“Making a scene,” Ithaca Times, Aug. 14, 2007
Sweaty from the lack of air conditioning inside No Radio Records, the crowd spilled onto the Seneca Street sidewalk. It was a quick set break during a punk show, and dozens of black-clad, tattooed and pierced under-30-year-olds were eager for some fresh air. Wearing too-tight pants and Converse sneakers, they sipped on water bottles and traded stories about their favorite upstate New York bands.
If this were Binghamton, Syracuse, or most other college towns across
the country, the Monday night scene would have been a pretty common sight. Not so in this city, home of hemp clothing, folk music and chilled-out singer-songwriters. Phillip Price is one of four Ithacans working to change that.
“Ithaca, as far as this music goes, is not where it should be,” said Price, a punk promoter best known around town for working at Volume Records on The Commons. “But I think punk is more than applicable for this area. It’s innovative, it’s fresh, it’s always creative, and 80 percent of the time it’s angry, fast and loud. Which is something young people really need. There’s a lot of kids who don’t feel like they fit in.”
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“The Great Beyond,” Ithaca Times, Jan. 16, 2008
Melissa Mueller used to think winter camping meant gritting her teeth and pushing through the unrelenting cold and discomfort. That was before she got the right gear, and before she started leading expeditions into the Alaskan wilderness. Now living in the Finger Lakes, Mueller sleeps in Cayuga dreamscapes worry-free in the snowy season.
“I consider a warm sleeping bag my most important piece of survival equipment,” said Mueller, a senior instructor for NOLS. “It’s what made me learn to love winter camping.”
The Ithaca Times spoke with Mueller and other local experts to find out how you, too, can stay warm and happy on your next outdoor adventure.
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“Take It Outside,” The Ithaca Times, Jan. 3, 2008
Can playing in the woods help kids focus in the classroom? Environmental psychologist Nancy Wells, a Cornell University professor, is studying that question – and others like it – by measuring the effects of a wilderness-immersion program on local city youth.
Urban Forest Adventures, led by Tim Drake and Jed Jordan of Primitive Pursuits, takes low-income tweens and teens in search of animal tracks and wild edibles in such accessible patches of nature as drainage ditches.
“We put ourselves into the same places the animals live, the marginal spaces,” Drake said. “We’ve actually seen deer and rabbits, because we’ve been in the brush. We go to the thickets.”
The Tuesday after-school program at the West Village and Parkside Gardens apartment complexes can be transformative for participants, many of whom have little to no prior experience in the wild, Drake said.
“You take a group of kids who normally get all their food plastic-wrapped, and you say, ‘Just pull it off that branch,’” Drake said. “Just seeing that you can take food, even in an urban setting, and eat it or making bracelets from plants that grow right there…raises the bar on awareness and (helps) create pathways to healing in the rest of their lives.”
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“They’ll leave the light on for you,” Feb. 15, 2007, Home News Tribune
AVENEL – The seedy little strip of Route 1 that runs through Avenel has a cluster of bars, convenience stores and cheap motels. After dark, hot pink neon lights advertise vacancies in curbside shadows. Cars and trucks roar past intermittently; momentary silences are relentlessly punctured.
With 12 rooms that go for $40 a night, the Douglas Motel is one of the smallest and oldest establishments on this strip.
“It’s not what you would call high class,” says an 18-year-old Woodbridge resident named Michael, who checked into the motel around 11 p.m. on a recent Thursday night.
MORE …
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“Colored with emotion,” Summer 2006, DesiNJ magazine
Rajini Balachandran is forever searching for home.
“Here or there?” she wonders. “Nowhere.”
Her gaze is striking in its intensity; her defiant sadness is at
once overwhelming and compelling.
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“Time takes toll on historic mansion,” Dec. 3, 2006, Home News Tribune
JAMESBURG – Buckelew Mansion is said to be haunted, but the house is a ghost of its former self.
The historic building, in a sad state of decay, is literally sinking.
Water from a nearby lake creeps through the basement’s brick floor, muddying it with puddles 4 inches deep. The corner of the dining room has sunk more than 4 inches over the past two years, detaching the ceiling from a plaster wall. In one of the mansion’s 23 rooms, an inch-wide crack runs like a lightening bolt to the floor. In another, Sheetrock, graying with mold, dangles from the ceiling in a twisted jumble. And all that’s keeping the 1830s-era parlor rooms from collapsing is a propped-up two-by-four.
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“Dimensions of Color,” DesiNJ magazine, 2007
Natvar Bhavsar’s paintings are stuck to the walls of New Brunswick’s Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum only in the most technical of senses; they somehow manage to transcend their earthly confines and surround the viewer.
One does not merely look at a Bhavsar work, one is transported by it.
It is as if the artist has bottled up the night sky, dusted it in powder pigment and cast it out in great dreamlike bursts. The result is a textured canvas that pulses with dimension: grainy up close, smooth and wispy from afar.
“What I have done is to enter the world of color,” Bhavsar said. “When I paint, I enter the realm of experience, which gives me that feeling the word “nirvana’ may have been invented for.”
