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 that 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. When I wrote about Laurence for Kansas Alumni magazine, I hoped he'd like the story. Today I'm pretty chuffed to report that it's posted on his Wikipedia entry.
You can go there or read it here

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 Collection
Man 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. Find the rest of the review and a recipe at CompulsiveReader.com

Master Liar

TCU Magazine
Sheila 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 Magazine


photo 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.

Wasser Ist Leben

Chesapeake Bay Magazine
What 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.

Light Celebration

The Photo Review



pinhole photograph by Willie Anne Wright




When asked to describe the work of Willie Anne Wright, a visitor to her recent 30 year retrospective nearly succeeds with one word: "elegy."

A mournful poem, yes; lament for the dead, not quite, for the subjects of Wright's pinhole photographs, photograms and composite prints are very much alive. Present with all their associations and concomitant life, Wright's images reside in, as Faulkner once wrote about the South, "a land where the past is not dead; it isn't even past."

Thirty Year Wonder

TCU Magazine

/photo by Loli Cantor









"Sorry I'm nekkid," says Johnny Simons, in a voice as smooth and deep as riverbed rock. As he pulls his t-shirt on, I fiddle in my bag for the recorder, but much as I want to, I don't turn it on. The writer, director and creative engine of Hip Pocket Theatre doesn't like to talk much about what he does.

"I know you don't want to talk about your work," I say, to let us both off the hook. Simons allows that he is a little tongue-tied. So I tell a tale on him instead.


...Read more at TCU Magazine.

Maestro in Mamaroneck

Hometown Media New York

Outside the Big Apple Shoe Repair in Mamaroneck, New York, the ripe red symbol of NYC hangs proud. Inside, busy at his workbench, is a living symbol of what lies behind the city's (and, many would say, the country's) greatness: immigrant, craftsman, small business owner, Isidro Frias.

Bending leather to his will involves smelly chemicals, sharp knives, a fair bit of manhandling and hammering. Mr. Frias does his shoe-repair behind a screen, shielding customers from the grind and push and stink of shoe work. Or maybe he's guarding his secrets, as any good magician does.

New Babe on the Beach

Just 15 miles from Charleston, every day is a day at the beach. Everywhere you look, it's sand and palms, ocean and palms, sunshine and palms.

In the palm of a palm tree is how one feels in designers Kevan and Funda Hoertdoerfer's residential commission on the Isle of Palms. The house stands ten feet high on hurricane-protective pilings, resembling, as one visitor said, a cross between a tree house and a church. And it's true, there's something both sacred and playful about the place, introduced early on by the Jacob's ladder entrance and the cantilevered roof-line that tips its hat to the three-tiered deck.

Size Matters

Labyrinths 11 by Joachim Kersten


In his studio in Nuremberg, Germany, it’s always a gamble whether Joachim Kersten can build a canvas big enough to please him, yet small enough to get down the stairs.

“Size matters,” he says with a grin, opening the massive door to the Rathaus (built in 1572). Inside, the stone walls soar. The floorspace is so vast that viewers shuffle backward to take in his work without bothering to glance behind them.

At last, Kersten’s king-sized abstracts hang in a space that accommodates their girth.