2000 — Not-for-profit entrepreneur Ellen Baxter '75 presents a lecture entitled "Homelessness in New York City: The Courts, the Politics and Pragmatic Solutions,” in the chapel.
Last week in its series on creativity, CNN profiled writer, composer, and multimedia artist Paul Miller ’92, aka DJ Spooky, aka That Subliminal Kid, who could be the spokesperson for the liberal arts. Miller intellectualizes and fuses apparently disparate images, sounds, and ideas, across genres to create new discoveries.
For instance, last fall, Miller introduced an audience at the New York Academy of Science to “Sinfonia Antartica” — a presentation of classical, electronic and go-go musical interpretations of physicist Brian Greene’s research. His 2011 book, The Book of Ice, presents charts, graphs, and alarming images of the effects of human-caused climate change that Miller noted on his 2008 expedition to Antarctica.
Brad Pitt in "The Tree of Life." Photo: Merie Wallace and Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation.
Steve ’70 and Paula Mae Schwartz were co-executive producers of last year’s The Tree of Life from director Terrence Malick and starring Brad Pitt, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, and was announced yesterday as a nominee for a Best Picture Academy Award.
In 2009, Steve, Paula Mae, and colleague Nick Wechsler produced the film adaptation of McCarthy’s novel The Road, which won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Other recent projects from the Schwartzes and Chockstone include the upcoming Cogan’s Trade, also starring Pitt.
You can’t tune into a media outlet lately and not run smack into Denver Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow, who has equally mesmerized and rankled fans and opponents this football season with his fourth quarter heroics and endzone prayers. Tebow’s improbable run through the NFL playoffs ended against the New England Patriots last weekend, but in the week leading up to that game, Owen Strachan ’03, a professor of theology and history at Boyce College in Louisville, Kentucky, wondered in an essay for The Atlantic“Does God Care Whether Tim Tebow Wins on Saturday?”
Strachan’s piece covers “a theology of providence, suffering, and sports,” and made an impact with scholars and face-painters. For several days it was one of the most-read pieces on The Atlantic‘s site, it was featured in the “Nota Bene” section of The Chronicle of Higher Education‘s Arts & Letters Daily website, and it drew thousands of Facebook “likes” and hundreds of comments.
In a new book, Penelope’s Hungry Eyes: Portraits of Photographers, photographer Abe Frajndlich focuses his lens on fellow celebrated photographers, including renowned camera obscura artist Abelardo Morell ’71 (image #10 of the slideshow). The Bowdoin College Museum of Art will feature an exhibition this summer by another of the distinguished subjects from Frajndlich’s book, part-time Maine resident William Wegman (slide #15).
Singer-songwriter Sarah Ramey ’03, who goes by the stage name Wolf Larsen, recently debuted a new album, Quiet at the Kitchen Door, “and it is not your normal record release,” she says.
Sarah paired up with the social microloan site Kiva and The Girl Effect, a non-profit that seeks to abolish poverty for adolescent girls, to release the album “as an Idea, rather than as a record.” The idea—when you invest in a girl’s education, the entire community improves—takes shape through a video explaining The Girl Effect. “Not my idea,” Sarah admits, “UNESCO and The World Health Organization are the biggest proponents.”
Sarah is donating one-third of all proceeds from Quiet at the Kitchen Door to these two organizations that invest in education for girls, as well as microloans for women entrepreneurs through Kiva’s www.joinfite.org program.
This is not a women’s rights issue—it’s a human rights issue.
Comedian Hari Kondabolu ’04, who was the cover story subject of last summer’s Bowdoin magazine, recently embarked on a comedy tour of India with two other Indian-American comics.
The U.S. State Department is sponsoring the three-week, seven-city tour called “Make Chai, Not War,” and NPR’s All Things Considered featured Hari and his comedic compatriots this week.
Hari Kondabolu, from Queens, N.Y., is edgy and cerebral. One of his jokes likens a bad relationship with an aggressive English woman to the British colonization of India.
One of the hottest new shows on television focused recently on the heroics of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain (Bowdoin Class of 1852). “Homeland” is the story of Marine Sergeant Nicholas Brody, who returns home eight years after going missing in Iraq, and Carrie Mathison, a driven—and possibly unstable—CIA officer who suspects Brody might be plotting an attack on America. The Showtime series, which has been nominated for three Golden Globe awards, recently completed its first season and has been renewed for a second. In season one’s penultimate episode, Brody takes his wife and two teenage children to the battlefield at Gettysburg, where he describes Chamberlain’s leadership at Little Round Top. Later at the motel, Brody urges his son to be “brave and daring” in life, just like the leader of the 20th Maine.
Blogger Susan Stephenson ’02 is wearing the same dress every day for 30 days in January, changing the style of that one dress each day with various accessories, as a “charitable publicity stunt.” The dress was donated by L.L. Bean Signature, and all of the accessories are donated from local companies, fashion students, and artists, whose work Susan will showcase, blogging and vlogging about the project throughout the month. Susan’s aim is to help women in the difficult economy to look their best as they enter or re-enter the work force, and she will donate all of the featured fashion to Dress for Success Southern Maine, a Portland non-profit that helps women get back into the workplace.
Last week in its series on creativity, CNN profiled writer, composer, and multimedia artist Paul Miller ’92, aka DJ Spooky, aka That Subliminal Kid, who could be the spokesperson for the liberal arts. Miller intellectualizes and fuses apparently disparate images, sounds, and ideas, across genres to create new discoveries.
