Tom & Alissa

The view from our window in Brooklyn last Sunday.

We are making merry with the family in snowy Albany, and therefore, this is the last blog post at this address. But never fear; next week a splash page will appear at this URL so you can find us wherever you might want, and you can also check out our photoblog (unimaginatively titled “365 | 2009″), where I’ve started posting pictures and will hopefully post at least one per day in 2009. This blog will be archived and available online, so you can come back and find whatever you might be looking for.

See you around, and a very happy New Year to you.

I have an article published at Comment today, and, as on every Friday, there’s a new edition of The Curator.

My review of The Wrestler is up at Christianity Today.

I review Doubt and Adam Resurrected in Christianity Today, um, today.

Have you noticed the near-silence on this blog?

That’s because life has been far too busy to actually sit down and write about it. I have lost all motivation to broadcast where we ate for brunch or which random movie director was at last night’s screening, beyond what I “tweet”. Once upon a time, I had a job where there was substantial downtime in which blogging was an appropriate activity, but these days that’s just not the case; of-the-moment stuff ends up on Twitter or Facebook.

Which is to say that I believe the era of this blog (which is an extension of the separate Tom and Alissa blogs of days gone by) is coming to a close, and will be archived for perusal but not updated beginning in 2009.

But never fear! You who have become acquainted with us through our blog, or whom mainly keep up with us through the blog, have myriad ways to keep up with us. We both use Twitter regularly, and if we know you we probably will add you. We both regularly update on Facebook, and we will probably add you even if we don’t know you very well (and we’re happy to make your acquaintance!). I personally also will be blogging at ConversantLife.com, and may be picking back up as a featured blogger at Radiant, and my personal site will feature a new and improved design and a mini-blog for tracking when I publish and those sorts of professional updates. We may be photoblogging from our iPhones, too. Plus I work for, you know, two magazines. And Tom has an IMDB page. In other words, we are easy to find around the ‘net.

So beginning somewhere around December 31 or January 1, a splash page with myriad links will be at this URL, so that you can find us, and you can always just drop us a line. And hopefully that will lead to more meaningful interaction and keep us from spreading ourselves too thin!

Testing the Wordpress iPhone app with photoblogging. This is some blurry snow last night in Brooklyn.

In time for Christmas shopping . . . big sale at the best literary journal around - Image! Back issues for $7 and reduced books. Picked one up for my thesis research!

I came back from Thanksgiving with a sore throat and some other ailments, so I’m home from class today, resting and catching up on an enormous load of work that has piled up despite spending most of Thursday and Friday working. The end of the semester is, well, brutal.

Changes coming to this blog soon, I think.

Forgive me for posting so infrequently those days. I’m beginning to wonder if my blogging days are drawing to a close, with Facebook and Twitter as places to post links and brief updates, and all my myriad projects eating my time. I started blogging in college, and really picked it up when I moved to New York, but that was when I had lots of dead time to fill at work and not too many actual writing projects, or magazines to fill. I don’t really need another empty text box making me feel guilty.

But, it’s getting cold in lovely New York City, and winter is fast approaching. Somehow, I find Christmas music soothing this early, now that it’s cold, and am looking forward to hanging fairy lights around the apartment after we get back from Thanksgiving next week. Maybe we’ll even actually have a tiny tree this year.

Last night we had a dozen people at home group, and I had a grand time mulling cider (on sale at Whole Foods!) and staying up late splitting a bottle of red wine among the six of us who stayed after it was over. It’s a real blessing to have this particular group of people in our home every week, forcing me to not only actually have a clean apartment once a week, but also to move outside myself and my alarming to-do list and serve other people. It’s too easy to turn in on myself, and I am so grateful for the changes in my life the last few months that force me into happy interaction each week - at home, and at work.

Now, to work. Happy Friday!

An Interview with Katie Herzig
Part 1
By Tom Wilkinson
The first of a three-part interview with singer/songwriter Katie Herzig.

Wax On, Wax Off:
Reflections on the Karate Kid
By Christy Tennant
Rediscovering your favorite movie of all time.

On a Year of Vegetarianism
By Wayne Adams
It’s amazing what a year-long experiment in giving up meat can teach you.

What Ghosts Teach:
Oliver Sacks’s Awakenings, Part I
By Rebecca Tirrell Talbot
What could being asleep for fifty years, and then awakening, teach a person about life?

Boffo Socko Jaco
By Kevin Gosa
Bassist Jaco Pastorius’ seminal work, The Birthday Concert.

Belief in the Bones
By Alisa Harris
Rationalism, mystery, and forensic science - in prime time.

This was my first of probably many Thursdays working from home, and it is so lovely to have this day. I brewed a French press full of Cinnamon Creme Brulee Coffee, which the amazing Jenni sent to me along with a horde of different kinds of tea this past week. (By the way, she has completely rocked my hot beverage world this week - I got hooked on Sweet Thai Delight due to a teabag tucked into my birthday card, and after that Mayan Cocoa Spice - Tom’s favorite - and Tahitian Vanilla Hazelnut. Jenni is all kinds of awesome.)

I brewed the coffee a little too strong, but it was still delicious and I’ll perfect my amount soon - I always brew too strong, anyhow. I settled down to write a bunch of work emails while Tom got ready to head to work. He’s on a new TV show now, hopefully through the winter and into early spring, and he’s enjoying the work so far.

In the course of the day, I managed to do three loads of laundry, make and eat lunch, write a movie review, clean the apartment, catch up on a bunch of work, plan meals for next week, order groceries (I’ve broken down because next week is so busy and I won’t have time to shop, so FreshDirect it is), and put together some spreadsheets for Comment. All in all, a good day.

Tom got home a while ago and our fellowship group is showing up any minute, so I threw some brownies in the oven and have a coffeepot ready to brew, and we’re having ravioli (frozen, from Whole Foods - I am lame), dressed with olive oil and sage and a bunch of black pepper, and some red wine for dinner as we wait. I promise I feed him vegetables.

On Tuesday night we saw Tom Stoppard in conversation with David Remnick (you know, the guy who edits that little magazine called The New Yorker. It was so good, and we were so delighted that we left with a BAM membership and a signed copy of The Coast of Utopia. We live four blocks away. It seemed like a good time for it, and their winter/spring lineup is amazing.

People are here. Ciao!

Meet BURN-E, a robot contemporary of WALL-E.

Choosing Creation Over Destruction
By Matt Cox
A brief profile of the father of video games, Shigeru Miyamoto.

Chocolate Tasting
By Daniel Nayeri
Want to knock your significant other’s socks off?

3191: A Year of Beautiful, Ordinary Mornings
By Jenni Simmons
A long-distance friendship spawns an intimate photographic examination of daily life.

We voted - I waited two hours at 7:30am, and Tom an hour and a half around 1pm - and we celebrated and we came home at 2am to crowded streets of cheering people in a neighborhood that counts this election very close to the heart.

Also, I am twenty-five.

My dear employer has an amazing new website!

Yesterday we hosted the last day of the Wedgwood Circle’s conference at the office, which turned out to be lovely. I met a bunch of people who I knew or knew about, but hadn’t met yet, and a few I had recently met, and we drank coffee and talked for a while afterwards. Really? My job is the coolest, accented by Michael Card’s pastor stopping by unrelatedly that afternoon to say hi on Michael’s recommendation. (If you knew my Dad, you know how HUGE of a deal that really is.)

So today I am here quite early to let the piano tuner in, and early this afternoon I am hopping a train and heading northward to spend time with my Mom this weekend. My birthday is on Tuesday (the universe’s gift to me will hopefully be that this election is OVER) and so my family is rather happy to see me this weekend, and I, them. In the meantime, Tom will be wrapping the current project and starting a new one soon afterwards.

I have no linkdump for you this Friday, but you should check out The Curator this week for fun with the Met and Doctor Atomic, a documentary film about exclusive Manhattan preschools, and a piece on bizarre performance art by a couple of my friends.

Lastly, for all those who giggle uncontrollably when someone says, “My SPOON is too big!”, this should be good news.

Doctor Atomic or:
How Opera Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
By Linnea Leonard Kickasola
Thoughts on the Metropolitan Opera’s production of John Adam’s Doctor Atomic.

Pre-School Mayhem in Nursery University
By Sarah Hanssen
If you thought college applications were grueling, wait until you find out about Manhattan’s most competitive nursery schools.

Performance and The Odd Lamb
By Sam Kho
On becoming co-pilot with The Odd Lamb and the mandatory veering off involved.

Bizarre “word of the day” definition . . . of the day.

Two vaguely odd bits of movie news:
• Scorsese to produce a remake Kurosawa’s High and Low, with a Mamet script and Mike Nichols directing.
• Joaquin Phoenix quits acting.

It snowed a bit on the way in to work today, and incidentally, this is my last day working at NYU. A day worthy of celebration.

Watching this minute-and-a-half long clip may be the best thing you do for your Monday. Or any day.

My reviews today - Changeling (disappointing, but probably worth a watch) and Synecdoche, New York (freaking amazing).

Truth in Advertising
By Kevin Gosa
Tired of advertisers making you feel less than human?

Never Underestimate the Power of Cartoons
By Christy Tennant
Political cartoons: child’s play, or public conscience?

Broken Windows and Internet Civility
By Alissa Wilkinson
Could better internet aesthetics make for better virtual neighborhoods?

Am miserable failure as blogger, lately, because life is just too busy and too full to really consider it. I twitter and I check Facebook and I write and I run a magazine, and when internet activity needs to drop off, blogging is the first to go.

In brief, though:
• Tom is busily finishing up the current shoot and hoping the next one is around the corner.
• I am busily plotting to take over the world as full a slate of programming as a nonprofit can handle in times of recession for 2009, writing, editing, and trying to study somewhere in there too. Next week is my last week working at NYU, which will hopefully take some of the load off.
• Since the last iBook I had was four years old, not mine, and subsequently stolen, I finally decided it was time to have an actual computer to, you know, write on and use at work and do all that studenty stuff. Hence, I got a shiny new MacBook (the cheaper version) and plan on it lasting me a very long time. And I love it - it’s small and light.

Am actually too scattered to think about much lately. But these articles have been provocative, when I’ve crammed them into short subway rides:
• A country so polarized that consuming arugula has become a political act: A conservative thinker is branded a closet liberal based on the food he eats.
• Malcolm Gladwell’s article on late bloomers, essential reading for everyone.
• Lower Manhattan Cultural Council to Run Artists’ Space on Governors Island
• Farmer in Chief - why food is important, and why it’s possible to change as a nation, for our health, our resources, our economy, and the way we treat the poor.

Can’t decide if this is an awful idea or genius: “Once” to be made into a Broadway musical. At least they’ll sell a LOT of tickets.

The New York Times discovers that homeschooling is growing in New York City.

I’m not a huge fan of the “unschooling” method (which has been around for a couple decades now), so I was kind of on the fence through the article until I got to this paragraph:

“In one sense it is hyperparenting, an extreme version of bourgeois parenting,” he said. Parents, he said, are anticipating a world in which children will have to be ever more flexible and creative, and some home-schooling parents believe their approach will provide that edge.

But Ms. Rendell and her group aren’t thinking about admissions to Stanford, she said.

Count me as one of those homeschoolers whose parents (neither of whom went to college) weren’t thinking about admission to Stanford. Oh, but wait; I earned my undergraduate at a top-tier private university, and now I’m in graduate school at another. Somehow, it didn’t matter. Every kind of schooling turns out some good students, some mediocre students, and some bad students.

My review of Robert De Niro’s latest, What Just Happened, is up at Christianity Today.

Keep Up the Conversation:
A Reflection on David Foster Wallace
By Rebecca Tirrell Talbot
Considering the work and life of a great writer, and what his death means for us.

On Fantasy Fiction;
Or, You Should Read Cyndere’s Midnight
By Annie Young Frisbie
In defense of speculative fiction and great stories, and an introduction to one such tale.

A Red Balloon of Hope
(Part 2)
By Jenni Simmons
Part two of our interview with singer/songwriter Sandra McCracken.

Many lamented the passing of music magazine No Depression this year, but it’s apparently been resurrected in “bookazine” form.

176 reasons to vote, via GOOD magazine. Some simply amusing, but many very thoughtful.