Tom & Alissa

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.

My constantly updated, somewhat curated list of mostly free events going on in Manhattan and Brooklyn this summer.

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!

I wrote a review of Shotgun Stories, which was released in New York last weekend. This was one of those wonderful films that greatly exceeded my expectations.

Plus, after laboring over it last week, we went to see “The Little Flower of East Orange” at the Public, and Michael Shannon was the lead - and he was great. And I was in the front row, about six feet away from the front of the stage. He could have spit on me (and nearly did). It was a little unreal. (Also, his mother was played by Ellen Burstyn.)

It appears that my Run, Fat Boy, Run review made it online. It wasn’t a great movie, but it’s not like you go see a Simon Pegg comedy for a cinematic revelation. It was fun.

We are seeing “The Little Flower of East Orange”, directed by Philip Seymour Hoffman at the Public Theater tonight (which I’m realizing I must clarify is an actual theater, not a movie theater, and this is not a film, because while PSH is amazing on-screen, he’s kind of a little god in the theater world as far as I’m concerned). I’ve been looking forward to this all week. Also to dinner at Applewood, our own little heaven on earth in Park Slope, tomorrow night.

Now if Bank of America would only SERIOUSLY get their act together and mail us that account confirmation letter (I mean, come on, I know it doesn’t take two weeks for something to get from Charlotte to New York), then we could put our application in for the apartment and start the nail-biting, and everything would be perfect.

I love weekends!

Easter weekend has always been a busy and possibly significant one in my life for years; back in high school, our church performed a cantata on Palm Sunday weekend (probably one of the more musically good ones we’d ever worked on), and it was during one of those cantatas that I got the offer to come work at the church as the assistant to the music director, who is one of the most important influences on my life and my faith. Working there also set me inevitably on the course toward the current iteration of my existence (somewhere in the reformed-postevangelical-neocalvinist world), though they never would have suspected it.

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.

Last night I made pumpkin ravioli in melted butter (with a little fresh sage and garlic) and asparagus, blanched for a minute in boiling water, drizzled with olive oil, and seasoned with a few cranks of the salt and pepper grinders. The asparagus (which I made up out of my head because I didn’t have enough pots to melt any more butter) was actually kind of brilliant. I will definitely be making it that way again.

And we watched Catch Me If You Can, not because it’s particularly Valentine-y but because we just wanted to. The last time I saw it, I was in Ukarumpa, Papua New Guinea (if memory serves me correctly, it had Finnish subtitles too). And Tom had seen it before. But it was great, and I now agree with him, probably one of the better endings to a Spielberg film.

Tonight is Macbeth, starring Patrick Stewart! And I have Monday off. I am not sure if we’re doing anything in particular this weekend. I should think we may try to see Atonement since we still haven’t seen it. Also, I have many books to read (one for a RELEVANT piece, three for fun) and about a hundred pages of readings by such estimable folks as Jurgen Habermas and Susan Sontag about “The Critic”, which should be fascinating since I am kind of a critic myself. Our assignment, in fact, is to write a critical review of something - and a film is on the list.

Lastly, and I think this is via Annie - sage advice for writers looking to get published from an agent.

There’s an excellent article in Comment this week about Taproot Theater in Seattle and their development, from the creative to the spiritual to the business side. I’m pretty sure I’ve met some of these folks last year at the IAM conference.

“There is a surprising consistency between our founding intentions and where Taproot is at right now, thirty-one years later,” Nolte says. When you see one of Taproot’s shows, “it’s not about didactic measures or an altar call. It’s the delivery of a story and counting on the audience to be responsible enough or bothered enough that they’ll go away and sort through what the story had to say.”

Still hunting for an equivalent in New York. (Intriguingly, though, I recognized the article’s authors as Redeemer people right off the bat. So maybe we’re getting somewhere.)

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.

It smells like fall today, with sort of a wet-cold mixed with smoke (who has fireplaces in this city?).

This weekend’s activities include dinner with friends, Control, and Hotel Cassiopeia.

And this reaction of Doris Lessing when informed that she’d won the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature has been making me laugh:

Pygmalion was quite good, and I can heartily recommend it for anyone in New York . . . if you can get tickets. Claire Danes is going to lose her voice from it, but she and the rest of the cast are delightful, and Jefferson Mays is as far from Rex Harrison’s Henry Higgins as you can really get (and more believable because of it).

Saw Eastern Promises on Saturday. It’s graphically brutal and bloody in a few choice spots (I closed my eyes). However, not only is David Cronenberg a confirmed genius (storytelling, the look of it, everything is just so interesting), but Viggo Mortensen has finally reached the upper echelon of my personal list of great living actors, playing a member of the Russian mafia in London with completely convincingly and without any hints of Aragorn. Not for the faint of heart, though.

We met with friends who are in from Scotland for their first trip to the US. (NYC is a very weird place to go on a first trip to the US, too.) We brought them out to Brooklyn, and after they got lost and then found again, we had dinner at Miracle Grill (southwestern American), then dessert at the Cocoa Bar. They were intrigued by the discovery of blue corn, which, we informed them, does indeed grow in the US and does not involve food coloring. Who knew?

On Sunday, the Village Church had our annual outdoor service in Washington Square Park:

It was actually the first one I’d gone to, and it was a lot of fun. Perfect weather, plenty of people dropping by to listen in, and some really good discussion during the question & answer time. It’s so good to hear people asking civil questions and giving civil answers in a public forum, you know?

Afterwards Tom and I went to see Across the Universe, which was a giant disappointment and probably not worth your ticket money unless you’re really, really into Julie Taymor or the Beatles. The acting was ok, and the music was totally re-imagined and therefore fun to listen to, but the story and script were so bad that it was dead in the water. I think she was trying to make an extended music video, but . . . it wasn’t. It’s quite lovely to look at, but wait and rent it. (And most of the people walking out of the theater were saying that as well.)

Tomorrow night we’re seeing Flight of the Red Balloon in press screenings at the New York Film Festival. We’ve only just seen another of Hsiao-hsien Hou’s earlier films (the lovely and meditative Cafe Lumiere) and saw Three Times last year when it was in theaters; this one is actually in French and stars Juliette Binoche.

On a non-movie note, we had some standing credit at the local Community Bookstore (they have the best fiction section EVER), and Tom went by the other day and brought home Annie Dillard’s new book The Maytrees and an older Lorrie Moore book, Anagrams. Can’t wait to tackle them.

Lastly, we were introduced to this last night while having dinner with our friends Victoria and Sam. Enjoy.

Did I talk about Coast of Utopia? I don’t think I did. We saw the first part, Voyage, on a whim Thursday night. It was pretty amazing. Tom Stoppard is on some other level entirely from the rest of us. If you understand a little bit about the history of philosophy, you’d probably enjoy it; on the other hand, if you don’t, you might be bored out of your skull. I’m not a philosophical expert by any means, but I enjoyed it. We hung out at the stage door afterwards because one of the actresses was in Tom’s movie this summer and we wanted to say hi; in the meantime, Ethan Hawke and Billy Crudup wandered out. (Jennifer Ehle was also in it, and a host of other venerable actors.)

We had a handful of people over for dinner on Sunday. Seis de Mayo, if you will. We jointly put together (way too much) gazpacho, seasoned meat for tacos, and strawberry lemonade. It was a great success and we now have a refrigerator packed with leftovers we’ll try to eat this week.

Currently reading: In Cold Blood (Truman Capote), which is making me want to watch the movie again.

Short notes.

• Do you know, I’d never heard about the planned arts & culture library that was planned for the area around BAM - near where we live - but I’m sad that it looks like it’s being abandoned. What a cool idea for the neighborhood! I especially like this quote from the chairman of cultural planning for the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership:

“I always had this crazy vision of Brooklyn being the Left Bank of New York,” he (Harvey Lichtenstein) added. “It’s not so crazy anymore.”

• In case you haven’t heard all the buzz, Darren Aronofsky (Requiem for a Dream, Pi, and the recent The Fountain) is working on a screenplay about Noah. That Noah, yes. His story has always struck me as one of the weirder ones in the Bible, and I’m very interested to see Aronofsky’s take on it.

• Think New Yorkers walk fast? You should check out Singapore, apparently, or even Dublin. (I personally think New York is #8 only because we get slowed down by the tourists. Don’t hate me.) via kottke

• This, to me, smacks simply of the stupidity of some people. The apparent assumption that bottle-generated tans are going to “protect” you from the sun maybe just means people need to be better educated about the skin’s relationship to the sun. D’oh.

• We watched Jurassic Park last night over a jointly-concocted dinner of curried chicken salad and white wine. It was my first time. If you recall, at the beginning they’re excavating a dinosaur and there’s a skeptical, scary little kid who needs to be educated about the dangers of velociraptors; I had this sudden, apparently disconnected thought about the old McGee & Me movies. (Remember those?) Lo and behold, that kid WAS in McGee & Me. I think he was that poor kid that got picked on at school that Nick befriended. My brain, it is frightening.

• In weirder deja vu movie news, Terry Bozeman, who played Sarah & Nick’s Dad on the aforementioned McGee & Me, now has a recurring role on Desperate Housewives.

• I woke Tom up this morning; one of the first things he said was, “Do you want to go see The Coast of Utopia tonight?” Most people probably don’t decide to go to three-hour epic theater productions about Russian intellectuals on the spur of the moment, but we’re clearly “special”.

I applied this week to direct a staged reading — that’s theater we’re talking about — so hopefully something will come of that. Before golden boy Orson Welles made Citizen Kane at the ripe age of 26 he was doing theater here in New York. His infamous broadcast of The War of the Worlds was in 1938 at twenty-three, but even before that, two years prior, when he was just twenty-one, Welles staged an all-black production of Macbeth set in Haiti with voodoo witch doctors. It later went on a national tour and served as the concept for Welles’ 1948 film of the same play. Here are some newsreel clips from the production:

I’m seated at Tea Lounge in Park Slope because I’m a bit afraid to go into work (nasty deep cough, red runny eyes) and I’m going to the doctor in a few hours; our internet has been out STILL at home (Verizon never apparently sent the technician on Tuesday, and they’re officially on my hate list, which is short owing to my general affability toward humankind) and so I’m here using theirs and drinking Moroccan mint green tea. Blessed throat relief.

We saw the Wooster Group’s production of Hamlet last night, which was experimental and crazy. Basically, they took the 1964 Richard Burton stage production that was filmed in front of a live audience and edited it so the speech was in iambic pentameter. They run it through monitors around the stage so the actors can watch, and then they projected another more edited version (with people erased from the background) and the actors essentially imitate the actors on the screen they’re watching.

It’s a bit bizarre and they splice in other random productions (Charlton Heston, and did you know there’s a film version of Hamlet with Bill Murray?!) but pretty cool to watch. Daniel, the lead from The Cult of Sincerity (the film Tom just finished) is in Hamlet as a host of different characters.

Ok. Off to go get medicated . . . I hope.

We saw Jack Goes Boating last night, and oh. Wow. Philip Seymour Hoffman on stage was worth the price of admission. I’ve never seen anyone with such control over his voice such that he never appeared to be projecting (or barely talking above a mumble most of the time) but you could hear every word. Incredible. And funny, too.