Photo: Joanna Hawkins/BBC. Artist David Taylor spotted this early 20th Century by Canadian impressionist Helen McNicoll at a UK auction house. It is valued at 150 times what it cost.
Let’s start 2025 with another fun story of a rediscovered treasure. The person who found it wasn’t just some guy. He was an artist who knew quality when he saw it and was willing to pay a large amount for it — just not as large an amount as it turned out to be worth.
David McKenna writes at the BBC, “A painting bought for just over £2,000 [~$2500] has been authenticated as a long-lost masterpiece worth £300,000 [~$374,000].
“The buyer, [Lincolnshire] artist David Taylor, said he had been ‘bowled over’ by the artwork while browsing a sale at a regional auction house.
“Experts on the BBC’s Fake of Fortune? were able to prove the painting, known as ‘The Bean Harvest’ and depicting a scene of women in a field, was a piece from the early 20th Century by Canadian impressionist Helen McNicoll. …
“McNicoll is one of Canada’s most celebrated female artists, achieving considerable international success during her career.
“Deaf from the age of two, McNicoll was known for her impressionist representations of rural landscapes.
“In 1915, her career was cut short when she developed complications from diabetes and died at the age of 35.
“During the episode, the show’s team — including presenters Fiona Bruce and Philip Mould — helped Mr Taylor to prove its authenticity.
” ‘I’d not heard of Helen McNicoll before we started investigating this painting,’ Bruce said. ‘But what a pioneer she was — a woman at that time, the early 20th Century, traveling abroad with her easel while profoundly deaf. I’m so glad we’ve been able to bring her name to wider attention.’ …
“Co-host Mould described the find as a ‘once-in-a-lifetime discovery,’ adding there was a massive desire on both sides of the Atlantic for the work of high-quality women artists.
“Canadian philanthropist Pierre Lassonde, a major collector of McNicoll’s work, flew over to London to see the painting in person. During the show, he said: ‘For a painting that has been missing for 110 years, I think it’s fantastic… I wouldn’t mind adding one more piece to my collection.’
“Mr Taylor described the experience as ‘an absolute adventure.’ “
More at the BBC, here. Find out more about the artist at Sotheby’s, where her painting was offered for sale in November.
Diagram: Q Cheng/Nexus. How a building’s zigzag wall could emit and reflect heat. IR refers to infrared energy.
In the department of “good ideas for a new year,” we learn about zigzag walls and how they might cool buildings without fossil fuels or even electricity. It’s kind of the opposite of “passive solar heat,” which you’ve heard of. This approach involves passive cooling.
Isabelle Rodney reports at the Guardian, “Incorporating zigzag patterns into building walls could help cool overheated buildings, research has found.
“Buildings are now responsible for approximately 40% of global energy consumption, contributing more than a third of global carbon dioxide emissions. A significant fraction of this energy comes from air conditioning usage. Scientists expect this figure to double by 2050 if left unchecked.
“As the planet continues to warm, the demand for cooling in buildings continues to rise. In response to this growing challenge, scientists have been exploring passive cooling solutions that do not rely on energy consumption.
“A research team led by Qilong Cheng at Columbia University in New York has developed a promising solution that could help reduce energy use, by redirecting the sun’s energy away from buildings.
“Cheng’s team has proposed a structural wall design featuring a zigzag pattern that can reduce a building’s surface temperature by up to 3C [37.4 degrees] compared with flat walls, without consuming any energy. …
“The design consists of walls with a series of protrusions that create a zigzag shape when viewed from the side. This configuration takes advantage of radiative cooling – a passive cooling strategy that reflects sunlight and emits long-wave infrared radiation through the Earth’s atmosphere into outer space. …
“Common strategies, such as painting rooftops white to reflect sunlight, have been effective for horizontal surfaces but are less ideal for vertical walls, which also absorb heat from the ground. The zigzag wall design addresses these challenges by creating surfaces that emit heat in the atmospheric transparency window and reflect infrared heat, rather than absorbing it.
“While this innovative cooling method shows promise for hotter climates, it could increase heating demands in colder regions during winter. To address this, Cheng and his colleagues have proposed an adaptive design featuring hinged ‘fins’ that can be raised in winter to increase heat absorption and lowered in summer to reduce it. More at the Guardian, here.
At LinkedIn, Cheng describes himself thus: “My overarching research goal is to contribute to the development of energy-efficient systems and high-performance devices, fostering a more environmentally sustainable and efficient society.
“At Columbia University, I developed thermal radiation regulated walls to reduce energy consumption in buildings. At UC Berkeley, I studied heat transfer in data storage devices and addressed related mechanics and tribology issues [tribology is the study of friction, lubrication, and wear in systems where surfaces are in relative motion]. I am currently continuing my academic journey at Purdue University.”
A chemistry PhD once told me emphatically that scientists did their most important work when they were young. Here’s hoping that this young researcher never loses his creativity.
Photo: Annick Sjobakken/New York Times. Farmers are restoring the prairie with government help. The aim is to reduce nutrient runoff from cropland, and help birds and bees.
Sometimes we have to go back to the old ways to fix the mistakes of the new ways.
For example, our country’s beloved “bread basket” has used for generations agricultural techniques that have depleted the soil. Maybe we can learn something from the time of Little House on the Prairie.
Cara Buckley reports at the New York Times, “The little tracts of wilderness grow on Maple Edge Farm in southwest Iowa, where the Bakehouse family cultivates 700 acres of corn, soybeans and alfalfa. Set against uniform rows of cropland, the scraps of land look like tiny Edens, colorful and frowzy. Purple bergamot and yellow coneflowers sway alongside big bluestem and other grasses, alive with birdsong and bees.
“The Bakehouses planted the strips of wild land after floodwaters reduced many fields to moonscapes three years ago, prompting the family to embark on a once-unthinkable path.
“They took nearly 11 acres of their fields out of crop production, fragments of farmland that ran alongside fields and in gullies. Instead of crops, they sowed native flowering plants and grasses, all species that once filled the prairie.
“The restored swaths of land are called prairie strips, and they are part of a growing movement to reduce the environmental harms of farming and help draw down greenhouse gas emissions, while giving fauna a much-needed boost and helping to restore the land.
“As the little wildernesses grew, more and more meadowlarks, dickcissels, pheasants and quail showed up, along with beneficial insects. Underground, root networks formed to quietly perform heroic feats, filtering dangerous nutrient runoff from crops, keeping soil in place and bringing new health to the land.
“ ‘We’re thinking about our farm as a small piece of the overall good puzzle,’ said Jon Bakehouse, on a visit to the family’s fields one sunny morning earlier this summer. ‘On a larger scale, we’re all in this together.’
“The fertile soils of America’s vast prairies made the heartland ideal for growing crops. But today in Iowa, less than 0.1 percent of original prairie remains, scattered in fragments around the state.
“Prairie strips are helping to reverse that loss, and are being adopted at an increasing clip. Researchers counted 586 acres of prairie strips on farmland across seven states in 2019. As of last year, they had spread to 14 states, filling 22,972 acres.
“While the acreage accounts for a tiny fraction of the Midwest’s farm fields — Iowa alone has roughly 30 million acres of cropland — researchers said the strips had disproportionately positive impacts.
“ ‘There are a whole suite of dramatic environmental benefits that come with this small intervention,’ said Lisa Schulte Moore, a professor of natural resource ecology and management at Iowa State University, and a founder of its prairie strips project. ‘If you put a bit of prairie back, it makes a big difference.’
“To be classified as a prairie strip, restored land must adjoin active cropland, reach a width of at least 30 feet and be sown with dozens of native plant species.
“Researchers at Iowa State found that when prairie strips were planted in and around soy and corn fields, they acted as both ‘speed bumps and diapers,’ Professor Schulte Moore said.
“Soil erosion and surface runoff plummeted, as the prairie plants held soil in place and transpired water. Levels of nitrogen and phosphorus carried in surface runoff from adjacent cropland decreased by as much as 70 percent, absorbed instead by the prairie strips, resulting in less water contamination. The prairie strips created better conditions for helpful bacteria, resulting in dramatically lower levels of nitrous oxide, a powerful greenhouse gas generated by chemical fertilizer, compared to cropland without prairie strips. The strips also drew twice as many native grassland birds and three times as many beneficial insects, compared to fields that had not been rewilded.
“While the research did not show that prairie strips affected yields in adjacent cropland, tests found that the strips boosted the health and fertility of the soil where they were sown. …
“Iowa has the most industrialized livestock farms in the country, and tens of millions of pounds of untreated manure that they produce end up fertilizing crops, along with synthetic fertilizer made from fossil fuels. The nitrogen-heavy runoff from agricultural fields threatens drinking water, and is a leading cause of an oxygen-starved dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico that kills marine plant and animal life.
“In 2007, Professor Schulte Moore was part of a team at Iowa State University that began researching the ways in which restoring parts of the prairie could enrich soil, help insects and wildlife, and stanch emissions and fertilizer runoff. They went on to plant prairie strips on commercial farms and at some of the university’s test sites, and found that benefits were consistently achieved when 10 percent of a farm’s cropland is converted into prairie strips, with lower amounts still providing some boons.
“The findings might have sat on a shelf, Professor Schulte Moore said, were it not for her department chair, who rewrote the professor’s job description so she could promote the idea to farmers.
“In late 2018, the prairie strips initiative got perhaps its biggest boost when it was included in the federal Conservation Reserve Program. That meant that farmland owners who converted some of their acreage to prairie strips could collect money from the federal government. According to the Agriculture Department, the average payout for prairie strips is $209 per acre each year.
“ ‘That was monumental,’ Professor Schulte Moore said. ‘It helped align hearts, heads and pocketbooks.’ ” More at the Times, here.
Photo: Michael Fox/The World. Rita Álvarez has been selling handicrafts and homemade jewelry on the streets of Asunción, Paraguay, for more than 40 years. She said that most of her customers in the city speak a combination of Guaraní with Spanish.
Most of our stories on indigenous languages are about struggles in the face of looming extinction.
It’s different for an indigenous language called Guaraní in Paraguay. Michael Fox reports on the phenomenon at Public Radio International’s The World.
“Tomas Zayas, who lives in the Paraguayan countryside, spoke only the Indigenous Guaraní language until he was 22 years old.
“Later, he started to speak Spanish to be better prepared as a community leader. But Guaraní has remained his main language.
“ ‘For me, Guaraní is identity,’ said Zayas, a longtime campesino leader with the Alto Parana Small Farmers Association. ‘It’s happiness. It’s beauty. Because a joke in Spanish isn’t funny at all.’
“The Guaraní language, along with its many dialects, comes from the Indigenous Guaraní people who have lived in this region since long before the Spanish conquest.
“Today, nearly 300,000 Indigenous Guaraní still live in Paraguay, Brazil, Bolivia and Argentina. In some of these countries, their language has influenced Portuguese and Spanish.
“But in Paraguay, Guaraní is spoken as an official language alongside Spanish. Most Paraguayans speak Guaraní or a mixture of Spanish and Guaraní as their first language, whether they are of Indigenous descent or not.
“Although there are several theories about how Paraguayans have been able to preserve their Indigenous language, one that stands out focuses on the Triple Alliance War of the 1860s.
“Most of Paraguay’s male population was killed after Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay invaded the country. ‘As a question of survival, the women who were left would only speak Guaraní,’ Zayas said. ‘They passed it on to their children.’ …
“But many Paraguayans say that Guaraní is a language of metaphor and beauty.
“Rita Álvarez has been selling handicrafts and homemade jewelry on the streets of Asunción, Paraguay’s capital, for more than 40 years. ‘For me, it’s the sweetest language,’ she said. ‘Because you can say with one word in Guaraní what you would need 10 to say in Spanish.’
“She said that most of her customers in the city speak a combination of Guaraní with Spanish, or jopara, which means ‘mixture’ in Guaraní. …
“Blanca Estela González is a retired elementary schoolteacher who now teaches Guaraní at IDIPAR Language School in Asunción.
“Gonzalez said that foreigners often pick up Guaraní rather quickly, because, unlike Spanish, there are only three types of verb conjugations: past, present and future. And Gonzalez said the language has received a boost in recent decades.
“ ‘Now, it’s an official language,’ she said. ‘And half of the lessons at the public schools are taught in Guaraní.’ ” More at The World, here.
Happy New Year to all blog friends, whatever language you speak. Any plans for celebrating?
Photo: Patrick Zachmann/Magnum Photos. The real miracle: Reconstructing the intricate wood frame of Notre Dame’s roof.
When the unthinkable happens to a beloved cultural icon, what’s next? In the days and weeks after the great fire of Notre Dame Cathedral broke hearts around the world, plans began to take shape.
Joshua Hammer writes at GQ, “Some time after six in the evening on April 15, 2019, Rémi Fromont was sitting at the Brasserie Saint-Malo, a lively café in Montparnasse, Paris, when his phone rang.
“ ‘Notre-Dame is on fire,’ ” said a friend on the other end of the line. … Fromont leapt out of his chair, got on his bike, and pedaled north toward the cathedral. …
“About an hour after his arrival, Fromont, with thousands of Parisians at the scene and millions watching around the world, looked on as the 750-ton spire, made of 1,230 oak beams, blazed, teetered, snapped like a matchstick, and crashed through the roof. Spectators broke into tears of disbelief and horror. …
“The day after the fire, French president Emmanuel Macron made a promise: Notre-Dame would rise again in the next five years. …
“None of the many priceless paintings, sculptures, and windows that filled the church’s interior — though they were stained by smoke and singed by fire — had been wrecked beyond repair. …
“The roof frame was a different story. Known in French as the charpente, it was an ingenious assemblage of triangular-shaped trusses, each one consisting of horizontal and vertical beams and diagonal rafters designed to support the heavy roof cover and distribute the weight over the walls beneath it. Built from thousands of pieces of wood and assembled without nails, it was a singular achievement, one of the oldest surviving all-wood structures in the world. …
“During World War I, German artillery shells had reduced the cathedral in Reims, another Gothic masterpiece, to charred wood and rubble. In 1919, the architect Henri Deneux launched the restoration, reconstructing the church’s roof with reinforced concrete, a decision that was controversial at the time.
“Fromont had not warmed to Deneux’s approach. He believed that the roof’s charpente could be rebuilt exactly as the medieval carpenters had done it. The approach was not without risks — Fromont had told me, ‘Wood burns. I’m not going to say the opposite’ — but certain measures could be put into place to mitigate its vulnerability. …
“The roof’s charpente was perhaps [Notre Dame’s medieval woodworkers’] greatest creation. Yet Fromont told me that, until recently, it had never been the subject of serious scholarly study. …
“In 2012, Fromont, then a 35-year-old scholar at Paris’s École de Chaillot, decided to address that absence. For his advanced degree, Fromont proposed spending a year surveying every inch of the charpente. When they were at last granted permission, he and his partner on the project, Cédric Trentesaux, entered the cathedral’s south transept and climbed a winding staircase into the triangular south gable. There they squeezed through an aperture and entered a medieval realm barely visited in over 800 years. …
“The two men emerged from the project with the most extensive blueprint of the 800-year-old structure that had ever been created. ‘It wasn’t a lot, but it was enough,’ Fromont said. …
“There was some skepticism that the charpente could be re-created in its original glory, but Fromont found an ally in François Calame, France’s leading apostle of traditional carpentry. In the early 1990s, as a young carpenter, Calame had visited Maramures‚ a remote region in western Romania. Isolated from a fast-changing world during Nicolae Ceausescu’s 24-year dictatorship, artisans there had kept the old ways of carpentry alive.
“Like in Romania, traditional French axmen used hand tools: the hache de grossière, a long-handled, narrow-bladed axe used to remove large amounts of wood, and the doloire, a broad-bladed, short-handled axe designed for precision chipping following the grain of the wood. It’s slow and physical work: Squaring lumber by hand can take much more time than doing it with buzz saws. For that reason, by the 20th century, axes had all but disappeared as a construction tool. Yet their proponents extol the end result: more pliable, stronger beams, and imperfections that reflect the extensive labor and love of craft. ‘This is a kind of magical work because you feel the material,’ Fromont told me. ‘You smell it and touch it.’ ”
Read what happened next in Paris. The long and fascinating article is at GQ, here. No firewall.
Photo: Lenora Chu. Ewa Łętowska, the elder stateswoman who helped build the legal framework of democratic Poland after communism, sits in her Warsaw flat last February.
Never underestimate the power of a woman. It may be under the radar, but woe to those who think they can always manipulate the quiet ones.
Lenora Chu of the Christian Science Monitor recalls, “It was late fall of 1987 in Poland, and the economic and social forces here were fueling tremors that would eventually fell communism across the Soviet bloc.
“Among a group of influential men – law professors – at a dinner party one evening was a Communist Party member brainstorming how to throw a bone to pro-democracy activists. The group was tasked with floating a name for a human rights ombudsman; that of legal scholar Ewa Łętowska kept surfacing. A devoted academic who had pumped out two decades of legal research on topics as benign as consumer protections and contract law, she was a respectable but safe choice.
“ ‘They said, “We want a woman, because women might be easier to manipulate,” ‘ Ms. Łętowska says in an interview in her Warsaw flat, lined floor to ceiling with books and opera records. She laughs at this memory that she possesses only because her lawyer husband was among the men feasting on schnitzel at that monthly table for regulars.
“If it was a wallflower they wanted, it turned out to be a miscalculation of historic proportion: They launched a stateswoman.
“Her trajectory as Poland’s top human rights thinker, she says, started ‘loudly, and with a bang’ when she was named the country’s human rights ombudsman soon after the dinner party, pioneering the balance between the state and the individual in the waning days of communism.
“She was an accidental influencer who, four decades later, now in her 80s, is a sought-after talking head, issuing viral social media posts about democracy. And when voters sent their right-wing government packing last October, a coalition of progressives turned to the wisdom and experience of Ms. Łętowska and her contemporaries.
“They’re looking for help to fix Poland’s institutions after the populists turned the country away from the European Union, rolled back civil rights such as abortion, took over the media and judiciary, and questioned the country’s humanitarian aid duties.
” ‘Ms. Łętowska’s value to Polish society cannot be overstated, says Helena Chmielewska-Szlajfer, a sociologist and assistant professor at Koźmiński University. ‘She’s a living legend, and she has the authority of this wise, powerful woman who set the institutions right in the beginning. She worked on this at a time it was the hardest – the intermediary stage between communism and democracy. And she still has much to say.’
“In 1980, the world saw burly Solidarity unionist Lech Wałęsa leading a revolt against communist authorities for worker rights – and eventually winning a Nobel Prize for it. But it was the progressive technocrats quietly blooming in that politically fertile time who did the less spectacular but essential work of building a democratic legal framework.
“Until then, Ms. Łętowska had forged her career as an impartial civil law professor, neither courting the communist regime nor joining the opposition. [She] now confidently says she … ‘was a state official to society, who brought more dialogue, more transparency. At the same time, I didn’t want a political future.’
“In an era when one didn’t easily trust one’s neighbor, there was little subversive in her ‘good girl’ youth to suggest she would emerge a strong voice for human rights and democracy. … On rare study trips abroad — few Polish scholars were trusted to leave the country — she might use German colleagues’ photocopiers to reproduce expensive legal tomes, like handbooks and casebooks on human rights law. …
“After law school in the 1960s, she published articles about civic law issues, rising through the ranks as a professor at the Polish Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Law Studies.
“A trip to the West – Hamburg, Germany – in the early 1980s was a turning point. She happened upon a demonstration by feminists. … From the other side of the street, she could see citizens hurling insults at the women.
“ ‘And in between you could see a line of police, with stone faces making sure no one gets hurt, being completely indifferent, and providing this space for demonstrating,’ says Ms. Łętowska. ‘It was the first time in my life I saw police not beating demonstrators – but rather protecting them. This is how I finally understood how things should be.’
‘The people of Hamburg would never know how much credit they should take, quite by accident, in my education,’ she says.
“Half a decade after that trip, she was named Poland’s first human rights official, judging the conduct of the state toward its citizens. … Should political parties have to register with the state? No, she famously wrote in 1988, when Poland was still under communist rule: ‘The constitution stated clearly: if parties want to form, let them form. Registration is required only for associations.’ …
“After the communist regime fell in 1989, she found herself among the legal scholars helping to modernize the Polish Constitution.”
More at the Monitor, here. Piotr Żakowiecki contributed to this report.
Photo: Creatives Rebuild New York. Painter Athesia Benjamin created a self-portrait while participating in the guaranteed income program.
From time to time this blog has checked in on experiments in basic income taking place around the world. If you use search terms like “basic income” or “guaranteed income” in my search box, you will find many related articles, including ones on helping Kenyan villagers, keeping New Orleans teens in school, slashing homelessness in Finland, and supporting artists in Ireland.
New York has also piloted a basic income for artists.
Maya Pontone writes at Hyperallergic, “Early findings from a guaranteed income program for artists across New York State reveal that such initiatives can provide crucial support for artists’ financial stability, professional advancement, and individual well-being.
“While more comprehensive results are slated to be released at the end of the year, preliminary outcomes show that when artists receive guaranteed income, they generally concentrate on addressing outstanding debt, bills, and increasing their personal savings. They also have more freedom to work on their practice and more time for caregiving responsibilities.
“The report was compiled by Creatives Rebuild New York (CRNY), a $125 million guaranteed income and work opportunity initiative that began in 2021 and is chiefly funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, and the Ford Foundation. Under the program, CRNY provided 2,400 artists across New York no-strings-attached monthly payments of $1,000 for 18 consecutive months, prioritizing individuals who are acutely impacted by institutional barriers to financial security based on their race, physical ability, sexual orientation, citizenship status, and caregiving tasks.
“On average, the survey found that 17% of the guaranteed monthly payments were used to pay off debt, principally outstanding credit card balances and loans and mortgages. Furthermore, artists saved approximately $150 more each month and put nearly $140 of the payments toward expenses like rent and utilities. The initiative also showed that participants generally reported feeling improved mental and emotional health in comparison to those who did not receive guaranteed monthly payments. …
“ ‘Going through a breast cancer diagnosis during a pandemic was the most difficult experience of my life,’ shared one anonymous participant quoted in the report. …
‘Guaranteed Income gave me the support I needed to slowly build my life back, become strong and healthy again, and has truly led me back to this industry feeling safe, valued and supported,’ the participant wrote.
“In an interview with Hyperallergic, Maura Cuffie-Peterson, CRNY’s director of strategic initiatives, explained that critics of guaranteed income programs generally ‘claim that they disincentivize work. … Our report shows that not only are artists working with a guaranteed income, but they’re really shaping work that is meaningful to them and in their community life.’
“The report’s findings add to survey results released by CRNY this summer that showed a majority of NY artists are in precarious financial positions, currently earning significantly below living wage standards.
“ ‘When done ethically and in collaboration of those who are directly impacted, research can lead us to better designed programs and even policy solutions,’ Cuffie-Peterson said, adding that guaranteed income programs could be more beneficial if they ran for longer periods of time.
“As an example, she cited Minnesota arts organization Springboard for the Arts’s recent announcement that it is extending its guaranteed income pilot for artists to five years and offering additional financial counseling services.
“ ‘It’s less what should be researched next, but more how these things that are all being researched are building up into something bigger, more impactful, and more meaningful to more people,’ Cuffie-Peterson said.”
Photo: Ilan Godfrey. Vusi Mdoyi, center, rehearsing this month with the Step Afrika! dance group at the Soweto Theater in Soweto Township in Johannesburg.
And speaking of other cultures, today’s story is from South Africa. It reminds me of how much I loved Miriam Makeba albums in the ’60s. And in the ’80s, a Xhosa-Zulu couple we knew (the husband was attending grad school at Harvard). I also remember young John (age 12 or so) auditioning for a kid show on Boston television with his pitch about ending apartheid. The American Black host doubted kids would be interested. Then there was the tour-de-force play Syringa Tree, Pamela Gien’s heartbreaking one-woman show about South Africa. It’s all coming back to me.
Now John Eligon reports at the New York Times on an intriguing dance story from South Africa.
He begins, “The young boy couldn’t resist the dance moves he saw being performed around him: the rapid foot taps, the ligament-spraining knee twists, the torso shimmies, all coming together in what some might describe as a sort of urban tap dance.
“Growing up in an impoverished Black township near Johannesburg in the 1980s, the boy, Vusi Mdoyi, loved watching his father dance with friends, in a style known as pantsula, in the dirt yards of their staid four-room bungalows. It was a sprinkle of joy in the dark days of apartheid.
“At about 7 years old, Mr. Mdoyi began mimicking the dance form. By 10, he was dancing in school festivals. By 14, he had created his own dance crew with neighborhood friends.
“Now 44, Mr. Mdoyi is a celebrated dancer and choreographer who has helped to achieve what felt unimaginable during apartheid: turning the street art of pantsula into a high art that attracts global praise, and audiences. …
“In 1998, while still a teenager, Mr. Mdoyi took part in workshops and shows put on by a dance company, Step Afrika!, which was co-founded in South Africa by C. Brian Williams, a Howard University graduate who had worked in the region. The company fused African American step dancing with traditional African dance.
“The interest that the American dancers showed in pantsula and other African dances helped to inject a sense of pride that their dances were meaningful, Mr. Mdoyi said. Under the white-led apartheid government, which had lost power only four years earlier, Africans were often made to feel ashamed of their own culture, he said. …
“In part with connections made through Step Afrika!, Mr. Mdoyi made his first overseas trip, to teach a pantsula workshop in Britain in 2001. The next year, he toured internationally with Via Katlehong, a pantsula dance company named after his native township. …
“Mr. Mdoyi’s latest work is in some ways a full circle moment to what originally vaulted his career from South African festivals to stages across the world: He choreographed and danced in a piece performed in Soweto this month, during the 30th anniversary celebration of Step Afrika!
“His new piece, titled, ‘The Tattered Soul of a Worker,’ tells the story of South African migrant workers who were forced to travel from their homes to find jobs, and it offers a critique of a capitalist system that has left the working class struggling.
“The dancers, clad in midcentury formal suits, dance at times with beer crates — it’s common in South Africa to see young people dancing pantsula with beer crates at traffic lights, seeking tips. …
“Black South Africans began to take up tap dancing in the 1960s after seeing it in American films, [Gregory Maqoma, an acclaimed South African dancer and choreographer who has mentored Mr. Mdoyi] said. That eventually evolved into pantsula, which started in townships where Black South Africans were forced to live.
“The apartheid regime largely restricted Black South Africans from freely traveling into cities. That left them with virtually no access to the theaters and studios where dance thrived as an art form. So for many Black South Africans, there was little expectation that dance could be anything more than a social activity. …
“As apartheid restrictions began to loosen in the late 1980s and early 1990s, opportunities increased for Black South Africans to access formal dance training and turn their talents into art.
“For Mr. Mdoyi, his focus on dancing as he grew up kept him away from the violence that consumed many Black communities while the government tried to maintain its fragile grip on power in the dying days of apartheid. Mr. Mdoyi said he connected with a popular street entertainer who danced pantsula and introduced him to the dance scene in nightclubs around Johannesburg. …
“The nightclubs were something of a dance academy for Mr. Mdoyi. He met street dancers from many different neighborhoods, each bringing their own styles, techniques and approaches. …
“Mr. Mdoyi’s dance productions can come across as stage plays, with elaborate costuming, soundtracks and even dialogues that tell a story beyond the dance moves themselves. He plays with genres and moods.
“In a performance called ‘Footnotes,’ Mr. Mdoyi and other dancers lay a soundtrack with typewriters, typing eviction notices. The piece grows angry and frantic as disgusted shouts from tenants boom over loudspeakers. …
“In 1998, Mr. Mdoyi won an award at a national dance festival for the first time, and the festival director connected him with Jackie Semela, who had established the Soweto Dance Theater, a company based in the nation’s largest township. Mr. Semela helped to start Step Afrika!, which in 1994 held its first festival, in Soweto, only months after South Africans elected Nelson Mandela president in the country’s first democratic election.
“Under Mr. Semela’s tutelage, Mr. Mdoyi not only honed his craft as a dancer and found a springboard to perform and choreograph pieces internationally, but he also learned the business side of the profession. He now has two companies dedicated to creating pantsula shows and teaching the dance.”
Read more and see cool videos of the dances at the Times, here.
Photo:Visit Dalarna. One of the languages spoken in Älvdalen, Sweden, has the charmingly elvish-sounding name of Elfdalian.Älvdalen is part of Dalarna, the area best known for colorful wooden horses.
I’m always interested in learning about endangered languages, and the radio show The World introduced me to one tucked away in the Swedish town Älvdalen.
Älvdalen appears to be a part of Sweden that, for context, is closer to that Norwegian Olympic site Lillehammer than to better known Swedish towns.
Bianca Hillier reported at The World that “an organization called Ulum Dalska, based in a small Swedish town called Älvdalen, is on a mission. For decades, members have been working hard to help save a language called Elfdalian, a remnant of Old Norse.
“ ‘We had our first meeting on the 1st of June in 1984,’ said press secretary Björn Rehnström. ‘And the biggest hall in Älvdalen was filled with people.’
“Elfdalian sounds nothing like the country’s national language, Swedish, which Rehnström said destabilized the language about 100 years ago. At that point, Elfdalian became stigmatized.
“Ulla Schütt, also a Ulum Dalska member, saw the impact firsthand while growing up in Älvdalen.
“ ‘My parents spoke Elfdalian with each other, and with my grandma and my aunts and uncles and everyone around,’ Schütt said. ‘But when they turned to me, they spoke Swedish.’
“Schütt said her parents spoke Swedish with her because that’s what was spoken in schools. Students were even discouraged to speak Elfdalian in the classroom. Now, there’s only about 2,500 speakers left. But people are getting creative in the fight to change that trend.
“ ‘[People are from] America, Australia, South America, Indonesia, Haiti, Cape Verde,’ he said. …
“The local government supports the teaching and preservation of Elfdalian. … The language is also recognized on an international level. In 2016, it was assigned an ISO language code, which helps the internet distinguish one language from another.
“But the national government of Sweden is a different story. They currently consider Elfdalian a dialect of Swedish, not its own language.
“Speaking in Elfdalian, Swedish MP Peter Helander recently asked Parliament why that’s the case. But before Culture Minister Amanda Lind could answer the question, the parliamentary speaker interrupted them both to say that only Swedish may be spoken in the chamber. Helander said the ‘only Swedish’ remark proves his point, that Elfdalian should be considered its own language. …
“Schütt said every time a language dies — which some research suggests is as often as once every two weeks — it is a sad moment. To her, losing Elfdalian would be an especially tragic loss. …
“Getting Elfdalian recognized as a language by the Swedish government, she added, is key to making sure that death doesn’t come.”
Read more about Elfdalian at The World, here, and at the blog Transly, here.
Dala horses come from the region where Elfdalian is one of the languages spoken.
For our family, this day is partly about opening gifts and eating. If the roads don’t ice up for our get togethers, it just feels happy and sleepy and good.
Sending greetings to all who celebrate Christmas, to all who are celebrating the beginning of Chanukah tonight, and to all who celebrate other traditions.
In fact, I’d love to hear of any childhood memory you may have of a tradition in your family. Not necessarily for this time of year. Families sometimes develop traditions that no one else shares. I’m thinking of little things like singing a certain song every year when you catch the first glimpse of your favorite beach. Or special gestures after two people say the same thing simultaneously.
I’d also be interested in cultural traditions from a place you spent time as a child.
Thank you for your presence on WordPress. It’s fun to have friends in other places.
This is my favorite version of the Christmas story. There may be more-accurate translations of the original, but none that sounds as lovely to me or has as many associations with my younger years, when we memorized Bible verses in school.
“And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed.
“(And this taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria.)
“And all went to be taxed, every one into his own city.
“And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judaea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem; (because he was of the house and lineage of David:)
“To be taxed with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child.
“And so it was, that, while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered.
“And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn.”
Photo: WJAR/file photo. Traffic on Interstate 195 west builds up on the approach to the Washington Bridge in East Providence, where one lane had to be closed a year ago. Now you can have a Washington Bridge Christmas ornament.
I do get tired of “Jingle Bells” and “Deck the Halls” on the radio starting before Thanksgiving, but there are other seasonal songs I look forward to hearing again, some that are lovely (“Mary’s Boy Child”) and some that are playful (“Santa Baby”).
If you want to hear holiday music that’s a bit different, check out WICN, the Worcester jazz station, here. It’s a breath of fresh air. I love seeing the creativity that holidays bring out in jazz musicians.
The holidays bring out the creativity of ornament makers, too, delighting people who want a small, kooky gift to give or something different for their own tree.
Ed Fitzpatrick at the Boston Globe has written about a new Christmas tree decoration that makes hay out of an unwelcome event in Rhode Island: the sudden closure last year of the westbound lane of a critically important bridge. Rhode Islanders are still dealing with the chaos that ensued.
“Forget Christmas ornaments of snowmen, Santa, or even the Big Blue Bug,” says Fitzpatrick. “This year, Rhode Islanders are decorating their Christmas trees with a miniature replica of the Washington Bridge ― complete with orange traffic cones shifting drivers away from the westbound lanes, which have been closed for more than a year. …
“Facing the choice of laughing or crying, many of the Rhode Island motorists who’ve spent time idling in bridge traffic jams have added a sardonic touch to their fir trees.
“Duke Marcoccio, the design artist behind mylittetown.com, said the Washington Bridge is by far the best seller from among the dozens of ornaments he sells. …
“Marcoccio, a Narragansett resident, said he has been making Christmas ornaments for 25 years now. The first was a replica of The Towers in Narragansett. Since then, he has created about 300 ornaments, including a Del’s lemonade cup, the Haven Brothers mobile diner, the Benny’s sign, and the Big Blue Bug. …
“The biggest hit has been the Washington Bridge ornament, Marcoccio said. He said he considered placing tiny orange traffic cones on the bridge deck, but they probably would have broken. So he just painted the cones and shifting lanes on the span. ‘They get the idea,’ he said.”
Read more of the entertaining story at the Globe, here. And please share holiday songs you like, especially ones that don’t get much play. Beautiful or quirky.
Louis Armstrong and his song “‘Zat You, Santa Claus?”
Photo: Estaban Bustillos/GBH News. A rider mounts a bull at New England Rodeo in Norton, Massachusetts, in September.
I have seen rodeos in Madison Square Garden and in Buffalo, Minnesota, and in the Southwest. But I never expected to hear there were rodeos in Massachusetts. I should have given a little more thought to the welcome variety of national cultures that have taken root here.
Esteban Bustillos reports at GBH News, “Drivers who pull onto the small road leading them to the New England Rodeo in Norton might well feel like they’ve arrived on a different planet.
“Located about an hour from Boston, the parking lot is a sea of cowboy hats, boots and pickup trucks. And as Kelly Pina, who helps with the behind-the-scenes paperwork for the rodeo, jokes, it’s New England’s best-kept secret. …
“The event is the only weekly event in the commonwealth to feature bull riding and barrel racing, making it a lifeline for rodeo culture that’s far from home. That’s especially important for Brazilians, who make up the vast majority of the bull riders at the rodeo. It makes for a swirl of English and Portuguese, Americans and Brazilians all coming together for a sport and lifestyle they love.
“Jullia Oliveira manages the rodeo’s bull riding — and she also speaks fluent Portuguese, a crucial skill given the high number of Brazilian bull riders in the sport. …
“Since Massachusetts has one of the largest Brazilian communities in the country, Norton’s rodeo is a natural hub. The owner, Elias DaSilva, hails from Brazil, too.
“ ‘It’s nice to have a place where they can come and feel comfortable and feel welcomed,’ Oliveira said. ‘Especially since they’re coming from another country, usually without being able to speak English.’ …
“As welcoming as the rodeo may be, the back of a bull is no place for the timid. As soon as the gate to the pen opens, it’s man versus nature. And for a few electrifying seconds, the riders are locked in a mesmerizing dance that shakes the earth beneath them as supporters scream and holler.
“But gravity and thrashing bulls have a way of getting the cowboys to hit the ground. As terrifying as it looks, they all dust themselves off and hop back up. Some even do so with a smile.
“Wesley Goncalves, Oliveira’s uncle, has been riding bulls most of his life. He says bull riding and soccer are the big sports in his home country of Brazil, so having the rodeo in Norton has been very important to him. … Walter Oliveira, Jullia’s father, is a bull rider as well. And having a local rodeo has been a game changer.
“ ‘We used to travel like six hours, seven hours, eight or more, sometimes sixteen hours, to go for a ride,’ he said. ‘And to have the New England Rodeo here, for us is great. For me, it’s one hour from my house.’
“Today’s established New England Rodeo is a long way from its humble beginnings. Tim Lee, one of the rodeo’s announcers, used to be a bullfighter — the type that helps wrangle a bull after it’s thrown a rider, not the matador-with-a-cape kind.
“ ‘Sometimes rodeo can be like a dying breed, but we’re never gonna let it die,’ Lee said. “There’s just nothing like rodeo, man. You bring so many people together like that, how could you have a bad time?’
“For Pina, the rodeo is a personal affair. Along with helping to run it, she’s a professional barrel racer, zooming through the dirt of the arena and weaving through barrels on horseback. And her husband, Ed Pina, is the other half of the rodeo’s announcing duo. …
“ ‘You come here a few times, you’re family. You work with us, you’re blood, no matter what,’ he said. ‘It’s about building our family bigger and teaching the next generation how to do our sport and to make sure our sport keeps going.’ ”
Shout-out to Craig, the bull rider who ran manufacturing for my husband’s former company. Despite bones repeatedly broken, he truly loved the sport. And he provided enthusiastic support to the many little kids who got their start by riding rams!
Photo: Ning Zeng. An ancient log excavated and likely buried naturally, cleaned and dried, with the lower end sawed off for lab analysis.
And while we’re on the subject of reducing carbon in the atmosphere, consider an ancient process that works without our help. You may find it a little weird, however, especially as intentionally pursuing this natural approach merely postpones carbon escape for a few thousand years!
Dino Grandoni writes at the Washington Post, “On the outside, its rust-red bark had peeled. Its sweet, distinct cedar smell had disappeared. But at its core, it’s still as hard as a tabletop — and may just contain a way of slowing down rapidly rising temperatures.
“A 3,775-year-old log unintentionally discovered under a farm in Canada may point to a deceptively simple method of locking climate-warming carbon out of the atmosphere for thousands of years, according to a study published [in September].
“ ‘This accidental discovery really gave a critical data point,’ said Ning Zeng, a University of Maryland climate scientist whose team unearthed the ancient chunk of wood. ‘It’s a single data point,’ he added, but it ‘provides the data point we need to really say under what conditions we can preserve wood for a thousand years or longer.’
“Figuring out ways of sequestering carbon may be crucial to meeting the world’s goal of halting warming beyond 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. … Doing something as simple as burying wood underground in the right spot, these researchers say, may be a cheap and scalable way of doing just that.
“Forests are Earth’s lungs, sucking up six times the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) that people pump into the atmosphere every year by burning coal and other fossil fuels. But much of that carbon quickly makes its way back into the air once insects, fungi and bacteria chew through leaves and other plant material. …
“What if that decay could be delayed? Under the right conditions, tons of wood could be buried underground in wood vaults, locking in a portion of human-generated CO2 for potentially thousands of years. While other carbon-capture technologies rely on expensive and energy-intensive machines to extract CO2, the tools for putting wood underground are simple: a tractor and a backhoe.
“Finding the right conditions to impede decomposition over millennia is the tough part. To test the idea, Zeng worked with colleagues in Quebec to entomb wood under clay soil on a crop field about 30 miles east of Montreal.
“ ‘We were trying to do a small pilot project at first,’ said Ghislain Poisson, an agronomist with Quebec’s Agricultural Ministry who worked with Zeng. … But when the scientists went digging in 2013, they uncovered something unexpected: A piece of wood already buried about 6½ feet underground. The craggy, waterlogged piece of eastern red cedar appeared remarkably well preserved. …
“Radiocarbon dating revealed the log to be 3,775 years old, give or take a few decades. Comparing the old chunk of wood to a freshly cut piece of cedar showed the ancient log lost less than 5 percent of its carbon over the millennia.
“The log was surrounded by stagnant, oxygen-deprived groundwater and covered by an impermeable layer of clay, preventing fungi and insects from consuming the wood. Lignin, a tough material that gives trees their strength, protected the wood’s carbohydrates from subterranean bacteria. The team wrote up their results in a paper in the journal Science. …
“Said Daniel L. Sanchez, an assistant professor at the University of California at Berkeley who was not involved in the study, ‘Scientists and entrepreneurs have long contemplated burying wood as a climate solution.’
“The next step is to find prehistoric logs in other locations, to see how well other types of soil preserve wood. … The researchers estimate buried wood can sequester up 10 billion tons of CO2 per year, which is more than a quarter of annual global emissions from energy, according to the International Energy Agency.
“One of the biggest challenges isn’t so much the supply of wood but rather the cost of transporting it to the right spots, Poisson said. ‘There’s probably a lot of unmerchantable wood right now that doesn’t have any market or doesn’t have any purpose.’ “
Hmmm. What do you think? Transporting wood to a burial site wouldn’t just be costly, it would cause more emissions. Not sure the scientists have thought this through. More at the Post, here.
Livestock produces a lot of methane, which is unlikely ever to be balanced out by carbon captured in the soil. The Soil Association Exchange wants you to know about a few positive effects, however.
It’s an ongoing process to keep up on the latest, especially when it comes to protecting the planet. I myself once thought that massive tree planting had the biggest bang for the charitable buck. Then I learned that, although trees are important, they can’t help much without due consideration given to where and how they are planted, and what varieties of trees they are.
Today I’m trying to bone up on the situation with cows, which we all know (including a young grandson who has cut beef out of his diet) produce too much climate-warming methane gas.
James Tapper reports at the Guardian, “New data shows [cows] may play an important role in renewing farm soil. Research by the Soil Association Exchange shows that farms with a mixture of arable crops and livestock have about a third more carbon stored within their soil than those with only arable crops, thanks to the animals’ manure.
“This also has an effect on biodiversity: mixed arable and livestock farms support about 28 grassland plant species in every field, compared with 25 for arable-only and 22 for dairy-only.
“Joseph Gridley, chief executive of SAE, which was set up by the Soil Association in 2021 to support and measure sustainable farming, said it was unlikely that carbon captured in soil would balance out the enormous amounts of methane created by cattle. Farm livestock around the world creates about 14% of human-induced climate emissions.
“ ‘It’s pretty unequivocal in the data that having livestock on your farm does mean you have more emissions – five or six times more emissions,’ he said. ‘But if you integrate livestock into the system, on every metric on soil health, there’s an improvement, and on a lot of the biodiversity measures as well.’
“Soils are degrading, but by how much exactly is unclear. In 2015, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization claimed that the world had only 60 harvests left, but researchers at Oxford University and Our World In Data said in 2021 that there was a complex picture. …
“Lee Reeves, UK head of agriculture at Lloyds bank, which helps fund SAE … suggested ministers should create a decarbonization strategy, and a standardized carbon calculator, so that farmers and other businesses could use a single tool to calculate their carbon impacts.
“ ‘Moving from traditional to regenerative farming can see a dip in profitability for the first five years, so the government needs to support farmers and banks in that,’ he said.
“[In the UK] the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has been investigating so-called methane blockers as a way to reduce emissions. Adding substances such as essential oils, probiotics and even seaweed to cattle feed can reduce the amount of burps and wind they generate.
“Last month the Green Alliance charity said that feeding Bovaer, a methane blocker, to a third of the UK’s dairy cows would cut the country’s emissions by about 1%. Yet this is not happening, the campaign group warned, because farmers were unwilling to pay extra for something they did not benefit from. It said methane blockers should be subsidized, as other green farming schemes were.”
More at the Guardian, here. The Natural Resources Defense Council explains more about regenerative farming here.
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