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 5.7 million hibernating bats have died in the 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?

In this article for Deutsche Welle, I spoke to bat disease specialist, Gudrun Wibbelt, at the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Berlin. Wibbelt is doing her best 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 on the museum's Youtube channel.

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.

Hickey always has fun, or else he's outta here. Even writing is fun for him: "Well of course it is, otherwise I wouldn't DO it." His high-flown, down to earth, scurrilous, gorgeous, heart-breakingly serious, hilarious prose has made him famous. Along with 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 magazine hailing from the place he's said he couldn't wait to see in the rear-view 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 for over an hour, he shrugged it off with, "It's your dime."

It was Skype, 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 VCU alumna, 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 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.