beginning of a lifelong fling
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.
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.
Looking forward to a quiet weekend, and hopefully to sleeping in tomorrow!
For your browsing pleasure:
• More “fun” ways to get a grip on what’s going on down there on Wall Street (and everywhere else, too).
• Another NYTimes article on opening festivities around the new performing arts center at my alma mater, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. That picture is really magnificent. I can’t wait to get up there and see it completed. They broke ground when I was a senior.
• Courtesy of my CTMovies colleague Peter Chattaway, the best trailer mashup I’ve seen yet:
I have little to report. I’ve been busily working, going to class, reading, brainstorming, and all that. I just don’t have much else to say. Tom has been busy working long days. We come home at night and talk about all the things we’ve heard, read, and seen that day in politics, culture, the arts, and the economy. The world is swirling about madly and we are watching, thinking, and processing together.
So in the meantime, here’s a bunch of links I’ve been piling up:
• I ordered a few tealights from Dirt on Saturday, because they are $1 apiece and I like variety, and I like to burn soy candles since they don’t release the same kind of harmful things into the air as regular candles. I ordered A Fresh Start, All-Nighter, Nitty Gritty (the impetus for the order), and Apple a Day (made mostly of actual apples!).
• From More Intelligent Life: Meeting Marilynne Robinson. Not your typical author profile.
• Full-length videos from the Slow Food Nation conference, including Wendell Berry, Alice Waters, Carlo Petrini, and Michael Pollan.
• Saturday is apparently the Second Annual Gowanus Harvest Festival, which looks not only pretty cool but also helps to dispel the myth that city people don’t care about this stuff (and yes, I realize I pointed toward a Wendell Berry video two points earlier).
• Why literary readings are so excruciatingly bad, useful as I’m trying to plan programming for IAM.
• Looks like movie people will have work next year, hurrah!
• Lastly, the University as arts patron.
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.
Kudos to my alma mater. Empac is finally getting ready to open.
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 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.
A wee article on Maurice Sendak. We have tickets to the birthday celebration they mention in the article, which I believe is next week.
In all the excitement, I’d forgotten that I have an article in Comment today about Tara Donovan’s work.
And our good friend Albert is Comment’s featured artist this week.
Well, bloglets, I have successfully launched The Curator and am officially testing the waters of grassroots, no-budget, almost-entirely-digital marketing. I’m intrigued to see how far the interwebs can go in generating traffic for a web publication with no official marketing. Stay tuned.
This is my last full-time day, and a short one at that; we close a little early for the holiday. So I’ll shortly be heading out to spend the evening on a bus, fighting our way through the traffic (oh dear) to south Jersey, where I’ll be chilling on the beach (or in the cottage, since it looks like rain tomorrow) with Tom and my grandparents and possibly my Mom and trying not to do anything too productive. Last year we young’uns (that would be Tom and I) hit the boardwalk for mini-golf, arcade games, and cotton candy, and I’m expecting similar pursuits. And salt-water taffy.
We’ll be back in town Monday night to start the autumn with a vengeance - screenings, class, new jobs, all that good stuff. My favorite part of the year.
Check it out, and leave comments here if you have anything to say!
The Curator is the web-based magazine I’ve been busily working to launch all summer; we’re hoping to have the first “issue” published at the end of August. Become a fan on Facebook to get updates and information as we near the launch date!
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.
Tonight is the conclusion of my class on Moby-Dick. It’s been really interesting, and I’ve learned a lot about reading texts, understanding them in their historical context, considering them through various reference frames, and American in the 1860s, but I can’t say I’ll be sorry to shelve the book after tonight. We’re presenting our final papers - mine is on literary critics, Job, and the twenty-first century reading of Moby-Dick - and then we’re done.
My next class starts on Monday, but in between I am heading Albany-ward to see my family for the weekend and to write frantically on the way up. Thank God for electrical outlets on trains. Tom is going in the opposite direction and will be in the DC/Virginia area for about a week and a half to see his grandpa, other family, and a lot of friends. I’ll be joining him on Thursday.
Yesterday I went uptown on my lunch break and met Tom to see the Olafur Eliasson show at MoMA before it closed. It was fascinating. I especially liked a few pieces where he had film-style spotlights aimed at mirrors so that the spot reflected off the glass and landed in a place on the floor that seems very removed from where the spot would normally fall. Hard to describe, but really cool. I sadly won’t get to see the P.S.1 part of the exhibit, but I’m glad I saw what I did. You can see the online exhibition here.
Speaking of Eliasson, today is the first day of his Waterfalls installation in the East River! I won’t have any trouble seeing that, since I cross the East River at least twice a day to get into Manhattan.
Also, Wall-E comes out this weekend. Please go see it. Pixar is apparently making bold moves with this one, which bodes well for the future of animation. You might find this interview at Christianity Today with Andrew Stanton (Wall-E’s director) interesting.
Grumbling tummy. Must find food.
The NY Times has a report on the N.E.A.’s study of working artists (including architects and designers) in the United States.
Interesting tidbits:
- “More Americans identify their primary occupation as artist than as lawyer, doctor, police officer or farm worker.”
- “More than one in four artists live in California and New York, where their sheer numbers are overwhelming compared to the artist colonies in other states.”
- “Overall, artists make more than the national median income.”
Dana Gioia’s comments are interesting as well.
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.
I read the always intriguing Malcolm Gladwell’s article on simultaneous discovery and some other stuff this morning on the way to work. I always find this phenomenon fascinating. Though he does make a distinction between artistic and scientific discoveries, it does happen in Hollywood, too, and I wrote briefly about it at WORLD a few weeks ago in the midst of a film review. It’s simultaneously comforting and unnerving to think that if you’re on the brink of a big idea or new discovery, someone else probably is, too.
• 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.
I am finishing a cup of Ginseng Green Tea (oh, I can feel the brilliance seeping into my brain). Yum. And because I got the magazine into layout after a lot of hours of hard work yesterday, I’m now doing everything I should have been doing the rest of the week. Oh, to be a real editor, one who doesn’t also do the designing and publishing! Anyhow. It’s fun, really, and I can’t complain. I get to listen to copious streaming archives of This American Life and drink tea while I do it.
Anthropologie sends me a lot of mail, both of the e and snail varieties, and I don’t mind because it’s pretty, but this “how to make a room your own” site that came in their last email is actually pretty cool. I especially love the library.
Tonight we are going to Alchemy, a local gastropub up the street from us, for Restaurant Week. Also, speaking of Brooklyn, I am crossing fingers, toes, and all other appendages in hopes that the letter from Bank of America which confirms that we do indeed have an account with them (nevermind that we have statements to prove it!) will arrive today, a full two weeks after it was requested, so that we can finally submit our application for the apartment. We are hopeful.
Lastly, Colin, who is awesome, ordered one of my prints from RedBubble. It arrived in Scotland from Australia, and he took a couple pictures of the picture. He claims it looks quite good. So, artists/designers/photographers, get thee to RedBubble.
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.
I started this morning with yogurt/berries/granola (new carton of yogurt, which means cream on top!), a mug of Tazo Zen tea (because I didn’t have enough time to brew a pot of the loose lemongrass green tea I bought at the co-op this week), a softly glowing rosemary-mint soy candle from the co-op on the wine crates that double as everything-tables for us, and a little bit of time working on the couch watching the rain and appreciating radiator heat. It was rather lovely.
I got an email about the extra 20% off sale at J.Crew (there’s still nice things left!) and quickly bought this top in black, which has now sold out, because I’ve been eyeing it for months and I ended up getting it for something like $80 off the original price.
I really needed a black top for the summer. I have none, which is a serious problem in my wardrobe.
And now I’m at work; Tom ordered the Nick Drake “Fruit Tree” boxed set and it came yesterday, and I ripped it all to my computer and am loving it. This is perfect working music to keep me calm under stress.
Because I’ve realized of late that when I’m stressed out, I gripe to myself about having to go to work every day, or about having too much to do, and I don’t only make myself unhappy, but everyone else, too. And there’s no need for that. I have an excellent job with great opportunities that many other people would kill for. I think perhaps I’m just in need of patience.
So now I’m observing the loveliness at the Bodum site, because I want a way to brew one cup of loose tea (preferably both at home and at work) and am exploring options beyond the traditional tea ball approach of my youth. I very much like their Yo-Yo approach:
I’d need two, one for home and one for the office, but they’re rather reasonably priced.
I also really loved this:
That would make me happy, brewing on my desk at work.
But although I already have a really lovely set of espresso cups and saucers that I’m very happy with, these made me smile and wish:
Set of six for fifteen dollars. Come on, someone needs to buy them.
Good stuff from the internets today:
• Kevin was my featured poet today at ConversantLife.com; he also has a great new poem on his site.
• My multitalented friend Christy has an article at Comment, reflecting on the IAM conference and ways to be a creative catalyst in your community.
• Excellent article at Burnside Writers’ Collective on spiritual disciplines. It seems they are resurfacing at last in the younger evangelical and formerly-evangelical consciousness. I just reviewed a book for RELEVANT about the same ideas (see May/June issue).
We went to Rockwood Music Hall last night, after a dash around the Lower East Side trying to find food, and saw our friend Nate, a rockstar songwriter, play some old and some new songs. In the process we saw many friends (film people/singers/actors/writers), all of whom we’re seeing tonight again at the behest of Nate’s lovely Jenn. And tomorrow night, we are feeding chili to a handful of friends. Wish us luck.
I chatter a little about books at Conversant Life.
It took about five hours of work, but our apartment is now clean, relatively brick-dust-free, and has half a brick wall on one end (which was intended - it’s the chimney). Our landlord stopped by and we got to talking about the building. Apparently it was built in 1890, and at one point in the past there was a family with seven children living in the building, both apartments. Even with both apartments, though, you’d have to be impressed. That totals about 800 square feet. For nine people.
The brick is very old and all different colors, probably because bits have been replaced in the last hundred-and-twenty years, but I love it. It has so much character and it looks great against the blue walls and adds a lot to the room. Maybe I can get a picture up at some point.
Tonight I have class. I’m looking forward to it. The readings this week were long and arduous but interesting, and I’m one of the few who doesn’t have a background in art history, so I think this seminar format really helps me learn and explore what I’ve read. Also, having class around a table is so much more fun than a lecture hall or one of those hideous industrial classrooms at RPI (which gratefully did NOT include the IT building, but unfortunately did include pretty much everywhere else I had class).
As part of next week’s work for class, I have to make it either to MoMA or the Met. I really need to go early in the week so I have time to write about it, but unfortunately they both close at 5:30 pm until Friday, after which they are opened in the evenings and more crowded to boot. I’ll probably end up at the Met on Friday night or Saturday morning. It’s just bigger, and therefore less annoying when it’s crowded.
I’m reading Slow Food: The Case for Taste (by Carlo Petrini) in my spare moments, and I’m really enjoying it.
Which, of course, I say as I’m about to finish up at work and wolf down a Clif bar on the way to class. But though I long for a really yummy meal, prepared with love and served around a table with friends, I’m okay with the Clif bar for now. It’s just a phase of life.
Today’s the one holiday we have this semester (besides spring break), and I’m spending it at home hacking away at three reviews (two books, one film) and an essay. I’ve finished one review, finally blasted through my block to get a framework for the essay set down - thankfully it’s not due for a week - and I’m about to finish the second book and hopefully start each of those reviews before the day is over.
We went to Tom’s wrap party on Saturday night. It was in a two-room downtown place that looks like it’s a rather nice restaurant/bar/cafe spot in its normal hours. We were hanging out in the less crowded room for a while and talking to people, when someone mentioned that there was food in the other room. As we made our way through the crowd, I looked up, and whoops, there’s Clive Owen. Ha! I giggled fangirlishly and Tom asked me what was going on. “I don’t get to see famous people every day at the university, you know,” I said. I may be a New Yorker, but I don’t see my most favorite actors all the time (well, except Philip Seymour Hoffman, for some reason.) Other familiar faces were in the crowd as well. I felt very chic for a few hours, at least.
But this is what is exciting: Olafur Eliasson is doing four installation waterfalls into the East River this summer. Further digging revealed that he’s also got a show at MoMA this spring. We’ve been totally fascinated by Eliasson after reading a piece in the New Yorker about him last year; he does simultaneously abstract and naturalist pieces, including the Weather Project at Tate Modern in London. So excited.
Many of our various friends and acquaintances are in Comment this week, in an article by yet another acquaintance by way of IAM. Check it out.
We saw The Darjeeling Limited last night after my class, and serendipitously ran into our friend Ira, who just moved to NYC from LA on Tuesday. Who would have thunk it? We’ll have him thinking that New York is a rather small town in no time.
The movie itself: it’s no Royal Tennenbaums, but it is sweet and fun. Personally, I was not too invested in the characters’ lives, but I enjoyed traveling with them. And I really loved the quirkiness of the whole cast. Adrien Brody always just cracks me up. It’s very lovely to look at, too, with great colors. If you’re a Wes Anderson fan, then it’s worth seeing now.
There was probably the greatest collection of trailers beforehand, too, including:
• Be Kind, Rewind - Michel Gondry’s latest (he directed Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Science of Sleep), and it stars Jack Black and looks hilarious.
• Juno - the cast includes Rainn Wilson (Dwight Schrute), Jason Bateman and Michael Cera (Arrested Development), and is directed by Jason Reitman, the guy who made Thank You for Smoking (easily one of the most brilliant dark comedies I’ve ever seen). Plus it looks like a very thoughtful, funny story about teenage pregnancy and adoption, but nothing at all like Knocked Up.
• The Savages - Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney. ‘Nuff said.
Also had a preview for Walk Hard, which I instinctively back away from - I’m a big fan of satire, but mostly just when it’s on TV - but I did end up in helpless giggles about halfway through, so who knows.
In other news, my copy-editing class looks like it will be a really excellent experience. I feel like it’s going to fill in all the strange gaps and divots in my editing knowledge, plus help me figure out how I can pull off doing this freelance. The class is mostly comprised of people who already work in publishing, an added bonus.
Speaking of school, this article in the Times about exploring ways to shorten the path to a Ph.D. is quite interesting.
Tom got called to work on the Glenn Close TV show today (Damages, I think). He called me and said they are out in far eastern Brooklyn, in a swampy place that’s definitely where you’d dump a body. I asked him if that’s what they were doing; “no,” he said, “but we did get to shoot Ted Danson.”
We have a very busy weekend coming up, which I’ve mentioned previously but will mention again because I like being able to go back and see what I’ve done. In short: tomorrow night we go hear Lorrie Moore and Jeffrey Eugenides read at the New Yorker Festival. On Saturday we go to the costume panel at the Festival, which features Colleen Atwood (Memoirs of a Geisha), Patrizia von Brandenstein (Amadeus), Patricia Field (Sex and the City, The Devil Wears Prada), and William Ivey Long (numerous Broadway productions including Grey Gardens, Hairspray and Chicago); then we’ll dash off to BAM for the Kronos Quartet More Than Four program. And on Sunday we hope to make it to the FREE “Parkour: New York” program at the Festival, and maybe have lunch with Angela.
Coffee? I think so.
My friend Annie (at SuperFastReader) is giving away a copy of the book Auralia’s Colors, by Jeffrey Overstreet! I haven’t read the book yet (it’s in my pile) but it’s been getting rave reviews as a tightly-written, gripping fantasy book. She’ll also be posting an interview with Overstreet in October. I’ve been reading his blog (which is mostly film and music reviews/news/musings) for a long time now and I’m excited for the book. So go check it out! (Who doesn’t love free books?)
Tonight we’re going to the IAM Open House at their new space in Chelsea! It’s so exciting that they finally have a “home”. Can’t wait to see it. :)
We are heading out of town this weekend to visit my brother at Messiah. It’s family weekend. Should be fun, and much cooler than when we moved him in a month ago. We’ll be gone till Sunday night. I can barely believe that October is almost here. Soon it will be Christmas time. Yikes! And yay!