Sounds of the Songbird (A Night of Music and Words)
April 2, 2009
Metro Gallery 1700 N. Charles St. Baltimore, MD
Doors: 7:00 pm Show: 8:00 pm
Tickets: $5 Available in Advance
Local Writers Join Band, Red Sammy, for Night of Music and Words Baltimore, MD —
On Thursday, April 2nd @ Metro Gallery, local musicians, Red Sammy, will once again join writers for a call and response between the band’s songs and literary works read aloud by Baltimore writers Kate Wyer and Chris Toll. A spring-time version of “Night of the Blackbird” a music/poetry dialogue event hosted back in November at Baltimore Theatre Project, Sounds of the Songbird will be another great chance for lovers of both writing and music to get together while supporting local music, writing, and art.
Red Sammy, who take their name from Flannery O'Connor’s short story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” draws upon a variety of both literary and musical influences. Regarded for their “graveyard country rock” style, their music is like a Jackson Pollack black pouring, or a Robert Motherwell elegy. It is imbued with Garcia Lorca’s duende: “black sounds are the mystery.” Gritty, stark storytelling; sparse, but accessible.
Kate Wyer won the 2002 Women Writing about Women contest open to the Mid-Atlantic. She is also the recipient of the Elisabeth Woodworth Reese award for most promising creative writing portfolio, issued from Goucher College. Her chapbook, From Spools of Thin Wire, was released in October 2008 by Publishing Genius. There are cicadas sucking at the roots of her 100 year old holly.
Chris Toll lives and writes in Baltimore, Maryland. Publishing Genius posted online his eChap, I’ll Be the Invisible Girl Till the Day I Die! Rock Heals published his minichap, I’m Having Some Shape-Shifting Problems. He recently began co-hosting a reading series called the Upward Spiral.
LINKS:
Red Sammy www.redsammy.com
Kate Wyer movingsidewalks.blogspot.com
Chris Toll www.myspace.com/iamchristoll
ADVANCE TICKETS ARE AVAILABLE: EMAIL redsammy@gmail.com
Red Sammy's Sophomore Record, Dog Hang Low, Available Now at Beechfields Record Label and CDBaby.com
HoCoPoLitSo, in partnership with Howard County Community College presents:
A Literary Gathering of Women
Thursday, March 26, 2009, 7:30 pm
Thursday, March 26, 2009, 7:30 pm
Smith Theatre
Howard Community College
10901 Little Patuxent Parkway
Columbia, MD 21044
Please join us for an evening celebrating women writers with novelists Donna Hemans, Helen Elaine Lee and Thrity Umrigar, with moderator Dr. Helen Mitchell. Within the intimacy of a living room setting, three writers read and discuss the role that gender and culture play in their literary works.
Accomplished poet Lucille Clifton will make a special guest appearance.
A question & answer session will follow the reading along with a reception and book signing.
Tickets $15, $10 with valid student ID
Credit card orders: Brown Paper Tickets
Email information@hocopolitso.org, visit www.hocopolitso.org or call 410.772.4568
Tickets also available at the HCC Bookstore
Released 03/02/09:
Two Review, an independent print journal of international poetry and creative nonfiction published annually, is now reading for the 2010 issue (due out in Fall 2009).
More information about the journal and guidelines may be found by visiting http://TwoReview.googlepages.com/
We thank you for considering a submission to Two Review, and for forwarding our call to poets and writers in your community.
Sincerely, Jeremy Edward Shiok & Brendan Noonan, Editors
The Writer's Center Co-sponsors Bethesda Magazine's Short Story Contest Bethesda Magazine's 2009 Short Story Contest for Montgomery County Residents
Notice to writers and residents of Montgomery County: Bethesda Magazine is now accepting submissions for its annual short story contest. There are two categories--Open and High School.
The winning stories in each category will be published in the July/August issue of Bethesda Magazine and on the magazine's Web site, http://www.bethesdamagazine.com/shortstory/.
The runners up will be published on the Web site. Entrance to the contest is FREE. The Writer's Center will give ONE free membership to all entrants, and a free 6-week workshop to each first and second-place winner.
If you are ALREADY a member, please note that entrants will receive a free membership next year.
The prizes: Open category: First prize: $500 Second prize: $250 Third prize: $100 High school category: First prize: $250 Second prize: $100 Third prize: $50
For further details on this contest, please visit Bethesda Magazine's Web site: http://www.bethesdamagazine.com/shortstory/
As the economy stumbles, the first things to get cut at the national, state, and local levels are the arts. The first thing that goes in our school curricula are the arts. Arts, common wisdom tells us, are luxuries we can do without in times of crisis. Or can we?
Let's see what happens when we start throwing out all the science and technology that the arts have made possible.
You may be shocked to find that you'll have to do without your cell phone or PDA. In the first place, it uses a form of encryption called frequency hopping to ensure your messages can't easily be intercepted. Frequency hopping was invented by American composer George Antheil in collaboration with the actress Hedy Lamarr. Yeah, really.
Next, the electronic screen that displays your messages (and those on your computer and TV) employ a combination of red, green, and blue dots from which all the different colors can be generated. That innovation was the collaboration of a series of painter-scientists (including American physicist Ogden Rood and Nobel laureate Wilhelm Ostwald) and post-impressionist artists like Seurat - you know, the guy who painted his pictures out of dots of color, just like the ones in your electronic devices. The programming inside owes its existence to J. M. Jacquard, a weaver, who invented programmable looms using punch cards. Exactly the same technique was borrowed to program the first computers and is incorporated into modern programming languages.
Then there are all those computer chips running our critical devices. They're made using a combination of three classic artistic inventions: etching, silk screen printing, and photolithography. Add to that the fact that data from NASA and NSA satellites is enhanced using artistic techniques such as chiaroscuro (a Renaissance invention) and false coloring (invented by Fauvist painters) to increase contrast so it's easier to perceive important information. (Parenthetically, artists also figured out how to hide information. Camouflage was invented by the American painter Abbot Thayer and during WWI the Vorticists in England and the Cubists in France were co-opted by their governments to design prints to protect troops, equipment, and planes.) Hey, the arts look pretty useful, huh?
That's only the beginning. In medicine, the stitches that permit a surgeon to correct an aneurysm or carry out a transplant were invented by American Nobel laureate Alexis Carrel, who took his knowledge of lace making into the operating room. Alexander Fleming discovered the antibiotic penicillin while gathering beautifully colored microbes for his (rather unusual) hobby of "painting" with microorganisms. Pacemakers are simple modifications of musical metronomes. If you have a neurological deficit, your neurologist may employ dance notation to analyze your problem. Physicians at Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and other major medical centers are trained by actors to interact humanely with you as a patient. These same physicians may learn to observe your symptoms more closely by being taught to draw, paint or photograph, or through art appreciation courses. Many hospitals employ music to relieve stress in operating rooms and post-operatively. Painting, drawing and sculpting are also used to treat depression and other psychiatric disorders. Indeed, our own institution, Michigan State University, originated music therapy as a way to treat soldiers suffering from what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder.
Oh, and that bridge you may drive over on the way to work? Princeton engineering professor David Billington and Smithsonian historian of technology Brooke Hindle have demonstrated that most innovations in bridge design originated with artistically trained engineers such as John Roebling and Robert Maillart. They're part of a long tradition of American artist-inventors. You may not know that Samuel Morse (to whom we owe the telegraph) and Robert Fulton (to whom we owe the steam ship) were two of the most prominent 19th century American artists before they turned to inventing -- visit the Smithsonian American Art Galleries some time and see for yourself. Alexander Graham Bell was a pianist whose invention of the telephone began with a simple musical game. Buckminster Fuller's geodesic domes don't just provide us with unusual architectures, they also inform our understanding of cell and virus structure and permit new biomedical insights. Kenneth Snelson's tensegrity sculptures (stroll past his "Needle Tower" outside the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden on the Washington Mall) aren't just fascinating constructions in and of themselves, they've also created a whole new form of engineering. Google it!
Thefact is that the arts foster innovation. We've just published a study that shows that almost all Nobel laureates in the sciences actively engage in arts as adults. They are twenty-five times as likely as the average scientist to sing, dance, or act; seventeen times as likely to be a visual artist; twelve times more likely to write poetry and literature; eight times more likely to do woodworking or some other craft; four times as likely to be a musician; and twice as likely to be a photographer. Many connect their art to their scientific ability with some riff on Nobel prizewinning physicist Max Planck words: "The creative scientist needs an artistic imagination."
Bottom line: Successful scientists and inventors are artistic people. Hobble the arts and you hobble innovation. It's a lesson our legislators need to learn. So feel free to cut and paste this column into a letter to your senators and congressmen, as well as your school representatives, or simply send them a link to this column. One way or another, if we as a society wish to cultivate creativity, the arts MUST be part of the equation!
