#Blair Mastbaum

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

[ ...Monday, February 27, 2023...Every town in the U.S. should give this some thought and practice it for ONE MONTH out of each year ! ...There is knowledge in darkness that we have long forgotten in the protective cocoon of artificial light, which has only been around for one Cosmic minute of our evolution... ]

"This Scottish Dark Sky Town Decided To Go Even Darker"

Moffat’s annual experiment in switching off artificial lighting has had unexpected results.

~ by Blair Mastbaum February 17, 2023

[via :: Atlas Obscura]

* * * *

“The truth is that there’s no better time to be happy than now.” If not now then when?. Your life will always be filled with challenges. It's better to admit it and decide to be happy anyway. One of my phrases: "For a long time it seemed like life was about to begin." The real life. But there was always an obstacle in the way, something to solve first, some unfinished business, time to pass, a debt to pay. Only then would life begin. Until I realized those obstacles were my life." “This perspective has helped me see that there is no shortcut to happiness.”.

-Eduardo Galeano

[biglisbonnews]

This Scottish Dark Sky Town Decided To Go Even Darker On a chilly January night, a pale yellow moon shines down on the small Scottish town of Moffat and two teenagers standing outside a cozy, candlelit pub. The pair wait with handmade, triangular paper lanterns that glow from within. A boisterous group exits the establishment and one of the teens steps forward. “Do you need a link?” asks Sarah Rogers, 15, ginger curls poking out from under her woolen cap. The party pauses, a little confused. “A what?” asks one of them. In Victorian-era London, links—back then known as link boys—provided a kind of mobile lamppost service, escorting middle- and upper-class customers through the city's dark, foggy, and sometimes dangerous streets. Historically, links were usually destitute children trying to earn a living: A customer might pay a single farthing, a quarter of a penny, per trip. In Moffat, Rogers and her fellow modern links have other motivations. “We do it for tips and donate what we earn to the charity of our choice,” says Rogers. “I’m going to give mine to Friends of the Earth this year.” Moffat is a quaint market town of old stone buildings with a population of about 2,400. It sits in a valley in the hilly southern uplands 60 miles southeast of Glasgow, and first gained attention as a Victorian-era spa town known for its sulfur-rich springs. More recently, the town’s fame has taken a darker turn—literally. After upgrading its public lighting, in 2016 Moffat became the first European town to receive International Dark Sky Place certification. As link girl Rogers and her friend escort the group of pub goers to an afterparty, their lanterns are the only sources of light along the narrow lane. One of their charges stops to admire the stars; the Milky Way is easy to make out in the midnight sky. Rogers points out The Seven Sisters, or the Pleiades—her favorite—and a cluster that can be difficult to see. Here in Moffat’s dark sky, the stars seem almost near enough to touch. It’s so dark in Moffat, in fact, that it’s almost as if the power has been cut. And it has. Sort of. Inspired by the town’s Dark Sky recognition, two of Moffat’s lifelong residents, friends Carol Rogers (Sarah’s mother) and Evelyn Atkins, conceived of something much more radical. After spearheading the opening of a town astronomy center in 2021, “We caught the darkness bug,” says Atkins. “We wanted to try—if only for two weeks a year—to live almost entirely without artificial light.” The pair believed the experiment could show that natural darkness is good for health and wellbeing, and even helps bring a community together. It could also, they reasoned, become Moffat’s newest claim to fame. Rogers and Atkins began by urging friends and neighbors to turn off lights in yards, gardens, driveways, and even inside houses, eventually expanding their campaign to the entire town. “I think I met every single resident of Moffat,” says Atkins. “Some think I’m mad." “Darkness is good for us.” Moffat now turns off nearly all of its public lights for two weeks each winter. It’s an experiment to rediscover life before artificial lighting stole the darkness from us. Town officials encourage residents to turn off porch lights and even interior lamps. They call it the “dark weeks.” But not everyone was onboard at first. Some residents were hesitant, says Mayor Tracey Little. “They’d heard the stories about criminals coming out in the dark,” she says. “But that hasn’t happened here. In fact, it’s quite the opposite.” During the annual January dark weeks, community spirit comes alive. Residents host bonfires in backyards, organize community theater by candlelight, and join night walks to observe owls and the stars. “It’s the most fun time of the year,” says Carol Rogers. “It’s also the coziest. I feel my best during the dark weeks. I just know it’s healthier. I stop wearing my glasses. I go to bed earlier.” “Darkness is good for us,” says Agata Łopuszyńska of the Polytechnic University of Wroclaw. The urban planner specializes in helping cities embrace darkness. When she heard about Moffat’s plans to change its lighting several years ago, she visited to create a before-and-after series of photographs that shows just how striking the changes are. “The people there are nuts about darkness. If only other towns were as open to it as Moffat, the night time would be much more beautiful.” Astrophotographer and dark skies advocate Josh Dury thinks that Moffat’s approach should be an inspiration to other communities. “If you squeeze the whole of human evolution into a single day, artificial lighting has been around for a minute,” says Dury. “Exposure to light at night can have serious health implications.” He adds: “It can particularly affect our body’s hormones, including the production of melatonin, which is responsible for maintaining sleep patterns and nocturnal rhythms.” There’s also evidence, he says, of a link between artificial light use and the development of certain cancers. Light pollution is also bad for wildlife, especially nocturnal wildlife—including protected species in Britain such as barn owls, bats, and hedgehogs—and migratory birds. “They tend to breed less and less successfully in light polluted environments,” says Dury. Carol Rogers says maybe it’s time to rethink the overuse of artificial lighting in our lives, too. “Maybe we should be headed back to a darker, cozier time. Maybe that’s better for us. I know it’s better for me. It would certainly put the links back in business.” On that chilly January evening, her daughter Sarah, her face brightened by the lantern glow and her enthusiasm for her role as a link, brings her group to their destination. She's still bubbling over with tidbits of link history. “The word ‘link’ is the name of the cotton wick of the torches they carried,” Rogers says. “The service is even mentioned in Shakespeare’s Henry IV: ‘Thou hast saved me a thousand marks in links and torches, walking with thee in the night betwixt tavern and tavern.’ Brilliant, right? "Oh, one more," she exclaims as she heads into the darkness. "You know the saying ‘you can’t hold a candle to somebody’? It means you weren’t even good enough to be their link boy…or girl.” The lantern Rogers carries fades into the winter night as she looks for more customers to light their way, much as Moffat may be illuminating a new path for us to embrace the darkness of our ancestral past, and to see where that path leads us. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/dark-sky-moffat-scotland

[yourdailyqueer]

Blair Mastbaum

Gender: Male

Sexuality: Gay

DOB: 24 January 1979

Ethnicity: White

Occupation: Writer, model

[ramascreen]

Official Trailer For IT TAKES THREE

Official Trailer For IT TAKES THREE

Gunpowder & Sky has released this official trailer for their new romantic comedy IT TAKES THREE On Demand and Digital on September 3, 2021. Starring:  Jared Gilman, David Gridley, Aurora Perrineau, Mikey Madison Directed By:  Scott Coffey Written By: Logan Burdick, Blair Mastbaum When the coolest guy in school discovers that the new girl sees through his popularity and good looks, he enlists the…

[berlinwritingworkshop]

Workshop Co-Leaders

Scott Coffey knows his craft from both sides of the camera through his work as an actor, director, writer, and producer.

Scott’s latest feature film ADULT WORLD starring John Cusack, Emma Roberts and Evan Peters, premiered at the 2013 Tribeca Film festival and was released in February 2014 by IFC Films. The film received rave reviews from the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Salon, and was a Critic’s Choice by the Village Voice and LA Weekly.

Filmmaker Magazine named Scott one of the “25 New Faces of Independent Film” for his first short film ELLIE PARKER, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2001.  Scott also received the Breakthrough Director Award from Movieline’s Hollywood Life Magazine.

Scott’s first feature, ELLIE PARKER, starring Naomi Watts and Chevy Chase was an Official Selection of the Sundance Film Festival and the film won the New American Cinema Award at the Seattle International Film Festival. The movie received rave reviews from The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Salon, Sight and Sound and Roger Ebert. Ebert and Roeper gave ELLIE PARKER “Two Thumbs Way Up.”  The film was distributed in the US by Strand Releasing.

His screen adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s ALL GOD’S CHILDREN CAN DANCE screened as the opening night film of CineVegas and at the Deauville International Film Festival and was on the Blacklist in 2006.

As an actor, he has appeared in numerous films including three John Hughes films, Nicholas Kazan’s DREAM LOVER and several David Lynch movies including LOST HIGHWAY and MULHOLLAND DRIVE. For his work in the movie SHAG, he was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for Best Supporting Actor. More recently, he can be seen in David Lynch’s INLAND EMPIRE, as Jack Rabbit in Lynch’s online series RABBITS, and in TWIN PEAKS: THE RETURN (2017).

He is currently developing CHEMICAL PINK with the author Katie Arnoldi, a film based on Arnoldi’s best selling novel set in the world of women’s bodybuilding in Venice Beach of the early 1990s. Scott will direct. Darren Aronofski and Scott Franklin are producing.

He has just finished the movie, RHINO (2018) a film produced by Gunpowder & Sky. Next up could be the thriller, HYENA, or the drama HAPPINESS SOLD SEPARATELY, based on the New York Times best-selling novel of the same name.  Coffey spends his time between Berlin and LA.

Blair Mastbaum is the author of Clay’s Way, Us Ones In Between, and Hommeboys. He co-wrote the upcoming Amazon film “Rhino,” which was directed by Coffey. Clay’s Way won the Lambda Literary Prize for Best Debut Fiction and was placed on the New York Public Library’s Books for the Teenage List. Us Ones In Between was shortlisted for the Ferro-Grumley Award for Fiction. Mastbaum lives in Berlin and Los Angeles.

[forgottengenres]

“A sub-division’s predictable patterns, rigid lines, and ordered structure might feel calming. Normally, they feel segregating and stifling, but for once, I’m scared of this infinite disorder and I’m afraid I might get lost in this place where anything is possible.”

Blair Mastbaum

[tomsahero]

clay's way quote

" 'What's wrong Sam?'

I wipe my eyes with my T-shirt sleeve and try to stop crying by holding my breath. I have to tell her how I'm feeling. If I keep this inside, I'll explode, burst into bloody pieces. "There's this person I really like and I'm not sure if they like me back." My face rushes with red, hot blood. That was hard to say.

'What do you feel in your heart?'

'I think they like me but won't admit it to themselves because they're scared.'

Sharky runs in and lies down by my feet. He feels soft and warm.

Susan looks at him. 'I think he likes you.'

He likes me.

No, she's talking about the dog.

We look at each other. An embarrassing connection forms. Moms know everything. She has to know Clay likes me, if he does."

blair mastbaum

[biglisbonnews]

How the Discovery of a Unique Sign Language Reconnected a Linguist With Her Past Speaking through an interpreter on a three-way video call from a chilly Tel Aviv, Sara Lanesman, a linguist at Haifa University’s Sign Language Research Laboratory, signs with energetic motions that convey the intensity of what she felt during two formative moments of her life. The first: having to flee Algeria as a child with her family. The second: finding the country again through a sign language she didn’t know existed. Several years ago, Lanesman and her mentor, the late linguist Irit Meir, were documenting the history of Israeli Sign Language (ISL). “We were interviewing subjects, asking them to do a simple picture-naming task,” Lanesman says. They asked a participant to sign “boy.” The 65-year-old volunteer, known to the research team by his initials, Y.Z., had immigrated to Israel from Algeria. His response caught their attention, Lanesman recalls. “He asked us: ‘Do you want me to use the sign I use with my friends, or the sign I use with my mother?’” This unexpected question from the study participant would lead to the discovery of a unique, nearly-lost language that was hanging on right under their noses. For Lanesman, finding the unknown language was particularly poignant: It was born in an isolated and now lost Jewish community in the same country she had fled as a child. From the start, Lanesman noticed the mysterious language had a few similarities with ISL. For example, the sign for “couscous,” one of the main staples of both Algerian and Israeli cuisine, emulates rubbing durum between the hands—just as it does in ISL. However, of the 300 signs Lanesman initially documented, there was very little overlap with any of the six sign languages she knows. “There was nothing in the literature. It was completely undocumented,” she says. “It was definitely a new language”—one now known as Algerian Jewish Sign Language (AJSL). Despite being new to Lanesman and other linguists, AJSL has centuries-deep roots: It evolved perhaps as early as the 15th century in the walled Jewish quarter of the Algerian town of Ghardaia. “AJSL is unique among known sign languages, and mutually intelligible with none of them, except for a few words that are common in all of that region’s sign languages, such as the pan-Arabic sign for water, which emulates drinking from a well,” says Kearsy Cormier, a linguist at University College London. “The isolation of its development shows in its unique signs, most of which are in no other language.” “The iconic origins of the signs are more preserved in AJSL than in ISL,” Lanesman says. “They’re less abstract.” For example, the sign for “deaf” is depicted as the action of cutting off one’s tongue with scissors. The signs for “boy” and “girl” reference sex organs, and are considered impolite or even obscene to ISL signers, yet they are completely acceptable in AJSL, reflecting different cultural norms. “In addition to embedded culture,” Lanesman says, “there are also elements of AJSL that hold community traditions like fossils.” The AJSL sign for the Jewish harvest holiday of Shavuot, for instance, depicts the act of spilling water. “The sign came from the ritual act of worshippers throwing water on one another, a custom that was prevalent in North African Jewish communities that has since died out. It’s now preserved only in the sign,” says Lanesman. Lanesman adds that AJSL also lacks certain concepts that ISL has. For one, there are very few signs for colors. Some reference common objects, such as using the sign for “carrot” to describe something as orange-colored. But for pink, green, and many other colors, signers simply point to something nearby with a similar color. Although AJSL is extraordinarily self-contained, there are some similarities between it and Algerian Sign Language (ASL), the dominant sign language of the region where AJSL originated. In both AJSL and ASL, the sign for “blue” depicts the crushing of blue powder used for eyeshadow. “I loved this sign when I was a girl in Algeria, when I used ASL to communicate,” Lanesman recalls. Now, it’s one of the signs found in both languages that have special meaning for her. “I still like those shared signs, historical connections to a place I only vaguely remember,” she says. In 1962, when Algeria won its independence from France, the parliament passed a law that denied citizenship to all non-Muslims, forcing out the country’s Jewish communities, many of which went back centuries. “I was six when my parents and my three deaf sisters had to flee from our home in Algiers,” Lanesman says. After a brief stay in Marseilles, the family immigrated to Israel, where she and her sisters quickly learned ISL. Lanesman says she forgot ASL, and never encountered another sign language from her homeland until that fateful day with Y.Z. in the language lab. Intrigued by the mysterious new language, she set out to document as much of it as she could, locating additional signers in Haifa and Tel Aviv to interview. During her research, Lanesman discovered something else that makes AJSL different from all other sign languages. “Probably the most unique aspect of AJSL now is that, ironically, it’s passed down from one generation to the next almost exclusively by hearing people,” says Lanesman. While deaf members of the displaced Ghardaia community quickly learned the dominant sign language of their new home, such as ISL, their hearing relatives never learned another sign language. As a result, many hearing members use AJSL to communicate with deaf people within the community, including their children and grandchildren, helping to preserve the language. Passing down AJSL in this way echoes how the language survived over centuries in Ghardaia’s walled Jewish quarter, where the isolated population was culturally cut off from the Muslim majority surrounding them. The men sometimes left the mellah to do business, but most women lived their lives entirely inside the walls, according to historical reports by archaeologists Lloyd Briggs and Norma Guède, who visited in the 1950s. “Traditionally, these small village sign languages are spoken by a majority of the hearing population because they occur in very specific places: in insular communities where there’s a genetic predisposition for deafness, and in places where there’s little opportunity for the community’s deaf people to come in contact with signers of the dominant sign language of their area,” says Cormier. While Ghardaia’s community was forced to disperse, the language lives on, which is unusual for any language that evolved in an isolated community. “Perhaps the most remarkable thing about AJSL is that it has survived centuries, resisting outside influences and a mass migration of its speakers,” Cormier says. The language of the lost Ghardaia mellah is hanging on, but it’s also fading. “Each year, fewer and fewer AJSL signers that I interviewed are around,” says Lanesman. “It’s dying, but slowly.” To preserve the language, Lanesman plans to conduct interviews in France—because of the country’s colonial history with Algeria, she suspects there may be many more AJSL signers there. “This community’s linguistic legacy lives on, proof that we existed and thrived in Algeria for hundreds of years,” Lanesman says. “It’s worth documenting, even if it won’t be saved.” https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/algerian-jewish-sign-language