Yesterday we hosted the last day of the Wedgwood Circle’s conference at the office, which turned out to be lovely. I met a bunch of people who I knew or knewabout, but hadn’t met yet, and a few I had recently met, and we drank coffee and talked for a while afterwards. Really? My job is the coolest, accented by Michael Card’s pastor stopping by unrelatedly that afternoon to say hi on Michael’s recommendation. (If you knew my Dad, you know how HUGE of a deal that really is.)
So today I am here quite early to let the piano tuner in, and early this afternoon I am hopping a train and heading northward to spend time with my Mom this weekend. My birthday is on Tuesday (the universe’s gift to me will hopefully be that this election is OVER) and so my family is rather happy to see me this weekend, and I, them. In the meantime, Tom will be wrapping the current project and starting a new one soon afterwards.
I have no linkdump for you this Friday, but you should check out The Curator this week for fun with the Met and Doctor Atomic, a documentary film about exclusive Manhattan preschools, and a piece on bizarre performance art by a couple of my friends.
Lastly, for all those who giggle uncontrollably when someone says, “My SPOON is too big!”, this should be good news.
Pre-School Mayhem in Nursery University
By Sarah Hanssen If you thought college applications were grueling, wait until you find out about Manhattan’s most competitive nursery schools.
Performance and The Odd Lamb
By Sam Kho On becoming co-pilot with The Odd Lamb and the mandatory veering off involved.
Am miserable failure as blogger, lately, because life is just too busy and too full to really consider it. I twitter and I check Facebook and I write and I run a magazine, and when internet activity needs to drop off, blogging is the first to go.
In brief, though:
• Tom is busily finishing up the current shoot and hoping the next one is around the corner.
• I am busily plotting to take over the world as full a slate of programming as a nonprofit can handle in times of recession for 2009, writing, editing, and trying to study somewhere in there too. Next week is my last week working at NYU, which will hopefully take some of the load off.
• Since the last iBook I had was four years old, not mine, and subsequently stolen, I finally decided it was time to have an actual computer to, you know, write on and use at work and do all that studenty stuff. Hence, I got a shiny new MacBook (the cheaper version) and plan on it lasting me a very long time. And I love it - it’s small and light.
I’m not a huge fan of the “unschooling” method (which has been around for a couple decades now), so I was kind of on the fence through the article until I got to this paragraph:
“In one sense it is hyperparenting, an extreme version of bourgeois parenting,” he said. Parents, he said, are anticipating a world in which children will have to be ever more flexible and creative, and some home-schooling parents believe their approach will provide that edge.
But Ms. Rendell and her group aren’t thinking about admissions to Stanford, she said.
Count me as one of those homeschoolers whose parents (neither of whom went to college) weren’t thinking about admission to Stanford. Oh, but wait; I earned my undergraduate at a top-tier private university, and now I’m in graduate school at another. Somehow, it didn’t matter. Every kind of schooling turns out some good students, some mediocre students, and some bad students.
In any case, the point I am trying to make is that only through a deep and unfailing awareness of the structure and effects of information, through a demystification of media, is there any hope of our gaining some measure of control over television, or the computer, or any other medium. How is such media consciousness to be achieved? . . .
The nonsensical answer is to create television programs whose intent would be, not to get people to stop watching television but to demonstrate how television ought to be viewed, to show how television recreates and degrades our conception of news, political debate, religious thought, etc. I imagine such demonstrations would of necessity take the form of parodies, along the lines of “Saturday Night Live” and “Monty Python”, the idea being to induce a nationwide horse laugh over televisions’s control of public discourse. But, naturally, television would have the last laugh. In order to command an audience large enough to make a difference, one would have to maket he programs vastly amusing, in the television style. Thus, the act of criticism itself would, in the end, be co-opted by television. The parodists would become celebrities, would star in movies, and would end up making television commercials.
Not so nonsensical, Neil, and perhaps more effective than you’d like to think:
I’ve been reading Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death for a class (oh yes, and I get to move onto McLuhan later tonight). Postman, for those who aren’t aware, is writing in 1985 and is not a big fan of the television. To put it mildly. He spends most of the book explaining how television is completely destroying religion, education, and politics, and though he has some excellent points and I’m sure it seemed at the time that the world was coming to an end, in hindsight it seems a little overblown (though I am no fan of televised “news” unless it emanates from the mouth of Jon Stewart).
So anyhow, I’m near the end of the book, and in chapter eleven, there’s this statement:
To be unaware that a technology comes equipped with a program for social change, to maintain that technology is neutral, to make the assumption that technology is always a friend to culture is, at this late hour, stupidity plain and simple.
And next to it, in old handwriting, is this handwritten gem:
Whatever your opinion of Barack Obama, his economic policies, and the rest of the speech he gave - and that’s not the point of this post - you have to appreciate this quote from his economic speech yesterday:
Part of the reason this crisis occurred is that everyone was living beyond their means – from Wall Street to Washington to even some on Main Street. CEOs got greedy. Politicians spent money they didn’t have. Lenders tricked people into buying home they couldn’t afford and some folks knew they couldn’t afford them and bought them anyway.
We’ve lived through an era of easy money, in which we were allowed and even encouraged to spend without limits; to borrow instead of save.
Now, I know that in an age of declining wages and skyrocketing costs, for many folks this was not a choice but a necessity. People have been forced to turn to credit cards and home equity loans to keep up, just like our government has borrowed from China and other creditors to help pay its bills. But we now know how dangerous that can be. Once we get past the present emergency, which requires immediate new investments, we have to break that cycle of debt. Our long-term future requires that we do what’s necessary to scale down our deficits, grow wages and encourage personal savings again.
I was recently turned on to Brooklyn Based, a three-times-a-week email with interesting stuff to do/see/buy/hear/eat in Brooklyn. Kind of like Daily Candy, without the bizarrely Manhattan-snob focus.
They sent a day trip to Red Hook email yesterday, and I’m loving it - day trip done right. Take a look, Brooklynites and those who wish they could be. (Why don’t more cities do this kind of thing?)
I have little to report. I’ve been busily working, going to class, reading, brainstorming, and all that. I just don’t have much else to say. Tom has been busy working long days. We come home at night and talk about all the things we’ve heard, read, and seen that day in politics, culture, the arts, and the economy. The world is swirling about madly and we are watching, thinking, and processing together.
So in the meantime, here’s a bunch of links I’ve been piling up:
• I ordered a few tealights from Dirt on Saturday, because they are $1 apiece and I like variety, and I like to burn soy candles since they don’t release the same kind of harmful things into the air as regular candles. I ordered A Fresh Start, All-Nighter, Nitty Gritty (the impetus for the order), and Apple a Day (made mostly of actual apples!).
• Saturday is apparently the Second Annual Gowanus Harvest Festival, which looks not only pretty cool but also helps to dispel the myth that city people don’t care about this stuff (and yes, I realize I pointed toward a Wendell Berry video two points earlier).
I have been all over since Wednesday. As I said to some good folks on Thursday night, I’d been (on Wednesday alone) in or through New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington DC, and Boston - if the founding fathers could only see me now. And I’m relatively confident I’ll get around to sharing more about this week’s trip later, since it was a lovely trip with lovely people in all aspects, and I came home with plenty of things to think about.
But all that to say, I got home this afternoon, brought my luggage to the apartment, then turned around to go to the New Yorker Festival’s Town Hall on Race & Class in America. It was a spirited debate which actually answered some questions I’d been asking about the party shifts since the 1950s. But I am home now, and I am tired. So here are a few tidbits that I need to mention before I forget:
- There is a new edition of The Curator available for your reading pleasure. We’re a little thin on articles this week (want to write for us? contact me with your ideas!), but they’re both well worth reading and I’m confident they’re worth your time.
I am absolutely exhausted and now that I’ve cleaned the apartment and blogged, I am off to bed. Tomorrow, I attend a Malcolm Gladwell lecture, also at the New Yorker Festival (I haven’t the foggiest idea of what he’s talking about, but it doesn’t really matter, because that man is fascinating). Book list for September forthcoming!