle this? Twitter, can you handle this? Facebook, can you handle this? I don’t think you can handle this.’

“Techapella is an annual Christmas concert where the in-house a cappella teams from all of the major technology companies showcase their singing capabilities.

“Software engineers, data scientists, accountants, marketers and sales reps from across Silicon Valley’s fiercely competitive technology industry have over the last few years formed groups including Facebook’s the Vocal Network, Googapella, Twitter’s Songbirds, LinkedIn’s InTune and Apple’s Keynotes. The groups meet each week in boardrooms and music rooms on their respective campuses to prepare for a dramatic end-of-year crescendo: two public concerts held in celebrated music halls in the San Francisco Bay Area.

“ ‘I didn’t expect us to have an a cappella group, let alone everyone in Silicon Valley,’ said Remy DeCausemaker, open source program manager at Twitter and beatboxer in the Songbirds. …

“ ‘People don’t usually equate hardcore engineering and the arts. It’s very cool to see brilliant technical people one moment solving database scalability problems and the next moment saying: “I think you’re half a step flat on this note here.” ‘ …

“Deke Sharon, the ‘father’ of modern a cappella and this year’s Techapella emcee [says,] ‘There’s no better way to connect to other people and create something wonderful than to get together with others and sing.’

“Allie Polubiec, a front end engineer at Facebook and soloist in the Vocal Network, agrees. ‘It’s physically exhausting working at a computer day in day out. I need time to rest and stretch other muscles,’ she said.

“ ‘Singing is just good for you. Psychologically, there’s something very cathartic about using your voice and expressing your inner joy,’ added Rico Rodriguez, a software engineer at LinkedIn. …

“Techapella diverges from pop culture tropes insofar as it’s resolutely not a competition, with the exception of a friendly beatbox battle during the show’s interlude.

“ ‘My entire tenure has been more defined by a cappella than the work that I do. It was the thing that kept me at Google for as long as it did and it was the thing that keeps me at LinkedIn,’ said Rodriguez. ‘So really, I’m just a singer – and I code as a side job.’ ”

More at the Guardian, here. I really liked the video there.

Read Full Post »

Glow-in-the-Dark Shark

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on February 3, 2018| 8 Comments »

I have been learning all sorts of strange marine facts from Suzanne and Erik’s children. They are hooked on a video series called The Octonauts, which features cartoon characters living in the sea. One piece of wisdom from the grandchildren was about wraith-like creatures called siphonophorae, a word that gives me trouble but rolls right off a child’s tongue. Siphonophorae live even deeper in the ocean than the Octonauts and some are light emitting, which makes for a good storyline.

All this leads me to another light-emitting sea creature recently discovered near Hawaii, a shark.

Lauren Smith writes at the Guardian, “Light emitted by a new species of lanternshark, Etmopterus lailae, is camouflage and helps them to hunt, communicate and find partners. Early [in 2017] a new species of deep water shark, Etmopterus lailae, was discovered in waters surrounding the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands in the Pacific Ocean.

“Measurements of external features, teeth, vertebrae and intestines, along with specific external markings and patterns confirmed that it was indeed a new species – a member of the lanternshark family. Lanternsharks (Etmopteridae) are one of the most species-rich shark genera. …

“The lanternsharks are one of two deep sea shark families to possess the ability to bioluminesce – in other words, they are able to glow in the dark. The other shark family with the ability to do this are the kitefin sharks (Dalatiidae). This family houses the infamous cookie cutter shark, which was known for its impressive ability to disable US Navy submarines in the 70s and 80s. …

“Bioluminescence is the emission of light as a result of a biochemical reaction. In contrast to fluorescence and phosphorescence, bioluminescenct reactions do not require the initial absorption of sunlight or other electromagnetic radiation by a molecule or pigment to emit light. …

“Bioluminescence in vertebrates is found exclusively among fishes living in marine environments. At present the only known terrestrial animals capable of bioluminescence are arthropods. …

“It is also worth noting that bioluminescence is not just exhibited by deep sea dwellers existing in perpetual darkness. [One study] analysed 17 years of video footage taken from the sea’s surface down to a depths of almost 4000 metres. Observations showed that the percentage of bioluminescent animals is remarkably uniform regardless of depth.”

More at the Guardian, here.

Read Full Post »

How Poetry Can Reach Kids

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on February 2, 2018| 4 Comments »

Photo: Ben Fractenberg
Jason Reynolds is a New York Times bestselling author, a National Book Award Honoree, a Kirkus Award winner, a Walter Dean Myers Award winner, an NAACP Image Award Winner, and the recipient of multiple Coretta Scott King honors.

Some children and teens who think they don’t like literature can really open up to it through poetry that is less intimidating. That’s the view of Jason Reynolds, author of the young adult novel Long Way Down, among others. Recently, he talked to PBS NewsHour’s Judy Woodruff about using poetry to capture the attention of reluctant readers.

“Woodruff: While Hollywood has figured out how to get boys to watch movies, the formula is trickier for getting boys to read, especially among those who have already expressed frustration and boredom with books.

“Reynolds: If you were to tell me that you were afraid of dogs, I wouldn’t then return to you with a pack of pit bulls. … What I might do is casually walk with you by one of those doggy day cares. The ones with the pups small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. Yippy little fur balls that get so excited, their tails wag the entire back halves of their bodies. The dogs that grin and want nothing more than to lap your skin with fervent affection. …

“So then, why, when it comes to young people who don’t like reading, who feel intimidated by literature, do we answer that cry with an onslaught of the very thing they fear? Why do we show up with a pack of pit bulls in the form of pages, and expect them to stop running away?

“Perhaps they haven’t found the right style of book because, sometimes it isn’t about subject matter, or voice, or point of view. …

“For some kids, those words [on the page] — the amount of words — is equivalent to a snarling dog. So, why not start with the less threatening, palm-sized pup in the window? In this case, poetry.

“Poetry has the ability to create entire moments with just a few choice words. The spacing and line breaks create rhythm, a helpful musicality, a natural flow. The separate stanzas aid in perpetuating a kind of incremental reading, one small chunk at a time.

“And the white space, for an intimidated reader, adds breathability to a seemingly suffocating task. …

“With the incredible selection of poetry and novels and verse from past to present, this is an opportune time to use them to chip away at bibliophobia. Less words on the page, more white space, without necessarily sacrificing the narrative elements.

“And once young people experience turning those pages, once the rush of comprehension and completion laps at their psyches for the first time, perhaps they will know they need not fear a thing created to love them, and for them to love.”

Read a 50-word poetic narrative that Reynolds wrote to draw in kids, here. See also this post on “poetry slams,” another way to get young people engaged in language arts.

My thanks to poet Ronnie Hess for posting the Reynolds piece on Facebook.

Read Full Post »

One and One and 50 Make a Million

Posted in Uncategorized on February 2, 2018| Leave a Comment »

I’m reblogging my 2011 post on Gene Sharp, who died last Sunday.

Suzanne's Mom's Blog

Gene Sharp (founder of the Albert Einstein Institution and the go-to guy on nonviolent revolution) is proof that one and one and 50 make a million. Sharp is one man, but his writings have had a powerful influence on many of the players in the 2011 Arab Spring and democracy movements elsewhere.

Today I went with Jane’s family to see a movie about Sharp at the Boston Film Festival. (Jane’s cousin, Ruaridh Arrow, directed it.) It’s a remarkable film. There were interviews with organizers of nonviolent change in Serbia, Ukraine, Egypt, Syria, and beyond. The documentary was interspersed with news footage and video from recent uprisings around the world. A key message is that change takes strategic planning (you can’t wing it) and is a kind of armed resistance, only people are armed with ideas for undermining the pillars that support an oppressive regime. In addition to conducting research on the…

View original post 215 more words

Read Full Post »

New Zora Neale Hurston Book!

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on February 1, 2018| 4 Comments »

Photo: Via Flickr / Imgur

It’s always fun to find a “new” book by a deceased author whose published work you’ve enjoyed. One such book is by Zora Neale Hurston, who before her death in 1960 had completed a study about the last survivor of the Atlantic slave trade.

As Daniel Johnson reports at the Black Youth Project, “Barracoon tells the story of the last known person to survive the transatlantic slave trade, a man named Cudjo Lewis. Many know that Hurston was an acclaimed fiction writer, but here it is her work as an anthropologist that shines. Hurston was able to sit down in the Black community of Plateau, Alabama, which was founded by Cudjo Lewis and other ex-slaves from the ship that brought them to America, and talk with the then 95-year-old Lewis about his life in 1931.

“Barracoon takes its title from the kind of ship that Lewis and company were held in. … Hurston talks with Lewis about memories and experiences from his childhood in Africa up until the end of the American Civil War. …

“Pre-order is available at both Harper Collins and Amazon … Barracoon is available for purchase from retailers on May 8, 2018.” More on the book here.

The Black Youth Project, where Daniel Johnson reports, came into being about 14 years ago. According to the website, it was “a national research project launched in 2004 that examined the attitudes, resources, and culture of African American youth ages 15 to 25, exploring how these factors and others influence the decision-making, norms, and behavior of black youth.

“Understanding the need to make this data available to a wider constituency beyond the academy, Professor Cathy Cohen, the Black Youth Project’s principle investigator, decided to create an online hub. …

“The Black Youth Project’s website is a cyber-resource center for black youth and all those who are committed to enriching the lives of black youth. Within the pages of this website, visitors can access research summaries, read blogs about and by black youth, search an extensive rap database, access black youth social justice organizations, and download social justice curricula to teach.”

Read Full Post »

The Eccentric Architecture of Queens, NY

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on January 31, 2018| 8 Comments »

Photo: Rafael Herrin-Ferri/Architectural League of New York
“Eclectic Row, Briarwood, NY” (2017), from the exhibit All the Queens Houses.

How much do you know about Queens, New York, a Big Apple borough located on Long Island? I think you’ll like this. A photographer, intrigued by the fiercely independent architectural self-expression of the borough’s denizens, recently showcased some of the quirkiest styles at the Architectural League of New York.

As Allison Meier reports at Hyperallergic, “In 2012, Rafael Herrin-Ferri began systematically photographing the houses of Queens, the New York City borough he calls home. The Spanish-born artist and architect lives in Sunnyside, one of the many neighborhoods which make up one of the world’s most ethnically diverse urban areas. Herrin-Ferri noticed that the architecture of Queens reflected this diversity. ,,,

“Over 270 of Herrin-Ferri’s photographs of 34 neighborhoods [were recently] installed at the Architectural League of New York in All the Queens Houses. … The ongoing photographic survey can be explored on his project website, also called All the Queens Houses. There viewers can explore by neighborhood, typologies (like detached houses and apartment buildings), and architectural details (including stoops and gardens). There’s a map of where he’s surveyed houses, with about a third of the borough covered in 5,000 photographs.

“ ‘I have always been interested in houses and was impressed by how idiosyncratic — and unorthodox — the low-rise housing stock is,’ Herrin-Ferri said. ‘They express the personal preferences and cultural backgrounds of their owners without much regard for what is “correct,” marketable, or fashionable. … I started this series of house portraits with the idea that it would reveal something about the urban vernacular in the “world’s borough.” ‘ …

“He believes that the community demographics inspire an ‘urbanism of tolerance’ for more extreme experiments in architecture. …

“ ‘[Most] residents of Queens … accept multiculturalism and embrace a laissez-faire attitude about building,’ Herrin-Ferri said. ‘Homeowners that I have talked to understand that people from different cultures have different ideas about what their houses should look like, and there is mutual respect.’ ”

See more photos at Hyperallergic, here.

Photo: Rafael Herrin-Ferri/Architectural League of New York
“Splayed Brick-and-Stone Rusticated Entry Porch, Maspeth, NY” (2015), from All the Queens Houses.

Read Full Post »

Edward Lear Before the Limericks

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on January 30, 2018| 8 Comments »

Source: Biodiversity Heritage Library
A Stanley parakeet, one of 42 plates in Edward Lear’s Illustrations of the Family of Psittacidae, or Parrots.

Years ago, I read a biography of Edward Lear in which I learned that Lear had distinguished himself at a young age as an illustrator of nature — long before his playful limericks found an audience.

A new biography by Jenny Uglow brings more details to Lear’s story. And Cara Giaimo has a post about him at Atlas Obscura, where she reviews Peter Levi’s Lear biography.

“Edward Lear was a man unafraid of his own imagination,” writes Giaimo. “In his best-known nonsense poems and limericks, he wrote of things the world has never seen: green-headed Jumblies; toeless Pobbles; oceanic romances between birds and cats.

“But before he began bringing these impossibilities to life, Lear had a different focus: he drew parrots. When he was young, Lear was employed as an ornithological illustrator, and he spent years learning to draw birds, favoring live models in an era when most worked from taxidermy. Before he turned 20, he’d published Illustrations of the Family of Psittacidae, or Parrots, a critical success, and the first monograph produced in England to focus on a single family of birds.

“Lear was born in London in 1812. One of the youngest of a gaggle of kids. … He was raised mostly by his oldest sister, Ann. According to biographer Peter Levi, it was Ann who taught Lear to draw. …

“Early on in Lear’s childhood, his father went into debt, and his family fell on hard times. When he turned 15, he decided to put his talents to work professionally, and began taking commissions for everything from decorative fans to ‘morbid disease drawings for hospitals,’ as he later wrote a friend. In this way, he explained, he managed to make enough money ‘for bread and cheese.’

“But when he found the time to choose his own subjects, he often made his way to London’s Zoological Gardens. … While many artists of the time relied on taxidermied specimens—which, after all, were better at staying still—Lear preferred drawing live animals, and was known to occasionally enter their cages, so as to get a better look. …

“Lear’s models inspired at least one bit of verse. In December of 1830, he ended a letter to a friend with an account of a parrot-filled day that had left him rather peckish:

‘Now I go to my dinner,
‘For all day I’ve been a-
‘way at the West End,
‘Painting the best end
‘Of some vast Parrots
‘As red as new carrots,—
‘(They are at the museum,—
‘When you come you shall see ‘em,—)
‘I do the head and neck first;
‘—And ever since breakfast,
‘I’ve had one bun merely!
‘So — yours quite sincerely.

“As this poem suggests, the job was rather demanding. … Eventually, though, he boiled the process down to a science. First, Levi writes, ‘A young zookeeper would hold the bird while Lear measured it in various directions.’ Then Lear would make a few pencil drawings of the parrot, in different poses, doing his best to ignore the curious public (although sometimes he drew them, too). …

“By 1831, he and Ann had moved houses to be closer to the Zoo; the next year, he put out what would be his final batch of parrot lithographs, drew up a table of contents, and encouraged his subscribers to bind them into a complete book. He was 19 years old.

“Although he started out expecting to produce 14 sets of illustrations, depicting about 50 species, Lear ended up stopping just short. … He didn’t want to make the same mistakes as his father. ‘To pay colourer and printer monthly I am obstinately prepossessed,’ he explained, ‘[and] I had rather be at the bottom of the River Thames than be one week in debt.’ …

“Levi writes of Lear’s participation in [John] Gould’s Birds of Europe, ‘The queerer the animal the more it arrested him.’ ”

More here.

Lear-inspired plates that my family members have cherished for years.
012518-Edward-Lear-plates

 

Read Full Post »

Neural Responses to Jazz vs Classical

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on January 29, 2018| 5 Comments »

Photo: Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Trumpeter Miles Davis, circa 1959. He once said, ‘”There are no wrong notes in jazz. It’s the note you play afterwards that makes it right or wrong.”‘ A small study suggests that jazz and classical music have different effects on the brain.

Pacific Standard loves these small-scale studies because they are fun and interesting. But as a retiree from an organization dominated by economists, I feel compelled to remind you that larger studies are needed.

Now for the fun. Tom Jacobs writes at Pacific Standard, “Can creativity be taught? Not directly, perhaps. But if such a curriculum exists, it would train one’s brain to regard unforeseen occurrences as potential springboards, rather than disturbing anomalies.

“Fortunately, there is at least one type of specialized training that shapes neural activity in precisely that way. …

“In a new, small-scale study, a Wesleyan University research team led by Psyche Loui and Emily Przysinda report the brains of jazz musicians are uniquely attuned to surprising sounds. Electronic monitoring revealed these players have ‘markedly different neural sensitivity to unexpected musical stimuli,’ the researchers write.

“These musicians are trained not only to anticipate unpredictable turns, but also to engage with them in a positive, creative way. That dynamic reflex stimulates creative thinking.

“The study in … Brain and Cognition featured 36 students from Wesleyan University and the Hartt School of Music. Twelve were studying jazz (including improvisation), 12 classical music, and the final 12 were non-musicians. …

“The participants completed a short version of a well-known creative thinking test, in which they were given six open-ended prompts such as ‘List all the uses you can think of for a paper clip’ in three minutes. They were scored on both the number of items they came up with, and their originality (that is, how often each answer was also given by other students). …

“The young musical improvisers were uniquely receptive to unexpected sounds. …

” ‘The improvisatory and experimental nature of jazz training can encourage musicians to take notes and chords that are out of place, and use them as a pivot to transition to new tonal and musical ideas,’ Loui and her colleagues write. ‘This could lead to the increased cognitive flexibility in jazz musicians.’ …

“It’s possible that people who decide to learn an instrument have brains that are pre-wired in a certain way, but previous research suggests that’s unlikely. Loui plans to study that issue, as well as whether other types of artistic training — say, improvisational theater — will yield similar results.”

More here.

Read Full Post »

The Greening of an Old Coal Town in Germany

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on January 28, 2018| 2 Comments »

Photo: Marcus Teply/PRI
Dr. Andre Niemann with a partial model of his plan to turn Prosper-Haniel into a pumped storage system (basically a giant, water-powered battery). “It shows responsibility. It shows that if mining is over you’re not leaving the place.” 

Recently I read a sad story about a coal miner in the U.S. who once thought he and his infant son would have secure jobs long into the future. Now his mine is closing and he’s off to find another.

What’s sad to me is that although there are opportunities to retrain in up and coming industries, he and his family are chasing a dead one. But I can understand that he wants to keep earning six figures, a salary unlikely in most fields for which he might train.

Meanwhile, in Germany, people in an old coal town are biting the global-warming bullet and moving on.

Valerie Hamilton reports at PRI’s the World, “For most people, the top of the mine shaft at the Prosper-Haniel coal mine in Bottrop, Germany, just looks like a big black hole. But Andre Niemann looked into that hole and saw the future.

“Niemann leads the hydraulic engineering and water resources department at the University of Duisberg-Essen, in the heart of German coal country, western Germany’s Ruhr Valley. For more than 150 years, Germany mined millions of tons of anthracite, or hard coal, from coal mines here that at their peak employed half a million miners. But that’s history now — Germany’s government decided a decade ago to end subsidies that made German hard coal competitive with imports. …

“The end of hard coal mining in Germany comes just as Germany is working to slash its CO2 emissions by replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy sources like wind and solar. The country calls it the Energiewende, or ‘energy transition.’ But wind and solar aren’t always there when they’re needed, so a key challenge of the Energiewende is to find ways to store sun and wind energy for later use.

“One way to do that is with a pumped energy storage system — basically a giant, water-powered battery. When the sun is shining or the wind is blowing, the excess energy is used to pump large amounts of water uphill into a reservoir. When the sun goes down or the wind dies, that excess energy can be released by letting the water flow back downhill, through turbines that generate electricity like in a hydroelectric dam.

“Existing pump storage systems make use of hills or mountains for the necessary difference in altitude. But Niemann says the depth of a coal mine — like Prosper-Haniel — would work just as well.

“He and a team of researchers have worked up a plan to turn the mine into a pumped energy storage system that could generate 200 megawatts of power, enough for almost half a million homes. Water would be pumped through a closed system of pipes from 2,000 feet below ground level up to the surface and fall back down again on demand, regenerating 85 percent of the renewable energy used to pump the water up in the first place — energy that would otherwise be wasted. …

“Niemann, who grew up in a coal-mining family in the coal city of Ibbenbueren, says it would be a powerful symbol that as Germany transforms its energy landscape, coal regions won’t be left behind. …

“[Miner Ernst] Mueller explains the deal offered to him and every other mine worker in 2007, when the German government moved to end the subsidies that kept Germany’s hard coal mines afloat. …

“Underground workers over 50, and above-ground workers over 55, like Mueller, can retire early, paid by a company fund, as long as they have 20 years on the job. About 400 of their younger co-workers can stay on to maintain the mine area after it closes. The rest get job placement and training. Beike says [the company] promises to find every worker a new job. …

“The hope is, eventually, green business will pick up where coal left off. To prepare, the region has opened a new technical college in Bottrop to train the next generation of workers — not in coal, but in fields like green tech, water management and electro-mobility.”

More at Public Radio International, here.

Read Full Post »

Turning Hurricanes into Music

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on January 27, 2018| 2 Comments »

Photo: AP
Hurricane Marie, as seen from the International Space Station last year.

To understand more about how tropical storms evolve and become hurricanes, two Penn State professors from very different fields are joining forces.

Mark Ballora, professor of music technology, and Jenni Evans, professor of meteorology, report on their research at the Conversation.

“During the 2017 hurricane season, major storms in the North Atlantic devastated communities in and around Houston, Florida, Puerto Rico and the wider Caribbean. The destruction shows how important it is to understand and communicate the serious threats that these storms pose. …

“Since 2014, we have been working together to sonify the dynamics of tropical storms. In other words, we turn environmental data into music. …

“Most of us are familiar with data visualization: charts, graphs, maps and animations that represent complex series of numbers. Sonification is an emerging field that creates graphs with sound.

“As a simple example, a sonified graph might consist of a rising and falling melody, instead of a rising and falling line on a page.

“Sonification offers a few benefits over traditional data visualization. One is accessibility: People with visual or cognitive disabilities may be better able to engage with sound-based media.

“Sonification is also good for discovery. Our eyes are good at detecting static properties, like color, size and texture. But our ears are better at sensing properties that change and fluctuate. Qualities such as pitch or rhythm may change very subtly, but still be sensed quite easily. The ears are also better than the eyes at following multiple patterns simultaneously, which is what we do when we appreciate the interlocking parts in a complex piece of music. …

“We distilled the changing characteristics of a hurricane into four features measured every six hours: air pressure, latitude, longitude and asymmetry, a measure of the pattern of the winds blowing around the storm’s center. …

“In our recordings, air pressure is conveyed by a swirling, windy sound reflecting pressure changes. More intense hurricanes have lower values of air pressure at sea level. The winds near the ground are also stronger in intense storms.

“As pressure lowers, the speed of the swirling in our sonic recordings increases, the volume increases and the windy sound becomes brighter.

“The longitude of the storm center is reflected in stereo pan, the position of a sound source between the left and right speaker channels.

“Latitude is reflected in the pitch of the swirling sound, as well as in a higher, pulsing sound. As a storm moves away from the equator toward one of the poles, the pitch drops to reflect the drop in temperatures outside the tropics.

“A more circular storm is typically more intense. Symmetry values are reflected in the brightness of a low, underlying sound. When the storm has an oblong or oval shape, the sound is brighter.

“So far, we have sonified 11 storms, as well as mapped global storm activity from the year 2005. …

“Even for experts in meteorology, it can be easier to get a sense of interrelated storm dynamics by hearing them as simultaneous musical parts than by relying on graphics alone. For example, while a storm’s shape is typically tied to air pressure, there are times when storms change shape without changing in air pressure. While this difference can be difficult to see in a visual graph, it’s easily heard in the sonified data.”

More here.

Read Full Post »

Radio Lifeline for Syria

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on January 26, 2018| 4 Comments »


Photo: Amandas Ong
An Alwan radio producer in the station’s recording studio. The broadcast lifeline to Syria is located in an apartment complex in Turkey.

Where people struggle to carry on their lives in the midst of war, radio can provide comfort and hope. This is a story about Syrians in exile who broadcast news and normalcy to people back home.

Amandas Ong writes at Slate, “I push my way out of the metro station in southwestern Istanbul where Sami — not his real name — and I have agreed to meet. …

” ‘It’s not far from here,’ he says, directing me down an overhead bridge through a number of serpentine streets. …

“The hive of activity inside forms the Istanbul operations of Radio Alwan, (Alwan means ‘colors’ in Arabic) an independent Syrian news station broadcasting into that devastated country every day. Alwan provides much-needed news updates to information-starved Syrians and also runs popular entertainment programs and controversial discussions. …

“Three bedrooms have been converted into a meeting room, a recording studio, and an office. … Most of the staff had no prior training in radio journalism before joining Alwan. Sami describes himself as having ‘come from a regular, boring HR job in Dubai.’ …

“ ‘The point of Alwan,’ he had told me in a prior conversation over FaceTime, ‘is not just to report the news. Radio is also a form of activism, and through our programs, we try to do our part by encouraging people to engage with civic organizations within Syria, and to inform them on what’s really happening both around the country and outside of it.’ …

“A law student named Ahmad al-Qadour started Radio Alwan in 2014 in the northern Syrian city of Idlib. … They decided to relocate Alwan’s central office to Istanbul after a series of threats from Islamic radical groups such as the al-Nusra Front, which had been part of the Syrian wing of al-Qaida before splitting from the group in 2016. …

“A typical day at Alwan begins at 6 a.m. in the Istanbul office, where the team of about 15 staff members assembles for a variety of Syrian and international news segments, followed by talk shows and short radio skits, some educational, others comedic. …

“Sami is especially proud of Oh, Grandma, a program presented by a woman from Idlib who is identified by her initial, N. She has a day job as a teacher, but in her role at Alwan, she visits the houses of women in the city and interviews them about their lives, their daily struggles, and discusses salient issues with them, such as the legal age for marriage for Syrian women. …

“Maram, a 24-year-old in a slouchy sweater and jeans, comes to talk to me. She graduated from a media school in Damascus and decided to come to Turkey to seek better job opportunities, before stumbling upon an open position at Alwan. …

“I ask her what she likes most about Alwan, and she doesn’t hesitate: ‘I learn a lot every single day, but most of all, it’s taught me so much about how to deal with uncertainty.’ …

“Sami [has] a philosophical approach to the objective of radio itself.

“ ‘We have a program called Acute Angle,’ he says, ‘that encourages people to accept the idea that there is no such thing as true fact. In each segment, we talk about different personalities like Michael Jackson, Ataturk, and even Walt Disney, and how these people have been represented both positively and negatively. I want our listeners to know that there are no taboos, and also no perspective on any one issue or narrative that should be taken for granted.’ …

“[It’s staff member] Dima who has perhaps the most poetic vision of her work at Alwan. ‘What I’ve learned is that the people who listen to us aren’t just suffering day in and out. They want to live, love, dance, laugh. Sometimes we draw courage from them, other times they are comforted by us, hundreds of miles away,’ she says. ‘That’s the beauty of radio: It has soul.’ ”

More here.

Unhappy Update, Dec. 29, 2019, here.

Read Full Post »

« Newer Posts - Older Posts »