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.

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.

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

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.

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!

Donald Miller posts his correspondence with the Obamas - on his blog!

The comments are possibly the funniest part, especially the people who - um - don’t get it.

[HT: Jeffrey Overstreet]

We all gripe about not having enough time in our day, but I think the real truth is that most of us don’t have enough discipline. That said, I thought this article, somewhat clumsily titled 25 Painless Ways to Free Up an Hour A Day for Your Goals, was very useful.

I have not hidden my love for Andy Crouch’s new book, Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling, but I think his article from last week’s Comment is an important and incisive companion to the book, even if you haven’t read the book.

If you are afraid of failure you will ultimately create safer, smaller things than God made you to make. You will seek to save your life, but you may well lose it. Indeed, the secret of practices, patience, purposefulness, and real partnerships is that they all require us to embrace risk, and therefore lead us to the question of whom we ultimately trust. Do all these ‘p’s pay off in the end? Followers of Jesus know the answer.

Let me highly recommend this essay, which is a review of Mary Swan’s book The Boys in the Trees but contains an interesting analysis of “cosmic realism”, a new strain of literary-ness perpetuated by the likes of Marilynne Robinson and Annie Dillard.

On the basis of these rhythms, the cosmic realist novel develops a distinct syntax of its own. Typically, the prose is lyrical and crisp–rich without being lavish, sumptuous but not florid. These books find the fewest strokes with which to paint the freshest image. “She watched blue shadows on his white shirt stretch and shrink as he moved,” Dillard writes. But the economy of language is not merely pretty. It calls to mind the classical Chinese poets– like them, commanding attention by demanding it. This prose promises to be experienced as poetry. It engrosses when it engages.

My review of Brideshead Revisited is up at Christianity Today - which, incidentally, makes this my first review for CT.

I thought this film was rather good, despite all the people who were ready to jump down the filmmaker’s throats, and so far Rotten Tomatoes is agreeing with me. Don’t trust the trailer - which is mightily awful and sensationally misleading - and just go see the film (but don’t take the kids).

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.

Friday night was great fun, listening to Michel Gondry talk about his work (he is kind of hilarious), watching a couple of his music videos - the Rolling Stones, Bjork, and the White Stripes - and hanging out with friends old and new. After a champagne reception with the Man Himself, we ate in Times Square, at a place that I think probably specializes in giving the “authentic American experience” to tourists. Not so much, but eating in Times Square is basically an exercise not unlike eating at one of the “authentic” places in Disneyworld. Suspend all disbelief, ye who enter here. And it was good chili.

I got home around 1:30 am, which was kind of a bad idea since I had to be up before six to pack and shower and catch a train. But we did all of the above and made our train with a few minutes to spare. By eleven we were in Albany with my Mom.

We went to the Tulip Festival in Albany’s Washington Park. I have to say that I lived in the general Albany area for twenty-one years, but had never really gone to the Festival except once to see my aunt dance, and we didn’t stay past the performance. Oh, my. Mom says the paper reported that 30,000 people were there; you could have fooled me, and I walked around in a bit of a daze, saying I had no idea there were that many people in Albany, period. There were street fair-style food vendors (we had gyros and split a funnel cake), booths for all kinds of crafty pursuits, bouncing castles, a petting zoo, two stages with bands, and a whole bunch of artists, which we enjoyed very much and even bought a Japanese-style cherry blossom painting by an artist from Massachusetts. We wandered about for a bit - the weather was sunny and warm and perfect - and then headed back to the house.

We spent the afternoon sitting around and chatting with Mom, mostly about politics (yes! us!), and then headed to Marmora Cafe, on River Street in downtown Troy. Now, I went to school in Troy for four years, and there wasn’t much to eat there, it seemed. A good Chinese restaurant and a loosely middle eastern restaurant, plus some pizza joints and the local brewpub (which, admittedly, was great), seemed to round it out. So I’m always a tiny bit dubious of Troy when it comes to eating, mostly because everything that’s sprouted up there in the three years since graduation is in areas of town I’ve never managed to be able to find very easily.

But, hurrah! We walked into Marmora and the owner said he was out of food. Disappointed, we started to turn away, but he said he thought he had a little bit left and could probably make us a nice platter. We almost left, but then decided to go for it, and fifteen minutes later there was a huge platter with tabouli, a lot of different kinds of hummus, baba ganoush, cheeses, strawberries, some kind of falafel ball with a sweetly spiced beef inside, and pita wedges. We ate like kings and thanked the owner profusely before driving out to the Colonie marina for a boat ride with the Womers. All in all, a perfect Saturday.

On Sunday we got to go to Terra Nova - always a treat - then went to my aunt’s house for Mother’s Day chicken and some time with the family. We had to leave pretty early to catch a train back, which got us home by 7:30 or so. Naturally, I cooked up some dinner and we watched The Machinist, which neither of us had seen, though we both distinctly remembered watching the trailers when it was coming out. It was less creepy than I thought it would be, but more than Tom thought. Whatever the case, it was beautifully shot and very solid. It was also very hard to watch Christian Bale, who lost something like 60 pounds for the role. He looked so emaciated. And to think, he did it again for Rescue Dawn. That man is one committed (and brilliant) actor.

I stayed home from work today with sore sinuses and head, venturing out only to buy groceries. I spent most of the rest of the afternoon watching eight (count ‘em) episodes of Battlestar Galactica, Season 3, which is of course brilliant. We have one disc left and then will probably start watching Season 4 on Hulu. We love the show, but I think we’ll be glad when it ends so we can finish Six Feet Under and start a new drama (The Wire? Sex and the City? The Sopranos? the possibilities are endless).

I’m hoping to be back on my feet tomorrow. Tom has a long, but relatively simple week this week (so far - schedules seem to change maniacally on this project), and I have nothing in particular planned but work until this weekend (which is very full). This is my last week before summer classes start, and I am very much hoping to have finished Moby Dick by Monday night. I’ve made a good dent in it already. Tom is also reading it, and we have two copies so we can both bring it along during the day. Thankfully, it’s none of the stuffy Victorian novel we were expecting. Actually, it’s hilarious and quirky and messy, and we are greatly enjoying it. Good thing, since I’ve got six weeks of studying it up ahead.

After realizing that I am going to have a lot of time to myself in the next two months while Tom does the whole production thing and I had no classes, I figured I should just knock out a few more credits (because, well, the more credits I have, the sooner I can graduate and move out into the big bad world, or at least onto more school). So I’m taking a class on Moby Dick (and literary criticism) in the English department. I’ve never actually read it, though I am pretty sure I read excerpts in high school, so I’m looking forward to it.

We have an awful lot buzzing and brewing, but nothing much to report. Stay tuned.

You can join ConversantLife’s new profile system and be my fan! Or even my friend, if you’re feeling ambitious.

Rather than being at Calvin like, oh, pretty much everyone in the universe right now, I’m still at work, hoping to have the magazine packaged at at the front desk for the printer to pick up on Monday. Hurrah!

So I’m going home once that’s done to start trying to gather research for my paper. Not to jinx it, but I’m postulating something along the lines of how the “new” evangelical film, produced by filmmakers from outside “the church”, has a lot in common with the classical definition of kitsch. I think I’ve got a lot to draw on for that. (If you’re in IAM, you know what I mean, but I do have a lot of scholarly work to back it up as well.)

Happily, today was delivery day at the house; the cable guy came to hook up our internet, the new bookcase was delivered, and the refrigerator has finally arrived (hurrah for groceries again!). Oh, and yesterday we got a coffee table, so now I finally have a place to scatter all my papers and set down my cup of tea while I work, since I don’t have a desk. Tom uses our desk and his job requires a lot of papers to be around all the time. I don’t really mind. After sitting in front of a desk all day at work, it’s nice to work from the comfort of the couch.

I have grand plans to spend most of tomorrow writing reviews for three books that only just came in the last couple days, watching a film and writing a review, wading through the five scholarly books I have from the library and tagging what’s useful, hopefully getting the skeleton of an outline down, then heading off to a pre-Tribeca Festival press screening and a friend’s staged reading. It’s times like these that I have a love-hate relationship with being a writer; on the one hand, it’s pretty easy for me to start writing a paper. I’ve gotten past the whole fear-of-the-page thing by now, since I’m always under the gun. On the other hand, it’s surprisingly hard to write scholarly work when you’re used to turning out Paste-worthy snappy writing. Academia seems not to look kindly on wit. My academic prose will never be too dry, but I have to kick myself into big-word mode.

It’s nice to be able to use big words, though. I’d gotten out of the habit.

Via Relief Journal, which is running an excellent series on why writers need technology - veteran blogger/author J. Mark Bertrand explains why writers, especially those who like to, you know, get published, should blog:

It’s 2004. The Art & Soul Conference at Baylor University. I’m in the lobby between sessions, browsing at the Eighth Day Books table. Minding my own business, in other words, in sharp contrast to everyone else. They’re networking. All of them. Somehow they’ve managed to meet up over the course of the event, to learn each other’s names. Not me. I’ve kept to myself. I’m a social moth.

“Hey, aren’t you—”

I turn to find a smiling man at my elbow. People are always saying I remind them of someone. Usually a crazy brother-in-law. I start to say, No, I’m not.

“—Mark Bertrand?”

“No, I’m . . . Oh.” Yes, actually. I am.

“I thought so,” he says. “I read your blog.”

That explains it. At least half the people I know, I met through my blog. Only I don’t usually meet them. Not without planning it in advance. The crazy thing is, for a brief shining moment, I feel like a celebrity. Somebody knows me. Somebody’s familiar with my work.

And the thing is, he’s not the only one. I got an e-mail this week from someone who’d read my book and enjoyed it.

“I’ve been reading your blog for a year and half.”

And then you bought my book. That makes you think, doesn’t it?

I can’t count how many times this has happened to me. It’s always weird when you’re meeting someone for the first time and suddenly you realize from the way that they’re acting that they read your blog. And conversely, it’s a bit strange to meet someone and then realize you read their blog.

And I haven’t even written a whole book yet.

I can’t be the only person who’s apprehensive about the just-confirmed Office spinoff being added to NBC’s fall line-up.

I don’t want things to chaaaaaaange . . . Although, who knows, it could be fun.

Google, as we all know, has the best April Fools’ jokes. The ones we ran across:
- Tom pointed out Gmail Custom Time.
- The Google Wake Up Kit.
- And, if you try to add an event to your Google Calendar, you can now click the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button, which may schedule, say, a date with Tom Cruise, Matt Damon, Johnny Depp, or any number of dashing celebrity types.

Those are the two apps we use on a daily basis. Anyone find anything else?

Something went funky with our comments database table yesterday, but I managed to fix it through the wonder that is Dreamhost. We’re back. Comment away.

I’ve done some tweaking of the Books and Film pages here. Most notably, I’ll be trying to track with our film viewing as we go along; I’ve also added some extra links to both pages. Check it out.

The 92nd Street Y blog (which, to be honest, I didn’t know existed before now, but I’m very happy to find it), mentioned my summary of the Robert Alter/Marilynne Robinson program a few weeks ago. Fascinating how small the internet is!

If you rush, you can get a few different Moleskine City Notebooks for $1.99 at Amazon. But they’re flying off the shelves.

3938 words so far. So far, so good.

In other news, we are going to Sufjan Stevens’ symphony at BAM tomorrow night, and I have a birthday this weekend.

Also, I am exhausted today. Why? I don’t know.

Of late, I’ve gone back and re-read my husband’s old blog entries, which start in May of 2004. We’ve known each other for two years and been married for a little more than one, and so it’s a bit mind-blowing to think that his “previous life” (and mine, too) were not so long ago. It just doesn’t seem possible.

Life’s so funny.

The new Radiant magazine website is up! And I’m a contributing blogger to “The Pulse”, Radiant’s blog about TV, music, movies, books, and art. First post is here!

Very rainy here today, but somehow still warm. Strange. Also, other New Yorkers, has the trash on the sidewalks smelled especially awful to you this week? It’s made me gag far too many times the last few days.

Last night we went to the Co-op to finally join, which we did, enticed by the proximity to our own home and the impressively inexpensive food; the produce is not too much cheaper but much fresher than surrounding grocery stores, but it is local and organic, and everything else there (meat, cheese, snacks, drinks, bulk grains, the list goes on) is so much more cost-effective than anywhere else in the vicinity. I can finally get Clif Bars (an integral part of my daily diet) for $1 apiece.

The co-op here works differently than the one to which my family belonged in Albany, which allowed non-members to shop at higher prices. At the Park Slope co-op, only members can shop, and each adult member of the household has to work one 2 3/4 hour shift every four weeks, which comes out to 13 shifts per year. So, between the two of us, we need to work 26 shifts per year. And my husband, who is amazing, is working something like six shifts this week and next to get us ahead. He worked one today already and is going back to work another this afternoon.

In other news, our New Yorker hard drive came at some point this week and the guy who runs the photo studio below us had received the package, so he caught us on our way out the door last night and handed it over. It’s great. I’m so excited that all the original cartoons and ads are preserved. If you like the New Yorker, or just like good writing, I think it’s well worth the cost.

Fall sparks creativity, I think. Tom and I have suddenly both started new writing projects. Here’s to hoping it lasts.

Friday night was my first time home since Wednesday morning. We had plans, but they got cancelled. We watched The World, a slightly strange but still coherent Chinese film about workers at a low-budget Epcot-style place in Beijing, interspersed with random thirty-second cartoon bits underscored with Asian pop. I have a really difficult time liking Asian cinema in general, but this one was okay.

Saturday we slept in and cooked breakfast, then went to a small screening of the film Tom worked on in February (just us, the directors and their wives, and the writer). So much fun. It’s great to see something that you were deeply involved with coming together.

We came home and watched Fracture (Anthony Hopkins, Ryan Gosling), followed immediately by Primal Fear (Richard Gere and a mind-blowing Edward Norton) - in doing so, we inadvertently were marathoning movies by the same director. Despite its melodramaticly stupid name, Primal Fear is probably the better movie - but Fracture is worth renting.

On Sunday after church we went shopping, then cooking, and then had a few people over for dinner. I made dijon-dressed new potato salad and hamburgers, and Tom cooked the hamburgers on our new indoor electric grill. They were pronounced by two present as “the best hamburger I’ve ever had”. So, a success for us. We make them with beer and Worcestershire sauce and onions and jalapeno peppers, and I think it makes a difference. Stayed up late discussing life.

We’d originally planned to go to the beach on Monday, but we just didn’t feel like making the long train trip and decided to go out to brunch (Los Pollitos II on 5th Ave in Brooklyn - cheap and yummy) and then went to Prospect Park for a few hours to read books and watch people flying the biggest kites I’ve ever seen in my life, with 8-foot wingspans. I finished Lolita - what a crazy book, but I bow at the feet of Nabokov. Came home and turned the leftover meat into tacos and watched The Wind Will Carry Us, an Iranian film that was surprisingly lively and funny. I was expecting something much more akin to other films I’ve seen from roughly that part of the world - slow, quiet, focus on the cinematography - but this was much funnier, with great dialogue.

I guess this is the start of the school year, which is the start of fall, which means everything starts in earnest again. I got up and took the long route running this morning, managing to cover over 3 miles, mostly running - a record for me, as I have a lot of trouble breathing and I’m trying to push through it. I think I’ve come to understand the concept of pushing through a “wall” better, though. Once you get past it, you start to feel like you could run forever.

Also, we’re returning to small group for the first time in a year, since we got married. We’re trekking out to Jersey City tonight. It’s sort of our old small group (though almost none of the same people), so we have grand hopes. It’s not a long way for me from work, but it’s a little longer for Tom, from Brooklyn; still, it takes a little over an hour, and we spend that much time getting to places in Manhattan.

Tomorrow we’re hoping to go back to IAM’s weekly Wednesday morning breakfast-and-discussion-group, from which we sort of took a break when I couldn’t go any more because of my job and Tom was working more consistently. But we’ll hopefully be back.

Tomorrow is also our first anniversary. :)