Tom & Alissa

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!

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!

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.

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.

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 have been all over since Wednesday. As I said to some good folks on Thursday night, I’d been (on Wednesday alone) in or through New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington DC, and Boston - if the founding fathers could only see me now. And I’m relatively confident I’ll get around to sharing more about this week’s trip later, since it was a lovely trip with lovely people in all aspects, and I came home with plenty of things to think about.

But all that to say, I got home this afternoon, brought my luggage to the apartment, then turned around to go to the New Yorker Festival’s Town Hall on Race & Class in America. It was a spirited debate which actually answered some questions I’d been asking about the party shifts since the 1950s. But I am home now, and I am tired. So here are a few tidbits that I need to mention before I forget:

- There is a new edition of The Curator available for your reading pleasure. We’re a little thin on articles this week (want to write for us? contact me with your ideas!), but they’re both well worth reading and I’m confident they’re worth your time.

- My review of Rachel Getting Married, a film I very much liked, is at ChristianityToday.com.

- Along those lines, I am now a Rotten Tomatoes critic. Yes, this is a very important moment in my little life.

I am absolutely exhausted and now that I’ve cleaned the apartment and blogged, I am off to bed. Tomorrow, I attend a Malcolm Gladwell lecture, also at the New Yorker Festival (I haven’t the foggiest idea of what he’s talking about, but it doesn’t really matter, because that man is fascinating). Book list for September forthcoming!

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!

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.

David Foster Wallace hung himself in his apartment yesterday. So sad.

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.

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.

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.

I was about to head out the door this morning when I realized that though tomorrow is my last full-time day here (which, I think, means I’ll soon be losing my desk), I will be leaving tomorrow afternoon and heading straight for Port Authority, to catch a bus down to visit my grandparents. Which means I need to bring home my personal items today. So I grabbed a sturdy bag and will instead be schlepping them to the screening of Tokyo! (emphasis theirs) tonight.

The beach this weekend! The real beach, with waves and a boardwalk and seashells. For three whole days. I am a little ecstatic.

Aaron Sorkin is writing a Facebook movie, and he wants your help.

My Big Fat Crete Wedding.

Juno, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, and Lars and the Real Girl are up for the 2008 Humanitas Prize. I am mostly intrigued by the fact that there is something called the Humanitas prize. Here’s the website. This is its mission:

We honor excellence in film & television writing. Stories that affirm the human person, probe the meaning of life, and enlighten the use of human freedom. The stories reveal common humanity, so that love may come to permeate the human family and help liberate, enrich and unify society.

The Curator launches tomorrow. Stay tuned for the announcement!

We spent the weekend in Albany with my Mom and brother. Tom hasn’t been there much since Christmas, because of his working schedule, so it was delightful to hang out with them. Tom cooked mussels in white wine sauce for dinner; we lazed around by the pool; we watched Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole; and in general, we did very little and enjoyed it (especially the weather).

Unfortunately for me, I contracted a nasty cold late last week and by Saturday I was quite sick. I was a bit better when we got home on Sunday, but yesterday I woke up and the right side of my head was swollen, mostly from sinuses, so I stayed home.

Which is, of course, bizarre, because this is my last week as a full-time employee of anyone, at least for a long time! We’ll spend this (long) weekend with my grandparents on the Jersey Shore, and then on Tuesday I’ll be starting at IAM. I’ll be doing about two days a week at NYU and three at IAM until the end of October (plus my duties at Comment, plus two classes, plus editing The Curator, plus a couple movie reviews for Christianity Today), when the NYU job will end and I will hopefully be able to breathe again. I am looking forward to it, but with a small bit of apprehension. Really, though, how can I complain? I’ll be spending most of my time on things I love, at long last. And hopefully soon Tom will have work again, so I’ll probably have a bit more time to myself anyhow. It’s much easier for either of us to be working a lot if we both are.

In other news, it’s beautiful in New York today - warmish but not hot, and sunny - and I am so excited for beautiful fall to arrive. Not just for the weather, either - for the movies! Most of the year’s best movies come out in the fall (for Oscar consideration) and there’s a number of great ones this fall. We just got invited to an advance screening of Burn Before Reading (the Coen brothers’ comedy), and there’s many more in the works. Cue popcorn season!

After a quick brunch at Smoke Joint, I spent all day Saturday until about nine o’clock writing my paper. The thesis clicked into place about halfway through the afternoon and went relatively smoothly from there. So now I am free! For three weeks.

We also watched The Bank Job (could have used three more rounds of revisions, I think) and Giant (very long, a little messy, but enjoyable), and ate at 67 Burger. I made grocery lists for the week. We did not watch the Olympics at all, because we can’t, really, except by streaming the video, and I am not that motivated.

Tom is working for a few days this week on the Jonas brothers’ 3-D movie (first job in six weeks), or something like that, and I have my evenings free except a screening on Wednesday night of What Just Happened. I am looking forward to finishing my book (The Twenty-Seventh City, by Jonathan Franzen) and starting another (probably The Rest is Noise, by Alex Ross), maybe watching a movie (we have Bottle Rocket and A Mighty Wind from Netflix for my own especial viewing pleasure), and probably working on getting The Curator ready to launch by the end of the month. After today, there’s only two more Mondays at this job!

I purged my makeup collection of everything old, yucky, or ridiculous yesterday, in my pre-fall-pre-new-jobs-pre-new-semester effort to streamline life. So now I have a wastebasket full of cheap old eyeshadows I never wore, or three-year-old eyeliner, or wrong shades of concealer.

And to my joy, Stila - which I love, but seldom purchase - is having a very good sale on some of their oldies but goodies, and some collections, too. Plus, free shipping! Go fast!

What did we do this weekend? Saturday was mostly laundry and a lot of angst from my corner at the direction (or, shall we say, non-direction) of my term paper. By the time we went to dinner around 9pm, after wading through a two-foot-high stack of Very Old And Smelly Books from the eminent NYU library, I finally had a grip on my topic. In between my two articles to write this week, I’ll get the paper written, by hook or by crook.

Yesterday we had the delight of the Shake Shack with Angela, who was in town, and various others. We stood in line for an hour and it was worth it. Everyone had regular burgers, but I had the ’shroom burger, which was divine; a portobello mushroom, stuffed with mozzarella and other cheeses, breaded, fried, and on a bun with shack sauce. Everyone duly oohed and ahhed, and Angela tried to take a bite and was inundated with cheese.

Tom and I came home and watched Kubrick’s version of Lolita, which is pretty tame (considering the source material, and no, I haven’t seen the 1997 Jeremy Irons version yet) and includes a hysterically twitchy Peter Sellars as Quilty. Also, Tom read the IMDB trivia, which noted that you can clearly see a famous building in Albany off in the distance near the end, when Humbert is visiting a slightly more grown-up Lolita, which means she was living in relative squalor in . . . Rensselaer. Teehee!

I have officially finished my stack o’ novels for class, and it was with much joy and deliberation that I picked up a book off the shelf since February that wasn’t assigned either by a professor or an editor. Happiness! I went with The Twenty-Seventh City, Jonathan Franzen’s first novel, and I have about four weeks until school starts again so I’m hoping to polish off The Rest is Noise, by Alex Ross, and then maybe something by Joan Didion or Kathleen Norris. I am practically salivating at the thought. I discovered this morning that the gym is the ideal context for reading the New Yorker (I can finish a lengthy profile and a shorter article in the half hour or so that I’m on the treadmill), so I can finally get back into reading.

We saw two excellent movies last week, one of which you might be able to see soon if you have an art theater nearby - Frozen River, directed by Courtney Hunt (a hometown girl!), a deeply moving, low-budget drama about smuggling, single mothers, and the working poor in the extreme northern US. The other film was the ensemble dramedy A Christmas Tale, which I’m reviewing for Paste and can’t rhapsodize about too much except to say it was funny, heartwarming, and French, with a cast to die for (including Mathieu Amalric of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and legend Catherine Deneuve). It will be out in November.

Hurrah; because we are under 35, we can get very steeply discounted tickets to events at the 92nd Street Y, which is one of the best cultural centers in the city. So, we’re going to A Celebration of Maurice Sendak (with such luminaries as Tony Kushner, Meryl Streep, James Gandolfini, Dave Eggers, Spike Jonze, Linda Emond, Catherine Keener, Anika Noni Rose, Stephen Greenblatt and others), and Marilynne Robinson!

It was kind of a weird weekend. I left work on Friday to buy tickets at the Angelika for Transsiberian, then spent a couple hours wading through a bunch of journal articles for my upcoming “midterm” paper (a bit of a misnomer, since it’s due two weeks before the final, but whatever). Thankfully, the Angelika’s cafe is large and has much seating, and I got an Orangina and sipped happily for a couple of hours.

The film itself wasn’t earth-shattering, but it was solid, and to our surprise, there was a Q&A afterwards with Brad Anderson, the writer & director. I am always annoyed at the end of Q&As in an relatively open forum. It’s not so much that people ask stupid questions as that they like to hear themselves talk. But, it was interesting. Anderson also directed The Machinist (also known as “the film for which Christian Bale lost an obscene amount of weight”) and he certainly has the whole indie director thing going on. He’s gotten a lot of funding from European countries - something worth exploring, I think. We headed to Angela’s afterward to hang out with some friends of hers who were visiting from Madrid (Spanish and Italian) and eat yummy pear mousse tart from Claude’s.

After a brunch on Saturday, I took off for midtown to interview an artist for an upcoming profile article, then went downtown to work on my midterm. The interview was interesting - her work is great - but the midterm was a dismal failure. I started writing one thing and wound up the afternoon by switching topics. It’s due a week from today, which would not normally be a problem, except there are many things going on this week and a wedding on Saturday. Oops. Wound up the day with the Zoae Series, a thoroughly enjoyable evening of music, performance poetry, and slightly sardonic art.

Yesterday I woke up feeling more exhausted than usual, and Tom decided we should stay home and relax, for which I was rather grateful. We made waffles and spent the day relaxing and resting, which is appropriate, I suppose, for the Sabbath. I’m very grateful; while I’m not exactly bouncing off the walls today, I don’t feel like crawling under my desk, and I’m accomplishing things. Hurrah!

We’ve yet to see “The Dark Knight”, and it’s looking like we may not this week either. On the bright side, that means we may get to see it at an IMAX theater when we do!

The Philharmonic concert last night was brilliant. Perfect weather, sixty thousand people, and fireworks. The music was ideal for a summer night on the lawn. Tom made delicious tabouli and brought some thinly-cut prosciutto to eat it with, and big, juicy strawberries for dessert, accompanied by a bottle of New Zealand pinot noir (apparently a new thing for the Kiwis). It was fabulously relaxing, and I felt rather pampered as I nibbled strawberries and listened to Beethoven.

This, folks, is why we live here.

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.

- Supplies of rice, corn, and wheat - crops that yield half the world’s food calories - could shrink dramatically by 2050.

- The monster collection of Moleskine tips, tricks, and hacks, especially useful for Moleskine newbies. I own too many Moleskines.

I arrived without incident in DC around 2pm on Thursday. Let me now recommend Bolt Bus; we were a little late, but the ride was direct, the bus was pleasant, and there was free Wi-Fi on board. Oh, and it was cheap.

Liz was our fabulously gracious hostess for the entire trip; we hung out with her and various friends all weekend. We saw Wall-E (again for Liz and me, first time for Tom and Angela), as well as Wanted (well, it’s not great cinema, but lots of things blow up and it’s visually awesome). We went to the Newseum and were duly shellshocked by the Pulitzer Prize Photojournalism exhibit, which I highly recommend - it’s worth the cost of admission alone. We watched fireworks from a rooftop and ate really good food, notably at Nora, Zaytinya, and the legendary Ben’s Chili Bowl. Tom and I stumbled into the National Portrait Gallery and wished we had a lot more time there. We stayed up very late and were rather raucous and, all in all, had a great time.

We got home Monday around 5:30pm and I dashed off to my 6pm class, for which I’d just finished the readings, and wow, I just love school. It’s so much work and it makes me stressed out but all this reading and discussion and research is invigorating.

Yesterday evening we had a screening of Brideshead Revisited, and I’m happy to say that the trailer is completely misleading and it’s actually very tight with the book. The casting is great (Ben Whishaw continually blows my mind), and the music is beautiful, and it’s really very good. We both were a bit confused by its August 1 release date, since it actually seems like Oscar material. In any case, I’m reviewing it, so I’ll say no more until then.

Tomorrow night, Bret Lott is having a book release party at the IAM space for his upcoming novel, Ancient Highway, and Kelley McRae is opening with a set. I know. I love living in New York. If you’re nearby and want to come, check out the Facebook event.

On the home front, I’m now reading H.G. Wells’ Tono-Bungay for Monday’s class, and we’re finishing Six Feet Under, at long last. We even went grocery shopping yesterday. It’s been a while. I have class again tonight, and then I’m off until Tuesday (thank God for a stay-cation!), so I might not blog too much more this week!

We’ve returned to New York, but I don’t have time to outline all of our pursuits over the past weekend right now. Perhaps later.

There was almost no traffic on this blog yesterday, which was confusing until I realized the server was down. Thanks, Dreamhost. We’re back up today.

I head south tomorrow morning for a long weekend in DC, which will involve festivities of various kinds, none of which are very nailed down. Just having a vacation outside the (well, this) city for a few days should be refreshing.

Lastly, this article on being a writer in Brooklyn is kind of awesome, especially this part:

I have a hard time understanding all the hype. I dig it here and all, but it’s just a place. It does not have magical properties. In interviews, I get asked a lot, “What’s it like to write in Brooklyn?” I get invited to do panels with other Brooklyn writers to discuss what it’s like to be a writer in Brooklyn. I expect it’s like writing in Manhattan, but there aren’t as many tourists walking very slowly in front of you when you step out for coffee. It’s like writing in Paris, but there are fewer people speaking French. What do they expect me to say? “Instead of ink, I write in mustard from Nathan’s Famous, a Brooklyn institution since 1916.” “I built my desk out of wooden planks taken from the authentic rubble of Ebbets Field. Have I mentioned how I still haven’t forgiven the Dodgers for moving to Los Angeles?”

After a somewhat harrowing week, I had a lovely weekend at home with my mom, my brother, and his girlfriend. We did some shopping and went to the farmers’ market and ate lots of yummy food and went to Terra Nova.

But we also went to the movies, and so the most important thing I can impress on you is this:

GO SEE WALL-E.

That is all.

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.

Hey kids.

Well, what a weekend. I was feeling rather under the weather on Friday, so I took a sick day. I pounded out most of a paper as I sat on the couch and drank copious amounts of water. We don’t really have any food at home - no time to shop lately - but thankfully, our neighborhood is full of wonderfully healthy and moderately-priced eateries, so we had brunch at Olea and dinner at Lil’ Pig. We spent the evening watching Hellboy - the first one - and it was, well, awful, though made a bit better because it does not take itself seriously at all. I’m all for movies with very vague plots, but not in that genre. But I try not to demand much from movies based on comic books; that way, I’m delighted with things like Batman Begins and Iron Man. (By the way, I am totally psyched for The Dark Knight. Moving on.)

I was feeling much better on Saturday, and because I got so much done on Friday I was able to tag along to the Mermaid Parade in Coney Island, along with Tom and a few friends who we met up with there. It was everyone’s first time, and it was certainly . . . interesting. On the one hand, I enjoyed the whole borough pride aspect. Brooklyn is proud to be Brooklyn, diverse, nutty, and happy. People from neighborhoods where you can have a house and garage brought out their antique cars, which were really cool. And some of the costumes were fantastic and well thought out. On the other hand, lots of people like to use marching in the parade as an excuse to get tipsy and wear very little clothing, and that’s their (legal) prerogative, but it gets old after a while and isn’t something I feel the need to experience repeatedly. So it was a one-time must-see event, but probably not one that will get any better year to year, and I don’t think we’ll do it again.

After the parade we went back to our apartment and cooked hamburgers for everyone, which was good fun, and watched trailers for scary movies. An excellent end to a Saturday.

After church on Sunday, we went back out to our ‘hood and had brunch at Red Bamboo, a vegan Thai restaurant (you won’t believe it’s not meat, etc.) with friends and ended up at Brooklyn Flea for a bit, where we did not buy anything but admired lots of things, including some imported and salvaged furniture. We wandered over to Smooch, which I immediately adopted as my coffeeshop, because it has really, really good coffee, great decor, eclectic decor, and a relaxed vibe.

We headed uptown shortly afterwards for the “Jesus Hopped the A Train” benefit reading, which was simply remarkable. Original cast plus Stephen Adly Guirgis, who is fast becoming my favorite playwright because he’s so remarkably profound. His plays are messy and profane, but somehow grace and forgiveness always explicitly slip in.

Our seats were good - on the floor, but near the back - and we were serendipitously seated directly across the aisle from Philip Seymour Hoffman’s perch at the soundboard as director. He still laughs, despite having heard this play and these actors a mind-bogglingly enormous number of times, and it was fun to be that close. I could have reached out and tapped him. He’s the most refreshing kind of famous New Yorker - still strolls around outside the theater and smokes before performances (this was the third time I’d seen him doing it), frequents the same random coffeeshops that I do. When we saw “The Little Flower of East Orange” a couple months ago, he got in an elevator with a bunch of the audience as they were going up to the theater on the third floor. They looked a little thunderstruck.

But! Our brush with celebrity was not complete. Yesterday I woke up with one of those stark-raving-mad headaches, and as this is not a week in which I can afford to be sick, I called in sick again and slept in very late. I had a dull headache all day, even after lunch at Pequena down the block, but I worked a little more on my paper and then went to class.

After class I took a few painkillers and dashed across town to met up with Tom at Madison Square Garden for the Coldplay concert. Coldplay gave away all 30,000 tickets for this performance, which was kind of awesome, because it was the first time they’d played through that set, which included a bunch of songs from Viva La Vida as well as some older stuff. They came into the arena seating - three rows behind us!! - and sang “Yellow”. And they didn’t play an encore - vaguely disappointing, but I’m kind of glad. I find encores a little pretentious. Everyone pretends they’re special, but it happens every time. Let’s save the encores for truly spectacular concerts. This one was an experimental concert, they flubbed a bit, but they were good-natured about it and very funny, and everyone enjoyed themselves. The only black mark was the drunken people to our left and in front of us who decided to get into a fight, just short of throwing punches, during “Fix You”, which is probably my favorite song. Oh well.

I’m finally back at work today and swamped, but tonight I’m planning to meet up with our dear friends Sarah and Matt and bring them up to the NY Philharmonic’s free concert in Central Park, as long as it doesn’t get rained out. This is my last week of the Moby-Dick class, and next week starts “Modern British Novel”. I admit that I’m a bit dubious about how I’ll manage to read all eleven novels and write two papers in the six weeks, but they don’t call it a “master’s degree” for nothing, I suppose.

The dark spot on my weekend is that it looks like I won’t get to see Wall-E on its opening night. Alas.

I finished Home on Sunday night, and it was magnificent - probably my favorite of her three fiction books, though they’re all spectacular. I was reading some of the press materials that came with it, in which Marilynne Robinson said that Moby-Dick was one of her favorite novels (my professor appreciated that). Her books were also compared to Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy, which I read last year, and that makes perfect sense, though I didn’t realize it until I was reading the article. They both deal with America in the 1950s, and they both write in a somewhat deadpan style (McCarthy far more so) which pleasantly belies the emotion and drama of the story. Robinson, at least, uses punctuation. In any case, do not miss this book when it comes out in September, and you might want to re-read Gilead beforehand - or read it, if you haven’t yet.

We watched Lars and the Real Girl on Sunday night as well, at long last. There were so many good movies in the theater when it came out that we missed it, and we haven’t had much time for movie-watching so far this year. It was great, as everyone said. Ironically, we’d been eating brunch at Tartine earlier that day when Ryan Gosling, very bearded, walked past with a friend. We continually find that life and art intersect in weird ways when you live here.

Which, by the way, reminds me that next week will mark the end of my third year in New York City. I think that makes me an official New Yorker. I no longer need a subway map to get around pretty much anywhere in Manhattan and a lot of Brooklyn’s “brownstone belt”, I don’t need to hold the pole in the subway anymore, I am completely ignorant of gas prices except when they show up on the news, I know the best place to get falafel for $2.50, I no longer venture above 14th Street unless it’s absolutely necessary and kind of turn up my nose at living in Manhattan, I say things like “the city” and “the Times” and expect people to know what I’m talking about, and I walk around saying things like “that used to be that great French cafe” and grumbling at tourists who walk four-across on the sidewalk. In short, I am some combination of the worst stereotype and the actual reality. Oh well. We are all victims of our locations, and this isn’t a bad one. I am so blessed to live here.

Did anyone else out there who grew up in church watch a movie called “Hoomania”? It was about a kid who got sucked into a board game that taught him about the book of Proverbs. There were some gamepieces called “Sluggards”, and a wise owl, and some other crazy characters, and it was partially live-action and partially claymation. I suddenly remembered this movie the other night and wanted to watch it, but it’s out of “print” and I can’t find any clips on YouTube.

Hello bloglings.

My most notable accomplishment this weekend - besides reading a lot about Zoroastrianism for class - was learning to play Uno last night. It wasn’t that we didn’t play card games when I was a kid (we played a lot of Dutch Blitz), but when we did play games they were usually either educational or something like checkers. So this was fun. I also did well, which is a plus. I still want to take poker back up again.

We had brunch at Lil’ Pig near our apartment. I had a chilled cucumber and avocado soup and a tilapia sandwich with pickled onions on baguette; Tom had gazpacho and I think a cornmeal-encrusted catfish sandwich. Tee-riffic. Not only is the place close, but they serve about fifteen varieties of tea, there’s wine in the evenings, the menu changes daily and is all kinds of local and healthy and innovative, and it’s all pretty reasonably priced. Like Grey Dog, but a little cheaper and with a much more interesting menu.

Tonight, it looks like we’re going to the premiere of the film Tom worked on as first assistant director the summer before we got married. Cool.