Tom & Alissa

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

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

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

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

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

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.

• Sorted Books art.

• 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 posted a brief listing of “fun” resources for getting a handle on what’s happening in the economy over at ConversantLife.

A wee article on Maurice Sendak. We have tickets to the birthday celebration they mention in the article, which I believe is next week.

There’s an MP3 on the Museum of the Moving Image’s website of the panel discussion on the making of The Wire, an event which happened last month (and which Tom attended).

I don’t have too much to say - I’ve been busy writing. I got most of a paper done last night, and am hoping to draft an article due next week. Plus, oh yeah, I have a job!

Interesting article on the “monoculture”.

Netflix is shutting down Red Envelope Entertainment, their small production unit. This is sad. They’ve put out some good films.

Wearable art at the Guggenheim.

The LA Times continues to disintegrate - now they’re folding their book section.

Oh hey, my article on One Million Monkeys Typing from the July issue of Paste made it onto the website. You can read it 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.

Actors union ratifies deal with Hollywood studios

I know most of you don’t make your livelihood through the entertainment and media businesses, but if you don’t mind sending up prayers and/or good thoughts that this all gets sorted out soon, the rest of us would appreciate it. Nobody really wants to deal with this again.

There’s a short piece in the July issue of Paste, which subscribers will receive any day, on One Million Monkeys Typing, a “collaborative writing project” on the web. I wrote the piece for the magazine, and then Tom - who is an avid “monkey” on the site - wrote the first piece of the story which was “planted” by Paste on the Million Monkeys site. You can
go there to check it out, join the site, and add to his story: Missing Marcus Mystery.

The NY Times has a report on the N.E.A.’s study of working artists (including architects and designers) in the United States.

Interesting tidbits:
- “More Americans identify their primary occupation as artist than as lawyer, doctor, police officer or farm worker.”
- “More than one in four artists live in California and New York, where their sheer numbers are overwhelming compared to the artist colonies in other states.”
- “Overall, artists make more than the national median income.”

Dana Gioia’s comments are interesting as well.

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. :)

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.

Hats, Coat, and Thick Skin Only - an excellent article on being a writer and developing a healthy attitude toward criticism from editors.

My constantly updated, somewhat curated list of mostly free events going on in Manhattan and Brooklyn this summer.

This will be my fourth summer living in New York - oh, my word - but you might be shocked and mildly appalled to know that in all that time, I’ve barely made use of the wonderful free things that go on here in the summertime - just a Philharmonic in the Park concert in 2006, and some of Midsummer Night’s Swing last year in Lincoln Center (which was not free).

So, I’ve put a lot of the more amazing things I’ve found going on around town, from classical music to free film screenings to rock and folk and readings. Highlights include:
• Readings by Richard Price and Junot Diaz
• Several free NY Philharmonic concerts, in Prospect and Central Parks
• Chris “formerly of Nickel Creek” Thile’s amazing band, Punch Brothers
• Lots of great outdoor movies
• The Philip Glass ensemble, Ailey II, and Beth Orton in Prospect Park
• Wilco in McCarren Park (sadly not free)

I’ll be constantly updating, so feel free to bookmark!

Lovers of good film and music: there’s a great article on Largo, the Los Angeles music/comedy club beloved of people like Sean & Sara Watkins, John Brion, Fiona Apple, Aimee Mann, and Paul Thomas Anderson, in this week’s New Yorker. The whole thing isn’t online yet, but keep an eye out.

Ann Conway writes about venturing outside your own kind at the Image Journal blog. Something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately.

• The NYTimes Reading Room “blog” is discussing Housekeeping by Marilyn Robinson next. Seriously, whoever’s picking the books over there has impeccable taste. They’ve already done War and Peace and The Moviegoer this year, among others.
• Small Cool Apartments, one of the more inspirational ideas for those of us who live in places the size of most people’s living room (and love it), has been on for a while at ApartmentTherapy.
• If you’re in New York, or even if you’re not, you can still catch Patrick Stewart in Macbeth, because it’s moving to Broadway! We saw it at BAM and it was astounding.
• The New York Philharmonic is playing a free concert on Governor’s Island this summer, and by george, I’d be there, but I just checked the calendar and we’re supposed to be seeing Les Liaisons Dangereuse, starring Laura Linney, that night. Hmm. Also, how cool is it that everyone will have to take a ferry?
• Poets.org says to celebrate Poetry Month by bringing a piece of poetry to your place of worship.
• And lastly, join about 6,000 other people and go watch The Cult of Sincerity. You’ll be glad you did.

I talk a little over at Radiant about a website you don’t want to miss.

This brief post by Jason Kottke about the newly announced MacPros made me laugh.

Mmm, 15,000 RPM omelettes!

Blendie, the blender that works only when you growl at it. Link includes video. I think this would be really useful in, say, an alarm clock that turns off when you growl at it. Or something. (via kottke)

Rob Long, TV writer guy and the man behind one of my favorite KCRW podcasts, Martini Shot, has a blog.

I missed the National Book Award finalists reading not, as I thought, because I had other plans that night, but because it apparently was last night and not Monday night. But it sounds like it was a real ruckus.

Download classic movies for free from Amazon.

Jeffrey Overstreet has a great interview with Sara Zarr, a nominee for the 2007 National Book Award for her book Story of a Girl, at his newish site, The Eagle and Child.

She says a lot of great things about writing during the interview, but this particularly caught my eye:

Overstreet:

Do you think that faith makes you a different writer? Do you see connections between your spiritual convictions and your writing?

Zarr:

This kind of goes back to your question about the flaws and redeeming qualities in my characters. My understanding and experience of faith involves a compassionate and gracious God, who is also just. If I’m the creator and god of my own little universe of characters, I want to be compassionate, gracious, and just, too. Which means seeing realistically the flaws in each character, while also seeing their potential for good. The justice comes in when it comes to consequences of things characters do and say. I don’t pretend to understand how it all works on a theological level in real life, but it seems that sometimes God lets us experience consequences to their full effect, sometimes he softens the blow, and sometimes he shields us completely. So all those things are options for me in a story . . . as the all-powerful creator of my little world, I get to orchestrate things so that my characters, who I love, get to experience grace. I love that about writing, and I don’t think I’d be that kind of writer if that’s not how I saw and experienced my own faith.

Yes, yes, yes.

I got the following press release from Paste today:

NAME YOUR PRICE!!
PASTE Magazine Subscriptions On Sale For, Well,
Whatever You Want…

“the best among American music titles”
– The Wall Street Journal

Decatur, GA (October 29, 2007) – Beginning today, and continuing for the next two weeks, PASTE magazine will be offering one-year subscriptions—and readers can name their price! New subscribers can sign up, and loyal subscribers can renew online at www.pastemagazine.com for a minimum payment of $1, though all are encouraged to pay what they think the subscription is worth. Anyone paying more than the $19.95 PASTE typically offers for a one-year (11-issue) subscription will be thanked in print, in a future issue of PASTE.

The campaign came about from a casual conversation at the PASTE offices discussing the recent Radiohead campaign and the Jim Collins book, Good to Great. “We were curious to know what our customers thought we were worth. And what better way to find out, than to let them tell us,” explained PASTE President/Publisher Tim Regan-Porter. “While it’s certainly a bit unconventional, we also see it as a chance to get our product in the hands of people who could become lifelong fans. It’s been our experience that once people become familiar with PASTE, they turn into loyal readers,” added Regan-Porter.

Interested readers can order multiple subscriptions to PASTE, as long as there is a valid mailing address, so even gift subscriptions are encouraged. Each issue of PASTE comes with a CD sampler, so one subscription will give you 11 CDs of great music, in addition to the award-winning writing and entertainment coverage.

Voted “Magazine of the Year” by the PLUG Independent Music Awards for 2006 and 2007, and having won the Grand GAMMA Award (along with 4 Gold awards and 1 Silver award) at the 2007 GAMMA Awards, Paste is rapidly emerging as the go-to source for music and film aficionados.

Paste magazine is one of the fastest growing independently published entertainment magazines in the country, recently named “Magazine of the Year” at the 2007 PLUG Independent Music Awards. Providing thoughtful analysis on the best in film, books and other aspects of popular (and alternative) culture, Paste is the premier magazine for people who still enjoy discovering new music, prize substance and songcraft over fads and manufactured attitude, and appreciate quality music in whatever genre it might inhabit. Now in its sixth year, Paste has grown quickly with international distribution in over 12 countries. Paste is available on newsstands all over the U.S. and Canada. www.pastemagazine.com

Occasionally I wish we had TV; yesterday it was because I was watching ALCS Game 7 on MLB’s Gameday website and pounding the couch because the connection kept dying and the page wasn’t refreshing fast enough. If you haven’t been reading my blog long, you might not have suspected that I come from a long line of Red Sox fans, of the rabid Southie variety. So last night was exciting.

Also? This is nuts.

Hello, internets.

It’s suddenly become very busy around here; Tom’s shoot started today (he was up by 4:30am and may be home by 9pm) and runs almost until Christmas, and my list of projects and deadlines is growing.

I’d been avoiding pitching articles for a while this summer, and considered leaving off until the New Year, but that’s basically been thrown out the window (be careful when you ask the Almighty for guidance) and I’m happily and slightly frightened-ly staring at my list of deadlines. Since I hope and plan to be in grad school in January, and to continue in grad school for roughly a decade, I guess my nice restful post-college era is coming to an end. It’s been fun, but we all know that I prefer to live dangerously.

I went to Barnes & Noble on my lunch break and splurged on the recent issues of two magazines I’m ashamed to have not read previously - Poets & Writers and Blueprint (which I resisted because of the Martha Stewart connection but opened and loved immediately). They’ve gone on my wishlist and I’m awfully glad to have them in my tote bag.

I’m seeing some friends from college on Thursday night - people with whom I spent a lot of time during various high-stress times (student orientation, senior capstone . . .). I’m excited about that. I never really meant to ditch RPI entirely; it’s just that nobody I knew from the class of ‘05 moved to NYC with me. Since then, that’s changed, and I’m glad.

A lot of my internet poking-around activity in the last year has involved trying to hunt up a good website for logging my books. Chainreading wasn’t interactive enough, LibraryThing didn’t have the features I wanted, and I had trouble finding anything that worked exactly as I wanted. But I finally took a look at Goodreads recently, and I’m hooked. It’s excellent. Here’s my page - add me, if you have an account!

This right brain/left brain test is fascinating me. Apparently most people would see the dancer turning counter-clockwise; I see her turning clockwise, and I can’t even make it reverse. Perhaps I’m more strongly right-brained than I thought. (HT: kottke)

Update: Oh wait, I made her reverse. By thinking about math problems. And now I can suddenly make her switch off by concentrating on thoughts of colors vs. number or punctuation. FREAKY.

Pygmalion was quite good, and I can heartily recommend it for anyone in New York . . . if you can get tickets. Claire Danes is going to lose her voice from it, but she and the rest of the cast are delightful, and Jefferson Mays is as far from Rex Harrison’s Henry Higgins as you can really get (and more believable because of it).

Saw Eastern Promises on Saturday. It’s graphically brutal and bloody in a few choice spots (I closed my eyes). However, not only is David Cronenberg a confirmed genius (storytelling, the look of it, everything is just so interesting), but Viggo Mortensen has finally reached the upper echelon of my personal list of great living actors, playing a member of the Russian mafia in London with completely convincingly and without any hints of Aragorn. Not for the faint of heart, though.

We met with friends who are in from Scotland for their first trip to the US. (NYC is a very weird place to go on a first trip to the US, too.) We brought them out to Brooklyn, and after they got lost and then found again, we had dinner at Miracle Grill (southwestern American), then dessert at the Cocoa Bar. They were intrigued by the discovery of blue corn, which, we informed them, does indeed grow in the US and does not involve food coloring. Who knew?

On Sunday, the Village Church had our annual outdoor service in Washington Square Park:

It was actually the first one I’d gone to, and it was a lot of fun. Perfect weather, plenty of people dropping by to listen in, and some really good discussion during the question & answer time. It’s so good to hear people asking civil questions and giving civil answers in a public forum, you know?

Afterwards Tom and I went to see Across the Universe, which was a giant disappointment and probably not worth your ticket money unless you’re really, really into Julie Taymor or the Beatles. The acting was ok, and the music was totally re-imagined and therefore fun to listen to, but the story and script were so bad that it was dead in the water. I think she was trying to make an extended music video, but . . . it wasn’t. It’s quite lovely to look at, but wait and rent it. (And most of the people walking out of the theater were saying that as well.)

Tomorrow night we’re seeing Flight of the Red Balloon in press screenings at the New York Film Festival. We’ve only just seen another of Hsiao-hsien Hou’s earlier films (the lovely and meditative Cafe Lumiere) and saw Three Times last year when it was in theaters; this one is actually in French and stars Juliette Binoche.

On a non-movie note, we had some standing credit at the local Community Bookstore (they have the best fiction section EVER), and Tom went by the other day and brought home Annie Dillard’s new book The Maytrees and an older Lorrie Moore book, Anagrams. Can’t wait to tackle them.

Lastly, we were introduced to this last night while having dinner with our friends Victoria and Sam. Enjoy.

Looks like we were ahead of the Times. (Haha). (via Angela)

Remember ours?

I’ve been a little obsessed with the story in this week’s double issue of the New Yorker about high-flying wine counterfeiters since I read it last weekend. I think it’s a great story. (A great movie?)

Anyhow, if you’re not a subscriber, you can now read it here.

Starting in 1980, Rodenstock began holding lavish annual wine tastings, weekend-long affairs attended by wine critics, retailers, and various German dignitaries and celebrities. He opened scores of old and rare wines, all provided at his own expense, and served in custom-made “Rodenstock” glasses that were supplied by his friend the glassmaker Georg Riedel. Impeccably dressed, wearing stylish Rodenstock eyeglasses and shirts with stiff white collars, he bantered with guests, exclaiming, over an especially fine bottle, “Ja, unglaublich! One hundred points!” He was punctilious about being on time, barring latecomers, and when serving older wines he banned spitting, which prompted some guests, alarmed at the number of bottles they would be sampling, to hide spittoons in their laps. “You don’t spit away history,” Rodenstock admonished them. “You drink it.”

Rodenstock made no secret of having discovered the Jefferson bottles; on the contrary, the record sale to Forbes had made him a celebrity in the wine world. In the spring of 1985, he would later explain, he received a phone call about an interesting discovery in Paris, where someone had stumbled upon some dusty old bottles, each inscribed with the letters “Th.J.” Rodenstock refused to reveal who had sold him the bottles, but apparently the seller did not realize the significance of the initials. “It was like the lottery,” Rodenstock said of the experience. “It was simply good luck.” He would not say how many bottles there were—in some accounts, it was “a dozen or so,” in others, as many as thirty. Nor would he disclose the address in Paris where they were discovered.

Terra Nova Church, in my hometown, is co-sponsoring two really awesome events at the end of September during Abolition week, including screenings of Amazing Grace and a concert with the wonderful Derek Webb along with Hundred Monkey Theory, a band with many of my Troy-based friends. Read about it here.

Of course, it’s the one weekend we have plans so far that month (it’s family weekend at my brother’s college, which will be awesome in its own right), but if you’re in the area you should definitely check it out. Derek almost never gets up into the northeast, and he has a lot of good things to say.