There's Magic Happening at Out North - Season Kickoff

[Looking this over, I realize it gets a bit gushy.  But I'm convinced it's accurate.  There really is something special happening at Out North now.]

The very first time I saw Scott Turner Schofield at Out North I knew this guy was special.  That feeling's been reinforced every time I've seen him in action.  Last night the years of work that Gene Dugan and Jay Brause put into clearing the land, planting the seeds, watering, fertilizing, keeping  the wild animals from trampling it all, are now turning into the magical arts incubator and stage they cultivated.

That's not to say a lot of special performances haven't already happened over the years.  But Scott seems to have sprinkled his own magic dust on Out North.

The season preview attracted a full house to bid on silent auction items, eat and drink, and then to watch Scott emcee the preview show spotlighting Out North Art House residents he's gathered to Primrose and Bragaw.

It's an amazing collection of talent - from Hmong youth musicians, Hispanic Hip Hop, a therapy theater group from Akeela House, youth rappers, a writers' group, 20 something actors troupe, a non-profit that works with disabled students, a dance group, local arts magazine, to an FM radio license - from such a variety of local communities and media.



I have no doubt that the kind of talent we sampled  last night exists in every community.  The difference is that here everything has come together just right to provide the nurturing and mentoring to hone one's craft and confidence, the space and time to  practice and perform, and an administrative infrastructure to get the bills paid and the audience to attend.  That infrastructure includes a lot of volunteers and a charismatic performer/organizer who contributes a special energy and excitement. 

I haven't had time to edit all the video I took of last night's event, but here's part one.



I've added the second part of the video here.
Part 3 is here.

Is The 1911 Fur Seal Treaty Relevant Today? A Dozen Meet at UAA - Public Presentation Tonight

Clark Wolf

UAA philosophy professor Raymond Anthony has put together an intimate conference of philosophers at UAA today and tomorrow with the help of a National Science Foundation grant.  I've been sitting in today and the discussions - focused on environmental ethics - have been fascinating.  Clark Wolf of Iowa State discussed intergenerational ethics of climate change, relating Michele Bachman's concern (voiced in his home town recently) about the financial debt the US is piling on the next generation to the environmental harm we're bequeathing them.  He also looked at principles articulated in a 1911 Fur Seal treaty which stopped the high seas slaughter of fur seals.

Professor Paul Thompson of Michigan State University examined biofuels.

All the professors listen to all their colleagues presentations and discuss them.  They'll continue tomorrow, but tonight. . .

 these two professors plus Professors Bryan Norton of Georgia Institute of Technology and Chrisoula Andreou of the University of Utah will speak at a public discussion tonight at UAA.

UAA Consortium Library 307

7:30pm

Thursday, September 8, 2011

I'm hoping to post more on the conference, but thought I'd get this up for anyone who can take advantage of coming to hear these folks tonight. 

After Seeing MLK Memorial, Clear that Architect Blew It Abbreviating the Quote

 Last week I listened to an NPR report on the critique of the design of the memorial - basically that a quote of MLK's was shortened and thus taken out of context and, in the words of Maya Angelou,  King was "made to look like an arrogant twit."

The memorial's executive architect, Ed Jackson Jr., is also interviewed.  He acknowledges Maya Angelou's greatness, says he owns some of her books, and that the quote was changed to a paraphrase based on time constraints.

"The statement that she made was very colorful and it  attracted the attention of the reader and that's what writers are supposed to do.  But I'm in the business of architecture and when we are faced to make design decisions, we have to do so with respect to a number of factors

• size, 

• shape,

• distance,

• perspective, 

• height,  

• depth, 

• weight, 

• size of letters, 

• font style.

The message had to be communicated succinctly and then allow the visitor to come around and face Dr. King and have that once in a lifetime experience."

He goes on to talk about the other inscriptions at the monument and how this one isn't going to overpower all the others.  (You can listen to him at the NPR audio - starting at 1:28)

My initial reaction to architect Jackson was not positive.   Font?  Depth?  Did he really say all those things?  Was he serious?  Yes, those are factors, but his job is to make all those things work, not to use them as an excuse to rewrite the words of the man he's honoring.

I visited the Martin Luther King memorial on the Tidal Basin Tuesday.

Now that I've seen the memorial, I have no sympathy for Jackson whatsoever.  He just botched it big time.  Who is he to change King's words?  "Well," he might say, "the symmetry would be better if we left some of his qualifiers out."  (I'm not going to even discuss what was changed and how it affected the meaning.  You can go to the NPR post to see that.)

His idea about seeing those words just before seeing the statue itself?  Well, we came to the statue along the path where the cherry trees line the Tidal Basin, so we saw the statue before we saw the quotes.

OK, here's the main statue of King. 

Behind it is the official entrance through 'the mountains.'  But, as I said, we came from the Tidal Basin side.  On the left (as you look at the statue in the picture above)  are the words "Out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope."

The people are looking at the MLK likeness in the front.  That's the Jefferson Memorial on the other side of the Tidal Basin.

Then on the right side (facing the statute) is the controversial edited quote.

As you can see, there is plenty of room on this side of the monument.  He could easily have included four more lines.  He probably would say that it had to be two lines to match the "Mountain" quote on the other side.  He didn't say that, but why else would he have cut it short?  As I said, and you can see, there's plenty of room.  Or he could have used a different quote on this side or the other side so they'd match. 

To put this into a different context, at the nearby Lincoln Memorial the wall to the right of Lincoln has three panels with Lincoln's Second Inaugural Speech.

On the left side (facing Lincoln) is the Gettysburg Address.  It's only one panel.  But that didn't cause the designer's of the Lincoln Memorial to edit the 2nd Inaugural to match the Gettysburg Address.

If it's good enough for Lincoln, I'd say it's ok for Martin Luther King, Jr.

I usually try to see the different sides of a controversy and to understate the situation and let the readers come to their own conclusions.  But in this case it is so completely clear that the architect Jackson's defense of his rewriting of King's words is just mealy mouthed weaseling to justify the unjustifiable.  He was so consumed with his technical issues, that he completely missed the much bigger issue.  This is a monument to MLK, and MLK's original words, in context, and not some abbreviated version to 'fit' what Jackson thought was the proper visual style. 

Oh yes, the other quotes.  They're good.  And the wall they are on shows us how much influence Maya Lin's Vietnam Memorial Wall has influenced how we think of memorials.

Here are a couple of the quotes that it would do us well to consider and discuss regularly.

Of course, there's always the possibility that I missed something. That he gave NPR a much better reason than font size and distance etc. for what he did it. But it really sounds like damage control.

Posing At The Lincoln Memorial

There are lots of people at the Lincoln Memorial.  Even on a cool, rainy day.  From all over the world.

3000 Year Old Humans vs Today's Humans

We know about racial bias, and ethnic bias, but we don't often think about what I call temporal bias - the belief that people today are superior to people who lived in the distant past.  We obviously know (well, some of us anyway) about history and so we know about them, but they didn't know about us.  That seems to give us some superiority.  And we live with cars and dishwashers and computers and telephones and airplanes, so it would seem obvious that we are far superior.

But how much is any one of us individually responsible for any of those things?  How many individuals today would be able to come up with even the simplest advances, say, like tablecloths or buttons or scissors?  If it weren't for a few geniuses amongst us who saw the need and conceived a solution when the right resources were available, would any of those 'great' inventions exist?

To what extent is the average human being walking the earth today intrinsically smarter or more sophisticated than those walking the earth 3,000 years ago?   The Spartans built the Trojan horse and then wrote great plays and poetry about it around 1200 BC.

And at the Freer Gallery yesterday I looked at vessels like this one, created about the same time.

How many of us could conceive of and then execute such an exquisite piece?  The level of sophistication in the craftsmanship and the artistry suggests to me that the person who made this ewer could walk into the modern world, and after a few months of adjustment, be able to understand and appreciate today's world.  And perhaps teach us a thing or two.

Despite the fact that we have 3000 years on the ancient Greeks and Chinese, our progress has occurred mainly in the area of technology through the efforts of a tiny fraction of humanity. In the area of interpersonal and international relations, we don't seem to have advanced much at all.

By the way, it said that this and a few other vessels like it, were for holding grain alcohol.  That surely says something about the importance of alcohol then.

Whistler at the Freer - Peacocks and Caprice

One of my favorite museums on the National Mall in DC is the Freer Gallery.

 "The gallery was founded by Charles Lang Freer (1854–1919), a railroad-car manufacturer from Detroit who gave to the United States his collections and funds for a building to house them. The Italian-Renaissance-style gallery, constructed in granite and marble, was designed by American architect Charles Platt. When the gallery opened to the public in 1923, it was the first Smithsonian museum for fine arts. In subsequent years, the collections have grown through gifts and purchases to nearly triple the size of Freer's bequest." (Smithsonian)

It specializes in Asian art, but it also has Whistler's Peacock Room.  The Smithsonian's website tells the story of
this room, how it was designed by an architect for Fredrick  Leyland's porcelain collection.  It has a large painting of Whistler's so the architect consulted with Whistler who offered to touch it up a bit.  Instead he radically changed the room while his patron, Leyland, was away.  Leyland refused to pay the 2000 guineas Whistler billed him for the changes - which included the peacocks, and eventually paid him half the amount in pounds instead of guineas which made it even less. (you can read the whole story at the Smithsonian link.)

Perhaps in retaliation, Whistler took the liberty of coating Leyland's valuable leather with Prussian-blue paint and depicting a pair of peacocks aggressively confronting each other on the wall opposite The Princess. He used two shades of gold for the design and highlighted telling details in silver. Scattered at the feet of the angry bird are the coins (silver shillings) that Leyland refused to pay; the silver feathers on the peacock's throat allude to the ruffled shirts that Leyland always wore. The poor and affronted peacock has a silver crest feather that resembles the lock of white hair that curled above Whistler's forehead. To make sure that Leyland understood his point, Whistler called the mural of the fighting peacocks "Art and Money; or, The Story of the Room."

The story, and much better photos, are on the Smithsonian site.  They also have a panorama of the room showing the ceramics here.

Another room has Whistler's "Nocturne" pictures of the Thames at night. As you might imagine, I found them rather dark and didn't take a picture, but I did find this interesting tidbit about them at abcgallery.com.

In 1877, Whistler began to paint a series of ‘Nocturnes’ based on the Thames views at night. One of his most famous works in this series in Nocturne: Blue and Gold – Old Battersea Bridge, originally called ‘Moonlights’. His patron, Frederick Leyland, an enthusiastic pianist, suggested the term ‘Nocturne’. Whistler replied, ‘I can’t thank you too much for the name Nocturne as the title for my Moonlights. You have no idea what an irritation it proves to the critics, and consequent pleasure to me; besides it is really so charming, and does so poetically say all I want to say and no more than I wish.’
Critics were outraged. John Ruskin, when seeing Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket and other night scenes at the opening exhibition of the Grosvenor Gallery in 1877, broke out in print: ‘I have seen and heard much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face’.  Whistler sued Ruskin for libel and won the trial. Whistler was awarded a farthing damages; his feelings on the subject are embodied in the Gentle Art of Making Enemies (1890).

ABCGallery.com reminds us there can be consequences of saying what you think:

The loss of Leyland as a patron and the effect of Ruskin’s harsh criticism left Whistler in a bad financial position. In 1879, Whistler was declared bankrupt and left for Venice for the next 14 months. During that stay in Venice, he produced four oils, many etchings and almost 100 pastels.

But Whistler was to recover.  The next year, 1889, according to the lengthy abcgallery biography, he was to meet Charles Lang Freer.


The room with the Nocturnes also has a picture called Caprice in Purple and Gold: the Golden Screen.

The model here was

". . . Whistler’s mistress, Joanna Hiffernan, called Jo. For a few years, this beautiful, red-haired Irishwoman managed Whistler’s affairs, keeping his house and assisting him with the sale of his work. To give herself respectability, she called herself Mrs. Abbott; her drunken father also referred to Whistler as ‘me son-in-law’. She sat for many of his . . ."  (abcgallery)

"Although The Golden Screen is in some ways a conventional Victorian painting, the model wears a Japanese costume and is seated on the floor like a courtesan. The composition is even more radical than the pose, considering the prevailing pictorial style: to Western eyes, the picture appears full of spatial puzzles, with a lacquer box that looks out of perspective and a folding screen that seems to float above a tilted floor. Whistler's concern was not to create a convincing illusion of space but to arrange shapes and colors like the patterns painted on the golden screen. Moreover, in documenting his collection, Whistler may have appreciated the typically Japanese means of structuring pictorial space, in which every object is shown in fuller dimension than is possible with Western perspective.
Whistler designed the frame and decorated it with Asian motifs, including badges of palm leaves and paulownia blossoms, in imitation of Japanese family crests." (Smithsonian)

This is a glimpse of just two rooms from the Freer, one of the smaller museums in the Smithsonian collection of museums.  Like all of the Smithsonian locations (including DC's zoo), the Freer is free. (Don't tell Eric Cantor.)  I'll try to get up more from the Freer soon.  

Oh, yes, here's a portrait of Whistler in 1865 by Henri Fantin-Latour.  Whistler would have been about  31.

Sunday Run - DC Style

Before festivities began today, I got to take a little run this morning.

Past the Lincoln Memorial.

Lincoln sits looking over the reflecting pool to the Washington Monument, but there was no water in the pool, and apparently the recent earthquake put a crack in the Monument.

 Then past the nearby Korean War Memorial.

 

And then back along the Potomac River - I think Arlington National Cemetery is on the other side of the bridge. 

Capital Bikeshare - Very Cool DC Bike Sharing Program

OK, I don't really know how cool it is because I only just saw it for the first time last night and I haven't tried it.  But it looks cool, and it has a cool website, and I want it to be successful.  It's called Capital Bikeshare.

Here's the station across the street from our hotel.  For $75 a year you can check out a bike any time.  You have 30 free minutes to get to another station.  Over 30 minutes and they charge you $1.50 and it gets higher the longer you keep it.  The idea is to encourage short rides so that as many bikes are available as possible at any given time.

I know I cut off the prices - $5 for a day and $15 for five days.  

There are 110 stations in DC and Arlington with 1100 bikes. 


The website shows all the stations and you can click on a station and see how many bikes and empty slots are available at any given time - so you can plan where to get or drop off a bike.  You can read the blog in 42 different languages, like Hungarian for Ropi or Spanish for Tomás, though they cold do fine with the English.

Here's their video explaining how it works.

New Look For Bloggers on Blogspot

I'm not sure what difference readers will see (probably none), but the new look for bloggers composing their blogs is pretty dramatic.   A very different experience.  On first impression - it looks cleaner, but I'm also going, "But where is . . .?"  I don't think it will be too hard to adjust, but it was a shock when I clicked "new post" and got it.  Here's a view of the old look as I'm writing this post (yes, you can still use the old one).

And here's the new look.

From what I can tell, the change is merely cosmetic.  All the old functions are still there, but they look different and some are in different places. Wait, there is one new function I noticed - Location.  I can mark where I'm blogging from.  Also, it looks like more of the options are available on my small laptop screen without scrolling down.  That's a plus.


Blogger Buzz on Aug. 31 says:

Blogger’s fresh new look Posted by: Chang Kim, Product Manager As you may have heard, things are starting to look a little different across many Google products—and today, Blogger is the next product to get a makeover. It’s been a few years since we made major updates to Blogger’s look and feel, and there’s a lot more to these changes than just shiny new graphics. We’ve rewritten the entire editing and management experience from scratch so it’s faster and more efficient for you—and easier for us to update and improve over time. Throughout the design process, we conducted user interviews to help identify how to make Blogger even easier and more enjoyable to use. We also watched users try our new interface and made many refinements based on their feedback.

Sunrise Sunset

We left Anchorage at 6:30am.  You can tell it's September already and nearing equinox - it's not that light yet.

After a stop in Seattle, we headed east.  I'm not sure where we were, but it was 4:45pm Anchorage time - 7:45 or 8:45pm where we were.