Moving in Circles

This time of year, I think a lot about the cyclical nature of things. It seems like only yesterday that I was watching daffodils and tulips come up. Now it is time to trim back gardens and enjoy autumn's mums and sedum. The warm afternoons will give way to frosty mornings which will give way to snowstorms which in turn will lead us back to spring sunshine.

Raining Acorns Redux

Today marks our first anniversary.

To mark the day, we are re-posting the inaugural post.

It’s raining acorns.  Last year I thought the sound was squirrels, harrying the leaves.  The sounds were scattered though, in space and time.  That should have been a clue, but I was too much a novice to connect the acorns strewn across our driveway with the noises in the woods.

Scranton, PA: More Than Just ‘The Office’

If you know Scranton, Pennsylvania, as the setting of NBC’s The Office—the U.S. version of Slough, the depressed and depressing overcast English city in which the Wernham Hogg Paper Company was doomed to eternally, if comically, fail—then your impression of the city is sunnier than the one most Scranton area residents have held of their hometown for decades.

“Mother and Father Worked Hard So I Can Play”

The billboard outside the museum shows a headless mannequin child at play, dressed in an outfit that looks Victorian, yet makes me think of Africa.

A Conversation with Composer John Metcalf: Discovering the Paths of Song

When Welsh composer John Metcalf opened the door to us, he apologized that he couldn’t shake our hands.  He’d been kneading bread and hadn’t quite finished.  He’d already alerted us that we shouldn’t buy any vegetables ahead of our visit, as he had a large organic garden “which you can raid when you're here.”

(Punk) Art and the City

I’m not an expert by any stretch, but I’ve been observing and writing about the productive relationship between cities and the arts since I moved to Baltimore in 2004.  In fact, my involvement with Pages & Places and its annual book festival stems from my awareness of reams of researching pointing over and over and over to the fact that cities heavily invested in a vibrant, diverse, street-level arts and culture scene are far more likely than their counterparts to thrive in the 21st century, and Liz Randol’s vision for the twin-themed Pages & Places Book Festival spoke directly to current best practices that cities like San Jose, Houston, Denver, and Memphis are struggling (some more successfully than others) to implement.

Summer's Ebb

You can't remember the last time you wore socks.

The days have imperceptibly become a little shorter, you find yourself surprised to see that it's only 7 or 8 o'clock when the sun is descending and the shadows are long. Some evenings you even consider pulling out a light sweatshirt because the air is cooling down more quickly each night. Even though in your mind it was just June, you realize that summer is waning all too fast.