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Success with Sea Dragons

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on May 9, 2023| 5 Comments »

Photo: Pinterest.
Seadragon, an elusive marine animal found in the waters around Australia.

Everyone in my family loves the ocean and the creatures that live in the ocean. Yesterday my oldest grandson was regaling me with stories of stripers swimming near where he surfs, crabs nibbling his toes, and a too-close-for-comfort encounter with a seal. His sister told me about last weekend’s visit to Mystic Aquarium in Connecticut and her subsequent internet research on sand sharks. She was relieved to learn that Rhode Island has very few shark attacks.

Australia seems to harbor some of the most exotic sea creatures, and today’s story is about another aquarium breeding one of them — the seadragon.

Remy Tumin reports at the New York Times, “For more than a decade, researchers at the New England Aquarium in Boston have been trying to breed some of the most elusive and enchanting fish under the sea. Lacy and delicate, sea dragons live only in the waters along Australia’s southern coast, and their small habitat and limited range make them an ideal candidate for in-captivity breeding.

“Since 2008, the aquarists have tried to replicate the sea dragons’ natural habitat. They have changed the temperature of the sea dragon tank to match the seasons of the southern hemisphere. They have adjusted the amount of light in the exhibit. They got a taller tank. None of it worked.

“ ‘I had kind of given up and thought it’s never going to happen,’ said Jeremy Brodt, an aquarist and galleries manager at the New England Aquarium. And then, ‘out of the blue,’ Mr. Brodt said, ‘it happened.’

“Last May, aquarium staff members discovered that a male weedy sea dragon was successfully carrying his mate’s eggs. … The eggs had hatched in mid-July, and [aquarists] have been raising 18 baby dragons since then. …

“Aquarists hope that breeding these fickle creatures in captivity will lead to fewer sea dragons being collected from their native sea grass habitat, which is under increasing stress from climate change and runoff from storms. Sea dragons, which are primarily of the leafy or weedy varieties, are not currently threatened, but the Australian government has strict regulations that allow only a limited number of them to be collected for public display in aquariums. Still, scientists are worried that the animals’ already limited habitat may be contracting.

“ ‘They’re a great, phenomenal animal, they get people’s attention,’ Mr. Brodt said. ‘It’s a way to get that message across and talk about these unique animals and the issues that they’re facing.’ …

“Like their sea horse cousins, male sea dragons are responsible for carrying the species’s eggs to term and can have more than 150 eggs attached to their tails. Their elaborate mating ritual involves male and female sea dragons mirroring each other, moving together as they spin upward through the water. During their dance, the female sea dragon transfers her eggs to a patch on the underside of her partner’s tail, where he fertilizes and carries them. If the transfer is interrupted somehow — by competing love interests, for example, or even clumsiness — the eggs may drop or end up unfertilized.

“No one has ever seen a leafy sea dragon mate in the wild, said Greg Rouse, a marine biologist at Scripps who was not involved in the New England Aquarium’s project. … To protect the male sea dragon from bumping the eggs off his tail, aquarists at the New England Aquarium moved him to his own smaller holding tank to be monitored. Once the eggs hatched, the team gently removed the baby sea dragons and placed them in a tank stocked with highly nutritious food. …

“ ‘They’re pretty impressive specimens when they’re adults,’ Mr. Brodt said. ‘That first year, it’s crazy. They’re about two centimeters when they hatch and look like floating grape stems. They grow about one centimeter a week for several months.’

“So what made this a successful pregnancy? The researchers were considering moving some of the adult sea dragons out of their display and into a larger tank to give them more space to float when they discovered the egg transfer had already occurred in the existing exhibit. Two developments may have helped the breeding effort, Mr. Brodt said: The aquarium had a surplus of live food to dole out (adult sea dragons are primarily fed frozen food with some live supplements), and because of natural population fluctuations, there were fewer sea dragons in the tank at the time. …

“Dr. Rouse, the Scripps marine biologist, said both food and space were likely factors in the success. Because sea dragons ‘bond up as pairs in the wild and they don’t hang around in big groups, maybe they get a little bit disturbed if there’s too many in a tank with them,’ Dr. Rouse said. … Even so, the hormonal ‘synchronization’ between a male and a female has to line up perfectly. Moon phase and water temperatures also probably play a role in their reproduction.”

More at the Times, here. Wouldn’t you love to be able to say to someone who asks you about your work, “Lately I’ve been raising ’18 baby dragons’ “?

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‘Ophelia’ Was an Artist

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on May 8, 2023| 1 Comment »

Art: John Everett Millais.
Pre-Raphaelite artist Elizabeth Siddal was the model for the drowned Ophelia of Shakespeare fame. She is not known for her art but for looking lovely in death.

I never thought about this before, but I read a critique the other day that claimed Western culture has an unhealthy admiration for pictures of beautiful dead girls — starting at least with the painting by John Everett Millais of the drowned Ophelia from Hamlet, if not earlier.

That’s a new reason to see something different in the painting. And here’s another reason: the model herself may have been victimized, or at least marginalized.

Richard Brooks writes at the Guardian, “She is immortalized as the drowning Ophelia in John Everett Millais’s celebrated 1850s painting and as the auburn-haired model for several pre-Raphaelite artists in the mid-19th century. After dying prematurely aged 32, Elizabeth Siddal was marked down for decades as a depressive and laudanum addict, and was portrayed as such in Ken Russell’s 1967 BBC film Dante’s Inferno – named after her husband, Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

“More recently, she has been mythologized in several TV dramas and novels – even as a vampire victim.

“Only now, with The Rossettis exhibition opening on 6 April at Tate Britain, will Siddal finally be judged for what she really was and achieved – a considerable artist in her own right.

“Admittedly, she had some bouts of poor health and suffered, not surprisingly, after giving birth to a stillborn daughter in 1861. However, this exhibition, with several previously unseen works, will show Siddal as an independent woman who was not just a talented artist but also had a strong influence on the career of Rossetti. …

“Siddal was untrained as an artist, as a teenager working in clothes shops in central London where she taught herself to design dresses. She was introduced to the pre-Raphaelites just as the group formed in 1849, before meeting Rossetti and becoming the model in his Rosso Vestita portrait. In 1852, she sat for Millais’s Ophelia and other pre-Raphaelites such as William Holman Hunt.

“She then began to draw and paint herself, encouraged by Rossetti and her patron, John Ruskin, who gave her an allowance. She also wrote poetry.

“And yet during the 1850s, as she began a relationship with Rossetti … her work was dismissed by the pre-Raphaelites as a ‘pale imitation’ of Rossetti. There were even claims that Rossetti helped paint her watercolors. Regarded as an appendage to her husband, she remained unknown during her lifetime. …

“However, ‘The Rossettis,’ featuring 17 of her drawings and watercolors, along with Jan Marsh’s forthcoming biography, Elizabeth Siddal: Her Story, plus new research by Glenda Youde, a York University art historian, highlight her as a skilled artist.

“They also prove that she had a real influence on Rossetti by comparing and contrasting the work of the two artists in the exhibition. ‘They were together, after all, in the same studio,’ says Youde. ‘You can see her effect on the style in paintings which Rossetti did himself either during her lifetime, or especially afterwards.’

“This view is supported by Marsh. ‘In many cases it was Rossetti who was adopting and responding to her ideas and execution,’ she says.

“The exhibition also contains a remarkable poem, dedicated to her by Rossetti. ‘The Portrait,’ which illuminates the power of a portrait to bring back memories of a dead loved one, was one of several kept inside a leather-bound book that in 1862 Rossetti buried beside her body in Highgate cemetery in north London.

“Seven years later the book was removed after the tomb was, controversially, opened. Owned for many years by the University of Delaware in the US, a loose sheet of paper with Rossetti’s original crossings-out and changes for ‘The Portrait’ will be seen for the first time at the Tate. Alongside will be Rossetti’s most famous portrait of Siddal – ‘Beata Beatrix.’ …

“There is, however, one unsolved mystery. Siddal is known to have completed one self-portrait – a rendering showing her red locks and stern expression. Siddal painted it in 1853, but it has not been seen publicly for more than a century, although it was photographed about 50 years ago. This photograph is in the exhibition’s catalogue.”

More at the Guardian, here. All I know is Rossetti wrote one of the saddest poems ever, “The Woodspurge,” which I always thought was after the death of this young wife. I memorized it in high school for a poetry assembly, and I still know it by heart. But now I have just looked it up and learned it was written before he even married her. No one seems to know what was troubling him when he wrote it. Hmph.

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Ethiopian Nun and Composer

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on May 7, 2023| 3 Comments »

Photo: Buda Musique via the BBC.
Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, the composer and piano-playing nun who died March 26 at age 99. The BBC reports she led an “extraordinary life, which included being a trailblazer for women’s equality and walking barefoot for a decade in the isolated mountains of northern Ethiopia.”

Here’s a woman who had a long and fruitful life, dying at 99 after making her mark as a nun, a musician, and a proponent of women’s equality. You may be surprised to learn of the advantages a girl could have back in the day if her family was connected to Ethiopian royalty.

Brian Murphy reports at the Washington Post, “Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, a classically trained musician who once abandoned music for a hermit-like life as a nun in her native Ethiopia and later returned to the piano with a genre-defying blend of Western and Ethiopian influences, died March 26 at her convent in Jerusalem. She was 99. …

“The styles explored by Sister Guèbrou (the title Emahoy is equivalent to ‘Sister’ for a nun) were so singular in sound and structure that music scholars often puzzled over the main source of her inspiration — seamlessly mixing forms such as jazz, chamber music and rhythms from her homeland. …

“Her work was brought to a larger audience in recent years on the soundtrack for the Oscar-nominated documentary Time (2020) about a two-decade saga for an inmate and his family; and as music on the Netflix race-and-prejudice drama Passing (2021).

“Sister Guèbrou, meanwhile, spent long stretches in solitude inside the Ethiopian Monastery of Debre Genet, or Sanctuary of Paradise, in Jerusalem, where she lived since 1984 in a single room adorned with her artwork of icons and angels. …

“In her few specific comments on her musical influences, she expressed admiration for the European classical canon including Frédéric Chopin and Johann Strauss. Yet she stayed rooted in the five-note melodic runs common in Ethiopian music, while also exploring the flowing richness of Eastern Orthodox chants or the distinctly American sounds such as jazz or the old-timey snap of ragtime. …

” ‘Just within the first five or 10 seconds of the song, we have invocations of European modernism, of Ethiopian traditional music and of the links between Ethiopian Orthodoxy and a broader Judeo-Christian tradition,’ said Ilana Webster-Kogen, an ethnomusicologist at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies.

“ ‘Getting all of that musical information within about five seconds of listening means that comparing her to anyone else wouldn’t make sense,’ she added.

“There was a decade, however, when Sister Guèbrou played nothing at all.

“She was a rising young talent as a teen, studying for two years under Polish violinist Alexander Kontorowicz in Cairo and then was offered a scholarship to London’s Royal Academy of Music. Sister Guèbrou never made clear what happened next. For some reason, she was blocked by Selassie’s government from traveling to London.

“She was devastated. For nearly two weeks, she refused to eat. She ended up in a hospital in Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa. Her family feared she was near death. Weak and ailing, Sister Guèbrou said she slept for an entire day.

“ ‘When I wake up, I had a peaceful mind,’ she told the BBC in 2017. ‘I was changed. And I didn’t care for anything.’

“She left music behind. At 19, she joined the Gishen Mariam monastery in Ethiopia’s northern highlands. For the next decade, she barely left the monastery grounds, where she slept in a hut on a dried-mud bed. She noticed many of the nuns and monks were barefoot. She gave up shoes as well.

“She had already experienced huge swings in her life. She was raised in privilege in a family that had deep connections in the Ethiopian royal court, including her father’s work in diplomatic and liaison roles. She and her sister, Senedu, attended a Swiss boarding school and soaked in Western music and art.

“After Italian forces under Benito Mussolini invaded Ethiopia in 1935, Sister Guèbrou and her family were placed under house arrest and later sent to POW camps in Italy for two years. Three of her brothers were killed in the fighting. (She composed the 1963 piece, ‘The Ballad of the Spirit,’ in their memory.) …

“At nearly 30 years old, she decided to see how her fingers felt back on the piano keys. The music flowed. Now, however, it was more infused with the meditative sounds and chants from the monastery.

“ ‘I said to myself, “I have nothing. I have music,” ‘ she recalled. ‘I will try to do something with this music.’ …

“In 1974, a coup toppled Selassie and ended Ethiopia’s monarchy. Anyone favored by the ousted royal regime, including Sister Guèbrou and her family, was now under suspicion and closely monitored. When Sister Guèbrou’s mother died in 1984, she moved permanently to the monastery in Jerusalem, always seen in public in the flowing religious garb that covered her head. …

“ ‘We can’t always choose what life brings,’ she told the BBC. ‘But we can choose how to respond.’ ”

More at the Post, here.

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Two Guys Open a Museum

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on May 6, 2023| 1 Comment »

Photo: Sophia Evans/The Observer.
Gilbert, left, and George at their new gallery on April 1. When artists want control, they sometimes open their own museums.

I am always curious about innovations in the museum world. If you search this site on the word “museum,” you will find a wide range of posts, including one about a pandemic-era “mini museum for stir-crazy gerbils,” here, and a 2018 post on micro museums, here.

Vanessa Thorpe reported at the Guardian recently about two guys in London who decided to open a museum for their own work.

“Every creative person yearns for a room of their own,” wrote Thorpe. “But for the stars of Britain’s contemporary art world, it seems that now only a venue of their own will do. [In March] it was Tracey Emin in Margate; on [April 1] it was the turn of the veteran duo Gilbert and George.

“ ‘It is very exciting to see so many people,’ said George Passmore, 81, after the gates swung wide at 10 am to let in an orderly queue of first visitors. ‘Most amusing,’ added his lifelong collaborator – and, since 2008, civil partner – Gilbert Prousch, 79. …

“ ‘Do you know the gates [at this building] are painted in a shade called Invisible Green?’ asked Passmore. ‘It was invented for the great garden designer Humphry Repton when he noticed the grounds of the stately homes he created were being walked across by the public. He needed to put up barriers in a color that would not stand out. It is odd, because it is not invisible at all.’

“The pair’s decorative wrought-iron gates are also not intended to keep out the public. Far from it: the Gilbert and George Centre, which they have planned for years, is a built representation of their slogan ‘art is for all’ and designed as a gift to the community they have lived and worked alongside together for most of their working lives.

“Passmore, born in Devon, and Prousch, born in Italy, met in 1967 while studying sculpture at St Martin’s School of Art in London and developed a unique and entertaining style that places their own images in a variety of visual contexts and poses. ‘We are two people but one artist,’ they have been fond of explaining.

“This first show in the venue features vast photographic screens of leaves and organic products, including figs, roses, dates and leafy greens through which the artists peer or can be seen lolling on benches, either resting or in a swoon. …

“Mark Schofield, 50, a longtime fan, brought his parents, Jackie and Tony, down from Peterborough to see the show. A scientist who now lives in Boston, he was bowled over by the galleries.

“ ‘There’s this clear contrast that I love between the deadpan faces and the joy and mischief of the art. It is so English, somehow,’ he said.

“Rachel Scott, a painting conservator from Dalston, was also struck by the humor of the work. … For Bash Ali, 44, a charity worker and artist, the trip up from the south-east of the city had been well worth it. ‘It really works. It is such a great space.’

“The ‘naughty and a bit rude’ tone of much of Gilbert and George’s art was part of the appeal, said Paul Rudgley from Birmingham, who was visiting the centre with his artist friend Arran Patel from London. But in the end, as a collector of Pantone colors and a former paint industry executive, it was the bright and bold hues that won the day for him.

“The opening of the Gilbert and George Centre followed last weekend’s seaside event in Margate, Kent, when a new artists’ space run by Tracey Emin, a comparative newcomer on the subversive art scene, was unveiled. And over in south London, Damien Hirst’s Newport Street Gallery has also given space to displays of work from his own art and his wider collection since 2015. Admission to each of these three new private galleries is free, although Hirst’s is currently closed.

“Emin, 59, wore a full town crier’s outfit for the opening of her venue. Called the TKE Studios and T.E.A.R. (Tracey Emin Artist Residency), it has been constructed inside a former Edwardian bath-house after a [$1.3 million] investment. As the artist cut the ribbon, she promised: ‘We are going to make Margate an artistic mecca’ before she announced new plans to buy up a nearby derelict pavilion, for swimmers and surfers.

“Early to the trend for running his own artistic space, Turner prize finalist Yinka Shonibare offered more than just a gallery to visitors to his experimental space in east London. Called Guest Projects, and launched a decade ago, his project still offers residences for performers as well as visual artists and musicians.

“When it started, it provided food, too, in a special supper club called the Artists Dining Room where guest chefs create dinners inspired by the work of artists including Louise Bourgeois, David Lynch, Frida Kahlo and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

“ ‘Artists should have a space in which they can fail, and the art market doesn’t really allow room for failure – there’s too much at stake, Shonibare said at the time.”

More at the Guardian, here. You can enjoy all the pictures as there is no firewall.

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Tracing a WWI Soldier

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on May 5, 2023| Leave a Comment »

Images: Brett Hawkes photos; Ally Rzesa illustration.

When do people get interested in researching family history? Some people never. Others — like my cousin who has made his genealogy hobby an obsession — very young. In today’s article, a 71-year-old from Massachusetts got the bug when he started going through the photos his grandfather took in France.

Travel writer Christopher Muther reports for the Boston Globe about Brett Hawkes and the stacks of old photos he used to re-create his grandfather’s journeys in WWI.

“For the better part of a century, the boxes and their mostly-forgotten contents collected dust while occupying real estate in attics throughout Massachusetts.

“But for Brett Hawkes … they inspired a once-in-a-lifetime journey that spanned 600 miles across the French countryside.

“Hawkes received the boxes of old photos and letters when his mother passed away in 2013. He said he glanced at them occasionally, but otherwise, they remained stored away, collecting another decade of dust. He came upon them again in the winter of 2022 while cleaning his office, but this time, the more he studied them, the more he was drawn to what he saw.

The pictures, taken in 1917 on the frontlines of the war in France, showed soldiers fighting in trenches, bombed buildings, and previously idyllic fields transformed into hastily-dug cemeteries.

“But his grandfather also took pictures of everyday life in the small towns where he was stationed. There are pictures of friends he made, soldiers playing football in a snowy field, and peaceful streets.

“ ‘I stared at these old photos and thought, “Oh my God, look at these churches bombed to the ground.” I started wondering what they look like now,’ Hawkes said. ‘I happened to find a photo he took of a famous chateau, and I Googled it and saw it was all renovated.’

“That’s when the idea for his trip took root. He devised a plan to find the locations of as many of the photos as possible — thankfully, his grandfather had labeled the towns where pictures were taken — and re-create his grandfather’s 1917 route in France. …

“Alton Hawkes entered the war just months after America’s entry and was sent for further training in Abainville before being stationed in the villages of Warmaise, Chepoix, and Broyes, about 70 miles north of Paris.

“Brett said his grandfather, who studied engineering, was also an avid amateur photographer and collector, which made reconstructing the route easier. He also had letters that his grandfather had written home to his family, outlining some of his more benign activities.

“ ‘What boggled my mind was that he took these photographs of the destruction and fighting that would be classified today,’ he said. ‘The more I learned, the more I became emotionally involved. It’s part of the reason why Ancestry.com and 23andMe are so popular. People want to feel an emotional connection with the past.’

“Hawkes has two skills that made the trip possible. The first was years of cycling experience. When he was 16, his neck was broken in a severe car accident. As a result, the right side of his body was paralyzed. Over time he regained the use of his body, but the former athlete continued walking with a limp. While he could no longer run or play sports, he could cycle, which remains his passion.

“His other skill is the ability to speak French and a general love of French culture. He brushed up on his French before the trip, but he spoke no English for three weeks on the road.

“ ‘Being able to speak French helped form bonds and broke down barriers with the people I met,’ he said. …

“Those meetings with residents are what made his trip a success. He would roll into small farming towns and seek out cafes where he would strike up conversations with locals. If the town was too small for a cafe, he knocked on the doors of houses that his grandfather had photographed, or he would seek out the mayor of a town he was visiting for assistance in finding buildings or bridges.

“ ‘I’m an older guy. I wasn’t threatening. I couldn’t punch myself out of a paper bag,’ he said. ‘I think that helped a lot.’

“When word spread through these tiny towns of the American retracing his grandfather’s WWI route, strangers would show up at bed and breakfasts where Hawkes was staying with information about locations in the photographs and stories about the war that had been handed down. …

“ ‘I started to really go through a transition. It became more than a vacation, it became a passion. It was an incredible experience. It’s hard to explain, but that’s really what happened. I went through a transformation.’

“He found the field where the French government awarded his grandfather the Croix de Guerre for his bravery in battle. In one photo, his grandfather stood on a pile of rubble that had once been a church. Hawkes found the location with a new church in its place. It was the same with historic buildings that had been repaired or rebuilt. Just like his grandfather, the younger Hawkes was there to document it all.

“ ‘He guided me from heaven,’ Hawkes said.”

More at the Globe, here.

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Twins Making Art

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on May 4, 2023| 3 Comments »

Photo: Luiz Bicalho.
The Sydnie and Haylie Jimenez creation “Memory Armor,” 2023. Stoneware, underglaze, glaze, oxide wash.

We have all read stories about the closeness of twins and the unusual effects that such closeness can lead to. I have blogged more than once about pairs of twins who become collaborative artists, for example, including the Brazilian brothers Os Gemeos (“the twins” in Portuguese), who created the first of the giant Dewey Square murals in Boston, part of my beat.

The acclaimed art critic Cate McQuaid wrote in April at the Boston Globe about identical twins whose work was being shown even closer to my home.

“There’s a rich figurative thread in the history of marginalized artists that declares, ‘this is who we are. See us,’ ” she writes. “When the 20th-century art world was besotted with modernist abstraction, sculptor Elizabeth Catlett, painter Aaron Douglas, and others stuck to figuration to tell Black stories. In the 1980s and 1990s, Nan Goldin and Catherine Opie used photography to showcase their queer communities.

“Identical twins Sydnie and Haylie Jimenez, mixed-race artists born in 1997, are the heirs of such artists. Their barbed show ‘Love You to Death’ is at Lucy Lacoste Gallery.

“Sydnie, a ceramicist, and Haylie, who paints and draws on paper and on clay tiles, make defiantly exuberant figurative works rejoicing in identity and relationship — their own, and those of their LGBTQ/BIPOC community. Some figures grin convivially, but many wear stern expressions, on the lookout for trouble.

“ ‘Memory Armor’ depicts a young woman with her hair atop her head in two buns. Sydnie crafted the figure and Haylie inscribed the tattoos. A chain inked at her hairline drops down, hinting at a third eye, a channel to wisdom and divinity. With a skull on her shoulder and Pegasus on her chest, a two-headed dragon and a butterfly on her back, she’s at once cautious and expressive.

“In collaborative pieces such as ‘I Love Country Boys’ and ‘Black Bikini,’ solid young women stand proud in their swimsuits, tattooed with flowers, nails, and the word ‘ROTTEN’ in ornate script. These figures, presented with the illustrative flare of cartoons, come across as people to be reckoned with. Many of Sydnie’s solo works have that thorny charm. A series of cherubs outfitted with black batwings includes ‘Blonde Haired Cherub,’ who looks ready to fight, and ‘Bucket Hat Cherub,’ wearing a beatific smile but a T-shirt emblazoned with ‘PROBLEM.’ …

“The Jimenez sisters say in their statement for ‘Love You to Death’ that their own relationship informs how they build community. These warm and prickly works invite viewers to hang with them, and savor their ferocity, loyalty, and joy.” More at the Globe, here.

You can read about artist twins Mohammed and Omar Kabbani from Lebanon and the Brazilian team Os Gemeos at this blog, here and here.

By the way, gallery owner Lucy Lacoste, who started out in ceramics herself, has a sharp eye for innovation in the field.

In the early 2000s, I brought her a booklet I picked up at a gallery in Minnesota where I was enraptured with the mysterious tea cups of Anne Kraus, coming back multiple times to admire the tiny paintings and read the inscriptions.

Lucy was grateful. She told me I’d made her day, and she set out at once to see if Kraus was already represented by a gallery. She was. Nevertheless, Lucy has been very successful hunting for similar kinds of quirky genius. What is interesting to me is that although the messages of the pieces are often dark, the artistic expression brings joy.

I guess that is how art tames and triumphs over what is painful.

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Mother’s Day by Luna & Stella

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on May 3, 2023| 4 Comments »

Photo: Luna & Stella.
Birthstones of family members can be extra meaningful on Mother’s Day. For fun, read here about traditional associations with your own birthstone.

Newer visitors to this site don’t know that my eclectic blog is hosted by my daughter’s jewelry company, Luna & Stella. Suzanne gave me carte blanche to write about whatever was of interest to me, and I’ve been grateful for every day of the 12 years I’ve been writing here — through all the adjustments to aggravating WordPress “improvements.”

Although I tend to wander off in all directions, every once in a while, I get the urge to tell the world about Suzanne’s lovely products, especially at Mother’s Day, May 14th this year.

The necklace above is the kind you can customize with different charms using the birthstones of the mother’s family. I got one from Luna & Stella’s online shop years ago. It has birthstones for February, March, April, May, July, and December — my husband, my children, my grandchildren.

Today, Suzanne also offers an array of vintage lockets — all one of a kind. Look at three she just got in.

Luna & Stella will ship pretty much anywhere in the world.

PS. I need to show you a painting I saw recently. It reminds me of Suzanne at about six months old, reaching for the turntable on the days I tried bringing her along to my radio show. (Just a community station. Nothing big.)

Art: Karen Winslow, Self-Portrait with Daughter Annie, 1988. Working with a baby on a hip. Ah, yes indeed!

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Very Poor and Very Kind

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on May 2, 2023| 6 Comments »

Photo: Guy Peterson/Special to the Christian Science Monitor.
In Niger, the poorest of the poor are protecting refugees on the run.

When I was chatting with blogger Will McMillan after one of his recent concerts, he said he noticed that at my blog, I seemed to seek out stories to cheer people up. I said, “To cheer me up, too.”

A great source for such stories is the internationally focused Christian Science Monitor (CSM). The news site is not unrealistic about the world’s challenges, but it looks for the good people and positive developments it knows are out there.

Here’s a CSM story by Nick Roll set in an impoverished part of Africa.

“Yacouba Aboubacar has an unusual way to measure the welcome he received as a refugee in Niger. 

“His razor blade.

“It takes a certain amount of trust, after all, to let a stranger cut your hair – and a good deal more to allow him to circumcise your baby. But since Mr. Aboubacar fled here from neighboring Nigeria in December, he has found his services as a barber and circumciser constantly in demand.

“Some of that work comes from other refugees, with whom he lives in a sea of white tents huddled on the edge of this small village. But much of it comes from the locals who inhabit the mud-brick houses in town. …

“Mr. Aboubacar is one of some 200,000 Nigerians who have fled rising violence in recent years to seek refuge in neighboring Niger. Chadakori’s population has doubled to 16,000 since 2020 – a refugee intake on a scale almost unimaginable in the West. Yet the response from Chadakori and other villages like it has largely not been one of resentment or rejection. Instead, in one of the world’s poorest countries – beset by its own problems with violent extremism – locals have made visitors feel welcome, even when there is little to share. 

‘Your guest is your god,’ says Laouan Magagi, Niger’s minister of humanitarian action and catastrophe management, reciting a popular local proverb.

“Mr. Magagi, whose grandfather was an immigrant from Nigeria, responds with a firm ‘non‘ when asked if Niger would ever impose a cap on the number of refugees it receives. Despite conflicts in some areas of neighboring Nigeria and Mali stretching back more than a decade, ‘Niger is an open country,’ he says. ‘Niger stands for humanity.’

“Niger and Nigeria have long been deeply interlinked. They share a 1,000-mile border – much of it porous. Trade, languages, and culture straddle this colonial-era divide. Still, Niger is not an obvious place to host refugees, no matter how much they share in common with locals. 

“At $590, Niger’s GDP per capita ranks the 10th lowest in the world. On the United Nations Human Development Index, Niger has long jostled for last place, and now it sits only above Chad and South Sudan. Meanwhile, climate change has made farming in the semiarid country even more unpredictable, and some 3 million people are expected to face hunger in the next six months, according to the nonprofit Save the Children.

“But in welcoming refugees, Niger is not an outlier. About 86% of the world’s refugees live in low- and middle-income countries, and nearly 70% are in a country that neighbors the one they fled from.

“ ‘A lot of people disagreed’ at first, saying ‘we should not accept them,’ says Achirour Arzika, Chadakori’s traditional chief, recalling the day three years ago when a government delegation came to ask the residents if refugees could be resettled here. But he held firm, and others soon warmed to the idea. ‘It could happen to us also,’ he says. ‘So we agreed, and we gave a place where we could host them.’ 

“Besides, he adds matter-of-factly, ‘this is … international law,’ referencing Niger’s adherence to the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention.

“Conflict between armed groups and the military have also displaced more than 350,000 Nigerians. … In northwest Nigeria, where Mr. Aboubacar is from, criminal groups stage regular armed robberies and kidnappings. It’s a campaign of terror born of poverty, joblessness, poor governance, and fights over the region’s dwindling land. 

“One evening last December, he was sitting outside with friends drinking tea in his village in Sokoto state, near Nigeria’s northern border. … After the attack, Mr. Aboubacar and the rest of his village fled north, over the border. He soon found himself in Chadakori, where ‘we were really received well,’ he says. 

“Integration isn’t always so smooth. Different official languages – French in Niger, English in Nigeria – are used in government as well as education. Refugee students must now make the switch to French, and government forms need translation.

“ ‘It’s a very welcoming country. … It’s just that the resources are very limited,’ says Ilaria Manunza, Niger country director for Save the Children, which runs child protection and other youth services in the country’s refugee camps. And the population of refugees, she notes, is constantly in flux. ‘They tend to go back when the situation is a little bit calmer, and they flee [again] when attacks increase.’ …

“Four years ago, Anas Habibou led a group of about 350 Nigerian refugees trekking through Niger, seeking somewhere to settle. Some villages offered help, but ‘many villages refused,’ says Mr. Habibou. Today, he is the traditional chief for 5,500 Nigerian refugees who have settled next to the town of Dan Daji Makaou, 22 miles away from Chadakori, where they outnumber the local population by a factor of four or five. ‘We are safe here,’ he says. ‘Even before NGOs brought anything, the head of the village and his people contributed personally.’

“Yacouba Saidou, a prominent Dan Dadji Makaou elder, says that other village leaders in the region warned him that trouble stalked refugees. They told him that the violence that caused Nigerians to flee could strike next on their doorstep. But his town’s experience, he says, has been the opposite. Refugees have been a boon to the local economy, working as farm laborers and brick makers, and spending their earnings in local markets. ‘It has turned into something beneficial to us,’ he says.”

More at the Monitor, here. No firewall.

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A Town Commits to Day Care

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on May 1, 2023| 7 Comments »

The Little Sprouts Learning Center in Warren, Minn., is the town’s only day-care center. Residents recently voted to expand it — and fund it. 

The residents of a small town in northern Minnesota recently decided that “put your money where your mouth is” meant ponying up for a day-care center they couldn’t do without.

Cathy Free wrote at the Washington Post, “Lindsey Buegler learned that the only day-care center in her town of Warren, Minn., would be closing. She went to work that afternoon, upset and terrified. …

“She went to her boss, Phil Thompson, who owns the accounting and crop insurance firm where she worked, and told him: ‘We have no family here to help. If there is no child care, we’ll have to move.’

“Thompson said the moment hit hard as he realized Buegler and others were in a precarious situation. He decided to pitch in about $20,000 with a local banker to keep the Little Sprouts Learning Center open in the rural town, which has a population of about 1,600.

“That worked for a while, but Thompson said he knew it wouldn’t be enough to sustain the day-care center, which was operating as a nonprofit. …

“Thompson said he has written other large checks to help keep Little Sprouts running since that first crisis in 2015. He now employs about 30 people at his firm, and doesn’t mind when employees bring their children to work in a pinch when they need it.

‘I’ve seen firsthand how this affects people,’ said Thompson, who is also chairman of the Warren Economic Development Authority. ‘If people have to move away to work and raise their families, our town can’t grow.’

“In 2019, Thompson helped put together a committee that spent several years taking an in-depth look at Warren’s day-care dilemma. They explored several options to financially assist the day-care center, which was licensed for 47 infants and children and seven teachers. None of those options worked long-term.

“Last year, he and the committee proposed an idea: The city would ask residents to vote on a 20-year sales tax increase of half-a-cent to fund a $1.6 million low-interest loan for a new child care center, while keeping the old one open as it was being built. By doubling the number of teachers and increasing the availability of open slots, the day-care facility could survive.

“The plan was that Warren City would own the building and lease it to Little Sprouts, and the day-care center could continue to operate as a nonprofit. On Nov. 8, 2022, the measure narrowly passed. …

“ ‘We’re an agricultural community centered around corn, soybeans and sugar beets, and we have a lot of young people,’ [Thompson] said. ‘Now there’s an incentive to keep them here.’

“Nationwide, about 51 percent of the population live in child care ‘deserts‘ with no child care providers or not enough licensed child care slots, according to a 2018 study by the Center for American Progress. The pandemic made the situation more dire.

“Thompson and other residents of his farming community were determined to offer a day-care center option for working parents. ‘We became completely centered on solving this problem,’ said Mara Hanel, Warren’s mayor from 2018 to 2022. ‘At one time, we had a shortage of 180 child care slots in a 20-mile radius. We knew that we had to do something.’

“Shannon Mortenson, Warren’s city administrator, said the town decided that child care should become an essential service like water, electricity and sanitation.

“ ‘We knew that if we lost Little Sprouts, we would also lose revenue and some of our workforce,’ she said. ‘If parents had no options, they would move their families elsewhere.’

“The idea of moving to be near child care created stress in the community, said Adam Sparby, whose two daughters and son attend Little Sprouts. ‘Everyone was really worried — closing the day-care would mean a lot of us would have to move to another town and commute back and forth to work,’ said Sparby, who sells John Deere farm machinery in Warren.

“He said that his wife, Ashley, a pharmacist, would often volunteer at Little Sprouts on her lunch hour to help the teachers when the center was short on staff.

“ ‘Day-care is such a huge thing for families, so I’m really excited that the tax increase passed and we’ll soon have a new facility,’ Sparby said.

“Thompson said the sales tax increase will raise enough funds over 20 years for the town to pay off a $1.6 million loan for the new center but the community still needed to raise another $700,000 to $800,000 to offset price increases that occurred during the pandemic.

“ ‘We should meet our goal soon,’ he said, noting that businesses and residents have contributed about $600,000 to the effort. ‘Our community might be small, but people have been incredibly supportive and generous.’ ”

More at the Post, here.

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PS

Posted in Uncategorized on May 1, 2023| 5 Comments »

Happy May Day!

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The Downside of Beautiful Things

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on April 30, 2023| 11 Comments »

Photo: John and Suzanne’s Mom.
On April 28, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’s courtyard was featuring cineraria and foxglove.

Last Friday, after a medical appointment, I thought I would treat myself to the Isabella Stewart Gardner again, a museum located in a wealthy woman’s former palace not far from the Museum of Fine Arts. The extraordinary collection has been mostly left the way Gardner displayed it, so there are no plaques. You need to rent the audio tour.

The Gardner may be best known outside New England for the brazen heist of valuable artworks in 1990. Empty places on the walls attest to the unresolved loss.

I usually love going there, but to my surprise, the magic really wasn’t happening for me Friday. That wasn’t just because I wanted to see the nasturtium display and they’d already changed it to foxglove and cineraria, or because the timed tickets had done nothing to control overcrowding, or because a guard told me I wasn’t allowed to carry my coat over my arm.

No, it was something along the lines of “what is one person doing with so much wealth?”

I have fallen into overthinking things: Was that piece of fruit picked for a living wage? Are the clothes I wear from factories with good ventilation and frequent bathroom breaks?

And if “philanthropists” give us access to their beautiful things after they die, wouldn’t they have been more truly philanthropic if they had spent some of that wealth trying to abolish poverty?

On Mastodon, I read about Paris Review contributor Katy Kelleher’s new book. Her publisher says she “explores our obsession with gorgeous things, unveiling the fraught histories of makeup, flowers, perfume, silk, and other beautiful objects. …

“Katy Kelleher,” Simon & Schuster continues, “has spent much of her life chasing beauty. As a child, she uprooted handfuls of purple, fragrant little flowers from the earth, plucked iridescent seashells from the beach, and dug for turquoise stones in her backyard. As a teenager she applied glittery shimmer to her eyelids after religiously dabbing on her signature scent of orange blossoms and jasmine.

“And as an adult, she coveted gleaming marble countertops and delicate porcelain to beautify her home. This obsession with beauty led her to become a home, garden, and design writer, where she studied how beautiful things are mined, grown, made, and enhanced. In researching these objects, Kelleher concluded that most of us are blind to the true cost of our desires. Because whenever you find something unbearably beautiful, look closer, and you’ll inevitably find a shadow of decay lurking underneath.

“In these dazzling and deeply researched essays, Katy Kelleher blends science, history, and memoir to uncover the dark underbellies of our favorite goods. She reveals the crushed beetle shells in our lipstick, the musk of rodents in our perfume, and the burnt cow bones baked into our dishware. She untangles the secret history of silk and muses on her problematic prom dress.

She tells the story of countless workers dying in their efforts to bring us shiny rocks from unsafe mines that shatter and wound the earth, all because a diamond company created a compelling ad.

“She examines the enduring appeal of the beautiful dead girl and the sad fate of the ugly mollusk. With prose as stunning as the objects she describes, Kelleher invites readers to examine their own relationships with the beautiful objects that adorn their body and grace their homes.

“[Kelleher] argues that while we have a moral imperative to understand our relationship to desire, we are not evil or weak for desiring beauty. The Ugly History of Beautiful Things opens our eyes to beauty that surrounds us, helps us understand how that beauty came to be, what price was paid and by whom, and how we can most ethically partake in the beauty of the world.”

I think I need to read the book and see if it will help me deal better with the rampant overconsumption and privilege I am finally noticing.

Art: Anders Zorn.
Gardner herself enjoying a high old time in Venice.

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Why Gardening Is Good for You

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on April 29, 2023| Leave a Comment »

Photos: John and Suzanne’s Mom.

My paternal grandmother, as the wife of a once-renowned Alpine gardener in Syracuse, New York, cherished this quote from Dorothy Frances Gurney: “The kiss of the sun for pardon,/ The song of the birds for mirth,/ One is nearer God’s Heart in a garden/ Than anywhere else on earth.”

Lacking profound insight into that particular claim, I will just say that gardening is good for one’s observational skills and hence one’s mental health, as a recent Washington Post article suggests.

Catie Marron wrote, “I often keep a single flower in a small bottle on my desk, where I can enjoy it. I learn a lot from studying that flower’s cycle.

“It’s an idea I got from the philosopher and author Alain de Botton, who once remarked that we unfairly dismiss museum postcards of prominent paintings. ‘Our culture sees them as tiny, pale shadows of the far superior originals hanging on the walls a few metres away,’ he observed, ‘but the encounter we have with the postcard may be deeper, more perceptive and more valuable to us, because the card allows us to bring our own reactions to it.’

“[As] with the postcard, that single flower invites us to study every detail more deeply. Even over just a few days, the changes are breathtaking. I’ve witnessed the magic of a peony going from hot pink to pale coral, watched a tulip’s petals double in size and seen a rose clinging to the last glimmers of its fading bloom. …

“It was a new sensibility for me, one I didn’t have before I began gardening seriously and closely observing these single blooms on my desk. Once I started digging in the dirt, I noticed ecosystems I had taken for granted. I’d pause to study a surprising color combination on a single flower or a mix of plants. I’d catch myself mid-stride if I recognized a plant but it looked different from similar varieties I’d seen before. Soon, looking carefully at plant life became a habit.

“Much has been written and said about gardening’s practical health benefits, and those effects are real and important. But less is shared about the way that gardening can reshape what you notice, and how that can impact your days. Gardener’s eyes can lead you to gaze at the texture of turf, the imaginative plantings on a brownstone stoop, the splendor of a February cherry blossom. …

The best thing about gardener’s eyes is that you bring them with you everywhere — and everywhere there is something to see. …

“I’ve been awed by the great, formal gardens I’ve visited, but I’ve been just as absorbed by my own modest vegetable garden, where plant growth and renewal always offer something new to capture my attention.

“Well-developed gardener’s eyes can also make you aware of how little you know, a feeling shared by the renowned garden designer Beth Chatto, who experienced this during a visit to Benton End, the home and gardens of Sir Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines. Morris was an artist-gardener who crafted ‘a bewildering, mind-stretching, eye-widening canvas of color, textures and shapes, created primarily with bulbous and herbaceous plants,’ Chatto said in Hortus Revisited, edited by David Wheeler. …

” ‘That first afternoon, there were far too many unknown plants for me to see, let alone recognize,’ she wrote. ‘You may look, but you will not see, without knowledge to direct your mind.’ That’s how I felt in my first gardening forays: I was looking, but not seeing. After years of reading about plants and simply spending more time in gardens big and small, I was able to see more clearly.

“That vision didn’t only come by watching plant life. I also learned to watch gardeners themselves. That was based, in part, on the unexpected advice of Tom Coward, the head gardener of Gravetye Manor in Sussex, England. I once bumped into Coward while walking around Gravetye. At that time, I was a new gardener, and I asked if he had any tips for a fresh practitioner of the craft. His guidance: Find a knowledgeable gardener, and watch what they do. …

“If you are new to gardening and feel confused, visit more gardens, spend an afternoon at your local nursery and talk to the gardeners. Ask questions and listen to their stories. Gardeners tend to be unfailingly patient and generous, because they too had to learn the trade in the same slow and circuitous manner. They know the feeling of gardeners’ eyes moving from muddled to clear.”

More at the Post, here.

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Music School Survives Earthquake

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on April 28, 2023| 2 Comments »

Photo: Nicole Tung for NPR.
Ibrahim Muslimani, 30, speaks to a class about a piece of music blending different eras and languages at the Nefes Foundation for Arts and Culture, which he cofounded in 2016, in Gaziantep, Turkey.

Today’s story is about how the arts can help victims of disasters get their bearings again.

As Fatma Tanis reported recently at National Public Radio (NPR), “When the powerful earthquake rocked her home in early February, 18-year-old Sidra Mohammed Ali woke up and thought of one thing: her music school — was it OK?

“The next day, as survivors all over southern Turkey were taking stock of the destruction and checking on loved ones, Mohammed Ali rushed to the school, the Nefes Foundation for Arts and Culture, and took a deep breath of relief when she saw it was still standing, only having sustained some minor damage.

‘This school is my sanctuary from the stress of life as a Syrian refugee in Turkey,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t bear the thought of something happening to it.’

“The Nefes Foundation was created by Syrian and Turkish musicians in the city of Gaziantep in 2016. They have group classes where they try to revive forgotten Syrian classics and integrate Turkish and Syrian cultures with music that the two have shared for centuries.

“The school also offers private music lessons on the piano and Middle Eastern instruments like the oud (a pear-shaped string instrument), the kanun (a plucked zither) and the ney (an end-blown flute).

“But more than six weeks after the Feb. 6 disaster, life in the earthquake zone is far from back to normal. The magnitude 7.8 earthquake killed more than 55,000 people in Turkey and neighboring Syria. It damaged or destroyed hundreds of thousands of buildings and left 1.5 million people without a home in Turkey alone, according to the United Nations.

“The school had not been able to resume classes until [March 2023], when only three students, out of many dozens, showed up to sing and play.

“Before the earthquake, the school would be packed on weekday evenings, with students ranging from ages 6 to 50, mostly Syrian, but some Turks attended as well.

“The classes are bilingual — in Turkish and Arabic. And that was especially important, according to Ibrahim Muslimani, a Syrian classical musician from Aleppo, who is the brains behind the organization.

” ‘Because some of the young Syrian kids have spent most of their lives here in Turkey and are more fluent in Turkish,’ he told NPR in November 2022. ‘We’re trying to preserve our Syrian cultural identity but also getting to know the Turkish identity through art.’

“Turkey hosts 4 million refugees, the largest number of any country, according to the U.N. refugee agency. The vast majority are Syrians who fled the civil war.

“In the early years of the Syrian civil war, which started in 2011, Turkey had a generous open-door policy toward Syrian refugees. But without broad integration initiatives by the Turkish government, life for many of the refugees has been difficult.

“More recently, politicians in Turkey who oppose President Recep Tayyip Erdogan have scapegoated refugees for the country’s economic problems, leading to a rise in discrimination and hateful attacks. …

“Mohammed Ali, who studies medicine at university and the kanun at the music school, said last weekend the school has been a lifeline for her. She has a bleak outlook on her future, and doesn’t believe that the people in Turkey will ever accept her existence in the country.

” ‘But anytime I have an upsetting encounter, my Turkish teachers and friends here comfort me,’ she said. …

“Rafeef Saffaf Oflazoglu fled Aleppo in 2013 after a near-death encounter. She comes from a family that’s passionate about classical Arabic music. To be able to continue exploring her love of music in Gaziantep was priceless, she said.

“The school also introduced her to centuries-old Turkish songs from the Ottoman archives, and old tunes that traveled from Istanbul to Aleppo. Studying those shared melodies made her feel closer to the culture in her new home.

“Having to go without classes after the earthquake was harder than she expected. ‘After maybe 10 days, I just figured out, like the thing I miss most is art,’ she said, even though she was living in her car at the time. ‘People under trauma react in different ways. It’s not just about singing, you know? It’s spiritual.’

“For Muslimani, the earthquake was a triggering reminder of how he had lost everything a decade ago in Aleppo. … The civil war in Syria destroyed much of the country’s cultural output, along with the lives of millions of Syrians. Muslimani has a mission to keep Aleppo’s traditional form of music, al-Qudud al-Halabiya, alive from Gaziantep.

“He and other Syrian artists also record music at Nefes. ‘I promised my teacher that I would immortalize those precious pieces in the best form possible,’ he said. ‘With the proper orchestra and the glory that they deserve.’ …

“The Nefes Foundation, which survived on donations and fees for private lessons, is now at serious risk of closing down, said Muslimani. They don’t have the funds to pay for next month’s rent. …

” ‘The mere thought of losing this place… it’s unbearable.’ “

More at NPR, here.

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Good Old-Fashioned Pens

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on April 27, 2023| 7 Comments »

Photo: Suzanne and John’s Mom.
Writing desk and pen of Moses Webster, born 1781. The red pen is new, a Beiluner.

Today’s story shows that love for the old ways can rise up unexpectedly in young people, maybe even start a trend.

Tara Bahrampour writes at the Washington Post, “The enormous patina-green fountain pen juts over the sidewalk on F Street, two blocks from the White House, its gold nib pointing down at the front doors like a command.

“ ‘Fahrney’s Pens,’ the sign in calligraphy reads. Inside, the narrow space with 28-foot ceilings is a cathedral to its acolytes, its objects of worship gleaming under glass counters. Ball or fountain. Plastic or rose gold. Steel or acrylic resin, redwood or ebony, matte or shiny.

“ ‘Allow me to dip it,’ store manager Phuntsok Namgyal says softly. He bathes a nib in a bottle of blue-black ink and hands a fountain pen to a customer, who dashes off his signature. …

“In its 94 years, Fahrney’s has outlasted the advent of mass-produced ballpoints, the rise of email and text messages, and a pandemic that decimated newer downtown businesses all around it. Its staying power can be attributed to a base of loyal customers, along with a new generation raised on the digital but enchanted by the mechanical. …

“[Solomon Dennis, 79] leaning on a copper-colored walking stick, recalled the first pen he bought at Fahrney’s, in 1974: a Montblanc Diplomat. ‘It was a hundred and fifty dollars then; I think it’s a thousand and fifty now,’ he said. When he lost it, he cried for a week.

“Pens at Fahrney’s range from $20 to nearly $5,000 and from themes like Harry Potter to King Tut. Some have historical connections, like the Fisher Apollo, a ballpoint pen that traveled to the moon and contains gas that allows it to work underwater, upside down, in freezing temperatures and at zero gravity. A National Zoo pen features pandas.

“Once, Fahrney’s sold a $130,000 pen ‘completely covered in diamonds,’ store owner Chris Sullivan said. …

“Choosing a pen is personal. How do you tend to hold it? Is your lettering large and loopy? Do you close your L’s? Do you prefer the feel of a light pen or a heavy one? Flashy or subtle? Fine tip or broad? ‘It shows their individuality,’ Sullivan said.

“Sullivan’s parents bought the store in 1972 from founder Earl Fahrney. Sullivan, 62, worked in the shop growing up and now co-owns it with his sister; his 83-year-old mother is still working, too, in the warehouse in Upper Marlboro. (‘I can’t get her to stop,’ he said.) …

“The store still does repairs, though it is getting harder to find parts. It also sells stationery, journals, inks and calligraphy books, a small bulwark against the drift of a country that long ago dropped handwriting classes from school curriculums.

“And yet the generation that didn’t learn cursive has somehow fallen for fountain pens — and their interest is helping drive demand. The average age of customers at Fahrney’s is 60, but it is dropping, Sullivan said.

“ ‘There’s a lot of young buyers — “young” being people in their 30s — paying $1,200 for a pen,’ said [David Baker, executive director of the Writing Instrument Manufacturers Association.] ‘From what I hear, during covid, a lot of collectibles and fine items became significant as people had time to browse and look at these things.’

“Trends like urban sketching and journaling have helped spur interest in fountain pens in particular, said [Jonathan Weinberg, an artist and curator of the Maurice Sendak Foundation in Ridgefield, Conn.] who owns around 250 of them. ‘With a ballpoint pen, your hand tends to get a little cramped,’ he said. ‘Your hand kind of flies across the page with a fountain pen.’ …

“ ‘It’s like a candy store for me,’ [Connor Rosenberger, a 19-year-old music major] said, standing in the middle of Fahrney’s, as if unsure where to turn. ‘A very expensive candy store.’

“For his choir mates, too. Teddy McIntyre, a 21-year-old redhead with a denim jacket and a mustache, said he writes actual letters to relatives. … ‘It gives me an excuse to use my wax seal,’ he said. And Anna Kate Scott, 22, said she writes novels and short stories by pen ‘because I feel more like I’m in it, rather than separated from it by a screen.’ ”

About a year ago, my pal David gave me a fountain pen out of the blue. What a lovely surprise that was!

More at the Post, here.

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Basic Income for Artists

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on April 26, 2023| 2 Comments »

Photo: Mark McGuinness.
Mark McGuinness, a photographer, said the income from Ireland’s government allowed him to devote two days a week to making work for exhibitions.

It’s hard to say which part of the story on Ireland’s experiment with guaranteed income for artists I love most, but “cross-party support” sure feels like heaven.

Alex Marshall reports at the New York Times, “Ian Fay had toiled for years to make it as a comic book artist and illustrator, and last fall, he was ready to call it a day.

“Fay, 32, who lives in Kilkenny in southern Ireland and specializes in drawing muscly superheroes, was only earning enough money to pay his bills, he recalled recently. He couldn’t afford vacations. He was considering boxing up his art supplies and getting a job in a grocery store.

“Then, in September, a lifeline appeared in his email inbox. A message from Ireland’s government said that Fay had been selected for a program guaranteeing 2,000 artists a basic income. For three years, participants — including musicians, novelists and circus performers — would be paid 16,900 euros a year, about $18,200, no strings attached.

“Fay stared at the email in disbelief. The payments — in weekly installments of €325 — would cover his rent, and lower his anxiety about making ends meet, he said. For the first time in years, he added, he would have ‘time to practice and develop my craft.’ …

“The Irish pilot project is the latest sign of growing international interest in universal basic income — when governments pay ‌their citizens, employed or not, a lump sum each month. Proponents of the idea, including antipoverty groups, left-wing politicians and libertarian organizations, say guaranteed income ensures a population’s sustenance and health better than other social welfare policies. Opponents say it’s simply giving the work-shy cash for nothing.

“In early experiments in Finland, California and Germany, people were paid regardless of their profession. But several pilots are now focused on cultural workers, who can spend months, or even years, on unpaid projects. Painters, dancers and musicians often rely on precarious, part-time jobs to fund their passions, and basic incomes are seen as a way to let them focus on artistic pursuits.

“Last year, in the United States, a privately funded initiative called Creatives Rebuild New York began giving 2,400 artists $1,000 a month. Similar programs are underway in San Francisco and Minnesota. But of these artist-focused efforts, Ireland’s stands out because it is government-run and involves rigorous analysis of the recipients’ finances, work patterns and well-being to gauge the handouts’ impact. The recipients’ livelihoods will be compared with those of 1,000 artists in a control group, who are not receiving any payments.

“Catherine Martin, Ireland’s culture minister — a trained singer and former street busker — said in a telephone interview that the idea for the policy emerged three years ago during the coronavirus pandemic. With Ireland’s music venues, theaters and museums shuttered, Martin commissioned a task force to explore how the government could help cultural workers survive. Its main recommendation was a basic income trial. …

The pilot, which has cross-party support, has a budget of €33.8 million a year — and that’s on top of the €130 million that Ireland spends on culture via the Arts Council, its main arts funding body.

“Applications opened last April for people working in the visual arts, theater, literature, music, dance, opera, movies, circuses and architecture. … The applicants had to submit two pieces of evidence to show they were genuine cultural workers, such as membership in a professional body, proof of income from art sales or newspaper reviews. Martin said the government didn’t consider the quality of the applicants’ work.

“More than 9,000 people applied, with 8,200 deemed eligible. From that pool, 2,000 were randomly selected to receive payments and 1,000 for the control group. …

“Lydia Mulvey, 47, a screenwriter, said that she quit her job in a telecommunications firm as soon as she heard she’d made it into the program. Now she spends her time writing pilot scripts for thrillers and sci-fi shows, rather than trying to squeeze that into evenings and weekends. ‘I knew it’d be transformative and give me my life back,’ Mulvey said, although she added that, if she didn’t already own her own home, she’d struggle to live on such a low income, especially in Ireland’s squeezed property market.

“Mark McGuinness, 31, a photographer, said that before receiving the basic income he had spent the whole week seeking commercial photography work to pay his rent and the cost of supplies, and had let his artistic practice slip away. Now, he’d ‘clawed back’ two days a week to make work for exhibitions, he said. …

“Ireland’s government is sending recipients questionnaires every six months that ask about the state of their finances, artistic career and health. … Last year, those taking part received a survey to collect baseline data. It asked if they could adequately heat their homes, replace worn furniture or ‘afford a meal with meat, chicken or fish every second day.’ …

“Aengus Ó Snodaigh, a spokesman on cultural issues for the opposition Sinn Fein party, which supports the program, said he wanted data long before the trial concluded so artists didn’t face a ‘cliff edge’ at the end. He added that he had many questions about the program, including whether payments benefited early-career artists more than established names, and whether the handouts were having unintended consequences, like causing tensions in rock bands if some members were selected, but others weren’t.

“ ‘Maybe the money would be better spent on hardship funds for artists who can prove they can’t afford the mortgage, or can’t rent a studio,’ Ó Snodaigh said.

“Few recipients are taking the windfall for granted. Mulvey, the screenwriter, said she’d recently met television companies about developing shows, and was often working long into the night. ‘I keep reminding myself that three years is a really short time, and we’ve already had six months,’ she said, adding that she wanted to make sure ‘I don’t have to go back to a day job when this stops.’ ”

More at the Times, here.

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