Stadium Theatre Windows on Main Street

The Stadium Theatre Building windows on Main Street are no longer boarded up. Each window now has costumes displayed from various musicals. This is uplifting for the pedestrians and especially for the students walking to and from school. A few kids burst into Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious at the Mary Poppins window. This is great for Woonsocket.

Stranded in Greece

“I left home for good,” he said. “I am not going back. If we could live there, why would we be here? There are not just bombs that are dangerous, you know.”

The Greek authorities have objected to the new triage by nationality, calling it unfair. In an email, Greece’s minister for migration policy, Ioannis Mouzalas, said the Greek government had “repeatedly expressed” its disagreement with what was going on at the border. “This categorization also contravenes the principles of the United Nations,” he said.
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Inclusive Storytelling

In a culture increasingly obsessed with self-obsession, rarely if ever seeing anyone like you on screen, Ms. Boylan said, fosters a dispiriting sense of invisibility.

“There is a big difference between thinking, ‘There is someone trying to imitate someone like me,’ and ‘There is someone like me, on screen, visible, and real,’” she said.

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Early in the Morning

It's early in the morning and I can't get right
'Cause I had a little date with my baby last night

Now it's early in the morning
It's early in the morning
It's early in the morning
And I ain't got nothin' but the blues

I went to all the places where we used to go
I went to her house but she don't live there no more

And it's early in the morning
It's early in the morning
It's early in the morning
And I ain't got nothin' but the blues

I went to her girlfriend's house, but she was out
I knocked on her door and her mother started to shout
Get away from here

Too early in the morning
It's early in the morning
It's early in the morning
And I ain't got nothin' but the blues

Went to Jenny Lou's to get something to eat
The waitress looked at me, she said, B., you sure look beat

It's early in the morning, baby
Early in the morning
It's early in the morning
And I ain't got nothin' but the blues

Had a lot of money when I first started out
I couldn't find my baby, now my money's run out

Now it's early in the morning
It's early in the morning
It's early in the morning
And I ain't got nothin' but the blues
It's early in the morning
I ain't got nothin' but the blues

by Songwriters
Barry Man, Cynthia Weil

(B.B. King - performed Early In The Morning)

Mark Twain

I couldn't bear to think about it; and yet, somehow, I couldn't think about nothing else.
― Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

James Baldwin on Love

Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.
― James Baldwin

Love takes off the masks we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
― James Baldwin

James Baldwin

Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be.
― James Baldwin

People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead.
― James Baldwin

James Baldwin on Art

All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up.
― James Baldwin

James Baldwin Paradox of Education

The paradox of education is precisely this - that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.
― James Baldwin

It is very nearly impossible to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.
― James Baldwin

James Baldwin

People don't have any mercy. They tear you limb from limb, in the name of love. Then, when you're dead, when they've killed you by what they made you go through, they say you didn't have any character. They weep big, bitter tears - not for you. For themselves, because they've lost their toy.
― James Baldwin, Another Country

James Baldwin

Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death--ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible for life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

James Baldwin

I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
― James Baldwin

James Baldwin

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.
― James Baldwin

Martin Amis: Fear Soup

Life is made of fear. Some people eat fear soup three times a day. Some people eat fear soup all the meals there are. I eat it sometimes. When they bring me fear soup to eat, I try not to eat it, I try to send it back. But sometimes I'm too afraid to and have to eat it anyway.
― Martin Amis, Other People

Martin Amis

I think all writers are Martians. They come and say, You haven't been seeing this place right.
— Martin Amis
Paris Review

I Want All Men to Fall in Love With Me

"I want all men to fall in love with me," she said using her wooden coffee stirrer to remove gunk from under her fingernail.
"Wow, now that's a statement," her friend said leaning in. "Do you realize how annoying that would be in reality? Just think about it for a second. All of these men in love with you trying to track you down and then don't forget they'd be fighting with each other. What a nightmare! You'd be like a dog in heat. You'd need a place to hide and someone to chase them off."
"You're right, but it hasn't stopped me from having this desire underlying everything I do," she said.
There was silence for a moment.
"At least you're not a flirt. If anything you're a tomboy. You were raised with brothers and they did all love you so maybe it's not so crazy," her friend admitted.
"Thank you. Hey, who needs psychotherapy when I have you," she said laughing.
They got up from the tiny table leaving a small hurricane of paper napkins and coffee cups.

Transmission

This morning I heard a well known song on the radio sung by someone new. It caught my ear because the tones and phrasing were completely different. I wondered if the singer really liked the song.

I am thinking about transmission. What is transmitted from the artist is often unknown to the artist and sometimes even ahead of the artist.

In receive-mode the days feel like ladders I must climb. It's the little habits that keep me going from rung to rung.

To avoid monotony I reverse the direction of my walk and everything is new again.

I have to listen to my painting to know what the next move should be. Listening to what is being transmitted is a mysterious and terrifying process.

Exercise for a Flexible Brain

The upshot of the findings, he said, is that daily mild exercise such as walking and mild jogging may affect the way the brain works, so that an older person’s brain “acts like a younger brain.”
Article

Christopher Benson

In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the character Polonius offers the following life advice to his son Laertes: “This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.” This is also a particularly wise warning to the aspiring young artist. “Style” in a work of art—while often a deliberate creation of its maker—is also, on a deeper level, an imprint of his or her inherently true personality, as well as of the true character of the time and place in which that work was made.

Every artist struggles with this problem. We see great art and want to emulate it. But try as we might to paint, photograph, sculpt, film, write, or compose in this way or that (and as students we do try to make works that resemble those of some master whom we admire), we can never quite expel the signatures of our own identity and place. It is not necessary then to try so hard to look contemporary, because if we are being honest, that part will take care of itself. The process of maturing as an artist is not one of manufacturing a voice, but of boiling off the influences that shaped and taught us as students and distilling the more personally original instrument of our adult practice. That kind of truthfulness ranks high among the defining characteristics of the greatest works of the past that continue to move us today.

Essay

New Mood Disorders Program Aims to Advance Treatments, Erase Stigma

$20 Million Gift From Dolby Family Fund Backs Neuroscience ‘Powerhouse’ At UCSF
By Pete Farley
Article