Vox clamantis in deserto
Getting off before the mountains
On the Massachusetts Turnpike in skidding season
“Once, just west of Framingham on the Worcester Turnpike or Route 9 in Massachusetts, I caught a ride in a truck that had worn brakes. The driver, a jolly red-nosed individual with a white beard who could have passed as Santa Claus, suggested that I might want to get out considering the situation regarding the truck’s brakes. Not wanting to turn down a ride in the middle of the night, I rode it out with the driver. Going uphill was all right, but coming down was decidedly hairy. The driver knew what he was doing and used his engine to slow himself down, but he had to depend on his emergency brake if he wanted to, or had to, stop. At one traffic light, which was on a downhill slope, he couldn’t bring his rig to a stop and just blew through the intersection, horn blowing, weaving past the cross traffic. …. He relied on his loud air horn, which sounded even louder in the dark of night. Fun was fun and eventually we got to Worcester, where I was glad to get off in one piece. I hope that he got his load to where it was going, but I knew that the farther west on Route 9 he went, the more mountainous the terrain would become and I didn’t want any part of that. Besides, this was where I needed to get off. My next leg would take me through Sturbridge and then on to Connecticut.’’
― Captain Hank Bracker, from his book Seawater One
Negin Owliaei: Billionaires, media and stealth politics
Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, who owns The Washington Post
From OtherWords.org
Bill Gates wants you to know that he pays taxes.
“I’ve paid more than $10 billion in taxes. I’ve paid more than anyone in taxes,” Gates told journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin. “But when you say I should pay $100 billion, OK, then I’m starting to do a little math about what I have left over.”
Supposedly Gates was talking about a wealth tax 2020 candidates have supported. But no plan yet proposed would seize $100 billion from the philanthrocapitalist anytime soon. Even if it did, he’d still be one of the richest men in the world, with $7 billion left over.
Gates isn’t the only billionaire who’s worried. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon also has concerns about the rising resentment towards his fellow elites.
“I think you should vilify Nazis,” Dimon told Lesley Stahl, “but you shouldn’t vilify people who worked hard to accomplish things.” Billionaire investor Leon Cooperman, who’s become a fixture on CNBC, recently teared up while complaining about the “vilification of billionaires.”
Why do the feelings of the 600 Americans that constitute our billionaire class suck up so much media attention?
For one thing, billionaires literally own the news. Buying up media companies is a new rite of passage for the ultra wealthy, such as the purchase of the Washington Post by Amazon head Jeff Bezos, or TIME by tech CEO Marc Benioff.
They’ll say they’re all about editorial independence, but the truth is billionaire ownership can affect news output. When billionaire Joe Ricketts found out the staff of DNAinfo, a network of city-based news sites he owned, was unionizing, he promptly shut down the entire venture out of spite.
There are more subtle ways in which the rich buy media access. The Gates Foundation, for example, has poured millions in donations into the media over the last several years to raise awareness around the foundation’s philanthropic goals — including its controversial funding of charter schools.
Not all billionaire power is publicly broadcast, however.
In their book Billionaires and Stealth Politics, researchers Benjamin Page, Jason Seawright and Matthew J. Lacombe document how economic elites have banded together to lobby for extremely conservative policies, such as cutting estate taxes, opposing regulations on the environment and Wall Street, and gutting social programs
Because these moves are highly unpopular, they’ve done this work in the background.
That means there’s a network of billionaires aligned with the Koch brothers, who’ve poured hundreds of millions of dollars into anti-labor policies. And Rupert Murdoch, the media mogul who changed the media landscape with Fox News. And casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, who’s spending his billions shaping U.S. foreign policy.
Their enormous wealth offers them an outlandishly oversized role in our democracy. It’s poisoning both our politics and our media.
So how about a ban on billionaires? Let’s tax away their wealth, but let’s get them off our airwaves, too. Imagine what we’d learn if corporate media didn’t devote entire news cycles to the whims of the rich.
You may not have heard, but for the last several months, the sanitation workers at Republic Services have been fighting for higher wages. “I haven’t had a raise since 2004,” Demetrius Tart told The Guardian. Meanwhile, the company is making a killing from the 2017 tax cuts, and returned more than $1 billion to shareholders through stock buybacks.
The company’s largest shareholder? Bill Gates. Workers took their fight directly to the billionaire, protesting outside a Gates Foundation event in September with signs that read, “Bill Gates treats his workers like garbage.” He ignored them.
Maybe these sanitation workers could get the airtime instead.
Negin Owliaei is an inequality researcher at the Institute for Policy Studies and a co-editor of Inequality.org.
Accidental electronic art
“Broken Television 300” (unique digital print), in Patty deGrandpre’s show “Broken Television,’’ at Bromfield Gallery, Boston, through Dec. 1. The show presents digital prints of bad TV signals.
New chances for Fall River
Kennedy Park in Fall River, with the famous towers of St. Anne’s Church in the background.
From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
It was good news indeed that Paul Coogan defeated the twice-indicted incumbent mayor, Jasiel Correia, and City Administrator Cathy Ann Viveiros, a Correia ally running as a write-in, and will be the new mayor of troubled Fall River. Mr. Coogan, a member of the city’s school committee, is well respected and holds promise to be an honest and steadying force for the city, which has faced far too much corruption, as well as socio-economic challenges.
Sleaze alert: The (Fall River) Herald News published a leaked video of a secret meeting where Mr. Correia told supporters that he couldn't beat Mr. Coogan, head to head, but that at least one person (presto -- Ms. Viveiros!) would launch a write-in campaign, helping him by dividing the vote. Luckily for the city, the scheme failed. Mr. Coogan won with 79 percent of the vote, with Mayor Correia, getting only 7 percent. Clearly the voters want a big change!
For the leaked-audio story, please hit this link.
Fall River has much poverty and plenty of drug problems, but also some great strengths, including notably hard-working residents, a spectacular hilly site at the head of Mount Hope Bay and some beautiful structures, especially (to me) those old stone mill buildings that look so beautiful as you drive on Route 195, particularly as the sun comes up and sets. Further, Massachusetts’s South Coast Rail project will restore commuter rail service between Boston and southeastern Massachusetts, with stations in Taunton, Fall River and New Bedford; service is expected to be restored by the end of 2023. These are currently the only major cities within 50 miles of Boston lacking commuter rail access to Boston. South Coast Rail will boost the region’s economy by connecting it much tighter with rich Greater Boston. This will include luring more refugees from the sky-high housing costs up there to seek affordable digs in Fall River.
For a long time, New Bedford, which has long been twinned in the public mind with Fall River, has had much better mayoral administration than the Spindle City. Let’s hope that Mr. Coogan’s victory evens that out.
Llewellyn King: How to attack cancer with data mining
NASA’s Omar Hatamleh
The word is exaptation. It will change the future, and it may save your life
It is a word traditionally used in evolutionary biology. But now in scientific and high-tech circles, it is used to describe finding and adapting processes and compounds to uses for which they were not originally intended.
In biology, exaptation is used to describe how an evolving species uses a trait in a new way.
The classic cited example of exaptation is prehistoric creatures that developed wings to keep warm. A later iteration in the same species finds wings can also be used to fly.
In today’s use of the word, it means cross-fertilization of old discoveries with new technologies; extant remedies applied in new ways.
For example, a medicine that was created to treat one disease may be used effectively for another. A drug destined for a specific cancer may be used to treat an immune disorder such as Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, also known as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. A material developed for space travel may be ideal for strength and lightness in an automobile.
All this takes on much greater importance in the age of mega data and computer capacity to delve into it and find treasuries of new uses.
Today’s machine learning enables the data to be squeezed and pummeled into yielding extraordinary applications and solutions.
“The challenge is to break down silos and to get companies to democratize their data internally and externally,” says Ryan Caldwell, CEO of MX, a financial technology company.
Now a forward-thinking NASA engineer wants to put this approach -- this multidisciplinary, multi-material, multi-compound, multi-procedural, multi-operational data approach -- on a fast track, accelerating cures and solutions.
He is Omar Hatamleh, chief innovation officer, engineering, at the Johnson Space Center (in Houston) of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and executive director of the Space Studies Program at the International Space University. Hatamleh, a polymath with a fistful of degrees, is establishing Infinity Institute, a new kind of think tank that will accelerate cross-industry innovation over the whole spectrum of discovery and application.
Think discovery and rediscovery as the findings of the past are linked to the needs of today, and as findings in one technology can pollinate unrelated technologies. Essentially, it is the story of NASA and the collateral developments from the space program. Exaptation at work.
The genesis of the Infinity Institute is to be found in a series of four annual NASA cross-industry innovation conferences -- the last just concluded.
They were notable for what was not on the agenda: no large discussions of money or the lack of it; no whining about government or regulations, or court decisions. Just a world of science, ideas and the bond between the seemingly incompatible, which when brought together inform each other. A cellist, Jennifer Stumm, described the math in Bach and what that means for science. A NASA scientist, Steve Rader, described how to find affinity ideas through the Internet of Things. An animated filmmaker, Charlie Wen of Marvel Studios, revealed synergies with industrial design.
In the last of these conferences, data expert Caldwell described how he used the very kind of data management and interrogation Infinity Institute has in mind to save the life of a colleague at MX.
When Brandon Dewitt was diagnosed with terminal cancer in his lungs and face at age 33, and given six months to live, Caldwell went to work to break down the medical silos, which enclose so much medicine and hide so many research results. A new treatment being tested in Oregon, which he found, shrunk multiple tumors in Dewitt’s lungs and cheek and saved his life.
When Caldwell’s 2 ½-year-old daughter Chloe was given the wrong medicine in an emergency room, her heart stopped cold. Doctors said would live only a short time without a heart transplant. Caldwell and his wife went to work: They established a war room with computers and whiteboards and bored into the research. A therapy was found and Chloe, now nearly four, is doing well.
Hatamleh’s first target for the new, sweeping concept of exaptation is cancer.
You would think that cancer is well-researched, but Hatamleh believes the exaptation route is the way to go: “We want to break down barriers, go across industries and identify emerging technologies from various industries and explore their application in other fields.”
He believes he can half the death rate from cancer in 10 years by cross-pollinating technologies and therapies and using the kinds of techniques and ideas on display at his unique innovation conferences.
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.
3 new industries for New England?
From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
Biochar
Herewith three products that might produce some economic and environmental benefits for New England—and the world. One is something called biochar, a charcoal that can increase soil fertility and resistance to some diseases affecting crops and reduce farm runoff into waterways. Perhaps most interesting is that it has been researched as a carbon-sequestration product to fight global warming.
And bioochar can be made from wood chips, as well as straw, husks, landscaping waste, manure and even sewage sludge. It’s being used around the world. New England, much of it being heavily forested, is a very good source of wood chips.
Threads plucked from a Saffron flower to be dried and used for various purposes
Then there’s the possibly highly lucrative potential of growing saffron (a flower that’s a member of the crocus family) in Rhode Island. As the wonderful local nature writer Todd McLeish writes in phys.org:
“Saffron is the world's most expensive spice, selling for about $5,000 per pound at wholesale rates, and 90 percent of the global saffron harvest comes from Iran. But University of Rhode Island agriculture researchers have found that Ocean State farms have the potential to get a share of the market as demand for saffron in the United States grows.’’ Saffron is also used for food coloring and fabric dye (think Buddhist monks’ robes}, and some have touted its uses against cancer, depression and age-related macular degeneration.
“The URI experimental saffron plot yielded 12 pounds of saffron per acre last year, compared to about 5 pounds per acre in {mostly arid} Iran in the second year of growth,’’ Mr. McLeish’s article said.
Another attraction: "It's a fall flowering plant and isn't harvested until late October, so it extends the season for farmers whose growing season is mostly over by now," Rahmatallah Gheshm, a URI postdoctoral researcher who moved to Rhode Island after being a vegetable seed producer and saffron grower in Iran, told Mr. McLeish.
To read the article, please hit this link.
The interior of a quahog shell
Then there’s Brendan Breen, who has figured out how to culture pearls in quahogs, something he learned how to do starting at an aquaculture class at the University of Rhode Island. By the way, reminder: Shellfish aquaculture cleans water. Given that Rhode Island is a major center of the jewelry business, this development is particularly good news.
The Newport Daily News ran a good story a while back on Mr. Breen’s efforts. Hit this link to read it.
Shefali Luthra: Warren's projection of out-of-pocket health-care costs holds up to scrutiny
“If we make no changes over the next 10 years, Americans will reach into their pockets and pay out about $11 trillion on insurance premiums, copays, deductibles and uncovered medical expenses.”
— Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren in an Instagram post about her “Medicare for All” plan.
Promoting her much-discussed plan to create a single-payer “Medicare for All” health system, Sen. Elizabeth Warren emphasized a striking figure.
“If we make no changes over the next 10 years, Americans will reach into their pockets and pay out about $11 trillion on insurance premiums, co-pays, deductibles and uncovered medical expenses,” the Democratic presidential candidate said in an Instagram video posted Monday.
This fact check was produced in partnership with PolitiFact.
The Democratic health-care debate has been full of competing analyses and estimates about what Medicare for All might cost, what it might save and who would bear the brunt of paying for it. But this precise number was new to us.
If true, it would be a figure both staggering and significant to the unfolding debate, as Americans try to understand how Warren’s brand of a single-payer health system could affect their pocketbooks. So we decided to dig in.
A Reasonable Estimate
We contacted the Warren campaign, which redirected us to a report from the Urban Institute, a Washington think tank, as well as to federal estimates of household out-of-pocket expenses and premium costs over the next decade.
The Urban report doesn’t include the $11 trillion figure. But economist Linda Blumberg, who authored the paper, told us the statistic is “perfectly consistent” with the analysis.
If anything, she said, the number is a lowball figure. When Blumberg and her team crunched the numbers, they found that, under the existing health-care system, Americans can expect to pay $11.7 trillion between out-of-pocket costs — the co-pays, deductibles and uncovered medical expenses — and premiums over the next decade. That calculation comes from Urban’s model for projecting what individual households might expect to spend, factoring in inflation, on these types of health costs.
“Talking about the amount of money we expect households to be spending over time is a very important part of trying to educate people on what single-payer would do, and what the tradeoffs are for them,” said Blumberg, who previously advised the Clinton White House on health policy. On the numbers, “they’re roughly in the right neighborhood,” she added.
We consulted other analysts, too, and as far as we can tell, no one else has done a similar calculation.
Experts told us that Urban’s estimate — and the Warren campaign’s use of it — checks out, based on what we know about American health care spending.
Cynthia Cox, a vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation and expert on the Affordable Care Act, pointed to what a typical American family currently spends on health care: about $5,000 per year, when you look at out-of-pocket costs and premiums combined. Extrapolating from there, she said, Warren’s claim seems reasonable. (Kaiser Health News is an editorially independent program of the foundation.)
“Over the course of 10 years, when you add it up — that sounds about right,” Cox said. “The reality is, people do spend a lot on health care out of their pockets, and there’s a lot spent on their behalf by employers or taxpayer-funded programs that they never see.”
Under Warren’s health-care plan, Americans would pay nothing directly out-of-pocket — no premiums, copays or deductibles — for health care. So that $11 trillion would disappear from the cost side of the ledger.
The figure Warren sited also tracks with national health expenditure projections for out-of-pocket health costs and health premium growth.
The Bigger Picture
Still, there are serious questions about the financing such a shift would require.
And Warren’s Medicare for All plan has been under intense scrutiny since she unveiled it earlier this month, with many critics suggesting it’s too optimistic in its estimates of how much money a single-payer system would cost.
Warren suggests the federal government would need to come up with $20.5 trillion — well below Urban’s estimate of $34 trillion. The difference comes largely from assumptions about how much the government could save, as well as decisions about how much to pay doctors and hospitals.
Warren’s financing structure includes cracking down on tax evasion, new taxes on financial institutions and the wealthiest Americans, and maintaining what many employers currently pay into the system. Critics say that could yield its own inefficiencies.
For instance, the way employer payments are structured could disproportionately harm small businesses, or lower-wage workers, noted Paul Ginsburg, who directs the USC-Brookings Schaeffer Initiative for Health Policy. He also argued that doctors and hospitals —represented by powerful lobbying organizations in Washington — could successfully battle any effort to pay them less, driving up what the government needs to spend.
Still, those disputes are separate from the question of this particular statistic. Here, Warren’s on firm ground.
Analysts also said the $11 trillion number gets at a larger point. Americans currently pay a lot out-of-pocket on health care. Certainly, some might see a tax hike under Warren’s proposed reform, or see downward pressure on their salaries.
Still, others could experience major pocketbook relief.
To be sure, Medicare for All is not the only approach to ameliorating what families pay for health care. Other, more incremental proposals — such as building on the ACA’s coverage expansions or pursuing a “Medicare for all who want it” approach touted by former Vice President Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg, the South Bend, Ind., mayor — would cut into the $11 trillion as well, Cox said.
While it wouldn’t eliminate that household cost burden, it would require less in taxes to finance.
“There’s a lot of ways to bring down what people spend on health care,” Cox said. “Any expansion of the role of public programs is likely to bring down individuals’ costs. It’s just a question of how much taxes have to go up to pay for that.”
Our Rating
In her explanation of how she would structure and finance Medicare for All, Warren highlighted what Americans currently pay for “insurance premiums, copays, deductibles and uncovered medical expenses.”
The $11 trillion figure is staggering — and it checks out. Whether and how to address that issue is fiercely controversial, but on this particular stat, Warren’s statement is accurate. We rate it True.
Shefali Luthra is a reporter for Kaiser Health News
Shefali Luthra: ShefaliL@kff.org, @Shefalil
SOURCES:
Instagram, “Medicare for All” post, Elizabeth Warren, Nov. 4, 2019
Medium, “Ending the Stranglehold of Health Care Costs on American Families,” Elizabeth Warren, Nov. 1, 2019
Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, “NHE Fact Sheet,” April 26, 2019
The Urban Institute, “From Incremental to Comprehensive Health Reform: How Various Reform Options Compare on Coverage and Costs,” Oct. 16, 2019
Peterson-Kaiser Health System Tracker, Household Health Spending Calculator, Nov. 5, 2019
Email Interview with Warren 2020 presidential campaign staff member, Nov. 4, 2019
Telephone Interview with Linda Blumberg, institute fellow in the Health Policy Center at the Urban Institute, Nov. 4, 2019
Telephone Interview with Cynthia Cox, vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation and director for the program on the ACA, Nov. 4, 2019
Telephone Interview with Paul Ginsburg, director of USC-Brookings Schaeffer Initiative for Health Policy, Nov. 5, 2019
'Major center of graphic arts'
“Squibble A’’ (aquatint and etching), by Joe Moore, in the show “Selections From Mixit Print Studio,’’ at Brickbottom Artists Association, Somerville, Mass., Dec. 5-Jan. 11.
The gallery says:
“Over time Mixit Print Studio {in Somerville} has made its mark on the Greater Boston scene, and sponsored artists from other regions of the US, and abroad.” Sinclair Hitchings, former keeper of prints at the Boston Public Library, wrote in the catalog for our 25th anniversary exhibition: “The world at large does not know—but many American graphic artists do know—that Greater Boston is a major center of graphic arts production. It is this level of skill and sophistication which artists bring to Mixit Print Studio. Thousands of prints by hundreds of area artists have rolled through the presses of Mixit Print Studio.”
Chris Powell: Connecticut's toll trauma
Gov. Ned Lamont's plan for imposing tolls on Connecticut's highways has devolved over a few months from 50 tolling stations producing about $800 million a year to just 14 stations at bridges needing renovation, where a mere fraction of that $800 million would be raised.
So what happened to the plan? The governor, a Democrat, eventually calculated that while his party has comfortable majorities in both houses of the General Assembly, a majority can be built for tolls only on the smallest scale, since the Republicans are opposed and many Democrats are fearful of retaliation from their constituents.
Some of the governor's ideas for transportation improvements are compelling, like bringing more passenger service to Tweed New Haven Airport or a serious amount to Sikorsky Memorial Airport,. in Stratford, along with modernizing the Metro-North commuter railroad from New Haven to New York. But putting tolls all over the place would be far too visible to voters. It also would be a regressive form of taxation, falling mainly on the poor and middle class, whom the Democrats purport to represent. Meanwhile the state's ever-rising taxes are inducing people with higher incomes to leave the state, which continues to lose population relative to the rest of the country.
Democratic legislators are usually willing to raise taxes, so their reluctance with tolls indicates a change in political atmosphere. Such a change was also indicated by the most notable result of this year's municipal election campaigns -- the defeat of New Haven Mayor Toni Harp by Justin Elicker in the Democratic primary and then again in last week's election, where Harp ran as the candidate of the government employee union-dominated Working Families Party. Harp had just raised New Haven's property taxes by 11 percent and her administration lately was full of costly incompetence.
Since Democratic legislators fear tolls and since even overwhelmingly Democratic New Haven seems sick of taxes, people here slowly may be wising up. So the government class may be vulnerable if Connecticut ever has an opposition party not led by President Trump.
In any case, tolls are not really for transportation purposes. Rather they are for allowing the state's Democratic regime to avoid economizing in the rest of government in favor of transportation.
Tolls will let state government continue to overlook its mistaken and expensive policies with education, welfare, and government employees, where ever more spending fails to improve learning, worsens the dependence of the unskilled, and makes public administration less efficient and accountable.
Connecticut needs profound reform in these respects, and enacting tolls will only reduce the pressure on elected officials to choose the public interest over special interests.
The state's most fearsome special interest, the Connecticut Education Association, the teachers union, inadvertently illustrated one of those choices the other day. The union issued a report about “sick” schools -- schools that, because of deferred maintenance and lack of improvements, suffer from mold, excessive heat, and such.
But school maintenance and improvements are neglected in large part because state law requires binding arbitration of teacher union contracts, thereby giving teacher compensation priority in budgeting. There's no binding arbitration for “sick” schools, so maintenance and improvements are often deferred in favor of raising teacher pay.
What's really sick here is the law, since it serves only the special interest, letting it cannibalize the rest of government.
Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.
Mass. keeps leading the way on medical matters
The main entrance of Massachusetts General Hospital, in Boston
From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
Massachusetts continues to lead the nation on health-care reform. It has long had among the greatest concentrations of medical care and research in the world, in large part because of its universities and associated hospitals. And the health-insurance law nicknamed “Romneycare,’’ after then-Gov. Mitt Romney, who helped lead it into law, morphed into the national Affordable Care Act, aka “Obamacare.’’
And now Gov. Charlie Baker, a former long-time CEO of the insurer Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, has come up with a big bill to further improve care in the commonwealth while trying to limit price increases.
Before I go on, consider the “super users’’ – the 5 percent of patients whose care comprises about half of America’s health-care costs. Some almost seem to live in hospital emergency rooms and many have mental illnesses and/or substance-abuse issues that sent them there.
The governor’s bill would require hospitals and insurers to increase by 30 percent over the next three years their spending on primary care and behavioral health, but without increasing overall spending. Given how many illnesses and injuries are made inevitable by thin primary care and often difficult to obtain mental-and-behavioral-health treatment, that makes sense. The governor says that less than 15 percent of percent of total medical expenses are spent on the combination of primary care and behavioral health. Instead, the big money goes to treat severe and chronic illnesses, many cases of which could have been prevented and/or at least diminished with much more available – and promoted -- primary care and mental-and-behavioral-health coverage. Mr. Baker’s package would also simplify insurance paperwork for mental-and-behavioral-health providers to help expand coverage in this sector, which is still woefully low compared to so-called “physical health,’’ as if the brain isn’t an organ.
American health care is pretty good at rescuing people in extremis but mediocre at preventing what they need to be rescued from.
There are other fine things in the package, including boosting state monitoring of drugs and their prices -- including those drugs bought through the private market and not just Medicaid -- that cost more than $50,000 per person per year – and expanding telemedicine, which cuts expenses in a number of ways.
I hope that other states, and the Feds, try some of these ideas, too. As usual, Massachusetts is a beacon for those seeking to build better health systems.
'Unexpected forms'
“Deli bag and lottery ticket (Gutter Punk with his dogs)’’ (watercolor monoprint), by Stella Ebner, in her show “And & With,’’ at Cade Tompkins Projects, Providence, Nov. 16-Dec. 21.
The gallery says: “‘And & With’’ features screen prints, water-based woodblock prints and watercolor monoprints, exploring the inherent qualities of printmaking to examine how imagery in our society is created and conveyed within the context of a deep appreciation for the moments that are left outside the picture frame - the overlooked, the forgotten.
“In the screen prints, Ebner is interested in pushing the boundaries of the medium by overlapping multiple transparent pigments that build to form the whole. The distinctive overlay of color and imagery that printmaking allows, gives rise to new and unexpected forms and relationships.’’
Make sure they're not eating
P.J. O’Rourke
“New Hampshire polling data are unreliable because, when you call the Granite State's registered Republicans and independents in the middle of dinner and ask them who they're going to vote for, they have a mouth full of mashed potatoes and you can't understand what they say.’’
— P.J. O’Rourke, essayist and satirist. He lives in Sharon. N.H. ,and is often on TV and radio with this wisecracks.
Schoolhouse in Sharon built in 1832
Write Rhode Island's exciting creative competition
This is a wonderful program!
Co-created by School One and Goat Hill, Write Rhode Island's annual short fiction competition is open to all Rhode Island students grades 7-12. Each fall, this flagship program offers students an opportunity to participate in workshops with a large creative community of writers throughout the state and to have their stories published in a high-quality print anthology. Winners are announced in March and honored at an awards ceremony at the Newport Art Museum.
End of a browsing heaven
The beloved Out of Town News in 2017
From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
The closing the other week of the beloved Out of Town News, in the middle of Harvard Square, Cambridge, testifies to the challenges of the print media in the World Wide Web age, even in such a center of worldly literacy as the neighborhood of America’s most famous university (and with mighty MIT down a few blocks). I remember happily browsing the emporium’s magazines and newspapers from around the world when I lived in Cambridge for a few months, in 1970-71. Sometimes I’d rush over there to get an early edition of The Boston Herald Traveler for which I had written a news story to see what the editors may have done to it. Often the ink was still wet. During my early months in the newspaper business, I’d get considerable pleasure from seeing my byline; the pleasure then faded. Who cared?\]
Happily, physical books are still doing well. It’s tough on the eyes to read a lot of pages on a screen. Please hit this link to read “On the Joy of Physical Books”.
Don Pesci: Praying an image into physical reality
Causeway to Enders Island
The Sacred Art Institute at Enders Island, in Stonington, Conn. has been in business now for nearly 25 years. The Institute, devoted in part to all things iconographic, opened its doors in 1995 and draws students from all over the United States. And no wonder. The institute offers extremely intimate classes, usually numbering a dozen or more students, in such disciplines as Gregorian Chant, Iconography, Medieval Manuscript, Mosaics, Painting, Photography and Stained Glass.
For those who suspect that art in the Western world did not begin with Picasso, the Iconic experience offers irresistible temptations. Those acquainted with Byzantine or Russian iconography will be familiar with the lure of Icons. For the rest of us, the excitement of writing an Icon or producing a Byzantine drawing may be compared with a child having two stomachs wandering hungrily through a candy store. Here at Enders Island, surrounded by the peace of the water, one is immersed in the methods and theology of an ancient art that preceded and gave rise to the splendor of the Renaissance. Classes usually last a week, though this one, under the direction of master iconographer George Kordis, lasted two short weeks and was broken into two parts, Byzantine drawing and icon painting. All courses at the institute are taught by master artists whose backgrounds in the history of their disciplines run leagues deep.
Over the course of two decades, this writer has taken at Enders Island courses in icon writing from the Russian Orthodox masters of the Prosopon School, fresco production and Illuminated Miniatures, taught by one of the few masters of the field from Chicago whose works, in the form of Stations of the Cross, adorns the small but intimate chapel at Enders Island, a repository of art works produced by – there is no other way to put this – people wrapped up in the mystery and wonder of Iconography.
Dr. Kordis with one of his drawings
On a first visit to the island more than two decades ago, I found myself seated beside a woman who, I knew, had taken multiple courses in Icon writing. “So then, what have I let myself in for?” I asked her.
“You are about to pray an image into wood.”
Dr. Kordis is assistant professor of iconography at the University of Athens. He teaches Icon painting at the Athens School of Art and the Eikonourgia Cultural Center. He is a visiting professor at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music’s summer program; at the University of Art and design in Cluj Napoca, Romania; at the School of Theology of Bucharest, Romania; at the School of Theology of Bucharest, Romania; and at the Pedagogical University of Odessa, Ukraine. More importantly for our purposes, he set himself to discover early in his career what he calls the “set” elements in Icon painting., those elements that remain the same throughout the various schools of Iconography.
“A good deal of study over several years was needed” Dr. Kordis tells us, “before I was able to perceive the unity within the variety” of the various schools of Icon painting. “Apart from the theory and theology of the Icon, and the meaning of Iconographic conventions” all important considerations, “teaching Icon painting is concerned primarily with fundamental artistic principles.” Those organizing principles are set forth persuasively in Dr. Kordis’s instructive book, Icon As Communion.
The title is by no means accidental. Communion implies a unity of understanding and purpose. Iconography is a medium of understanding, a language similar to that of music. As in music, the artist disappears unobtrusively into his art. The Icon speaks to the viewer by means of color, shape, line and harmony. The unvarying understructure of the Icon ties it to traditional modes of representation. Color and line infuse the Icon with form. Communion is a joining together of the viewer and the Icon, most impressive in churches such as St. Catherine Greek Orthodox Church in Braintree, Mass., where Dr. Kordis’s work may best be seen in a setting that speaks to the viewer through the eye of the heart. As in music or any other art form, harmony is created through the interplay of all the forces of energy mentioned above.
“How is it possible to tell when an Icon is successful?” I asked Dr. Kordis.
All the movement and forces in an Icon, he has said, are deployed to engage the spectator. Opposing forces within the Icon flow from the surface of the wall and create an optic cone in front of the Icon that engages and even depends upon the viewer. In Icons, light is not used to render form, as in a painting by, say, Caravaggio. Because there is no depth in an Icon, the image is directed outward by a movement from the surface of the Icon to the viewer though the motion and harmony of color, light and perspective that together produce the rhythm of the Icon and brings it into communion with the spectator. The Icon must always be a presence of the person depicted. The person depicted must be immediately recognizable by the faithful people. The Icon must invade the reality of the spectators and create an aesthetic bond with them. The spectators entering a painted church must feel the presence of the saints and have a taste of the qualities of Paradise. If the communion works, the Icon is good.
In the course of a week, Kordis provided to his students several Byzantine drawing demonstrations each day, personally advising each student on individual projects and, when necessary, correcting their drawings. “There, you see – easy.” It was not always easy, but it was always good. Life in an icon shop during the slow and beautiful flowering of iconography was much like our shop of a dozen people. We were apprenticing with an amusing and masterful iconographer.
Dr. Kordis generously fielded questions and on occasion returned some surprising answers. The difference between a movie and an Icon is simple. The movie, unlike a play which involves real people on a stage, is hyper real and therefore more artificial – actually more unreal. If you rush the stage, you might have a dialogue with an actor of your choice. Of course, you’ll be thrown out of the theater. But just try entering into a conversation with a film presence, however apparently real. The Icon in many ways is more real that the star imprisoned in celluloid. An Icon is what it is. And what is that? It is a portal of eternity – in direct communion with you. There is nothing more real than that, right?
Here is Dr. Kordis on reality and rhythm in an Icon: “Rhythm is the basic instrument the painters during the Byzantine period used in order to achieve communion between the beholder-believer and the person depicted. The main idea was that the Icon is not merely an image, a form on the wall of a church or on a surface of wood. The icon must be alive, must be a presence of the saint in the church. In this way, the Icon could demonstrate the belief that the Church is the living Body of Christ in time and space, where all members are embodied and live. In this perspective, the Icon should give the spectator the impression that whatever is depicted is alive, is present. More specifically they wanted to show that the person depicted comes to the dimensions of the spectator and is connected with him. So they had to create a system of painting principles that could serve this need. Rhythm was the basic instrument. Rhythm is a way of handling the movements and energies that exist on a painting surface. Any line or color is an energy. The painter could organize these movements or energies in order for the Icon to enter the reality of the spectator and meet him. So they followed the way ancient Greek painters used rhythm. All lines shape an X on the surface and everything in the composition follows this X axis. In this way everything in any Icon is organized properly, is united and creates a state of dynamic balance. There is always movement, indicating life and motion, and at the same time there is also stability that indicates eternity, a state of timeless reality. Through rhythm the Icon is projected to the reality of the spectator. Color, light and perspective, are also used as vehicles to create this projection. We could say that rhythm is a vehicle creating unity in any Orthodox Icon and contributes to fulfill its mission in the Church.”
Thelonius Monk and Marc Chagall would have had no difficulty parsing this passage. And icon painting, if I may put it so, is just such a passage – from image to reality.
Addressing the dozen people with whom I had spent a week in close communion at breakfast, lunch and dinner each day, most of the time in the studio, my wife, Andree, and I were bidding goodbye to the group . Through inveterate shyness, I get tongue-tied at such moments. I silently cursed myself on the way home for not having said what was in my heart. So many lives, so many ways through the twisting maze of our modern world, so many bruised hearts, so many words never said, I was lucky to have brought Andree along. To all present she said how grateful we were to have spent these few days with such open and honest soulmates, and she said of Kordis how kind and generously intellectual and good he was. He bowed his head modestly – one of those rare men who wear modesty and humility properly – and there was a faint twinkle in his eye.
For three days, the island, a too little visited jewel, had been storm swept, raked by rainy gales and fierce winds. But now, on this last day, and for the remaining week, the clouds had parted, the winds were docile as doves, the sun gleamed brightly on God’s handiwork – also on the icons these good people would paint in the following week. They would gratefully be praying their images into wood.
Don Pesci is a Vernon, Conn.-based columnist.
at November 10, 2019
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Labels: Caravaggio, Enders Island, Kordis, Picasso
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Setting up for summer of '20
“Summer Feeling” (mixed media paper collage), by Adam Langehough, in his show “New Landscapes,’’ at Paper Nautilus, in Providence, Jan. 21-March 2.
Look out below!
View of 200 Clarendon Street, in Boston’s Back Bay, a skyscraper known as the John Hancock Tower, and colloquially known as The Hancock, after the insurance company. The tower is 62 stories and 790 feet high, making it still the tallest building in New England.
It was designed by Henry N. Cobb of I. M. Pei & Partners and was completed in 1976. In 1977, the American Institute of Architects presented the firm with a National Honor Award for the building, and in 2011 its Twenty-five Year Award. But as it got close to completion it became infamous, for a time, for a materials flaw that led to some windows popping out and crashing to the street. Luckily, no one was killed.
The memoir industry
From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
“The Brat in Your Classroom,’’ Michael John Carley’s memoir of his troubled time at Moses Brown School, in Providence, in the ‘70s in the Oct. 27 Providence Journal, was often a good read, including sometimes quite funny, and I must assume much of it was accurate. (He includes pictures of teachers’ comments from the time.) The enthusiastically self-promotional Mr. Carley, who’s on the autism spectrum, identified himself as a “playwright, a diplomat, executive director of nonprofits,’’ along with having had other impressive roles. He described such nasty if usefully cinematic episodes as being beaten by the police. Was all this fact-checked? As my father used to say: “Remarkable, remarkable, if true.’’
The piece falls into the rapidly growing category of memoirs detailing the overcoming of tough problems of youth – presented in sort of made-for-TV-or-the movies narratives – and it speaks to Americans’ greater and greater obsession with themselves, as reflected in social media and elsewhere. Of course, we’re all at the center of our personal universes, but we’ve been taking that to extremes lately.
Eli Pariser, the chief executive of Upworthy, a Web site for "meaningful" viral content, has noted:
“We thought that the Internet was going to connect us all together. As a young geek in rural Maine, I got excited about the Internet because it seemed that I could be connected to the world. What it's looking like increasingly is that the Web is connecting us back to ourselves.’’
Perhaps in an age when promoting one’s “personal brand’’ is granted such economic importance this is inevitable. And naturally most of us have the desire, especially as we approach old age, to try to make sense of our messy histories and to control the narrative, if only for our children. And don’t underestimate the desire for revenge, expiation and, if the storyteller is a particularly strong writer, money.
Of course a major attraction to running such magazine-style pieces in The Journal (where I labored as an editor on and off for decades and that I still loyally read daily) is that you don’t need paid local reporters to fill up that space with news, of all things. Another, and to me stranger, thing is the increasing number of long tributes to the paper’s own remaining staffers in the paper – space that might otherwise be used for news, if only from other newspapers and news services. It comes under the heading of meta:
Definition: “Referring to itself or to the conventions of its genre; self-referential’’. This is happening in many other now very short-staffed newspapers, too.
Keith Combs: Honor vets by protecting the Postal Service
Via OtherWords.org
If you’re looking for a way to honor veterans, here’s one: Protect the U.S. Postal Service.
I’m a veteran from a family of veterans. After serving in the Marine Corps, I got a good-paying postal job that put me on a solid path to financial security. Now I lead the Detroit Area Local for the American Postal Workers Union. Our 1,500 members include many veterans, some of whom I served with myself.
Across the country, nearly 113,000 veterans now serve as postal workers. With former military members accounting for over 18 percent of our workforce, the Postal Service employs vets at three times their share of the national workforce.
Why? For one thing, military values include hard work, showing up on time, and taking pride in your work set you up perfectly for postal jobs.
For another, the USPS gives veterans like myself preferential hiring treatment. Disabled vets, like many I work with in Detroit, get special consideration too. And once they get here, they get generous medical leave and benefits, including wounded warriors leave, among other hard-earned benefits won by our union.
Unfortunately, these secure jobs for veterans are now under attack.
A White House report has called for selling off the public mail service to private, for-profit corporations. And a Trump administration task force has called for slashing postal jobs and services for customers.
In particular, they want to eliminate our collective bargaining rights, which would jeopardize all those benefits we’ve won for veterans and other employees. They also want to cut delivery days, close local post offices, and raise prices, which would hurt customers.
This cost-cutting could also threaten another valuable benefit for service members: deeply discounted shipping rates on packages they get overseas. Currently, shipping to U.S. military bases in other countries costs the same as a domestic shipment, and USPS offers cost-free packing supplies to the folks who send these care packages.
Instead of slashing and burning the USPS, we need to be expanding and strengthening it.
One idea is to let post offices expand into low-cost financial services. Veterans are four times more likely than the national average to use payday lenders for short-term loans, which typically charge exorbitant interest rates.
But if post offices could offer affordable and reliable check cashing, ATM, bill payment, and money transfer services, we could generate all kinds of new revenue — while protecting vets and their communities from predatory lenders.
From discounting care packages to employing disabled veterans, our Postal Service plays an important part in the lives of our service members. USPS does good by Americans who’ve dedicated a portion of their lives to armed service, and by the millions of Americans who rely on them.
I hope you’ll join me in applauding these veterans — and the postal service. Let’s build the USPS up, not tear it down.
Keith Combs is a 30-year postal worker and president of the Detroit District Area Local of the American Postal Workers Union.
