I have blogged about the elusive street artist Banksy a number of times — for example, here. There is always some curious new story about him, or about this or that artist who may or may not have been him. He’s like Macavity, T.S. Eliot’s mystery cat, who’s “called the hidden paw.”
Now, according to the Huffington Post and the Independent in England, he has done a kindness for someone living in an oil tank that got too famous after Banksy painted it.
“In 2011, while in Los Angeles promoting his documentary ‘Exit Through the Gift Shop,’ the shadowy British street artist Banksy tagged a vaguely elephantine water tank near the Pacific Coast Highway with the sentence ‘This Looks a Bit Like an Elephant.’ Unbeknown to him, the abandoned tank had been serving as a makeshift home for Tachowa Covington. …
” ‘I looked out of the hatch, and there were two guys there,’ he told the Independent. ‘ ” They were writing on his home.
“Less than two weeks later, after buying the tank directly from the city of Los Angeles, the owners of the design firm Mint Currency had it removed by crane and trucked away, leaving Covington just 16 hours to gather his possessions and vacate his home of seven years. That’s when Banksy stepped in to help the man he’d inadvertently left homeless, giving him enough money to find an apartment and pay his bills for a full year.
” ‘He helped me so fast, I didn’t have to spend a single day more on the streets. It was like a miracle,’ Covington said. ‘There ain’t no better man than Banksy … He was an angel to me. He helped me more than anybody helped me in my life.’ ”
In 2011, while in Los Angeles promoting his documentary “Exit Through the Gift Shop,” the shadowy British street artist Banksy tagged a vaguely elephantine water tank near the Pacific Coast Highway with the sentence “This Looks a Bit Like an Elephant.” Unbeknown to him, the abandoned tank had been serving as a makeshift home for Tachowa Covington, and the attention brought by the famous artist’s stencil forced him to abandon his home of seven years.
Suzanne is in Denmark at the moment and sent me a website for something unusual she saw there: a modern Stonehenge.
“The idea of creating The DODECALITH arose in 2006 when the composer Gunner M. Pedersen saw sculptor Thomas Kadziola’s land art project Anemarken (Ancestors’ field) … on the island of Lolland.
“The composer suggested that he and the sculptor create a Stonehenge on Lolland, consisting of a circle of twelve huge menhirs with heads in the open countryside.”
The creators write, “On a hill overlooking the sea, we are creating a singing monument … that will give everyone from near and far an experience of greatness, closeness and beauty, of time’s migrations and settlements. It will express pride and humbleness, times gone by, the present, and, importantly, time coming. …
“The stone figures will stand on invisible foundations and they will sing!
Under a circle of natural sitting stones, a 12 channel sound system will be installed. This system will allow spatial electro acoustic song and music specially created for The DODECALITH to sound inside the circle at intervals every day, all year round. …
“The ancestors [came] from afar, from the land to the south where the waters rose 7,500 years ago and sent the Lolers on their long journey. … Along the coast from Ravnsholt to Ravnsby alone, over 70 burial mounds have survived, several of which are passage graves. … There are now only four mounds … It is here we are re-erecting the Ring of the Lolers, The DODECALITH, to let the new Lolers ancestors sing.” More.
The Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, has an entrepreneurial competition they call the Eastman New Venture Challenge.
This is how it got started: “The Institute for Music Leadership (IML) received a major part of a $3.5 million grant to the University of Rochester from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation to support entrepreneurship education. The IML’s focus in ‘entrepreneurship in music’ is helping students learn how to turn promising ideas into enterprises that create value.”
Award winners Marissa Balonon-Rosen and Lauren Petrilli came up with the Pianos for Peace Project.
According to the Eastman website, Pianos for Peace “follows the idea that by actively involving people in music, we can make for a more peaceful community. This summer, about 10 pianos (upright and baby grand) will be placed throughout the City of Rochester (mostly outdoors) for anyone to play. They will be placed in several different neighborhoods, including those that generally do not have much access to the arts or pianos.
“Youth, local artists, and community members will work together to paint the pianos peace themed. After a couple weeks, we will create a ‘Piano Park for Peace’ by placing the pianos outdoors at the Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence … . There will be several events to bring the community together through music and peace — free piano lessons, yoga, lectures about nonviolence, etc. The surviving pianos will then be donated to youth-focused and nonviolence-focused organizations.”
I once read about something similar in New York City, here. The British artist Luke “Jerram got the idea at his local coin-operated laundry, according to a website about the project. He saw the same people there every weekend, but none of them talked to each other. He thought a piano might help bring people together in places like that.”
The Pianos for Peace Project seems to be building on that idea. Read more about Marissa Balonon-Rosen and Lauren Petrilli, here.
Photo: Suzanne’s Mom
Until Eastman posts pictures of the Pianos for Peace, this one in a public space will have to do. Who can tell me where it is?
Given the tick situation, my husband has decided to garden only in containers on the deck and not mess with clearing land. So far we have had some nice lettuce, arugula, rosemary, and tarragon. The grandsons pick the flowers. Neighbors who live in Rhode Island year-round have a serious garden, but it is surrounded by a very high fence to thwart the deer.
I liked the gardening-with-pop-bottle idea from another WordPress blogger, “Your Other Mother Here,” here. I’m trying to picture how you keep the little planters watered just right, though.
On the radio show “Living on Earth,” Bruce Gllerman interviewed Antioch education professor David Sobel recently about helping kids grow up to care about nature.
“Research shows that adults who are strong environmental stewards were allowed to explore nature unfettered as kids. … Sobel says educators are too focused on rules and making sure that students learn correct scientific terms instead letting kids be kids. …
“SOBEL: Kids should have alone time in the woods. If it gets crazy, then there should be some adult intervention. … There needs to be a large quotient of being outdoors, in the meadows and in the woods, as well as the more didactic, pictorial experience of IMAX and National Geographic.
“GELLERMAN: So basically, take the kid kayaking.
“SOBEL: Take the kid kayaking. Take the kid berry-picking.
“GELLERMAN: Well, [with] a lot of parents — you say ‘berry-picking’ and they’ll say, ‘Oh my gosh, they’ll pick something poisonous!’ I know I take my kid mushrooming, and I tell other parents, and they look at me like ‘Oh my God, should we call the police on this guy?’
“SOBEL: Exactly. It’s fascinating how shocked and disapproving other parents are about [that] kind of behavior. … One of the things in childhood that seems to shape environmental behaviors in adulthood is parents taking their kids mushroom picking and berry picking: selecting a natural resource for consumption …
“GELLERMAN: You know, Professor, if I were asked, I could trace my environmentalism to when I was just maybe four years old. And my mother gave me a spoon, put me in the garden, and I started digging to China. Do you have a memory like that?
“SOBEL: The analogous memory that I recount is a snow day when I was about eight years old. And my friends and I decided we would play this game where they were gonna go off and I was gonna to follow them fifteen minutes later. And in the midst of tromping through waist-deep snow all by myself, my glasses were fogging up, I had one of those little epiphany moments: that I was out here, all by myself, in the snowy wilderness, and wasn’t this great! It’s a recurrent phenomenon that kids have these great moments, somewhere in early to middle childhood, that often connect them to the natural world.”
More at the website, where you also can listen to the recording of the interview.
Photo: Flickr CC/your neighborhood librarian Walking in the woods.
New research featured at WBUR radio’s “Only a Game” suggests that frequent physical activity in school boosts learning.
“Mid-morning on Tuesday at the South Lawrence 5th Grade Academy in Lawrence, Mass., a row of students prepares to learn science more efficiently…by stepping.
“At this kind of school within a school, the daily schedule for these fifth graders includes not one physical education class, but three. The students break during the day for physical activity, which, according to Kevin Qazilbash, the school’s principal, is not to say academics are being de-emphasized.” More.
“The curriculum at the South Lawrence 5th Grade Academy is based in part on the notion that exercise improves brain function and stimulates learning. According to Dr. Majid Fotuhi, the Chairman of the Neurology Institute for Brain Health and Fitness in Baltimore, studies support the idea that exercise can improve learning efficiency for children. …
“ ‘It’s so exciting,’ Fotuhi told Bill on … Only A Game. ‘There are actual new cells that are born in the memory parts of your brain. Literally, new cells are born, this has been shown in animal studies. So exercise is the best thing for [the] brain, especially for the memory part of the brain.’ …
“Though no study prescribes a perfect amount of exercise, Fotuhi offers guidelines to parents and educators.
“ ‘My recommendation would be at least one hour a day for children who are 6-12 and for high school kids, two hours a day,’ Fotuhi said. ” More.
I myself find that walking around helps me think, and I remember my father doing that, too. He was a writer. There is something about moving around while puzzling out how to express a complicated thought that is more productive than sitting in front of a computer (or in his case, a typewriter).
Along the Greenway, there is a changing array of public art. This photographic display was borrowed from New York City. The themes are Home, Streets, Creatures, Play, and People. The artists are all topnotch, but the location — set way back from the sidewalk and alongside a superhighway — makes me think that not many people are going to take a good look at it.
Ilona Szwarc entered this one in People/Rodeo Girls.
The artist says, “Rodeo Girls is an ongoing portrait project about young girls from Texas who compete in rodeos. These individuals have a fundamentally different idea about their femininity and a contrasting attitude towards gender roles. … They grow up according to a male archetype and I am examining how their lives and identities are shaped by their surroundings. The photographs celebrate the beauty of the terrain and the idiosyncrasies of this old fashioned American tradition, which is recently vanishing.”
The Fence is “a summer-long, outdoor photographic exhibition that explores the essence of community across cultural boundaries and geographical lines. The Fence is a site-specific exhibition stretching over 1000ft in length, culled from a call for submissions; we asked our community of photographers across the globe to respond to the question – ‘what makes up a community?’ ” More at the project’s website, here.
John’s son has a friend at the beach, a three-year-old musician whose dad is the contemporary composer Kenneth Kirschner.
5against4 has a word on Kirschner’s work, here: “Ken Kirschner’s second longest release to date is a hypnotic exploration of what we might call ‘mobile stasis’. The complex texture, comprising vibes, electronic tones & strings intermingle in ever-changing permutations. Certainly one of Kirschner’s most ambitious texture works &, for those open to its unique type of language, an immersive, rewarding listening experience.” They link to a free download.
Last.fm has more, here: “Composer Kenneth Kirschner was born in 1970 and lives in New York City. He is known for his open source approach to music, his experiments with software-based indeterminate composition, and his interest in adapting the insights and aesthetics of 20th century composers such as Morton Feldman and John Cage to the context of contemporary digital music.
“His work has been released on CDs from record labels such as 12k, Sub Rosa, Sirr, and/OAR and Leerraum, as well as online through a wide variety of netlabels and other sources. A large selection of Kirschner’s music is freely available for download from his website.” See http://www.kennethkirschner.com.
You can also find remixes of Kirschner’s work at Soundcloud.com, but it doesn’t look like he puts his compositions there himself.
This was such a nice story. It’s about idealistic young adults who join Teach for America , get sent to poor, rural areas, and decide they like the simpler life. When they settle down, they bring new energy and business — while receiving in return local wisdom and friendship.
Bret Schulte writes from Helena-West Helena, Arkansas, for the NY Times, “If you are from around here, you know Doug Friedlander is not.
“Born in New York City and reared on Long Island, Mr. Friedlander is Jewish and vegetarian and has a physics degree from Duke.”
He and others who fell in love with the Delta “arrived through Teach for America and stayed beyond their two-year commitment.
“Mr. Friedlander is now the ambitious director of the county’s Chamber of Commerce. He frets over the kudzu that is devouring abandoned buildings. He attends Rotary Club meetings, where he sidesteps the lunch offerings for carnivores. He organizes workshops to modernize small businesses and pushes tourism and the development of a decimated downtown along the banks of the Mississippi. …
“Matty Bengloff, 28, is one of [the new] people. He grew up in an apartment on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Now he owns a three-bedroom home in Cleveland, as well as a hip new yogurt shop called Delta Dairy, with his fiancée, Suzette Matthews. …
“Residents cured Mr. Bengloff of his Yankee ways. Soon after arriving in the South with Teach for America, Mr. Bengloff was in a school speaking to a receptionist. When he could not hear the man’s words, Mr. Bengloff asked, ‘What?’ The receptionist said: ‘I can tell you’re not from around here. When you don’t understand something, you say, “Excuse me, sir?” Or, “Sir?” ‘ ”
Photo: William Widner for the NY Times
Matty Bengloff, who grew up in Manhattan, in his frozen yogurt shop in Cleveland, Miss. The unofficial motto is “Keep Cleveland Boring.”
I went out at lunch this week and took pictures of a public art project I had somehow overlooked: Boston Bricks. The bronze bricks are set among ordinary bricks in a narrow alley called Winthrop Lane, not far from Downtown Crossing and Macy’s. Although the styles look very different to me, the bricks are all by Kate Burke and Gregg Lefevre.
Here are eight of them. I include the artists’ credit brick, Boston in relation to the moon, a horseman who is either Paul Revere or George Washington, swans suitable for a Boston swan boat, tea bags suitable for a Boston tea party, directions to Provincetown, America’s first subway (1898), and the Great Molasses Flood.
If you are not from the area, that last one is no joke. The molasses flood was deadly. A book about it, The Dark Tide, is available at bookstores or online.
[8/14/13 new research showing that the type of molasses added to its destructiveness.]
She’s a mild-mannered school teacher in Pakistan — unless education for girls is threatened, and then, watch out! She’s the Burka Avenger!
Salman Masood and Declan Walsh have the story at the NY Times: “Cartoon fans in Pakistan have been excited by the arrival of the country’s first caped crusader, in the form of a female superhero who flies through the air, battling villains using pens and books.
“The heroine, Burka Avenger, is certainly an unusual role model for female empowerment in Pakistan: a woman who uses martial arts to battle colorful villains …
“But the cartoon, in which a demure schoolteacher, Jiya, transforms into the action heroine by donning a burqa, or traditional cloak, has also triggered an awkward debate about her costume.
“ ‘Is it right to take the burqa and make it look “cool” for children, to brainwash girls into thinking that a burqa gives you power instead of taking it away from you?” asked the novelist and commentator Bina Shah in a blog post.
“The criticism has not overshadowed the broader welcome that Burka Avenger, which aired [in Islamabad] for the first time on Sunday evening, has received. With slick computer animation, fast-paced action and flashes of humor that even adults can appreciate, the character could offer Pakistanis a new cultural icon akin to Wonder Woman in the United States.”
And she is generating some thoughtful discussions about the role of girls and women and the importance of education for girls. The show’s maker, pop star Aaron Haroon Rashid, points out that the burka is merely the heroine’s disguise.
(An excellent disguise indeed, used effectively by the playwright Tony Kushner in Homebody/Kabul, about a Western woman who leaves home and disappears in Afghanistan.)
Here’s a heartwarmer about how a groom raised by his grandfather got a hospital’s help to make the perfect wedding.
Shandana Mufti writes at the Globe: “When Danny Weaver and fiancée Paula Hatch-O’Loughlin set a wedding date for Aug. 10 at Old Orchard Beach, Maine, they never imagined that they would say their vows on June 25 at Emerson Hospital in Concord.
“But that was before Danny Weaver’s grandfather, Donald Weaver, who raised Danny Weaver and whom he considers the ‘greatest man and friend I have ever known,’ fell ill. And when Donald Weaver’s condition rapidly deteriorated on June 25, Danny Weaver, Hatch-O’Laughlin and the nursing staff at Emerson Hospital came together to organize a wedding in fewer than three hours. …
“ ‘They had the huge courtyard all blocked off,’ Danny Weaver said, describing the event. ‘They had 50 chairs lined up outside, they had music going, they picked songs for when she walked down the aisle. They literally wheeled my grandfather outside – poles, IVs, they brought it all outside.’ …
“Perhaps most importantly of all, Donald Weaver loved the ceremony. Danny Weaver said that even the next morning, his grandfather couldn’t stop talking about the beauty of the wedding.
Photo: Emerson Hospital (L-R) Joey O’Loughlin, Jarrod Hatch, Jillian O’Loughlin, Daniel Weaver Jr., Kylie Weaver, Paula Hatch-O’Loughlin, Danny Weaver and Donald Weaver gather after Paula and Danny were married at Emerson Hospital.
“The first feature of our inclination toward art is that we seem to have a universal love of landscape paintings — and not just any landscape, but landscapes similar to those our ancestors would have encountered on the African savanna. A central pillar of evidence for his argument is a 1993 study commissioned by Russian painters Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid that surveyed people from ten diverse countries and found a surprising number of consistent aesthetic preferences. …
“Dutton suggests that this seemingly universal preference for paintings depicting open spaces, trees, water, and animals is related to our ancestors’ search for food and safety. Such landscapes would have presented opportunities for cultivation; and the presence of water and climbable clusters of trees — which could have served as lodgings for game and provided safety from predators — would have been preferred by hunter-gatherers to either a dark forest or desolate plains.” More.
Evolutionary psychology often seems like a stretch, but it’s fun to think about. I do like landscapes. I also like abstraction. In any case, I’m sure my ancient Picts and Celts ancestors, if such they were, would have liked the 19th century painting Andrew picked to go with his entry.
Who can resist a Turner?
Image: Petworth Park: Tillington Church in the Distance, J. M. W. Turner, c. 1830, via Wikimedia Commons
Some artists have had an idea that spins off the “whistlestop” train tours that politicians since Lincoln have taken to connect to voters.
Randy Kennedy writes at ArtsBeat in the NY Times, “Chartered train trips tend to conjure images of flag bunting, stump speeches and glad-handing politicians.
“But a cross-country whistle-stop tour now being planned as a kind of rolling public art project by the artist Doug Aitken might give train travel considerably more cultural cachet.
“Mr. Aitken, who works in Los Angeles and whose pieces in video and film often explore speed and people in transit, has organized a three-week journey from New York to San Francisco, with 10 stops in between, called ‘Station to Station: a Nomadic Happening,’ which will include not only shows by visual artists but also music, poetry and food. …
“ ‘This really came out of a kind of restlessness, the feeling that art forms are too often segregated, music played in the same clubs and art shown in the same galleries and museums,’ Mr. Aitken said in an interview. ‘I felt like we needed to experiment with a new model.’ ’
The trip will go from September 8 to September 28. Read more to see if it will stop in your town.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
President and Mrs. Roosevelt on a whistlestop tour.
In Boston: a Greenway exercise class on a hot morning, a North End corner named for a beloved local, a Street Seats bench by ideo, one with a grassy cushion near the Children’s Museum, and a wavelike one in a shaded arcade along Fort Point Channel.
In Concord: an arched vista, a Michio Ihara sculpture at the Concord Art Association, the entry of the Art Association, a shop’s wind decoration still outside at at 6 a.m., and the herb garden behind First Parish.
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