I have an article published at Comment today, and, as on every Friday, there’s a new edition of The Curator.
I review Doubt and Adam Resurrected in Christianity Today, um, today.
An Interview with Katie Herzig
Part 1
By Tom Wilkinson
The first of a three-part interview with singer/songwriter Katie Herzig.
Wax On, Wax Off:
Reflections on the Karate Kid
By Christy Tennant
Rediscovering your favorite movie of all time.
On a Year of Vegetarianism
By Wayne Adams
It’s amazing what a year-long experiment in giving up meat can teach you.
What Ghosts Teach:
Oliver Sacks’s Awakenings, Part I
By Rebecca Tirrell Talbot
What could being asleep for fifty years, and then awakening, teach a person about life?
Boffo Socko Jaco
By Kevin Gosa
Bassist Jaco Pastorius’ seminal work, The Birthday Concert.
Belief in the Bones
By Alisa Harris
Rationalism, mystery, and forensic science - in prime time.
Choosing Creation Over Destruction
By Matt Cox
A brief profile of the father of video games, Shigeru Miyamoto.
Chocolate Tasting
By Daniel Nayeri
Want to knock your significant other’s socks off?
3191: A Year of Beautiful, Ordinary Mornings
By Jenni Simmons
A long-distance friendship spawns an intimate photographic examination of daily life.
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.
My reviews today - Changeling (disappointing, but probably worth a watch) and Synecdoche, New York (freaking amazing).
Truth in Advertising
By Kevin Gosa
Tired of advertisers making you feel less than human?
Never Underestimate the Power of Cartoons
By Christy Tennant
Political cartoons: child’s play, or public conscience?
Broken Windows and Internet Civility
By Alissa Wilkinson
Could better internet aesthetics make for better virtual neighborhoods?
Keep Up the Conversation:
A Reflection on David Foster Wallace
By Rebecca Tirrell Talbot
Considering the work and life of a great writer, and what his death means for us.
On Fantasy Fiction;
Or, You Should Read Cyndere’s Midnight
By Annie Young Frisbie
In defense of speculative fiction and great stories, and an introduction to one such tale.
A Red Balloon of Hope
(Part 2)
By Jenni Simmons
Part two of our interview with singer/songwriter Sandra McCracken.
Many lamented the passing of music magazine No Depression this year, but it’s apparently been resurrected in “bookazine” form.
Sandra McCracken: A Red Balloon of Hope (Part 1)
By Jenni Simmons
Part one of a two-part interview with singer/songwriter Sandra McCracken.
Playing God on Private Practice
By Alisa Harris
Bioethics makes an appearance on prime-time television.
Sugar
By Daniel Nayeri
Sugar will kill you, right?
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.
I pontificated a little on my favorite digital meal-planning tools, shopping habits, and some notes on shopping at natural food grocery stores at ConversantLife.
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.
The second edition of The Curator went live this morning, with four excellent new articles. Here is the table of contents:
Caramel
Daniel Nayeri
Caramel is the saddest thing.
Shutting Up Our Inner Censors
Alisa Harris
Michael Chabon, blogging, writer’s block, and learning to speak the truth.
Wii Are the World
Matt Cox
Can a video game help us regain community?
She Spoke to Silence
Jenni Simmons
Vassar Miller: beauty, humor, and poetry in the physically broken.
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.
In all the excitement, I’d forgotten that I have an article in Comment today about Tara Donovan’s work.
And our good friend Albert is Comment’s featured artist this week.
Well, bloglets, I have successfully launched The Curator and am officially testing the waters of grassroots, no-budget, almost-entirely-digital marketing. I’m intrigued to see how far the interwebs can go in generating traffic for a web publication with no official marketing. Stay tuned.
This is my last full-time day, and a short one at that; we close a little early for the holiday. So I’ll shortly be heading out to spend the evening on a bus, fighting our way through the traffic (oh dear) to south Jersey, where I’ll be chilling on the beach (or in the cottage, since it looks like rain tomorrow) with Tom and my grandparents and possibly my Mom and trying not to do anything too productive. Last year we young’uns (that would be Tom and I) hit the boardwalk for mini-golf, arcade games, and cotton candy, and I’m expecting similar pursuits. And salt-water taffy.
We’ll be back in town Monday night to start the autumn with a vengeance - screenings, class, new jobs, all that good stuff. My favorite part of the year.
Check it out, and leave comments here if you have anything to say!
The Curator is the web-based magazine I’ve been busily working to launch all summer; we’re hoping to have the first “issue” published at the end of August. Become a fan on Facebook to get updates and information as we near the launch date!
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.
I interrupt this brief stay-cation to mention that I have an article on Slow Food and buying local at Comment today.
Iron Man: the review, in far too few words. As Tom summarized over dinner last night and I briefly mention in the review, the genius of the film is that Stark has no real superpowers except privilege and wealth. Tom pointed out that he’s a prototype for what we all want, for those with power and privilege (that’s us, folks) to stop pointing fingers and take responsibility for righting wrongs.
I left work early on Friday to have lunch with the lovely Liz, who I’ve known through a couple different mutual friends for a while but hadn’t met. She was on her way from DC to visit her brother and had a stopover between bus and train in town, so we ate dutiful salads at a random Europa Cafe (oh, NYC lunch chains) and shared a kahlua brownie and talked for a couple hours. It was splendid.
I then went to see Made of Honor for a review which should be in WORLD (print!) soon. It was not very good, but it wasn’t painful. That’s about all I can say. Afterwards I headed downtown and jotted down the substance of my review before heading to a ukelele extravaganza at the Bowery Poetry Club, then the Half Pint with a horde. Definitely one of the better Fridays I’ve had lately.
On Saturday our dear Colleen came over; she was in town for a few days after moving home to Anchorage last year, and she’s headed Dublin-ward to Trinity this fall, and I am very excited for her. We had burgers at 67 Burger and then picked up some groceries. Alisa came by later on, and we ate copious waffles and drank rosé and discussed good books before everyone went home.
After church on Sunday, we had a lovely relaxing brunch in the garden behind Palma, and dinner at the Stone Home Wine Bar around the corner from us, all with friends. I also finished Brideshead Revisited and started Saturday, which is amazing.
Today I had one triumph - I convinced the university that I am properly immunized and managed to register for the Moby-Dick class. I’ve already bought the books, so I’m glad there were no snags. I am very excited for this class to start. I’m playing at being a grad student in the English department this summer, what with Moby-Dick and the British novel class, and I have to say, I think it’s a good way to spend the summer.
A relatively open week for me, besides work. I don’t even have class. On Friday I’m going to An Evening with Michel Gondry at the Museum of the Moving Image, and perhaps a tiny féte afterwards, and Saturday brings an Albany-bound train for Mother’s Day. I haven’t been home or seen my mom since January, and I’m very much looking forward to it. She tells me the Tulip Festival is brightening the pretty part of downtown Albany, and maybe we’ll get to see it this year.
Lastly, my review of Harmony Korine’s newest, Mister Lonely, is in this issue of Paste, but it’s also online. I tried, but I wasn’t a huge fan.
We moved to Fort Greene yesterday. Yes, we did. We have wonderful friends who came and helped us with about a day’s notice and everything is in our apartment now, though we need to send some stuff out to live in Tom’s old room in his parents’ house in New Jersey. But after working all day, it’s in livable condition. And though we’ll always miss living in the Slope, we like it here very much.
In the meantime, however, interesting things were published in Comment:
• An article on the “blog.mode” exhibit that just closed at the Met, or is about to, written by me.
• An interview with our own dear Dan Nayeri, writer of The Cult of Sincerity and various forthcoming things and pastry chef extraordinaire (you think I am kidding, but I’m not).
Ok, that’s enough for now. The two weeks ahead are enormously full of ridiculous amounts of things to do and I need a little rest before that begins.
I wrote about two recent movies, La Misma Luna and The Visitor, and about making movies about illegal immigrants.
The Cult of Sincerity premieres today on YouTube! It’s already gotten a ton of traffic today. Go check out the comments, then watch the movie.
If you’re still not convinced, here’s the trailer:
In other news, we are definitely moving. Probably next week. Details still to be determined.
And of course, work never slows down - here’s my review of My Blueberry Nights.