When I signed up for a week-long workshop on straw-bale-home construction a few months ago, I figured my fellow students would be oats-and-granola, California types. Fine by me: although I've now lived in Connecticut longer than California, you can't take the Golden State out of the boy. So I was surprised to find, on arriving in early September in a no-stoplight village near Syracuse, NY, that workshop attendees had come from around the world. Switzerland, Egypt, a number of Canadian provinces, even South Carolina (sorry, Cal, had to say it!). Their professions were all over the place — …

When you hear the name 'Edward Hopper,' what comes to mind is paintings like “Nighthawks” or “Gas,” “Lighthouse at Two Lights” or “Rooms by the Sea” — studies in isolation that are neither lonely nor depressing because they're colorful, orderly, well-lit. Hopper's many years in the magazine and advertising trade are readily apparent, even if he claimed to detest commerical work: his paintings tend to be “friendly,” inviting, even when their subjects seem lost, unhappy, on the edge. Spend time in Hopper's hometown, however, and you may come to agree that his approach to art derives less from …

Most people go to Southbury's Bent of the River nature sanctuary for the bird life — it's an Audubon Society preserve, after all. And don't get me wrong — I love "things with wings," I've been a Life Member of Audubon for decades, and the Bent is one of the best inland places for birds in Connecticut. You can watch goldfinches and grosbeaks, chickadees and catbirds, warblers and woodpeckers, nuthatches and flycatchers, dart in-and-out of an array of bird-feeders and the surrounding bushes, all from the comfort of a covered porch. But when I'm standing there, using Bent-borrowed binoculars, I'…

The Picasso etching show currently at the Bruce Museum shows an artist “taking a breath” — re-energizing himself by returning to basic lines, by portraying things only in his studio. The exhibit (which closes October 16) nicely complement's the Bruce's other main art show, Power Incarnate: Allan Stone’s Collection of Sculpture from the Congo (closes September 4), as it also touches on elemental forms of representation. But with one major difference: you'll find no Western neoclassicism here, no "art for art's sake." “Power Incarnate” is composed entirely of Congolese sculptures, and they are…

Noah Webster, the nation's best-known lexicographer, is my great-great-great grandfather. So you'd think I'd have insisted, back when my kids were in grade school, they soak up a little family history by visiting our ancestor's 18th-Century birthplace in West Hartford. But no, the trip never happened... at least in part because of my own conflict about Webster. Sure, he created a world-famous, ground-breaking dictionary... but hey, it was a dictionary, a long list of words! The project, which took nearly 30 years, was important, the book indispensable to many, yet struck me as uncreative, …

I've always had a thing for bluebirds. Their plumage is an extraordinary color, much more delicate than you find on blue jays, or even kingfishers on Lake Lillinonah — and have much nicer personalities, too, bluebirds never scold. Even their songs and calls are sweet: the website just hyperlinked, above, characterizes bluebird vocalizations as “a series of melodious, gurgling whistles sometimes sounding like cheer, cheer, cheerful, charmer.” So one of the first things I did after moving to Brookfield was put up a bluebird house. A pair was already hanging out, feeding on caterpillars and …

News reporters, and now bloggers, are always being approached with story ideas. Some are good, some not-so-good... but we always listen to “the pitch,” because that's central to the job. If something matters to one person, it probably matters to other people, too. When my former neighbor Claire Bannister called up the other day, I wasn't prepared for such a pitch — she's long since retired from the business world, has no agenda to “sell.” Or so I thought, until we started talking... and I realized her proposal, though hardly Brookfield-specific, was both good and worthy. And it made sense …

Pablo Picasso was already famous, and rich, by 1933. As a preternaturally talented son of a Spanish painter, he learned the rules of art; as a young man, he consistently broke the rules, as every great artist must; by middle age, he saw his rule-breaking — most famously through Cubism, before and during World War I — become accepted, “the new normal.” But acceptance didn't sit well with Picasso: a life-long Communist, serial philanderer and artistic provocateur, he was incapable of standing still, always needed to be in the minority, an exile, a man apart. So it's impossible not to smile …

We lived on Obtuse Road North for five years, maybe six, before realizing the neighborhood had a so-called “group home.” Sure, we saw the wheelchair-ready vans going down the street, pulling into driveways now and then... but assumed they were doing day-care pick-ups and drop-offs. Who knew “those people” actually lived near us, that — horrors! — we lived in an integrated neighborhood? I identified the group home one day when I noticed it was identical to another house just off West Whisconier. Each looked like a house-within-a house — what seemed to be a tiny red cottage, complete with small…

Art doesn't have to be beautiful to be good — think of works by Breugel, Picasso, Kahlo, Botero. But Surrealism? It's always left me cold: Dali's melting watches, Ernst's strange birds, can be striking images, but much of their work is, well... repellent. But you might regard Surrealism differently after taking in Double Solitaire, an exhibit now running at the Katonah Museum of Art, just off I-84 in New York State. The show highlights how Yves Tanguy and his Albany, New York-born wife Kay Sage influenced each other's work... but the real “find” here is Sage, for while her paintings exhibit …

Mike Renz, back in his soccer playing days, was famous for his smile — win or lose, sun or rain, he wore a big grin on his face. And the smile's still there... these days, though, it appears when Mike talks about snowboarding. Yes, even in June, because Mike and his fellow Brookfield High just-graduates, Alex Calder and Chris Walsh, have been making snowboards as part of their joint Senior Experience. The three were hoping for a miracle winter resulting in summertime snow — Alex planned some extreme runs down Tuckerman Ravine on New Hampshire's Mount Washington, which he'd hiked more than …

The recording studio is in the basement. And a little makeshift — naturally, since three of the four band members are students at Brookfield High. “We don't have the equipment to do a professional job,” says Kevin Peterson, the closest thing to a “front man” the band has, “but the blue painter's tape works fine.” And it's everywhere — holding mics at the proper angles, securing tissues to the bass drum for damping, sticking insulating foam to the wall behind the drum kit. It took 12 hours over two days to set up the drums, Kevin says, because something was always going wrong: the snare drum …

Over the weekend Patch readers got the “scary” version of the recent storm, by way of a personal account by Matthew Goodrich (yup, my son) of our home getting hit, violently, by a falling pine tree. But that's not the only way to play the story: there are “up” sides, too, and I suspect many Brookfielders have experienced them as well.  Major property damage isn't something you'd wish on anyone... but it's reassuring to know that in the event of serious trouble, friends, family and even complete strangers do, in fact, rally 'round.  The storm cloud's silver lining: Texting works, even from the…

I wasn't all that surprised to see Gil Scott-Heron's obituary in the newspaper the other day — just look at the accompanying photograph from a 2009 concert in San Francisco and you'll see why. The smile is wide, the eyes lively... but Scott-Heron's once-handsome face is ravaged, skeletal — the face not of a great song-writer, or novelist, or poet, but of a drug-addict, a felon, a prophet without honor. And he was all those things, though the initial reports of his death scanted the dark side... wisely, since this so-called “Godfather of Rap” was very different from the other musicians who …

Oakland, Calif., is perhaps most famous for writer Gertrude Stein's comment, “There's no there there.” Or used to be, at least — today the city may be best known as the headquarters of Family Radio, whose leader, Harold Camping, promised Apocalypse-slash-“Rapture” this past weekend. Yup, Oakland gets the last laugh: there's still a “there there,” life continuing Rapture-free for every soul in Oakland, Brookfield and around the world. Camping is an easy target for mockery — his last the-end-is-coming prediction was for 1994, and that was, as we know, a bust. But while he may be a little nuts, …

In the early 1990s, after deciding to build a Lotus Seven “replicar” as homage to the 1960s television show The Prisoner, I knew instantly the car would be red. The sports car driven by the Number Six character (played by Patrick McGoohan) was yellow and Lotus's official color was green, but red seemed the obvious choice: that's how middle-aged men deny the aging process, right, by buying red convertibles? I was only in my mid-30s when those 1,000-plus car parts arrived in a couple giant crates, but then, my agenda was different, too: I was interested in exploring — and maybe exploding — …

When you're on a Native American reservation in the U.S., you usually know it. Gambling and cigarettes are common, often dominant: subsistence and nomadic cultures that once had little use for money now find it near the center of their lives. Why? Because tribal sovereignty allows tribe members to compete in a modern economy that fits many like a bad suit. If Tecumseh, Sitting Bull and Geronimo were resurrected, they'd be shocked to see the Mohegan Sun and Foxwoods, the gaming halls in Florida and California, tax-free gas-and-cigarette sales in New York. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em, right…

"[I]t is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail." — Abraham Maslow, psychologist. One of my good friends, over in Washington, Conn., is an iPad "True Believer." Clay has always been an Apple fan — he's written, published or edited many Apple computer books and manuals — but claims the iPad is a true game-changer. And although I've always bought Microsoft products, grudgingly, due to their far lower price... I think Clay's right. So does that mean I support Brookfield High's proposed plan to issue half of incoming freshman, as part of a pilot …

Back in the 1980's, when I worked for a law magazine in San Francisco, I did a story about the “necessity defense” – the legal argument that sometimes it's okay to break the law, because higher things are at stake. The defense has been used by protesters of every stripe – anti-abortion, anti-logging, anti-animal-testing – but is rarely countenanced by the court system, for obvious reasons. Judges are supposed to enforce laws, not theories. In 1987, however, a trial judge did allow defendants to use the necessity defense, at which point the State of California dropped trespassing charges …

One day I'll get down to New Orleans for Mardi Gras. But not this year: I’m currently scheduled to attend a considerably smaller celebration in Magnolia, Mississippi, a town of about 2,100 souls located a hundred miles north of the Big Easy. Yes, it’s a small parade, but I hear it’s fun... and I’m lucky to be here at all, because my deployment — I’m in Pike County to help out an understaffed Habitat for Humanity affiliate — lasts only a week. We're well inland, but Hurricane Katrina damaged homes in this area, too, including one that’s been abandoned since a “Katrina tree” fell on it five …