As you’ve probably noticed, Crucial Minutiae has been silent for the last month. While all of us enjoyed writing together in this space for almost three years, this site has officially closed up shop.
But we’re not going away! Six of are currently incubating a Crucial Minutiae spin-off, and we will launch this new site sometime in March. We’ll announce the new blog here, then after a few weeks, this site will automatically redirect to that new space.
We’re already blogging in that space to kick things off — by the time we launch, you’ll have 100 new things to read, so keep us on your RSS feed until then!
Special thanks to Ethan Todras-Whitehill, the mastermind behind Crucial Minutiae, who suggested that our writers’ group try blogging three years ago. Our initial goal of Crucial Minutiae was for the blog to find its own tone and audience, and through its 1,000+ posts, it’s done exactly that.
And thank you to all of our readers since 2007 — we hope you’ll check out our new blog next month and bring the same insightful comments and discussion that you brought to Crucial Minutiae!
I finally got back to work as an Artist (Writer) in Residence at the children’s hospital last week. My warm-up was an art project at a tree lighting ceremony for chronically ill kids. It went beautifully, but when I got home and discovered I just missed tucking my baby into bed, I was a wreck. All I could think was, how do moms do this? How did my mom do this? Late that night I was as actually happy to wake up at 1 and 4 and 6 a.m. to feed and snuggle my little one. I didn’t know how I was going to leave her for eight hours that day and worried over whether or not I’d left enough milk for her. This must be the Italian mama in me. You know the ones who cook the ten course meal and wonder if that’s enough. In any case, getting back into the swing of things went more smoothly than I expected. It helped that the other artist and dancer I worked with are amazing and that one of the first patients I met said she loved, loved, loved Shakespeare. What I didn’t expect was how much it would affect me to see unwell babies and their parents.
A few weeks ago, I created the word, mom-athy. Now I feel that its definition needs to be expanded. Evidently this sort of deep empathy extends not only to your own ailing child, but also to those of total strangers. You don’t usually take an infant to the hospital unless something is very wrong, so you can imagine the condition of the babies I saw when I first walked through the automatic doors.
Our very own Courtney Martin is up for Next Great American Pundit at the Washington Post, and she would love your vote before tomorrow (Monday, Nov. 9) at 3pm EST!
Courtney’s blurb about her latest entry in the contest:
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.
“Small Changes” by Jennifer and Christopher Gandin Le!!
Tonight was the Intelligent Use of Water Film Competition Screening and Awards ceremony, held at the Getty Center in Los Angeles. It was thrilling to see our work on a big screen and to hear the audience’s reaction. And it was even more thrilling to receive the Jury Prize, complete with big check and all!
Tuesday morning was the first time I left a twenty foot radius from my infant’s side. She’s still reticent to accept a bottle after a week of coaxing, but it was time for me to get back to teaching my Playwriting class. I had to convince myself that she would survive the two hours away from her primary food source while in the care of her doting dad. So, I borrowed Joe’s car and headed to the university, listening to NPR for the first time in over a month. A soldier was talking about the blog he kept in Afghanistan. He said that the Army offers medicine for depression, sleeplessness and anxiety, but that he found writing to be better than any drug.
Then, bam. I was rear-ended just a block from the university. Since this was the first time I was outside of the twenty-foot-from-infant radius, it was also the first time I had been in a car without her since she was born. My mind raced from oh my god I can’t believe that just happened to what if she were in the car with me? Would she be hurt? And what if this had happened, and she were in the car, and it was that first day or two of parenting when I kept buckling her legs through the arm straps? What then? Or what if this accident were worse, and something happened to me, and she can’t drink from a bottle?
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.
This week, I’m sharing my own work, because I’m so dang proud of it. Chris & I, along with our incredibly talented Austin-area friends, created this 2 minute water conservation PSA in response to RainBird’s “Intelligent Use of Water” film contest. Austin is in the middle of the worst drought in 50 years, and last week, officials announced even tighter water restrictions, so this awareness-raising contest comes at a crucial time.
We had a great time making this film, and I couldn’t be more pleased with how it turned out. Enjoy!
Natalie Goldberg’s most recent book, Old Friend from Far Away, came out in 2007, but I didn’t discover it until earlier this year, when I had the privilege of hearing her at an Austin synagogue. This book is focused on the practice of writing memoir, and is as rich as all of her other books on writing.
One chapter is titled “Practice Notebook.” In it, she suggests keeping a small separate notebook where you write a brief note about your practice every single day. You write down the date, whether or not you practiced, and any other short notes about the day’s practice. The idea is to be aware of your writing practice, rather than feel ashamed or derailed by the days that you don’t write. It’s all part of the practice. She says, “This act of noting makes your writing–or not writing–conscious. It plants a seed; you stay connected.”
I’m now keeping a practice notebook for my writing, and, indeed, I feel the ways that this kind observing of myself has started to transform the evil, self-judgmental voices in my head that crop up when I skip a day.
This style of radical self-acceptance and awareness is useful beyond writing practice, too. I’m using it to observe myself around other habits that I’d like to change, and it’s such a relief to see the habits clearly written on the page, rather than seeping like mist through the dangerous regions of my mind.
What places in your life could use this kind of loving, non-judgmental attention?
—– 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.
Dear Scott Neustadter, Michael H. Weber, Marc Webb, Eric Steelberg, the producers, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Zooey Deschanel, and everyone else involved in making the movie (500) Days of Summer,
I’ve been subconsciously writing this letter for four months, since I first saw your movie at SXSW. I wrote on this site about my screening experience, but looking back, my post seems flippant and doesn’t indicate the depth to which your story delighted me. My husband wasn’t with me at the SXSW screening, which was unfortunate, because as soon as the credits rolled, I knew he would see himself on that screen. (As will many, many men my age.) Last night, I took him to see the movie at another screening in town.
I loved the movie again, maybe even more this time. You have created a masterful film that captures countless desperately honest moments. It was a visceral pleasure to watch. And I want to articulate some of the reasons why it has touched me so significantly.
I’ll cut here so I can spill lots of spoilers below. (Crucial Minutiae readers, if you’re going to see this movie, bookmark this post and come back once you’ve seen it. I don’t want to ruin your viewing experience.)
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.
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.
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.
There’s a free party happening on the East River in Manhattan today from 3pm-7pm, and it celebrates the anniversary of Loving v. Virginia (1967), the Supreme Court decision that legalized interracial marriage in the U.S.
DJ Dhundee and DJ Tyler Askew will be spinning, there’s free BBQ all day long, and there’s free beer for the 1st hour. It’s at Solar 1, on the East River Waterfront at East 23rd St, NYC.
Go soak up some of the beautiful day in the company of beautiful, happy people and families!
This new indie movie is definitely worth seeing. Imagine the Breakfast Club set in Christa McAuliffe’s New Hampshire high school. She was the teacher aboard the Challenger space shuttle that went down in January of 1986. Only we never see her or the crash. Instead, we watch people collide and try to assess the damage. And finally, a papier-mache shuttle crashes to the ground on the high school’s auditorium stage.
Unlike other teenage angst movies that wallow, this one is seen through the eyes of a British, middle-aged reporter (played by Steve Coogan) and is so quirky that you’re almost never prepared for what comes next. With its calculated tone and pace, the movie teaches you how to watch it– be patient, don’t grab at storylines, don’t expect answers– and then it stays with you after you leave.
The 1908-1909 Broadway season featured roughly 140 productions and 12.8% of them were by women. 100 years later, of all the shows at major New York theaters this year, only 12.6% were by women. This isn’t representative of the number of plays being written by my gender. At least 40% of scripts submitted to professional theaters are written by women.
So if I can support the work of a female playwright, I will. Unfortunately, God of Carnage was already sold out and I was facing an impatient woman at the TKTS window. I didn’t think I wanted to see Reasons to Be Pretty. In spite of all the accolades garnered by In the Company of Men and Shape of Things, I’ve never been a fan of Neil LaBute’s. I may even have called his work misogynistic (on a regular basis). But there I was in the Plays Only ticket line, and I had been promised that this LaBute play was different. It was.
I spent most of the fall and winter helping create an online tarot game for myLifetime. I worked closely with Eve Lavendier, a super positive and passionate project lead over at Lifetime, and Lucy Blackwell, an awesome graphic designer, as you can see below. I directed the designs and wrote the copy, and think it turned out really cool. Shuffle the deck and let me know what you think!
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.
The Script Frenzy is over. For those of you who never knew that it began, it was a month-long challenge to writers around the world. 30 days, 100 pages of scripted material (a screenplay, stageplay, television script). Every writer who successfully uploaded 30 pages on April 30th was instantly named a winner. There were 1,273 of them, and no, I was not among them. I am not so much surprised by my failure (although Me from a few years ago probably would be), as I am by the way in which this venture tested my ethics.
My high horse had to be parked in the giant barn for a couple of days as I sweated out the question of whether or not to sneak across the finish line. I rode around all semester braying at my students for using Spark Notes and including text verbatim from Wikipedia on their exams and in their papers. Then, there I was, plotting not how to get from Act 2 to Act 3, but how to get from page 92 to 100 without writing 8 more pages. I had all the excuses: two jobs, a conference to attend, a visit from friends, a wedding to be in, and even a flu that sent me to the hospital. But as much as excuses have to do with deadlines, they should have nothing to do with ethics.
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.
Dear Scott Neustadter, Michael H. Weber, Marc Webb, Eric Steelberg, the producers, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Zooey Deschanel, and everyone else involved in making the movie 
This new indie movie is definitely worth seeing. Imagine the Breakfast Club set in Christa McAuliffe’s New Hampshire high school. She was the teacher aboard the Challenger space shuttle that went down in January of 1986. Only we never see her or the crash. Instead, we watch people collide and try to assess the damage. And finally, a papier-mache shuttle crashes to the ground on the high school’s auditorium stage. 
The 1908-1909 Broadway season featured roughly 140 productions and 12.8% of them were by women. 100 years later, of all the shows at major New York theaters this year, only 