Live Culture | Seven Days | Vermont's Independent Voice
Friday, September 29, 2017

Posted By on Fri, Sep 29, 2017 at 7:00 AM

click to enlarge Middlebury's Edgewater Gallery Expands Into Stowe
Courtesy of Edgewater Gallery
Edgewater Gallery in Stowe
Earlier this month, Middlebury's Edgewater Gallery opened a third location in downtown Stowe with the logical name of Edgewater Gallery in Stowe. The gallery's marketing and design manager, Dalton Hartye, said the team has been "discussing the idea of expanding for quite some time, and, after much consideration, we decided that Stowe would be the best location for a good market for us."

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Thursday, September 28, 2017

Posted By on Thu, Sep 28, 2017 at 5:11 PM

click to enlarge Emory Fanning Celebrates 50 Years at Middlebury College, in Concert
Courtesy of Todd Balfour
Emory Fanning
When Emory Fanning was growing up in Wilmington, Del., he sang in a cathedral choir to organ accompaniment. Both the choral and instrumental aspects of this experience shaped his life. Fanning became a consummate organist and choir director, spending most of his post-graduate career at Middlebury College.

In fact, it has been 50 years since Fanning joined the college’s music faculty. Though he retired 20 years ago from his full-time professorship, he has continued to serve as the college organist, direct an alumni choir he founded, and give private organ lessons on campus. Fanning will celebrate a half-century of Midd affiliation with a gala concert this Sunday, October 1, in Mead Chapel.

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Tuesday, September 26, 2017

Posted By on Tue, Sep 26, 2017 at 3:46 PM

click to enlarge What Feminism Can Speak To: Katha Pollitt and Janell Hobson
Janell Hobson (left) and Katha Pollitt
On Wednesday, September 27, the Middlebury College Program in Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies will host award-winning columnist, author and poet Katha Pollitt in conversation with author and professor Janell Hobson for the talk "What Can Feminism Speak To?"

Pollitt has written for the Nation since 1980, and many of her columns have been compiled into three volumes:
Reasonable Creatures: Essays on Women and Feminism, Subject to Debate: Sense and Dissents on Women, Politics, and Culture  and Virginity or Death! And Other Social and Political Issues of Our Time. Her most recent book, Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights, was published by Picador in 2015 and is a vehement argument for dispelling cultural stigma around abortion.

Hobson teaches in the Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies department at the University of Albany, State University of New York. She is the author of
Venus in the Dark: Blackness and Beauty in Popular Culture and Body as Evidence: Mediating Race, Globalizing Gender, and a contributor to Ms. magazine.

Seven Days spoke with both Pollitt and Hobson by phone, asking some (big) questions prior to their Middlebury appearance.

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Posted By on Tue, Sep 26, 2017 at 12:38 PM

click to enlarge Words Out Loud, in the Middle of Nowhere
Kelley Goulette
Alison Prine reading in Old West Church
Art at the Kent is a quintessentially Vermont experience: a large, important art exhibit in the middle of nowhere. The venue is the Kent Museum, in East Calais, a historic 1830s brick and wood building owned by the State of Vermont that lies at a dirt crossroads. Driving the mostly empty rolling hills earlier this month to the opening of “Refuge,” this year’s art exhibit, I was sure I had lost my way — until I began passing lines of parked cars on both sides of the road extending half a mile from the building.

I returned on September 24 for one of three Sunday poetry readings in the related series “Words Out Loud.” These occur down the road from the Kent, at the Old West Church, and finish with wine-and-cheese receptions amid the art. Again, cars lined the road in both directions.

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Monday, September 25, 2017

Posted By on Mon, Sep 25, 2017 at 3:58 PM

Talking Technology and Art With Amelia Marzec
Amelia Marzec
Amelia Marzec performing in Weather Center for the Apocalypse
After more than a yearlong break, Generator's Big Maker series is back. The events bring to Burlington innovators in fields as diverse as environmentally conscious burial, biometrics and game design to talk about their work and process.

Next in that lineup is 36-year-old Amelia Marzec, an artist, inventor and MFA graduate of Parsons School of Design who  lives and works in Brooklyn. Marzec's focus is on communications, the environment and "enabling activist communities through innovative uses of technology," according to the maker space publicity.

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Posted By on Mon, Sep 25, 2017 at 12:27 PM

It's Monday, which means it's time for your weekly dose of locavore levity: the Joke of the Week! This week's joke comes from Burlington's Eric Dreiblatt. Take it away, Eric…

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Sunday, September 24, 2017

Posted By on Sun, Sep 24, 2017 at 11:22 AM

click to enlarge Ashley Jimenez Leaves Burlington City Arts
Burlington City Arts
Ashley Jimenez
On November 1, Burlington City Arts will say goodbye to gallery manager and assistant curator Ashley Jimenez.

Jimenez, 30, says that she's "ready and eager" to move on to a new chapter. "I will always value the relationships that I’ve made with the artists that I’ve had the pleasure of working with over the past four years," she tells Seven Days. "I’ve made some good friends through BCA, put together some great exhibitions and have been a part of an organization that makes a profound impact on its community."

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Saturday, September 23, 2017

Posted By on Sat, Sep 23, 2017 at 11:08 PM

click to enlarge Jensen Beach Receives Vermont Book Award
Margot Harrison
Allison Titus and Jensen Beach, holding his Vermont Book Award made by artist Jesse Cooper
At a gala in Montpelier earlier this evening, author Jensen Beach was pronounced the winner of the 2017 Vermont Book Award for his 2016 short  story collection Swallowed by the Cold. The $5,000 award is given by the Vermont College of Fine Arts every year to the author of an outstanding work of literature.

Poet Major Jackson, who received the honor last year, made the announcement. In addition, VCFA founding president Thomas Christopher Greene used his time on the stage to unveil a new scholarship sponsored by Phoenix Books in late Vermont author Howard Frank Mosher's name for students in VCFA's writing and publishing program.

Selected by the judging panel from eight finalists for the award, Beach teaches in the undergraduate program at Johnson State College and is a faculty member in the graduate writing and publishing program at VCFA. When he took the stage, he said, "I've never won anything in my life — not even a fucking lottery ticket." He tacked on praise for the college and Vermont itself, saying, "this place means a lot to me."

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Friday, September 22, 2017

Posted By on Fri, Sep 22, 2017 at 11:17 AM

Playtime: Freakshow Industries Makes 'Audio Effects for the End Times'
Freakshow Industries
Screenshot of Freakshow Industries' landing page
If one applied the Dungeons & Dragons Alignment System to audio startups, Freakshow Industries would definitely be plotted as Chaotic Good. The audio effects company allows users to steal its first plug-in, Backmask, which aligns with a general mission of good-natured disruption against order .

On its website, Freakshow states, "We believe that people who would buy software will buy software and we would rather give you our effects directly and unencumbered by archaic DRM." The company, which has a Burlington tie, adds that prefers not to send users "into the dark corners of the internet to grab questionable or altered versions of our work."  The theory is that offering freebies will encourage satisfied users to support the company by buying merch or other programs.  The statement concludes: "We believe that trust, generosity and goodwill are principles worth taking a chance on and so we put our continued existence into your very scary hands."
Freakshow's motto is "Audio Effects For The End Times,"  and they certainly dance on the grave of numerous conventions. The company's founders are audio industry veterans who formed Freakshow to "lovingly and repeatedly combat creative stagnation in the face, opening portals to new and unique sounds with exceedingly affordable audio product."

One of the founders, former Soundtoys employee Jasper Duba, is based in Burlington. Duba is the kind of modern renaissance man you'd expect to hide out in Vermont — he hunts mushrooms and throws pottery in his spare time.
Freakshow's first release, Backmask, is a chaotic reverse effect that appears to have been made by Rick Sanchez, the alcoholic scientist from the Adult Swim animated series "Rick and Morty." The interface is intuitive, with the emphasis on experimentation; basically half the fun is figuring what the controls actually do.

Backmask functions as a sample reverse with multiple effects options. But beyond that, Audiopluginguy.com describes it as "the most conceptual plug-in we've seen."

Don't let its eccentric design deter you from trying it: Backmask is actually super fun and fairly easy to create useable sounds with. The overall aesthetic is damn refreshing in an industry dominated by sterile design. Instead of technical explanations or comparisons to classic equipment, Freakshow's website offers mostly warped demo videos with a nihilistic sense of humor.

Check out Freakshow Industries haunted virtual laboratory at freakshowindustries.com.

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Posted By on Fri, Sep 22, 2017 at 10:55 AM

click to enlarge Changes at the Athenaeum
St. Johnsbury Atheneum
Left: Williams Bouguereau's "Raspberry Girl"; Right: Alice Burnham as the Raspeberry Girl
The exterior of the St. Johnsbury Athenaeum received a small makeover last week, when staff members swapped out an entryway banner depicting Williams Bouguereau's "Raspberry Girl" for a slightly different version. (The 1890 original is housed in the gallery.)

Instead of the young girl clutching a lettuce leaf full of berries, the pastoral landscape now feature the figure of 91-year-old library docent Alice Burnham.

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