WRITING CULTURE 2012: Film, Food & Beyond

I am so disappointed that I did not know about Katherine Vaz teaching at Baruch,. That would have been such a great opportunity to read the book, ask questions about it right from the author, and ask the author about some tricks she uses in writing. We had a small chance to ask this writer several questions at the event and next day in class, which was nice. (more…)

A buzzing sound right behind the wall, I wake up because it seems like someone is drilling my head. They start making noise at 9 am and keep working all day long. The first floor of our building got flooded and now the landlord is renovating it. The walls flake off like potato chips, my neighbor tells me he is afraid of all the mold to come up to our floor. Every day i see the growth of the heap of construction garbage near my door. Harrison NJ is recovering from Sandy. As i walk to the train station, I see people working on their basements, i see piles of trash, i even saw a chest with open drawers full of colorful panties; this whole thing was under the water and the owner just decided to throw away everything at once.
Path trains that connect NJ and NY are not running properly, they stop running at 10, so if you work at night, you should wait until 5 am when they start working again.
The stores’ shelves got full again, there is no shortage of bread, milk or eggs as it was right after the hurricane. The gas stations work as they used to work, everything comes back to normal.

Empty supermarket shelves before Hurricane Sandy, Montgomery

This was the scariest hurricane I faced (well, i remember Katrina hit when I was in Florida, but I was not affected as much as here) and I hope NYC will never be hit hard like this again.

The picture is taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Empty_supermarket_shelves_before_Hurricane_Sandy,_Montgomery,_NY.jpg

Are you familiar with these trashy looking places that have pictures of celebrities all over their walls, when you think of how not to get food poisoning because you see all the buckets with dirty dishes and leftovers right next to you and you are afraid of a possibility to find a cockroach? My question is, why do celebrities go there? (I know about cockroaches, because I worked in a Kosher Diner myself and saw them multiple times.)

the owner and “The Fly”

It took awhile for our waiter to finally come to us and bring menus. The food came fast, through.Since the place is called “Eisenbergs Sandwich Shop”, I decided to get a sandwich, and, as a fish lover, ordered lox with cream cheese on a toasted rye bread. It was delicious, but the price was not. For a sandwich that had only these three ingredients I had to pay $9.

The sandwich was good though. I also ordered some mashed potatoes and cole slaw. I loved the food, and I guess that might be the reason why so many celebrities come here. The place has been open since 1929, so they should know how to cook and they have a right to raise their prices. I love kosher food, since it reminds me of Russian food, it has a lot in common: fish, potato, soups and salads are made the same way they make them in my country. They also have a lot of pickled stuff.  There are even t-shirts with the name of the restaurant for sale.

Upon leaving you had to go to the cashier and tell him what you had. I forgot to mention my tea, and the waiter appeared from nowhere and reminded me about it.

What I really liked about this place is that it is right next to the Russian bookstore which I never knew of.

So now I discovered one more place where I can eat good and healthy food which is not a chain store.

It was not eight oclock yet, my roommates were asleep while I went to the kitchen to get some hot tea with honey and lemon on a day like that. I looked outside of my window to see what was happening. It was superwindy, it rained hard, when I saw a huge flash coming from far away, like something went on fire and exploded. Later I found out it was a ConEd explosion, which caused a tremendous power outage. Giving the fact that I live in Harrison, NJ, and could see the explosion from there, it was pretty bad. I looked around and saw the water one house away from mine. It  felt like some idiot built all the houses steps away from the pond, and some houses inside the pond. I saw a couple passing by my house wearing flip-flops and winter jackets. They walked into the water towards their house, struggling with the water current all their way through before they got in. I rushed to wake up my roommates. By the time we came back to the window, we saw our house immersed into the water. Loud banging on the door. Our neighbor with a flashlight on his head, blinding us, asked us if we wanted to be evacuated. All three of us started panicking and running around collecting the most important stuff: documents, cash and some jewelry (that was mine). I also took a blanket and a book to read (how could I know we would spend a night in the library?). We had to put every precious item from the floor to the shelves in case of flooding. Two big firemen met us on our way to the bus, asking if there was anyone else in the house. They were evacuating people, but we found out about it from our neighbor. Chaos. There were only six people on the bus (including us). They brought us to the senior house which looked very neat and cozy.

Drying my soaked shoes and socks after walking through the water

There were a lot of people with big traveling bags,and it looked like they were on the way to the airport, and then got stuck there. They reminded me of the people who were forced into Nazi camps, who were allowed to take one bag per person and put there the most precious things. Many of them cried. A woman, a community worker, went over each and everyone with a cart full of sandwiches. There even was a choice: a white or a wheat bread with either turkey or ham and condiments on the side. When somebody wanted a juice or something she ran out of, she would go back and look for it and then bring it to that person. The whole senior center was divided into two parts: one was with the animals, another without. There were not only cats and dogs, but also rabbits and some types of big home rats in cages. It looked like the Noahs ark.

The shelters workers were apologizing for the warm water.

Some time later we were asked to move to the secondary school, which library kept me from going insane. The people who were in charge of taking care of the refugees gave us food and dusty cots. I had to take the last one that was broken and no one wanted to sleep on it. I felt this would be better than sleeping on the floor or on wooden chairs. The big TV in the cafeteria streamed the news about the Sandy.

The donated food we ate with pleasure

Children had the privilege in getting the food

I was not able to sleep well that night: babies who mostly slept on the floor with their parents were taking turns in crying, it was very cold, there was no ventilation, and the smell of diapers came together with the smell of sweat and food.

The library of the secondary school converted into a refugee center

On the good side, the government takes care of their citizens, and does all that is possible for better accommodation in emergency situations. After we came back to our house, we found out that the first floor got completely flooded and our floor was one step away from the water. Thanks god the grandmother who lived on the first floor was evacuated beforehand. Another plus was that I got to know all my neighbors after I lived in this place for three months. They are very nice and helpful people and I feel very sorry for their flooded basements and garages, but happy that we are all safe. God Bless America!

Green, yellow, red, big, small, sour, sweet, mushy or crispy- there are so many different kinds of apples!

You pick an apple from the tree, if you want it sweet and ready, you should pick it up from the ground, but if you are into sour and crispy, pull it off the tree. I love sour. Green, round, juicy, young, big apple. You cut it and drops of juice are leaking down the knife. You take the first bite and feel the sourness of the apple. As I am  describing this fruit, your mouth is probably watered now because it evokes your own memories of eating an apple. I love apples, they are full of vitamins and can prevent many diseases, including cancer.

Catch the fish, put it in a bucket of salt, let it stay there for 3 days, then soak it and hang it for at least a couple of days and then, voila, it is ready to eat. I know to a non-Russian it may sound quiet weird, eating a basically raw salty fish, but we love this, especially with beer.

I used to do it myself when we had a house on the river. It is fresh, organic home-made food, nothing can be better. My parents send me a bag of dried river fish twice a year, because the fish bought here, even if it is bought in a Russian store, is still different.

This type of activity is very popular where I come from, people even make their living this way. Many fishermen can give you some pieces of advice on that.

You have to watch the flies though and not let them get into the fish, since they can lay eggs inside so that later in may be contaminated with worms. So to avoid this, wrap the gauze around the fish.

Otherwise, it is very healthy and delicious, you should try it if you havent yet.

Frankly speaking, I did not know that Detroit is going through a major economical crisis: many people just have no jobs, so the majority moves out, the housing and land drastically decreased in price: the filmmakers give an example of a house in a remote neighborhood that was sold for $6000.

My major is journalism, so I loved the way this documentary was put together and filmed in general.  You could see that the filmmakers did a huge job in terms of shedding light to both sides of the conflict, interviewing people who relate to this story from different angles: workers of the big company who lost their jobs, social workers that help these kinds of people, politicians who try to help the dying city and rearrange the neighborhoods, land purposes and budget, the citizens who disagree with the latest, people who crumble down  the growing amount of abandoned houses, those who try to survive in these conditions by collecting and selling scrap metal and those who own a business on the outskirts of Detroit, and finally those, who move in to this city drawn by the housing cost.

I loved the small details that underline the general gloomy mood of the movie: they were showing a lot of old and abandoned houses,closed theatres with a bunch of rotten furniture (they even invited an opera singer to one of these theatres to sing in an empty and shabby walls for the contrast), but the word on the wall, made from remaining letters of the former “auto parts” store sign, which now said “utopia”, seemed to be the apotheosis of the whole comparison of how prosperous the city used to be in the 30-s and how this city is now. It took the filmmakers quiet a while to film all the parts of the movie and put all the pieces together: some parts of the movie take place in the winter and some in the summer.

In general, the movie is just telling us a story of  once “the fastest growing city in the world”  becoming basically shrinking city with falling rate of jobs, and it seems that the only thing that is raising here is crime rates.

I dont think I really liked the movie, and I guess it is because it is lacking the sensation, something extraordinary and extremely interesting. The filmmakers are just showing what is happening very slowly, just like a time bomb, which when once explodes, will give a better movie.

The pictures are taken fromhttp://www.google.com/imgres?q=detropia&um=1&hl=en&sa=N&biw=1228&bih=598&tbm=isch&tbnid=rDFALnpWCDCfeM:&imgrefurl=http://detroit.curbed.com/tags/detropia&docid=CSKGkINf-kH3rM&imgurl=http://detroit.curbed.com/uploads/Screen%252520Shot%2525202012-01-20%252520at%25252011.06.11%252520AM.png&w=500&h=282&ei=kJFzULSwOufi0gHM1YCIAw&zoom=1&iact=hc&vpx=103&vpy=158&dur=473&hovh=93&hovw=169&tx=159&ty=109&sig=118304664772334435137&page=1&tbnh=94&tbnw=169&start=0&ndsp=19&ved=1t:429,r:7,s:0,i:95

and

http://www.google.com/imgres?q=detropia&um=1&hl=en&sa=N&biw=1228&bih=598&tbm=isch&tbnid=l9lLgD8MuZBbxM:&imgrefurl=http://www.sundancechannel.com/sunfiltered/2012/01/the-sundance-review-review-detropia/&docid=mbuL1lZ7wQyEGM&imgurl=http://www.sundancechannel.com/sunfiltered/wp-content/uploads/detropia-01232012.jpg&w=560&h=385&ei=kJFzULSwOufi0gHM1YCIAw&zoom=1&iact=rc&dur=313&sig=118304664772334435137&page=1&tbnh=127&tbnw=160&start=0&ndsp=19&ved=1t:429,r:5,s:0,i:88&tx=55&ty=72

Kseniya Simonova was a participant of the “Ukraine’s Got Talent” show. This piece can be called a historical drama, but her way of expressing the sorrow of World War 2 is not performed through camera and actors, but through drawing with sand. She tells us a story by merely throwing the sand on a surface and dragging her fingers on top of it thus illustrating first a peaceful time followed by the war and losses. This is very touching and a very unusual type of art, Ive never seen anything like that before. She is very talented, she seems to be a good artist, she can make a picture out of sand much faster and nicer than many painters can do with the help of a brush.

The performance made me think one more time about the the overwhelming war and its consequences. She interchanges happy days of everyday life with the horrors of war and weapons, love and death, youth and maturity. She is very emotional while performing, I felt that the war somehow touched her family as it did to almost every family in Soviet Union.

<iframe width=”420″ height=”315″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/n5bdMyOWLHg” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe>

The movie is unique. First of all because it is a performance. It has its plot and the pictures are arisen one from another,  this piece is done by one person without a big crew of filmmakers. My previous post was about historical drama/holocaust movies. This movie is about war, the war when the holocaust took place and it is definitely a historical drama, it reflects the pain the people went through, and the pain is written on the faces of those who were watching this performance. It is very short yet meaningful piece.

“The Boy in The Striped Pajamas”- youll love it even if you are not into history or war.

What happens when a country finds itself to be ruled by a fanatic, a sick person? Not only its citizens are afraid to say no to follow the orders of the presidents, but a number of people die, a huge number of people die. 3 million Jews died in concentration camps in the time of Holocaust, 3 million people is a lot of people, just imagine, say, Jamaica to be erased from the map (and the population of Jamaica is 2.7 million- even less than 3 million). These are only Jews that were killed, there were millions of people of other nations destroyed.This war set a huge seal in the history of my country (I am Russian), my country still feels the traces of war in its demographics. There were at least one person taken away from an average Russian family by this war.

I love watching movies about World War the second, movies about concentration camps in particular. There were so many books written and films shot, not all of them are good, but some of them, once seen, will stay in your mind forever, and one of them is “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas”.

This move is about how Nazis son, going for a walk, comes to the wire of the concentration camp where his daddy burns people works. He meets another boy , same age, who (just like this boy) likes to play and is playing next to the wire. The two boys become friends, and the Jewish kid invites him over to play with him in the camp, gives him the striped pajamas so that he was not noticed, after what the kids are taken to one of the gas rooms and both die with hundreds of other people.

The scary part is that for the boys the pajamas is just some weird type of clothes that you have to wear all the time and the wire shows your territory, when for the grown-ups it is an indication of the fact that a person needs to be slaughtered just for being Jewish or Russian or gypsy (or for not having the Aryan blood) and the wire keeps them in their little cell. The boy could easily run away, he came outside the wire to play with his friend, but he sees his life there as something not dangerous at all, his little mind just does not know yet that people can be so cruel and can kill for nothing. The other boy sees this little Jewish boy as any other person to play with, he does not know what Jew means yet, he does not see the difference between them.

This kind of movies (historical drama, holocaust movie) is the most interesting to me. Watching these movies is just like being immersed into the past, sometimes horrible past thus letting all the events go through yourself and understanding the history a little bit more. Another movie, which is one of my favorites, is “The Pianist”. It tells us about a very talented Jewish pianist hiding in Nazi Germany from being taken to the concentration camp. Another movie which is on the list of the movies I have to watch is “The Schindlers List”.

http://blogs.woodtv.com/2008/11/21/review-boy-in-the-striped-pajamas-is-sad-and-poignant/

The Caucus Blog is a place where everyone can blog about the political news. Bloggers express their own thoughts about the latest events in politics.

Right after the Democratic National Convention, the wall was filled with a number of blog posts about this event. Bloggers were discussing mostly speeches of the ones who were on stage, the president Obama was discussed more than Romney here simply because it was a Democratic National Convention.

A lot of people get involved into reading (or commenting) the Caucus Blog through Facebook, twitter or Google plus. I think that blogging about political events is a very good idea. You already have pictures, text, and someones opinion, not only just a dry coverage of what happened where and when.

Multimedia features.

It is understandable that New York Times is a professional in presenting multimedia features for their stories. The images they are using are bright, some of them dont even need a description (they speak for themselves), and they are done by professionals. The pictures make the blog more vivid and interesting. The photo slideshow depict the brightest moments of the event, sometimes telling us even more of what happened than if they went together with the text.