Arts
The Arts section of Orient Lodge
Little Brother
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 06/13/2014 - 08:40Recently, a friend posted on Facebook a link to Cory Doctorow’s post on BoingBoing, Why I'm sending 200 copies of Little Brother to a high-school in Pensacola, FL.
The principal of Booker T Washington High in Pensacola FL cancelled the school's One School/One Book summer reading program rather than letting all the kids go through with the previously approved assignment to read Little Brother, the bestselling young adult novel by Cory Doctorow. With Cory and Tor Books' help, the teachers are fighting back.
Before I learned that I’m supposed to be embarrassed to read young adult novels, I downloaded it for free.
At the top, Cory has “THE COPYRIGHT THING”. It is chock full of great quotes:
Universal access to human knowledge is in our grasp, for the first time in the history of the world. This is not a bad thing.
As to why he gives away his ebooks, he says,
For me -- for pretty much every writer -- the big problem isn't piracy, it's obscurity… I'm more interested in getting more of that wider audience into the tent than making sure that everyone who's in the tent bought a ticket to be there.
Well, I’m glad to help with that. Perhaps this blog post will encourage a few more people to check out Cory’s writing.
Yet the quote that has particularly jumped out at me is this:
If you're not making art with the intention of having it copied, you're not really making art for the twenty-first century.
Of course, I wonder what people who advocate not making art, just making something think about this final quote.
Reimagining
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 06/01/2014 - 20:14Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit. Another month rolls down the hill like a Sisyphean bolder and a new month begins. What will this month bring? Last month, my 2014 campaign for State Representative began. What kind of impact can I have this time? I went to an event to reimagine the Episcopal Church in Connecticut. I’ve shared my reactions and wonder what sort of impact that will have. Meanwhile, I try to balance work and home.
As I try to pull together thoughts on reimaging both politics and religion in the twenty-first century, I keep in mind what a luxury that is. For too many, it is too much to just get by from day to day. How do we encourage those who are too exhausted from the daily grind to be more engaged in politics or religion?
For me, my relaxation often comes from trying to gain new perspectives, particularly through the arts. I’m trying to determine what my literary diet for the coming months will be. Should I dive back into poetry? From Maya Angelou and Nikki Giovanni to Billy Collins and Denise Levertov? Should I reread some Thomas Merton or perhaps the writings of some Great Awakening preacher?
How do I relate all of this to what I read on Facebook? I’ve been thinking of trying to post something upbeat each day, whether it be a picture of a flower, a great quote, or an inspiring article. I’ve been trying to highlight things going on around me where regular people make a difference. I’ve been avoiding jumping into many of the discussions where seem to be venting with no real solutions.
Saturday, someone posted a link to Download a Free Copy of Danah Boyd’s Book, It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens. This led me to explore the Open Culture website for a while, and ultimately end up checking out their list of films by Andrei Tarkovsky that are online.
I ended up watching Ivan’s Childhood. One person describe the film this way:
First Film by the prophet of modern cinema Andrei Tarkovsky
While Sergei Eisenstein literally wrote the grammar of cinema by inventing Montage, Tarkovsky found the true calling of cinema with his exposition of long shot where the roving camera wanders examining stuff and through its eyes reach into the heart and soul of the protagonist. Through him film became what it was meant to be, the purveyor of dreams. All other developments in cinema are borrowed from other visual and literary developments.
The film is set on the front lines of World War II and traces the experiences of a child, Ivan. It is the sort of film to make you think, especially about the lives of people very different those of us living comfortably in the twenty-first century.
So, let’s see where the boulder rolls this month.
#TEDxVille - Prologue
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 03/31/2014 - 06:00Still reeling from the death of Bridget and the news that another friend is in the hospital, I got behind the wheel of my rusting 1997 Black Nissan Altima and started my drive up to Somerville to hear my middle daughter, Miranda, speak at TEDxSomerville.
The drive is only a couple hours, much shorter than the trips I used to take when Miranda was in College in Virginia, but to add to my blues was the rain. It seems like every time I drive up to a big event Miranda is involved in, it is raining, sort of like the negative space in a painting.
I’m going through one of those really busy phases at work, and my free time is also at a premium right now. I missed two other important events to go up and hear Miranda. I thought about Bridget. I thought about my friend in the hospital. What is life all about, anyway? I go through the motions every day. I do my tasks at work, hoping to make life better for those around me. On good days, I get a chance to write.
“What I need”, I thought to myself, “is a transcendent moment, a transformational moment, a spark of inspiration.” I go to so many conferences. I gather information. I write about the parts that grab me. This too, has become yet another task, yet another chore, something I do by rote.
I arrived in Somerville, parked in a lot and headed over to the TEDxSomerville venue, Brooklyn Boulders.
Brooklyn Boulders is a climbing community in an old factory. The walls are covered with foothold, handholds and art. It is a great space, but not the sort of space you’d expect to find a TEDx conference. People were climbing as volunteers set out folding chairs and giant beanbag chairs.
I headed towards the Assembly Row blogger lounge. I sat around and talked with other writers, had some amazing champagne raspberry Jello shots, recharged my batteries and got ready for the event.
The Public Creative Empathetic Sphere
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 02/02/2014 - 09:16This morning, my Chromebook was acting weird, sluggish. It wouldn’t save what I was writing. In the end, I lost a draft of a blog post which I had put a lot of work in. It’s just one more thing in what is been a frustrating few days. Yesterday, one of the dishes from my mother’s house, from my childhood, broke. Things have been very stressful at work. Blah.
Anyway, I had started my blog post reflecting on Groundhog’s Day. It may be that Punxsutawney will see six more weeks of winter, or perhaps those in the media spotlight will continue to experience cold slippery conditions, but any woodchuck here in Woodbridge would have difficulty seeing much beyond the end of his burrow, let alone his shadow.
The top news story of the day that Google News select for me was about Gov. Christie’s letter to his supporters. The whole thing reads like he is helping write the libretto for Christie and the GWB, an opera on the scale of Einstein on the Beach,Nixon in China, or perhaps Brokeback Mountain.
The next story was about the Super Bowl. I wonder how many people will be talking about Gov. Christie as they drive across the George Washington Bridge on their way to the big game. I expect traffic will be pretty bad.
Buried much deeper in the news was reports that the death toll has now risen to 16 in the volcano in Indonesia.
Yesterday, Dan Kennedy posted a status on Facebook, talking about the State Department report on the XL Pipeline. It has now received fifty six comments, most of them very insightful well thought out about climate change, transportation, cost benefit analysis, stakeholder analysis and so on.
It provided an interesting data point with which to think about Howard Rheingold’s video, Why the history of the public sphere matters in the Internet age. This is a video that was posted back in 2009 and recent reappeared in my social media feed. It has lots of interesting ideas to explore, and I’d love to hear thoughts about it five years later.
Was the discussion around Dan’s post a good example of the public sphere online? Was it an anomaly? What can we learn from it? I was planning to write more on this after I took a break to go to the dump. On the way, I listened to David Sedaris on NPR reading his New Yorker article, Now We Are Five.
It was a moving recounting of issues in his family and it made me stop and think. Is it the public sphere that we need to be thinking about, or is there something bigger, something more important? What about an empathetic sphere? What about a creative sphere? How do these spheres relate to one another? Do the overlap? Does one encompass another? They they part of some giant three dimensional Venn Diagram?
What does this public creative empathetic sphere look like and how does it behave? It’s still foggy outside, and I’m not really sure. So, I’ll get ready and head off to church for Candlemas.
Promoting Empowered Wellness Through Spreading the Contagion of Creativity.
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 02/01/2014 - 11:14Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit. I”m glad January is over. Let’s hope February will be better. I’ve been incredibly busy with issues at work and have had little time for writing or exploring new ideas. I did get a chance to visit my daughter Miranda up in Boston last week, and as we talked about my work in health care and hers in arts education, a phrase came to my mind, The Creativity Contagion.
One of the really important movements in health care right now is the empowered patient, or ePatient. Often this empowerment is tied to being online; finding information about diseases and connecting with others to address the disease. It seems to work well for privileged patients, who have gone to college, had good careers and made enough money to be comfortable, but what about other patients, those struggling to get by day to day, those who are not empowered in their daily lives. How do we empower these patients?
My ideas started crystallizing around a 3D printer we got at work. There is something empowering about having an idea, learning how to take the idea and make something of it, and, in the case of a 3D printer, see the idea actually take shape as an object in front of you.
Creativity may be the key to empowerment that I’ve been looking for. Too much health care is defensive. We get our shots and change our diets to avoid getting sick. When we do get sick, we go to the doctor’s office to get better. Wellness gets bandied about but not pursued as much as it should be, especially when we are dealing with chronically ill patients.
We try to avoid getting sick. What we should really be doing is trying to become creative, with all the hope and empowerment that comes with it.
Perhaps that captures what I hope to do with a 3D printer at a health center, Promote Empowered Wellness Through Spreading the Contagion of Creativity.
