And its near-completion is proof that the Big Dig, the city's decade-old road-construction project, will some day, please heaven, draw to a close.It took years for people to say anything nice about the Big Dig, a $14.6 billion slog that has plagued Bostonians with traffic jams and cost over-runs.
Inside, slender brick columns soar toward heaven, drawing the eyes of humble worshippers up in awe.
"Heaven Will Wait" draws from real stories of teen-age girls in France who joined networks of jihadists.
He had only "the most rudimentary sense of existence, such as may lurk and flicker in the depths of an animal's consciousness," until memory came back to him, "like a rope let down from heaven to draw me up out of the abyss of not-being, from which I could never have escaped by myself".
Some sketch the Russian flag they spy on passing warplanes, bombs dropping, headless and limbless stick figures being loaded into ambulances or floating into the clouds under the caption: "The souls of our martyrs ascend to heaven". Others draw fantasies: baskets of fruit they cannot eat, forests and streams they cannot see.
Recorded earlier this year at London club Heaven, the performance draws on work from his early cult EPs (Air and Lack Thereof, the Kelis-sampling CMYK), his self-titled debut album and Mercury-winning second, Overgrown, and ends with his signature cover of Joni Mitchell's A Case of You.
While Heaven and Earth drew attention to the varied states of chaos and ecstasy that make up the black experience, his short film elaborates on that by depicting black people as spiritual beings who can transcend the pain of the physical world.
"Heaven," which has drawn comparisons to the work of Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Kieslowski and Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, follows two story lines that don't so much intersect as spiral around each other, as vital connections are never quite made even as coincidence seems to bind the characters ever closer.
It's a statement that might apply equally to Lederer herself, a small-business owner (she runs a recruitment agency for computer scientists and mathematicians) whose second poetry collection, "The Heaven-Sent Leaf," drew on her six years of experience as a "brainworker" at a Manhattan hedge fund.
For example, the play, "For Heaven's Sake, Mother!" drew the comment: "A more appropriate title would be just plain 'For Heaven's Sake.'" A number of other examples given.
