I love when I’m forced to take off my headphones and take in what’s actually happening around me. Sometimes what’s actually happening isn’t that fun. Sometimes it is. In this case, it was, and I was happy to experience and capture the moment.
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Kimmi
Therapy Thursdays
Everyone knows it’s not the most secure time to be a writer. There’s a lot of doomsday rhetoric out there, which I really try to stay away from. I believe that people will always be hungry for stories–well-crafted, beautifully told, reflective. Those take time and, therefore, money, to create. Twitter, in other words, isn’t going to displace people’s interest in nonfiction and novels. Or at least that’s my belief.
Plenty of people are trying to innovate new ways of organizing the news, however. One of the latest is True-Slant. According to the site:
True/Slant is the digital home for the “Entrepreneurial Journalist.” Knowledgeable and credible contributors anchor and build their digital brands on True/Slant using tools that enable them to easily create content and craft stories filtered through human perspective (not an algorithm)…Our goal is to build a community that is as engaged with the news as we are. With that in mind, we opened up the site even though we are not quite ready to launch a finished product. We consider this our Alpha version, and ask you to remember that as you explore the site.
It will be interesting to follow this experiment as it develops.
Courtney Martin
- This Thursday, July 3rd, Courtney will speak at the National Youth Leadership Forum in Washington D.C.
- “Was the Economic Meltdown a Crisis of Masculinity Run Amuck?” on AlterNet.
A bag of blood hung from a pole. “It’s not my type,” the eleven year old informed the nurse, spurring a lecture on the capabilities of a universal donor.
BET played “Thriller,” which she and the nurse watched on the small television hanging over her chair. “This video used to scare me,” the girl told me. Amazing that someone so calm in the face of blood transfusions would be scared of dancing zombies, but I nodded. “Me too.” The nurse flushed her IV and walked away. The girl returned to her watercolor painting and her haunted house story. Then she paused. She looked at Michael Jackson’s face with such empathy and said to me, “I wasn’t even thinking of him yesterday.”
“I don’t think anyone thought this would happen,” I assured her. The news hit me like the end of an era the night before. She persisted– of course she didn’t think he would pass away, but more importantly, she didn’t think of him before he was gone forever. I lingered, wondering if the thoughts of a child can save someone.
Have you ever looked under the lip of the ocean? I hadn’t. But last week in the Virgin Islands, I floated on the surface as the entire back of my body crisped red under the sun. An interloper. I snorkeled three times a day and marveled at the world beneath me. If only I could feel half as acclimated to my environment as these fish and sea creatures seemed to be. With each wave gust, they moved gracefully–never bumping into one another, never losing orientation, assured of place, part of a greater flow. The immediacy of this collective reaction is something I’ve rarely seen on land. These under water inhabitants seemed to have mastered a Taoist bending principle that I hadn’t (and haven’t).
Items to note. Underwater bubbles sound like crackling. Being in the water with a nurse shark is not as scary as I anticipated. Angel fish hide by sliding their flat colorful bodies in between rocks. Trumpet fish skim the surface like a troupe of swords. Barracuda stare right into your eyes. Squid travel in families and line up in perfect formation, like jet fighters. Sea turtles coast along like mellow dudes and dudettes of the ocean. Black spiny sea urchins dance about with their 12-inch long spines. You part through long wide schools of glimmering bait fish, creating an illusion of closeness. Somehow when you swim down deep and look up, bait fish shine like raindrops.
Extract the blue and this landscape is desert-like. A similar starkness punctuated by bright colors–a place of canyons and flats, grays, mustard yellows and deep reds. It is what I imagine the moon to be. I loved being part of two worlds at once. Face down to the peaceful hum of the ocean. Face up to thrashing waves, squawking seagulls and pelicans diving in for bait fish. And then, … the human element. Read more…
Please reply in 500 words or less! GO!
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Kimmi
Therapy Thursdays
This week, I got an exciting e-mail from my friend and fellow 2006 REAL Hot 100 winner, Deanna Zandt. She’s a media technologist and a leading expert in women and technology, and she’s about to add “first-time author” to her resume.
She’s signed with the Berrett-Koehler publishing group to write a book about “the social media moment as a huge opportunity for social change and action.” Women, people of color, queer people, and many more have too often been left in the dust of technological advances (see film, TV, and radio in their formative years). Deanna will use her experience in the feminist community and bring in experts from the fields of racial justice, LGBTQQI organizing, the front lines of the class warfare, and more, to assemble strategies for widening the diversity of voices in social media.
Deanna is a sharp, compassionate, thoughtful person, and her book is going to help women and other sidelined communities release their fear and take advantage of the new technologies. The last thing we need is another place where the dominant culture creates uncontested content that blocks out all other perspectives.
If you’re interested in technology and social justice, you should be reading Deanna’s blog. Also, the publisher doesn’t offer advances, so Deanna is fundraising for living expenses this summer while she writes the book in 4 short months. Even if you have $10 to spare, visit her Feed The Author page and join supporters like the Hightower Lowdown, and Don Hazen and Doug Kreeger (editor and board member of AlterNet). It’s a fantastic project in which to invest.
Her full fundraising letter below the cut.
I’ve been fantasizing about men a lot lately. No, not that kind of fantasizing you dirty birds…I’ve been fantasizing about them getting involved in activism around family-friendly work policy, subsidized childcare, sexist mainstream media, violence against women, and a range of other fields that have too long been framed as “women’s issues.” An excerpt from a column of mine that ran yesterday sums it up:
The truth is our fates are inextricably tied together, not running on two parallel tracks. When men lose their jobs — and, indeed, they have at a higher rate than women recently — American families all suffer, just as they suffer when women are paid unequal wages or fired for missing work to take care of sick kids or an elderly parent. Newsflash: Men aren’t from Mars and women aren’t from Venus; we’re all struggling to make healthy, meaningful lives on the same damn planet — and it’s time we started acting like it.
At the end of my panel on feminism and men on Saturday at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the unstoppable Daniel May asked a question about the language that we use to frame such issues and it got me thinking…maybe feminists do need to let go of a bit of the ownership. But if we step back, dudes, will you step forward?
The ER looked crowded with overflow into the hallway of parents and children wearing face masks. Throughout the hospital, I kept running into moms with a mask haphazardly covering their mouth but not their nose and a toddler with his mask around his neck. They didn’t seem sure of where they were going or what the diagnosis would be. Was I in a remake of the Dustin Hoffman movie, Outbreak, from the 90’s? I tried to tell myself not to overreact. Somehow I got a reputation for being dramatic in my family and I’d like to live it down eventually. But this was scary. All over the hospital where I work in Arts in Healthcare, signs explained the new rules that siblings and friends are no longer allowed to visit patients and detailed the symptoms to watch out for that may point to Swine Flu– all an effort to keep exposure down.
A fifteen year old boy came into the hospital on Friday and lost his life there on Saturday due to a severe case of Swine Flu, accompanied by Pneumonia and MRSA. Another patient also faces a dire situation, and many others are being treated for Swine Flu or Influenza A. I worked with a patient with a fever the other day without even thinking about it. Now I’m concerned. The news is grim, between reports from Iran and the rush hour train crash in D.C. today, but the hysteria over the Swine Flu died down not too long after it dragged my friends back from their honeymoon in Mexico. Why was the fear of it nationally newsworthy, but the reality of it hushed? We’ve all heard how the common flu has taken the lives of the elderly, small children, and the immunosuppressed, but would you have known that the Swine Flu could take the life of a teenager or that at least 63 people have already died of it in the U.S.? Perhaps it’s easier to keep washing our hands and staving off panic.
Courtney Martin
- “Don’t Call it a He-Cession” in The American Prospect Online.
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Kimmi
Therapy Thursdays
via Ekwa MO and Melissa Silverstein
Ela Thier, a director and filmmaker for 20 years, wrote this letter about her experience in the film industry as a woman. It’s four pages of pure passion, focused specifically on fundraising for her new project, but it speaks to so much more than simple donation dollars. For example:
After years of learning, practicing, and teaching, after years of query letters, phone calls, meetings, film markets, panels, classes, LA trips, networking, more networking, even more networking, my scripts – those ones that this market reader liked better than the 150 scripts she read that summer – those scripts sit on a shelf. After years of trying and falling and getting up and trying, something finally dawned on me: maybe I’m not the most unlucky bastard that ever lived. Maybe I’m female.
There is no petition to draft. There is no policy to fight. Yet, of the 250 top-grossing films in any given year, 6% are directed by women; of the 50 top-grossing movies each year, roughly 5 star or focus on women. In 80 years of Oscar history, with roughly 250 directors receiving a nomination for best director, 3 nominations went to female directors. No woman director ever received an Oscar.
It would be so much easier if someone would just flat out say it: “You’re not a director. You’re a girl.”
As a screenwriter and aspiring filmmaker with my own taste of the industry, I often fight feelings of defeat and depression when I read statistics like this. It would be simplistic to blame all of the slow movement or rejections in my career on my being a woman; I know it’s more complicated than that. But I do wonder, what if I’d put the name “J. Gandin Le” or “J.G. Le” on the title pages of my scripts instead of “Jennifer”? And I’m a young, white, straight, middle-class woman who’s worked with a legendary filmmaker. I melt into a useless puddle when when I think of the challenges or downright refusals that women of color, transgendered people, lesbians, or poor women must face.
So I give major applause to Ela Thier for resisting that instinct to lose hope, for fighting, for putting her anger and frustration into such eloquent words, and for vowing to work 20 times harder if it means her work will make it into the world.
Read the full letter below the cut.
I just can’t resist Sarah Haskins. She’s feminist. She’s funny. And she’s a vicious critic of stupid advertising.
Did you ever think that you were wasting your time in high school? That it wasn’t the best place for you to spend seven hours a day, five days a week? If you had determined this and you had failing grades to prove that you and high school were not a good fit, would your parents have let you stay home and watch movies all day?
David Gilmour’s book, The Film Club: A Memoir, came out last summer, but when I heard him read some of the final chapter on NPR yesterday, he had me near tears. And no, it wasn’t preggy hormones. Even Douglas McGrath, in his New York Times Book Review, said that the book moved him to tears… more than once.
Courtney Martin
- This Saturday, June 20, Courtney, along with Gloria Feldt, Kristal Brent-Zook, and Deborah Siegel, will hold a conversation on women’s lives, power, entitlement, and empowerment at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum. Click here for all the details.
I am moving.
“Whoa. Montana,” said the verizon wireless dude 10 minutes ago, “So you’re like gonna be living in, like, farmland.”
“And mountains,” I responded.
“No cabs anymore, no people,” he said shaking his head, “I think you’ll miss New York.”
My apartment is empty, save the old white rug, two lawn chairs, an industrial size fan and the blow-up mattress that so many of my friends passing-through have slept on. And of course, my computer. These inconsequential items somehow remind a person that three years have passed, that life has been lived here.
I am sweaty with today’s up and down five floors–lugging, carrying heavy things–…hence the minimal effort in posting today.
Now off to lie on my back in Central Park, to breathe during my last weekend as a resident of this city I love.
I grew these! They were our first attempt at growing vegetables, so we didn’t know that you shouldn’t plant four seeds in one spot. But these are our homegrown mini carrots, and they are beautiful!
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Beauty in a Wicked World is a weekly column by Jennifer Gandin Le. It appears on Wednesdays.
Do not miss Michael May’s (yes, Daniel May’s brother) amazing This American Life, Turncoat, on Brandon Darby, post-Katrina organizer turned FBI informant. A description:
Brandon Darby was a radical activist and one of the founders of the incredibly effective relief organization Common Ground. Michael May reports on how Darby changed from a revolutionary who wanted the overthrow of the U.S. government into an informant working with the FBI against his former radical allies.
It brings up so many critical issues about activism: the “hero complex,” working inside vs. outside the system, violence vs. nonviolence, approaches to leadership–collaborative (slow, but ethical) vs. authoritarian (effective, but isolating), mentorship in the movement etc. etc.
Jennifer Gandin Le
- Jennifer hosts “Beyond Fear: Managing the Psychology of Terror,” the monthly podcast produced by Psychology Beyond Borders. This month, Jennifer interviews Nontombi Naomi Tutu, international peace and human rights activist, and daughter of the Most Reverend Desmond Tutu. Click here to listen to the podcast or click here to hear the podcast in iTunes.
Courtney Martin
- On Saturday, June 20, Courtney, along with Gloria Feldt, Kristal Brent-Zook, and Deborah Siegel, will hold a conversation on women’s lives, power, entitlement, and empowerment at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum. Click here for all the details.
- “The Future of Philanthropy” at The American Prospect Online
Anybody else watching the Tony Awards? Yikes. I had just settled in with some fried zucchini (my husband could be Giada) and said, “Boy, it sure is a lot more relaxing to sit here on the couch and watch the awards than to be a sleep-deprived production assistant.” Flashback to running around, wiggling behind chorus girls to deliver Starbucks and pacing the production trailer, watching the allotted time for the show dwindle in the overly dramatic hands of long speech givers.
I am especially glad to not be backstage tonight, because they are having a sound nightmare. It started in the opening number when the Westside Story gangs were inaudible. Then, it sounded like aliens were descending upon Radio City Hall in the midst of Neil Patrick Harris’s monologue. Several numbers later, when they were just about to start rocking the boat, a stagehand had to run on stage to give the soloist a handheld mic. Outside of sound issues, names were mixed up and tech crew could be seen upstage of a presenter.
