I review Doubt and Adam Resurrected in Christianity Today, um, today.
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.
Two vaguely odd bits of movie news:
• Scorsese to produce a remake Kurosawa’s High and Low, with a Mamet script and Mike Nichols directing.
• Joaquin Phoenix quits acting.
It snowed a bit on the way in to work today, and incidentally, this is my last day working at NYU. A day worthy of celebration.
A very interesting blog post from Anne Thompson at Variety on economic downturns/recessions/depressions and the movie business. (With great video clips.)
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.
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!
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.
We showed Chop Shop to a small crowd on Friday night at work, and it was just as good the second time around as the first. It didn’t hurt that there was lots of yummy popcorn going around, too.
But by the time I got home I realized I was getting sick, and I woke up Saturday with a raspy throat, plugged ears, and a stack of homework to do. Tom headed out to help Ken & Sarah (and Dahlia) move, and I spent the next eight hours writing essays, plowing through esoteric scholarly articles on art and anthropology and such, and trying to unearth myself a bit. It was successful, but a little exhausting!
When Tom got home we started watching The Wire, finally. We’d previously watched the second season, because Tom had seen the first, but as it turns out, this is emphatically not a show where you can actually do that. So we’re starting from the beginning again. I wouldn’t say I’m sucked in, but I know I’ll eventually be really into it and I immensely appreciate the skill in the storytelling.
I did manage to get to church on Sunday. Lots of new faces, and a few new names on our small group sign-up list. Afterwards Tom and I went to Moustache for middle eastern-style pitzas (and the discovery that it’s a Slow Food establishment), then came home and watched Caramel, a sweet Lebanese movie we missed when it was in theaters. We ate a quinoa-chicken-vegetable concoction I cooked up that was rather good and very healthy, to boot.
So here I am, at NYU since 8am this morning, with a giant water bottle on one side and a giant cup of hot tea on the other, which keeps me from coughing. I passed a somewhat sleepless night since I have trouble breathing without coughing, but I feel rather cheerful and am diving headfirst into the work I’ve got this week. This is Tom’s last free week before he starts a job next week, too.
We also have three excellent screenings this week: Wendy and Lucy tonight (directed by Kelly Reichardt, who also made Old Joy), a Variety screening of Blindness tomorrow (directed by Fernando Meirelles of City of God and The Constant Gardener), and Ballast (which finally has a screening I can attend since I started getting invitations in the spring). We also are seeing Marilynne Robinson read with John Crowley at the 92nd Street Y on Thursday night.
And next week, while Tom’s working, I’m supposed to be in meetings in NYC, DC, and Boston, all between Tuesday and Friday. I haven’t been on a business trip since I left BofA in 2007. I’m pulling out the teeny-tiny travel bottles once again . . .
But let me just say that today is a lovely first official day of autumn, and I am happy to be alive!
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.
My review of The Women is up at Christianity Today. It’s the kind of movie where I laughed and enjoyed it while I was watching (most of the time), but was progressively more bugged by it when I went home. Not bad for a chick flick, but it’s trying to be something else.
It appear that The Cult of Sincerity has started a trend: YouTube premieres. Magnolia Pictures will premiere The Princess of Nebraska on YouTube next month. Let it be known, folks - Cult did it first.
First and foremost, we saw the Coen brothers’ new comedy, Burn After Reading, at a Variety screening on Monday night. I believe it’s releasing this weekend, so technically I guess I can’t say too much. But let’s just say that it is my kind of movie - a little dark, a little weird, and very funny. They somehow managed to make both George Clooney and Brad Pitt deeply unattractive (not a small feat, my friends), and Brad Pitt in particular is kind of astounding as a bouncy, vaguely juvenile personal trainer who shares a penchant for adventure with Frances McDormand. Also notable is the appearance of Richard Jenkins, who I am happy to see popping up all over the big screen lately.
I never mentioned that I finally watched The Band’s Visit the other night, which is now available on DVD. It’s a sweet, funny comedy about an Egyptian classical folk band that gets accidentally stranded in the wrong Israeli town en route to a cultural exchange. Instead of the ethnic tension I was expecting, the film is mainly about people learning from each other and bettering one another’s lives, all in the space of an evening. This is very likely going to be one of my top ten films of the year, and it’s well worth seeing. (Incidentally, it’s also good for people who are just getting into subtitled films; about half of it is in English, since that’s the language held in common between the two groups.)
Last night we watched another sweet, funny comedy that we should have seen earlier this year - Son of Rambow. It’s a little reminiscent of Billy Elliot in that the main characters are young English schoolboys, but it’s a little quirkier and much less Hollywood. It’s also very funny, and the two lead actors (for whom this was their first job) were brilliant. There’s some small commentary on being an outsider, too, but it’s mainly a fun and touching movie about friendship and making amateur movies as kids - something that has been touched on already this year in Michel Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind.
On the docket this week is a cast & crew screening of Ghost Town, starring Ricky Gervais, Greg Kinnear, and Tea Leoni; next week we’ll be screening Chop Shop (a must-see) at my office; and we’ve just landed a screening of Fernando Meirelles’ much-anticipated Blindness the week after that. I’ll be sure to report on these as well. Busy movie season has begun!
Congrats to my friend and colleague Jeffrey Overstreet, whose blog I’ve been reading ever since Tom introduced it to me nearly three years ago (and he had been reading much longer). Besides being a novelist, writer, editor, and film critic, he’s had two film-related columns launch in the last week - one at Image Journal’s website and one at Christianity Today. Both are (and will undoubtedly continue to be) well worth the read.
We had a brilliant anniversary weekend.
Tom met me at Ogawa for a lunch of sushi on Friday. Then he made me close my eyes and led me around the corner to Great Jones Spa, where he’d used our long-stored-up credit card points to book an hour-long massage for each of us. That in and of itself was fantastic, but Great Jones has a water lounge for clients to use, complete with sauna, steam room, hot tub, and cold plunge, with lounge chairs and a huge sunroof. We stayed for an hour before and a couple hours after the massages, just relaxing and enjoying it. Bliss. We left and ducked down to Anthropologie, which is having its blow-out summer sale right now, before heading home to watch Shakespeare in Love, one of the romantic films Tom had picked out for the weekend.
On Saturday we slept in, then made brunch from everything in the refrigerator (scrambled eggs with scallions, biscuits, breakfast sausages, strawberries, coffee, and peppermint iced tea) and watched Say Anything, which neither of us had seen but both of us greatly enjoyed, followed by Chasing Amy. We headed out into the torrential downpour to Keens steakhouse for dinner. The place is incredible; filled with historical memorabilia (ours had Lincoln paraphernalia all over the walls, and the ceilings were completely lined with old tobacco pipes), and excellent service. I’ve never had such a tender steak - the rest of it is presently waiting for lunchtime - and we had a beautiful time. Tom planned the whole weekend with great thoughtfulness and kept the whole thing a secret - not a small feat. And so we have been married for two years.
The weekend rounded out yesterday, with church, then a barbecue on the terrace at our friends’ apartment. By far the most relaxing weekend I’ve had in a long time, which made it hard to see Monday roll around, even though it’s a short day at work, followed by class.
But tonight! We’re seeing Burn After Reading at the Museum of the Moving Image’s special advance screening for Producer’s Circle members. I am probably a bit too excited about it.
Cheers, bloglets, and have a great day.
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.
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!
Can I just point out that this is one of the many reasons why we love New York and hope to never have to move to LA?
“All of us in New York, Hollywood and across the country should be concerned about how this failure to reach an agreement is impacting our members,” said N.Y. SAG president Sam Freed. “They have already suffered significantly as a result of the WGA strike, and now they are experiencing an additional loss of work, made worse when they can find a job, by having to work without a contract under old terms and conditions. There are some who feel we have all the time in the world to make this deal. We on the N.Y. board do not.”
The New York statement also accused SAG’s leaders of playing politics by not moving forward on the contract until after the guild’s election concludes Sept. 18. Rosenberg issued a blistering response that made the same accusation.
We saw Ne le dis a personne (Tell No One) on Friday night after work. It was pretty tight, a French crime/psychological thriller with some real moments of humor, and it held it together until the very end, and even when it stumbled it wasn’t story-killing. Thoroughly satisfactory for a Friday night movie.
We also rented the 1967 Bonnie and Clyde, starring Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty. It had two effects on me: I laughed riotously when I recognized the actor playing the Texas ranger, because he also played Briscoe Darling on the Andy Griffith show to great comic effect and he had the same exact moustache in this film; and I appreciated Robert Altman’s Thieves Like Us a lot more.
We have nary an evening free this week, and we’re heading to Albany on Friday night. Only two weeks left in this job!
Last night we finally saw The Dark Knight, and I can’t say anything about it that hasn’t already been said but yes, it is brilliant and nervewracking in the very best way.
I had my last class of the term on Wednesday night. I spent a little time on my walk to the subway reflecting over the summer’s classes and realized that though they’ve been intense, they’ve really propelled my critical thinking about literature forward. I don’t think I’ll ever pursue a degree in literature, but I have definitely learned a lot. I’ll have to finish my paper tomorrow (wish me luck) and then I’ll have a few weeks off before the fall semester begins. I’m hoping to be taking two classes: History of Media Theory (in my department), and The U.S. and the Long 20th Century (in the American Studies department).
We saw a lot of trailers last night, many of which were awesome - Quantum of Solace and Watchmen in particular. The former is one of the better trailers I’ve ever seen (along with all the many WALL-E trailers). We sat contemplating why so many trailers are so bad, even for great movies. What is up with that?
We got our assignments a while ago, but I forgot to mention the results. These are the films I’ll be reviewing for Christianity Today between now and December:
• The Women
• What Just Happened?
• Synecdoche, New York
• Changeling
• Youth in Revolt
• Doubt
This is a great list, but even if it weren’t, any lineup that includes two films starring Philip Seymour Hoffman and a movie directed by Clint Eastwood is fine by me!
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.
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.
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.
I suppose I should mention that we saw Indy 4 last night. Honestly? I have very few expectations for any movie that has both Steven Spielberg and George Lucas attached to it - not that it will be a bad movie, per se, but I don’t expect it to be a work of art, and I generally expect an uneven script (thank God George Lucas didn’t write it). So it was exactly what I expected: the cinematic equivalent of an amusement park ride. I was not at all disappointed. It’s pure fun, and there are weird creatures and a pretty awesome “car” chase sequence, and a lot of inside jokes.
Also, Tom’s ringtone is the Indy theme, so I hear it a LOT, and it’s nice to hear some variations!
Short article about The Cult of Sincerity in the printed version of WORLD Magazine this week, which you can see most of online. Note the photo credit. :)