Recently in Culture Category

One of Olafur Eliasson's three New York City waterfalls, this one visible from the Promenade. On display through October 13, 2008. I haven't gotten super close to any of Eliasson's three waterfalls, but any thoughts on this public art project? I want to be able to get closer. I suppose I could always hop on a Circle Line boat. Is it worth it?

To extrapolate from the epigraph (below) chosen for Life Studies, this collection of short stories intends to explore the questions, "What is art?" and "To whom does it belong?" Four stories in, I have yet to find the answers here.
The lives that Susan Vreeland portrays are those that circle the periphery of Western art's great masters--Renoir, Manet, Monet, among others. And despite the characters' often dire circumstances, at least the first few of the collection are perhaps too awash in imagined awe and rarefied nostalgia to allow the reader to answer those questions in truth. Yet moments of beauty do glimmer on the page and, like a moment captured in paint and canvas, live on in the memory. Favorite quotes to come all week.

"The real question is: To whom does the meaning of the art of the past properly belong? To those who can apply it to their own lives, or to a cultural hierarchy of relic specialists?" --John Berger, Ways of Seeing, 1977.

Last night, under the influence of champagne and chocolate, it occurred to those of us at abrooklynlife's New Year's party that 2008 rhymes with ... great ... yeah, so some would consider that a rough night. Others, perhaps, would consider that an indicator of New Year's Eve success. Regardless, in the spirit of eminent future greatness, Subway Reads emerges from the glitter and spangle to greet the cold light of the new year with spectacles and keyboard in hand.
Less ambitiously this year, instead of chronicling the ins and outs of the F train, I'll be exploring the much more modest confines of my bookshelf, though hopefully a few observations from underground will make its way onto the screen as well.

Today, we begin with the one book I received for Christmas:

Women in the Material World

by Faith D'Allusio and Peter Menzel

Arranged alphabetically, Women in the Material World explores the lives of women in countries from Albania, Brazil, and Cuba to Russia, Thailand, the United States, and fourteen other countries all over the globe. This book follows on the heels of the authors' previous project, which documented thirty statistically average families around the world. You can check out their portraits here.

But D'Allusio and Menzel discovered that the stories they had told were predominately male stories, and so revisited many of the profiled families to take a look from the female point of view. This new book is full of life--through conversations, observation, statistics, and of course, photography.

I'll include excerpts from these women's stories here each day of the week.

As Naomi Wolf writes in the foreword, "the beauty on the page is a tribute to the inherent beauty of the subject: the female love, passion, and toil that invisibly undergird human societies everywhere."

Sixty-nine events. Eight hours. The Brooklyn Book Festival is back.

Certainly, borough president Marty Markowitz does enough trumpeting for all of us, but I can't help but do a little extra promotion myself. Most impressive is the broad range of offerings—whether you are a writer, reader, publisher, comic geek, poet, wannabe or just someone who likes festivals, yep, there's probably something you're interested in. Everything is free, even the ticketed events—just pick up tickets an hour before the event.

Kick off the festival on Saturday evening with a free screening in Borough Hall Plaza of Paul Auster's film Smoke.

Put a Poem in Your Pocket

One good reason to get out of bed this rainy Friday: the magic of alliteration.

National Poetry Month winds down this weekend, and to bid a fond farewell, the city of New York has teamed up with a bevy of august organizations to get poetry out into the streets (or, at least into a certain Manhattan park). Bring a poem to the Bryant Park reading room any time today and receive a free book of poetry.  Students can participate in an open mic all afternoon.

Poem in Your Pocket Day
Friday, April 27, 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.
Bryant Park, 40th to 42nd  streets between 5th and 6th avenues

In my pocket today:

Meditation at Lagunitas by Robert Haas

All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that
talking this way, everything desolves: justice
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words. Days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

In honor of the under-employed, Happy Administrative Professionals Day!

Instead of the awkward post-dinner drink with coworkers, most of whom make more money than you do, spend the evening with folks who really care. The Reverend Jen has organized a night of reverence, delight, drunken debauchery, and what's even better--free treats. Relax with free back rubs, makeovers, an open mic, raffle prizes and (she promises) more!

Reverend Jen's 11th Annual Professional Secretaries Day Extravaganza

9:30 p.m. at Mo Pitkin's, 34 Avenue A

$4

(thanks to nonsense nyc for the tip)

Stuff to check out this weekend:

• One of my favorite online shops, Fred Flare, has a pop-up store in Williamsburg for the holidays. It's at 175 N 10th Street, and it's open this Friday through Christmas Eve. [Via FashionGeek]
• Prospect Park's Kate Wollman Rink opens on Thanksgiving from 10 a.m.- 1 p.m., 2 p.m.-6 p.m. and stays open all weekend long. It's $5 admission ($3.50 kids and seniors) and $5.50 skate rental.
• Check out one of Brooklyn Museum's cool exhibits: Ron Mueck's gigantic people, animalistic watercolors by Walton Ford and an Annie Leibovitz retrospective.
• Celebrate a new Bonita location  that's only three G stops away in Fort Greene. [Via Brooklyn Record]
• And reason enough for second helpings of turkey: The F train isn't all screwy--yea for holiday tourist season!

I don't click over to the Brooklyn-based Design*Sponge as often as I like (partially because I like much of what I see over there, and my apartment is only so big). On Friday, a friend sent me a link to this "bittersweet" note card series that says such witty things as "you just suck the life out of me" or, put more simply, "suck it." Perfect way to start a Monday, I say.