It’s been a week.
Tom spent the week working on his various projects at home, since he begins a job on Monday. He also is working on an interview with singer/songwriter/rockstar Katie Herzig, forthcoming in The Curator, and has been keeping busy all week.
I started out quite sick; Monday was adrenaline-powered, with a lot of coffee and water on the side as I went to work around 8am and then class all afternoon, then we met up and headed to a screening of Wendy and Lucy, which, as it turns out, is a very good film - quiet, a little sad, with a beautifully nuanced performance by Michelle Williams. Definitely the best movie I saw all week.
On Tuesday I went to work and coughed my way through the day, with stuffed ears, before heading downtown to meet Tom for a gallery opening and then a screening of Blindness, followed by a panel discussion with Mark Ruffalo, Danny Glover, director Fernando Meirelles, and writer Don McKellar. They had some interesting things to say, and though the movie wasn’t everything you might hope, it was still engaging and truly beautifully shot - a shoo-in for a best cinematography nomination.
I was completely ill on Wednesday and worked from home all day, then threw on some clothes and ran to class. I’d drank a tea made of ten cloves of garlic, the juice of one whole lemon, and some honey, and though I think it worked, I positively reeked of garlic. But class went well and I got home in one piece.
Yesterday we went to a screening of Ballast - jury’s still out - and then Tom did some work in cafes while I went to the office for a while, and did a lot of work in between finalizing plans for our grand northeastern tour next week. Tom met me at the office and we headed uptown for a reading with John Crowley and Marilynne Robinson, which was, as always, great.
But today takes the cake; I arrived at the office to discover, report, and deal with a break-in (that only apparently resulted in my missing laptop, which is being dealt with). So I actually sat down to work around 4pm. But now that’s mostly fixed, and I have a laptop to work with and I don’t think I lost anything in particular.
Next week: meetings in NYC, DC, and Boston (on Wednesday I will be in all three cities within a twelve-hour time period) and a lot of trying to shoehorn in time to do work and write reviews. Oh, and a screening of Rachel Getting Married on Monday night, and Malcolm Gladwell on Saturday. Break out the vitamin C!
Check out this week’s edition of The Curator!
“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.
I don’t know why this captures my imagination so much, but these two “homegrown” performing arts ventures are good examples of great art being done on a small, community-driven scale:
• From the Utne Reader: Garage Theater in Minneapolis.
• From the NYTimes: Lorin Maazel and his wife plan to host an annual music festival on their “farm” in Virginia.
In a new level of weirdness to the press-political relationship this “fine” election season, John McCain is trying to postpone Friday’s debates, the first of the election between two actual, bona fide candidates, because of the . . . economic crisis?
I mean, yes, they’re both senators, but . . . um?
Kudos to my alma mater. Empac is finally getting ready to open.
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.
We showed Chop Shop to a small crowd on Friday night at work, and it was just as good the second time around as the first. It didn’t hurt that there was lots of yummy popcorn going around, too.
But by the time I got home I realized I was getting sick, and I woke up Saturday with a raspy throat, plugged ears, and a stack of homework to do. Tom headed out to help Ken & Sarah (and Dahlia) move, and I spent the next eight hours writing essays, plowing through esoteric scholarly articles on art and anthropology and such, and trying to unearth myself a bit. It was successful, but a little exhausting!
When Tom got home we started watching The Wire, finally. We’d previously watched the second season, because Tom had seen the first, but as it turns out, this is emphatically not a show where you can actually do that. So we’re starting from the beginning again. I wouldn’t say I’m sucked in, but I know I’ll eventually be really into it and I immensely appreciate the skill in the storytelling.
I did manage to get to church on Sunday. Lots of new faces, and a few new names on our small group sign-up list. Afterwards Tom and I went to Moustache for middle eastern-style pitzas (and the discovery that it’s a Slow Food establishment), then came home and watched Caramel, a sweet Lebanese movie we missed when it was in theaters. We ate a quinoa-chicken-vegetable concoction I cooked up that was rather good and very healthy, to boot.
So here I am, at NYU since 8am this morning, with a giant water bottle on one side and a giant cup of hot tea on the other, which keeps me from coughing. I passed a somewhat sleepless night since I have trouble breathing without coughing, but I feel rather cheerful and am diving headfirst into the work I’ve got this week. This is Tom’s last free week before he starts a job next week, too.
We also have three excellent screenings this week: Wendy and Lucy tonight (directed by Kelly Reichardt, who also made Old Joy), a Variety screening of Blindness tomorrow (directed by Fernando Meirelles of City of God and The Constant Gardener), and Ballast (which finally has a screening I can attend since I started getting invitations in the spring). We also are seeing Marilynne Robinson read with John Crowley at the 92nd Street Y on Thursday night.
And next week, while Tom’s working, I’m supposed to be in meetings in NYC, DC, and Boston, all between Tuesday and Friday. I haven’t been on a business trip since I left BofA in 2007. I’m pulling out the teeny-tiny travel bottles once again . . .
But let me just say that today is a lovely first official day of autumn, and I am happy to be alive!
Having spent a couple years on Wall Street myself (though, obviously, not trading), I’ve been vaguely keeping tabs on the falling sky for the last couple days. I have mixed feelings and opinions, but I thought yesterday’s David Leonhardt column in the Times was insightful and instructive.
Now should come the harder part: a much more serious attack on our economic problems. Earlier this week, I called Mr. Hart, who has written some thoughtful things about the economy lately, for his take on all this. “We’ve been consuming more than we’ve been producing. We’ve been spending more than we’ve been earning,” he told me. “It’s been a big holiday.”
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.
It came on Monday, but I haven’t had time to crack it open yet. And that? Is driving me crazy!
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.
I pontificated a little on my favorite digital meal-planning tools, shopping habits, and some notes on shopping at natural food grocery stores at ConversantLife.
My review of The Women is up at Christianity Today. It’s the kind of movie where I laughed and enjoyed it while I was watching (most of the time), but was progressively more bugged by it when I went home. Not bad for a chick flick, but it’s trying to be something else.
The second edition of The Curator went live this morning, with four excellent new articles. Here is the table of contents:
Caramel
Daniel Nayeri
Caramel is the saddest thing.
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.
It appear that The Cult of Sincerity has started a trend: YouTube premieres. Magnolia Pictures will premiere The Princess of Nebraska on YouTube next month. Let it be known, folks - Cult did it first.
First and foremost, we saw the Coen brothers’ new comedy, Burn After Reading, at a Variety screening on Monday night. I believe it’s releasing this weekend, so technically I guess I can’t say too much. But let’s just say that it is my kind of movie - a little dark, a little weird, and very funny. They somehow managed to make both George Clooney and Brad Pitt deeply unattractive (not a small feat, my friends), and Brad Pitt in particular is kind of astounding as a bouncy, vaguely juvenile personal trainer who shares a penchant for adventure with Frances McDormand. Also notable is the appearance of Richard Jenkins, who I am happy to see popping up all over the big screen lately.
I never mentioned that I finally watched The Band’s Visit the other night, which is now available on DVD. It’s a sweet, funny comedy about an Egyptian classical folk band that gets accidentally stranded in the wrong Israeli town en route to a cultural exchange. Instead of the ethnic tension I was expecting, the film is mainly about people learning from each other and bettering one another’s lives, all in the space of an evening. This is very likely going to be one of my top ten films of the year, and it’s well worth seeing. (Incidentally, it’s also good for people who are just getting into subtitled films; about half of it is in English, since that’s the language held in common between the two groups.)
Last night we watched another sweet, funny comedy that we should have seen earlier this year - Son of Rambow. It’s a little reminiscent of Billy Elliot in that the main characters are young English schoolboys, but it’s a little quirkier and much less Hollywood. It’s also very funny, and the two lead actors (for whom this was their first job) were brilliant. There’s some small commentary on being an outsider, too, but it’s mainly a fun and touching movie about friendship and making amateur movies as kids - something that has been touched on already this year in Michel Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind.
On the docket this week is a cast & crew screening of Ghost Town, starring Ricky Gervais, Greg Kinnear, and Tea Leoni; next week we’ll be screening Chop Shop (a must-see) at my office; and we’ve just landed a screening of Fernando Meirelles’ much-anticipated Blindness the week after that. I’ll be sure to report on these as well. Busy movie season has begun!
A wee article on Maurice Sendak. We have tickets to the birthday celebration they mention in the article, which I believe is next week.
An interesting article, if perhaps a little belated (as is the NYTimes wont on these topics), on social networks and what they’re doing to our “real” relationships. More perceptive than some that I’ve read, and thankfully, finally throwing out some things I was taught when we were studying the sociology of the internet in college - we’d read the books, and all of the students would feel uncomfortable with the conclusions about internet anonymity but nobody knew what exactly to say. This helps.
Here’s an excerpt:
Psychologists and sociologists spent years wondering how humanity would adjust to the anonymity of life in the city, the wrenching upheavals of mobile immigrant labor — a world of lonely people ripped from their social ties. We now have precisely the opposite problem. Indeed, our modern awareness tools reverse the original conceit of the Internet. When cyberspace came along in the early ’90s, it was celebrated as a place where you could reinvent your identity — become someone new.
“If anything, it’s identity-constraining now,” Tufekci told me. “You can’t play with your identity if your audience is always checking up on you. I had a student who posted that she was downloading some Pearl Jam, and someone wrote on her wall, ‘Oh, right, ha-ha — I know you, and you’re not into that.’ ” She laughed. “You know that old cartoon? ‘On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog’? On the Internet today, everybody knows you’re a dog! If you don’t want people to know you’re a dog, you’d better stay away from a keyboard.”
Congrats to my friend and colleague Jeffrey Overstreet, whose blog I’ve been reading ever since Tom introduced it to me nearly three years ago (and he had been reading much longer). Besides being a novelist, writer, editor, and film critic, he’s had two film-related columns launch in the last week - one at Image Journal’s website and one at Christianity Today. Both are (and will undoubtedly continue to be) well worth the read.
We had a brilliant anniversary weekend.
Tom met me at Ogawa for a lunch of sushi on Friday. Then he made me close my eyes and led me around the corner to Great Jones Spa, where he’d used our long-stored-up credit card points to book an hour-long massage for each of us. That in and of itself was fantastic, but Great Jones has a water lounge for clients to use, complete with sauna, steam room, hot tub, and cold plunge, with lounge chairs and a huge sunroof. We stayed for an hour before and a couple hours after the massages, just relaxing and enjoying it. Bliss. We left and ducked down to Anthropologie, which is having its blow-out summer sale right now, before heading home to watch Shakespeare in Love, one of the romantic films Tom had picked out for the weekend.
On Saturday we slept in, then made brunch from everything in the refrigerator (scrambled eggs with scallions, biscuits, breakfast sausages, strawberries, coffee, and peppermint iced tea) and watched Say Anything, which neither of us had seen but both of us greatly enjoyed, followed by Chasing Amy. We headed out into the torrential downpour to Keens steakhouse for dinner. The place is incredible; filled with historical memorabilia (ours had Lincoln paraphernalia all over the walls, and the ceilings were completely lined with old tobacco pipes), and excellent service. I’ve never had such a tender steak - the rest of it is presently waiting for lunchtime - and we had a beautiful time. Tom planned the whole weekend with great thoughtfulness and kept the whole thing a secret - not a small feat. And so we have been married for two years.
The weekend rounded out yesterday, with church, then a barbecue on the terrace at our friends’ apartment. By far the most relaxing weekend I’ve had in a long time, which made it hard to see Monday roll around, even though it’s a short day at work, followed by class.
But tonight! We’re seeing Burn After Reading at the Museum of the Moving Image’s special advance screening for Producer’s Circle members. I am probably a bit too excited about it.
Cheers, bloglets, and have a great day.
In what I thought was an Onion headline, but isn’t, Stephen Colbert’s DNA is being sent into space. That way, if the human race is wiped out, the aliens can recreate us from his DNA.
On second thought, that’s not such a bad idea.
Happy anniversary to us! Two years ago today, we stood in my mom’s backyard under a little tent and said our vows, then ate cheesecake with everyone and took off for Cape Cod. And it’s been pretty happily ever after since then.
Gideon Strauss, who is, well, my boss at Comment, has a review of Andy Crouch’s excellent Culture Making in the latest Books & Culture.
And correspondingly, Andy kindly posted about The Curator on his site when it launched on Friday. I’m not just saying this, though: please read his book.
We had an excellent weekend with my grandparents on the Jersey shore. My mom drove in for a day, too. We ate great seafood, toasted in the sun, frolicked in the ocean, and played mini-golf. We went to a waterpark and enjoyed having cable television for a couple days. And we were sad to come home.
Not too sad, because yesterday was my first day in the IAM office, and if I might say, a vastly superior working experience to any office I’ve ever worked in, and a significant improvement on the two offices I’ve worked in since moving to New York. It’s refreshing to actually be trusted to be competent in doing the job you were hired to do. Ahem.
In other exciting news, The Curator generated some good buzz on the internet and we had well over 3,000 hits over the weekend - impressive, since we’re relying entirely on word-of-mouth advertising for now. Some interesting opportunities floated our way as well. And now that the first edition is out, I’m brainstorming where we’ll go from here.
Tonight I have my first “A History of Media Theory” class, with a professor who is immensely popular in my department and is rumored to be tough, but fascinating. The books range from McLuhan to Turkle and I’m pretty sure I’m going to enjoy it and be challenged. My other class is on Mondays, so it doesn’t begin until next week.
Also, our second anniversary is this Friday. Tom has some supersecret plans and has only asked me to leave work at noon (which, happily, I can do). Oooh, intrigue.
I nearly finished a few books this month, but I just haven’t been pushing myself. After classes ended (I got As in both classes, by the way!), I needed to relax a little. Nevertheless, I did finish one very long book in its entirety.
The Twenty-Seventh City - Jonathan Franzen
Franzen wrote The Corrections, one of my favorite novels, and this was his first novel. It’s sprawling and messy and reminded me of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth for its emphasis on racial and political issues through characters. It wasn’t as awesome as The Corrections, but you can definitely see his style evolving. And it’s good in its own right. [3/5]
I am on the verge of finishing a couple books, but classes start tonight so I promise nothing!