WELCOME TO THE WEEK, UPPER VALLEY!
Mild, mostly cloudy. There's a chance of snow showers to the north, possibly mixed with rain closer to us, but not so much once you get south of, say, Fairlee. Highs in the high 30s today, dropping into the mid-20s tonight. Did the Norwich Selectboard just decide not to renew the town manager's contract? Norwich Observer blogger Chris Katucki notes that at a special SB meeting on Friday, a motion to discuss extending Herb Durfee's contract failed on a 3-2 vote. The deadline for the town to offer him a new one is Thursday, though Katucki points out that Durfee's contract runs through April and one of the "No" votes — John Pepper — will step down after Town Meeting in March.Listen to close youth center, hand off programs to Second Growth. The Junction Teen Center, which has been in WRJ since 2006 (and in its current spot by the bridge to West Leb since 2013), no longer meets Listen's core mission, director Kyle Fisher tells the VN's Nora Doyle-Burr. The $150K it costs to run each year will help the nonprofit meet rising demand for food, fuel, and rental assistance. A "head-snapping" art experience in a corridor at DHMC. That's where you can see Craig Altobello's marquetry. What's marquetry? "Think of it as 'painting' with thin, papery layers of wood," writes Susan Apel of the new exhibition. Altobello, who lives in Peterborough, does "small, charming portraits" of animals — chickadees, a hummingbird, a dragonfly — but it's his landscapes, Apel says, that especially draw the eye. "The works are intricate, delicate, nuanced in shape and color. They are beautiful to look at from afar but really call for the viewer to approach them."Blow-me-down Brook in Plainfield is also beautiful to look at from afar... and up high. Every wonder what it's like to follow the twists and turns of a stream in winter as a bird might, just grazing the trees? Drone artist William Daugherty was out and about this weekend.Dartmouth to turn Jewel of India building into vacant lot. The VN's John Lippman caught up with Rick Mills, VP of finance and administration at the college, on why it's not renewing the popular restaurant's lease. Dartmouth has been "under pressure from the town to address the aging building’s issues," Lippman writes, and plans to do so by demolishing it. And the soon-to-be hole on Lebanon Street? “I think someday we will develop it,” Mills says. “When that will be I don’t know yet.”Becca White's new bill lands national attention. White, who represents Hartford in the Vermont House, is proposing to allow drivers to add one of six emojis to their license plate when they register a vehicle. NBC5 first drew attention to the bill Friday morning, it got picked up by the AP, and now seems to be everywhere. First, though, it has to get out of committee. “We are seeing a lot more species that we normally wouldn’t." That's Grae O’Toole, the lead wildlife keeper at VINS, on the record total of 705 birds the center treated last year. "Birds are moving in different patterns, and a lot of birds you’d only see in the south are up here and getting into trouble." Some 77 of last winter's cases, the VN's Liz Sauchelli reports, were barred owls. Even more endangered than general stores? Vermont's antique stores. In 1979, the Vermont Antique Dealers Association listed 119 members, notes VTDigger's Anne Wallace Allen. Now there are only 44. The biggest force for change: the internet, which has shifted demand. Large furniture, American pewter, bone china, farm and kitchen tools are slumping. But the market for vintage clothing, and for some jewelry, silver, and artwork remains strong. Oh, and if you've got a good daguerreotype lying around, you're in clover.Team Vermont's mind-bending snow sculpture. The 2020 International Snow Sculpture Competition winds up Wednesday in Breckenridge, CO. There are 16 teams in all, including from China, Ecuador, Mongolia, and Switzerland, as well as Alaska, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Vermont. Vermont's entry, "Square Dance," is six interwoven squares... oh, you should just take a look.Washington State maple syrup? Don't look for it in your grocery aisle anytime soon. There's this guy in the northwest corner of the state, Neil McLeod, who's making a boutique syrup from Bigleaf maples, which are often treated more as a weed than a cash crop out there in the Pacific Northwest. It takes 60 to 100 gallons of sap to make a gallon of Bigleaf syrup (compared to about 40:1 for sugar maple). But McLeod's tapping them, planting thousands more, and making $2 an ounce selling wholesale to restaurants, says NPR. You can figure out the pricing yourself: There are 128 fluid ounces in a gallon.
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SO YEAH, MONDAY EVENING...
Nina Tandon is a fellow at the Lab for Stem Cells and Tissue Engineering at Columbia, as well as co-founder and CEO of EpiBone, which uses stem cells and 3D printing to create skeletal implants that essentially harness the body's own tissues to help repair it."Being able to use your own cells means you're empowered to heal yourself as well," she says. 4:30 in Dartmouth's Haldeman 41.
You may remember that The Space on Main is hosting a series of "how I built this" stories by local entrepreneurs on Monday evenings. Tonight, it's a hard one to ignore: the stories behind Bradford's Red Kite Candy, South Ryegate's Upper Valley Coffee Roasters, and the cow's-milk cheeses from Corinth's Blythedale Farm. 5:30 pm.
The first film is 2008's
Picasso and Braque Go to the Movies.
Narrated by Martin Scorcese, the film "doggedly makes the case," as
Cynephile
puts it, "that moving images exerted a profound influence over the formal development of Cubism, inspiring Picasso and Braque’s invention of a new kind of pictorial space in which, like cinema, reality is viewed from multiple angles at once." Followed by
Yoko Ono Lennon’s Courage Awards 2016: Laurie Anderson, Mohammed el Gharani, Eileen Boxer, RoseLee Goldberg, LoftOpera.
7 pm.
Greta Gerwig rethinks the classic for our time, with sparkling storytelling and an indomitable, spirited cast. 7:30 at Woodstock Town Hall (and at the Leb cinemas).
Let's start the week off on a high. Here's Èlia Bastida, a young, Barcelona-based triple-threat singer, jazz violinist, and saxophonist,
(Thanks for the tip, Dad!)
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