Gil Faizon and George St. Geegland are outrageously opinionated, 70-something, native New Yorkers that Nick Kroll and John Mulaney first began performing on the alternative comedy stages in NYC. Honed for over a decade, the fictional duo garnered a cult following and found their way onto a Comedy Central special, viral videos and late night couches everywhere. Oh Hello, on Broadway is Gil and George’s “memoir for the stage”—a laugh-a-minute two-man tour-de-force that’s part scripted, part spontaneous comedy, and totally unprecedented.
Friday, October 28, 2016
MUSEUM
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Jerusalem 110 - 1400: Every People Under Heaven
We got to see actual documents written and signed in Maimonides own hand!
"Beginning around the year 1000, Jerusalem attained unprecedented significance as a location, destination, and symbol to people of diverse faiths from Iceland to India. Multiple competitive and complementary religious traditions, fueled by an almost universal preoccupation with the city, gave rise to one of the most creative periods in its history.
This landmark exhibition demonstrates the key role that the Holy City played in shaping the art of the period from 1000 to 1400. In these centuries, Jerusalem was home to more cultures, religions, and languages than ever before. Through times of peace as well as war, Jerusalem remained a constant source of inspiration that resulted in art of great beauty and fascinating complexity.
This exhibition is the first to unravel the various cultural traditions and aesthetic strands that enriched and enlivened the medieval city. It features some 200 works of art from 60 lenders worldwide. More than four dozen key loans come from Jerusalem's diverse religious communities, some of which have never before shared their treasures outside their walls."
Thursday, October 27, 2016
THEATER
Beckett Theater
A Day by the Sea - N. C. Hunter
"A DAY BY THE SEA is a warm, human and often humorous depiction of the “crisis” of middle age. Julian Anson, a once-promising Foreign Service employee, confronts professional disappointment and personal failure while picnicking along the English seaside. Jolted into the realization that maybe it’s not too late—he seizes an opportunity to correct his past mistakes and start fresh—but will the results be any different?"
“A FORGOTTEN MASTERPIECE, ACTED BY THE BEST ENSEMBLE CAST I’VE SEEN IN RECENT SEASONS.” – TERRY TEACHOUT, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
"A DAY BY THE SEA opened on the West End in 1953 and ran for 386 performances in a production that starred Dame Sybil Thorndike, Irene Worth, Sir John Gielgud and Sir Ralph Richardson. In New York, the play opened in 1955 with Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn headlining the cast; Hunter’s only Broadway production.
A DAY BY THE SEA is a New York Times Critic’s Pick. “There’s so much to like about the Mint Theater Company’s revisiting of A DAY BY THE SEA that it’s hard to know what to single out,” wrote Neil Genzlinger, calling the play “a beautiful study in conversations never had, or had too late.”
MUSEUM
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Valentin de Boulogne - Beyond Caravaggio
We love Caravaggio and have seen his paintings hanging in Rome and an exhibition in London at the National Portrait Gallery. This exhibit of Valentin de Boulogne's work was spectacular in painting qualities and in numbers of paintings.
"The greatest French follower of Caravaggio (1571–1610), Valentin de Boulogne (1591–1632) was also one of the outstanding artists in 17th-century Europe. In the years following Caravaggio's death, he emerged as one of the most original protagonists of the new, naturalistic painting.
This is the first monographic exhibition devoted to Valentin, who is little known because his career was short-lived—he died at age 41—and his works are so rare. Around 60 paintings by Valentin survive, and this exhibition brings together 45 of them, with works coming from Rome, Vienna, Munich, Madrid, London, and Paris. Exceptionally, the Musée du Louvre, which possesses the most important and extensive body of Valentin's works, is lending all of its paintings by the artist.
Although he is not well known to the general public, Valentin has long been admired by those with a passion for Caravaggesque painting. His work was a reference point for the great realists of the 19th century, from Courbet to Manet, and his startlingly vibrant staging of dramatic events and the deep humanity of his figures, who seem touched by a pervasive melancholy, make his work unforgettable."
‘Valentin de Boulogne: Beyond Caravaggio’ Review: Intensity and Intricacy
A heightened sense of the individual set his work apart from that of the Italian master
Karen Wilkin •Oct. 25, 2016 4:38 p.m. ET
At the beginning of the 17th century, Rome was full of painters from elsewhere, most of them enthralled by the radically new, pitiless realism of Michelangelo Merisi, known as Caravaggio. Just as countless hopeful abstract painters in 1950s New York emulated Willem de Kooning’s gestural, wet-into-wet approach, many of Rome’s international community of aspiring artists in the early 1600s adopted Caravaggio’s way of filling canvases with large figures in theatrically lighted, indeterminate space, painted directly from models without preparatory drawings. Caravaggio fled Rome in the spring of 1606 and died, without returning, four years later, yet the influence of his potent, startling work persisted.
One exceptionally gifted French-born painter’s response to the allure and challenge of Caravaggio is the focus of “ Valentin de Boulogne: Beyond Caravaggio,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a brilliant, compelling exhibition organized by Keith Christiansen, the Met’s chairman of the Department of European Paintings, and the French art historian Annick Lemoine. (Since the last survey of French followers of Caravaggio was seen in 1973, the current show was so eagerly awaited that the Louvre lent all six of its important Valentins, including those never made available.) Little is known about Valentin’s early years (born in Coulommiers, France, in 1591, he died in Rome in 1632), although he is documented as being in Rome in May 1614 and may have arrived as early as 1609, when he was 18. The young Frenchman’s earliest paintings clearly reflect the vanguard aesthetic of the time of his arrival in the Eternal City: dramatically lighted martyrdoms enacted by bald-headed, bearded old men; cinematic close-ups of saints stripped to the waist; groups of equivocal cardsharps; biblical stories featuring downstage violence. These are Caravaggio’s motifs, largely discovered at one remove by Valentin in the work of his own contemporaries, notably the Italian Bartolomeo Manfredi or Jusepe de Ribera, known as Lo Spagnoletto—the little Spanish guy.
But as the show’s subtitle, “Beyond Caravaggio,” attests, Valentin was no mere follower. A bare-chested, mustachioed St. John the Baptist, with an inquisitive lamb (probably a self-portrait painted c. 1613-14) at once acknowledges its sources and demonstrates a new angular intricacy of composition and a heightened sense of the individual. The young painter fully announces his gifts in an uncanny “David With the Head of Goliath” (c. 1615-16), in which the distinctly troubled boy-hero leans toward us, across the huge, monstrous head of his victim. The staging and lighting are effective, but it’s the immediacy and psychological intensity of the image that capture us—hallmarks, we discover, along with a ravishing touch, of Valentin’s most unforgettable works.
In his canvases made between the later teens and the mid-1620s, the angled limbs of musicians, fortune-tellers, cheats and biblical characters, arranged in complex groups, articulate rhythmic paths through fictive space, with the implied three-dimensionality of structure heightened by the play of light on crumpled linen, shiny armor and flesh against infinite darkness. In the astonishing “Christ and the Adulteress” (c. 1618-22), Jesus crouches before the accused woman sentenced to be stoned to death, his gaze fixed on her pale, spotlighted décolletage; it’s as if Christ has implicated himself in his pronouncement “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.”
Every work on view offers fresh excitement and new revelations about this superb painter. Groups of strangely serious musicians, seated around tables or chunks of Roman spoil, allow us to savor Valentin’s ability to convincingly conjure up everything from carpets to silk to carved stone while still celebrating the character of paint. The delectable, thinly painted surfaces of his later works have been read as evidence of an interest in Titian, yet the fierce naturalism of the result is quite different, just as the psychological dramas of Valentin’s strongest works differ from Caravaggio’s meticulous, eloquently still prototypes. Yet, as we move through the show, we recognize Valentin’s habitual models, a revelation of artifice that turns his deeply felt narratives into staged fictions, without, however, diminishing their impact. Like his accomplished touch, this quality explains why Valentin was admired by Édouard Manet and Gustave Courbet, painters acutely attuned to both nuances of paint-handling and dispassionate presentation.
This dazzling exhibition ends, crescendo, by bringing together both of Valentin’s largest and most important commissions, “Allegory of Italy” (1628-29), with its muscular river gods and gorgeous red drapery, and “Martyrdom of Sts. Processus and Martinian” (1629-30), with its tangle of bare limbs. The latter, commissioned for St. Peter’s, departs from Caravaggio’s magnificent “Martyrdom of St. Matthew” (1599-1600) in Rome’s San Luigi dei Francesi. Valentin pays homage to his predecessor but creates an innovative composition of stunning spatial complexity, powerful emotion, and heart-rending realism. The dramatically lighted scene, crowded with torturers and victims, is horrifying but confusing. Something terrible is happening, but we’re not entirely sure what. We shudder and then are seduced by the picture’s formal strengths. Beyond Caravaggio, indeed.
‘Valentin de Boulogne,’ Bright Star in Caravaggio’s Orbit
By JASON FARAGO•
“The Concert With Eight Figures” (circa 1629-30), in “Valentin de Boulogne: Beyond Caravaggio” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.Musée du Louvre, Paris
A canon is not a static list of dead white men. It’s an assertion of who from the past can speak to the present, and its shape is always up for negotiation. “Valentin de Boulogne: Beyond Caravaggio,” a big Baroque blast of a show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is the first exhibition anywhere devoted to a French painter whose theatrically lit tableaus of musicians, cardsharps and saints now stand in slight obscurity. It is also, quite explicitly, an application for canon membership, a full-throated bid to place Valentin (1591-1632) alongside Jusepe de Ribera and Georges de La Tour as a pioneer of the early 17th century.
Valentin de Boulogne’s “Martyrdom of Saints Processus and Martinian” (1629-30).Vatican Museums, Vatican City
With 45 of his 60 extant works, including a whopper of an altarpiece from the Vatican and every single one of his works in the Louvre’s holdings, you have the evidence before you, and you may, especially if Baroque drama is not your thing, find him a mere follower of an earlier genius. Or, like me, you may be overcome by Valentin, and find in his dark vision truths about our own lives, our pleasures and our shortcomings.
A Valentin show has been a longtime dream of Keith Christiansen, who leads the Met’s European paintings department and who has organized this exhibition with the French art historian Annick Lemoine. Its subtitle, “Beyond Caravaggio,” may be a marketer’s necessity to win attention for a less famous artist, though it sets the exhibition’s stakes. There is nothing by Caravaggio in this exhibition, but his influence and example permeate the Frenchman’s art, and you’ll need to know something about him and his devotees to fully adjudge Valentin’s invention. (Next week, the National Gallery in London is opening its own show, “Beyond Caravaggio,” which places Valentin among a trans-European tradition of Baroque naturalism.)
“Cardsharps” (circa 1614-15), a genre scene painted by Valentin in Rome.Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden
Caravaggio was the leading painter in Rome at the turn of the 17th century. His two grand paintings of St. Matthew, done in 1600 for the church of San Luigi dei Francesi, shocked an older generation but made younger artists swoon. When he bailed town in 1606 — he went on the run after murdering a pimp — he left behind a generation of young painters who emulated his tight cropping, bold light and taste for flesh. Three paintings by other Caravaggisti, as his followers were called, open this show, and the best is a scene by Bartolomeo Manfredi (circa 1582-1622), in which Christ wields a cat-o’-nine-tails on slack-mouthed merchants.
Valentin spent his whole career in Rome. He got there from France no later than 1614, and his early paintings display a Caravaggesque taste for low life in the holy city. Soldiers play dice, cheat at cards. Young men play music while getting drunk and eyeing up Gypsies. A young military man offers his palm to a fortune teller while robbers ply him with wine. The figures’ buttery flesh and midaction positioning make these genre scenes uncannily lifelike, and Valentin’s religious pictures, too, relinquish sacred precision for the realities of the flesh. In “Christ and the Adulteress” (circa 1618-22), Pharisees in contemporary armor look every which way as the accused woman’s bodice droops down, and Jesus kneels in the dirt. A painting of John the Baptist, half-naked beneath a flowing red mantle, is probably a self-portrait of Valentin: young, mustachioed, beautiful and on the make.
Valentin’s “Judith and Holofernes” (circa 1626) tells a biblical story.National Museum of Fine Arts, Valletta, Malta
Like Caravaggio, Valentin lived fast and died young, succumbing at 41 to fever after a night of binge drinking that ended in a fountain. He belonged to a hell-raising confraternity of artists known as the Bentvueghels — “birds of a feather” in Dutch — whose motto celebrated the pleasures of “Bacco, tabacco e Venere”: drinking, smoking and sex. Like Caravaggio, too, he refused to make preparatory drawings, relying instead on the innovative practice of painting from live models. You’ll see favorites recur as you work through this show. A man cast as a pensive Joseph in a 1624-26 painting re-emerges later in a grand allegory, sporting a longer beard and a rug of chest hair.
The difference from his paragon, especially in the paintings after 1620, is in the darkness. For Caravaggio, chiaroscuro — the contrast of light and dark — was principally a painterly conceit, a means of bringing drama to altarpieces like “The Calling of St. Matthew” (1599-1600) or “Seven Acts of Mercy” (1607). The darkness in Valentin’s mature painting, by moving contrast, is pervaded with a melancholy absent in Caravaggio, a haze of lost love and the certainty of death. At the Met, a single, heart-stopping gallery contains six large paintings with musical motifs, and in all of them the parties ache with a worldly regret. Sitting at tables or castoff blocks of Roman marble, soldiers stare into space as musicians strum lutes or beat tambourines. Two paintings featured depressive violists who look down as they aimlessly bow their instruments. Valentin’s nights out in Rome may have been dissolute, but the nights he painted are suffused with pain.
Valentin’s “Judith With the Head of Holofernes” (circa 1626-27).Musée des Augustins, Toulouse
Rome in the early 17th century was no honeymoon destination. It was a fetid, debauched, wildly unequal metropolis where starving artists hustled for commissions — Valentin got one of his largest from a diamond thief who used art to launder money — and where painterly disputes were settled with rapiers. In this show’s catalog, the art historian Patrizia Cavazzini provides a bulging register of artists brawling in taverns, and even, after Caravaggio’s example, indulging in a little light murder. Valentin’s own roommate, a sculptor, was stabbed to death in 1626. This was not a place suited to the lofty perfection of the High Renaissance, nor even to the moralizing of contemporary Dutch genre painting. Death was everywhere, and that put life on canvas into a more plangent key.
Toward the end of his short life Valentin got his most important commission, for an altar of the recently completed St. Peter’s Basilica. He painted a barnstorming composition of the martyrdom of the saints Processus and Martinian, whose nude bodies, splayed on the rack, bisect a deluge of torturers, mourners and angels. Its vertical collision of saints and seraphim strongly echoes Caravaggio’s “Seven Acts of Mercy,” and here, too, the high drama of holy suffering is tinged with the violence of the Roman street. At the time, Valentin’s altarpiece was contrasted unfavorably with one by Poussin, another Frenchman in Rome, whose cleaner finishes and bows to antiquity had come into fashion. The rest is canon formation: Valentin became a mere follower, when he was so much more.
The altarpiece is a wildly accomplished work of art, but to modern eyes the most immediate pictures in this momentous exhibition are those melancholy musical paintings, and one in particular. An allegory of the four ages of man, painted around 1628, depicts in a diamond arrangement a boy with a bird cage, a youth with a lute, a grown man with a book, and an elder with a drink. They’re all downcast, reflective, awash in sad thoughts. The man with the book seems skeptical of learning, the boy fiddling with the cage wonders about the meaning of freedom. The mustachioed lutenist plays despite his sorrows, and he looks a lot like John the Baptist in the earlier painting: a lot, that is, like Valentin himself. This world is vanity, but he plays all the same.
Wednesday, October 26, 2016
THEATER
Pearl Theater
Public Enemy - Henrik Ibsen
“When a local doctor discovers that the water in his small town’s mineral baths is contaminated, it sets off a cataclysmic showdown between a corrupt government that doesn’t want to be blamed, an angry community that doesn’t want their economy ruined, and a single man’s determination to tell the truth—no matter the cost to family, town, or self.
The play offers a story of political corruption (a poisoned water supply and the conspiracy to cover it up) and one man’s almost self-destructive need to reveal the truth. This adaptation offers a 90 minute compression of the Ibsen original that streamlines the action of the story, but sticks closely to his style. The setting and costumes have been updated to reflect 2016, and, although it doesn’t draw a one-to-one comparison with Flint, MI (the play doesn’t entirely allow it), that narrative is very much in our minds. It’s an incredibly timely piece, with a great cast.”
WHY PUBLIC ENEMY?
“When I read Harrower’s lean adaptation, I was stunned. His writing allows Stockmann to go for the jugular, to confront the hypocrisies of his town, and root out the corruption inherent in its local politics. Ultimately, my approach is to show that there is a price for excessive adherence to principle – and there’s a greater price for society in ignoring one’s truer ideals.” From Hal Brooks, Director and Artistic Director
“Henrik Ibsen pulled off one of theater’s great hairpin turns…” –The New York Times
“instead the audience is faced with a real live polemic, sitting at the edge of their seats…listening to a man truly asking questions about the corrupt and false nature of leaders…and asking us to confront the evils majorities let happen, and how willful ignorance will lead us to the brink of disaster” –New York Theatre Review
“The incandescent timely core of the play shines through…when push comes to shove, self-interest can so thoroughly dominate otherwise decent people that the general good gets subverted…it is a message as timely today as when Ibsen first wrote it.” –Plays to See
"Ibsen’s parable of the collision of truth and politics in the public sphere takes on new immediacy in this punchy and raw adaptation from the playwright behind Broadway’s Blackbird. When Dr. Stockmann finds that the town’s tourist-friendly baths contain lethal levels of toxins, he sets out to clear the air and quickly finds his friends and neighbors poisoned against him."
Review: In ‘Public Enemy,’ a Noble Whistle-Blower Turns Fanatic
By ELISABETH VINCENTELLIOCT. 25, 2016
Jimonn Cole, foreground, in “Public Enemy,” David Harrower’s adaptation of Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People.”
Henrik Ibsen pulled off one of theater’s great hairpin turns in “An Enemy of the People.” That play’s titular character, Dr. Thomas Stockmann, starts off as a noble whistle-blower, only to turn into a fanatical crusader who delivers a proto-Ayn Randian aria of elitist contempt for the masses.
The play is admittedly a bit of a slog, so in 2013, David Harrower (the esteemed Scottish author of “Blackbird”) retitled it “Public Enemy,” spruced up the translation and shaved the five acts to a 90-minute sprint — which the Pearl Theater is now presenting in a satisfyingly sturdy staging.
Thanks to its subject’s evergreen qualities, this Ibsen work from 1882 is revived fairly often. It was last seen on Broadway in 2012, and the next year the Brooklyn Academy of Music presented a feisty Thomas Ostermeier production that incorporated audience interaction and David Bowie music.
There is nothing nearly as provocative here, but Hal Brooks’s modern-dress production does well by the story. Harry Feiner’s ash-gray wooden set looks lifted from a Scandinavian design magazine, its clean lines contrasting with the messy acrimony between Stockmann (Jimonn Cole) and pretty much everybody else.
The doctor sets the conflict in motion when he realizes that the town’s lucrative spa baths have been contaminated by industrial runoff, and he recommends that they be closed for a lengthy cleanup. The mayor (Guiesseppe Jones) objects to that costly idea and turns the townspeople against Stockmann, his brother.
On the doctor’s side are his wife (the excellent Nilaja Sun, who has earned praised for her solo shows “No Child …” and “Pike St.”) and the sea captain Horster (Carol Schultz, in a role written for a man).WRITE A COMMENT
It’s easy to sympathize with the embattled Stockmann when he fights for public health; less so when he delivers a fiery rant against the tyranny of an ignorant majority over an educated minority. Mr. Cole fully comes into his own as Stockmann turns his last stand into a grandstand about the “majority getting what it wants.” For him, that amounts to the “gang rape” of democracy.
Being ostracized only reinforces the doctor’s messiah complex. In this society, you can be corrupt or you can be a zealot. What bleak options this thought-provoking show offers.
Mahmoud Ahmed’s rapturous voice dances across octaves and floats over hypnotic beats that are punctuated by bluesy brass and funky guitar lines. Of his singing, The New York Times cited his “passion that needs no translation.” Experience it all when the winner of the prestigious BBC World Music Award and star of the legendary Éthiopiques series of recordings dazzles with his ecstatic blend of pulsing rhythm and blues, jazz, and sizzling Ethiopian soul music.
For more than 40 years, Mahmoud Ahmed has deftly combined the traditional music of Ethiopia (essentially a five-note scale that features jazz-style singing offset by complex circular rhythm patterns that give the music a distinct oriental feel) with pop and jazz, yielding some of the most adventurous, passionate, and often surreal sounds heard in free jazz today.
Ahmed was at the forefront of Ethiopian music's "golden era" in the 1960s and '70s, and is still one the country's most eminent musicians. His body of work--including landmark recordings Almaz, Alèmyé, Ere Mela Mela, and Tezeta re-released as part of the Éthiopiques series--have become an essential benchmark of Ethiopia's musical history and cultural heritage, earning Ahmed the prestigious BBC World Music Award in 2007.
Ahmed has been a star in Ethiopia since the day he began performing. His swooping vocals with his multi-octave voice, complemented by the freewheeling jazz of Ibex (the band with whom he recorded his masterpiece, Ere Mela Mela), are very different from what is normally lumped into the broad category of Afro-pop. The rhythms are repetitive and intense, similar to those of Fela Kuti. But Ahmed's voice--swirling high notes that sound as if they're chasing one another, impeccable tone and phrasing--is the distinguishing element. By singing in this style, he has attempted to fuse the past and the present. Ahmed is not an elitist when it comes to singing older Ethiopian music, but he hears the similarities in Ethiopian pop that have thrived over time and is keen to bring them together.
LECTURE
One Day University
Symphony Space
A Semester of Ideas (all in one day) - NYC
"Join One Day University as we present our fall full-day event on October 22nd. Spend a fascinating day with 4 award-winning professors. You'll experience all four thought-provoking talks and countless engaging ideas - all in one day. And don't worry, there are no tests, no grades and no homework. Just the pure joy of lifelong learning!
Students will have a 1 hour and 15 minute lunch break. You may bring your own or purchase it at a nearby restaurant."
9:30 AM - 10:45 AM
Four Trials That Changed the World
Austin Sarat / Amherst College
Even if we know little about the law, most of us know something about one of law's great rituals, the trial. We are regularly fascinated when this or that legal case is played out in a courtroom and proclaimed in the media to be "the trial of the century." Courtroom contests pit good versus evil, right versus wrong. But, in addition to their dramatic quality, they also are educational moments, occasions on which some of our most important political and social issues get played out before judge and jury. In this lecture we will consider four trials that changed American history during the twentieth century.
We will start by examining the so called "Scopes Monkey Trial." In this 1925 case, a high school teacher was accused of violating a state law that made it illegal to teach human evolution in public schools. Next we take up the Nuremberg trials, held by Allied forces after World War II to prosecute the leaders of Nazi Germany. Our third trial occurred in 1995 when the state of California prosecuted O.J. Simpson for the murder of his wife. The final of the four trials that changed America occurred four year later when the United States Senate took up the impeachment charges against President Bill Clinton arising out of his conduct during and after his affair with Monica Lewinsky. Each of these trials crystallized crucial issues of the day. And, the decisions reached in each of them had a profound impact well beyond the boundaries of the courtroom. If you are interested in such pressing issues as freedom of speech and religion, the responsibilities of perpetrators of war crimes, the legal treatment of celebrities, and the private lives of public figures, or if you just want to have the fun of revisiting some of the most riveting moments in recent American history, this lecture will give you considerable food for thought.
Austin Sarat is William Nelson Cromwell professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts. He has written, co-written, or edited more than ninety books in the fields of law and political science. Professor Sarat has received the the Stan Wheeler Award for his excellence as a teacher and mentor, awarded by the Law and Society Association.
11:00 AM - 12:15 PM
The Science of Sleep: How it Impacts Memory, Creativity, and the Ability to Process New Ideas
Jessica Payne / University of Notre Dame
What's going on in your head while you sleep? The research of Notre Dame Professor Jessica Payne shows that the non-waking hours are incredibly valuable for your day-to-day life, especially for helping to commit information to memory and for problem solving. If you ever thought sleep was just downtime between one task and the next, think again.The fact is, your brain pulls an all-nighter when you hit the hay. Many regions of the brain - especially those involved in learning, processing information, and emotion - are actually more active during sleep than when you're awake. These regions are working together while you sleep, helping you process and sort information you've taken in during the course of the day. Professor Payne's research has focused on what types of information are submitted to memory, and has been instrumental in better understanding how the brain stores the information.
Sound interesting? It is. And useful too, as Professor Payne will outline all sorts of practical information on how to control your sleep habits to insure maximum productivity.
Jessica Payne is the Nancy O'Neill Collegiate Chair and Professor of Psychology at the University of Notre Dame, where she directs the Sleep, Stress, and Memory Lab. Her course, The Sleeping Brain, routinely sports a waitlist because of its immense popularity among Notre Dame students. In 2012, Professor Payne received the Frank O'Malley Undergraduate Teaching Award. She is also a two-time recipient of the Distinction in Teaching Award, and won the Award for Teaching Excellence at Harvard University's Derek Bok Center.
12:15 PM - 1:30 PM
Lunch Break
1:30 PM - 2:45 PM
Rights in America: A Brief (250 Year) History
John McCaskey / Columbia University
Rights to "Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness." The Founding Fathers took these as self-evident, but we've been fighting about them ever since. What exactly are rights? Who has them? Are there different kinds? Are rights natural and inborn or artificial and granted by governments? Can rights come into conflict? If so, what should we do when that happens?
In this lecture, Professor John McCaskey will trace how Americans have answered these questions—from the country's founding, through the Civil War, the woman suffrage movement, the Progressive revolution, Roosevelt's Second Bill of Rights, the United Nation's Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Civil Rights Movement, and recent battles over gay marriage and health care. Whatever your political persuasion, Professor McCaskey will give you a framework that you can use to analyze—and argue with others about—any question involving rights.
John McCaskey is an internationally recognized authority in the history of philosophy and has taught history, philosophy, and social ethics programs at Columbia University, Stanford University, and Brown University.
3:00 PM - 4:15 PM
Music and the Brain: What We Know (And What We Don't)
Jessica Grahn / Western University
Babies come into the world with musical preferences. They begin to respond to music while still in the womb. At the age of 4 months, dissonant notes at the end of a melody will cause them to squirm and turn away. If they like a tune, they may smile and let you know. Scientists cite such responses as evidence that certain rules for music may be wired into the brain.
This class will discuss how humans (and even animals) react to music, and how the brain's movement centers light up in response to music and rhythm, even when we aren't moving a muscle. To illustrate some of the effects music has on the brain, we will turn to research with people of all ages, from 1 to 100! We will also cover the exciting potential held by some musical therapies for helping those with degenerative neurological diseases such as Parkinson's disease.
Jessica Grahn is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at Western University in Ontario. She has established herself as an emerging leader in the field of the neuroscience of music which combines her unique background as a classically trained concert pianist and her training as a neuroscientist. Professor Grahn's research studies how the brain responds to musical rhythm and how it may be processed in the brains of those who have brain dysfunction, such as those with Parkinson's disease. She has been awarded countless grants and honors for her work in neuroscience.
