Lovely Day

January 2012: Ode on Intimations of Immortality

2012-01-27T10:47:00.009-05:00

Now, Wordworth's Ode on Imitations of Immortality is a poem about springtime, but we've had a bit of spring here in January, haven't we? Hours spent reading in the sunshine, on a bench by the river. Bundling up only to shed two layers on my brisk walk uphill to the train. I've ridden my bike to work this week! Springtime indeed.

It's also a poem about regret of an ending, an anxiousness that you didn't drink it all in, that you didn't live it right. It's about mourning a lightheartedness that fades with knowledge and education and experience. It's a dark one, no doubt. But electric in its sense of gratitude and anticipation. John and I read it the other night-- surprised at ourselves for doing such things, but thankful just the same. Those Romantics understood it--- this crazy, temping spring.

Ode: Intimations of Immortality

William Wordsworth

Intimations of Immortality From Recollections of Early Childhood

I

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore;--
Turn wheresoe’er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen
I now can see no more.

II

The Rainbow comes and goes,
And lovely is the Rose,
The Moon doth with delight
Look round her when the heavens are bare,
Waters on a starry night
Are beautiful and fair;
The sunshine is a glorious birth;
But yet I know, where’er I go,
That there hath past away a glory from the earth.

III

Now, while the birds thus sing a joyous song,
And while the young lambs bound
As to the tabor’s sound,
To me alone there came a thought of grief:
A timely utterance gave that thought relief,
And I again am strong:
The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep;
No more shall grief of mine the season wrong;
I hear the Echoes through the mountains throng,
The Winds come to me from the fields of sleep,
And all the earth is gay;
Land and sea
Give themselves up to jollity,
And with the heart of May
Doth every Beast keep holiday;--
Thou Child of Joy,
Shout round me, let me hear thy shouts, thou happy
Shepherd-boy!

IV

Ye blessed Creatures, I have heard the call
Ye to each other make; I see
The heavens laugh with you in your jubilee;
My heart is at your festival,
My head hath its coronal,
The fulness of your bliss, I feel--I feel it all.
Oh evil day! if I were sullen
While Earth herself is adorning,
This sweet May-morning,
And the Children are culling
On every side,
In a thousand valleys far and wide,
Fresh flowers; while the sun shines warm,
And the Babe leaps up on his Mother’s arm:--
I hear, I hear, with joy I hear!
--But there’s a Tree, of many, one,
A single Field which I have looked upon,
Both of them speak of something that is gone:
The Pansy at my feet
Doth the same tale repeat:
Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?

V

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But He beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature’s Priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.

VI

Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own;
Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind,
And, even with something of a Mother’s mind,
And no unworthy aim,
The homely Nurse doth all she can
To make her Foster-child, her Inmate Man,
Forget the glories he hath known,
And that imperial palace whence he came.

VII

Behold the Child among his new-born blisses,
A six years’ Darling of a pigmy size!
See, where ’mid work of his own hand he lies,
Fretted by sallies of his mother’s kisses,
With light upon him from his father’s eyes!
See, at his feet, some little plan or chart,
Some fragment from his dream of human life,
Shaped by himself with newly-learned art;
A wedding or a festival,
A mourning or a funeral;
And this hath now his heart,
And unto this he frames his song:
Then will he fit his tongue
To dialogues of business, love, or strife;
But it will not be long
Ere this be thrown aside
And with new joy and pride
The little Actor cons another part;
Filling from time to time his "humorous stage"
With all the Persons, down to palsied Age,
That Life brings with her in her equipage;
As if his whole vocation
Were endless imitation.

VIII

Thou, whose exterior semblance doth belie
Thy Soul’s immensity;
Thou best Philosopher, who yet dost keep
Thy heritage, thou Eye among the blind,
That, deaf and silent, read’st the eternal deep,
Haunted for ever by the eternal mind,--
Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!
On whom those truths do rest,
Which we are toiling all our lives to find,
In darkness lost, the darkness of the grave;
Thou, over whom thy Immortality
Broods like the Day, a Master o’er a Slave,
A Presence which is not to be put by;
Thou little Child, yet glorious in the might
Of heaven-born freedom on thy being’s height,
Why with such earnest pains dost thou provoke
The years to bring the inevitable yoke,
Thus blindly with thy blessedness at strife?
Full soon thy Soul shall have her earthly freight,
And custom lie upon thee with a weight
Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life!

IX

O joy! that in our embers
Is something that doth live,
That nature yet remembers
What was so fugitive!
The thought of our past years in me doth breed
Perpetual benediction: not indeed
For that which is most worthy to be blest--
Delight and liberty, the simple creed
Of Childhood, whether busy or at rest,
With new-fledged hope still fluttering in his breast:--
Not for these I raise
The song of thanks and praise;
But for those obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings;
Blank misgivings of a Creature
Moving about in worlds not realised,
High instincts before which our mortal Nature
Did tremble like a guilty Thing surprised:
But for those first affections,
Those shadowy recollections,
Which, be they what they may,
Are yet the fountain light of all our day,
Are yet a master light of all our seeing;
Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make
Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal Silence: truths that wake,
To perish never;
Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour,
Nor Man nor Boy,
Nor all that is at enmity with joy,
Can utterly abolish or destroy!
Hence in a season of calm weather
Though inland far we be,
Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither,
Can in a moment travel thither,
And see the Children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.

X

Then sing, ye Birds, sing, sing a joyous song!
And let the young Lambs bound
As to the tabor’s sound!
We in thought will join your throng,
Ye that pipe and ye that play,
Ye that through your hearts to-day
Feel the gladness of the May!
What though the radiance which was once so bright
Be now for ever taken from my sight,
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind;
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be;
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering;
In the faith that looks through death,
In years that bring the philosophic mind.

XI

And O, ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves,
Forebode not any severing of our loves!
Yet in my heart of hearts I feel your might;
I only have relinquished one delight
To live beneath your more habitual sway.
I love the Brooks which down their channels fret,
Even more than when I tripped lightly as they;
The innocent brightness of a new-born Day
Is lovely yet;
The Clouds that gather round the setting sun
Do take a sober colouring from an eye
That hath kept watch o’er man’s mortality;
Another race hath been, and other palms are won.
Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

Simon Rich: Center of the Universe

2012-01-06T16:22:00.004-05:00

This week's Shouts & Murmurs is obnoxiously accurate and undeniably brilliant. Have you read it yet? Eh hem:

On the fourth day, God created stars, to divide the light from the darkness. He was almost finished when He looked at His cell phone and realized that it was almost nine-thirty.

“Fuck,” He said. “Kate’s going to kill me.”

He finished the star He was working on and cabbed it back to the apartment.

“Sorry I’m late!” He said.

And lo: she did not even respond.

“Are you hungry?” He asked. “Let there be yogurt!” And there was that weird lo-cal yogurt that she liked.

“That’s not going to work this time,” she said.

“Look,” God said, “I know we’re going through a hard time right now. But this job is only temporary. As soon as I pay off my student loans, I’m going to switch to something with better hours.”

And she said unto Him, “I work a full-time job and I still make time for you.”

And He said unto her, “Yeah, but your job’s different.”

And lo: He knew immediately that He had made a terrible mistake.

...

They bought some beers at a bodega and drank them on a bench in Prospect Park. And Kate introduced Him to a game her friend Jenny had taught her, called Would You Rather?

“I don’t know if I want to play a game,” God said. But she made Him play anyway, and after a few rounds He saw that it was good. They played all afternoon, laughing at each other’s responses. When it got cold, God rubbed her shoulders and she kissed Him on the neck.

“You know what I kind of want to do right now?” Kate said. God tensed up.

“What?”

“See a movie,” she said.

And God laughed, because it was exactly what He wanted to do.

They decided to see “The Muppets,” because they had heard that it was good. They had a great time, and when it was over God paid for a cab so they wouldn’t have to wait all night for the L train.

And the Cantilevered Inference Shall Hold the Day

2011-12-31T10:54:00.001-05:00

And the Cantilevered Inference Shall Hold the Day

by Michael Blumenthal

Things are not as they seem: the innuendo of everything makes
itself felt and trembles towards meanings we never intuited
or dreamed. Take, for example, how the warbler, perched on a

mere branch, can kidnap the day from its tediums and send us
heavenwards, or how, held up by nothing we really see, our
spirits soar and then, in a mysterious series of twists and turns,

come to a safe landing in a field, encircled by greenery. Nothing
I can say to you here can possibly convince you that a man
as unreliable as I have been can smuggle in truths between tercets

and quatrains on scraps of paper, but the world as we know
is full of surprises, and the likelihood that here, in the shape
of this very bird, redemption awaits us should not be dismissed

so easily. Each year, days swivel and diminish along their inscrutable
axes, then lengthen again until we are bathed in light we were not
prepared for. Last night, lying in bed with nothing to hold onto

but myself, I gazed at the emptiness beside me and saw there, in the
shape of absence, something so sweet and deliberate I called it darling.
No one who encrusticates (I made that up!) his silliness in a bowl,

waiting for sanctity, can ever know how lovely playfulness can be,
and, that said, let me wish you a Merry One (or Chanukah if you
prefer), and may whatever holds you up stay forever beneath you,

and may the robin find many a worm, and our cruelties abate,
and may you be well and happy and full of mischief as I am,
and may all your nothings, too, hold something up and sing.

Black Mountain Wine House

2011-12-19T16:15:00.014-05:00

I know. I know, I know, I know. I've been away from this space for a million years (since Halloween? Eeks.) But life has been a little nutty recently and I didn't feel like writing. That's just the truth. That's real life. Life got weird and then it got bad and then better, and now it's just plain BETTER and I'm back and I'm fine and let's talk about wine!

This Christmas, instead exchanging gifts, two of my girlfriends and I treated ourselves to dinner and told each other how appreciative we are of each other. It started out as a joke, (it sounds so lame and corny, doesn't it?) but in the end it was really lovely. How often do you do that with your girlfriends? Just look them straight in the eye and say 'I really like this about you'? Not enough! Maybe never! It's a little awkward! But-- as a wise woman once said--- I like corny. I've been looking for corny. My friends said that they appreciate me for the good advice that I give. Isn't that the nicest!? Thanks, girls. I love my gift.

This little verbal gift exchange took place at one of my favorite spots in ~~New York~~ the world-- Black Mountain Wine House in Carroll Gardens. I wasn't initially going to share the name of this little gem in fear of it becoming garishly crowded and famous, but another bloggie already gave it up today, and, well, sharing is the right thing to do. We sat in the back corner, right next to the most perfect little fireplace, sipped champagne, and then Pinot Noir, munched on cheese and meatballs, and just plain enjoyed ourselves.

In addition to our appreciation conversation we talked about 2011 in it's entirety. We went month-by-month and rehashed the craziness of being women in our 20s figuring it all out. Katie lived in Germany for the first six months of 2011. Alison got to spend an entire week in Miami with her sweet mother. I traveled to Florida three times this year (what?!)--- the first time alone, the second time with a boy, and the third time in panic. Life is weird!

And now it's suddenly Christmastime and I've never been more ready to celebrate. Cheers, my lovelies. Here's to us.

Shocktober

2011-10-31T14:38:00.006-04:00

Boo!

This time of year always feels busier than the rest-- summer is over and the art world wakes up and suddenly it's Halloween and I completely missed out on seeing the fall leaves upstate. Is there still time? My sources tell me no but I'm trying not to think about it. It has already snowed.

This year in particular has been busier than ever. As of November 3rd I will be sitting at a new desk with a new commute and new coffee carts and new everything. I am leaving my job at the magazine and moving to a Chelsea gallery on Wednesday. This is actually happening! TRICK OR TREAT!

It's also my birthday today, did you know that? I was born on Halloween twenty-something years ago today. The doctor who delivered me was dressed up as a vampire and my dad's friend requested 'Sarah' by Jefferson Starship to play on the local Kalamazoo radio. It's not a very good song but how sweet of him!

I want to say here, in this little space of mine in the blogosphere, that it will all soon slow down. Once I start my new job and figure out a routine, everything will just stop spinning so quickly. But I know better. Halloween marks the gateway to turkeys and gift wrapping and kissing at midnight. And if I play my cards right I'll be pulling my hair out in Miami one month from today. Deep breath.

Happy Halloween, my lovelies. Keep it classy out there.

Hey Marseilles: Rio

2011-10-05T11:12:00.003-04:00

Who are these people?! Loving this song and all of the happy dancing in the video. Thanks Ali!

Miami, part I

2011-09-30T16:19:00.006-04:00

One week ago today I was laying on this beach in Miami covered in salt and sand, giddy over this cloud formation. Have you ever seen a more perfect cloud? I kept thinking that any second cherubs would burst through in song. Shortly after, I would walk to the Raleigh hotel, order a peach daiquiri, and discuss the evening ahead, happy as a clam.

Let's go back, wanna? New York is exhausting me this week. Woof.

Books & Books

2011-09-27T07:50:00.016-04:00

Boo! I'm still here!

Back three weeks later, it seems, but with a worthy round up of summer book recs, all licked up and passed along to a lucky few of you. I highly recommend any and all of these titles. HIGHLY. I toted them along with me this summer to the beach, on the plane, in grassy parks, to coffee shops, and in my bed on Sunday mornings when sleeping in once again failed me. All summer, I've been chattering away about Patti Smith and Bennie Salazar, Robert Cohn and Lady Brett Ashely with friends and with strangers with excitement and urgency. MMMmmm, a delicious summer it has been indeed.

"Yet you could feel a vibration in the air, a sense of hastening. It had started with the moon, inaccessible poem that it was. Now men had walked upon it, rubber treads on a pearl of the gods. Perhaps it was an awareness of time passing, the last summer of the decade. Sometimes I just wanted to raise my hands and stop. But stop what? Maybe just growing up."

Out of everything I picked up this summer, this book was my favorite.
I loved this book. If you've been in my presence in the past few months, you're more than aware of this, and perhaps writing this down will temper my constant gushing.

Just Kids is Patti Smith's telling of her early days in New York with Robert Mapplethorpe before she became Patti Smith, the rock and roll queen with the hard edges and poetic superiority. In fact, that she even becomes that gritty rocker seems far fetched, up until those last few chapters. Her voice and her telling of this story was surprisingly soft, loving, and protective-- you'll notice it right away.

It's also a love story to New York (choc full of passion, lust, heartbreak, and tragedy) and an homage to the late 60s and early 70s spent here on these streets. She allows us entry to that electric time spent at the Chelsea Hotel, Max's Kansas City, and CBGBs. She started out in Clinton Hill, did you know that? My heart skipped a bit when I read her cross streets-- just blocks from my first real apartment in this city.

Old news, (what, with the Pulitzer) but this one's worth your time! A Visit From The Goon Squad opens with one of the best first chapters of all time then snatches the main character out from under us to tell a story that spans 50 years and three continents, jumping through time and voice. It's about rock-and-roll and dreams and what becomes of us all eventually. It's also a relatively quick read, choc full of wit and intelligence.

Fun fact: Egan found out about the Pulitzer while lunching at Olea in Fort Greene-- my favorite!

My cover doesn't look like this, because I bought my copy at Powell's in Portland, and it's probably a first edition or something. Jealous, much?

I think I've ragged on enough about Hemingway and his short stories on this bloggy, so just trust me that they are GOOD, RELEVANT, and not all about hunting and wars!

Remember GATZ? Well, shortly after finishing The Sun Also Rises, I was offered a plus-one ticket to see the Elevator Repair Services' The Select (The Sun Also Rises.) Such a treat! If only this pattern followed suit in the rest of my life! (Oh, you liked Just Kids? Here's a free front row seat to see Patti Smith. Oh, you liked Harry Potter? Welcome to Hogwarts!)

And if you really want to enter the world of Hemingway's Lost Generation, read this one with a liquor cabinet nearby. So boozy! (So awesome.)

This is my current read, compliments of one Miss Lo Ashley Hoffman. I should be done with it by now, as I sat staring at a pool for what must have been a grand total of 20 hours in the past few days. But my brain apparently turned to mush in Miami and all I could possibly bring myself to read was the cocktail menu. ("Four Falanghinas please. No, that's just for me. Yes, all at once, thank you.")

Nevertheless, I'm finally entering the world of Fillory and I look forward to sharing more. Anyone want to join me for the ride? Two person book club? I hear the last sentence tops all.

Two More

2011-08-31T13:09:00.000-04:00

You're welcome.

Movie Trailers

2011-08-24T14:22:00.004-04:00

For the past week, I've been dog sitting for a friend of mine in Brooklyn Heights who-- in addition to the world's cutest dog-- has a full cable package, Netflix On Demand, Hulu Plus, TiVo, and Apple TV. YET---- all that I seem to watch is these four movie trailers over and over and over. Here we go!

Clooney and GOSSLING?!?! Paul Giamatti? Philip Seymour Hoffman!? Are you kidding me?! Yes, I will watch this. I don't even care what it is about-- those four can just sit there and knit for all I care.

People, they subtitled the dog. SLAY ME. Are you a little worried that the movie itself won't be half as lovely as the trailer? Me too. (I've watched this trailer so many times that it actually leaked into my dreams one night. I'm not proud of that.)

John saw this film at Sundance in February and called me immediately, saying that he just watched my new favorite movie. (Isn't he a good friend?!) Apparently there is a big Paul Simon tie-in too. Can't wait can't wait.

This looks creepy and awesome. Come see it with me and tell me what happens while my hands are in front of my eyes.

White Christmas

2011-08-22T10:41:00.009-04:00

Did you know that you can watch White Christmas in its entirety on YouTube!? And the picture quality is wonderful! What a world.

(If nothing else, just skip to 54:19. The 6 minutes to follow will make your heart stop.)

*Side note: I always felt really bad for Rosemary Clooney at the conclusion of that scene (1:00:16). She just looked so sad there with her dumb tambourine, all fake smiley after Vera Ellen KILLED IT with those legs. I've since gotten past this.

Oh Land

2011-08-10T11:55:00.007-04:00

Last October I was at a party with John M, talking with a very sweet Scandinavian girl who was new to New York and had just moved to Brooklyn, not far from John. We happened to be seeing a Danish pop singer, Oh Land, the next week at a gallery that our friend runs, so we decided to invite our new blonde friend along to the show. Her response?

"I am Oh Land."
"Oh, you know her music!"
"Yes, I am Oh Land."
"What? You like Oh Land?"
"No, I am Oh Land."
"Oh."

And then I ran away and got more champagne and hid in a corner and John continued talking with her. (This is how John and I differ socially.)

Anyway, she seems to be doing well, is super pretty, and is opening for Katy Perry this fall! Go Oh Land.

Marcel Dzama

2011-08-09T12:24:00.010-04:00

Some art for your rainy Tuesday! Are you all familiar with Marcel Dzama? I love this image and came across it again today while sorting through work research.

His work serves as fairy-tales for these dark days (where even CHEESE is killing our planet. Ugh.) With nooses, googly-eyed guitars, angry snowmen, and trees with heads, Dzama gives us something to fret about while adding just a touch of good humor. "When you're alone in the woods, you always see faces,'' the Canadian artist has said.

The best part is that frowny fan, amiright?

The Dog Days

2011-08-08T11:46:00.013-04:00

We're in the thick of it, New York. The Dog Days are here and I'm beginning to feel those first twitches of wanting it all behind me. I'm (almost!) ready to leap into fall. This heat! But as John so rightly reminded me over cocktails on Saturday in a sticky restaurant on Canal street-- on days like this, it's helpful to think about The Great Gatsby:

We had luncheon in the dining-room, darkened too against the heat, and drank down nervous gayety with the cold ale.
"What'll we do with ourselves this afternoon?" cried Daisy, "and the day after that, and the next thirty years?"
"Don't be morbid," Jordan said. "Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall."

Anyway. In that crazy heat, in the thickest imaginable post-rain humidity, before the cocktails on Canal Street, I found myself at a party at this apartment on Saturday evening. The man doesn't have any possessions! I obviously found the whole thing a little odd, but at the same time........ inspiring. Can you imagine? It must be somewhat freeing. I like people who live in the extreme and Klaus does it well.

For the 'purpose of appreciation and categorization": The Book Cover Archive.

I finished Just Kids over the weekend and have so much to say about it. I've been trying to nail down exactly why I liked this book so much, and I think it has to do with amount of unashamed love leaking onto the pages. Patti Smith is generous, kind, loving, protective, and INTERESTING to boot. This book is anti-snark in a world we've all imagined to be tainted with egos. I think you should read it.

Have you hear the new Bon Iver album? Stunning. They are playing a show in Prospect Park Wednesday night and I will be there*.

And Breakfast at Tiffany's is playing on Thursday in Brooklyn Bridge Park and there will be protesters! Come!

And finally, my friend Brian wrote this piece about Ryan Trecartin's crazy PS1 show. Well said, Brian.

*Sitting right outside the fence where we can drink wine and where it is free.

Penny and Oscar

2011-08-01T12:27:00.006-04:00

I have so much to tell you about. Project Nim, and Race to Nowhere, and some crazy art as PS1 and Patti Smith's book that I cannot put down. I have wanted to write about Movies with a View and about The Sun Also Rises and about Midnight in Paris and this really fantastic restaurant that recently opened in my neighborhood called Brucie. But I'm BUSY these days and it's just so very hot. So here are some pictures of cats! Can you tell which cat is sweet and which cat is grumpy? That's all.

Fire Island

2011-07-26T10:22:00.012-04:00

We took a little 'day trip' to Fire Island on Saturday.

Have you been? I like it there.

The beaches are shockingly not crowded.

The food is superb.

The walking is delightful.

And although we sadly missed Frat-urday...

...we did catch a touching little garden ceremony instead.

We all meant to leave that night, we really did. It was a Sunday after all.

But there was an outdoor pool! and an empty beach! and a hot tub and a drag show and a seafood hut and a sleeping bunk!

And so much more to do and see.

So instead of catching the Sunday night ferry, we decided to stay and discover what Fire Island looks like at 6:10 on a Monday morning.

Let's go back soon.

Portland V: Books I Found at Powell's

2011-07-12T12:35:00.013-04:00

You all told me that I would love Powell's books, but honestly I had no idea. I live in New York City where I frequent bookstores almost daily and was skeptical that a used bookstore in Portland would effect me any more than it's New York couterparts. My favorite bookstore is McNally Jackson-- just two blocks away from my office-- but I also spend a lot of time in Housing Works, or I'll trot up to The Strand, and then there is BookCourt, in my neighborhood. (I like BookCourt, but sometimes I wish they were friendlier.) You know where they ARE friendly!? Greenlight.

But Powell's is the bookstore to beat all bookstores. It's humungo and it's organized by color and it's exhaustive in it's inventory. I loved everything about it and I thoroughly enjoyed my time there.

These are some of the books that I found:

First off, please ignore my chipped manicure. I moved and unpacked like 35 boxes the day before. The nail polish, however, does match this pretty Maugham cover. Have you read it? I've only read one of his-- For Cakes and Ale-- and I loved it.

Anais Nin makes me feel a little crazy. I'm always tempted to buy this one, but in the end after flipping through a few chapters I know it wouldn't be good for me or for anyone around me. Sorry, Ninny!

I almost bought this one for the cover alone but then I read a few sample pages and noted the blatant racist language. Ernest! Come on.

This book is randomly super expensive. It's like $38 for a normal sized book. I always look for it anyway, hoping to find a cheap used version as I don't really cook that much anyway. No dice.

Speaking of Spain! Cute cover, no?

This one took forever to find. It was in the 'oversized' section of the City and Urban Planning Section in the Pearl Room (although I was initially told Rose.) Hilary read aloud from it at the beach one day, peaking my interest, but she had the slightly smaller paperback. This one was a hard cover and 1200 pages and it was just too heavy.

See? Oversized.

Lots of Hemingway.

Demain! One of the books that affected me most in High School. It's like the grownup's Giver. Have you read it?

The aforementioned Cakes and Ale with the best opening sentence ever.

I saw a play about this in the Village this winter.

Katherine Hepburn later starred in the movie version of this novel. I found it in the Westerns.

But Lonesome Dove was found in the literary section. Go figure! (Maybe because it won a Pulizer? Still the quintessential Western novel, amiright?)

Are you still reading this post? Is it boring? Isn't this a cute cookbook cover?

I remember my Grandpa Red reading this book in his camper. It was always in this basket by the passenger's seat.

So big! I was transfixed by the idea as a child that anyone could read this much.

Our Editor wrote this!

City Life is a really interesting compilation of essays that I found by the Moses book about 'every major city in America.'

But over half of it was about New York. HA.

One of the best things about used books is that someone else owned it before you did. Willy got that Basque Cookbook as a birthday gift one year from someone named Rose.

The end.

Une Femme est Une Femme

2011-07-11T10:39:00.013-04:00

I watched Godard's Une Femme est Une Femme on Saturday night after ditching out early on the overly crowded, overly cool PS1 Summer Warm Up. We were lucky enough to score fancy VIP passes that included special seating and free beer, but even with that-- TOO CROWDED! Too loud. Am I old or just boring? Anyway, I traded in my a perfectly lovely New York summer evening in favor of Anna Karina on instant Netflix. Whatever!

Une Femme est Une Femme is a silly little film about a flirty stripper (the cute kind, in sailor costumes and bloomers) who decides to trade it all in for the hope of a baby. Her boyfriend disagrees and there, dear reader, lies the story. I haven't watched a lot of Godard (Breathless should be next, I'm told) but this one is choppy yet delightful with musical crescendos so dramatic they made me squirm a little bit.

I can't say that Godard stands the test of time, but he does, most definitely, take us back to a time in Paris we didn't even know we longed for. (check out the bit at 1:25. ANNA!)

Crazy. Night. In.

Portland IV: Multnomah Falls

2011-07-05T12:43:00.006-04:00

Have I mentioned that I also hiked up a waterfall while in Oregon? These photos don't do a bit of justice to the startling beauty of Multnomah, but I did my best. Landscape photography is difficult to master.

I've said it before, but Sloane Crosley said it best in her recent compilation of essays, How Did You Get This Number:

"I took one hundred-thirty-two photographs in Alaska, one hundred of which were of icebergs. Sometimes you can see otters or fishing poles in the background. Sometimes you can see the ghost forest, betraying their vampire-like nature by showing up in pictures. Mostly it's a lot of ice. I blind people with iceberg photos. Here's a iceberg from far away. Here it is again, up close. Here's a chunk of it floating in the water. Here it is from the boat, from the shore, from the sides, give me cold, give me big, you're chiseled like an ice sculpture, you're a cube and the ocean is your glass. Brrr, baby, brrr. The pictures are frustrating.

What I want to say is this: Here is a country that is ours but not ours. A crazed landscape of death and marriage with bells to acknowledge both. Here is the longest breath of fresh air you will ever take, the bluest stream you will ever dip your hand in, the humane thing to do. Why does none of it show up on film? Maybe I need a better camera."

Vanity Fair's Hitchcock Hollywood Portfolio

2011-07-05T10:25:00.007-04:00

There is absolutely nothing new about this post-- the photos above premiered in the February 2008 Hollywood Portfolio issue of Vanity Fair. However, I was reminded of the shoot last night while cutting my losses on New York's frustrating July 4th festivities in favor of one of my favorite go-to films-- Hitchcock's To Catch a Thief.

So good, right? I love Seth Rogan in the North by Northwest shoot, as well as ScarJo and Javier in Rear Window. And what in the world is Rebecca? Has anyone seen that one?

Related: Annie Leibovitz does Wizard of Oz starring the Art World's darlings.

Cakes and Ale

2011-07-05T09:45:00.008-04:00

One of the better openings in modern lit, don't you think? So well observed! (Click on the photo, it gets bigger.) I get you, William. People are predictable and annoying.

Cheers.

Portland III: The Blue Hour

2011-07-01T15:19:00.016-04:00

Are you sick of my Portland photo posts yet? Because I have so many more photos! It was very pretty in Portland. I mean-- that window up there in the first photo? (Click on it, you can make it bigger!) I didn't tweak those colors or that lighting a bit. It's not fair, really. Brooklyn doesn't often look like that.

Anyway. I've been reading a lot of Hemingway recently as I'm sure I've mentioned. I'm halfway through The Sun Also Rises, a story about expat writers and artists and thinkers living in Paris in the 20s. (Related: Have you all seen Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris yet? I adored it, and am pretty sure it was based partially on this book. All the dancing and drinking and brooding you can handle.) Much of the story's conversations took place in the summertime around 9pm. That sizzly time of day after work has ended but before night has really begun-- that's the blue hour.

The blue hour, or in French- l'heure bleue, refers to the period of twilight each morning and evening where there is neither full daylight nor complete darkness. Everything looks a little... blue. See Jen up there, stepping outside? That was the blue hour, and we were on our way to get gelato. Jen had composed a Caprese salad for dinner that night, and I poured the two of us bountiful glasses of a dark, earthy red.

We had crazy discussions over such glasses all weekend-- just like Hemingway's Jake and Cohn and Brett did. We talked about LIFE and about love and about grief. Her father, Rex, was dying, and we found ourselves quite suddenly acting as real live grown ups. There weren't as many tears as I imagined there would be, but reader, we shifted the world with our words and thoughts and feelings. It was hard. But you know that already.

Rex passed away on Monday. The funeral was today, and I hear that Jen gave a stunning, articulate, and heartfelt eulogy. I also hear that there's a party tonight-- a big white tent, bowls of bright flowers, stacks of sweets, multiple kegs, and of course there will be wine. It's a celebration, in the end, and no one throws a party like Jennifer Pasko does. And pretty soon Jen will be back in Portland, saving lives with her talents and trademarked determination. (For real. She's a surgeon.) Our little worlds will go on spinning, three thousand miles apart.

Rex would have been 63 on Monday. Yes, he was born on the 4th of July, just like my grandfather. And America. Let's all celebrate, shall we? I love this sizzly time of year and we're just getting started.

Sunnyside Wedding

2011-06-27T11:47:00.008-04:00

The men wore kilts, toasted with cider, and spoke in limericks. The groom serenaded Kim with The Magnetic Fields, and my cheeks hurt from smiling. We ate tacos from a truck, the ceremony lasted a brief two and a half minutes and I could not. stop. dancing.

Congrats Kimlet and Martinini!

Portland: II

2011-06-24T14:02:00.002-04:00

Portland: I

2011-06-24T13:59:00.004-04:00

Related: THIS is my favorite song about Portland.

Also related: Chris Thile is playing at Prospect Park on Thursday with the Punch Brothers. (Please don't rain.)

James Stevenson, “Belmont Stakes,” June 22, 1981

2011-06-10T14:22:00.004-04:00

This little article from the New Yorker online archives is so random, but totally cracked me up:

I have little knowledge of, or affection for, horses (I have been kicked by them, bitten by them, stepped on by them, and thrown from the tops of them), and I would just as soon see the one hundred and thirteenth swimming of the Dugong Derby as see the Belmont, but I do like events, and I have to take what is available or stay home. (The events offered in this area on Saturday were a crafts expo, an energy fair, and a skate-a-thon.) What I learned from Larousse [“Encyclopedia of Animal Life”] was: “Horses, asses, zebras … are monodactyl, the functional digit being the middle one…. The different parts of a horse’s limbs must be clearly understood. The upper parts … down to the elbow or knee, are enclosed within the outline of the body…. The visible parts of the legs begin with what correspond to our forearms and shins. Thus, what is commonly called the knee in a horse is really the wrist, and the equivalent posterior joint, the hock, is really an ankle.”…

This means, I realized, that if a man were to race against a horse—in a fair race—he would have to “race” lying down, balanced on one knuckle of each hand and foot; that is, “running” with his wrists, forearms, shins, and ankles only. (Illustration A.) The horse would have a clear advantage in such a contest, but you have got to give the horse a lot of respect for running like that in the first place.

—James Stevenson, “Belmont Stakes,” June 22, 1981

Hahahhaaa, right!? I am just tired or is it actually that funny?!? Anyway, good stuff, NYer.

The New Yorker Summer Fiction Issue

2011-06-08T14:47:00.007-04:00

The best New Yorker of the year should be in all of your mailboxes by now, with that awesome cover of what looks to be a Miami interior. Makes my mouth water.

I've only read one story so far (busted) and-- turns out-- it wasn't even fiction. It sounds like Lahiri and read the same books as kids though:

I learned what my fictional companions ate and wore, learned how they spoke, learned about the toys scattered in their rooms, how they sat by the fire on a cold day drinking hot chocolate. I learned about the vacations they took, the blueberries they picked, the jams their mothers stirred on the stove. For me, the act of reading was one of discovery in the most basic sense.

Also in this issue:

Rock-Rock-Rockaway Beach

2011-06-06T11:21:00.006-04:00

Yes, we did listen to that song while we were there, thanks to HILARY and her rad beach mix. We also tried the suddenly famous Rockaway Tacos, sampled ruby grapefruit icies, and I took a mini-nap and had a dream about airplanes. It's still too cold to swim, but maybe next week.

Red Hook

2011-06-06T10:42:00.004-04:00

The dogs are named Betty and Meatloaf, the last photo is my favorite, and yes, I made that pie.

Hello, summer.

Robyn

2011-06-03T10:54:00.003-04:00

I haven't watched a music video in a very long time, but apparently they've gotten awesome? We love you, Robyn!

Memorial Day Weekend

2011-05-27T15:19:00.004-04:00

What are YOU doing for this nice, long holiday weekend? I am going to the homeland, and while I thought it was going to be all bridesmaids and baby showers, the bride herself just sent me this (!!!!). Jealous, much?

Solvitur ambulando

2011-05-26T05:58:00.009-04:00

Well, it's my second sleepless night in a row. There is no reason for the not sleeping. I do all of the right things-- plenty of exercise, limited caffeine, a book before bedtime. Yet some nights my mind just will not turn off. You know what it's like. I look at my phone more than is healthy, and watch form emails roll in from depressing places like Snapfish, Daily Candy, and Banana Republic (unsubscribe, unsubscribe, unsubscribe.) It's deceptively lonely at 4am.

So I find myself here, at four-in-the-freaking-morning, cutting my losses by making coffee and watching old episodes of The West Wing until the sun rises and cools my nervous, whirling, working mind.

Springtime is slowly shifting away and this city is announcing its big, shiny summer plans. I've lived in my own little rented studio for an entire year now and have finally managed to get the people at the fancy wine store down the street to remember my name.

Two of my best friends will be back in the city come Monday, and another is leaving me for the left coast. Annie moved into a place with a garden, and Kate and Helen scored a Williamsburg balcony. Holly and I were discussing our summer goals a few months ago, and the only one I could really think of was that I wanted to make margaritas-- good margaritas, with real limes and agave nectar-- for friends at my apartment. I also want to go to the beach, and I want to read more Hemingway and I want to dance on a rooftop at some point. That Sleigh Bells album from last summer entered my playlist again-- makes a girl want to dance!

I've also started avoiding the subway and walking to work-- which is much easier than one would think-- and the city is shrinking before me. Cobble Hill to Brooklyn Heights to Downtown Brooklyn, across the Brooklyn Bridge, into Wall Street, Chinatown, and SoHo. It's become a sort of mantra in my mornings and brings me more joy than is probably normal. I know I should get a bike, and probably will soon, but for now the walking works. Solvitur ambulando, as the Romans used to say: the solution comes through walking.

New York, lately

2011-05-25T22:39:00.011-04:00

(One of these things is not like the others.)

Cochinita

2011-05-25T16:18:00.008-04:00

Photo: Michael Allin

WHAT THE....?!?!

Again. When I lived in Clinton Hill, just ONE YEAR AGO, we had to walk for years to find a decent place to eat/drink/not do our laundry. Now, it seems, the neighborhood has decided to wake up, stretch, and put on a decent outfit. First Hot Bird, followed by Fulton Grand, then Brooklyn Victory Garden (BVG is so great!) Then came Beny's, Hanson Dry, and Dean Street. And now THIS!?

According to Grub Street,

“I’m a gringo preaching the taco gospel,” says Los Angeleno Adam Frank, a former event planner and gallery director who soft-opens the taco shop Cochinita on Friday. Frank is willing to concede that New Yorkers’ understanding of Mexican cuisine has progressed “beyond the ingredients for nachos,” but ascertains that there’s still plenty of work to be done. He makes the process relatively painless, though: You order your $3.50 tacos by penciling in a form, checking off fillings, sides, and condiments. Then a cashier rings it all up on an iPad — a transaction we imagine wasn’t much in evidence in the Mexican wholesale-market food stalls that inspired the shop’s design. The corn tortillas are made in house, and the pork in the signature taco filling, the Yucatán specialty cochinita pibil, is humanely raised. (Humane treatment extends to vegetarians, as well, via a few meat-free options.) There’s flan for dessert and beer on the way.

Cochinita, 922 Fulton St., nr. St. James St., Clinton Hill; 718-789-7700

Humrph. Good luck trying to get everyone to my new, fancy, hood now, huh?

Weather

2011-05-24T12:02:00.007-04:00

Again, I always feel like my grandparents when I harp on the weather (they LOVE the weather so much) but how gorgeous has this week turned out to be?! But in case it turns sour again--- a tip! Accuweather.com is so much more optimistic and pleasant than gloomy weather.com. They use tricky phrases like 'mostly sunny' instead of 'partly cloudy' and 'a thunderstorm possible' rather than 'scattered thunderstorms.' Get it? And their suns look like egg yolks.

Also of note:

Have you heard the Paula Poundstone vs Michael Pollan food debate on Wait, Wait? HILARIOUS. She can be really annoying but her relentless defense of the Ring Ding and complete commitment to the bit really works in this case.

Words We Don't Say, by NY Mag's Kurt Anderson. BLOGGERS! READ! And be sure to read the comments, as they are just as funny as the list itself. Rare!

A well observed, funny, funny list.

Well, THIS is exciting!

Mmmmmm that's all for now, I think. Sorry that I haven't really written anything of content recently, I'll work on it!

Berry Nice

2011-05-23T15:28:00.007-04:00

So silly! Yet, not a bad way to start this drizzly Monday-- discovering that Chicago thinks I look berry nice. I think that YOU look berry nice, Chicago. (Who knew?!)

Thanks, Glo!

Weekend

2011-05-23T11:33:00.014-04:00

What a weekend! A few links:

I finally sampled a Negroni (or was it an Americano?) on Saturday in heaven after the rapture.

Have you all seen Sloane Crosley's cheeky tumblr, Sad Stuff on the Street? I found this sad thing on the 2nd ave subway platform. So sad!

This is one of my favorite stories ever, as told by my friend and colleague Brian. It came up in conversation again recently and I realized it's been awhile since I forced it upon my audience. Read it, I'm so serious!

Read this too.

Have you been reading the 'I Had a Stroke When I Was 26' series on The Hairpin? Pretty good.

And finally, Look! Here I am in Chicago! Berry nice.

Pier 6, Brooklyn Bridge Park

2011-05-20T13:35:00.006-04:00

Good news, just steps from my front door:

The eating options in Brooklyn Bridge Park will spread south to Pier 6 on May 28 when Bark, the haute dog spot in Park Slope, Brooklyn, opens a stand there serving franks and burgers, along with ice cream from Blue Marble and Uncle Louie G’s, and sandwiches from Milk Truck Grilled Cheese. Later next month it will move to a terrace cafe on the pier with 200 seats and will start serving beers from Sixpoint Craft Ales and wine. The stand will be open Saturdays and Sundays, then the terrace will be open Friday nights, Saturdays and Sundays through Labor Day.

Who wants to join me for a grilled cheese and a Sixpoint on the terrace at Pier 6? Done.

{photo}

Brooklyn Bridge

2011-05-19T13:09:00.006-04:00

When it rains, NO ONE is on the Brooklyn Bridge. I walked the entire stretch between the two archways yesterday without seeing a soul. Never felt so alive.

(Downside: It was raining.)

Summer Book Recs

2011-05-18T10:02:00.026-04:00

Several people within the last few weeks have asked me for a list of summer book recommendations. The reason they ask, mind you, isn't because I have stellar taste or any real literary connections, knowledge, or insight. In fact-- my taste of often borders on questionable as I read WHATEVER is set in front of me. This, this, and this included. But I do love books, and I love talking about them with people who care. I'm asked for recommendations because I have an opinion, that's all. The books below are those that I am reading, have read, or intend to read in the coming months. And unlike many of the quacky new aged voyeuristic titles that I've picked up as of late, I think you'll like these too.

The Ask was recommended to me by two people whose taste I trust for completely different reasons. The first rec came from someone who tends towards solid, thoughtful, and well written material. The other came from a bit more indulgent and demanding reader who enjoys absolute entertainment above all else. I have a few chapters left of this novel and can say in all honesty that it's the best book I've read in a very long time. Lipsyte clearly has fun with language and gets off on deconstructing sentences so that they clamor along like the ideas themselves. He tells a story of squirming middle class woes, right here in New York with a sick sense of humor and rare brilliance. I love this book and look forward to reading more of his work. (Actually, if you want a taste, try this.)
The Best of Everything popped into my head last week when talking with a friend about the lack of Mad Men in our lives. I read this book several years ago and then again last summer. It's a story about secretaries in 1950's New York, although written after the Sexual Revolution, a decade later. It is therefore a very specific narrative that pokes and prods at feminism without dismissing the indulgence and excitement of an era of typewriters, martinis, driving gloves, and pillbox hats. If you miss Don, Roger, Peggy, Bette and Joan, well here ya go. Handed to you on a platter, I swear.
I've been unknowingly reading Gabrielle Hamilton for years, in essay form in various publications. When Blood, Bones, and Butter debuted a few months ago, I finally put it together that this, this, and this(!) were all written by the same snappy, heartfelt lady. I WILL love this book, I can already tell, and look forward to the sunny day in the near future that I can lay outside and dig into it. (I don't however, like the title or the cover of this book. WHY, Gabrielle!? Those are three of my least favorite words, an unsettling illustration, and not my favorite color.)
I was blown sideways by this book. Never have a read a more dysfunctional, dynamic, and obsessive love story. This is the book that will stay with you, all wide eyed and surprisingly fulfilled by two characters living on raw emotion and little else. Charlie Smith's writing is wild and sprawling and his narrator, Billy, is an unforgettable loser--much like The Ask's Milo but with a less tasteful ego, if you can believe that. READ IT, then let's talk about it.

Hemingway crept into my life a few weeks ago without sufficient warning. I always shied away from his novels with a naive distaste for what I only assumed was overly masculine prose and content. However, this essay caught my interest for its cinematic accuracy, and then a bartender in Chicago (of all places, of all people) recommended The Sun Also Rises as somewhere to start. I later spent an entire Saturday dragging John from used bookstore to used bookstore on the west side before getting my hands on my own copy. It's a STUNNING read, so outrageously contemporary that I find myself underlining like a mad woman. This is the story of a group of American and British expats lounging around in Parisian cafes just like those cliched black and white photos from the same era. I haven't finished it yet, and while i don't look forward to the bull fighting portion, the Spanish nightlife and saucy romances will surely push me through.

A better way of finding essays like The Hills are Like White Elephants than my current tactic of searching 'full text Hemingway' online. These little stories are packed with-- I'll say it again-- outrageously contemporary dialogue. Hemingway is blowing me away and I cannot get enough of these little cafe conversations taking place in Paris, Barcelona, Switzerland, Africa, Cuba, and Florida. This is the quintessential 'summer get-away' package, if I may be so cliche.
Alison lent me this book months ago with the most glowing of recommendations, yet I haven't picked it up. It's currently mocking me on my nightstand. Soon, Ali, I promise. It's on my summer list.

One of my favorite New York novels, I read this book the first month I lived here. I had a habit of reading books like this that year-- The Bell Jar, The Best of Everything, Goodbye to All That, The Dud Avocado, The Women's Room, The Women, Captoe's Breakfast at Tiffany's-- books about young girls moving to New York and usually getting really messed up over it. I LOVED books like this-- they solidified my motives and kept me company duing those first few months when I didn't know a soul. Next up? THE GROUP!
As perfect but slightly less iconic than Gatsby, Tender is the Night is an easy, escapist, intelligent book about Paris in the 20's. (Not unlike Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, I'm suddenly realizing while typing this.) This is also his most autobiographical novel-- all tragedy and glorious heartbreak. As Fitzgerald himself wrote, "Gatsby was a tour de force, but this is a confession of faith."
Let's all read this, why not. Bossypants is the book that I will stay up all night finishing, I swear to you. It falls in line with my habit of reading self-indulgent-memoirs-written-by-strong-and-intelligent-women, but this one will be funny! Can't wait.

I'm So Tall

2011-05-10T15:24:00.001-04:00

I am!

(Bowery at Prince)

Photopic Sky

2011-05-04T12:13:00.004-04:00

I LOVE stuff like this. Chills.

May Day

2011-05-03T11:24:00.004-04:00

Born Yesterday

2011-04-30T14:56:00.006-04:00

Born Yesterday is a cheeky little revival playing at one of those little Broadway theaters you never think to go to. I was slightly nervous going in-- secretly judging this 1940s self-proclaimed romantic comedy for its impending jazz hands, overblown stereotypes, and corny punch lines. I've been disappointed by these kooky golden age revivals more times than necessary, undoubtedly annoyed that someone out there didn't try a little harder, and that Broadway is full of blockheads, and that all the good ideas have quite frankly run out.

However. After fidgeting for the first fifteen minutes or so of introductions, and then completing a mental packing list for my little business trip the next morning during all of Jim Belushi's opening business driven dialogue, one Miss Nina Ariana snapped the entire play into focus. Oh! This play is about Billy! Ignore gravely old Brock (Belushi), he isn't the point anyway.

Born Yesterday, turns out, is a slightly deconstructed version of Pygmalion that chooses to maintain our leading lady's own version of self while simultaneously handing us the gratification of a makeover. She's smarter but not uglier. She'll question but not demand. It's also a lovely little observation on the gender war as was so brilliantly outed by Hepburn and Tracy a decade earlier in rom-coms Adam's Rib, Woman of the Year, and Pat and Mike.

It's so well observed, in fact, that the conversation I forced upon my theater companion during intermission was quite astonishingly mirrored onstage as the lights dimmed and the curtain rose again. Life imitating art!, or the other way around. (Although whether the repeated conversation is testament to the script's timeless quality or rather a commentary on the repetition of human interaction is up for further debate.)

Nina Ariana stole this one, folks. Belushi and his intellectual counterpart, played by Robert Sean Leonard, were perfectly fine but utterly forgettable in the spotlight of Broadway's next Tony award winning actress (you heard it here first). It's a fun play with a surprisingly thoughtful conclusion that if nothing else, allowed this jaded theater goer a full fledged sigh of relief.

Snails

2011-04-25T23:06:00.007-04:00

One has to have a subscription to read John Witte's poem "Snails" in last week's New Yorker, but seek it if you can. (Oh, subscribe already.) It's so difficult to write about so-called intimate things like kissing without crossing the line into cornball, but Witte does it confidently and well. As Shakespeare once said, 'by the book.'

Zadie Smith's essay on Katherine Hepburn said everything exactly right. (Full text here!) Every once in a while Smith lets herself seep into sentiment but always with due thought and solid reason. I love that about her.

This year's clear contender for 'summer cocktail' has me convinced of it's necessity, and I realize how outlandishly pretentious that sounds. Who wants to join me? Negroni's? A garden somewhere in Brooklyn? Let's do it.

Sam Lipsyte is back with this week's NYer fiction! I have his book sitting here next to me, on my nightstand, awaiting my time and energy. Soon, Sam, I promise.

Did you all see these Whale prints?! Haunting.

And do you follow @NatGeoSociety on Twitter? No? You should.

This was lovely.

This too.

This song reentered my life this week for no apparent reason and make me ache for another sticky summer. Alison forced it one upon me around this time last year and I'll always love it for that reason. So ready for the weather to shift for real.

Easter Parade

2011-04-22T10:32:00.011-04:00

Easter Parade easily falls into a category of things I loved as a child but have had to rethink as a grownup (also in this category: Goonies*, Breakfast at Tiffany's**, South Pacific***, meatloaf****, and corndogs*****.)

You have to roll your eyes at this film, but I watch it every year anyway. It's one of two spin-off films from the great (albeit silly) classic Holiday Inn, the other being one of my favorite films of all time, White Christmas. I'll take Kaye over Astaire any day.

Yes, Fred Astaire is his usual douchie, self important, condescending self in Easter Parade starring alongside Judy Garland-- whom I adored in both Meet Me in St. Louis and The Wizard of Oz, but later formed a keen distaste for upon discovering her icky aging-cigarette-voiced-Christmas album in the Kmart bargain bin about fifteen years ago-- who overacts, over sings, and can't really dance at all.

The story is essentially Pygmalion, though decidedly less charming than it's counterparts and lazily constructed to match box office blockbusters of the day. It's therefore the type of movie musical that makes most of you out there DESPISE movie musicals, especially from this golden era. Here is Fred at his lowest ebb, just after his first retirement from cinema, cranky from the flash and pomp of it all. And there is Judy, emerging from a nervous breakdown, a suicide attempt, and a psychiatric hospital stay just weeks before filming.

If you're not familiar with the film, excuse the spoiler (although, why exactly would you watch this film for the first time after reading this glowing review?) but I'm going to cut to the end here. After an hour and a half of silly yet welcomed dance numbers and a dramatic makeover on Garland's part, the film slowly beats itself into a frenzy of jealous dancers, back stabbing performances ("It Only Happens When I Dance With You"), and flip flopping accusations. Who are we mad at again? Which one of you did wrong?

We take a deep breath, check our watches, then exit the film as quickly as I've ever seen. With an outpouring of gifts (including a gorgeous live white rabbit), a 'let's laugh it off' apology, an iconic stroll down fifth avenue, and a VERY QUICK proposal there amongst Easter bonnets, top hats, and jolly well wishes, we're kicked right off the MGM lot. Anyway, enough.

Almost unsurprisingly-- this was the most financially successful picture for both Garland and Astaire as well as the highest-grossing musical of 1948. And for the very same reason that thousands of movie goers stormed the theaters fifty years ago, I too will watch this film this weekend. I suppose it's my version of the Cadbury egg-- a stupidly sweet treat that comes around but once a year. Despite it's flaws Easter Parade is there in my history and I can't reject it, not just yet.

*really stupid
**not stupid AT ALL, but definitely racist and about prostitution.
***kind of stupid, and also racist and about prostitution!
****thanks, JSF
*****thanks again!

Success Story by Terence Winch

2011-04-15T11:55:00.007-04:00

One of the many wonderful things about PRI's Writers' Almanac is that they not only publish all of them poems on their website from past episodes, but also for the four days to come. Think of it! You can actually read TOMORROW'S poem.

And tomorrow's poem happens to be hilarious!

Success Story

by Terence Winch

My clothes are perfectly contoured
to my body. my shoes & socks
fit just right. My cat is a delightful
intelligent animal. My apartment
is great. The right location,
cheap rent. I eat the best food.
My friends love me. I adore them.
My lover is terrific & beautiful.
The sun is shining. There are trees
even in the slums in Washington.
I have tons of money & a gorgeous
air conditioner. Great art hangs
on my wall. I live a spine-tingling life
of delirious sex & intense happiness.
"Success Story" by Terence Winch, from The Great Indoors. © Story Line Press, 1994.

Looking forward to a good night and a pleasant tomorrow.

Images from Jonathan Franzen’s Island of Solitude

2011-04-13T14:51:00.002-04:00

While Franzen's essay in no way lacks necessary visual information, I was still excited to find the NYer News Desk posting of actual photos from his journey to the so-called Island of Solitude. That donkey! That blue!

Farther Away

2011-04-11T12:24:00.009-04:00

The New Yorker released Jonathan Franzen's latest essay this morning on Facebook, of all places. (Were they commenting on the NYT's wall? Or maybe on Franzen's FB line at the end there? What's going on?) I read it this morning in one big bite, while my friend Lauren--two thousand miles away in Seattle-- patiently waited for me to finish so that we could discuss it.

Farther Away starts out as a sort of overly romanticized adventure story--- all 'I feel like it would be a good idea to find my footing again by being completely alone on a tropical island for a while, and to pack nothing but some iodine tablets and “Robinson Crusoe.”' My favorite part in the essay is actually when Franzen discovers a fully functioning cabin on his campsite with food and a bed and a stove and gets all annoyed and decides to ignore it.

'The refugio’s existence made my already somewhat artificial project of solitary self-sufficiency seem even more artificial, and I resolved to pretend that it didn’t exist.'

Hilarious.

The essay eventually switches into another story all together, one that I wasn't quite prepared for. The intended Defoe/Crusoe literary criticism fest (no one does this better than Franzen, by the way. Franzen writes about books the way that duller people wax poetically along about food. Well, Zadie Smith does it pretty damn well too.) casually morphs into The Big Essay. The one about his dear friend's suicide and the eventual acknowledgement of his own grief.

Franzen's grief is palpably raw and understandably muddled. He writes almost clumsily around his own feelings of anger and regret, love and tension. When it finally comes time to scatter Wallace's ashes on one of the island's many cliffs (at the request of his late wife), he does so with a narrative so nervously honest and confused that it caused this reader to dig at her cuticles until they bled.

'It was late afternoon, and the wind was blowing out over the insanely blue ocean, and it was time. La Cuchara seemed more suspended in the air than attached to the earth. There was a feeling of near-infinity, the sun eliciting from the hillsides more shades of green and yellow than I’d suspected the visible spectrum of containing, a dazzling near-infinity of colors, and the sky so immense that I wouldn’t have been surprised to see the mainland on the eastern horizon. White shreds of remnant cloud came barrelling down from the summit, whipped past me, and vanished. The wind was blowing out, and I began to cry, because I knew it was time and I hadn’t prepared myself; had managed to forget. I went to the refugio and got the little box of David’s ashes, the “booklet”—to use the term he’d amusingly applied to his not-short book about mathematical infinity—and walked back down the promontory with it, the wind at my back.

I was doing a lot of different things at every moment. Even as I was crying, I was also scanning the ground for the missing piece of my tent, and taking my camera out of my pocket and trying to capture the celestial beauty of the light and the landscape, and damning myself for doing this when I should have been purely mourning, and telling myself that it was O.K. that I’d failed in my attempt to see the rayadito in what would surely be my only visit to the island—that it was better this way, that it was time to accept finitude and incompleteness and leave certain birds forever unseen, that the ability to accept this was the gift I’d been given and my beloved dead friend had not.'

It takes great courage to write about a failed attempt at anything, and Franzen's pursuit of quietness and isolation gives us hope that perhaps our busy world is good enough as is. He returns to his 'girlfriend and a martini' back in California without regret but also without any clear revelation or spiritual understanding gained from such a dramatic little journey. But it's this lack of closure that gives the story weight and undeniable importance-- 'As long as we have such complications, how dare we be bored?'

Extra Tough Love: Update

2011-04-05T12:34:00.004-04:00

An extra little (written) story from last night's episode: http://bit.ly/hCVSWQ

Unbelievable.

This American Life: Very Tough Love

2011-04-04T20:38:00.008-04:00

Anyone out there in the mood to get angry? Specifically at this fine country's judicial system? Not that we necessarily need to drag up a reason, but have a listen to this week's episode of This American Life, Very Tough Love.

In this episode, Ira takes us to Georgia to a drug court program that is run differently from every other drug court in the country, acting in ways that are contrary to the very philosophy of drug court. The episode works because the story is unbelievably strong and should be told, but it's good because Ira clearly takes a stance. He often tries to remain non-partisan in these things but his irritation gets the best of him in this story and clearly leaks through. I love Ira.

And after you're all heated over the idiots down in Georgia, have a listen to DIY from 2005 (but happened to appear on my ipod last week so I just heard it for the first time). DIY is the story of an OUTRAGEOUS injustice against an innocent man from Brooklyn by our own city court system. It's crazy and will infuriate you.

Then if you need a palate cleanser after the podcasts above, I see that Mike Birbiglia will be on the TAL tv show this week! Laughter! Perfect! So if you're someone who watches tv and knows what the tv show is all about, there's that. (I have seen the same episode 4 times on 4 different flights. That one with the bull with the gross hangy skin.)

Or, by all means, do what I'm going to do right now--- watch Jane Feltes* instructional make-up videos on The Hairpin. Crazy. Night. In.

(More TAL here.)

*Jane Feltes is actually a producer on This American Life. Interesting.

Mildred Pierce

2011-03-31T07:47:00.006-04:00

Forget Mad Men. Let's watch Mildred Pierce.

(UPDATE: I just realized that I actually can't watch this without HBO. But I like that it exists.)

Massimo Grimaldi at Team Gallery

2011-03-30T10:58:00.004-04:00

While Upper Manhattan is still on the cobra hunt (yeek!) we've been squirming for weeks down in Soho regarding Team Gallery's latest exhibition by Italian artist Massimo Grimaldi involving two live snakes.

The snakes apparently served as "a barrier between the viewer and the artworks and imbuing the dynamics of spectatorship with a sense of the forbidden," but in the end its just a cheap trick. The ol' shock factor, staking claim to live-snakes-mimicking-line-and-gesture before someone else dares to do the same.

The work was about as mesmerizing as a screen saver, but still lured me inside with it's promises of pomp and vigor. And next up? New York's original shock star-- Ms. Marilyn Minter.

(photos via)

Mad Men: Season 5

2011-03-29T14:01:00.006-04:00

Well, finally. But seriously, a year?! AMC, get it together. Or hire me to sell ads for you.

In the meantime, and for the next YEAR, let's watch this scene again:

My Sandy

2011-03-29T11:42:00.005-04:00

SOLID GOLD: An eight page NY Mag write up on Sandra Lee.

Have I ever told you about the time that I bought Sandy's (cleverly titled) memoir for $1 at Housing Works as a joke for my friend Alison, and then "accidentally" started reading it on the train ride to her apartment and then couldn't hand it over until I finished it three days later and suddenly started defending her meatloaf and infamous Kwanzaa cake in mixed company? Yeah, that happened.

Moving on! Let's now turn to one of my favorite essays of all time, to hear Anthony Bordain's experience with the lady in white:

I’m standing there by the boeuf bourgignonne station, sucking down martinis with my wife (they drink a LOT of martinis in the movie), minding my own business, having an innocent chat with some friends, when I notice someone has their hand on me. An icy, tendril of fear runs down my spine. I turn and find myself looking straight into the deceptively attractive and reasonable looking face of Sandra Lee.
To make matters worse–and more…..uncomfortable, she’s standing next to her boyfriend, Andrew Cuomo, the Attorney General of the State of New York.

Now, I’ve said some unkind things over the years about Sandra. Far too many and far too terrible things to ever apologize for. Plus, I pretty much meant every word. Once you’ve seen Sandra making Kwanzaa Cake on YouTube, there’s no backing down . My head is reeling with the thought that one phone call from Cuomo and my last twenty years of tax returns are getting audited . I’m paralyzed, wondering what the statute of limitations is on various things I may or may not have done twenty years ago. Sandra is talking. I know this cause her lips are moving and she’s saying–overtly anyway, nice things. Like “You’re a very naughty man,” and she’s chatting amiably with my wife. But one hand is picking over me like the meat buyer at Peter Luger selecting a rib section–like some demonic bird of prey is poking and prodding, deciding where the weakest, most tender point of entry is, giving, as I recall, a point by point review of her investigations to my wife–who ordinarily, I have to say, would have been across the table with a tomahawk chop elbow to the top of the skull by now, but who, like me, sits mesmerized and grinning insanely, frozen by the ..bizarrenessof the moment which seems to go on forever as Sandra’s hand wanders upward, tugs an ear lobe and asks if my ears are red yet. (They were.) Having had her way with me, she leaves the emptied husk of my carcass teetering at the table and moves on.

I felt like the victim of a drive-by shooting. “What just..happened?” I said with a weak, trembly voice. I looked around to see if anyone else had noticed the quiet but very thorough disembowelment that had just occurred. Nothing. It had looked, to anyone who’d care to notice, like any other cocktail party conversation–but I knew better. I had looked into those eyes. I’d seen. Oh, she was smiling all right, but I’m pretty damn sure you could have dragged a rusty butterknife across my carotid artery right there at the table and her expression would not have changed, maybe only the eyes, they’d roll over white as I geysered onto the chafing dishes.

As we say on the show all the time, “What have we learned today?”

I learned that were a nuclear weapon to fall on New York, I’m pretty sure that if no one else, Sandra Lee would survive to clamber out of the rubble. That if it came down to a fight over the last can of food, she would surely emerge the victor.

I learned that I am truly and deeply afraid of her. And I’m pretty sure she’s a Democrat.

And for some completely unrelated reason, the photos of Cuomo and Lee remind me SO MUCH of Botwin and Reyes (possibly because Cuomo so closely resembles Mr. Tijuana, but most likely because I've been watching way too many episodes of Weeds before bedtime but that's also beside the point.) Can't you just imagine a fantastic Sandra scandal in the future involving a hidden tunnel straight from her sunny upstate liquor cabinet right to the heart of the Columbian drug lords? One can dream.

Babycakes NYC

2011-03-24T16:52:00.004-04:00

Okay! Further delaying the inevitable! Let's talk about cookies!

I first read of Erin McKenna on the Awl a few weeks ago, completely impressed with her savvy business model and jealous of her cute haircut. Babycakes is a 100% vegan, gluten free, wheat free, sugar free, most-allergen-free bakery on the Lower East Side, just a short jaunt from my office. I don't have any allergies, but I do like a fresh idea (well, it's been open for years, I'm late on this train) and am a sucker for pink icing.

So a few days later I slipped over to Babycakes on my lunch break and tried a cookie sandwich. Holy balls, people. TRY A COOKIE SANDWICH. I've been back twice since my initial visit, shoving them into the slightly skeptical fists of my friends and coworkers, then watching their reactions with an anticipation not unlike Doc Brown with his flux capacitor, coconut oil in place of plutonium.

But don't let the vegan-gluten-whatever stuff fool you, these are neither healthy nor bland. They aren't the least bit dry, and they are hands down my favorite treat in all of New York City. Even Alison agrees, and she's a tough crowd on baked goods. Okay, I don't have a whole lot else to say on the subject, but I just felt the need to share.

And now... a video.

BabyCakes NYC: Frosting Party! from BabyCakes NYC on Vimeo.

Jane Eyre

2011-03-24T14:29:00.005-04:00

I know it's been well over a week since writing anything on this ol' bloggy, though not for lack of content. I've written about once sentence about this, and this place, and this, and this. But lately, whenever I sit down to write something for this lovely space, I remind myself that I still haven't thought of a single word for a much more topical purpose-- my Maid of Honor speech, due for a wedding two days from now.

And each time I sit down to write that, I inevitably end up in a cornmaze of a google chase that somehow lands me at YouTube, watching the Bridesmaids trailer ten times over before flat out giving up on grounds of absolutely NO HOPE of ever being as funny or awesome as Kristin Wiig. Might as well just resign!, I decide before collapsing into bed face first, exhausted from the very thought of my weekend ahead.

ANYWAY.

I saw Jane Eyre last week. The NEW Jane Eyre, the film noir Jane Eyre starring that awesome young actress from The Kids are All Right and the bad Alice movie. My friend Lo and I saw it together at the Sunshine's matinee performance with all the old people, candy in hand, eager for the dark drama ahead. We spent much of the movie melting over the Byronic Mr. Rochester, his good hair, and his impressive skill of forcing people to talk to him before berating them for it. SWOON.

Lauren kept nudging my arm, wide eyed and giddy over the overt absurdities-- A beaten orphan! A secret wife! A handy fire! A blind lover!-- but we loved every swooping second. She was smart, that Brontë sister, albeit perhaps a bit repressed? (It's why we like it!) Jane is a deeply developed story, Lo pointed out to me, despite the, uh, wife-through-a-hidden-doorway trick, in a time when women were writing little more than cotton candy.

And directed by the stripped-and-stark Cary Fukunaga, this Jane held its own outside of the chic-y nineteenth century dramas to which we've become accustomed. His version enters a new category of lady-films cut without grace or petaled romance. It's Brontë-meets-Plath, if you will. (Well, that might be stretching it-- there is still a dashing-blind-man-who-survives-the-handy-fire in the ending.) Brontë-meets-Ibsen. Happy?

Now, onto the next.

Great Artists

2011-03-14T12:20:00.010-04:00

(Honestly, I'm not one hundred percent sure what Picasso was getting at in the quote above, but I like the cheeky sentiment so let's go with it.)

A few links for you after what I might consider to have been a very perfect weekend:

THIS has me in stitches. Seriously, so funny.

The Hairpin has been awfully sharp these days. Well done, ladies.

I've said it before and I'll say it again--- Ninth Street Espresso is the best coffee in New York City. THE BEST. Kate and I happily spent Sunday afternoon at the 10th St location over steaming mugs of cafe au lait (true story-- I used to think it was "cafe olé". Like Spanish coffee or something. SERIOUSLY. Don't tell anyone.) Yeah, it's all the way over on Avenue C, but in addition to the best coffee, they also have the best trees over there. Worth it.

Andrew Bird played a lovely little show with a mix of other performers at City Winery on Friday Night. A clip here.

She makes me laugh.

So does he.

Have you all heard of the Iranian custom of Taaroffing? It's so fascinating! Great piece on TAL, listen here.

That's all! Enjoy.

How to Die in Oregon

2011-03-10T08:55:00.011-05:00

When Megan invited me to attend a screening of the Grand Jury Prize winner for best Documentary at Sundance this year, I jumped in with two feet. Hell yeah, sign me up.

It wasn't until the morning of the screening, however, that I finally clicked on the attached link that she sent describing the film. How to Die in Oregon, turns out, is a little documentary about euthanasia. Go figure.

How to Die is an account of the process by which several Oregon residents chose to end their lives with the administration of a physician-prescribed dose of barbiturates. The film opens with old man drinking a cup of murky white liquid into a quick and painless coma that would result in his death before introducing us to the woman mixing the liquid-- his 'volunteer' Sue Porter, from the non-profit Compassion & Choices. It's shockingly okay in that room, we observe while watching the man die peacefully after a few laughs and final farewells.

We then meet Cody Curtis, a 54-year-old Portland woman of grace and verve and clarity who is suffering from recurring liver cancer. She shares with us her 10 month struggle with terminal illness and her linear struggle with the decision to end her own life. We meet her steady husband and two teary eyed twenty-something kids. We watch her hike through the forest, garden, and visit her doctor to talk about her time line. Now, I understand that much of this is editing and director's angle, but Cody will BREAK YOUR HEART, dear reader. She'll make you want to be a better human being.

The film also depicts the 2008 Washington state ballot initiative debate over whether terminally ill residents should be allowed to end their lives similarly. The film's director was careful to include the opposition as an equal voice, fairly and honestly. We heard from doctors who oppose the initiative, and those who support it. We heard from a man whom the state refused aid for chemotherapy, but offered the deadly barbiturates as an alternative. I understood his anger, and so will you. Washington's ballot passed, by the way, and Montana is next.

What struck me throughout each story (we meet about 10 people who choose to end their lives) was the amount of clarity in each decision. None of them were afraid. None of them were second guessing their choice to die. Cody, the wonderwoman I mentioned above, seemed to approach her death as one might approach selling the family home, or giving away a much loved pet. "We're doing it at 6:00 on Monday, because that is when my surgeon is through with her clinic that day," she tells her hairdresser the Thursday prior. "But I'll take the first pills at 5:25. Thank you so much for my lovely haircut."

The film was gruesome. So much so that half of the HBO staff walked out of the original Sundance screening, and the majority of press in attendance openly sobbed. I closed my eyes for most of the medical stuff and ugly-cried at the end there. It's gruesome, this film. Heartbreaking like you can't even imagine. But for those who manage to make it through, the film’s message is ultimately uplifting. It's as much about life as it is about death, and death suddenly reveals itself as something not so scary.

I hope you're able to see it too.

Salt Bar

2011-03-10T08:53:00.004-05:00

Pre-pre-Mynabirds John and I had after work cocktails (well, after work for me, early morning for John, who slept until 3pm that day and had a Sidecar for breakfast, eh hem) at the only open establishment we could find on the LES. Is 5:30 on a Monday too early to start drinking? Yeek.

At any rate, we were the first customers in this warm little bar chock full of things that ~~white girls~~ I like-- fancy cocktails for under $10, small plates, salty olives, vintage wallpaper, reclaimed wood, a friendly Aussie bartender, and a Pandora station set to play things like the Xx, Thom Yorke, and Beach House.

Two hours later, we were best friends forever with a couple honeymooning in NY from London, throwing high-fives with the aforementioned Aussie, and having heated discussions cross-bar about Florence and the Machine, Black Swan, and the National Board of Review.

I'm told that Salt Bar gets over crowded on weekends, as all LES spots do, but for one cold night in what-felt-like-was-the-middle-of-winter-but-was-actually-the-beginning-of-spring it was our own little Cheers. And for the record, I loved Black Swan, and let's all go back soon.

Mynabirds

2011-03-10T08:52:00.013-05:00

Some of my favorite people and I stayed up way past our bedtimes on Monday for the Mynabird's late show at Mercury Lounge. As often happens when seeing these shows, I didn't know much about the band ahead of time. But if Laura says I'll like something, I probably will.

According to their website:

What We Lose in the Fire We Gain in the Flood was recorded in the rugged hills of Oregon in the summer of 2009 with singer-songwriter/producer Richard Swift at the helm. When they finished recording each night, they’d polish off a bottle of whiskey and dance to records — Dandy Livingstone, Buffy Sainte-Marie, James Brown — until the sun came up.

Yes, I want to listen to music like that!

However. The sad-and-sorry point that is sticking with me from that night is that I am getting old. We all are. Six otherwise happy-go-lucky concert goers who adore the Mynabirds and bands that sounds like them started to squirm with achiness an hour after the show was supposed to start. Seriously, Mercury Lounge, start your shows on time! I just can't stand that long with all those young hipsters bumpin' into my gym bag! I was even sipping whiskey!

Due to this extended wait, your audience ends up a little sleepy and distracted during the actual show. Instead of enjoying the music as fully as they should, they find themselves fixating on whether or not they, too, could pull off a cute, short white vintage mini-dress as well as the darling blonde lead singer before blinking out if it three songs later. (The final conclusion was no, Sarah, you cannot pull that off.) You get my point.

I'm old.

But the Mynabirds are worth your while. (AND from Nebraska! Who knew?!)

PULSE and The Armory Show

2011-03-07T11:32:00.006-05:00

Art Info and I are for the most part happily in agreement on the best and the worst of this year's Armory Show. I couldn't agree more with the 5 worst-- Gallerists, are you listening?! Stop with the 3D and irrelevant technology!

That said-- there was good to be found. I'm pleased to see Greenberg Van Doren's Tim Davis recognized as 'the funniest and most engaging work in the fair' with his multiscreen video project "The Upstate Olympics." I can't seem to find videos of this work anywhere online (probably a good thing-- art remaining art and all that) but it was so refreshing to find a moment of laughter and originality in the midst of so many egos staged in over reaching, over packed European booths.

Also of note is Sam Van Aken's "New Edens" exhibition of fruit trees at Ronald Feldman Gallery's booth. "New Edens" showcases an orchard of live trees genetically altered to simultaneously grow five fruits, sectioned off in veins like those carnations we altered with food coloring in grade school. It's a symbiosis of humankind’s relation to nature-- biodiversity versus food monoculture, genetic engineering, and pure shock factor. Overall it held just the right amount of umph to blow his surrounding exhibitors irrelevant. I wish that more galleries would showcase single artist booths like this-- such a bigger impact!

The photo above is from the PULSE fair that took place at the Metropolitan Pavilion this year--a huge improvement from that concrete disaster last year at the end of Houston. I always find the exhibitors at Pulse more interesting that those at The Armory Show, this year being no exception. ('Saying funny things in neon' isn't revolutionary or in any way transcendent, by the way, but it always causes pause and still holds the right amount of self-deprivation to remain relevant.)

PULSE allows smaller galleries from exotic places like Brooklyn and Canada a shot at recognition from the heralded collectors in town for the bigger fairs. It therefore feels more settled and less hyper than The Armory Show, less stuffy than The Art Show uptown, but still more confident than either Volta or Scope. (Do these silly words make sense to you, dear reader?)

At any rate, it happened. Art Week is over and I remain grateful for it all. It's a real treat to have the best of the best arrive in my town for 5 quick days. These dealers that I speak with daily come right to me, spreading their wings with paintings and installations and strange sculpture ripe for judgment and perhaps a bit of inspiration. In the end, it's a flurry but also a much needed jolt back into a world that I find important and so very necessary.

Next up? Chicago.

NY Art Week

2011-03-07T08:28:00.010-05:00

New York Art Week has come and gone. I'm so glad I'm not the person in charge or orchestrating the tear-down process. Can you imagine all of those needy egos trying to ship their (very expensive!) works back to wherever they came from at the same time as everyone else? That pier will be cleared within 24 hours. Seriously, can you imagine?! So glad I was merely an ad man in that mix.

Anyway. Despite my busy week/weekend, the world kept spinning.

A few non-art fair related notes:

I recently finished a book of truly exquisite short stories, all (but one) of which brought me to a greater understanding of human interaction. Highly recommend!

I re-watched two films that I loved last year, and loved them both again. Especially Please, Give. I can't get it out of my head.

Each week I read “Shouts & Murmurs” in the New Yorker and often wonder why it isn’t very funny. However, this week's didn't disappoint.

Speaking of the NYer, Tina Fey is back this week with a fantastic piece I read online this morning in bed. I didn't really like her last contribution, which made me feel a little unsettled. Who doesn't love Tina Fey? Luckily this one cured my weird guilt issue.

This illustrator's work made me audibly gasp.

Miss Moss' comparisons of runway fashion to paintings are some of the coolest things I've seen online in a while.

Oh, and I finally saw The King's Speech and I get it now.

I know I just mentioned this, but I want to recommend Miss Moss' notes on art, in general. Not just the fashion comparisons. Seriously smart lady.

LALA Land

2011-03-04T07:43:00.009-05:00

If you're keeping tabs, you know I've been away more than normal or necessary this past month. Palm Beach, Las Vegas, and now Los Angeles. If you catch me complaining about the New York winter, you have every right to slap me across my slightly sunkissed face, as, well, I've managed to escape it. (Although it was FREEZING in LA, I swear.)

John, Pam, and I just returned from a weekend getaway at The Standard Downtown LA. Ashley met us there, and had you a lens on our weekend, you would at any given moment find us dancing to John's pop mixes, laughing at something undoubtedly vulgar, or jumping on our perfectly stationed king sized bed.

We sipped complimentary champagne, bumped elbows with movie stars, and found ourselves cutting line at big Hollywood Oscar parties. We saw the best worst movie at the best movie theater in the city, and I broke my shoe on Hollywood Boulevard. We dined at Jar and BLD, and fell into bed exhausted each night (morning?), pinching ourselves over this new found reality.

But I'm back now, in Brooklyn, for a long while and as much as I'd like to make up for the sleep I didn't get in Lala Land, its Art Week here in NYC so that will all have to wait. If you need me, I'll be boosting art dealers' egos just past the West Side Highway at Pier 94. The art is good, by the way-- I love this time of year. More on that later.

Hills Like White Elephants

2011-02-22T16:27:00.003-05:00

WHILE WE'RE ON THE SUBJECT... this story came to mind when considering Blue Valentine as a story without a middle. Hemingway's short 'Hills Like White Elephants' is alternately a story without a beginning or an end. It's a snapshot of a conversation and a portrait of a relationship written almost 90 years prior to Blue Valentine but with an equally deft portrayal of a difficult and unfair conversation.

A taste:

The woman brought two glasses of beer and two felt pads. She put the felt pads and the beer glass on the table and looked at the man and the girl. The girl was looking off at the line of hills. They were white in the sun and the country was brown and dry.

‘They look like white elephants,’ she said.

‘I’ve never seen one,’ the man drank his beer.

‘No, you wouldn’t have.’

‘I might have,’ the man said. ‘Just because you say I wouldn’t have doesn’t prove anything.’

The girl looked at the bead curtain. ‘They’ve painted something on it,’ she said. ‘What does it say?’

‘Anis del Toro. It’s a drink.’

‘Could we try it?’

The man called ‘Listen’ through the curtain. The woman came out from the bar.

‘Four reales.’ ‘We want two Anis del Toro.’

‘With water?’

‘Do you want it with water?’

‘I don’t know,’ the girl said. ‘Is it good with water?’

‘It’s all right.’

‘You want them with water?’ asked the woman.

‘Yes, with water.’

‘It tastes like liquorice,’ the girl said and put the glass down.

‘That’s the way with everything.’

‘Yes,’ said the girl. ‘Everything tastes of liquorice. Especially all the things you’ve waited so long for, like absinthe.’

‘Oh, cut it out.’

‘You started it,’ the girl said. ‘I was being amused. I was having a fine time.’

‘Well, let’s try and have a fine time.’

‘All right. I was trying. I said the mountains looked like white elephants. Wasn’t that bright?’

‘That was bright.’

‘I wanted to try this new drink. That’s all we do, isn’t it – look at things and try new drinks?’

I love that last line. It reminds me of something Daisy would say. And that drink reminds me of the "Americano" served at Locanda Vini E Olii, where that photo was taken up top. LOVE that place. It also reminds me that I want to visit Spain. And that Hemingway was ahead of his time.

Full text here.

Blue Valentine

2011-02-22T10:23:00.006-05:00

I saw Blue Valentine this weekend with three girls, each smarter than the next, fully ready to analyze the hell out of this little film about a big bad relationship. We did so afterward at a tiny table in Nolita, sipping on beer with upset eyes and differing opinions. There is just so much to say!

Blue Valentine is tragic-- head to toe. It starts out lonely and ends hurtfully. I don't think it needed to be this mean, to be honest, but I guess therein lies the great big question of what makes fiction good, necessary, and transcendent.

Iris Murdoch once described love as "the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality." This is the secret of fiction. It offers a challenge—a challenge to try to understand that other people are real in the same way we are. That they are as complex, as sensitive, as capable of being hurt. Similarly, my girl Nicole describes fiction as "the ability to remind us of ourselves, of who we are in our essence, and at the same time deliver a revelation."

This is a surprisingly difficult thing to remember when entering movie world, as we tend to separate it fully from real life. We want to see OURSELVES up there, on that screen. We tend to merge Michelle Williams' Cindy with our own persona's, ignoring the fact that Cindy is as real as we are and doesn't need that crutch of relativity too easily offered in contemporary verse. Ryan Gossling isn't our ex-boyfriend and that's not your father. Get it?

The present culture encourages the opposite idea, that it's all about you. Good fiction that rejects that idea, and Blue Valentine achieves this tricky balance better than most. It's mean, yes indeed, but the vicious fights and unfair circumstance only serve to underline what is, in it's essence, a truly honest and beautiful love story.

65 and Sunny

2011-02-18T15:02:00.003-05:00

Talking about the weather always makes me feel like my grandparents (they LOVE the weather) but lordy, this is a gorgeous February day! Makes me want to sit outside and drink Corona. Or a margarita. And listen to Paul Simon.

Happy weekend, New York!

Zadie Smith: Changing My Mind

2011-02-16T10:31:00.005-05:00

Holy smokes, this book is good. I've known about it for quite some time (ask John how many times I've carried it around in a bookstore before longingly putting it back in favor of the tall stack next to my bed at home) but finally bit the bullet and purchased a copy before my two super long travel days last weekend.

Smith opens with a quote by none other than Tracy Lord, 'The time to make your mind up about people is never!' and then has an entire chapter on Katherine Hepburn. Swoon! AND E.M. Forester, and Keats, and Chekhov, and her dad, and George Clooney. And D.F.W. (Using initials like that now makes me feel like a Scientologist. Did you all read this article!? Yikes!)

Changing My Mind is a refreshingly unique form of non-fiction writing. It's a collection of essays about, well, things Smith wanted to write about, without the obligatory connective lens haphazardly found in so many non fiction essay collections out there. The randomness works for Smith because we trust her. She's smarter than we are, and has every right to do so.

Smith is good for girls like me. She gives us a backbone and an energy for critical thinking. She never halts for sentiment, but instead powers through the clutter of bad content and poor writing out there, demanding something better from each of us. In 2008, she refused to award a prize for her annual essay contest, crying mediocrity in each entry. (Seriously, read this, it's amazing.)

She is also, along with my lover, teaching courses just up the street at NYU as a recently tenured professor. Props, Z.S. Let's do lunch.

VEGAS

2011-02-14T22:23:00.009-05:00

I've been in Las Vegas all weekend. Whew, it was a big one.

The weather was ideal. The sun felt amazing.

I got married by Elvis, just off the strip.
JUST KIDDING! I didn't.

She did.

While there, we journeyed to Paris...

...and ancient Rome...

...and China.

But nothing made me more excited than walking around and finding...

bits of my New York.

Happy Valentines Day, my lovelies! It's so good to be back in Brooklyn.
xoxo.

Now, Now

2011-02-10T11:08:00.007-05:00

Bradley (or as John likes to call him-- Boo-Radley. Get it?) Hale was in town last night with his band Now, Now-- formerly Now, Now Every Children-- playing a show at The Highline Ballroom. The show was delightful and strong and polished-- much like the man himself.

We had dinner in Chelsea post performance, where we talked about Brad's new life as a rock star, his European tour, how John used to make us lay on his floor in college and listen to Sigur Rós with our eyes closed, and about the time Brad left my dorm room senior year with my bra accidentally caught in the hood of his sweatshirt. Sorry about that, Boo-Rad.

And look! Now, Now is soon going to blow up before our eyes, even Interview wrote about them. Have fun in Boston, guys, and come back soon.

ALSO: Brad is an insanely talented graphic designer/printer/artist. He is doing freelance work on the road, and you should hire him. More here.

The Ice Storm

2011-02-02T11:58:00.009-05:00

My favorite ice storm movie? The Ice Storm!

I have a coworker who upon having her second set of twins moved from the Upper East Side to Westchester County. She told me a few months ago that in order to understand her life, I needed to watch this movie. Being the voyeur that I am, I rented it that night and sat in horror over everything but the fashion. Yikes, Leslie!

Shivers.

Dean Street

2011-01-27T14:49:00.006-05:00

As I mentioned last week, my ol' stomping grounds are suddenly becoming the place to be. Shocking! Last week, just blocks from the aforementioned Hanson Dry, Dean Street opened in the old Tavern on Dean building, with The Spotted Pig's Nate Smith signed on as head chef, and his wife Sophie Kamin of Four & Twenty Blackbirds as pastry chef. Again, SHOCKING. (I actually had no idea that Tavern on Dean had closed, but to be honest, I was okay with it. They weren't all that friendly there.)

The menu is tiny-- one fish option, one pasta, a rocking burger, two salads, etc. The decor is minimal, which serves to lovingly recognize the beautiful old bar and dark woodwork that Tavern on Dean never quite understood. The apple pie is outstanding, and the fries still resemble potatoes. The staff is green, to say the least, but they will get better.

Smith's menu seems to reflect the new Brooklyn standard of good food made well-- a simpler dining option, consciously removed from the decedent and overly sauced Spotted Pig. (He brought along the deviled eggs though, and thank goodness for that.)

The best part? Dean Street is eons away from anything else. It's a little gem just off Atlantic (the dodgy end) that aims to serve locals without pomp. Let's go back soon.

**That salad photo is not from Dean Street, but I didn't bring my camera and there isn't another photo to be found! Why is no one writing about this place? Lovely Day: on the pulse.

George Condo: Mental States

2011-01-26T12:53:00.007-05:00

The New Museum was the place to be last night for the opening party of George Condo's new exhibition, Mental States. The Art World's darlings set the tone for an evening of pomp and intrigue resulting in the best show I've seen at the New Museum thus far. I had been eagerly anticipating Condo's work since this fantastic piece in the New Yorker and was floored by the quality and resonance of his paintings up close.

Condo shied away from labeling the exhibition a retrospective, instead calling it a “conceptual portraiture survey” of work over the past thirty years. Divided into four sections-- the strongest of which being the fourth floor's salon style arrangement-- the show explores Condo's take on Old Master portraiture while the rest of the world was painting soup cans.

He ran around with Taaffe and Basquiat and Haring, and once pulled prints for Warhol himself. Yet unlike so many of his pals, Condo remains extremely contemporary--proven by Kanye, if no one else. His current work seems to be stretching further from portraiture into fantasy and otherworldly creatures tapped by his signature raw, languid emotion. It's electric-- all of it-- a rare look at painting through the lens of a downtown artist who's absolutely still got it.

Mental States is showing at The New Museum through May 8, 2011.

Art Palm Beach

2011-01-23T12:01:00.006-05:00

I'm back in NY after a few days in Florida attending Art Palm Beach. I spent two days winding my way through booths, chatting up dealers, and enjoying those balmy January evenings.

These niche satellite fairs are inevitably much more conservative than their New York/Miami/Basel counterparts, and less shocking to say the least. Palm Beach's scene is much... shinier. It's art that we want to own, live with, hang over our sofas. Rothko called this category of work 'mantle paintings' for that very reason. Yes, he meant it as an offensive critique, but there is a time and a place for art that we relate to on a aesthetically visceral level.

The art was good. It was solid, clean, and worthy. But as wonderful as it felt to sip coffee at 9am by a turquoise pool, I'll be ready for something a little less shiny come March.

Hanson Dry

2011-01-19T16:07:00.008-05:00

Since my departure last April, Clinton Hill appears to have gotten noticeably cooler. First Fulton Grand, then Brooklyn Victory Garden, then Beny's, and now THIS!? When I lived in Clinton Hill, the best thing on Fulton was Clean Rite University. And Putnam Candy Store.

Al, Beth, and I tried Hanson Dry for the first time last week, pleased as punch to be drinking fancy cocktails so close to home. (Well, Al's home. I had to take the G.) The dark and manly interior fits nicely with the current 60's Mad Men trend sweeping the borough and I hope it sticks around. It was kind of empty that Friday.

We tried to order drinks based on our personalities, but failed miserably. I ordered the 'classic' (ha!), Alison opted for the 'even' (sorry, but no.) and Beth tried the 'stealthy' (fail.) Tasty, though, every one of them.

Next time I'll bring my camera (there isn't a single current photo out there!) and I think I'll try the Kaboom. Sounds about right.

Jim Campbell: Scattered Light

2011-01-19T11:26:00.006-05:00

Madison Square Park continues their impressive public art program with Jim Campbell's 'Scattered Light' installation, up through February. Kate and I wandered that way a few weeks ago on an indulgent day off packed with brunch, pedicures, art, and Tempranillo. It was January 3rd and the rest of the city was still hungover, leaving Manhattan empty and big for the two of us. I liked that day.

Campbell's interest is in 'low resolution imagery'. He aims to test visual perception and the amount of information required to make an image recognizable in the human mind. The result is a shimmering block of hanging bulbs that project images--ever so slightly-- of passing figures. One can't help but nod at Felix Gonzalez Torres (whose photos of light bulbs I have hanging above my bed) although conceptually Campbell seems to pointedly direct our thoughts, while Torres blows off his commentary like those fluffy white dandelions. I actually prefer Torres, but I'll spare you that lecture.

The work shines from the center of the great lawn of Mad Sq Park, where we of course aren't allowed walking access, but view its undulating light from the periphery. It's undoubtedly brilliant there in the moonlight, shining on the snow, but perhaps turns a little too 'holiday' in this context. I'd like to see it in the summertime when light is less nostalgic, less comforting. We could sit there and split a milkshake and consider Campbell's influence without shivering ourselves into giggles. Just sayin'.

'Scattered Light' is on view at Madison Square Park from now until February 2011.

Daniel Kitson: The Interminable Suicide of Gregory Church

2011-01-14T08:48:00.019-05:00

"Exploring That Old Knee-Slapper, Suicide."

The Public Theater's Under the Radar Festival charges on, and with it, a brilliant performance of what Ben Brantley deftly called 'theatrical urgency'-- Daniel Kitson's The Interminable Suicide of Gregory Church.

Aside from the bits of sparkling review found on the theater's website, I had no real prior knowledge of Kitson or his show before freezing my way to St. Ann's on Wednesday night. The site also holds and a brief yet poignant description that summed up the show as 'a story of death postponed by life.' It's a one man show about the discovery of over 15,000 suicide notes written by Gregory Church (and another 15,000 or so responses) in a loft in West Yorkshire.

Under The Radar: Keepin' it random.

Daniel Kitson enters the arena setup of St. Ann's with a glass of water, a reporter's notebook, and what we can only assume are the same clothes he put on upon waking that morning. He sports a full beard, shaggy hair, thick rimmed frames, and a slightly awkward yet confident gait-- he's someone who touches his face a lot, who shoves up his glasses at the arch, and fidgets with his keys at the dinner table. Those initial moments of 'Hello, I'm Daniel, thank you all for coming, I hope you like it," made us all relax into the evening knowing that, yes, we know this guy, and yes, we're interested in what he has to say. He's someone with whom we'd get along.

He begins the show hurriedly with the back story of what becomes an obsessive and ultimately voyeuristic two year journey as the self appointed curator the life of Gregory Church. We expect Kitson to at some point relax as well, to catch up with himself and his telling, but he instead charges rampantly on, as if his mind works faster than the average human, and his speech-- graced with a stunning vocabulary and illustrative structure-- can't quite keep up. The result is 90 minutes of uninterrupted explosive storytelling that I wish I could rewind and watch again. It happens fast-- yours truly let her mind wander twice and missed two extremely important points that I had to piece together later with research and conversation. It's that smart, it's that good.

The life of Gregory Church-- that we know only through the letters as told by Kitson-- touches on the ol' George Bailey model: 'Remember George, No man is a failure who has friends'. We meet Church as a retired, unhappy, miserable old man who plans to kill himself by noose the next morning, after writing a few (56, initially) suicide notes. We leave knowing that those 56 notes expanded to 30,000 and that Church lived on to experience a life parenthesized by his impending death. It's poignant, touching, and humbling to unravel a tale of two men-- one obsessively writing, the other obsessively reading-- whose lives become entwined by relationships alone.

Yet therein exists a third layer to this web of understanding. The catch here (catch is probably the wrong word, but bear with me) is that Kitson mentioned in his opening remarks that the entire play to follow is fiction-- that he made it all up. Although unlike any other work of fiction or novel, or various other styles of created prose, this performance in particular feels outrageously true. I've been trying to nail down why it's more difficult to believe it to be fiction that not (usually its the other way around). I suppose it is simply a testament to Kitson's performance.

The show ended as abruptly as it began, with a quick 'well, that's what I wanted to tell you, that's the story, I hope you enjoyed it.' (Further convincing us of its truth! He didn't even think of a poetic ending!) Although the swift exit left my head spinning for the entire walk home, unsure of what just happened, wishing I could ask more questions, wanting to see those letters myself-- just as Kitson intended.

The Interminable Suicide of Gregory Church is playing through Jan 30th at St. Ann's Warehouse in DUMBO.

photo: NYT

What!? Is this real?

2011-01-12T12:42:00.004-05:00

Please say no.

Yeah, I'm going with 'no'.

Marcel the Shell at Sundance

2011-01-11T12:45:00.009-05:00

Guess who is going to Sundance (besides John)? Marcel! I am so happy for him! (her?)

And how gorgeous is that poster? I want one for my bedroom.

In case you aren't going to Sundance, and in case you aren't one of the lucky few that I've tied down and forced to watch this with me, here it is again for your viewing pleasure:

Gob Squad's Kitchen (You've Never Had It So Good)

2011-01-10T12:25:00.003-05:00

Gob Squad's Kitchen is showing as part of the Public Theater's Under The Radar Festival right now in the Village. I attended the performance Saturday night knowing very little about the festival or the troupe, but left fully convinced of Under The Radar's spirit and intention.

The ultimate goal of UTR is to 'offer a crash course in theater that is exciting, independent, and experimental.' The Gob Squad, one of 20 or so invited artist groups, is a traveling troupe of British and German artists working collectively with video, installation, and theater to explore the 'complexities and absurdities' of various pop culture phenomenons-- in this case, Andy Warhol's film 'Kitchen'.

The play has been called a 'live film', as the audience views the play on a screen placed in front of the actual set. We entered the space through the infamous 'factory', before taking our seats facing a screen that-- after a round of technical difficulties that I swore were part of the act (they weren't)-- projected the action in a grainy yet illuminate black and white picture. Smart indeed.

The tone isn't unlike Jemaine and Bret's Flight of the Concords-- a performance that doesn't take itself at all seriously about people who take themselves extremely seriously. The result is an endearing yet extremely silly observation of real people, acting themselves, in an otherwise banal setting. That silliness is the saving grace of the depiction of Warhol's world of foggy, confused pretension. No one REALLY wants to watch those old films without some sort of mind altering aid, come on. But we do want to know about it. So what the Gob Squad handed us instead was a recreation. And it worked.

Edie Sedgwick was there, among others, in black tights, a pixie cut, and aloof giggles. Yet instead of playing Edie by the book, the Gob Squad shifted her into 'Sharon', who gives us a solid footing that Sedgwick would never yield to. I laughed aloud for much of the 90 minutes, delighted by the little inside jokes about Warhol and the 60s and the feminist movement and basic human tendency. There was an element of audience participation, and a three minute kiss, and many references to 'others watching it in 100 years', which seems to be as far into the future as people dared to consider mid-century. Those tiny observations, spewed from the mouths of very sweet British and German actors, gave structure and meaning to an otherwise random piece of theater.

Gob Squad's Kitchen is silly, lasting, and smart. I can only imagine what the other 19 Under the Radar are handing out for free (well, like $15, which is amazing). The festival lasts through the 16th, and tickets can be found here. GO.

At the Restaurant

2011-01-02T22:11:00.018-05:00

Jonathan and Laura brought up this Stephen Dunn poem on New Year's Eve while discussing our favorite writers. Dunn's work, albeit remarkably approachable, remains a rare truth in contemporary prose. He never gets pretentious-- I love that about him.

Laura called him an 'old mountain man who writes about his feelings'. I like that too. This poem in particular touches on The Human Condition in its most glorious form. It's about dreading small talk at dinner parties and aching for sincerity in a world so neglectful of such things. That last line kills me--

"Inexcusable, the slaughter of this world.
Insufficient, the merely decent man."

Enjoy.

(My New Years Eve, by the way, was in no means a reflection of the poem below. Incidentally, it was one of the most enjoyable New Years I've ever had, partially because we skipped over formalities and went straight to discussing poetry.)

At the Restaurant

by Stephen Dunn

“Life would be unbearableif we made ourselves conscious of it.”– Fernando Pessoa

Six people are too many people
and a public place the wrong place
for what you’re thinking–

stop this now.

Who do you think you are?
The duck à l’orange is spectacular,
the flan the best in town.

But there among your friends
is the unspoken, as ever,
chatter and gaiety its familiar song.

And there’s your chronic emptiness
spiraling upward in search of words
you’ll dare not say

without irony.
You should have stayed at home.
It’s part of the social contract

to seem to be where your body is,
and you’ve been elsewhere like this,
for Christ’s sake, countless times;

behave, feign.

Certainly you believe a part of decency
is to overlook, to let pass?
Praise the Caesar salad. Praise Susan’s

black dress, Paul’s promotion and raise.
Inexcusable, the slaughter of this world.
Insufficient, the merely decent man.

A Lens

2010-12-30T14:40:00.007-05:00

Above are a few photos taken with my new 35mm lens over the holiday. Can you believe those bright orangey reds!? The lens is extremely kind to clueless photogs like me and even kinder to skin tones.

That's my cousin Lucy up there, and her husband Mike. Then there is the Minden Courthouse, near where my Dad grew up, and our lab Belle, who gets sweeter every time I see her. The last photo is a gift from my sister-- a book of letters that Julia Child and Avis DeVoto wrote back and forth from Paris to New England in the 50s. They talk about cooking and knives and Nixon and McCarthy, and it really is quite wonderful.

I love this time of year and look forward to toasting in 2011 with a four day weekend that I just realized I have. Seriously, it didn't occur to me until 3pm that I don't have to be back at work until Tuesday.
Happy New Year, all!

La Lune

2010-12-22T17:21:00.005-05:00

Did you all see the Lunar eclipse last week!? I did not. Typical. But this guy did, and in an enviable fashion-- with a bottle of wine and a fire pit.

Also:

Alison and I cannot. stop. laughing. over this site.

If you read Freedom, watch this. Some good Franzen/DFW scoop in there.

Fantastic piece by George Saunders from the New Yorker online.

Guess where the 'greenest restaurant in America' is located!?

True story.

Happy almost Christmas, dearies! Kiss New York for me, I'll be in the homeland drinking tea and taking bubble baths. IT'S COLD THERE.

The Tree Story

2010-12-17T11:33:00.008-05:00

And now, to counter my obnoxiously upbeat take on this holiday season, please read this: Lauren Hoffman's newest essay on The Nervous Breakdown

And a bit of our corresponding chatter:

5:25 PM Lauren: Christmas stories have morals – things like “Giving is important” or “Family matters” or “Maybe snoop through your husband’s closet a little to find out what he got you before you up and cut off all your hair” or “If you don’t want the inside of your hotel to be covered with placenta and overrun with shepherds, go ahead and tell that nice pregnant lady that you’re all booked up.”

6:10 PM me: bahaaaaaaaa

did you write that??

please say yes

6:11 PM Lauren: yeah

I changed "covered with placenta" to "covered IN placenta"

6:17 PM me: that makes all the difference

Lauren: are you being sarcastic?

because OMG IT DOES

6:18 PM me: my arms hurt

Lauren: yoga?

my thumbs hurt from christmas button crafts

6:22 PM me: i wasn't being sarcastic! i love little word changes

i do i do! (yes, yoga.)

6:23 PM Lauren: hahaha

I'm trying not to overwrite

but I really hate christmas

You can get this for me for Christmas

2010-12-15T15:33:00.003-05:00

It will take up my entire kitchen/living room but totally worth it.

(By Markus Krauss)

Ai Weiwei: Sunflower Seeds at the Tate Modern

2010-12-15T14:59:00.002-05:00

Have you all heard about Ai Weiwei's current installation at Tate Modern? Amazing. He filled the museum's turbine hall (I love that hall, it puts MoMA's atrium to shame) with millions of life-sized sunflower seed husks made out of porcelain. Each of the hand-crafted seeds were individually formed and painted. I will repeat that-- EACH OF THE SEEDS WERE INDIVIDUALLY FORMED AND PAINTED.

It's a commentary on the 'Made in China' phenomenon and the shrinking world and it's brilliant. More on Weiwei here.

And the Cantilevered Inference Shall Hold the Day

2010-12-13T12:00:00.007-05:00

Hello my lovelies, did you have nice weekends? Yesterday was terrific, so rainy and terrible out that I was forced to stay indoors and watch movies all day. (Well, that is until around about 5pm when I thought I was going to go mad from being indoors all day that I dashed to a bikram yoga class on Court Street to downward dog with other stir crazy girls. I'm not so good at staying in.)

Anyway. I actually posted this poem a year ago, but it is so very appropriate for this time of year, all about hope and new beginnings. The last few stanzas (stanzas?) get to me, so if nothing else, skip over the first part about the warbler and spend some time with the lying in bed portion of the poem. (But then, of course, you will want to circle back and read the warbler part because the laying in bed portion was so very perfect.)

So here you are, New York. Enjoy this poem and enjoy this dark and lovely December day.

And the Cantilevered Inference Shall Hold the Day

by Michael Blumenthal

Desk Set

2010-12-10T13:54:00.007-05:00

Tracy and Hepburn's 1957 anti-computer office flick isn't commonly thought of as a Christmas movie, but it absolutely is. It's a silly little film, but one of my favorites, and one of two movies that features Katharine Hepburn as a very exaggerated drunk. It's the office party we all wish we had in an era when tinsel and mistletoe flowed freely and everyone had names like 'Bunny' and 'Peg' and 'Ruthie' and 'Watson'.

My office holiday party is Monday, at a fancy Nolita restaurant where everyone will undoubtedly down champagne, stand a good two feet apart, stare awkwardly at the food, and be home by 7. Same, same.

Redheads by Joel Meyerowitz

2010-12-08T10:45:00.006-05:00

Super Labo recently reissued a book of Joel Meyerowitz's 1991 collection of portraits, 'Redheads.' All of his subjects are redheads (clearly) and they really are quite something. From the book,

"Photographing redheads was so compelling that I cast my net even wider. I ran an ad in the local paper, the Provincetown Advocate: "REMARKABLE PEOPLE! If you are a redhead or know someone who is, I'd like to make your portrait, call…." They began coming to my deck, bringing with them their courage and their shyness, their curiosity and their dreams, and also their stories of what it is like to be redheaded. There were the painful remembrances of childhood, the violations of privacy—"Hey, 'Red'," "freckle face," "carrot head." They also shared with me their sense of personal victory at having overcome this early celebrity, how like giants or dwarfs or athletes they had grown into their specialness and, by surviving, had been ennobled by it. You could say that they had been baptized by their fire and that their shared experience had formed a "blood knot" among them. I had begun making portraits with the intention of photographing ordinary people. But redheads are both ordinary and special."

I never really had the painful redheaded experiences like those above, but I am interested in any bond--physical or otherwise-- that brings random people together in a general understanding. These little bonds are what make our silly New York world tick, leveling the playing field when we realize that, 'Oh! We both summer at the cape!' 'Seriously!? I grew up 10 miles from there!' 'Don't you hate shopping for pants with such a long inseam!? It's so frustrating!' It's a rare loveliness, isn't it? Watching those 'blood knots' form?

The book is worth your time, both for the conceptual insight from a group of people who make up less than 2% of the worlds population(!) and also for the sheer talent of Meyerowitz at capturing the human spirit so generously. More here.

Black Swan

2010-12-05T20:52:00.013-05:00

Alison and I agreed that our Saturday was really about as perfect as they come-- so perfect that I'm going to tell you about it. We started the day with brunch-and-cheesecake at the New Apollo Diner downtown Brooklyn; attended the greatest craft sale in the world at the Starrett-Lehigh Building on W 26th street (have you been inside!? Those windows!); talked with a man as passionate about glitter as I am ('This glitter in particular is EXTREMELY useful,' he said in all seriousness while showing us the snow pack); saw the best movie I've seen all year; stopped for a glass of wine in a random Chelsea bar where we've NEVER been more popular; and ended the night in Williamsburg at a housewarming/Hanukkah party with a backyard and a bonfire and the best latkes on this side of the East River. Should I have used commas in place of semi-colons in that sentence? Who cares, it was perfection! But let's talk about the movie, or I'll go on for days about glitter.

Black Swan. Black Swan is the story of Nina, a New York City ballet dancer played by a dramatically changed Natalie Portman, and her pursuit of a single dream. Nina lives at home with a controlling mother, tends toward bulimia and compulsive scratching, and doesn't have any life experience to speak of. She eats grapefruit for breakfast and sleeps in a room dressed in teddy bears. She's timid and dedicated and quiet and is suddenly handed the role of a lifetime-- Swan Queen in Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake.

But alongside the iconic white swan, crowned in feathers and sparkles, and white, white, white!, Nina is also asked play her evil doppleganger-- the Black Swan. SEDUCE ME!, the director (Vincent Cassel) cries, while grabbing at her skinny limbs in want and in anger. He maintains that she’s suited only for half the double role, but offers both parts anyway as a sort of sick fascination with watching a little girl crack into a woman. It's a brilliant set-up: asking the Purest Dancer of All to lose control. And there our story begins.

I read somewhere that Darren Aronofsky tended toward a tight camera angle on the back of Portman's neck for much of Black Swan to hint at paranoia. We, the audience, therefore play the part of 'stalker'. By doing so, he brought the audience along with Nina in a rapid head game of feeling like someone is watching you, anticipating turning on the lights to someone standing there in the darkness.

The dancing is beautiful-- breathless at points-- thanks in no way to Aronofsky. It says something about ballet itself, as Aronofsky did his best to darken its shiny surface. He favorited cracking joints, quivering exhales, bleeding toes and emaciated backbones in place of the lightness we are used to. We see dancing swans through a shakey lens and the sound of heavy breathing. They become something else there before us-- puppets representing Dickensian archetypes: Good and evil. Right and wrong. Pure and tainted. Tchaikovsky's violins start to scream and that music will never sound the same, I assure you.

The movie could have been made about go-carts, Portman stated in an interview, making the point that it isn't about ballet at all in the end. But I disagree. The ballet world cradles such a story perfectly, for the very reasons stated above. It's an incredibly soft backdrop for such a harsh story. Without it, Black Swan could feel too mean, too terrifying, too destructive to matter. But because of the ballet, this baby will win awards.

Yes, the film is GRUESEOME-- a horror film or close to it. I closed my eyes for at least 10 minutes of that, but so did everyone else around me. Don't even really know what happened in that hospital room with Winona Ryder, I just heard a lot of tearing flesh. Ick. Honestly, a good chunk of that could have been cut out, but I personally don't like gore to begin with. To me, it wasn't necessary in leading the psychological downfall, but I will say that the blood and guts did lend toward a PHYSICAL reaction from the audience, which absolutely has its place in the film's lasting impression. You will leave completely shaken, trust me, and will have to force your mind away from it when crawling into bed that first night. Shivers. I still can't think about it at bedtime, to be honest.

Black Swan is my favorite film of the year, hands down. Portman especially is more deserving of an Oscar than any actor in my memory. And if not an Oscar (I am by no means an expert on these things) than at least a nod at unwavering focus and commitment to her craft. Forget the year of intensive ballet training, severe dieting, 16 hour workdays to get her body to look and move the way it did, Portman's fluid transition from scared girl to psychotic tour-de-force kept us at attention for the full two hours.

You will exit the theater completely shaken and undone. You'll need to talk about it, laugh about it, scream about what you saw. It's visceral, and its supposed to be. As most good movies are, Black Swan is really about the Human Condition and how far we can be pushed before snapping. And the snapping, in the end, is only a few steps away from normal. Scary, indeed.

William Albert Allard

2010-12-03T12:06:00.005-05:00

A shivering group of former Midwesterners (and one Alaskan!) arrived at Steven Kasher Gallery last night for the opening of William Albert Allard's photography exhibit, not knowing quite what to expect. Allard is a celebrated National Geographic photographer, and has been for almost 50 years, but we know him as 'Kate's dad's friend from Minnesota.'

We were greeted by the best possible addition to a gallery opening-- a coat check!!!-- alongside a warm group of appreciative viewers. The ~~real~~ other art-types are all down in Miami (without me) which perhaps added to the warmth and friendly tone of last night's Chelsea showing. Less pomp, more sincerity. (Sour grapes? Possibly.)

Allard's work is what you expect-- narrative, epic, impactful. The exhibit spans nearly five decades of large-scale color photographs and a selection of unique Polaroids that had us all itching to ditch our city jobs for that which would allow us time in Spain, in Mexico, and Argentina.

'National Geographic Photographer' might just be the most enviable job around, yessirry, and the photographer himself was kind, to boot. A lovely night in Chelsea--not at all expected and oh-so-refreshing for this stunted gallerina.

The show runs through January 8th, and is accompanied by a worthy catalog-- get thee to Kasher.

Jonathan Franzen at Book Court

2010-12-02T10:58:00.004-05:00

I caught the tail end of Jonathan Franzen's reading at Book Court last night, on my tip toes in the back of a gorgeously literary crowd of worthy Brooklynites. The reading was no where on my agenda, but Book Court is a few blocks from my apartment and I was able to bop in last minute, as really anything can distract me from what I really should have been doing-- laundry.

He spoke about the book's source (a woman he met for 10 minutes at a party), the blocks (quitting a novel two years into the process), the beauties (metaphors working to his advantage), the cerulean warbler on the cover ("A likely poster-bird," he called it) and Oprah (they are bff now). I could all but hear the many aspiring writers in that room lapping up his wisdom like milk, and the female audience members swooning in unison. That man is attractive, yes sirry.

Franzen's casual and somewhat self deprecating responses to audience questions were refreshing from someone I only assumed would be harsh and jaded in person. But--turns out-- he finds his own characters humorous and interesting, which actually shifted my view a bit on the exhausting unhappiness with which he tends to sculpt. The brutality of it all is funny in the end, and thank goodness for that.

Also, I just realized that Franzen will be reading at McNally Jackson tonight, a few blocks from my office. Is he following me!??! Wouldn't be surprised.

Alfred Eisenstaedt

2010-12-01T11:35:00.007-05:00

This rain! So terrible! I was in the worst mood this morning, dripping wet and freezing, but came across these Alfred Eisenstaedt photographs that cheered me up a bit.

Eisenstaedt's work is clearly a bit cliche at this point (re: kissing sailor), and while still reeking of sentiment, these photographs of children at a Parisian puppet theatre in 1963 seem fresh and honest, not as posed as some of his work. (The second shot is the moment that St. George slays the dragon-- so perfect! That little guy at the bottom, swoon!)

Stay dry, New York, and let's hope the temperature drops soon so that we can trade this rain for snow. Happy DECEMBER!

Speaking of Gatsby...

2010-11-28T12:23:00.007-05:00

Someone somewhere found a sample page from Sylvia Plath’s copy of The Great Gatsby, above. It confirms the idea that great readers make great writers. (And I like that part too, Sylvia.)

I did my own underlining on a flight last week, en route to Omaha. I don't know why I bother underlining, as I'm usually the only eyes to read my favorite texts. I tend to hoard my best books for myself (I do! So terrible of me!) as I find that my friends often never read the novels I shove into their lives. My treasured books instead end up on a desk somewhere under a pile of mail, making the borrower guilty for not reading, and myself nervous for their whereabouts. I, on the other hand, love my books to death, pick them up often, and wish them the good night that they deserve.

I suppose that underlining helps us later find words and passages that once challenged, intrigued, shocked, or comforted. A writer will often nail a human emotion so exactly right that we feel cheated for not reading it before that moment, and worry that we will forget it later without a clear line drawn beneath its brilliance. "It's the ability to remind us of ourselves, of who we are in our essence, and at the same time deliver a revelation," Krauss once said about good fiction. So true.

There has been much underlining (and one found TYPO! Pg 142, last line. SCORE!) in Krauss's Great House, a few of which I'll share with you below. It's the least I can do, with the given knowledge that I probably won't loan you the book. Enjoy.

"When I first began to spend time in Belsize Park it made me queasy to see how carelessly Yoav and Leah treated the furniture that passed through their house, which constituted their father's, and their own, livelihood. They rested their bare feet and glasses of wine of Biedermeier coffee tables, left fingerprints on the vitrines, napped on the settees, ate off the Art Deco commodes, and occasionally even walked atop the long dining tables when it was the most convenient way of getting from on place to another in a room crowded with furniture."

"...and as he did I had a vision of our turret from the outside, a shining glass cabin containing two experiments in human life floating in a dark sea."

"And though I hadn't had more than three or four relationships, I already knew that each time the thrill of telling another the story of yourself wore off a little more, each time you threw yourself into it a little less, and grew more distrustful of an intimacy that always, in the end, failed to pass into true understanding."

"... those wonderful tree-lined roads planted with a ruler and a whip that you can only find in a place as anal about beauty as Europe."

GATZ

2010-11-22T10:32:00.012-05:00

Oskar Eustis, the Public Theater's Artistic Director, said it best-- that upon his first time seeing GATZ, he was transported. He "walked out into Soho that cold winter night convinced that The Great Gastby was the greatest American novel ever written." It took him a few days to come back to earth, he said, and to remember that Moby-Dick was actually the greatest American novel, and to start the process of bring it to The Public.

I would probably argue the Moby Dick promotion, but its only been three days since my viewing, and its possible my views will shift. I love this novel. Loved it the first time I read it, and drank in every single word on Friday night in what can best be described as a prayer. My mind started wandering exactly two times during the performance, both of which I mentally bookmarked, and reread later that evening from my own worn copy in my bed in Brooklyn, clinging to the haze.

I knew all about this play before seeing it-- read the stellar reviews, contributed to the buzz, and gawked with the masses regarding its odd format. It's a 8.5 hour play-- starts at 3pm, ends at 11:30-- that uses for its script the entire text of The Great Gatsby (that wonderful blue and white paperback copy we all read in High School), each and every word and no additions. The formula doesn't make sense, any of it, which is clearly part of its appeal. I was told I that I couldn't get a ticket, that the production has been sold out for months, but reader, please. I found myself there at the Public Theater on Friday afternoon, Playbill in hand, front row center, eagerly awaiting what would surely be an eight hour thrill.

The show opens in a drab office in a nondescript industry, somewhere in America. A khaki-wearing redheaded someone enters the space, hangs his coat, and reaches to turn on his outdated clunky computer. The computer won't start, he tries again, murmurs to a coworker or two who have entered looking bored-as-all-get-out, and suddenly, VOILA!, our leading lady of a book pops from a Rolodex as we all audibly adjusted forward in our seats to discover how the hell this was going to play out.

Our redhead flips to the first page, and slowly begins reading the novel aloud-- seemingly for the first time-- and clunkily starts the ride. I knew it would work, that we would soon be successfully transported to East Egg from Office Building Somewhere, but those first twenty minutes were key to drawing in an audience in dulled mass confusion only to charm our socks off four short hours later.

Scott Shepherd, the redhead, of Elevator Repair Service took on the role of Nick Carraway--that daunting task of narrating the show and speaking all but the scattered dialogue aloud-- although I'm pretty sure he was actually playing Jimmy Stewart playing Nick Carraway, which was a fantastic decision on his part. His voice dipped and clung, a melody of normalcy that we recognize from an era gone by.

Literary snobs love to cry disappointment to adaptations of classic novels, arguing that they shouldn't be touched, and cannot be approved upon. But this is different-- its as if Collins always wanted to remake Gatsby, but understood the task as a setup for gigantic failure, as all abridged versions are. Then he decided to not take anything out, read it in its entirety, and completely dismiss the idea of costuming and set design all together. We already know what it looks like, you see. We don't need him to tell us, the book does that just fine. (THIS was just announced, by the way, and its two leading men actually sat behind me at Friday's production, ha!)

It is with this attempt that we can't argue the execution because we all saw the story as we saw it the first time we read Gastby, and I will bet that most of us geeks sitting there for all 8.5 hours read it every year. I could tell you here, exactly what happened on that stage, but even I am unbelieving of it now. The famous twinkling party scene at Gatsby's manner was played out as the cast cleaned up papers and spilled whiskey and note cards strewn across the floor from the 'Myrtle Apartment' scene right before. Jordan Baker served as our comedic relief, and the swimming pool was played by a leather couch. Gastby wore a magenta suit, and Daisy was brunette. None of it adds up, which is the point of it all, you see.

I left the theater upon its intricate and compelling conclusion understanding the real feat of whole thing: GATZ is a true testament to the human mind and the scope of an often neglected grown-up imagination. It's also a testament to good theater and to good writing and--let us not forget-- the book itself, but it is the human mind that takes us from a theater, to an office, to Southampton Proper without explanation. I've written about this before-- my annoyance at too-literally-executed set designs on Broadway and Off-- and GATZ all but laughs at big budget attempts to create a castle, when their audience is fully capable of building one themselves.

Why the office? It was someplace to start-- a challenge, I presume, of John Collins to his actors. It was also about READING BOOKS, and turning off our computers and ipads and droids, sitting down with a book, which come to think of it, is the same message we received from the other show I saw last week. Interesting. At any rate, the show closes with Nick seated at his desk, after a slow stripping of office supplies and papers and the computer itself, sometime in the past 4 acts. I thought perhaps they would nod back to the office setting at the end, fixing the computer and returning to daily life, but they didn't and I'm glad. It was the quiet ending Fitzgerald offered, so we left still in Gatsby's world, and not our own.

GATZ is closing on the 28th, so SEE IT. This show is magic, I mean it, and despite what you will hear, there are tickets to be found.

Modern Art

2010-11-21T21:59:00.002-05:00

Great print by Craig Damrauer. Smart, but also a nice design and a bit cheecky*.

*(Listening to too many Prince William interviews, my mind has started speaking with a British accent. And NO, I'm not excited about Will and Kate. UGH. Dreams shattered.)

Having a Coke with You

2010-11-19T12:34:00.004-05:00

Well, this is nice! Some poetry for your Friday. (That picture up there has nothing to do with it, but its one I took a while ago that I really like.) Enjoy and happy weekend!

Having a Coke with You

by Frank O'Hara

is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne

or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona

partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian

partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt

partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches

partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary

it is hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything as still

as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it

in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth

between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles

and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint

you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them

I look

at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world

except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick

which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together the first time

and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism

just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or

at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me

and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them

when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank

or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn’t pick the rider as carefully

as the horse

it seems they were all cheated of some marvellous experience

which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I’m telling you about it

Frank O’Hara, “Having a Coke with You” from The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara. Copyright © 1971 by Mauren Granville-Smith, Administratrix of the Estate of Frank O'Hara.

Source: The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara (1995)

The Dinner Diaries

2010-11-18T11:46:00.004-05:00

Loved this little piece from the New Yorker News Desk blog. It reminded me of this entry by Molly Wizenburg of Orangette (the part about Nibbler just about does me in!).

That's all. Enjoy!

Turkeys In Pilgrim Clothing

2010-11-15T11:58:00.009-05:00

This American Life has been breaking my heart a lot recently, what, with that episode about unconventional love? Don't be fooled by the sweet title, folks, its about a family having to put their son in a home. And the other story is about a woman who adopts a child raised in terrible circumstances in a Romanian orphanage and is unable to feel attachments to anyone...and what they do about it. I mean, really, Ira. Then there were the last two episodes about the economic crisis and then one about the Tea Party, and while they were completely well done and important and thoughtful, they weren't funny and you do funny so very well!

However. Back in the TAL archives, there exists a really fantastic episode about Thanksgiving. The hilarious Sarah Vowell examines "what happens when television takes on a subject it really has no business exploring at all, but seems fairly obsessed with nonetheless: The Pilgrims." It's a mockery of American pop culture and of a holiday that makes us a little uncomfortable when actually considering its roots.

Have you read William Bradford? I have! And I highly recommend it, actually, although its a pain to get through. It's the original text from Plymouth, THE primary source, told in his seventeenth century tongue. It's gory and intelligent and raw, and makes you feel like a slightly better American for understanding what really took place on that first Thanksgiving. Read it. OR listen to Sarah Vowell talk about it.

In the meantime, I'll be brushing up on my pie making skills. Happy holidays, New York.