All posts tagged: Essays

3 Movies: In Conversation

June 10, 2013 ,

By ELIZABETH WITTE

 

These were not snapshots, but motion pictures – hence, “movies.” Or rather, they were “talkies” – sound happened too. And through editing there were unions and disunions of movement and sound, the building of story, of character. In the span of seven weeks I watched three.

Things we experience in close proximity in time come to bear on each other, bridge the gaps between them. Persons in close proximity attempt a similar bridging.

The first movie was a drama, imagined from the ground up. The other two were documentaries crafted from ongoing lives. Each brought a unique document of a couple-at-home to the screen in my home.

3 Movies: In Conversation
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Vanishing Chinatown

June 9, 2013

By ALLEN GEE

I know the Chinatown, New York, of long ago from my parents.  My grandfather, like a grand impresario, hosted their wedding reception there.  They were married on September 19, 1959, and he personally invited everyone to the reception, stopping by at the Gee, Lai, and Gong family association buildings, which was where men gathered to consolidate finances and dictate business decisions, and where women met to socialize.  Once invited to the reception, you could bring any number of family, but it was a matter of honor not to overstep the generosity of the invitation. I should add that the reception lasted for three consecutive nights.

Vanishing Chinatown
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Speculative Summer School

Speculative Summer School

May 31, 2013 ,

By KATHERINE JAMIESON

At the threshold of summer, the sunglasses are on. Running in blue-sky mode, I’ve been talking up some ideas for multiplying the writing workshop times the architecture studio. Their product would be a format for storytelling across media, an alignment of complimentary strengths really well suited to engage the built environment.

Speculative Summer School
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On Limits and Liberation: Oulipo, the New Wave, and My Summer in Paris

May 28, 2013

By SONYA CHUNG

1.

In the fall of 1960, an exclusive group of writers and thinkers gathered in Paris to officially launch a new way of approaching both the study and creation of literature.  This gathering—which would become “a kind of literary supper club . . . a hallowed echo chamber for investigations of poetic form and narrative constraint and the mathematics of wordplay,” as Daniel Levin Becker describes it in his book Many Subtle Channels—called itself Ouvroir de littérature potentielle (Workshop of Potential Literature), or Oulipo.  According to co-founder Raymond Queneau, the workshop would explore “new forms and structures that may be used by writers in any way they see fit.”  Becker, who is currently one of 20 living members of the still-active workshop (there are 38 total members, living and dead), was elected to the Oulipo in 2008 and describes the workshop a bit more specifically:

On Limits and Liberation: Oulipo, the New Wave, and My Summer in Paris
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Changing Places: Ich Bin Ein Berliner

Changing Places: Ich Bin Ein Berliner

May 27, 2013 ,

By MELODY NIXON

We painted lipstick on our lips and watched businessmen in suits flip open Die Welt, grazing the top of the newspaper with their line of sight, conspicuously shy in their observations of two foreign frauen. The train shot into Berlin’s Hauptbanhof with succinct precision, confirming one of our German stereotypes: 7.00pm exactly on Dec 31st, 2003, and not a minute late. My friend and I hoisted backpacks and flowed out of the central station and into a city that was eagerly, furiously rebuilding, was humming with energy, and was dusty and heterogeneous and still could not quite figure out how to contain itself. 2004 seemed like an inauspicious year to welcome.

Changing Places: Ich Bin Ein Berliner
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Coastlines

Coastlines

May 14, 2013

By TEOW LIM GOH

 

The ocean encircles a lone peak.

Rough terrain surrounds this prison.

There are few birds flying over the cold hills.

The wild goose messenger cannot find its way.

In the first half of the twentieth century, a Chinese immigrant carved this poem on the wooden walls of the Angel Island Immigration Station in the San Francisco Bay. It was unsigned, one of many.

Coastlines
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Homage to a Failed Venture: The Chesapeake and Ohio Canal

Homage to a Failed Venture: The Chesapeake and Ohio Canal

May 13, 2013 ,

By JULIA LICHTBLAU

If Washingtonians have a patron saint, it’s the late Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. The longest-serving Supreme Court Justice, a famous defender of civil liberties, Douglas was a committed environmentalist, who wanted to be remembered for leaving the earth more beautiful.

In February, Texas A&M University’s Transportation Institute dubbed the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan area Number One in the U.S. for traffic. Local drivers fritter away on average sixty-seven hours and thirty-two gallons of gasoline a year in traffic.

I was born in Washington and spent a good part of my childhood in the area. Though I haven’t lived there in years, each time I go “home,” I feel grateful to Justice Douglas for preventing my favorite Washington place, the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal, from becoming just another congested highway.

Homage to a Failed Venture: The Chesapeake and Ohio Canal
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From the 17th Floor: Second Look

From the 17th Floor: Second Look

May 10, 2013 ,

By JENNIFER ACKER

1.

I’ve been watching the Qasr al Hosn. Watching it since I arrived in August. The boarded-up block below my office window withholds this oldest structure in Abu Dhabi—the whitewashed fort—and the arch-studded building of the Cultural Foundation. The block has so much potential, but for months, nothing’s happened. Or, I’ll see a kick up of dust and realize it was the wind.

From the 17th Floor: Second Look
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Discontinuous City

Discontinuous City

May 3, 2013

By SCOTT GEIGER

Two weeks ago today, I woke up reading an email that Watertown was closed. The Boston, Cambridge, and Watertown police departments had sealed a perimeter. No entrance, no exit. The office was closed. I had started working for a landscape architecture practice in Watertown that Monday, the morning of the Marathon. After three months on the city’s outskirts, writing full-time, at last I had started traveling around Boston and Cambridge. The Lockdown froze the city in its novelty for me.

Discontinuous City
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Vincent’s Final Days

Vincent’s Final Days

May 1, 2013 , ,

By GREGORY CURTIS

This is an excerpt from a narrative about the last seventy-four days in the life of Vincent van Gogh. It begins in Paris on the morning of Saturday, May 17, 1890, when Vincent first met his sister-in-law Jo, the wife 
of his younger brother Theo. It ends in Auvers, northwest of Paris, at one-thirty in the morning of Tuesday, July 29, 1890, when Vincent died after wounding himself in the chest with a pistol.

Vincent’s Final Days
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