Update: The One Good Thing Project

Last October, I wrote about The One Good Thing Project.

The One Good Thing Project is a participatory art project that helps us find the good that happens each day. Getting involved is easy! Take a booklet. Fill it with good things. Keep it or return it to the collection.

Desk with return slot!

Since showing the project at CLP Hazelwood, the next step was to bring the project out into the community. Emily Sciulli and I launched the program with middle school students at Pittsburgh Mifflin and St. Rosalia Academy. The results have been stellar! Check out some photos from the schools!

One Good Thing Project @ Pittsburgh Mifflin

8th Grade @ Pittsburgh Mifflin!

8th Grade @ Pittsburgh Mifflin!

8th Grade @ Pittsburgh Mifflin!

Paying it forward: We got ice cream at Dell’s for Mifflin students who returned booklets!

Special thanks to everyone who has participated so far. Now we want YOU to take part!

We will be featuring the project at CLP Hazelwood this summer. To participate, drop by the library starting in July. Take a booklet. Fill it with good things (photos/words/anything good). Return it to the collection or keep it as a gift.

The One Good Thing Project returns to CLP Hazelwood soon!

Can’t get here, no problem! Grab a notebook and start record one good thing every day.

Happy Summer. Fill it with good things!

Michael (CLP Hazelwood)

Make Pittsburgh Beautiful.

Bittercress (Credit: Doug Oster/Post-Gazette)

It has officially been spring for nearly one month and it’s finally starting to feel like it. Now that the gloom of winter is over, it’s time to get busy beautifying our city again. Spring is a time for renewal. Flowers are blooming. Trees are being planted. Litter is being removed. And, yes, you can help!

Last week, volunteers from the Explorers Club of Pittsburgh scaled Mt. Washington to clean up the mountainside! They removed 60 bags of trash, 25 bags of recyclables, a shopping cart, and even a baby stroller! Amazing!

Mt. Washington Clean Up (Credit: KDKA)

There are so many volunteer opportunities celebrating Earth Day on and Arbor Day over the next few weeks. The Great PA Cleanup is a good place to start. There are still a few community cleanup’s scheduled all over Pittsburgh – Hazelwood (4/20), Homewood (5/2), Highland Park 5/11).

Tree Pittsburgh is an environmental non-profit organization dedicated to enhancing the City’s vitality by restoring and protecting City trees. There are opportunities to help at tree planting events and learn to prune the urban forest. Check out Tree Pittsburgh’s calendar.

At CLP-Hazelwood we will be celebrating Arbor Day with the finale of Teen Reading Lounge. Stop by to help clean up around the library, pull weeds, spread mulch, and hang colorful birdhouses on trees along Second Avenue! Thursday, April 25th at 5:00pm.

Sneak Preview: Birdhouses @ CLP-Hazelwood!

Can’t make it to a clean-up event? No Problem! Start small. Clean up litter around your house, street, or school! Water dry flowers, grass, and trees. Keeping and making Pittsburgh beautiful is something everyone can do!

(Michael @ CLP-Hazelwood)

Larimer teens discover the music of the future: No Generation Podcast

Just down the street from both CLP – East Liberty and CLP – Homewood is the Kingsley Association, a community center extraordinaire. They have a pool, basketball court, yoga classes, community meetings, and a Youth Advisory Council.

An EEYAC meeting

 

I recently went to an unveiling of the Council’s new project: a podcast called No Generation Radio.

Artwork by Blaine Siegel

Teenagers from EEYAC had come together with local artist Blaine Siegel to create the podcast. They interviewed community members of Larimer to find stories from their past and present dealing with music, and then musicians from Larimer and other Pittsburgh neighborhoods imagined what the music of the future in Larimer would be like, based on those stories.

This includes David Bernabo, who said on his blog that his future music piece was created “us[ing] census data and analysis to forecast how Larimer will change in the future. I imagine that gentrification would occur to some extent and the neighborhood will become more racially integrated. From a musical standpoint, I am presenting music that would exist for an educational use. The idea was that music could be encoded in the future to “push” knowledge to the listener.”

All 7 podcasts can be heard on the No Generation tumblr. Check them out!

 

If you’re interested in creating a podcast, you can do it at the library!  The Labs have the equipment and mentors to help you realize your vision and put it out into the world. Come to one of the Labs locations!

Check out these books to get you started:

  

And, don’t forget, the library has many Teen Advisory Councils in its locations – if you want to bring your fun ideas to the library for old and new friends to enjoy, make it happen!

 

-Tessa, CLP – East Liberty

 

Alice waits…

The weighted, doom-laden clouds lingering atop 1811 Brownsville Road can only mean one of two things:  CLP Carrick is the epicenter of the Apocalypse, or the Haunted Library is BACK!  (I’m about 99.638% sure it’s the latter ‘cos it’s not even December yet.)

After a year’s absence, the terror-driven tradition is returning with a brand-spanking-new story, set, and crew.  This year’s Haunted Library was entirely planned – and will be constructed and staffed – by members of Teen Think, Carrick’s teen advisory group.

3 Days! October 25th, 27th, and 30th

Unrequited love, unspeakable savagery, vengeance – all spread across three rooms of unmitigated, family-friendly terror… and it’s FREE!  You have no excuse.

Remember, the only thing scarier than losing your library card is the Haunted Library!

‘Tis the season:

         

Jon : Carrick

RADical Days

You may have heard about RAD.  RAD is the Allegheny Regional Asset District, which helps to support regional assets like sports facilities, parks, libraries, and cultural institutions, among other things.  RAD money is collected as part of the Allegheny County sales tax.  Every time you buy something, you are supporting these institutions!

Enter RADical Days.  Every fall, as a thank you to Allegheny County residents, RAD hosts RADical Days to celebrate these institutions.  In the words of the Allegheny Regional Asset District, “RADical Days is an annual event celebrating the assets with free admission, musical and dance performances and family activities offered by arts and culture organizations, parks and recreation, and sports and regional attractions that are funded by RAD”.

So, go out and enjoy them during RADical Days!  All events can be found here.  RADical Days is ongoing through October 13.  Here’s a list of my personal favorites, which descriptions from the website:

Saturday, September 29
Allegheny County Parks: Hartwood Acres Hay Day
Free admission 11am-4pm
Kids of all ages will enjoy Fall fun activities: hay rides, pony rides, petting zoo, music, arts and crafts, “I made it!” Market, “Books are Fun” Book fair, and food vendors.

Sunday, September 30
National Aviary
Free admission 10am-5pm
Get nose to beak with flamingoes, penguins, macaws, owls and more. Watch as birds eat, bathe, and play in free-flight exhibits. Immerse yourself in the sights and sounds of a real penguin colony at Penguin Point.

Saturday, October 6
Pittsburgh Filmmakers: Ann Arbor Film Festival
Free admission: 7:30pm and 9:15pm.

Sunday, October 7
Pittsburgh Zoo & PPG Aquarium
Free admission 9am-5pm (gates close at 4pm)
Enjoy some of the most amazing animals from around the world, including sea lion and sea otter pups, tigers, elephants, polar bears, giraffes, pufferfish, and much more.

Saturday, October 13
Pittsburgh Cultural Trust: Sketch Crawl
Free admission 10am-4pm
Start at the Trust’s Education Building and join us on a drawing journey through Downtown scenic plazas. Bring your own preferred art supplies and come for as long as you’d like. Artist-illustrator Rick Antolic will be on hand at each location. For artists of all levels. Children under 18 must be accompanied by an adult.

See you there!

POW: Censorship Poetry

Welcome to Poetry On Wednesday!

Today I’m going to be self-promoting and share a poem I made by censoring the work of another author — okay, it’s not really censorship, but that sounds more fun than “Selectively-Editing-With-Sharpie Poetry”

I took a page from a withdrawn library book, in this case Dragon’s Egg, by Robert L. Forward, and I selectively edited it using a Sharpie, until it became my own work. Here’s a picture of what it looks like with the text following:

God

he had been

God’s-Chosen,

abandoning the sleds.

Later

he has no idea

The people are behind him,

underleaders, understand

tending crops like laborers.

The astrologer sticks are right

in some way. Disrupting,

hungry, swift, has

this rabble-rouser spell

the powerful east Priest of any blessing.

A sharp ripple, pale, turns, passed

less than half a Temple. As

Empire thronged, finally God held

an eastern orifice

once again.

This is a fun writing exercise because it lends the flavor of the original text to the finished poem. I’d never normally write such a sci-fi piece, but Robert Forward allowed me to go beyond my boundaries and think about the exciting possibilities of the genre. And I really do think it’s a writing exercise, not just an erasing exercise – to make a poem out of a page definitely requires creative thinking as well as grammatical maneuvering.

There’s a whole literature of erasure out there, conveniently profiled in this article, “Absent Things As If They Were Present” from the January 2012 issue of The Believer (and unconveniently not available in full online, but check out the library for a copy).  Jonathan Safran Foer, famous for writing Everything is Illuminated & Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, just made a whole new book out of one of his favorite books, and had it published in an amazing edition where all the words he didn’t use were cut out of the original work.  Thus, The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz becomes Tree of Codes by Jonathan Safran Foer.

Want to try your hand at this stuff?  It’s one of the activities available at tonight’s Teen Open Mic Poetry Slam at The Zone in Lawrenceville. Join us from 4-6 pm to read work, hear others read, and hang out.  More info is at the  previous link, or read about the Zone here.

-Tessa, CLP – East Liberty