Readers of this blog know how passionate we are about Polaroids, specifically the work of Jamie Livingston and his Photo of the Day project.

Christopher Bonanos, an editor at New York Magazine, has written a history of Polaroid called Instant. Thankfully, Betsy Reid of Legacy Portrait Films texted me early to say that Scott Simon on Weekend Edition interviewed Bonanos about his new book

I haven’t heard the interview yet but I did want to talk about the book.

Interestingly, Steve Jobs is said to have modeled the corporate style of Apple on the creative atmosphere of Polaroid.

According to the author, Instant is a business book about what happens when a company loses its innovative spark. The book also showcases the amazing things photographers—from Ansel Adams to Andy Warhol to Chuck Close and even Jamie Livingston—did with Polaroid film.

It is also a technology and pop-culture history. He writes: ” I like to think that it also tells a larger story, about the rise and fall of American invention and manufacturing.”

We’re thrilled that Bonanos included a photograph by Jamie Livingston in Instant. Livingston’s Photo of the Day project consisted of one Polaroid a day from 1978 until the day of his death from cancer on October 25, 1997.

Since Jamie’s death, Hugh Crawford and Betsy Reid re-photographed all  six thousand photographs and created a dedicated website for this work, which went viral in 2008 and is enormously popular all around the world, especially in China where it gets millions of visitors every year.

The Polaroid by Jamie Livingston above is from September 29, 1987.

Saturday morning. Everyone is asleep. It’s MY TIME to… meditate, blog, listen to Scott Simon on NPR.

I think this is my most favorite time of the week. The apartment is quiet, the living and dining rooms are empty, the chaotic energy of this household is dulled considerably.

It’s been busy around here lately. It seems like the four of us are running in four separate directions. My daughter is in the thick of her sophomore year of high school. My son is working in Brooklyn and playing music. This weekend he is playing a show at Bard College.

Hugh is helping organize ArtObama on October 3rd and installing a show of his photographs at Two Moon Art House and Cafe next week, which will be up through the end of October. He is also designing a photographic mural for the Brooklyn Public Library for installation in December. He’s busy and we pass like ships in the night.

My weeks are busy, too. The weekdays begin when I  wake early to drive my daughter to her school in Midwood. Our morning drive on Coney Island Avenue listening to the Elvis Duran radio show is an important bonding time for us.

Once home, the business of Brooklyn Social Media takes up all my time now. I’m either on the phone, on the computer, or at a meeting these days. And I’m excited and grateful about every minute of it.

But the onset of the weekend, the early hours before anyone awakens. It’s peaceful here, a time to think. I’m glad for this time, for this soft start to the weekend.

Tom Martinez has a show of his photography at the confusingly named Ninth Street Espresso (because it is actually on East 10th Street). It turns out the space is the western half of the now-defunct Life Cafe, a legendary East Village bar/restaurant/cafe on the corner of Avenue B.

Tom’s photos of the Coney Island Mermaid Parade, the Occupy Wall Street May Day march and other New York City moments look great at the cafe, which is located at 341 E. 10th Street right across from the north side of Tompkins Square Park.

Ninth Street Espresso is an attractive cafe for serious coffee lovers who like artisenal beans and the assurance that the growers are well cared for.

Tom took the photograph of Felix Morelo at work on a mural on his way to the show’s opening reception.

A new indie film by a female director will be having a week-long run at the ReRun Gastropub Theater in DUMBO beginning October 5th.

In Montauk is a romantic/drama about a pregnant photographer who has an affair that presents her with some impossible choices.

According to director Kim Cummings: “The film speaks to artists and women alike who are trying to balance a career and family and finding it a struggle.”

The October 5th screenings will be followed by Q&A with Cummings, the writer/director & stars Nina Kaczorowski, Lukas Hassel & George Katt.

After approximately 147,000 studio visits to 1,708 artists, and then 9,457 nominations, Go Art Brooklyn has gone public with the top ten nominated artists, the results of their big Brooklyn crowd sourcing experiment. In alphabetical order:

Aleksander Betko, Cobble Hill, painting and drawing

Jonathan Blum, Park Slope, painting and printmaking

Adrian Coleman, Fort Greene, painting

Oliver Jeffers, Boerum Hill, painting, illustration, and drawing

Kerry Law, Greenpoint, painting

Prune Nourry, Boerum Hill, photography, video/film/sound, and sculpture

Eric Pesso, Ditmas Park, sculpture

Naomi Safran-Hon, Prospect Heights, painting

Gabrielle Watson, Crown Heights, painting

Yeon Ji Yoo, Red Hook, mixed media sculpture

Go Art Brooklyn was an open studio weekend event sponsored by the Brooklyn Museum on the weekend of September 8-9, 2012, with an element of crowd sourcing and “beauty contest”.

It was their goal to have a mix of artists represented in this group, including painters, illustrators, sculptors, and installation artists. Painting clearly ruled with seven of the ten artists being self-identified painters.

At the same time, they noted an absence of design, fashion, and textile arts, and also that photography, video, and performance are represented only in Nourry’s work.

 The results were also a bit surprising in terms of the weekend activity, as was hinted at in Shelley’s post on unexpected traffic patterns. Nine neighborhoods are represented, but they are not the neighborhoods that most people were predicting to be the hot spots. Shelley will be delving into these results to show how visitation may have shaped nominations, so stay tuned as we report on this more.

Over the next month, curators will visit the  ten artists’ studios and begin highlighting them one by one on our website. By November 15th GO will announce the featured artists for the exhibition, which will open on December 1, 2012 during Target First Saturday evening.

The holiest day of the Jewish year is upon us. The Day of Atonement, the ritual fast. “For on this day He will forgive you, to purify you, that you be cleansed from all your sins before God” (Leviticus 16:30).

I always thought it was interesting and curious that atonement for the previous year came a week after the New Year’s holiday. Why not the other way around? Why celebrate first and not after?

The Jews, of course, knew what they were doing. We do not begin the New Year until the past year—its transgressions, its sins—have been atoned for.

Jews the world over acknowledge the holiday in different ways. Many fast, abstain from work, washing, sex, the wearing of leather, the “anointing” of the body.

Some don’t do anything at all.

For many, it is a day of prayer and meditation; a day of standing up and sitting down in synagogue. There’s Kol Nidre, the evening service with the hauntingly beautiful music that moves me to tears. There’s the morning service and in the afternoon, the Yizor memorial service, a time to commemorate those who have died.

It is a long day for all, a day of stomach pangs and fatigue, family and failed attempts at reading transliterated Hebrew. Finally, there’s the Neilah, the “closing of the gates” service at sunset.

During the course of the day, Jews confess their sins eight times and recite Psalms almost constantly.

Growing up in a reform Jewish family with leanings towards agnosticism, we didn’t belong to a synagogue. My mother rejected the Brooklyn conservative Judaism she grew up with. My father wasn’t interested in instituionalized religion. A philosophy major in college,  he read the Old Testament to us at supper. We were rapt at his sunset readings in our dining room on Riverside Drive.

Despite this (or maybe because of it), I felt drawn to the rituals of Judaism in a very private way. It’s interesting that a connection to spirituality can well up inside of you at a young age even if it is not enforced—or overtly discussed.

Oddly, I longed for ritual. Maybe as a reaction to its lack in my family life. So I would secretly fast on Yom Kippur, somewhat half-heartedly, because I wanted a part of it.

My Judaism was personal and private. Something that I grappled with alone.

For complex reasons, I have never joined a synagogue so I am a wandering Jew when it comes to the High Holy Days. I have tried many of the congregations in Park Slope. Each has its own flavor, its own style. Often I go to Congregation Beth Elohim, where my sister is a member and I feel very comfortable. I have also been to Kolot Chayenu, which meets in the big church on Sixth Avenue, around the corner from me.

Still, I always feel like an outsider because my Judaism is a private thing that wells up inside me. Maybe that’s where my synagogue is. Inside of me where it was when I was a little girl when I was grappling with these feelings in my very own way.

Phew. September, month of many events, is OVER. And now on to October, which is event-full as well. Look/see:

October 10 at 7PM:  Only the Blog at Two Moon Reading Series presents Emma Koenig, author of Fuck! I’m in my Twenties. Everyone has that moment—the realization that adulthood has arrived, like a runaway train, and there’s no getting out of its way. In attempt to express the contradictions and anxieties that come with being over-educated, minimally employed, mostly single, and on your own, Emma Koenig turned to the blogosphere. In this collection of her most popular posts from her blog of the same name, Emma harnesses the power of illustrations, graphs, checklists, and flowcharts to explore this twenty-something life

October 18 at 8PM: Brooklyn Reading Works Presents Poetry: A Cure for the Common Curated by Pat Smith with with three amazing poets, a soulful chanteuse, plus some new poems by Pat. He’s chosen artists that rocked the house at readings around town and he’s very excited to be able to present them for your pleasure. Five bucks at the door gets you wine, beer, snacks and the company of charismatic creators.

October 23 at 7PM: Only the Blog at Two Moon Reading Series presents “The Family Thing” with novelists Peter Wheelwright (As It Is On Earth) and Leora Skolkin-Smith (Hysteria) reading about complicated families. 315 Fourth Avenue at 3rd Street.

Tomorrow. Get ye over to The Bell House. Stat. To hear some fine music and to raise money for a fine church, Old First Dutch Reformed Church in Park Slope, the oldest church in Brooklyn. Their ceiling is falling down and they need to fix it.

From 3-7PM, actor Peter Sarsgaard will be on hand to emcee a great afternoon of music with Grammy nominee Tony Trischka on double banjo, Kenny Kosek on the fiddle and Jen Larson on vocals.

Klezmer legend, Andy Statman will also be in da house with his trio.

Also appearing: Chris Thile, Noam Pikelny and Chris Eldridge of the Punch Brothers; Aofie O’Donovan of Crooked Still and Goat Rodeo; Kristin Andreassen of Uncle Earl and Michael Daves.

It’ll only cost ya $45 now if you click here $35 for kids and $55 at the door. Note as of 5:00 on Saturday, pre-sale tickets are sold out. There will be tickets available at the door.

Brooklyn Bluegrass Bash, Sept. 23, from 3PM – 7PM at The Bell House, 149 7th St Brooklyn.

I was 15 minutes late for Friday night’s performance of Einstein on the Beach at BAM and had to stand in the back of the orchestra until the first “Knee Play” was over. I was then escorted to my aisle seat in row L.

There I sat next to a man who was not happy about the woman who was texting next to him.

“I would prefer that you not do that,” he told her without rancor.

I could see his point. Einstein on the Beach, the 1976 masterpiece created by Robert Wilson, Philip Glass and Lucinda Childs, is an epic experience that requires fortitude, focus and a meditative openness and calm.

Give into it and it shimmers with resonance and meaning. Tweeting while viewing could be distracting. And it was obviously distracting to the man sitting next to me.

Which isn’t to say that there was a rigid, church-like, sanctimonious atmosphere at BAM. The audience is encouraged to wander in and out, which is a good thing since the opera lasts four hours and thirty minutes. There is no intermission but during scene changes people raced to the restrooms and lobby for bathroom and/or wine and snack breaks.

Some of the audience didn’t come back. The show can be a tad minimalist for some theater goers.

EOTB is, roughly, about Einstein, the theory of relativity, time, space, trains, spaceships, clocks, the atomic age, life, love…

It’s a non-narrative opera with a euphoric score by Philip Glass based on repeating harmonic and rhythmic structures for singers, keyboards, saxophones, and a lone virtuosic violin.

Einstein’s violin. A violinist dressed as Einstein sits on the stage through much of the opera playing Glassian arpeggios.

Set design, staging and lighting are by Robert Wilson and it’s visually stunning. “As with all of my work, the images you see on stage are not decoration; they’re architectural. At the very start there is a vertical bar of light that appears three times. Then, in the second scene, you have a horizontal bar of light. Together, they represent the cross of time and space: time shown as a vertical beam, space as a horizontal line,” Wilson told The Guardian recently.

But it’s the singers, actors, and the dancers, the dancers, who bring this minimalist classic to life. In two sections, the stage clears completely and the dancers leap across across in intersecting patterns with repeated simple, almost folkloric movements by Lucinda Child Their skipping, turning, leaping adds splendor to the music and the overall experience.

I’ve now seen EOTB three times. I saw it at BAM with my father in 1984. He’d seen the premiere at the Metropolitan Opera in 1976, where it played for one evening, an unforgettable experience. I think he longed to recapture the excitement of that evening and he was not disappointed. Seeing it with him in 1984 was a very special experience for me. I saw it again in 1992, also at BAM.

I’d forgotten how funny the opera is. It is timeless—and about time itself—but also very much of its time, filled with a slew of 1970’s references: NYC radio stations and DJs, Carole King, Crazy Eddie, Patty Hearst, Mr. Bojangles The man I sat next to is a theater professional, an avant gardeist. He, too, saw the original at the Metropolitan Opera all those years ago.

“A lot of people just hated it then,” he said. “But I was like, there’s something here. I found it so interesting,” he told me in the lobby when we both happened to take a drink break.

I tried to imagine what it was like to see the show in 1976. I also tried to imagine what people will think of it one hundred years from now. And I believe it will be performed one hundred years from now. Because it is, among other things, a work that depicts our time.

“Do you remember what happens at the very end?” the man asked me while we sipped our drinks.

“No, I don’t,” I told him as we walked back in.

“Wait till you see,” he said.

I had forgotten the ending, a story told by a bus driver on a two-dimensional bus. Indeed, it’s a curious and sweet ending: a story about love, a story about connection. A story that  left the audience open to hope and transcendence as it exited into the Brooklyn night.

It was with inspiring words that Brooklyn Poet Laureate,  Tina Chang, introduced Brooklyn Reading Works’ Young Writers Night Thursday at the Old Stone House (a Brooklyn Book Festival Bookend Event).

The poet urged the young writers who participated in this evening of poetry and songs, to listen to their hearts and keep writing. “You never know where it will take you,” she said.

Chang, the author the Half-Lit Houses and Of Gods & Strangers and co-editor of an anthology of contemporary poetry from the Middle East and Asia, told the crowd that she started writing at a very young age. “I knew it was what I wanted to do,” she said. She now teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in Park Slope.

Yesterday she sent me a lovely email:

Thank you so much for last night. Those performers! Wow, I was so
impressed by the maturity, the talent, and the charisma of all those
musicians and readers.

I also remembered the first singer’s line, “I was becoming something
unfamiliar” in referencing a bird and I was astounded when she said,
“Um, I wrote this when I was 14.” If this is our youth, then I was
overjoyed to think that this is the direction they are headed.

The Brooklyn Book Festival has an interesting line-up of events slated for the Main Stage, which is in Borough Hall Plaza. If you decide to plant yourself on the steps of Borough Hall, you’ll be in for some interesting—and some wacky events within eyeshot of the bustling marketplace of publishers who will fill Borough Hall Park on Sunday.

11AM: David Rees (How to Sharpen Pencils), the world’s only artisanal pencil sharpener, in conversation with Sam Anderson, critic at large for the New York Times Magazine. They discuss the artisanal culture of the Hudson Valley, Rees’ pencil business (he hand-sharpens pencils for mail order customers), and the artisanalization of everything in Brooklyn, from mayonnaise to soda.

12PM:  Only the Dead Know Brooklyn. And you thought Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn. Literary history comes alive on stage with readings by Troupe of works by revered authors who are no longer with us. I’m guessing they’ll be reading from the great Thomas Wolfe short story.

1:00 PM: I’d Like To Apologize To Every Teacher I Ever Had. Tony Danza in Conversation with Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz. As an actor, Danza conquered nearly every entertainment realm—TV, the movies, even Broadway—and he wanted to give something back. Inspired by a documentary made by Teach for America, he decided to take time out to teach!  Markowitz converses with Brooklyn born Danza about his career and his book about teaching high school.

2PM: Let’s Talk About Sex: Grappling with Gender in the 21st Century. Is biology destiny? What does it mean today to be a man, a woman, or to feel somewhere in between? Naomi Wolf (Vagina: A New Biography), Carlos Andres Gomez (Man Up: Cracking the Code of Modern Manhood) and Kate Bornstein (A Queer and Pleasant Danger) consider the role of sex and gender in culture today, how it makes us, and how we react to the trappings of gender put upon us by society at large. Moderated by Hanna Rosin (The End of Men).

3PM: When a character has a dark side or a painful history, how does an author write about it? AuthorsAmelia Gray (Threats), Dennis Lehane (Moonlight Mile) and Sapphire (The Kid) deal with violence in their work and discuss how they handle it. Moderated by Greg Cowles, New York Times Book Review.

4PM: Good Times – Different Times. Jimmie Walker (Dyn-O-Mite: A Memoir) and Bern Nadette Stanis (Situations 101: Relationships, the Good, the Bad and the Ugly) from the landmark TV sitcom, Good Times, in conversation. Moderated by Carolyn Greer, Brooklyn Book Festival.

For a full list go here.