John Paul: “Inside the payload we have a very small constructed Arduino board that’s basically a tiny computer that makes the live streaming possible.”

Father’s Pride: My son John Paul Beard is mentioned in this news story for his role as the Logistics Coordinator on the Balloon Sat Team consisting of students and faculty from the Kentucky Space Grant Consortium at Bluegrass Community and Technical College (BCTC).

By Cheri Lawson, WEKU

A team from Bluegrass Community and Technical College will live-stream eclipse footage as part of a national Eclipse Ballooning Project

The NASA-sponsored project, which is led by the Montana Space Grant Consortium at Montana State University, has been years in the making.

In a classroom laboratory at Bluegrass Community and Technical College in Lexington students Alex Eberle and John Paul Beard are making sure all the equipment they need is in order for Monday.

The students are part of a team that will help live stream the Great American Eclipse,  by sending up a helium-filled balloon about the size of a small van. It will carry a video camera and other equipment into the atmosphere to an altitude up to 100,000 feet.

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John Paul Beard points to the video camera that will actually stream the event. It’s  housed in what looks like a white styrofoam ball about as big as a basketball. He refers to it as “the payload.”

John Paul: “Inside the payload we have a very small constructed Arduino board that’s basically a tiny computer that makes the live streaming possible.”

To read entire article or listen to the radio spot, click HERE.

Wanda Jackson is known as the Queen of Rockabilly. Autumn de Wilde /Courtesy of the artist

By Maria Sherman, NPR

When Wanda Jackson was six years old her father asked her, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” She shouted back: “A girl singer.” A barber by trade and country performer by night, Jackson’s father was a supportive figure who urged Wanda to be herself and to pursue endeavors that made her happiest. He bought her an old Martin D18 guitar soon afterwards and watched as her ineffable rasp and relentless determination crafted a career that would quickly eclipse his — long before she reached drinking age — in turn challenging the traditional path of popular music.

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Known as both the Queen and First Lady of Rockabilly, Jackson’s prolific career protested patriarchal standards of music new and old. She did the unacceptable and refused to compromise. As Elvis Costello says in the 2008 Wanda Jackson documentary, Sweet Lady with the Nasty Voice, “You can hear lots of rocking girl singers who owe an unconscious debt to a woman like Wanda. She was standing up on stage with a guitar in her hand while other gals were still asking, ‘How much is that doggy in the window?'” Because of Jackson, we’ll never have to again.

Read full NPR article HERE.

Rolling Stone: What has surprised you most about Trump?

Jason Isbell: The Trump presidency has convinced me that we are living in a post-Christian America. I could see how a lot of conservative right-wing Christian Americans would vote for someone like Mitt Romney, who seems like a stand-up guy. But Trump is obviously not a good Christian person. I think the fact that so many people voted for him means that there aren’t that many good Christian people left in rural America. God is gone from those people.

Read full interview HERE.

Courtesy of Jim Cox Photography

Hollywood Reporter:

Gospel and rock ‘n’ roll pioneer Rosetta Tharpe gets her due in a lively new musical from the creator of ‘A Night With Janis Joplin.’

In 2008, the State of Pennsylvania declared Jan. 11 Sister Rosetta Tharpe Day and held a concert to raise funds for a marker for her grave. The fact that the final resting place of this gospel and rock ‘n’ roll pioneer had been neglected may have caused a backlash, spawning biographies and documentaries, as well as a 2014 off-Broadway play, Marie and Rosetta. From director Randy Johnson (A Night With Janis Joplin), Shout Sister Shout! offers spirit-raising gospel, proto-rock and rhythm and blues courtesy of a rousing cast. Tracy Nicole Chapman, whose Broadway credits include The Lion King and Caroline, or Change, headlines an irrepressible evening of song, her acrobatic vocalizations fusing bravura with tenderness.

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In her time, Tharpe was lauded for guitar work equal to that of any man. In fact, she could outplay most of them. It’s no surprise she was a victim of sexism and racism, and her final resting place nearly forgotten. While Shout Sister Shout! serves as a necessary theatrical testament to an American treasure, it’s also a rollicking celebration of her joyous spirit.

To read entire review, click HERE.

C-Monster on Andy Warhol: The Last Decade, at the Brooklyn Museum in 2010.

Natasha Fraser-Cavassoni was the last employee that Andy Warhol ever hired. She worked at the Warhol Studio and has written After Andy, a notable memoir capturing Warhol’s final days.

“After Andy demonstrates her storytelling chops as the book masterfully winds through anecdotes, scenes and interviews with scores of Warhol’s associates, acquaintances and admirers,” writes Rolling Stone. “It is breezy without ever feeling light, channeling Warhol’s enigmatic presence.”

From Nick Ripatrazone in Rolling Stone: “And it is the puzzle at the center of that enigma which Fraser-Cavassoni captures: Warhol’s Catholicism. At the memorial service, art historian John Richardson eulogized that Warhol ‘fooled the world into believing that his only obsessions were money, fame, and glamor and that he was cool to the point of callousness.’ As a fellow Catholic (like her mother, she attended St. Mary’s Ascot convent school in Berkshire), Fraser-Cavassoni gets Warhol’s religion.

“Almost everyone who remained relevant in Andy’s life was Catholic,” she explains, “whether it was Paul Morrissey, Fred Hughes, Bob Colacello, the photographer Christopher Makos and Vincent Fremont.” She continues: “Being brought up Catholic gives a sense of hierarchical order, discipline and faith. Faith, when embraced, anchors the creative … I think it would also be fair to say that the romantically rich and multi-layered religion that forgives all – lest we forget! – allows unconventional traditionalists.”

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After Andy captures the artist’s almost otherworldly staying power. “Warhol’s primordial influence was a religious one,” she asserts. “His genius was changing the face of art by mixing it with contemporary flare and timeless technique. Look at the Marilyns, Jackies and other Sixties portraits – the ones termed by Andy as his ‘rainy day paintings’ – the suggestion of sainthood and or martyrdom gives an eternal quality to each subject. Meanwhile, the best of his self-portraits are Christ-like and imply that Catholicism plagued him.” After Andy is an entertaining ride about work, play and the weirdness in-between that creates great art.

To read entire article, click HERE.

Tipping his top hat and waving his walking stick, 69-year-old Alice Cooper is still cranking out great music. This week, the king of macabre-greased, tongue-in-cheek rock-n-roll, released his latest album Paranormal – with the help of Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top and Larry Mullen of U2 as well as original band mates. As fans have come to expect, there are plenty of hard-driving songs with plenty of creepiness thrown in: “My shadow has a life of its own / Watching you while you sleep all alone.” Or “When the night is all cool, skin and bones / And you lie wrapped in sheets on your own.”

“That’s kind of what people want or a certain amount of that out of Alice Cooper. They want a certain amount of Edgar Allan Poe out of me, and I love writing those types of songs,” Cooper recently told Paste.

Of the many things that have changed within American culture, the shock factor of rock ‘n’ roll has to push ultra-extreme limits in order to compete with the nightly news.

“I mean, nothing’s scarier than CNN. They cut my head off on stage, right? And that was really shocking in 1970,” Cooper said. “Now it’s traditional, and people really wanna see that bit in the show, but it doesn’t shock them. They really wanna see it, because they saw the Alice Cooper Guillotine thing or the straightjacket or the snake or whatever it is. All that stuff was shocking in 1970. In 2017, you turn on CNN, and there’s a guy really getting his head cut off by ISIS. And that is shocking. To me, Marilyn Manson, Rob Zombie, and myself cannot outdo reality when it comes to what’s shocking anymore. So, all of us understand that shock value is great within the show, but nobody’s really being shocked by it. They just like the spectacle of it.”

Cooper continues: “If you really strip away the Alice image and the Alice character and the show, we’re a very straight-up, guitar-driven rock and roll band. I mean, every single album I ever made, I surround myself with great guitar players, and I surround myself with really good hard rock players. And really, that’s what we are. That’s what Aerosmith is. That’s what Alice is. That’s what Guns N’ Roses is. We’re hard rock bands. That’s the one music that has never gone away. Grunge went away. Punk went away. Disco went away. But what stayed? Guitar-driven rock and roll. So that’s always what I’ve done. If anything, I’m probably closer to Detroit-type of rock and roll than anything else. I just put my twist on it.”

By Mary Wakefield, The Spectator

Some of the time, most of the time, it’s tricky to believe in God. There’s just too much that’s sad — and behind it all, the ceaseless chomping of predators. Then sometimes the mist lifts and just for a moment you can see why the saints insist that everything’s OK. There’s a documentary out now, Summer in the Forest, that for a while cleared the mist for me and made sense of faith.

It tells the stories of a group of men and women with learning disabilities who live alongside volunteers without disabilities in Trosly-Breuil, a small French village north of Paris. The community is called L’Arche — The Ark — and it was founded 53 years ago by a French-Canadian former naval officer, Jean Vanier. In his mid-thirties, Vanier visited an institution for ‘idiots’ and was struck by the great loneliness there. Where most of us would scuttle away guiltily, Jean Vanier made a decision in the autumn of 1964 that sent his life’s trajectory off at an odd angle.

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According to the philosophy of L’Arche, men and women with learning disabilities — loving and guileless — teach us how to live. But, says Vanier, they have another lesson for us too — they also teach us the mystery of living with loss. This I find unnerving. What is the mystery of loss?

‘We all live with loss,’ said Vanier. ‘It’s inevitable. We begin, most of us, by being loved totally when we’re born — then we enter into a world of loss, a mystery of loss. Every time you lose a job, or something precious, or there’s death, there’s loss. We cannot live without this movement of loss and gain. But some people are so frightened of loss, they are just scared stiff of loss.’

He laughed. I didn’t. I thought of a life spent acquiring and keeping safe: a husband, the baby, a house, the great stream of packages from Amazon. The possibilities for loss give me vertigo.

‘You can’t escape it,’ said Jean Vanier, gently. ‘In the end, you even lose what you feel is yourself. We all do. There’s a beauty in that. There’s a beauty even in something like Alzheimer’s, because it is a cry. It’s not a disaster, it’s a cry for a one-to-one.’

But how can that be beautiful? Isn’t it just catastrophically sad?

‘We have to learn to cry,’ said Jean Vanier, ‘because we’ve created an identity of power and not an identity of relationships, and that’s what the whole film is about — an identity of relationships.’

To read Mary Wakefield’s entire essay in The Spectator, click HERE

By Sarah Condon

Yet another harrowing indictment of modern family life recently came across my newsfeed. “Life at Home in the Twenty-First Century” chronicles the ways in which American family life is falling in on itself. Apparently things are worse than we thought. We are surrounded by our belongings, our children are staring at screens, and no one is going outside. Also, it turns out everyone is eating chicken nuggets. Dammit, America, haven’t we talked about this already?

Mostly, all of the neurotic-as-I-am mothers are posting articles about this book and wondering what we are doing to screw our kids up. We see ourselves somewhere in the book’s sad evidence: if it’s not the hours of Disney Jr., it is the backyard swingset that no one is using.

The thing that I find most jarring about these scary assessments is not the information they hold but the clarion call for self-righteousness that they herald. Some people read this stuff and feel the weight of their sin, and some people read this stuff and feel very shiny in their righteousness…. Continue reading →

Photograph: Jane Bown for the Observer

Russian dissident poet and novelist Irina Ratushinskaya, known for writing poems in her bars of soap and then memorizing them while she was in a Soviet prison camp, died in Moscow on July 5, 2017, at the age of 63. There are many fine obituaries of this courageous woman, but what follows is one of the best profiles of her indomitable spirit. 

By Kathy Keay (Third Way, November 1990)

Irina Ratushinskaya was sent to a Soviet hard-labor camp in April 1983. She was beaten, force-fed, put in solitary confinement in brutal, freezing conditions, and became so gravely ill that many feared she would not survive. Her “crime” – writing poetry. For this, she was branded “a dangerous state criminal” and was sentenced a second time to seven years hard labor and five years internal exile – the maximum possible punishment for this offense and the hardest on any woman since the Stalin era.

Irina was the youngest woman in the Small Zone – a special unit for women political prisoners at Barashevo in Mordovia. She repeatedly protested against camp practices which flouted Soviet as well as international law. In May 1986 her first book of poems, No I am Not Afraid, was published in the UK. Her plight, by now a matter for world public concern, finally led to her release on October 9. Two months later she was allowed to come to Britain. Continue reading →