We just had the first rehearsal for our short film, Dee, based on the novel, My Bad Side. The actors are excellent. Megan Hill is Dee with Gardiner Comfort is Derek, while David DiGregorio will play the doorman. Biba decided not to rehearse for her role of Apollo.
Ready for her close up
Megan and Gardiner work very well together; it is something to see actors give life to characters, not exactly what you anticipated and something more as well. Mike Deminico directs the production with Adam Holz on camera. There will be a lot of handheld work and a lot of movement. It might be black and white; that hasn’t been decided. But there will be close ups of high heels on the pavement and a struggle for the knife.
Dee towers over Derek
The shoot is on Wednesday. It doesn’t seem real. I wonder if I should have left Dee alone on the page.
Today is a day of contemplation, a day to remember those we have lost, who we are and what we may become. More Art’s presentation of Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Abraham Lincoln: War Veteran Projection asks us to do just that. The work, now on display in New York’s Union Square Park (at 16th Street), is a 24-minute projection loop of war veterans expressing their feelings on the damaging effects of war. Faces, projected onto the statue of Abraham Lincoln, bring the spirit of this icon to life. And they speak:
I know a veteran that committed suicide because he had nobody to talk to. He couldn’t talk to anyone and he lived on the streets. He died alone.
It came from not being able to sleep for a day to an entire week.
The daydreams, they sneak up upon you.
I couldn’t live alone and at the same time I couldn’t live with anyone else.
When I came back, the worst thing that happened to me was the rejection of the people.
We can do so much more when we put the gun down.
Wake up, people! Help the veterans. Do something for the veterans. The installation, on display 6-10pm from now until December 9, is a great work of public art. Accessible, powerful and relevant, the work reaches deep inside the viewer and really does ask who are in this world today. Krzysztof Wodiczko should be thanked for this. More Art should be thanked for this. And most of all the veterans should be thanked for this.
Compromise (verb): Settle a dispute by mutual concession.
Compromise can be a noble action. It is something that leads one from an extremist position and actively helps in avoiding acts of conflict and war. It’s an action to which we should aspire, and yet an action that evokes terror to those in power. When asked to compromise to avoid the upcoming fiscal crisis, House Speaker John Boehner, balks, insisting that Obama intention to raise taxes on the wealthy “will destroy jobs in America.”Boehner, like many other in the Republican Party, are wedded to a pledge of not raising taxes and believe that to compromise is to sully this position, or, as the dictionary says: to weaken a reputation or principle by accepting standards that are lower than is desirable. A good example of this is what happened to New York when it was compromised by the tidal surge of Hurricane Sandy or what has happened to the public reputation of David Petraeus in admitting to his extra-marital affair.
Mr. Petraeus and Ms. Broadwell
But this not the understanding of the word when opposing groups are asked to seek compromise. As absurd as it is to think, even those negotiating the current dispute for the National Hockey League believe this as well. Players’ representative Donald Fehr and League Commissioner Gary Bettman remain entrenched in their positions, 56 days into the lockout and only a short time from potentially cancelling yet another season. They don’t seem to understand that if there is no hockey, there is no revenue…and leads us to another interesting word: extinction.
The word misogyny has recently been redefined in Australia as “entrenched prejudice against women”. This switch from the more commonly accepted definition of “hatred of women” is partially thanks to the now-famous speech delivered by Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard in October 2012.
Prime Minister Julia Gillard
Her angry words against Opposition Leader Tony Abbott have been commended by many, supporting Gillard’s fury against the representation of women as inferior to men, homemakers and bitches. And yet, this support comes across as sadly superficial. (Add Like or Smiley here.) The rampant sexism in our world is insidiously real and, on the whole, completely accepted. The female faces of Fox News say it all. Young and blond would appear to be the only requirement to deliver the categorical truths at Fox. And it’s not just the weird world of Fox; it’s ingrained in today’s stories and entertainment. I recently noted this in two films last week. Flight opens with Nadine Velazquez walking naked back and forth past the camera.
Nadine Velazquez plays Katerina Marquez
Her nudity is aimed to establish a night of debauchery, even though Denzel Washington isn’t measured by the same standard, staying in bed, unexposed. Later in the film, Washington also meets a lovely addict (Kelly Reilly) who the viewer previously saw begging for heroin on a porn set. While the atmosphere of a self-indulged and self-medicated world is the point of these characters and scenes, the manner in which they are portrayed is baldly gratuitous. The same can be said of Looper, a science fiction film in which women are either sex workers
Piper Perabo
or sexy and fiercely independent.
Emily Blunt
It’s not that either Looper or Flight – or for that matter Fox News – are the epitome of art or expression. Actually it’s more the fact that they aren’t that make it all the more insidious. This is what is accepted in our culture. Women equals sex. It’s not equality. It’s an equation.
It was cold and ugly last night: a mix of freezing rain, snow and wind, all in all, utterly lousy.
7th Avenue and 20th Street, Manhattan
Fulton and Gold Streets, Manhattan
It was just a storm like so many others, not that bad, but I went to sleep with a feeling of dread, thinking about the people in Staten Island, the Rockaways, along the Jersey shore, everyone hit so hard. This was anything but just another storm for them.
It was cold this morning, but the wind and rain were no more. It wasn’t nearly as bad as I had expected. Battery Park was quiet and peaceful. And people were pouring back into the city. The tourists were here too.
At the Stock Exchange
Everything seemed the same, like this storm had never happened, like it was just another hyped event, just more news to cover. But it did happen. It really did. And so now what? What do we actually do? There’s a mountain ahead, overwhelming, almost impossible…but perhaps we might follow Governor Christie‘s advice (via his mother): “Do the job you have in front of you and the rest will follow.” I know that I’ve got to get back to my book. It’s time for the final edit.
Okay, Obama won. And that’s good.But there’s another storm coming to New York today, a powerful Nor’easter, and that’s bad.Winds are expected to be 25 to 35 mph with gusts up to 60 mph. There are warnings of coastal flooding and more rain and snow. Much of the Hurricane Sandy cleanup operations have been put on hold. Parks are closed. People are being urged to stay inside. And so we wait…again.
Looking southeast from Battery Park
It’s a good time to think. What can be done? Can the melting of the ice caps be slowed? What about the release of methane from the polar tundra? And the rising seas? Indeed, can we really do something that will address this climate change? I have my doubts. It’s depressing to think about how badly we have behaved as stewards of this planet. However if President Obama is looking for a legacy, this is it. Or not and we can just ride out this storm and the one after that and the next…just remember that you can never have enough candles.
The problem with us humans is that we tend to forget. And most of what we like to forget is all the bad things that we’ve done. This planet is in trouble and we are to blame. There is no doubt about any of that.
Con Edison truck acting as temporary barrier to the Stock Exchange
Sadly, we have stacked the cards badly against ourselves and it doesn’t look good…but at least we can try. And today there is a choice for American voters. Barack Obama on climate change: “The issue of climate change is one that we ignore at our own peril. There may still be disputes about exactly how much we’re contributing to the warming of the earth’s atmosphere and how much is naturally occurring, but what we can be scientifically certain of is that our continued use of fossil fuels is pushing us to a point of no return.”
Mitt Romney on climate change: “My view is that we don’t know what’s causing climate change on this planet. And the idea of spending trillions and trillions of dollars to try to reduce CO2 emissions is not the right course for us.”
Kepler 22b …and only seven hundred light years away!
It is true that Obama has a long way to go on this issue, but he is the only option…unless we’re thinking of taking a starship to another planet so we can fuck that one up too.
Before today, I had not visited Staten Island properly – only a couple of times on the final leg of the popular Five Boro Bike Tour in the spring. The truth is that Staten Island does not get much positive hype in New York from the other four boroughs. It’s often derided as the weakest link, if it’s even acknowledged as a borough at all. But the news is dire from there. NY1, New York City’s much-loved 24-hour news station ran a story about an emergency relief center at Miller Field (marked as New Dorp Beach above) and they needed volunteers. I knew I could do something and took the Staten Island Ferry this morning. It was another cold crisp day, perfect for pictures of the city. I biked south on a rolling road, past brick houses and closed gas stations before going under the Verrazano Bridge and arriving at the northeastern shore of the island, the area that has been most severely hit. The wreckage is absolutely overwhelming: poles, stairwells, signs twisted and broken,entire sidewalks and yards vanished, remarkably neat rows of debris piled in front of house after house after house, and the trees and debris piled in parking lots, the abandoned cars, and the garbage piled together along the shore.
Note the dried seaweed twisted around the pole four feet off the ground.
I came to Miller Field, driftwood dotting the landscape, and went to the emergency center. I found a woman in charge who told me to work in the clothing tent. I was asked to make sure that people didn’t leave clothes on the ground, that they collected only one bag each and stayed no more than 15 minutes. I wasn’t very good at that and sort of wandered around instead and picked up the loose clothes and shoes and then finally got into what I’m good at: consolidating. (My mother ingrained this into me at a young age. ) I went at the piles of boxes and garbage bags and moved the coats and blankets outside, piled the boys and girls clothes separately as neatly as I could and got the garbage outside. There were quite a few of us there – another seven or eight volunteers just in this one tent – and we soon had the area in much better shape. The people were incredibly focused, direct and hard-working. This wasn’t about being nice and pleasant; this was about getting something done. I got stupidly emotional thinking about what wonderful people they were and how I was such an ass for participating in the bad-mouthing of this, the distant borough.
This food truck handed out free waffles.
I had pizza and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and worked for another couple of hours. Someone called out, “If there are any extra volunteers, the blanket lady needs help!” Somebody else arrived and announced, “Any volunteers out there? We got to move a boat out of a living room.” But I had to get going and beat the dark. I biked along the beach, much of which has been moved further into shore
Note the trucks and garbage pile in the background.
and is wind-swept and oddly littered. The ride was easy, and it was cold going back to Manhattan. I stood on the bow of the ferry and imagined that I was the surge of last week’s storm, that I was coming at the city like that, relentless, constant, unstoppable. I actually spooked myself thinking like that, focusing on what it might be like to be an unconscious force that just goes on and on until it is spent…and then thought about this week’s forecast of a storm moving in, the dreaded Nor’easter, and wondered what the people of Staten Island would be doing to prepare for that.
There were only a few people in the streets of Lower Manhattan last night, nothing compared to the crowds in Brooklyn. We went to see the the BAM Opera House to see the Brazilian dance troupe, Grupo Corpo.The performance was very enjoyable, most invigorating really and enthusiastically received by the packed house. And then we had our cold walk home through Brooklyn, around the long lines for shuttle buses and across the Brooklyn Bridge – 41 degrees now – back into Manhattan, many of the buildings on the lower end still dark. We returned to Ward III in Tribeca, our refuge after the storm, to see what it would be like with power and lights. It was still dark, bu it wasn’t the same. It was loud – both the music and the people – and crowded. Our drinks were great, but the Narragansett was now in a glass and the Negroni had ice. We were still content and waxed sentimental about the Days of the Surge before going home to watch Saturday Night Live’s parody of Bloomberg’s press conference, all very amusing, especially the jokes on Bloomberg’s mastery of the Spanish language.
It is cold and bright again today and much of the wreckage remains.The Con Edison trucks are everywhere. As are the emergency relief vehicles, the used hoses and sandbags. But Leo’s Bagels is open again! Amazingly, the line is not yet out the door. And that is most definitely something. Egg and cheese, please.
It’s cold today, bright and cold on Saturday, November 3.We have our power back in the building; however that’s not the case for many of those to the east and south of us. Generators are still the norm.There isn’t so much water being pumped out now. The level is going down in the Battery Park underpass as well. Some stores are trying to open…if only half. And I’m happy to report that there was finally another animal at the Dog Run.
Biba finds a friend.
There are shades of normalcy coming back to the neighborhood, so much so that we have decided to venture out tonight, across the Brooklyn Bridge, to see Grupo Corpo at BAM. It will be a long, cold walk, perhaps something worth reporting.
Mike Deminico directs the production with Adam Holz on camera. There will be a lot of handheld work and a lot of movement. It might be black and white; that hasn’t been decided. But there will be close ups of high heels on the pavement and a struggle for the knife.
