Aug 23-29, 2017
The ‘Joyful Curation’ of Renowned Composer Nico Muhly; Intimate Agritourism at Green Mountain Girls Farm; Vermont Hot Sauce Makers Feel the Burn
Cover Story
Composer Nico Muhly Talks Vermont and Joyful Curation
Nico Muhly is not big on expectations. The lazy explanation for this would be because he so frequently defies them. Muhly, 35, is a globally lauded composer whose works traverse, blend and sometimes transcend the boundaries of contemporary classical, minimalist, experimental and pop music. He’s scored films; counts Philip Glass as a friend, collaborator and…
The Parmelee Post: New Tech Startup to Provide Safe Space for Vermont Internet Trolls
Vermont’s newest tech incubator is seeking to help nurture the state’s most talented and passionate internet users: its online trolls. Montpelier startup the Sewage Beneath the Bridge aims to provide the state’s aspiring internet trolls a safe place to hone their skills and help preserve Vermont’s reputation as one of the worst places to be online…
Obituary: Ralph Oswald Humburg, 1952-2017
Ralph Oswald Humburg, 65, passed away on May 12, 2017, surrounded by his loving family under the gracious care of the University of Vermont Medical Center, in Burlington. Ralph was born in Switzerland on March 21, 1952. He grew up in Bedford Hills, N.Y., and spent summers at his family’s cottage on Peach Lake in…
Seriously: The True Cost of Wealth Care; The Spice of Life
This week Bryan talks about the cost of health care with the CEO of a nonprofit hospital and attempts to increase his longevity by eating a spicy red pepper. Featuring Conor Lastowka as Bentley McWentworth. CREDITS Written by: Bryan Parmelee and Conor Lastowka Filmed and edited by: Bryan Parmelee Artwork/photography courtesy of: Suzanne Podhaizer, Bryan…
![16th Annual Travis Roy Foundation WIFFLE Ball Tournament [SIV501]](https://i0.wp.com/www.sevendaysvt.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/episode501-scaled.webp?resize=1200%2C900&ssl=1)
16th Annual Travis Roy Foundation WIFFLE Ball Tournament [SIV501]
8/13/17: Down a dirt road in Essex is a remarkable place: a one-quarter scale replica of Fenway Park, in the backyard of Pat and Beth O’Connor. In addition to Little Fenway, the O’Connors added Little Wrigley and Little Field of Dreams to enable more players and teams to participate in their fundraising events. The 16th…
A UVM Migration Scholar Talks Refugee Resettlement
At his office in the University of Vermont’s Old Mill building, Pablo Bose joked that he isn’t much of an interior designer. His young daughter’s drawings were scattered about the room. A poster of Harry Potter above the door was starting to yellow. A framed single-page art print from Jules Verne’s Around the World in…
Ask Athena: I Think I’m in Love With My Stepbrother
Dear Athena, I think I’m in love with my stepbrother. His father has been married to my mother since we were teenagers. We are both single, and I think it’s because we both love each other. I don’t know what to do or if this love can be possible. What should I do? Signed, Family…
Vergennes Laundry Is for Sale
After seven years in business, the owners of Vergennes Laundry, at 247 Main Street in Vergennes, are looking for a buyer, said Julianne Murat, who owns the bakery and café with her husband, Didier. The couple, who have a young daughter, are selling the business so they can have more family time, Julianne said. “We…
Inequality Persists: The Quest for Women’s Parity Continues
Some 400 people will gather in Randolph Center on a mid-September Saturday to talk about economic opportunities for women. For 21 years now, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt) has sponsored this free event. Among the sessions on the agenda: Find a Career That Fits. The workshop’s description boasts, “We will dispel career myths and encourage you…
Vermont Hot Sauce Makers Feel the Burn
Benjamin Littenberg, MD, a professor of internal medicine at the University of Vermont, isn’t big on fiery foods. “I don’t like hot peppers; they make my nose run,” he says. “I’m just not a spicy food guy.” Nonetheless, when one of his students, Mustafa Chopan, came to him with an interest in studying the relationship…
Million-Dollar Question: How Much Should Nonprofit Hospital CEOs Earn?
The average Vermonter makes about $50,000 a year. Executive directors of Vermont nonprofits make an average of $83,000, according to the group Common Good Vermont. Yet the heads of nonprofit hospitals in Vermont earn around $550,000 on average. Last year, the University of Vermont Medical Center CEO made more than $2 million. Hospital board members…
Vermonters Behave Themselves During Apoc-Eclipse 2017
Thousands of Vermonters watched a rare solar eclipse on Monday afternoon. And unlike our president, the state’s sun-gazers must have heeded warnings not to look directly at that big glowing orb. The University of Vermont Medical Center emergency room reported no “incoming” injuries during the cosmic event. The Vermont State Police didn’t notice an increase…
Letters to the Editor (8/23/17)
Roy Has Rights I think that firing Ryan Roy is wrong [Off Message: “Hood’s Off: Burlington White Nationalist Attended Charlottesville Rally,” August 15; Last 7, August 16]. Any person is free to think and to talk about what he or she wishes. To punish people for their beliefs or their speech violates their constitutional rights. …
Album Review: Guthrie Galileo, ‘Modern Day Ripples’
(702999 Records DK, digital download) Guthrie Galileo lies motionless in an infinity pool, floating atop its unblemished, glassy surface. He’s acutely aware that any movement or motion he makes will disturb the water’s placid sheen. The slightest jostle will send wavelets in every direction, which inevitably reverse course back to the source of the aqueous…
A Williston Official Regulates Land Use — and Develops Projects, Too
A 100-room hotel proposed for Taft Corners is the largest in more than a decade to come before the Williston Development Review Board. But the body’s chair, Scott Rieley, won’t be weighing in on whether the new extended-stay facility gets built. That’s because he’s the one who wants to construct it, and the town’s conflict-of-interest…
Album Review: Eric George, ‘Not About Nightingales’
(Self-released, CD digital download) Eric George and his dog, Walden, recorded Not About Nightingales in the former’s bedroom in Burlington. Physically, the album presents itself as a hand-stitched book of lyrics and poems, the cover imprinted with a bird and a bee. It’s a dear object to possess, and I am not sure which shelf…
Intimate Agritourism at Green Mountain Girls Farm
The co-owners and founders of Green Mountain Girls Farm in Northfield say they farm relationships. To Mari Omland, 50, and Laura Olsen, 46, the concept of “relational farming” underscores the sprawling network of interconnecting systems on their land: a small, diverse hill farm nestled between the mountains off Interstate 89. It also describes the crux…
Experimental Thriller ‘Haze’ to Premiere in Burlington
Cinema Casualties is a periodic Burlington film series celebrating B movies that are scary, campy or (frequently) both. On Tuesday, August 29, however, the series will explore the domain of subtler horrors when it premieres South Burlington filmmaker Rob Cunning’s “Haze.” The 45-minute film about a very bad trip on a fictional drug will precede…
Hackie: Two Taylors
“Hi. I’m at Harris-Millis dorm at UVM. Can you come pick me up to go to the airport?” “Sure thing,” I replied into my cellphone, or, more precisely, my earbud. It’s the law, and it’s a good one: no handheld devices while driving in Vermont. “Are you in the front or the back?” “I think…
Central Market Offers One-Stop Multicultural Shopping
On a Friday morning, Som Timsina was bleary-eyed as he straightened the vegetable baskets in his supermarket in the Old North End in Burlington. The owner of Central Market: Taste of Asia had returned the night before from a 30-hour round trip to New York and New Jersey to get fresh produce and supplies. “Every…
Middlebury New Filmmakers Fest Focuses on Female Directors
Joan Kron has worn many hats during her lifetime. Costume designer. Pop-art impresario. Journalist. Contributing editor-at-large at Allure magazine. Plastic-surgery expert. Not content to rest on her laurels, in 2012 the octogenarian added another item to her lengthy résumé: film director. Take My Nose … Please!, a documentary about cosmetic surgery that was four years…
Begging for Change: Burlington Stabbings Prompt Proposed Penalties
Sporting a bandanna over a graying ponytail, Arthur Madeiros sat bare-chested on the northwest corner of Church and Main streets on August 16, holding a cardboard sign that read: “Homeless Anything helps.” The 50-year-old Rutland man had arrived in Burlington a week earlier, just hours before a fight among three itinerant men turned violent in…
Sterling College Partners With Kentucky’s Berry Center
In “A Poem on Hope,” Wendell Berry writes, “Because we have not made our lives to fit our places, the forests are ruined, the fields eroded, the streams polluted, the mountains overturned.” Words like those from the 83-year-old farmer, poet and essayist — whom environmental activist Bill McKibben calls “the prophet of responsibility” — have…
Maiz Vargas Sandoval Fights Prejudice and Xenophobia on His Debut Album, ‘Historia de un Immigrante’
Maiz Vargas Sandoval stands outside his rehearsal studio in Burlington’s South End smoking a hand-rolled cigarette. The stoutly built Costa Rican multi-instrumentalist is clad in earthy, natural fibers. His shirt is embroidered with images of the resplendent quetzal, a brightly plumed bird native to his home region. With ornately detailed plugs, a septum piercing, multiple…
Chef’s Downtown Deli Open in Randolph
Chef’s Downtown Deli, a breakfast and lunch shop, opened last month at 29 North Main Street in Randolph. The business is an offshoot of Chef’s Market, a natural foods store on Route 12 in Randolph that celebrated its 10th anniversary last spring. The downtown deli is owned and operated by Brandon Aronson, whose parents own…
Movie Review: ‘The Hitman’s Bodyguard’ Offers Neither Thrills Nor Laughs
Some movies just nail the zeitgeist, you know? It’s uncanny the way certain filmmakers have their finger so tightly on the public pulse that, even though their new release began shooting a year earlier and was written well before then, it taps into the popular consciousness on opening weekend to a practically psychic degree. The…
Lawson’s Finest Liquids Breaks Ground in Waitsfield
In April 2016, Lawson’s Finest Liquids announced that it would move from Sean and Karen Lawson’s home in Warren to a larger, more visitor-friendly space in Waitsfield. Now, after more than a year of planning and preparation, the Lawsons will close on the property at 155 Carroll Road later this week. On Friday, August 25,…
Maple Wind Farm Offers Product for Dogs
The Burlington Farmers Market has gone to the dogs with a new offering from Maple Wind Farm. The Chittenden County farm is now selling ground chicken backs at the market, a by-product of the 18,000 chickens the farm processes in a year, co-owner Beth Whiting said. Those backbones could make a lot of chicken stock,…
Movie Review: Heist Flicks Go Blue Collar With Soderbergh’s ‘Logan Lucky’
Right now, Hollywood pundits are chortling about how maverick director Steven Soderbergh failed to “change the film business” (in the words of a Hollywood Reporter headline). For Logan Lucky, his first film since 2013, the Oscar winner took the unusual step of devising his own marketing strategy. In a particularly egregious act of Hollywood heresy,…
Architects and Homeless Vermonters Envision Houses
Last Thursday, Burlington-area architects mingled over wine and cheese with homeless Vermonters in the lobby of TruexCullins on Battery Street. On the walls hung the drawings and stories that brought them together: images of home conceived by those without one and designed, for the most part, by the architects. Rock Point School nurse Alison Cannon…
Art Review: ‘Interpose,’ New City Galerie
In Jonathan Glazer’s unsettling 2013 film Under the Skin, an alien life form takes on the bombshell body of Scarlett Johansson. With a few aesthetic choices of its own, the ambiguously gendered creature then uses the appropriated costume to seduce and consume men. In questioning the nature of empathy, gender and the performance of being…
Free Will Astrology (8/23/17)
VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): What I wish for you is a toasty coolness. I pray that you will claim a messy gift. I want you to experience an empowering surrender and a calming climax. I very much hope, Virgo, that you will finally see an obvious secret and capitalize on some unruly wisdom and take…
Eat This Week, August 23 to 29, 2017: Wine Not?
Take a virtual tour of Stowe’s burgeoning food and beverage scene at the mountain town’s flagship summer food event. Pair a glass of Vermont-grown wine or cider with local cheeses, then partake in plates by Michael’s on the Hill, the Bistro at Ten Acres, Roost, Flannel and the Restaurant at Edson Hill, among others. Then,…
Soundbites: A-Dog Day Afternoon; Night Moves
We’re approaching an action-packed weekend, folks, and time is of the essence. Summer is unfortunately winding down, and one of the things I’ve always loved about Vermont life is how seasonal change puts a sense of urgency on everything. The moment I see the first hints of crimson encroach upon a verdant maple, I immediately…
Elmore’s Fire Tower Pizza: Quality by the Slice
“This is the best meat pizza I’ve ever had,” said my friend Dave, midway through a slice of Fire Tower Pizza’s Three Dog Night meat-lover’s pie. Indeed, each bite was a savory fiesta of smoke and spice, marinara and mozzarella, all awash in that greasy special something only pork fat and cheese can elicit. Dave’s…
In Richmond, Sweet Simone’s to Serve Monday Dinners
Richmond is home to plenty of restaurants. But on Monday evenings, noted Lisa Curtis, owner of Sweet Simone’s at 40 Bridge Street, all but the pizza joint close, leaving locals hungry for more dinnertime options. So Curtis, who lives in nearby Huntington, decided to do something new: Beginning on September 18, Sweet Simone’s will serve…
