Late update 1/26/14
The Peabody Essex Museum gives only a limited number of tickets out daily to this show. It was sold out when I arrived at noon today. I think it will be great, but be sure you can get in before you go.
At the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot is working with a veterinarian and a curator, among others, to ensure that his untrained zebra finches enjoy themselves while performing on musical instruments for the public.
Geoff Edgers writes for the Boston Globe, “The French artist-musician is quiet … but his bandmates won’t shut up. They’re birds — 70 chirping, swooping zebra finches. And Céleste Boursier-Mougenot needs them.
“You see, the artist doesn’t use his fingers to play the Gibson Les Pauls mounted around a white-walled gallery at the Peabody Essex Museum. He depends on his winged collaborators to create the wash of power chords that have turned his installations into a sensation from London to New York City.
“ ‘I kind of feel a sense of amazement every time I see it,’ said Trevor Smith, a contemporary-art curator at the Peabody Essex, where Boursier-Mougenot’s sonic exhibition opens Saturday. ‘You’re hearing these extraordinary sounds, and they’re made by these birds. It’s both primal and very unexpected.’
“So do birds landing on guitars count as art? Yes indeed, according to critics around the world. Boursier-Mougenot has garnered rave reviews, particularly in London, where he staged a version of the piece at The Barbican Centre in 2010. ‘Hate Modern Art?’ a headline in the Telegraph read. ‘Guitar-playing exotic birds will change your mind.’ ”
@OFH_John tweeted this cool article about making batteries from something like rhubarb.
CBS News has the story: “A cheap rechargeable battery that harnesses energy by using the electrochemistry of organic molecules rather than metals is being touted by Harvard researchers as a breakthrough for renewable energy.
“The Harvard team reports that the battery, which they say can be applied on a power-grid scale, uses naturally abundant and small organic compounds called quinones rather than electrocatalysts from costly precious metals such as platinum.
“Quinones would be inexpensive to obtain and can be found in green plants or synthesized from crude oil. The battery designed by Harvard scientists and engineers used a quinone molecule that’s almost identical to one that’s found in rhubarb.
“The technology is outlined in the Jan. 9 edition of the journal Nature.”
Photo: Eliza Grinnell, Harvard School of Engineering & Applied Sciences
Michael J. Aziz with metal-free flow battery made from naturally abundant, small organic molecules.
My scientist brother makes ice lanterns, a useful skill for lighting friends to your door in a cold Wisconsin winter.
Here’s how. “Large 9” water balloons are frozen out on my deck, then emptied of liquid water, candled, & lit.
“The only tricky part is knowing when they are ‘done.’ Ice should be not too thin, and not too thick. Also, you need to blow air into the balloon after you fill it with H2O, so there will be a nice flat surface on top. That’s where you punch a hole in the ice to empty the liquid H2O & place the candle.”
You gotta grab all the gusto and try to enjoy the cold weather we have been having. I remember that when we lived in Minneapolis, it was a hoot to pour water off the balcony and watch it freeze in flight.
You might also want to check out how Asakiyume makes her frozen soap bubbles, here.
Carolyn Johnson’s science column in the Boston Globe yesterday had a funny bit about the blog, LOLmythesis, “a tongue-in-cheek celebration of the futility and incrementalism that can seem to be at the root of a project that has basically co-opted a person’s life.” She means science projects.
“Harvard senior Angie Frankel told the origin story of LOLmythesis on National Public Radio,” writes Johnson, “explaining that ‘I have killed so many fish’ sometimes just feels much more accurate than the true title of her thesis, “Characterizing the Role of [A Specific Gene] in Second Heart Field Progenitor Cells — A Close Look at Zebrafish Embryonic Cardiogenesis.”
There are other funny thesis titles at LOLmythesis from universities around the world. Here are a few.
“Rocks that are next to each other in Massachusetts now were also next to each other 400 million years ago.” — Geology, Amherst College
“A newly discovered worm protein does the same thing as a more well-known worm protein.” — Biology, MIT
“People reach faster and straighter to [take] pictures of cake than pictures of vegetables.” — Cognitive Neuroscience, Brown University
“Turns out my 3 years of research made zero ripples in reproductive biology. But spending 3 years researching bull sperm serves as a great first date and bar topic.” — Reproductive Biology & Nutritional Sciences, Cornell University
Read more here. And how about sending me your own? I remember making up silly titles for possible papers when I was in college, but the funnier part of my fake title “Soap Imagery in ‘Troilus and Cressida’ ” was that someone actually thought it could make a good paper.
Photo: DoctorMacro.com
Pick a thesis title for this research. How about “People from similar backgrounds tend to be wary on first acquaintance.”
I liked an op-ed Stan Stojkovic wrote for the NY Times about a positive sort of prison program founded by a warden.
“It’s the singular guest at a prison who receives a standing ovation from inmates,” writes Stojkovic. “I’ve heard of only two: Johnny Cash and Percy Pitzer, a retired warden who in 2012 started a nonprofit corporation to award college scholarships to children of inmates.
“I sit on the board of Mr. Pitzer’s group, called the Creative Corrections Education Foundation. I recently went with him to visit some of the inmates at the Milwaukee County House of Correction. …
“He started in H6, a 60-bed women’s dorm. ‘Good morning, ladies. I’m Percy Pitzer, from Beaumont, Texas,’ he began. He told them that he had made a living for his family by working for the Bureau of Prisons, and that he and his wife wanted to give back. So he’d kick-started a scholarship fund with $150,000 of his own money. But he wanted it to become an inmate-funded venture, and said it would not work without their help.
“ ‘Will you help me with the price of a candy bar a month?’ he asked.
“His audience probably had a sense of the odds working against their children. Close to seven million children in the United States have a parent involved in some form of correctional intervention — jail, prison, probation or parole. …
“ ‘I will,’ one inmate said.
“ ‘I will,’ said another.
“ ‘I will.’ …
“In all, 13 women in H6 donated $41; one signed up to donate $5 per month. …
“At some correctional facilities, inmates earn $10 a day. Either way, this is money that would otherwise go to small luxuries, like snacks and deodorant. And yet about 300 inmates in Texas, New Mexico, Ohio and Wisconsin have donated. Thanks to that money, in addition to private contributions, by the end of this year Creative Corrections will have awarded 40 $1,000 college scholarships.”
The website Narratively just alerted me to something cool from StoryCorps, a feature I generally hear on National Public Radio (NPR).
According to the StoryCorps website, “The first-ever animated feature from StoryCorps, Listening Is an Act of Love, presents six stories from 10 years of StoryCorps, where everyday people sit down together to ask life’s important questions and share stories from their lives. Framing these intimate conversations is an interview between StoryCorps founder Dave Isay and his nine-year-old nephew, Benji.
“Listening Is an Act of Love will be broadcast by public television stations nationwide. … on varying dates through February 2014. Can’t wait until the animated special airs on your local station? Watch on PBS Roku and Apple TV channels — available on DVD, too!” More here.
(At ny1.com, here, you can read how recording people’s stories caused Isay to take a permanent detour from his medical school ambitions.)
Do you have favorite StoryCorps stories? Have you ever created one?
I have a tape of my father reading the Kipling story “The Elephant’s Child” and poems he loved like “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” which always choked him up. But if you do a StoryCorps story, you get it archived at the Library of Congress — probably more permanent than my old cassette tape.
Album cover for The Bathrooms are Coming!, a 1969 American-Standard musical (Blast Books)
I heard a great Studio360 show today. It was on the industrial musicals once used by corporations to get the sales team charged up to go out and sell.
“In the 1950, 60s, and 70s, a subgenre of musical theater entertained thousands. It had showstoppers composed by some of the brightest talent in the business. But instead of selling out Broadway houses, these shows played to packed hotel ballrooms and convention halls. …
“ ‘It was to build morale and build a sense of being on a team,’ explains Steve Young. ‘You weren’t isolated, you were a part of a greater whole that was looking out for you.’ A writer for David Letterman, Young has made himself the curator of the world’s largest collection of corporate musical theater performances. ‘Sales Training,’ a groovy number from 1972, includes specs for York air conditioner’s new line. ‘Once in a Lifetime’ breathlessly heralds the arrival of the 1958 Ford Edsel.
“Writing these musicals was no simple task and corporations spent lavishly to attract top talent. In 1966, John Kander and Fred Ebb wrote Go Fly a Kite for General Electric (in which Benjamin Franklin meets modern utility executives) — they went on to win a Tony for Cabaret. …
If you like musicals, you really must listen to the whole Studio360 show. It’s too funny.
You don’t want to miss “PDM (Power Distribution Management) Can Do”
from Go Fly a Kite — General Electric, 1966, by John Kander, Fred Ebb, and Walter Marks, or “An Exxon Dealer’s Wife.” Be sure to catch the song composed to sell Edsels and the haunting American-Standard number “My Bathroom” from 1969. (“My bathroom, my bathroom is a private kind of place.”)
Studio360’s show,”Curtain Call: Industrial Strength Musicals,” may be found here.
When I was poking around the web for art to illustrate my post Iceland Has Elves, I found a lovely picture by John Bauer.
I didn’t know anything about him. But Stuga40 wrote in the comments that he was Swedish. She knew where he had lived before his untimely death in 1918 and said she grew up on his fairy stories.
I decided I wanted to know more.
Wikipedia says John Bauer is “best known for his illustrations of Bland tomtar och troll (Among Gnomes and Trolls). Princess Tuvstarr and the Fishpond [is] perhaps Bauer’s most notable work. …
“Bauer’s early work was influenced to a large extent by Albert Engström and Carl Larsson, two contemporaries and influential painters. Bauer’s first major work was commissioned in 1904, when he was asked to illustrate a book on Lappland. It was not until 1907 that he would become known for his illustrations of Bland tomtar och troll, the yearly fairy tale book.”
A contemporary story collection called Swedish Folk Tales uses Bauer’s illustrations and is available here. Also, someone posted a bunch of his illustrations on Pinterest, including a sweet Santa Lucia.
John Bauer art showing a boy and a troll: Wikimedia Commons
Here’s another good one from WBUR’s “Only a Game.”
Bill Littlefield interviewed author Tim Lewis, who has written a book called Land of Second Chances: The Impossible Rise of Rwanda’s Cycling Team.
Littlefield starts out by discussing Rwanda’s history before moving on to the subject of bikes.
Bill: “Tell us about the country’s wooden bikes.”
Tim Lewis: “If you go to Rwanda today, you still see the wooden bikes. You don’t see them on the main road anymore because they’ve been banned by the president because he feels … it isn’t the message that he wants a modern, progressive country like Rwanda to convey. But on any roads off the main roads you see people using these wooden bikes. They’re hacked out of eucalyptus trees.
“People there love using them. … They’re like the mule of Rwanda. People use them to carry bananas or goats on the back or live chickens. … Part of the reason they’ve been banned from the main roads is that they’re so horribly dangerous. They have two speeds. One of them is not moving at all or kind of very slowly going up these hills. And the other of which is going downhill, and they’re so out of control that anyone in their path gets knocked over.”
Bill: “In the chapter titled ‘The Dot Connector,’ you mention Project Rwanda, the brainchild of Tom Ritchey. What was Mr. Ritchey’s goal?”
Tim: “Tom Ritchey is a real pioneer of bicycle design, in particular, mountain bikes. In 2005 Tom Ritchey visited Rwanda. And one of the things that really affected Tom was how much people in Rwanda loved riding bicycles. And so Tom thought, ‘Can I design a bike that would be affordable for Rwandans to buy?’ and that could really change people’s lives there — in terms of coffee farmers being able to pick coffee in the morning and get them to a washing station to get it processed, which can make a big difference … At the same time an idea popped into his head which is, ‘You know, these guys look like amazing athletes. What about starting a bicycle team?’ ”
Eventually, Rwanda did get a team. It’s a great story. Read more and listen to the broadcast here.
I can’t remember at the moment how I came across this tidbit, but I knew as soon as I saw it that I wouldn’t be able to resist something cool about Stockholm.
I took the Stockholm subway a few times in the 1990s, but I don’t remember anything like this. Relatives living in Stockholm will have to let me know if the subway today is really the magical mystery tour that Dangerous Minds suggests.
Go to the Dangerous Minds website for a wonderful array of pictures. It sure doesn’t look like the Red Line. If the Red Line looked like this, I would expect to encounter Ming the Merciless around every corner.
Some school districts are pushing the envelope on recycling.
Michael Wines wrote for the NY Times in December, “Nothing seemed special about the plates from which students at a handful of Miami schools devoured their meals for a few weeks last spring — round, rigid and colorless, with four compartments for food and a fifth in the center for a carton of milk.
“Looks, however, can be deceiving: They were the vanguard of what could become an environmental revolution in schools across the United States.
“With any uneaten food, the plates, made from sugar cane, can be thrown away and turned into a product prized by gardeners and farmers everywhere: compost. If all goes as planned, compostable plates will replace plastic foam lunch trays by September not just for the 345,000 students in the Miami-Dade County school system, but also for more than 2.6 million others nationwide.
“That would be some 271 million plates a year, replacing enough foam trays to create a stack of plastic several hundred miles tall. …
“Compostable plates are but the first initiative on the environmental checklist of the Urban School Food Alliance, a pioneering attempt by six big-city school systems to create new markets for sustainable food and lunchroom supplies.” More here.
Apart from what the initiative does for school budgets, what it does for the environment, just think how educators are setting an example for children about working to find solutions to problems. Impressive.
Photo: Joshua Bright for The New York Times Kindergartners in Manhattan being served lunch on plates made from sugar cane, which are expected to replace plastic foam trays next year in six districts.
Photo: Shareable The tiny village in Austin will include tiny houses, mobile homes, teepees, and refurbished RVs,
Housing the homeless is not something that we as a country have done very successfully yet. Some solutions work for some families, but many solutions don’t.
Some communities have tried supportive housing, which provides extra services that some homeless families need. Others build wonderful programs to get people on the road to independence. But I have also read about weird little pods just big enough for one person to sleep in. (That was in a design article. You never hear afterward how these designs work out for actual humans.)
Austin, Texas, has recognized that failing to house the chronically homeless costs the city too much. So it is inaugurating a village of tiny houses that will have a lot of community-building elements and could be just the ticket. My friend Mary Ann put this on Facebook.
Kelly McCartney writes at Shareable, “In Austin, Texas, a project to offer affordable housing to some 200 chronically homeless citizens is on the move. Community First! Village, which has been in the planning stages for nearly 10 years, is set to soon break ground on a 27-acre property sprinkled with tiny houses, mobile homes, teepees, refurbished RVs, a three-acre community garden, a chapel, a medical facility, a workshop, a bed and breakfast, and an Alamo Drafthouse outdoor movie theater.
“Supporter Alan Graham, of Mobile Loaves and Fishes, notes that the price of not housing these folks costs taxpayers about $10 million a year, not to mention the emotional and psychological tolls on the homeless themselves. …
“Graham has been working with the homeless in his community for more than 14 years and cites broken families as the leading cause of homelessness. With Mobile Loaves and Fishes, Graham has not only helped feed the homeless all these years, but he has helped transition them into homes and jobs, as well.” More.
3/2/14 Update: At the Associated Press, Carrie Antlfinger describes how the movement has spread, here.
Lots of creative people need a little push to just sit down and do it.
If I recall writer Anne Lamott’s advice in Bird by Bird correctly, she says that in addition to writing a little every day and embracing terrible first drafts, the most important thing is a group of other creative types with whom you meet on a regular basis to say what you have done since last time.
So it doesn’t surprise me that there are popular musicians who are grateful to be allowed into a songwriting challenge called “The Song Game.”
Acacia Squires wrote about it for National Public Radio: “Bob Schneider finished writing ‘The Effect,’ a song from his latest album, Burden of Proof, in just a few days. That’s how he does it: For 12 years, the Texas musician has beaten back the urge to procrastinate by writing a song once a week, every week. It began casually, just him and a friend sharing their songs with one another. …
“Now it’s grown into an Internet-based, deadline-driven songwriting motivation strategy which Schneider calls ‘The Song Game.’ It’s a game without winners or losers — just productivity. He’s filled five studio albums with songs from the game since 2001, and says he still needs it all these years later.
” ‘There’s the critical voice inside your head and it stops people from writing,’ he says. ‘I try to eliminate that voice by saying, “Look, I’m gonna write a song. I’m gonna try to make it interesting.” ‘ …
“One of the ground rules of the game: fail to submit a song every week, and Schneider will cut you from the invite-only email list. And here’s another rule: the phrase. To keep songwriters from working ahead, he sends a short phrase to the group that has to be in the next week’s song.”
Read more here and see what well-known songs started out with the word of the week from Schneider.
Photo: Chris Miller Singer and songwriter Bob Schneider, founder of “The Song Game”
Bill Littlefield describes a tournament between young lacrosse players in Harlem and middle schoolers from the Boston suburbs: “There are many stories that have built up over the years of kids being asked questions in Harlem as they carry the lacrosse stick on the subway, including, ‘What is that thing? A fishing pole? ’”
“Charles Gildehaus, a board member of an organization called Harlem Lacrosse and Leadership, is one of the people responsible for children in Harlem mystifying their friends on the subway.
“Gildehaus, who is also president of the youth lacrosse organization in Concord, Mass., where he and his family live, spoke with me on a recent Sunday afternoon on the lacrosse field at Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School. There 6th, 7th, and 8th grade boys from Concord and some of Boston’s other western suburbs had formed teams with players from Harlem’s Frederick Douglass Academy.
“ ‘Concord’ may have mythical implications [to the Harlem kids] now, but according to Gildehaus’s wife, Pamela, a driving force in the event they call ‘The One Nation Tournament,’ at first the trip just seemed scary.
“’We picked the kids up,’ she remembered. ‘They arrived in Concord in the pitch black, and they got off the bus, and everyone was quiet and shy, and very fearful. And we put them in our car, and this one boy looked out the window at all the trees and said, “Oh, my gosh, are there wolves in these forests?” And then I pulled the car into the garage, and another one said, “You put the car right in the house?” ‘ ”
“During her first experience hosting the boys from New York, Pamela Gildehaus and her husband took in 12 lacrosse players. Ms. Gildehaus became concerned about the only one of the dozen who wasn’t active and loud.
“ ‘This one boy was sitting very quietly in a chair, reading a book. And I said, “Are you okay?” And he said, “I’m just in the middle of a really great book.” And my daughter, who was 11 at the time, said, “Oh, my gosh, I’m reading the same book.” ‘ ” More here.
I love how Littlefield seeks out these offbeat sports stories. He covers pro sports, too, and invites lots of expert commentators on, but for me the delights of his show are in stories like this one, the one about the K9 Fitness Club, and oddball “games” that only he would think qualify for a sports show. Every story has the perfect musical bridge, too, but Littlefield says it’s a guy on the WBUR staff who picks the music.
Try to catch the show. It’s hosted in Boston but picked up in other markets.
Photo: Bill Littlefield/Only A Game The One Nation Tournament in Concord, Mass., brings middle school lacrosse players from New York and Boston’s suburbs together.
I moonlighted as a theater reviewer for years and loved doing it. But even if I hated a particular show, I worked hard to find some aspect to praise. People had to read between the lines for the criticism. I really felt for the actors.
The critics of yore had no such scruples, and as I laugh out loud, I can’t help being a little jealous of their freedom.
Yesterday my husband dug out some reviews of the 1945 Broadway show Polonaise. He had read an obit about the star, who just died at age 99. As there are few shows he hasn’t heard of, he was stumped and went straight to the “critical quotebook” Opening Night on Broadway.
The show’s creators had decided to use the music of Chopin, a Pole, for a story about another Pole, a man who volunteered in George Washington’s army. The two Poles had nothing else in common.
Reviewer Luis Kroneberger wrote, “The best I can say for the thing as a whole is that it appalled me enough at times to keep me from being bored.”
Burton Rascoe noted, “The playbill says that the Alvin Theatre is perfumed with Prince Matchabelli’s ‘Stradivari.’ There was not enough of it used to overcome the odor of dry-rot and mothballs that emanated from the book, the lyrics, and the production of Polonaise.”
And Willela Waldorf must have been hanging out at the Algonquin with Dorothy Parker too much. She let it rip: “It is about time somebody started a League for the Defense of Dead Composers. It is disturbing that some of Chopin’s finest works, ‘adapted’ for the occasion, should be carelessly flaunted on the Broadway stage in a futile attempt to add luster to a stupid, inept, often embarrassingly ludicrous spectacle. … The concert pianist hired to play Chopin’s Polonaise in A-flat while the ballet stormed the Royal Palace, not only performed with vigor at the pianoforte but spoke his one line of dialogue clearly and as if he knew what it meant. Maybe what Polonaise needs is a few more concert pianists in some of the other roles.”
Today there is plenty of harsh talk in the media, but I would venture to say it lacks the literary flair of the critics of 1945.
Photo of Chopin: Bisson, c. 1849, via Wikipedia
He looks troubled. Is he foreseeing the future Broadway show Polonaise?
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