Sons and Daughters of the Incarcerated is an intimate personal portraiture piece “… of boyhood marked by the criminal justice system, and what it means to become a man in America.”
On Friday, September 29th, 6:30 – 8:30 PM, I am hosting a fundraiser for this deeply compelling feature documentary film at my Brickbottom Studio — just off of McGrath Highway in Somerville near Union Square. Everyone is invited to join the director, the producer, other supporters and me for a sneak peek at this moving piece and to learn more about what’s needed to help get this important project across the finish line. Hors d’oeuvres, beer and wine will be served. No donation is required.
This was the noblest Roman of them all.
All the conspirators save only he
Did that they did in envy of great Caesar.
He only in a general honest thought And common good to all, made one of them.
His life was gentle, and the elements
So mixed in him that Nature might stand up
And say to all the world, “This was a man.”
Friday, September 22, 2 – 4 p.m., Professor Emeritus Athans Boulukos will lead us in the first in a series of discussions on Shakespeare’s Roman plays. Please bring your copy of Julius Caesar. Athans will introduce the series at this meeting. He invites you to choose a passage from the play that you would like to discuss/read. Everyone is welcome.
“We are reading Shakespeare’s last three Roman plays,” Professor Boulukos writes, “to know them better and to ask ourselves this question: What is Shakespeare seeing when, at critical moments in their history, the Romans saw their past disappearing and their future emerging unknowably?”
We’ll choose our meeting room (either the Chair’s office or a nearby conference room) to fit the size of the crowd–so please let us know whether you can attend.
The man was locked in solitary confinement in a Somali jail. The novel the man “read” was Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. An inmate in an adjoining cell “read” the book to the inmate by tapping the novel–all eight hundred pages–through the jail cell wall using a percussive code that the two men, who never saw each other, devised. “Reading” Anna Karenina, the man says, saved his life.
During Spring 2017, Liberal Arts Department reading enthusiasts gathered together to read Anna Karenina, the book that saved the life of an incarcerated, forgotten, and despairing man. Professor Leon Steinmetz convened the meetings and read the book in English and its original Russian. Who said literature doesn’t set you free?
Starting September 22nd, Liberal Arts Professor Emeritus Athans Boulukos will leading a similar reading group–this one reading late Shakespeare plays. Who knows what jail cells that reading group may liberate? Join the reading group…for the joy of reading.
Click the blue button below to hear the story of the man who read through walls.
Professor Judith Nies workshopped her play, Bella’s Choice, in the Liberal Arts Department Playwriting workshop. Now it goes live on stage.
Judith Nies
“Bella’s Choice,” Judith Nies writes, “is about Bella Abzug’s 1976 effort to become New York’s first woman senator. Newburyport Actors Studio selected it in a competition for one-act plays .”
The play appears in Glass Ceilings, “a collection of four one-act plays,” the Actors Studio of Newburyport reports, “written and directed by women. The challenges, accomplishments, disappointments and successes presented in these short plays engage, entertain, inspire, amuse and take us on a journey through life’s moments, big and small, from the feminine perspective. The playwrights are Kathleen Miller, Judith Nies, Adair Rowland, and Edith Wharton. Our directors are Kathleen Isbell, Hailey Klein, Anna Smulowitz and Sally Nutt.”
Performances are 8:oo PM September 15-17 and September 22-24 and 5:00 PM September 17 and 24. More information is here.
Writes (former) Liberal Arts Professor Felix Kaputu:
Felix Kaputu
I’m in Brazil, about to undertake a comparative analysis of the Likumbi Lya Mize (from Zambia) and the Congado (from Brazil). Both are festivals that celebrate ancestors’ memories in specific conditions. The Congado also seems to carry many remembrances of African rituals especially those from Angola, Zambia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Background:
In May of 1787 delegates from all of the states of the newly-formed nation, except Rhode Island, met in Philadelphia to revise the Articles of Confederation, the first governing document of the new nation. Instead of revising the Articles of Confederation, they thought it necessary to create an entirely new frame of government. Continue reading →
At the Best Bees Company Urban Beekeeping Laboratory and Bee Sanctuary (UBL) that I direct, my associates and I focus on what enhances the health of honey bees. We are presently assessing DNA values of honey to measure queen health, the presence or absence of the unicellular parasite Nosema ceranae, and the diversity of the flowers on which the bees gather pollen. Together or alone, queen health, Nosema ceranae, and floral diversity incline a hive to thrive or fail. Because Nosema ceranae now constitutes an acute challenge to numerous colonies, we have been testing an all-natural anti-fungal treatment on honeybees and, accordingly, we are testing mated queens for the presence or absence of Nosema ceranae.
Observation Hives
This summer we have also been testing how honeybees communicate. We are studying their waggle dances in observation hives (honey comb enclosed in glass) by video recording their behavior under varying experimental treatments (see pictures attached). How intensely and frequently they waggle dance varies under different conditions.
And we’re expanding. We’re about to undertake significant research within the city limits of Boston. The Urban Bee Laboratory has purchased five vacant lots from the City of Boston to turn into productive urban farms and apiaries.
Maybe best of all, MassArt students are contributing to our work. Two MassArt students, Greg Maslin and Ethan Drory, will be working on art+science projects on the farms this fall. Greg is now learning beekeeping, honey harvesting, and hive box building. He’s fabricating twenty-seven cube container displays to make visible to visitors how various specifies interact. Ethan is constructing an aquaponics (fish and plants symbiotic) system.
Next on my wish list? A greenhouse here at MassArt to serve both as a productive farm and a ‘living laboratory” where students and faculty could behold, up close, how living things live by sustaining each other.
Paul Bempechat concertizes. Autochrome images of Paris c. 1910-1920.
Surely a Mass Art first… France is about to honor Liberal Arts Professor Paul Bempechat for for his services to French culture internationally and especially for his revival of French composer Jean Cras. His efforts to promote ecumenism through music, especially through the music of Felix Mendelssohn, also inspired French authorities to confer this award.
The French Consul in Boston will be investing him with the title of knight of the order of arts and letters on October 4th in Cambridge.This award is equivalent to a lifetime achievement award. Huzzah to Sir Paul!
