News & Views You Can Use
Jul 23, 2003
City Pages
Quick! Speak Out On Transportation
The Athens-Clarke County Planning Commission is starting to develop our part of a new long-range transportation plan for this area. Right now the department is soliciting public comment, and this is your chance to speak up for more comprehensive bus routes and service, traffic calming, sidewalks, bike lanes, rails/trails and anything else you think our area needs to lessen the dominance of traffic clogged streets and support alternative transportation.
You can offer oral and written comments Wednesday, July 23 from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. in the planning department auditorium, 120 W. Dougherty St. (the former public library building).
You can also send comments by email to macorts@co.clarke.ga.us, or by mail to ACC Planning at 120 Dougherty Street, Athens, GA 30601. Or call the department at 613-3515. Comment deadline is August 15. For additional information, visit the planning department website at www.athensclarkecounty.com/~;planningdept/acorts/index.html.
This plan is the framework for transportation policy in this area for the near future. You have the opportunity now to help guide that policy. Speak up now and make a difference, instead of cursing the traffic later.
There will be another hearing in Watkinsville Wednesday, July 30 from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. in the Oconee County government annex on SR 15 (Greensboro Highway).
The official name of the transportation plan under discussion is the Madison Athens-Clarke Oconee Regional Transportation Study (MACORTS).
Only You Can Prevent Bushes
America's wild forests have survived centuries of storms, fires, drought and natural disturbance. Unfortunately, they may not survive the four years of the Bush administration. July 3 marked the end of the public comment period for the draft Chattahoochee-Oconee National Forest management plan. Unfortunately, the current draft plan does little to protect wilderness, community and economic values. Instead, it drops key water and wildlife protections, allows increased timber production and leaves some of our favorite places open to road building, logging and off-road vehicle use.
America's public lands were dealt another blow on June 9 when the Bush administration announced that it would exempt protection for the wild roadless forests in America's wildest and largest National Forest, the Tongass Forest in Alaska. The Bush administration policy will also allow individual governors, often heavily influenced by the timber industry, to seek exemptions to protection of wild federal forests in their respective states. This plan is the latest attempt to dismantle the Forest Service's widely popular Roadless Area Conservation Rule – and undermine historic protections for our nation's last remaining wild forests. These pristine wild forests are areas of national significance, but the Bush administration has chosen to eat away at their protections one state at a time.
After placing the historic Roadless Rule on hold in early 2001, the administration then refused to defend the Roadless Rule in a timber industry lawsuit. With its June 9 announcement the administration followed its established pattern of "settling" lawsuits with one of its corporate political allies, the timber industry. This time the administration announced it would file a lawsuit settlement with the State of Alaska to exempt the Tongass National Forest.
The Bush administration claims that while it will retain the popular Roadless Area Conservation Rule in theory, it will allow states pressured by the timber industry to seek exemptions. States will be able to "seek relief for exceptional circumstances," but given the Bush administration's track record, this appears to be a huge loophole to promote logging under the guise of fire protection.
The Roadless Rule was the result of the most extensive public comment process in history, and its development spanned three years and 600 public meetings. To date, the Forest Service has received an unprecedented 2.2 million comments from the American people, overwhelmingly in favor of the strongest protections for these wild forests. Despite fervent attempts by the Bush administration and allies in the timber industry to undermine roadless protections, the rule has withstood court challenges and is now considered the law of the land.
The rule, representing the single largest forest conservation initiative in decades, covers nearly 60 million acres of the last wild areas in our national forests, including areas like Kelly Ridge and Mountaintown here in Georgia. It is intended to safeguard our last remaining pristine forests, thereby protecting some of the highest quality fish and wildlife habitat, backcountry recreation and clean water supplies in the country.
The June 9 announcement comes as part of a series of Bush administration decisions to weaken or eliminate the core protections for America's national forests. The Bush administration is dismantling decades of environmental safeguards piece by piece, and the Roadless Rule is the latest victim. Since taking office, the Bush administration has promoted intensive logging across public lands as a remedy for forest fires. The administration seeks to reduce public involvement in forest management and has also proposed serious changes to benchmark laws like the National Environmental Policy Act and the National Forest Management Act.
It is clear that where Americans see long-term recreational opportunities and clean water, the timber industry sees short-term profits. Unfortunately, the Bush administration shares the industry's vision for these last pristine wild forests. There are already more than 440,000 miles of roads that scar our National Forests, over 1,600 in Georgia's Chattahoochee-Oconee. These roads are built for the logging industry and paid for by our tax dollars; the results are destroyed wildlife habitat, mudslides and water pollution.
We can do better than this for our children and grandchildren. They should have the same opportunities to explore the pristine national forest areas that we currently enjoy. If America's wild forests are going to survive the Bush administration's policies, it will be up to American citizens to urge forest protection instead of forest destruction. If future generations are to enjoy these primeval forests years from now, we need to act today. For more information on the Bush administration's destructive forest policies and what you can do, see the Sierra Club's website at www.sierraclub.org/logging.
Katherine Smolski
Katherine Smolski is regional conservation organizer for the Sierra Club National Forest Campaign.
No Connection: Some Definitions
I was already writing a column on computers in schools when a friend came over yesterday wanting advice on a computer purchase. He was trying to help his girlfriend pick a laptop before she went off to law school, and his questions basically boiled down to understanding some terminology, so I'm going to recap here some of the things we talked about.
XGA and Friends Long ago, manufacturers were sure to point out that their video cards or displays were VGA/SVGA compliant. This is because before the VGA standard happened there was no such thing as a "generic" video driver to fall back on if you didn't have the driver disk for a card (or OS, or application). Then, after a while, it just became assumed that everything spoke SVGA, and the labeling died off.
In 1990 IBM introduced the XGA (eXtended Graphics Array) spec, which was completely ignored as a marketing term by everyone for over a decade, but has suddenly reappeared on the scene. XGA is defined as a resolution of 1024x768 pixels at 256 colors (which is pretty paltry these days). Related terms are: SXGA (1280x1024), UXGA (1600x1200),
and UWXGA (only used by Sony; 1280x600 or 1024x480)
10/100/1000bT Anything followed by "bT" means ethernet. Ethernet is a networking protocol developed at Xerox in 1976. The numeric part of the designation refers to the speed of the network, in millions of bps (bits per second). The 'b' stands for "baseband," which boils down to meaning that there's only one "channel," so ethernet cabling has to be dedicated to ethernet. The 'T' stands for "twisted pair," and refers to the physical cable used. Modern ethernet cable actually has 4 pairs of wire, and is very much like telephone cord, but in olden days there was also 10b5 (AKA Thicknet) and 10b2 (Thinnet), which both used coax cable.
When you see values separated with slashes (like 10/100bT), that means the equipment you are looking at will work at either speed. For practical purposes, 10Mbps is 1 megabyte per second. The abbreviations, by the way, are pronounced "ten base tee," "hundred base tee," and "gigabit." (No one says "thousand base tee.")
802.11a/b/g (WiFi) 802.11 means wireless ethernet (AKA WiFi, because 802.11 isn't a very sexy name), which has been all the rage since Apple popularized it as "AirPort." 802.11 is the actual IEEE standard for wireless ethernet (regular ethernet is 802.3), and the letter refers to an implementation of the standard, but in practical terms it defines the speed.
Hardware supporting 802.11b is by far the most common today, and runs at a top speed of 11Mbps - under ideal conditions. Since WiFi uses radio instead of shielded cable, distance and interference affect transmission rates. As the signal level drops, the speed is cut back to 5, then 2, then 1Mbps and then nothing.
802.11a and g both transmit data at 54Mbps (again, under ideal conditions), but use different data encodings. At the consumer level, only 802.11g exists in the form of hardware you can buy right now. Be careful though: it's so new, and companies so rushed products to market following the success of 802.11b, that there are actually incompatible versions of 802.11g hardware available right now, so do your homework. Of course, it also costs more than 802.11b.
USB/FireWire PCs used to have serial ports (9 and 25 pin), parallel ports (25 and 32 pin), AT keyboard ports, and PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports (which are mechanically but not electrically identical). Macs had 9 pin serial ports which were round, instead of the PC's trapezoidal, and ADB keyboards and mice. If you wanted an external disk, you could pick from one of the nigh-infinite flavors of SCSI available. And you weren't supposed to un/plug any of this stuff with the power on.
Today, all data input and output (except screen graphics), on PCs and Macs, can be handled through two types of connectors: USB and FireWire. Both are daisy-chainable, meaning you can hook devices together in sequence. Both can be used with hubs, to give you more ports than are available on your computer. Both support over 50 devices attached to a computer at once. Both use slender cables to minimize clutter. Both are hot-swappable, meaning you can plug and unplug things at will (even your keyboard). They are one of the best ideas to happen in years.
There are differences though. USB transfers data at 12Mbps, and is designed for use with low-bandwidth peripherals like keyboards, mice, printers, scanners and cameras. FireWire operates at between 100 and 400Mbps, and was designed for applications which involve moving lots of data in a time-sensitive manner, like disk drives and digital video capture. There are new versions of USB and FireWire out, which work at speeds of 480 and 800Mbps, respectively. Some people see USB and FireWire as competing technologies, but this is a flawed viewpoint; they're completely complimentary, and having both is a good thing.
I hope there was something helpful in here. If you enjoy this sort of thing, let me know. If you don't, let me know that too; I'll try to field any reasonable request for information or punditry involving computers and their applications: mdxi@collapsar.net.
Shawn Boyette
Shawn Boyette has spent way too much time around computers as well as old textbooks, good movies and cooking. He has an embarrassing fondness for 1980s metal.
Local Thespians Sing And Dance
Hey there! The Thalian-Blackfriars Student Theatre Company is putting on its first musical EVER this summer, and we wanted to let you know about it!
The Thalian-Blackfriars will present Weird Romance, Two One-Act Musicals of Speculative Fiction, at the University of Georgia Fine Arts Building's Cellar Theatre July 24-26 (8 p.m.) and July 27 (2 p.m.). The show features music by Grammy winners Alan Menken and David Spencer and script by Alan Brennert.
The first act, "The Girl Who Was Plugged In," shows the problems of love in a commercialized future society where advertising has been outlawed. "Her Pilgrim Soul," the second act, is based on a "Twilight Zone" episode about finding one's future in light of one's past. The show is directed by UGA senior Elizabeth Gathers, with music direction by UGA senior Jonathan Sparks and choreography by UGA senior Alisha Cardenas. General admission is $5. Call 552-0603 for reservations and information.
Elizabeth Gathers
Elizabeth Gathers is, in case you didn't notice, director of Weird Romance...
Six Degrees Is Comic & Serious
"The imagination. That's God's gift to make the act of self-examination bearable." Six Degrees of Separation, by playwright John Guare, is a comic yet serious exploration of the threads of chance that link one person to another. When a young black man shows up at the Upper East Side home of fine-art dealers Flanders and Louisa Kittredge, bleeding from a knife wound and claiming to be Sidney Poitier's son, the upper-crust couple is completely charmed - and completely taken in. The young man speaks eloquently, seals an important business deal for Flanders and makes a terrific plate of pasta. Only later do they realize that he's a fraud - or is he?
In terms of content, Six Degrees of Separation is edgier than the average Athens theatrical production. Most of the characters belong to New York's high society, living a rarefied existence in a world of wealth and privilege, sheltered from the concerns of the middle and working classes, sheltered in ways that keep them from being any more "real" than the con artist who disrupts their lives. The Kandinsky that hangs in the Kittredeges' apartment - painted on both sides of the canvas, one side muted, the other side wild, stands as a symbol for the "separation" within each of us. With clashes between the characters over racial stereotypes, homosexuality and the nature of the imagination, Six Degrees of Separation challenges the audience to consider its own ideas of "culture" and truth.
In his plays, Guare disrupts the conventions of realistic theater with frequent asides, monologues and dream sequences, preferring the search for inner, or psychological, truth in his characters - where the boundaries of the mind are fluid - over the depiction/portrayal of realism. The film director Louis Malle has said of the playwright, "At a time when most plays and films have become glorified sit-com television, Guare's grace and inventiveness with words, his superb contempt for conventional psychology and plot coherence, and his brilliance at tearing apart the logical and the expected make him stand pretty much alone."
Directed by Allen Rowell, this contemporary drama will be performed by the Town & Gown Players at the Athens Community Theater (Prince & Grady behind the Taylor-Grady house) for two weeks only: Friday-Sunday, July 25-27 and July 31-August 3. Curtain time is 8 p.m. with a 2 p.m. Sunday matinee. NOTE: performance on Saturday, August 2, at 3 p.m. only. Tickets are $10 and under. Call 208-8696 (208-TOWN) for reservations.
Kelly Caudle
Kelly Caudle is stage manager for Six Degrees of Separation.
Watch Food Grow Here
Daily Co-op is sponsoring tours of the locally grown farm cooperative member farms. This month (July 27) will be at Paul Chew's Beaver Farm outside Winterville, and will feature a roundtable discussion (6 p.m. to 7:30 p.m.) about mutually beneficial ways to increase community involvement in local farming, followed by a farm tour (7:30 to 8:30 p.m.). We'll be having a tour every month through October (and already did one in June at Michael Hill and Melissa Tufts' Two Swallows Farm). Every tour but the July tour features a Farmer for a Day component, where we try to provide two hours of volunteer labor to help our small local farmers - almost all of whom have day jobs, yet grow vast amounts of herbicide/pesticide-free produce by farming evenings and weekends. They have virtually no money or outlet for additional labor to help with day-to-day (let alone special) projects.
In August we'll be at Mills Farm (where they grind grits using mules), in September at Boann's Banks on the banks of the beautiful Broad River and in October at Heirloom Farm in Winterville, which focuses on keeping many heirloom vegetables in the local green market and on our shelves.
I think of the farmers themselves as heroes - people who deal with heat, drought, flooding and everything else nature can throw at them, yet still produce good food for us so we don't have to grow it ourselves.
If you're interested in taking a tour, contact me at Daily Co-op (548-1732) or come by and sign up.
Marc Tissenbaum
Marc Tissenbaum is community outreach manager at Daily Co-op.
The News Is Out, (Almost)
Word is that former Flagpole Executive Editor Brad Aaron is launching the Athens Weekly News, a weekly newsletter on local happenings. According to the Friends of Five Points listserv, the anticipated beginning date for the newsletter is the week of August 14, and subscriptions are by mail (with on-line access) for $30 a year ($20 for six months) or on-line only for $25 a year.
Subscriptions and other information (including ad and sponsorship rates), are available by writing The Athens Weekly News, P.O. Box 781, Athens GA 30603, or by email to subscribe@athensweeklynews.com.
The Athens-Clarke County Planning Commission is starting to develop our part of a new long-range transportation plan for this area. Right now the department is soliciting public comment, and this is your chance to speak up for more comprehensive bus routes and service, traffic calming, sidewalks, bike lanes, rails/trails and anything else you think our area needs to lessen the dominance of traffic clogged streets and support alternative transportation.
You can offer oral and written comments Wednesday, July 23 from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. in the planning department auditorium, 120 W. Dougherty St. (the former public library building).
You can also send comments by email to macorts@co.clarke.ga.us, or by mail to ACC Planning at 120 Dougherty Street, Athens, GA 30601. Or call the department at 613-3515. Comment deadline is August 15. For additional information, visit the planning department website at www.athensclarkecounty.com/~;planningdept/acorts/index.html.
This plan is the framework for transportation policy in this area for the near future. You have the opportunity now to help guide that policy. Speak up now and make a difference, instead of cursing the traffic later.
There will be another hearing in Watkinsville Wednesday, July 30 from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. in the Oconee County government annex on SR 15 (Greensboro Highway).
The official name of the transportation plan under discussion is the Madison Athens-Clarke Oconee Regional Transportation Study (MACORTS).
Only You Can Prevent Bushes
America's wild forests have survived centuries of storms, fires, drought and natural disturbance. Unfortunately, they may not survive the four years of the Bush administration. July 3 marked the end of the public comment period for the draft Chattahoochee-Oconee National Forest management plan. Unfortunately, the current draft plan does little to protect wilderness, community and economic values. Instead, it drops key water and wildlife protections, allows increased timber production and leaves some of our favorite places open to road building, logging and off-road vehicle use.
America's public lands were dealt another blow on June 9 when the Bush administration announced that it would exempt protection for the wild roadless forests in America's wildest and largest National Forest, the Tongass Forest in Alaska. The Bush administration policy will also allow individual governors, often heavily influenced by the timber industry, to seek exemptions to protection of wild federal forests in their respective states. This plan is the latest attempt to dismantle the Forest Service's widely popular Roadless Area Conservation Rule – and undermine historic protections for our nation's last remaining wild forests. These pristine wild forests are areas of national significance, but the Bush administration has chosen to eat away at their protections one state at a time.
After placing the historic Roadless Rule on hold in early 2001, the administration then refused to defend the Roadless Rule in a timber industry lawsuit. With its June 9 announcement the administration followed its established pattern of "settling" lawsuits with one of its corporate political allies, the timber industry. This time the administration announced it would file a lawsuit settlement with the State of Alaska to exempt the Tongass National Forest.
The Bush administration claims that while it will retain the popular Roadless Area Conservation Rule in theory, it will allow states pressured by the timber industry to seek exemptions. States will be able to "seek relief for exceptional circumstances," but given the Bush administration's track record, this appears to be a huge loophole to promote logging under the guise of fire protection.
The Roadless Rule was the result of the most extensive public comment process in history, and its development spanned three years and 600 public meetings. To date, the Forest Service has received an unprecedented 2.2 million comments from the American people, overwhelmingly in favor of the strongest protections for these wild forests. Despite fervent attempts by the Bush administration and allies in the timber industry to undermine roadless protections, the rule has withstood court challenges and is now considered the law of the land.
The rule, representing the single largest forest conservation initiative in decades, covers nearly 60 million acres of the last wild areas in our national forests, including areas like Kelly Ridge and Mountaintown here in Georgia. It is intended to safeguard our last remaining pristine forests, thereby protecting some of the highest quality fish and wildlife habitat, backcountry recreation and clean water supplies in the country.
The June 9 announcement comes as part of a series of Bush administration decisions to weaken or eliminate the core protections for America's national forests. The Bush administration is dismantling decades of environmental safeguards piece by piece, and the Roadless Rule is the latest victim. Since taking office, the Bush administration has promoted intensive logging across public lands as a remedy for forest fires. The administration seeks to reduce public involvement in forest management and has also proposed serious changes to benchmark laws like the National Environmental Policy Act and the National Forest Management Act.
It is clear that where Americans see long-term recreational opportunities and clean water, the timber industry sees short-term profits. Unfortunately, the Bush administration shares the industry's vision for these last pristine wild forests. There are already more than 440,000 miles of roads that scar our National Forests, over 1,600 in Georgia's Chattahoochee-Oconee. These roads are built for the logging industry and paid for by our tax dollars; the results are destroyed wildlife habitat, mudslides and water pollution.
We can do better than this for our children and grandchildren. They should have the same opportunities to explore the pristine national forest areas that we currently enjoy. If America's wild forests are going to survive the Bush administration's policies, it will be up to American citizens to urge forest protection instead of forest destruction. If future generations are to enjoy these primeval forests years from now, we need to act today. For more information on the Bush administration's destructive forest policies and what you can do, see the Sierra Club's website at www.sierraclub.org/logging.
Katherine Smolski
Katherine Smolski is regional conservation organizer for the Sierra Club National Forest Campaign.
No Connection: Some Definitions
I was already writing a column on computers in schools when a friend came over yesterday wanting advice on a computer purchase. He was trying to help his girlfriend pick a laptop before she went off to law school, and his questions basically boiled down to understanding some terminology, so I'm going to recap here some of the things we talked about.
XGA and Friends Long ago, manufacturers were sure to point out that their video cards or displays were VGA/SVGA compliant. This is because before the VGA standard happened there was no such thing as a "generic" video driver to fall back on if you didn't have the driver disk for a card (or OS, or application). Then, after a while, it just became assumed that everything spoke SVGA, and the labeling died off.
In 1990 IBM introduced the XGA (eXtended Graphics Array) spec, which was completely ignored as a marketing term by everyone for over a decade, but has suddenly reappeared on the scene. XGA is defined as a resolution of 1024x768 pixels at 256 colors (which is pretty paltry these days). Related terms are: SXGA (1280x1024), UXGA (1600x1200),
and UWXGA (only used by Sony; 1280x600 or 1024x480)
10/100/1000bT Anything followed by "bT" means ethernet. Ethernet is a networking protocol developed at Xerox in 1976. The numeric part of the designation refers to the speed of the network, in millions of bps (bits per second). The 'b' stands for "baseband," which boils down to meaning that there's only one "channel," so ethernet cabling has to be dedicated to ethernet. The 'T' stands for "twisted pair," and refers to the physical cable used. Modern ethernet cable actually has 4 pairs of wire, and is very much like telephone cord, but in olden days there was also 10b5 (AKA Thicknet) and 10b2 (Thinnet), which both used coax cable.
When you see values separated with slashes (like 10/100bT), that means the equipment you are looking at will work at either speed. For practical purposes, 10Mbps is 1 megabyte per second. The abbreviations, by the way, are pronounced "ten base tee," "hundred base tee," and "gigabit." (No one says "thousand base tee.")
802.11a/b/g (WiFi) 802.11 means wireless ethernet (AKA WiFi, because 802.11 isn't a very sexy name), which has been all the rage since Apple popularized it as "AirPort." 802.11 is the actual IEEE standard for wireless ethernet (regular ethernet is 802.3), and the letter refers to an implementation of the standard, but in practical terms it defines the speed.
Hardware supporting 802.11b is by far the most common today, and runs at a top speed of 11Mbps - under ideal conditions. Since WiFi uses radio instead of shielded cable, distance and interference affect transmission rates. As the signal level drops, the speed is cut back to 5, then 2, then 1Mbps and then nothing.
802.11a and g both transmit data at 54Mbps (again, under ideal conditions), but use different data encodings. At the consumer level, only 802.11g exists in the form of hardware you can buy right now. Be careful though: it's so new, and companies so rushed products to market following the success of 802.11b, that there are actually incompatible versions of 802.11g hardware available right now, so do your homework. Of course, it also costs more than 802.11b.
USB/FireWire PCs used to have serial ports (9 and 25 pin), parallel ports (25 and 32 pin), AT keyboard ports, and PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports (which are mechanically but not electrically identical). Macs had 9 pin serial ports which were round, instead of the PC's trapezoidal, and ADB keyboards and mice. If you wanted an external disk, you could pick from one of the nigh-infinite flavors of SCSI available. And you weren't supposed to un/plug any of this stuff with the power on.
Today, all data input and output (except screen graphics), on PCs and Macs, can be handled through two types of connectors: USB and FireWire. Both are daisy-chainable, meaning you can hook devices together in sequence. Both can be used with hubs, to give you more ports than are available on your computer. Both support over 50 devices attached to a computer at once. Both use slender cables to minimize clutter. Both are hot-swappable, meaning you can plug and unplug things at will (even your keyboard). They are one of the best ideas to happen in years.
There are differences though. USB transfers data at 12Mbps, and is designed for use with low-bandwidth peripherals like keyboards, mice, printers, scanners and cameras. FireWire operates at between 100 and 400Mbps, and was designed for applications which involve moving lots of data in a time-sensitive manner, like disk drives and digital video capture. There are new versions of USB and FireWire out, which work at speeds of 480 and 800Mbps, respectively. Some people see USB and FireWire as competing technologies, but this is a flawed viewpoint; they're completely complimentary, and having both is a good thing.
I hope there was something helpful in here. If you enjoy this sort of thing, let me know. If you don't, let me know that too; I'll try to field any reasonable request for information or punditry involving computers and their applications: mdxi@collapsar.net.
Shawn Boyette
Shawn Boyette has spent way too much time around computers as well as old textbooks, good movies and cooking. He has an embarrassing fondness for 1980s metal.
Local Thespians Sing And Dance
Hey there! The Thalian-Blackfriars Student Theatre Company is putting on its first musical EVER this summer, and we wanted to let you know about it!
The Thalian-Blackfriars will present Weird Romance, Two One-Act Musicals of Speculative Fiction, at the University of Georgia Fine Arts Building's Cellar Theatre July 24-26 (8 p.m.) and July 27 (2 p.m.). The show features music by Grammy winners Alan Menken and David Spencer and script by Alan Brennert.
The first act, "The Girl Who Was Plugged In," shows the problems of love in a commercialized future society where advertising has been outlawed. "Her Pilgrim Soul," the second act, is based on a "Twilight Zone" episode about finding one's future in light of one's past. The show is directed by UGA senior Elizabeth Gathers, with music direction by UGA senior Jonathan Sparks and choreography by UGA senior Alisha Cardenas. General admission is $5. Call 552-0603 for reservations and information.
Elizabeth Gathers
Elizabeth Gathers is, in case you didn't notice, director of Weird Romance...
Six Degrees Is Comic & Serious
"The imagination. That's God's gift to make the act of self-examination bearable." Six Degrees of Separation, by playwright John Guare, is a comic yet serious exploration of the threads of chance that link one person to another. When a young black man shows up at the Upper East Side home of fine-art dealers Flanders and Louisa Kittredge, bleeding from a knife wound and claiming to be Sidney Poitier's son, the upper-crust couple is completely charmed - and completely taken in. The young man speaks eloquently, seals an important business deal for Flanders and makes a terrific plate of pasta. Only later do they realize that he's a fraud - or is he?
In terms of content, Six Degrees of Separation is edgier than the average Athens theatrical production. Most of the characters belong to New York's high society, living a rarefied existence in a world of wealth and privilege, sheltered from the concerns of the middle and working classes, sheltered in ways that keep them from being any more "real" than the con artist who disrupts their lives. The Kandinsky that hangs in the Kittredeges' apartment - painted on both sides of the canvas, one side muted, the other side wild, stands as a symbol for the "separation" within each of us. With clashes between the characters over racial stereotypes, homosexuality and the nature of the imagination, Six Degrees of Separation challenges the audience to consider its own ideas of "culture" and truth.
In his plays, Guare disrupts the conventions of realistic theater with frequent asides, monologues and dream sequences, preferring the search for inner, or psychological, truth in his characters - where the boundaries of the mind are fluid - over the depiction/portrayal of realism. The film director Louis Malle has said of the playwright, "At a time when most plays and films have become glorified sit-com television, Guare's grace and inventiveness with words, his superb contempt for conventional psychology and plot coherence, and his brilliance at tearing apart the logical and the expected make him stand pretty much alone."
Directed by Allen Rowell, this contemporary drama will be performed by the Town & Gown Players at the Athens Community Theater (Prince & Grady behind the Taylor-Grady house) for two weeks only: Friday-Sunday, July 25-27 and July 31-August 3. Curtain time is 8 p.m. with a 2 p.m. Sunday matinee. NOTE: performance on Saturday, August 2, at 3 p.m. only. Tickets are $10 and under. Call 208-8696 (208-TOWN) for reservations.
Kelly Caudle
Kelly Caudle is stage manager for Six Degrees of Separation.
Watch Food Grow Here
Daily Co-op is sponsoring tours of the locally grown farm cooperative member farms. This month (July 27) will be at Paul Chew's Beaver Farm outside Winterville, and will feature a roundtable discussion (6 p.m. to 7:30 p.m.) about mutually beneficial ways to increase community involvement in local farming, followed by a farm tour (7:30 to 8:30 p.m.). We'll be having a tour every month through October (and already did one in June at Michael Hill and Melissa Tufts' Two Swallows Farm). Every tour but the July tour features a Farmer for a Day component, where we try to provide two hours of volunteer labor to help our small local farmers - almost all of whom have day jobs, yet grow vast amounts of herbicide/pesticide-free produce by farming evenings and weekends. They have virtually no money or outlet for additional labor to help with day-to-day (let alone special) projects.
In August we'll be at Mills Farm (where they grind grits using mules), in September at Boann's Banks on the banks of the beautiful Broad River and in October at Heirloom Farm in Winterville, which focuses on keeping many heirloom vegetables in the local green market and on our shelves.
| |
I think of the farmers themselves as heroes - people who deal with heat, drought, flooding and everything else nature can throw at them, yet still produce good food for us so we don't have to grow it ourselves.
If you're interested in taking a tour, contact me at Daily Co-op (548-1732) or come by and sign up.
Marc Tissenbaum
Marc Tissenbaum is community outreach manager at Daily Co-op.
The News Is Out, (Almost)
Word is that former Flagpole Executive Editor Brad Aaron is launching the Athens Weekly News, a weekly newsletter on local happenings. According to the Friends of Five Points listserv, the anticipated beginning date for the newsletter is the week of August 14, and subscriptions are by mail (with on-line access) for $30 a year ($20 for six months) or on-line only for $25 a year.
Subscriptions and other information (including ad and sponsorship rates), are available by writing The Athens Weekly News, P.O. Box 781, Athens GA 30603, or by email to subscribe@athensweeklynews.com.
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