My guest for this addition of "DITD" is Douglass DeCandia, or "digs". Doug currently works as a farm manager on Ryder Farm , with an organization called SPACE... a nonprofit residency program and organic farm located on the grounds of a 224-year-old family homestead in Putnam County, New York, just an hour north of New York City. SPACE hosts residencies for artists and activists. Doug is part of a collective of individuals working to make space for people to connect deeply with each other, with humanity and with the land. As a farmer he’s committed to healthy soil, growing and sharing food and medicine, and to the healing of both people and the earth.

This Month on Live Culture I am delighted to present a conversation with Music Maker Relief Foundation’s founder and photographer Tim Duffy about his Blue Muse Project which involves a museum exhibition, a book, a music album and participation in this year’s New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. This multi-sensory extravaganza is in celebration of MMRF’s remarkable 25 years of creating collective cultural goods by directly helping artists.

Duffy, a musician, and photographer has mastered the challenging art of tin-type portraiture, creating indelible images of MMRF’s American blues and roots musicians. Tin-types- a process that dates to the 1870s- create unique photographic images using a chemical process on metal plates.

For the first time, these prints will be shown together in a major exhibition at the New Orleans Museum of Art, and large exterior prints of the portraits will be strategically placed throughout the city during the festival. Tim Duffy: Blue Muse, will open at NOMA April 25th and run through July 28th, 2019.

The accompanying publication Blue Muse: Timothy Duffy’s Southern Photographs, produced by UNC Press, in association with the New Orleans Museum of Art, offers a beautiful book showcasing the prints and featuring thoughtful essays. It is available as of March 28, 2019.

Thirdly, also featuring the tintype images, is the music disc Blue Muse, which came out on February 1st, this year. A few selections from this compilation will be featured on this edition of Live Culture. The album features 21 tracks, most of which were recorded by Duffy himself. Blue Muse artfully places some of the most important musicians you’ve never heard alongside rockstars and longtime Music Maker supporters Taj Mahal, Eric Clapton, and Dom Flemons.

Music Maker Relief Foundation offers support to some of the many American musicians living in poverty, offering help with such vital needs as medication, subsistence and support getting their music seen and heard. This powerhouse of a project has led to graphic novels, books, videos, concerts, and images as well as offering life-changing individual support and care of our musical elder statesmen. Over the 25 years more than 435 artists, with 11,840 grants, have benefitted from MMRF actively helping keep traditional blues and folk songs alive.

“This is who we are as a nation,” Duffy says. “Everyone drinks from the root of this music. It’s our greatest export.”

This year the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival will be offering sets by Music Maker Relief Foundation Artists Ironing Board Sam, Little Freddie King, Leyla McCalla, Ernie Vincent, Kenny Neal, and Henry Gray as well as advisory board member and Blues Hall of Famer and Americana Lifetime Achievement Award winner Taj Mahal. The festival runs April 26-May 5th and more information is available here http://www.nojazzfest.com/

About the exhibit: Tim Duffy: Blue Muse, at the NOMA website herehttps://noma.org/exhibitions/timothy-duffy-blue-muse/

About the Blue Muse compilation CD here https://musicmaker.org/shop/

About the Book Blue Muse: Timothy Duffy’s Southern Photographs, here https://musicmaker.org/events-blog/blue-muse-book-release/

Information on MMRF here https://musicmaker.org/

Thursday, April 25, 2019, 12 noon WPKN 89.5 FM www.wpkn.org

Humans live everywhere: on a piece of dirt with a house, in a tower, with our parents, in a shared apartment, any number of places, but almost all of us have a plant, a flower box, a garden, even a site. There are 3 basic things that grow:

1) The store-bought, developed/engineered plants we nurture and create from seeds, seedlings, little plants, they are our pets, including our lawns, vegetable gardens/containers, full on gardens, either perennials or annuals, we control them. We future them, and mostly they live.

2) There are other plant (from nature, from friends, from stores) that are native, not bred into perfection. They explode into the landscape, or just die. Perhaps invasive or natural, things like pachysandra, ivy, ferns, lilies, wild oats, Aguga are there already or launched by us, and we let them take over or find a species that will take over

3) Then there are, well, weeds. The things that grow whether we like them or not. Dandelions, crab grass, poison ivy, They are deemed “wrong” we do not control them, they control us. We want them gone, or do we? We use chemicals, a shovel, our hands to remove these offending criminals. Why?

Today, we have 2 incredible resources of defining what we value and what to do about it when it comes to our gardens, flower boxes, yards, potted plants, inside or out:

Stacey Pope is the lawn and garden specialist who works at Van Wilgen’s Garden Center in North Branford CT. Van Wilgen’s is a plant nursery & store. She is the point person for thousands of civilian amateurs, who are confronting their grades Right Now – for the first time in 6 months.

Nancy DuBrule-Clemente is a passionate garden creator and advocate who created Natureworks Natureworks – Garden Center in Branford. Natureworks, a very special retail garden center in Southern Connecticut . On an acre of land) Nancy has been focusing on organic gardening since Natureworks began in 1983. Education is her primary focus. She has dedicated her life to the challenge of being fully organic and sharing this passion with her customers

Join us as we explore how our where we live is affected by what else lives there, our plants and our homes.

Dr. J broadcasts live with Karen Henson Jones, author of “Heart of Miracles.” Her story of perseverance is sure to inspire women and men alike! At the age of 30, her life was stopped in its tracks when she was diagnosed with a rare heart condition. Her journey to healing included a near death experience, kundalini yoga and serendipitous adventures in international travel which prompted a radical change in diet and lifestyle. Her story will inspire you to live a healthy life full of gratitude, passion and the desire to embrace all that this world has to offer.

Debate Over Trump Impeachment Follows Facts Revealed in Redacted Version of Mueller Report, Karen Hobert Flynn, President of Common Cause, Producer: Scott Harris

Trump Executive Orders Aim to Green Light Fossil Fuel Pipeline, Infrastructure Projects, Collin Rees, Senior Campaigner with Oil Change International, Producer: Scott Harris

BXE Protest Shines Light on FERC as Fossil Fuel Industry Rubber Stamp; Drew Hudson a member of Beyond Extreme Energy; Producer: Melinda Tuhus

The Stop and Shop strikers, members of the United Food and Commercial Workers, Locals 919 and 371, ended their walk out today, April 22, with a tentative agreement that appears to meet all their demands. I recorded these interviews with workers on the picket line at the Branford Stop and Shop store on Saturday, April 20.

Interviews by Richard Hill

WPKN celebrates Earth Day today with selective rotating programming during the day including an 'in-studio' roundtable from 11am-12noon featuring:

Douglas Holcomb, GBT - Transit & the Environment + Electric Bus Pilot Project;

Christine Sandolo Green Village Initiative - Bridgeport Community Gardening & Food Social Justice;

Greg Dancho, Beardsley Zoo

Organized by Susan Rubinsky.

Bill Finch, Discovery Museum on Bridgeport's First Earth Day

Thursday, March 28, 2019, 12 noon WPKN 89.5 FM www.wpkn.org

Host: Duo Dickinson

Homes are a mirror. So where we live changes. We paint a room, we take down or build a wall. We put in a kitchen or bath, or add a room, finish an attic.

But it can be more. Whole locations change. Whole approaches to life change. Life cycles make house cycles. Couples make a new place together. Families have children and need new space. Relationships end, and a new place must be found. Our children leave, we leave the Family Home for the After Kids Home – downsizing/deaccessioning, change. When a partner dies, the remaining spouse must confront life alone.

Talking to HOME PAGE today are 3 women in the new realities of home. Chion Wolf is heard everyday on WNPR, but has just created a new life with her partner Emily Petersen. Cori SaNoriega just moved into her new home, a Full Family Home, with 3 young daughters and her husband Adam Farstrup. Meg Botteon, an editor at Oxford Press has left a house in New Jersey for an apartment in New Haven to be with Richard Mammana in a place to start a life together.

Home Cycles are House Stories: Come listen to these wonderful stories:

Chion Wolf is the technical producer, announcer, photographer, and personality with WNPR and the Colin McEnroe Show. She produces and hosts The Mouth-Off – a live storytelling event,”Asking for a Friend”, and a weekly Facebook live show, “It’s Chopped Salad Time!” and produces of Connecticut Voice Podcast,. Chion is also an animator, and on the Board of Directors for Night Fall, Inc., founder of “Pedal to the Medal”, an annual pre-Eversource Hartford Marathon bike ride.

Cori SaNogueira was born and raised in Connecticut but has spent time living in various places all over the globe including Kobe, Japan, London and Jerusalem. After attending Muhlenberg College she went on to work in various non-profit educational settings before getting her Master’s Degree in Elementary School Education. She currently lives in Old Greenwich, CT with her husband Adam Farstrup and three children. Cori is past chair of PJ Library in Greenwich and currently serves on the boards of both Carmel Academy and UJA-JCC Women’s Philanthropy.

Meg Botteon is a college textbook editor, and works in New York city and has embarked, this year, on a new life in New Haven, commuting to New York.

Thursday, February 28, 2019, 12 noon WPKN 89.5 FM www.wpkn.org

Host: Duo Dickinson

“Beauty” can be a four letter word for fine arts sensibilities of any sort. The intellectualization of aesthetic innovation is particularly daunting when it comes to our essentials: preciously artisanal food, bizarre high fashion clothing, and the ambience and design of our homes.

In the last few years, science has begun to understand that “beauty” is not a learned value of a civilization, but a hard-wired essential element in heredity. Some in the world of aesthetics see a direct connection to how we design with how humans perceive “beauty”: and when it comes to architectural design the elemental simplicity of what deeply moves all humans should not be ignored as nostalgia or pandering, but rather that baseline truth needs to be used in the creation of where we live or we fail our humanity.

Home has 3 thought leaders in the New World of Beauty, a world that lived before the Academy, and a human reality that exists independent of abstract construction or rationalization. That is is not always what designers can control, or reveal: it may be that “beauty” is a reality that is revealed to designers through the eyes, hearts and minds of those who use their designs.

Join HOME PAGE for an hour of finding Beauty where we have always lived:

Joining first is Martin Pedersen, who created a forum for new ideas in design, The Common Edge Collaborative, http://commonedge.org which has become a pace where ideas of a Beauty Based architectural ethic are being discussed. Pedersen is executive director of Common Edge, a not-for-profit web site decided to public engagement in architecture and planning. A critic, author and journalist, Pedersen served as executive editor at Metropolis Magazine for nearly a decade and a half. He lives in New Orleans.

A multi-discipline academic, Dr. Nikos A. Salingaros https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikos_Salingaros is Professor of Mathematics at the University of Texas at San Antonio, is on the faculty of the Building Beauty Program, and has held guest professorships in Architecture at the Delft University of Technology, Tecnológico de Monterrey, Querétaro, Mexico, and Università di Roma III. He is an internationally recognized architectural theorist and urbanist, who has worked with Christopher Alexander and others at defining and exploring the realities of beauty that have often been unaddressed in teaching design..

Donald H. Ruggles, , AIA, NCARB, ICAA, has just written Beauty, Neuroscience & Architecture, https://www.amazon.com/Beauty-Neuroscience-Architecture-Timeless-Well-Being/dp/0692928626 and is president of Ruggles Mabe Studio, a design firm based in Colorado. Founded in 1970, the firm is dedicated to the idea that beauty can improve the lives of its clients. The firm’s projects have been featured in publications throughout the U.S. and Europe, and has received numerous awards for its work and dedication to the industry. Deeply involved in the Institute of Classical Architecture and serves on the Board of Advisors for the University of Colorado Denver College of Architecture and Planning and on the Board of Advisors for the Center of Advanced Research for Traditional Architecture.

Organic land care consultant Mike Nadeau shares a his wisdom on how to convert our toxic lawns and public spaces to safe, pesticide-free environments.

Panel: Guy Beardsley, Richard Hill, Chris Ferrio