Elephantitis of the Emotions

My friend Brent Greenblatt and I went to the Whitney Biennial two Saturdays ago. As always, it is an eclectic and sometimes difficult to understand collection of contemporary pieces by American artists, but what stood out for me was the crossover of art and documentary. Everything from Spike Lee's excellent documentary about the aftermath of hurricane Katrina When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, which was originally shown on HBO, to a beautiful piece by the artist Javier Téllez titled Letter on the Blind For the Use of Those Who See. This gorgeous black and white video could have been filmed by Jean Luc Godard. Téllez's art gives a voice to the marginalised (how cool is that?). It's his way of offering us an out from our false assumptions. In this video, the artist re-created the Indian parable "The Blind Men and the Elephant," filming six blind men as they touch a real live elephant who is standing in the middle of the McCarren Park swimming pool in Williamsburg (now emptied of water and often used as a concert venue for Indie rock bands). The idea is to show that "every being experiences the same thing in a unique way." It was a great lesson in how different people open themselves up (or not) to the same experience. Some of the men lightly touched the majestic (and patient) animal, one man folded up his stick and touched the elephant with his entire body. An embrace. Enormously moving.
Marianne Fassler, who was here last week and also deeply touched by this video, felt that is was addressing the idea of "the elephant in the room": We would never ask a blind person to tell us what they see. True. (She pointed out that elephants were something of a mini-theme at this year's biennal. Another installation upstairs saw just elephant feet and a tusk, and where the rest of the elephant should have been, simply the words "Iraqi Oil".
The Whitney Biennale is on for some time. See it if you get the chance.

http://www.whitney.org/www/2008biennial/www/?section=artists&page=artist_tellez

A Jew for President?

Fran Lebowitz in New York Magazine had the following to say: "...it's never going to happen. Because people don't like Jews. You must have noticed that by now. And I will also tell you, as a Jew, I don't want there to be a Jewish president. We have enough problems. Imagine if they could blame this on us too."

It's Always Been About the Hair

The actress Jean E. Taylor came into my friend Aliza's Greenpoint living room last night (that's Greenpoint in Brooklyn, not Greenpoint in Cape Town) and turned it into an alternate universe. The Wild Hair Living Room Tour is an example of "basement art making," she says. "Exploring how possibility may emerge from a gloomy sense of nothing, we discovered scrap cardboard and string to be handy tools for constructing the world of our piece."
With a roll of tape, a doctor's coat, a chalkboard, and the aforementioned string and cardboard, Taylor (Ophelia disguised as a museum docent) began her highly entertaining "lecture" about the Wild Hare as part of the so-called Museum of Natural History's Outreach Program. This soon morphed into a tale of Wild Hair (read: non-conformists) and Dark Castles...a fairy tale about a thwarted love affair between a prince and a maiden, a dark place filled with immoral people and a young woman who needs to find the courage to step into the unknown. Of course this was all a metaphor for much deeper stuff.
Taylor is an energetic and talented performer and there is something about theater inside a living room that takes away the sometimes unbearable intimacy that I usually feel in a much larger theater. Or perhaps because it's in the living room there is no need to feel that intimacy as something "other".
At the end of the performance, there was a video made where the audience was asked to share an experience of being a "Wild Hair". Of course I had to get involved...told my story of leaving Elle (Dark Castle) when most thought I had a dream job. No regrets there.
For more info: http://wildhairlivingroomtour.com/index.php

Hussein: What's in a Name?

When I was in South Africa recently, there was great hysteria amongst the Jewish community (ok, my family), brought on by an e-mail that was being sent around on the Internet claiming that Barack Hussein Obama was a Muslim. I tried to explain to my mother that even if Obama was a Muslim (which he isn't), it didn't make him a militant suicide bomber. She regarded me suspiciously, wanting to believe. In Vanity Fair's Hollywood Issue a profile on Obama addresses these accusations thus: Todd S. Purdum writes that Obama told me [him] that he could only laugh at the false press accounts that portray Soetoro [Obama's stepfather] as some kind of radical Muslim who had sent him to an Islamic school. "I mean, you know, his big thing was Johnny Walker Black, Andy Williams records," Obama said. "I still remember 'Moon River.' He'd be playing it, sipping, and playing tennis at the country club. That was his whole thing."
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And today on Salon.com, there is a longer discussion. Take a look: http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2008/02/28/hussein/

A Different Shoulder to Rub

I mingled with the literati at the National Arts Club last night where the finalists for the LA Times Book Award were announced. Made me think that I should get myself a job in book publishing (that's not to say I don't have a book in me). Thinking went like this: If magazine journalism has become just like selling thanks to the rampant consumerism of our time then I am nothing but a sales person. And if I'm nothing but a sales person, what is the one thing I wouldn't mind selling? Other people's novels. I'm looking into it.

By the way, the National Arts Club is a fascinating place. It is housed in the historic Tilden Mansion (15 Gramercy Park) and has been there since 1898.

Architect Philip Johnson called the mansion, "among the most beautiful in New York."

The awards will be announced in April.

And the nominees are....
Fiction

Junot Diaz, THE BRIEF WONDROUS LIFE OF OSCAR WAO (Riverhead)
Andrew O'Hagan, BE NEAR ME (Harcourt)
Stewart O'Nan, LAST NIGHT AT THE LOBSTER (Viking)
Per Petterson, OUT STEALING HORSES (Graywolf)
Marianne Wiggins, THE SHADOW CATCHER (Simon & Schuster)

ART SEIDENBAUM AWARD FOR FIRST FICTION

Antonia Arslan (Translated by Geoffrey Brock), SKYLARK FARM (Knopf)
Rebecca Curtis, TWENTY GRAND AND OTHER TALES OF LOVE AND MONEY (Harper)
Pamela Erens, THE UNDERSTORY (Ironweed Press)
Ellen Litman, THE LAST CHICKEN IN AMERICA (W.W. Norton)
Dinaw Mengestu, THE BEAUTIFUL THINGS THAT HEAVEN BEARS (Riverhead)


Biography

Nancy Isenberg, FALLEN FOUNDER: THE LIFE OF AARON BURR (Viking)
Tim Jeal, STANLEY: THE IMPOSSIBLE LIFE OF AFRICA'S GREATEST EXPLORER (Yale)
Simon Sebag Montefiore, YOUNG STALIN (Knopf)
Robert Morgan: BOONE: A BIOGRAPHY (Algonquin)
Michael J. Neufeld, VON BRAUN: DREAMER OF SPACE, ENGINEER OF WAR (Knopf)


Current Events

Ishmael Beah, A LONG WAY GONE; MEMOIRS OF A BOY SOLDIER (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Tom Bissell, THE FATHER OF ALL THINGS: A MARINE, HIS SON, AND THE LEGACY OF VIETNAM (Pantheon)
Ronald Brownstein, THE SECOND CIVIL WAR: HOW EXTREME PARTISANSHIP HAS PARALYZED WASHINGTON AND POLARIZED AMERICA (Penguin Press)
Naomi Klein, THE SHOCK DOCTRINE: THE RISE OF DISASTER CAPITALISM (Metropolitan)
Elizabeth D. Samet, SOLDIER'S HEART: READING LITERATURE THROUGH PEACE AND WAR AT WEST POINT (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Sibling Revelry

I was invited to a screening of That Other Boleyn Girl, which I couldn't make, but I did cut out of my master class in fiction to attend the lavish dinner that followed at Christie's. I mean who wouldn't cut class for a chance to view Natalie Portman, in a floor-length velvet gown, up close and Meryl Streep's daughter Mamie Gummer. Plus, the table decor featured macabre miniature guillotines with trick blades that stopped short of chopping off your digits. "Off with her fingers!"

Indie Love at the Oscars

Didn't you just love all the gushy sentimentalism at last night's 80th Academy Awards ceremony? From Juno screenwriter, Diablo Cody thanking her parents for loving her just as she is, to the short documentary winners' urging that you can fulfill your dreams. Most priceless is this "morning after the Oscars" picture on Cody's Myspace blog.
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