A Candle for Gita (1910-2011) at Candela Books
Worlds in A Room: The Portraits of Irving Penn
Irving Penn (1917-2009) transformed fashion photography with his work for Vogue in the '40s and '50s. He then began to both capture and create many of the icons of the 20th century: it's difficult to think of Picasso, Pacino, Capote, Dietrich, without one of his luminous portraits springing to mind.
Pablo Picasso, Cannes 1957
He was in complete control in the studio, ushering his subjects into a corner he'd made by slanting two backdrops together. Deprived of props and PR, hunched into a small grey space, the great personalities of the day revealed themselves in surprising ways to the camera. Limiting his subjects' movement relieved him, Penn said, "of part of the problem of holding on to them.”
His compositions were always simple; even his fashion shoots were famously unfussy. He didn't speak much to his subjects as he worked, unless it was to ask something that might jolt them into being themselves. Penn was never happier than when he left the bright tight glitz of the cities and went to parts and people unknown.
Selections from those travels was the subject of Ethnos, a recent show at Bernheimer's Gallery in Munich. The installation included Penn's portraits from Peru, Dahomey (now Benin), Morocco, and New Guinea.
In 1948, after a shoot for Vogue in Lima, he travelled to Cuzco, historic capital of the Inca Empire. Intrigued with the look of the local people, he decided to try to take some portraits. He then happened on the only photo studio in the town. Thrilled with its stone floor and perfect northern light, he convinced the owner to take some time off and let him rent it.
In the most affecting shot from those few days, Penn placed a boy and a girl in the room on each side of a wooden stool. The children are so tiny that the stool appears to be table-high. Diminutive figures with immense self-possession, they hold hands and stare out at Penn, at the unknown world that lives in that box and beyond it, with an innocence and dignity that could break your heart.
In the 1960s, he became smitten with platinum rather than silver printing, although the process demanded much more time and precision in the darkroom. It was worth it for the velvety blacks and glowing whites of the resulting image, nowhere more evident than in his series from Dahomey, where the dark skin of his subjects made for some of his most striking work.
In 1972, Penn went to the southwest desert area of Morocco to photograph the blue men of the Tuareg. However, they had no interest in his enterprise. He had more luck with the Guedra women in Guelmine, who “sat, eyes fixed on the lens, enjoying the camera’s scrutiny yet themselves impenetrable…"
In Worlds in a Room, published in 1974, Penn wrote about his journeys in prose as elegant as his photographs. In Morocco, although having met the first photographic subjects he couldn't control, he seems not to regret it at all: "What is revealed is no more than these mysterious creatures meant us to know."
Spirits Come Home: The Civil War (Redux) Images of Willie Anne Wright
© 2011 WILLIE ANNE WRIGHT
The ghosts of the Civil War are always present in the South — stand in the shade of the stone rifleman in any southern square, and they crowd up close, hoping you'll wonder their names.
Native Virginian Willie Anne Wright does more than that: she catches them on film. Armed with pinhole cameras of her own design, she followed Civil War re-enactors to many of the most famous battlefields from Manassas to Gettysburg.
"In over a decade of photographing Civil War re-enactors, I saw thousands of people, men and women, Caucasian and African American, expend untold hours and energy in a quest to understand and honor a segment of our shared history," says Wright. "Witnessing this deep desire confirmed my feeling that the past is not some forgotten dimension, but is always with us, affecting our lives in ways we may not comprehend."
Re-enactors say that they experience a kind of time travel. Those who experience Wright's Civil War Redux do, too. Using the antique process of camera obscura, Wright lets the sun flood through a tiny aperture onto film, allowing "the past to inscribe itself onto the present day."
The past, as ever, plays a few tricks, from Custer leaning against a pick-up with U.S. Army plates to Robert E. Lee standing next to his own memorial on Monument Avenue in Richmond. But be warned: you might choke on that chuckle when the widows at Manassas turn your way, or the bucket of feet by the hospital tent looms into view.
© 2011 WILLIE ANNE WRIGHT
All of Wright's work with the lensless camera speaks of a world long gone, from the graves and abandoned houses in Southland to the antique clothing in Left Behind, to the returning shades in Civil War Redux.
"I'm hung up on loss and change," she says with a smile, convinced that the past is always with us, even if we can't see it. That's where the pinhole camera comes in. "It sees things I don't."
Although she began her life in art as a painter, Wright turned to lensless photography in the '70s. She is "one of the first artists to revitalize pinhole photography in modern times," says author and consultant for photography at the Chrysler Museum, Brooks Johnson. To this day, she remains one of its most respected and dedicated faithful.
To commemorate the sesquicentennial of the Civil War, Civil War Redux has been on the march both north and south of the Mason-Dixon Line. In 2011, selections from the series were shown in group shows at the George Eastman House in Rochester and the Chrysler Museum in Norfolk. Solo show venues were the Morris Museum in Augusta, Georgia and the VMFA in Richmond, which will travel the show statewide through 2013.
Anniversary of a Near-Death
German writer Rudolf Ditzen used a pseudonym when he began to write, afraid that such a career would disappoint and embarrass his father, a prominent judge. He named himself after two characters from The Brothers Grimm: Hans, a boy who puts little stock in worldly riches, and Falada, a talking horse who always speaks the truth.
This year marks a century since the event that haunted Fallada (who added an "l" to the name to make it his own) all his life. In 1911, at the age of 18, he and a friend staged a duel to obscure their planned double suicide. The friend missed.
Fallada promptly shot himself in the chest, severely injuring himself. Cleared of murder charges, he was sent instead to the first of many psychiatric institutions. Another suicide attempt, addiction to morphine, embezzlement, then prison time and clinic stays followed.
Somehow, in the next 35 chaotic years, Fallada managed to write nearly 30 books. Not long before dying in 1947, he wrote the novel that would become, thanks to Michael Hofmann's English translation in 2009, an international bestseller.
Jeder stirbt für sich allein (Every Man Dies Alone) tells the story of working class couple Otto and Anna Quangel, scraping by in their Berlin apartment during the Second World War. The death of their only son during the invasion of France spurs them to work against the state in their own quiet way.
They begin dropping hand-written postcards in buildings throughout the city. Denouncing the Hitler regime with words that no-one would dare speak aloud (Deutsches Volk Wache Auf! German people wake up! We must free ourselves from Hitlerism!) they do their Sunday card-writing in the hope that others will read them and feel called to their own acts of resistance.
Otto and Anna were based on a real couple, Otto and Elise Hampel, who were eventually arrested in October 1942, sentenced to death and beheaded. Fallada wrote the 500-page novel in just under a month, after setting himself the task of writing more each day than he had the day before.
He finished the book, but never saw it published, dying from morphine overdose in 1947 at the age of 53.
Falada the faithful horse comes to a bad end, too. A treacherous servant has him butchered for being witness to her betrayal of the princess.
But the true princess pays the butcher to hang Falada's head under the bridge where she can see him each morning. And it's Falada's daily greeting to his "young queen," that is reported to the king and leads to the discovery of the servant's evil.
Fallada the writer is a master of the small moment. In Every Man Dies Alone, he sets out his characters as carefully as Otto places his tools on the table: inkpot, blank cards, white gloves. Such power resides in these commonplace things, such potential for good or evil. Fallada, who was himself falsely denounced by an acquaintance's letter and briefly arrested, would have us take note.
Seeing Guido Reni at the Alte Pinakothek
...reminds me that I've met someone who knows his paintings like the back of her hand...
I'm working on a new slew of stories for Endeavors, the online creativity and research magazine of my alma mater, Texas Christian University. Not that I actually went to school there. I've simply decided to make myself an honorary step-child of the place, seeing as it's been a "bountiful mother" to me for about as many years as it takes to get a PhD. I wonder if I need to tell somebody.
I'm talking about wealth, here. The kind you can't count, fold, shine up or slink around in. I've thought it many times over the years, as I've had the chance to interview people who discover, enthuse and enjoin, transform, spark and heal: Writing their stories is the best job in the world.
I remembered that yet again this week, listening to the soft west Texas accent of Dwayne Simpson, who has spent forty years trying to un-knit the chain-mail of drug addiction. And to the world's most patient engineer, Tristan Tayag, who had to explain to me at least three times how his machine (the one that may one day help cure diabetes) tumbles, tumbles, tumbles cells so that they never land, or break apart, or die.
It has been a lucky education. I don't mind if they never let me graduate. As long as I can keep coming to school.
Aïda Rogers and Daufuskie Island author, Roger Pinckney
Perspicacious editor of Sandlapper Magazine for over two decades and my great friend Aïda Rogers introduced me to Roger Pinckney, as she has all of the best things about South Carolina. We took the ferry from Hilton Head and met with Roger in March for an article I wrote about him for the autumn issue of the magazine.
Gruff, Southern, handy with guns: Pinckney seems an unlikely environmentalist. Maybe it's time to ditch the stereotype.
Woven through all of the beauty and banter of his prose in three books of essays, a screenplay and novel, is Roger Pinckney's deep commitment to preserving Daufuskie Island. He'd like to see it the way it was before the oysters died and the Gullah rivermen had to leave for other jobs of work. Before the development boom in the 1980's that sought to make Daufuskie the Martha's Vineyard of the South. Before acres were uprooted to build golf courses and gated communities, and swampland was drained to create condos.
When the moon had to compete with floodlights, and leatherback sea turtles headed landward on what they thought was their age-old path to the sea, Pinckney got mad, got naked, and got busy. He sees Daufuskie as it is, still enchanting and wild in places, and he means to keep it that way. If you didn't know about all that, or about the no money root and Dr. Buzzard and the bald eagles that finally stopped the builders, then you haven't read Roger Pinckney. And if you haven't read Roger Pinckney, then there are some who'll say you'll never know Daufuskie Island. And that would be a damn shame.
It all started off with a wedding and a horse race
You know you're in Munich when young girls who normally lift nothing heavier than a lipstick start hefting liters of beer. This year, Munich has gone all historic, with the Stadtmuseum's show on the life of Oktoberfest through the centuries and the Wiesn opening one day early to celebrate its 200th birthday.
It all went down like this: On Sept. 17, 1810, Crown Prince Ludwig and Princess Therese of Saxony-Hildburghausen celebrated their nuptials. The army staged a show of the regimental horses to impress the couple and provide some fun for the masses, on a field now called Theresienwiese in the bride's honor. Beer-masters, dirndl-makers and wurst-sellers capitalized on the fun, unknowingly kicking off the yearly party that would make Munich a mecca to hops-lovers worldwide.
Hops might be the ingredient that makes this year's Jubilee Oktoberfest beer (Das Jubiläums-Wiesnbier) so special--but whatever it is, nobody's saying. Even the directors of The Association of Munich Brewers don't know what their chief brewmeister put in to make the stuff so rich and heady with history. All I know is, the beer is potent and a deep honey-brown, and I'll have to try a few more to tell whether it's really as good as the ones we knocked back in 1810.
Scanonization
The British Library announced today in less than poetic language that lovers of ancient newsprint should brace for a "mass digitisation." No longer will the 30,000 researchers who make the pilgrimage each year to the Newspaper Library have to traipse to Colindale: soon, 350 years of local, national and international news stories (52,000 titles and counting) will wend their way webward.brightsolid, a subsidiary of Dundee-based publisher, D.C. Thomson, will scan up to four million pages in the next two years, gnashing ever faster through the pile. By 2020, they reckon they'll have all 40 million pages scanned in. The website will go live next year. Finally, you'll get to read about Napoleon being buried under the willows on St. Helena, look up the Whitechapel murders, or find an eye-witness to The Great Mutiny in India sans microfilm. But have your credit card handy, love: nothing in this life is free.
Unless you go online inside the library, of course. You'll have to go to London for that, but then, why not? Check out the marvelous map exhibit while you're there.
Queen of Poisons
Just take a gander at this website and tell me what you see. The ink stain that could be blood, the Sherlockian magnifying glass, and the ominous scientist looming over Manhattan on the book cover, all do their part to make you think Deborah Blum has written a crime thriller, right?
Even Blum's enigmatic smile in the author pic makes you wonder: Has the Pulitzer-winning science writer with four other non-fiction books to her credit started writing fiction?
Not at all. She's still, "Investigating Science One Story at a Time," as the tagline reads. But if the character-driven, true-crime history of poisoning in America in the '20s and '30s grips you like a thriller, that's okay with her.
And if reviewers insist on using the word, "enthralling" to describe the book, that's fine, too. Almost as good as the book is Blum's blog, a cornucopia of poison mysteries occurring in the news (watch out for those day lilies, wild-foodies!), history, and her own pretty fascinating life.
Writing about the site for my regular column on freelancing for NASW gave me the chance to talk with Blum about her work, her start as a journalist, and her tips for staying sane. What fun! The lady, as you will quickly gather from her bio: is a hoot.
A funny science writer? Now there's a mystery for you.
Hell: Frozen Over
It's official: White-Nose Syndrome has been found in Tennessee-- photo by Marvin Moriarty/USFWS
Biologists are calling it the most devastating wildlife decline in the past century in North America. Since White-Nose Syndrome was discovered in a New York cave in 2006, an estimated one million hibernating bats have died in the northeastern USA.
The hallmark of the disease is a powdery white fungus on bat noses, ears and wings. The fungus seems to irritate their skin, and bats rouse from hibernation months early. They either fly out of their caves during the daytime, dehydrated and dying, or use up all their fat reserves and freeze to death where they hang.
Over the past three decades, European bat specialists have reported seeing a small number of bats with white noses. But European bats soon groom the fungus off, and appear healthy. Is it the same fungus, and if so, why do European bats survive it?
Bat disease specialist, Gudrun Wibbelt, at the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Berlin, is trying to find out.
Skulls-R-Us
Happy Holidays from the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia
Skull Wreath by Noah Scalin
Once you start looking, you see skulls everywhere, says Noah Scalin, the graphic artist who gave himself the task of making and posting a new skull every day on his blog for a year. Within a few months, his skull-a-day blog had hundreds of thousands of hits. His inventive variation on a theme resonated with people around the world. A publisher eventually came calling, and the project has been reborn as a book.
As Scalin points out in an interview with Robert Hicks, intrepid director of the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia, the "memento mori" is a time-honored reminder that our days are numbered. Scalin found that staring at skulls every day made him want to celebrate life.
Hicks has begun posting videocasts with authors he invites to speak at the museum on the Mütter's website. The site makes the Mütter look like a fun place. Not many other museum shops would offer a skull wreath as a cheery holiday gift idea. But then, how many museum directors get to refer to their collections as "Skulls-R-Us?"
Find all of Dr. Hicks' videocasts here, at No Bones About It.
The Clock is Tck-ing
Angela Merkel expressing her regret a few years hence, if Cop15 climate talks fail. Altered images of world leaders greet arrivals at Copenhagen airport. (Created by Greenpeace and tcktcktck.)
Dave Hickey on the Line
In one of his regular columns for Art in America, the glossy international review that bills itself as "the world's premier art magazine," Dave Hickey crams Joe Cocker, a waspish art critic from a '40s noir film, Wilson Pickett singing In The Midnight Hour, Caravaggio, Andy Warhol, a new theory about the unconscious, and his own bifurcated psyche into the Stax recording studio in Memphis, circa 1965.
And "Lawd have mercy!" as Pickett would shout, by the time you meet up with all the cool characters, rocking tunes and renegade ideas that Hickey whips into that box, you forget you're reading a sniffy art mag — and maybe even that Hickey's just told you he's the most famous art critic in the world — and start having fun.
To be fair, Hickey probably IS the most famous art critic in the world. One reason is his high-flown, down to earth, scurrilous, gorgeous, heart-breakingly serious, hilarious prose. Another is his gift, lyrical sentences notwithstanding, for ticking people off.
Here, for example, is Hickey accepting a compliment about his work: "I regard myself as a serious intellectual person, but I don’t care if intellectuals like what I’ve written. I’m that arrogant. What do I care about the praise of idiots?"
I was, understandably, a little nervous about phoning him for a small article slated for a small magazine hailing from the place he's said he couldn't wait to see in the rearview mirror. Being an idiot myself, the first thing I did was praise his writing to the skies. He was gracious, funny and more than patient. When I apologized for keeping him over an hour, he shrugged it off with, "It's your dime."
It was Skype-phone, actually, and I kept the camera firmly turned off, grateful that the man who makes his living from "tearing stuff down" couldn't see me.
A Hole in Time: German Exhibition of American Masters
The Ruins of Menokin, by veteran pinhole photographer and VCU alumna, Willie Anne Wright.
Ever Present Past, which ended much too soon at The Neue Sächsische Gallerie in Chemnitz, ought to come with a word or two of warning. If it doesn't already, Time — captured, lost, mournful, unyielding — will certainly haunt you once you've seen this show.
So be careful when you enter the transcendent rubble of Willie Anne Wright's abandoned houses or fall up into the eternity of Ed Levinson's skies. Watch your back as you move across Craig Barber's lightstruck paddies: ghosts of the past hover. Time makes its insistent call to look back, look beyond, look inside.
At the very least, be prepared to find heartache in the rich shadows of dreamscapes, battlegrounds and interiors from Tokyo to Manassas and Havana to Viet Nam. But don't despair: amid the ghosts and grief caught by these three veterans of the pinhole camera, there also shines a healing light.
Ever Present Past
-curator, Marko Hehl
www.neue-saechsische-galerie.de
European Eye
When Belgian photographer Philippe Vandenbroeck self-published his book on European Capitals, he didn't expect it to be so successful. Vandenbroeck's photographic pilgrimage has struck a chord with travelers and residents alike. Not least with José Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, who was especially taken with, "...the melancholy and the light" of a wall scrawled with "Amor" and the likeness of a beloved Portugese poet. "This is indeed my Lisbon!" he wrote, echoing the response of so many who have seen the book and found themselves at home.
Vandenbroeck's panoramic shots offer the unvarnished streets, interiors and minor miracles the resident finds in his city every day. Here, Luxembourg is a brocade chair waiting on the street for the bin man; Budapest a snowbound elephant; Dublin a Beethoven in a café window. Much of Vandenbroeck's work has a dreamlike quality, but make that symbolic rather than swirling. Stark, anachronistic, a passing glimpse that suggests deep meaning, like Athens and its walking wreaths, above.
The Eyes Have It
Ravia's Eyes photograph from Belly Dancers series
by Anne C. Savedge
Certainly Ravia's eyes have it, several times over, in this image. But in most of Anne C. Savedge's Belly Dancers series, it's the body that counts. In shot after shot, among spinning fabrics of fuchsia, purple and gold, bodies soar like birds and whirl in ecstatic splendor, singing a language that we all know but only dance can speak.
Savedge expertly captures the light and movement of the women's costumes, veils, and limbs as they dance. Her images, like the Middle Eastern music that belly dancing seeks to embody and reveal, take us to a place where everyday sadness and pain are shimmied and swung into something unexpectedly shining and joyful.
Bi-continental by Design
Oregon Quarterly
His native Germany has the highest density of architects in the world. But that’s not what keeps Lars Uwe Bleher up at night. The architect, exhibition designer, and assistant professor of architectural design and digital design media at the University of Oregon shuns shut-eye to straddle two worlds. As managing director of design for Atelier Markgraph, an exhibition design firm based in Germany, he’s got to keep a foot in two time zones. When it’s midnight in Eugene, his colleagues in Frankfurt are just bidding each other guten morgen.
read the rest of the story at Oregon Quarterly...
Composing a Life Abroad
Soprano Beate von Hahn and composer Laurence Traiger at the Black Forest Music Festival.Laurence Traiger loved Austria so much during his junior year abroad – he decided to stay. In 1976, the KU music student flew to Salzburg to study at the Mozarteum, the university of music and dramatic arts. Jump ahead 30 years. Traiger's still in Europe, composing and teaching music theory at the Mozarteum himself.
the rest of the story...
Photography Speaks in Chemnitz
Marko Hehl worked for a year to bring this stunning international show to his city.
Street-People-Nature, a group show featuring work by Nobuhiro Nagashima, Phillippe Vandenbroeck and Marko Hehl, is a celebration of the surprising gifts of the world. The photographers themselves are a surprising gift to Chemnitz, the former Karl Marx Stadt in eastern Germany. For how often have residents of this city had the chance to see Belgian, Japanese and German sensibilities sharing the same space?
The chance to experience the spare beauty of black and white photography untouched by PhotoShop is a rare pleasure. None of the 39 works has titles, which means listening to hear what each piece names itself. From Nagashima’s solitary man in a subway car with his lap full of flowers, to Hehl’s mist-hung Saxon woods, to Vandenbroeck’s dark church with one burning window, it is a show that speaks with quiet urgency directly to the heart.
F/Stop: Leipzig's First Photo Fest
Leipzig, new darling of the art world, won't be known solely for its painting if Kristin Dittrich has anything to do with it. The founder of Zentrum für Zeitgenössische Fotografie [Center for Contemporary Photography] Dittrich is the organizer and art director for Leipzig's first international photo festival.
The 29 year old curator, who cut her teeth at the Sorbonne and Paris Photo, had a dream: for Leipzig to celebrate fine art photography with an annual international photo festival. Dittrich and her team worked for months without salaries to make it happen. In June, 140 artists from nine countries met in the heart of Leipzig's art district. Three thousand guests came to the four-day festival, and the press has been riotously good. Dittrich is broke, but happy. And already planning for next year.
The Collector
Highlight from The Chrysler Museum Photography CollectionMan Ray: Le Souffle, 1931
© Man Ray Trust
When Brooks Johnson left a tiny backwater on the Chesapeake for the big city, he just got in his ‘65 Ford Fairlane and drove. Everything he owned was stuffed inside the old station wagon — most importantly his camera, which had worked so well to help him meet girls. He was 17, a bit of a rough cob to hear him tell it, and not absolutely sure of the route. But he set off for Baltimore and the Maryland Institute College of Art, terribly excited, deeply shy, and all alone.
It’s hard to credit that picture of Johnson now, sitting across from him as we lunch in what I think of as “his” restaurant, on the ground floor of “his” small gem of a museum in Norfolk, Virginia. The soft-spoken curator of photography at The Chrysler, not too many miles but worlds away from his boyhood home, laughs at his former incarnation. That self-deprecating humor may be the key to why Johnson has become so successful: unlike many who know as much as he does about photography and spend thousands of dollars a year acquiring it, Johnson is a modest man.
Wally Shawn — in Texas?
David Yeakle in Wally Shawn's A Thought in Three Parts
photo courtesy of Josh Meyer
Wally Shawn and Texas don’t usually appear in the same sentence — but then Austin is an unusually un-Texan place: in the past week it proved itself America’s most progressive city.
Or at least one of Austin’s hundred or so theatres did (The Vortex), where Rubber Repertory produced Shawn’s play, A Thought in Three Parts. Banned from the London stage 30 years ago and never produced in the USA (until now), Shawn told co-directors Matt Hislope and Josh Meyer that if they succeeded in staging the play: “My boys, you’ll be pioneers!”
To discover the real identity of Mr. Frivolous and what Wally said to him backstage....go to TCU Magazine online, and scroll to the final story on this page.
Buxom Cakes & Homemade Sin: Marcel Desaulniers' Death by Chocolate Cake
Don't know a spatula from a Sacher torte? Don't worry. In this aptly named cookbook for chocophiles, (Death by Chocolate Cake) Marcel Desaulniers makes baking your own gâteaux look as easy as pie.
He's known as the Guru of Ganache. Some call him Dr. Chocolate — and wish he made house calls. As serious as he is about chocolate, (and he is serious: this is cookbook number three in his Death by Chocolate and Desserts to Die For series) Desaulniers is certainly the funniest chef in print. Every recipe comes with a few paragraphs of wit and wisdom about how best to make the cake, what to snort along with it (Marcel favors a chocolate-flavored Russian vodka), a bit of the history behind the recipe, and how best to handle its delicate parts.
...find the rest of the review and a recipe at CompulsiveReader.com
Master Liar
TCU MagazineSheila Stark Phillips would rather climb a tree and tell a lie than stand on the ground and tell the truth. It’s a preference that served her well when she represented the south central US at the biggest confabulator’s conference in the country. She didn’t have to climb a tree, but she did have to travel to the tiny town of Jonesborough, Tenn., where the National Storytelling Festival was held, and lie her head off.
Wasabi Toothpaste?
Herbs for Health Magazinephoto by Henri Li at kronka.com
Hold on to your hat and pile your plate with wasabi: new research indicates that it may be good for your health.
Used for centuries by the Japanese on raw fish as a tasty antimicrobial, recent studies suggest that the incendiary green paste may help prevent blood clots, asthma, and even cancer.
Hideki Masuda, Ph.D., has discovered another use for it. At a meeting of the International Chemical Congress, Masuda reported that wasabi is capable of deep-sixing Streptococcus mutans, one of the primary bacteria responsible for causing tooth decay.
In Masuda’s lab experiments, high concentrations of wasabi interfered with the bacteria's ability to stick to bone and teeth. Masuda says that clinical research will be needed to confirm wasabi's plaque-pouncing powers. Any volunteers?
Zen Calling
Stanford Magazine
It's a raucous morning at the Mozart Café. The jazz is loud; the espresso machine gushes like Old Faithful; a delivery man bangs through the door with a dolly of beer. But Susan Ji-on Postal sips her chai serenely. While other patrons bend close to hear each other through the din, Susan is unbowed by all the chaos. A sweet-faced woman with dark cropped hair, she sits straight and speaks with quiet joy about her life as a Buddhist priest.
Find the rest of the story at: Stanford Magazine.
Play Nice, Now
Dog Fancy Magazinephoto by Candace Jenkins
Charleston, South Carolina, is known as the country's most sociable city. Little wonder then, that Charleston's canine residents have quite a reputation for being charming too. But they do have a secret advantage: a weekly support group for the socially challenged dog.
more...
Wasser Ist Leben
Chesapeake Bay MagazineWhat is it that’s so satisfying about living near water? I ask myself this question as I drive happily down a narrow Virginia road, the Potomac and Rappahannock Rivers on each side of me like green-skirted sisters eager to link arms and show me the view. Their insistent voices and shining faces encourage me to pull over, stop the car and abandon it, as I’ll someday leave my unwieldy body behind and fall up into that great river above.
This stretch of land, nearly to Windmill Point, is a water-lover’s paradise. But I could say the same about all of the Chesapeake’s watershed: no matter where you live in Chesapeake country, you’re never far from the water and her charms. Some of you can see it from your living rooms; others may have to drive a few miles. Whether it’s a river, a creek, or the Bay herself, it doesn’t matter. You’re all in luck, and you know it. You live more contentedly than dry-landers, that’s all there is to it. I know. I used to live here too.
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