Photo from FBI site: An empty frame in the Dutch Room of the Gardner Museum, where Rembrandt’s The Storm on the Sea of Galilee and A Lady and Gentleman in Black once hung.
The agent overseeing the FBI investigation into the 1990 Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist spoke at my workplace today (a real perk of my job).
I learned a lot. Did you know, for example, that because Mrs. Gardner’s will specified that no art was to be moved, sold, or replaced, the paintings had no insurance? They were not be replaced. The agent said that the usual scenario is that stolen art is held for ransom from the insurance company. The thieves probably didn’t dream that there was no insurance on Rembrandts and Vermeers.
Our speaker was quite entertaining (for example, showing a slide from the Simpsons cartoon in which Vermeer’s The Concert is found in Montgomery Burns’s mansion ). He answered many questions and punted others as the investigation is ongoing.
As you may have seen recently, the FBI announced that they knew who had stolen the art and at least two of the places it had been seen. They have not announced the names of the thieves but may do so once they work through all the leads the latest announcement has brought. The statute of limitations ran out on the theft after five years (Mass. Senator Ted Kennedy subsequently pushed through a federal law extending the limit to 20 years), but possession of stolen art is a crime not subject to time limits.
I learned that the museum had good security. As most locals know, the guards let the thieves in believing they were cops. When you have a Trojan Horse inside, security doesn’t help, the agent said. Nowadays guards in different museums call each other every 20 minutes just to check.
Extensive research has shown there has never been a museum theft like this, where the thieves stole so much of value and also so much of little value and took a leisurely 81 minutes to do so.
And perhaps there has never been a crime at a major museum where the paintings were not insured.
The agent believes the art will be recovered one day. Read the FBI dedicated site, here.
When you consider all the minority languages that are endangered today — many of which I’ve blogged about (for example, here) — it seems a bit perverse to be bringing back Latin on the radio. But as one more way to interest people in languages, how bad can it be?
For the Finns, who have to speak many languages because hardly anyone speaks theirs, it’s just one more.
As John Tagliabue wrote in yesterday’s New York Times, the Internet has given a boost to “a weekly summary of world events and news broadcast by Finnish state radio — not in Finnish, but in classical Latin. …
“In recent weeks, the subjects have included the financial crisis in Cyprus, an unusually brilliant aurora borealis and the election of Pope Francis. …
“It may be no coincidence that the broadcast began in 1989, the year Communism collapsed in Eastern Europe and the Finns turned toward Western Europe. For educated Finns, Latin had long been the country’s link to Western culture, and they were required to study the language in school. …
“While the broadcasts once went out over the airwaves, with shortwave reception for listeners outside Finland, more and more listeners tune in to the program’s Web site, through podcasts and MP3 downloads.” More.
Image: Wikipedia
Cicero Denounces Catiline, fresco by Cesare Maccari, 1882–1888. It’s what Suzanne’s Mom thinks of when she thinks “Latin.”
On Saturday we watched the documentary Urbanized, about urban planning.
Although there were many discouraging notes (Mumbai slums, Beijing smog, destructive construction in Stuttgart), there were enough positive ones to give hope.
I liked the grassroots gardening efforts in Detroit, pedestrian/bike paths in Bogota (while cars were relegated to mud), miraculous transformations of aging infrastructure (the High Line in Manhattan), lighted paths in Cape Town, and bicycle commuting in Copenhagen.
The point was made that walkability (one of my favorite topics, as readers know) and similar quality-of-life improvements in cities can be hugely beneficial to the planet just because cities are so big and changes there affect so many people.
Doug Foy, who helped get Boston Harbor cleaned up and now consults with New York City’s Mayor Bloomberg, has spoken at my workplace a few times. He likes to talk about how New York avoided buying a whole new water supply simply by partnering with plumbers unions to get standard toilets gradually replaced with low-flush toilets.
I went online to find information about a Vermont bird book mentioned briefly in the Boston Globe this week. I found more at Seattle pi, of all places (the pi comes from Post-Intelligencer, the newspaper’s name before becoming completely virtual).
Seattle pi writes, “Some bird species that depended on open farmland have seen their populations drop over the last three decades while the land has grown up into forests, but during that time some other bird species have become more common than they were, according to the new book, the ‘Second Atlas of Breeding Birds of Vermont.’ …
“The book was produced by the Norwich based Center for Eco-studies and the Department of Fish and Wildlife and is described as the most complete assessment of birds ever assembled for Vermont.
“The book took 10 years to produce with input from 350 volunteers who spent 30,000 hours working on the project. … [It] includes 208 photographs, 415 maps, 591 tables and 215 graphs.
“We cannot know the nature of Vermont, the health of the woodlands, wetlands and other wild places, without knowing the status of our birds,” said Rosalind Renfrew, a biologist with the Center who edited the book.” More.
I like the image of 350 volunteers. Birds rely on volunteer bird lovers in so many ways. John has helped with the Christmas bird count in the Boston area. And his son already identifies a few birds, with additional support from John’s bird-loving wife. Imagine how many birds my grandson will recognize by the time he is three!
I enjoy blogging about my cousin the tree artist (here, for example). I’m a longtime fan.
Today I learned that one of Sally Frank’s miniprints has been accepted into the International Mini Print Exhibition at the Center for Contemporary Printmaking in Norwalk, Connecticut.
According to its website, “the Center for Contemporary Printmaking is the only nonprofit organization between New York City and Boston solely dedicated to the art of the print, including printmaking, papermaking, book arts, digital processes, and related disciplines.”
Sally Frank does many different kinds of prints and drawings. You can see how varied are the media she works in at her site, here.
“If you want to go into business during tough economic times, you might want to do it with family,” writes Lisa Rathke, Associated Press, at the Boston Globe.
“According to the Family Business Institute,” she says, “90 percent of US businesses are family owned. Some giants got their start as family businesses, including retailer Walmart and automaker Ford.
“Maple Landmark, a wooden-toy company in Vermont started by Michael Rainville, now employs his sister, his wife, his mother, and his grandmother, as well as his sons.
“Rainville is willing to work long hours and do whatever it takes to keep the business going. When business softened after 2001, they bought a similar Vermont company so they could offer a broader array of toys. But between 2002 and 2007 they were lucky if they grew at all and ended up smaller by about 15 percent.
“Rainville said he didn’t have any more tricks to pull out his bag so they focused on being more efficient. …
“Brothers Charles and Arthur Anton also grew up in the family business, Anton Cleaners, based in Tewksbury, Mass. Their grandfather started the business nearly 100 years ago.
“When the economy soured, people were dry cleaning their clothes less often. But like the Rainvilles and [others] they didn’t resort to laying off employees. They cut back hours.” They were determined to make it work because it was family. More.
The infighting at some family businesses I’ve heard of make them seem like a bad idea most of the time, but I haven’t previously considered that in a recession, blood may really be thicker than water.
Photo: Toby Talbot/Associated Press Michael Rainville employs his sister, wife, mother, and grandmother at Maple Landmark, a wooden toy company based in Vermont.
As long as no one is hurt and there is not too much damage, hail is a rather wondrous phenomenon.
I was in Central Falls a few years ago to interview someone, and suddenly the whole world changed. I pulled my car over and just submitted to the racket as hail stones clattered against the roof. Nothing to do but wait.
There is something leveling about hail. People’s differences fade in the face of Nature showing who’s boss.
Dale Lezon had a hail story in the Houston Chronicle this week: “Residents in Hitchcock and Santa Fe woke up to broken roofs, shattered windows and dented cars after softball-sized hail battered the communities late Tuesday night.”
I especially liked the picture.
Photo: Brett Coomer / Houston Chronicle via AP Christine Hubbard shows off hail stones she collected Wednesday, April 3, 2013, in Hitchcock, Texas.
My mother took in renters, and the last guy who rented my brother’s old room was a serious tinkerer.
There was no space to move around among all the gadgets and spare parts, but he did manage to squeeze us in when we were around and show us a particularly cool invention.
It was a colorful display on a computer screen that responded to sound, loudness, and rhythm of music.
I was thinking about that guy as I read the story that James Sullivan wrote for the Boston Globe about Bill Sebastian, inventor of “a kind of optical synthesizer called the Outerspace Visual Communicator, or OVC.
“Designed to let the user ‘play’ with images as part of a musical composition, the original OVC was a custom-built keyboard featuring an array of sensors to be brushed with fingertips (‘like fingerpainting’). It created dynamic color changes in the lights on a structure overhead, such as a dome over a concert stage.
“Sebastian performed with the OVC in a few extended runs with Sun Ra and his big band, the Arkestra.”
Now Sebastian has built “a new visual synthesizer — this one in 3-D…
“For the past several months, two fellow engineers and computer programmers have been working … on proprietary computer programs and prototypes of the new OVC, which, in place of the keyboard and buttons, is operated by hand controllers that look a bit like robotic arms fitted with valves (like those of a trumpet) and sliders (roughly analogous to the frets on a guitar). Sebastian envisions applications for the 3-D OVC ranging from planetariums to virtual reality headsets.” More.
Whatever happened to that guy at my mother’s house? What was his name again?
Photograph of Bill Sebastian, Visual Music Systems, by Dina Rudick, Globe staff
The University of South Carolina has developed a manual for health centers that want to collaborate with farmers markets on health, even writing food prescriptions for patients who need to improve their eating habits.
The manual’s authors, Darcy Freedman and Kassandra Alia, write in the intro of their manual:
“Farmers’ markets have grown in popularity in recent years as a place for improving health, increasing economic growth for local agriculture, and building communities. …
“Though the rebirth of farmers’ markets represents an exciting movement in the United States, data reveal that the benefits of farmers’ markets are not evenly distributed. Communities with the greatest need for farmers’ markets, for instance, are least likely to have them.
“In the present manual, we describe an approach for developing a health center‐based farmers’ market. Health centers, in particular federally qualified health centers or FQHCs, were identified as a strategic place to locate farmers’ markets because they may be located in food desert contexts (i.e., low‐income communities with low‐access to healthy food retailers). Additionally, locating at a health center makes an explicit connection between farmers’ market and preventive medicine.” More.
In January I blogged here about ForSpaciousSkies.com and a guy who thinks we would all be a lot better off if we looked at the sky more.
I have to say, he has a point. When we lived on the 18th floor in Minneapolis in the ’90s, we were constantly admiring clouds from our balcony. And now, since reading about Jack Borden’s crusade, I’ve begun to pay attention to the sky again.
I find that looking at clouds for a few minutes in the middle of everything else that is going on can really feel good.
Two of these photos were taken near my house, and one is over the Seekonk River in Providence.
Planetizen’s Brent Toderian wrote a while back that he attended a book party in Vancouver where Simon Fraser University City Program Director Gordon Price asked “each member of the crowd to state an urban design decision that ‘they loved.’ …
“When it came to my turn, my answer took a big picture and perhaps surprising approach, depending on your definition of urban design. In Vancouver, a city often referred to as ‘a city by design,’ the most important urban design decision we ever made, the decision I loved most, is actually usually referred to as a transportation decision.
“In 1997, the city approved its first influential Transportation Plan.
“It was a game-changer for our city-making model in many ways, most notably in its decision to prioritize the ways we get around, rather than balance them. The active, healthy and green ways of getting around were ranked highest – first walking, our top priority, then biking, and then transit, in that order. The prioritization then went on to goods movement for the purposes of business support and economic development, and lastly, the private vehicle. …
“If you’re a driver who is worried about a ‘war on the car,’ remember this — our model of city building understands the ‘Law of Congestion’ and proves that when you build a multimodal city, it makes getting around better and easier for every mode of transportation, including the car. It makes our city work better in every way.”
Back in first-grade, we learned to read from books featuring invariably blond, blue-eyed children. Today, primers have more variety, but multicultural pleasure reading, where it exists, is not always available to poor children.
Leslie Kaufman wrote recently at the NY Times that a “nonprofit called First Book, which promotes literacy among children in low-income communities, announced the Stories for All project, a program intended to prod publishers to print more multicultural books. …
“In a 2012 study, the Cooperative Children’s Book Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison evaluated some 3,600 books, looking for multicultural content. Of the books examined, 3.3 percent were found to be about African-Americans, 2.1 percent were about Asian-Pacific Americans, 1.5 percent were about Latinos and 0.6 percent were about American Indians.” More.
First Book picked two winning publishers in its first Stories for All competition — HarperCollins and Lee & Low Books — and purchased $500,000-worth of books from them. The books “will be available beginning in May through the First Book Marketplace, a website offering deeply discounted books and educational materials exclusively to schools and programs serving kids in need.”
Among the books are: “Shooter”, Walter Dean Myers (HarperCollins); “Tofu Quilt”, Ching Yueng (Lee & Low Books); “In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson”, Bette Bao Lord (HarperCollins); “The Storyteller’s Candle: La Velita de Los Cuentos”, Lucia Gonzalez (Lee & Low Books); “El Bronx Remembered: A Novella and Stories”, Nicholasa Mohr (HarperCollins); and “Passage to Freedom: The Sugihara Story”, Ken Mochizuki (Lee & Low Books).
The editor of a small poetry journal in England was desperate for money to keep the magazine going, so she entered a poem of her own in a contest — and won.
The poem came straight from her mother’s memories of World War I. WW I poems — mostly written by young men in service who never came home — are some of the saddest ever composed.
At the Guardian, Alison Flood has the story on Agenda editor Patricia McCarthy’s win.
“McCarthy, who has published several poetry collections of her own, beat 13,040 other entries to win the anonymously-judged prize. Her winning poem, ‘Clothes that escaped the Great War,’ tells of the plodding carthorse who would take boys away to war, and then return, later, with just their clothes. ‘These were the most scary, my mother recalled: clothes / piled high on the wobbly cart, their wearers gone,’ writes McCarthy. …
“McCarthy said winning the £5,000 prize was ‘just extraordinary.’ “I’ve never even won a raffle. I don’t go in for competitions – the only other time I did was decades back, when I got runner-up,’ she said. ‘But I’m really down on my finances – I edit Agenda, and was really struggling, and thought this was probably better than a gamble on the horses.’ ”
I was in Providence for a work event this morning, setting out early to miss the traffic.
I got to walk around a bit, and I’m going to show you my photos. If you are wondering why I took the first one, it’s because it reminds me of a song in Guys and Dolls, one of my favorite shows. Do you know the “Fugue for Tinhorns,” in which harmonic gamblers bemoan the lack of a location for “the oldest established permanent floating crap game in New York”?
It goes: “So the Biltmore garage is the spot. / But the one thousand bucks we ain’t got.”
I liked this National Public Radio story on a Jewish South American composer creating a St. Mark’s Passion that uses many ethnic styles and has enthusiastic urban kids in the chorus.
Anastasia Tsioulcas writes, “Salsa rhythms, Brazilian martial arts and a Jewish prayer of mourning: It’s not exactly what you would expect from a classical composer’s setting of the Gospel according to St. Mark. But that’s exactly what Argentine Jewish composer Osvaldo Golijov, a MacArthur ‘genius,’ did when he was asked to write a choral work based on one of the gospels, in a hugely acclaimed piece that’s been presented around the globe …
” ‘I never expected a Passion to have this funk and Spanish and everything inside it. I never thought I would be able to sing them,’ says Andrew Farella, a 16-year-old bass in the chorus. He and his friend Jerry Ortiz, another 16-year-old bass, say they’re thrilled to hear all these different kinds of music within Golijov’s work — ones they know well from their own lives.
” ‘I’m actually very excited to do this piece, me being from the Latin culture,’ says Ortiz, who is Dominican and Puerto Rican. ‘Everything that’s in here is based on my culture, my background. So I can feel the music when we sing it. I was kind of surprised to hear African and also Indian stuff. But he talked about how in Latin America we come from three places. There’s our white side, our Native American side and there’s our African side. And that’s basically what La Pasión is — coming from those three to combine into one, the Holy Trinity.’ ”
Photo: Chris Lee/Carnegie Hall A coach and high school students work on Osvaldo Golijov’s Passion According to St. Mark with the composer (right) in November 2012.
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