HOMEFRONT HELPERS

During World War II, millions of Americans kept snapshots and letters from loved ones deployed overseas. In the last decade’s wars, military families have had many more options to stay connected: email, cell phones, Skype, and (when the Pentagon says so) Facebook.

Thousands of military families also have acquired Flat Daddies: life-sized, laminated, waist-up photographs of absent fathers (and, less commonly, mothers).

Flat Daddies, which were first marketed in 2003, have come in for a certain amount of ridicule. (Esquire magazine honored them in its “Dubious Achievement” awards in 2007.) But Rebecca A. Adelman, an assistant professor of media and communication studies, believes they deserve serious attention. “These objects are actually functional and practical in their way,” she says “They help ease anxiety that young children won’t recognize their parents when they come home.”

That is not to say that Adelman is uncritical of Flat Daddies: She views them as part of a process in which military families learn to discipline themselves to support the war effort – and perhaps even avoid certain kinds of questions about their situation.

In an essay that will be published next year in the journal Photography and Culture, Adelman analyzes hundreds of testimonials published on the Flat Daddies website. Those testimonials may not represent the experiences of all Flat families – the company presumably wouldn’t publish letters from unhappy buyers – but they are appealingly raw and unvarnished.

“Our baby gets so excited when she sees him she squeals and kisses all over his face,” reads one statement. “It has also helped me deal with the separation as well. He sits at the table for dinner and we go around the table to discuss our day.”

Adelman says that exploring the presence of visual representations in American lives is a key element in her work. “Rather than just looking at visual representations of war,” she explains, “I want to focus on how people use those visual artifacts in their own lives, how they interpret them.”

Adelman earned her doctorate at Ohio State University in 2009 and arrived at UMBC that same year. Her Flat Daddies study is part of a larger project about how Americans have created and interpreted the visual culture of the War on Terror.

One of the most fascinating aspects of Flat Daddies, Adelman says, is that they upend some of our usual expectations about photography. “We usually read photographs as documents of absence and records of the past. But Flats are about presence, and their families use them in anticipation of a happy future.”

The images have other meaning as well. For some families, Adelman believes, the unwieldy, outsized nature of the Flat Daddy serves as a symbol of the burdens that the family is shouldering. She also argues that the Flats serve as a totem through which military families can manage their feelings of fear, anger, and ambivalence.

“Flats expose and then repair the fractures that deployment opens,” she writes, “channeling negative feelings quietly toward the Flat (rather than, for example, toward the state or war that necessitates it), whose stoic and smiling face acknowledges and then defuses them.”

— David Glenn
Image: AP Photo, Bill Lackey

GRRL POWER

American theatre today is abuzz with debate about increasing opportunities for women in the footlights – both as playwrights and as actors.

The statistics – especially for playwrights – are grim. According to a 2009 study by Emily Glassberg Sands, a graduate student at Harvard University who conducted her research as an undergraduate at Princeton University, women playwrights accounted for a mere 12.6 percent of Broadway plays in 2008-09. (A hundred years ago, in Broadway’s 1908-09 season, women wrote 12.8 percent of the plays.)

So the woman playwright in the United States has not come a long way, baby. Yet. But over the past seven years, Susan McCully, a senior lecturer in UMBC’s theatre department, has helped move the discussion forward by creating Grrl Parts – the university’s annual celebration of new plays written to highlight roles for female actors.

Like many innovations in pedagogy at UMBC, Grrl Parts got its start by improving the student experience at the university. McCully and her colleagues were having a difficult time finding plays with enough roles for women to keep all their female students active in productions.

McCully’s solution was to generate new plays featuring such roles – and offer them a home at UMBC. And as Grrl Parts has grown over the past few years, it has attracted a number of award-winning playwrights, including Tina Howe, Naomi Wallace, Ellen McLaughlin and Timberlake Wertenbaker.

“I have been surprised by how much it has resonated with the larger conversation happening about the importance of telling and hearing women’s stories,” McCully observes. “I was used to and prepared for a culture of resistance. I thought it would involve pushing boulders uphill to convince writers to participate, to get university support and to excite the students about the possibilities. But, to paraphrase the great white male dramatist Victor Hugo: One can resist armies, but there is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come.”

That Grrl Parts’ time has arrived is clear. The 2012 edition was not only produced on campus, but was selected for a Saturday performance at Center Stage in Baltimore that attracted an even larger audience. McCully also has an anthology of the Grrl Parts plays in the works.

Grrl Parts also demonstrates that the university itself can have a significant effect on a debate that is challenging the entire U.S. theatre community.

“I think this entire movement can be traced to universities,” says McCully. “The major female American playwrights of the last part of the 20th century – Paula Vogel, Marsha Norman, Maria Irene Fornes, and Tina Howe – have been at the forefront of this movement, not only as writers, but as professors and heads of preeminent university playwriting programs. When I stop to think about it, those women have trained many of the playwrights (male and female) produced in professional theatre today. They have trained a generation of smart and talented women writers who are fighting to be heard and expect to be heard. Their male peers studied in these same programs, and I think they too ‘get it.’ So UMBC’s project is part of a culture shift in training future artists. I know our students ‘get it.’”

— Richard Byrne ’86

TRAVELING DRY

Visualize some tiny yellow crumbs on a kitchen countertop. Now, imagine some crumbs of that same size on an asteroid, hurtling through the galaxy. Suddenly, a planet looms in the asteroid’s path.

There’s a crash. The yellow crumbs are scattered. And if they happen to land near water, those crumbs suddenly become something much bigger – life on another planet. Life on Earth, even.

Sound like science fiction? A team led by Kevin Sowers, a professor of marine biology at UMBC, says that there’s more science than fiction to the scenario. Those little yellow crumbs are real: dried-out versions of Methanosarcina barkeri, a methane-producing bacterium. In research funded by NASA, Sowers and his colleagues have found that the bacteria can remain in their dried-out state for at least 25 years and, who knows, possibly more.

“These bacteria have innate ability to survive extended periods of desiccation,” says Sowers. “And when they’re in that desiccated state they can survive in what would normally be lethal conditions.” Sowers and his team propose that this ability is a type of survival mechanism.

To determine the bacterium’s survival time in the air, which is normally toxic to such microorganisms, Sowers and his team removed the water from the bacterial cells, exposing them to conditions that simulated the driest known conditions on Earth. Researchers discovered that the bacterium could survive for 30 days in the air with negligible loss of viability.

Then, says Sowers, “I knew I had some 25-year-old desiccated cells of Methanosarcina thermophila [closely related to M. barkeri] in the lab, so once we developed the method for quantifying survival with freshly dried cells, I included the old material.”

Sure enough many of these cells also came back to life when rehydrated. “That experiment,” says Sowers, “enabled us to look at the long-term survival of cells.” Unfortunately, he adds, “I cannot take credit for planning the experiment 25 years ago.”

Sowers and his team think that the prolonged survival of these cells in a dried-out state, which could occur in environments such as drained rice paddy soils, might allow the bacteria to travel long-distances here on Earth. “Soil can be picked up by the wind,” says Sowers. “We actually have these atmospheric winds that distribute microorganisms from one continent to another.”

And space travel? Sowers says that such desiccated bacteria could possibly be carried on an asteroid to another water bearing planet, such as Mars, where they might survive. Researchers think there is water below the surface of Mars, and in theory, these bacteria would be able to survive the dry periods.

The next step in Sower’s research is to examine which genes are important for the cells to survive being dried out. Sowers and his team already know that these bacteria undergo cellular changes that prepare them for the transition from a hydrated to desiccated state. “We want to find out what the actual mechanisms are that allow these organisms to adapt and survive in that state,” says Sowers.

— Nicole Ruediger
Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech

A LOT TO LEARN

Ask Richard Blissett ’11, bioinformatics, about the vacant lots that blight Baltimore and other cities, and he argues that enlisting an army of “superhero” volunteers to swoop in, clean up, and swoop out is not a sustainable way to revitalize them. The real long-term solution, he says, is for local youth to explore these sites as assets and transform them to meet community needs.

During a one-year AmeriCorps VISTA position with stepUP! Baltimore, supported by UMBC’s Shriver Center, Blissett created a service-learning curriculum at South Baltimore’s Ben Franklin High School to put this message into action.

First, Blissett taught his students about factors leading to vacancy and disinvestment in Baltimore and the health and environmental issues that affect neglected properties. He then asked them to imagine how they could turn vacant lots near the school into vibrant community spaces.

Blissett’s path to the classroom was far from typical. On his way to earning a bioinformatics degree at UMBC, Blissett says, “I came to the slow realization that every job I’ve had and enjoyed—where I’ve taken the initiative to do things myself and felt like part of who I was as a person was going into it—was within education.”

With the help of the Shriver Center, he began working in local schools. Before long, he created his own service-learning initiative: Major Inspiration. The program teaches K-12 students about the diversity of university majors and career paths.

Teaching also led Blissett to see bioinformatics as a tool to formulate best practices in education policy. “It’s about how to use data efficiently, effectively, and purposefully,” he says. His blending of quantitative training and classroom experience helped him earn a spot in Vanderbilt’s International Education Policy and Management doctoral program for the fall.

But before he gets to Tennessee, Blissett is finishing what he started on Baltimore’s vacant lots. As with any new program, there have been challenges. Translating student interest into engagement was harder than he imagined. And a change in the high school’s overall schedule reduced the number of students in the program and shrank the window for accomplishing their work.

Unsure if they’d be able to finish by the end of his AmeriCorps term, Blissett encouraged students to partner with community groups that could propel the project forward – including Civic Works, United Way of Central Maryland and the Parks & People Foundation.

Blissett also brought students to speak at the Greater Baltimore Children and Nature Conference, and he calls their presentation one of his “proudest moments” in the program.

He says the audience feedback – serious questions and recommendations – was particularly valuable. “It means something when it’s coming from me,” he shares, “but in the end they see me as their teacher. When they are hearing it coming from other people, it really sinks in.”

The seeds Blissett has planted are blossoming now. His students have begun engaging their neighbors in the project. They are even talking about adopting additional vacant lots.

“I think consistently keeping them connected to people from the outside reinforces that this is not just a small school project that they are going to do now and then forget about later,” Blissett says. “It’s something people are going to remember.”

— Dinah Winnick

PERFECT BLEND

The UMBC Gospel Choir started in 1976 as a small, student-run organization. These days, it’s a key part of the university’s musical community, performing on-campus and boasting more than 40 dedicated members under the direction of Janice Jackson ’79, music.

The choir’s traditions give the group both continuity and a “family feel,” says Comfort Oke ’13, the group’s official historian. Members gather every Wednesday night at 8:45 p.m. in the Fine Arts Recital Hall. Each session begins with Bible study and then an hour of practice. As rehearsals draw to a close, students link arms and share things that are happening in their lives, both good and bad.

There are no formal auditions. The choir’s weekly practices are open for anyone who wants to join. Each year the group adds more songs to its repertoire, choosing songs with the potential to speak to all faiths.

“We teach the whole gamut from spiritual to contemporary gospel,” Jackson explains. In addition to annual spring and winter concerts, the Gospel Choir sings at university events and in music festivals at other universities. The group has even gone on tours in places such Disney World and Italy.

Service is also a key element in the choir’s songbook, says Stephanie Okpara ’14, the group’s treasurer. “One of my favorite moments wasn’t an actual singing engagement,” she recalls, “but the time we volunteered at a kitchen. It was fun to serve the community with an organization I was a part of, and that made it so much more real.”

— Laura Lefavor ’13

HELPING THE HUNGRY

In 2007, when Julie Rosenthal saw her daughter walk into their well-stocked kitchen and complain that there was nothing to eat, something nagged at her conscience. She decided to show her children just how fortunate they are by creating a group called Food on the 15th to help hungry low-income senior citizens in her family’s community.

Five years later, Food on the 15th remains true to Rosenthal’s initial impulse to demonstrate to her own kids – and the students at Pointers Run Elementary School in Clarksville, who work for the program – both the cycle of hunger and how to combat it.

“I didn’t want the [donated] food to just disappear,” explains Rosenthal, who works in UMBC’s Asian Studies program. “I wanted the students to see the process from beginning to end.”

The “15” in the program’s name is important: Social Security checks start to run out halfway through the month. That’s when students in fifth grade classes at Pointers Run swing into action: sorting donated food and delivering over 60 bags of groceries door-to-door to senior citizens at Morningside Park Apartments in Jessup. (Parent volunteers do the driving.)

Food on the 15th has grown to include more schools and additional donations – including toiletries and gift cards at local shops. It has delivered more than 12,000 bags of groceries.

Now Rosenthal hopes to bring the program to her own workplace. “UMBC is the perfect place for Food on the 15th because the people here care about the community,” she says. “All it takes is a little creativity and energy to do something that has a huge impact.”

— Laura Lefavor ’13
(Learn more about Food on the 15th here.)

CRICKET LOVELY CRICKET

Cricket is one of the world’s most popular sports, yet it has never been popular in the United States. But perhaps it is another indication of UMBC’s diversity that its club cricket team has become so prominent on campus.

UMBC’s club cricket team (“22 Yards”) is one of the best in the country, and has appeared in multiple national championship tournaments. But the club team also serves as a home away from home for many students who come from countries and regions (including India, Pakistan, and the Caribbean) where cricket is their nation’s most popular sport.

Indeed, the presence of cricket on UMBC’s campus was part of what attracted Austin Aluvathingal ’13 to the university. He came to America from India at the age of 15 and immediately missed having cricket as part of his everyday experience. “My sister mentioned UMBC had a cricket team and that interested me a lot,” he says. “I wanted to come here over other schools.”

Attendance at UMBC cricket practices averages between 30 and 40 people. Some don’t even show up to play, but simply to share cultural connections. “It’s not just a team,” Aluvathingal said. “It’s just like spending time with your family when you play cricket.”

Aluvathingal says that the cricket team has even helped him network. “When I came in as a freshman, I didn’t know much about the classes or what to expect, but most of the players gave me a lot of opinions on classes. I got an internship through cricket, too.”

— Corey Johns ’11

DISC DRIVE

Every Friday afternoon at Erickson Field, rain or shine, UMBC’s frisbee players gather for their “ultimate” experience.

Ultimate frisbee has been around for decades. But according to USA Ultimate, the national governing body for the sport, it remains one of the fastest growing sports in the world, with more than 800,000 people playing regularly each year. UMBC has fielded an ultimate team (“Booya”) since the 1990s, and players wearing hoodies emblazoned with the team’s trademark pink elephants are a regular sight on campus.

Until recently, UMBC’s Booya ultimate frisbee team was a co-ed experience, with men and women playing together. But last autumn, the team’s six female players formed their own team (“Shazam Blue”) under the auspices of Without Limits Ultimate – an offcampus organization that promotes women’s participation in the sport.

Dozens of women at UMBC have joined Shazam Blue, and the team now competes in a local women’s league. Shazam Blue captain Kim Haines’12 says that her first experiences with ultimate led to her deep involvement with UMBC’s team.

“The people who played really won my heart,” Haines says. “Experience didn’t matter as much as wanting to improve.” Since becoming captain, she adds, cultivating that same spirit among her teammates is a top priority.

And despite the formation of a women’s team, that co-ed spirit persists in ultimate at UMBC. Booya and Shazam Blue still mingle at each other’s practices and participate in pre-tournament traditions involving pink hair dye and mohawks before they divide for actual competition.

— Monica Berron ’13

Geographically, Silicon Valley is far away from UMBC.

In fact, the Apple Campus at 1 Infinite Loop in Cupertino, California is 2,850 miles from UMBC. And Google’s headquarters is 2,846 miles away in Mountain View, California.

But “Silicon Valley” isn’t just a place. It’s also an aspiration – a beacon that’s bright enough to attract some of the best global technology talents and entrepreneurs.

Considering the attention that UMBC has received in recent years for its strengths in undergraduate teaching and learning, it’s no surprise that a number of UMBC graduates have taken the education they got inside Hilltop Circle and lit out for Silicon Valley to work at some of its biggest and most innovative companies.

In this issue, UMBC Magazine sent associate editor Jenny O’Grady to Northern California to meet some of those UMBC alumni, including Harry Chen ’98, M.S. ’00, Ph.D. ’04 – a key figure in the development of Apple’s Siri, the voice-responsive “personal assistant” found inside the latest iPhones (Read it here). She also wandered around the famed Google campus and talked to a number of UMBC alumni about what it’s like to actually work there.

O’Grady also took in another sight during her West Coast trip: The Beat Museum run by alumnus Jerry Cimino ’76, history. Cimino has transformed his passion for the literature and the culture of the Beat Generation into a delightful museum located at the crossroads of the movement in San Francisco’s North Beach district (Read it here).

Also in this issue, we have an interview with the most senior member of UMBC’s academic leadership team. On July 1, Philip Rous will become the university’s provost.

Rous’ perspective on UMBC is informed by his long tenure at the university (22 years) and the many positions in which he has already served – including as a tenured professor in and chair of the physics department, vice president and president of UMBC’s Faculty Senate, and as dean of the College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences. He has approached the challenges facing the university from many angles, and has collaborated in many of its celebrated successes.

You can read a brief portion of our interview with Rous in this issue’s “Over Coffee” feature – and I hope that it whets your appetite to read the full interview online.

If you are interested in how UMBC is engineering the acclaim that it has received for its achievements in education and research and diversity, there are few more authoritative voices than UMBC’s new provost on how collaboration, hard work, innovation and analysis have transformed the campus.

— Richard Byrne ’86

Before the discovery of insulin in 1922, children and adults who developed Type 1 diabetes usually died within a few months of the disease’s onset. That all changed when insulin became widely available, but women with diabetes still faced another challenge: significant odds that their offspring would be born with birth defects.
Even today, women diagnosed with diabetes (either Type 1 or Type 2) before they become pregnant have a greater risk of having a child with a severe birth defect than nondiabetic women.
In her laboratory at the Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston, Mary Loeken ’80, M.S., biological sciences, is studying mice to unlock the secrets of diabetic pregnancy. Eventually, she hopes to improve clinical practices so that the birth defect rate for children of diabetic and nondiabetic women is the same.
Loeken, who is also an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, began her research career at UMBC, studying under Professor Thomas F. Roth. She had previously earned an undergraduate degree in biology from Gonzaga University.
The UMBC of that era had a relatively young science faculty, with many excellent professors only a few years out of their own post-doctoral experiences. “[The faculty] were trained at really prestigious universities and laboratories,” Loeken says. “So I thought they would know what the expectations were for students to succeed in their careers, and would probably be energetic and looking for students to be involved.”
Loeken stayed in the area after graduating from UMBC, taking a Ph.D. in reproductive endocrinology at the University of Maryland’s School of Medicine, and then working as a post-doc at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda in the then-new field of recombinant DNA technology.
The Joslin Diabetes Center, a teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School, hired her to bring recombinant DNA technology to its program. Loeken became the co-head of the newly-formed Section on Molecular Biology, as well as the director of the center’s Molecular Biology Core Laboratory.
Loeken’s research focuses on why babies born to diabetic women are at much greater risk for birth defects – and how this risk might be lowered or prevented.
Approximately two percent of babies born to nondiabetic women develop congenital malformations. But that number rockets to three or four times higher for women who have diabetes – even if they have successfully controlled the disease and planned their pregnancies. The birth defect rate is even higher for diabetic women with unplanned pregnancies or unchecked diabetes.
Maternal diabetes can cause many kinds of birth defects, and many babies have more than one, especially congenital heart defects and neural tube defects. The neural tube defects include spina bifida (where part of the spinal cord is exposed) and anencephaly (where part of the brain is exposed).
Loeken studies the neural tube defects, partly because they also occur with high frequency in the mice she studies. She adds that these malformations are also easy to spot in mouse embryos.
The malformations have been tracked to a change in how a particular gene (Pax-3) expresses itself. Pax-3 is part of a family of genes involved in embryonic development. Contrary to what most scientists believed, Loeken and her colleagues discovered that Pax-3 regulates a tumor-suppressing protein called p53 which is either missing or mutated in almost all tumors.
“It was always thought that Pax-3 turned on genes needed for the formation of these structures” in developing embryos, Loeken observes. But she and her colleagues discovered was that if there is not enough Pax-3 present, then the embryo cells produce too much of the p53 protein.
While the p53 protein is actually doing its job in those cells to prevent cancer, the surfeit of the protein actually kills the cells needed to form structures such as the spinal cord properly. Thus, the overabundance of p53 is destructive at a crucial time in embryonic development.
In her research, Loeken has also discovered that when the embryo receives too much glucose – as occurs with diabetes – a delicate chemical balance that controls the expression of Pax-3 gene is upset.
Loeken says her investigations demonstrate why women with diabetes should endeavor to get their blood glucose levels as close to normal as possible before becoming pregnant.
“It’s still important for women to plan their pregnancies,” she says. “Most women with diabetes have healthy babies. The majority do. But because these birth defects are so devastating, as long as they are more common in diabetic pregnancies than in nondiabetic pregnancies, we will be working to understand how they occur and how to prevent them.”
— Joel N. Shurkin

Before the discovery of insulin in 1922, children and adults who developed Type 1 diabetes usually died within a few months of the disease’s onset. That all changed when insulin became widely available, but women with diabetes still faced another challenge: significant odds that their offspring would be born with birth defects.

Even today, women diagnosed with diabetes (either Type 1 or Type 2) before they become pregnant have a greater risk of having a child with a severe birth defect than nondiabetic women.

In her laboratory at the Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston, Mary Loeken ’80, M.S., biological sciences, is studying mice to unlock the secrets of diabetic pregnancy. Eventually, she hopes to improve clinical practices so that the birth defect rate for children of diabetic and nondiabetic women is the same.

Loeken, who is also an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, began her research career at UMBC, studying under Professor Thomas F. Roth. She had previously earned an undergraduate degree in biology from Gonzaga University.

The UMBC of that era had a relatively young science faculty, with many excellent professors only a few years out of their own post-doctoral experiences. “[The faculty] were trained at really prestigious universities and laboratories,” Loeken says. “So I thought they would know what the expectations were for students to succeed in their careers, and would probably be energetic and looking for students to be involved.”

Loeken stayed in the area after graduating from UMBC, taking a Ph.D. in reproductive endocrinology at the University of Maryland’s School of Medicine, and then working as a post-doc at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda in the then-new field of recombinant DNA technology.

The Joslin Diabetes Center, a teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School, hired her to bring recombinant DNA technology to its program. Loeken became the co-head of the newly-formed Section on Molecular Biology, as well as the director of the center’s Molecular Biology Core Laboratory.

Loeken’s research focuses on why babies born to diabetic women are at much greater risk for birth defects – and how this risk might be lowered or prevented.

Approximately two percent of babies born to nondiabetic women develop congenital malformations. But that number rockets to three or four times higher for women who have diabetes – even if they have successfully controlled the disease and planned their pregnancies. The birth defect rate is even higher for diabetic women with unplanned pregnancies or unchecked diabetes.

Maternal diabetes can cause many kinds of birth defects, and many babies have more than one, especially congenital heart defects and neural tube defects. The neural tube defects include spina bifida (where part of the spinal cord is exposed) and anencephaly (where part of the brain is exposed).

Loeken studies the neural tube defects, partly because they also occur with high frequency in the mice she studies. She adds that these malformations are also easy to spot in mouse embryos.

The malformations have been tracked to a change in how a particular gene (Pax-3) expresses itself. Pax-3 is part of a family of genes involved in embryonic development. Contrary to what most scientists believed, Loeken and her colleagues discovered that Pax-3 regulates a tumor-suppressing protein called p53 which is either missing or mutated in almost all tumors.

“It was always thought that Pax-3 turned on genes needed for the formation of these structures” in developing embryos, Loeken observes. But she and her colleagues discovered was that if there is not enough Pax-3 present, then the embryo cells produce too much of the p53 protein.

While the p53 protein is actually doing its job in those cells to prevent cancer, the surfeit of the protein actually kills the cells needed to form structures such as the spinal cord properly. Thus, the overabundance of p53 is destructive at a crucial time in embryonic development.

In her research, Loeken has also discovered that when the embryo receives too much glucose – as occurs with diabetes – a delicate chemical balance that controls the expression of Pax-3 gene is upset.

Loeken says her investigations demonstrate why women with diabetes should endeavor to get their blood glucose levels as close to normal as possible before becoming pregnant.

“It’s still important for women to plan their pregnancies,” she says. “Most women with diabetes have healthy babies. The majority do. But because these birth defects are so devastating, as long as they are more common in diabetic pregnancies than in nondiabetic pregnancies, we will be working to understand how they occur and how to prevent them.”

— Joel N. Shurkin

With Matt Belzer, Director of Jazz Studies

UMBC’s music department is known for pushing boundaries in new music – including its jazz studies program, headed up by director Matt Belzer – who’s excelled as a teacher, composer and performer.

UMBC’s jazz studies program is four years old now, and it boasts three official ensembles (including a “large” ensemble) and many unofficial student groups.

Jazz is woven into America’s cultural fabric, but many people are still unfamiliar with or intimidated by jazz music.

“Folks sometimes feel on the outside looking in…. But that’s also part of the appeal of jazz,” Belzer says. “It’s got a set of traditions and a community.”

So how can you tune in to those traditions? Here are some of Belzer’s tips:

Step 1: DON’T WIG OUT

Jazz culture has a lingo all its own that may seem impenetrable at first. The music also has a rich tradition in which its artists build on – and challenge – previous musicians and movements.

Belzer says that shouldn’t stop you. In fact, start with jazz you hear right now in 2012. “Jazz history probably should be taught in reverse,” he says. “You start with someone who’s creatively active today, and then work backwards.”

Trusting your own ears is another must. “If you can hear it, then you’re entitled to an opinion,” Belzer says. And as you keep listening – and discover more about the music and how it’s been shaped – “you’re entitled to change your opinion.”

Step 2: OPEN UP TO IMPROV

Improvisation is integral to jazz – flights of instrumental fancy that bend and reshape a song into individual expression. Understanding it, says Belzer, is key to appreciating the music.

“It’s really about being as in the moment as you can,” he says.

Soloing also turns out to be anything but solitude. Improvisation requires a performer to be acutely aware of what’s happening around him. “Some of the best jazz recordings are evidence of mental telepathy,” Belzer says. “You are expanding your awareness. Putting your antennae up. Even into the audience. Your goal is to make everyone else sound good. It’s a giving thing.”

Step 3: DON’T TAKE COVER

Jazz has always had connections with popular music, especially through cover versions of tunes such as saxophonist John Coltrane’s classic take on The Sound of Music showpiece “My Favorite Things.”

While Belzer says that exploring the standard “jazz repertoire” is one way for a new listener to go, he argues that exploring the world of jazz composition – music written specifically for jazz ensembles by great composers like Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk or Duke Ellington – can reveal even more about the music.

“You’re really getting that artist’s view,” says Belzer, who cites Herbie Hancock as an example of a dynamic jazz composer also known for his cover versions and explorations of other forms of music.

“If I were introducing someone to Herbie Hancock,” he observes, “I would play them ‘Dolphin Dance’ [a composition from Hancock’s first record, 1965’s Maiden Voyage].”

Step 4: HEAR JAZZ LIVE

Get in a room and hear people play, Belzer says. “The best way to introduce someone to jazz is to see it live. And even if a person is not the type to go to bars and clubs, there are plenty of institutions that have jazz concert series.”

Belzer adds that there are multiple senses touched by live music. “You get an impact on different levels – intellectually, emotionally, and viscerally,” he observes. “Literally, it’s vibrations hitting your skin.”

Belzer says hearing jazz at UMBC is a great place to start. The university’s ensembles have regular concerts each semester – and there are also many student recitals. Growing into a greater appreciation of America’s greatest indigenous art form can be as simple as strolling over to the Fine Arts Building.

(Check out the calendar of all jazz and other UMBC music department events at www.umbc.edu/music/news/index.php)

— Richard Byrne ’86

* * * * *

Matt Belzer Picks Three Jazz Records to Jump Start Your Collection

“For the impossible task of choosing three jazz albums, I’ve settled on the following selections. The beauty of jazz is that you can begin anywhere. These recordings have meant a lot to me personally. In no particular order…”

1) Kind of Blue, Miles Davis
This is a very popular choice and for good reason. Everything about this recording is transcendent. It’s also a great introduction to Davis’s long and varied career as well as to his sidemen.

2) Speak No Evil, Wayne Shorter
I’m sure I’m not alone in feeling a spiritual connection to Wayne Shorter’s music. His compositions and performances have been hugely influential, filled with magic and feeling.

3) Mingus Ah Um, Charles Mingus
If anyone represents the ability of jazz music to be appreciated intellectually, emotionally, spiritually, and viscerally, it’s Charles Mingus.

President Hrabowski will appear on NPR’s Tell Me More on June 6. He talks to host Michel Martin about the importance of higher education, how families can weigh the costs and benefits of college and why UMBC is investing heavily in the arts and humanities.

Locally, you can hear the program on WRAU-88.3 FM or WAMU-88.5 FM from 2 pm to 3 pm. You can also listen online. President Hrabowski’s segment is expected to air about 40 minutes into the program.

Should computer science be a required course for today’s college students? That’s the question posed by USA TODAY reporter Sonia Su.

UMBC’s Marie desJardins tell Su that, “Being a smart computer user is like being a smart consumer — the more you understand how it works, the more you can benefit from it,”

Su writes, “In her introductory computer science class for non-majors, desJardins said she emphasizes key concepts, one of which is that computational thinking is, as its core, about problem solving, which is useful for everyone.”

desJardins tells Su, “I find that my students often do not really know how to think clearly about a problem, identify the constraints and goals and analyze different alternative solutions,” said desJardins. “Computer science requires you to do all of these things, and to do them very clearly and precisely because computers only understand clear and precise instructions.”

But is computer science fun? Would students enjoy it?

Su writes, “UMBC Professor Penny Rheingans said she went to college expecting to major in something in the social sciences, but after taking a computer science course her first semester, she discovered something she loved.”

Rheingans told Su, “I found computing to be both incredibly frustrating and incredibly addicting,” Rheingans said in an email. “I love the challenge of building something to solve a problem and the satisfaction of figuring out why my creation isn’t working and fixing it.”

From Freeman Hrabowski, President, and Philip Rous, Provost Designate & Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs

We are delighted to announce that Rebecca Boehling, professor of history and director of the James T. and Virginia M. Dresher Center for the Humanities, has been named the next Director of the International Tracing Service (ITS) in Bad Arolsen, Germany. The ITS is unique in scope and significance, serving victims of Nazi persecutions and their families by documenting their fate, preserving crucial and indispensable historical records, and making its rich archive available for research.

Dr. Boehling was appointed unanimously by the eleven-member state International Commission, which supervises the work of the ITS, at its recent annual meeting in Paris. She will take a leave of absence from UMBC and begin her directorship on January 1, 2013.

Dr. Boehling’s impressive academic work makes her a natural choice for the position. She is an expert in the history of the Holocaust, World War II, and the early postwar period in Germany. She has studied and researched in Germany and had a research fellowship at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Leo Baeck Institute in New York. Last year, she co-authored with Uta Larkey Life and Loss in the Shadow of the Holocaust: A Jewish Family’s Untold Story, based on the family letters of Suzanne Ostrand-Rosenberg, professor of biological sciences at UMBC. She will also bring important administrative experience to the ITS.

Dr. Boehling’s appointment is a testament to the international reputation she has earned for her scholarship while at UMBC. She hopes to connect UMBC students with research opportunities at ITS. We invite you to read more about Dr. Boehling’s appointment here.

Please join us in congratulating Dr. Boehling on this exciting opportunity.

At his San Francisco museum, UMBC alumnus Jerry Cimino ’76 makes sure the world is still hep to one of America’s greatest literary movements.

By Jenny O’Grady
Photos by Mirissa Neff and Brittany Powell

The Beat Generation was a uniquely American movement – producing pockets of poetry and art across the land. You could find them in 1950s New York City in their early days clustered around Columbia University – or down in the cafes and jazz clubs of Greenwich Village. Some of them found refuge at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. And they drank and declaimed in juke joints across the Midwest and the Southwest.

That restless urge to explore great spaces is at the heart of Beat verse and prose. But if you had to pick an epicenter of the movement, you’d likely choose San Francisco’s North Beach – and specifically the crossroads of Broadway and Columbus Avenue.

That’s where you’ll find one of America’s great literary meccas: the checkerboard-floored City Lights Books, which was founded by poet/ publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti in 1953. Right next to it is the Vesuvio Café, a popular watering hole of poets like Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. And just up the street, at 1562 Grant Avenue, young writers spent hours smoking dope on a crooked stairwell called “Poet’s Corner” – and then headed to the press next door to check galleys of the latest chapbook.

North Beach is also where you’ll find Jerry Cimino ’76, history. From the book-lined open air porch of the Beat Museum, which he founded in 2003 at 540 Broadway to pay homage to a generation of writers and artists who continue to inspire him, he takes in the rich history of this historic section of the city. He savors it. And he can’t help but share it with anyone who will listen.

“What we like to say is: ‘Welcome to the center of the universe,’” enthuses Cimino, with the flair of a modern day P.T. Barnum. “Because you’re at Broadway and Columbus right now – and everything that happened with the Beat Generation happened right here at this intersection.”

The museum’s walls reflect this, exploding with colorful posters, books, author photographs, drawings and videos covering every surface. One wall is devoted completely to editions of Kerouac’s On the Road from around the world. Another shows an early version of Ginsberg’s “Howl,” complete with scrawling edits by the author – enough to make even the biggest bookworm giddy.

More than 60 years after the Beats’ heyday, the culture has found a true evangelist in Cimino, a determined man driven by respect for the inclusive, nonconformist ideals the Beat authors represented. With a little elbow grease – and some recent attention from Hollywood – he’s on the road to making a lasting tribute to his heroes.

“IT KNOCKED ME OUT”

Cimino grew up in the suburbs of Baltimore, the son of a WWII vet-turned-postal clerk. His first encounter with the music and movement of the Beat writers came when a teacher read poems from Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s classic collection A Coney Island of the Mind to his eighth-grade class.

“That whole book of poetry literally changed my life…it knocked me out,” says Cimino, who to this day can recite the book’s fifth poem, “Sometimes During Eternity,” from memory.

“You know, 1968 is when it all happened,” Cimino recalls. “Bobby Kennedy was shot and killed. Martin Luther King was shot and killed. The Vietnam War was raging, and all of us kids were looking at each other and saying, ‘What in the hell are we inheriting?’”

When Cimino arrived at UMBC in 1972, he was among the few students actually living on campus at the time, splitting time between what were then called “Dorms 1, 2, and 3.” He says that many of the bonds that he formed in that era at UMBC – including friendships with older students freshly scarred from serving in Vietnam, and with closeted gays who trusted him with their secret – would forever change his own way of thinking. He also enjoyed some time on stage with the theatre club, sharing the bill (but, sadly, never the stage) with one-time UMBC student Kathleen Turner in a 1975 campus production of Antigone.

“For the first time in my life, I was interacting with a lot of people who weren’t like me,” says Cimino. “And that’s what the Beats were all about – coming together and really celebrating your differences… they were about tolerance and compassion and having the courage to live the most authentic life you can.”

Jonathan M. Cooperman, who roomed with Cimino at UMBC before finishing a degree in physical therapy at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, recalls a thoughtful, passionate friend who also had more hair back then.

“He is very much the same guy to me now as he was then,” says Cooperman, who is now a member of the Beat Museum’s board. “If you walked into his room at three in the morning, the door would be cracked open with light pouring out into the hall. If you walked inside, Jer would be sipping tea and reading a book – usually Kerouac.”

Although he loved history and other subjects he’d studied at UMBC, Cimino graduated without a clear career path to follow. So he went with the flow in which he found himself, relocating to California and forging a successful career in sales for both IBM and American Express.

VOICES THAT SPAN GENERATIONS

Over the years, however, Cimino and his wife, Estelle, started craving something more than a career in business. His continuing affection for the Beat literature he had read as a young man led him to befriend John Cassady – the son of Kerouac’s friend Neal Cassady, who is immortalized in the character of “Dean Moriarty” in On the Road.

Cimino also began building a collection of Beat generation memorabilia which eventually became “The Beat Museum on Wheels” in 2003. And just as Dean Moriarty took off across the country with Sal Paradise (the character representing Kerouac himself in On the Road), Cimino and Cassady drove “the mighty beatmobile” across America’s highways in October 2005 – even parking it overnight in Commons Circle at UMBC.

Cimino says he reveled in the chance to share his growing collection with UMBC students and see his old campus. And faculty members were happy to have a bit of the Beats in Catonsville.

“The students enjoyed visiting the museum on wheels, with all kinds of interesting, hard-to-get publications and memorabilia, and just hanging out with Jerry and John,” says UMBC associate professor of English Piotr Gwiazda, who helped organize the appearance.

The Beats cast a spell over today’s students now just as much as ever, Gwiazda says.

“Whenever I teach ‘Howl,’ students respond with interest,” he says. “There still seems to be something magnetic about the work of Beat Generation writers: the idea of community it embodied, its counter-cultural aspects, its philosophical dimensions, and of course its sheer verbal power and vitality.”

STAR POWER

Of course, interest in the Beats has never been limited to college students reading in circles on the grass. A new Hollywood treatment of Kerouac’s On the Road – which features Kristen Stewart of Twilight fame and Viggo Mortensen from the Lord of the Rings films – is traveling the festival circuit now and scheduled for general release later this year.

Cimino couldn’t be happier about what the new film means for the legacy of the Beats – and for the future of his own museum.

“It’s just great, have you seen it?” he says, cueing up the movie trailer on a screen above the museum’s entrance. Since filming began in 2010 under director Walter Salles, Cimino says members of the film’s cast have visited the museum and asked questions about their characters.

The cast and crew even dropped off a surprise prop from the film at the museum. Just to the right of the museum’s check-in desk sits a dusty maroon 1949 Hudson Hornet used during filming and driven to its resting spot in North Beach by none other than the movie’s star Garrett Hedlund (“a really delightful young man,” says Cimino), who portrays the everrestless Dean Moriarty.

Beside it stands a sign: “Walter’s only request of us was that the dust and grime – accumulated on the car during the 5,000 miles he and Garrett spent traveling the country making the film – remain undisturbed. Walter considers this ‘the Holy Dirt of America.’”

“You know, every fingerprint has a story,” says Cimino. “It’s important to keep that history intact.”

That’s a major part of Cimino’s job as curator: making the story of the Beats accessible and fun for anyone who might wander in. He loves every second of his evangelism for the movement and its great writers.

“The museum is successful because it represents a significant part of American culture and American literary history,” says Cooperman. “The opening of the movie On the Road demonstrates how this literature is still relevant.

“Of course, the fact that Jerry is probably as knowledgeable of the Beats as any academic doesn’t hurt either,” he adds. “He’ll ultimately be successful because he has a passion for what he does.”

NOW AND LATER

Passion is one thing. But, if you’re wondering how a start-up museum makes it in such difficult economic times, here’s your answer: It ain’t easy.

But the Beat Museum now survives and thrives thanks to Cimino’s magnetic business sense and a lot of hard work.

Just above Cimino’s desk hangs a complicated organizational chart showing a collage of boxes representing duties spanning everything from marketing to merchandising to fixing the guest toilet. One line connects them all.

“And every one of those boxes has my damn name on it,” he jokes. “That’s just how it is.”

The museum’s collection has grown as fans discover it. Cimino admits that “most people who love the Beats don’t have a lot of money,” but as fans of certain writers have discovered his museum, the memorabilia contributions have flowed in steadily. There’s a plaid jacket once worn by Kerouac, and a creaky pipe organ owned by Allen Ginsberg. There’s even an original “Can YOU pass the acid test?” card from the days when Neal Cassady drove Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters across the country in a psychedelic bus – a trip immortalized by author Tom Wolfe in his 1968 book, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. (There’s also a film version of that book in works, to be directed by Gus Van Sant.)

Over the years, Cimino also found mentors to advise him as his plans for the museum have grown. He singles out the late Kim Greer, who was president of the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas, California, until his death in 2006.

“I have people come in every day telling me what I should be doing,” he says. “But I only take advice from people who have successfully done what they’re telling me I ought to do. It’s easy to guess…but that’s not going to get you anywhere.”

Right now, the Beat Museum is just as Cimino would like it to be: full, eclectic, engaging. Not too smooth, or too uniform: that wouldn’t fit well with the artists that it celebrates. Mismatched shelves offer hand assembled chapbooks by local poets. A claw-footed bathtub filled with dime store novels invites visitors to try something new. There’s a definite flavor to the place – a sort of San Francisco sourdough bite.

Cimino would enjoy having someone else fix the toilet from time to time. More important, however, is growing the Beat Museum so that it can stand strong for generations to come. That’s his next step.

“I started this place the only way I know how. I built it from nothing,” he says. “Now we’ve built a track record, we’ve made it succeed with the blood and sweat of a lot of people. If this thing’s going to outlive me…I’m going to have to think big.”

• VIDEO: Interview with Jerry Cimino ’76, founder of The Beat Museum
• Read Jerry’s blog from his 2005 visit to UMBC
• Read Jerry’s review of Walter Salles’s new movie, On the Road