PaRDeS
Editor: Elissa Strauss
Art Editor: Anat Litwin
Contributors: LABA Fellows, Mark Rifkin
Theme: PARAVICE
This month we take a look at the easy, less virtuous, and often fleeting pardes we create for ourselves through earthly indulgences. Sex, food, booze, clothes, drugs, and rock and roll, we cover them all.
Art Editor: Anat Litwin
Contributors: LABA Fellows, Mark Rifkin
Theme: PARAVICE
This month we take a look at the easy, less virtuous, and often fleeting pardes we create for ourselves through earthly indulgences. Sex, food, booze, clothes, drugs, and rock and roll, we cover them all.
ESSAY: Matriarchs, Chick-Flicks, and My New Dress by Elissa Strauss
In almost every single chick-flick there is a pivotal scene during which the character goes shopping. It is almost always presented as a montage of different stores, outfits, looks, and expressions, and signals for the character a passage to second chances, redemption, and ultimately, a resurrection. I would like to be able to roll my eyes and see this as one of the many silly elements of the chick-flick genre. But I can't, and the reason I can't is because it has happened to me. More than once.
Just like the tan, blond lead of any given chick-flick, I too have felt the transformative power of a new dress. I have witnessed how it can give structure, even if just for a little while, to the messiness of existence, and inspire new, superior, personal narratives. This embarrasses me.
Read the rest here.
Just like the tan, blond lead of any given chick-flick, I too have felt the transformative power of a new dress. I have witnessed how it can give structure, even if just for a little while, to the messiness of existence, and inspire new, superior, personal narratives. This embarrasses me.
Read the rest here.
COMMENTARY: Eat, O friends; drink, yea, drink abundantly, O beloved: The pleasures of eating and the quest for a lost paradise by Ruby Namdar
Rabbi Abdimi of Haifa said: Before a man eats and drinks he has two hearts,but after he eats and drinks he has one heart, as it is said (Job XI, 12) : "A hollow man is two-hearted."
Babylonian Talmud: Tractate Baba Bathra, Folio 12b
The joy of cooking and the pleasure of eating are two separate mental and emotional entities. I will resist the temptation to say that they are two opposite sensations, almost mutually exclusive – but at times of heightened sensitivity this statement most certainly seems to hold some truth in it. Hosts and hostesses often end up eating very little of the magnificent meals over which they have slaved for hours. It is as if the joy of cooking satisfies the senses in a way that leaves little room to enjoy the food produced by the cooking process.
Read the rest here.
Babylonian Talmud: Tractate Baba Bathra, Folio 12b
The joy of cooking and the pleasure of eating are two separate mental and emotional entities. I will resist the temptation to say that they are two opposite sensations, almost mutually exclusive – but at times of heightened sensitivity this statement most certainly seems to hold some truth in it. Hosts and hostesses often end up eating very little of the magnificent meals over which they have slaved for hours. It is as if the joy of cooking satisfies the senses in a way that leaves little room to enjoy the food produced by the cooking process.
Read the rest here.
ART: From the Pardes Group Exhibit at the 14th Street Y
Sunset / כי הערב כבר ירד וכבו התפוזים,
Ruth Oppenheim, 12"x34" c-print on light box, 2010
Sunset is the image of Nut, the Egyptian mythological goddess of the sky, who swallows the sun every night and gives birth to it every morning.
Sunset is also the Pardes – a place of sensuality and seduction that offers the fruit of knowledge, which is about to be consumed.
Sunset is the eclipse of the myth of the orange.
A fruit that symbolizes an ideology that ceases to exist and hopes to be reborn.
Ruth Oppenheim, 12"x34" c-print on light box, 2010
Sunset is the image of Nut, the Egyptian mythological goddess of the sky, who swallows the sun every night and gives birth to it every morning.
Sunset is also the Pardes – a place of sensuality and seduction that offers the fruit of knowledge, which is about to be consumed.
Sunset is the eclipse of the myth of the orange.
A fruit that symbolizes an ideology that ceases to exist and hopes to be reborn.
Greenlanders, Alic Trossman, digital print, 6' x 15', 2003
Anna Pinkas, Untiltled (737 NYC Community Gardens), Animation
While evoking the desire to escape the city's asphalt, community gardens are inescapably urban. There are over 700 such plots in New York City. The compilation of geometrical shapes they form are at once beautiful and essentially contrived by the city blocks they are surrounded by and created from.
While evoking the desire to escape the city's asphalt, community gardens are inescapably urban. There are over 700 such plots in New York City. The compilation of geometrical shapes they form are at once beautiful and essentially contrived by the city blocks they are surrounded by and created from.
MUSIC: Open Spaces at Mike's Place by Stephen Hazan Arnoff
At Mike's Place, an infamous dive in Jerusalem, there was a ratty, blissful nirvana populated by the mostly harmless underbelly of the Holy City. Not a place for the politics or religion of the newspapers, it was a grubby hole for souls to crawl in and get lost: the gargantuan Vietnam Vet on some secret military mission weeping to "Sweet Home Alabama," the heiress in a low-cut dress buying drinks for the house one night and then disappearing by morning, the yeshiva drop-outs, the college drop-outs, the U.N. drop-outs, the roustabout kids of pastors, rock stars, and rabbis, and an endless stream of backpackers from all over the world.
Read the rest here
Read the rest here
AROUND TOWN: Sex and the (Naked) City by Mark Rifkin
Antony Gormley photo by Mark Rifkin
Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loin coverings. Genesis 3:7
Ever since Adam and Eve first adorned their nether regions with fig leaves, people have been obsessed with nudity. Infants and toddlers are constantly trying to get out of their baby clothes. When summer beckons here in New York City, people walk the streets baring more and more skin, eliciting tacit glances from wide-eyed passersby. Men, women, and children strip down in Central Park, on rooftops, at outdoor concerts, and, of course, at the beach, staring directly in the face of original sin in this biggest of apples.
Tourists and locals alike are currently lining up at MoMA to slip between two naked actors (“Imponderabilia”) in Marina Abramovic’s “The Artist Is Present” retrospective, then staring up at a nude woman balanced on a bicycle seat halfway up a wall (“Luminosity”). For his “Event Horizon” installation, British artist Antony Gormley has placed thirty-one life-size iron-and-fiberglass sculptures of himself, complete with full genitalia, in and around Madison Square Park and on nearby buildings.
Read the rest here
Ever since Adam and Eve first adorned their nether regions with fig leaves, people have been obsessed with nudity. Infants and toddlers are constantly trying to get out of their baby clothes. When summer beckons here in New York City, people walk the streets baring more and more skin, eliciting tacit glances from wide-eyed passersby. Men, women, and children strip down in Central Park, on rooftops, at outdoor concerts, and, of course, at the beach, staring directly in the face of original sin in this biggest of apples.
Tourists and locals alike are currently lining up at MoMA to slip between two naked actors (“Imponderabilia”) in Marina Abramovic’s “The Artist Is Present” retrospective, then staring up at a nude woman balanced on a bicycle seat halfway up a wall (“Luminosity”). For his “Event Horizon” installation, British artist Antony Gormley has placed thirty-one life-size iron-and-fiberglass sculptures of himself, complete with full genitalia, in and around Madison Square Park and on nearby buildings.
Read the rest here
NEWS by Becky Skoff
BINDING
This weekend, the Pardes LABA Festival 2010 continues with these exciting events- don’t miss them! Tickets are $10 and available at the front desk, or call 212-780-0800
Saturday, April 17-A night of art, music and theater!
Pardes Exhibition / Gallery: Featuring the visual work of the LABA Fellows
Opening reception Saturday, April 17 / 5pm-8pm / FREE
I am living so there / Theater: LABA Fellow Ronit Muszkatblit by Gina Bonati, Saturday, April 17 / 8pm
The Alchemical Garden: A Soundwalk Journey / Music: LABA Fellow Katie Down, An individual tour with MP3 players, available throughout the Festival
BINDING, MAY 5-15: Dance theatre piece, will be performed at PS122 as part of the soloNOVA Arts Festival. BINDING was created with support from LABA. Buy tickets here.
Read the rest here
Saturday, April 17-A night of art, music and theater!
Pardes Exhibition / Gallery: Featuring the visual work of the LABA Fellows
Opening reception Saturday, April 17 / 5pm-8pm / FREE
I am living so there / Theater: LABA Fellow Ronit Muszkatblit by Gina Bonati, Saturday, April 17 / 8pm
The Alchemical Garden: A Soundwalk Journey / Music: LABA Fellow Katie Down, An individual tour with MP3 players, available throughout the Festival
BINDING, MAY 5-15: Dance theatre piece, will be performed at PS122 as part of the soloNOVA Arts Festival. BINDING was created with support from LABA. Buy tickets here.
Read the rest here
Futurist Manifesto of Lust by Valentine de Saint-Point
A reply to those dishonest journalists who twist phrases to make the Idea seem ridiculous;
to those women who only think what I have dared to say;
to those for whom Lust is still nothing but a sin;
to all those who in Lust can only see Vice, just as in Pride they see only vanity.
From the Manifesto of Lust by French artist Valentine de Saint Point, one of the few women who worked with the Futurist Movement.
IYAR: The Month of Splendor
The name "Iyar" is, like the others in the Hebrew Calendar, of Babylonian origin. The Torah itself refers to the month as the "Second Month," with relation to Nisan, the First of the Months.
It is also referred to in the Bible (Melachim Aleph, Ch. 6) as "Chodesh Ziv," meaning the Month of Splendor." This is because of the splendor of the sun during this month, when it has reached the height of its brilliance, but does not yet burn with the (sometimes harmful) intensity that it does in the late summer months.
Read the rest at http://www.ou.org/chagim/roshchodesh/iyar/month.htm
It is also referred to in the Bible (Melachim Aleph, Ch. 6) as "Chodesh Ziv," meaning the Month of Splendor." This is because of the splendor of the sun during this month, when it has reached the height of its brilliance, but does not yet burn with the (sometimes harmful) intensity that it does in the late summer months.
Read the rest at http://www.ou.org/chagim/roshchodesh/iyar/month.htm
