Meanwhile, on the same planet

Now, watch this:

Peter Schumann is the founder of the Bread & Puppet theater…at home for nearly 40 years now on a farm right next door in Glover, Vermont. Unfortunately the Radical Jesters’ video interview of him has been taken down.

Bread & Puppet’s Cheap Art Manifesto reads, in part: “Because art is food…”

Cheap Art Philosophy

The Cheap Art movement was launched in 1982 by the Bread and Puppet Theater in direct response to the business of art and its growing appropriation by the corporate sector. With this fact taken into account art becomes: “political whether you like it or not…”

Cheap Art hopes to reestablish the appreciation of artistic creation by making it available to a wider audience and inspire anyone to revel in an art making process that is not subject to academic approval or curatorial acceptance.

Orange Blossom Special

My friend Mary Rowell turns 50 this year. We celebrated last night in her yard/garage/barn in Craftsbury, Vermont where we all live some of the time. It poured down rain outside, and the light was terrible — too poor for video. But this didn’t hinder the audio a bit, as you will hear if you click below. You might just set her going and kick back and close your eyes, but for those of you who cannot tolerate TV without pictures I have tossed in a few stills. The music — provided by friends and neighbors (any guest, really, who brought or borrowed an instrument) — was awesome:

I’ll be right back

Dr Thomas Hargrove was kidnapped by the Columbian rebel group FARC and held for ransom for eleven months. Almost from the moment he was taken, a group of people — his wife, his brother, his neighbor, his children, his neighbor’s children — galvanized around his rescue. Twice, ransom sums were raised and rendered. One day, for no clear reason, the FARC released him. He walked home to Calli. He walked in on his wife, who was on the phone with his brother. Walked in on the neighbor who was firing up the barbecue to cook some t-bone steaks she’d bought and put away for him — not because she expected him there, but because the ritual of preparing a meal for him consoled her.