For your browsing pleasure:
• More “fun” ways to get a grip on what’s going on down there on Wall Street (and everywhere else, too).

• Another NYTimes article on opening festivities around the new performing arts center at my alma mater, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. That picture is really magnificent. I can’t wait to get up there and see it completed. They broke ground when I was a senior.

• Courtesy of my CTMovies colleague Peter Chattaway, the best trailer mashup I’ve seen yet:

So in the meantime, here’s a bunch of links I’ve been piling up:
• I ordered a few tealights from Dirt on Saturday, because they are $1 apiece and I like variety, and I like to burn soy candles since they don’t release the same kind of harmful things into the air as regular candles. I ordered A Fresh Start, All-Nighter, Nitty Gritty (the impetus for the order), and Apple a Day (made mostly of actual apples!).

• From More Intelligent Life: Meeting Marilynne Robinson. Not your typical author profile.

• Full-length videos from the Slow Food Nation conference, including Wendell Berry, Alice Waters, Carlo Petrini, and Michael Pollan.

• Sorted Books art.

• Saturday is apparently the Second Annual Gowanus Harvest Festival, which looks not only pretty cool but also helps to dispel the myth that city people don’t care about this stuff (and yes, I realize I pointed toward a Wendell Berry video two points earlier).

• Why literary readings are so excruciatingly bad, useful as I’m trying to plan programming for IAM.

• Looks like movie people will have work next year, hurrah!

• Lastly, the University as arts patron.

“In the Parlance of Our Times”:
An Insufficient Appreciation of the Coen Brothers
Jeffrey Overstreet
What has made the films of these masters of the dark comedy so distinct, and what does that say about their newest film, “Burn After Reading”?

New York, New Art
Wayne Adams
A walk through some of the most talked-about openings in the New York art world this fall.

Found Objects: One Person’s Trash . . .
Christy Tennant
Thrift, found objects, and artist Barry Krammes.

We spent all of Saturday happily bumming around; I made scrambled eggs with scallions, cheddar grits, and Applewood Farms chicken & sage sausage for brunch and we watched Saturday morning cartoons (i.e., The Simpsons on DVD). We also watched the pilot episode of Fringe, which you can (and should) watch on Hulu. The pilot cost something like $10 million to make and is almost an hour and a half long, and though I don’t watch much TV and haven’t ever watched a J.J. Abrams show except his episode of The Office, I thought it was rather good. Tom said it was kind of like what the X-Files meant to be, but a little better. I think we may try to follow the show on Hulu.

In the evening, we went to a cast & crew screening of Ghost Town, which is coming out this weekend. Tom worked on it last fall. I honestly have no idea what I’m allowed to say about it, but it played at the Toronto Film Festival and did pretty well, and I thought it was rather funny. In fact, it’s a good sign when a room full of people who lived with the movie for six months and can tell you what the weather was like in every shot still laugh at the film. Ricky Gervais is particularly funny in his bumbly, rambly moments.

The most notable thing about yesterday was that we had a “bad movie night”, which is a Tom-and-Alissa Sunday night tradition that we’d abandoned for a while. Fall is the best time, since all the bad movies from the spring that we didn’t see in the theater are now on DVD.

We started with Smart People, which was far worse than I thought it was going to be - dull, depressing, with a very jumpy and disconnected plot but without any kind of stylistic indication that that’s what they were trying to do. Basically, it was a snarky screenplay that just threw up all over itself when the cameras showed up. Do not bother.

The other was Baby Mama, which by comparison was amazing, but in reality was just a cheery, light comedy that somehow had Steve Martin in it. Tina Fey and Amy Poehler are great, and it had some serious laugh-out-loud moments. I think it was exactly what it was supposed to be, and so I went to bed happy.

Tonight we are going to “A Celebration of Maurice Sendak with Tony Kushner“, at the 92nd Street Y (which mercifully allows its under-35 patrons to get tickets for $10). Sendak, if you recall, is the author of the children’s book Where the Wild Things Are, which is sort-of in production as a feature film, written by Dave Eggers and directed by Spike Jonze (creative differences with the studio are holding it up). Other guests at the event are supposed to include Jonze, Eggers, Meryl Streep, James Gandolfini, Catherine Keener, and a bunch of other people, and yes, that’s a weird combination.

This technically kicks off our crazy fall event calendar, what with the New Yorker festival in October (we have Malcolm Gladwell tickets - woohoo!), the BAM Next Wave Festival, a bunch of Variety/MoMI screenings of the Oscar contenders (Blindness next week), actual press screenings, and whatever other things float our way - plus my various and sundry fundraising efforts. Not to sound like a broken record, but autumn in New York is sublime - not just for the weather, but the opportunities to soak up the best of culture and the arts. I am grateful that this is now my hometown.

Shutting Up Our Inner Censors
Alisa Harris
Michael Chabon, blogging, writer’s block, and learning to speak the truth.

Wii Are the World
Matt Cox
Can a video game help us regain community?

She Spoke to Silence
Jenni Simmons
Vassar Miller: beauty, humor, and poetry in the physically broken.

And our good friend Albert is Comment’s featured artist this week.

This is my last full-time day, and a short one at that; we close a little early for the holiday. So I’ll shortly be heading out to spend the evening on a bus, fighting our way through the traffic (oh dear) to south Jersey, where I’ll be chilling on the beach (or in the cottage, since it looks like rain tomorrow) with Tom and my grandparents and possibly my Mom and trying not to do anything too productive. Last year we young’uns (that would be Tom and I) hit the boardwalk for mini-golf, arcade games, and cotton candy, and I’m expecting similar pursuits. And salt-water taffy.

We’ll be back in town Monday night to start the autumn with a vengeance - screenings, class, new jobs, all that good stuff. My favorite part of the year.

We also dropped by the Apple store yesterday to see if we could get iPhones. Let me back up here; I haven’t planned on getting an iPhone, since I have a Blackberry (for work) and a cell phone and both work perfectly well, and I’ve become increasingly averse to bandwagon-jumping in my old (snort) age. Tom, on the other hand, really has a legitimate business need for a data phone, and after copious amounts of research, he concluded that an iPhone would be the best bet. So, he has been planning to get one. After running the numbers and taking into account a few as-yet extenuating factors, we realized that it would be cheaper, in the long run, for us both to jump to AT&T and get iPhones (8GB for me, 16GB for him) now, rather than waiting and keeping a contract with both companies.

So then, yesterday - you know, four days after the device’s release - we arrived at the Apple store only to find the line wrapped around the block and stretching several more blocks north. Yeah. Right. We popped by the AT&T store, which didn’t have any phones and said to come back in the morning. It’s across from my office, so we went by early this morning and waited until they opened. They don’t have any iPhones, they don’t know if they’ll have any iPhones today or indeed any other day. By this point, I was getting frustrated, envisioning my life in the next few weeks as a futile attempt to get an iPhone. Solution: we ordered them. Should have them within a week. Shiny new gadgets, woohoo.

Far more information than you wanted to know. But I’ll bet a few bucks that the iPhone craze in New York is more ridiculous here than anywhere else. Anyone have similarly insane reports?

I have a scarily long and sordid to-do list this week, mostly due to a concentration of articles and papers in the near future. But tonight, I am taking my reading to Central Park for the Philharmonic’s other concert in that park (they were in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park last night). Tom is meeting me with a blanket, a bottle of wine, and some food. Tonight they play Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 4, and Sibelius’s Finlandia. Lang Lang is the pianist. Hopefully we can get near the front, since it’s just the two of us.

A few collected links:

- From Papercuts, the NYTimes book blog: The Perfect Novel

- New rules about shooting on New York City streets.

- The Knitting Factory, a Lower East Side institution, is heading to Brooklyn and westward.

- Why more authors should be blogging.

- The aesthetics of buzz in the dining room.

- Art in the Berkshires. First stop: The Clark Art Museum, in Williamstown, Massachusetts. I grew up about forty minutes away from here, on the New York side, but didn’t spend too much time in the museum, unfortunately. Williamstown is great. If I’d been thinking harder, I probably would have tried to go to Williams College.

- Supplies of rice, corn, and wheat - crops that yield half the world’s food calories - could shrink dramatically by 2050.

- The monster collection of Moleskine tips, tricks, and hacks, especially useful for Moleskine newbies. I own too many Moleskines.

Though walking across the Bridge leans toward the touristy side, I had a good reason for wanting to go: the aforementioned Waterfalls in the East River, which “opened” yesterday. They are lovely and fascinating to watch, and at night they’re stunning (see the pictures in that article). If this is the future of public art, I heartily approve.

Tom left early this morning to meet up with his father in New Jersey and head south to Virginia. I’ll join him on Thursday. In the meantime, I am traipsing home to Albany tonight, and will be back in town Sunday night, ready to start learning about the modern British novel. I have a seedling of an idea for my paper for that class, which is more than I can usually say. Maybe that means I am starting to catch onto this humanities stuff.

Have a good weekend, and in the meantime, if you are one of the ten people who haven’t, check out Garfield Minus Garfield.

My next class starts on Monday, but in between I am heading Albany-ward to see my family for the weekend and to write frantically on the way up. Thank God for electrical outlets on trains. Tom is going in the opposite direction and will be in the DC/Virginia area for about a week and a half to see his grandpa, other family, and a lot of friends. I’ll be joining him on Thursday.

Yesterday I went uptown on my lunch break and met Tom to see the Olafur Eliasson show at MoMA before it closed. It was fascinating. I especially liked a few pieces where he had film-style spotlights aimed at mirrors so that the spot reflected off the glass and landed in a place on the floor that seems very removed from where the spot would normally fall. Hard to describe, but really cool. I sadly won’t get to see the P.S.1 part of the exhibit, but I’m glad I saw what I did. You can see the online exhibition here.

Speaking of Eliasson, today is the first day of his Waterfalls installation in the East River! I won’t have any trouble seeing that, since I cross the East River at least twice a day to get into Manhattan.

Also, Wall-E comes out this weekend. Please go see it. Pixar is apparently making bold moves with this one, which bodes well for the future of animation. You might find this interview at Christianity Today with Andrew Stanton (Wall-E’s director) interesting.

Grumbling tummy. Must find food.

Interesting tidbits:
- “More Americans identify their primary occupation as artist than as lawyer, doctor, police officer or farm worker.”
- “More than one in four artists live in California and New York, where their sheer numbers are overwhelming compared to the artist colonies in other states.”
- “Overall, artists make more than the national median income.”

Dana Gioia’s comments are interesting as well.

Ergo, I give you Culture Log.

I’ll be blogging several links and quotes and things per day that I find interesting. It’s all completely subjective. Tumblr doesn’t provide commenting features, which I’ve fallen progressively more out of love with anyhow, and it makes it very easy to quickly blog all kinds of media. Culture Log has an RSS feed, so feel free to subscribe . . . or not. This is mostly for my own edification and for anyone else who wishes to look over my shoulder and see what I’m reading.

Anthropologie sends me a lot of mail, both of the e and snail varieties, and I don’t mind because it’s pretty, but this “how to make a room your own” site that came in their last email is actually pretty cool. I especially love the library.

Tonight we are going to Alchemy, a local gastropub up the street from us, for Restaurant Week. Also, speaking of Brooklyn, I am crossing fingers, toes, and all other appendages in hopes that the letter from Bank of America which confirms that we do indeed have an account with them (nevermind that we have statements to prove it!) will arrive today, a full two weeks after it was requested, so that we can finally submit our application for the apartment. We are hopeful.

Lastly, Colin, who is awesome, ordered one of my prints from RedBubble. It arrived in Scotland from Australia, and he took a couple pictures of the picture. He claims it looks quite good. So, artists/designers/photographers, get thee to RedBubble.

A couple years ago, my first Easter in New York was also, if I remember correctly, the first time I went out to Tom’s childhood home (and possibly the first time I met my then-future-in-laws, though it does seem kind of late in the game for that, so maybe not). Last year I was in the buzzy-hubbub world of interviewing for new jobs and actually got my present job based loosely on a conversation I had there - long story.

This year, we saw Chop Shop on Good Friday. I can’t recommend this film highly enough. Tom likened it to the work of the Dardennes brothers - he’s completely right - but it’s by an American director of Iranian descent, Ramin Bahrani, whose previous film, Man Push Cart, played at the “New Directors/New Films” festival at Lincoln Center a couple years ago.

Chop Shop is the story of a twelve-year-old boy and his sixteen-year-old sister living in a tiny plywood room above a mechanic’s shop in the sea of car mechanics out beyond Shea Stadium in Queens; however, if it weren’t for the subway footage and the fact that the kids are speaking English, you wouldn’t realize it wasn’t in a third-world Central American village until you see the corner of the stadium peeking into frame twenty minutes into the film. It’s more real than a documentary; this will more than likely end up on my top-ten list this year.

We saw the film because our church doesn’t have a Good Friday service, since we don’t actually have a building (refresher: we rent a great space from a Seventh-Day Adventist church, but only on Sundays). Some day I’d like to go to a Good Friday service at one of the gorgeous cathedrals around here, but I am just not up to braving the tourists right now.

Saturday was a culture-y day; we saw “The 39 Steps” at the Roundabout (amazing), then tripped on up to the Upper East Side for brunch at Mon Petit Cafe (crepes for both of us, mm), and then popped by the segment of the Whitney Biennial at the Armory (very skippable, but it was free, and we only had an hour or so). Then, after coffee and chocolate souffle at Fig and Olive, we headed to the Zoae Series at the Brecht Forum.

And, I wore these shoes all day and was simultaneously flabbergasted and elated that my feet did not hurt. Shoes are the bane of my existence, and I could not believe it that these were almost more comfortable than just regular flats. So comfortable, in fact, that I’m ordering another pair, because when you live in New York and your feet take you everywhere, shoes are more important than almost any part of your wardrobe, even your bag.

Righto. Easter Sunday dawned sunny and chilly, of course, and after church we went to lunch at Smorgaschef with Tom’s parents, and then wandered about the Village a bit before they headed back to Jersey and we went on out to Brooklyn for a quiet evening. And so closed the weekend.

I am pushing to get the magazine into layout and copyedited this week - cross your fingers - and hopefully we’ll be turning in the paperwork for the apartment application by mid-week, and I have class again this week after a couple weeks off, and Tom is scouting office buildings, and we are taking full advantage of Brooklyn Restaurant Week, and we’re seeing Little Flower of East Orange at the Public on Friday, directed by none other than Philip Seymour Hoffman, whose work we tend to trust implicitly. Good ways to do good work during a good week at the start of spring.

I got an email about the extra 20% off sale at J.Crew (there’s still nice things left!) and quickly bought this top in black, which has now sold out, because I’ve been eyeing it for months and I ended up getting it for something like $80 off the original price.

I really needed a black top for the summer. I have none, which is a serious problem in my wardrobe.

And now I’m at work; Tom ordered the Nick Drake “Fruit Tree” boxed set and it came yesterday, and I ripped it all to my computer and am loving it. This is perfect working music to keep me calm under stress.

Because I’ve realized of late that when I’m stressed out, I gripe to myself about having to go to work every day, or about having too much to do, and I don’t only make myself unhappy, but everyone else, too. And there’s no need for that. I have an excellent job with great opportunities that many other people would kill for. I think perhaps I’m just in need of patience.

So now I’m observing the loveliness at the Bodum site, because I want a way to brew one cup of loose tea (preferably both at home and at work) and am exploring options beyond the traditional tea ball approach of my youth. I very much like their Yo-Yo approach:

I’d need two, one for home and one for the office, but they’re rather reasonably priced.

I also really loved this:

That would make me happy, brewing on my desk at work.

But although I already have a really lovely set of espresso cups and saucers that I’m very happy with, these made me smile and wish:

Set of six for fifteen dollars. Come on, someone needs to buy them.

• Kevin was my featured poet today at ConversantLife.com; he also has a great new poem on his site.

• My multitalented friend Christy has an article at Comment, reflecting on the IAM conference and ways to be a creative catalyst in your community.

• Excellent article at Burnside Writers’ Collective on spiritual disciplines. It seems they are resurfacing at last in the younger evangelical and formerly-evangelical consciousness. I just reviewed a book for RELEVANT about the same ideas (see May/June issue).

We went to Rockwood Music Hall last night, after a dash around the Lower East Side trying to find food, and saw our friend Nate, a rockstar songwriter, play some old and some new songs. In the process we saw many friends (film people/singers/actors/writers), all of whom we’re seeing tonight again at the behest of Nate’s lovely Jenn. And tomorrow night, we are feeding chili to a handful of friends. Wish us luck.

It took about five hours of work, but our apartment is now clean, relatively brick-dust-free, and has half a brick wall on one end (which was intended - it’s the chimney). Our landlord stopped by and we got to talking about the building. Apparently it was built in 1890, and at one point in the past there was a family with seven children living in the building, both apartments. Even with both apartments, though, you’d have to be impressed. That totals about 800 square feet. For nine people.

The brick is very old and all different colors, probably because bits have been replaced in the last hundred-and-twenty years, but I love it. It has so much character and it looks great against the blue walls and adds a lot to the room. Maybe I can get a picture up at some point.

Tonight I have class. I’m looking forward to it. The readings this week were long and arduous but interesting, and I’m one of the few who doesn’t have a background in art history, so I think this seminar format really helps me learn and explore what I’ve read. Also, having class around a table is so much more fun than a lecture hall or one of those hideous industrial classrooms at RPI (which gratefully did NOT include the IT building, but unfortunately did include pretty much everywhere else I had class).

As part of next week’s work for class, I have to make it either to MoMA or the Met. I really need to go early in the week so I have time to write about it, but unfortunately they both close at 5:30 pm until Friday, after which they are opened in the evenings and more crowded to boot. I’ll probably end up at the Met on Friday night or Saturday morning. It’s just bigger, and therefore less annoying when it’s crowded.

I’m reading Slow Food: The Case for Taste (by Carlo Petrini) in my spare moments, and I’m really enjoying it. , I think you’d really like this book. It’s not a cookbook. It’s a history of the slow food movement and a case for thoughtful, flavorful, healthful meals and eating as a communal activity, which is a rather Biblical idea, when you get right down to it.

Which, of course, I say as I’m about to finish up at work and wolf down a Clif bar on the way to class. But though I long for a really yummy meal, prepared with love and served around a table with friends, I’m okay with the Clif bar for now. It’s just a phase of life.

We went to Tom’s wrap party on Saturday night. It was in a two-room downtown place that looks like it’s a rather nice restaurant/bar/cafe spot in its normal hours. We were hanging out in the less crowded room for a while and talking to people, when someone mentioned that there was food in the other room. As we made our way through the crowd, I looked up, and whoops, there’s Clive Owen. Ha! I giggled fangirlishly and Tom asked me what was going on. “I don’t get to see famous people every day at the university, you know,” I said. I may be a New Yorker, but I don’t see my most favorite actors all the time (well, except Philip Seymour Hoffman, for some reason.) Other familiar faces were in the crowd as well. I felt very chic for a few hours, at least.

But this is what is exciting: Olafur Eliasson is doing four installation waterfalls into the East River this summer. Further digging revealed that he’s also got a show at MoMA this spring. We’ve been totally fascinated by Eliasson after reading a piece in the New Yorker about him last year; he does simultaneously abstract and naturalist pieces, including the Weather Project at Tate Modern in London. So excited.