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Fancy Footwork (Jit & Jookin)

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 10, 2014| Leave a Comment »

I intended to go straight to YouTube after reading NY Times dance critic Alastair Macaulay’s enthusiastic review of jookin at a recent Memphis showcase. But then I couldn’t remember the name of the dancer or what the dance style was.

It’s jookin. And I can see why Macaulay — who can be utterly scathing about ballet dancers and choreographers who don’t meet his standard — is so ecstatic about jookin.

Macaulay writes about the rise of the form and a now-famous dancer called Lil Buck (born Charles Riley) at the NY Times: “In 2007 Katie Smythe, a  ballet teacher working out of her native Memphis, was driving her most remarkable student, Charles Riley, across the Mississippi to a lecture-demonstration in Arkansas. Mr. Riley, a young man specializing in the local form of virtuoso hip-hop footwork known as jookin, had started taking ballet lessons to gain strength and extend his range.

“Ms. Smythe had already persuaded some jookin dancers to improvise to Haydn and Mozart. Now she asked Mr. Riley to perform to the cello ‘Swan’ music from Saint-Saëns’s suite ‘The Carnival of the Animals.’ …

“In jookin, men wearing sneakers dance a version of pointwork too. They don’t wear tights, and in those shoes they can’t straighten their knees, but they go onto tiptoe and ripple their arms with the hip-hop currents … When Ms. Smythe and Mr. Riley reached their destination, she introduced him to the audience and put on the music. Her school’s archivist filmed the performance and posted it on YouTube.

“In 2010 this YouTube video (no longer online) was spotted by Heather Watts, a former principal of New York City Ballet who had danced for George Balanchine, Jerome Robbins and many other choreographers. …

“Watching this video of Lil Buck on YouTube, Ms. Watts was immediately electrified.” Read here how she helped him get national attention.

Jit is another type of street dance, from Detroit. I believe that is what you see in the second video, but I hope someone will correct me if I’m wrong.

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Nature, Early and Late

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on August 9, 2014| 5 Comments »

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I have a bunch of island pictures for you again, having had a few days to take my time with things. The slow pace makes a nice change, but I wouldn’t want it every day of the year.

At least it has helped me make a serious dent in the first volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s multivolume memoirish novel.

The pictures don’t need much explanation. Wonderful clouds. Tiny jellyfish like diamonds where the waves pencil their retreat on the sandy shore. An approved path down the bluffs to a rocky beach.

Rhode Island taught me what the English meant by “shingle,” the smooth round stones that Matthew Arnold describes: “Listen, you hear the grating roar of pebbles, which the waves draw back and fling at their return up the high strand.” I first heard that sound in a Misquamicut motel at night, decades ago now.

 

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The Story of the Boat

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on August 8, 2014| 8 Comments »

A few years ago, John bought a small wooden rowboat secondhand. Even after he got a motor going, he never had as much use out of that boat as he expected, having been somewhat sidetracked like Toad of Toad Hall by a faster-moving windsurfer.

So a couple weeks ago, he put it out by the road with a For Sale sign.

Quite a few people stopped and looked, appearing to discuss with a reluctant partner whether to take on a worn wooden boat. Sandra suggested John pitch it to one of the seafood restaurants for use as a raw bar. Then I wondered if it could offer a competitive advantage as a lemonade stand once the grandkids got into the business.

But today a young man with dreadlocks came and bought it. The boat is going to a good home.

It seems that the buyer and his father actually built that boat years ago. He told my husband that a similar boat built around the same time ultimately landed in a dump in Newport, which made him sad. He said was happy to have this one back and was planning to fix it up in between hours spent renovating a double-ender fishing boat.

I love happy endings.

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Interactive Campaign: Walk Your City

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

Walkability greatly improves the quality of life in a town or city, a precept our country lost track of for many years. I grew up in exurbia, where there were no sidewalks. And although I loved walks in the woods, I always felt a little gypped by the ads in comic books starting, “Be the first on your block …” What was a block? As an adult, I have lived only where there are sidewalks.

One of the most engaging recent developments of today’s walkability movement is Walk[YourCity], which enables you or anyone else to make professional-looking signs to interesting places in walking distance. (I love the stealth aspect of posting them.)

Suzanne and I began noticing signs in Providence a couple months ago, but it was only recently that some folks behind the effort blogged about it.

“Providence, RI, is playing host to two Walk [Your City] campaigns — both intended to activate public space and promote active transport.

“PopUp Providence is a placemaking project that ‘introduces interactive, artistic and cultural displays and interventions throughout the City’s 25 neighborhoods.’ W[YC] signage has been incorporated … Other first-season PopUp Providence projects include a pop-up music studio offering teaching and performance spaces, and a parklet adding seating to the streetscape. …

“Providence’s Planning Department mentioned W[YC] to folks from the I-195 Redevelopment District, who thought the signs would be a great way to direct folks to their interim use art installations — soon to include 12 creative installations throughout the I-195 downtown parcels.”

More at the Walk[YourCity] blog, here. (And may I just note that Providence has exactly the kind of creative, entrepreneurial climate that would lead people to embrace something like this.)

Photos: Emily Kish and Kate Holguin

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Sometimes the Suit Makes the Man

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 6, 2014| 2 Comments »

I’ve heard of nonprofits like Dress for Success that provide women with business clothes for their job search. At work, we’ve had donation drives for Dress for Success.

Recently, I read that there are similar organizations for men. NY Times reporter Rachel Swarns interviewed several men who have benefited from such organizations.

Joseph Campbell, writes Swarns, “didn’t have a suit hanging in the homeless shelter where he lives. So he arrived at a job placement agency last week in a black T-shirt, green canvas shorts and Nike boots. He had a job interview scheduled for 3:30 p.m. — his first in months — and he was itching to get going.

“But the case managers at the agency told him he had one last appointment before he headed out, for something unexpected: a fitting, and a second chance. …

“When the job counselors directed him to the Suited for Work office last week, he felt as if he had stumbled into a new world. Brand-new suit jackets from designers like Calvin Klein, Perry Ellis and Michael Kors hung from the racks. A kaleidoscope of ties beckoned. Dress shirts sat neatly stacked on the shelves, their pearly buttons calling for nimble fingers.

“Mr. Campbell had landed at one of the few nonprofits that provide jobless men with free suits and business attire. …

“With his job interview less than two hours away, the Suited for Work helpers scrambled to hem his trousers with safety pins and to replace his Nikes with a pair of wingtips.

“And then he was out the door, on the subway and arriving at his job interview right on time. The company manager, who interviewed him, offered him a part-time position on the spot, for $8 an hour.

“The two men shook hands on it and Mr. Campbell said goodbye.

“ ‘Nice suit,’ the manager said.”

More here.

Photo: Andrew Renneisen/The New York Times
Joseph Campbell, 32, deciding on a tie as he prepared for a job interview.

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Denmark’s New Kind of Zoo

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 5, 2014| 2 Comments »

On the whole, I believe in having zoos, but I do realize most of the animals would rather not be there.

So I was interested in a zoo concept that was tweeted this week by @SmallerCitiesU. It’s an article about a plan for a zoo in Denmark.

At Good magazine, Caroline Pham asks, “Is there an ethical way to publicly display captive animals? Danish architecture firm BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group) is on a mission to answer that question with a hefty redesign of Denmark’s Givskud Zoo. …

“Their recently revealed plans for what has been dubbed ‘Zootopia’ attempt to mesh nature with inventive design in a 1,200,000 square meter park imagined under advisement from the zoo staff. Manmade buildings would hide within the constructed natural environments and animal habitats would mimic ones found in the wild as much as possible.

“Renderings showcase a circular central plaza with an ascending ramp-like border where visitors can enjoy panoramic views of the entire park, which features varying natural environments (that seem to be fairly open-air) connected by a four-kilometer hiking trail. …

“The project is currently in progress, with the first phase set for completion in 2019.” More here.

Photo:  Bjarke Ingels Group

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Monkey Wallah

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

If you have the right skills, you can meet some very peculiar employer needs. In India, for example, people who can imitate macaque monkeys’ enemies are currently in demand.

Sean McLain and Aditi Malhotra sent a report to the Wall Street Journal about Mahesh Nath. His “assignment last week: Imitating monkey hoots and barks to scare other primates away from the bungalow of a member of parliament. …

“The calls mimic the warning noises of a territorial alpha-male gray langur monkey — a natural enemy of the smaller macaque monkey that has infested the leafy heart of New Delhi.

“Mr. Nath, a slightly built 40-year-old with a broken arm, calls himself a ‘monkey wallah,’ a South Asian term that loosely translates to ‘monkey man.’ He is part of a team of 40 men hired by municipal authorities to shoo pesky macaques away from prominent places where they don’t belong.

“ ‘It’s not a bad way to earn my bread and butter, and it is all I’ve got to look after my three daughters,’ says Mr. Nath…

“Macaques are a real nuisance. They uproot vegetables, strip fruit trees bare, overturn garbage cans and raid garden parties. …

“Until last summer, the capital’s streets were patrolled by actual langurs. Monkey wallahs and their male primate partners manned posh neighborhoods … But the Indian government decided a year ago to enforce a rule against keeping langurs, which are protected under India’s wildlife law, in captivity.

“Without their langur partners, many monkey men swung into other professions. Those like Mr. Nath, who stuck with it, had to perfect their langur impersonations and come up with other tactics. …

“The biggest threat Mr. Nath faces, other than the monkey horde, is a sore throat from all the grunting. He gargles with a traditional remedy of alum and water to avoid losing his voice. I have to take care of my throat, it’s critical to my job,’ he says.”

More here.

Photo: Junho Kim
Mahesh Nath is a ‘monkey wallah,’ a South Asian term that loosely translates to ‘monkey man.’

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Flowers of Summer

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on August 3, 2014| Leave a Comment »

After I blogged about playing fairies in the backyard as a child, Ursula sent me a book from North Carolina, where she has been living for years. It was Flower Fairies of the Summer, by Cicely Mary Baker. It contains “The Song of the Yarrow Fairy” and many other illustrated fairy songs and is a real classic.

I thought about the book as I photographed a few summer flowers on recent morning walks. I can’t see the flowers’ fairies here (fairies don’t photograph well), but if you do, please let me know which flower.

Here are two kinds of lilies, a Rose of Sharon, yarrow and Queen Anne’s Lace together, and a trumpet vine growing beside Lakeside Drive.

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Cafés in Parking Spaces

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 2, 2014| Leave a Comment »

More and more cities are adding mini parklets, pocket vegetable gardens, food trucks, and tiny outdoor businesses to their parks and playground amenities.

Sara Feijo writes for the Cambridge Chronicle, “Parking spots have always been reserved for cars and motorcycles, but that’s no longer the case in Cambridge. The city is now leasing them to restaurants for pop-up cafes. Tasty Burger in Harvard Square was the first to apply for the permit. …

” ‘It’s a cool idea, David Dubois, owner of Tasty Burger, said. …

” ‘The pop-up cafes work in places where the sidewalks don’t facilitate outdoor dining,’ said Katherine Watkins, city engineer for DPW. “It enables us to expand the outdoor program. We’re really excited to see this one go in.’ …

“Unlike outdoor dining, food is not sold in the pop-up café. Folks have to order food inside and then bring it outside. According to Iram Farooq, acting deputy director for the Community Development Department, pop-up cafes must be placed in locations where there is plenty of parking and they must be adjacent to the permitted business.” Read more.

There really are a lot of wasted mini spaces in cities and towns. I myself would like to see something other than weeds growing around the parking meters on Thoreau St. (Anyone want to go with me under cover of darkness and plant tomatoes there?)

Photo: Wicked Local / Sam Goresh
Cambridge restaurants may now lease ‘pop-up cafes’, where diners are invited to eat their take-out orders.

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Spray-Can Cupcakes

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 1, 2014| 2 Comments »

Never underestimate the ingenuity of a 20-something in a bad job market. Kids have no choice but to keep inventing things. With three entrepreneurs in the family, far be it from me to say that this inventing business has gone too far. But spray-can cupcakes?

Billy Baker has the story at the Boston Globe.

“It all started a little over a year ago, when John McCallum, one of the Harvard students, was sitting in the lab at his Science & Cooking class, trying to come up with ideas for his group’s final project. As he puts it, they were spitballing a bunch of possibilities that all followed the same theme: ‘ways to eat more cake.’

“[Joanne] Chang had appeared before the class earlier that semester and talked about the chemistry behind what makes cakes rise. As McCallum stared off into the distance, thinking about cake, he happened to notice someone spraying whipped cream from a can.

“That’s when the 20-year-old from Louisiana had his eureka moment: cake from a can.

“McCallum wondered if he could borrow the technology from the whipped cream can and create a similar delivery mechanism for cake batter, in which an accelerant releases air bubbles inside the batter, allowing the cake to rise without the need for baking soda and baking powder.

“To his surprise, it worked.” More here.

Maybe baking one cupcake at a time isn’t such a bad idea after all.

Photo: Essdras M. Suarez/Globe staff
Chef Joanne Chang of Flour bakeries fame tested the creation of Harvard students John McCallum and Brooke Nowakowski, and the verdict was a thumbs up.

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A Swede Invites Immigrants to Dinner

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 31, 2014| Leave a Comment »

Sweden has taken in a lot of refugees from troubled countries, but like the U.S., it sometimes struggles to find the best approach for absorbing the influx.

At the NY Times, Suzanne Daley writes about one Swede who may have found an important way to speed integration, a way that enriches the experience of Swedes and newcomers alike.

“Last year, when Ebba Akerman, 31, was teaching Swedish to immigrants in the suburbs of this city, she ran into one of her students on the train and asked him whether he enjoyed living in her country.

“She found the answer deeply disturbing. The man shrugged, saying his life here was not much different from the one he had left behind in Afghanistan. It became clear to her that most of her students, living in neighborhoods packed with immigrants, had virtually no contact with native Swedes.

“In the months that followed, Ms. Akerman decided to try to change that, calling herself the minister of dinners in charge of the Department of Invitations and using Facebook and Instagram to try to bring individual Swedes and immigrants together for a meal, something like a dating service.

“ ‘We let people into our country, but not into our society,’ Ms. Akerman said on a recent Friday night. … ‘I finally decided that I had to do something. I could be the connector.’ …

“On a recent evening, Ms. Akerman was feeding about a dozen people, including a middle-aged couple from Bangladesh who had brought a chicken dish, a recent arrival from Cameroon with her two children, a Swedish marketing expert, the mother of one of Ms. Akerman’s friends and a young Swedish doctor in training, all of whom had been early participants in her project. All told stories of good times and miscues.

“The marketing expert, Henrik Evrell, said he had served spaghetti Bolognese, the most Swedish dish he knew, to his guest from Ivory Coast. At first they had trouble communicating because his guest’s Swedish was so poor. But soon they discovered that they both spoke French and loved the same Ivory Coast musicians. After eating, they spent the rest of the evening in front of a computer, taking turns pulling up music on Spotify that each thought the other would like.” More here.

Photo: Casper Hedberg for The New York Times
Ebba Akerman set a table on her backyard for a meal that brought Swedes and immigrants together. 

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Paddling a Concrete Canoe

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on July 30, 2014| Leave a Comment »

Who can resist a playful idea, especially one that comes from civil engineers, a cohort perhaps given too little credit for creativity.

Corey Kilgannon writes in the NY Times, that a beloved pastime among civil engineers is racing concrete canoes.

“It might sound like an idea that would go over like the proverbial lead balloon, but in September, a group of engineering students at City College of New York began meeting and devising a way to build a concrete canoe.

“ ‘When I heard that, my response was like: “What? A boat made of concrete?” ‘ said Dr. Friso Postma, an expert paddler from Brooklyn, who had not heard of such a thing until he was asked to coach the team this spring, once the canoe was finished.

“Team members reassured him that while they were building the canoe over the winter, in a workshop at City College, they had made certain that the vessel would float. After all, they told Mr. Postma, the primary rule in concrete canoe competitions — yes, there are such events — is paddling a boat that does not sink.

“They also told him that concrete canoeing has a rich tradition among civil engineers, and at City College, whose teams go back to at least the 1970s.

“ ‘It’s a huge thing within the civil engineering program,’ said Juan-Carlos Quintana, 29, a team member. ‘We take it very seriously.’ ”

More here.

Photo: Kirsten Luce for the New York Times
Esther Dornhelm, left, and Fidan Mamedova practice at Paerdegat Basin in Brooklyn for this weekend’s national concrete canoe championships.

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Music Stirs Memory

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 29, 2014| 2 Comments »

In case you missed it, there’s a new movie about using elderly people’s favorite music to call them back from dementia or Alzheimer’s.

The website for Alive Inside: A Story of Music and Memory says the movie is an “exploration of music’s capacity to reawaken our souls and uncover the deepest parts of our humanity. Filmmaker Michael Rossato-Bennett chronicles the astonishing experiences of individuals around the country who have been revitalized through the simple experience of listening to music.”

The documentary follows “social worker Dan Cohen, founder of the nonprofit organization Music & Memory, as he fights against a broken healthcare system to demonstrate music’s ability to combat memory loss and restore a deep sense of self to those suffering from it. Rossato-Bennett visits family members who have witnessed the miraculous effects of personalized music on their loved ones, and offers illuminating interviews with experts including renowned neurologist and best-selling author Oliver Sacks (Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain) and musician Bobby McFerrin (‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy’).”

At the Washington Post, Michael Sullivan writes, “The benefits of music to enliven and awaken the senses are not limited to those with dementia. ‘Alive Inside’ also focuses on a woman who suffers from schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, and on a man with multiple sclerosis. The scenes in which they and others are shown listening to music that has personal meaning are absolutely joyous, but they also might move you to tears.

“As the movie makes clear, none of these conditions are reversible. Music isn’t a cure for anything. But it does seem to be a key to unlocking long-closed doors and establishing connections with people who have become, through age or infirmity, imprisoned inside themselves.” More.

Hmmm. It seems that in addition to making wills, we should all be writing lists of the music that we have enjoyed in our lives so that people know what to play. Should I go with “Swan Lake” and “The New World Symphony” or “For the Beauty of the Earth” and “Mary’s Boychild”? Or how about the Platters and Elvis and Nina Simone and Edif Piaf or musicals like Nine and Chess. Anything in a minor key.

I haven’t even scratched the surface.

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Seeing What’s in Front of Your Nose

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 28, 2014| 2 Comments »

discussing-finances

I’m not much of a world traveler although I always enjoy new places once I get there. I feel sufficiently challenged, though, just trying to see what is in front of me and delving into meanings.

I overheard two men who were walking in a shade-dappled lane this morning. They were discussing “operations” and the “lowest cost per month” and were consulting a smartphone. I’m not sure they saw much in front of them.

Not to be superior, I miss things, too. How many times have I come up out of the Porter Square subway station to cross the street and not noticed the bollards with the mysterious carvings? I’ve pasted three samples below.

A few more photos. Two sides of an especially nice paint job on the Painted Rock. A whole family brought their beach chairs and drinks to watch the artists among them paint the sunset, boats, and sea creatures and then photograph the art before someone painted over it with new messages. Which happened in a couple hours and involved much less style. But that’s OK — the rock is the billboard of pure democracy.

On another rock, one I had never noticed until early Saturday, please note directions to China.

Circling back to the “lowest cost” guys, when I got to the bend in the lane, they were gone. I was walking so much slower than they were.

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Åland Islands

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , on July 27, 2014| Leave a Comment »

My WordPress stats indicated that someone from the Åland Islands clicked on this blog today, and I said to myself, “Where are the Åland Islands?”

Naturally, Wikipedia had an answer. They are between Sweden and Finland.

They are “an autonomous, demilitarised, monolingually Swedish-speaking region of Finland that consists of an archipelago lying at the entrance to the Gulf of Bothnia in the Baltic Sea. …

“Åland comprises Fasta Åland (“Main Island”, on which 90% of the population resides) and a further 6,500 skerries and islands to its east. Fasta Åland is separated from the coast of Sweden by 38 kilometres (24 mi) of open water to the west. In the east, the Åland archipelago is contiguous with the Finnish Archipelago Sea. Åland’s only land border is located on the uninhabited skerry of Märket, which it shares with Sweden.

“Åland’s autonomous status means that those provincial powers normally exercised by representatives of the central Finnish government are largely exercised by its own government.” More here.

What brought a reader from that part of the world to Suzanne’s Mom’s Blog? Was it the same person who (according to WordPress stats) searched on the word “lusthus”? A reasonable guess. Here are my pictures of Margareta and Jimmy’s lusthus, or gazebo, when Suzanne and Erik were visiting in Sweden.

I wonder if the reader from the Åland Islands is there on vacation right now or lives there all year ’round. And if you live there all year ’round, what kind of job can you have there?

Map from Wikipedia

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