Filip Noterdaeme, my art lecturer, who is also the artist, activist, educator and director of HoMu, the Homeless Museum of Art, took me for tea to Bouley Bakery in Tribeca this past Wednesday. We bought our coffees and our mini pastries (although we eyed those illegal Ispahans that Bouley still carries despite being accused of copying them from some other baker-genius) and were forced to go downstairs and take them in between a raw fish counter and a wine cellar. It was a most bizarre place.
Filip told me about his upcoming performance art project (although he assures me that this is not a performance, "I'm serious about it," he says): "I want to heal the art world one person at a time -- weather permitting."
Filip will take to the streets of Manhattan this Spring with his booth that resembles the one that Lucy uses in Charlie Brown. It is labeled "The Homeless Museum of Art -- The Director is IN" and indeed you will find Noterdaeme there to give counseling sessions to the willing.
Filip told me that he was at his least creative when he was doing yoga and therapy, but he didn't discount therapy the way Rilke does. He says it's about controlled madness. For more info go to www.homu.com
Saturday, February 23, 2008
On Letting Go
How is a magazine editor supposed to deal with the below? One might say that the three rules of magazine editing are judging, controlling (managing), and being on trend (or right).
"There are only three things you need to let go of:
judging, controlling, and being right.
Release these three and you will have the whole mind
and twinkly heart of a child. It really is that simple."
-Hugh Prather, The Little Book of Letting Go
"There are only three things you need to let go of:
judging, controlling, and being right.
Release these three and you will have the whole mind
and twinkly heart of a child. It really is that simple."
-Hugh Prather, The Little Book of Letting Go
Friday, February 22, 2008
Peter Akinti, Debut Author
I met Peter Akinti in September 2007 at the Brooklyn Book Festival. Days later we had a drink in Harlem before he got onto a bus headed to Jena, Louisiana to see what the race riots were all about. He still says he wishes I'd gotten on that bus with him... And I still laugh at the thought of a white South African being anything other than problematic on that particular journey.
Akinti began his novel Forest Gate just before we met. It has nothing to do with Jena, but everything to do with race -- this time though it's race issues in the U.K that are looked at. In early January this year, it was acquired by Jonathan Cape. It will be published in a year from now. Look out for this new voice.
http://www.thebookseller.com/news/53274-teen-suicide-novel-to-cape.html
Akinti began his novel Forest Gate just before we met. It has nothing to do with Jena, but everything to do with race -- this time though it's race issues in the U.K that are looked at. In early January this year, it was acquired by Jonathan Cape. It will be published in a year from now. Look out for this new voice.
http://www.thebookseller.com/news/53274-teen-suicide-novel-to-cape.html
Brent Stirton, Photographer
Brent Stirton, the great love of my twenties, recently won 1st prize Contemporary Issues Singles at the 2007 World Press Photo Awards for his photos of the evacuation of dead Mountain Gorillas discovered in Virunga National Park in Eastern Congo. The story broke in August last year in Newsweek. Take a look at the winning photograph and more of Stirton's phenomenal work at http://www.brentstirton.com/feature-gorillas.php
Reading Like a Writer
I am reading Francine Prose's book Reading Like a Writer. I am fascinated by people who have surnames that foreshadow their future career. I once heard about a guy who had a surname that portended his bisexuality: Waddilove.
But that's not why I am reading Prose's excellent book. I am studying sentence structure. And she has made that very, very simple.
I like what she says here: "You will do yourself a disservice if you confine your reading to the rising star whose six-figure, two-book contract might seem to indicate where your own work should be heading. I'm not saying you shouldn't read such writers, some of whom are excellent and deserving of celebrity. I'm only pointing out that they represent the dot at the end of the long, glorious, complex sentence in which literature has been written."
But that's not why I am reading Prose's excellent book. I am studying sentence structure. And she has made that very, very simple.
I like what she says here: "You will do yourself a disservice if you confine your reading to the rising star whose six-figure, two-book contract might seem to indicate where your own work should be heading. I'm not saying you shouldn't read such writers, some of whom are excellent and deserving of celebrity. I'm only pointing out that they represent the dot at the end of the long, glorious, complex sentence in which literature has been written."
Wednesday, January 2, 2008
Inside the Media Echo Chamber
When I look back on the year that was, there is something I wish I hadn’t been party to. April 16 2007 was the day that Seung-Hui Cho, 23, killed 32 students and professors at Virginia Tech and then turned his gun on himself. I had just begun a freelance project for a news website. I was there to create original content, but first there was a period of training so that I could learn how to post my stories and visual packages online.
On that day, at about 5pm, I was asked to work late. At 7pm my editor called to tell me to expect a slide show of images. “As soon as you get them, post them live and then go back and write captions for each image,” he instructed. The images were stills taken from the video that Cho had sent to NBC before he opened fire at his college — a video that NBC had aired. On the website it was business as usual to report on this event and in “just following orders”, I became responsible for spreading those poisonous images across the Internet.
Certainly I was not alone. A writer on salon.com called news organisations like the one I was working at “the media echo chamber”, to describe how they “dutifully printed and broadcast everything straight from the mouths of high-profile violent offenders and felons alike, calling it ‘news’”. That night, when I went through image after image of an obviously disturbed and now already dead young man, scowling and pointing his gun into my face, I felt extremely uneasy, but I didn’t stop. I was doing my job.
I couldn’t sleep when I got home, not least of all because the assignment had left me with a mild dose of post-traumatic stress. Each time I closed my eyes I saw the black barrel of Cho’s gun and heard his gruff, strangled threats.
By the time I got to my desk the next day, pale and a little shaky, the news organisation had handed the mouthpiece over to its resident psychologist, who was quickly saving the day by saying how harmful it was for the national psyche (international, really, considering that it’s the “World Wide Web”) to have to stare at Cho’s violent diary of death. Of course, by this time the entire media echo chamber had cut down its coverage to just the tamest photograph of Cho, finally understanding that for a sociopath, anonymity is worse than death.
But the damage was done. As the essay on salon.com says, the media had collectively convinced “other disenfranchised citizens that the best way to get your voice heard is by doing something ‘newsworthy’ in the fine tradition of John Hinkley jnr, Ted “Unabomber” Kaczynski, Mohammed Atta and other celebrated sociopaths, terrorists and misfits”.
A few hours later, when one of my senior editors asked me to go down to Korea Town (a neighbourhood in Manhattan that’s bordered by 31st and 36th Streets and Fifth and Sixth Avenues) and ask Koreans and Korean-Americans how they felt about being Korean in light of Cho’s disastrous deed, I finally found my voice and declined. I can’t say that taking this stand served me particularly well at work — I was viewed after that as a little prickly and criticised by more hardcore news types as “not a real journalist” — but I was glad I turned it down.
I have since moved on from the news organisation — I eventually lost my mojo entirely when, during the civil war in Gaza, our features meetings were all about Paris Hilton’s sojourn in jail — but the small role I played in spreading Cho’s hate-filled message has stuck with me.
Last week, in the Associated Press’s annual vote, the Virginia Tech killings were chosen as the top story of 2007 by US editors and news directors. The mortgage crisis, which unsettled the US housing market, was second; the war in Iraq, third.
Virginia Tech was the worst mass shooting in modern US history and news coverage has prompted colleges to reassess their emergency response systems, but voting it in at number one when the US is still in Iraq and more journalists have been killed trying to cover that war than ever before seems to smack of industry self-congratulation.
But after a year like this, I guess we should all be grateful that the triumvirate of tarts — Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears or Paris Hilton — didn’t make the top three.
This column first appeared in the Sunday Times, South Africa in the Made in Manhattan column
On that day, at about 5pm, I was asked to work late. At 7pm my editor called to tell me to expect a slide show of images. “As soon as you get them, post them live and then go back and write captions for each image,” he instructed. The images were stills taken from the video that Cho had sent to NBC before he opened fire at his college — a video that NBC had aired. On the website it was business as usual to report on this event and in “just following orders”, I became responsible for spreading those poisonous images across the Internet.
Certainly I was not alone. A writer on salon.com called news organisations like the one I was working at “the media echo chamber”, to describe how they “dutifully printed and broadcast everything straight from the mouths of high-profile violent offenders and felons alike, calling it ‘news’”. That night, when I went through image after image of an obviously disturbed and now already dead young man, scowling and pointing his gun into my face, I felt extremely uneasy, but I didn’t stop. I was doing my job.
I couldn’t sleep when I got home, not least of all because the assignment had left me with a mild dose of post-traumatic stress. Each time I closed my eyes I saw the black barrel of Cho’s gun and heard his gruff, strangled threats.
By the time I got to my desk the next day, pale and a little shaky, the news organisation had handed the mouthpiece over to its resident psychologist, who was quickly saving the day by saying how harmful it was for the national psyche (international, really, considering that it’s the “World Wide Web”) to have to stare at Cho’s violent diary of death. Of course, by this time the entire media echo chamber had cut down its coverage to just the tamest photograph of Cho, finally understanding that for a sociopath, anonymity is worse than death.
But the damage was done. As the essay on salon.com says, the media had collectively convinced “other disenfranchised citizens that the best way to get your voice heard is by doing something ‘newsworthy’ in the fine tradition of John Hinkley jnr, Ted “Unabomber” Kaczynski, Mohammed Atta and other celebrated sociopaths, terrorists and misfits”.
A few hours later, when one of my senior editors asked me to go down to Korea Town (a neighbourhood in Manhattan that’s bordered by 31st and 36th Streets and Fifth and Sixth Avenues) and ask Koreans and Korean-Americans how they felt about being Korean in light of Cho’s disastrous deed, I finally found my voice and declined. I can’t say that taking this stand served me particularly well at work — I was viewed after that as a little prickly and criticised by more hardcore news types as “not a real journalist” — but I was glad I turned it down.
I have since moved on from the news organisation — I eventually lost my mojo entirely when, during the civil war in Gaza, our features meetings were all about Paris Hilton’s sojourn in jail — but the small role I played in spreading Cho’s hate-filled message has stuck with me.
Last week, in the Associated Press’s annual vote, the Virginia Tech killings were chosen as the top story of 2007 by US editors and news directors. The mortgage crisis, which unsettled the US housing market, was second; the war in Iraq, third.
Virginia Tech was the worst mass shooting in modern US history and news coverage has prompted colleges to reassess their emergency response systems, but voting it in at number one when the US is still in Iraq and more journalists have been killed trying to cover that war than ever before seems to smack of industry self-congratulation.
But after a year like this, I guess we should all be grateful that the triumvirate of tarts — Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears or Paris Hilton — didn’t make the top three.
This column first appeared in the Sunday Times, South Africa in the Made in Manhattan column
Sunday, December 2, 2007
On Silence
Sticks and stones are hard on bones.
Aimed with angry art,
Words can sting like anything.
But silence breaks the heart. ~ Phyllis McGinley
Aimed with angry art,
Words can sting like anything.
But silence breaks the heart. ~ Phyllis McGinley
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