Last night kicked off events for The New York Intellectuals Series at the packed Theresa Lang Student Center at the New School. Hosted by n+1 editors Keith Gessen and Mark Greif, the discussion featured Michael Walzer, the longtime editor of Dissent magazine and professor of political theory at Princeton. Walzer discussed Dissent’s beginnings at Brandeis, “where the ‘60s began in the ‘50s” with Irving Howe and a group of lefties that had left behind the “totalizing Marxist doctrine and sectarian style” of their forebears to form a new and powerful voice.

While Dissent made an effort to separate itself from the Trotskyite American tradition of the Daily Worker and other old-guard leftist publications (“Manhattan was a part of the Soviet Union for a long while,” Walzer quipped), they looked to the civil rights movement as a model for change in a new era.

Walking the audience through the history of the early days of Dissent, including disagreements he had with “New Left” groups like the Students for a Democratic Society that lionized Ho Chi Minh and Chairman Mao, Walzer wondered aloud why radical leftists so often support democracy for themselves but not others, tying in the left’s fascination with figures like Hugo Chavez and other authoritarian leaders. He simplified theories from his 1977 book Just and Unjust Wars and broke down his vision for an egalitarian society, giving us the digestible basics in a clear and compelling way.

Finally, Walzer discussed the state of grass-roots politics in the age of Obama, saying we need to continue knocking on doors if we want real and lasting change. “An email list is not a social movement,” he said. Well, maybe it’s just a small part.

For information about upcoming New York Intellectuals events, check  n+1.

Ever look around at the frenzied construction of Bloomberg-era New York City and wonder how to turn it into art? On November 18th at Studio-X, multimedia artist Daniel Perlin will do just that, and in a novel way: using screws, glue, nails, sawhorses, an audio cassette and a laptop to question work and construction as auditory processes. In his performance “re:construction,” he will ask: What do buildings sound like? How do structures house the process of their construction?

At Studio-X (fittingly, a downtown annex of the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University, located just blocks away from Donald Trump’s new and looming Soho tower), Perlin will build a small house over the course of one hour. Recording and manipulating samples from the construction process, he will simultaneously build a large orchestral work with rhythm, melody and harmony to be recorded onto a cassette tape in real-time. According to Studio-X, this cassette will then be housed within this new structure “as an artifact built to highlight process, and to archive the sounds of its own creation.”

Who: DANIEL PERLIN
What: re:construction
When: Tuesday, November 18, 7 pm
Where: Studio-X, 180 Varick Street, Suite 1610
1 train to Houston
RSVP: gdb2106@columbia.edu.

Brooklyn-based New Yorker editor Ben Greenman is looking for help with his new “highly fancy limited edition publication.” The book, Correspondences, is a collection of short stories written in epistolary form, and includes an unfinished story called “What He’s Poised to Do” that intentionally leaves gaps in the narrative.

“The Man is staying in a hotel. While he is there, he writes and receives a number of postcards. Some carry messages of love, others messages of regret, others still are confessions or rationalizations. There are nine postcard messages in all, not a single one of which is actually reprinted in the text of the story. That’s where you come in.”

Calling this interactive portion of the book The Postcard Project, the unwritten sections, numbered from one to nine, represent postcards sent from one character to another. Greenman is inviting writers (or anyone, really) to fill in the holes in the story by sending in postcards to an address in Brooklyn, numbered according to where they belong in the story.

Submissions will be read by Greenman and selected to be included in future editions of Correspondences. More information can be found here.

Much like it’s subject, Patti Smith: Dream of Life — a documentary about the legendary poet, singer and performance artist directed by Steven Sebring, now on view at the Film Forum — does not follow an expected path. Accompanying the singer and her friends and family through ten years of tours and travels, Sebring offers us a portrait that is as much a reflection of Smith’s personal aesthetic — her heroes, treasured objects and way of expressing herself — as it is an immersion in her unique energy. Take a bath in Patti Smith.

Beginning with a meditation on some of the people who have influenced her most (Robert Mapplethorpe, Bob Dylan, William S. Burroughs, Alan Ginsberg, William Blake, her late husband Fred “Sonic” Smith), the movie ambles along, Smith sometimes narrating directly to the camera, weaving in and out from the past to the present and back again. Visually, it’s almost painfully beautiful, shot in both black and white and color, lovingly and carefully capturing the smallest details that bring Smith’s humanity into focus: her hands on a guitar, the lines on her skin, her slightly crooked teeth close up as she laughs. The film shows her to be gorgeous but never pretty, pretentious and supremely humble, dorky, innocent, tenderhearted and fierce.

Patti Smith is a person who has been touched by loss, and grown stronger. When she talks about Robert Mapplethorpe, showing off his remains with something like pride, and the joy she feels when she thinks of her late brother and husband, it’s clear that she’s been able to transform the energy of grief. This grace translates to everything she does. She is more poet than rocker, more political performance artist than just singer, a little bit shaman and a little bit provocateur. She incites people to wake up, appreciate the moment, “rise up and take the streets.”

“We all have a voice,” she says, “and we have the responsibility to use it.”

Tuesday night was the inaugural event for Rapid Response, a new series at Studio-X in New York that will be held through the fall, on the last Tuesday of every month. Billing itself as “an open and undetermined platform for quick response to events that have transpired over the last thirty days,” Rapid Response is the brainchild of alumni and staff of the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation of Columbia University.

Titled Beijing Air, the opening night was dedicated to the brouhaha surrounding air quality in Beijing during the 2008 Summer Olympics. Sarah Williams, Director of the Spatial Information Design Lab at Columbia University GSAPP, presented data from her work with Carbon Footprint, a small mobile carbon monoxide air quality censor attached to a GPS device that was used to measure levels of pollution in the area around the Olympic Games.

In cooperation with members of the Associated Press, Sarah and her team became local monitors, traversing the city during the week before and the two weeks of the Olympics with their hand-held censors, comparing the data they collected to the official smog readings of the Chinese government and to comparably-sized areas of London and New York City.

They discovered, as they suspected, that air pollution can be highly localized, and that the measures taken by the Chinese government to reduce pollution, at least on first glance, seemed to have had a drastic effect on overall pollution levels, raising questions about what happens next for Beijing, after the factories get back into production and the traffic resumes it’s normal level of insanity.

David Benjamin, co-founder of The Living, an architecture practice based on open-source research and design, discussed the implications that widespread use of this kind of technology could have on pollution here in New York, where pollution levels are at least three to six times lower than in Beijing (therefore differences in local air quality more acutely felt). Could an army of citizen censors, posting data online from their neighborhoods and local parks, effect real change in areas where power is normally concentrated in the hands of a select few?

Rapid Response will meet again next month to discuss something totally different, but timely. Check Studio X’s website frequently for updates.