Author Archives: Emdashes

Adrian Nicole LeBlanc Speaking at NYU on 11/12

A truly exciting bit of news from New York University about one of the most powerful works of journalism we know. From the press release:

Narrative Journalist Adrian Nicole LeBlanc to Speak at NYU, November 12th

Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, author of the best-selling book Random Family and a Visiting Scholar at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Institute of Journalism will talk about narrative and immersion journalism, Random Family and her latest projects. LeBlanc will speak as part of Professor Mitch Stephens’ Foundations of Journalism course. The NYU community and media are welcome. The talk will be held on Thursday, November 12, from 11:00 – 12:15 p.m. at the NYU Stern School of Business, Schimmel Auditorium, Tisch Hall, UC-50, 40 West 4th Street (at Greene Street). Please note that no film or recording devices are allowed during the presentation.

A frequent contributor to The New York Times Magazine, LeBlanc has also published her work in The New Yorker, Esquire, and other magazines. She holds a B.A. in Sociology from Smith College, a Master of Philosophy and Modern Literature from Oxford University, and a Master of Studies in Law from Yale Law School.

LeBlanc has received numerous awards, including a Bunting fellowship from Radcliffe, a MacDowell Colony residency, and the Holtzbrinck Fellowship from the American Academy in Berlin. In 2006, she was named as a MacArthur Fellow. Random Family was her first book.

Media contact and RSVP: Joscelyn Jurich, jsj237@nyu.edu , 646.717.4828

Comics Fest: The Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival

_Pollux writes_:
While in New York for the New Yorker Festival in October, I had the pleasure of visiting Brooklyn’s “Desert Island Comics”:http://www.desertislandbrooklyn.com, a treasure-house of independent and mainstream comics, and meeting its knowledgeable and friendly owner, Gabriel Fowler.
It now gives me great pleasure to announce on Emdashes a festival sponsored by Desert Island Comics and the local publisher PictureBox:
“The Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival!”:http://www.comicsandgraphicsfest.com/
It will take place on Saturday, **December 5, 2009** between 11 AM – 7 PM.
The venue will be:
Our Lady of Consolation Church
184 Metropolitan Ave.
Williamsburg, Brooklyn
Admission is free!
Cartoonists, illustrators, designers, and printmakers will all be gathering at The Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival to bring you:
*A bustling marketplace in which over 50 exhibitors will be selling their zines, comics, books, prints and posters
*Book signings
*Panel discussions and lectures by prominent artists
*Exhibition of vintage comic book artwork
*An evening of musical performances

The Warm Glow of the Bauhaus at MoMA

Jonathan Taylor writes:
Bauhaus 1919–1933: Workshops for Modernity is the Museum of Modern Art’s first major Bauhaus exhibit since 1938. Janet Flanner (“Genet”) wrote in 1969 about a Bauhaus retrospective at the Musée National d’Art Moderne (then on the Ave. du Président Wilson) and the nearby Musée Municipal d’Art Moderne in Paris, coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the school’s founding. Flanner wrote that the show was to go on to Chicago. The article gives little detail about the contents of the show—it’s more of a primer on the great artists the Bauhaus gave the world: Kandinsky, Klee, Mies.
The new MoMA show is more about what great artists gave to the Bauhaus. Many reviewers have felt the need to cite an invented consensus perception of the Bauhaus: in the words of the Times‘s Nicolai Ouroussoff, “tubular steel furniture, prefabricated housing, ranks of naïve utopians and Tom Wolfe’s withering disdain for all of the above. A show about the Bauhaus? No thanks. Who, after all, really needs to see another Breuer chair?”
But even if one’s opinion going in is less hostile, the chance to see so many products of Bauhaus design, craft and manufacture is a revelation, if one has never had the chance to experience their sheer materiality in person. The school’s emphasis on the properties of their materials—metal, wood, glass, and in the case of the playful photomontages, paper—lends these objects, in their contemporary context, a real warmth (aided somewhat by the yellowing of the paper exhibits, and the patination of metal). Even after the Bauhaus’s turn away from its Expressionist roots in nostalgia for the premodern, and toward the stark geometry and sans-serif typography it’s better known for, there’s a wonderfully consistent presence of the earthy and decorative in the Bauhaus’s textile products and wallpapers, by artists including Anni Albers and Gunta Stölzl.
For me, the highlight of the exhibit, exemplifying the quest for ingenuity and the personal touch inherent in the Bauhaus’s formation of master craftsmen and -women, is a pair of textiles whose patterns were devised by Hajo Rose using a typewriter. In one case, the pattern consists with rows of nearly interlocking typed “9”s, creating a semiabstract pattern that Alexandra Lange describes well as “letterforms turning into repetitive and almost floral scallops.” The exhibit includes both the swatches of typed paper, and the resulting textiles. I’ve looked for an image online to link to, but can’t find one. It’s just as well—this show is about what you can learn about the Bauhaus from being in the presence of its art, rather than reading about it.

Sempé Fi: The Masquerade

Ware_Unmasked_11-2-09.JPG
_Pollux writes_:
Sometimes my approach in writing these Sempé Fi columns involves showing someone, usually not a _New Yorker_ reader, the cover of the latest issue and see what their initial reaction is. With “Chris Ware’s”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Ware cover for the November 2, 2009 issue, called “Unmasked,” the reaction I received, from more than one person, was: “Yeah, that’s how people are.”
That’s how people are –meaning the parents who stand in the street depicted in Ware’s cover, their attention monopolized by their phones, rather than in their young children, who are trick-or-treating. The parents are there and not there at the same time, empty uniforms in the field of battle of parenting.
The kids are having their childhood experiences; they probably won’t remember their parents being there at all, if they remember the night at all. The parents aren’t living it. A night out trick-or-treating is a distraction from real life rather than an experience of it. Their phones are keeping them connected to what’s “real.”
The phones cast a glow upon the parents’ faces. Ware skillfully renders the artificial illumination both a masking and an unmasking. The glow turns the faces into masked faces that match the children’s actual masks, but the glow is actually casting a light upon the parents, revealing them to be what they really are: busy, unfocused, unsentimental, and somewhat selfish.
When their kids, whose faces are literally masked and facing the glow of not LCD screens but houses warm with light and candy, get their sack full of Milk Duds and M&M’s, the parents will momentarily put their phones down and move to the next house. It’s an empty ritual; it won’t make for a memorable night, both for child or for parents.
Ware leaves out the usual color and magic associated with Halloween night. Ware creates a bleak image of undecorated houses and parents focused on all the wrong things. It’s a glum procession of the masked and unmasked.
Ware’s cover works as a stand-alone visual piece, but the cover ties in with a graphic short story, also by Ware and also called “Unmasked,” that lies within the covers of _The New Yorker_. Ware manages to incorporate a lot of family drama and commentary on families within the four pages accorded to his illustrated piece.
The first panels of the short story match the image on the cover: a middle-aged woman on her iPhone 3G receiving a text from her husband Phil, who is too busy to accompany her and their four-year-old daughter on Halloween night. He’s too busy. “I was so mad. I could hardly type…” she thinks. “How many Halloweens did he suppose he’d have with his four-year-old?”
But as her young daughter innocently and happily frolics throughout the short story, the woman, too, seems to direct most of her energies and attention elsewhere. As Ware’s story unfolds, we learn that the woman’s mother lives alone since her husband died. The woman and her mother sit in the park, as the four-year-old daughter enjoys herself on a swing. There, at the park, the woman’s mother reveals that her late husband had been having an affair with his teaching assistant.
Her mother’s revelation makes the woman angry rather than sympathetic. Was her mother implying by her revelation that Phil is now cheating on her? She stops drying her daughter with a towel in order to make “a very important phone call to Daddy.”
After she finishes the call, she shrugs off such fears of an affair. “Poor mom…” she thinks, “she was still naïve in so many ways…”
And so the woman assures herself after communicating with her husband via a telephone. Who knows what her husband doing? There’s no way to tell; husband and wife never seem to be in the same room. And her daughter, while still young, will not be young for long, and perhaps will grow up with her own set of resentments and issues.
That’s how people are, and always will be, except now they have access to the fastest, most powerful phones on the market.

Cartoon Bank Overhaul: Ben Bass Blogs On Who Broke the Bank

_Pollux writes_:
All change is not growth, as all movement is not forward. So the saying goes, and _The New Yorker_’s “Cartoon Bank”:http://www.cartoonbank.com has changed, but it has not grown. The changes made, as of October 6, 2009, to the Cartoon Bank have unfortunately set it back in terms of usability, accuracy, and reliability.
Ben Bass has written a cogent “analysis “:http://benbassandbeyond.blogspot.com/2009/11/who-broke-bank.html of the overhaul, and its effect on what used to be a dependable storehouse of _New Yorker_ cartoons and covers.
It’s not just about searching easily for your favorite dog and desert island cartoons. As Bass writes, “the removal of popularity search also adversely affects the artists themselves, who get commissions on each sale.”
For my part, I’ve experienced difficulties finding such simple things as Robert Crumb’s famous 1994 “cover”:http://sexualityinart.wordpress.com/2008/03/18/robert-crumb-drawing-as-a-medium-for-analysis-of-american-culture-drawing-on-the-important-things/ that depicted his version of Eustace Tilley.
I type in “Robert Crumb” and get results that include cartoons and covers drawn by artists whose first name is Robert (e.g. Robert Tallon, Robert Kraus). But no Robert Crumb cover. And I did what everyone else will soon do: find an alternate way of looking for _New Yorker_ artists’ work.
Is every change to the Cartoon Bank a move backward? No. The site has a clean, intuitive design with “Refine Search” engines that simply need to be fine-tuned.
We’d be interested in what Emdashes readers have to say about this issue. Please post your feedback!
**Update**: As of November 11, 2009, some changes were made to the site, which include enhanced navigation, new framing options, a preview tool for customized products, and a canvas print option for covers.
Also by Ben Bass: a recent “write-up”:http://benbassandbeyond.blogspot.com/2009/10/home-and-home-series.html on The New Yorker Festival and “Avenue Queue”:http://emdashes.com/2007/10/avenue-queue-a-new-yorker-fest.php, a special 2007 Festival report.