I am naturally organized. It’s one of my superpowers.
As a toddler, my parents once found me methodically pulling clean diapers out of their box, lining them up along the wall in the hallway, and then placing all of my stuffed animals in a diaper, one by one. As a pre-teen, I would empty my big container of collected pennies and line them up on the carpet in order of their year. Now, I take great satisfaction in a well-constructed Excel spreadsheet, and even my writing talismans on my desk-side table sit in a specific arrangement. I moderate Crucial Minutiae’s comments without second thought, and took deep satisfaction from re-organizing the weekly columns.
When I started meeting professional writers in my early 20s, I noticed that many of them, especially the most commercially successful ones, were naturally disorganized. They are brilliant writers and thinkers who, when they go deep into the writing process, seem to lose all sense of their physical world.
Talk about 180 degrees from my enraged post on Sunday! These tiny items are more adorable than beautiful, but the human imagination involved in making them is very much so. They’re Tiny Knitted Things, designed and made by Anna Hrachovec, a knitter who lives in New York.
My favorites are the bats; since moving to Austin, I’ve become quite fond of stuffed toy bats.
Ahhh! Kawaii!!!
—– Beauty in a Wicked World is a weekly column by Jennifer Gandin Le. It appears on Wednesdays.
9/9/09, huh? It’s an exciting day! It marks the last set of repeating, single-digit dates that we’ll see for almost a century (until January 1, 2101), and the Remastered Beatles catalog, Beatles Rock Band, and the new Apple iPod are all being released today.
But my favorite celebration today is my third wedding anniversary with the extraordinary Christopher Gandin Le. Suicide prevention expert, exquisite photographer (still and motion pictures), beloved friend, and the best damn husband and partner I could ever desire.
For our anniversary, he gave me the gift of music from one of my favorite artists: Erin McKeown. Since I first heard Distillation 9 years ago, I have loved this woman’s music, and have had a total crush on her as well. She’s excruciatingly talented across a wide variety of instruments and musical styles, her lyrics are poetic, her style is fantastic (check those Fluevogs!), and her live show is always fabulous. Oh, and she’s only 31; she’s been making great music since she was in college.
Her newest album, Hundreds of Lions, comes out this October on Righteous Babe records, and to raise funds for this self-financed album, she launched a very cool endeavor this summer.
I’ve never seen anyone tell a story in this medium. I am so impressed by human ingenuity. Watching this skillful artist is worth 8 minutes of your life.
edited to change “the Ukraine” to the correct “Ukraine.” Thank you, reader Anne!
—– Beauty in a Wicked World is a weekly column by Jennifer Gandin Le. It appears on Wednesdays.
It’s been a busy week. From writing and shooting a three-minute PSA for a film competition to battling squash vine borers in our garden, almost every waking minute has been accounted for.
This afternoon, looking for writing practice prompts, I discovered a quick way to find visual inspiration: the Flickr search engine. I just searched for “blue” in everyone’s uploads on Flickr, and got pages and pages of beautiful images, from barn walls to butterflies. I’ve also searched for “kitten,” “peace,” “feta,” and “America.” Try it, and see how long it takes you to find an image that moves you.
—– Beauty in a Wicked World is a weekly column by Jennifer Gandin Le. It appears on Wednesdays.
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.
On Monday, President Obama officially proclaimed June 2009 as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Month. This made my jaw drop and my heart soar. Yes, there is much more work to be done to truly “turn back discrimination and prejudice everywhere it exists,” as Obama asks Americans to do. But formal acknowledgments are a big deal in our country, and this is definitely an important first.
~ ~ ~
On a fluffier note, check out this re-recording of “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” with the vocalist singing/narrating what’s actually happening in the video (which is, by the way, completely creepy). Clever and hilarious!
—– Beauty in a Wicked World is a weekly column by Jennifer Gandin Le. It appears on Wednesdays.
With all due respect for the original intentions of this holiday, I’d like to draw attention to the world’s loss of different type of hero earlier this month. Augusto Boal was a chemist from Rio de Janeiro, who began studying theatre in the midst of his research at Columbia University and wrote and directed his first play in New York in 1955. Boal returned to Brazil the next year, where he began creating what he called Newspaper Theatre– political shows packed with audience engagement, performed in the countryside for the purpose of addressing local problems. By 1971, Brazil’s military dictatorship began to see Boal’s theatrical activities as a threat. They imprisoned and tortured him for three months.
Boal complained of knee pain at a plush hotel in Hollywood, but then laughed and told me that he wasn’t sure if it was from the torture or because he was in his 70s. His smile was contagious. His bravery unimaginable. This particular workshop, led by Augusto Boal and his son Julian, was not only on Theatre of the Oppressed (his first book and life’s work) but also on Legislative Theatre. Imagine if before voting, Congress watched a short play about the possible effects of the law they are about to pass. Now imagine Congressmen getting up on stage to explore other outcomes and to express their ideas. Twenty laws were passed this way in Rio De Janeiro when Boal was a City Councilman.
Another video landed for my column this week, this one about a promise made on YouTube that exploded into playful creativity amongst a group of strangers.
Here’s the video that started it all, from writer Amy Krouse Rosenthal. It’s strangely touching to me, the gathering of big and small things that she’s made. I’ve been in a funk this week where all I can concentrate on are the things I haven’t made. It gave me perspective to see “this mess” nestled in with “this boy” and “this book” as things that she’s made. It all counts. It’s all part of life.
—– Beauty in a Wicked World is a weekly column by Jennifer Gandin Le. It appears on Wednesdays.
I got the tip on this clever, well-shot short film via Facebook. “Validation” is a fable about the magic of free parking, starring TJ Thyne (on “Bones”) and Vicki Davis, and directed and written by Kurt Kuenne (“Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father”). Spending 16 minutes watching this film is highly preferable to reading panic-bloated coverage about the swine flu, I promise.
—– Beauty in a Wicked World is a weekly column by Jennifer Gandin Le. It appears on Wednesdays.
As more information about the torture memos becomes public this week, it’s important to note that there is also a thrilling news story related, in a way, to torture. Lynn Nottage has won the Pulitzer Prize for her play Ruined, a story about women in the Congo who have been systemically raped and tortured. I haven’t had the privilege of seeing the play, but everyone in the Mama Gena’s School of Womanly Arts has been buzzing about this play for months, especially about the way it takes a hard look at something awful, yet leaves the audience with great catharsis and hope.
Melissa Silverstein at Women & Hollywood has a great write-up about why awards matter, for the individual artist being honored and for the larger community of women and people of color who are making great work.
Thank you, Ms. Nottage, for creating more space for future artists, for bringing Americans’ attention to horrors we must face as fellow human beings, and for using the powerful medium of live performance to convey hope even in the middle of hopelessness.
So, what’s the appropriate greeting today: “Happy April Fools’”? I hope you haven’t been tricked too severely. (My long-time favorite resource for verifying questionable information is Snopes.com, by the way. For future reference.)
I’ve been thinking about fools and sacred clowns today, appropriately enough. One of the movies I saw at SXSW was The Yes Men Fix The World, a documentary about the culture jamming activists called the Yes Men. This group uses inventive mischief and deceit to expose the wrongdoing of powerful corporations and governmental offices. The movie features Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno, but they’re only two members of the larger group.
The Yes Men have created politically-charged hijinks like:
At an awards luncheon, you expect familiar faces, mediocre food, and thank you speeches. Everything proceeded as foreseen at the Buffalo Art Council’s Art Awards, including technical hiccoughs in the video presentations. That is– until the founder of the Art Voice stood at the podium to collect his award. His speech was scathing.
“The county executive isn’t even here, and Mayor Brown walked out forty minutes ago. What does that tell you? The county has cut funding for the arts and there’s no city funding at all. Yet there’s money for the Bills and money for street and highway projects…”
Jamie Moses talked of growing up in Greenwich Village, the inspiration for Jane Jacobs’ book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, where the arts and artists thrive. The inspiration for his Village Voice- like paper? The “incredible population of talented artists, actors, musicians, and writers” he saw working in Buffalo, NY.
The punk-rockery adolescent guy and I had about 8 seconds to share in the elevator of the cavernous New York Public Library. His forearm was covered in lines that connected and squiggled, but squiggled with some sort of purpose.
I couldn’t resist.
“Excuse me?” I asked.
He looked up, semi-stunned. “Yes?”
“Is that a tattoo of a landscape?” I asked smiling and nodding at his arm, then thought to myself, What the hell did you just ask him? A landscape? What does that even mean? What kind of lame, unarticulated question is that?
“Kind of,” he said with a shy grin, “It’s the Mississippi River system.” And he twisted his pale forearm to show me how the tattoo wrapped around.
“It’s beautiful. Is that where you’re from, Mississippi?”
Though I enjoyed all of them, my favorite was 500 Days of Summer, a surprising and funny not-love story, directed by Marc Webb, written by Scott Neustadter & Michael H. Weber, and featuring Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt.
I won’t lie; much of my enjoyment of the movie came from the pleasure of his (completely surprising to me) charm and sexy handsomeness. Also, his karaoke version of “Here Comes Your Man” was super-hot. (What can I say? I’m a sucker for the Pixies.) Also, we share the same initials, which I only realized this because the young women behind me in line kept startling me by talking about “JGL” this and “JGL” that, and I kept thinking they were reading my mind somehow. It finally dawned on me that they were talking about the actor in kind-of code.
But I also enjoyed the movie because it was well-told, beautifully shot, honest romantic comedy that tells you right from the start that it isn’t a love story. The filmmakers and lead actors were on hand to answer questions after the screening, and, it being a SXSW audience of filmmakers (aspiring and current), most of the questions were for the director and writers.
The writers both expressed how lucky they felt to have found a director who was on the same wavelength as they were, who took their unusually structured and wacky script and ran with it in the direction they’d wanted. I want exactly that for my movie — I want to stand on a stage in front of an enamored audience, expressing gratitude for my film’s director and standing in awe of how well the movie turned out, even better than my wildest dreams. And I want my movie to star two really hot guys.
A great way to end a film festival, I’d say.
—– Beauty in a Wicked World is a weekly column by Jennifer Gandin Le. It appears on Wednesdays, with a special daily edition during the SXSW Film Festival.
A surprise (to me) hit at the 2008 SXSW film festival was veteran actor Jeffrey Tambor’s acting workshop, a two-hour class for those interested in bridging the gap between actor and director. I missed it, but as soon as it was over, a palpable buzz shot through the crowds at the Austin Convention Center.
So this afternoon, after an energizing and encouraging pre-production mentor session, I slipped into the acting workshop to see what was the big deal.
Everyone was right. Jeffrey Tambor’s workshop was dazzling and lucid, like light through a diamond. His basic goal is to help artists burn through their fear and self-doubt so they can give their talents to the world, which needs them so desperately.
There is no bullshit about this man. He led two actors through a scene rehearsal and helped them crack open. As audience members asked questions, he put his attention fully on each questioner, touching the heart of their creative talents and dreams with frank yet sensitive observations that were, in every case, absolutely accurate.
Much of what he said mirrored the work I’ve encountered through the School of Womanly Arts or The Artist’s Way, but it was refreshing to hear it from a masculine point of view.
He gave us some real gems this afternoon, but my favorite was that whatever teacher(s) you choose, they should say, “You know what you’re doing,” rather than “Do exactly what I did.” Don’t be an acolyte; don’t stay too long.
He ended his workshop with urgent words: “Go to work! The world needs your voice!” His words echoed one of my favorite lines from a play, from the end of Angels in America: “You are fabulous, each and every one, and I bless you. More life. The great work begins.”
Begin.
—– Beauty in a Wicked World is a weekly column by Jennifer Gandin Le. It appears on Wednesdays, with a special daily edition during the SXSW Film Festival.
I’ve been reflecting on perspective– how we have it, how we don’t, how it can only funnel through our one unique lens. So, I dug up this piece of writing from my time in New Zealand, when I modeled for an art class to stay warm in the wet cold of a southern hemisphere winter, and to make some extra cash. My house had no heating; the art studio had two space heaters.
Why did each of these artists draw me as a version of themselves? What does that say about us, as observers of the world?
13/14 Vingettes
For the long foggy winter months in the town of Dunedin, a group of artists shared three hours every Monday night in a small tattered room with two space heaters, an unlimited amount of red paint, cups of hot tea, and one nude model.
***
His body droops in an oversized green t-shirt that says HOT AFRICA, MAN. He is barely a man, he is far from Africa, and nothing about his hometown is hot. Olly is sixteen with big eyes, freckles, and a love for opposite charcoal shading. His seriousness is endearing. He is applying to art school. When his piece is not working for him, when he has ruined it, when he cannot isolate an angle, when he cannot invoke the feeling of the pose, he pouts. His pout is discreet, but I know it when I see him move from standing to sitting. (more…)
I am often accused, by one person in particular, of hating white people.
I do not hate white people.
It’s true, I ask questions, complain, and react to things in ways that makes this one person in particular think that I hate white people. But I don’t.
Walked into an Italian restaurant. Sat down at a table with my boyfriend and his parents. Noticed the long, sleek, gray hair of the woman sitting next to us. Looked a little closer. Watched her profile as she turned to beckon the waiter. Elegant. Sexy. Composed. How is it that, in a city of 8 million people, I have come to an arm’s length away from my favorite poet? The one whose poetry inspired me, in highschool, to look for meaning in blowing milk bubbles, the arch of an eyebrow, or the way a postcard’s edge crumples? And yet, there she was–normal, eating a saucy meat dish, conversing with a young man, itching her wrist, sipping, occasionally, on a glass of white wine. Star struck isn’t the right phrase. I had seen her before at poetry readings. I was awed, instead, to see the poet-in-the-flesh, who had birthed all of those public poems, living her private life and relishing dinner on Sunday night with a friend. How had she done it all? The moment reminded me of what the New Yorker recently wrote about John Updike:
“As well as any writer ever has, he fulfilled Virginia Woolf’s dictum that the writer’s job is to get himself or herself expressed without impediments–to do so as Shakespeare and Jane Austen did, without hate or pause or protest or obvious special pleading or the thousand other ills that the embattled writer is heir to.”
My good friend, and yoga teacher, Sarah Court, was recently featured in a New York Times article by Abby Ellin called The Enlightened Path, With A Rubber Duck. Sarah is a serious and passionate yoga teacher who knows how to laugh and play and poke fun a little. Check out her Yoga Thug videos as proof. Today, she’s ON THE COUCH WITH KIMMI:
9/9/09, huh? It’s an exciting day! It marks the last set of repeating, single-digit dates that we’ll see for almost a century (until January 1, 2101), and the Remastered Beatles catalog, Beatles Rock Band, and the new Apple iPod are all being released today.
As more information about the torture memos becomes public this week, it’s important to note that there is also a thrilling news story related, in a way, to torture. 
At an awards luncheon, you expect familiar faces, mediocre food, and thank you speeches. Everything proceeded as foreseen at the Buffalo Art Council’s Art Awards, including technical hiccoughs in the video presentations. That is– until the founder of the 
The punk-rockery adolescent guy and I had about 8 seconds to share in the elevator of the cavernous New York Public Library. His forearm was covered in lines that connected and squiggled, but squiggled with some sort of purpose.
Though I enjoyed all of them, my favorite was 
