Hello, faithful readers. We are indeed back in a very sweltering New York City, and have been since Sunday night.
In case you missed the memo, we were in Boston for a couple weeks and then in Albany. We had a wonderfully relaxing and rejuvenating time. I will soon be posting sort of a “roundup” of what we did (I wrote our activities each day in a Boston City Moleskine). But briefly, in many ways we did the literary loop of the general area, including Cambridge, Concord, and a whole lot of historic areas, plus a couple of concerts, a lot of phenomenal foodie experiences, and plenty of just sitting in TeaLuxe and reading. I finished a lousy book and a much better one and started two others. And we froze in the chilly Massachusetts weather; not that it was very cold, but we were in sweltering-NYC-mode when we packed and didn’t have enough sweaters. C’est la vie. Oh, and my brother successfully graduated from high school. We are officially old.
I have been up to my ears in work of every variety since I got back and have barely had time to relax, so more later.
Apparently Josh Ritter has a new album coming out in August and it’s going to sound a little something like this…
Trailers are out for three movies I’ve been waiting for all year, plus one film I’ve been waiting all year to get out of my life.
The first is only a teaser trailer and the film actually won’t come out until summer 2008, but it’s nice to see Pixar rocking it all over the place with their new movie Ratatouille coming out in a week and a half to rave reviews. Wall-E is the creation of Andrew Stanton, director of my favorite Pixar movie Finding Nemo. That film set a new bar for the beautiful work that can be done with CGI; the underwater lighting is truly a marvel. I think my favorite part of this trailer, though, is the music. It makes me want to dance.
The second comes from one of Alissa’s and my favorite directors, P.T. Anderson (Boogie Nights, Magnolia). Based on Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil!, There Will Be Blood has me a little worried considering it’s P.T.’s first adaptation. On top of that, the trailer is a little odd, it doesn’t get me all that excited. No matter, the film should be great!
In terms of Hollywood, I Am Legend took over New York for shooting this year, at various times shutting down the Fifth Avenue and the Brooklyn Bridge. It didn’t affect my life too much, but it is nice when the big productions finally leave. For all of that though I think the trailer rocks; Will Smith is a great actor, totally underrated.
And my favorite trailer of them all, because it’s the Coen Brothers, because it got wonderful reviews at Cannes, because it’s based on a Cormac McCarthy book, because I’m currently reading another Cormac McCarthy book and want to adapt it into a movie, and because that book currently has me obsessed with modern day westerns, No Country For Old Men stands to be one of my favorite movies of the year. I just felt like calling it now.
Jerry Seinfeld’s thank you speech is hysterical, skewering awards shows for what they are, and I think it’s among the best ever given.
We saw Dave Brubeck in concert last night at Harvard. He is way too old to be that sprightly on the piano, but there you have it. I hope I’m that great when I’m 88.
So we’ll be on a train in about three hours bound for Boston, and we’ll be gone for two weeks. You may or may not hear from us in that timeframe. Don’t abandon us! We’ll be back. (Perhaps even with pictures!)
I just finished working on a film where the director had an idea, but didn’t know how to make choices to execute it. Similarly, despite all our bashing of Hollywood blockbusters, Noel Murray makes a good argument over at the AV Club:
Not so long ago, the big summer blockbusters were being helmed by the likes of Roland Emmerich, Chuck Russell, Stephen Sommers, Simon West and Dominic Sena - all middling technicians with no clear vision - and Michael Bay, a visionary with no finesse. The movies were frequently sloppy, ugly, and dispiriting. By contrast, [Sam] Raimi (Spider-man 1-3) and [Gore] Verbinski (Pirates of the Carribean) make movies with personality, crafted with skill. Critics and film buffs may not like that personality, but they should at least appreciate that definite choices were made, by directors with a clear plan in mind. They’ve given us something intelligible to engage with.
It’s like the difference between arguing politics with a newspaper columnist and arguing politics with a Jerry Springer guest. Both may be an exercise in futility, but at least the former will give you a chance to use your wits, if you choose to take it.
On another note, I’ve noticed that the number of musician biopics has gone up since the success of Ray. Last year it was Walk the Line. This year we have La Vie en Rose (about Édith Piaf), Todd Haynes’s tangential Bob Dylan flick I’m Not There, Anton Corbijn’s Control about Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis, and, of course, Across the Universe Julie Taymor’s Beatles extravaganza. Then in development are biopics on Janis Joplin (starring Zooey Deschanel), Miles Davis (Don Cheadle) and a project about Keith Moon, the Who’s drummer (starring Mike Myers). (courtesy of GreenCine)
You knew I’d blog about this: Writers weigh in on their recent favorite books. I haven’t read ANY of the books, but the authors are worth listening to (among them Dave Eggers, Stephen King, Jonathan Safran Foer, Nicole Krauss, and Jeffrey Eugenides).
I spent Saturday writing, mostly, and Tom was at work. I turned out a behemoth of an article and I’m uncharacteristically having a hard time cutting it down. Through a bloodletting I managed to get 400 words cut today but I still may have 400 more, which means cutting a major point. Thankfully, I have a good editor, so we’ll see what she says.
Yesterday was my darling husband’s 25th birthday. We had a grand time after church at lunch with 15-or-so people at Khyber Pass (Afghani). We chose it partially because there’s inexplicably never anyone there when we go. The food is great, the price is right, you can sit in the window if your group is small enough, and we’ve been half a dozen times.
Tom’s parents drove us out to Brooklyn and helped install the air conditioning, thankfully, so we slept soundly last night for the first time in a month (cool air, and since the windows were closed, we didn’t hear the trucks or the very loud drunk people that are invariably outside at 3am). Bliss.
As I’ve mentioned a bit, I’m deeply into and enamored with The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. Naturally, I looked him up on Wikipedia and ended up on an essay by Kathryn Chetkovich, Franzen’s girlfriend, called “Envy”. You can read it here. It captures succinctly the difficulties of two people in a relationship, particularly when one or the other suddenly has success. It’s a difficulty that both of us face on a regular basis, and I find it’s a tricky balancing act; on the one hand, I’m totally delighted when Tom gets a great film job or takes a great picture, but on the other hand, I have my own pursuits in which I wish to find success. It’s been a particular struggle as I work a day job that sometimes seems like it’s in the way of doing the things I should be doing, but at the same time, I know I’m called here for a purpose.
Anyhow, this quote was particularly interesting.
My friends, trying to be helpful, had this to say: ‘I could never do that, be involved with a writer who was that much more successful than I was.’
But really: why not? Partly, I suppose, because a fellow writer’s success makes it that much harder to console oneself with thoughts of what Virginia Woolf called ‘the world’s notorious indifference’. The world, Woolf said, ‘does not ask people to write poems and novels and histories; it does not need them. It does not care whether Flaubert finds the right word or whether Carlyle scrupulously verifies this or that fact.’ So when the man was merely gifted but not particularly rewarded, I was comfortable; we were in it together, comrades in a world that didn’t care what we had to tell it. But now, what did his success prove, if not that when the gift is prodigious enough, the world does need us, it will pay?
When the subject of his success came up, often enough a friend would say, ‘The great thing is he really deserves it.’ Were they kidding? This was precisely what made it so hard. For once, the gods hadn’t made the stupid mistake of smiling on another no-talent, well-connected charlatan. No, this was a genuinely excellent piece of work by a man who had dedicated his life to doing such work and was now being rewarded for it. Proof that the system was not essentially corrupt and misguided, incapable of recognizing true merit, after all.
Where was the comfort in that?
A year ago, I moved to Brooklyn; I can’t really believe it’s been a year, but there you have it. I’ve lived in Brooklyn longer than I lived in Manhattan, two weeks longer, and I love the borough, though we still hope to move back to the Village some day. I’m in a lovely cafe fifteen blocks south of my apartment because we still don’t have air conditioning and the air in the apartment is too muddy to breathe.
This all means I’m coming up on two years in New York City. I mentioned this to mom recently and she sort of gasped. “How things have changed,” she said, and she’s right. In those two years I’ve graduated from college, ended one relationship, began another, got married, moved twice. My father was diagnosed with leukemia a few months after I moved here; he passed away last August, right before my wedding. My brother went to “real school” for the first time, after eleven years of homeschooling, and he’ll graduate from high school in three weeks. My mother went back to work in an office for the first time since my brother was born eighteen years ago, and my family moved from the rural house where I spent my teenage years to the house where my mother grew up. Our lives bear almost no resemblance to what they were two years ago, in some good ways and some very sorrowful ways. But I suppose that is what makes a life; the changes.
Also, tomorrow is Tom’s 25th birthday. He’ll be two years older than me for about five months. (Okay, I know that’s bad math, but math is not my strong point.)
A chuckle. Check out this user review on Amazon of Pride and Prejudice.
(Actually, more like a sob.) (via Kari)
I forgot to mention - we saw the Irish film Once this week. It is fantastic. It’s a music film, with songs by two people you’ve probably never heard of (at least if you’re from the U.S.), but three days later the songs are still running through my head and we’re buying the album. The musicians and lead actors are Glen Hansard, Irish singer-songwriter and frontman for The Frames, and Marketa Irglova, a Czech classically-trained pianist and singer.
Unlike a lot of “music films” (and definitely the antithesis to the upcoming Across the Universe), it’s wholly realistic and beautifully restrained. If it comes to your town, it’s well worth seeing; if not, then rent it when it comes out on DVD. And dig up the songs on iTunes.
Caveat: It’s rated R, entirely for language because it’s an Irish film and they drop the F-bomb a lot (but not in the obscene sense). I don’t think it would be offensive to anyone who’s been around college students.
Our summer reading Amazon order just arrived in four separate boxes, since I sometimes order used from Amazon, and sometimes new.
Want to know what was inside?
For our trip to Boston -
• Moleskine Boston City Notebook
• Lonely Planet Boston (my preferred travel book series)
To make us better photographers -
• Magic Lantern Guides: Canon EOS 5D (a more expanded and useful manual for our camera)
• Master Lighting Guide for Portrait Photographers - Christopher Grey
• The Best of Wedding Photojournalism: Techniques and Images from the Pros - Bill Hurter
Tom’s chosen books -
• Atonement - Ian McEwan
• The Road - Cormac McCarthy (I will definitely read this before the summer is out, too)
• The Big Sleep - Raymond Chandler
And for me -
• The Year of Magical Thinking - Joan Didion
• The Death and Life of Great American Cities - Jane Jacobs
• The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community - Ray Oldenburg
I love new books (and used ones, too).
Kate Spade has, of all things, a really cool bookshelf thing on their website. I can’t explain, just check it out.