You are currently browsing the Crucial Minutiae weblog archives for January, 2009.
Photographer Jonas Bendiksen’s exhibition, The Places We Live, is on view at New York’s ICP until this Saturday, but the website is worth viewing if you don’t live near NYC or can’t make it. Bendiksen’s camera documents 16 homes in four different slums throughout the world: Caracas, Venezuela; Mumbai, India; Nairobi, Kenya; and Jakarta, Indonesia. As the site notes, for 2008, for the first time, more of humanity is living in urban areas than rural ones, and more than a third of us citydwellers have homes in the slums. They are the fastest growing segment of urban life, existing at the edge of both the physical city and our understanding.
Check out CM homie, Wyatt Cenac (of The Daily Show), in this awesome film, showing as of today at the IFC in New York. A.O. Scott gave it a great review today.
_____
Kimmi
Therapy Thursdays
I feel kind of like a die-hard Red Sox fan after the 2004 World Series–excited that my team won, but thrown off by the reversal of my “underdog” status.
If you were ordering me as a drink in a bar, you’d ask for confused straight up with a twist of happiness.
These are metaphors, of course.
“Winning the World Series” = $150 BILLION in education spending in Obama’s new stimulus plan
“Dire Hard Pre-2004 Red Sox Fan” = grad student specializing in issues of educational equity
“Confused Straight Up w/a Twist of Happiness” = my state of mind
Just as the recession was threatening to limit spending on education–especially on financial aid for college students–the Obama administration goes ahead and announces that it will MORE THAN DOUBLE THE CURRENT DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION BUDGET.
Schools, from pre-K through college, are getting everything but the kitchen sink!
Check out this awesome summary by future freelance juggernaut Tara Rose to our panel last week. An excerpt:
So my partner and a friend of ours- all of us self-described writers- filed into the 92Y in Tribeca, an awesome new community center that offers a ton of workshops and artsy events that immediately spoke to my soul. The panelists featured were several young NY writers, Kimmi Auerbach, Kate Torgovnick , Theo Gangi , Joie Jager-Hyman , and of course, Courtney Martin. They are all part of a writers group that meets every other week for 3 hours of wine, food, and critique- my kind of party. Job-woes had me desperate for answers, and the panel provided. It was like waking up.
Ahhhhhh! So awesome. Her take-aways after the jump.
So I’m at the beginning of a long book project, and for the first time I’m having to deal with a large number of files on my computer in some sort of systematic way, keeping track of the little, random text files I write late at night as well as longer pieces I keep coming back to and working on in a way that resembles diligence. There’s also a lot of material that I’ve written over the last few years as this project has been brewing, scattered over several computers and operating systems, tucked into folders and sub-folders, often in places that don’t make sense.
I just started re-reading Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, and it starts off with her going back to something she wrote shortly after her husband’s sudden death:
Life changes fast.
Life changes in the instant.
You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
The question of self-pity.
Read more…
Courtney, Kate, Kimmi, Theo, and Joie
- Ron at GalleyCat wrote about the Crucial Minutiae panel at the 92nd Street Y in Tribeca last week. Check the link for his highlights of the panel!
Courtney Martin
- “What Obama owes his young legions” in Newsday
Kate Torgovnick
- Tonight, Kate will be speaking at an American Society of Magazine Editors conference about the process of writing a book while being the editor of a magazine. She’ll be joining magazine mega-stars Gary Belsky (editor-in-chief of ESPN: The Magazine) and Kate White (editor-in-chief of Cosmpolitan). Download the registration form here.
- “Make Money” in Time Out New York
It’s weird to walk into a movie knowing how it’s going to end.
In general, I avoid the biopic because mid-movie I will inevitably start thinking about which scenes actually happened and which ones were manufactured to move the silver screen version of things along. Occasionally, I see a What’s Love Got to Do With It, where the acting is so good it actually doesn’t matter which parts of the story are true.
Fall 1993. Howard University Homecoming. In the dorm room of a friend of my friend C. I first heard Biggie Smalls’ “Party and Bullshit.”
Who. Is. That?
None of us knew then that B.I.G. would become Notorious, but I did leave DC with a tape of “P&B” on repeat.
So with early nineties nostalgia all over it, I facebooked my old-school, college crew (yes, Carman 7!) and planned a field trip to a Saturday night showing of Notorious.
I have been spending time with prairie dogs in Terry Tempest Williams’ new book “Finding Beauty in a Broken World.” Pantheon Books got it right linking this pub date to our sparkling but treacherous new year. At the close of President Obama’s inauguration week, I offer some snippets of the first half of Williams’ book. Pulling bits and pieces from a work can be misleading, but in this case, snippets are appropriate because Williams’ theme is mosaic.
People talk about medium. What is your medium?
The prairie dog lives because of community.
John Steinbeck created an allegory, a myth about our relationship to the American landscape and what it means to find home.
We are eroding and evolving, at once.
The Navajo elders objected, insisting, “If you kill all the prairie dogs, there will be no one to cry for the rain.”
I believe in prairie dogs. I hear the echo of Elizabeth Costello’s voice, “I believe in what does not bother to believe in me.”
A rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections. Perhaps prairie dogs are not a keystone species but a rhizome species. Can one be a rhizome artist?
The degree of our awareness is the degree of our aliveness.
We are all blood and bones, muscles and spirit.
What other species now require of us is our attention. Otherwise, we are entering a narrative of disappearing intelligences.
She said, “Make your brother a bridge of bones.”
Dear Newscasters Everywhere,
Please run your language by someone else before saying it on air. Especially if you’re going to talk about “fisting” in reference to the President and his wife without having a really reliable source. You’ll thank me later.
Thank you,
Jennifer
via advodude
____
Kimmi
Therapy Thursdays
Thanks to everyone who came out for the panel last night, asked great questions, bought books, and had a great exchange (and a few beers) afterward! We’ll keep you posted on our next event.
I’m not talking about sports teams. I’m talking men and women. A fascinating description of gender on the streets came up in my last session at the homeless shelter. A man was describing the culture around the burning barrel, the community there. “It’s an oath,” he said, that men take. “I got your back. You got mine.” At this point, the woman I mentioned before compared the men who hang around the barrel to a pack of wolves.
“Do the women have a place to meet?”
“No.” She shook her head. “We’re panthers.”
Although Jewish, I am not a staunch defender of Israel. Still, the column in the NYTimes today by Muammar Qaddafi (yes that Muammar Qaddafi) on a One-State solution to Israel and Palestine strikes me as sinister, for reasons that will not be clear until after the jump. Read the whole op-ed here.
In absolute terms, the two movements must remain in perpetual war or a compromise must be reached. The compromise is one state for all, an “Isratine” that would allow the people in each party to feel that they live in all of the disputed land and they are not deprived of any one part of it.
I’ve heard from my ex-pat and non-American friends that much of the rest of the world thinks that America is a place of extremes. We’re depicted as either obese, SUV-driving warmongers or tanorexic, Hollywood-types jogging over to the Scientology Center. 
Obviously, these are simplistic caricatures of American culture–but you have to admit that we do tend towards the black or white.
George “axis of evil” Bush gave us villains like Osama Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and Dick Cheney. It was only a matter or time before a (feminist) superhero like President Obama would come and save us.
Even so, he can’t do it alone. The greatest man ever seems to recognize greatness in someone else–Marian Robinson, aka the “first granny,” who will be bunking in the White House with Sasha, Malia and the gang. As someone who spent a lot of time with grandparents growing up, I really admire the Obamas’ ability to recognize granny greatness.
In celebration of the Inauguration, “Oh Hells Yeah, We Did!” an Obama t-shirt photo essay by the one and only Ms. Robyn Twomey.
What can I say? Congratulations to every door knocker, phone banker, street marcher, and wide-eyed believer across this renewed nation, and across the world. Yes we did.
In his own words:
We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things. The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea, passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.
“Down, down, down!” Trent yelled.
The snow cat had turned back up the slope, its lights pointing in our direction. Trent and I dropped flat into a small depression, our bodies hopefully obscured by the shadows. The snow was cold and hard, but I was wearing plenty of padding. We were at the top of Vail Mountain at night, and it was pitch black save for the snow cats grooming the ski slopes for the next day. We looked around for our third, but Matt’s tall, skinny shape was nowhere to be found.
The lights passed us over. “Go!” Trent cried. In the crunching snow at a full sprint, we covered the last open expanse, then slid baseball style down to the catwalk, fully out of view. Matt reappeared a moment later, clutching a square of folded black plastic to his chest. “I dropped my trash bag,” he explained.
The sledding we were about to do was not smart, legal, or safe. In fact, we were probably the stupidest people on Vail Mountain that night. But that’s what made it great.
Check out this awesome video that some enterprising friends made last year.
