Photos of the 2008 AFTA convention

Last weekend, the nonprofit Americans for the Arts held its 2008 convention in Philly. Cities vie to have AFTA bring hordes of distinguished guests to their cities, and for the first time in 25 years, Philly won. (Check out our coverage.) The convention featured talks on the state of public arts programs, boozing at the Kimmel Center, tours of Philly’s public art and more boozing at the Art Museum.

Check out some photographic highlights of the weekend.

Beyond Green

The broad mission of Philly’s incoming sustainability director

Last week, Mark Alan Hughes, who in May was appointed director of sustainability for Philadelphia, spoke to a packed auditorium at the Sustainable Philadelphia forum at the Academy of Natural Sciences. Beginning in July, Hughes will try to make good on Michael Nutter’s promises to improve recycling rates, reduce the city’s energy consumption, and generally return Philadelphia to the days of William Penn’s “greene countrie towne.”

At the forum, a panel of academics had been discussing metrics for gauging how sustainable Philly is. But when Hughes delivered his keynote address, he posed a more fundamental question: Do we even know what “sustainability” means?

A couple of photos

Aesthetes in the making

From City Paper:

In 2005, National Geographic Traveler upped Philadelphia’s street cred by declaring it the Next Great City. This weekend, D.C.-based nonprofit Americans for the Arts (AFTA) will descend upon our town to further prove its mettle as more than 1,400 arts and civic leaders gather from around the country for AFTA’s annual convention. Titled “American Evolution: Arts in the New Civic Life,” this year’s program will alternate between talks at the Center City Sheraton (on improving community arts programs) and tours of Philly’s cultural highlights. Discussions will mostly revolve around strengthening existing arts programs in cities and increasing the size of the arts’ blip on the nation’s political radar.

War Torn

The corner of 15th and Cecil B. Moore Streets is a node on the fault line that divides Temple University and blighted North Philadelphia. On the corner is a 7-11 with a triangular overhang, a popular shelter for beggars who stand outside the door and solicit shoppers for change. Most stand humbly upright before their potential donors.

Tony Martin doesn’t. The outside of 7-11 is Tony’s primary place of self-employment, and he slouches against the brick wall underneath the overhang, one leg extended and the other angled upward. He casually asks those entering and leaving if they have anything to spare for food. But he is often a peddler of sorts, hawking various items-of-the day to people unlikely to want a degraded Starter jacket or a Walkman with broken headphones and no batteries. When I go to meet him, he hands me a Lord of the Rings computer game for PC and gives me his best sales pitch. I tell him that unfortunately I have a Macintosh and that this requires a PC. “What’s a PC?” he asks.

One Family, Two Factions, Split Along the Cochlea

Perhaps it’s one of the ultimate exercises of postmodernism: what you call a disability, I call a culture. To the deaf, the malfunctioning cochleae are the source of their language and unbreakable bond between one another. And as Josh Aronson’s documentary “Sound and Fury” shows, the culture strives for its own posterity as does any other. Preventing a deaf child from hearing seems counterintuitive, if not downright abusive, to most who can hear. But Aronson provides an extraordinarily fair look at a debate that is mostly unknown to the hearing world: If the deaf are altered to hear, is it the end of deaf culture? And should deaf culture be preserved at such a cost anyway?

Take With Food

Eating is Sisyphean tedium, perfunctory and passionless. Boiling pasta, heating up sauce, straining the pasta, putting it on a plate, pouring the sauce over the pasta, carrying it over to the sofa and repeatedly sticking a fork wrapped in food in my mouth, only to have to endlessly repeat the process until death – I’d rather suppress my hunger with legal stimulants. If I’m not cooking I’m buying food, satisfying myself for a few hours and then feeling pangs to buy another five-dollar sesame chicken. Unless someone else is feeding me, I try to avoid the ordeal altogether.