the curatorship of possibilities – ben's blog about urban ethos and connectedness
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I asked this man if he is seeing any interesting birds? He said: “Look, other there is the famous Central Park Red-Tailed hawk Pale Male with his pair”. And sure enough there was this building facing the 5th Ave. and the nest about the arch of the top middle window. The glorious bird flying in and out of it.
I went to breath in the air of the Great Hall of the New York Public Library. Much has changed there since it was my reading room in the late eighties. Only the last three southern rows are specifically computer free. Everyone else is looking at a screen of some sort. There is an annoying constant trickle of tourists taking digital photos, even I took a few… This must be unbearable for the volumes.
Alas the blue recycling bins is a visual insult to the magnificent millwork, far worse than the laptops. But still there is a magic about the room. It must be one of the best places in the world to read and dream.
What used to be the great cafeteria and now the great Greek Hall at the Met on Sunday.
On a Tel Aviv bench, photo by Max Reider
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With all the chatter about post-orthodoxy I had a chance to observe some in the belly of the beast this Purim. There are certain aspects of a civilization that are almost non existent in the Jewish tradition, like civil governance, the structure of education, etc. You would expect this from a tribe historically deprived of a country. But there are the persistent formulas. Hey, you can tell a Russian from a mile, long after they crossed the pond (at least a Russian can). So while I was watching the Purim dancing a woman pointed to the dance floor and said to me: “Why the vulgar moves?” It was too noisy to respond but I immediately recognized a Russian girl and the typical Russian dance moves. It was not vulgar; it was how they dance in Russia.
On my way to New York I was reading the book about Spinoza by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, that she kindly signed for me. The opening chapter is a lengthy description about the first encounter with Spinoza in the Lower East Side Orthodox high school in the late sixties. All the angst of the intellectually curios girl colliding head-on with the “history” as taught in the typical indoctrination factory. I was getting inpatient, I read millions of such descriptions in the Jewish context but especially for people who grew up behind the iron curtain this was our life. There are volumes of the dissident literature that talk about the subject. Nevertheless the book came back to me after Purim. It takes a heroic effort, the mad curiosity of someone like Rebecca to overcome the indoctrination. Most people succumb to the path of least resistance and carry the legacy through their lives. And one can gleam the post denominational insight from the real pockets of the New York post orthodoxy. Here is want you should expect from the post orthodox culture:
But let me break from the list as I am about to make a point about Purim. So I was sitting having my lunch on Tannis Ester. Over sudden there is a herd of yeshiva yingelach walking down the street. I knew some of them; they looked like they just landed from the moon in that neighborhood in Boston. I was wondering where they were going till they took a sharp turn to a consignment second-hand clothing shop. But of course they were shopping for the Purim costumes. So wait, don’t they already wear a costume? In a regular culture a carnival is a day when you exercise your alter ego. But what do you do as an orthodox Jew when you daily life is behind a mask in a costume. Do you come out as yourself? For this very reason I always felt that the orthodox Purim is such an unsettling horror show. I am yet to meet an orthodox woman without a tzitzis envy that doesn’t have a proudly displayed photo of herself when she was 14 on Purim as a bearded Chassidic man…
Shakespeare in the Park
A friend called me last week to challenge me on my assertion in The Derivative Trifecta – Internet, Jews, Wall St. that Judaism is a derivative religion. He conceded that the culture, the popular ideology is derivative but then there were the mad creative eruptions, the heroic innovations. We went through a glorious list and I had to agree. I was thinking on a bus to NY and realized that I really wrote about this before. But let me try to remodel the expression, being that the Evanston Jew quote is still ringing in my ears:
“Some hide, (Jewish Studies Judaism) some party (Carlebach and Jewish Renewal). Many many turn away from the burden of a historical memory (intermarrieds, secular, Reform), leaving only the pintele yid, a pointillism of sorts, some call it a post impressionism, that sees Orthodoxy as belonging to the world of OCD and psychopathology.”
Evanston Jew calls Jews shearis hapleitah (the remnants of the survivors) and I would add shearis hapleitah b’arey hapleitah (the remnants of the survivors in the biblical cities of refuge). Let me explain. There is a temptation to describe a culture by its highest expression. A repressive ideology forces the crime of a genius to a city of refuge. There a creative sprit can find a reprieve from the blood thirsty mob. There a spirit can hide behind some exquisite grammar studies, poetry, law, etc. But then comes the forgetfulness, the criminals lose track of the geography and claim that they, the citizens of the cities of refuge define the culture outside of the walls. On rare occasions the claims catch on and a sect is born but in general this is exactly what the sign on the gates says – an escapist illusion. This is like saying that the way communism is practiced under the comrade Stalin is not a true communism but few of us here in the Manhattan chapter of the Communist Party really know what the true communism is all about. So please leave the non derivative thinking where is belongs, in the escapism of the cities of refuge, not in Judaism.
Great news, hopefully all medai sources follow this example. I have no doubt it will be more profitable than the print news ever was.The Times to Charge for Frequent Access to Its Web Site:
“The New York Times announced Wednesday that it intended to charge frequent readers for access to its Web site, a step being debated across the industry that nearly every major newspaper has so far feared to take.
Starting in early 2011, visitors to NYTimes.com will get a certain number of articles free every month before being asked to pay a flat fee for unlimited access. Subscribers to the newspaper’s print edition will receive full access to the site.”
“Early 2001″, why not now?
Wassily Kandinsky, A Colorful Life (Das Bunte Leben), 1907. Tempera on canvas. Bayerische Landesbank, on permanent loan to the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich
Das Bunte Leben is the first painting on display at the Guggenheim retrospective. And although the Frank Lloyd Wright spiral trends upward, the decent into abstraction is the breakthrough downfall for the Kandinsky’s art. You can see in this early painting that Kandinsky was an unmatched colorist. He had an innate feel for drawing, Chagall for example would never be able to do a figurative drawings as well as Kandinsky. He was thinking pointillistically long before brother Camille Pissarro did. When Kandinsky’s became more and more abstract, his art became less and less interesting and naturally art critics started to value and praise it more and more. Did I mention there is a “free audio tour” included with the $18 admission?
What is missing from the exhibition are his books, the books that now theoretician Kandinsky wrote to explain the circles, the lines and the squares. And there is the trap. We think and see metaphorically, even when we imagine an abstract concept. The world is presented to us as people and objects and they are the screen in front of the essence. Kandinsky insisted on looking the essence directly in the eye, alas this is not how it works. The essence is too intense to be able to gaze at it directly.
P.S. Was there a better stylization of the Mother Russia than Das Bunte Leben?
I have been “sitting” on this link for a while. Perhaps now is the right time for an aspirational resolution and a small memorial to William Safire who founded a club that is really what true networking is all about. And it’s a pretty simple formula – you meet the same people regularly (decades) and you share meals and conversations. WSJ – What Facebook Can’t Give You:
“In 1957, as men in their late 20s, they began meeting—initially over breakfast, then over dinners held at the Sherry-Netherland Hotel or at the Harvard Club in midtown Manhattan. Few were born to means. Many were sons of immigrants. Most went on to become luminaries in their fields—presidents of television networks, partners at banks, editors of magazines.
On occasion, they shared their influence with one another. When member Mort Janklow made a career switch from corporate attorney to literary agent, a fellow member, columnist William Safire, offered himself as a famous first client. When Robert Menschel, a senior director at Goldman Sachs Group Inc., was considering deals involving large consumer companies such as Procter & Gamble, he would pick the brain of fellow club member Ed Meyer, the former chief executive of Grey Advertising.”
So as far as the fad of the online social networks or even the socially retarded religious gatherings, the litmus test is pretty simple. It’s only worth it if leads to regular meetings around food and conversations (with the emphasis on conversation not the food). Oh yes, you need to get invited. But then William Safire was a scribbler with no college degree, may be the way to get invited is to found a club?
New York Magazine – The Hot List – Fifty of the city’s tastiest soups. There are only 49 in the photo (7X7). What soup is missing? And naturally it all revolves around the Matzoh Ball Soup in the middle.
Pesh, Mark Altman, Shmulik Nemanov
We went to see “Oh, Those Beautiful Weimar Girls” in the legendary La MaMa Theatre in the Village. The play is directed by Ildiko Nemeth. Written by Mark Altman. Choreography is by Julia Atlas Muz. The play is about Germany in between the two wars and the dancer Anita Berber.
My friend tells me that the expression “360-degree turn” is amusing because you end up in the same place. But when you return to the same place after a 360-degree turn you are a different person and you see things differently. Perhaps if you travel to a new place you wouldn’t notice the 360-degree difference.
The ubiquitous Central Park photos are pretty stupid, but I couldn’t resist a few. ►►►read more
