In the window of a tiny coffee shop near school, artist Yumiko Matsui has produced a model of the coffee shop and the primary school around the corner, entirely out of paper! Every detail is there, from the paper coffee bags above the shop's espresso machine to the school's bricks, seal, security camera. すごい!
Had my camera along the other day when I went to Film Forum, and took some pics of some of my favorite subway art: Deborah Brown's "Platform Diving," 1994.
In Theorizing Religion today, students described their experiences attending a religious festival: I'd given them four options to research and visit, all of which happened to fall this past weekend: the start of Sharad Navaratri (Hindu), Eid-al-Fitr (Muslim), Rosh Hashanah (Jewish), and the feast of San Gennaro (Catholic). Finding a place to witness one of these festivals was part of the assignment, as was writing an account of what they found and what they made of it.
is invited to celebrate a festive Rosh Hashanah dinner with the family of a Russian Jewish co-worker, though she's warned "we're not very religious anymore." Two boys attend a Hindu community celebration in a tiny room; as some pujatis convulse on the floor, one student is unnerved, and the other is surprised to find a "pure form" of the "spirit" he now thinks animates all religion. Many students go to the San Gennaro Festival in Little Italy and are disgusted or discouraged by its commercialism; people they ask about the religious significance of it know little, but one student makes it past the food vendors and freak shows to the Church of the Most Precious Blood, where he finds the painted plaster statue of the saint fluttering with taped-on dollar bills;
another student discerns a religious love animating even the tackiest street events. A girl who interns for an organization helping South Asians is told about Eids and Navaratris past by people she meets, and then is treated to dinner at a Pakistani place by a taxi driver - he has neither time nor family to celebrate Eid himself, so offering it to her is his Eid celebration.
sometimes vulgar festival garb. A "reality check" for the theories we're discussing in class - do they really apply to anything but academic constructions of religion? I also wanted them to feel the complex energies of the festivities and wonder if they were really "religious," and to start to think about festival "higher time" and the power of community celebration, topics we'll take up in a few weeks. Seems to have worked!
One needn't and probably shouldn't be pious about religious topics to write about them, but an authorial voice such as Chafets' pretty much prevents the reader from learning anything.
The problems are too deep to be "resolved" by plot. "Still walking" (in Japanese "Aruitemo aruitemo," words from a song which appears in an unexpected way two-thirds of the way into the film, describing walking and walking with the one you love, rocking like a boat) is a delight to watch, full of beauty, with remarkable performances by the actors, especially as they interact, and especially the children. A family gathers on the anniversary of the death of the eldest son, whose passing (he died saving a child from drowning) leaves the family broken in a way it can't ever fix. They live on - they are still walking - but the unanswerable questions of how he would have lived on, and how he would have affected the others' lives, raise in their turn unanswerable questions about the lives each of the survivors' lives, a kind of barely visible question-mark over every life choice, every relationship. In the end, this film is somewhat bitterer in its reflections on the legacies of the dead among the living than some of its predecessors, but no less true. True of what? Not just the way the loss of a particular person in a particular family lives on. Kore-eda is as ambitious a film-maker in one register as he is restrained in another, and as I discussed the film with my friend D after watching it, every detail and apparently casual reference started to seem like it bore a message. I'm not sure finally what all these additional messages are about - the burden of the past, of what might have been, the present moment... might have to go see it again!
Some scenes from four full days in Berlin. The Schaubühne am Lehninerplatz, where I saw a new production of Friedrich Hebbel's 1861 "Nibelungen." A nearly rusticated philosopher at the State Library. "Die Stelen," as the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe is known. A horse chestnut. Religion section
at Dussman - somehow Atheismus has come between Glaube and Benedikt XVI. Witty trash receptacle in a nation of trash-separators. Manhole cover of the Berlin skyline. Reflection of our tour boat in one of the grand new government buildings on the Spree. (Those joggers kept pace with us for a long time.)
The Four Evangelists carved by the astonishing Tilman Riemenschneider in the recently reopened Bodemuseum. Advertisement for a leftist party, protesting the privatization which led to the collapse of the S-Bahn system. The silent monument to the book burnings at the Bebelplatz - an empty library beneath the square; look carefully and you'll see the bare white shelves. The squat hulk of the Berliner Dom, with the DDR-era TV tower behind it (left), and the spires of the brick gothic church of St. Nikolai (right). And finally: garden gnomes, Berlin style. They're saying, "Come back soon" in their way, I'm sure!
(You can get almost everything in New York, but not good solid German rye bread.)
palatial Dussman on Friedrichstrasse and found these writers have indeed both been praised as major contributions to contemporary German literature. Isn't it wonderful? I started reading the comic Kaminer, and had to laugh out loud - something that only happens to me with Bill Bryson (and less often with David Sedaris). This book is in fact a bit Bryson-like, a travelogue of true, hidden Germany. Who better to reveal it to us, German-Americans abroad, than a Russian theater artist who came to Berlin just a few years ago and discovered a new life as a writer in German? Who else would have been at a reading in Chemnitz, once known as Karl-Marx-Stadt (although Marx never set foot there), noticed that there was a garden gnome conference on, and realized that the great head of Marx still at the city's center (less determined and scary-looking than the Soviet versions) was really like the head of a garden gnome?!
Then, just days before, I arrived, problems were found with the brakes, too! It will take four years to fix the whole fleet, and in the meantime, for the foreseeable future, only 25% of train cars are usable. Most S-Bahn lines are running on dramatically reduced schedules (im 20-Minutentakt), and other lines - greyed out in the map above - aren't running at all. How long will this continue? Nobody knows.
Saw a remarkable and very important film today, one to keep an eye out for. It just opened this week in Germany, and may not open across the seas for a long time, but here's hoping. The film, by Hans- Christian Schmid, is called "Sturm," and tells the story of Hannah Maynard, a lawyer working for the International Criminal Court for Yugoslavia near the end of its allotted time; politicians want the court to finish its business, but justice takes time. Higher-ups see bigger pictures, but lawyers, at least sometimes, hear the voices of individuals. I don't want to say much more, but will say that every moment of this film rings true, in pain, complexity and psychological insight. Every performance, especially leads Kerry Fox and Anamaria Marinca, is stellar. Something happens when Hannah meets a young Bosnian refugee in Berlin named Mira Arendt. Yes, something like a Hannah Arendt emerges, but in so subtle and believable a way it took me hours of discussing the film to even begin to figure it out.
Greetings from Berlin, where I've just played the part of the relation from faraway New York at a reunion of descendants of my mother's maternal grandparents. I've only been to two of these biennial reunions before, but it's nice to feel part of an extended family! I think I might try to come to the next one, too, though then it would cost me real money, not just frequent flier miles...
Had a grand time rewriting history this evening! I've been in charge of a project to make more people (students especially) aware of the history of The New School, in this its ninetieth year, and this was the time for me to officially unveil the online reader we've put together, and to suggest that and why this history is worth getting to know. (Above are six "splash" images from the reader website, running the gamut from social science publications and Hannah Arendt through student protests and course catalogs to dance and the particular niche The New School has long played in New York culture.) The finale of my presentation were the Benton murals, which you've heard me rhapsodize about before. But the way I got there was kind of neat, if I say so myself.
resigned from Columbia in protest at restrictions on academic freedom during WW1, Charles Beard and James Harvey Robinson; the philosopher and educational theorist John Dewey; and the economist and cultural critic Thorstein Veblen. Grand founding figures and inspiring. Our orientation speaker actually called them "founding fathers," and contrasted them with the founding fathers of older and more established universities (Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Columbia). I wonder if that's is or even should be our aspirational peer group, but my first question was: "fathers?"
joining the New School experiment, and it was she who insisted on some of the most innovative aspects of the structure of the new institution (like the absence of tenured positions, or an endowment); she signed her suggestions "your anarchist"! But she's just one of many women who supported, taught at and studied at The New School at a time when there were few vehicles for educated women outside of women's colleges. Remember that this was 1919, the year women first gained the vote. (And some day I'll tell you abut Clara Mayer, the forgotten woman who ran The New School for forty years.)
educational experiments in the same vein, from the (socialist) Rand School of Social Science, the Bureau of Social Research (later a part of the Columbia School of Social Work), the LSE in London and the Institut für Sozialwissenschaft in Frankfurt. In particular, the hopes of the school, both in terms of audience and impact, are better understood by seeing it in the context of other institutions created by progressives steeped in the social sciences in turn of the century New York than by seeing it as a species of the genus university.
The social sciences were important to it, but as part of a broader attempt to bring the methods of modern scientific inquiry to the humanities, which - Beard and Robinson had written - were still "medieval" in character. But it was broader even than this suggests. Psychology and sociology and anthropology and economics had to be pursued. But the modern arts, too, were forms of social research - explorations of the conditions, challenges and significance of modern forms of living. It was not an accident or a distraction, and certainly not an embarrassment, that The New School within three years of its founding became a center for the study and practice of the arts.
students a sense of the excitement with which the histories and ideals of the school fill me, and what's sometimes called a "usable past." Or better, multiple usable pasts, materials for a "choice of inheritance." We are a university now, we give degrees, and mainly to students transitioning to careers (or at least lives as self-supporting grown-ups), but the flame kindled by folks like Putnam, "your anarchist," burns on. I hope our New School history project feeds the flame!
One of the more interesting aspects of contemporary evangelical culture is the creation of a parallel world, a sort of demimonde, of Christian pop culture. Competing with godless secular culture, it began in the 1970s, achieved some genuine heights with CCM (contemporary Christian music), and continues apace with Christian horror novels, video games, rock festivals, ironic teeshirts, etc. I stumbled on an early example today, a fully licensed Christian parallel Archie comic from 1975. (You can download the whole volume here.) A team of cynical television reporters comes to Riverdale High looking for stories of deviancy and strife, but finds none (except Archie's accident-proneness, yuk yuk). Instead they find kids saying grace in the cafeteria, a saved ex-hippie, and everyone - even the principal - happy clappy in the Bible Club. 
I'm doubtful that this movement has created a securely Bible-centered counterculture. But recent events (like hysterical Texas parents objecting to President Obama's exhorting their children to work hard in school) confirm they're following Archie's example in tangling up the media.
Just finished Tim Winton's new novel, Breath. It won the Miles Franklin Award, and you can see why. Breath tells the story of two teenagers in Western Australia in the 1970s who test their limits by (among other things) surfing ever more dangerous waves. The ending was darker - the characters more damaged by what happens to them - than I wanted, but it rings true throughout. Indeed, it sings: his writing is of an almost magical precision and power (even though there's no magical realism in this novel, as in the lovely Cloudstreet).
The Brooklyn Museum is showing an exhibition of the work of Yinka Shonibare, a gifted young Nigerian-British artist with one idea. He complicates images of 18th and 19th century European life by creating scenes with (headless) mannequins in period costumes - but the fabrics are all the colorful Dutch wax prints which colonialists, learning from Indonesian batik, printed in Europe (probably on cotton from India) and exported to Africa, whose emblem they have now become. (Above: "The Age of Enlightenment - Adam Smith," 2008.) The effect is initially jarring, often beautiful, and shimmers with a sort of profundity - the whole colonial economy of the modern world seems on unwitting display: the emperor's new clothes are colonial! But after a while it can seem a bit repetitive, even formulaic.
Happily, Shonibare created a special installation for this show which demonstrates the wit and power of his approach in all its freshness; his work really needs to be taking on something familiar and local, and then it's electric! He placed figures of children (still headless) in some of the period rooms in the Brooklyn Museum's 
standing collection. Looking for them - like a game of hide and seek - energized and troubled displays which would otherwise have seemed of merely antiquarian interest. Here are three: a girl under the table in the dining room from Cane Acres Plantation in Summerville, South Carolina, c. 1806; a child skipping rope in the "Moorish Room" designed for a New York townhouse in 1878; and a boy playing with a marionnette soldier in a "Civil War Dressing Room," a composite display whose fireplace hails from Andrew Johnson's White House in Washington, DC. The innocent joy of the children, their games, and their racial opacity really bring the post-colonial critique of western modernity home, heartbreakingly.
There's a sweet article in today's Times about people reading books in the subway; the attached slideshow included these pics of people doing religious reading. (I noticed the religious subway readers soon after becoming a commuter.) The Korean woman above is nearing the end of a six-volume study of the Lotus Sutra. The two brothers below usually read a page of Talmud together on their way to work (in a restaurant), but this picture was taken on a Wednesday, when one of the brothers studies another kind of scripture, the Dining section of the Times!
Convocation - the formal opening of the academic year - was this afternoon. The many officers of the university (most of them not academic) share the stage of Tishman Auditorium with the winners of the Distinguished University Teaching Award (this year instructors in fashion retailing, journalism, psychology and nonprofit management), and the faculty member invited to deliver the year's "Aims of Education" address (this year a historian of dance). Music is provided by students from the Mannes School of Music and the Jazz program. It's a rare opportunity to see the University as a whole - for the university to see itself - and it never fails to fill me with a somewhat amazed pride at the range of things we do. This year was no exception - indeed, it was the most inspiring Aims of Education address in many a year, and (not because!) delivered by one of my best friends.
And yes, in case you were wondering, Belief-O-Matic and The Savvy Convert made for a fantastic class yesterday. Did I mention that - in order to lend an air of faux seriousness to it - I borrowed the cart of laptops from the science department (on which I did chemistry modeling last year!)? Everyone got to try the Belief-O-Matic, I got to explain my groundrule for religious studies classes (I don't want to know what your result is, it's none of my business and has no place in this class), and we had a great discussion about what surveys clarify and obscure, what the survey omits and how it might be asked about, just who BeliefNet is, just what it offers and why, and what it says about America in the early 21st century that there is such a "market" in faith/inspiration. I wonder what they'll have to add tomorrow, as we wade into more academic but even more exciting materials...
This was the story of Cameron Todd Willingham, executed by the bloodthirsty state of Texas in 2004 although there were reasons already then to dismiss the claim that the fire which killed Willingham's children had even been arson in the first place. An article in the newest New Yorker shows that the case against him was faulty in every aspect. The exoneration is too late, of course. Willingham is, as Bob Herbert puts it, "innocent but dead"; his case "should send a tremor through one’s conscience." Maybe it will finally help Americans see the evil of the death penalty, although I fear we have a long way to go to get there.
