While you may have spent the holidays listening to, or even playing or singing, the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, I spent a rather enjoyable chunk of time reading about it. And, eventually, surfing YouTube to watch and listen to a few unique performances. But more on that later. Read More..
It’s getting to be the time of year when you can’t avoid images of smiling people bobbing in the waves at their favorite vacation spot—including tourists swimming above Venice’s Piazza San Marco, where the acqua alta was molto alta. I’m lucky enough to have sauntered around San Marco, as well as the shores of New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland, and I can’t imagine the high waters of the past weeks in any of those places. I’m having a hard enough time with the low waters of Lawrence; a foot less precipitation than usual last year, and this year we’re at only half of “normal.” Read More..
About a year ago I was deep into deep time on the Plains, studying the charismatic megamammals that made a home where the bison now roam. Fascinating stuff, the Pleistocene on the prairie, and one beast that intrigued me was the pronghorn. A true native of North America, pronghorn thrived and survived. How? Well, you don’t get far into the pronghorn literature before you come upon the name of biologist John Byers. His explanation of pronghorn survival: they were fast. Read More..
It’s an ominous sign when, in the middle of a drought, the Spencer Museum of Art is forced to close due to flooding. Sure enough, lightning struck and our collective conversation on art spasmed and shrunk, for esteemed writer and art critic Robert Hughes has died.
I’ve failed at attempts at remembering when I first encountered Hughes’s writing, but I do know that I’ve always liked his forthright style and extremely wide-ranging perspective on how art fits into and shapes the world. He was one of those authors I paid attention to, even if I didn’t read all his works cover to cover. (I just had to go back and change that sentence from present to past tense. I hate that.) At the last Friends of the Library book sale I scored a copy of The Shock of the New, Hughes’s excellent examination of the rise and fall of modern art, for a whopping $1. The eyebrows went up on the gentleman totaling my purchases—he knew that I’d found a deal. Read More..
It hardly seems possible, but it’s been 25 years since Frank and Deborah Popper, two academics from New Jersey, hit the Great Plains with a force greater than an F5 tornado simply by publishing a paper. Observing persistent trends of population decline, they proposed re-opening the Plains to the buffalo. They called their idea the Buffalo Commons. Read More..
A few posts back, Dan C. wrote about Edward Burtynsky’s Manufactured Landscapes. I’ve discovered that since that work Mr. Burtynsky has been focused on oil, and even more recently has been deep into water– the 2010 Deepwater Horizon blowout providing a slick transition between the two. Read More..