Edie Meidav's Blog, page 4
June 2, 2011
Beautiful New Film for LOLA just released now
Dear friends,
The great director Rebecca Dreyfus just made this beautiful movie in honor of LOLA coming out very soon -- See what you think
She used two students of mine and our upstate New York locale, and somehow emerged with a beautiful palette reminiscent of all those 70s films I used to watch back in my lost youth.
Incredible soundtrack by one of my musical heroes, Kevin Salem, who had many interesting alternative soundtracks as well; some sounded like a lost Mexican opera singer was crying her heart out alongside Highway Five.
I am really thankful.
Please see it and, as they say, if it finds grace in your eyes, recommend it to your Facebook or Internet masses! For this is how I understand such things work -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6iY2A....
Until soon,
Yours in the moviesphere,
Edie
The great director Rebecca Dreyfus just made this beautiful movie in honor of LOLA coming out very soon -- See what you think
She used two students of mine and our upstate New York locale, and somehow emerged with a beautiful palette reminiscent of all those 70s films I used to watch back in my lost youth.
Incredible soundtrack by one of my musical heroes, Kevin Salem, who had many interesting alternative soundtracks as well; some sounded like a lost Mexican opera singer was crying her heart out alongside Highway Five.
I am really thankful.
Please see it and, as they say, if it finds grace in your eyes, recommend it to your Facebook or Internet masses! For this is how I understand such things work -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6iY2A....
Until soon,
Yours in the moviesphere,
Edie
June 1, 2011
Newsletter up and running again
Dear good readers,
Just to keep you in the loop: there's a newsletter (quaint word in this era of blogs, right? Can you remember the first person who savored the word "blog" as s/he said it to you? I can. San Francisco, circa 2000, a proud fire-dancer who liked to swerve around half-naked in the dark. Are these not,really, the way that blogs function?) at www.ediemeidav.com.
Go ahead. Subscribe again to something else. I promise to try to keep it interesting.
Yours in the logosphere,
Edie
Just to keep you in the loop: there's a newsletter (quaint word in this era of blogs, right? Can you remember the first person who savored the word "blog" as s/he said it to you? I can. San Francisco, circa 2000, a proud fire-dancer who liked to swerve around half-naked in the dark. Are these not,really, the way that blogs function?) at www.ediemeidav.com.
Go ahead. Subscribe again to something else. I promise to try to keep it interesting.
Yours in the logosphere,
Edie
May 25, 2011
Day of Onion, Day of Honey
Here's today's kind review from Booklist. May I say that I feel understood? Is that kosher to say?
"As teenagers in the 1970s, Lana and Rose were typical BFFs: joined at the hip, flowing goddesses high on groovitude. Daring each other, baring their secrets, they tried on different mantles of pseudo-adulthood, with Lana emerging the stronger personality, Rose her willing supplicant. At the core of it all were Vic,Lana's father, a counterculture guru with a cultlike following, and her mother, Mary, an early feminist educator. Stressed by the increased demands of his notorious career, however, Vic's temper explodes one day, and he murders Mary in a fit of professional and romantic jealousy. Swiftly convicted and sentenced to death row, Vic is abandoned by his daughter but not her friend. Though Rose and Lana drift apart, attorney Rose makes it her life's mission to track elusive Lana down in order to reunite her with Vic in
2008, just days before his execution—a meeting Lana works hard to avoid. In this intense and tumultuous tale, Meidav adeptly limns the dark and sinuous obsessions of friendship with penetrating insights. — Carol Haggas
"As teenagers in the 1970s, Lana and Rose were typical BFFs: joined at the hip, flowing goddesses high on groovitude. Daring each other, baring their secrets, they tried on different mantles of pseudo-adulthood, with Lana emerging the stronger personality, Rose her willing supplicant. At the core of it all were Vic,Lana's father, a counterculture guru with a cultlike following, and her mother, Mary, an early feminist educator. Stressed by the increased demands of his notorious career, however, Vic's temper explodes one day, and he murders Mary in a fit of professional and romantic jealousy. Swiftly convicted and sentenced to death row, Vic is abandoned by his daughter but not her friend. Though Rose and Lana drift apart, attorney Rose makes it her life's mission to track elusive Lana down in order to reunite her with Vic in
2008, just days before his execution—a meeting Lana works hard to avoid. In this intense and tumultuous tale, Meidav adeptly limns the dark and sinuous obsessions of friendship with penetrating insights. — Carol Haggas
February 28, 2011
From the Land of Sublime
Okay, so this is the first and tardy post from the Latin country with monitored Internet access -- let's call it Sublime. Here in Sublime, where we are for two months, the socioeconomic intensity can so fill one's pores one must seek release in the volcanism of the music or dance here. Music becomes a way to gaze beyond the moat of the ocean.
Let that be enough for now, more later soon.
Let that be enough for now, more later soon.
January 23, 2011
Happy Travel
Here, in the spirit of all the advice-givers of our insecure era, are a few rules for happy travel to a place you have never been:
1) Wherever you are, create a routine. It does not have to be elaborate; it can be as simple as having your morning drink in the same place every day. In this way, (repeated) time conquers the (foreign) space. On last week's trip to Nicaragua, for example, I went to the same dance class every morning, taught by a beautifully queenie and charismatic, slightly lazy instructor to young girls and big housewives and a few eager boy teens on a liability-seductive wooden floor strewn with nailheads in the hot center of Managua, across from the university site that has been a site for many student demonstrations. Something about dancing the cumbia across the floor every morning, the instructor sailing in happily always a half-hour late and animating the students, served as the perfect grounding device as well as an absurdist comment on all the recent, as well as older, political history of the country. In the Pyrenees, I used to have cafe au lait at the same small cafe across from the prefecture and learned too much about the local gossips this way.
2)Come with half the clothes and twice the money you think you need.
3)Any bit of language you know prior to departure will be magnified four-fold upon arrival, so try to have something proto-linguistic going on.
4)Read the local paper wherever you are.
5)Any contact you have prior to departure will, similar to #3, above, be magnified in its beneficent effects perhaps ten-fold. Even your uncle's old schoolmate's wife's sister's friend. It all helps. The only time this hasn't helped me -- I can think of one example -- was in Sri Lanka when a contact turned out to be something of a bibulous newspaper scion and, somewhere in my first month there, feeling romantically spurned, decided to publish a scandalous piece doing everything short of naming me in the tiny island's main English-language paper, going out to 18,000 people, turning me into something of a representative of the worst libertine ills of Western society, and quoting from a friend's letter to me he had procured and kept in his possession.
6)When moments of culture shock crowd, which they will if you are anywhere for an extended period, try to return to private routines of succor. Everyone has some form of this, whether it be yoga, writing a friend, keeping a journal.
7)Every interaction you have with anyone has potential for grace. Remember that.
8)Find the possibility of gratitude.
That's all for now.
1) Wherever you are, create a routine. It does not have to be elaborate; it can be as simple as having your morning drink in the same place every day. In this way, (repeated) time conquers the (foreign) space. On last week's trip to Nicaragua, for example, I went to the same dance class every morning, taught by a beautifully queenie and charismatic, slightly lazy instructor to young girls and big housewives and a few eager boy teens on a liability-seductive wooden floor strewn with nailheads in the hot center of Managua, across from the university site that has been a site for many student demonstrations. Something about dancing the cumbia across the floor every morning, the instructor sailing in happily always a half-hour late and animating the students, served as the perfect grounding device as well as an absurdist comment on all the recent, as well as older, political history of the country. In the Pyrenees, I used to have cafe au lait at the same small cafe across from the prefecture and learned too much about the local gossips this way.
2)Come with half the clothes and twice the money you think you need.
3)Any bit of language you know prior to departure will be magnified four-fold upon arrival, so try to have something proto-linguistic going on.
4)Read the local paper wherever you are.
5)Any contact you have prior to departure will, similar to #3, above, be magnified in its beneficent effects perhaps ten-fold. Even your uncle's old schoolmate's wife's sister's friend. It all helps. The only time this hasn't helped me -- I can think of one example -- was in Sri Lanka when a contact turned out to be something of a bibulous newspaper scion and, somewhere in my first month there, feeling romantically spurned, decided to publish a scandalous piece doing everything short of naming me in the tiny island's main English-language paper, going out to 18,000 people, turning me into something of a representative of the worst libertine ills of Western society, and quoting from a friend's letter to me he had procured and kept in his possession.
6)When moments of culture shock crowd, which they will if you are anywhere for an extended period, try to return to private routines of succor. Everyone has some form of this, whether it be yoga, writing a friend, keeping a journal.
7)Every interaction you have with anyone has potential for grace. Remember that.
8)Find the possibility of gratitude.
That's all for now.
January 15, 2011
Little Video I Shot Yesterday in a Managua Boxing Gym
The reason I share this little clip, two young boxers fighting while a third dances around with the happiest, most foolish grin, one of many such clips and interviews I'm filming on a new and perhaps not incredible handheld video camera -- hence the roughness -- is I love the way that, in these gyms, vortices of intensity, every single kid there seems to believe he will be Nicaragua's next world champion.
Perhaps the roughness of the video does not hide the intensity of these kids.
So far, have talked with a few contenders and a few champions, and there is an intensity -- sophrosyne? -- to the guys who did make it. Discipline, clarity, purity, eyes on the prize: the champions have in spades what the contenders hope for.
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?i...
Perhaps the roughness of the video does not hide the intensity of these kids.
So far, have talked with a few contenders and a few champions, and there is an intensity -- sophrosyne? -- to the guys who did make it. Discipline, clarity, purity, eyes on the prize: the champions have in spades what the contenders hope for.
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?i...
December 29, 2010
Black Swan: A One-Minute Film Review! The Movie That Dips Its Beak Toward Leda!
BLACK SWAN, the new movie -- or rather Film, with a tottering capital F -- takes the self-v.-self plot conceit, throws it into a revamped La Boheme milieu, tosses in some horror tropes and pre-Beauvoir Cinderella psychology -- at times I found it unbearable to watch, both the prefabness of it all and the horror -- and yet moments of specificity hit that particular sweet-spot note of narrative inevitability, quivering between utter cliche and utter urgency, which could just about make a viewer's head spin around, several times and fast, a la the Exorcist.
The dancer I saw the Film with found it unbearable as well -- and yet. And yet.
Whatever it is, film, movie, last year's nightmare: it enters one's head like a virus from outer space, clenches in, resists forgetting, especially in the resplendence of its cliches. So does that, therefore, make it Oscar material?
Signed,
Uncurmudgeonly Unman*
*As a friend of mine says: only curmudgeonly men of a certain age don't like this movie.
**The music link, above, is just for fun. The movie trailer -- and not, mind, that I recommend you see this movie -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jaI1X....
The dancer I saw the Film with found it unbearable as well -- and yet. And yet.
Whatever it is, film, movie, last year's nightmare: it enters one's head like a virus from outer space, clenches in, resists forgetting, especially in the resplendence of its cliches. So does that, therefore, make it Oscar material?
Signed,
Uncurmudgeonly Unman*
*As a friend of mine says: only curmudgeonly men of a certain age don't like this movie.
**The music link, above, is just for fun. The movie trailer -- and not, mind, that I recommend you see this movie -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jaI1X....
December 26, 2010
The Other White Meat
An article on the Jewish Xmas Eve tradition of Chinese food and a movie, first published in 1992 in Contemporary Ethnography:
http://dragon.soc.qc.cuny.edu/Staff/l...
Bon appetit!
http://dragon.soc.qc.cuny.edu/Staff/l...
Bon appetit!
December 24, 2010
In Memory of a Late Teacher: Thesis and Antithesis
To enter that high school European History classroom was to enter a sanctuary. You were being inducted into something much greater than you could access, you a freshman, he a teacher with consonants exploding klieg-fast and with a certainty you could never hope to muster. Let's have a summary, he'd splutter, and you would try to recover from your careful notes -- taken before in the marble notebook he demanded -- some simulacrum of the prospect view and theory of history on which he had lectured the day before. Years later, you revisit his syllabus, his careful crafting of European history, and marvel at how gracefully opinionated his ideas were, how much history he happily elided, and the absolute respect he extended to mostly American students by proffering them, on a filigreed silver platter, the absolutisms of his Europe.
The defenestration of Prague. Thesis (splutter) and antithesis (double splutter).
To this writer, having been schooled in Oakland-Berkeley public school with not much more to show for it than an acquaintance with Japanese kite songs, the Pate-Pate, and the best methods for incubating chicks, becoming a person who would never truly master which states border Minnesota, Mr. Crome's specificity and transcendence knocked away walls and created a vaulted intellectual cathedral. One could master history and form a thesis; even Herodotus was a kind of fiction writer; historiography already an imperiled pursuit. Come to history with some creativity, he seemed to imply, a stance which might have been a result of his brief past as a kid in the Hitler Youth, a student-borne "fact" which might have had no legs. A bad historian, I still don't know.
His head shone under fluorescence so brightly it seemed spit-polished, as was, perhaps, the careful curl of his forelock. In his being, he retained something of the blue-eyed boyish roue (accent over the e, but can't put it in here!) about him: I would always see him at Au Coquelet, the Berkeley cafe on University and Milvia, savoring with great nostalgia some pastry with layers of whipped cream which just about screamed opening night at the Bavarian opera house. In short, he was exactly the particular enigma students remember and savor, everyone held in the loving esteem which the school -- note "school" as a breathing, corporeal being -- showed its faculty as well as its students.
I remember Mister Crome talking to me on a walkway at what we still thought of as the new campus, telling me a term paper I had written on Descartes was a noble failure, and the phrase stuck: he offered me the epiphany of realizing ideas would forever be embedded in words as a kind of holy vestment, and that there would never be a way to sunder an idea from its representation in language. I could almost say my entire career (as a writer who seems unwillingly drawn, again and again, back to the idiosyncratic byways of history) could have come from the moment of realizing both the failure of my attempt and the nobility of the pursuit.
To the memory of Mister Hans Crome, therefore, to spit-curls and klieg-consonants, in gratitude, I raise the above cup of nostalgic froth.
The defenestration of Prague. Thesis (splutter) and antithesis (double splutter).
To this writer, having been schooled in Oakland-Berkeley public school with not much more to show for it than an acquaintance with Japanese kite songs, the Pate-Pate, and the best methods for incubating chicks, becoming a person who would never truly master which states border Minnesota, Mr. Crome's specificity and transcendence knocked away walls and created a vaulted intellectual cathedral. One could master history and form a thesis; even Herodotus was a kind of fiction writer; historiography already an imperiled pursuit. Come to history with some creativity, he seemed to imply, a stance which might have been a result of his brief past as a kid in the Hitler Youth, a student-borne "fact" which might have had no legs. A bad historian, I still don't know.
His head shone under fluorescence so brightly it seemed spit-polished, as was, perhaps, the careful curl of his forelock. In his being, he retained something of the blue-eyed boyish roue (accent over the e, but can't put it in here!) about him: I would always see him at Au Coquelet, the Berkeley cafe on University and Milvia, savoring with great nostalgia some pastry with layers of whipped cream which just about screamed opening night at the Bavarian opera house. In short, he was exactly the particular enigma students remember and savor, everyone held in the loving esteem which the school -- note "school" as a breathing, corporeal being -- showed its faculty as well as its students.
I remember Mister Crome talking to me on a walkway at what we still thought of as the new campus, telling me a term paper I had written on Descartes was a noble failure, and the phrase stuck: he offered me the epiphany of realizing ideas would forever be embedded in words as a kind of holy vestment, and that there would never be a way to sunder an idea from its representation in language. I could almost say my entire career (as a writer who seems unwillingly drawn, again and again, back to the idiosyncratic byways of history) could have come from the moment of realizing both the failure of my attempt and the nobility of the pursuit.
To the memory of Mister Hans Crome, therefore, to spit-curls and klieg-consonants, in gratitude, I raise the above cup of nostalgic froth.
December 12, 2010
Recognizing the Slave
I had an odd encounter this evening, in person, with a spokesperson for a major demonic force in corporate America -- let the name of the big entity go unspoken for now. And while at first I saw only the flat deadness in the eyes of this spokesperson (so much like the eyes of a bigoted policeman I once had the fortune to meet off a highway in Whittier, California) while this customer service manager spoke his party line, I did some internal jiujiutsu, the conversation turned, there came into my proxy's gaze the merest flicker of humanity, and lo and behold! -- the clouds parted enough to let me see the slave that lived in his eyes, helpless, almost forced into American glossolalia, speaking its American code, and then the glossolalia passed and we started to have something that almost resembled real conversation.
Being able to recognize the slave in another's eyes: a gift capable of unlatching whatever keeps all our thousands of tiny inner slaves unnoticed.
Being able to recognize the slave in another's eyes: a gift capable of unlatching whatever keeps all our thousands of tiny inner slaves unnoticed.
