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Tightrope over the Channel

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 25, 2012| Leave a Comment »

John and two college friends rented a motor boat in Fort Point Channel Friday to see the sights of Boston Harbor. But first they motored near my building so I could wave as they passed under this piece of public art.

The Mystic Scenic Studios site explains the art:

“A designer named Peter Agoos approached Mystic Scenic Studios with the idea of creating two life-sized human figures made of aluminum to hang above the Fort Point Channel in Boston.

“Mystic Metal’s, Mike Onischewski, fabricated the figures from an aluminum sheet; [they] were then covered with refractive dichroic film with the help of David Forshee, also of Mystic Scenic Studios.

“The piece was installed on July 2, 2012, with a team of 12 volunteers who worked from a small boat on the water and a scissor lift on land. The piece was strung from a 300-foot yellow tightrope between the Samson Post structure on Summer Street and the counterweight tower on Congress Street. The life-sized figures were counterbalanced on the rope and inspired by a classic articulated wooden artist’s manikin.”

Photograph: Mystic Scenic Studios

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Collage and Editing

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 24, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Sunday evening I went over to Concord Academy to hear Seán Curran talk about how he creates choreography. Betsy, one of the dancers from his company, did a beautiful job of demonstrating what he meant.

As a little boy growing up in Watertown, Seán said, he waited eagerly for the mail that brought Look magazine. He liked to cut out pictures and make collages with them.

He says that his approach to choreography is similar. He arranges many snippets or dance phrases in different ways. His challenge is to edit down the many ideas so that the choreography doesn’t topple from too much weight.

I make collages, too. I have always liked the idea of taking a bunch of random things people have said and trying to make a play out of them, for example.

I also make collage greeting cards. I keep a box of promising pictures, cut from magazines and gallery postcards. I go through the whole pile and set aside maybe 20 items that somehow remind me of the person for whom I am making the card. Then I edit them down to the few pieces that will be best for the particular occasion.

All that happens before I cut the shapes and decide on how to arrange them. Sometimes I do a cutout of a cutout and put something else in the space: for example, I cut a vista out of a painting of a window and put a girl in the space (bottom right).

Here are examples.

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Marsden Hartley’s Dogtown Paintings

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , on July 23, 2012| 2 Comments »

Sunday we drove up to Gloucester to the Cape Ann Museum to see Marsden Hartley‘s Dogtown paintings. I have always liked the spooky quality of the rock formations as represented by Hartley somewhere on the continuum between abstraction and realism. I love the strong outlines and the ambiguous puffy clouds, which convey either hope or irony.

The museum itself is charming in an eclectic way, and I was happy to renew my acquaintance with the work of children’s illustrator Virginia Lee Burton, who spearheaded a local artist collaborative called Folly Cave Designers, creators of wonderful fabrics.

Walker Hancock‘s plaster version of the angel-and-soldier war memorial at Amtrak’s 30th Street Station in Philadelphia is also in the museum. Not to mention all sorts of dories and fishing implements and seafaring works by Fitz Hugh Lane.

We enjoyed walking around Gloucester, the Beauport of Kate Colby’s recent book of poetry. I got a blueberry-lavender lemonade.

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The Value of Daydreaming

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on July 22, 2012| 2 Comments »

Science Daily reports on new research that reaffirms the value of daydreaming.

It’s all about letting our conscious mind take a rest while our unconscious mind puts random but important pieces together for us. Getting enough sleep matters for the same reason.

“In recent years, researchers have explored the idea of rest by looking at the so-called ‘default mode’ network of the brain, a network that is noticeably active when we are resting and focused inward. Findings from these studies suggest that individual differences in brain activity during rest are correlated with components of socioemotional functioning, such as self-awareness and moral judgment, as well as different aspects of learning and memory.”

That’s a mouthful, but you know what they are getting at, right?

I can’t imagine life without daydreaming. Unfortunately, a lot of people seem almost afraid of the empty spaces. I think they miss out on a certain amount of insight and creativity.

Read more on the research here.

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Mortgage Paid Off in Pennies

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , on July 21, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Thomas Daigle, an optician in Milford, Massachusetts, is a thrifty guy.

Writes Martine Powers in the Boston Globe, “Daigle, 60, has finally fulfilled the goal he set for himself decades ago: Arriving at the Milford Federal Savings and Loan Association in April with two 200-pound steel boxes, Daigle paid off the couple’s final mortgage payment with the contents — more than 62,000 pennies.

“That day was also the couple’s 35th wedding anniversary. Daigle hopes his story, first reported Wednesday in the Milford Daily News, will teach others the value of good old-fashioned long-term commitment.

“ ‘One of my sons always tells me, “Dad, you’re stuck in the ’50s,” ‘ Daigle said. ‘But it’s how you’re brought up, and it comes down to values.’ …

“It took the bank two days to count the coins, Daigle said, but it turned out his tally was exactly correct — to the cent. The sum was a little more than what Daigle owed, he said, but he did not ask for the surplus.

“ ‘I just wanted the pennies out of my house.’ ”

Wouldn’t you have liked to see the customers’ reactions when the 400 pounds of rolled up coins were delivered? But good for him. I value pennies, too.

Read more.

Photograph: Essdras M. Suarez/Globe

Thomas Daigle paid his last mortgage payment in pennies.

 

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The White Buffalo

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 20, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Did anyone watch the television show Rin Tin Tin as a kid?

I thought of it today when I read this awesome AP story:

“The birth of a white bison, among the rarest of animals, is bringing Native Americans who consider it a sacred event to celebrate at one of the least likely of places, a farm in New England.

“Hundreds of people, including tribal elders from South Dakota, are expected to attend naming ceremonies later this month at the northwestern Connecticut farm of Peter Fay, a fourth-generation Goshen farmer.

“Native Americans in the area have come with gifts of tobacco and colored flags for Fay and the bull calf since it was born there a month ago, and Fay is planning to offer his hay field as a campsite for the expected crowds.

” ‘They say it’s going to bring good things to all people in the world. How can you beat that? That’s the way I look at it,’ Fay said.” More. (There’s a photo there, too.)

I knew I had to blog about it because I loved the Rin Tin Tin episode when young Rusty is in dire straights and is saved by the White Buffalo. I know the song from that episode by heart. It was one of my brother’s records when he was little, although I don’t think it made it into the website with his blues records.

“There’s an old Indian legend that I heard long ago.
“It’s about a special valley and the White Buffalo.

“The legend says you’ll find it if your heart is brave and true
“And you treat all men as brothers no matter what they do.

“I have searched for that valley since I started to grow.
“I won’t stop until I find it — and the White Buffalo.”

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Bluegrass in Afghanistan

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on July 19, 2012| 3 Comments »

The bimonthly magazine called the Utne Reader likes to showcase alternative and contrarian views on the news. Here’s a sort of hands-across-the world story about taking bluegrass music to Afghanistan.

“My name is Peyton Tochterman. I’m a musician from the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. I make my living writing, teaching and performing American Folk music—the music that tells stories in notes, chords and verse about who we are and what we Americans are all about. And I’m now in war-torn Afghanistan. …

“In little more than a week we have already met thousands of Afghans and found them to be kind, generous, hospitable, talented and honorable. They take great pride in their heritage and culture, but they also have a thirst for American Folk Music, for the stories we tell, our instruments and the way we play. The Afghan musicians with whom we played are some of the best in the world and were eager to share their masterful techniques and songs.

“Some might ask, ‘What difference can a folk singer from the Blue Ridge Mountains make in a tortured place like Afghanistan?’ It’s a valid question—partly answered by one of the State Department officers who said our visit did ‘more for diplomacy between Afghanistan and the United States than any diplomat had done, more then any road that was built, or any power plant that was constructed in the last year.’ ” Read more.

Photograph of Peyton Tochterman: The Utne Reader

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How Crochet Is Saving Coral

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 18, 2012| 2 Comments »

Photograph: South End Knitters

Today I am thinking about the South End Knitters, the stealth street artists who wrap their knitting around parking meters and fire hydrants and telephone poles.

Writes Linda Matchan in the Boston Globe, “The South End Knitters’ weekly meetings at a Washington Street café seem innocuous, but don’t be fooled. Over knitting needles and yarn at the long table they’ve commandeered, they are contemplating something far more mischievous than a sweater. They’re graffiti knitters, and they’re plotting their next target. …

“As with graffiti, no two tags in the yarn-bomber subculture are alike. They range from sleeves on parking meters to tubes on tree limbs to sweaters on statues: A recent high-profile example is the neon pink sweater that the New York street knitter Olek crocheted in December for the 16-foot ‘Charging Bull’ statue on Wall Street.”

What put me in mind of the South End Knitters was an extraordinary post at the WordPress blog Pickled Hedgehog Dilemma, which describes a crochet effort that is drawing a lot of attention to the plight of vanishing corals.

Concerned about the effect of global warming on reefs, Margaret Wertheim and her twin sister got an idea that involved “crocheting corals. They used a crocheting technique invented by mathematicians in 1997 to model hyperbolic shapes called hyperbolic crocheting. … This ended up being a perfect technique for producing coral reproductions. …

“They crocheted a lot of corals,” continues Pickled Hedgehog, ” then they did something to change the world. They shared their corals with art museums. They got a community in Chicago to crochet with them. Then the crafting became a movement and groups all over the world started to crochet corals.”

Read Pickled Hedgehog Dilemma’s illustrated summary here. And if you have the time, this TED talk is super.

Pickled Hedgehog Dilemma

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Women in Philanthropy

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on July 17, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Do men and women have different approaches to charitable giving?

In the July 12 Christian Science Monitor, Temma Ehrenfeld writes that the Women’s Philanthropy Institute at Indiana University has found that “female-headed households are more likely to give to charity than male-headed households, and that in nearly all income groups women give more than men.”

In addition, continues Ehrenfeld, “Insiders say women have their own culture in grant-making. …

“For example, the Global Fund for Women (GFW), unlike most grant-givers, accepts handwritten proposals of any length and in any language, and is unusually open to grants for general purposes rather than specific projects. It also funds meetings to create networks of women activists.

“The approach demonstrated its power during Egypt’s Arab Spring, said Christine Switzer, GFW’s director of development. ‘Our women were able to mobilize together,’ she said, pointing to 77 grants totaling more than $1 million GFW has given to Egyptian women, young and old.”

I often wonder, though, Are women more generous to the underprivileged when they become heads of state? I doubt it. Indira Gandhi? Maggie Thatcher? Golda Meir? Kirchner of Argentina? Let me know if you see studies on this topic.

Meanwhile, there’s more to read at the Monitor.

Photograph: http://www.dw.de

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Biking to Produce Electricity and Reduce Jail Time

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

An Associated Press story on an “innovative program that allows inmates to reduce their sentences in exchange for generating power” caught the attention of NPR today. It seems that prisoners may volunteer to help “illuminate the town of Santa Rita do Sapucai [Brazil] at night.

“By pedaling, the inmates charge a battery that powers 10 street lamps along a riverside promenade. For every three eight-hour days they spend on the bikes, [the volunteers] get one day shaved off their sentences.

“The project in the southeastern state of Minas Gerais is one of several across Brazil meant to cut recidivism by helping restore an inmate’s sense of self-worth. Prisoners elsewhere can trim their sentences by reading sentences — in books — or taking classes.

“Officials say they’ve heard a few complaints the initiatives are soft on criminals, but there’s been little criticism in the country’s press or in other public forums.” Read more at National Public Radio.

Here is what such a bike might look like.

Photograph: Eric Luse, The Chronicle / San Francisco

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On an Island

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

Whenever I walk by this field, I think of the Andrew Wyeth painting “Christina’s World.” But Christina doesn’t live in the house. An old woman does, visited by her son, who lives nearby.

One day, I suspect, the field will be sold and summer cottages will sprout there to take in the view of the pond.

From today’s walk: note the bumble bee on the button bush. And the water lilies.

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Thoughts on Alice’s Origins

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on July 15, 2012| Leave a Comment »

At ConceptualFiction.com, Ted Gioia writes that the friend of Lewis Carroll who helped organize the boat trip where  Alice in Wonderland emerged deserves much of the credit for its being a story that amuses adults as well as children.

“On July 4, 1862, mathematician Charles Dodgson—better known to us as Lewis Carroll—spent a pleasant afternoon with a small party of acquaintances. The group embarked on a rowing expedition from Oxford, journeying to Godstow some three miles away, where they stopped to have tea on the river bank.  Dodgson was joined by his friend Reverend Robinson Duckworth and the three Liddell sisters:  Edith (age 8), Alice (age 10) and Lorina (age 13).  As he often did on such occasions, Dodgson regaled his companions with an extemporized tale.”

Some of the bits the children found funniest on their level could be understood differently by the adults, and Gioia thinks that is what gave the story its lasting appeal.

Rev. Duckworth later wrote an account of the day:  “I rowed stroke and he rowed bow … and the story was actually composed and spoken over my shoulder for the benefit of Alice Liddell.” In essence, it was being told to both Duckworth and Alice.

The e-mailed Poem-a-Day I just received:
A Boat, Beneath a Sunny Sky
by Lewis Carroll

A boat, beneath a sunny sky
Lingering onward dreamily
In an evening of July—

Children three that nestle near,
Eager eye and willing ear,
Pleased a simple tale to hear—

Long has paled that sunny sky:
Echoes fade and memories die:
Autumn frosts have slain July.

Still she haunts me, phantomwise,
Alice moving under skies
Never seen by waking eyes.

Children yet, the tale to hear,
Eager eye and willing ear,
Lovingly shall nestle near.

In a Wonderland they lie,
Dreaming as the days go by,
Dreaming as the summers die:

Ever drifting down the stream—
Lingering in the golden gleam—
Life, what is it but a dream?

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Further Adventures of the Babushki

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

You may recall that six grandmothers from the former Soviet Union competed in Eurovision. We blogged about them here. Loreen from Sweden won first prize, but the babushki came in second.

In a follow-up story in the NY Times, Andrew Kramer writes that the grandmas’ fame is bringing a modicum of prosperity to their forgotten village. In particular, it is rebuilding the church that Stalin destroyed and that they loved in secret. They chose to spend their winnings on the church.

“For years, Buranovo was a dying village, one of many in the Russian countryside left behind by an oil-driven boom that revitalized drab Soviet cities and drew the young away from the farms that had sustained their parents. …

“Now, the women’s good fortune is transforming not only their lives, but also Buranovo. In appreciation of the group’s near victory, the local government is building a water pipeline, installing streetlights and high-speed Internet for the village’s sole school and laying new gravel on the main roads. …

“It all began with a miracle, said Olga N. Tuktareva, the leader of the singing group …. Ms. Tuktareva recalled strolling about the village with a friend in 2008 and lamenting a sad episode in local history: the destruction of the Church of the Trinity, taken down like countless other churches in Stalin’s Russia. …

“During that walk, Ms. Tuktareva recalled, her cellphone rang. It was a music producer in Moscow who had heard of the singing babushki …”

Read more.

Photograph: Oleg Nikishin

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What I Saw on the Path

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on July 12, 2012| Leave a Comment »

The bike path between the Alewife and Davis Square subway stops is lovely early on a summer day.

The path is part of the Minuteman Bikeway, I think. But a sign said it was the “Somerville Community Path: Alewife Linear Park Section.”

Today people were enjoying walking their dogs at 7 a.m., biking, commuting on foot to the T, and pushing strollers.

I loved it all, especially discovering a co-housing community along the way (kind of like a commune, but not quite) and a tree with eyes.

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A Painting a Week for 52 Weeks

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on July 11, 2012| Leave a Comment »

I have admired the New England artist James Aponovich for some time but had not seen his paintings up close until the Clark Gallery in Lincoln had a show of his recent work. Amazing!

I am probably not using accepted art history terms, but the paintings  make me think of Italy and the Renaissance and are breathtakingly luminous. He might feature, for example, a large, glorious amaryllis flower in an ornate urn on a wall high over a traditional, distant landscape. You just want to go there.

The work in the current show is the result of Aponovich making up his mind to create a painting a week for an entire year. He succeeds splendidly, often making everyday items like Chinese takeout feel exceptional. For my money, there is not a dud in the bunch. (Although my money can’t stretch to even the smallest of the 52 pictures.)

I am so grateful to galleries that make work like this free for anyone who walks in off the street to view. Museums, wonderful as they are, don’t often let you in free.

Read Aponovich’s blog about the 52 weeks. Cate McQuaid in the Globe captures the essence of the show. Check her out, too.

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