16 January 2012
I worked through most of MLK day, but I did enjoy wandering the Studio Museum of Harlem for an hour or so. It’s a privilege to live in this neighborhood, to partake in its culture, present and past; and I forget it too easily.
I found this photograph utterly arresting and beautiful. I failed to photograph the plaque with the artist’s name, but I’m working on tracking it down.
Kira Lynn Harris‘s homage to Romare Bearden‘s “The Block,” part of the Romare Bearden Project, celebrating the centennial of his birth.
If you’re a New Yorker, be sure to make the trip uptown; if you’re an uptowner, be sure to get over to the Studio Museum sometime if you haven’t. It will be worth your while.
10 January 2011
We’ve been obsessed with the Republican primaries and debates here. I suppose that means I’m not as cynical as I thought I was; I keep looking for candidates to break through with a true voice, to stray from pre-packaged message message message. Newt and Dr. Ron are the ones to watch in this respect, although John Huntsman showed signs of life on Sunday in NH.
Romney‘s electability strategy is clear: I’ve run businesses, I’ve lived “in the real economy,” that Obama guy hasn’t. Another strategy that I imagine the Romneyans will pursue might go like this: I’m a doer, not a hand-wringer, we need real-world action; this isn’t a time for “nuanced thinking,” for professorial passivity.
Ugh.
With the departure of Obama’s Chief of Staff Bill Daley, this dichotomy of character comes up again: Rahm Emanuel was a “ball-buster,” a guy who “got things done.” Again, he wasn’t known as a thinker, a ponderer, but rather a guy with a short fuse and sharp, goal-oriented focus. This is apparently what a good Chief of Staff needs to be, what Daley wasn’t (not enough, anyway).
But what about in the rest of life? I wonder often if we’re all destined to be one or the other, in a final-accounting-of-your-life sort of way, i.e. thinkers or doers. People of process or people of results. An obvious answer is, “Of course not.” Weirdly, the older I get, the more I think (in an unnuanced way), maybe so…
1 January 2012
Happy 2012, one and all.
Quote for the year: “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.”
Tancredi says this to his uncle in The Leopard. We understand that he is speaking of politics, class upheaval, a way of life in 1860 Sicily. For me, I think it has to do with aging (ugh). Those things that I would want to “stay as they are” have to do with youth — forward motion, energy, vision, curiosity of the soul, a developing mind. In order to preserve and nourish these, “things will have to change.”
Diet and exercise, yes. But I’m thinking more along the lines of “strategic spiritual self-nourishment.” Not exactly sure what I mean by that, but something to do with giving things the time they need, resisting the temptation to rush or cut bate or shortchange.
As for looking back, if you haven’t seen the Year in Pictures 2011 feature at the NY Times, it’s pretty amazing. Here’s hoping that Campaign 2012 doesn’t make a complete mockery of all that’s happened — what struggling people around the world have expressed — in 2011.
26 December 2011
Phew — made it.
Every year, during the month that starts at Thanksgiving and ends after Christmas, I feel like an undersized running back at the two yard line (deep in my own team’s territory), working my way down the field. I keep hoping that the quarterback will hail-mary us to the end zone in one gorgeous, painless swoop; but it ends up being more like piecemeal progress, fending off tackles, a little achey and bruisey.
There’s just too much expectation around these holidays. Some of which I feel unable to meet, some of which I am unwilling.
In a few days my homage to Giuseppe di Lampedusa‘s The Leopard will go up at The Millions; and in it I write about how much I sympathize, and even empathize, with Don Fabrizio, the novel’s middle-aged Sicilian protagonist, a Prince circa 1860 no less. What could I possibly have in common with the Prince of Salina during Italy’s Risorgimento? Well, principally this:
I belong to an unfortunate generation, swung between the old world and the new, and I find myself ill at ease in both.
My family life is not conventional enough to conform to holiday expectations; and I suppose I am not (yet) unconventional enough at heart to truly feel free from all those expectations.
Anyhoo — officially, we (if you happen to relate to this) can now come out of hiding. It is okay to be doing non-holiday things — like work, correspondence, etc — without seeming too much like a sad weirdo. Here is a bit of what we did on Dec 25, here in Buenos Aires, Argentina:
Parque de la Memoria (for The Disappeared) — “To Think/Contemplate is a Revolutionary Act”
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Kitschy Nativity Scene, outside Congreso
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Quiet subway platforms — a gathering of tourists mostly!
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Families fishing along the Rio de la Plata
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Football (soccer) stadium, River Plate Team, the rich team (think Yankees)
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In Once (OHNsay) – an immigrant neighborhood centered around a place called Plaza Miserere (yikes) that reminded me of Queens (and not really miserable at all)
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And what did we eat? Leftover Chinese takeout, sauteed gai-laan, leftover peach pie (homemade, by a lovely young expat who hosted us for Christmas eve dinner), and flan from the corner bakery. Whiskey and soda, cheap Malbec. Good stuff.
14 October 2011
A convergence of things: reading/teaching Susan Choi‘s American Woman, watching Sidney Lumet‘s Running on Empty, listening to Ben Marcus read Kazuo Ishiguro‘s “A Village After Dark” on the New Yorker podcast. The title of this post is taken from the Ishiguro story, a dream-surrealist sort of story where a man revisits his past, is reminded of the (unspecified) activism of his youth, and confronts those whom he harmed or disregarded in those days.
Both Choi and Lumet also look at youthful activism – that is, an activism that embraced violence (in the 60s). The characters look back on what they did, who they were, how they justified their actions; consider whether they stand by their acts of “conscientious violence.” They consider, in short, whether they can be held accountable for what they did when they were very young.
Most of us haven’t planted bombs, but maybe we’ve naively or unknowingly – like Ishiguro’s Fletcher – ruined people’s lives. It’s a bit terrifying to think about how earnestly we move through each day, each season of our lives, deciding and acting (and not acting) and intuiting. I suppose that’s why it makes for such good literary/cinematic material…
19 September 2011
I appreciated Amy Sullivan‘s piece at TIME about questioning politicians on religion. She wrote in response to Bill Keller‘s NY Times column, in which he challenged journalists to ask “tougher” questions about candidates’ religious beliefs and practices. Sullivan urges journalists to ask not “tougher” questions, but more relevant and informed ones. Generally speaking, “liberal” journalists have less direct experience in, for example, evangelical or – particularly relevant this year – Mormon communities, and thus often ask questions that, in Sullivan’s words, “compar[e] religious believers to people who believe in space aliens, and refer[...] to evangelical Christian churches as ‘mysterious’ and ‘suspect.’”
For the first time, it seems a real-life political analysis may actually be more hopeful – less cynical – than a TV one. As an avid watcher of The West Wing, I would often lament real-life politics and wish for Aaron Sorkin‘s version; but in this case, I recall a (very good) episode about religion and campaigning, where the Republican candidate Arnie Vinick (played by Alan Alda) – a non-churchgoing John McCain straight-talking centrist type – says at a press conference: “If you ask candidates about religion, you’re just asking to be lied to.” Keep religion completely out of it, Sorkin seemed to be saying in this episode; it’s irrelevant, and always disingenuously presented besides. Sullivan is saying, Oh no, it’s very relevant, but not in the way that goofy gotcha questioning is trying to imply.
I especially appreciate Sullivan’s exhortation for journalists to learn, and use, the language of religion(s) more intelligently. She offers the examples of “devout” and being “called” (to a vocation in politics); both terms that she feels are lazily employed in political journalism.
You can listen to Sullivan talk with Bob Garfield at NPR’s On the Media here.
12 September 2011
Watching on TV a good part of the 9/11 memorial ceremony yesterday at Ground Zero, I was struck by (and can’t stop thinking about) how many of the mourner-presenters – who stood to read a portion of victims’ names, then the name of their own lost loved ones along with a brief few words about them – said something about their beloved deceased “watching over them.”
Almost without exception, survivors of 9/11 (and survivors of those family members who died), when interviewed, will talk about how changed they are, how nothing was ever or will ever be the same. I wonder how many of them believed in spirits or the spiritual realm beforehand, and how/if this in particular has changed.
This of course assumes that nothing strictly script-like (other than a word limit and perhaps some guidelines?) was given to yesterday’s presenters; although, at one point, hearing the repetition, it did almost seem that their words had been prescribed. For instance, I think almost everyone addressed their deceased loved one directly, e.g. Mom, we love you and we miss you… I’d like to believe that every word came from the heart yesterday; in fact, I am choosing to believe that. With something as deeply tragic as the loss of someone you love to an event as horrific as 9/11, I can’t imagine that so many people would allow such a specific prescription from an external power.
It made me think about whether or not, if I unexpectedly lost a loved one, I would speak to him or her, in my mind or out loud, as if the person were still with me. Would I believe the person were still with me? Or would it be more like talking to myself, to the part of that person that had become, in some ineffable way, a part of me? Not unlike the question, Would you have stayed in the burning tower, or would you have jumped? it’s simply and utterly impossible to imagine. Nothing could ever prepare a person for such horror or devastation or loss.
19 July 2011
If you listen to This American Life on NPR, you know that the show’s excellence lies in its storytelling, and its humanizing of complex issues. Well, they’ve done it again – here is a painfully accurate portrait of the natural gas drilling conflicts (“fracking”), from the perspective of several key stakeholders, in Pennsylvania. In the stories highlighted here, we see corporate profit vs public health, the ties between academic research and political power (i.e. funding), short-term vs long-term views on community wellness, and class conflict between local farmers and newcomers (usually urbanite transplants).
Despite all of the investigative pieces out there in the mainstream that question the health, environmental, financial, and social costs of hydrofracking, drilling goes forth with full force – somewhere in the realm of 100,000 wells to be drilled in the NY/PA region. (Governor Cuomo intends to lift the moratorium on fracking in NY state.)
My other posts on fracking here.
9 July 2011
The Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater (WHAT) on Cape Cod will be exhibiting the work of my very talented friend and portrait photographer Robin Holland this summer. If you’re in those parts, stop by the opening reception on Friday, July 15, 6-7:30.
Robin’s subjects include American and international independent filmmakers, Oscar- and other award-winning actors, musicians and composers, artists, architects, writers, political activists, journalists, politicians. Check out images on Robin’s amazing web site. The list is too long, but we’re talking everyone from Louise Bourgeois to Edward Albee to Jessica Simpson to Sapphire to Isabelle Huppert to Wong Kar-wai.
Congrats, Robin!
Tax Time
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1 April 2011
April is going to be an especially busy month. As such, you’d think it might be an opportune time to finally enlist an accountant to do my taxes. But no, nothin’ doin’. I don’t know what it is – it’s not that I enjoy it. But I do find it interesting to shuffle through receipts, and bank and credit card statements, and walk down memory lane a bit. You confront that uncomfortable sense that you are what you spend.
Maybe there’s also something comforting there, something concrete, in the midst of a life that can sometimes start to get away from you and feel a bit out-of body. I spend, therefore I am. I think another reason I like seeing where it all went is that it gives me a tangible way of considering change and improvement for the coming year.
I’m also I suppose an honesty geek when it comes to paying taxes. I don’t want someone (an accountant) to tell me “what I can get away with.” I want to deduct what’s actually deductible, what’s actually “business-related.” I want to make those decisions on my own. What really happened during that $60 lunch date? How much of that Amazon purchase am I using for “work”? It’s not unlikely that for my entire working life I’ve been grossly over-paying in taxes. On the other hand, when you don’t make much, how much could you possibly overpay? As long as Mr. Obama is in office, I’ll pay my share; not exactly gladly, but willingly.
