“Hudson Valley Writers Resist: Louder Together for Free Expression” will bring a collective of writers and musicians to the Bearsville Theater in Woodstock on Sunday, January 15 – the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr., a few days before the inauguration – to celebrate the power of words, compassion, equal rights, free speech, social justice and environmental issues.
Deborah Dows traveled the world – “sleeping in haystacks and palaces” – and is said to have associated with general George Patton when he was still a major, and to have done a stint at the renowned Spanish Riding School in Vienna. Dows opened her riding school at Rhinebeck’s Southlands Farm in the late 1930s. An avid horsewoman, her aim was to teach people of all ages to respect and love the land and its animals. The nonprofit Southlands Foundation operates primarily as an equestrian center, but it opens its nearly 200 acres of trails to the public for hiking, cross-country skiing, snowshoeing and birdwatching for free, seven days a week.
You can put this local cidery’s offerings to the taste-test and simultaneously support a worthy environmental cause.
Eva Hesse’s sculptures were different: Though mainly employing latex, fiberglass and plastics as materials, they were messy, complex, organic, out-of-control. Art critic Arthur Danto described her work as “full of life, of Eros, even of comedy.” She died too young of a brain tumor – in 1970, at age 34 – to enjoy the level of critical regard that would eventually attach to her oeuvre, but today she is seen as a pioneer of Post-Minimalism.
Surprisingly, director Damien Chazelle’s original concept for La La Land – a student film from his Harvard days, titled Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench and developed with then-classmate Hurwitz – was set in Boston. It wasn’t until they adapted it into one of those paeans-to-itself that Hollywood loves so much that they were able to find backers. (The critical and commercial success of Chazelle’s 2014 project, Whiplash, didn’t hurt either.)
Our weekly roundup of family events, including You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown at the Center for Performing Arts at Rhinebeck, Japanese calligraphy at Arts Mid-Hudson in Poughkeepsie, Winter Animal Tracking in Woodstock, Winter Open Barn at Stony Kill Farm in Wappingers Falls, Snowpeople drawings at Kingston’s Storefront Gallery, Ice harvesting programs at Hudson River Maritime Museum, Birding for Children at Mohonk Preserve.
“We feel, if we’re asking for the community’s financial support, the artists will in turn do something for the community.”
A documentary film revealing the exhaustive records, both visual and audio, that the photographer compiled while living next door to a NYC loft that was a Mecca for jazz artists from 1957 and 1965. Smith installed microphones throughout the building, even in the stairwells, capturing off-the-cuff conversations between legendary artists along with their musical collaborations.
For many involved in the peace movement of the 1960s, the moment when things began unraveling – when antiwar activists’ hold on the moral high ground became hopelessly slippery – occurred on March 6, 1970, when three members of the Weather Underground were killed in an explosion that destroyed a townhouse at 18 West 11th Street in Greenwich Village, where they were working on constructing a nail bomb in the sub-basement. Two of their colleagues, Kathy Boudin and Cathy Wilkerson, whose father owned the building, were upstairs at the time and managed to escape relatively unhurt. Both became fugitives, named to the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list, and Wilkerson successfully evaded the authorities for another ten years.
The Japanese like to visualize good fortune to come by making their first calligraphy of the year an auspicious Chinese character called a kanji, encapsulating the particular flavor of positive energy that one next wishes to embody. The practice is called Kakizome, meaning “first writing.”