Straight outta downtown youngstown and onto The Great Wall...
The Wall is a place to make friends and explain that the technology and software behind the product comes from the minds and portfolio companies within the Youngstown Business Incubator.
In this particular section of The Wall, it's almost straight up.
Kulig is the name of a Polish winter festival filled with sleigh rides, food, snow, and music.
And on Thursday, Kulig will be coming to Mill Creek Park, with (for the first time ever) horse-drawn rides on closed roads around snow-covered Lake Glacier.
The event will be up and down the hill near Fellows Riverside Gardens from 5:30pm to 9pm.
Components include: - roasted kielbasi and hot drinks at the Old Log Cabin - ice carving demonstrations - horse-drawn sleigh rides (advanced sign up available) - live music - dancing (a lot usually) - Polish comfort food
In the heart of downtown youngstown, a tiny sprite with a lit candle runs though the stone passages of a 110-year old church.
Jumping between shadows and light filtered through Tiffany stained-glass windows, the young sprite presents the flame to the rector, and thus the Boar's Head Festival begins.
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For 50 years this amazing tradition has occurred in the same fashion inside the stunning Arts and Crafts interior of St. John's Episcopal Church.
With over 150 costumed people playing roles throughout the two-hour brass, organ, and song event (with a feast afterwards!), one can't help but feel completed blessed that we have these types of events in the community.
Here's a four-minute video of just some of the performers walking to the sanctuary. Check it out:
What costumes! What voices! What an effort!
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Photographer extraordinaire Bill Lewis has great pictures from the 2010 event you can see here, as well as a video of a musician playing trombone for 50 consecutive years here.
There were more beefeaters than in a baker's dozen of gin bottles.
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The history of the Boar's Head Festival goes back to circa 1167 in Oxford University in England.
The boar's head itself comes from Roman traditions, as the beast - a menace to man - was served at feasts. Serving the head represents the triumph of good over evil.
In 1892 the first Boar's Head and Yule Log festival was performed in the United States.
In 1961 the music for Youngtown's event was selected, arranged, and composed by Dr. Ronald L. Gould, who served as conductor for the 2010 version.
If you've never seen this amazing display of pageantry, you'll have to wait until 2012.
What is the total economic impact of the arts in within a geographical area?
Aside from the ticket costs, and labor paid, and the art pieces purchased, what are all the components that can funnel into calculating how much money flows through the local economy because of the arts?
We have a saying in Youngstown:
"yes, but how much peniaze?"
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Monday afternoon will begin the kickoff to count the money.
Thus, the local uber-entity "The Power of the Arts" is partnering with "Americans for the Arts" to kickoff their Economic Impact Study initiative.
That kickoff takes place at . . . Monday, January 10, 2011 @ 3pm in the Eleanor Beecher Flad Pavilion (same building as Overture restaurant) 260 West Federal Street Yo, O 44503
from their request for participants:
"Every art and cultural organization in the Mahoning Valley is encouraged to become a part of the Economic Impact Study initiative. One goal of Power of the Arts is to define the role of arts and culture in the economic development of our Valley.
During the kickoff reception, arts and culture organizations in Mahoning and Trumbull Counties will be provided materials concerning the study process.
Every organization is encouraged to send a representative."
For a quick primer on the components of economic impact studies, click here.
2010 saw a lot of great artistic accomplishments in Youngstown, including the launch of an additional university-based literary magazine, simply named "Jenny".
"Like many struggling postindustrial cities across the country, Youngstown, Ohio is a place defined by images of ruin and rust, and there are few images more striking than that of the Jeannette Blast Furnace.
“Jenny,” as plant workers called her and as Bruce Springsteen referred to her in his 1995 song “Youngstown,” was one of two furnaces located at Youngstown Sheet and Tube.
It [Jenny] was a place where things were made, shaped, created.
While the absence of our blast furnaces has been felt in terrible ways throughout our region, our fire has not gone out.
In the aftermath of de-industrialization, we are not a people without industry. Youngstown is not done creating, not done making.
We are each of us, every day, telling stories. Here in the pages of Jenny, we aim to display some of those artifacts made by wordsmiths and visual artists alike."
The motif of romantic rust belt infrastructure, with strong ties to "making things" is clear in Jenny, but what about elsewhere in Cleveburgh?
let's look around the region . . .
we've got the "Rubbertop Review" at the University of Akron. (most recent rust belt chic cover here)
we've got the "Hot Metal Bridge" at the University of Pittsburgh. (most recent rust belt chic cover here)
we've got "Whiskey Island" at Cleveland State University (most recent rust belt chic cover here)
So here's a question:
Why is rust belt chic such a dominant theme of late in the literary magazines of the mega-region's largest cities?
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editor's note: details on submitting work to Jenny can be found here.
"Northeast Ohio and southwestern Pennsylvania are far more interconnected with each other than either region is with other parts of Ohio or Pennsylvania. The day-to-day interaction of local businesses are geared toward regional partners, not Harrisburg or Columbus. Pittsburgh industries are far more linked to markets and suppliers in Youngstown, Akron and Cleveland than with those in Allentown, Scranton or even Philadelphia. In so many ways the state boundaries we think of as important are no more than lines on a map.
Annual migration among Cleveburgh communities dwarfs the movement of people to other places across the nation. Daily commuting over state borders is a growing phenomenon. It is not uncommon to see workers from Ohio and West Virginia looking for jobs in Pittsburgh, and Pittsburgh residents considering jobs in Weirton or Youngstown or farther reaches of the region.
No one definition of our greater region is right for all circumstances. But we can't be limited by municipal or state boundaries that mean less and less as time goes by.
Roads and rivers, power lines and pollution; all ignore the lines arbitrarily drawn on maps centuries ago. It is our mental map of who we are that will have the most to do with who we become."
