Photo: Jesse Costa/WBUR
Workers lay cement for the Lynch Family Skate Park in Cambridge, Mass.
Other than Asakiyume, I didn’t know any daredevil types who skateboard. But at Thanksgiving, David was telling a young parkour artist at my house about his early years doing skateboarding — before getting into tamer events like double marathons.
Whew. I do appreciate being exposed to worlds I am never likely to explore on my own.
Here is Zeninjor Enwemeka with a WBUR story on the new Lynch Family Skate Park in Cambridge, Mass.
“The $3 million, 40,000-square-foot facility, located in East Cambridge underneath ramps to the Zakim Bridge, is the first skate park of its size in the Boston area.
“Organizers say the skate park is designed for skaters of all skills levels as well as athletes in wheelchairs. It features three bowls reminiscent of empty swimming pools (the largest is 11 and a half feet deep) and a street skating areadesigned to mimic public locations like sidewalks and plazas — complete with stairs, ledges and other common street furniture.
“ ‘Skaters that like street are going to find enough street-type elements to satisfy their wants and needs, and then the same thing goes for the folks that like to ride transition in the bowl area,’ said Doug Russell, the skate park’s project manager. …
“[Renata] von Tscharner, of the Charles River Conservancy, said the skate park will not only be ‘a home for the skaters’ but also an attraction for the city.
“ ‘It’s wonderful to watch skaters,’ von Tscharner said. ‘It’s like watching fire, constantly changing [and] flowing. So, it will be a great destination also for tourists to come here and see what the skaters are up to.’
“In addition to skateboarders, the skate park will accommodate BMX riders, rollerbladers and scooter riders. The park also has viewing areas for spectators, and organizers say the facility will be used to host community events and professional skating competitions. The public outdoor park will be open year-round. Organizers say skaters will likely still get use out of the skate park even in the winter months since a large portion of the park is covered by the highway.”
If you are a consumer these days, after Black Friday comes Small Business Saturday, Cyber Monday, and Giving Tuesday. I do love Giving Tuesday as there are so many worthy causes to choose from, and you don’t have to go farther than your computer to donate. This year I am torn between a food bank I admire and my favorite refugee nonprofit, although I do love the Granola Project. Maybe I will do something for all three.
But tomorrow is Saturday, and I am headed down to Providence to help Erik with the kids while Suzanne has a Luna & Stella birthstone-jewelry trunk show at Talulah Cooper Boutique on Traverse St, just off Wickenden (12 pm to 5 pm).
While we are on the subject of Luna & Stella (the parent of this blog) you should know that now through Cyber Monday (November 30, 2015) only, you can get 40% off all earrings, plus $20 off orders over $100 anywhere on the website — with code SHOPSMALL.
This season, Suzanne is into mixing her jewelry with some vintage lockets she has found. The ones in the picture are all from the Greater Providence area, long known for jewelry making.
Photo below: Rhode Island Foundation
A Luna & Stella trunk show pictured in a profile at “Our Backyard,” which features Rhode Island people and businesses, here.
I’m wishing you a good Thanksgiving, with lots of laughter and no stresses inherited from past generations or bygone holidays — just relaxing, enjoying the people around you. and eating well.
Cosmopolitan‘s Heather Wood Rudulph recently presented an interview with Lisa Mara about the path that led to Mara starting a dance company.
“Mara, 29, founded DanceWorks Boston as a creative outlet for people just like her: skilled dancers who also have full-time jobs and never pursued dance as a career. A handful of friends dancing together turned into hundreds of dancers, a second DanceWorks location in New York, and a new career that marries her love of business and her passion for the art form.
Mara: “Since I could walk, I was really active — I played soccer, tennis, I swam, I skied. I kind of went kicking and screaming to my first dance class. I didn’t like to join things when I was younger unless a friend was doing it. But I was dancing around the house 24/7 in my older sisters’ dance costumes. …
“In seventh grade, I was hugely influenced by Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, and *NSYNC. I learned all the dances and sent in an audition tape to MTV’s TRL. I was asked to dance on this Britney Spears show. I think in a dream world I thought I wanted to be her backup dancer, but it was also my first taste of what these glamorous Hollywood red-carpet events are like. It’s like hurry up and wait. You never see the celebrities. And everyone hates it. I was like, This is kinda not fun.
“I went to the Newhouse School at Syracuse University and studied PR. … I fell into PR because I thought that’s what I would be the best at.
“Syracuse has several options for trained dancers. I chose the student-run organization, DanceWorks. After a fairly competitive, strenuous audition, I joined the company my freshman year. By sophomore year, I was on the executive board, and by junior year, I was the co-director. Everything was run like a business. I choreographed dances, organized workshops for up to 300 dancers, led auditions, ordered costumes, managed budgets. I wanted a hand in everything.”
After several years in PR, Mara moved back to Boston and thought about what she wanted to do next.
“I had a network of about five Syracuse alumni in Boston. I said, ‘Hey, I’m thinking of starting a DanceWorks Boston. Would you join if I did?’ They said, ‘Yeah, where do I sign?’ …
“The target audience I was reaching was high-caliber dancers who wanted to continue dancing and choreographing into their adult lives. Many of our dancers have full-time jobs. Many of our dancers are dance teachers, but this is their opportunity to dance for themselves.”
Funny thing: I myself went to the Newhouse School, not in PR but television and radio. One assignment was to interview a classmate in the TV studio. I asked a classmate who had always been a ballet dancer but had stopped dancing to come to grad school. I interviewed her about dance.
After we were finished and were walking away she said to me, “Wow, this interview really makes me want to find a dance company in Syracuse and keep dancing.”
At ecoRI, Frank Carini has a story about an unusual ambition.
“Julian Forgue’s life, at least his professional one, revolves around food,” writes Carini. “He owns the popular restaurant Julians on Broadway [in Providence], just opened Pizza J a street over on Westminster, operates a catering business and has a food bus. The foodie would like to add a vertical garden/indoor farming operation to his food pyramid. …
“The longtime restaurateur even has a piece of property in mind: the former Head Start school on Almy Street, at the corner of Meader Street.
“The derelict three-story building has been wasting away for years, but thanks to the vision of city officials and ambitious urban farmers the pavement surrounding the 90,000-square foot property has been growing food for the past three years. Forgue would like to do the same inside. …
“Forgue said he has been intrigued by the idea of vertical farming for about a decade. … [He] has had very preliminary discussions with a city official who didn’t shoot down the idea. That’s a start.
“ ‘It’s not necessarily about making money, but drawing action around growing more local food in inner-city neighborhoods,’ Forgue said. ‘It’s about the action of proof and showing projects like this can be done. There’s energy out there for this. We can’t just keep opening up restaurants and bars.’ ” More here.
The article was made possible with support from the Horsley Witten Group. Did want the same piece of information that I felt was missing? What happened to the Head Start school?
Photo: Joanna Detz/ecoRI News A Providence restaurant owner would like to see this vacant building at the corner of Almy and Meader streets turned into a vertical farm. An urban farmer is already growing food outside the former Head Start school.
I learn some really cool things from the Christian Science Monitor. (I’m on their listserv for stories about people helping people, the CMS Change Agent newsletter.)
A recent newsletter highlighted an initiative by successful Mexicans living in New York who have decided to offer practical support to poor immigrants from their homeland.
Tyler J. Kelly writes, “The view from Carlos Valverde’s 38th-floor office tells a story by itself – New York stretching below, the mighty skyscrapers of the World Trade Center rising all around.
“Mr. Valverde is the construction manager of the World Trade Center’s Tower Three, responsible for 2 million square feet of real estate, and the vista from his office is, in many ways, the realized vision of many immigrants’ dreams.
“From Brooklyn’s workaday Sunset Park, however, the view is quite different. There, at classes put on by a nonprofit, the Mixteca Organization, six to eight immigrants sit in folding chairs around plastic tables struggling to spell tarea, Spanish for ‘homework,’ or trying to understand the concept of the hundreds’ place in math. …
“In Mexican culture – both in Mexico and here in New York – there’s little tradition of people bridging these two worlds. But that is changing. Valverde is part of a slowly growing effort to bring the resources of New York’s Mexican-American 1 percent to bear on the problems of the 99 percent.
“The benefits for the immigrant community here are plain. Edgar Morales, for one, has gone from being a construction worker to getting a college education paid for by a Mexican philanthropist. He’s now a computer science major with dreams of interning at Google or Microsoft.
“But it has also changed Valverde, who volunteers at Mixteca in Sunset Park, and others like him. In Mexico, the wealthy travel with bodyguards and live in houses surrounded by electrified wire; in the US, some are reaching and gaining a new perspective.
“After spending hours talking with clients about every conceivable detail of an elevator’s interior, Valverde says, ‘I go to Sunset Park and talk to a graduate [at Mixteca] who just finished English 3 and is a baker.’
“Compared with the baker’s reality, he says, the elevator issues seem ‘minute, minuscule.’ ”
Photo: Ann Hermes/Christian Science Monitor
Carlos Valverde (standing outside 3 World Trade Center in New York) helps new, less affluent Mexican immigrants go to school and find work.
Andrew Joseph writes at the Globe’s new national health publication, Stat, about the potential of silk worms to solve people’s joint problems.
“When Dr. Ailis Tweed-Kent was an internal medicine resident at Massachusetts General Hospital,” he writes, “she saw arthritis patients who were sometimes unable to work because of the pain. She could prescribe pain relievers, but she felt frustrated that there wasn’t more she could do. …
“In 2013, she founded Cocoon Biotech Inc. to come up with a way to treat the actual cause of arthritis, the loss of cartilage in joints. For the therapy, she turned to a biomaterial that has been used for thousands of years: silk. …
“What makes silk so special, researchers and entrepreneurs say, is its versatility, something that a synthetic material has not yet replicated. Silk has the added benefit of being naturally biocompatible, meaning it’s safe to use in the body.
” ‘It’s a simple protein, basically, and yet it’s all in the way it’s processed and used,’ said David Kaplan, chair of biomedical engineering at Tufts University, who has studied silk for more than two decades.
“Cocoon is one of a number of biotech companies that have licensed silk technology from Tufts. The microscopic spheres it has developed are meant to be injected into joints where they can lubricate the bones’ surfaces as a stand-in for lost cartilage.”
I’ve been watching a tiny house go up in front of the Umbrella Community Arts Center. It’s an art project that started in June and is supposed to wrap up next June.
The Umbrella said “Artist Miranda Aisling will be building a tiny house on the front lawn of The Umbrella and filling it with handmade items.”
I am now going to post the photos I have taken periodically, and I hope I get them in the right order. Even though the project is only half way, when I saw the new color today I said to myself, “Time to report.”
At Mass Live, Carolyn Robbins writes that a retired math professor known for having a favorite number is being honored with his own road sign. This could only happen at Hampshire College.
“There are probably an infinite number of ways to say goodbye to a beloved math professor, but Hampshire College’s David Kelly would prefer his students and colleagues keep it to just 17.
“Kelly, who has taught the mathematical and social history of the number 17 during his four and a half decades of teaching, didn’t want a party. So, instead of a dinner reception, Hampshire College decided to give Kelly the lasting tribute he preferred. …
“Elizabeth Conlisk, a professor of public health, together with Hampshire College President Jonathan Lash, worked to make it happen. All of the 15 mph speed limit signs on campus have come down and been replaced with ones that read 17 mph.
“Kelly’s reaction of seeing the new 17 mph speed limit signs for the first time: ” ‘It felt very good,’ he said. ‘And soon after, someone from admissions told me a prospective student was visiting campus, and when he drove up and saw the 17 mph sign he said, “I’m going here.” ‘ ” More here.
Photo: Hampshire College, Amherst, Massachusetts
Professor David Kelly taught the mathematical and social history of the number 17. In his honor, all the 15 mph speed limit signs on campus came down, replaced by 17 mph speed limit signs.
I hardly need to remind readers of this blog that people are people. We are all just living our lives, with more or less the same daily concerns. And the differences are what make things interesting.
Sam Radwany at the radio show Only a Game recently described some youthful experiences in Minneapolis that sound both the same and different. The story is about a group of American Muslim girls who choose to cover themselves in keeping with their kind of Islam but who are also enthusiastic basketball players.
“The Twin Cities are home to one of the largest Somali populations in the world. The community is concentrated in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood of Minneapolis, where these pre-teen players go to school. … Balancing their cultural and religious standards of modesty with sports can be tricky.
“ ‘Sometimes our hijab, our scarves, got off, and we would have to time out, pause, to fix it,’ Samira said. ‘Our skirts were a problem — they were all the way down to our feet.’ …
“Last season, some of the girls opted to wear long pants instead of dresses. But that still put them at a disadvantage when playing other Minnesota teams. …
“And because the girls’ team didn’t have their own jerseys, they had to share with the boys. Ten-year-old Amal says the experience was unpleasant.
“ ‘Horrible! Very horrible,’ she said. ‘And the boys, their jerseys were all sweaty and yucky and nasty.’ …
“That’s where a local nonprofit dedicated to expanding sports and recreation opportunities for local Muslim girls stepped in. … [They] brought in researchers and designers from the university to help the young athletes find a new solution to the stinky jersey problem.
“Jennifer Weber, the girls’ coach, said the players did most of the work themselves, with guidance from the experts. …
“Chelsey Thul from the university’s Tucker Center for Research on Girls and Women in Sport described some features of the new uniforms: ‘And so this sport uniform has black leggings. It’s longer, probably about to the knees …
“ ‘The biggest change to the hijab is that it’s not a pullover, so that instead, it fastens with Velcro at the neck,’ Weber said. ‘So it’s got some give to it, and it’s forgiving, and it moves as they move.’
“And of course, with the young girls’ input, there’s a bit of color. Samira and Amal said the team had a lot of ideas.” Read about their design ideas and their delight in the uniforms here.
Photo: Jim Mone/AP
Somali American girls in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood of Minneapolis designed their own uniforms for greater freedom of movement.
An art museum in Minnesota has used the occasion of its 100th birthday to grow a field-size replica of a Van Gogh work.
Emile Klein at Studio 360 has the story.
“The Minneapolis Institute of Art [MIA] has been throwing a year-long party for its 100th birthday, and the guest list has been a bit of a cultural catch-all. …
“How about a 1.2 acre rendition of a Vincent van Gogh painting, composed with items you could buy at the Home Depot?
“Van Gogh’s original piece, Olive Trees with Yellow Sky and Sun, measures about two feet by three feet and hangs on a wall in the MIA. The new rendition, by land artist Stan Herd, covers 1.2 acres, or 7,230 Olive Trees. It’s so big that you’d have to fly a plane over to appreciate it …
“As a land artist, Herd knows that most of his work is just too big to fit inside a traditional museum, and that’s OK by him. ‘I’m a Kansan, and I make art on a frickin’ tractor. Do I really want the avant garde en Paris to see it?’
“Even if a major museum could secure zoning rights, representational art like the kind Herd makes is out of fashion in the art world. Surprisingly, the person who might appreciate Herd’s work the most is van Gogh himself. …
“Herd’s slice of Saint-Rémy won’t last forever. It will fade over time. Surprisingly, so will van Gogh’s. That’s because he painted with pigments now known to be ‘fugitive,’ like a very slowly disappearing ink. The chrome yellows and scarlets scattered throughout the painting’s sky will, in time, wilt like the marigolds in Herd’s field. Everything in nature is ephemeral — van Gogh would probably like that.”
It’s getting chilly around here. Thirty degrees this morning. I’m getting wimpier about taking my walk outside and just go ’round and ’round indoors. I need to toughen up. The NY Times health columnist Jane Brody is older than I am and not only swims every day (vigorously, I’m sure) but walks five miles. Whoosh. I would have to walk back and forth to the high school — twice — to do five miles. It would take me half the day.
Here are photographs from the last couple weeks: shadows at the zoo, where my grandson ran into a friend he usually sees only in summer; milkweed and shadows; leaves casting shadows; an abandoned bird nest; overdevelopment reflecting on the waters of Fort Point Channel; and a burning sunset.
With a little creative thinking, a woman in Detroit was able to put a rundown house to good use, improve the neighborhood, promote her flower business, and help florists who focus on locally grown flowers.
Stacy Cowley writes at the NY Times, “Eleven months ago, a derelict house here that is now filled with 36,000 flowers contained far grimmer things. …
“Twelve thousand pounds of trash had to be hauled out before Lisa Waud, a florist who bought the duplex at auction for $250, could see what kind of canvas she had purchased.
“The house remains a structural wreck, but its atmosphere has been transformed. [In October] some 2,000 visitors [toured] Flower House, an art installation Ms. Waud and more than three dozen floral collaborators from around the country created on the site. Their goal is to cast a new light on the Detroit metropolitan area’s infamous blight, and on their own trade. …
“All of the plants and flowers filling [the rooms] are American-grown, a rarity in an industry that imports a majority of its wares from Colombia and elsewhere. …
“The inspiration for Flower House struck in 2012, when she saw images from that season’s Christian Dior couture show, held in a Parisian mansion filled with flowers in a rainbow of colors.
“ ‘It was stunning, and I knew immediately that I wanted to do that — but living in Detroit, I pictured it in an abandoned house,’ she said. ‘I’m trying to rebrand abandoned houses as a resource.’ …
“Ms. Waud estimated that she would need to raise $150,000 to cover the installation’s floral costs, but when she contacted her usual wholesalers, the California Cut Flower Commission, Mayesh and Nordlie, all three offered to donate their flowers.” Read about the inspiring results here.
Photo: Laura McDermott for The New York Times Lisa Waud, a Michigan florist, works on her room on the back side of the Flower House on the first day of the installation in Hamtramck.
In case you’ve ever wondered why anyone would become a scholar and spend life mired in musty, dark library stacks, let me introduce you to an assistant professor of English at Montclair State University in New Jersey.
“In an unassuming notebook held in an archive at the University of Cambridge,” writes Jennifer Schuessler at the NY Times, “an American scholar has found what he says is an important new clue to the earthly processes behind that masterpiece [the King James Bible]: the earliest known draft, and the only one definitively written in the hand of one of the roughly four dozen translators who worked on it.
“The notebook, which dates from 1604 to 1608, was discovered by Jeffrey Alan Miller, an assistant professor of English at Montclair State University in New Jersey, … last fall, when he was in the archives at Sidney Sussex College in Cambridge, researching an essay about Samuel Ward, one of the King James translators and, later, the college’s master. He was hoping to find an unknown letter, which he did.
“ ‘I thought that would be my great discovery,’ he recalled.
“But he also came across an unassuming notebook about the size of a modern paperback, wrapped in a stained piece of waste vellum and filled with some 70 pages of Ward’s nearly indecipherable handwriting.
“The notebook had been cataloged in the 1980s as a ‘verse-by-verse biblical commentary’ with ‘Greek word studies, and some Hebrew notes.’ But as Professor Miller tried to puzzle out which passages of the Bible it concerned, he realized what it was: a draft of parts of the King James Version of the Apocrypha, a disputed section of the Bible that is left out of many editions, particularly in the United States.
” ‘There was a kind of thunderstruck, leap-out-of-bathtub moment,’ Professor Miller said. ‘But then comes the more laborious process of making sure you are 100 percent correct.’ ” More here.
Photo: Maria Anna Rogers/Master and Fellows of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge Pages from Samuel Ward’s translation for part of the King James Bible, the earliest known draft for the King James translation, which appeared in 1611.
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