Habitus

by Habitus · 04/24/12

Habitus editor Joshua Ellison read an essay for NPR’s Berlin Stories, drawing heavily on his explorations of the city for our Berlin issue. His essay, titled “Germans in the Mirror,” recalls our conversation with Turkish-German writer Zafer Şenocak.

Get your copy of the issue here. You can also follow the excellent series on Facebook. The season-premiere episode is online in its entirety. Thanks to Anna Winger, Victoria Gosling, and the rest of the Berlin Stories team for including us.

Give a listen and tell us what you think!

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by Daniel Bloch · 01/10/12

Myrtle Avenue, Brooklyn / William Gedney

Here’s what on our mind this week:

From the scribes

Poet, translator and Habitus contributor Lisa Katz offers an intriguing who’s who of contemporary Israeli poetry, from more well-known writers like Agi Mishol (featured in our Budapest issue), Dan Pagis, Yitzhak Laor and Taha Muhammad Ali to relative newcomers (at least for those of us who are stateside) like Anat Zecharya, Almog Behar and Admiel Kosman.

In Shalom Auslander’s new novel, Hope: A Tragedy, the main character, already besieged by a slew of problems in his daily upstate-New York existence, discovers Anne Frank herself living in his attic. Auslander discusses the connotations of this here.

And Etgar Keret’s story, “Creative Writing,” finds a husband and wife spinning fantastical tales.

Through the viewfinder

We said goodbye this week to Eve Arnold, who passed away at 99. The daughter of a rabbi, Arnold was the creator of iconic images of celebrities (perhaps most famously, Marilyn Monroe) and ordinary folk alike, and one of the first female photographers to be hired by Magnum.

In another, more gradual goodbye, the photographer William Gedney documented the demolition of the Myrtle Avenue elevated subway in the late ’60s and early ’70s, and the reshaping of the landscape beneath it, all from his apartment window.

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by Daniel Bloch · 01/04/12

Courtesy of Project Neon

Happy new year! Here’s what’s on our mind this week:

Start 2012 off with a few fascinating reads: The Shifting Boundaries of Jewish Identity: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Multiple Identity Narratives and Histories explores both new and familiar nuances of what it means to be Jewish. BOMBlog considers the rollicking and largely fabricated legacy of Octobriana, a Soviet-era cartoon bombshell. And philosopher John Gray offers a thoughtful antidote to doom-and-gloom scenarios created by recent socio-political change.

And the latest in city-speak: Economist Edward Glaeser celebrates cities as catalysts for “collaborative brilliance.” SoBro vs. ProCro? The Atlantic Cities finds out what’s behind the art (or lack thereof) of (re)naming a neighborhood. The Manhattan grid system design just turned 200, and the Museum of the City of New York is honoring it through April. And finally, what’s lovelier than a frigid New York night lit up by neon?

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by Daniel Bloch · 12/28/11

From "The Block," by Romare Bearden

Here’s what’s on our mind this week:

Urban renewals

If you haven’t guessed by now, we love a good city story, and here are a few: Read Shelley Salamensky’s insightful look at “Diaspora Disneys,” re-creations–and, in some cases, renewals–of urban Jewish life and culture in Krakow, Birobidzhan and a town in western Spain. Follow cookbook author and food blogger Alex Schmidt as she enlists her bobe Dora on a hunt for Jewish soul food in Mexico City. Check out Madrid’s version of the High Line, part of an enormous project that includes new parks, plazas, transit options and a rebirth of the Manzanares river. Finally, be sure to take a look at the Best CityReads of 2011, courtesy of The Atlantic Cities.

Literary musings

Habitus contributor and friend Susan Bernofsky remembers Robert Walser, who died on Christmas Day, 1956. The New York Times considers the Bible’s overwhelming literary legacy through the ages. And the daughter of Ezra Pound fights to have her father’s name disassociated from an Italian right-wing group connected to the recent shooting deaths of Senegalese immigrants in Florence.

Cinematic intimacy

Tintin and Margaret Thatcher biopics not your thing? Have no fear: Dau, a grandiose doozy of a film about the life of physicist Lev Landau is already five years in the making; here is a preview/exposé from GQ. (Warning: lie down before you read this because you will need to afterward.) On a smaller scale, Papirosen, the latest film from Argentine director Gastón Solnicki will screen at the Museum of the Moving Image next month. For the film, Solnicki–who will appear in person at the screening–distilled hundreds of hours of footage of his extended family to a brief 74 minutes, charting their lives in Buenos Aires and beyond.

Portraits

Photographer Gisèle Freund captured Virginia Woolf and James Joyce in eerily timeless color images, but photographing the star writers of her day was only part of her fascinating journey. We salute abstract artist Helen Frankenthaler, who passed away this week at the age of 83. And a special cosmic shout out to Romare Bearden, whose centennial is currently being honored at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Jazz at Lincoln Center, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the Studio Museum in Harlem.

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by Habitus · 05/17/11

We had a wonderful time hosting a panel as part of the PEN World Voices Festival.

If you weren’t able to join us, the audio has been posted online at the PEN website. Please listen and tell us what you think!

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by Daniel Bloch · 05/10/11

Hear Habitus board member André Aciman read an excerpt from his latest novel, Eight White Nights, released last year. A synopsis gives us a taste of the unique romance at the novel’s heart:

A young man goes to a Christmas party in upper Manhattan where a woman introduces herself with three simple words: “I am Clara.” Over the following seven days, they meet every evening at the cinema. Overwhelmed yet cautious, he treads softly. The tension between them builds gradually—marked by ambivalence, hope, and distrust—culminating in a final scene on New Year’s Eve [...] charged with magic and passion.

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by David Gutherz · 01/20/11

If you missed the acclaimed premiere of Mahler on the Couch, last Wednesday–don’t worry. The 20th Annual New York Jewish Film Festival still has plenty of great, thought-provoking, tangentially-Jewish movies on the way. Start tonight at six p.m. with Lily Rivlin’s loving homage to and memorial for the short story wizard Grace Paley. Upcoming highlights include “Singing in the Dark”–one of the first American dramatization of the Holocaust–at 1:30 p.m Sunday, “Lillith,” an Israeli documentary centered on the aftermath of a teenage suicide at 3:45 and 6 o’clock Monday, and a closing night screening of “The Matchmaker,” which was nominated for 7 Israeli Academy Awards including Best Picture.

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by David Gutherz · 12/22/10

“From Caligari to Hitler”–with this apocalyptic abbreviation the great cultural critic Siegfried Kracauer pithily set the tone of his groundbreaking “psychological history of german film.” Since then, most interest in Weimar cinema has followed Kracauer’s lead, focusing primarily on films that foreshadow the rise of Nazism or directors who either worked for Hitler or were persecuted by him. Kracauer’s book was written during a stay at the N.Y. Museum of Modern Art, and so it seems fitting that a new exhibit at that same institution is filling in some gaps that have resulted from this (understandable) over-emphasis on the catastrophic end of the ‘golden era’ of German film. In addition to classics like “Three Penny Opera” (airing Dec. 27 at 4:30 p.m. and the 30th at 7:30 p.m. ) and Fritz Lang’s “Dr. Mabuse, The Gambler” (Jan. 3. @ 7:30 p.m. , Jan. 8@ 7 p.m.) MoMA has collected a number of popular films from the period, mostly cabaret musicals and romantic comedies, like the “Congress Dances”, airing tomorrow at 4:30, “a musical about the Congress of Vienna (1814–15), in which European ambassadors redrew the map of the continent.” For Habitus readers eagerly awaiting our upcoming Berlin issue, these MoMA screening are a great resource.; for the rest of you–a terrific chance to experience entertainment the way those weird Weimarians did.

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by David Gutherz · 12/13/10

If you’re looking for some light beach-reading to fend off Seasonal Affective Disorder, then now is not the time to read Timothy Snyder’s new book, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. But if you are one of those people–like me–who saves all your Shoah research for December because it makes a windy winter day in Brooklyn seem like a holiday in the Gstaat, then this text ought to be at the top of your list. As the author puts it in a recent interview on the Leonard Lopate show, “This is not  a history for everybody because this is a history about how things are actually darker than we understand…The concentration camps and the Gulag were horrible, but unfortunately they’re only the introduction to the horror.” Without at all minimizing the appalling nature of concentration camps, or slighting the significance of 6 million, Snyder focuses on the 14 million people who were deliberately killed “in a relatively small place–between the Baltic and Black Seas, between Berlin and Moscow–over a relatively short period of time between 1933 and 1945.”  Some of these died in more well-known places and ways, but many were exterminated through forced starvation or migration, shot in their homes or over mass graves in sites that remain forgotten.

In related news, Claude Lanzmann’s  564  minute documentary Shoah–the definitive film on the subject–has just been re-released to theaters. In New York, IFC and Lincoln Plaza Cinemas are currently carrying it. Wider distribution is expected in the new year.

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by David Gutherz · 08/18/10

Citizens of the Windy City, be sure not to miss a rare opportunity to see the thought provoking thriller Backyard (El Traspatio). Mexico’s official submission to the 2010 Academy Awards, Backyard is a fictionalized account of the all-too-real 1990′s Juarez femicides written by Sabina Berman. A critically aclaimed playwright and contributor to our soon-to-be-released Mexico City issue, Berman has made it clear that she has intentions that transcend the simple catharsis that characterizes the murder-mystery genre. “When people leave the theater,” she told one interviewer, “their sense of right or wrong will be strengthened.”

Presented as part of the Maya Indie Series, Backyard will be playing for only one more night in Chicago. After that, its off to Miami until the 26th.

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