Happy Father’s Day, Fathers!
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged father's day | 2 Comments »
I have blogged before on the use of the arts to help veterans readjust to civilian life. Today I’d like to highlight an initiative started by veteran Drew Cameron and Drew Matott. It focuses on the art that interests them most — papermaking — and is their way of giving back and moving on.
“The Combat Paper Project utilizes art making workshops to assist veterans in reconciling and sharing their personal experiences as well as broadening the traditional narrative surrounding service and the military culture.
“Through papermaking workshops, veterans use their uniforms worn in combat to create cathartic works of art. The uniforms are cut up, beaten into a pulp and formed into sheets of paper. Veterans use the transformative process of papermaking to reclaim their uniform as art and begin to embrace their experiences in the military.
“The Combat Paper Project is based out of art studios throughout the United States and has traveled to Canada and the United Kingdom, providing veterans workshops, exhibitions, performances and artists’ talks.” More here.
Photograph: Combat Paper
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged art, artist, arts and military, combat paper, drew cameron, drew matott, healing, papermaking, veteran | Leave a Comment »
Cities that want to encourage foot traffic, public transit, and getting around on bicycles are starting to remove parking spaces in favor of mini parks big enough for a couple planters and benches where passersby might read, chat, or eat a sandwich.
Eric Moskowitz writes in the Boston Globe: “The program, boston.PARKLETS, follows the lead of San Francisco, which boasts 30 parklets, and New York, which unveiled the first of what it calls ‘curbside seating platforms’ in 2010.
“They are part of the growing movement to reclaim urban space for pedestrians and bicyclists and promote public transit. Mayor Thomas M. Menino has proclaimed ‘the car is no longer king,’ citing the environmental, aesthetic, and health benefits.
“It remains to be seen how willingly Bostonians, known for fiercely coveting and protecting their parking spots, receive the parklets.
“Vineet Gupta, planning director for the Boston Transportation Department, said the city will work with merchants and neighbors to find appropriate spots, with the first parklets probably appearing next spring. They would scarcely put a dent in the city’s 8,000 metered spaces and untold thousands of unmetered and resident-permit spots, but they would enliven areas with heavy foot traffic otherwise lacking in public amenities, he said.” Read more.
If you have actually seen where this has been done, do send a photo.
These two parking spaces in Boston could become a parklet — a tiny patio with benches and planters. (Essdras M Suarez/ Globe Staff)
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged biking, boston, eric moskowitz, Essdras M Suarez, medical, mini park, parklet, pedestrian, traffic, Vineet Gupta | 2 Comments »
From a NY Times article by Stephanie Strom June 12:
“A few companies have taken some small steps to bring lost manufacturing jobs back to American soil, driven sometimes by declining labor costs in the United States, other times by dissatisfaction with the quality of goods made abroad.
“General Electric, for example, has created almost 800 jobs by building plants in Schenectady, N.Y., and Louisville, Ky., to make sophisticated batteries, some of which were previously made in China. NCR is making automated teller machines in Georgia that had also been made overseas. Last month, Starbucks announced it would build a factory in Augusta, Ga., that would employ 140 people and make the company’s Via instant coffee and the ingredients for its popular Frappuccino drinks. About half of Starbucks’s new employment overall will come in the United States, the rest internationally. …
“The effort is not all altruistic. Chinese labor has become more expensive, and Starbucks and other companies are looking at their supply chains more holistically. American Mug can deliver to Starbucks in four days, while Chinese suppliers may take three months.
“A Chinese supplier is also likely to require an order in the hundreds of thousands, increasing the risk that Starbucks will get stuck with inventory. And then there is the difference in shipping costs. ‘No doubt the cost of doing what we’re doing in East Liverpool [Ohio] at least in the initial stage will be more expensive for Starbucks, but the investment we’re making in this is about the conscience of our company and recognition that success has to be shared,’ [Starbucks CEO Howard] Schultz said.” Read more here.
We will probably never have the massive manufacturing we once had, but do send me what you hear about manufacturing picking up, even a little. For example, I recently heard about a new company in Massachusetts, 1366 Technologies, which makes silicon wafers for solar applications and has a manufacturing pilot going in Bedford. I mentioned this to a colleague who added that he knew of a new gin distillery in South Boston, which wasn’t really what I meant by manufacturing, but whatever floats your boat.
Photograph: http://www.1366tech.com/
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged 1366 technologies, batteries, ge, howard Schultz, lexington, manufacturing, ncr, solar, starbucks, Stephanie Strom, wafers | Leave a Comment »
An article in the UK’s Guardian addresses the fact that downtowns are changing now that so much retail activity is online. Some “big thinkers” were asked their thoughts on the future of downtowns.
Writes Tim Lewis, “Across Britain, one in seven shops is now boarded up, as consumers drive to out-of-town malls or wait out the recession with their hands in their pockets. Then there is the one-click efficiency of online shopping: the UK is Europe’s leading e-retail economy, with sales estimated at £68.2bn for 2011; the market grew 16% in 2011 and is predicted to increase by a further 13% this year. That is why high street chains such as Woolworths, Zavvi and Habitat have made way for an endless parade of mobile-phone stores and charity shops.”
In response, Mary Portas, who since May 2011 has been “heading up an independent review for David Cameron’s government,” solicited ideas from a variety of creative thinkers, beyond the usual urban planners. Here are a few of the ideas that surfaced.
* Artist Martin Boyce: turn high streets into urban playgrounds
* Retailer Jane Shepherdson: offer lower rents to attract new talent
* Architect David Adjaye: bring public buildings on to the high street
* Fashion magazine editor Lorraine Candy: “create a lust for bespoke shopping”
For details on how such things might be implemented to transform the high streets and their boarded-up storefronts, read the article.
Illustration about downtowns becoming more playful: Patrick Morgan for the Observer
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged cities, David Adjaye, downtowns, economic development, guardian, internet, Jane Shepherdson, Lorraine Candy, Martin Boyce, Mary Portas, observer, patrick morgan, revitalization, tim lewis, transformation, urban plannig | Leave a Comment »
Brendan, creator of the Museum of Endangered sounds, here, invites visitors to enjoy his site:
“Click a thumbnail to take a listen down memory lane. Click the thumbnail again to turn it off and play another. Or, if you like industrial music, try turning on all the thumbnails at once!”
Check out the PacMan sounds or the recorded payphone operator.
I am inspired to think of other endangered sounds (milk bottles landing on front stoops in Wayland Square) and sounds that are no more (the sound of the ivory-billed woodpecker). Do send me your own suggestions. Maybe I will e-mail them to Brendan.
After you check out the sounds at the Museum of Endangered Sounds, read more on Brendan at his site. He writes, for example:
Photograph: Brendan at http://savethesounds.info.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Brendan, Chattanooga State Community College, milk bottles, Peleus Research Team, wayland square | 3 Comments »
At some point in my childhood, family friends raised goats. It seemed exotic. The Gordon children drank goat’s milk. And we learned that goats will eat anything when my brother tried to pat a goat and lost his mitten.
In addition to mittens, goats eat weeds, and increasing numbers of individuals and groups are deciding to use goats instead of herbicides to control weeds.
Evan Allen writes in the Boston Globe, “According to the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the use of goats to control invasive species, already common out West, is becoming more common across the East Coast.
“Goats love woody shrubs and vines, making them ideal weed-whackers. Using goats cuts down on the need for herbicides, and, unlike tractors, goats don’t require diesel fuel to do their job. And nimble goats can easily maneuver across rocky or marshy surfaces that humans and machines can’t safely reach.
“ ‘Folks are looking for long-term means of control,’ said Eric Schrading, private lands coordinator at the Fish and Wildlife Service. ‘As the last 30-plus years have gone by, we’ve started to, maybe not abandon chemical control, but use that as only one tool in the toolbox.’ …
“In Wellesley, the goats were shuttled out to the Boulder Brook Reservation in a bright pink truck driven by a crew from the Goat Girls: Hope Crolius, owner of the Amherst-based business, and two of her goatherds.” Read more here.
For a video about goat weed control, check out this clip from Bear Creek Park in Colorado.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged bear creek park, boulder brook reservation, colorado, ecology, environment, Eric Schrading, evan allen, fish and wildlife, goat, goatherd, hope crolius, invasive, mowing, nature, park, sustainability | 5 Comments »
Saturday night we saw a splendid production of Puccini’s opera La Bohème at a $25-a-seat benefit for the Friends of the Performing Arts. Pretty amazing to have fully staged opera professionally sung with orchestra accompaniment someplace other than the big city.
Robin Farnsley, who sang the role of the Bohemian seamstress suffering from tuberculosis, was the heart and soul of the production. I blogged about her before, here. Not only was her singing exquisite, but her acting was unusually sensitive and subtle for opera.
But all the leads were great in this tale of poverty and the artistic spirit: Ray Bauwens as as Mimi’s love, Rodolfo; Tim Wilfong as a delightful Marcello; and Sarah Vincelett as the thoroughly convincing coquette, Musetta. Also worthy of mention were Michael Prichard, Thomas Dawkins, and Miles Rind.
I loved the naturalistic translation, shown in supertitles.
Alan Yost conducted, Kathy Lague was stage director, and Paula Eldridge was chorus master. As far as I know, everyone donated their time to support the performing arts in Concord.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Alan Yost, FOPAC, friends of the performing arts, kathy Lague, la boheme, music, opera, Paula Eldridge, puccini, Ray Bauwens, robin farnsley, Sarah Vincelett, Tim Wilfong | Leave a Comment »
We are going to the opera tonight, and I’m remembering the last opera we saw, by MIT Media Lab innovator Tod Machover.
It was called Death and the Powers, and it was about a genius who wanted to live forever and figured out how to convert himself into a sort of computer after death. Given that it had lyrics by former poet laureate Robert Pinsky, I thought it would be great, but it was nowhere near as good as Machover’s Resurrection, a Tolstoy story adapted by MIT’s Laura Harrington. (The robots in Death and the Powers were cute anyway.)
Machover is a tremendously interesting and prolific musician. Here he talks about how music can bring back memories, not unlike Proust’s petit madeleine.
Below he explains how his “hyper instruments” have drawn people of all types, including the elementary school classes he visits, into the joy of music making.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged compose, composer, death and the powers, h.m., hyper instrument, laura harrington, media lab, MediaLab, mit, music, musician, opera, resurrection, robert pinsky, robot, robot opera, Tod Machover, tolstoy | Leave a Comment »
The president recently handed out the Medal of Freedom awards. Maybe in the excitement around around Bob Dylan, Toni Morrison, and John Glenn, you missed that Dolores Huerta, co-founder of the United Farm Workers union, also was honored.
Fox News-Latino wrote, “The White House will present the lifelong unionist and immigrant rights advocate with the Medal of Freedom. …
“Huerta’s sense of justice developed from an early age. Raised in Stockton, Calif., Huerta watched her father work for little pay in the fields, while her mother managed a hotel that often let poor migrants stay for free, according to the Daily Beast.
“Along with César Chávez, Huerta founded the National Farm Workers Association in 1962, which later evolved into the United Farm Workers of America. …
“Using strikes, marches, boycotts and hunger strikes, the UFW has defended the interests of farm workers. … Huerta has been arrested 22 times and been beaten for her activism.
Notwithstanding her run-ins with the law, Huerta has been influential in passing far-reaching legislation. Her accomplishments as a labor rights activist include helping pass California’s Agricultural Labor Relations Act of 1975 and helping secure disability insurance for California farmworkers. …
“Huerta launched the Dolores Huerta Foundation in 2002, with the mission of supporting community organizers and budding political leaders.” Read more.
Getty Images
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged community organizer, Dolores Huerta, immigrant, labor, medal of freedom, migrant, organizer, union, United Farm Workers | Leave a Comment »
I read an article by Rebecca Milzoff in the NY Times recently that got me seeing people on the street in a new way.
Milzoff was interviewing a New York City choreographer about his latest work, and something he said stuck with me.
“ ‘I was assured when I came to live in this space on Broadway between Prince and Spring that SoHo would never come this far,’ David Gordon said, looking out the wall-to-wall windows in his second-floor loft. ‘Instead I now live in the Mall of America.’
“ ‘When I set foot out the door, there are so many people going in different directions,’ he said. ‘The choreography of the street is mind boggling.’ ”
Those words came back to me a couple days later as I waited for the morning train. There’s a point when bells start ringing because the gate is going down, and commuters stream across the parking lot with their briefcases and coffee mugs. On this particular day, they looked to me like dancers in a choreography of the everyday. The flow, the spacing between people suggested dance. The commuters had a special aura, partly because they had no consciousness of being in a dance performance.
I hope to be alert to other such happenings in the future.
It sure jazzes up the commute.
Photograph: Julieta Cervantes for The New York Times
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged choreographer, choreography, dance, dancing, David Gordon, pedestrians, Rebecca Milzoff, street scene | 3 Comments »
A new $100 bill is in the works. For security, it will have half a million tiny lenses in a special strip, and the lenses will create a particular optical effect as you tip the bill this way and that. Kind of like a hologram, is my understanding. There will be even more tiny lenses on the Liberty Bell and the numeral 100, and as you tip the bill, the one will turn into the other, thanks to the lenses.
This rather surprising information I learned from a speaker today — Doug Crane, vice president of the family company that has been making America’s currency and some other nations’ currencies since 1801. He makes paper only from cotton (80%) and linen (20%).
There are a lot of interesting old documents about the history of Crane & Co. — and how it overlapped with key events and players in American history — at this blog on WordPress.
More information is on the regular website of the company, which is based in Dalton, Massachusetts, and employs 850 people locally. Among them are the people who make print so tiny you could “print the Bible twice on a dime.” They also employ optical engineers who create the micro lenses and are responsible for Crane’s 80 patents.
Other employees work in Tumba, Sweden, ever since Sweden asked Crane to take over its currency making. At the Tumba site, Crane makes currencies for additional countries.
A paper-making enterprise requires a lot of energy, so Crane is working with numerous alternatives as it moves toward its goal of 100% sustainability. It has already drastically cut its oil use in a partnership with a steam-producing landfill enterprise. Hydroelectric is proving trickier because there are so many jurisdictions on the Housatonic River to give permission to remove waterfalls.
Perhaps the river could become a Blueway and get everyone working together. (See yesterday’s post.)
Postcard from cranesbond.com
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged bills, crane & co., currency, dalton, doug crane, hologram, housatonic, massachusetts, micro, optical, optics, paper, paper mill, sweden, treasury, tumba | Leave a Comment »
You probably think of the Connecticut River as being in Connecticut. And so it is. But it flows through most of the New England states, so protecting it results in protecting a large chunk of the Northeast. Its 7.2 million acre watershed runs through Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont.
The Christian Science Monitor recently added to its Change Agent series an article on the U.S. Interior Department’s May 24 designation of the Connecticut River as the first National Blueway.
Correspondent Cathryn J. Prince writes, “Between 40 and 50 local and state entities, both public and private, from four states will work together to preserve the 410-mile-long Connecticut River and its watershed. …
“It took the cooperation of between 40 and 50 local and state, public and private, organizations from four states to make the designation possible. While it doesn’t mean more federal funding, it does mean better coordination between these groups to promote best practices, information sharing, and stewardship.
“National Blueway is more than a label, says Andy Fisk, executive director of the Connecticut River Watershed Council.
“ ‘There are no turf wars here, but there are a lot of folks on the dance floor,’ Mr. Fisk says. ‘It’s important to recognize that this is a new way in how you get things done. It’s not one entity that will get things done, it’s diversity.’ ” Read more here.
Photograph: John Nordell, Christian Science Monitor
The Connecticut River, as photographed from the French King Bridge in Gill, Mass. The river and its watershed have been named the first National Blueway, an effort to coordinate the work of nonprofit groups and governments to protect and wisely use the entire 410-mile river and its 7.2 million acre watershed.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Blueway, Cathryn J Prince, Change Agent, collaboration, connecticut river, conseervation, ecology, environment, French King Bridge, gill, John Nordell, massachusetts, new england, new hampshire, Vermont | Leave a Comment »
You remember the advice at the end of Voltaire’s Candide? “Il faut cultiver ton jardin”? Increasing numbers of people are finding the advice to cultivate a garden a good idea for our times. But the implication of minding one’s own business is not part of it as people become more neighborly and create better communities through gardening.
“In 2002,” writes Katherine Gustafson at YES! Magazine, “two neighbors armed with spades and seeds changed everything for crime-addled Quesada Avenue in San Francisco’s Bayview-Hunters Point area.
“The street had been ground zero for the area’s drug trade and its attendant violence. But when Annette Smith and Karl Paige began planting flowers on a small section of the trash-filled median strip, Quesada Gardens Initiative was born. Over the course of the next decade, the community-enrichment project profoundly altered the face of this once-blighted neighborhood.
“Jeffrey Betcher is the initiative’s unlikely spokesperson. A gay white man driven to the majority-black area by the high cost of housing elsewhere, he moved into a house on Quesada Avenue in 1998 to find drug dealers selling from his front stoop and addicts sleeping beneath his stairs. He told me about the day that he returned home from work to discover that his neighbor Annette had planted a little corner of his yard.
“ ‘Even though there was a throng of people – drug dealers who were carrying guns, pretty scary folks – she had planted flowers on this little strip of dirt by my driveway,’ he told me. ‘I was so moved by that … I thought, that’s what life is about. That’s what community development is about. That’s what’s going to change this block faster than any public investment or outside strategy. And in fact it did.’ ” More here.
If you like this sort of thing, please read a little book called Seedfolks. You will love it.
Photograph: Katherine Gustafson
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged annette smith, Bayview-Hunters Point, community development, community garden, garden, gardening, jeffrey betcher, karl paige, Katherine Gustafson, nature, neighborhood, paul fleischman, Quesada Gardens Initiative, san francisco, seedfolks | Leave a Comment »
Looking at streams swollen by yesterday’s rain, I began thinking about Scuffy the Tugboat.
“The water moved in a hurry, as all things move in a hurry when it is Spring. Scuffy was in a hurry, too. ‘Come back little tugboat, come back,’ cried the little boy.”
A farmers market in Providence was undaunted by the rain. The farmer at the farmstand here joked that the puddle was just a matter of hydroponic gardening. In other photos, I show peonies and a sign buffeted by the storm — and a rabbit too busy foraging to worry about cameras.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged author, children's books, concord, farmer, farmers market, farmstand, Gertrude Crampton, hydroponic, illustrator, library sale, new england, peonies, polka-dot tie, rain, scuffy the tugboat, Tibor Gergely | 5 Comments »
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