Michael Lewis says that even in this financial mess (to use a much weaker word than I’d like), we can look on the bright side. Sort of.
A lot of attractive office space seems to be opening up in midtown Manhattan, for instance, and the U.S. government is now getting paid to borrow money. (And with T-bills yielding 0 percent, they really ought to borrow a lot more of it, and quickly.
Lewis wrote Liar’s Poker, a startlingly engaging and scary story about the birth of mortgage-backed securities (otherwise known as, the Legalized Gambling That Is Screwing Wall Street And Everyone Else Over Right Now) in the 80’s. When I started training before beginning my job at Banc of America Securities in June of 2005, our instructor insisted that we read Liar’s Poker before we start work, and it was fascinating but really and truly frightening. I sat reading it and feeling like our whole financial system was just a house of cards waiting for a little puff of air. And what do you know? Two years later.
GOOD magazine (of which I have lately become a big fan) has an interesting piece on the five best farmers’ markets in the country. NYC’s Union Square market is on the list. My personal favorite is the one in our neighborhood, but the Prospect Park market is great and a little bigger.
Friday was a quiet night. We caught a late afternoon screening of a new print of The Godfather at Film Forum, and it was my first time, so it adequately blew my mind. We’re hoping to see Part II sometime next week. Living in New York has many advantages, but one of the biggest is being able to see random things like this in a proper theater, the way it was originally seen.
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.
The Philharmonic concert last night was brilliant. Perfect weather, sixty thousand people, and fireworks. The music was ideal for a summer night on the lawn. Tom made delicious tabouli and brought some thinly-cut prosciutto to eat it with, and big, juicy strawberries for dessert, accompanied by a bottle of New Zealand pinot noir (apparently a new thing for the Kiwis). It was fabulously relaxing, and I felt rather pampered as I nibbled strawberries and listened to Beethoven.
This, folks, is why we live here.
Well, I’m back at work today, after a not-nearly-long-enough vacation at home. We went to the Coney Island beach and ate mangos; finished Six Feet Under; watched A Streetcar Named Desire, Lust, Caution, Hellboy 2 (apparently I just don’t like Del Toro), and a lot of The Simpsons; ate at home a bit; did our laundry; and basically tried to stay as low-key as possible. I also had H.G. Wells’ Tono-Bungay to read for class on Monday night, which I finished just in time.
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.
- The monster collection of Moleskine tips, tricks, and hacks, especially useful for Moleskine newbies. I own too many Moleskines.
After class ended last night, I met up with Sarah and Matt, friends from forever ago, and a few more recent friends and went to the Brooklyn Bridge. It was a lovely night, and we caught the sunset just right. We walked from the Manhattan side to Brooklyn, then had ice cream at the Brooklyn Ice Cream Factory, which sits on the Promenade in Brooklyn Heights and looks directly toward downtown Manhattan. Good ice cream, lovely view.
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.
Hey kids.
Well, what a weekend. I was feeling rather under the weather on Friday, so I took a sick day. I pounded out most of a paper as I sat on the couch and drank copious amounts of water. We don’t really have any food at home - no time to shop lately - but thankfully, our neighborhood is full of wonderfully healthy and moderately-priced eateries, so we had brunch at Olea and dinner at Lil’ Pig. We spent the evening watching Hellboy - the first one - and it was, well, awful, though made a bit better because it does not take itself seriously at all. I’m all for movies with very vague plots, but not in that genre. But I try not to demand much from movies based on comic books; that way, I’m delighted with things like Batman Begins and Iron Man. (By the way, I am totally psyched for The Dark Knight. Moving on.)
I was feeling much better on Saturday, and because I got so much done on Friday I was able to tag along to the Mermaid Parade in Coney Island, along with Tom and a few friends who we met up with there. It was everyone’s first time, and it was certainly . . . interesting. On the one hand, I enjoyed the whole borough pride aspect. Brooklyn is proud to be Brooklyn, diverse, nutty, and happy. People from neighborhoods where you can have a house and garage brought out their antique cars, which were really cool. And some of the costumes were fantastic and well thought out. On the other hand, lots of people like to use marching in the parade as an excuse to get tipsy and wear very little clothing, and that’s their (legal) prerogative, but it gets old after a while and isn’t something I feel the need to experience repeatedly. So it was a one-time must-see event, but probably not one that will get any better year to year, and I don’t think we’ll do it again.
After the parade we went back to our apartment and cooked hamburgers for everyone, which was good fun, and watched trailers for scary movies. An excellent end to a Saturday.
After church on Sunday, we went back out to our ‘hood and had brunch at Red Bamboo, a vegan Thai restaurant (you won’t believe it’s not meat, etc.) with friends and ended up at Brooklyn Flea for a bit, where we did not buy anything but admired lots of things, including some imported and salvaged furniture. We wandered over to Smooch, which I immediately adopted as my coffeeshop, because it has really, really good coffee, great decor, eclectic decor, and a relaxed vibe.
We headed uptown shortly afterwards for the “Jesus Hopped the A Train” benefit reading, which was simply remarkable. Original cast plus Stephen Adly Guirgis, who is fast becoming my favorite playwright because he’s so remarkably profound. His plays are messy and profane, but somehow grace and forgiveness always explicitly slip in.
Our seats were good - on the floor, but near the back - and we were serendipitously seated directly across the aisle from Philip Seymour Hoffman’s perch at the soundboard as director. He still laughs, despite having heard this play and these actors a mind-bogglingly enormous number of times, and it was fun to be that close. I could have reached out and tapped him. He’s the most refreshing kind of famous New Yorker - still strolls around outside the theater and smokes before performances (this was the third time I’d seen him doing it), frequents the same random coffeeshops that I do. When we saw “The Little Flower of East Orange” a couple months ago, he got in an elevator with a bunch of the audience as they were going up to the theater on the third floor. They looked a little thunderstruck.
But! Our brush with celebrity was not complete. Yesterday I woke up with one of those stark-raving-mad headaches, and as this is not a week in which I can afford to be sick, I called in sick again and slept in very late. I had a dull headache all day, even after lunch at Pequena down the block, but I worked a little more on my paper and then went to class.
After class I took a few painkillers and dashed across town to met up with Tom at Madison Square Garden for the Coldplay concert. Coldplay gave away all 30,000 tickets for this performance, which was kind of awesome, because it was the first time they’d played through that set, which included a bunch of songs from Viva La Vida as well as some older stuff. They came into the arena seating - three rows behind us!! - and sang “Yellow”. And they didn’t play an encore - vaguely disappointing, but I’m kind of glad. I find encores a little pretentious. Everyone pretends they’re special, but it happens every time. Let’s save the encores for truly spectacular concerts. This one was an experimental concert, they flubbed a bit, but they were good-natured about it and very funny, and everyone enjoyed themselves. The only black mark was the drunken people to our left and in front of us who decided to get into a fight, just short of throwing punches, during “Fix You”, which is probably my favorite song. Oh well.
I’m finally back at work today and swamped, but tonight I’m planning to meet up with our dear friends Sarah and Matt and bring them up to the NY Philharmonic’s free concert in Central Park, as long as it doesn’t get rained out. This is my last week of the Moby-Dick class, and next week starts “Modern British Novel”. I admit that I’m a bit dubious about how I’ll manage to read all eleven novels and write two papers in the six weeks, but they don’t call it a “master’s degree” for nothing, I suppose.
The dark spot on my weekend is that it looks like I won’t get to see Wall-E on its opening night. Alas.
I finished Home on Sunday night, and it was magnificent - probably my favorite of her three fiction books, though they’re all spectacular. I was reading some of the press materials that came with it, in which Marilynne Robinson said that Moby-Dick was one of her favorite novels (my professor appreciated that). Her books were also compared to Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy, which I read last year, and that makes perfect sense, though I didn’t realize it until I was reading the article. They both deal with America in the 1950s, and they both write in a somewhat deadpan style (McCarthy far more so) which pleasantly belies the emotion and drama of the story. Robinson, at least, uses punctuation. In any case, do not miss this book when it comes out in September, and you might want to re-read Gilead beforehand - or read it, if you haven’t yet.
We watched Lars and the Real Girl on Sunday night as well, at long last. There were so many good movies in the theater when it came out that we missed it, and we haven’t had much time for movie-watching so far this year. It was great, as everyone said. Ironically, we’d been eating brunch at Tartine earlier that day when Ryan Gosling, very bearded, walked past with a friend. We continually find that life and art intersect in weird ways when you live here.
Which, by the way, reminds me that next week will mark the end of my third year in New York City. I think that makes me an official New Yorker. I no longer need a subway map to get around pretty much anywhere in Manhattan and a lot of Brooklyn’s “brownstone belt”, I don’t need to hold the pole in the subway anymore, I am completely ignorant of gas prices except when they show up on the news, I know the best place to get falafel for $2.50, I no longer venture above 14th Street unless it’s absolutely necessary and kind of turn up my nose at living in Manhattan, I say things like “the city” and “the Times” and expect people to know what I’m talking about, and I walk around saying things like “that used to be that great French cafe” and grumbling at tourists who walk four-across on the sidewalk. In short, I am some combination of the worst stereotype and the actual reality. Oh well. We are all victims of our locations, and this isn’t a bad one. I am so blessed to live here.
Did anyone else out there who grew up in church watch a movie called “Hoomania”? It was about a kid who got sucked into a board game that taught him about the book of Proverbs. There were some gamepieces called “Sluggards”, and a wise owl, and some other crazy characters, and it was partially live-action and partially claymation. I suddenly remembered this movie the other night and wanted to watch it, but it’s out of “print” and I can’t find any clips on YouTube.
Conductor:
“This is Jay Street - Borough Hall. Transfer is available to the letter A and letter F trains. Have a good morning, and thanks for riding the C train, the best damn train in the world.”
I am headed to the Upper West Side for The Moth, at Symphony Space, for Science Week. The Moth is an event where people (like, uh, Malcolm Gladwell) get up and tell true stories without notes for about ten minutes. And they’re generally great. So far I’ve only experienced The Moth via the weekly podcast, but it’s been a great experience.
Sadly, Tom can’t go. Boo! Hiss!
Akismet tells me it currently has 7,777 spam comments in the queue. Is that ominous or auspicious?
What did you do yesterday? We went to Coney Island, and it was wonderful. We took the subway - about half an hour from where we live - oh YEAH. It’s not exactly a highbrow beach, but then, that’s not what you go to Coney Island for. And it was much nicer than we expected. The boardwalk is short, but has a lovely look out over the beach, which is very wide and sandy with little bits of colored rocks and shells in it - and yes, a little bit of broken glass polished smooth. I stuck my toe (singular) into the water and it was frigid, but I think it probably gets warmer in the later summer, in tandem with the Jersey coast. Big waves.
So we walked the length of the boardwalk, laid out on the windy beach for a bit, then got some good boardwalk-y junk food. Fried clams and shrimp and onion rings, oh my. We went to the Coney Island Sideshow, which, as it turns out, is kind of delightful and low budget, but has bona fide fire eaters and snake handlers and sword swallowers, and the host-guy pounds a nail into his nostril, then a power drill. We were a little enthralled. We left and played video games and shooting-range games and scoped out the rides for a future trip we are planning. They are not cheap, but day passes are. Maybe I’ll even overcome my distaste for being jerked around and go on the Cyclone, because, after all, it’s actually got a sign placed there by the Parks Service.
I am coughing today, which I hope is the remnants of my allergies and maybe a little sand, so I stayed home to work to spare the ears and my lungs. Knocking an hour and a half or so out of my commute isn’t shabby either. I’ve gotten the laundry done in between my workings and will soon embark on the rest of my reading. Tom went to set around 6:30 this morning and has been running around all day. The busy part of his shoot is finally commencing, and he has some weekends coming up. Yay to overtime pay; boo to weekends apart. But that’s life in a film biz household!
I skim a lot of blogs relating to arts and culture during the day, and things catch my eye, but I hate to repeatedly blog little links here. I’ve been experimenting with Tumblr and I think it’s the right way to do it, leaving this blog for stuff that’s actually about us (hence the name, right?).
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.
This will be my fourth summer living in New York - oh, my word - but you might be shocked and mildly appalled to know that in all that time, I’ve barely made use of the wonderful free things that go on here in the summertime - just a Philharmonic in the Park concert in 2006, and some of Midsummer Night’s Swing last year in Lincoln Center (which was not free).
So, I’ve put a lot of the more amazing things I’ve found going on around town, from classical music to free film screenings to rock and folk and readings. Highlights include:
• Readings by Richard Price and Junot Diaz
• Several free NY Philharmonic concerts, in Prospect and Central Parks
• Chris “formerly of Nickel Creek” Thile’s amazing band, Punch Brothers
• Lots of great outdoor movies
• The Philip Glass ensemble, Ailey II, and Beth Orton in Prospect Park
• Wilco in McCarren Park (sadly not free)
I’ll be constantly updating, so feel free to bookmark!
• The NYTimes Reading Room “blog” is discussing Housekeeping by Marilyn Robinson next. Seriously, whoever’s picking the books over there has impeccable taste. They’ve already done War and Peace and The Moviegoer this year, among others.
• Small Cool Apartments, one of the more inspirational ideas for those of us who live in places the size of most people’s living room (and love it), has been on for a while at ApartmentTherapy.
• If you’re in New York, or even if you’re not, you can still catch Patrick Stewart in Macbeth, because it’s moving to Broadway! We saw it at BAM and it was astounding.
• The New York Philharmonic is playing a free concert on Governor’s Island this summer, and by george, I’d be there, but I just checked the calendar and we’re supposed to be seeing Les Liaisons Dangereuse, starring Laura Linney, that night. Hmm. Also, how cool is it that everyone will have to take a ferry?
• Poets.org says to celebrate Poetry Month by bringing a piece of poetry to your place of worship.
• And lastly, join about 6,000 other people and go watch The Cult of Sincerity. You’ll be glad you did.
We were out quite late Friday night, eating chips and other snacks and watching old clips of “Square One” (the PBS kids’ show about math from the late eighties/early nineties) on YouTube and talking with various people, and generally relaxing.
On Saturday, we ate brunch at Stone Park Cafe (best brunch in the universe). Tom had some kind of poached-eggs-on-fish-cake thing, and I had shrimp-in-savory-grits, and it was great. We headed home and started cooking; three hours later, or so, we had chili cooking on the stove and extremely rich chocolate pudding in a bowl and various other goodies ready to feed the (eventually) eleven people who were there. Nearly everything was raved over and polished off, so it seems it was a rousing success.
Yesterday after church we had brunch with ten others at Philip Marie (on Hudson Street), then Tom and I went home, ran back out to see an apartment, then came back home and watched Rushmore and tried to unwind. Possibly too little quiet, relaxing time this weekend, but it was fun and full of good food, so who’s complaining?
It’s spring break at the University this week, which means I don’t have class tomorrow night but I do have about twice as much reading to do, and a lot of other things to write and revise and edit and such. It’s also a bit chilly out for “spring”. I sort of wish we were in Cancun, or somewhere.
Also, the city is INSANE here, with all the crazy people who think they’re Irish and a handful who actually are. Mom is in Albany, where it’s not much better, with the inauguration and all. I Heart New York.
Tom found this today: Park Slope 100. See why we love Park Slope.
The Kitchn loves the Co-op too.
Interesting article from the NYTimes about art institutions who are renovating to include event space in their floorplan. (The picture of the Morgan Library made me stop and stare a while. I want to live in a library.)
For New Yorkers and art lovers: three exhibitions not to miss, including the Olafur Eliasson at the MoMA & P.S. 1, about which I am probably unduly excited.
Shameless self-promotion: my website has gotten a wee facelift, courtesy of a new Wordpress theme and my mad hacking skillz (not really, but I know more about CSS than I wish I did).
Hulu has been released to the public, which is very good news for you, and you should go check it out now. They’ve been loading dozens of movies onto the site as well - good movies.
Also, I have been pondering the role of the critic lately, and I’d love it if you (intelligently) weighed in. Really.
We have been tres busy this week, what with two screenings, concert tonight, Tom’s upcoming chili and my upcoming dark chocolate pudding experiment, Tom scouting with the Disney bigwigs and eating great food, and my foray into the book I have to read for class next week. Also, it’s spring, which means we’re planning for all the theatre we need to catch this spring and summer. Oh, and I have a magazine coming out at work soon, I hope, and a related podcast to get off the ground. Did I mention we’re busy? But not too busy to watch a little bit of The Simpsons.
Dare I say it? I think spring is on the way.
I’ve got kind of semi-ringside seats to this Elliot Spitzer scandal - my Mom works for the Department of State in Albany - and I am sad about the whole thing, and trying to understand what the Christian reaction should be (moral outrage, yes; name-calling and snide remarks, probably not).
But is it awful of me that I’m immediately thinking just what a great movie this will make in a few years?
1. An apartment cannot be “sexy”, “charismatic”, “vivacious”, or “cheerful”. Your use of these terms does not make me more interested in renting your apartment.
2. Listing the neighborhood of your apartment as “Brooklyn” is not helpful, at all.
3. In the same vein, “Berkeley Street” is not a useful designation. That could be almost anywhere in Brooklyn. Same for “Flatbush Ave”.
4. 20th Street is not Park Slope. It’s nice, but really, come on. We all know that’s not Park Slope.
5. Somehow, not putting any pictures or information about the apartment’s layout, size, or features, then saying it’s a “must see”, doesn’t convince me.
6. Rows of asterisks, ALterNaTING CaPS and lowercase, ALL CAPS, and anything involving an image that blinks basically makes me think that the apartment must be lousy for you to have to resort to weird and unintelligible measures to get me to see it. Who are you trying to attract? Four-year-olds?
7. Posting a listing in my price range, then using that space to list out multiple apartments above my price range, is called bait-and-switch. We don’t like bait-and-switchers and will not pay attention to anything they try to rent us. Please just stop.
8. You and I both know that there are no “giant” one-bedroom apartments in the West Village on “tree-lined blocks” that are $800 a month, all utilities included. Stop trying to scam the newbies.
Can you tell I’m tired of looking? Where are the sane people?
It seems like this is the third or fourth time that a high-rise building in New York has collapsed in the last year. Yikes.
Brief things, written in a tearing hurry:
I wrote a bit about apartment hunting in New York City at ConversantLife.com, and the site appears to have finally, officially launched!
On Monday night we saw Purple State of Mind, met Craig Detweiler, and went out afterwards with a handful of random people who were at the premiere, from musicians to journalists to doctors to famous playwrights. We were up very late, but it was worth it.
Yesterday after work and class I had dinner with my friend Umbereen from college, who I don’t think I’ve seen since I graduated, and eight of her co-workers (IT consulting). We went to a French steakhouse in the financial district, and my French dip sandwich was rather tasty.
Tonight is dinner with the Strauss, of Ontario and Comment.
I mentioned several months ago that Blueprint, my favoritest woman’s magazine (and the only one I really could stomach, because it was for people just like me!), stopped publishing. Its subscriptions folded into Martha Stewart Living, which started coming last week. It’s a nice-looking magazine, but I can tell I’ll never re-subscribe. It’s clearly aimed at the suburban housewife with a lot of time on her hands and decent resources at her disposal, and though I don’t have any particular problems with suburban housewives - though I don’t think I’d make a very good one - nothing in there pertains to me. The recipes are far beyond anything I have time or patience to make, with ingredients I don’t buy, and I don’t have space for things like gardens or sewing nooks. Oh well. The pictures are lovely. :)
But, I’ve made these cookie bars several times from the Martha Stewart website, and they’re great. And very easy.
We heard through a reliable grapevine that New York, I Love You is going into production. We greatly enjoyed Paris, je t’aime last year. This film’s list of directors is intriguing; it includes a few fairly obvious choices (Woody Allen, Zach Braff) and a couple of oddballs (Scarlett Johansson?).
If you’re in New York, keep an eye out on the street!
I AM IN SHAPE
round is a shape
I think I’m learning that I shouldn’t even try to write on Mondays. Because my brain runs consistently on two parallel tracks (what I’m doing, and what I’m thinking about), I usually leave a Word doc open on my desktop to jot down whatever fabulous ideas come to mind for the piece I’m fiddling with at the moment. But on Mondays, that blank document makes me nervous, mostly because it remains blank for most of the day. I don’t write on weekends if I can help it, so taking out Mondays as well means a four-day writing week. Oh well. It’s not my full-time job, yet. (Wishful thoughts.)
We had a good weekend. On Friday night we had dinner and a late night at Jenn and Nate’s place. We slept in Saturday and went to see Charlie Wilson’s War (review forthcoming, if my brain turns on soon), which we enjoyed, especially since we were pleasantly surprised to see our friend Wynn onscreen (she is the more talkative of the secretaries in Tom Hanks’ office). Then we headed to Amy’s sister’s birthday party (again, hi Amy!) for a bit before heading home and watching Gilmore Girls for a bit.
On Sunday after church we headed to Astoria, ate some Cuban food at a hole in the wall place that was madly good and cheap, and saw Punch-Drunk Love at the Museum of the Moving Image. Love P.T. Anderson. Love seeing his movies on the big screen. We went upstairs after the movie and poked around the museum for a while and realized we simply must go back. What a cool place! The exhibits are all genuinely interesting, with lots of hands-on bits that give visitors a real look into the movie business. We’re probably more knowledgeable about the whole film world than your average Joe, but we both found it pretty fascinating.
Tom’s starting on The International this week (directed by Tom Tykwer of Run Lola Run and starring Clive Owen & Naomi Campbell) and working for about ten days straight. He just got the call. Very exciting.
I, for my part, have somehow racked up about five pieces to write this week, plus back-to-back screenings on Wednesday night at two different places (Run, Fatboy, Run, which is David Schwimmer’s directorial debut - you know, Ross from Friends - and looks pretty funny, and Sleepwalking, starring Charlize Theron and a bunch of other people). And I’m heading up to Albany on Friday for my grandparents’ fiftieth anniversary celebration, and coming back sometime Saturday.
There’s a bunch of cool movies coming up. Have you seen any trailers for movies that interest you, or at least intrigue you? (Mine include, but are not limited to Be Kind Rewind, In Bruges, Jumper, and maybe Vantage Point.)
One thing I’m very grateful for this Christmas: that my office is downtown, in a neighborhood the holiday masses seem to have forgotten about, and not in Rockefeller Center. I get to do things like each my lunch and walk outside my door without becoming completely stressed out.
I’m starting to get confused about what day it is. I feel like it’s just getting light when I come to work (it isn’t, the sky has just been very cloudy), and it’s already dark hours before I leave the office.
So, backing up, we saw The Diving Bell and the Butterfly on Tuesday night at the Angelika. It was outstanding, a visually beautifully film, stirring, and still accessible. I wrote a review here. If it comes to your town, don’t miss it.
Which makes this as good a time as any to say that I’ll be writing a blog (not like the blog I keep here, but more of a free-form semi-weekly column) at the upcoming Conversant Life which launches in January. The blogging team they’ve assembled is a little staggering, and I’m completely honored to be included. So keep an eye out.
I seem to jinx myself every time I mention what we’re doing before we do it, but I’m going to risk it anyhow. We’ll be at the Bowery Poetry Club tonight for the CD release party of one of our favorite slam poets, Taylor Mali. Hopefully we’ll be seeing Juno tomorrow, and we have plans to be at the Sarah Lentz & (many very talented) Friends Christmas concert at 7pm, at St. Paul’s Church in Carroll Gardens on Saturday night. (Details on Facebook here.)
I’m beginning to doubt more and more that I’ll finish the NaNoNovel, not because I don’t want to but because I keep getting (paid) work thrown in my direction. Which is awesome! But I want to do my best on it.
But still, maybe I’ll just keep going and see what happens. I ran out of story suddenly yesterday but I’m keeping it all in the back of my head. If you have a good idea for a somewhat realistic story in which the protagonist is a smart six-year-old boy living in Greenwich Village, let me know.
In other news, this has been a crazy week at work and I got home around 9pm tonight, forced to forgo the IAM event I was going to both attend and photograph. In lieu of that, I watched a screener of Sand and Sorrow, a George Clooney-narrated documentary about the events leading up to the genocide in Darfur and into last year, and I’m now thoroughly outraged. I do highly recommend seeing the film when it comes out (next month?) but I can’t say much more because I’m supposed to write a review this week.
I am hearing nothing but the biggest and best of raves about There Will Be Blood. P.T. Anderson is probably my all-time favorite filmmaker (I kid you not, it borders on worship sometimes), so I was expecting this, but I didn’t anticipate the almost deliriousness of every review. Now I absolutely cannot wait to see this film.
But, this is not the weekend. (I think it comes out right after Christmas.) So this weekend, we were thinking of seeing Beowulf, but we may see something else. I am very prejudiced against this Beowulf - from the first time I saw the trailer, I knew I was going to hate it, it’s all wrong - but whatever. They’re calling it a “must-see” and so I must. I guess.
Also, we are going to a SeptokberfestinNovember party (don’t think about that too hard) at Kevin & Laura’s tomorrow night, which will undoubtedly be awesome, and I really need this weekend to recuperate. I am very glad that next week is a short work week, even if it means spending a lot of time traveling. Also, stuffing and gravy make everything much better. And Christmas can officially start. We can get our (tiny little) tree!
Last random observation: on my way to the IAM reception/lecture last night, I passed bagpipers on the steps outside of Cipriani and a whole lot of men in kilts for what felt like blocks. Sometimes I think that writers in New York are actually at a little bit of a disadvantage, because we get so used to the unusual that it barely registers and therefore rarely makes it into the notebook.
P.S. Amanda, I read the Zadie Smith book today, and I’m swooning.
We had a perfect weekend.
On Friday night, Catherine and I went to see Rosie Thomas and Over the Rhine at the Highline Ballroom. I’d never been to this venue - it’s WAY out in the meatpacking district. Rosie was adorable, as always, and Over the Rhine was amazing. They played all of the songs from The Trumpet Child, plus North Pole Man, Born, Ohio, and Orphan Girl.
I had an amusing moment; we handed our tickets to the doorman/bouncer. He asked if we wanted a table, and we declined. Then he said, “We ask that there be no moshing at this concert.”
Now, if you’re familiar with either of these artists, you know that moshing is probably not something you could actually do at this concert. So I smiled.
“I’m very serious, ma’am,” he said, as he ushered us in the door. I felt vaguely reprimanded, but it was so ludicrous that I just starting laughing when I was safely away from the bouncer. I didn’t want to get kicked out.
The drummer on this tour was on the Snow Angels tour last Christmas; we liked him so much that Tom went backstage and got his contact info in case we ever ran across a sudden need for an awesome drummer. I was so excited when he came onstage that I texted Tom. And he did not disappoint. After his drum solo, the twentysomething guys next to me were clapping and shouting “Mickey! Mickey!”
I met up with Tom for dinner at Lobo in Park Slope (nachos loaded with pork, yum). He walked in grinning like a Cheshire cat. After we ate, he handed me the sweetest birthday card (yes, my birthday isn’t until this coming Sunday . . . but stay with me here), grinning again. We went home and when I walked in, I saw one of these.
Yeah. Major freak-out. Once upon a time, piano was my life, but I haven’t really played much since I started college six years ago and not at all since I moved to New York. It’s amazing. I’ve never played a keyboard that so closely resembled an actual piano. I can’t stop grinning.
On Saturday we got up late, watched a few episodes of Battlestar Galactica (we’ve almost finished Season 1), and headed off to Angela’s for her birthday celebration including much food, good company, and a very late night. Felt a lot like old times. I stuffed a lot of prunes with cheese and wrapped them in bacon, and I managed to clean out the roast pot, so she was very happy.
We were misinformed by several people on Saturday night and therefore set the clocks back when we got home around 3am; unfortunately, when we finally got up Sunday morning, we discovered that we were wrong because of the legislation that moved the end of Daylight Savings Time forward one week. Whoops. So we were rather late for church.
After church we had a raucous lunch at Miracle with plenty of lovely people (including these two. Tom and I dashed off to the Angelika to see Before the Devil Knows Your Dead (the jury’s still out, but I can’t say I recommend it), then dashed out of there to see a staged reading of a play, of which two of the actors were from Tom’s class at Esper. Very New York day.
And the World Series was just the icing on the cake.