elenabella

Local Growers Guild makes food issues visible

2010-05-04T23:25:00.000-07:00

I am on the board of the Local Growers Guild, which met in our back yard this evening. I wonder how many other such groups exist across the United States?

The Local Growers Guild was featured last year on Earth Eats, when Maggie Sullivan was the director. You can read or listen to an interesting interview with her there. Maggie is also one half of the Green Couple, with a blog about "learning to live green, and live together." (There's another Green Couple on facebook, The Green Couple, from Edmonton, Canada.)

The Local Growers Guild has a new director now, Kim Kanney, with the same focus and commitment to supporting a stronger local foods economy.

The mission of the Local Growers Guild is this one: The Local Growers Guild creates a local foods system that provides quality food to communities through direct markets and retailers; preserves the viability of family farms; improves the quality of life for growers; makes food issues visible; and promotes practices that preserve and protect the Earth.

Photos from the May Day Parade from In the Heart of the Beast

2010-05-03T03:18:00.000-07:00

Living uproariously large, sometimes on stilts: a few photos of the May Day Parade and Festival yesterday in Minneapolis, with thanks to the photographer, Jeanne Lakso. They capture much of the heart, and the beastiness, of this wonderful, ephemeral event. (I want a version the "breathe" sign for my wall..)

What innumerable traces exist in our collective consciousness, thanks to this event, I wonder? What do they look like, and where do they go? (Here's a clue: the captcha I got when posting this to facebook was "giant Demeter"!)

In the Heart of the Beast MayDay Parade: Uproar! for a better city, better life

2010-05-02T10:41:00.000-07:00

It's just about to begin – my favorite public art event: the In the Heart of the Beast Puppet Theater MayDay Parade and Festival. The MayDay Parade and Festival has helped build a "better city, better life" for 36 years now in the Twin Cities. (Here's the link to where I wrote about the event in 2009.)

The theme this year is:

Uproar!

A call to be fully present to the uncertainties of these shifting times

In this Year of the Tiger*, we stop to inhale the immense beauty of the world we share.

We exhale into a thunderous UPROAR! an embrace of multitudes joining together with collective strength for the present and future health of this world.

*according to the Buddhist, or Chinese, lunar calendar

Social genius Sandy Spieler, founder of In The Heart of the Beast, posted some photos by Andrew Kim at her facebook page, giving a glimpse of the artistry and effort that goes into MayDay. The parade travels down Bloomington Avenue in Minneapolis, to Powderhorn Park, where there is a ceremony at the edge of the lake.

Here is more about the Tree of Life Ceremony, with its suggestions for a reflective census:

The Tree of Life Ceremony 2010

In this year of the census when we are asked all manners of questions - name, age, race, how many are in your household - our Ceremony asks:

What if we "counted" all the trees, beetles, fishes, the waters, worms and raccoons?
What if we asked each other questions toward our wellbeing?
What if we asked questions of wonderments, of outrage?
What is immeasurable?
And what if these questions opened channels of compassion, action, and love, throughout the land?

Anyone can help contribute to MayDay, where the donation page makes this observation:

Your contribution is critical to the programs that delight the senses, push the issues and prod us to see the world through a different lens.

"Better City, Better Life"? Expo 2010 opens while housing activists remain in detention

2010-05-01T09:12:00.000-07:00

It's the opening day for Expo 2010 Shanghai China , the largest world's fair ever, with a logo from the Chinese character 世 ('world', Chinese "shì") modified to represent three people, with the 2010 date at their feet.

More than 70-100 million people are expected to visit Expo 2010, which runs through October 31, making it a high impact energy event, one that would require a heck of a lot of carbon offsets. In a promotional movie, Expo 2010 presents itself as "a magical world of sustainable development, as a world without traffic jams or pollution." That does, indeed, sound like magical thinking.

I guess it's much better than spending money and energy on war, which is what our world cultures tend to do. Still, there are many back stories involving displacement and exploitation, power moves of the first order.

You can see images of the rather ingenious pavilions at Design Boom, including this Macau Pavilion, which takes the shape of a jade rabbit lantern. Designed by the Chinese firm Carlos Marreiros Architects (such a Chinese name!) this building is wrapped with a double-layer glass membrane, with fluorescent screens on its outer walls. Balloons serve as the head and tail of the "rabbit", which can be moved up and down to attract visitors.

The Macau Pavilion is constructed from recyclable materials, with solar power panels and rain collection systems. The design was inspired by rabbit lanterns popular during the mid-autumn festival in south China in ancient times. I have to say that while I find it to be in some ways "delightful" (and would love to see it in a Pixar movie), this construction reminds me more of a take-out container for some kind of fast food item. Not so sure about it as a livable or workable habitat – it's pretty sterile.

A good source for news about Expo 2010 has been DW World DE Deutsche Welle, where there was a piece about a month ago about the last minute chaos of construction. Since 2000, 18,000 families have been evicted, often without compensation, to make way for the Expo, and historic sections of Shanghai have been razed. One result was the expansion of the Shanghai housing rights movement, which is largely led by women.

Another essay at Deutsche Welle, by social development expert Dr. Doris Fischer, considers some of the social ironies of an event on this scale. Fischer argues that "the challenges facing China's big cities are in some ways strikingly similar to topics and visions addressed by legendary science fiction silent film Metropolis":

The Expo is a global event, not only representing China. Still the motto seems to especially address the challenges posed by China's metropolis. Will the exhibition live up to the expectation of the motto? ["Better City, Better Life"] Or will we just see another futuristic view of cities, the beautiful part, blinding out the ”underground” workforce and machinery that may be needed to keep the wealthy and shiny part running?

Amnesty International has also reported on the emptiness of the motto "Better City, Better Life" to those housing activists who have been held in incommunicado detention for protesting eviction from their homes. You can call for their release here: please do, especially before participating in any global utopian enthusiasm for Expo 2010.

Maggie's painting anticipates May

2010-04-30T17:46:00.000-07:00

April is drawing to a close, and on this glorious day I felt little desire to dig with either squat pen or fraught pixel. Instead, after dinner I planted ramps in the vicinity of our oak savanna, at the suggestion the other day of Daughter Number Three.

Those, and a rose bush, and lots of onion sets. A chokecherry, and a red oak, given away today by Sycamore Land Trust at all of the Bloomingfoods stores.

We have a newly expanded garden center at Bloomingfoods East, with bamboo plants grounded in mulch swaying in the breeze as perimeter fencing, courtesy of Needmore Bamboo. It's a beautiful thing: taking the parking lot partly back to nature.

Here's a vibrant image that reflects my mood, and my gratitude for this vanishing April: a wildflower bouquet painted by Maggie Bruce.

Watermelon brickyard hails from Japan

2010-04-29T18:46:00.000-07:00

And now for something completely different: practical application of the square to the phenomenon commonly known as watermelon.

These images were at the Huff Po today, of watermelons incubated inside cube-shaped glass boxes, conforming to confining angles as they grow. First available in Japan (where they once cost about $75 each), some growers are said to be trying this in Brazil and California. Square fruits take up less space in the ice box, doncha know.

I just have to say: that factory where the women sort, shrink wrap and label those bricks looks pretty depressing to me.

Also over at the Huffington Post today, a rant about convenience foods by Michael Ruhlman and a recipe by Stephanie Bejar for vegan banana chocolate chip muffins.

Ruhlman was fresh off what looks to have been a fascinating IACP conference (for the International Association of Culinary Professionals) in Portland, Oregon, and he had this to say (in a somewhat hectoring tone) about that prevalent notion that "everyone seems to believe and propagate: that we all lead such busy lives that we have no time to cook.

[B]ullshit. Maybe you don't like to cook, maybe you're too lazy to cook, maybe you'd rather watch television or garden, I don't know and I don't care, but don't tell me you're too busy to cook. We all have the same hours every day, and we all choose how to use them. Working 12-hour days is a choice."

Hear, here. Once you choose to loosen up and start to cook things, it can become a great stress reliever, a pleasure, a way to process your your life and the features of your day. Ruhlman goes on: "..spending at least a few days a week preparing food with other people around, enjoying it together, is one of the best possible things in life to do, period. It's part of what makes us human. It makes us happy in ways that are deep and good for us. Fast and easy has nothing to do with it."

And when you don't want to cook anything time-consuming or complex, improvising with real food is in fact surprisingly fast and easy (dare I say?). Quick oats in little individually packaged bags, at outrageous prices? Regular oatmeal can be made in less than five minutes flat. Saute your ramps, eat an apple. Slow down and chew your food.

While you're at it (and while I'm dispensing commands): make sure that your melons stay round. Filling up every last inch of space in the fridge (or on the shipping truck) isn't high on my list. I do think those melons, in some sort of recyled material, might make a nice building material: their patterns remain quite reptilian and appealing.

Ramp it up for local greens

2010-04-28T05:58:00.000-07:00

Daughter Number Three participated in No Impact Week last week, a project of Colin Beavan (author of No Impact Man), described as a "one week carbon cleanse." She wrote about trash, energy use, local food, water conservation, and transportation, warning that it could be TMI week at her blog: the sustainable, like the political, has its highly personal dimension.

Wednesday, April 21, was Local Food Day, with the challenge to eat only local food. She posted this wonderful photo of ramps from Wisconsin, and confessed to also eating fiddleheads from ostrich ferns (I wonder what those taste like?), and sorrel pesto made from a plant in her yard (sounds delicious). Let's hear it for all the pestos and green sauces: basil, cilantro, parsley, sorrel, thyme, chives, oregano, marjoram, sage, mint. Horseradish greens are also amazing, with a strong spicy taste.

My friend Cheryl reminds me that Barbara Kingsolver's book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is a great place to read about asparagus and ramps (next up: garlic scapes) as harbingers of spring. I have the book, and that's my sign – time it crack its spine.

I ate ramps, asparagus, and local egg for breakfast: it was divine.

Mint sauce, like poetry, deserves a revival

2010-04-27T14:42:00.000-07:00

Okay, folks – here is more about mint sauce, from our friends at Wikipedia. I am determined to place it on the table, as did Seamus Heaney's mum. With a bit of local lamb, or some new spring peas. Notice the line here about how this sort of sauce "became less common and mostly died out as Europe entered the Modern Era." (That's anything after the Middle Ages, apparently.)

I did have mint sauce at Sunday dinners in Ireland with Eithne and Fred Kiberd, parents of Declan, Damian, and Marguerite. Eithne, like Heaney's mother, would have known and been able to perpetuate the secrets of an older way of life, one that included an admiration for all that rife mint.

I just planted six kinds of mint a weekend before last, purchased at the beautiful expanded garden center at the East Bloomingfoods. Now I have a chokecherry bush waiting for a bit of digging. Here are 10 Essential Herbs to Grow.

This is what I love about Heaney: there is always both a poetic and a practical application to his lines, appealing to the eager part of the mind, as well as to the digger's hunched rump.

•••

Mint sauce is a sauce made from finely chopped mint leaves, soaked in vinegar, and a small amount of sugar. Occasionally, the juice from a squeezed lime is added. The sauce should have the consistency of double cream. In UK and Irish cuisine it is traditionally used as a complement to roast lamb (but usually not other roast meats) or, in some areas, mushy peas. Mint sauce can sometimes be used in recipes in place of fresh mint. For instance, it can be added to yoghurt to make a mint raita. "Sweet and sour" sources such as Mint sauce, and Cranberry sauce were common throughout Medieval Europe, (with the use of mint being more common in French and Italian cuisine of the period than that of the English ^[1]), however they became less common and mostly died out as Europe entered the Modern Era^[2] ^[3].

References

^ The Medieval Kitchen: Recipes from France and Italy by Odile Redon, Françoise Sabban, Silvano Serventi, translated by Edward Schneider, University of Chicago Press, 2000, ISBN 0226706850, 9780226706856, page 107
^ http://www.practicallyedible.com/edible.nsf/pages/medieval!opendocument&startkey=medieval
^ Cooking in Europe, 1250-1650 by Ken Albala, Greenwood Publishing Group, 2006 ISBN 0313330964, 9780313330964, page 15

External links

This condiment-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.

Seamus Heaney's 'Mint': snippets for the eager parts of the mind

2010-04-26T19:42:00.000-07:00

On request, prompted by a question, the last poem Seamus Heaney read here on April 15th was "Mint," from The Spirit Level, reprinted below:

MINT

It looked like a clump of small dusty nettles
Growing wild at the gable of the house
Beyond where we dumped our refuse and old bottles:
Unverdant ever, almost beneath notice.

But, to be fair, it also spelled promise
And newness in the back yard of our life
As if something callow yet tenacious
Sauntered in green alleys and grew rife.

The snip of scissor blades, the light of Sunday
Mornings when the mint was cut and loved:
My last things will be first things slipping from me.
Yet let all things go free that have survived.

Let the smells of mint go heady and defenceless
Like inmates liberated in that yard.
Like the disregarded ones we turned against
Because we'd failed them by our disregard.

-- Seamus Heaney

Note how "defenceless" is spelled the British way, more easily suggesting a "fence" pun around the trope of liberation and letting go. This poem linked back to Heaney's first ("Digging") and to the topic of memory:

My last things will be first things slipping from me. Yet let all things go free that have survived.

Heaney's mother made sauce from the mint; he made a kind of music:

The given line, the phrase or cadence which haunts the ear and the eager parts of the mind, this is the tuning fork to which the whole music of the poem is orchestrated, that out of which the overall melodies are worked for or calculated. [from Heaney's essay "The Makings of a Music: Reflections on Wordsworth and Yeats" in Preoccupations.]

Look how that poem moves from the small green beloved-yet-underestimated sauntering thing (every time the word "saunter" appears in Irish literature we have a vivid echo of Joyce, who "owns" that word) – like a mint plant sending out tenacious underground runners. It concludes with another "last thing": the disregarded/discarded "ones we turned against/ because we'd failed them by our disregard."

We turn against "the disregarded ones" and not the other way around, because of our failure to regard, to notice. It's a poem that ponders the enduring appeal of those "almost beyond notice" things (or "ones") we often neglect, that might nonetheless be ripe/rife for transformation .

A few fresh minted snippets of memory, reshaped and arranged – for the eager parts of the mind.

Seamus Heaney at Indiana University

2010-04-25T19:36:00.000-07:00

Seamus Heaney visited Indiana University on April 15th, with conversation and poetry. "Famous Seamus!" It was a wonderful occasion – a packed hall in the Fine Arts Auditorium, a hushed awe, excited buzz. His tender wry voice, enduring words, verbs and verbiness ("all verb"), stocky nouns, the arch of a life story in which themes are elaborated and refined, dug up, returned to the ground of poetry over time. He talked about that.

The rhyme in time: the same words repeated, loaded, downloaded, delivered to new ears. The familiar cadence of his voice. His wit, humility. The aging process doing its work on an enduring specimen. White hair now. A right hardy specimen of a man.

Sweetness. He gave me a little wave as he got in the black car and was driven off after the reading. I've seen him a few other times in my lucky life, in Ireland and Minnesota, though that's all quite a long time ago now. And the next time? I hope there is one, somehow.

Heaney began, as he often does, with the poem he says was his first, "Digging." This video catches him reciting that poem in various moments over the years. (Thanks to Jenny for passing it along. Image courtesy of Indiana University.)

Switching Landscapes: April showers came down

2010-04-24T14:07:00.000-07:00

Back in sweet home Indiana, where we are having a lot of rain. Switching landscapes pretty dramatically. Along came this poem from Jade:

April showers came down. Not a real shower. Just a watering can. I was so happy, I started singing in the rain.

Here, it's a real shower, steady all day.

Last morning in the Sonoran desert

2010-04-23T06:52:00.000-07:00

The last morning on my green patio chair, listening to and watching the birds fly in and out of their spots in the saguaros. We've been staying in little casitas here at the White Stallion Ranch, with a broad boulevard of cactus in the garden outside the door.

Yesterday we took a long desert horseback ride, back to a destination of Rattlesnake beer and Cheetos. (I like Cheetos, but don't like Doritos: Queen Anne is addictive.)

Russell, the owner, was out on the trail with the beer coolers, ready to visit and tell stories about years on the ranch: how cool was that? This place is family-owned, by smart people who are right there at dinner, on the desert outposts, in the saddle, even teaching guests how to throw a rope. They seem to take great care in keeping the place real and the service personable: a fantastic spot for a vacation or something like Dialogue.

There have been quite a few people from England and Germany here, their flights disrupted by the Icelandic volcano. "It could be worse!" they say, over common meals on the patio and in the dining hall.

The staff here will get you up on a horse pretty quickly, too. It's true that on a horse you see the wide and shallow view, the panoramic view (as a horse does, sort of, but not really), whereas when walking you have to be so much more focused on your feet, narrow and deep.

Crisp and cool today...and then comes my plane ride, the aerial view. Kind of hard to say goodbye to the desert and the wonderful people I've met. Like summer camp for adults. (I like summer camp, but I don't like leaving – that's the feeling, even in April.)

Saguaros stand tall in the Sonoran Desert

2010-04-22T21:37:00.000-07:00

Yesterday morning we walked back into Saguaro National Park until we came to a grove of mostly old saguaros. Saguaros have long arms supporting arms supporting arms supporting arms, though it takes as long as 60-75 years for them to develop their first one. They become homes for gila woodpeckers, purple martins, house finches, and gilded flickers. Scar tissue nests form in the saguaro accordian-like skin. We saw just a few of the wonderful blossoms, the Arizona state flower.

This is the cactus we drew as a kid, though it only exists in a relatively small area (and not at all in Texas). Note the unusual one with the crossbars, below.

Two shots of Hat Mountain...(and one of tequila)

2010-04-21T13:55:00.000-07:00

Dialogue in the Desert: We started the day at 5am with a hike in the Saguaro National Park. The desert is in bloom with an unusual number of wildflowers just now.

Here are two views of Hat Mountain – one with the sun coming up, and the other a couple of hours later. We also visited a grove of saguaros. More on that tomorrow.

Oh – and what happened yesterday, on a "learning from horse sense theme" here at White Stallion Ranch. I had a chance to practice "moving the feet" of a palomino named Peaches, eventually convincing her to follow me. That was a fascinating experience.

Later, our team wrangled three longhorn cattle into their pen, in 38 seconds flat. Pretty good for people who hadn't been on horses for years.

Just had a hayride to a cook-out, in the wind, with shots of tequila and grapefruit juice. All part of a necessary acclimation to the dude ranch life.

Sunrise Desert Meditation

2010-04-20T07:23:00.000-07:00

We walked out into the desert this morning, past the grazing longhorns, to meditate as the sun rose, and to hear some flute music. Peace.

Just a couple of photos from yesterday, then I am under orders to power down. It promises to be a beautiful day here in the desert.

Dialogue in the Desert Early Morning Bird Calls

2010-04-19T06:18:00.000-07:00

Early morning in the Sonoran desert in Arizona means bird sounds – mourning doves, starlings, so many more – flying in and out of their apartments in the tall saguaro cactus. A beautiful little golden white long-eared rabbit just hopped by. I hear the snorting of horses, too.

I'm at the White Stallion Ranch this week for Joe Williams' Dialogue in the Dessert workshop...powering down with the electronics, but up with the sensory apparatus. Off to a dude ranch breakfast and then a full day of learning with folks from Canada, the US, and Australia. Outside my little casita is a glorious cactus garden, in flower thanks to rains this past year.

Many thanks to friends LuAnne and Bill for introducing me to this experience, and to Joe, for making it all happen!

Desert Sculpture

2010-04-18T14:54:00.000-07:00

Time and space travel: I've relocated for six days to a dude ranch outside of Tuscon, home of extraordinary natural sculpture. I'll let the photos speak for themselves.

Tomato? Potato? Calling for a Real Food Revolution

2010-04-17T10:48:00.000-07:00

This video hints at why I so appreciate "Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution". (Please click on that link and take a few seconds to signal your support for healthier eating.) I've had similar experiences with kids in elementary schools, and it is always surprising to learn how little they know about fruits and vegetables. Wouldn't a curriculum with food at its thematic center have cross-disciplinary value in life skills, health, social studies, history, reading, writing, math, science, and art? We all have to eat. (Oh, and economics, too.)

Every March, I serve Fruits of the World to fourth graders at the Lotus Blossoms Bazaar, in a booth sponsored by my food co-op. I'm shocked by how many have never tasted a kiwi, a mango, or even a mandarin orange, grapefruit, or tangerine. Some kids can't pull themselves away from the booth once they get a taste of real fruit. They bounce back all day long with a twinkle in their eyes, letting me know they are ready for another sample. Bounce, twinkle: fruit energy is palpable.

I think children have a craving for real food. We use their so-called aversion to new tastes as an excuse for under-nourishing them, and it's just laziness (and selfishness – greed) on the part of adults. We have a responsibility to do better, and Jamie Oliver is pretty adamant about that. It's so good to see this on tv. Can it make a difference? That's up to us.

Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution takes aim at school lunches

2010-04-16T19:02:00.000-07:00

It's a Friday night thing for me now: checking in with Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution, the reality tv show set in Huntington, West Virginia, a place Oliver refers to (somewhat inaccurately) as "the fattest city in the fattest country in the world."

Tonight he is meeting with hospital representatives, making a pitch for money. They point out how damaging it may be for Huntington to be identified with obesity. But Oliver is vehement about bringing change to the town, teaching people how to cook, and building a common commitment to fresher foods.

The show is sponsored in part by Wal-Mart, Bene-fiber, and Scott's Lawn Chemicals, so one has to wonder just how progressive its message can be. Cynical perspective: it's a green-washing opportunity for advertisers. On the other hand, I am convinced by Oliver's energy and the adamant passion he brings to the seemingly impossible task of improving school lunches. He boldly jumps in, takes risks, uses his foreignness to his advantage, and makes direct personal in-your-face appeal to those people who resist his efforts. The goal is "fresh food, cooked from scratch, on-site."

Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution brings to a broad mainstream audience bold criticisms of sugared milk, trans-fats, and what he calls "horrible processed foods." It exposes the the bureaucratic issues and "state regs" that hinder change: the notion that kids need calcium from milk and will only drink it if it's altered with sugar and strawberry or chocolate flavors, the idea that french fries are a healthy vegetable, and so on.

Learn more at the site for the show, and while there, sign the petition! It's interesting to see where the signatures accumulate: still only 5872 from Indiana so far.

Landscape Re-Mix at the Walker Art Center

2010-04-15T00:02:00.000-07:00

Last weekend it was possible to drop off electronic waste at Indiana University to have it hauled away to be recycled. I read one comment about how someone dropped off an overhead projector: "I hadn't seen one of those in years."

Watching this very charming video, made by the landscape design studio ROLU, of a Designing Play! event at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, made me want to acquire an overhead projector of my own. In the hands of artists, the old technology tools can be remixed to very useful, beautiful, and contemporary effect. The tool is always only what we make of it.

The music is called "Coloring" by Lullatone. Lullatone "makes loopable lullabies for babies (and adults)" and has an album called Songs that Spin in Circles. If you click here to go to their Raindrop Melody Maker, you just might get lost in a splish splash of happiness and bliss.

This event look place last February, so there is snow outside those windows. Viewed through our windows today, the redbuds and apple trees are blooming. But who wants to be inside, looking out? Spring escapes into the landscape, the Earth having spun its birth circle again.

Many thanks to Nina Hale for tweeting this link.

No Impact Week begins on April 18th

2010-04-14T01:06:00.000-07:00

There's a No Impact Week coming up, starting Sunday April 18th. I won't be able to participate this week (I have some exciting travel plans that coincide exactly with the challenge), but I'll be watching the blog when I return, and will probably try it week after next.

I know that for me this experiment will work much better as a result of having seen the film No Impact Man, so if you are interested in the challenge, I'd recommend starting there. Once you register, which you can do from a link at Colin Beavan's blog, you'll be able to download ("but don't print out") a guide to five daily steps, with a page of ideas and resources to help you with that day's challenge.

Day one, Sunday, is a reflection on consumption. To kick off, the project recommends watching Annie Leonard's video The Story of Stuff. That's another thing I've wanted to do. One nifty aspect of No Impact Week is that it rounds up resources you can explore in blog-space conversation with a cohort of others engaged with the project. There are some face-to-face events in New York City, and you can become a local No Impact ambassador in your own community too.

Cool! Regarding consumption: one thing I started to do this past January was aim for at least four Buy Nothing Days per week. This is an interesting way to develop awareness about spending. When tempted to buy something, anything (even an apple) I weigh it against the thrill of adding another Buy Nothing Day to my calendar.

I try to cluster shopping trips onto particular days, making it easy to then track purchases. For example, I might go to the co-op for groceries on a day when there is a farmers market next to it, so I can consolidate my shopping. I'll try to fill the car with gas that day too. If I'm aiming to Buy Nothing for five more days, I'll be more conscious of how much gas I'm using, cutting back on aimless or extraneous trips. This is a great way to curtail impulse purchases of all kinds, creating more consciousness around spending.

Just a statistic from The Story of Stuff, found in the No Impact Week guide: "Ninety-nine per cent of the stuff we harvest, mine, process, transport – ninety-nine per cent of the stuff we run through this production system is trashed within six months." Can this really be true? It's a shocking statistic. Every little bit less is something I can easily buy into.

Real Life in the age of the Interweb

2010-04-13T03:32:00.000-07:00

Tom Tomorrow's clever commentary on decorum distinctions between so-called "Real Life" and the Internet, published at Salon. Anonymity makes it so easy to be rude, our attention spans are short, and empathy can be an elusive commodity.

On the other hand, it's also a place where you may just experience the kindness of strangers or distant friends, as I have so frequently here. Thanks for clicking over to elenabella!

Remembering my grandmother Mary

2010-04-12T18:21:00.000-07:00

It's April 12th, the birthday of my grandmother Mary, who would have been 103. She died at age 97; it doesn't seem that long ago. I have many memories of this grandmother, but had no photos of her in my computer. Mom just sent these: Mary's high school graduation picture (at age 16), and one of the last pictures taken, of Mary in her 90s on the occasion of an all class reunion in Milton, North Dakota. The last alive from her graduation class (and, eventually, the last remaining sibling in her family), Mary was the grand marshall of the parade they had for the celebration. My mother observes: "So both of these photos are school photos!"

I think of her quite often, especially at this time of year. Lilacs in bloom remind me of her, as does the Easter season.

Mary managed to live on her own until the very last weeks of her life, keeping her sharp mind, sense of humor, and interest in other people. She made hundreds of gifts during her lifetime, knitting and crocheting, embodying a sense of both thrift and generosity. She was very practical, fair, and engaging, working as an English teacher for many years. I miss her, and continue to feel her presence in my life. This late photo brings with it the tone of her voice and the sound of her laugh.

No Impact Man has big ripple effects

2010-04-11T19:52:00.000-07:00

Just home from two screenings of No Impact Man, the film featuring the "no impact family" of Colin Beavan, Michelle Conlin, and their endearing, adaptable daughter, Isabella. If you read my post of the other day, you'll know I was somewhat apprehensive about the eco-extremity of this project: a year of only locally grown food, no electricity, no public transportation, no toilet paper, and so on – from the heart of New York City, no less.

It's a wonderful movie, and I'll make a few observations and comments.

First, the toilet paper. I don't think it's as hard as one would think to make a switch to something else. I just searched for more about cloth toilet wipes, and found a good post from way back in 2006, at Walk Slowly Live Wildly (where I found the photo on the right). No Impact Man doesn't dwell much on the issue of toilet paper, though it shows the couple speculating about the implications of going without, feeling uneasy about assumptions people may make about hygiene. It's the lack of toilet paper that got picked up as a headliner in the New York Times when the No Impact project was publicized there. (I guess the family's solution involved only water and air drying.)

The film doesn't talk much about the family dog, so I was curious about the experiment with regard to pet ownership. It was a great project to undertake with this particular two-year-old, an amenable child who demonstrates wonderful flexibility. The scene when Beavan explains to Isabella that they will not be using toilet paper is worth the price of admission – a lovely inversion of the conversation most parents have with kids of that age.

I was relieved to see them ease into the project in phases, waiting a while to turn out the lights. Both parents struggle with the project and discuss it in revealing, honest conversations. Michelle's ambivalence is very understandable and her story holds the film together; she comes to find more value than expected in the changes that occur as the year goes by. She talks about how long the days become once the lights are out and the air conditioner off in summer, and she huddles under the covers in winter, reading by candlelight. She looks forward to story time with her daughter again, aided by a bedside lamp.

The film made me think about how I washed all of my clothes for one year in the bathtub in Ireland, stomping on them much as the family does in this show, and hanging them on wooden racks, where they would dry slowly over a number of days. (Hanging them outside on the clothesline on the roof resulted in coal-speck-covered clothes that were dirtier than before.) I huddled under the comforter, too, heating one room at a time.

Beavan is so committed to the project, without being too overbearing, and there is a bit of play in their no impact "system", humanizing the film. They are not purists, but are giving us an intimate glimpse of the messiness of their lives. Their apartment appears somewhat chaotic, with books piled high on the shelves. They aren't minimalists living an inaccessible aspirational life, but parents with work to do and the complications of competing desires.

The couple negotiates and explores the value of their decisions, showing us both frustration and joy. They aren't prescribing specifics so much as challenging us to imagine different, more creative ways to live, whether in a large city or elsewhere. It's a great test of both object and human relations, showing the unexpected benefits that may occur with a conscious step away from excessive consumption. The project asks us to ask: what do we truly want and need?

Soup Bowl Benefit 2010 captured on video by Duane Busick

2010-04-10T06:51:00.000-07:00

Videographer Duane Busick (whose community videos I've mentioned before) has made another wonderful short video, about the annual Soup Bowl Benefit in the town where I live (just click that link to watch). Phil, who works at Bloomingfoods East, organizes the kitchen for this highly successful, soul-warming occasion.

I like what potter Karen Green Stone (shown in the photo below at the microphone) says in the video about the value of one particular bowl – a tangible object made from ancient clay, shaped by an artisan, fired in the kiln of a friend, finally selected by a Soup Bowl visitor. Here's more history, from Duane:

16 years ago Robert Meitus and Carrie Newcomer brought an idea for a community fundraiser home to Bloomington, Indiana. That idea became the Soup Bowl Benefit, now one of the most popular events in Bloomington, Indiana, providing the largest contribution to the Hoosier Hills Food Banks annual operating budget. Over 30 local artisans contribute hundreds of handmade pottery bowls, local restaurants donate an array of delicious soups, and local bakers provide bread and cookies. Carrie Newcomer's song "If Not Now" introduces the video.

Here are photos from a previous Soup Bowl, capturing some of the spirit of this annual occasion. Now we can watch the video for the more complete story – thank you, Duane!

Google Imitates Jackson Pollock

2010-04-09T04:33:00.000-07:00

Shortly after writing about Pi Day on Sunday March 14th, I discovered an essay in the Sunday New York Times T magazine called "Google's Doodles." The author, Alice Rawsthorn, talks about the Google tradition of creating day-specific logos, and the possible broader implications for branding and design. Google, she argues, pushes against the "consistency imperative" (my words) that typically rules under Apple/Nike-style branding. Instead, many of its day-specific logos seem casual, or even amateur in their execution. Yet they fit, somehow, under the wide sweep of the Google identity.

The image used for that article, courtesy of Google, is a take on a Jackson Pollock painting. Of all the day-specific Google logos, this more subtle one is my favorite. It reminds me of a Smithsonian magazine article by Henry Adams, from November 2009, about his wife Marianne Berardi's discovery of a hidden Pollock signature in the 1943 painting Mural. Because the letters in both images are so obscured, they evoke the very act of "searching." Rev up your search engines, and look carefully behind the lines.

Managing the many human obligations – with help from a spring meditation

2010-04-08T05:14:00.000-07:00

My mind is drawing a blank: good for a Buddhist, bad for a blogger. Actually, my head is way too full: corralling many details. And our basement flooded in last night's torrents of rain, so we literally had to sweep water down the drain, under the ground. Ground water. It's an interesting form of zen practice.

How to be mindful when you have a head full of strands to connect? That's the challenge of our time, but probably of earlier times, too, in different ways. Wanting to empty the head, the cup, the vessel, the calendar, in order to fill it with something fresh. To experience completion and calm. To tap into the flow state of mental wonder and emotional beauty. To find time to reset.

What do you do – to pause, complete, move on, renew, manage the many human obligations? Give me a tip...

••••

In the meantime, voting closes today over at SAFE: Soap Artisan Friends of Etsy, where there is a poetry writing contest going on. Soapmakers have written poetry in the hopes of scoring some soap supplies. I love this poem by Laura Natusch of Urban Eden; run over there and give her a vote!

(Here is a little "How to Vote" tutorial: First you click on comments. Then you post a comment saying who you vote for. You'll have to do the word verification thingie. And then – this might be the tricky part – you need to choose an identity. This was easy for me because I have both a blogger account and a google account. If you don't, you'll have to register to be able to post. That involves choosing an online identity and giving them an e-mail address – so they know it's not the same person voting more than once. If you've ever made a comment here at elenabella, you're all set up: just use that process. If you are new to this, once you vote over at SAFE, you'll be all set to join the comment gallery over here – which would be terrific!)

An interesting thing about switching to only bars of handmade soap – not only are they wonderful for your skin, but they seem to last much longer than those liquid soaps in plastic dispensers. I see them as good luck talismans for self and household care. Maybe for mindfulness, too, especially when combined with meditations such as the one below.

Gardener's Poem:The Week Before Easter

Walking up Mountain Avenue
With my green plastic watering can,
I head towards the FRESH community garden,
Passing the abandoned pickle factory
And the stoop of a white, wind-chimed two-decker
Where two girls on cell phones
Unfurl their bare arms.

Salsa from the Super Fiesta Market
Mingles with sparrow song

And I think of the squirrel who, earlier this morning,
Raided my compost pile, burying her face
In an avocado with such bliss

That, reading the sign in front of the Madry Temple Church,
I can almost believe
No bunny loves you like Jesus.

Maybe today the pac choi will have sprouted?

Dandelions muscle their way through cracked sidewalks.
Forsythia swells yellow

And when, in my raised bed I find
Not pac choi, but pea seeds
Wrinkling their noses in the unexpectedly dry air,
I tuck them back under their blanket of soil,
Telling them, "Hush. Be patient. Wait
'Til you see what's coming."

Laura Natusch

Happy Birthday, Johno! Peeper sounds abound in April

2010-04-07T00:44:00.000-07:00

It's the birthday of my brother John, so here's a shout out to him: Happy Birthday, Johno!

I've always thought of April 7th as lucky, marked by his birth in Albert Lea, Minnesota, early in the morning on a spring day, back when I was 7 years old.

April is National Frog Month, and so I went in search of some images for John, whose daughters are fond of frogs and toads. The Smithsonian website has a good collection of amphibians.

A number of facebook friends posted this collective poem. One comment read: "Somewhere I have a haiku about daffodils as the sound of peepers made visible."

I'm lifting their words for a first blog publication, crediting the authors below. A little gift for my bro, musician with a keen ear for natural sounds and peeper songs. Thank you, facebook friends... And hey, poets: weigh in and tell us just how you wrote this poem!

The peeper frogs of April nights
sound like Spring.
Exactly!
They sound
the way the tiny
fat buds on the tree branches look,
and the way the first whiff of thawing grass
smells and like a friendly
alarm clock for your sense of possibility
after the long huddle of winter. I love peepers.

I would wear one as a brooch
if I could.

They sound like
Nothing else.

Music to my ears!
I always wave wildly to them
but I can never tell if they wave
back. So tiny.

Like the stars whistling for the comets
to come home. Like tulip tree fingers
ttrumming harp strings of rain.

Brooch indeed!
Hat brims of peeper songs
spilling over in the dark.

by Julia Dadds, Chuck Rogers, Carolyn VanderWiele, Nell Weatherwax, Melodie Hudson, Lisa Wheeler-Lovell, Diane Kondrat

The Eco-Extremity of 'No Impact Man'

2010-04-06T00:38:00.000-07:00

I have to admit, I've been somewhat skeptical about No Impact Man: the movie, the book, the blog, the hefty no-impact apparatus. Maybe it's the hype about the Prada-loving wife. Maybe it's apprehension about people who seem too eco-aggressive (while their egos are clearly high impact). Nonetheless, I'm curious. So I helped arrange a special screening next Sunday, at the Buskirk-Chumley Theater here in Bloomington, Indiana.

I haven't yet seen the movie, but it has gotten a good bit of attention, with more screenings this month around Earth Day. Lower impact lifestyles are all the rage right now – but what does it feel like to really adopt one? Are they sensible, or simply sensationalist?

Whether you are eco-conscious or just eco-anxious (or in a state of eco-denial) you might also be curious about Colin Beavan, a self-described “liberal schlub who got tired of listening to himself complain about the world without ever actually doing anything about it.”

Several years ago, in November, 2006, Beavan began a year-long “No Impact Project” in which he, his wife Michelle Conlin, and his then two-year-old daughter (and their four-year-old dog) went off the grid, attempting to live in the middle of New York City with as little environmental impact as possible.

No Impact Man tells the story of that year: its challenges, humorous moments, and the difficult choices demanded by a lower impact lifestyle. The rules of the game were: no more electricity, no more automated transportation, no more non-local food, no more conspicuous consumption. (There’s even something in there about toilet paper.) Begging the question: can you do this kind of thing without driving yourself or your family crazy?

The goal was to attract broad public attention to a range of pressing environmental issues – food system sustainability, climate change, water scarcity, and materials and energy resource depletion.

If you’ve ever wondered how far your should stretch your own lower-impact efforts (or rolled your eyes when a relative or friend suggested using a solar oven instead of the gas grill), you might enjoy this vicarious plunge into eco-extremity.

No trash, no toxins in the water, no elevators, no subway, no product packaging, no air-conditioning, no television...the list goes on. You can learn more about how the family is living today at Beavan’s blog. And if you live in or near Bloomington, please join me on Sunday April 11 at the BCT! (Special pricing for members of Bloomingfoods.)

Speaking of orchards, here's 'Real Homegrown Spaghetti'

2010-04-05T00:01:00.000-07:00

Speaking of orchards: my brother passed along this charming video, with a note that it was shown on April 1st in Jazzie's school. If you've ever wondered where the very highest quality pasta comes from, now you know!

Here is more information about this elegant little video, as well as access to a higher quality version of the segment:

On April 1, 1957 the British television programme Panorama broadcast a three-minute segment about a bumper spaghetti harvest in southern Switzerland. The success of the crop was attributed both to an unusually mild winter and to the virtual disappearance of the spaghetti weevil. The audience heard Richard Dimbleby, the shows highly respected anchor, discussing the details of the spaghetti crop as they watched video footage of a Swiss family pulling pasta off spaghetti trees and placing it into baskets. The segment concluded with the assurance that, For those who love this dish, theres nothing like real, home-grown spaghetti.

The Swiss Spaghetti Harvest hoax generated an enormous response. Hundreds of people phoned the BBC wanting to know how they could grow their own spaghetti tree. To this query the BBC diplomatically replied, Place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best.

To this day the Panorama broadcast remains one of the most famous and popular April Fools Day hoaxes of all time. It is also believed to be the first time the medium of television was used to stage an April Fools Day hoax.

Since 1955 Panorama had been anchored by Richard Dimbleby, whose authoritative, commanding presence had made him one of the most revered public figures in Britain. If Dimbleby said it, people trusted that it was true. Which is one of the reasons why the spaghetti harvest hoax fooled so many viewers. His participation lent the hoax an air of unimpeachable authority.

Almost no one else at the BBC knew about it. The segment was not mentioned at all in the pre-transmission publicity handouts.

The line-up for that days show included a long segment about Archbishop Makarios, leader of the Greek Cypriots, and a clip of the Duke of Edinburgh attending the premiere of the war film The Yangtse Incident.

The second-to-last segment was about a wine-tasting contest, and then it came time for the spaghetti harvest.

Dimbleby, sitting on the set of Panorama, looked into the camera and without a trace of a smile said: And now from wine to food. We end Panorama tonight with a special report from the Swiss Alps.

The screen cut away to the prepared footage. When it was all over, Dimbleby reappeared and said, Now we say goodnight, on this first day of April. He emphasized the final phrase.

Panorama never attempted another April Fools Day spoof, despite numerous calls for a sequel. However, the hoax did inspire a number of similar stunts in its honour.

This film footage is from the Archive Collection held and administered by the Alexandra Palace Television Society: APTS ~Preserving the televisual past for the digital future.

Happy Easter! A Community Orchard is in the works

2010-04-04T05:08:00.000-07:00

This glorious image also came from Lois, on the day I purchased a cherry tree to plant in our yard. She writes:

Having enjoyed "April in February" here in the Pacific Northwest, we are now being treated to "February in April" and are confused as to which of the two months is actually crueler. But the cherry trees are in bloom, and "wearing white for Easter tide."

Here in Bloomington, the magnolias are in full flower. And we are trying to win a community orchard! Here is the scoop on that effort, started by Amy Countryman, mother, farmer, and student in the IU School of Public and Environmental Affairs. YOU can help us with a simple voting process. Go to the site mentioned here, and click on VOTE at City of Bloomington Parks and Recreation Department. Just repeat once per day until the end of April. (! I know, it sounds like a lot to ask.)

As you can see, there is a lot of enthusiasm and excitement about this project. And, as my friend Jane put it, the voting process is "very testosterone-y!" We are currently in the nail-biting number one position, with one close challenger.

Your Community Orchard Team is in full force and we need your help!

Vote online and play a simple, yet critical, role in winning Bloomington a grant for a FREE FRUIT ORCHARD which will provide free fruit to the entire community. *We need to vote through April 30th.

Vote for the Bloomington Community Orchard at Communities Take Root EVERYDAY until April 30 (11:59 p.m. PT). Make it your home page and make it simple for yourself to make a major contribution.

For more information about the Bloomington Community Orchard visit us online at
Facebook. For more information about the free trees and other support this grant will provide for our Orchard, please see the "participant submission" and "application" documents which will soon uploaded to our Facebook page.

In Bloomington, Indiana, our budding community orchard is about the future. It is about leaving a legacy for generations to enjoy. But it is also about right now. It is about finding others who share a vision of abundance and coming together to make one patch of the earth a better place for everyone. The orchard will contribute to Bloomington’s food security, inspire joyful community engagement, and educate citizens while making sustainability delicious.

The City of Bloomington has offered support and a spacious site adjacent to our largest and oldest community garden, a public park, and the YMCA. The first public meeting for the orchard, held in February at City Hall, was standing room only. Participants are eager to put their expertise, resources, and physical labor into the creation and maintenance of the public orchard. Work groups are establishing the administrative and operational structures needed to allow the orchard to thrive. Bloomington's People's University is offering a low-cost course on orcharding to create a core of educated volunteers to care for the trees.

To ensure that fruit from the trees will reach those in need, Bloomington Community Orchard is partnering with the Hoosier Hills Food Bank Gleaning Program, which harvests surplus crops on local farms to feed those who are hungry. Strong traditions of community gardening already exist in Bloomington, offering educational opportunities; free, fresh, nutritious food; and beauty for all to enjoy. We are ready for our Community Orchard. All we need now are the trees.

Happy Birthday, Bü, with both pink and blue

2010-04-03T15:51:00.000-07:00

It's the birthday of my father-in-law, Friedrich: happy birthday, Bü! Last year I posted one of my favorite family photos, a picture of Friedrich (on the left) with his older brother Peter. (He looks so much like Jack in this photo.) They were the two oldest boys in a large family, born in the late 20s in Germany.

Bü's birthday coincided with a message from Lois, a friend of my mother's (who, like my mom, spent her childhood and youth in North Dakota). She shared this, on the topic of color coding for infants:

Your blog on the color pink reminds me of my bewilderment when I first paged through my Aunt Sophy's scrapbook from the 1920s. It contained all sorts of memorabilia as well as yellowing newspaper fragments relating to engagements, weddings, and births among her long gone circle of friends. At first, I felt mildly embarrassed for the printers in North Dakota who obviously hadn't a clue that pink was for girls, blue for boys--or perhaps they were color blind.

My cousin Rodney's birth announcement (ca. 1926) [posted at the right] shows a baby swaddled in a pink-flowered blanket, and tucked into a pink basket! There were several announcements, and the color scheme was consistent. At last I went to the Internet and found that until about 1950, pink, as a watered down shade of red, a manly color, was assigned to boys; blue was considered more delicate, as well as being the color of the Virgin's robe, and hence more suitable for girls. I was so pleased to have the job printers of my home state vindicated!

Lois also sent this photo of Pulmonaria, noting that its pink buds open to blue blooms: "best of both worlds." Thank you, Lois!

One little p.s. – it's so lovely to receive messages via email from readers, especially when they include images and observations like this one. If you have a topic, link, video, or story that reminds you of with a blogpost here, please don't hesitate to contact me: ellenkmichel[at]gmail[dot]com.

Obama's notes: A lesson in expository writing

2010-04-02T00:01:00.000-07:00

Not everyone does all of their editing on a wiki page or in the computer.

This image of Obama making edits to a speech comes from Jocelyn Hale, executive director of The Loft Literary Center. It reminds me of what we used to say in composition rhetoric classes back when I taught expository writing while going to graduate school at the University of Minnesota:

• Put everything down and then begin rearranging segments and replacing words
• If it is awkward or grammatically incorrect, pause, step back and rethink your idea
• You discover what you think as you shape your thoughts and research into words on paper
• You may surprise yourself with a changed opinion
• You refine your ideas as you craft and reshape your drafts
• Sometimes it's good to step back from the computer and and add some handwritten revisions
• Think about various contexts for your text: how does it carry over?
• Try reading your piece aloud
• Share it with someone else to see if it works for your intended audience

Update on the Obama Poetic Language Initiative

2010-04-01T00:06:00.000-07:00

It's the second year of the Obama Poetic Language Initiative, a little known act signed into law by the President early in his administration, without the expressed approval of Congress. It may be a questionable use of taxpayer money – but, as the keeper of a blog on the poetics of daily life, I feel inclined to support it nonetheless. I admire Obama for keeping a promise he made to supporters of The Loft Literary Center, back in Minnesota in the early days of his campaign.

As you may recall, Obama charged the nation's poet laureate, Kay Ryan, with asking living poets to go back and expunge negativity and obscurity from famous poems of the past, with the goal of making them more accessible and transparent. For those of you who are critics of wasteful spending: to his credit, Obama made it very clear that the poets are not to be paid for their efforts. Like all artists, they do their best work when subsisting modestly on the sheer pleasure they get from practicing their craft. All of the funding for this project will be used to publish revisions of the poems in an inspirational volume, under the bipartisan leadership of Laura Bush.

A good example is the revisionary work that has now been completed on T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland", a poem that was recently modified by poet Wendell Berry. The opening line of this famous poem now reads:

APRIL is the kindest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dormant land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

Berry removed the Greek epigraph to the poem (because, after all, who reads Greek anymore): references to Hades, even in a dead language, only signal a disincentive to hope. Footnotes to poems violate the preferred protocols of the art form, requiring readers to have a frame of reference that exceeds the 100-mile radius of sincere local acute observation, the most valued perspective for a writer.

Here is the full first stanza of the new "The Wasteland." I don't think it is Berry's strongest work, but he's done an admirable job of making this a less depressing and disturbing poem.

I. THE BURIAL OF THE ONION SETS APRIL is the kindest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dormant land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with preserved jam.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Kentucky hills
With a shower of rain; we stopped near the chicken coop,
And went on in sunlight, into the garden,
And drank water, and talked for an hour.
We used words we could both understand.
And when we were children, staying just down the road,
My cousin took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, dear
Cousin, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the winter hills, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, under the cover of winter.

Let's hope the Obama Poetic Language Initiative works. It's remarkable to have a President who pays any attention to poetry at all, and inspiring to have one so dedicated to making the form more democratic, hopeful, and less obscure. We'll be watching with interest here at elenabella as poetry unfurls its patriotic wings to soar like an eagle over this great land, becoming more accessible, appropriate, and inspirational for every American.

Try this instead of pie: Sweet Potato Carrot Puff

2010-03-31T21:06:00.000-07:00

I was at an open house last New Year's Day at LuAnne's and Bill's, sun streaming across the floorboards, finches flitting around bird feeders in every last window, and Liza the dog wagging her tail, with her happy gregarious tongue hanging low. The mood was perfect for the small crowd of normally crazy-busy people: we were pushing the pause button and just hanging out.

Jan Grant brought her famous Carrot Puff, to a round of many delighted exclamations. Just the other day I ran into her again, and she promised to send me the recipe. It arrived, so I set to work cutting carrots.

Only problem was, I had run out of butter. And had only one pound of carrots. Never to be deterred...I made a Sweet Potato and Carrot Puff, with coconut oil instead of butter. It's delicious and nutritious. It made people turn away from a plate of fudge. This could be the star dessert at a Thanksgiving table. It's a beautiful color, too. Oh, and it's easy to throw together.

So – now you know what to bring to your next celebration! (I don't have a photo of the puff, but in honor of
Audobon Bill, here is a beautiful zebra finch, with sweet potato carrot colored beak, flown in from the Interweb.)

Here's the recipe from Jan, with her voice in parentheses and mine in brackets.

Carrot Puff
with a Sweet Potato and coconut oil variation

2 lbs. baby carrots [or normal ones, it makes no difference.
You can use 1 lb. each of carrots and sweet potatoes]
2 sticks of butter, melted [or use Earth Balance, or coconut butter/oil]
6 eggs
1 ½ cups sugar [I used natural raw sugar; I think that if you use sweet potatoes in the recipe, you could reduce the amount]
6 tablespoons all-purpose flour
2 tsp. baking powder
2 tsp. vanilla

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Spray a baking dish with cooking oil spray [or spread oil with a paper towel.]

Place carrots in medium-size saucepan and cover with salted water. (I use a small steamer). Bring to a boil; reduce heat and simmer, uncovered, for 20 minutes or until carrots are tender. (Again, I just steam mine in the steamer until they are tender). Drain.

Place butter (or margarine)[or coconut oil], eggs, sugar, flour, baking powder, and vanilla in blender. Add carrots a little at a time and puree the mixture. Pour into prepared baking dish. Bake at 350 degrees for approximately an hour or until the center is somewhat firm. Let stand for five minutes before serving.

Note: This may be made a day ahead and refrigerated without baking. Then bring to room temperature before baking. I’ve often served it at room temperature and it seems to go over just as well as when it’s warm.

Also, know that while it comes out of the oven somewhat puffed up on top, as it cools it will fall. Don’t worry – it tastes great!

Okay, I just ate some: this is divine. How about a Puff on an Easter Sunday?

Giving the gift of medical exam appointment scheduling

2010-03-30T00:01:00.000-07:00

I missed the CBS Cares "Give Her the Gift of a Pap Smear" commercials last Christmas and Hanukkah, mentioned by Lyle in the comments yesterday as among the worst he'd ever seen. ("Give her the gift that even Santa can't deliver.")

They were all created on the same murky brown set, with minor prop enhancements (zebra pillow equals Jewish woman, whose gift is of a "schmear"). Here's the presumptuous-but-"caring" guy who delivers the bad advice to schedule the Christmas gift of a pap smear appointment.

Just to be sure there's no sex discrimination, here's a link to the CBS Cares "Gift of a Prostate Exam" PSA, too, in both Creepy Santa and Kosher Prostate versions, complete with female faces that light up with delight at the thought of "saving prostates."

These ads remind me of the talk given by artist Sarah Sudhoff, who documented her experience with medical treatment for cervical cancer. Maybe the ads look different to someone whose life has been saved due to catching cervical cancer in time for treatment? On second thought, I bet they still look ludicrous.

(By the way, isn't "pap smear" just the weirdest and most awkward-ugly name for such an intimate procedure?)

Sudhoff is someone who has treated the subject of women's reproductive cancer (cervical, vaginal, and ovarian cancers) in a sustained and serious way, proving that an artist might explore a topic in its complexity to unveil dimensions of medical practice (for example) that are typically obscured by routines and protocals.

She also wondered whether the importance of screening for reproductive cancer (and awareness of the many women it affects) might not be lost among the barrage of pink-themed breast cancer messages in the media. ("Nothing against breast cancer awareness, but...") Sudhoff underwent so many pap smears, and spent so much time alone waiting on medical tables, that one piece of her work includes video documentation of a "I think I can just do this myself by now" self-administered one.

She said that the artwork on the wall was really there at the office where she had her exams and took this photo. It's a remarkable image to hover over someone interested in health procedures for women, and in what you might call the aesthetics of medical waste.

Prostate cancer is another story, complicated by the fact that there is more ambiguity about the value of treatment for this usually slow-growing cancer. There was a good update on this on NPR just the other day.

Okay, those are the medical PSAs of the day from elenabella!

LelliKelly: the 'world's worst commercial'... Ever?

2010-03-29T01:46:00.000-07:00

My very discerning and opinionated digital native Generation Z niece, Jazzie, posted this message to her facebook page:

I found the world's worst commercial in Japanese or Chinese or Korean or something! (No clue what the language is. But apparently this is the WORLD's worst commercial. Ever.)

She goes on to say: I really, really love this.

So we are back in the PINK with LelliKelly, makers of crappy-but-sparkly stuff for young girls. (Check out all the grammatical errors at that website). There are so many problems with the LelliKelly commercials along every axis of race, class and gender (not to mention eco-awareness) that it's hard to know just where to begin.

The girls in the ads certainly display an irrational exuberance, though, and their LelliKelly objects appear to give them access to an annoying-but-potent form of Girl Power. I can imagine their appeal, and the way it sets girls en route to those pink-striped Victoria's Secret bags. (The preteens want to be older, and the big girls want to be children again: it's an interesting tension that leaves them all back in those pink baby clothes – or does it? They do exude body confidence, but maybe it's the confidence that comes most easily when you are a spoiled babe?)

There's even a LelliKelly cookery book "with lots of suggestions and simple recipes made with seasonal produce plus invaluable nutritional information for a healthy, natural diet for all the family." Hmmm. What, no glitter or sparkles in those food items? Where's the fun in that?

Here is the video ad that Jazzie posted, and another in a German version.

Following those, my own favorite LelliKelly ad, a parodic critique, perhaps the best kind. I have to say:
I really, really love this.

But I also really, really love these boots. Your thoughts?

ReadyMade Yogurt, Redux, with a look at 'Greek' Yogurt

2010-03-28T13:52:00.000-07:00

~Revisiting a recipe from Monday, January 5, 2009

I posted this recipe over a year ago, and for several months we ate delicious homemade yogurt. Then life intervened and I lost the rhythm, until eventually homemade granola became the weekly handcrafted kitchen item. Today we had extra milk on hand, but only a dollop of yogurt, so I decided to revive the craft, as part of a rainy Sunday afternoon.

I had to call up that old post to review, so I'll paste it in below. I don't divide the quantities into two bowls covered with plastic wrap (as the recipe recommends) but place everything into a retro covered earthenware pot that is the perfect size for making a quart of yogurt.

Like any other culinary practice, this isn't hard to do, once you get the hang of it. I never lose the Voila! feeling, either, when I open the pot and see the warm transformed milk.

If you have a penchant for the denser Greek-style yogurt that is now all the rage, just strain the finished product for a few hours or overnight. It will then have a thicker consistency, one that a friend of mine says reminds her of (chocolate) mousse.

This thicker yogurt becomes yogurt cheese the drier it becomes, and can be used as a substitute for milk, sour cream, quark, or even crème fraiche (or clabber) when cooking or baking.

Greek yogurt has more concentrated protein and fewer carbs than the average American yogurt. It also contains less lactose, the sugar in dairy products that some people find difficult to digest. With any yogurt, though, the goal should be to find or make a product that is unadulterated. Add your own fresh herbs, fruits, honey or jam to flavor your yogurt, or simply eat it straight up. I avoid the wasteful little cups of yogurt that line so many dairy cases, especially those high offenders laced with additives, sugar, and gelatin. Make your own to pack smaller portions in small reusable containers if taking yogurt for lunch.

One note about the whey that is left behind when you strain yogurt: it is incredibly nutritious, so think twice before you simply discard it. Whey helps regulate spikes in blood sugar. It is highly "bioavailable" and thought to enter the blood stream faster than other sources of protein – hence the popularity of whey powder substances among athletes. Need a power boost? You can skip the whey powder and just ingest the real thing. (Think buttermilk, or kefir.)

Because of the nutritional value of whey, arguments about the superiority of Greek yogurt over "regular" yogurt are somewhat misleading. The textural and not the nutritional difference is the distinguishing feature between the two. Anyway, here's that recipe, revisited below, and another version available at EllieMay's Blog, where I found the nice photo of yogurt with walnuts.

*****

Voila! I made yogurt for the first time. I recently found a recipe in ReadyMade magazine that made it sound so easy...and then I found a crock at Goodwill that seemed perfect for the purpose. I have long wanted to make homemade yogurt, and may have even had one of those electric yogurt makers once with the little cups, so many years ago that I don't really recall. In any case, yogurt making never became a practice for me, the way I hope to make it now.

My goal is to free myself from plastic tubs, and to use Organic Valley or Traders Point organic milk, reducing the cost of organic yogurt. And to enjoy the process of transforming one thing to another, an insatiable pleasure.

So now we have 4 cups of fresh homemade organic yogurt in the fridge, with yogurt cheese not far behind. Here is the recipe from ReadyMade. If you travel to where is is archived, you'll find recipes for yogurt cheese and for a chilled yogurt soup.

CULTURE CLUB

Goodbye, plastic tubs! DIY yogurt is as simple as boiling milk
by Scott Hocker

Though yogurt bears a hard-to-shake association with health food stores and college co-ops [HEY, Scott! WTF? Get hip to the co-op, dude!] the creamy foodstuff is a delicious and versatile ingredient in the kitchen. Best of all, it’s ridiculously (and cheap) to make from scratch. All you need is a whole lot of milk, a tiny amount of all-natural store-bought yogurt, and an oven.

INGREDIENTS
1 qt. whole, lowfat, or nonfat milk
1 1/2 tbsp preservative-free, all-natural yogurt

MAKE IT
1. Preheat oven to approximately 200 degrees.
2. Pour milk into a large saucepan and bring to a boil over medium-low heat. A higher flame may be used, but the higher the heat, the more constant stirring is required to ensure the milk doesn’t scorch.
3. When the milk comes to a boil, turn down the heat until the milk is gently simmering. (Careful: milk has a tendency to boil over quickly once it reaches the boiling point.) Let simmer for approximately two minutes.
4. Take the milk off the heat and let cool until the temperature on an instant-read thermometer is between 110 and 115 degrees.
5. In a four-cup bowl, blend yogurt with approximately 1/2 cup of the milk. (Adding some of the hot liquid, but not all of it, keeps the mixture from curdling and killing off the healthy bacteria.)
6. Turn off the oven.
7. Return the yogurt-milk mixture to the saucepan and stir with the remaining milk.
8. Divide the contents between two bowls and cover each with plastic wrap.
9. Place the bowls in the oven and drape a kitchen towel over them.
10. It will take anywhere from 6 to 15 hours for the yogurt to set. If after 6 hours it hasn’t gelled, simply leave the mixture in the oven and check back about every 3 hours.
11. Once it sets, refrigerate. The longer the yogurt sits in the refrigerator, the tangier it will be.

Portia Munson's Paintings, Photographs, and Other Projects

2010-03-27T05:53:00.000-07:00

Portia Munson has a great variety of work at her website, including these photos in a series from 1994-1999, where she examines color coding as an indicator of the sex of children. Hint: one of each of the babies in these sets is a boy, and one is a girl.

There's an axial stone with teacup over there, too, looking like a metaphor for more than one marriage.

Her paintings of the past twenty years stand in formal contrast to the sensory overload of her sculptural installations. Munson isolates single objects to reveal the particulars of their structural and metaphorical implications. Here are a few of my favorites, including two that bear a link to previous posts: a small vase named "Out of the Blue" and another called "Crow." Also included here is "Angel Food" and "Dolphin Hair Clip Under Glass."

'Pink Project' by Portia Munson: establishing artistic succession

2010-03-26T21:50:00.000-07:00

Artist and critic Mira Schor called attention to the work of Portia Munson in her comments to yesterday's post about The Color Project of JeongMee Yoon. Schor raised the issue of aesthetic matrilineal indebtedness::

I know JeonMee Yoon is aware of this piece, but the closeness of her work to Munson's is almost plagiarism unless it is acknowledged -- here is an instance of matrilineage if ever there was one.

I would perhaps develop my comment in this way: that two artists would focus on the same type of gendered color coding of endless amounts of cheap every day commodities is an indicator of a general situation, but if one knows that the other did the --visually identical -- work of discovery and research already, what is her responsibility to the earlier artist?

Holland Cotter praised the "impressive debut"of Portia Munson's first NYC solo gallery show in 1994. Her Pink Project was first seen in the "Bad Girls" show at the New Museum in 1993.

Pink Project is now on display at P.P.O.W., a contemporary gallery in New York City, as part of an exhibition called Debris, with Sarah Frost and Aurora Robson (from March 20--April 24). The photo above from the exhibit shows, as Cotter puts it: "a Surrealist melding of nostalgia, humor and a somewhat creepy sensuality." Schor notes that:

It is also a very beautiful art work, in the real, as a sculpture, and also as a kind of a painting, as light hits it, as it fills your visual field, absorbs the viewer in the endless wonderment of detail while filling one's eyes with color, and its beauty, the intense visual pleasure is part of the deep significance of the piece...

More images of Munson's work are archived in a piece by Raychael Stine at a blog-with-syllabus called Collections and Archives as Creative Practice.

Schor acknowledges one distinction between the work of JeongMee Yoon and Portia Munson, in a comment that helps establish conceptual and matrilineal succession:

I would add one point: JeonMee Yoon's work emphasizes the children who are the consumer/ collectors of these objects which have been created in order to help them conform to gender stereotypes. Portia's work which came first pointed to the astounding lengths to which commodity culture went to create, uphold and benefit from stereotypical femininity -- the sheer amount and type of objects that are PINK.

Putting children into rooms with their possessions (much as Peter Wenzel and Faith D'Aluisio do with families and food in the book Hungry Planet: What the World Eats) makes us think about the documentary process of working with human subjects to investigate their particular object relations.

I experience both fascination and repulsion in relation to the work of these artists. The visual elements of all of these objects and their careful arrangement force me to think about the extraordinary investments of desire we place on chosen commodities. We relish and examine minute variations, create meaningful juxtapositions, and take pleasure in arranging sets.

Both projects prompt reflection about topics that extend far beyond the compelling formal elements of the work. They encourage conversation about arousal, commodification, waste, compulsion, and gender. (And, yes, especially in the context of feminist art – artistic indebtedness and matrilineal succession.)

I also think that experiencing Munson's work directly must provoke many memories in relation to childhood and youth, and to that almost infantile sensation we feel in when we come across objects that arouse internal mechanisms of need, demand, and desire.

Color Blind, Blinded by Color: 'The Pink and Blue Project' of JeongMee Yoon

2010-03-25T00:06:00.000-07:00

The images here are by JeongMee Yoon, a photographer from South Korea
whose work makes visible the gender divisions that so often prevail in the bedrooms of children from the time they are born. If you search for her name, dozens of pink and blue photos will appear, pictures of children surrounded by possessions in the predominant color of their childhood. These are part of her Pink and Blue Project, which she describes as exploring:

the trends in cultural preferences and the differences in the tastes of children (and their parents) from diverse cultures, ethnic groups as well as gender socialization and identity. The work also raises other issues, such as the relationship between gender and consumerism, urbanization, the globalization of consumerism and the new capitalism.

Yoon explains that The Pink and Blue Project was prompted by her five-year-old daughter "who loves the color pink so much that she wanted to wear only pink clothes and play with only pink toys and objects." She also has an eleven-year-old son, who chooses clothing from the blue hues "even though he does not seem to particularly like the color blue over other colors." A couple of her examples defy the stereotypes but reinforce the idea of having a "favorite color" (one of those ubiquitous questions during childhood): "Lola and Her Yellow Things" and "Steve and His Red Things".

Yoon's work with this concept was the subject of a New York Times piece in February 2008, where the tone is fairly effusive about "the wonderful world of color." (There is a slide show by that name there, too.) A blogpost at Daughter Number Three considers the more invasive implications of gender color-typing. DN3 also links to an interesting post by social psychologist Sam Sommers called "Gender Stereotypes and the Fast Food Drive-Thru." (One more reason to avoid giving your kids this terrible food.)

It all got me thinking about how much energy parents invest in their children's objects and identities, a topic Jesse Ellison touched on in her Newsweek piece, "My Parent's Failed Experiment with Gender Neutrality." Failed? Not so sure. At least her parents resisted the compulsion to crowd out her childhood with one preassigned color. There may be huge intangible benefits to that.

'What's Wrong With this Feminist Picture?' Nona Willis Aronowitz asks a good question

2010-03-24T12:04:00.000-07:00

The inter-generational image here is of six women staffers at Newsweek: three young women (Jesse Ellison, Jessica Bennett, and Sarah Ball), and three older women who pioneered awareness of sex discrimination at the magazine by bringing a suit against it forty years ago. Their story, "Are We There Yet?," is told in what writer Nona Willis Aronowitz calls "a long, thoughtful, and brave article written by three young Newsweek reporters, calling out their own publication for a kind of lingering sexism that’s hard to pinpoint."

The historical piece has several supplements: a library of Newsweek images called "The Visual Language of Liberation," Jesse Ellison's personal essay "My Parents' Failed Experiment in Gender Neutrality," Jessica Bennett's article "Feminism or Bust," and a photo collection called "Have Women's Rights Paid Off?"

"What's wrong with this Feminist Picture?" though, Aronowtiz asks at her blog, GirlDrive. Her criticism is mindful of the risk of feminists calling each other out, yet it is pointed and specific about one thing: "In the 3500 words total that Newsweek devoted to the future of feminism this week, amid the 10 people who are quoted in these pieces, not one woman of color shows up."

In fact there is one woman of color there, identified as ACLU attorney Eleanor Holmes Norton. She appears in a photo of that 1970 press conference when the forty-six female Newsweek employees become the first group of media professionals to sue for employment discrimination based on gender, under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. Where is she now? Norton is in her tenth term as congresswoman for the District of Columbia. (Her very impressive biography is here.) She wasn't contacted for the article, though.

Aronowitz, whose own writing is always what she calls "intersectional" regarding race, gender, sex, age, class, ethnicity, and religion, makes the astute observation that:

This happens constantly when the mainstream pubs try to cover feminism. It happened in a CNN news segment last June, where the network’s definition of feminism was Angelina Jolie, Hillary Clinton, and Gloria Steinem. It happened at a highly publicized Planned Parenthood event a few months ago called “Voices on Feminism,” which consisted of, yep, three white women.

She makes the point that there were plenty of diverse young feminists who could have been called for quotes in these stories:

Young feminists are trying not to make the same mistake that some Second Wave white feminists made of being blind to race issues. But places like Newsweek, CNN and other mainstream outlets make that a frustrating uphill struggle by painting a whitewashed, monolithic picture of feminism.

There has been some interesting fallout around this call-out. Jezebel's Irin Carmon wrote a piece called "On Looking Back and Newsweek's Incomplete Picture" picking up on Aronowitz's critique:

There is a space for media criticism in all this, and for self-criticism, and for self-revelation. And yet to have your entire, extensive editorial package focus on your magazine and its past covers, and your childhood, and your issues with the F-word — well, it's all too easy for something like this to happen. If the actual staff of Newsweek doesn't include much in the way of diversity, isn't it time to utilize those reporting skills of which the traditional media is supposed to be the last guardians?

Irin puts her faith in the Internet, if not in traditional media:

Luckily, the authors have launched an entire blog, Equality Myth, where they will have ample opportunity to present a fuller picture of what women beyond their ken are dealing with. Once again, the Internet saves us all.

So what's over at Equality Myth tonight? A picture of a broken heart, and the news that the three writers feel slighted by Jezebel. In fact, they are breaking up with her – and they don't address Aronowitz at all. They want unalloyed admiration for their six months of effort on the Newsweek pieces,
in line with their earlier life experiences as high achieving valedictorians. They're hurt and under-appreciated – by women this time. "We thought that you, like Salon, and New York Magazine, and even the Women’s Media Center, would see our piece as a brave weapon in a struggle that’s not over."

I was surprised and disappointed to see this response: "Turning the story into a statement about race is simply, well, beside the point." It seemed so completely unreflective regarding what Aronowitz and Irin had to offer by way of constructive criticism. As Aronowitz put it: "It’s not racism – it’s colorblindness. It’s failing to realize the bigger picture of what feminism means today."

A big piece of the obscured picture of feminism today is right there in the story of that one women of color who wasn't contacted by Newsweek: the woman whose riveting gaze (calmly assessing the feminist spokesperson) jumps right out of the historical photo.

Eleanor Holmes Norton is clearly one of the enduring heroes of the 1970 case, despite the fact that she was not a plaintiff. (She was the lawyer!~ giving this story a remarkable twist.) Photos at her website show her at the signing of the Lilly Ledbetter Act, welcoming same sex couples to a marriage equality event, and standing with her first Latino congressional council.

Tell me why Norton's voice in the Newsweek piece, her memories of the 1970 moment, and her reflections on intersections of race, class and sexuality around "the equality myth" would have been "beside the point."

Health Care Reform round-up, with a painting by Mira Schor

2010-03-23T00:13:00.000-07:00

Daughter Number Three rounded up a few interesting pieces regarding the passage of Health Care Reform, including a link to a post by science fiction and fantasy writer George R.R. Martin, "recounting specific cases of self-employed writers who could not get insurance, writing with anger, grief and relief."

Writer John Scalzi (who is also creative consultant for the television show Stargate: Universe) offers Health Care Passage Thoughts here. He has received 160 comments on that post, which is preceded with a preemptive note about civil commentary:

The Mallet of Loving Correction is in play as of NOW. Please be polite to each other even if you disagree with each other vehemently as to the benefit of the health care bill. Also, just as a general tip, comments that are rhetorically indistinguishable from what they would be if the GOP and the Democrats were merely football teams in the Super Bowl are likely to be mocked by me, if in fact I don’t just delete them for inanity. What I’m saying is be as smart in your comments as I know you can be. Thank you.

Daughter Number Three also tracked down a summary of the new law at Women's Voices for Change, a chart called "How the bill affects you" from The Los Angeles Times and a CNN Money story about how the bill will affect small business.

Here is a look at the 34 democrats who voted against health care reform, from Talking Points Memo, where there are many more relevant bits, including wacky RNC Chairman Michael Steele's comments to Fox News anchor Shepard Smith, captured on video: he agrees with House Minority Leader John Boehner's assertion that health care reform is akin to Armageddon.

On a more positive note: over on facebook, I learned that Annie Corrigan, co-host and producer of the NPR podcast Earth Eats, early morning radio announcer extraordinaire, and oboist (for Pete's sake!) is another one of those ubiquitously creative and hard-working people who has been uninsured. That should change now, and that alone makes me pleased.

New York artist Mira Schor, author of A Decade of Negative Thinking: Essays on Art, Politics, and Daily Life (and painter of the image here) has been posting historic videos about health care to her facebook page, including one of Teddy Kennedy from 1978. Pounding the podium in the name of health care as "a matter of right and not of privilege," Kennedy's comments about his own family's ability to pay for and "receive the very best" point to the disparities that fueled his passion for health care reform. Here is another, even earlier (1974) interview with Edward Kennedy on the topic.

An Axial Moment: Passage of Health Care Reform Legislation

2010-03-22T07:40:00.000-07:00

Last night's historic passage of Health Care Reform legislation struck me as a spectacular example of an "axial moment," as described the past two days in posts about the play Out of the Blue by Archipelago Theatre. Poet George Quasha, author of Axial Stones: an Art of Precarious Balance (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2006) writes: "Sooner or later everything turns...when the axis is open or released, things turn freely, moving in and out of balance."

The moment even had its crows, crowds of protesters outside the Capitol, and the rather bizarre shout of "Baby Killer!" cawed-out at anti-abortion Democrat Representative Bart Stupak. Congressmen John Lewis and Barney Frank were also harassed during the past few days, with vile and profane insults. Safe and civil discourse appeared to be precariously out of balance. (Joan Walsh has a good opinion piece on this topic over at Salon.)

Passage of the bill required compromise and suspended animation regarding one dimension of women's rights. A morning story on NPR by Andrea Seabrook, called "Health Care Passage Hinged on Abortion Language" describes the drama (and the irony) well.

The "bipartisan in content, but not in context" Health Care Reform bill made me want to take a look at Quasha's website for examples of Axial Stones (he is adding more each week).

Here is what Carter Ratcliff has to say in the forward to the book, about situations of precarious alignment:

Gathered into one another’s company, George Quasha’s axial stones establish a zone of riveting stillness. Yet each was brought to that shared state by a history—a tempo of events—entirely its own. It is the work of an instant to spot a likely stone, but it may take the artist days or years to see how two stones fit together to form a single piece. The fitting itself can be quick or slow. In any case, the process follows strict rules: one stone must be balanced on another, at a narrow point of contact, and no adhesive is permissible nor may either stone be modified in any way. The results are astonishing.

Click here for more axial art including a video of the axial stones in process.

Paula Rego's Crows Figure in 'Out of the Blue'

2010-03-21T02:25:00.000-07:00

The paintings of Portuguese artist Paula Rego inspired visual elements of the Archipelago Theatre play Out of the Blue, with its preponderance of crow-like black-winged women, visible in this group photo by Jay O'Berski. Images for the show were created by Jan Chambers, and music composed by Allison Leyton-Brown.

I asked Nor Hall, dramaturg for this and many other Archipelago Theater productions, why crows figured in the work. As it happens, she had written program notes to address that very question. Even though I wasn't able to see the play, I find these ideas very interesting. I'm also recalling the times of year when dozens of crows descend on our yard, taking pause in the sycamore tree and white pines, noisy and en route to somewhere.

Why Crows

The old crow sees you without looking directly at you. Crows just know. They gather in groups called a riot, a murder, a mob, a brotherhood, a court, or an assembly—cawing in judgment and making asides. Clever creatures with a complex language system, corvids roost at the periphery of our day worlds where they maintain a raucous watch on the comings and goings of human beings. They’ve been known to play ball, mimic songs, take rings, rearrange pages, shake shamanic rattles, change scenes. As tricksters and ambassadors of the wild, crows have long been regarded as messengers of fate.

Crows became essential to the show because they embody both the ordinariness and total mystery of things that happen out of the blue. When crows show up at particular moments, as they tend to--after a car accident, during a picnic--at moments along life’s continuum from catastrophe to celebration, its our signal that something has unexpectedly shifted to create an opening that wasn’t there before.

When we first started working on this piece Ellen was intrigued by the work of two artists--paintings of Paula Rego’s mid-aged dancers in black tutus standing and waiting for their moment, off-stage like crows in the wings. And the incongruously balanced stone works of poet George Quasha. He describes the axial moment that arrives suddenly to the artist who’s taken a “posture of chance.” “Sooner or later everything turns…when the axis is open or released, things turn freely, moving in and out of balance.” (Axial Stones)

His choreographic language for sculpture next to Rego’s visual images of stilled dancers gave us a way to imagine the ineffable opening, the precarious shift and sudden portal to another place that is meant when we report something as happening “out of the blue.” Our best hope is that the play will come to you that way, as a dramatic moment that captures the suspension of one state of being as it is struck by the possibility inherent in another.

“There is no breakthrough without breakage.” --N.O.Brown

But how many can we take?

Counting crows, “One is for sorrow, two is for mirth…”

--traditional crow augury

'Out of the Blue' from Archipelago Theater

2010-03-20T14:20:00.000-07:00

I sometimes consider small theater companies to be islands of sanity, beauty, and evolution, and the name of one of them, Archipelago Theatre, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, evokes that for me. Over the past decade or so one of my friends, writer and dramaturg Nor Hall, has collaborated with the artistic director there, Ellen Hemphill, to create some remarkable productions. The most recent was Out of the Blue, an original work that, in the words of Hemphill:

centers on axial moments, those instances in time when the balance of life shifts unexpectedly – sometimes subtly, sometimes cataclysmically, but always irrevocably – and launches one headlong down an unforeseen path. In this work, we will explore the desire and effort it takes to create balance in our lives, those provocations that tip the balance and change life for all eternity, the ways in which we respond to those changes, and the synergy of multiple axial moments in collision. Out of the Blue examines what is certainly a universally human experience, positioning the sometimes weighty, sometime humorous arguments for destiny and free will squarely against the element of chance.

Quoting John Lennon, "Life is what happens to you when you are busy making other plans." This can be on a mythical, a global and more often, on a mundane daily level. With this large concept in mind, our intention is to create a series of scenarios that bring the characters to the point of change or transformation, most often as a result of something "out of the blue." By creating two worlds of characters: the seen and unseen, we hope to to ignite the imagination of the audience with fresh insight into those moments we tend to forget.

As artists we develop a sort of pattern recognition in order to see what's hidden in plain sight, out everyone's front door. Conveying the emotive power and precarious balance inherent in these scenes requires an unusual team of sense-based artists who can exquisitely craft a common language of movement, sound and visual image.

I'll write more about this tomorrow, from Hall's perspective. In the meantime, think about that notion of axial moments. What hits you, out of the blue? The photo here is by Jay O'Berski.

Photos from the Galápagos Islands, by Ginger Oppenheimer

2010-03-19T06:35:00.000-07:00

The Galápagos Islands are famed for their endemic species, unique to this archipelago of volcanic islands in the Pacific Ocean west of continental Ecuador, near the equator. Charles Darwin traveled there during the voyage of the Beagle, making observations and amassing collections that later contributed to his theory of evolution by natural selection.

Ginger Oppenheimer traveled there in 1999, inspired by a book she read about the settling of the island of Floreana by the German Wittmer family. She took a camera and began to discover a passion for photography, collecting images such as these of the species she encountered: blue-footed boobies, giant tortoise, lizards and sea lions. I think they are exquisite and humbling portraits of other divine life forms. All rights reserved: please contact the artist at her website if you'd like more information.

Here's who's out there: photographer Ginger Oppenheimer

2010-03-18T07:38:00.000-07:00

Ginger Oppenheimer tells the story of how she became a photographer at her website, where you can see photo gallery collections from San Francisco, the Oregon coast, and an abstract series. I love her sense of color and texture, and was honored both this year and last when she sent me her From Here to There calendar of photo prints, which fits neatly into a CD holder. It sits on my desk at home.

Here are a couple of favorites from this year's twelve, as well as words from the artist about the evolution of this time-and-place-marking project. Speaking of evolution, tomorrow we'll see stunning photos Ginger took in the Galapagos Islands, back when she was first discovering her passion for photography. Click in!

I've produced seven years of the From Here to There Calendar. I had actually received a gift in the mid-90s of a similar calendar and was so taken by the concept that I kept it for quite a while. When I began taking photos in earnest starting in 1999 when I went to the Galapagos, the first thing I did was make photo cards for friends and I gave sets of them away. I always had that gift calendar in the back of my mind and as the holidays approached in 2002, I decided very last minute to make a calendar like the one I'd received. That first year I made 50 of them and gave them all away. I got so much great feedback I decided to do it again the next year...and the next...the only year I didn't make a calendar there was a bit on my own personal calendar: in 2006 I got married and my husband and I did a giant reconstruction project on our house. I decided a calendar really wasn't part of the picture for 2007.

The name came from the concept of my travels because not only did I get on planes a lot during that time, but I also began concentrating on my own backyard, literally. I was starting to garden a lot and I began photographing all the amazing blooms. And I realized a style was emerging in my photography: I kept wanting to get closer and closer to things and what seemed to catch my eye were shadows, patterns, and intensity of color. From there I jumped to extreme close-ups on, mostly, distressed metal, and these, when enlarged and printed on canvas, look like abstract paintings.

Since switching to digital imagery (film now seems so terribly old-fashioned, yet, it wasn't that very long ago!), I've felt a real freedom to snap away with the challenge of finding the gem among the rough.

This year's calendar feels like it hangs together sweetly. While I usually try to have imagery from as many places as possible, this year I concentrated on San Francisco, Napa Valley, and Portland. For whatever reason, there are a lot of windows. And the three flower images are three different varieties of poppies all grown in my yard.

St. Patrick's Day: Memories of the Coombe

2010-03-17T04:04:00.000-07:00

St. Patrick's Day reminds me of the year I spent living in the Coombe in Ireland, while teaching English at Trinity College Dublin. Here's a photo from that era, with my friend Serial Susan and two of the girls from the family next door, on the edge of the tarmac park just outside my front window. Not a lot of green space in the Coombe, a poor neighborhood a stone's throw from St. Patrick's Cathedral.
(Here's a Chieftain's tune called "The Coombe.")

One of my favorite memories from that year: the sonorous, joyous church bells marking the hours of the day. Spring in Ireland is a beautiful thing, as longer nights unfold and spring bulbs pop up in the parks. On the tarmac that year, all the neighborhood kids were doing the moonwalk.

One word says it all

2010-03-16T16:45:00.000-07:00

Almost! I'm speechless and watching as the world wakes up.

Savannah Dances to 'Fame'

2010-03-15T20:08:00.000-07:00

I've always liked the movie Fame, in part because Maureen Teefy, a fellow student at The Children's Theatre School in Minneapolis (where my sister and I were students for a time) stars in the film. It was fascinating to have experienced acting classes with Maureen, and then to see the story of high school theater students translated to the big screen. Years later, my daughter and my sister's daughter danced to the music down in our basement playroom. Somehow this collage became another interpretation – though it would be hard to tell from the visual components that there is a connection.

This goes out to the former students of The Children's Theatre School who have been getting together for reunions, reflecting on the creative legacy of those oh-so-formative years.

Happy Pi Day: March 14, 2010

2010-03-14T11:32:00.000-07:00

It's Pi Day, Albert Einstein's Birthday, and the day we spring ahead with daylight savings time. Numbers and formulas are significant today. Google has even made a special logo to mark the occasion. Here's the scoop about Pi Day from Erictric:

Since pi approximately equals 3.14, March 14 [3-14] was chosen as the date to celebrate pi in countries that use the month/date format. Pi Day was founded by now-retired physicist Larry Shaw 1988 at the San Francisco Exploratorium. Nowadays, the holiday is celebrated by eating different kinds of pie, and by discussing the relevance of pi.

I'm wondering what those discussions sound like. We haven't gotten that far at my kitchen table, I'm afraid. But I have always had a mad fondness for pi, as the refuge of both the "irrational" and the circumference of a circle. And I wish I'd had some math teachers who talked more about the ideas in math – my kids have been lucky that way. (Thank you, Mr. Berzins!)

He re is what Google, the King/Queen of algorithms, has to say about pi – strangely enough, that logo is missing on that page, though it appears on the search page. (Here's a link to a couple of other Google logos. My nieces are onto it: they've made pie!

Bill Condon to direct 'The Big C' with Laura Linney and Gabourey Sidibe

2010-03-13T05:20:00.000-08:00

Film director Bill Condon is working in television with a new dark comedy sit-com for Showtime, working title The C Word. Because Condon wrote and directed the film Kinsey, starring Laura Linney and Liam Neeson, my first thought was that Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues might be a consultant for the show. But no, it's not that C word, nor the one used for shock value in Jon Stewart's look at Chatroulette (below). Here is a piece from the UK Independent, a conversation with Germaine Greer, about that first, most controversial C word, dubbed "the last taboo of the English language."

In the show, though, the word is cancer, and the title looks to have been changed to The Big C. The most recent news is that Gabourey Sidibe has been added to the cast. I have tremendous respect for Bill Condon as both writer and director, and for actress Laura Linney, who is also executive producer of this show. I'll be adding it to the tiny repertoire of tv that I tivo.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Tech-Talch - Chatroulette

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show
Full Episodes

Political Humor

Health Care Reform

Annual Harvest Team Breakfast for Mother Hubbard's Cupboard Food Pantry

2010-03-12T18:00:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was the Annual Harvest Team Breakfast for Mother Hubbard's Cupboard Food Pantry – a great way to start the day. I sat next to a former client of "the Hub," Desta Ricketts, who now serves on its board. She said that telling her story as a speaker at last year's breakfast was one of the most empowering and satisfying moments of her life. "It's about so much more than the food."

This fantastic organization, recipient of the Sycamore Foundation's "Best of the Best" Indiana Achievement Award (10/23/2009), was started by two young mothers, Jessica Mott and Laura Marks. The mission of Mother Hubbard's Cupboard is:

To provide healthful, wholesome food to people in need, as well as nutrition and gardening education and
To provide our services in ways that build community while enhancing the dignity, respect, and self-care of all involved.

We watched this video yesterday, and heard a moving endorsement from board member Felisha Legette-Jack, coach of the IU Women's Basketball team; she recalled the experience of hunger as a child. I also learned that Monroe County, for all of its resources, has more poverty than any other region in the state. That shocked me and made me think about how much work there is to do.

Food 101 on Oprah: Michael Pollan and other food fighters

2010-03-11T15:28:00.000-08:00

Michael Pollan recently visited Indiana University, to give an address at the IU Auditorium during Arts Week. This was bliss for me: food and/as art in an intelligent, entertaining conversation reaching thousands of people. Because Gary Paul Nabhan (a chile head from the southwest) and Come-to-Jesus! real food evangelist Joel Salatin also came here in January, awareness of food issues has been growing. More people from more walks of life are making both significant and small personal changes in the direction of a more equitable local sustainable food system.

But let me emphasize: it is not easy. We have magical notions about food, tending to assume that there are enough growers and producers out there to supply us with the quality food we may want to eat.

Pollan was on Oprah Winfrey's show today. She has a link at her website to an interview with him at O magazine: "How to Break Bread (and Poor Eating Habits)."

Remember when Oprah was sued by Texas cattlemen for her criticism of the meat industry? Here is "The Trouble with Meat," an article by Jim Motavalli from E magazine in 1998: "Why Oprah Was Right, The Texas Cattlemen Were Wrong, and the Crisis Facing the American Hamburger Isn't Over."

The trouble with meat was revisited in the movie Food, Inc., also a topic on today's Oprah. In fact, she mentioned a special deal at Amazon through March 17th; you can buy the DVD and a download for $9.99. I thought about that again, in appreciation of Oprah's willingness to bring these issues to not just the rivulets and the backwaters, but the mainstream.

I started my day at a breakfast for Mother Hubbard's Cupboard food pantry (more on that tomorrow), did some work on various projects for my food co-op, spent some time researching food issues at Fair Food Fight, worked on an article about gardening, and then watched Michael Pollan and vegan actress Alicia Silverstone on Oprah. (Yes, it's true and the word spread on twitter – she talked unselfconsciously about her poop.)

Somewhere along the way I discovered my new food motto, borrowing from Michael Pollan and taking inspiration from Fair Food Fight's Barth Anderson (that's him in the black and white photo):

Eat Food - Not Too Much - Mostly Plants
– and Add One Food Rant Per Day

Now to make some curried coconut carrot soup.

Get in the ring: Context and contention around milk in Wisconsin

2010-03-10T00:32:00.000-08:00

Here is more from El Dragón at Fair Food Fight, in a comment called "Get in the Ring, Baby" under a recent post called "Rosendale Dairy and the Green Bay of Manure." It gives a sense of the purpose of the site, in connection with a specific issue.

If you are interested in digging deeper to learn more about the sources of your food, Fair Food Fight is a great place to stake a bookmark. You get behind the press releases and newspaper stories to more context and contention about important issues affecting the quality and availability of food.

Fair Food Fight is sponsored by Equal Exchange, a fair trade food company (coffee, bananas, nuts, chocolates, teas) that has done an exemplary job of providing access-to-market for small, organic, sustainable farmers abroad who are otherwise shut out of the food system because of their size, who don't have access to credit that big comglomerate farms do, and who are creating a just and democratic food system.

My goal as a blogger is to take those same principles of Equal Exchange's and examine issues swirling around US domestic food and ag system. Why? Because small farmers in the US face the same issues that small coffee farmers face in, say, Nicaragua -- particularly in this rough economy. Particularly in the dairy industry. As I'm sure you know, many, many small US dairy farmers are not receiving a price for milk that even covers their cost of goods, and haven't been for over a year. That's beyond unsustainable. That's a nightmare.

What's the answer? Many in the industry think they need to get bigger and consolidate, drive prices down, and volume up. That's the Rosendale Dairy strategy. But I say that's how we got here in the first place. Consolidation edges out small, independent farmers, even in good economies -- and there we are, back to the access-to-market issue that many small coffee farmers have sadly faced.

I'm not saying all CAFOs and big operations are problematic. But the strategy of consolidation does have its drawbacks, particularly, that bigger CAFOs have dire consequences when they fail. As citizens, we owe it to our land and ourselves to ask lots of questions about CAFO expansion, because when big CAFOs do fail, as in Union-Go Dairy in Indiana, they create a host of environmental problems and stick taxpayers with the clean-up cost when they go out of business.

Small farms don't tend to create such problems. Especially small, sustainable farms.

Is Rosendale Dairy going to fail or become a massive polluter? I've laid out my case as to why the State of Wisconsin should have been very skeptical about issuing a permit. If you want an even deeper dig into the problems that Rosendale Dairy might pose to the local water system, read this article at La Vida Locavore. I also question Rosendale's financial viability, being built as it is during the midst of a giant milk glut.

So I'm not bashing farmers. I literally have my local dairy's number in my cell phone (Cedar Summit Organic Dairy) and I call when I need to learn something from the Minars about dairying, grazing, or organic production. The whole goal of Fair Food Fight is to hammer these issues out so that shoppers and consumers know what they're getting when they make choices at the grocery.

Linden Hills Food Co-op plans an expansion, and that's a good thing

2010-03-09T08:00:00.000-08:00

I recently got all riled up, even at the distance of a couple of states, about Eric Utne's criticism of Linden Hills Food Co-op, which is planning a move to a new space, eight-tenths of a mile away from their current home. Utne wrote something called "When Growth Isn't Good," in the magazine he once co-owned, Utne Reader.

A response to Utne's essay was posted on the website Fair Food Fight, a project of Equal Exchange, a co-op pioneer in the fair trade movement. Written by El Dragón (a writer also known as Barth Anderson), the response seems both fair and feisty to me.

Fair Food Fight is a wonderful place to vent and rave about this and other food issues. You can post your own fight under the cover of a personal avatar or other more-or-less transparent identity. I'm over there in the comments section as (no surprise here) elenabella. My fighting stance icon comes from a photo of a locker at Harmony School.

Thinking about this issue, I realized that almost nothing makes me more frustrated (mystified, bummed out) than a disconnect with someone like Eric Utne, whom I would otherwise assume to be totally hip to the importance of food co-ops when it comes to creating a more equitable natural, local, and sustainable food economy. But fair enough: this is always a long conversation, if not necessarily a fight.

The best place to read about plans for this upcoming, necessary and really pretty darned cool co-op expansion is at the Linden Hills website, and in their newsletter, the Rollin' Oats Journal.

Carol Leifer gets weirder and meets Marcel Proust: hybrid identities

2010-03-08T09:00:00.000-08:00

Comedian Carol Leifer recently came out as vegan, prompting a little piece titled Carol Leifer Gets Weirder over at Vegetarian Star, a site for celebrity vegetarian gossip and news. She quipped:

“I recently became vegan because I felt that as a Jewish lesbian, I wasn’t part of a small enough minority. So now I’m a Jewish lesbian vegan.”

I love these hybrid identities. We all have them. What's yours? (Hint: it changes over time.) Maybe that is the reason people are fascinated with something like the Oscars: it is a pleasure to watch actors change from one skin to another. Meryl Streep is just one Mistress of the Multiple Selves, with great performances this past year in both Julie and Julia, and It's Complicated.

Marcel Proust puts it best, just a few pages into Swann's Way, the first volume of his In Search of Lost Time. This is from the translation by writer Lydia Davis, which I've just begun:

But even with respect to the most insignificant things in life, none of us constitutes a material whole, identical for everyone, which a person has only to go look up as though we were a book of specifications or a last testament; our social personality is a creation of the minds of others. Even the very simple act that we call "seeing a person we know" in in part an intellectual one. We fill the physical appearance of the individual we see with all the notions we have about him, and of the total picture that we form for ourselves, these notions certainly occupy the greater part. In the end they swell his cheeks so perfectly, follow the line of his nose in an appearance so exact, they do so well at nuancing the sonority of his voice as though the latter were only a transparent envelope that each time we see his face and hear his voice, it is these notions that we encounter again, that we hear.

I think that is the smartest comment on identity and psycho(social) media that I've read in a long time.

Pushing the envelope: Happy birthday, Jack!

2010-03-07T19:33:00.000-08:00

Jack's 19th birthday, and I wanted to make a card out of something unusual. I get a lot of business envelopes, and they are usually the first thing to be recycled or shredded. But I noticed that the insides of these are often interesting, and they include windows made of glassine paper.

I had a lot of fun making a card with a front, back, and an interior page, gluing envelopes together and adding other paper elements, including part of a reproduction from a math project Jack did as a kid, a chart showing prime numbers.

The front is the WOW page, with the WOW behind glassine. The back has the little Hermes fellow with the American flag (the Jack icon). The next page includes part of the math chart. Next up, the orange page, with the illustration that reminds me of elaborate catapulting constructions Jack used to make. The end result is a little card sculpture.

Happy birthday, Jack!

Shopping trip over at the Etsy store: Amyliz dish cloths and gift tags

2010-03-06T17:05:00.000-08:00

Somewhere in central Minnesota lives AmyLiz, an artisan with an Etsy shop. Last week, a set of her sage and jute dish cloths popped up in a photo, and I set off in hot pursuit. I bought the ones below, as well as two irresistible sets of chalk-weathered gift tags: the ladies here, and Thank You tags.

Amyliz also makes handmade wool felt items, and creates special orders. I'll let her speak for herself:

**A special THANK YOU to Etsy for featuring my sage and jute dish cloth set on the Storque over the weekend! Check it out here, scroll down to the Spring Cleaning section:

http://www.etsy.com/storque/spotlight/etsy-finds-traveling-down-the-greenway-7214/

Update: I am knitting as fast as I can, and will be getting your dish cloths out as quickly as possible! Thank you everyone for your support, I TRULY appreciate it all!

You can check out our other store, HTTP://WWW.AMarketCollection.ETSY.COM
for lots of fun wool felt embellishments, wool felt sheets and moreover....
We would GLADLY combine shipping costs if purchasing from both stores!
Convo me and let me know before purchasing!

I am a proud member of the SSODS (Secret Society of Dirty Sisters) Street Team and CSSTEAM (Cottage Style Street Team)

So, I paid for these with Paypal, bypassing the heftier fees taken from the seller by Visa or Mastercard (see my earlier post on that topic), and today received what always feels like a little gift in the mail.

It's fun to purchase something this way: a bit subversive, more personal, and with the special kick that comes from knowing that in some small way you are supporting a real person and her passion for creation. In this case, hot damn! – a member of the Secret Society of Dirty Sisters, helping me clean up that sink full of dishes. (These dish cloths, which come in many other colors, would also make great face cloths.) That's my consumer advisory for the day, with this disclaimer: No catalogs were created in the marketing of these items.

More of the same: contemporary clothing catalogs

2010-03-05T03:44:00.000-08:00

Okay, so yesterday I saw a copy of the latest Lands' End catalog. You know – the company from Dodgeville, Wisconsin, that was purchased by Sears. (That gives very good customer service, with a "Guaranteed. Period." returns policy.) Once again, so odd to discover the absolute homogeneity of its models in the print version of the catalog: everyone Caucasian – no Asians, no Hispanics, no African-Americans, no American or East Indians. (There was, to their credit, one middle-aged woman with white hair – a small concession to diversity.)

Total emotional homogeneity, too, with everyone grinning from ear to ear. The clothes never vary much from year to year – slight tweaks to the gauge of the cotton or the fit, but there's not much variety within the line. The catalog here, with the skirt-pulling boy, represents the most interesting, potentially objectionable (and therefore risky) of the Lands' End imagery, but it is not the current one. (It could be called "Revenge on the Attack of the Fifty-Foot Woman": doesn't the scale of that kid to the woman look a bit off?)

We do have a First lady these days with dark skin (and handsome husband) who is considered a style icon. (Have they noticed?) Much is made of the fact that she occasionally buys from catalogs, too. And we live in a world where the demographics are rapidly changing. I went to the Lands' End website and did find one black man, the guy here in the striped shirt. There was a little bit of diversity among the females over there.

But a quick survey of this and other on-line catalogs (including Target, WalMart, Gap, and Sears) makes me think that, for one thing, ad budgets must have been cut a lot in the past few years. There aren't a lot of models anymore anywhere. Mostly just generic clothing, shot on a whiteboard, with no human inside – or a headless one.

The opening photo for the kids' section at Target does the best job of representing a range of skin tones and types of kids. With H&M, you get the same catalog all over the world, though you can click a button to make the language change.

Is the implication at these companies that "the more the world changes, the more things stay the same"? As someone who once worked as a seamstress, I would love to see pictures from behind the scenes: who is making these clothes? There are so many of them! We talk about cheap food: surely we also have incredibly cheap clothing available here in the U.S. At what cost, to what invisible people?

(Three) Beautiful People in the Sundance World

2010-03-04T00:01:00.000-08:00

I received a catalog from Robert Redford's Sundance company, founded in 1969 and located in Salt Lake City, Utah. It has some aesthetically-pleasing items in it, of the artistically-inclined, follow-your-own-pricey-drumbeat vibe. Laid back ease fused with rebel chic. The perfect attire for Elizabeth Gilbert. Other words that dominate the copy are: handcrafted elegance, poetic simplicity, earthy, ruggedly sleek, luxuriously fluid, talisman, ancient, alluring. Oh, and "dazzling Bohemian illumination," used for a lovely Palazzo Chandelier.

I had fun sifting through the 84 pages, but I couldn't help but think that it has been a very long time since I looked through a catalog featuring such a limited range of beauty. No ethnicity, except for the Indo-European kind. (Think France, or a Mediterranean vacation. No, think Lake Tahoe– or the Orange County in California.) In fact, for female models, the photos offer only slight not-quite-discernible variations on these two:

There were no male models, but I found guy below ("your manly man") all over their website:

I was surprised. It seems clear that they think their ideal shopper is Elizabeth Gilbert and her younger cohort, and pretty much nobody else. Yet most people associate Redford with the independent Sundance Festival, where the films tend to give you a broader view of the world. (The aim is to "discover, champion, and spread brave new ideas.") A Small Act by Jennifer Arnold, for example, tells this story:

As an impoverished boy in Kenya, Chris Mburu's life was dramatically changed when an anonymous Swedish woman sponsored his primary and secondary education. Now a Harvard-educated human-rights lawyer, he hopes to replicate the generosity he once received by founding his own scholarship fund to aid a new generation. The challenges Mburu faces instituting his new program seem at times insurmountable but lead him down the path to discovery. Who is Hilde Back, the person who signed the checks that gave him a chance to succeed?

If you click on the Artist Community section of the Sundance site, the world becomes just a bit more diverse, with photos of Chann Luu and Thoi Vo, and little snippets about their identities. Here is Chann Luu's photo, with a brief description of her work:

Born in Vietnam and currently residing in Pacific Palisades, California, Chan Luu relates easily to the landscapes of both mountains and beaches. Her loves of hiking and scuba diving put her in touch with the colors, shapes and textures of nature. But while many of her design ideas may begin in the natural world, her chic finished pieces often end up on the glossy pages of fashion magazines. Scores of celebrities are smitten with her earthy/urban aesthetic.

So what about other company catalogs? Over at Eddie Bauer, at least you see a couple of African-American models. (No one from Asia, though.) That site won't let me snag their photos. The opening image for their Outdoor Ecudor section shows you the Eddie B. version of Angelina Jolie, with a Brad Pitt clone standing on the roof of a Hummer-wide expedition vehicle, bungie-cording numerous Eddie Bauer bags of gear. (No children in sight; it's a couple's getaway.)

I did find this model at the Sundance Festival Store, but you won't find him in the Sundance catalog. You don't find that earthy custodian work gear there, either.

Nancy Ortenstone: 'Between Two Worlds'

2010-03-03T07:56:00.000-08:00

Artist Nancy Ortenstone, from Taos, New Mexico, posted a new work, called "Between Two Worlds," with this comment:

...a place I keep returning to. Paintings I saw in my mind's eye for years before I began painting them. It seems they are a centering, meditative space I need when there is so much unsettling uncertainty all around. How can you not respond creatively to the earth actually shifting???

I keep recalling the words of our local seismologist here in Bloomington, Michael Hamburger, who gently reminds us that Indiana is overdue for a quake, too. We had a mini-quake a year or so ago that made Andreas shoot out of a dreamstate in the middle of the night, convinced that our furnace was about to explode. Such an odd sensation when the house starts to rumble.

Hard Up: 'Pinching Pennies' by Joyce Kennedy

2010-03-02T03:10:00.000-08:00

I sent James Moore this poem yesterday, written by my mother, Joyce Kennedy. It recalls her childhood during the depression in small town North Dakota. My mom has often said that she always felt like her family had enough of everything; nevertheless, an awareness of tight times comes through in this timely-once-again poem. There's a child's observation of language, too.

Pinching Pennies

   I tried to get out of the country,
   But poverty forced me to stay…
                                The Old Settler's Song

Back then, my mother and father said
money was scarce--they talked of getting by.
Those were hard times--my mother's sister,
Mattie, and her family, were hard up.
"But Mattie keeps her house so clean,
you can eat off the floor," my mother said.
Almost everyone had to pinch pennies,
some folks were flat broke--
wasn't the whole country down on its luck?

"Money doesn't grow on trees," said Dad;
even if it did, trees on prairie were few.
"They're poor as church mice," said Mother,
creating for me a picture of little mice-children
scampering across the floor of the church basement,
scrabbling for crumbs from the Ladies' Aid.

Set back from a country road, it was
the poorhouse afflicted my young heart.
Low and ramshackle, it looked about
to fall down, so poor it was in spirit.
"Poor house," I thought as we drove by,
feeling sorry. That was where we would go
if we got to be too hard up--
"We'll end up in the poorhouse!"
We would reach rock bottom,
flat as prairie, not up in any way.

Joyce Kennedy

®all rights reserved

James Moore's Poetry Emergency

2010-03-01T02:35:00.000-08:00

Poet James Moore posted this poetry emergency status update to his facebook page at 2:41 yesterday. Send him something, via elenabella, facebook, or his email address. This beautiful photo of Jim was taken by his wife, photographer JoAnn Verburg. His own books include Lightning at Dinner, The Freedom of History, and The Long Experience of Love. I've pasted in what he's received by way of emergency response so far, below. Social media to the rescue!

Shoulder bag with passport and journal and books by Ko Un, Ruth Stone, and Merwin stolen. Passport easy to replace but what about the poems! I'm in Italy another two weeks. If anyone wants to send me a poem they've been reading recently and liking, that would be great. Or if you are not a poem person, a good quote would be lovely, too.

Sorry to hear about the loss! I am sending a few short poems from 170 Chinese Poems and a little one I wrote. Look in your email soon. (from Justine Johnson)

Dog grief and the love of coffee / lengthen like a shadow of mine // and now that my eyes no longer / swear to anything I look out // through the cloud light of this autumn / and see the valley where I came // first more than half my life ago / oh more than half with its river // a sky in the palm of a hand / never unknown and never known // never and never not mine / beyond it into the distance // the ridges reflect the clouds now / through a morning without shadows // the river still seems not to move / as though it were the same river (wsm, shadow) (from Todd Boss)

" . . . underneath the anguish of death and pain and ugliness, are the facts of hunger and unquenchable life, shining, and peaceful. It is as if our bodies, wiser than we who wear them, call out for encouragement and strength and, in spite pf us and the patterns of proper behavior we have learned, compel us to answer, and to eat." --MFK Fisher (from Rebecca Weaver)

Emotional Beauty and Natural Disasters

2010-02-28T04:24:00.001-08:00

Jade's Valentine 2010
Originally uploaded by elenabella.blogspot.com

My niece Jade made this valentine this year. I like the messages a lot, especially "Love makes you adore things." Jade makes art every day, and the dog and cat at the bottom of the page are frequent signature images. It can be hard to talk about love, but Jade does so here in a profound and emotionally intelligent way. We adore you, Jade!

I started a flickr page, finally, where I was able to edit this photo through an application called picnik, and then post it directly here. Not sure yet if I like this process, though, as you can't resize the image by clicking on it, or save the edited photo to your desktop. (I think you can do those things if you upgrade to a not-free version of picnik). I'm also not crazy about the black frame around the photo, preferring the more subtle frame that comes with image uploads here at blogger. You can link to the flickr page directly, though, where a larger version of the valentine shows you the dog's heart-shaped tail.

Meanwhile, we received the message below from one of Andreas's colleagues, who just took his family to Chile a few days ago, for a stint of research. Sam Martland is an assistant professor of history and Latin American studies; one of his areas of expertise is disasters and modern society since 1700.

Dear Folks,

We did get a rude awakening last night (earthquake at 4 am or so), and we are without power or telephone, but no one was hurt and the house we are staying in had no serious damage (a big piece of art glass fell over and smashed, water sloshed out of the pool, and a few books fell off). I walked a few blocks to a house of friends where there is electricity and internet. The supermarkets are closed and in some places the traffic lights don't work, and we understand that the Metro is not running, but other than that everything is more or less normal here. Santiago, we gather, is not much damaged. Schools are opening a week late. Santiago is also well inland.

Standing under the front door frame as the earthquake finished -- it had been a bit like walking on a ship to get there -- we recollected that we had a crank-up radio and light, plus crank flashlights that we'd brought as gifts. Instant disaster supplies-we tuned in and heard enough to know that there was not in fact a disaster where we were. The host kids are quite taken with the lights and our radio. Later on we heard about the more serious damage in and around Concepción:

The epicenter, near Concepción, is about 250 miles south of here. Concepción seems to have suffered some serious damage, fires, etc., but still with deaths numbered in the very low hundreds if that. I've only heard snatches of radio.

The upshot is that we are not worried about anything except whether the start of school will be delayed, and finding an apartment. Everyone can be confident that we are well. The kids may actually have enjoyed it after a fashion. Actually, they were invited to come visit other kids here where I am writing --two different American-Chilean families -- but didn't want to leave the pool and perhaps felt a bit shy. I made a comment in the church newsletter that we were going to have the unusual experience of living ordinary life. This is not exactly ordinary, but it is the sort of thing not every tourist sees.

Sam

Feel free to circulate this to anyone who might be interested to know (including departments, congregations, random acquaintances, etc.)

So already on this Sunday morning, a little excursion from emotional beauty to natural disaster to something that passes for ordinary life. Tonight I hope to attend a concert by the Voces Novae chamber choir, called The Proper Resolution of Dissonance: Music of Billings, Palestrina, Purcell, and Vivaldi. The title makes me think that, somehow, this (and the rest of it) all fits together.

Happy Birthday, Joyce!

2010-02-27T16:47:00.000-08:00

Another year has come around, and I'm so grateful to say that it is the birthday again of my beloved mom, Joyce Kennedy. We talked on the phone today, before she headed out with Wally-Dad for dinner at Brasa Rotisserie, followed by a performance by the extraordinary TU Dance at the Ritz Theater in Minneapolis. It's a cabaret performance set to jazz standards, with dancers Toni-Pierce Sands and Uri Sands collaborating with the Jeremy Walker Quartet and actor/musician T. Mychael Rambo: chamber dances exploring concepts of respite in the city, drawing on Uri's memories of Central Park.

As Joyce put it: "Not a bad date for a woman in her eighties!" (Actually, she said "for an olede": old lady in Papua New Guinea pidgin.)

I'm so grateful for my kind and intelligent mother, who is shown here exploring respite in the woods, during a not-that-long-ago canoe trip. Happy birthday, Mom! We love you.

The Fairview Strings Program and other school budget cuts

2010-02-26T01:33:00.000-08:00

It is Arts Week in Bloomington, Indiana, with a keynote lecture tonight by food defender Michael Pollan. Arts Week always leaves me with some of the same feeling I have around Earth Day: "Earth Day Every Day" is the ultimate take-away. "Arts Week Every Week" could be a sub-theme for elenabella. I'm very grateful for Arts Week, although the timing is bittersweet this year.

I grew up in a family with tremendous respect for and involvement in the arts, and in arts education. As a result, one of the things I find most depressing about the tidal wave of cuts to local, state and national school funding is that the arts are always among the first subject areas gutted. How many times have these words been used, ignorantly, in the same sentence: "arts" and "fluff"? Or "arts" and "frosting on the cake"?

Anyone who makes the mistake of talking that way around me is immediately demoted, in my internal reckoning, to the status of unimaginative, dull-witted, and hopelessly behind the curve. As in: "Don't these idiots know anything?" I have such an intense reaction that I'm not the best person to speak out at school board meetings; I would start to sputter, and possibly cry. Yes, it's an emotional topic. I wait, therefore, until the dead of night to craft my response into written language.

Here's why: the way our brains are wired, the arts help put things together. They promote the firing of synapses and growth of unexpected ideas. They are not simply decorative; they are cognitive.

The arts also offer a remarkably basic way to learn about teamwork, and the full emotional range of bringing something initially difficult to completion. The skills gained translate to many other subject areas and domains.

Merrie Slone, one of the cashiers at Bloomingfoods Near West Side (who is also a songwriter and musician: in other words, she can count out a cash drawer AND make music), was wearing a t-shirt the other day from the strings program at Fairview Elementary School; when I commented on it, she mentioned that the image had been drawn by her daughter, a program participant.

The strings program in this lower-income neighborhood school is described in this piece from the Indiana University Newsroom, also posted at the homepage for the IU Jacobs School of Music. It's a remarkable collaboration with the Jacobs School, under the direction of IU associate professor of music education, Brenda Brenner. There is a research component to the project that considers the developmental learning effects of early music education. (Math and reading scores have both gone up, while behavioral issues have subsided. Self confidence improves, too.)

You can see a performance of the young violinists in the Musical Arts Building on the IU campus below. There's also a very good video segment in the archive of the WFIU Weekly Special (it's "Fairview Violin Program," number 105), featuring an interview with Brenda Brenner. The images here are courtesy of Indiana University.

This program is just one of many that was cut in a vote of our local MCCSC School Board last Friday night. An article by Andy Graham in the Herald-Times details the devastation to our district. As always with cuts to arts and education funding, what we make up in the short run costs a great deal more in the long run, in terms of finding the momentum, resources and talent to initiate something like this again someday, far into the future. In the meantime, we let down the kids, teachers, and parents who have been engaged and inspired. We inevitably waste time scratching our heads, trying to discover other ways to so rapidly advance learning. Worksheets and standardized tests alone are simply not going to cut it.

Approved cuts to the Monroe County Community School Corporation

Budget-cutting moves approved Friday by the Monroe County Community School Corp. board:

SALARIES, BUILDINGS, PROGRAMS
Increase class-size ratio, cutting about 45 certified teaching staff, with program cuts eliminating about 30 other certified jobs.
Eliminate elementary and middle school media specialists.
Eliminate middle school foreign language instruction.
Eliminate middle school family and consumer science.
Eliminate one assistant, part-time athletic director at each high school.
Reduce high school assistant coaches.
School age care staff adjusted to break even.
Eliminate six elementary assistant principal positions for 2011-12.
Eliminate unfilled assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction job and related secretarial job.
Eliminate the healthy school coordinator position.
Freeze all administrative salaries.
Reduce school board salaries.
Move Aurora Alternative High School to Bloomington High School North building with some reduction to staff.
Reduce the Teen Learning Center.
Reduce Alternative to Suspension.
Reduce Youth Outreach.
Eliminate Bradford Woods program.
Eliminate Honey Creek School.
Eliminate elementary strings program.
Drain high school pools out of season.
Close Batchelor Middle School pool.
Eliminate substitutes for building secretaries.
Eliminate summer school.

OTHER NON-PERSONNEL SAVINGS
Move NWEA (testing) costs from general fund to capital projects fund ($85,000).
Eliminate corporation cell phones.
Lower energy costs through Energy Education Inc. program.
Move maintenance materials and supplies from general fund to capital projects fund.
Reduce instruction materials and supplies by 10 percent.
Reduce administrative materials and supplies by 10 percent.
Reduce travel expenses by 10 percent.
Reduce vehicle purchases.
Eliminate the district’s supplemental share of band uniform purchases.
Reduce each school’s allocation for substitutes for teacher and staff professional development opportunities.
Eliminate staff development costs from the general fund that are not (state law) PL 221 required.
Eliminate the general fund’s portion of purchasing library books and periodicals.

“Repository” and Other Projects: A Lecture by Sarah Sudhoff

2010-02-25T00:32:00.000-08:00

The announcement below is from Catherine Johnson-Roehr, curator of art, artifacts, and photographs at The Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction. The lecture takes place today, as part of Arts Week 2010. I hope to be there, to hear more from this courageous, relevant artist.

“Repository” and Other Projects: A Lecture by Sarah Sudhoff

Thursday, February 25

5:30 to 6:30 pm

Fine Arts 102

1201 East 7th Street

Indiana University, Bloomington

Sarah Sudhoff is a fine art and editorial photographer working in San Antonio, Texas. Following surgery for cervical cancer in 2004, Sudhoff began investigating the effects of the illness on herself and others for a project she titled “Repository”, a series of photographs and videos that presents an unflinching account of the artist and her illness. Sudhoff will be discussing and showing images from this work, as well as her current project, “At the Hour of Our Death”.

Sudhoff’s photographs and video projects have been exhibited internationally and nationally, and her images have been featured in publications such as The New York Times, Fortune, Men's Health, Neon and Time.com. Sudhoff holds an MFA in photography from Parsons The New School for Design in New York City, as well as a Bachelor's degree in journalism from the University of Texas at Austin. She is currently on the faculty at the University of Texas at San Antonio. To see examples of her work, visit her website.

For more information, contact Catherine Johnson-Roehr at 812-855-8890 or catjohns [at]indiana[dot]edu.

Sponsored by The Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction for ArtsWeek 2010.

Credit Unions offer real money tools

2010-02-24T16:28:00.000-08:00

Not all credit cards are created equal. I'm not really in the habit of making financial tips, but I do think there is an art to moving capital through communities to the greater benefit of the common good. Or moving cash through a lifetime to help you make the most of your best opportunities. And now we are swimming in shark-infested waters.

I attended a financial services webinar today, offered by Signal Financial Federal Credit Union, the credit union serving the National Cooperative Business Association (NCBA). The presenter described in detail the advantages of seeking financial services from a credit union, especially in today's economy. Credit unions did not engage in sub-prime mortgage lending, or make wildly speculative investments at the risk of members' deposits. They are in a position to lend, at reasonable rates.

Signal Financial is offering an affinity card with a relatively low APR (6.5%) for the life of a balance transfer, with no balance transfer fees. You must qualify to join, with a $5 deposit to a share (savings) account. This particular affinity card directs 2¢ of every purchase to the Cooperative Development Foundation, a group that helps co-ops in our country and abroad (including cooperative groups in Haiti).

You can contact them directly to find out how to qualify for membership. Signal Financial is networked with other credit unions across the country.

Credit unions are cooperatives guided by the Seven International Cooperative Principles, including education, information, and training. One of the things I appreciate about them is that they usually have someone on staff who gives free financial services advice. They typically offer accounts for children that help kids learn how to manage and save money, too. Here's a neat "Thrive by Five" program for preschoolers over at the Credit Union National Association (CUNA) website. As is so often the case, teaching these principles to kids is not a bad way for adults to absorb them.

Meanwhile, I received an application today for The New Visa® Black Card. Lord knows I don't "deserve" one – they are meant to attract those discerning "individuals" (always that word) who have thousands of dollars of disposable income (read "flush it away") per year, who might find it a privilege (or sign of status) to pay a $495 annual fee. Here are the jaw-dropping terms and conditions for this Black Hole of Debt card. You don't find this kind of language over at the credit union sites, either, by the way:

For those who demand only the best of what life has to offer, the exclusive Visa Black Card is for you. The Black Card is not just another piece of plastic. Made with carbon, it is the ultimate buying tool.

The Black Card is not for everyone. In fact, it is limited to only 1% of U.S. residents to ensure the highest caliber of personal service is provided to every Cardmember.

That requires some levity. Here, Jon Stewart gives a little lesson about loan sharks (with thanks to Daughter Number Three):

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Make it Rain - Bank of America

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show
Full Episodes

Political Humor

The Olympics

The Future of Money, via Pay Pal

2010-02-23T19:55:00.000-08:00

The Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure Act of 2009 went into effect on Monday, but hidden and deceptive fees still lurk in the small print of many (if not most) cards. And in the months leading up to the new law, many credit card companies dramatically increased their interest rates. Borrower beware!

I called Target (for example) to cancel my card when they initiated an across-the-board interest increase to 23.24% on purchases (with Target Visa), or 25.24% (with the Target card). The representative I spoke with said that "the recession has been hard on Target." I am not an economist, but imagine the brand loyalty that would result if Target had sent out a letter telling card holders it was lowering rates, in their interest? Instead, this somewhat more savvy retailer comes off as yet another greed machine. I found the rate hike so disturbing that I made a decision to not shop there (or at any other big box retailer) until things change. Sorry, Target – was always kind of fond of you in the past! Here's more about changes to the law.

Check out this article in the latest issue of Wired magazine, on the ways in which PayPal is reshaping the way money changes hands. The trick is to bypass using credit cards, which take unearned big bites from consumers and businesses. PayPal is using an open source developer network to imagine lots of ways people could source capital, pay for products and services, and simplify transactions, perhaps while learning something about fiscal realities along the way. This article is getting a lot of attention on Twitter, too: it's so interesting to see how ideas spread.

The image on the cover of the current issue of Wired, shown at the top here, appeals to my paper-cutting and shaping sensibilities. It reminds me of the time when (at age 5) our ingenious friend Liam stealthily invented the $55 dollar bill, craftily merging two $5 banknotes, using scissors and glue.

Duane Busick catches 'The Welcome Table' parade on video

2010-02-22T18:42:00.000-08:00

Videographer Duane Busick was at Malcolm Dalglish's The Welcome Table last Saturday night, and soon thereafter posted a video called "Malcolm's Parade" on You Tube. The Welcome Table was a remarkable, magical concert of original song and dance, with a wide emotional range: from the Dr. Seussian-ridiculous (a dance of deer and young hunter to the sounds of a huge marching bassoon ensemble, "Abbotts Bromley Horndance") to the sublime.

One of my favorite pieces was "The Brink," Malcolm's story of an unexpected all-night vigil in a human knot with other teen climbers on a mountain ledge in the Wyoming Wind River Range in late August of 1969. (You can hear the haunting beginning of this song here; it's on the CD Into the Sky.) He sang it Saturday night with Mia Dalglish, Lydia Elmer, and Moira Smiley; it gave me goose bumps, as it always does.

The evening ended with this Pie March, first performed in Hobart, Tasmania in July 2009. The words were changed for the Bloomington performance, and the theme adapted to celebrate pie, as a postscript to a Dalglish's "Pie R Pie." At the foot of sculptor Dale Enochs's limestone "Bloomington Banquet," volunteers served five kinds of Bloomingfoods pie to a crowd over 400 people. We gathered near Enochs's limestone and copper fire pit to eat, sing, and stave off the winter blues.

It's fantastic to see this little film catch some of the spirit of the night. Busick has been busy with less happy occasions recently, including a protest on our courthouse lawn of Governor Mitch Daniels's cuts to public education in Indiana. The Welcome Table came on the heels of a vote just the night before when the local school board eliminated teachers, special programs, media specialists (librarians), summer school, Honey Creek historic school, trips to Bradford Woods, and other important features of the Monroe County Community School Corporation (MCCSC).

Busick is the youngest of 12 children, and was born and raised in Paoli, Indiana, home of Lost River Community Co-op. Both Duane and his wife, Kathy Loser, a librarian at Bloomington High School North, are dedicated advocates of education and the arts. Duane recently created a facebook page called Support Public Education in Monroe County. It has become a space for community conversation, activism, and strategic suggestions in response to over 3 million dollars in cuts of state aid to our school corporation. Thank you, Duane!

No time to Twitter? Try Flutter (or Shttr Dwn)

2010-02-21T12:42:00.000-08:00

Feeling a little ambivalent about the world of micro-blogging? Take a look at this...with thanks to SlateV.
(It's ancient now, from April 2009...time flies when you are reading tweets.)